Jed’s voice, frightened but defiant, with a note of the equestrienne’s command: “Why don’t you take an adult? You bloody bullies. Take one of us. Take me if you like.” And then much louder as her fear and anger joined, “Bring him back, you bastards!”
Hearing Jed’s challenge, Daniel’s captor yanked Daniel round to face her, while he held the pistol to his temple and did the baddy’s lines in a sawing Bronx snarl:
“Anybody comes after us, anybody comes up the path, anybody tries to cut us off, I kill the kid, okay? Then I kill whoever. I don’t give a shit. I’ll kill anybody. So stay down there and shut up.”
The blood was pulsing in Jonathan’s hands; they were out in front of him, each fingertip throbbing. Sometimes his hands wanted to do the job on their own and pull him after them. Busy footsteps thumped across the wooden deck of the balcony. The kitchen door burst open, a man’s fist groped for the light switch and flicked it, to no effect. A hoarse voice panted, “The fuck, Jesus Christ, where the fuck? Shit!” A bulky figure stumbled toward the cash desk, and stopped midway.
“Anyone in here? Who’s in here? Where’s the fuckin’ light, for fuck’s sake? The fuck!”
Bronx, Jonathan recorded again, flattened behind the door to the balcony. A genuine Bronx accent even when he’s out of earshot. The man advanced again, holding the bag out in front of him while he groped with his other hand.
“Anyone in here, get the fuck out, hear me? That’s a warning. We got the kid. Anyone makes trouble, the kid gets fucked. Don’t mess with us.”
But by now he had found the piles of bank notes and was sweeping them into the briefcase. When he had finished he went back to the doorway, and with only the opened door to separate him from Jonathan, he shouted down to his accomplice.
“I’m going on down, Mike! I’ll go start the boat, hear me? Jesus fuck,” he complained, as if the world were being too hard on him. Then he hurried through the kitchen to the scullery door, which he kicked open, before heading down the path toward Goose Neck. In the same moment Jonathan heard the man called Mike approaching with his hostage, Daniel. Jonathan dried his palm once more on his shorts, drew the knife from his waistband and passed it to his left hand, the sharp edge upward as if to rip a belly from below. As he did so, he heard Daniel sob. One choked or muffled sob, so brief the boy must have caught himself almost before he began it. One half-sob of tiredness, impatience, boredom or frustration, the kind you might hear from any child, whether dirt poor or super-rich, who has a bit of earache or doesn’t want to go upstairs to bed until you’ve promised to come and tuck him up.
Yet for Jonathan it was the cry of his childhood. It echoed in every vile corridor and barrack hut and orphanage and every auntie’s spare back room. He restrained himself a moment longer, knowing that attacking blows are better for this moment of delay. He felt his heartbeat slow. He saw the red mist gather across his eyes, and he became weightless and invulnerable. He saw Sophie, her face intact and smiling. He heard the clump of adult feet, followed by the reluctant scuffle of smaller ones, as Daniel’s captor came down the two steps from the wooden balcony and reached the tiled floor of the kitchen, dragging Daniel after him. As the man’s foot hit the tiles, Jonathan stepped from behind the door and with his right hand seized the arm that held the pistol and gave it a ferocious, breaking twist. Simultaneously, Jonathan screamed: one prolonged cathartic scream, to ventilate, to summon help, to terrorize, to put an end to too much patience for too long. The pistol clattered on the tiles, and he kicked it out of reach. Hauling the man and his damaged arm into the doorway, he grabbed the door, threw his body weight upon it and crushed the arm between the door and jamb. The man called Mike screamed too, but stopped as Jonathan laid the knife blade against his sweating neck.
“Shit, man!” Mike whispered, somewhere between pain and shock. “Fuck you doing to me? Holy shit. You some crazy man or something? Jesus!”
“Run back down the hill to your mother,” Jonathan told Daniel. “Off you go. Quick now.”
And despite everything that was raging in him, he selected these words with elaborate care, knowing he might have to live with them later. For why should a mere cook know that Daniel’s first name was Daniel, or that Jed was not his mother, or that Daniel’s real mother was several thousand miles away in Dorset? As he spoke them he realized that Daniel was no longer listening, but gazing past him toward the other door. And that the bagman, having heard the screaming, had come back to lend assistance.
