15

Cabo Gracias a Dios, Houduras

Steffie Brough, dreaming of her own death, woke when a spider crawled over a closed eyelid. She sat upright quickly and swatted the creature aside. Curled defensively inward, it created a huge black furry ball that flew across the air and struck the far wall of the tent then dropped in long-legged disarray. It took Steffie a moment to assemble her thoughts and remember where she was, and the recollection depressed her. There were men here who wanted to kill her.

She heard rain strike the canvas overhead. The tent sagged in the centre where it had gathered water during the hours of darkness. She got up, glanced at Ruhr who lay on the cot. She parted the flap, looked out, saw a dismal steamy morning. Rain weaved a mist in the trees and the density of the forest was overwhelming. Unseen insects kept up their constant click-clicking. How could she possibly have imagined escape last night? There was no way out of this place unless Ruhr said so. If she ran now he’d simply find her and bring her back. She was trapped.

Ruhr still slept quietly and yet she had the odd feeling he could wake at will, that he’d trained himself to sleep only in the most shallow way. Any unusual noise would bring him around.

Last night, when it had seemed inevitable that he’d overpower her after the pointless attempted escape, he’d suddenly and strangely lost interest, pushed her away, tossed her a blanket and told her to sleep on the floor. It was almost as if she were a game he didn’t want to finish, something he needed to linger over because there was more pleasure in it that way. She clenched her hands and stood in the centre of the tent and realised that if she could see herself from a point outside she would probably look like some kind of animal with her stringy, dirty hair. I smell, she thought. I smell horrible.

Ruhr woke. Steffie had never seen anybody who rose quite like him. One minute asleep, the next fully awake, no transition between. He tossed his blanket aside and got up. He wore white underpants, white T-shirt. He dressed without talking, without even noticing her. He brushed his teeth, using water from an old pail, and spat toothpaste out on the floor. He combed his thinning hair and studied his face in a small corroded mirror. There was intense self-interest in the way he did this, a vanity.

He took his knife from under his pillow. He ran the tip of one finger along the blade, testing its keenness, then sheathed the knife and strapped it to his shin. Only then did he look at Steffie Brough, as if the weapon had reminded him of her existence.

“Hungry?” he asked.

She didn’t say anything even though she was famished. Ruhr produced a plastic bag from which he took some dried fruit – God, that was all she’d had to eat since leaving England. He gave her two brown rubbery discs that might have been dehydrated apricot or pear, you couldn’t possibly tell by their taste. They were awful, but she ate them anyway. When she was finished she understood she felt a vague, though sullen, gratitude toward Ruhr for the food.

But then she remembered how he’d touched her, that humiliating invasion of her privacy, his awful lips on her mouth, his hands all over her body, and her brief gratitude dissolved.

“More?” Ruhr asked.

She declined. She was still hungry but she didn’t want him to know it. He had too much power over her already: why give him more? He took out a metal flask from a canvas bag. It contained lukewarm water. She drank. It was ghastly, gritty, tasted of iron.

“Things here are a little different for you,” he said. “You’re used to something else.”

“Yes.”

“No pleasant bedroom. No nice bathroom for you here.” Ruhr smiled. He rubbed his face with the bad hand. Steffie barely noticed the deformity. She certainly wasn’t repelled by it in quite the same way as before. You can get used to anything, she thought.

“You would like to go home,” Ruhr said.

Why had he said that? she wondered. There was some sly quality in his voice. He was teasing her, only he wasn’t very good at it. He wasn’t much good at any kind of social interaction, she’d noticed. Even when he moved he did so without poise, like a man who knows he’s ugly and feels people are watching him critically. There was an aura about him of loneliness, the same pall she’d seen around those sad, solitary figures who sat for motionless hours in the draughty reading-room of her local library, sometimes leafing newspapers but more often staring into space at nothing. Steffie, raised by decent people who tended to see the best in the human race and the bright side of everything, almost felt sorry for him.

Almost.

He kills, she thought. He kills casually. She remembered Trevaskis and his unfortunate kindness.

“Perhaps policemen will rescue you,” he said, still teasing in his awkward manner. He opened the flap of the tent. There was the pungent smell of wet canvas. “Perhaps even as we speak, some kind English policeman is closing in on us. Somebody good and cunning. Perhaps Sherlock Holmes, eh?”

“Perhaps,” she said.

“Hope is so wonderfully human, little girl. What person has not been completely betrayed by hope at least once in his or her lifetime?”

She sat on the floor, and hung her head. It was important to fight despair. Sometimes you couldn’t find the strength to do so. Nobody was looking for her, nobody was closing in. It was stupid to think so.

He kneeled alongside her, cupped her chin in the palm of his hand. “Do not be so despondent, child. Keep hoping. What choice do you have?”

She hated him then more than ever before. The way he touched her under the face was awful in itself, but his words were the real killers – don’t give up hope. Don’t be despondent. Should I sing for you, Ruhr, and dance? She closed her eyes, blinked back tears and thought Fuck you, you won’t see me weep, you rotten bastard.

He stood upright. She didn’t look up at him. He said, “I have some business to attend to. You will stay here, of course. It would be pointless to run again. Where would you go in any case? I expect to be back very soon.”

