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Two guards opened the gates at the house entrance, and stood passively while Walker drove his old convertible in. Then they closed them. Half-instinctively, Ruby looked about for exit points. Were they trapped? Were they about to be? Impossible to know. She trusted Poynter, but then she’d trusted back-stabbers before, and she wasn’t the sort who always learned her lesson fully first time round. No sign of the dogs.
Poynter, dressed in pyjamas and slippers, was no less tall and gangly than the last time they’d met. He came out of the house with an elderly Indian-looking woman in tow. She wore a dressing gown and a worried expression.
“Welcome,” he said. He indicated his companion. “Mrs Chatterjee, my housekeeper. Come inside.”
They walked through a hallway with a figurine of Ganesh in an alcove and a bigger picture of Rama and Sita on the wall.
“My last posting was in Delhi,” Poynter said, as if it was a bit of a secret.
They walked into the lounge, a large, square room with pale brown armchairs, a deep pile carpet and more Hindu artefacts. Three landscapes of Jamaican beaches hung on the walls. An air conditioning fan whirred softly on the ceiling next to a chandelier.
Jack Maddison stood by one of the armchairs like an exhibit, his face unreadable. Obviously, he was as apprehensive as Ruby was. She suddenly realised: she’d expected a friend, but neither of them had any idea what the other was going to say, and if there was news, whether it would be good or bad. Even now, the whole thing might still be a trap. The JCF might already be on their way over.
She didn’t think so. He advanced with a handshake and a smile. “Nice to see you again, Ruby. I can’t begin to tell you how relieved I am to find you alive and apparently well.”
“I understand you’ve been looking for me,” she said. “These are my friends, Andrew Walker and Vilma Cuesta. Vilma’s an old friend of mine.”
“From your African adventure. Yes, I’ve been reading your file again.”
How to take that? She didn’t like all these how-do-you-do, pleased-to-meet-you English pleasantries. She wanted to get down to business.
“Mrs Chatterjee’s making you something to eat,” Poynter said, indicating the elderly woman, although she hadn’t yet left the room, and there was no smell of cooking. “Come through into the dining room. I’ll close the door and we can talk.”
Vilma and Walker looked nervous. The idea that it might be a ruse hadn’t just crossed their minds, Ruby realised: it was careering backwards and forwards in there like a freight train. Vilma had probably brought her gun into the house. A good or a bad thing? It might be their only ticket out of here. On the other hand, it might go off accidentally.
But no: Vilma was too professional.
So many things to worry about, impossible to see the wood for the trees.
Poynter pulled out chairs for them, and handed cigarettes and cigars round. Ruby was the sole non-smoker. Only Vilma took a cigar.
Then brandy. The tension was becoming unbearable. At this rate, Mrs Chatterjee would be in with a tureen, six spoons and a set of soup bowls before anyone had said a word about what had brought them all here.
“We need to talk,” Ruby said. “With respect, I mean, now.”
Maddison folded his hands on the table. “I’ll come straight to the point, Ruby, since I can see we’re giving you the heebie-jeebies. As of this afternoon you’re no longer persona non grata. Parton is.”
The news was so blunt and unexpected that for a moment, she was speechless. She wasn’t intending to, but she drank her brandy. She coughed.
“I’m not?” she said. “And he is?”
“As soon as I heard you were ‘dead’, I flew out here,” he continued. “You may or may not know this, but I officially retired the day you came to Jamaica. You were my last parting shot at ‘the Circus’, as some people call it. I didn’t want to leave you unmourned in a foreign land. If need be, I was prepared to make arrangements to have your body flown home. Parton wouldn’t have. But the truth is, I didn’t really believe you were dead. Then I heard about Collins’s murder, and it all became disturbingly plausible.”
“I witnessed that murder,” Walker said.
Maddison nodded. “The CIA circulated your photo. You’re Collins’s impersonator.”
“I’m a journalist,” Walker replied. “I couldn’t prevent the killing, but I did feel professionally bound to investigate it.”
Maddison took a drag on his cigarette. “I think we can persuade them it was all worthwhile. The way things stand at the moment, I can’t see you going to prison.”
“Thanks,” Walker said softly, his tone suggesting this might be the first time the possibility had occurred to him. “I didn’t mean any harm.”
“Have another cigarette,” Poynter told him.
Maddison swilled his brandy round his glass a few times and sipped it. “The breakthrough came when I found Camilla Hebblethwaite. She wasn’t particularly pleased to see me, but she accepted her husband had been hiding something and her brother was probably in cahoots with him. She didn’t think you’d killed William, but she wasn’t sure how else that might have occurred, so - ”
“It was me,” Vilma said.