“Fucker’s broken my fucking arm!” the titan called Mike was yelling. “Let go my fucking arm, you mad shit! He’s got a knife, Gerry. Don’t fuck with him. My fucking arm’s broke. He broke it two fucking times. He’s not kidding. He’s crazy.”
But Jonathan went on holding him, by the arm that was probably broken, and he kept the knife pressed against the man’s thick neck. The head was tipped right back on him with its mouth open, like a head at the dentist’s, and the man’s sweated hair stroked his face. And with the red mist there before his eyes, Jonathan would have done anything that he felt was necessary, without compunction.
“Walk back down the steps,” he told Daniel, quietly so as not to scare him. “Go carefully. Off you go.”
At which Daniel did at last consent to take his leave. He turned on his heel and began tripping unevenly down the steps toward the arc lights and the frozen crowd, flapping one hand above his head as if to acknowledge his accomplishment. And this was the consoling image that remained in Jonathan’s mind as the man named Gerry hit him with his pistol butt, then hit him again over the right cheek and eye, then yet a third time as Jonathan floated to the ground in veils of Sophie’s blood. While he lay on the floor in the recovery position, Gerry dealt him a couple of kicks in the groin for good measure before grabbing his accomplice, Mike, by his remaining arm and—to renewed screams and imprecations—dragging him across the kitchen to the opposite door. And Jonathan was pleased to see the stuffed briefcase lying not too far away, because clearly Gerry couldn’t manage a maimed Mike and the loot at the same time.
Then came fresh footsteps and voices, and for a bad moment Jonathan thought they had decided to come back and give him some more of the same, but in his confusion he had mistaken the origin of the sounds, because it was not his enemies who were now gathered round and staring down at him, but his friends, all the people he had fought for and nearly died for: Tabby and Frisky, Langbourne and the polo players, the old couple who touched each other’s faces while they danced and the four young blacks from the bar, then Swats and Wet Eye, then Roper and Jed with little Daniel clutched between them. And Miss Amelia, crying on and on, as if Jonathan had broken her arm too. And Mama Low, yelling at Miss Amelia to shut the fuck up and Miss Amelia screaming, “That poor Lamont.” And Roper had noticed it and was taking exception.
“Hell’s she calling him Lamont for?” Roper was complaining while he leaned his head this way and that to get a better look at Jonathan’s face beneath the blood. “He’s Pine from Meister’s. The night flunky chap they had. Englishman. Recognize him, Tabby?”
“That’s who it is, Chief,” Tabby confirmed, kneeling at Jonathan’s side and holding his pulse.
Somewhere at the edge of his screen, Jonathan saw Frisky pick up the abandoned briefcase and peer inside.
“It’s all here, Chief,” he was saying soothingly. “No harm except to life and limb.”
But Roper was still crouching over Jonathan, and whatever he saw must have been more impressive than the jewelry, for he kept wrinkling his nose as if the wine were corked. Jed had decided Daniel had seen enough and was walking him sedately down the steps.
“You hear me all right, Pine?” Roper asked.
“Yes,” said Jonathan.
“Can you feel my hand okay?”
“Yes.”
“Here too?”
“Here?”
“Yes.”
“How’s his pulse, Tabby?”
“Quite sporting, considering, Chief.?
??
“You still hearing me, Pine?”
“Yes.”
“You’re going to be okay. Help’s on its way. We’ll get you the best there is. You talking to the boat there, Corky?”
“On line, Chief.”
In the back of his mind, Jonathan had a notion of Major Corkoran holding a portable telephone to his ear, one hand propped on his hip and his elbow raised for extra authority.
“We’ll fly him to Nassau on the chopper now,” Roper was saying, in the gruff voice he had for Corkoran. “Tell the pilot, then call the hospital. Not that lower-class place. T’other one. Ours.”
“Doctors Hospital, Collins Avenue,” said Corkoran.
“Book him in. Who’s that pompous Swiss surgeon, got a house at Windermere Cay, always trying to put his money in our companies?”