She heard him push the open flap aside and then he was gone and the tent was silent save for the metronomic ticking of the rain.

The girl could wait. Delayed satisfaction only heightened anticipation. Ruhr walked down through long wet grass and mud to the landing-strip. The transport plane had gone at first light. He wondered briefly about Sweeney, but Ruhr wasn’t sentimental about friendships. He simply didn’t have any. All human relationships were inherently doomed, whether by death or declining interest. Why make any kind of commitment?

He had never loved in his life. On those few occasions when he’d felt the tremor of affection for another, he’d dismissed it as a chemical anomaly, a flaw in his system, something to be rooted out. It was simpler to destroy than to love. Destruction was quick and fevered and exciting. By contrast love, as he understood it, could be a protracted torture, a bundle of insecurities, a murderous game of the emotions.

He paused on the edge of the runway, enjoying the rain against his face. Then he crossed the concrete, passing the missile that sat in the truck at the edge of the runway. The green waterproof tarpaulin, running with rain, still covered the weapon. In the distance, their sounds muted by foliage, soldiers went through tedious drills designed simultaneously to dull the critical faculties and raise the temperature of enthusiasm. Pumped up for the overthrow of Castro, they would set sail with an effervescent sense of purpose and a determination sharpened by weeks of preparation here. The idea of discipline, with its unambiguous rules and codes pleased Ruhr.

He went up the slope to the place where Fuentes’ tent was situated. Tommy was inside with the Englishman, Bosanquet. They sat on either side of a card-table on which a map was spread. Ruhr ducked his head, went inside. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. Inverted lids of old coffee jars were being used as ashtrays by the chain-smoking Fuentes.

Fuentes looked up. Bosanquet took off his reading-glasses.

“His majesty,” Fuentes said. “See how he condescends to visit us in my humble dwelling, Bose old bean. Are we flattered? Beat the drums. Roll out the red carpet. The king comes!”

Bosanquet, who thought poorly of Fuentes’ heavy-handed sarcasm, stared at the German. He was really a disgusting shit as far as Bosanquet was concerned. Up there with the schoolgirl in his tent – very bad form. It was child-molesting, no two ways about it. He would gladly have cut out Ruhr’s throat, and in other circumstances might have done just that. As it was, it was the child who would have to die, because that was how the order had come down from Harry Hurt. In Bosanquet’s scheme of things, whatever was sent down the pipeline from Harry had top priority. Harry signed the paycheques and Bosanquet’s loyalty was the commodity he bought with them.

“You didn’t appear last night,” Bosanquet said. “We waited for you. You were supposed to perform a task and you failed to show up, which is unforgivable.”

“I fell asleep,” Ruhr said drily. He enjoyed the Englishman’s restrained display of temper. “I had had a busy day, you may recall.”

“What about the girl?”

“What about her?”

“Is she alive?”

“For the moment,” Ruhr said.

“For the moment,” Bosanquet remarked. He really had no stomach for the idea of the girl dying. He got to his feet. Her death wasn’t his business. Nor was the murder last night of one of Ruhr’s henchmen. These things were Ruhr’s own affairs. He changed the subject. “Are you ready to do the work you should have done last night?”

“It’s raining,” Ruhr said, as if this might prevent him working.

“Does that make a difference?” Bosanquet rubbed his sweaty face with his red bandanna. He remembered how Harry Hurt had said that the German’s needs were to be met at all times, because he was a very important part of the operation. Presumably this order included pandering somewhat to the German’s sense of his own shattering superiority.

“Perhaps not,” Ruhr said. “The tools.”

“Of course.” Fuentes removed a canvas bag from under his card table. It rattled as he handed it to Ruhr. “Everything you have requested is in there.”

Ruhr unzipped the bag, looked inside, apparently satisfied.

All three men walked to the airstrip. Ruhr glanced at the covered missile on the truck and the large tarpaulined rectangle that contained the weapon control system. He had no intention of doing the work under the eyes of the other two.

The key to survival was the same as it had always been: he had to be indispensable. He’d known all along that this point would be reached, this place where his future was in the balance. It was always this way. Many of his employers had tried to shaft him in the past, to cheat him after the event. None had ever succeeded. He was always prepared, always kept something in hand. He had the documents in the care of the lawyer Herr Schiller in Hamburg, of course, but Ruhr liked to take out even more insurance policies. In this case, he was essential to Fuentes and Bosanquet and Rafael Rosabal and their scheme because of his specialised knowledge. That was the key and neither of the other men possessed it. Only Ruhr.

Fuentes pointed to a wooden crate, sheltered from wetness by sheets of plastic. He said, “This is what the Israelis delivered.”

Ruhr glanced at the box, then turned away from it. For the moment he wanted to look at the missile. He unrolled the green tarpaulin a few inches, revealing the blunt grey canister. Without the nose cone the weapon lacked a dimension. Armed, it would have a range of approximately fourteen hundred miles; it could travel at five hundred and fifty miles an hour.

Ruhr walked to the wooden crate, asked Fuentes for a tool, a tyre iron. Tomas found one inside a jeep parked nearby. Ruhr gently opened the crate.

Inside was a layer of packing material, which Ruhr removed.

