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.
Lime had gone over the ground at the mountain farm where the kidnappers had abandoned the phony Navy helicopter. The serial numbers had been filed off and acid-eaten but a team of Spanish detectives had etched them out with alcohol and hydrochloric; the helicopter belonged to the Pamplona branch of a German rental concern used by wealthy skiers seeking untouched slopes in the high areas inaccessible by road. The manager of the office had been found dead Monday morning in his bed in Pamplona—at first glance from a heart attack, but autopsy showed he had been murdered with a long thin needle jabbed between the upper ribs into the heart. Only a tiny scab on the skin gave clue. Perhaps he had seen the kidnappers’ faces too clearly, or had found out something he shouldn’t have—or perhaps he had refused to rent the helicopter to them. At any rate that chain of investigation was broken by the manager’s death.
The helicopter had been painted Navy colors and the ID numbers proved to have been splashed on by means of hand-cut stencils. From more than a few feet away they looked perfect and of course at the time no one had had reason to inspect them closely.
The helicopter had been left inside the barn; its rotor blades had been removed crudely by the use of hand tools. The bodies of two Secret Service Agents were in the barn with the chopper, shot by 9mm slugs fired from two different handguns, neither of which had been found.
The helicopter abounded with fingerprints of Fairlie and the two Secret Service men; those were the only identifiable prints found anywhere except for a variety of small partials in and around the house; they were being checked out but were probably the prints of children and wanderers who had stopped by the deserted farm last summer.
The farm did offer one clue: a pair of black leather gloves a Guardiano had discovered while sifting through the powder snow piled up by the helicopter’s movements. The descending chopper had swept a barnyard area free of snow; this was the clue that had attracted the searchers’ attention from the air and had brought investigators here late on the afternoon of the kidnapping. Half buried in one of the loose drifts the gloves had gone unseen until the following morning; a Spanish inspector was studying them when Lime arrived. Handling them gingerly with tweezers.
Lime had told Chad Hill, “Send them to London.”
“Why London?”
“Scotland Yard. They’ve worked out a glove-print identification scheme. They can get glove prints off the helicopter controls,” he had explained. “If they match these gloves then we know these were worn by the pilot. About half the time London’s been able to pick up latent fingerprints—enough for an ID—from the inside surfaces of the gloves. These are plain leather, they’re not lined—I think we’ve got a pretty good chance.”
So the gloves had been flown to London aboard a United States Navy Phantom Jet, along with the dismantled control stick of the helicopter, and Lime and Chad Hill had proceeded to Palamos.
Now in the garage he sat on an upturned packing box wearing a rumpled tweed suit the color of cigarette ashes and a five-o’clock shadow. He felt customarily benumbed, subject to dull pains of resentment—Dominguez, the top man in the Guardia, had wasted hours of his time during the night by insisting that Lime address himself personally to the variety of woebegone witnesses the Spaniards had rounded up. There was nothing for it but to comply; not so much because of the demands of international courtesy but because it was indeed possible one of them had something to offer by way of information.
It had consumed most of the night. An old woman who claimed to have seen a hearse drive in and out of the garage. (An old hearse was found near the waterfront; whether it was a clue was indeterminate since it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.) A young man who claimed to have seen several Arabs in the vicinity of the garage. (Immigration was checking; questions were being asked in Palamos. No results yet.) A bus driver who had passed the hearse Monday night and seen its driver—a black man in chauffeur’s uniform. (The phony helicopter pilot? Possibly; but what did it add?)
There was also a Basque fisherman with a strange tale about several Arabs and a coffin and a fishing boat. The story was unclear. The fisherman had been taken before Dominguez and Lime had watched as Dominguez infuriated the fisherman to the point of stubborn silence. Dominguez had fired his questions arrogantly and impatiently; Dominguez’s accent was Castilian, the fisherman was a Basque. Lime had fumed silently: surely the Guardia had a Basque member who could do this interrogation more successfully? But Dominguez wasn’t the sort to whom that kind of suggestion would be welcome. Dominguez thought he had a natural gift for intimidating people; with the Basque it produced only defiance but Dominguez couldn’t see that.
On his way out Lime had dropped a word to an R.N. subaltern: “See if you can bring that fisherman around to see me when he’s through with him, will you? I’ll be at the garage.”
Three hours ago. Now he sat on the packing box still awaiting the Basque because there was nowhere in particular to go.
Chad Hill kept trotting back and forth bringing items of useless news to him from the various knots of technicians. “It’s American gum—spearmint. No fingerprint on it—he must’ve pressed it with a rag. The alarm clock’s a Benrus.”
“A Benrus.” Lime had learned how to repeat the last word or two whether he was listening or not. It made people go on talking. It was even possible Hill might eventually tell him something he could use.
The 500 KC transmitter was a fishing-boat model. The Wollensak recorder was an old model but a common brand. The mylar tape was also German, available anywhere on the continent; the alarm clock had been used to trigger the broadcast. The tape was reeled onto five-inch spools, Hill explained. It ran at one and seven-eighths inches per second. It was long enough to play about an hour. All three of Fairlie’s speeches were on it, separated by five-minute intervals of blank tape.
It was a simple robot device. The ordinary alarm clock was evidence the kidnappers had set the transmitter not more than twelve hours before the broadcast; but that was meaningless—you could travel forever in twelve hours, and by the time Fairlie’s voice had been aired at 12:30 P.M. local time last Tuesday the kidnappers could have been anywhere. And by now they had a lead of fifty-six hours on Lime.…
They’ve moved, Lime thought. They didn’t stay around here, they’d have known the search would be too intense. They went out: how? Not by public transport; Fairlie was too recognizable. Not by car. Helicopter, airplane or boat—it had to be one of those.
Boat, he thought. Because Palamos was a sea-front town, and because the Basque fisherman had seen Arabs on a boat. There had been Arabs around the garage; too much coincidence unless they were the same Arabs. All right then. Boat. What next?
A commotion in the corner: Chad Hill bouncing on his feet, wheeling, loping across with his loud voice preceding him:
“A fingerprint!”
Hill was very excited and Lime stared bleakly. When Hill came to an awkward stop above him he threw his head back. “Chad it could be anybody’s fingerprint. Maybe the owner of the place.”
“Well of course. But I mean they seem to have wiped the whole place clean before they left—but they missed this one.”
“Where is it?” So many people were crowded into the corner he couldn’t see.
“On the panel where the light switch is.”
It was a possibility to be conceded. He got to his feet with an effort. Their last act would have been to switch off the lights before driving out. They’d have done that after having wiped the place. Yes; a possibility. He went across.
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 Fai
rlie, 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.
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