Second Wind Part 33

I looked at John Rupert and at Ghost with respect and growing affection. Few enough people gave their time as they did, living double lives without recognition. Ghost, as if feeling for me something of the same emotion at the same time, said he hoped we really would, one day, get to writing Storm.

"You'd better, after that huge advance,

"John Rupert said with irony.

Ghost, with a sudden urge, broke all secret-operative rules.

"Perry, " he said, his face full of private liking and professional indiscretion. "Feel better, your friends aren't likely to be prosecuted. Nor are Harvey or Quigley, unless they do something foolish. Our superior officer has decided to leave those two in place to start again. What we actually stalk the Traders for is what you've just given us, the written lists of the materials they are currently expecting their clients to buy and sell. If we manage to acquire a list--like this one, pure gold--we send each order, each component of the package, to our counterparts in Germany or wherever the activity is taking place, and they prosecute or close down or use whatever force they like.

We, John Rupert and I and some others, we see our job as identifying Traders (or whatever they happen to be calling themselves this year, this month, whatever) and then from that identification we set out to obtain or copy their requisitions, preferably without them knowing. Very often, like we'll do this time, we leave the Traders in place and active, so we can steal from them again. Those German letters you've found for us will put all those people who wrote them, who aimed to buy or sell--it will put all those people in court or out of business, some in a violent way, and it will collect and put into safe storage the materials they were offering for sale. Acquiring papers like those you have just given us, that is our job. That's how we choke off acts of terrorism, even before the terrorists get as far as their own detailed planning stage. You can't make a nuclear bomb if you can't get the hot stuff. " He stopped, but not from regret at what he'd said, more in satisfaction.

John Rupert, the one who might more likely have disapproved of this frank disclosure and have tried to stop Ghost's abandonment of "need to know"--even John Rupert was nodding in approval.

"You'll see now that we know more about uranium and so on than we admit to, " he confessed. "We hide behind ignorance to be safe. We wanted to enlighten you on Friday in the hospital. Our superior officer won't be pleased that we have. " "Don't tell him, " I said.

I shook their hands, one by one, with commitment and warmth.

John Rupert said, "What we're always looking for are red hot letters like those in the folder you first came to tell us about. All those foreign scripts! " "As far as we know they've never resurfaced, " Ghost said.

"They are so sensitive they must be in someone's safekeeping.

Funny if they're back where they started. " John Rupert thought the idea frivolous. Ignorins it, he said, "There are ant.i.terrorist governments in Russia and in Germany and of course in many other countries. They welcome what we can send them. We never know exactly when we prevent sabotage or blackmail, but we receive intense expressions of thanks. " "But, " Ghost warned, "do you remember we told you about the man in the Everglades? " "The one who was shot for seeing too much? " "That's right, " Ghost said. "We knew him. So take care, Perry. The Traders are sometimes not lethal, as you know, but the basic bomb merchants, the ones who physically write their orders for enriched uranium, they almost always are. " Before I could make any promise the Special Services man bustled up kindly to fetch me, and he set off at a fast walk, carrying my holdall and telling me the airplane had boarded all except for me.

I waved briefly to John Rupert and my ghost. They'd told me for certain what I'd mostly surmised. The Traders were middlemen, and John Rupert, Ghost and others like them, were middlemen catchers.

I walked into the humming engine noise of the almost full airplane to be greeted by a chorus of knowledgeable eyes staring and elbows going nudge-nudge, and I wondered how many million years made up the half-life of a Trader-hunter.

THE SPECIAL SERVICES Department had outdone itself by arranging a rental car to be ready for me to collect at Miami, and the one I picked up had the added unexpected blessing of a talking map display. "Turn left at the next intersection for the Federal Highway to Sand Dollar Beach... " I twiddled k.n.o.bs and found a radio weather channel busy with things to come.

