When the telephone rang she made a face. She wound a towel around her wet hair and tucked the edges in and picked it up on the fifth ring.

It was Howard, his voice very low — like a phonograph running at the wrong speed. “I’m glad I caught you at home. I’ll be there in twenty minutes. Wait for me. Has anybody called you?”

“At this hour of the morning?”

“Leave it off the hook till I get there. I don’t want it coming from someone else.”

“Must you be melodramatic?”

“Yes. Wait for me.”

By the time the doorbell rang she had fitted into skirt and blouse and sandals; she was putting her face on. She had a look through the Judas glass and saw him lighting a cigarette on the doorstep.

He seemed to have faded a bit with age, like a photostatic copy of himself. She was surprised to realize how long it had been since she had seen him face-to-face; it had all been letters and the occasional telephone vitriol. The things they had said to each other—

She opened the door to him; he neither spoke nor entered but simply looked at her, his eyes swollen. It unnerved her. She cried with completely false affection, “Howard, darling, why is it I never see you any more?” But she kept her face blank to put the lie to it.

Howard held up a forestalling finger. She let him in; he turned half around, waiting for her to close the door, holding the cigarette in the manner of an actor preparing to turn toward the audience and deliver a curtain line. But still he didn’t speak.

“Darling, you look simply marvelous.” An awkward lie. “I love the distinguished way your hair’s graying at the sides. It would do credit to an investment banker.”

He seemed caught in dumfounded paralysis. She tried again, needling him with her saucy screw-you grin. “How’s your ass anyway?”

“Carole, please.”

“Well then.” She pointed him with vague weariness toward a chair.

He went to it like an old man, wincing as he sat down. She watched him search the coffee table with childlike baffled concentration. Exasperated — “Good grief!” — she plunged into the kitchen, found him an ashtray in a drawer, dropped it on the table before him so that it rattled. Howard twisted the half-consumed cigarette into it, grinding it out savagely. He looked around the room like a fitful airline passenger anxious to memorize the locations of the fastest exits.

“It’s Robert,” he said.

“Of course it’s Robert. I can’t imagine anything else that would bring you here.”

“Sit down.”

Perversely she drew herself up. “He’s dead.”

“No. He’s not dead as far as I know. Sit down, Carole.”

She was furious. “What’s happened? You’ve done your level best to provoke cardiac arrest and there’s nothing wrong with him? You’ve no right—”

“I didn’t say there was nothing wrong with him. Well actually as far as I know there’s nothing physically wrong with him.” He plucked feebly at his pocket. “I happened to be here.” Found another cigarette. “In Los Angeles I mean. Meetings with the Japanese.” He had to use both hands to light it. “The office reached me at my hotel an hour ago.” He inhaled, choked, coughed, recovered. “It’s an unhappy coincidence, my being here just now. I’d rather have been in Washington — I think this would have been easier long-distance.”

She realized he was groping not for a way to tell her but for a way to avoid telling her. He kept glancing at the telephone as if he expected it to reprieve him. It was so masochistically like him: Never face quick pain if it was possible to choose the long agony of not facing it.

She controlled herself. “What’s happened to him?”

He gave her a reproachful look. It slid away; he brooded at the cigarette and his mouth worked ruefully.

She said, “There is, I have to assume, a crisis involving our son — yet you insist on keeping it back so that I can watch you squirm in your own crisis. You’re as demanding of attention as a child banging its spoon on the table. You’re a bastard, Howard, you really are.”

His mouth lifted, one side of it, in a sour smile. “There’s such an irony in it,” he said. “Hijacked. Terrorists. He’s been kidnaped.”

He sucked at the cigarette and smoke poured from his mouth with each word: “It’s not as if he isn’t used to it, is it. I mean at least he knows the ropes, it’s not the first time he’s been kidnaped.”

“Kidnaped.” She repeated the word stupidly.

His hands fluttered and he dropped the cigarette and went scrounging for it in the carpet. When he found it he said, “Apparently it was some sort of grisly accident. He wasn’t meant to be one of the victims — he just happened to be there, he got swept up in it. No rhyme or reason.”

“He’s been kidnaped by terrorists?”

She watched him stand up; he seemed to loom when he approached her — she wasn’t wearing heels. She saw what he was up to in time; she moved away, she didn’t want his clumsy embrace. She said, “I don’t want comforting, Howard. I want facts. Tell me the punch line.”

“There’s no punch line. They took him yesterday afternoon. Nobody knows anything. Nobody knows where he is or whether he’s dead or alive. One assumes he’s still alive — dead hostages aren’t worth much.”

“Hostage for what?”

“It’s still not clear.”

She wandered around the room. “Shall I make coffee?”

“A drink,” he said, “a drink would be better.”

In the kitchen she drew herself together, helped by the mechanical minutiae: Open the cabinet, take down two glasses, find the Dewar’s, pour, return.

Half aware of her movements she sank into the recliner and its footboard flipped up unbidden under her calves. Howard said, “This must be, what, the third time he’s been kidnaped?” There was waspish accusation in his tone.

“Let’s not get started on that.” She tasted the drink but it wasn’t what she wanted; she put it aside. “Mexico?”

“Mexico? Yes, in Mexico. Well at least they were kidnaped in Mexico. God knows where they are now. They could be anywhere. State has no idea. It’s near the coast and there’s flat country all around where they might have landed a plane. The vehicles were found abandoned ten kilometers from where it happened — that doesn’t mean anything, of course they’d switch vehicles. The authorities are looking for witnesses, of course, but—”

She watched him inhale deeply. He threw his head back and closed his eyes. “I’ll try it from the top. I’m sorry. It was Harrison Gordon they were after. He’s the Ambassador. The kidnapers must have been fairly well organized — at least they seem to have had advance information about his itinerary. He was on a fact-finding tour of the provinces. His party was ambushed at a village junction near the coast of Mexico above the peninsula. The kidnapers took Gordon and everybody in his party, hauled them off in buses. Nobody was killed. Apparently one security guard took a rap on the head. A reporter named Ortega happened to be an eyewitness — he’s a stringer for the L.A. Times.”

“What was Robert doing there?”

“According to Ortega he’d hitched a ride down there to plead for medical assistance for the Yaquis. Robert was talking to Ambassador Gordon when it happened. So he was swept up along with the rest of the party.”

“Why hasn’t it been in the papers?”

“It’ll be in the afternoon editions. Washington and Mexico City wanted to keep it quiet but of course they couldn’t keep Ortega muzzled for very long. They were waiting for the demands.”

“Demands?”

“Ransom. There are always demands, aren’t there? I mean you don’t kidnap a United States Ambassador for a lark.”

She said, “It’s a mistake, isn’t it. A ghastly mistake.”

“We’ll know more in time. I asked Paine to call me here this morning if he learns anything. I hope you don’t mind—”

“Who are they? Don’t they even know who they are?”

“The terrorists? Nobody knows yet.”

She said, “What do we do? Just wait? I don’t know if I can bear that.”

“I don’t know what else to do.” His hands wrenched at each other. “It’s not much good saying I’m sorry. But I hope you know how much I’m hating myself right now. If we hadn’t treated him like a Volleyball between us he might not have run away to Mexico with his Peace Corps nonsense and this might—”

“Don’t be ridiculous. A thing like this is as arbitrary as a tornado. I don’t want to indulge you in a mea culpa right now — I haven’t the strength. Do you want breakfast?”

“No. But go ahead if you’re hungry.”

“I’m not.”

She watched him light his third cigarette. She said, “Shall we just sit here and wait for the phone to ring, then?”

“I don’t know.” She saw the tremor in the hand with which he lifted his glass. He said, “I don’t know what to do or what to say. I’m supposed to be in a meeting at eleven. The Japanese trade delegation.”

“Then go to it.”

“And leave you here alone?”

“I’m going to the studio,” she said, deciding it even as she spoke. “We’re still editing the picture.”

“I wonder if it’s possible to work. To keep one’s mind on anything.”

“I’m not strong enough not to,” she said. “I couldn’t possibly sit here and stare at the walls.”

“I suppose you’re right.”

She looked at her watch. “You’ve still got time to make your meeting.”

“Can I drop you at the studio?”

“No thanks. I may want my car with me.”

“I’m at the Hilton,” he said.

“All right. You can reach me at the studio.”

He made as if to stand, but didn’t. “Carole, this is awkward but let me ask you: Have you got a boy friend?”

“A boy friend? No. I have a few men friends.”

“Someone you can turn to, I mean.”

“Let me worry about it, Howard. Rest assured if I want a shoulder to cry on I won’t choose yours.”

“I didn’t mean it like that,” he said with almost laughable petulance. “But it’s just that if you need anything—”

“I know. I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be intolerable. It’s kind of you to offer but I’ll be all right.”

He said vaguely, “I think I’ll ask Paine to fly out today and take my place in these meetings. I’ll go back to Washington tonight. I’d rather be there — maybe I can keep my finger on the pulse of things from there. Mexico’s not my desk, of course, but I know Mark Blaisedell fairly well. Maybe I can build a few fires. I’d hate to think we weren’t doing everything possible to save them.”

“Will you keep me informed?”

“Instantly I know anything.”

She didn’t believe him but there was no point arguing with him.

At eight that night she couldn’t stand it any more. She backed the car out viciously against the mailbox post and drove away leaving bits of red glass in the street.

She walked into the lobby in high dudgeon, browbeat the clerk into revealing the room number and went up in the elevator with a tourist couple and a bellboy. The Iowans were talking about Knott’s Berry Farm. She had to curb her tongue to keep from screaming at them to shut up.

Howard answered the door in T-shirt and shaving cream; evidently he’d been expecting room service. He went all colors at the sight of her.

She thrust past him into the room and kicked the door shut.