“Marti,” said Corkoran.
“Call Marti, get him up there.”
“Will do.”
“After that, call the coastguards, the police and all the usual idiots. Raise some serious hell. Got a stretcher, Low? Go and get it. You married or anything, Pine? Got a wife or anyone?”
“I’m fine, sir,” said Jonathan.
But it was the equestrienne, typically, who had to have the last word. She must have done first aid at convent school. “Move him as little as possible,” she was telling someone, in a voice that seemed to float into his sleep.
13
Jonathan had vanished from their screens, missing, believed killed by friendly fire. All their planning, all their listening and watching, all their supposed mastery of the game, lay like a trashed limousine at the roadside. They were deaf and blind and ridiculous. The windowless headquarters in Miami was a ghost-house, and Burr walked its grim corridors like a haunted man.
Roper’s yacht, planes, houses, helicopters and cars were on constant watch; so was the stylish colonial mansion in downtown Nassau where the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company had its prestigious headquarters. So were the telephone and facsimile lines belonging to Roper’s contacts round the globe: from Lord Langbourne in Tortola to Swiss bankers in Zug and semi-anonymous collaborators in Warsaw; from a mysterious “Rafi” in Rio de Janeiro to “Misha” in Prague and a firm of Dutch notaries in Curaçao and an as yet unidentified government official in Panama who, even when speaking from his desk in the presidential palace, affected a drugged murmur and the alias of Charlie.
But of Jonathan Pine, alias Lamont, last heard of in intensive care at Nassau’s Doctors Hospital, not a whisper from any of them.
“He’s deserted,” Burr told Strelski, through the spread fingers of his hands. “First he goes mad, then he escapes from hospital. A week from now we’ll be reading his story in the Sunday newspapers.”
Yet everything so perfectly planned. Nothing left to chance, from the moment of the Pasha’s departure from Nassau to the night of the faked kidnapping at Mama Low’s. The arrival of the cruise guests and their children—the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell, the Langbourne family with sullen wife and overpretty nanny—all had been secretly welcomed, trained, housed and hated by Amato’s watchers, and finally seen aboard the Pasha, nothing left to chance.
“You know something? Those rich kids had the Rolls pull up at Joe’s Easy, just so they could buy their grass!” Amato the proud new father protested to Strelski over his handset. The story duly entered the legend of the operation.
So did the story of the seashells. On the eve of the Pasha’s departure, one of Ironbrand’s bright young men—MacArthur, who had made his debut with a nonspeaking part at Meister’s—was heard telephoning a dubious banking contact on the other side of town: “Jeremy, in God’s name, help me, who sells seashells these days? I need a thousand of the bloody things by yesterday. Jeremy, I’m serious.”
The listeners became unusually vocal. Seashells? Literally seashells? Shell-like missile? Sea-to-air projectile perhaps? Nowhere in the lexicon of Roper’s weaponspeak had anyone before referred to seashells. They were put out of their misery later the same day when MacArthur explained his problem to the manager of Nassau’s luxury store: “Lord Langbourne’s twin daughters are having a birthday on the second day of the cruise. The Chief wants to hold a shell hunt on one of the uninhabited islands and give prizes for the best collections, but last year nobody found any shells, so this year the Chief is taking no chances. He intends to have his security staff bury a thousand of the things in the sand the night before. So please, Mr. Manzini, where can I get hold of shells in bulk?”
The story had the team in stitches. Frisky and Tabby, launching a night raid on a deserted paddling beach, armed with duffel bags of seashells? It was too rich.
For the kidnapping, every step of the way had been rehearsed. First Flynn and Amato had disguised themselves as yachties and made a field reconnaissance of Hunter’s Island. Back in Florida, they reconstructed the terrain on a tract of dune set aside for them in the training compound at Fort Lauderdale. Tables were laid. Tapes marked the paths. A shack was erected to denote the kitchen. A cast of diners was assembled. Gerry and Mike, the two bad guys, were professional toughs from New York with orders to do what they were told and shut up. Mike the kidnapper was bearish. Gerry the bagman was lugubrious but agile. Hollywood could not have done better.
