A big one lifted her ten or twelve feet and she slid down the backside of it nose first. The bow dug into the following comber and Sturka again was buried in black marbled water but when the bow wallowed out of it he was still there with water rolling off him like oil. The chain slacked a little at trough-bottom and Sturka set the ratchet and began to make his way aft, hand over hand along the railing. Mario idled the screw down and waited with his hand on the throttle to see if the anchor had taken hold. The chain drew up taut and he had a feeling, nothing more than an intuitive sensation, of a brief distant scraping before the arrowpoint of the anchor took a grip and the boat hung, cork-bobbing like a buoy, from its straining chain, stern toward shore.

Sturka swung himself into the wheelhouse acrobatically, his clothes pasted to his bony skin. Alvin was coming up from the forward cabin and Mario gave him the wheel and followed Sturka aft to inflate the rubber raft.

He slid the folded raft out from under Peggy’s bunk. Peggy gave him a bloodshot look and rolled over; Mario said, “Won’t be long now,” in an effort to be encouraging but she only grunted. Cesar on the opposite bunk was in bleary agony and the cabin reeked of vomit; Mario was glad to hurry topside, dragging the raft, Sturka pushing it up from below. Sturka came out into the little fishing deck to help him hold the raft down while they inflated it from its canister of compressed air. It was tricky work with the deck pitching eight feet in the air and slamming down; he was soaked through within seconds.

Sturka put his mouth close to Mario’s ear to make himself heard over the roar of the sea. “If they catch you.”

“They’re not going to.”

“If they do.”

“I don’t say a word.”

“They’ll pry you apart in time. You’ll have to talk—everyone does.”

“I hold out.” Shouted gasps in the roiling night. “As long as I can. Then I give them the thing we made up.”

“Recite.”

“Now? Here?”

“Recite Mario.”

“You’re in Tangier waiting for me to pick you up in the plane.”

“Go on.” Sturka’s voice very thin against the roar.

“Jesus. I promise you I haven’t forgotten anything.”

After a moment Sturka pulled the raft toward the stern rail by its gunwale rope. “All right Mario.”

They got it overboard and Sturka held it against the transom while Mario climbed over the rail and braced himself in the raft. The bottom was already awash; he would be in water up to his navel in instants but the raft would hold. The oars were plastic, bolted into their locks; he fixed his grip on them and shouted and Sturka cast him off. He pulled hard; the boat loomed momentarily and then a wave took him; for a bit he was under water with the taste of salt. When it cascaded off him the boat had disappeared and he was alone in the raft—lost, for a bit, until the next breaker picked him up and he had time for a quick glance over his left shoulder to locate the lights of Almería. They gave him bearings and he began to row toward the black silent beach.

THURSDAY,

JANUARY 13

8:00 A.M.Continental European Time Lime paced the garage floor with apathetic weariness. He had slept on the plane but that had been more than twenty-four hours ago and things had moved maddeningly slowly in the day and night since.

The place was cluttered with scientists and their equipment; they were analyzing everything—grease spots on the floor, a wad of chewing gum stuck to the underside of the tool bench, the 500 KC marine transmitter and the Wollensak tape recorder that was plugged into it.

Triangulation by Sixth Fleet and Spanish shore stations had located the point of origin of the Fairlie broadcast—somewhere in the town of Palamos. But Sixth Fleet’s radio plot had been faulty by some decimal fraction and the location was an area, not a pinpoint; it had taken nine hours of house-to-house searching to find the transmitter in this place.

The garage sat in solitary squalor along the side of a country road half a kilometer outside Palamos. Its owner was on vacation—visiting a sister in Capetown; he had been away since the ninth of January, which happened to be the day before the Fairlie kidnapping. The garage owner’s name was Elías; the South African Government was seeking him for questioning but he hadn’t turned up yet.

When they did find Elías he wouldn’t be able to tell them anything useful; Lime knew how these things worked. Some faceless intermediary would have offered Elías a hundred thousand pestas to disappear for a week; the intermediary would be described by Elías, and another John Doe would be added to the list of individuals sought for questioning. It would consume far more time than was available; it was the kind of lead Lime never bothered with. You left that sort of thing to the minions of organization. If they turned up something useful they passed it on to you; otherwise you ignored it.

Yesterday at dawn Lime had landed at Barcelona in an Air Force jet with Chad Hill and a team of agents and technicians sent along by Satterthwaite. At the airport they had been collected by a delegation of American and Spanish types and it had been tedious; Lime disliked the boredom of establishing credentials.

The Spanish Fuerza Aérea had flown them up to Perdido and Lime had talked with Liam McNeely, who had told him President Brewster had announced that European governments were cooperating with Washington in a vastly expanded program of “protective surveillance” on suspected revolutionaries throughout the Western world. From Perdido Lime had reached Bill Satterthwaite by telephone: he had not tried to conceal his anger. “You’re only driving them deeper into their holes. How do you expect me to make contacts if they’ve all gone to ground?”

“Contacts?” Satterthwaite had sounded confused. Lime had explained it tersely—you had to hope there were scraps of information floating around the Maoist underground; you had to look for pigeons willing to tell you things. One revolutionary could lead you to another—but not if he’d been scared into hiding.

“I’m sorry.” Satterthwaite had been cool. “It was a matter of policy—hoping to forestall any further violence from the left. We can hardly rescind it now. You’ll have to do the best you can, that’s all.”

Before ending the transatlantic dialogue Lime had said, “Find out Fairlie’s blood type for me, will you?”

“You haven’t found blood.”

“No. But we might.”

“All right. I’ll check—where can I get back to you?”

“I’ll get back to you.” And he had rung off.

There had been an insider at Perdido obviously but he had got away, possibly in the confusion of departures that had attended the end of the Spanish ministers’ visit an hour or two before the kidnapping. At any rate no one had kept tabs on the parking lot or the exit road until after the kidnapping and by that time the insider was gone. Careful interrogations by Spanish Guardianos had produced the likely possibility the insider had been a handyman who’d been hired on the day before the kidnapping—a Spanish-speaking mestizo with a Venezuelan passport who had paid the chief grounds-keeper fifty thousand pesetas to give him the job, saying he had to prove he had employment or the Spanish government would deport him at the expiration of his alien labor registration. Evidently the Venezuelan had been very persuasive and had triggered the groundskeeper’s sympathies—either that or the groundskeeper’s price was cynically low. Now the groundskeeper was filled with contrition; he was being held by the Guardia, he had been fired by the spa, he probably would be subjected to brutal interrogations for weeks. That would keep a small army of bureaucrats occupied for a while but would produce no useful results.