Howard said, “I’m sorry. You don’t know what a day it’s been. This problem came up at the conference and then I had to drive one of the Japanese to the airport and of all the damn stupid things the car had a flat and the idiots hadn’t included a spare, and the poor bastard missed his plane and we had a hell of a flap—”

“Soon to be made into a major motion picture,” she said with icy disbelief. “You left instructions with the desk that you weren’t taking calls from me, didn’t you. I’ve been phoning you for six hours.”

“Carole, damn it, I’ve got nothing to tell you. They’ve had nothing to tell me.”

“It was on the car radio just now. It’s been on the news for hours. They’re Cubans.”

“All right. What of it? Nobody knows where Robert is. Isn’t that the bottom line?”

“You might have had the courtesy to call me. At least to let me know they’re getting somewhere.”

“They’re going in circles,” he said. “Accumulating useless facts. Don’t you think I’ve been keeping in touch with Washington? There’s nothing. Nothing hard.”

She sat down, handbag in lap. “If it’s not too much strain I’d appreciate your telling me everything you know.”

“I could give you twenty minutes of utterly useless information. Would that help?”

“What I want from you,” she said with quaking control, “is the stuff that hasn’t been in the news. And don’t give me any of that need-to-know horseshit. I’m his mother. I need to know.”

He went to the bureau where he’d scattered the contents of his pockets; he picked up the wristwatch and looked at it. He actually looked at his watch. She wanted to scream at him.

“I’ve got a plane to catch,” he explained.

“You don’t go out this door until you’ve talked to me.”

He wiped the foam off his jaw with a towel. “Over the years it’s belatedly occurred to me that you have an abrasive wit and the acidulous instincts of a barracuda but just possibly, behind those defenses, you’re as vulnerable as any of us. So I’m going to ignore this fishwife assault. Now if you’ll just take it easy for a moment—”

“I don’t want your goddamned forgiveness, Howard. I want information.”

He found a cigarette in the litter. “All right. If it’ll ease your mind. There’s nothing in it that helps us. First you must understand that it isn’t my department. I’ve been on the horn with Mark Blaisedell but it’s been hard to get a clear picture so early. To some extent it’s a Central Intelligence Agency matter and I’m sure you know how jealous they are of information — they don’t share it with State unless they’re forced to. I don’t have the clout to force them. It’s possible they know things we don’t know but there’s nothing I can do about that.”

“Just tell me what you do know.”

“Well it’s our best judgment that the terrorists probably are Cuban exiles. We don’t know who they are, actually, but the circumstantial evidence points to that conclusion. This morning a ransom demand, a penciled note, was received through the mail slot of a Venezuelan newspaper in Caracas.”

“Howard, I know that much. I’ve heard the radio. What did the ransom note say?”

“They want ten million dollars. In cash. American dollars. Small bills, unmarked. And they want eleven political prisoners released from jails in Latin America.”

“What prisoners?”

“Five in Venezuelan prisons, four in Colombia, two in Mexico. They were convicted of various guerrilla crimes — hijacking, violating gun laws, murdering Cuban communist rebel organizers, so forth. What they have in common is that all eleven are anti-Castro people. They’re not all Cubans but they’re all right-wing. Two of them are Germans from Paraguay. Therefore we’re assuming the people who kidnaped Harrison Gordon and Robert must be anti-Castro Cuban exiles who want to get their leaders out of jail and raise money to finance guerrilla action against Cuba.”

“What’s being done to rescue the hostages?”

“Very little, I imagine. It’s not like Entebbe, you know. Nobody knows where the hostages are. How can you mount a rescue expedition if you don’t know where to send it?”

She said, “Will the ransom be paid?”

“I don’t know. And I don’t know whether the eleven prisoners will be released. It’s not up to me, Carole.”

“What’s Washington doing about it?”

“I don’t know what pressures are being applied. This thing’s in the laps of the governments of Mexico and Venezuela and Colombia. It’s up to them to decide whether to meet the demands or not. They’re the ones against whom the demands were levied. Officially it’s not Washington’s problem — only indirectly, since some of the hostages are Americans.”

“Including a United States Ambassador. Doesn’t that mean anything?”

“Of course it does. But it’s an awkward situation—”

“Awkward situation. Good Christ.”

“Carole, there simply isn’t a hell of a lot we can do about it right now. Our hands are tied, on top of which we’re blindfolded.”

He stubbed out the cigarette and looked at his watch again, strapped it to his wrist, and collected the shirt from its hanger. Howard’s once athletic physique had been worn down by an unstable and lazy personality; he was no longer trim but neither was he a wreck.

He buttoned it, top to bottom, and reached for his tie. “I don’t know what else to tell you. Does any of this help? I don’t see how it could. I don’t know about you but I feel just as much in the dark as I did this morning.”

She realized the extent of the difficulty with which he was keeping up the calm front. He had to knot the tie three times before he got it right; by the end of the performance he was reduced to oaths and savage jerks at the fabric.

She felt a residue of affection toward him. It was not any wish for reconciliation — too much blood had flowed under the bridge — but she felt sorrow for him and it made her soften her tone when she spoke. “Of course there’s one thing you haven’t told me.”

He was distributing things in his pockets. “Don’t be silly.”

“Of course there is, Howard. I’m not an absolute fool. You don’t kidnap people for ransom and leave the delivery date wide open. There’s a deadline, isn’t there?”

His hands became still. His eyes closed briefly, his lips worked and finally he said, “Today’s Tuesday. They want the money and the release of the eleven political prisoners by Friday noon. Two and a half days from now.”

“Thank you,” she said quietly. She got up to leave. “I do wish you’d make some attempt to make things a bit easier for me. Do you think I enjoy prying things from you with a crowbar?”

“I didn’t want to upset you—”

“Upset me? As if I weren’t already distraught, you mean? Didn’t it occur to you that knowing there’s a finite limit to this suspense might be preferable to dragging out the agony indefinitely?”

“I’m sorry.” He actually sounded miserable. “I’m truly sorry. I didn’t think.”

“Please think next time. Don’t keep things from me — it’s cruel.”

His hands gestured — helpless, apologetic.

“I won’t keep you,” she said. “You’ll miss your plane.”

“I’ll keep you posted.”

“Will you,” she said drily. “I’ll be in Washington tomorrow afternoon — at the Hay-Adams if they’re not booked up.”

“There’s no need for that.”

“Isn’t there? I don’t see where I’ve got much choice, do you?”

“I don’t suppose there’d be any point in my asking you to trust me.”

“It’s a little late for that.”

It made him wince. “I deserved that, I guess. All right. Do you want to stay at the house — would it be more comfortable than a hotel?”

“God no.” She went.

When Glenn Anders entered the Coral Gables office the Deputy Chief told him of the death of Robert Lundquist.

“They dumped the body on the back steps of the police station in Merida, Yucatan. They left all his identification on him so they’d be sure we got the right message. And a note pinned to his shirt. I don’t need to tell you what it said.” The Deputy Chief — Mackinnon — had a sour jowled face and wisps of black hair across his bald head. “It’s a goad, of course. Proof that they mean business. The message is directed mainly at Venezuela. The note said among other things that they’ll kill another hostage tomorrow and another the day after that and so on, saving the Ambassador till last, until their demands are met. The idea here, I guess, is that they started with the least prominent of the hostages. The kid was an accidental member of the party.”

“This is the Peace Corps boy, I take it? Lundquist?”

“Yes. Poor son of a bitch. At least they did it clean. Shot him in the back of the head. Maybe he never knew it was coming.”

“Anything useful in the note?”

“The same anti-Castro propaganda. It’s in the lab in Mexico City. Along with the kid’s clothes and personals. They’re flying him into Houston for the autopsy. Who knows, maybe something will turn up under his fingernails.”

“Did they set a new deadline?”

“Noon tomorrow. Predictably.”

“Any word from the Venezuelans?”

“Not that I know of. But there’ll be a lot more pressure on them now. They’re holding out against three countries. A couple of Congressmen are making noises about embargoing oil imports from Venezuela. It wouldn’t happen, of course, but the fact that anybody suggests it is pretty hard on the Venezuelan image. Tourists are canceling reservations, that kind of thing. Maybe they’ll knuckle under. Personally I wish they wouldn’t. The only way to deal with these bastards is to refuse to deal with them. I’m all for the Venezuelans — let ’em stonewall it.”

Anders made no reply to that; he rarely believed in certainties or flat statements. If the Venezuelans hadn’t stonewalled it, he thought, this Lundquist might not be dead now. But who knows. Everything was caprice.

Mackinnon said, “I take it you didn’t turn up anything.”

“A couple of names that need checking out. Emilio Ortiz, Guillermo Garza. Mean anything to you?”

“Not especially.”

“They’re both out of the country on business trips.”

“Well maybe they are.”

Anders went out to the desk they had lent him and wrote up a report of his day. Then he put through a call to O’Hillary on the scrambler. “Anything new on the Lundquist boy?”

O’Hillary’s voice was calm, smooth, avuncular. “No, except that the killing achieved its purpose. The Venezuelans are capitulating. It’s not public yet but I have it on good authority. They’ll broadcast it tonight — they’ll be flying the prisoners out to Buenos Aires in the morning.”

“So the bastards get everything they asked for.”

“For the moment. Until we find them and take it back. That’s still your job, Glenn.”

“At the present rate,” Anders told him, “I’ll probably find them in nineteen ninety-three. Nothing’s breaking around here. Anything from air recon?”

“Some marvelous photographs of clouds and trees.”

“Shit.”

“The beeper in the container hasn’t moved since it was dropped. We don’t know if they’re leaving it there deliberately or if they’ve removed the money and left the container behind.”

“Probably the latter,” Anders said. “Any instructions?”

“No. Just carry on. We have every confidence in you.”

