Lime shook his head. “It’s no good, you know that.” It wasn’t altogether that he didn’t want a crack at it. He had wanted this boredom; now he was eager to get away from it; the old warhorse, he thought, but he turned back before reaching the point of commitment. “Look, things have changed, it’s a different world from the one I operated in. The quality of your mind doesn’t count—only the quality of your marksmanship. I’m a lousy shot.”

“That’s a crock of shit and you know it.”

“No. Nothing’s decided by brains any more—in spite of that think tank of yours across the hall. There’s no room left for chess players, you know that—it’s all decided by assassination and counterassassination.”

“All right. Assassinate them. But find them first. Find Fairlie and bust him out.”

Lime laughed off key. “Use the local boys over there. Spanish cops, Bedouins, desert rats—hell it’s their territory.”

“I think it’s important to have an American in charge.”

“It’s not Barbary pirates you know—these aren’t gunboat days.”

“Look, it’s an American they’ve kidnapped and I suspect the kidnappers themselves are Americans. How would it look if a Spanish cop got too close to them and then bungled things? Do you have any idea what that would do to relations between Washington and Madrid? A little stupidity like that could slide Perez-Blasco right into Moscow’s camp. At least if an American runs the show it’s our success or our failure. If it’s a success I think we’ll climb quite a few notches in international esteem and we could use that right now, God knows.”

“And if it’s failure?”

“We’ve had them before, haven’t we.” Satterthwaite sounded abysmal. “It wouldn’t be anything new. Don’t you see that’s why I don’t want the CIA clumping about in their jackboots? They’re such clumsy idiots—they’re all hated over there, they’d never get the cooperation you’ll get.”

Satterthwaite stood up. He was too short to be imposing but he tried.

Lime shook his head—a gentle stubborn negative.

Satterthwaite said, “I don’t give a shit what your motives are but you’re dead wrong. You’re the best we’ve got—for this particular job. I recognize what you’re really afraid of is the responsibility—suppose you take the job and you fail, and they kill Fairlie. You don’t want that on your conscience, do you. But how do you think I’ll feel? What about all the rest of us? Do you think you’ll be the only one who’ll have to cover himself in sackcloth and ashes?”

Lime’s silence was a continuing refusal.

But then Satterthwaite punctured him. “If we lose Fairlie because you refused to try—you’ll be far more to blame.”

There was a mad satanic beauty to it. Satterthwaite had been baiting the trap all along and had let Lime watch him do it.

“If you do the job,” the little man breathed, “at least you won’t have lost Fairlie for want of trying.”

Neatly cornered. Lime’s eyes drilled hatred into him.

Satterthwaite crossed half the distance between them and frowned a little behind his glasses; he lifted one hand in a vague gesture of truce. “Don’t hate me too hard.”

“Why shouldn’t I?”

“Because I wouldn’t want you messing this up just to spite me.”

Lime saw how it could be. The little man was right again. A fiend—but you had to stand in awe of him.

“Now you’ll go to Barcelona,” Satterthwaite said, a down-to-business voice. “You’re leaving Andrews Air Force Base at half past five—I’ve laid on a C-one-forty-one.” A flap of wrist, glance at watch. “A little over four hours to pack your things and say your goodbyes. You’d better move along.”

Lime, hooded, watched him in silence.

Satterthwaite said, “I won’t give it to the press yet. You’ll want a free hand. What do you need?”

A long ragged breath; the final surrender. “Give me Chad Hill from my office—he’s green but he does what he’s told.”

“Done. What else?”

A shake of the head. “Carte blanche.”

“That goes without saying.”

Lime walked forward to pass him but Satterthwaite stopped him. “Your theory.”

“I told you—it was too full of ifs.”

“But I was right about it.”

“I told you you were.”

“Then my judgment’s not that terrible after all. Is it.”

Lime didn’t answer the thin smile in kind.

Satterthwaite eeled past him through the door and Lime emerged, looked back into the room curiously—a crucible, but it looked ordinary enough. The door swung shut. No Admittance.

Satterthwaite was walking toward the war room. When he reached it he stopped. Over his shoulder: “Good hunting—I suppose I should say something like that.” The grim little smile was glued on. “Get the son of a bitch out alive, David.”

Having given himself the curtain line Satterthwaite disappeared into the war room.

Despising the man for his cheap theatricality Lime stood a moment burning his stare into the closed door before he shambled away, head bowed to light a cigarette.

WEDNESDAY,

JANUARY 12

10:40 P.M.Continental European Time Mario had grown up inculcated with a hatred of stinkpot powerboats. He had learned summer seamanship aboard the Mezetti ketch, a two-masted sixty-four-footer with the grace of a racing regatta champion. He knew nothing about engines—those were Alvin’s job—but he had the wheel and the responsibility of navigation by binnacle and charts. The boat was American built, a thirty-nine-foot Matthews powered by a single big diesel. She was probably at least twenty-five years old although the diesel was newer, a French engine. A stubby wooden craft with belowdecks cabins both fore and aft and only a tiny fishing deck between the rear-cabin ladder and the transom, she had been built with customary Matthews shipyard economy and there was not quite enough headroom for a six-foot man in the wheelhouse. Mario was stocky enough to have no trouble but both Alvin and Sturka had to stoop when they came inside.

There was no chart table as such; the paper image of the western Mediterranean was spread across the wooden dash to one side of the binnacle where Mario could read it while standing with one hand on a wheel spoke. He was using compass and chart to dead-reckon from lighthouse to lighthouse. The sea had lifted, an hour before sunset, to a nine-foot chop and had not become any calmer in the hours since; the chunky round-bottomed hull made heavy going of it and Mario had to tack at five-minute intervals against a sea that was running quarter to his course—Southwest by Cabo de Gata, then west around the headlands toward Almería. The weather was running in from the Straits, slanting against the shore. A rough night for seafaring—there were very few boats out, the only lamps were buoys.

It was Cesar who had proved the worst sailor and Mario felt remotely vindicated by that: he knew they all held him in contempt but Cesar was the most arrogant of any and it was satisfying to see him green with mal de mer. The malaise had infected Peggy to a lesser extent; she and Cesar were glued to their bunks in the after cabin. Alvin and Sturka were forward, below with Clifford Fairlie, probably trying to indoctrinate him by the dialectic exchange. A stupid pursuit—you couldn’t change their minds once they’d gone over the hill. Mario had learned that at home. Mezetti Industries destroyed the environment from day to day with the willful malice of a Genghis Khan and you pointed this out to your father and he came back with engineers’ lies contrived to prove it was all Communist propaganda.

Mario knew the others held him in low esteem because he wasn’t terribly smart and his Maoism was more doctrinaire than practical. None of them really liked him, Sturka especially, but it didn’t matter. Mario was useful; it was important to be useful. Not just the money he could provide but other things as well—like the seamanship they demanded of him now. An ignorant sailor would have swamped the boat in cross-seas a dozen times by now, or run aground on coastal shoals.