“Are you gentlemen fully conversant with your orders, now?” Irish Pat Flynn inquired, eyeing the brass rings on each finger of Gerry’s right hand. “We’re only asking for a couple of friendly belts now, Gerry. More in the line of a cosmetic alteration to the appearance is all that is required. Then we ask you to withdraw with honor. Am I making myself plain, Gerry?’
“You got it, Pat.”
Then there had been the fallbacks, the what ifs. All covered.
What if at the last minute, the Pasha failed to put in at Hunter’s? What if she put in at Hunter’s, berthed, but the passengers decided to have dinner on board? What if the adults came ashore to dine, and the kids—perhaps as punishment for some prank—were made to stay aboard?
“Pray,” said Burr.
“Pray,” Strelski agreed.
But they were not really putting their trust in Providence. They knew that the Pasha had never yet passed Hunter’s Island without putting in, even if they knew there was bound to be a first time and this would probably be it. They knew that Low’s Boatyard in Deep Bay held top-up stores for the Pasha, and they knew the skipper stood to take a piece of the stores bill and of the dinner bill at Low’s, because he always did. They placed great faith in Daniel’s hold upon his father. Daniel had conducted several painful phone calls with Roper in recent weeks about the hellishness of adjusting to divided parents and had singled out the stopover at Hunter’s Island as the high point of his forthcoming visit.
“I’m really going to get the crabs out of the basket this year, Dad,” Daniel had told his father from England only ten days ago. “I don’t dream about them anymore. Mums is really pleased with me.”
Both Burr and Strelski had had similar upsetting conversations with their children in their time, and their guess was that Roper, though not of the English class that places children high in its priorities, would walk through fire rather than let Daniel down.
And they were right, absolutely right. And when Major Corkoran called Miss Amelia over the satcom to book the terrace table, Burr and Strelski could have hugged each other, which was what the team said they were doing these days anyway.
It was not till around eleven-thirty in the evening of the day itself that they felt the first stirrings of unease. The operation had been scheduled for 2303 hours, or as soon as the crab races had begun. The holdup, the climb to the kitchen, the descent to Goose Neck, had never taken more than twelve minutes in rehearsal. Why on earth hadn’t Mike and Gerry signaled “mission accomplished”?
Then the red alarm lit up. Standing with
folded arms at the center of the communications room, Burr and Strelski listened to the playback of Corkoran’s voice talking in fast order to the ship’s captain, the ship’s helicopter pilot, Doctors Hospital in Nassau and, lastly, Dr. Rudolf Marti at his home in Windermere Cay. Corkoran’s voice was already a warning. It was cool and steady under fire.
“The Chief appreciates you’re not in the first-aid business, Dr. Marti. But the skull and side of the face are severely fractured, and the Chief believes they’ll have to be rebuilt. And the hospital needs a doctor to refer the patient to them. The Chief would like you waiting at the hospital when he arrives, and he will wish to compensate you generously for your trouble. May I tell him you’ll be there?”
A fractured skull and side of face? Rebuilt? What the hell had Mike and Gerry got up to? The relationship between Burr and Strelski was already strained by the time a call from Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami had them racing there by flashing light, with Flynn riding alongside the driver. When they arrived, Mike was still in the operating theater. Gerry, gray with anger, was chain-smoking in the waiting room, wearing his navy life jacket.
“Fuckin’ animal crucified Mike in the fuckin’ door,” Gerry said.
“So what did he do to you, Gerry?” Flynn asked.
“To me, nothin’.”
“What did you do to him?”
“Kissed him on the fuckin’ mouth. What do you think, dick-head?”
Then Flynn picked Gerry straight off his chair as if he were a rude child and slapped him hard once across the face, then sat him down again in the same indolent attitude as before.
“You whip him, Gerry?” Flynn asked kindly.
“Fucker went crazy. Played it for real. Held a fuckin’ carving knife to Mike’s throat, got his arm in the fuckin’ door like he’s choppin’ firewood.”
They returned to the operations room in time to listen to Daniel talking to his mother in England over the Pasha’s satcom.
“Mums, it’s me. I’m all right. I really am.”
Long silence while she wakes up.