We have every confidence — it made Anders smile when he put down the phone. He was both amused and concerned by the Agency’s attitude on this thing. By putting the job in his hands they had revealed a great deal. In the hierarchy of things he was junior-grade. By putting him in charge Washington was going through the motions but it was clear to Anders that nobody was going to be axed if he failed to produce. The whole thing was indicative of the ambivalence with which Washington and Langley regarded this affair. Terrorism must be countered of course — but what if the terrorists weren’t quite our enemies?

What a marvelous embarrassment it would be, he thought, if I actually nailed the bastards.

Rosalia came along to his desk. Euphonious Rosalia Rojas. She had the pert eager bounce of an earnest trainee stewardess; certainly she was out of place around here but Mackinnon had called her our best pipeline to the Cuban community. The word that suited her was cute. She had dark tangled hair, cut medium-short, that bounced when she moved. Pug nose, very large black-brown eyes shaped into an expression of astonishment and vulnerability, a short-waisted buxom little body with a nervous brisk way of moving. From the outset she had appealed to him carnally. It had ripened beyond that and beyond anything he’d anticipated: Yet somehow it wasn’t alarming.

She had a small steno notebook from which she started reading aloud before she stopped walking. “I checked into those six names. Four of them are here in the Miami area working at their jobs and they haven’t been out of town in months except one of them took the wife and kids to Disney World six weeks ago. This leaves two, if the new math hasn’t altogether corrupted my arithmetic, and one of them is definitely in Mobile on one of those corporation refresher-training courses. He fixes cars for the Oldsmobile dealer and they’ve sent him to GM mechanics’ school.”

“Leaving one more.”

“Go to the head of the class,” she said cheerfully. “His name is” — just the slightest trace of accent, hees-name-ees, you might miss it if you weren’t listening for it — “Ignacio Gandara, age forty-one, occupation construction worker. At the moment he is laid off and collecting Unemployment but he didn’t pick up the two most recent checks at the Unemployment office and no one who knows him has seen him in about three weeks.”

“Does he have an American passport?”

“Yes.”

“Find out if he’s used it, can you?”

She made a note. “How did you do?”

“About the same as you. Five negatives, two possibles. Guillermo Garza, occupation lawyer — or so it says on his shingle — and Emilio Ortiz, who’s—”

“A construction engineer,” Rosalia said. “I know Emilio, he’s godfather to one of my sisters. He’s been shuttling back and forth to St. Thomas, working for a company that’s building a condominium over there.”

“That could be a cover, couldn’t it? Let’s not scratch Ortiz off the list just yet.”

She said, “Maybe you’re right. But I’ve always liked him.”

“One of the delights of this business is learning how little you can trust people.” He looked at his watch. “Join me for supper?”

When he looked up he caught the sparkle in her eye. “I’d love to. I’ll be ready in ten minutes — I’ll just put the Gandara inquiry on the wire to Passport Control.”

A fish jumped through the surface of the river: broached, shook foam, dived. Cielo watched for a while but it didn’t leap again. He listened to the birds and then finally went back along the riverbank reluctantly; it was time to put things in motion.

There were clouds; steam in the air; soon there’d be rain. It was what he had waited for — a safe time to move the hostages out. Later if someone tried to backtrack them with dogs or infrared the rain would protect them by washing away clues between the camp and the dock. The whole thing, he thought, was a quixotic farce; but one might as well maintain security. He slapped at a mosquito.

Cielo wasn’t the name he’d been born with; the nom de guerre had been chosen mainly for its meaninglessness. Cielo: sky. Only two of the nine men in his band knew his real name, not that it mattered; Rodriguez was not so astonishing a surname.

No one was in sight; that was in obeisance to the discipline of the camp — there was no knowing what sort of high-altitude equipment might be in search of them; the rule was to stay under cover at all times. Cielo entered the camp from tree to tree until he reached the covered walkway.

The camp had been built long ago by a Dutch oil company as quarters for its men during an exploration for petroleum in the river delta. When they found no oil they’d floated their rigs away to try again farther down the coast; they’d left the camp behind, as they usually did — it was cheaper to prefabricate a new one than to dismantle the old one and haul it away.

Cielo had left it all untouched; when he was gone he wanted to leave behind no sign of his presence. Nothing had been disturbed; machetes were forbidden — not even twigs were allowed to be broken.

He found Vargas and the big Draga boy in the money hut standing well away from the cage and looking expectantly toward him; he had interrupted their colloquy, startled them, and there was no way for Cielo to know whether they had been discussing the weather, the subject of sex, or the possibility of stealing the ten million dollars from Cielo.

He said, “It’ll rain soon.”

Vargas had a terrifying smile; it went with his size. It was said Vargas had broken a man’s back with his hands but Cielo knew the story to be false. Vargas was as gentle as he was massive; a man that big rarely needed to lose his temper. Cielo had known him twenty years. That was part of the trouble, he thought: We’re too old to believe in this nonsense. It takes children.

No, the money wouldn’t tempt Vargas; and as for the Draga boy, the idea might amuse him but in the end he would not steal because he did not need to steal. Emil Draga was the heir to his grandfather’s fortune, which would be enough to discourage him from taking suicidal risks. The lad wasn’t in this for money. He was in it, in an atavistic sense, for the adventure — he was a clever youth, big and muscular, ugly, stuffed with Draga legends of machismo and arrogance and financial bucaneering: Through determined rapacity the Dragas had acquired empires of cane and rum. Left to himself the hard and ruthless young Emil probably would become a corporate-takeover pirate, a Wall Street raider; if and when the old man died, Emil probably would move instantly to New York. Cielo had no illusions that The Movement could survive old Draga.

For the moment Emil would stay at Cielo’s right hand until the old man ordered him elsewhere or he saw an opportunity to flex his brutal muscles again.

In the cage with the money the squirrel and the parakeet showed no signs of illness. It had been long enough. Cielo said, “You can pack up the money and give their freedom back to the bird and the squirrel.”

Vargas showed his chilling smile. “It’s our day for being magnanimous. Today we give freedom back to everybody.”

“Don’t forget your hoods.” Cielo went toward the door wondering if he’d neglected anything. The parakeet and the squirrel had been caged forty-eight hours with the ransom money because Cielo had heard once about a rigged payment of money that had been radioactively treated so as to infect anyone who handled it. During the past days they also had studied the money under infrared and ultraviolet lights to make sure it hadn’t been dyed; they had sifted laboriously through the $50 and $100 notes looking for evidences of serial-number sequences or counterfeiting; they had subjected the money to every test they could think of. So far as Cielo could determine, it was clean. No doubt there’d been giveaway devices attached to the canister in which the money had been dropped from the helicopter, but they hadn’t even bothered to search it for transmitters. They’d left it where it had fallen until fourteen hours after the drop, when they’d moved it under cover of rain and transferred the money into the canvas sacks and gone out the way they’d come in — by canoe part of the way, outboard motorboat the rest.

He always preferred boats when it was possible. He was an island man, that was part of it, but also there was the fact that a boat left no footprints.

He said, “We’ll go in half an hour,” and left the hut.

When Carole emerged into the steamy Houston heat there was a ravening mob of journalists on the concrete steps and Howard took her arm, leading the way, trying to drive a wedge through them. Strobes half-blinded her and there was the flicker of lenses. One of the bayonet microphones almost took her jaw off. The reporters were all talking at once and she couldn’t understand a word; she cringed, shaded her eyes, got behind Howard and pressed forward, using him as a ram. “Get me out of this.”

Can you tell us how it feels... Have you been told if anything has been learned... What sort of boy was he... Your reaction to the Venezuelan delay that may have cost your son his life... How does it feel?

She screamed. “You fucking hyenas!” knowing the obscenity would render their films and recordings useless.

Howard was booming calmly, “Give us a break, this is no time...” His voice was lost in the babble.

He fed her into the car; she punched the lock button down and stared ahead stonily. Like slavering kids at a candy store window they pressed up against the windshield. She held herself rigid. Flashbulbs exploded. One of the reporters stumbled against the car, making it rock. Howard fought his way around and squeezed into the driver’s seat. When he turned the key in the ignition she said, “Run them down.”

“Take it easy. We’ll be out of this in a minute.” He gunned the engine in neutral, making a noise. It drove the pack into retreat and he pulled it gently away from the curb. When she looked back she saw the red light still winking above a TV camera’s zoom lens. Then they were around the corner and she slumped. “Ghouls.”

“I know. I know.” He pulled up at a red light. “Look, we’d better drive up to Beaumont and catch a plane there. They might be covering the airport here.”

“You go ahead. Drop me by a taxi. I’ll check into a motel.”

“What’s the point of hanging on here?”

“I’m going to wait and fly back to Virginia with the body when they’re finished with it.”

“That’s morbid.”

“One of us has to do it.”

“They’ll send it on. We’ve got to get back to Alexandria — the funeral arrangements have to be made...”

“You go ahead then.”

“It’s something else, isn’t it?”

She said, “In all the madness I didn’t really get a chance to talk to that Marine.”

“You won’t get a crack at him for weeks, Carole. He’ll be closeted in debriefing sessions with the others. They won’t let him talk to outsiders until they’ve squeezed him dry — they may not even let him talk afterward.”

“I have to know,” she said.

“There’s a better chance of that in Washington than there is here. At least we may be able to squeeze some information out of O’Hillary.”

“There’s a taxi. Pull over.”

“Nonsense,” he said. “If you’re determined I’ll take you to a hotel. Any preference?”

“I’ve never been in Houston in my life. How do I know?”

The car’s air conditioner blew a dry chill against her face. The street was a wide boulevard lined with structures that looked tentative and temporary; it might have been Los Angeles. Traffic endlessly streaming. Life goes on, she thought with bitter banality.

At the first motor hotel she said, “That one will do,” not caring; Howard pulled in under the porte-cochere and opened the trunk to get out her overnight bag. The heat was close and depressingly heavy.