An extremely rapid voice rattled off, "There has been a weakening trend and a change in the direction of the upper winds over the western end of the Caribbean, with a consequent strengthening of the cyclonic system further east, which we have just heard has now officially been designated tropical storm Sheila, with sustained winds of over fifty miles an hour. Coordinates of Sheila, as of four o'clock Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, were sixteen degrees north, seventy-eight west, moving northwest at approximately ten miles an hour. Now we'll bring you your local forecast, after these messages... " The voice sounded as if he were uninterested, except for trying to complete the weather bulletin as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the commercials, always (as the source of the channel's income) more important than the formation of gale-force winds.

The coordinates given put Sheila about four hundred miles southeast of Grand Cayman Island, not enough of a threat yet for Michael and Amy Ford to nail onto their huge house panels of sea-repelling plywood.

I switched channels.

"Continue down Federal Highway, straight ahead over the next intersection, take the left fork ahead... " The car took me to the street and a memory for numbers took me to Robin Darcy's spreading house.

It was dark by then. I rang the bell with a feeling of stepping off a cliff.

It wasn't Robin himself who opened the heavy medieval type front door. Evelyn, slender in floor-length black and iridescent with long ropes of bugle beads and pearls, had been expecting someone else. Her welcoming smile faded to a shrewd inspection of me from toes to eyebrows while she acknowledged unwillingly to herself that she knew my name, that I'd been a guest in her house three weeks earlier and that she now regretted it. "Perry Stuart, " she said accusingly, "why are you here? Surely Robin can't be expecting you. " Robin himself appeared, framed in a double doorway across the marble-floored hall. There was an essential stillness in him, none of the flutter of host toward valued guest.

"Yes, " he said calmly. "Perry Stuart. Yes, I was expecting you. Maybe not tonight, maybe tomorrow, but yes, expecting you. How did you get here? " "British Airways and Hertz, " I said. "And you? " He smiled faintly. "Come in, " he said. "American Airlines and wife. " I walked forward into the center of the entrance hall and stopped under the lit chandelier. Ahead, as I remembered, lay the sitting room, with, beyond that, the terrace where we'd sat in the evening, and below that, the pool. Standing where I was, I had the bedroom I'd slept in on my right. Robin and Evelyn inhabited un mapped regions to my left, along with kitchens by the square mile and, in its furthest reaches, the big room allotted to Kris.

"Well? " Darcy asked.

Behind me, unmistakably, Evelyn c.o.c.ked a handgun.

"Don't shoot him. " Darcy said it without heat. "It would be , , unwise.

Evelyn protested,

"But isn't he the one... ? " "He's the one, " Robin Darcy agreed, "but he's not much use to us dead. " I was wearing the new white s.h.i.+rt and dark gray pants, but not the Edwardian greatcoat, and in general looked as I had at Caspar Harvey's lunch.

Robin too, conventional, unimpressive, chubbily round, Robin with tepid eyes behind the black owl frames--he too looked as if his day-to-day business occupation, his propagation of sods, made up the total pattern of his life.

I stood quietly under the chandelier thinking I would have miscalculated disastrously if his curiosity wasn't strong enough to keep me alive. After a tense little pause he walked round to his wife, and although I couldn't stifle an involuntary swallow altogether, I managed not to move or speak.

"Hmph, " he said. "Cold under fire. " He walked round in front of me, holding the gun loosely and removing the bullets.

"What do you think of, " he asked with evident interest, "when you're not sure the next instant won't be your last? I've een you twice stand motionless like that. " "Petrifaction, " I said. "Fear. " He twitched his mouth and shook his head. "Not in my book. Want a drink? " Evelyn made a no-no gesture, but Robin turned and walked back into the sitting room where a champagne bottle stood open alongside four crystal gla.s.ses.

"As you ran away from me last night in London, " he said to me as I followed him, "or to put it more accurately, early this morning, I am to conclude, am I not, that you have come to apologize and return what Kris wanted to give me? " I tasted the champagne, dry but with too many bubbles. I jL set the narrow flute down. "I don't think you should conclude anything like that, " I said peacefully.