There it was.

A nose cone of dull silver contained the nuclear warhead. A series of metal connecting pins studded the warhead. These fitted corresponding slots in the housing of the missile. Ruhr stared at the thing for several seconds. Instruments of destruction, from the flick-knife to the warhead, had always exerted great fascination for him. In the war museums of the world he’d been hypnotised by displays of old lances, maces, swords, blackpowder muskets, grenades from World War I, tommy-guns, sophisticated automatic rifles. He believed that man reached his creative peak only when the design and manufacture of aggressive weapons was his goal. All the rest, the other products of creativity, the symphonies and poems and philosophical thinking, the computers and scientific theories, all that was just so much dross in contrast to the creation of devices meant to maim and kill.

Slicks of rain slid over the cone. Ruhr replaced the lid of the box. The beat of his heart was just a little faster.

“Now what?” Fuentes asked.

“I will wait,” Ruhr replied.

“For God’s sake, what for?” Bosanquet asked.

“For the ship.” Ruhr stepped back from the wooden crate. “On board the ship I will make the final marriage.”

“The marriage?”

Ruhr smiled. “Have I used the wrong phrase?”

Bosanquet loathed this smug character. It was damned hard to stay calm. “You are supposed to attach the warhead to the missile and make all the connections now, Ruhr. That is the plan. The missile is to be loaded in an armed state.”

Ruhr shook his head. “If you are unhappy, do it yourself.” He knew neither man could possibly perform the task. Even if they brought in an expert, the newcomer could not easily fathom the connections between the warhead and the missile because Ruhr, with the foresight of the survivor, had had the warhead built to his own specifications, which had been given to the Israelis, Levy and Possony. Changes in the wiring inside the missile were required to make it compatible with the warhead, which was a brilliant modification of the device known in the nuclear arms trade as the W84. A wrong connection, a minor mistake, and the fusing would burn out, rendering both missile and warhead useless. And Bosanquet knew that: Ruhr had once again made himself indispensable.

Ruhr had acquired his extensive nuclear understanding from a homosexual West German technician employed by NATO at Wueschein, a base in Germany. He’d learned how the missile worked, and the principles behind it. He’d absorbed this with the ardour of a man in love with his subject. The technician, menaced by blackmail, had been a wonderful teacher, Ruhr an even more marvellous student. The arcane terms, the payload, the velocity, the range, the connections between warhead and missile – Ruhr took it all in without needing second explanations.

Now Fuentes tore off his hat and flung it to the ground. “Tronco de yucca,” he said to Ruhr. “That’s what you are, Ruhr. A goddam tronco de yucca. Why don’t you do the goddam job now?”

“I don’t speak Spanish,” Ruhr replied. He enjoyed Fuentes’ primitive display of irritation. “Is that a compliment?”

“I don’t think it is,” Bosanquet remarked. He breathed deeply, staying calm. After all, did it really make a difference if Ruhr armed the missile here or on board the ship? So long as the device was ready to fly when it was placed in Cuba – that was the thing of consequence. Ruhr could make “the marriage” on the ship, if that was how he wanted it.

“It’s okay,” Bosanquet said. “It’s going to be fine.”

“I know it is,” Ruhr responded.

He walked across the runway and back up through the long grass to his tent. Guns fired in the misty distance. Target practice. He entered the tent. The girl was lying on the camp bed, her eyes closed.

He watched her. He was ready for her now.

He moved towards her quietly, with a weightlessness years of stealth had taught him. He was about a foot from the bed when she opened her eyes and drew her hands out from under the blanket. She held a piece of broken mirror, a scabbard-shaped length she held like a dagger, and she thrust it at him. He stepped away, watching how the makeshift blade drew small reflections from within the tent – the girl’s lips, one of her determined eyes, Ruhr’s own face, fragmented images.

She raised her weapon in the air and slashed again and this time he seized her wrist and slammed it down across his knee, forcing her hand to open and the length of mirror to fall to the ground. She wasn’t beaten even then. She pulled herself free of him, twisted, kicked, lashed air with a foot that had never been meant to inflict damage, a long foot, a dancer’s foot. He caught the ankle easily, and twisted it, and pushed her back across the bed.

She lay there, breathing hard.

He stood over her.

And smiled.

London

The doctor, Ghose, examined Pagan’s chest with his head cocked, like that of a bird, to one side. He kept up an ongoing stream of chatter while he studied the stitches. The human body, Mr Pagan, is a miracle of design and efficiency. Consider for instance the lung, the robust delicacy of that organ, the bronchi, the bronchioles, the whole system of highways that we call alveolar ducts. Easily damaged, Mr Pagan, but they mend under the right circumstances. And these include bed rest, no needless activity. Think of yourself as sedentary for a while.

Pagan liked Ghose and the cheerful manner in which the doctor chided him.

“In future you will move, if at all, only slowly,” Ghose said. He replaced the damaged stitches after cleaning the wound thoroughly.