By the room, key in hand, she said, “Go ahead. I’ll be all right. I’ve got phone calls to make.” She opened it and pushed inside.

“I don’t like leaving you just now.”

She turned, lurching; walked blindly toward a door.

“Where are you going?”

“The bathroom,” she said. “Don’t worry, I’m all right.”

“Don’t go. Stay here.”

“Howard, I’m going to make a fool of myself and cry.”

“Fine. I’d rather you cried here with me than by yourself in there.”

She sat down. “I’m sorry to be such a fool. I’ll get over it in a minute.”

“Suppose I stay on a while. I can take a late-night flight. Let’s have dinner before I go.”

“I’m afraid I can’t. I’ve just remembered I have a terrible headache.”

He pressed his hands together until she heard the knuckles crack. “I wish I knew what to do for you.”

“Nothing. I’ll be all right. You can depart with a clear conscience.”

“Please don’t be like that.”

“I’m sorry.” She was too exhausted to argue.

“Look, if there’s anything—”

“The fact is right now at the moment I’m unable to meet the emotional demands of this and I need to be left alone to collect myself. If you stay much longer we’ll start degrading each other.”

After he left she went to the window and watched his car until he got into it and drove away into the traffic. Failing to collect her thoughts she attempted to rest but her eyes wouldn’t stay shut and finally she made a number of phone calls trying to arrange a meeting with the Marine but everything was shut to her.

Then she had a half-formed idea. There’d been a dimly familiar face in that mob of journalists on the steps. She went back to the phone. It required three calls. One to Los Angeles Information; armed with the number she called the L.A. paper; armed by the Examiner with a Houston number she called Dwiggins’ hotel.

Dwiggins arrived in something under twenty minutes and gave her a baffled smile.

“Come in,” she said, “I’m unarmed.”

“Why me?”

“Because I want something from you.”

“Quid pro quo?”

“Yes. You can have an interview if you think it’s worth it.”

“You’re front-page copy right now. Celebrity mother of terrorist victim.” He came in but seemed hesitant about shutting the door. She made a vague gesture and he closed it and crossed gingerly to a chair where he sat up on the edge like an expectant pupil.

Dwiggins was fortyish and quite fat, his hair prematurely white and wispy; he had a journalistically bibulous nose and wry eyes that had seen everything.

She said, “I noticed you in that lynch mob but it didn’t register until afterward.”

“I’m flattered you remember me at all.”

“Your column on me wasn’t particularly friendly, as I recall — something about me being the apostate leader of a new wave of sentimentality and cornball trash — but you did me the extraordinary courtesy of printing what I’d actually said in the interview. I find that unique.”

He dipped his head an inch. “Thank you.”

“Are you also old-fashioned enough to honor an agreement to keep something off the record?”

“If the agreement is made beforehand. I won’t print anything without your permission.”

“You won’t even discuss it among your friends. Fair enough?”

“All right. But—”

“The quid pro quo, I know. I’ll give you an interview you can print. This is something else.”

Dwiggins acceded with a dip of his broad face.

“I’ll make it as painless for you as possible.” She nodded toward the tape recorder, granting permission. “You want to know how I feel about the death of my son. I feel every which way — like a kaleidoscope. Right at this moment I have an acute desire never to feel anything again.”

“Sure.”

“I’m sure you don’t need remarks from me about the senselessness of this tragedy. Of course it’s arbitrary, it’s a grisly waste of a brilliant human life, it’s pointless and maddening.”

He said quietly, “Have you cried much?”

“Yes, I have tears but I don’t let them blur my vision. Mainly right now I feel rage. I want revenge, you see. I can’t help it, I can’t rationalize it away. It’s intensely personal and I’m sure that’s a useless response to such an impersonal attack but that’s how I feel. I want these terrorists punished.”

“Brought to justice.”

“Justice,” she said, “doesn’t come into it. I’m talking about emotions now. Justice is an abstract concept.” She made a loose fist and contemplated it; she looked up at the reporter. “I want to be there, physically present, the day these animals are destroyed. I’ll get satisfaction from it — I know, nothing can bring my son back. But all the same. It’s what I feel.”

Dwiggins said, “Tell me about Robert.”

In the fading September light the trees were heavy with dark leafery and she walked heavily. The funeral was still an open wound and she had no idea when it might begin to heal; she anticipated nothing.

O’Hillary in his office was as before: all plastic surface, running his hand through that wavy hair of his. A quick pleasant smile and cold eyes. Smooth, cynical and adept; earnest and compassionate, without an ounce of feeling in it. He probably made love as if he were dictating a memo. According to the white-gold ring he was married and she found this astonishing.

“I appreciate your coming,” he said. He pronounced “appreciate” with a very precise “c.” “We’ve debriefed Ambassador Gordon and some of the other hostages. I thought you might like to know the results. I’m afraid for the most part they’re negative. We know there were at least seven terrorists. The leader was a big man with a bushy beard. The beard may have been false, of course. The others wore masks or hoods at all times. They spoke with Spanish accents. At least one or two of them have some background in seamanship — they transported the hostages in a sailing boat. Now as to the death of, ah, Robert Lundquist, I’m afraid we’ve learned less than we’d have liked to learn by this time. As you know, one of the Marines on the security detail had been struck a severe blow on the head, and evidently your son was concerned there might be concussion — he badgered the terrorists to get medical attention for the Marine. After a while your son was taken out of the hut. The others thought he was being taken to see the leader so he could press his request for medical attention for the Marine. That was the last any of them saw of him. They didn’t see the murder take place, so I’m afraid his murderer won’t be identified until we’ve apprehended the terrorists and interrogated them.”

“You’ve found the hiding place, haven’t you?”

“It’s being searched. Every lead is being pursued.” Something — possibly the coldness of her face — prompted him to add, “This gang seems to be some sort of wild-card outfit. None of the known Cuban exile groups knows anything about them. We’ll come up with results, I think I can promise you that, but it’s going to take time.”

“If a crime isn’t solved in the first forty-eight hours it probably never will be solved. Statistical fact, Mr. O’Hillary.” One of Robert’s statistical facts. “I’m not a supplicant begging for scraps. I’m a citizen. I’m the one who pays your salary.”

O’Hillary’s face colored a bit. “Of course I understand how upset you are. But we’re on the same side, aren’t we.”

“I don’t think we are.”

“Isn’t that a bit — well, paranoid?”

“It’s consistent with the facts.”

“Consistent? You could say that about a cathartic. We’re doing our jobs, Mrs. Marchand, as best we know how to do them. There’s no massive conspiracy to cover up the facts about your son’s death. I think you must be careful to make sure your anxieties don’t drive you into emotional difficulties. I know this is an excruciating cliché, but nothing any of us can do about this can bring your son back or make up for your loss.”

“I haven’t entirely taken leave of my senses,” she said. “I simply want to be able to face myself when I think of my son. Never mind, Mr. O’Hillary.” She saw it was no good; there was no getting through to the apparatchiks; she got up and left.

It wasn’t much of a walk back to the hotel. An old woman went by walking an infinitesimal dog, and somewhere a siren shrieked; a young man came along bearing cut flowers in white tissue wrappings, beamed at her and went on by with a spring in his step. She nearly snarled at him. She knew she was going to have to do something about this rage before it destroyed her.

At the desk she found a message from Dwiggins; in the room she dialed with the eraser end of a pencil and sat tapping the pencil against her teeth, listening to it ring. Dwiggins answered on the fifth ring and said, “Call me matchmaker. Have I got a boy for you.”

“Good grief. You’re drunk.”

“Do you want to hear this or not? You’ll love the guy. He’s this big lug, got his nose right next to his ear, hairy all over. Just like a movie star.”

“Yeah,” she said. “King Kong.”

Dwiggins laughed uproariously.

“All right,” she said. “Who and what is he?”

“Crobey. Harry Crobey. I knew him in the highlands. Listen, the guy’s a creature of clandestine warfare the way a tiger’s a creature of the jungle. He’s the kind of guy you’re looking for.” She heard the sound of ice in a glass.

She said impatiently, “Tell me about him.”

“Who?”

“Crobey. Harry Crobey. For God’s sake.”

“Oh yeah, him.” The phone seemed to drop from Dwiggins’ mouth. She vaguely heard him muttering, then after a moment his voice came back on the line. “Sorry, I dropped the phone. You still there?”

“I’m still here.”

“Tell you about Crobey,” he said. “He used to fly in and out of the highlands on this old Air America plane, DC-3.I went in with him a couple times.”

“He’s a pilot?”

“Yeah, he was then. He’d take off with a six-pack of beer by the seat. Drink the beer, refill the empties by urinating in them, drop them out the window on Cong villages. I mean the guy’s beautiful. A top-grade infidel.”

“You do make him sound attractive,” she said.

Dwiggins’ belch sounded cavernous. “I talked to him. He’s between jobs right now. He’s willing to listen to your proposition.”

“Where and when?”

“Nassau. If you want to talk to him you have to go there. He can’t come to Washington right now.”

“Why not?”

“Maybe he ought to tell you that. I don’t like telling tales out of school. You haven’t had second thoughts, have you?”

“No.”

She heard him drink — sucking swallows. “I hope they don’t write this up as Dwiggins’ folly,” he said. “I hope you don’t get killed or something.”

“Tell me about this Crobey person.”

“Well there are people who like him. And then there are people who find him a thoroughly poisonous creep. You mustn’t trust any of these guys. They can be trusted to obey the laws of their own existence — they’d never walk into a potential trap without reconnoitering the exits first, they’d never rape a woman if they thought her husband could do them any harm, they’d never shove a stack of chips out to the middle of the table if they didn’t think they could beat the other guy. But dope, extortion, murder, any of the really vile crimes — those are paper laws to these guys. I’m not trying to impugn Crobey particularly. I’m just telling you about these people as a class. They don’t operate according to the inhibitions you’re used to. They’re pretty wild.”

