One of the Spanish technicians looked up. He smiled but his eyes were ready to show fear. “She look like they ef-forgot thees wan.” He was very proud of his English.
These Spaniards were all James Bonds, trying to decode every laundry list they found in somebody’s trash basket. But you couldn’t tell; you had to check everything out. Give us this day our daily break.
“Put it on the wire.”
“Ahjess.”
It would be cabled out to Madrid and London and Washington. In a few hours they would have an answer.
7:30 A.M. North African Time The two engines made a racket in the plane like the thunder of a Second World War bomber, Fairlie thought. The fuselage vibrated a great deal. Some loose piece of metal in the cabin kept chattering.
Fingers closed on his wrist: Lady’s hand, checking his pulse again. She seemed to do it quite frequently. Perhaps they were worried about the effects of the drugs they had given him earlier on.
He wasn’t drugged now. Blindfolded, his mouth gagged with tape, his hands bound with wire. They didn’t want him throwing tantrums. They weren’t sure of him yet, they weren’t sure he wasn’t about to go berserk.
He wasn’t sure of it himself.
Lady had warned him not to struggle because he might make himself sick; vomit could make him choke to death. They had taken him ashore in a dinghy and from snatches of talk he pieced it together that they were sinking the boat. A stranger’s voice then—an unfamiliar tongue, but the voice had a husky gravel quality, a high-pitched wheezing sort of voice, as if its owner had a bad case of catarrh.
Back into the dinghy again. They’d rowed him out into a fierce chop. He had tried to keep relaxed: he wasn’t ordinarily susceptible to seasickness but the young woman’s cool warning about vomit had fixed his mind on the subject and it was almost impossible to ignore. He remembered one of McNeely’s jokes: All right, you can do anything in the world as long as you don’t think of a white hippopotamus. Then the McNeely grin: Ever tried to not think of a white hippopotamus before?
McNeely. That was in some other world.
They had lifted him, with some strugglings and mouthings of oaths, into a cramped cabin of some kind; helped him feel his way into a seat and settled him into it. Then they had wired his ankles together.
The gravel-voiced wheeze taking its leave; Fairlie had heard oarlocks squeak—evidently the wheezer rowing back to shore alone.
He had thought he was aboard a boat—the same boat or a new one—until he’d heard the engine choke and sputter and begin to roar; he realized immediately it was an airplane.
A seaplane, then.
The second engine had whined into life and there was a great deal of gunning before he felt it begin to move. Taking off seemed to be touch and go: the sea had a wicked slap to it, the cabin lurched and pitched. The epithets of Abdul the black pilot were intense. Fairlie remembered Abdul’s cool handling of the helicopter when Abdul had somehow killed the engine while pretending something had gone wrong with it; Abdul’s anger now terrified Fairlie but finally they were airborne and he felt the seat tip under him as the plane climbed steeply.
There was no accurate way to estimate the length of time they had been in the air or which way they were heading or even where they had started from, but there was enough talk for Fairlie to identify the various voices and realize there were at least four of them in the plane with him: Abdul, flying it; Sélim, the leader who spoke with a Slavic accent; Lady, who attended him with a professional detachment; Ahmed, who had a Spanish sort of accent and tended to talk in dogmatic clichés.
It was very hard to concentrate. He thought there must be plans he ought to be making. Spotty recollections of all those Second World War memoirs by British aviators who had spent five years organizing incredibly elaborate schemes to escape from Nazi POW camps. We have a duty to escape.
There was no we, there was only Fairlie, and escape was beyond question; his duty appeared clear enough for the moment—to maintain sanity. He could demand nothing more of himself, not now.
8:10 A.M. Continental European Time Lime was still on his packing crate. One of the Spanish uniformed cops came into the garage and beckoned: there was a radiophone call from Fleet. Lime took it in the Guardia jeep.
The Admiral. “I thought you’d better know—the rival firms are moving in.”
Lime went back inside, somewhat depressed. It was not to be avoided that agents for the other side would come into the case. The Russians, the Chinese, an indeterminate number of others. Suppose an Albanian hard-line field agent got in ahead of you, rescued Fairlie—suppose the Albanians decided to keep Fairlie? Farfetched, but it was a risk; you didn’t want to exchange one set of kidnappers for another. What it amounted to was that you had to try and prevent the rival firms from finding out what you had found out. It wasn’t easy, not with communications tapped routinely and areas of the world where members of the opposing teams sat on the corners of one another’s desks. It meant Lime had to tighten his communications, use safe lines whenever possible, code his transmissions—another time-consuming chore.
More likely the rival firms were eager to help out. For a Russian or a Chinese team to rescue Fairlie would be a propaganda victory unprecedented in decades—a triumph of public relations if nothing else. But you still couldn’t afford to work with them. Once you admitted them to partnership you would be delayed at every junction place; your partners would be required to check back with superiors and clear every decision through layers of bureaucracy.
You could expect a certain amount of help—technical stuff, manpower, communications—from the allies; but these were equally hamstrung by tiers of authority and in the end you had to keep your hand free. So you used everyone and gave nothing to anyone. In a very short time all of them would begin to resent Lime and he would find resistance when he sought further assistance.
The CIA had a hundred thousand employees of whom twenty thousand were field agents; of these a thousand or more were strung through the Mediterranean area, on call if and when Lime needed them. At the moment they merely had orders to check whatever contacts they had, find out what sort of rumors were floating through the underground.
The English sailor arrived at half past eight with the Basque fisherman in tow. The fisherman’s name was Mendes; his smile looked slack-muscled, as if he had been posing too long for a slow photographer. His eyes were a faded blue and his drooping pinched mouth suggested a discontented lifetime of anxieties and disappointments. He smelled faintly of fish and the sea. He spoke no English and minimal Spanish. Lime had summoned a Basque-speaking Guardiano two hours ago; now he brought the Guardiano into the circle and began the session.
It was very kind of Señor Mendes to make the time to assist. The commandante’s unfortunate manner was regrettable; it was to be hoped Señor Mendes had not been too offended—everyone was under great strain, perhaps the commandante’s abruptness was understandable? Would Señor Mendes care for an American cigarette?
Lime made sure he had Mendes on the hook before he began to tug the line—gently at first: a day’s fishing was being lost by Señor Mendes’s detention, the American government assuredly wished to compensate him for his loss of time—would a thousand pesetas be sufficient? But very gently always because you couldn’t afford to offend; when Mendes took the money it was with the proud agreement he was not being bribed but rather being paid a suitable wage for his time and labor as a detective assisting in the search for the abducted American President-elect.