Pagan disengaged himself from the proceedings by thinking about the report of Herr Kluger’s death in Paris. He’d translated it slowly on the plane back to London, skipping vocabulary he didn’t know. The gist of the thing was that Caporelli and a couple of his acquaintances – the detailed report named them as Harold Hurt and Sheridan Perry, American citizens – had witnessed the event. Were they simply out strolling, taking the night air, four old pals crossing a street when – wham – one of them is dragged under a truck? Perhaps they were headed somewhere, a meeting, a café. It was a dead-end. He could check out Hurt and Perry, which would take time unless they had records of some kind at the American Embassy or were otherwise noted in some central law enforcement computer – if they had ever broken any laws in their time. Time: there it was again, an intolerably demanding master.

Ghose bandaged him. “There. Almost as good as new. I underline the almost. Now go home. Behave yourself. Don’t play in the streets. Cars are quicker than you, Mr Pagan.”

Pagan told Ghose he was going directly to bed, but when he left the hospital he took a taxi, through clogged West End traffic, to Golden Square. It was after seven o’clock when he reached his office. He took the bottle of Auchentoshan from his desk, poured a very small shot into a glass. He sifted his messages. There was one from Foxworth, who hadn’t returned from Glasgow. Something about a car-hire company he was going to check out. Pagan could hardly read Billy Ewing’s handwriting. Steffie Brough’s mother had called, just checking. Just checking. This terse message, between whose lines lay a world of pain, caused Pagan to feel as if his heart had been squeezed. He glanced at the child’s picture pinned to the wall. The elfin features of the kid neither accused nor derided him for his failure to locate her. They seemed indifferent suddenly, as if resigned to exile.

Just checking. Pagan imagined he heard death in those words. He felt as if he’d entered a memorial chapel to find Steffie’s mother looking down into her daughter’s coffin and whispering to herself those two dreadful words Just checking, just checking, a hand laid softly on the child’s cold cheek.

I’ll get her back for you, Pagan thought. Some way.

He called Billy Ewing, told him to run a check on Harold Hurt and Sheridan Perry. Ewing had some information of his own, which concerned the protocol of Frank Pagan interviewing the Cuban Minister of Finance. It required a shit-load of paperwork, Ewing reported. Reasons had to be spelled out, justifications given. Documents were then submitted to the Cuban attaché in London, with copies to the Foreign Office. The government in Havana would review the request in due course. To put it bluntly, said Ewing, it might take six months, perhaps a year, and even then it didn’t sound promising.

Pagan thought about the great bureaucratic mire into which human intentions, reduced to paperwork, were sucked and invariably lost. He hung up. His next call was to the Commissioner. Pagan asked for a meeting as soon as possible, Burr agreed. They chose a pub in Soho because Burr had an engagement at a restaurant in Greek Street at eight. Pagan then made one other call, this time to an airline company.

On his way out of his office, he encountered Billy Ewing, who had his face buried deep in a big white handkerchief.

“By the way, anything new from Foxie?” Pagan asked.

“Not yet.” Ewing came up for air from the folds of the handkerchief. “Bloody pollen.”

“If he gets in touch I’ll be at the French pub.”

“Then what?”

“We’ll see.”

“There goes a man of mystery,” Ewing said, more to himself than to his boss, as Pagan headed for the door with an agility Ghose would not have recommended.

The French pub, so-called because in another incarnation it had been the headquarters for the French government in exile during World War II, was crowded with West End types, a few tourists, theatre-goers finishing drinks hurriedly, and some dubious characters Pagan recognised as having been acquainted with Her Majesty’s prisons at one time or another. He squeezed into the bar, careful to avoid potentially painful contact with anyone, and ordered a scotch.

Quite suddenly he remembered having been in this same bar thirteen years ago with Magdalena Torrente. They’d drunk anis from a large glass urn on the counter and then they’d gone deeper into Soho, strolling hand-in-hand down Old Compton Street, up through the food stalls in the Berwick Street market. They’d eaten dinner at a small Greek restaurant on Beak Street. He’d got quite drunk that night. Drunk and passionate, and probably silly in his passion. The touching evening came rushing back to him in little particles of memory that had been scattered and overlooked.

Martin Burr arrived five minutes after Pagan was served. Unlike Pagan, the Commissioner waded into the throng, nudging with his stick wherever appropriate. He was an imposing man. The eye-patch, the bulk of his body, gave him presence and set him apart. He didn’t want a drink. Since the place was crowded, he and Pagan went outside into the street. A snappy little breeze blew up from Shaftesbury Avenue and Pagan turned up the collar of his coat.

“How is the wound?” Burr asked.

“I’ll survive,” Pagan remarked. He drained his scotch and set it down on the window-ledge of the pub.

“Don’t overdo it.”

“I don’t know how, Commissioner.”

Martin Burr smiled thinly. Frank was the kind who’d soldier on regardless. Either one admired this attitude or criticised it for being headstrong. Burr was never sure which side he took.

He put his hands in the pockets of his tweed overcoat. “I’m getting flak, Frank. All the bloody time. This damned commission of inquiry has its first meeting tomorrow. I’m going to have to talk to them about the leak that led to the calamity in Shepherd’s Bush. What can I tell them? I know absolutely nothing new about it.” Burr looked up at the night sky over Soho, looking like a one-eyed country squire sniffing the air for weather changes. “I also just received some other news that may or may not have something to do with the bloody missile. According to an intelligence report that came to my desk, the Israelis have reported two of their most highly rated nuclear physicists as missing, as well as sufficient matériel to make a warhead compatible with the cruise missile. Both men are said to be somewhere in South America. The Israelis are blaming professional burn-out for the theft. Both men were said to be, and I quote, ‘highly strung’. But who knows? The information is vague.”