“All right, you’ve forewarned me. What about Crobey?”

“You ask him. He’ll tell you whatever he wants you to know about himself. It’s better that way.”

They made the transfer uncomfortably in a heavy chop forty miles off San Juan. A line came across from the catamaran weighted by a small grappling hook; Cielo’s crew drew the two boats together and with great care they cabled the money sacks across by a breeches-buoy system. Then they used the dinghy and everyone got soaking wet.

When the ketch turned about and headed back into the Gulf toward the Mexican town from which it had been rented, the three men aboard her were newcomers to her deck. Cielo and his entourage ensconced themselves along the rails of the catamaran and watched her go. The ketch slid quickly into the darkness, running without lights. A good vessel; they’d never see it again.

It wasn’t a storm, just a wind; the men stood on the open decks drying out in the warm breeze. Someone revved the engines and the catamaran’s stern went down as she wheeled toward home. Cielo with his head thrown back counted stars and felt gloomy. Before sunrise they’d arrive on the coast; the boat had only left port a half day earlier and this was its home registry so there would be no customs inspection, not for a brief fishing foray. The ransom would go ashore without trouble.

Glenn Anders unpacked his suitcase with the efficiency of long practice. It wasn’t merely his suitcase; it was, largely, his home.

At the bedside desk he swept aside the fan display of tourist folders and local guides — This Week in Mexico — and reached for the phone to buzz Rosalia’s room but before he touched it the instrument rang. Disquieted by the coincidence he picked it up tentatively. “Hello?”

“Anders?”

“Yes.”

“Wilkins.”

“Hello, George.”

“How’re they hangin’, old buddy?”

“All right.”

“O’Hillary asked me to brief you. Right now all right? I’m in the lobby.”

“Come on up.” Anders pushed the cradle down to break the connection. Then he dialed Rosalia’s number. “If you’re all beautiful and your pantyhose are on straight, come on down to my room. Bring your notebook. We’re getting a briefing from the station chief.” He hung up and glanced around the room. No possibility of its being bugged; he’d booked it at random. That was the best kind of security. He had no reason to suspect anyone might be interested in his conversations but when you went into any foreign country where you were known as an agent of the U.S. government you had to expect counterintelligence types to keep an eye on you as a matter of drill.

Rosalia’s tap; and as he opened the door to her he saw George Wilkins tramping forward in the corridor. Wilkins’ high long face developed a funereal smile as he followed the girl into the room.

Rosalia perched by the desk with her notebook, looking efficient, but the soft smile in her eyes betrayed something else and Wilkins seemed wise enough to spot it and cosmopolitan enough to refrain from comment.

“Welcome to the pits,” Wilkins said. “I suppose I should say something like that. By way of official greeting and all.”

“How’re things?”

“Tedium, ever tedium. I wish somebody would try to overthrow the government around here. At least it would give us something to take an interest in.”

Anders said, “Did you know this Lundquist kid?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Allerton did, I think. Over at the consulate.”

“We’ll talk to him. What have we got?”

“Not much since we sent the last report to O’Hillary. They haven’t turned up but one or two items out of that old oil camp.” Wilkins talked with a slow prairie twang. Kansas? “A Gauloise butt, for instance, and a corner of a page, out of a paperback book. Been dog-eared a few times and broke off, you know how they do. A whole gang of bright scholars are trying to find out what book it’s from. Only got about four complete words on it and bits of a few others so it may take them a while and then I expect they’ll come up with something like Gone with the Wind or How to Have a Happier Sex Life.”

“It’s in English?”

“Yeah. We already knew they spoke English, didn’t we. Let’s see, what else. Oh yes — debriefing on Velez, he came up with an item—”

Rosalia looked up from her notebook. “Velez who?”

“Juan-Pedro Velez. Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. One of the hostages, you know. The one that had to go into the hospital with dysentery.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Anders observed.

“He’s all right now. They turned him loose yesterday and we interrogated him. Anyhow he seems to remember one of the gang talked Spanish with a German accent. Thin guy, he says. Not very big.” Wilkins blinked slowly; he looked tired. “They’re scraps but it’s the best we can do right now. Any of it help you?”

“Who knows,” Anders said.

Cielo had tumbled asleep like a weary peon who had shaken off his load but when he awoke he found evidence in the tumbled bed of a difficult night; nor did he feel rested.

After a while he went along to the kitchen ramming his shirttails into his pants. Soledad stood over the ironing board looking cross, her hair tied in a horsetail with a small ribbon; he thought she was breathtakingly beautiful.

She said, “You were impossible. I had to sleep on the couch in the end. I don’t know what the children must think.”

“I’m sorry. It must have been bad dreams or something.”

“And now you have to go out again?”

“Si.”

“For how long this time?”

“I can’t say. You realize I should be up there with them all the time — I’m shirking my duty, laying so much onto Vargas and my brother.”

“When will this madness stop?”

“When the old man dies, I suppose.”

“The Dragas are long-lived — his uncle lived to ninety-four.”

“But blind and senile the last few years, wasn’t he?”

“Old Draga isn’t blind or senile.”

“Don’t nag me,” Cielo said, “you won’t change anything.”

She said, “It takes young men to do this sort of thing. He should know that. Your heart isn’t in this.”

“No, most of the time it’s not. Once in a while I try to remind myself. You know I talked to Ortiz yesterday? Raoul Ortiz?”

“You didn’t mention it.”

“Ortiz was in Cuba just a few months ago. Running guns to people in the mountains. He said it is even worse than before. The squalor and all. The despair.”

“You’re trying to pump yourself up but it all keeps leaking out again, doesn’t it.”

“Well I’d like to do something for them. You know.”

She said, “Surely, but this way? Who are you — Don Quixote?”

Cielo watched her push the iron back and forth across his black chinos. “It’s not that bad, you know. I don’t mind what we’re doing now. One day these weapons will be used.”

“But not by you.”

“No, I’m too old. I’ve turned cautious.”

“Someone will confiscate the weapons before anyone can use them. How do you expect to keep them hidden for years?”

“Bury them. Nobody looks in El Yunque.”

“It takes a big hole to bury cannons and machine guns.”

“We’ve got plenty of time to dig it.”

“Not really. The old man, Draga, he’ll get impatient soon.”

“I’ll tell him the time isn’t right yet.”

“And he’ll believe it just because you say so?”

“He trusts me.” The statement came out like a confession, shaming him.

She said, “Rodrigo — talk to me about it.”

“How can I talk about things for which there aren’t any words? Feelings—”

She smiled mournfully. “You poor thing. You hang onto this nonsense as if it was the first woman’s breast you ever sucked. You’ve even forgotten why you’re doing it.”

“I know why it’s done. But it’s just that it’s no longer fashionable to spend one’s life discussing the ultimates of good and evil. That’s for university students. The advocates of revolution.”

She said, “I remember the days when even villainy was innocent.”

“You know the CIA has received orders from the White House to stop all secret anti-Castro exile activities. We must be circumspect. Old Draga understands that — he’ll curb his impatience.”

“Those orders were issued more than a year ago, querido. Nobody paid much attention to them.”

“Just the same.”

“Is it the old Draga who worries you — or the young one?”

“Emil.” He only sighed.

“That one is trouble, since he was little.”

“You know the expression ‘trapped between a rock and a hard place,’ querida? Well the old man is the rock. All the same, I think we can control Emil. I think we’ve thrown a little respect into him. His ribs are still taped up, though he doesn’t want anyone to know it.”

Suddenly he could feel the air whistling through his own nose. He unraveled the handkerchief from his hip pocket and blew his nose.

She sighed with infinite tolerance. “Put it there with the laundry and get a clean one. Por Dios, you can’t even get out of the house in the morning without soiling another bit of cloth.”

“When the girls come home from school I want you to have a talk with them about this TV business. We should ration their hours — there are things in life besides television.”

“They would listen more closely to you than to me. It’s something you ought to take care of.”

“I probably won’t be here tonight.”

“Then it can wait until you come back. Tomorrow maybe?”

“Maybe. I can’t promise.”

“It’s a good thing I know you. Otherwise I’d think you had a woman squirreled away.”

He reached out for her hand, took the iron from it and stood it up on the metal pan; he put his hands on her shoulders and uttered each word as if he had coined it on the spot: “I adore you with all my heart and soul. I always will — to the end of my life.”

The liveliness came back into his eyes. She walked into his embrace.

Toting her overnight case, Howard hurried along ahead of her into National Airport’s noisy terminal. By the time she caught up he’d claimed a spot in the ticket-counter queue. She said, “If I’m not back by Thursday, drag the Caribbean.”

“I don’t see the point of this. There’s nothing you can do down there.”

“I can’t sit on my hands.” The line inched forward. She glared at the clock, worried about the time; traffic on the bridge had coagulated around a stalled car and she was late. “Will you do something for me? Will you keep feeding the fire under your friend O’Hillary?”

“Sure... sure.”

“Not that it’ll do much good. It’s a grotesque farce. They’re all engaged in this monstrous masquerade.”

“You’re getting alarmingly paranoid about this, Carole.”

“I am? Then why is it, do you suppose, that I could hire one solitary middle-aged man with a limp and no pull at all, and he was able to accomplish in six days what all the forces of the most powerful government on earth failed to do in fifteen?”

“Your man Crobey may think he knows the name one of them used fifteen years ago but that’s a far cry from catching them. He’s no closer to them than anybody else is. Why persist in this absurd anti-Washington neurosis? You know they’re doing everything they can.”

