Alex knew all this already. It was what Blunt had told him in London.

“But recently, and quite by coincidence, Sarov came to our attention. Turner and I were investigating the Salesman. And we discovered that among all the other things he’d been selling, he’d managed to get his hands on a kilogram of weapons grade uranium, smuggled out of Eastern Europe. For what it’s worth, this is one of the biggest nightmares facing the security services today-the sale of uranium. But he’d done it-and if that wasn’t bad enough, the person he’d sold it to-”

“-was Sarov.” Alex finished the sentence.

“Yes. A plane flew into Skeleton Key and it didn’t fly out again. Sarov was there to meet it.” She paused. “And now, suddenly, we’ve got a meeting between these two men-the old general and the new president-and there may be a nuclear bomb in the picture. So you won’t be surprised to hear that there are a whole lot of worried people in Washington. That’s why we’re here.”

Alex absorbed what he was being told. Inside, he was seething. Blunt had promised him two weeks in the sun. But it looked like he’d been sent to the front line of World War Three.

“If it is a bomb, what’s Sarov planning to do with it?” Alex asked.

“If we knew that, we wouldn’t be here!” she snapped. Alex looked at her closely. He was amazed to see that she really was scared. She was trying not to show it but it was there, in her eyes and the tautness of her jaw.

“Our job is to find the nuclear material,” Turner said.

“With the Geiger counter.”

“Yes. We need to break into Casa de Oro and take a look around. That’s what we were talking about just now.”

“Who was he? The man you were with?”

Turner sighed. He had already said much more than he wanted to “His name is Garcia. He’s one of our assets.”

“Assets?”

“That means he works for us,” Troy explained. “We’ve been paying him over the years to keep us informed and to help us when we’re here.”

“He has a boat,” Turner continued, “and we’re going to need it because there’s only one way into the Casa de Oro-and that’s by sea. The house is built on a sort of plateau right at the tip of the island. It’s an old sugar plantation. They used to grow sugar cane there and they’ve got an old mill that’s still in full working order. Anyway, there’s only one road that reaches it and it’s narrow, with a steep drop down to the sea on both sides. There are security men and a gate. We’d never get in that way.”

“But by boat-” Alex began.

“Not by boat…” Turner hesitated, wondering if he should go on. He looked at Troy, who nodded. “We’re going to use scuba. You see, we know something that Sarov may not. There’s a way into the grounds of the villa that goes past his defences. It’s a natural fault line, a shaft inside the cliff that runs all the way from the top to the bottom.”

“You’re going to climb it?”

“There are metal rungs. Garcia’s family has been on the island for centuries and they know every inch of the coastline. He swears the ladder is still there. Three hundred years ago it was used by smugglers to get from the villa to the beach without being seen. There was a cave at the bottom. The shaft-they call it the Devil’s Chimney-runs all the way up and comes out somewhere in the garden. That’s our way in.”

“Wait a minute.” Alex was confused. “You said you were going to use scuba.”

Troy nodded. “The water level has risen all around the island and the entrance to the cave is now submerged. It’s about twenty metres underwater. But that’s great for us. Most people have forgotten the cave is even there at all. Certainly, it won’t be guarded. We swim down in scuba gear. We climb the ladder and get into the grounds. We search the villa.”

“And if you find the bomb?”

“That’s not our problem, Alex. Our work will be done.”

The waiter arrived with Alex’s drink. He picked up the glass. Even the feel of it, cold against his skin, came as a relief. He drank some. It was sweet and surprisingly refreshing. He set the glass down.

“I want to come with you,” he said.

“Forget it. No way!” Troy sounded incredulous. “Why do you think I’ve told you all this? Only because you know too much already and I need you to understand that we mean business. You have to keep out of the way. This is not a child’s game. We’re not zapping the bad guy on a computer screen! This is the real thing, Alex. And you’re going to stay in the hotel and wait for us to get back!”

“I’m coming with you,” Alex insisted. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but this is meant to be a family holiday. You dump me on my own in the hotel a second time, maybe somebody’s going to notice. Maybe they’re going to start wondering where you are.”

Turner fiddled with the collar of his shirt. Troy looked away.

“I won’t get in your way,” Alex sighed. “I’m not asking to come scuba-diving with you. Or climbing. I just want to be on the boat. Think about it. If the three of us go together, it’ll look more like a family cruise.”

Turner nodded slowly. “You know, Troy, the kid has a point.”

Troy picked up her drink and gazed into it moodily, as if trying to find an answer inside the glass. “All right,” she said at last. “You can come with us if that’s what you really want. But you’re not part of this, Alex. Your job was to help get us onto the island and if you ask me, we didn’t even need you for that. You saw the security at the airport, it was a joke! But OK, since you’re here, you might as well come along for the ride. But I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you’re there.”

“Whatever you say,” Alex sat back. He had got what he wanted, but he had to ask himself why he wanted it at all. Given the choice, he would have preferred to take the first plane off the island and put as much distance as possible between himself and the CIA and Sarov and the whole lot of them.

But that was a choice he didn’t have. All Alex knew was that he didn’t want to spend time in the hotel on his own, worrying. If there really was a bomb somewhere on the island, he wanted to be the first to hear about it. And there was something else. Turner and Troy seemed confident enough about this Devil’s Chimney. They had assumed that it wasn’t guarded and that it would take them all the way to the top. But they had been equally confident when they had gone to the Salesman’s birthday party, and that had almost got Turner killed.

Alex finished his drink. “All right,” he said. “So when do we go?”

Troy fell silent. Turner took out his wallet and paid for the drinks. “Straight away,” he said. “We’re doing it tonight.”

THE DEVIL’S CHIMNEY

It was late afternoon when they set out from Puerto Madre, leaving the port with its fish markets and pleasure cruisers behind them. Turner and Troy were going to make the dive while it was still light. They would find the cave and wait there until sunset, then climb up into Casa de Oro under cover of darkness. That was the plan.

The man called Garcia had a boat that had known the sea too long. It wheezed and spluttered out of the harbour, trailing a cloud of evil-smelling black smoke. Rust had rippled and then burst through every surface like some bad skin disease. The boat had no visible name. A few flags fluttered from the mast, but they were little more than rags, with any trace of their original colours faded long ago. There were six air cylinders lashed to a bench underneath a canopy. They were the only new equipment in sight.

Garcia himself had greeted Alex with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. Then he had spoken at length, in Spanish, with Turner. Alex had spent the best part of a year in Barcelona with his uncle and understood enough of the language to follow what they were saying.

“You never talked about a boy. What do you think this is? A tourist excursion? Who is he? Why did you bring him here?”