“If there’s a connection with Ruhr, then the cruise might be armed by this time.”

“It might be.”

“Which makes the picture even more gloomy.”

“Gloomy indeed. Who is going to blow up what, I wonder.” Burr slipped fingertips under his eye-patch and scratched. “If it weren’t for the fact that I’d feel like some rotten little bugger sneaking off a sinking ship, I’d tender my resignation in a twinkling. No messing about. But I’m like you, Frank. I keep going. Kinnaird’s been supportive, I must say. Which I appreciate.”

A roar of buses was blown on the breeze from Shaftesbury Avenue and the theatre district. This was a transient, brightly lit little corner of London, streets filled with drifters, people who idled in the Haymarket and around Piccadilly Circus and wandered toward Leicester Square.

“Kinnaird’s the conscientious sort,” Pagan said.

“Calls me three, four times a day, Frank.” Burr looked as if he were wearied by the Home Secretary’s attentions. “What did you want to see me about?”

Pagan arranged his thoughts. He expected an argument from the Commissioner, or at least an objection. He talked quickly, hoping Burr wouldn’t interrupt him. He went lightly on the details, his past relationship with Magdalena. He talked about the connections between Rosabal and Ruhr, the evidence of the rented farmhouse. He sketched his conjectures, trying to give them solid weight, about the threads that linked Caporelli and Chapotin to Rosabal, and thus to Gunther Ruhr. En passant, he spoke about the deaths of Caporelli and the others. Now, if there was only the vaguest possibility that the stolen missile was armed, it gave the whole investigation even more urgency.

“There are some iffy bits in there,” Burr said.

Pagan agreed and muttered something about the nature of all hypotheses. He glanced down the busy street.

“What do you propose, Frank?” Burr asked. Sometimes he adopted an attitude toward Pagan similar to one that might be held by an uncle toward a favoured, if slightly wilful, nephew. He was tolerant, bemused, gently critical; he knew that Pagan always did his best no matter the circumstances.

Pagan said what he had in mind.

Martin Burr put one hand up to his dark-green eye-patch. “Are you really sure that this person – this Magdalena – will tell you anything, even if she’s in a position to do so?”

Pagan wasn’t sure. He thought about the mysterious coup she’d been so reluctant to discuss: if he knew more about that, there might be progress. “She’s the only real connection I have to Rosabal. And I think the road to Ruhr leads through the Cuban.”

“You could travel a long way and have nothing to show for it.”

“I could also sit on my arse around London and have even less.”

“True,” Burr said. A certain look sometimes came to Frank Pagan’s face, and the Commissioner recognised it now, determined, and hard, the slight forward thrust of the jaw, aggressive. “May I remind you, Frank, that you’re not in great shape for travelling? On top of that, your activity in Paris today hasn’t improved your condition.”

“I feel fine,” Pagan said. And, for the moment, that was true enough. How long this transitory well-being would last was another matter. He had the feeling he was held together by nothing more substantial than Ghose’s stitches.

Burr said, “Very well. Make arrangements to go.”

“I already made them.”

Burr smiled. “I should have known.” He was quiet a moment. Pagan’s confidence was sometimes an impressive thing. “There’s an old contact of mine in Dade County. A certain Lieutenant Philip Navarro. You might need him. He knows his way around.”

Pagan memorised the name.

“I hope you bring something back, Frank. God knows, we could use a break.”

The Commissioner shook Pagan’s hand, then turned and walked in the direction of Old Compton Street. Pagan didn’t watch him leave. He didn’t have time to linger. He had to go to his apartment, toss a few things together, get his passport and his gun, and be at Heathrow Airport within the next two hours. He was pleased to have the Commissioner’s blessing, the official imprimatur.

With or without it, he’d have gone anyway.

Washington

Harry Hurt kept an expensive apartment in an area of Washington that afforded a splendid view of the Potomac. It was a rich man’s view, designed to instil in its owner a sense of unbridled superiority. High above the riff-raff, Hurt indulged his patriotism, which fostered the illusion that anyone – anyone at all – could rise to wealth and prominence in these United States. Any Appalachian dirt farmer’s boy, any steelworker’s son from Bethlehem, PA, could – God, hard work, and the machine willing – ascend to the highest offices in the land. Harry Hurt believed this without question. While he was not an innocent in world affairs by any means, he was nevertheless naive when it came to some areas of understanding. His romanticised America eclipsed the hard reality.

The apartment had an exercise-room fitted with an electronic bicycle, stretching devices, a Nautilus machine, a variety of weights and a rowing simulator. In this room Hurt burned off calories and kept himself tight and lean.