The queue crept forward a notch. Howard put the case down to free his hands for a cigarette. Carole said, “Don’t you know those things will stunt your growth?” Agitation made her bounce up and down on the balls of her feet; she kept looking resentfully at the clock above the oblivious ticket clerk. A metallic disembodied voice ran around overhead, half comprehensible — “Mr. Equation Funeral, Mr. Equation Funeral, please report to the American Airlines information desk.”

“You’re flagellating yourself,” Howard told her in an intense hiss. “Stop building dungeons in the air. No one’s conspiring to cover up Robert’s murder.”

“Howard, I’ve never known quite such a round-heeled pushover as you are. Working in the guts of it all this time I’d have thought you’d have learned better. I hold these truths to be self-evident: That irrespective of realities, the deformed indoctrinations of nationalistic stupidities will take precedence every time over basic human morality; that the secret war against Castro is not over just because the President of the United States goes on television and says it’s over; and that us niggers are being discriminated against because these terrorists happen to be the right political color — therefore they will be protected whatever their crimes.”

“Carole, your mouth runneth over.” Howard had gone very pale; he glanced around to see if anyone had overheard.

She slapped her bag down on the counter and demanded her ticket. When that rigamarole was completed — “Aisle or window?... Smoking or nonsmoking?” — she snatched up the boarding pass, hiked her bag over her shoulder and turned to Howard to make a grab for the overnight case. Howard kept it, determined to race along with her to the plane. Striding across the terminal he got some of his color back. “I get awfully tired of banging up against that brittle impregnable wall of your wise-ass cracks,” he drew a shuddering long breath to continue, “and I wish that just once in a while you’d give the rest of the world credit for possessing at least a tenth of the lofty moral values that you claim to possess.”

There was another queue at the security funnel. The metal detector kept beeping and several men were emptying out their pockets of coins, keys, cigarette cases, ballpoints. The loudspeaker announced the final boarding call for Carole’s flight to San Juan.

She began to push forward, cutting into the line, fuming.

Howard grabbed her sleeve. “Calm down. They won’t take off without you — they wouldn’t dare.” The afterthought amused him; she saw it in his eyes and knew abruptly that he was patronizing her. She couldn’t stand it.

She said, “You can still be a master of the gentlemanly shiv when you want to be,” and icily put her shoulder to him.

The queue began to move again. Carole placed handbag and overnight case on the moving belt. “Try to keep me posted, will you?”

“Yes, I’ll try.” He wasn’t quite being evasive; he was just staying low-key in order to counterbalance her. She knew he wasn’t her enemy. Looking back from beyond the checkpoint she caught the gentle worry in his face. He still had a hopeless remnant of feeling for her.

Howard waved; and she ran to catch her plane.

Glenn Anders slouched in an uncomfortable wooden chair while Perez flipped through the photo cards with the repetitive efficiency of a bank teller counting money. Perez had been through mug-shot canvasses before; just the same Anders was dubious — Perez flipped them over so quickly. After a while there was a danger of forgetting what one was looking for. One’s eyes began to go out of focus and one might flip right past the vital one.

A girl in an Afro natural hairdo and bone earrings came in. She put a paper bag on the table and smiled brightly and left.

Anders removed two capped Styrofoam cups from the bag.

“Yes. Black please, with two sugars, yes?”

The room was prim and sinister, the windows set high. The tile floor sloped to a center drain and the walls were slick with high-gloss green paint. This was police headquarters: a washable room designed for interrogations.

Anders stirred sugar into the coffee with the wooden tongue-depressor stick and pushed the cup across the table to Perez. “Take a break. Tell me again what he looked like.”

Perez — slight, birdy, poplin suit, fake silk tie — had a cocky way of narrowing his eyes and dropping his voice near a whisper, as confidential as a desk clerk pimping for a girl on the third floor. As it happened he was neither pimp nor pusher; Perez was a plainclothes police detective.

Perez said, “I wasn’t so close to see him clearly,” and ended the sentence with a nervous meaningless laugh that sounded like a telephone’s busy signal. The habit irritated Anders. Perez, proud of his English, said, “I was tired to sit waiting in the car, I was getting out for walk, then I hear the footsteps, yes? In the open he startled me and I went up in a doorway to look like I’m ringing the bell of the house. I am afraid he spotted me. I think so, yes?” And another honk of laughter, this one to cover his shame. It was another point against him that he still hadn’t understood Anders’ question.

Anders contained his irritation. None of it meant much anyhow. Likely the whole thing was a false lead. The Volkswagen had provoked the attention of the bureaucracy and Anders was obliged to follow up dutifully but he wasn’t sure it would take him anywhere.

Reasoning that Rodrigo Rodriguez might spend part of the ten million dollars’ ransom on armaments, Anders had activated the clumsy apparatus. Inquiries were made in seventeen ports. The report that flagged Anders’ attention came from Fajardo, the port town at the northeast tip of the island of Puerto Rico.

The dealer was a regular police informant who ran a small import business in molasses and wine and occasionally cocaine. He had reported a visit from a Cuban who went by the name of Cielo, was unfamiliar to the dealer and had visited him to inquire obliquely into the possibility of purchasing certain arms — mainly mortars and rocket launchers, not hip-pocket stuff. The dealer informed his visitor that he did not traffic in such items. When the visitor left the dealer made a note of the plate number of the Volkswagen and telephoned to his contact on the police.

It was tenuous but it had drawn Anders’ eye because of the locale and the nature of the request. Not just anyone had much interest in mortars and rockets; and Crobey’s clue had given him a reason to be interested in Puerto Rico.

Anders had flown into San Juan and exercised a few quiet pressures to set in motion a search for the Volkswagen. The dealer from Fajardo had gone through the same photo files that Perez had before him now; the dealer hadn’t singled out a face but he was an odd vague sort and a simple experiment had proved he had an almost nonexistent memory for faces. Under repeated questioning he’d proved uncertain about nearly everything. He couldn’t remember what clothes Cielo had worn; yes, Cielo might have been older, might have been heavier — it was hard to say. The dealer had gone home bewildered and Rosalia, her hand on Anders’ shoulder, had exhaled with a slumping sag of disappointment.

The name Cielo clearly was not so much an alias as a nom de guerre, a code name; You can call me Cielo, it meant nothing to the police or the agency; quite possibly it was a name adopted for one operation, as disposable as a paper wrapper.

But then the Volkswagen had been identified by its license number and the police had sent Perez to cover it. Now Perez had seen the man who drove the car and Perez had been trained to identify faces.

Anders said, “He didn’t have a belly or a beard.”

“No. No beard. Big in the shoulders and as tall as you, yes? But no heavier than you are. One-ninety, perhaps two hundred. No more.”

“The face? Tell me again now.”

“Comó se dice, square, yes? Latino but not too dark. Not Indio. Short hair, not crew-cut but short and neat, and not bald. A, how do you say, widow’s peak, yes?”

“Then he didn’t wear a hat.”

“No, no hat.” Perez scowled. “The face, yes. I have a good picture here.” He tapped his temple. “A square face, heavy bones, is hard but not stupid, you understand? Wide face, very wide.”

“And the clothes?”

“Khaki jeans, a light windbreaker jacket, faded gray. Work boots like a car mechanic. Your clothes would fit him.”

“When you first saw him he wasn’t coming out of a house, you’re sure of that?”

“He came out a driveway between two houses. From behind, the next street I think, yes?”

If it was Rodriguez, Anders thought, he’d have been smart enough to leave his car parked several blocks from his destination. It made for the dreary prospect of house-to-house inquiries.

Perez said, “If he is in these pictures I’ll find him. It’s a promise, yes?”

“All right. I’ll check back with you.” Anders left the second cup of coffee for him.

The federal building looked like something the Spaniards might have constructed to contain lunatics and violent offenders. The agency had borrowed a desk for him in an office attached to the Department of Agriculture; officially he was out-of-bounds on U.S. soil. At least the office had a scrambler phone. He found Rosalia there — she gripped his tie and pulled him down, licking his mouth lasciviously.

Anders poked both fists into his kidneys and reared far back. “You yank at me like that again, you’ll have me in traction for a week.”

Rosalia leaned leeringly forward, straining cloth with breasts. “Your place or mine?” She was in a springy droll mood.

“You’ve got fabulous boobs,” he told her. “But it’s the wrong time of day to be caressing each other’s erogenous zones. Did George Wilkins call in?”

“Not yet. If we got married could we still work together?”

“I doubt it. Against regulations.”

“Then we won’t get married until you retire.”

“Got it all worked out, I see.”

From the beginning she had amused him with her cub-reporter bounce and cuddly lovability; she’d inculcated in him a kind of playfulness he thought he’d lost. It was beginning to occur to him that perhaps she was the girl to whom he wanted to be faithful: Despite her overt sexuality she possessed the soft nesty instincts of a purring kitten.

“Oh dear. I’ve forgotten what I was going to say.” She rummaged through papers. “Here it is. Mr. O’Hillary wants you to call him.”

“God.” He fixed his glance on the phone as if he expected it to serve a subpoena on him.

“Also there was a call from Harry Crobey.”

“How the hell did he know where to find me?”

“I gather he called the FBI and they transferred him to the Justice Department and they transferred him to—”

“No. I mean how’d he know I’d be in San Juan at all?”

“Are you asking me?” She ripped the page off her pad. “He’d like to meet you tonight at half past seven for dinner at the Tres Candelas in Old Town. He said he’d be bringing a guest.”

“Carole Marchand?”

“He didn’t mention a name.”

“All right. Why don’t you come along?”

“Love to. I’ll put on something slinky.”

He regarded her husky ripe shape. “Sure. You’d better ring O’Hillary for me and put it on the scrambler.”

O’Hillary — smooth, avuncular, elegant: “Glenn, how are you? Any fix on Rodriguez?”

“Not yet.”

“Can you be overheard?”

“Only by my assistant.”