"Get rid of him, " Evelyn urged, looking at her watch.

Robin also looked at his watch and then, nodding to Evelyn, said, "Of course you're right, my dear, " and to me, "Can you come back tomorrow? Same sort of time? " It sounded a most normal invitation. Which of us, I wondered, looked the more trusting and meant candor least?

Evelyn ushered me fast to the front door. Robin, when I glanced back, was watching my departure with expressionless eyes. Whatever he wanted to say to me could not be said in front of his wife.

Outside in the warm night, with the door closed firmly behind my back, I retrieved the rental car, drove it to the nearest busy shops, parked it outside a four-screen cinema and walked the short distance back to the Darcys'.

Bright lights now shone on the driveway and on the heavy door. I waited concealed in rampant greenery across the road as near as possible to the house, knowing the expected guests could be strangers but from Evelyn's urgency, hoping not.

Evelyn the Pearls had done a splendid semaph.o.r.e act with her watch, and also Robin with his four waiting champagne gla.s.ses, but they had flagged only half of the story. When the guests arrived both Evelyn and Robin appeared in the brightly lit doorway to greet them.

The guests, unmistakable anywhere, were Michael Ford and Amy. Evelyn and Robin welcomed them effusively, and the car's driver, in a black baseball cap, slipped quietly out of the long vehicle and into hiding not far from where I crouched, stepping out later from deep cover to move in and out of the striped shadows of palm fronds, slowly making a bodyguard's circuit to keep his employers safe.

The only real difference between him and me was that he carried a gun and I didn't.

The bodyguard-chauffeur finished one of his mostly invisible circuits and stopped in the roadway by Darcy's gates, directly opposite my own patch of concealment. In the deep starlight he leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette, and there he stayed on watch, without alarm of any sort, the sweet smell of burning tobacco drifting across as the evening's sole entertainment.

He and I both waited two and a half hours for Michael and Amy to reappear. The chauffeur came to life with ease to open rear car doors and drive away, and I, still pinned with stiff muscles, was about to cross the road to where Robin stood in his doorway looking at his guests' departing car when Evelyn, appearing behind him, put her hand persuasively on his shoulder and drew him into the house.

The inside lights went off progressively until they shone only in their owners' bedroom, and I saw no likelihood that night of getting Robin on his own. Evelyn was a complication and a nuisance.

Thanks to her I'd wasted a long time learning the leaf shapes of enveloping Florida bushes, and thought them a poor exchange for the rear end registration number of the visitors' car, which showed its home state unsurprisingly to be Florida.

To Michael and Amy, I learned later, the Cayman Island house was a weekend cottage. An equally grand house north of Miami was home.

My rental car, collected from outside the cinema, had been too far away for me to be able to follow Michael and Amy if I'd tried, but it was Robin alone I wanted. I hadn't known Michael and Amy wouldn't be in their house on Grand Cayman, and they weren't anywhere in sight when I returned to the middling motel one road back from the beach that had seemed to me a faceless place to stay.

In the frugal but reasonably comfortable motel room I wrote a long letter to Jett, telling her on paper all the loving things I found it difficult to say to her face. My dear grandmother might warn her that I'd loved and left three times in the past, but Jett was different... and how did one define "different"? Except that anyone who could love Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X was as different as Pu-239.

The television in my room predicted a short life for tropical storm Sheila, now located over open water at sixteen degrees north, seventy-nine degrees west, and still traveling northwest at ten miles an hour. A map was screened briefly, with a storm warning issued for a place called Rosalind Bank.

By morning it was raining on poor old Rosalind Bank, but tropical storm Sheila, although now circling with sixty-mi lean-hour winds, showed few serious signs of organization and was traveling north.

Tropical storm Sheila, I mentally calculated, was about six hundred miles due south of Sand Dollar Beach. If she went on traveling due north (very unlikely), she would hit the Darcy house in roughly sixty hours, or nine o'clock in the evening on Thursday, two and a half days ahead.