A spartan bedroom with a certain Polynesian flavour adjoined the mini-gymnasium, and beyond was a large living-room where he sometimes entertained people. A glass-panelled cabinet, centred against the main wall of the living-room like a shrine, contained a variety of weapons – automatic rifles, shotguns, pistols – as well as photographs of Hurt in crumpled fatigues and black glasses when he’d been a “military advisor” in Central America. A clutch of shrunken heads, gathered in Central American villages, hung alongside the cabinet like a spray of discoloured garlic bulbs. All were reminders of his glory days.

The door of the living-room led into a vestibule furnished in soft white leather chairs and sofas. This room was presently occupied by new guards Hurt had hired. There were three in all, one a former Secret Serviceman. They wore dark-blue suits.

On this particular evening, more than twenty-four hours after the limousine had exploded, Hurt was in the living-room pouring small shots of an inexpensive scotch called Passport from a bottle labelled Glenfiddich. He had some miserly ways and, like most misers, thought he could fool people with transparent deceptions.

Freddie Kinnaird, who had arrived an hour ago on Concorde, sipped his drink and pretended to enjoy it. Sheridan Perry, knowledgeable about malt whiskies, made no objection either. He was accustomed to this odd streak of niggardliness in Harry. The more wealth Hurt accumulated, the more thrifty he became and the more energy he spent jogging and rowing and heaving weights around. It was almost as if he were obeying some strange axiom of his own: great wealth leads only to parsimonious guilt which can be reduced only through endless exercise.

Freddie Kinnaird, who had just finished relating the death of Enrico Caporelli, set his glass down a moment. Hurt deftly slid a coaster, filched from the Stanhope Hotel in Manhattan, under the Englishman’s drink.

“When does it end?” Hurt asked. He’d already told Freddie about the attack on the limo, glancing all the while at Perry, as if for some sign of his compatriot’s guilt.

“When we three are dead, I daresay,” Kinnaird remarked.

“Hold on, hold on,” Hurt said. “Let’s be logical. Let’s take this thing apart and put it back together again. It has to lead somewhere.”

Kinnaird picked up his glass and finished his drink. He had so little time to spend here. There was business to conduct back in England, the affairs of his office not the least of it, but he’d come here to show a sign of solidarity with Hurt and Perry. After all, they were members of the same exclusive club. He detected some mild tension between the pair. Had there been a squabble? In the circumstances, though, nervousness was inevitable.

Freddie Kinnaird also had some information to impart at the appropriate moment, which would come when Harry had played out his little string of paranoia.

“For a while, I thought Enrico himself might be behind it,” Hurt said.

“How wrong you were,” said Kinnaird.

“Now, if it’s an inside job …” Harry Hurt didn’t finish his sentence.

“We three,” Freddie Kinnaird said.

“Right,” Perry said. “If it’s an inside job, it’s one of us.”

Freddie Kinnaird played with his empty glass. A lock of hair fell across his forehead, creating the impression of a rather red-faced, ungainly boy. He swept it back with a toss of his head. “Consider the explosion of the limousine,” he said to Perry. “Who had the information that you and Harry were travelling in the vehicle?”

Perry said, “Only Harry and me. That’s it.”

“Unless you knew, Freddie,” Hurt said.

Kinnaird laughed. “I was many miles away, Harry. I have no crystal ball, something my political enemies in the House of Commons discovered some time ago.”

“You’re saying …” Perry stopped, looking both indignant and somewhat despondent at the same time.

“It’s either you or me.” Hurt turned to Perry. “That’s what Freddie’s saying.”

“Wait a minute there,” Perry said.

Kinnaird interrupted. “It’s only one possibility, gentlemen. Consider this as an alternative. Parties unknown to us, parties seeking the destruction of the Society, might be responsible.”

This was what Hurt wanted so badly to believe. But was it really preferable to ascribe the killings to some faceless organisation rather than to Sheridan Perry? Perry he could deal with. An unknown outfit was more spooky. How the hell did you begin to fight back at a shadow? His thoughts returned to the fiery limousine and the striking little perception he’d had when he’d been obliged to flee the tailoring establishment. Perry knew, he had thought then.

Now it made some kind of sense to him.

Consider: Perry knew.

Assume: Perry arranged the hit.

The killers Perry had hired to strike the limousine had erred. Maybe they were supposed to blow up the car later, at some time when Perry – perhaps on the pretext of buying a newspaper, something like that – had stepped out of the limo. It made simple, stunning, logical sense. Perry’s killers, in their enthusiasm to do the job, had mistimed the affair.

This is what it came down to: Perry wanted it all, the whole ball of wax. He wanted the Society for himself. He wanted Cuba for himself.

Hurt switched on the light in the aquarium standing against one wall. Sudden fluorescence illuminated a clan of silken Siamese fighting fish. When they moved they did so with a kind of narcissism, as if studying their reflections in an infinity of mirrors. Hurt peered into the aquarium. His own image, the angular features, the great bony jaw, the steely close-cropped hair, shone back at him. Seeing himself thus he remembered that control was one of his strengths, that he wasn’t the kind of man to leap to unfounded conclusions. Perhaps he was judging Perry wrongly.

He turned to look at his fellow American. Sheridan Perry was pouting very slightly, the shadow of an expression left over from a spoiled childhood. Little Sheridan Perry had been the centrepiece of his parents’ marriage. Fawned over, bestowed with riches, his life an endless cycle of tearing apart wrapping-paper to get to the goodies, young Perry had reached his tenth birthday before he realised that in most other houses Christmas arrived but once a year.