“Ask her to leave, will you?”

Anders cupped the mouthpiece. “He wants privacy.”

With genial disgust Rosalia lifted her nose into the air and went out, pulling the door shut with a quiet reproachful click.

“All right. I’m alone.”

O’Hillary said, “This project of yours has consumed a lot of time in briefings and meetings. It’s becoming a tedious football.”

“What am I supposed to do about that? Drop the ball?”

“It’s not quite that simple, as I’m sure you appreciate. As you know, Glenn, there are varying factions of opinion on this issue. There is, not to put too fine a point on it, an ambivalence in the Administration’s attitude. On the one hand an Ambassador was victimized, an American murdered, and the Administration can’t be seen to condone terrorism—”

Can’t be seen to. That summed up O’Hillary all right.

“At the same time,” O’Hillary went on, “there’s also the matter of the current efforts to ameliorate relations with Cuba.”

Anders could picture him tipped back in his wingback swivel chair with his silk-clad ankles crossed, gently palming the distinguished wave in his silver hair and staring whimsically at a point about a yard above the President’s official photograph.

O’Hillary said, “Conversely Castro is still, in an unofficial way, the enemy. There’s the sticky affairs in Somalia and Ethiopia — and we have people among us who still haven’t forgotten the history of the Angola affair. In certain eyes Fidel Castro remains the bad guy. In regard to the Rodriguez group, there’s still a faction here that takes the understandable position that he who is my enemy’s enemy is perforce my friend. To be blunt, this faction — numbering not an inconsequential few persons in high places — is engaged in the attempt to persuade the Administration to let Rodriguez run and see if perhaps he won’t take care of Castro for them. As a result we’re in dubious straits, my friend. We’re in grave danger of being short-circuited by conflicting orders.”

Whenever O’Hillary turned pedantic and longwinded it meant he was preparing a smoke screen. O’Hillary had an abstract fondness for intrigue as an end rather than a means. He had an infallible intuition for gothic complexities — he thrived on deceptions even when they were superfluous; he was a success in his profession because he had mastered the skill of trick marksmanship — shoot first, then draw a bull’s-eye around the bullet hole.

The principal of survival in Langley was Cover Your Ass; ultimately the decision would come down on one side or the other and O’Hillary would be ready, either way, to end the match with a perfect bull’s-eye — a neat trick and one that might require the sacrifice of a subordinate or two.

Anders knew he had to listen very carefully to O’Hillary now: It wasn’t what O’Hillary said but what he didn’t say.

“I do hope you’re not recording this, Glenn. If things backfire we mustn’t make the error of leaving tape-recorded evidence of our misstatements about, must we.” Like a disagreeable schoolmaster, Anders thought, O’Hillary selected his tone for its prim offensiveness.

“It’s not being recorded.”

“Good. Your instructions — from me, not from above me, and not in writing — are to proceed with the investigation, to locate this man Rodriguez and his little Sherwood Forest band, and to report personally and directly to me and to no one else. You’ll consult with me before taking action of any kind. And you will not take the police or anyone else into your confidence. In other words you must proceed henceforth without police assistance.”

“Then how am I supposed to find them?”

“Wits. Ingenuity.”

“And what am I supposed to tell the police?”

“Tell them the leads proved false. Pull them off the case.”

“You honestly expect me to find Rodriguez without any help?”

“I do. If there’s a man who can do it it’s you.”

“You can butter me up all you want,” Anders said, “but you can’t have me for breakfast. This opens up a provocative can of beans. You want me to find Rodriguez but then keep hands off him. That’s pointless.”

“We must be prepared for whatever decision comes down, mustn’t we. We can do that only by performing thoroughly the task to which we’re officially assigned — the task of intelligence-gathering. Once we fix Rodriguez’s location we can then take whatever action we’re ordered to take. In the meantime nothing is to be filed through normal channels. You’re on your own and I’m your only contact with the company. Understood?”

“In other words if the Administration decides to let him run you don’t want the record to show we knew where to lay hands on him. You want to keep it private because you don’t intend to produce it until it’s absolutely clear you’ll be applauded for producing it. Christ — what a grisly waste,”

“Regardless of provocation you’re to take no action that might jeopardize security. You understand your instructions, don’t you? You’re to find Rodriguez. But you’re to do it in such a way that no one except me knows you’ve done it. Not Rodriguez, not the police, not the agency. No one.”

“We’ll see.” Anders smiled, anticipating the response.

“Don’t give me evasive answers!” He could have heard O’Hillary without a telephone.

It made him laugh aloud. “You’re so easy to string along. Mind your blood pressure. I understand the orders — we may have an argument about it when I get back but I understand them. Anything else on your mind?”

“As long as you’re on the phone you may as well bring me up to date.”

She awoke stiff and grumpy to the buzz of a distant tractor. Sunlight stabbed in through holes in the cheap blind.

It was too rustic for words. She had to pick a barefoot path across weeds to the privy; she accomplished her morning toilette at the kitchen sink with the aid of the compact mirror from her handbag.

There didn’t seem to be a soul in the house. She was glad of that; it gave her time to collect herself. She dressed in a plaid shirt and blue jeans and desert boots; and rummaged through the Spartan kitchen.

Last night, she thought, they seemed to have reached an understanding of sorts. Her last glimpse of him had discovered a defiant and lascivious grin. She had responded in kind.

It was inevitable, in the circumstances, that she would be tempted toward an unhealthy attachment: Crobey was the only remotely familiar object in this alien world, the only bridge between her and the sanity she’d left behind. But she had to guard against trusting him too much.

As if summoned by her mind a car crunched into the yard. She went to the kitchen door and looked out — it was Crobey but it wasn’t the same little shoehorn car he’d had last night. This one was a high square Bronco, a coiled-cable winch on the front bumper, a drab green paint job and big-lugged tires that looked like cross-country equipment. Undoubtedly it was four-wheel-drive. Crobey stepped down and glanced at her, not smiling, and reached into the back of the truck, from which he lifted a heavy rucksack. He carried it toward the house.

Carole made an ineffectual and self-conscious swipe at her hair. “Good morning.”

“Yeah.” He squeezed past her into the house. When she followed him into the front room she found him dumping the contents of the rucksack on the parson’s table — a jumble of oily blue-black machinery that she belatedly recognized as disassembled guns.

He began to sort things out on the table. There was a flat red steel box; he slid the lid off it and revealed a collection of ramrods, white cloth patches, cans of oil and solvent.

He assembled something out of the parts — it looked like the kind of stutter gun that airborne commandos carried in war movies. Stubby, ugly, wicked. Crobey worked its action with a great deal of sinister clacking.

“I see you’ve been to the arms dealers.”

“One of ’em. If he’s been approached by Rodriguez he’s not admitting it. I’ve got a few more on the list — then we’ll have to widen the net. Caracas, Rio, the Azores.” He gave her a direct glance for the first time. “Glenn Anders is in San Juan.”

“Oh?”

“Flew in last night.”

“How do you know?”

“I haven’t altogether wasted my time since I got here. You’ve got two other people on your payroll besides me and Santana. I slipped them a little something to keep their eyes open — I check in with them now and then.”

“Who are they?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Crobey—”

“Part of the reason they’re willing to deal with me is they know I won’t name them. All right?”

She conceded it. “So Anders is here. Why?”

“I suggest we ask him.”

“We?”

“He wants to meet you. When I was in Mexico City I told him I’d try to set it up.”

“What have you told him?”

“A little bit of the truth. Not too much.” He went back to work on his toys.

She said lamely, “Where’s Santana? Working the farm?”

“No. He’s out looking into the Rodriguez family background.”

“Have we stirred them up at all yet?”

“I’ll ask Anders when I see him.”

“I’m asking you. You’re supposed to be my expert.”

“An expert’s a fellow you hire because he’s the one who knows what experts to call in, and when to call them. Are you going to dispute everything I do? Because if you are I don’t see much point in carrying on. I can’t function if I’m harassed from both sides at once. Do you want me to pack?”

“Don’t throw ultimatums at me,” she said. “I might call your bluff.”

“Then you’re ready to give it up?”

“No. I’ll look for somebody a bit less prickly. You can’t possibly be the only man alive who knew those people in the Bay of Pigs days.”

“Ducks, I don’t think I can be happy here if we have to have this conversation twice a day. It doesn’t give me a sense of job security.”

“Security? You?”

“I’m not talking about the long term. I’m talking about maybe getting the rug pulled out from under me at the wrong moment.”

“You don’t trust me.”

“Ah, ducks, tell me why I should.”

She touched a finger to one of his guns and twirled it on the table, picked a stray hair off her cuff, leaned back, crossed her legs, put an elbow on the table and her chin in her palm, looked him in the eye and said, “Nobody can do that. It’s a trick question and you know it. The only way to find out whether you can trust someone is to trust the person and see what happens.”

“You’re a truly contrary creature.” He stood, pulling the Levi’s down from his crotch.

She watched him limp toward the back door. “Where are you going?”

“To the loo, ducks.”

“Why’ve you started calling me by that awful epithet?”

“Ducks?” In the doorway he turned; the smile was more sardonic than amiable. “When I use it, it’s a term of endearment.” Then he went.

She heard the slap of the privy door and realized she was smiling. She straightened her face. She kept catching herself trying to ingratiate Crobey — it was a warning sign; she had to guard against it. It wasn’t a contest of will or pride; in effect he’d imprisoned her and rendered her ineffectual; if she remained she could only sink into passivity. That wasn’t what she’d come for.

When he came in from the yard he said, “I wasn’t intending to switch cars right away but there was a problem in town — I left it parked while I went to see the man about the guns and when I came back I found it jammed in by two parked cars that hadn’t been there before. One of them had a couple of smokers in it. So I stepped into a hotel and got lost. I phoned the rent-a-car people to go pick it up and we got the Bronco from a pal of Santana’s.”

