'Yes. One thing was, she said it would help us if we let her see him before we got him out of the country. She said she'd got a great deal of information on him.'

It took another ten minutes to give him a replay of the scene in Kruger Drug last night; then I called up the other material that hadn't been specifically about Proctor. 'She told me I'd caught her at a critical – no, a crucial time, and that she needed help. There was no one she could trust.'

'She has no friends?'

'She didn't know if they'd be strong enough – I quote.'

'For what?'

I asked him to give me a minute.

I don't know how strong they'd be if things got really rough. And none of them know about George Proctor. Okay, we were close, yes, but they don't know about this thing that's happening.

Told Croder.

Thing.' He dropped the word like a stone into the silence.

'I don't know,' I said, 'what the thing is. But she began talking about Proctor again before we left Kruger Drug.' Pictured her face, her hands spread on the marble-topped table, listened for her voice. He still had a reserve I couldn't get through, and I believe he was doing things unknown to me that would have surprised me – correction, alarmed me, frightened me – not just personally, I mean on a geopolitical scale. I want to get this right – on a clandestine geopolitical scale.

Told Croder. He didn't comment, and I kept on going. 'She said something interesting about the late Howard Hughes, that he had a mad dream about buying America, by getting control of the industry, the machinery behind the throne. She said there was an easier way, that to buy America all you had to do was buy one man: the president.'

I sat back.

'You must have asked her to elaborate on that.'

'I would have, but her bodyguard brought her a remote phone. She had to go.'

'Who was the caller? Did you -'

'A Mr Sakomoto.'

'Was he the Japanese you saw boarding the cutter with her?'

'I don't know. He -'

'You tagged Cambridge -', Ferris, 'from Kruger Drug to 1330 Riverside, and she came out of the house with the Japanese and you tagged them to the quay, is that right?'

'Yes. But he wasn't necessarily Sakomoto.'

'There could be several Japanese,' Croder said, 'in that house.'

'Yes.'

'And how did you leave the Cambridge woman?'

'Leave -?'

'At Kruger Drug. What was said, do you remember?'

'She asked me when we could meet again, and I said I'd phone her the next day. She -'

'Today.'

'Yes. She said it was vital that we met again as soon as possible, and that she'd stay at her phone until noon.'

Croder scuffed through the book. 'You didn't telephone her.'

'I was on board Harvester's boat all the morning. At that time I wasn't certain I could trust her, and I only used the phone once, to call Ferris, just a two-word signal.' Shadow safe. 'It looks,' Ferris said, 'as if you'll need to meet Cambridge again.'

'Especially now.'

'Now that she's been on board the Contessa, and may have seen Proctor.'

'She may be still there,' Croder said. 'On board.'

'I doubt that. She goes on the air every day.'

'In a minute from now,' Monck said. 'Tench, is there a TV in that cabinet?'

He pulled open the double doors. 'Yes, sir.'

'Turn it on and cut the sound down and play the channels. We're looking for These Are My Views, you know the one?'

'Erica Cambridge, oh yes.'

'Channel 6,' Monck said. 'Half past nine.'

'Thank you, sir.'

Flick, flick, flick, and the juiciest cheeseburger you ever saw, dripping with some kind of sauce, then lots of them with lots of people with big white glistening teeth all biting into them with the cheese pulled out into strings, fade out, fade in some shadowed cleavage.

'No,' Ferris was saying on the phone, 'but you can leave a signal there. How is Jowett doing?'

'Tench,' I said, 'use that other phone and get me the number for Newsbreak studios, Miami, will you?'

'Jowett?' asked Croder when Ferris had rung off.

'There's no news.' Jowett had run Cocktail into the shit in Sri Lanka.

Knocking on the door. Tench went across and opened it. The security guard and a man in a khaki suit and carrying a worn leather bag, looking around. 'Who's the patient?'

This is Dr Hornby,' Ferris said. Bloody doctors. He must have sent for him. I pulled my shirt up and Hornby came over and looked at the dressing and began loosening it.

Tench asked me if I wanted him to get Newsbreak.

'Yes. I want to leave a message for Erica Cambridge.'

'It's good of you to turn out,' Ferris said, and took a look at the wound.

'I was only mending a rod. Fishing rod. Was it a clean knife, or dirty?'

'I'd say clean.'

'Woman did these? These stitches?'

'Yes.'

'Thought so. Wonderfully drawn. Nurse?'

'Yes.'

'They're underrated, you know.'

'She'd like to meet you.'

Good evening. I'm Erica Cambridge, and these are my views. The violet eyes, the brilliant smile. Shuffling the papers. Yesterday in New Hampshire it looked as if Senator Mathieson Judd was, for the first time, pandering to the dictates of those on his campaign staff who have been trying to persuade him -

'I've got Newsbreak on the line, sir. Her show.'

I took the phone. 'Who is this?'

'Bennie.'

– Has put it, to counterbalance the Republican candidate's serious and perhaps solemn approach to the matter in hand. But in my view, ladies and gentlemen -

I thought she looked a degree nervous, just a degree.

'Bennie, this is Richard Keyes. Ask Miss Cambridge to telephone me, would you, as soon as she comes off the air? She can find me at -'

'She's not here, Mr Keyes.'

'She taped the show tonight?'

'That's right.'

'Look, if she happens to call, give her this number.'

'See me in four days,' Hornby said. 'Here's my card.'

– His respect and regard for the electorate. So what happened in New Hampshire was not rehearsed, was not premeditated. It was real. Some of you were there, I believe.

I thanked Hornby and tucked my shirt in again. Had she met Proctor on that yacht? That would make her nervous, a degree nervous. Unless of course she'd been lying, unless she'd known already that he was there.

I phoned her apartment.

'She's not here, Mr Keyes, I'm sorry.'

'Can you tell me where I can find her?'

'She just went out, that's all I know.'

I left both numbers where she could find me and Ferris picked up the other phone.

Monck told him, 'Ask your people if they saw her come off the cutter.'

'But of course.' The tone acid. Ferris can get touchy when people give the impression he can't think straight.

'We need that woman,' Croder said. 'We need her badly.'

'Yes,' I said.

We'd begun feeling jumpy now, all of us, especially Purdom. When we'd parted company at Kruger Drug last night she'd told me it was vital we got together again as soon as possible and since then she'd gone to 1330 Riverside and she'd gone aboard the yacht out there and if she still wanted to talk to me she might give me the evidence we needed to push Barracuda straight into the end-phase.

'She is our new objective,' Croder said, 'for the mission,' the thin body buried in its clothes, the gaunt head sunk onto the shoulders, the obsidian-black eyes watching me to see if I understood how very important Cambridge had suddenly become to us all.

'If she'll cooperate,' I said.

'We shall do all we can to persuade her.'

The bleak, bright, bare-walled scene of an interrogation cell flashed across my mind, triggered by the word persuade. But of course he didn't mean that. We would approach Erica Cambridge, if we could, with civilised blandishments and exhortations, like the gentlemen we are.