It came down to a question of the order of subtlety of the bluff and he knew once he became trapped analyzing levels of possibility he could burn his brain out trying to guess the truth.
The one thing that stood out was that the kidnappers were professionals. Or at least they were led by a professional. A professional was a man who didn’t leave clues unless he intended to. This entire operation had been set up not by any amateur revolutionary but by a pro who had planned every step and timed every movement. The snatch caper at Perdido had been a model of economical efficiency. The mountain farm had been selected with exact precision for its proximity to the Mediterranean coast and its flying distance from Perdido because the kidnappers knew they had to get the chopper under cover before the authorities got a search operation under way. The kidnappers knew just how much time they had for each step of their operation and obviously they hadn’t rushed anything. They had taken Fairlie, concealed the chopper, driven openly by car from the farm to the garage outside Palamos—all this during the period of time when the authorities were still organizing for a search, still absorbing the impact of the incredibly simple crime that had been committed. But once under cover in that Palamos garage the kidnappers had stayed put, not allowing panic to push them into movement again until after dark. By that time they had to assume the police and security of a dozen nations were searching for them but they acted with aplomb, delivering Fairlie by hearse to the waterfront, getting aboard Lopez’s boat and heading out to sea.
They hadn’t left things to chance at any other step and there was no reason to assume the abandonment of Lopez’s boat had been an accident. If the engine had frozen up it was probably because the kidnappers had poked a hole through the rusty oil pipe to make it look like an accidental failure.
They might have left one inadvertent clue: the fingerprint on the light switch in the Palamos garage—if in fact the print belonged to one of the kidnappers and not the owner of the garage or one of its customers.
It was the fingerprint that gave him the impression the kidnappers were amateurs led by a professional. A professional developed habit patterns, he never left fingerprints on anything and never had to think about it. By reflex he always went back and wiped things off.
The light switch was the last thing they had touched on their way out and someone had forgotten to wipe it.
If the print turned out to be Fairlie’s then Lime would believe it had been left on purpose to attest to the fact that Fairlie was alive. But he doubted it was Fairlie’s fingerprint; they wouldn’t have allowed Fairlie near a light switch. If the print belonged to any of the kidnappers then it hadn’t been left there deliberately; leaving misleading clues was part of the game but giving away the identity of your own man was not.
Barcelona in winter was a distressing gray city of industrial blight and waterfront rot.
The Spaniards had provided an office in an overflow annex a block from the government admin building; it was a quarter of bleak narrow streets—cobblestones and soot-black walls. From the aircraft carrier a whaleboat had brought ashore a Navy UHF scrambler transceiver; it had been manhandled into the office.
The crew had arrived ahead of him and the office crawled with personnel but what took Lime by surprise was the presence of William T. Satterthwaite—rumpled, tired, his curly black hair awry.
There was a small private room set aside for Lime’s use but Lime took a quick look at it and declined. “Have you got a car outside?”
“Yes. Why?” Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up.
“Let’s sit in the car and talk.”
In the car Satterthwaite said, “Do you honestly think they’d have the nerve to bug that office?”
“It’s what I’d do. You don’t want foreigners running king-size security operations on your turf without finding out what they’re up to.”
Satterthwaite was capable of dismissing the problem instantly: “All right. What about this coffin they carried Fairlie in? Do you think he’s dead?”
“I doubt it. You don’t kill your ace in the hole until you have to—or until you’ve run out of a use for it. There’s a better question than that, though—how do we know it was Fairlie? It may have been a hundred fifty pounds of bricks.”
“You mean you’re not buying the Lopez boat thing at all?”
“Suppose they had accomplices who took Lopez’s boat to make it look as if they took Fairlie that way?” Lime hunted around the dashboard for the ashtray. “The only thing definite is they’ve given us two pieces we were meant to see.”
“The Arab costumes and the boat headed north. One suggesting North Africa and the other suggesting western Europe. Do you think they could both be phonies? Maybe they’re going for the Balkans?”
“It’s all guesswork right now. We’re chasing our tails.”
“Don’t get so damned defeatist, David. There are hundreds of thousands of people working on this. Someone’s bound to come up with something.”
“Why? We’re not dealing with wild-eyed freaks.”
Satterthwaite’s eyes burned behind the high magnification of the lenses. “Who are we dealing with?”
“A pro and a cell of well-trained amateurs. Not a government job, not a people’s liberation-movement thing. We won’t find an organization working the caper, although we may find one paying the bills.”
“Why not?”
“Because you haven’t told me anything to the contrary.”
“I don’t follow that.”
Lime tapped ash, missed the ashtray, brushed ashes off his trouser leg. “If any establishment was behind it your hundreds of thousands of agents would have had a hint by now. It’s not the kind of operation a power bloc would try. The only political effect it can have is to solidify the existing powers. The Communists will help us, they won’t help the kidnappers; they’d expect reciprocal treatment if somebody snatched one of theirs, they can’t afford to open this kind of can of beans. It would start a free-for-all of assassinations and abductions. You can’t conduct international relations on that level and everybody since Clausewitz has known that—look what happened after Saravejo.”
Lime snubbed the butt out in the ashtray and pushed it shut. “Look, what’s their motive? You’ve heard the ransom demands. All they seem to want is the seven bombers. It’s the Marighella technique—nothing unusual about it. They arrest yours, you kidnap theirs and make a swap.”
“Then we all know who’s running this show, don’t we,” Satterthwaite said. His eyes rested complacently against Lime.
“Probably,” Lime replied, quite evenly. “But we’ve had the search out for Sturka and his people for more than a week. He may have gone to ground—this may be an entirely different bunch.”
“You’re grabbing at straws,” Satterthwaite growled; he leaned even farther forward and his voice was an angry hiss: “Why in the hell do you think we had to force you onto this job?”
“Because you assumed I knew it was Sturka.”
“And Sturka is your boy, David. You nknow him better than anybody else—you’ve proved you know the way he thinks. You’ve covered the same ground he’s covered.”
“I’ve never laid eyes on the man.”
“But you know him.”
“Maybe it is Sturka’s caper. But I’m not putting all my eggs in that basket. Logic points to Sturka but logic is a test of consistency, not truth. If it’s not Sturka, and I try to play as if it is, then we’ll end up farther behind than we started. I’ve got to work with facts, don’t you see that?”
“Assume it’s Sturka, David. What then?”
Lime shook his head. “We’ve made too many wrong assumptions already. Give me a fact and then I’ll go to work.” He found another cigarette in the crumpled pack. “Now you didn’t fly over here just to tell me I thought it was Sturka. You knew that already. Or are you just shuttling back and forth across the Atlantic to keep tabs on me?”