Perry said, very quietly, “It wasn’t me. I’m not behind it. I wish you’d quit staring at me, Harry. I’m no traitor.”

He looked convincing to Hurt. He sounded like a man telling the truth. Kinnaird’s hypothesis of an unknown party seemed suddenly feasible to Hurt, who couldn’t stand the pained expression on Perry’s face. How could Perry, no matter the unfathomable extent of his greed, be responsible for wiping out the Society?

Hurt shook his head, astonished by his own ability to vacillate. You simply couldn’t have it both ways. Either Perry was guilty or he was not. Indecision was a sin in Hurt’s eyes.

“Let us set all this unpleasantness and mutual suspicion aside for the moment,” Kinnaird said in a firm way. “There’s something else that complicates our lives – the fact that a certain London policeman is presently on his way to the United States. A man called Frank Pagan. Pagan is the one who interviewed Enrico in Paris. He was present at Caporelli’s unfortunate death.”

“Do you think he knows anything?” Hurt asked.

“Very little, I imagine. At this present time. All I can tell you is the information I myself get from Scotland Yard.”

“How did he get on to Enrico?” Sheridan Perry asked, frowning, looking oddly pale and anaemic in a way no hearty carnivore ever should.

Kinnaird replied, “Through Rosabal, I gather. I haven’t seen Pagan’s report yet on his meeting with Enrico.”

“But how the hell did Pagan get on to the Cuban?” Hurt wanted to know.

Freddie Kinnaird stretched his legs, clasped his hands at the back of his head, and tried to look relaxed, but he was faintly nervous here. “British domestic intelligence has an occasional policy of observing members of the Cuban government visiting Britain – diplomats, ministers, etcetera. Now and then, a Cuban is selected for surveillance. Rosabal’s number came up. He was watched in Glasgow. He was seen with Enrico.”

While Hurt absorbed this information, he could hear various doors squeak open in the long murky corridor of his mind. The idea that Rosabal had been followed in the United Kingdom worried him deeply. Perhaps Enrico had also been placed under surveillance on account of his association with the Cuban. And where could that have led?

“Is it possible that British intelligence is responsible for the deaths of our members?” he asked.

Kinnaird smiled. “I don’t think it’s likely. That kind of information would have come to my attention one way or another.”

“Unless they’re on to you, Freddie.”

“Nobody is on to me, Harry. Believe me.” Kinnaird smiled. The very idea of his exposure was preposterous.

The silence in the room was disturbed only by water passing softly through the aquarium filter and a faint plup as a fish briefly broke the surface. Then Hurt asked, “How good is Pagan?”

“His determination is notorious. He’s also known for overlooking the book when it suits him,” Kinnaird said. He recalled the hurried telephone conversation he’d had with Martin Burr just before boarding Concorde. “Right now he’s on his way to Miami. He has a contact inside the Cuban exile community. Mind you, I don’t think Pagan knows very much. Nor do I imagine he’s remotely interested in Cuba or anything that might happen there. He wants Ruhr and he wants this young girl Ruhr was silly enough to grab. He also wants to know the whereabouts of the missile.”

Hurt walked to the window. He surveyed the other blocks of apartments that overlooked the Potomac. Lights burned in windows and a passing yacht created a bright yellow band on the dark waters. Hurt felt suddenly crowded. It was more than the deaths of his associates, it was the idea of this Frank Pagan. He looked at his watch. Everything was so damned close to completion. How could he allow some British cop to interfere? If Pagan was headed for Miami and the Cuban community there, he was getting a little too close. He was trespassing on Harry Hurt’s zone of comfort.

“Who’s his contact in Miami?”

“This is the interesting part, Harry. According to my information, Pagan’s friend is a woman called” – and here Kinnaird consulted a small morocco bound notebook fished from his inside pocket –“Magdalena Torrente.”

“So? What’s so interesting about that?” Hurt asked.

Kinnaird was quiet a second. Then he said, “Magdalena Torrente is an intimate friend of Rosabal’s.”

“Intimate?” Hurt asked, alarmed by this new connection. “How intimate? What does that mean?”

Kinnaird gazed at the shrunken heads. They really were monstrous little things. Their mouths hung open as if these were the faces of people who had died in unspeakable pain. “My dear Harry, I can only tell you what I read in the reports. And police reports are not renowned for their pornographic details. She’s a friend, a close friend. Perhaps a lover.”

“What does she know? Did Rosabal tell her anything?”

Kinnaird shrugged. “I don’t have the answers. My information isn’t complete. Pagan won’t tell me anything directly. And since he’s not the quickest person when it comes to compiling reports for the Commissioner, I am sometimes not altogether au courant. But I rather doubt that Rosabal would confide in this woman anything so important as our undertaking, don’t you?”

Hurt nodded, though a little uncertainly. “I don’t like it anyway you cut it. The fact that Pagan’s contact in Miami is an intimate friend of Rosabal – this is not good news, Freddie.”

Sheridan Perry said, “It’s very simple. I’ve always followed the old line that it’s better to be safe than sorry.”