“Because he’d chained me up,” Ruby said, “with a view to ... well, he was going to kill me eventually.”
“I’ll spare you having to re-tell the story,” Maddison said, “and maybe tell you something you don’t know. Cedric was working for the police.”
“The police?” Ruby said.
“The Bureau of Special Investigations, to be precise,” Maddison replied. “They’d suspected Hebblethwaite for a while, and of course, Cedric was an insider, and he’d seen him writing in code.”
“If only we’d come here twelve hours ago,” Vilma said. “Ruby had two beautiful specimens of that code.”
“No matter,” Maddison went on. “Parton burned the hotel down, as I’m sure you know, to destroy any trace of his and William’s misdeeds. I reasoned that William might keep something related to his crimes at work, and that all Camilla had to do, as next of kin, was go in and claim it. I desperately hoped Parton had overlooked that possibility, and thank God, I was right.”
“What did you find?” Ruby asked. “Although I think I can guess.”
“Three encrypted notebooks. I passed them to Lawrence, and he forwarded them to MI6, keeping Parton out of the loop on the grounds of his family connection to Hebblethwaite. Detailing dates, contacts, landing times, ports, routes, and so on, for cocaine shipments from Colombia to Europe and the United States. Cleverly done. Only prime number pages contain genuine information, and even then only on specific lines, otherwise, they’re meaningless strings of letters and symbols. Williams made the crass mistake of writing the key on the underside of the binding.”
“Understandable on one level,” Poynter said.
Maddison grunted. “The idea was that each member of the consortium should re-cipher the information by means of an agreed formula before passing it on to the next person. Each knew only his own code and formula and that of the operative immediately succeeding him. The dates and contacts would be systematically altered as the book was passed along, so no one person would know the cargo’s full history. Of course, we can probably unpick it by putting spies into the system.”
“So has Parton been arrested?” Walker said.
“We’re looking for him,” Maddison replied. “The drugs are being delivered tomorrow night.”
“We know,” Walker said. “Heinous, ain’t it?”
They all turned to look at him. Maddison and Poynter as if they couldn’t believe he was being sarcastic, Ruby and Vilma as if they knew he was, and weren’t certain whether to disown or back him.
“I take it the guns are still on,” Walker added.
“Not if I have anything to do with it,” Maddison said.
“In that case, why not just tell the police?” Walker asked. “They could put a warrant out for Parton’s arrest, and they’d stop the guns as they came in.”
“Seaga’s going to win this election by a landslide,” Maddison said, “so Whitehall and Washington agree there’s no need for further destabilisation. In my opinion, the guns were a mistake all along. Even so, we can’t risk the possibility that they’ll be traced to MI6 and the CIA. It’s our mess, and we’ll clean it up.”
“You’ll have a hard time persuading Weddermon to see it that way,” Walker said. “He’s got his heart set on those weapons. What are you going to do? Get the ship to turn around and go back where it came from?”
“Officially, and perhaps actually, the captain doesn’t know what he’s got aboard. We’re assuming the drugs and the weapons are on the same vessel, otherwise Parton wouldn’t be able to use the one as a cloak for the other.”
“Why use a container terminal?” Vilma asked. “Jamaica’s got six hundred and thirty-eight miles of coastline. You could smuggle drugs in anywhere.”
“There are advantages to doing it in plain sight,” Maddison replied. “Officials can be bribed and you can import industrial quantities. Our job now is to divert Weddermon somehow, or make sure he never gains access.”
“Using how many guys?” Walker asked. “Because last time I looked, he had an army.”
“Sorry to cut in,” Ruby said, “but I don’t understand why Parton’s still on the loose. Surely he can’t know you’ve cracked his code? In which case, he must think he’s safe. Can’t you just ask him to report to the BHC and seize him when he gets there? I assume you’ve some way of contacting him in the event of an emergency?”
“We’ve tried,” Poynter said. “Don’t forget, he’s an intelligence officer, and a senior one at that. If he chooses to go off the radar for a day or so, no one’s going to ask any questions. As things stand, he’s supposed to be coordinating the weapons handover in person. Our guess is that he’s using the razing of his hotel as an excuse to break contact with us and ensure it stays that way till after he’s sure he’s safe. Or not.”
“We can’t get the Jamaica Constabulary Force involved,” Maddison said. “At least not the whole of it. Parton’s got too many friends in there. He’d be tipped off straight away, and that would be that. We need to catch him red-handed.”
