“How about the basement?”

“No sir. He looked.”

“All right. Call me back.”

He hung up and lit another cigarette and tried to get his brain in working order. Somewhere in all this there ought to be a pattern but it wasn’t emerging. Perhaps he was missing it: he was running on his batteries, he’d had less than four hours’ sleep last night and it hadn’t been enough to make up for the previous two days without.

The phone rang. Chad Hill again. “For Christ’s sake. He’s coming back to Gibraltar. The pilot just radioed for landing instructions.”

“All right. Put an eight-man tail on Mezetti. As soon as he’s separated from the pilot bring the pilot in.”

“Yes sir.”

Lime cradled it but within seconds it rang again. “Sir, it’s Mr. Satterthwaite on the scrambler. You want to come over here?”

Satterthwaite’s high-pitched voice was shrill with unreasoning anger: he was getting rattled, things were piling up against him. “What have you got out there, David? And don’t tell me you’ve drawn a blank.”

“We’re moving. Not far and not fast, but we’re moving. You saw the message we’re supposed to get tonight?”

“A lot of good that is,” Satterthwaite said. “Listen, they’ve taken Dexter Ethridge to Walter Reed in an ambulance.”

It made Lime sit bolt upright. “Bad?”

“Nobody knows yet. He seems to be out cold.”

“You mean somebody tried to assassinate him?”

“No. Nothing like that. Natural causes, whatever it is—he was home in bed, or in the bathroom. Listen, you know what happens if Ethridge packs up. We’ve got to have Fairlie back by the twentieth.”

“Well you’ve still got a line of succession.”

“Milt Luke?” Satterthwaite snorted. “Get him back, David.”

As usual Satterthwaite was trying to sound like Walter Pidgeon in Command Decision and as usual his voice was wrong for it. Lime ignored the heroics. “What’s the decision on the exchange?”

“We’re divided. It’s still, ah, hotly contested, as it were.”

“It’s up to the President, though. Isn’t it.”

“We live in a democracy,” Satterthwaite said, quite dry. “It’s up to the people.”

“Sure it is.”

“David whether you like it or not it’s a political decision. The consequences could be catastrophic if we do the wrong thing.”

“I’ve got a piece of news for you. The consequences will probably be catastrophic whatever you do. You’d better shit or get off the pot.”

“Funny—Dexter Ethridge said the same thing. In somewhat more genteel language of course.”

“Which makes Ethridge a little brighter than the rest of you,” Lime said. He glanced across the communications room. A dozen men were busy at phones and teleprinters; a few of them wore headsets. Chad Hill was handing a telephone receiver back to the man seated at the table beside him. Hill started to gesture in Lime’s direction—something had developed that required Lime’s attention. Lime waved an acknowledgment and said to the scrambler, “Look, we’re glued onto Mezetti. Right now he’s leading us in circles but I think he’s going to take us to them if we give him a little time. I can’t have——”

“How much time?”

“I’m not an oracle. Ask Mezetti.”

“That’s what you ought to be doing, David.”

“Are you ordering me to pick him up?”

Static on the line while Satterthwaite paused to consider it. Lime was dropping the ball in his lap. “David, when I talked you into this it was with the understanding that the best way to get a job done is to pick the best people and give them their heads. I’m not going to start telling you how to do your job—if I were capable of that I’d be doing the job instead of you.”

“All right. But Mezetti may lead us right into the hive, and it could happen any time. I need to know how much latitude I’ve got if I have to start talking deals with them.”

“You’re asking blood from a stone.”

“Damn it I have to know if you’re going to agree to the exchange. Any negotiator has to know his bargaining points. You’re tying my hands.”

“What do you want me to tell you? The decision hasn’t been made yet. The instant it’s made I’ll let you know.”

It was all he was going to get. He stopped pressing it. “All right. Look, something’s come up. I’ll get back to you.”

“Do it soon.”

“Aeah. See you.”

He broke the connection and crossed the room and Chad Hill bundled him outside. In the Government House corridor Chad said, “He’s changed course on us.”

“He’s not landing in Gib?”

“The plane turned north.”

Lime felt relieved and showed it with a tight smile. “Now we’re getting somewhere. Who’s on him?”

“Two planes at the moment. Another one coming across from Lisbon to pick him up farther north.”

“All right then. Just let’s don’t lose the son of a bitch.”

The worst part was doing nothing, knowing things were happening out there but sitting still waiting for news. Lime sent a man out to buy him half a dozen packs of American cigarettes and if possible a large order of coffee. He retreated to his monk’s cell and tried to put his head together.

His sense of time had been blurred: fatigue gave him a sunless sense of unreality, everything took place at a distance as if seen through a camera. He had to rest. Once again he stretched out on the floor and closed his eyes.

He pictured Bev but the image drifted and he was thinking of Julius Sturka, the vague face in the grainy photograph.

He didn’t want it to turn out to be Sturka. He’d tried to get Sturka before and he’d failed. Failed in 1961 and failed again in the past fortnight.

In the old days he had wasted a lot of time learning nonfacts about Sturka—the sort of rumors that were always available to fill the holes between facts. Maybe it was true he was a Yugoslav who had watched the fascisti torture his parents to death in Trieste, or a Ukrainian Jew who had fought Nazis at Sevastopol, but Lime long ago had begun to distrust all the simplistic Freudian guesses about Sturka. There wasn’t any doubt Sturka had a romanticized picture of himself but it wasn’t the messianic sort that had characterized Ché Guevara. The nearest Lime could come to a definition was to think of Sturka as a sort of ideological mercenary. He couldn’t fathom what motivated Sturka but it seemed clear enough that Sturka was preoccupied more with means than with ends. He had an unrealistic view of political strategy but his tactics were impeccable. He was a methodologist, not a philosopher. At least from a distance he resembled the master criminal who was more concerned with the mechanical complexity of his crime than with its reward. Sometimes it tempted Lime to think of him as an adolescent prankster doing something outrageous just to prove he could get away with it on a dare. Sturka had the traits of a game player, he took delight in moves and countermoves. At what he did, he was superb; he was a professional.

A professional. Lime understood that; it was the highest accolade in his lexicon.

Two professionals. Was Sturka the better?

What is Fairlie to me that maybe I’ll have to die for him? But the adrenaline was pumping and Bev had been right: he had sought peace but boredom had become a kind of death and he was joyous with this job. He was at his best when he risked the most.

Needing sleep, his nerve-ends raw, his belly afire from caffeine and nicotine, he was alive. The malaise of David Lime: I have pain, therefore I am.

Five days to spring Fairlie. Well anyhow that was the spring Satterthwaite was trying to wind. If you didn’t get Fairlie back there was always Ethridge and if Ethridge turned out to be dying of something there was always Milton Luke. A senile cipher, Luke, but they’d survived Coolidge and Harding and Ike in his last years. The deadline was real but if it passed the world might hang together in spite of Lime’s failure.…

Thinking in circles now.