“You mean what I think you mean?” Hurt asked.

Perry nodded but said nothing.

“You’d eliminate the pair?” Hurt asked.

“Eliminate’s a good word,” Perry remarked.

Hurt wondered if Perry’s suggestion, lethal and yet so simply phrased, was Sheridan’s attempt to turn attention away from any suspicion of murderous betrayal that might have gathered around him. Kinnaird had deftly changed that subject a few minutes ago, putting into abeyance the question with which this meeting had begun. Sir Freddie, diplomat, smoother of tangled paths, had focused attention on another problem, one more easily solved than that of identifying the killer behind the murders of the Society members.

“Who would you get to do it?” Hurt asked.

Sheridan Perry shook his head. “Harry, come on. I don’t have an inside track with the criminal fraternity. I thought you might know somebody. After all, you’re the man with connections when it comes to guns and guys that know how to use them.”

Hurt had the feeling that Perry’s last remark was a way of casting a little light of suspicion on Harry himself. It was undeniably true that he had contacts among ex-soldiers and mercenaries, men who considered killing as natural a function as, say, screwing. Hurt had kept some bad company in his time, also true. Was Perry trying to damn Hurt by association? Was he trying to say that Hurt was the logical candidate if the murders were an inside job?

Sweet Jesus, Hurt thought. When you stepped on board that great rolling locomotive of doubt and suspicion it just gathered speed and kept moving, never stopping at any stations, it rattled and screamed past objectivity in its frantic journey to confusion and madness. He took a couple of deep breaths, seeking the calm centre of himself.

“I could make a call, I guess,” he said. Why deny it? He had the contacts.

“I wish there were some other way.” Kinnaird’s voice was quiet.

“There isn’t,” Perry said. “You let this character Pagan go where he pleases – what then? And if the woman happens to have information … No, Freddie. There’s no other way. We can’t afford to take chances now.”

Hurt stepped inside the kitchen. Kinnaird and Perry could hear him talking quietly on the telephone. He spoke for a few minutes, then he returned to the living-room.

“It’s done,” he said flatly.

There was a silence in the room. In the entrance room, behind the closed door, one of the bodyguards coughed. Hurt strolled to the window. The view was breathtaking. There was more traffic on the river now: launches, yachts, one of which was strung like a Christmas tree. In the windows of other apartment buildings lights were dulled by drawn curtains or tinted glass.

He said, “Ever since we became involved in this Cuban business, we’ve had nothing but problems. I remember when everything was easy. Plain sailing. No clouds. Full membership. We didn’t have deaths, killings. We weren’t involved in all this …” He waved a hand. The appropriate word had eluded him. “Mainly, though, our associates were still alive and well.”

He stared across the expanse of the Washington night. Because of the vast electrical glow of the city, the stars were dimmed in the sky. He was about to turn his face back to the room when a bullet, fired from an apartment tower nearby, pierced the window in an almost soundless manner.

It penetrated his skull.

Harry Hurt put his hand up to his head, thinking for the shortest time possible, the kind of time only a sophisticated atomic clock might measure, that he had a migraine. It was his final perception, quicker than quicksilver. He neither heard nor saw Freddie Kinnaird and Sheridan Perry rush to the place where, face-down, he had fallen.

The Caribbean

The freighter, an old vessel badly in need of fresh paint, flew the red white and blue flag of Cuba. It was not of Cuban origin. Built in Newcastle, England, some forty years before, it was registered in Panama and named – at least for this voyage – La Mandadera. It was a vessel of formidable shabbiness. Rust seemingly held the ship together, creating brown bands around bow and stern.

The captain was a moustached Cuban-American called Luis Sandoval who lived in Florida. He had fled Cuba in 1964 with his wife and family at a time when rumours concerning the removal of children from Cuba to Russia had been rife on the island. It was said that Fidel was going to send Cuban kids to the Soviet Union to be educated and raised there as good little Communists. Luis, like thousands of others, had left Cuba for good. For more than twenty-five years he’d plied his trade as a fishing-guide around Miami, impatiently waiting for the moment of his return to the homeland.

Now he was in the vanguard of the liberation movement.

He stood on the bridge of La Mandadera, his binoculars trained on the dark shore five miles away. There was a half-moon and some low cloud and the sea was tranquil. Sandoval scanned the shoreline slowly. He wasn’t nervous.

There! To his right he saw the sign he was looking for: a red-orange flare that ripped the darkness like a wound opening. It was followed by a constant flame, a bonfire burning on the beach. Luis Sandoval gave his crew the order to proceed. Within a mile of the place known as Cabo Gracias a Dios he would drop anchor and wait for history to take place. It did not escape his vanity that he was one of many co-authors helping to shape forthcoming events.

Twenty-three thousand miles above La Mandadera, a United States spy satellite, that until recently had been bugged by a mysterious malfunction, began to take photographs, hundreds of them, thousands, pictures that would be relayed back to a deciphering station deep in the green West Virginia countryside, where they would be processed and analysed and, like little coded mysteries from space, broken wide open. These same photographs also showed a stormy cloud formation, as menacing in its darkness as a black hole, moving across the Gulf of Mexico and the Yucatan Peninsula toward the waters of the Caribbean.