“I take it he’s not mentioned by name in the code books?” Vilma asked.
“I’m afraid not,” Maddison said. “We’ve got the cooperation of the Bureau of Special Investigations.”
“So Jamaica’s not getting any new weapons?” Walker said. “What are you going to do with them in that case, and how do I – we - know you’re telling the truth?”
“Because hopefully, we’re going to break them up for scrap metal, and as a journalist, you’re welcome to watch. We’ll destroy the drugs in the usual way. The official story will be that The Medellín Cartel landed contraband in Kingston as a means of consolidating and expanding its Jamaican market.”
“In that case, back to my original question,” Walker said. “How are you going to beat Weddermon off at the terminal, given that you don’t want to involve the JCF?”
“We’ll let the Jamaican Defence Force – the army-navy equivalent – in at the last moment. We won’t be telling them who Parton really is, of course, and there’s no way they can find out. The Consulate’s got a list of officers we can trust, and of course, we’ll be running that past the BSI.”
Walker nodded sagely. “Weddermon’s my uncle,” he said. “This might sound crazy, but I don’t want him to get hurt. I don’t mind him going to prison for a while.”
“He didn’t seem to care too much for you, as I recall,” Vilma said.
“We don’t know that,” Walker said. “It could have been a mix-up.”
Vilma laughed humourlessly and blew cigar smoke in his face. “He tried to kill me and Ruby. Was that a mix up, too?”
“We’re not looking to kill anyone if it can be avoided,” Maddison said. “Ideally, we’d like to take both Weddermon and Parton out of the equation before tomorrow night.”
Ruby leaned forward. “How do you intend to do that?”
“That’s precisely where you come in, my dear,” Poynter said. “We assume you were at the Gleneagles earlier today. I can’t see any other reason why Parton would have burned it down. We know he was staying there. He did tell us that much.”
“Andrew saved my life,” she said.
“I saved your life,” Vilma said.
“We were hoping you might turn up here,” Maddison said. “We guessed you’d find out from Parton that I was on the island and calculate that coming here was your best chance of finding me. We expected you a little earlier, I must say. Lawrence was beginning to lose hope.”
“We thought Mr Poynter would probably be at work,” Ruby said.
Maddison nodded as if, yes, that explained it. “We took the liberty of putting a plan in motion that involves you. We’re going to pretend that you were the fire’s only survivor. Badly burned, you checked yourself into Kingston Public Hospital this evening, then lapsed into unconsciousness. The SPI will put out a press release in the name of the hospital and the police more generally. It’ll provide enough information to ensure that Parton recognises his nemesis. He’s probably going to be watching TV or listening to the radio anyway, given how precarious a situation he’s in and that apprehension’s a spy’s best friend. If he’s consistent, he’ll want to finish you off. When he turns up, we’ll be waiting for him.”
“He won’t come in person,” Walker said. “He’ll get Weddermon to send someone.”
“That can be useful too,” Maddison said, “though I’ve a feeling he may be going off Weddermon. In any case, we’ll see.”
“What will Ruby be doing all this time?” Vilma asked. “And please don’t tell me she’s going to be in that hospital, pretending to be expiring.”
“No, because we don’t want to give unnecessary hostages to fortune,” Maddison said. “The figure in the bed will be a dummy, its face encased in bandages. Ruby will be outside with us. That is, if you agree, Ruby.”
She shrugged. “I can’t think of a better plan.”
“You’d better not be thinking of jettisoning me and Andy,” Vilma said. “I want to see this through.”
“On the contrary,” Maddsion replied. “Never split a successful team till all its objectives have been achieved. One thing I’ve learned over the years.”
Vilma put the butt of her cigar in the ashtray. “It doesn’t bother you that I’m Cuban? Because most people in your organisation, it probably would.”
“Our file on Vilma Cuesta’s only marginally smaller than our file on Ruby Parker,” Maddison said. “We’ve agreed you’re not a threat. I can’t go into the reasons, but none of them are a discredit to you.”
They all looked at each other. Vilma made a compliant noise. Walker nodded.
Poynter raised his glass. “If I may be so presumptuous?” he said.
Ruby expected him to say something faintly embarrassing. ‘To Ruby, Vilma and Andrew’, ‘To friendship’, ‘To success’, or even ‘To the Queen’.
“To Jamaica,” he said. “May her ills dissipate, her enemies be vanquished, and happiness and prosperity arrive and reside in her midst for ever.”
They looked at each other. A bit pretentious. Could be worse.
“To Jamaica,” they all said.