“Who were the men in the car?”

“Locals. I’ve no idea whose.”

She said, “If someone’s putting pressure on the police to scare you out of Puerto Rico, it shouldn’t be impossible to find out who that is. If the police are impressed by this person or frightened of him, it means they know who he is.”

“I realize that. But I can’t think of any coppers I’d like to talk to right now.”

“Would Anders know?”

“Anders could find out,” he conceded.

“Then let’s arrange to see him.”

Crobey said, “A while ago you were chastising me for consorting with him.”

“Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” She smiled. “Besides, I want to give you a fighting chance.”

“Good. I already made a date for tonight: seven-thirty at the Tres Candelas.”

Crobey drove, as always, with one eye on the mirror. She was accustomed by now to his sudden turnings and doublings back. All the same when they reached the highway she was exasperated enough to say in a caustic voice, “I trust you’re sure you’ve lost them.”

“Right.”

She cast an eye at him. “You mean you were being followed?”

“Right.”

And she believed him. Crobey had the peripheral vision of a professional basketball player.

She said, “Why are you angry with me this time?”

“Forget it.”

It didn’t take her long to work it out. Insects smashed into the windshield and the Bronco jounced her gently. Crobey’s profile was pale in the dashboard’s reflected illumination. She said, “If you didn’t have me along you’d have let them catch you, wouldn’t you?”

“It might have been useful to ask them a few questions.”

“Suppose they’d asked first?”

Crobey only crooked his lip corner in a tidy smile. Feeling rebuffed she said, “Tell me something: Is there anything you do badly?”

“Yes. Lose.”

“Your conceit is absurd.”

“I told you before: We’d get along faster if you’d go home.”

She began to retort, then curbed her tongue. It was occurring to her he might be right. He tolerated her because he was a mercenary and she was his employer; he resented her because she was a woman and an amateur.

She wondered why he put up with her at all.

She said, “Who were they?”

“I’ve no idea.”

“But they might be some of Rodriguez’s people?”

“Might.”

She didn’t comprehend his equanimity; she said bluntly, “You want me to leave, then.”

He made no answer. They were approaching the turnoff. Crobey punched the button, extinguishing the lights, and used the hand brake to slow the truck so that the brake lights wouldn’t flash. They rolled slowly off the main road into that total darkness that had frightened her so much the first time. The truck eased to a halt; she heard the ratchet of the emergency brake. Crobey hooked his elbow over the back of the seat and twisted to watch the road behind. He didn’t take the revolver from under his jacket but she knew it was there; she’d seen him put it there before they left the house.

He had a stalking predator’s steady inexcitability. It wasn’t tranquillity; it was the cool command of an otherwise tumultuous temper. His cool passivity came across as menace.

That morning he’d instructed her in the manufacture of a Molotov Cocktail. “You mix soil and gravel, and a little bit of soap powder to make it grunge together. Fill the bottle about one third with this gunk. It weights the bottom and gives you throwing ballast — and the gravel makes good shrapnel. Now we fill the rest up with petrol — gasoline from the pump, the octane doesn’t matter. Right to the top. Tear off this much rag, see — wad it up with this little bit of clotheslines for a fuse. Stuff it in the mouth like this to soak up gasoline from inside and make sure the clothesline pokes out an inch or two. When you light this thing get rid of it fast — throw it hard and drop on your face. Drop behind something that’ll shield you from the blast and the heat, if you’ve got a choice. In Hungary they took out Soviet tanks with these things.”

“Why the hell are you showing me these horrible things?”

“Because the kind of people we’re dealing with, ducks, you may find yourself getting chased into the woods by people with guns and machetes and maybe all you’ve got is your little car and your handbag. You’ve got gasoline in the car — suck it out through a hose you strip off the engine, if you have to — and I never met a woman who didn’t carry half a dozen little bottles in her handbag.”

She’d stared with revulsion at the fused bottle of gasoline. Crobey had said, “When the crossbow was introduced in the twelfth century the Pope called it an inhuman engine of destruction and banned its use.”

“If I were still a college sophomore I might find that world-weary cynicism of, yours dramatically mysterious. Right now I’m not too thrilled by it.”

“Cynicism,” he’d replied, “is idealism corrupted by experience, like Machiavelli said. Remember one thing: You haven’t been there. I have. Listen to old Harry once in a while.”

Now, watching him peer back into the darkness with his chin on his forearm, she remembered the quiet tolerant tone he’d used.

He faced front and let the brake out and put the vehicle forward at a crawl, hunching over the wheel to peer through the night. Carole couldn’t see a thing. Branches slapped the truck, coming out of nowhere; the suspension bucked and pitched as roots and rocks went under the wheels. But Crobey seemed to know where he was going. Finally he switched on the headlights. When she looked behind she saw nothing in the red taillights’ glow except forest — the road was out of sight back there.

After a while they reached the yard of Santana’s farm and Crobey parked the truck behind the house; they went inside and Santana, dressed as if he planned to go somewhere — a shabby seersucker jacket, a white shirt frayed at the collar — stood up in deference to Carole’s presence. He had an open can of beer in his fist: He looked, she thought, rather like a can of beer himself — stubby, squat, cylindrical.

Santana’s face was animated. He began to speak in something approximating English but neither of them understood it and Santana lapsed into Spanish. Crobey snapped a few monosyllabic questions at him, got answers and translated for her:

“He thinks he’s got a line on Rodriguez’s family.”

“Where?”

“Here. Rio Piedras.”

Santana spoke again, with gestures, and Crobey said, “All right, but keep your head down. Don’t show yourself.”

An adventurously brash grin and Santana was gone, the screen door slapping shut behind him.

“Where’s he going?”

“To stake out the house.”

“He knows the house?”

“Sure. Probably the one where Rodriguez spent the night when Glenn’s cop spotted him.”

“Then why send Santana? Let’s question them ourselves.” She was already turning toward the door.

“Calm down, ducks. We’d get nowhere.”

“What?”

“Elementary security — if you’ve gone to ground you don’t tell civilians where you are. Not even your own wife. We could torture the children and force the wife to talk but she wouldn’t be able to tell us what she doesn’t know, would she? All we’d do is expose ourselves.” Crobey tossed his jacket onto the couch. “If Rodriguez turns up Santana will spot him. I kind of doubt he’ll turn up. He knows people are looking for him.”

She was shocked. “Don’t you even want to know—”

“Know what? What his wife and kiddies look like? I don’t care all that much, ducks. Go on — go to bed. You’ve got to learn how to wait things out.”

She lowered herself into one of Santana’s ruined chairs. “How did he find them?”

“Mostly on the telephone. He hunted down some of the old-timers from the days we all worked training fields in Alabama. You know how it goes. You dig up one veteran and he gives you the number of two others. It’s like a chain letter. The first nineteen don’t know a thing but number twenty happened to bump into Rodriguez’s wife in a supermarket or whatever. It’s harder to disappear than most people think it is. Especially if you’ve got reasons to stay around an island where people know you. If Rodriguez had really wanted to evaporate he’d have had to move to Africa or the Philippines. But he didn’t because he’s a soldier, of sorts, and this is where his army is.”

“And Santana was able to make this contact while all Glenn Anders’ minions couldn’t?”

“In the first place I kind of get the feeling Glenn’s minions have dried up on him. I don’t think he’s got police co-operation any longer. If he did he wouldn’t be so eager to have our help. And in the second place Glenn didn’t know all those people the way Santana did. Santana was one of them. He knew who to ask.”

She was still tracking Anders. “Why wouldn’t he have police co-operation?”

“My guess is they’ve told him to soft-pedal the investigation.”

She tipped her head back onto the top of the chair and closed her eyes. She’d been running on her nerve ends too long; exhaustion was overtaking her.

Crobey said, “Maybe tomorrow we’ll show ourselves again and let them follow us around a while. Maybe we can pull them in and ask them questions.”

She opened her eyes. He stood in the middle of the room looking down at her, lamplight reflecting frostily off the surface of his eyes. She said, “We? Us?”

“You wanted to be dealt in, didn’t you?”

It made her sit up. “You’ve changed your tune.”

“Have I?” He turned away. “Go on to bed, ducks.”

He stood with his back to her; his spine seemed rigid — defensive; but against what?

Too tired to resist his suggestion, she went into her cell — she thought of it as a cell: the cot, plaster flaking off the wall. There was no shade at the window; she took one or two things out of her case and then switched off the light before undressing. A narrow rind of moon had come out, throwing a bit of light through the glass, and for a while she stood taut in tawny underwear looking up toward the mountain peak. It was quite clearly silhouetted against the stars.

The floor creaked; she turned; and knuckles rapped her door.

“Yes?”

She watched the knob turn. She could have spoken; she didn’t. A bit of faint illumination bounced around corners from the kitchen and outlined Crobey when the door came open. He didn’t advance, he only stood there.

“I sort of was wondering what you’d look like without your clothes.” His voice had gone raspy.

Almost with relief she stirred, with a slow, carnal smile. “Ah Crobey,” she murmured, “you’ve got twenty-four hours to get out of my bedroom.”

He flipped the door shut with his heel. His hands lifted to her shoulders and dropped upon them. He stood at arm’s length. His hands seemed weightless. “You’re vibrating.”

“I’m terrified.”

“Tell me to leave. I’ll go.”

With hesitant fascination she reached up, palms against his grizzled cheeks. Crobey had a face like a leather coat, she thought; the kind that looked better the more battered it got. He turned his lips into her palm, kissing her hand; everything seemed to move at sixty-four-frame slow motion. She felt the pound of a pulse in her throat and an odd vertigo — her head thrown back to look into his eyes, she felt as if he were bearing down on her like an avalanche. She cried out; but what emerged from her lips was only breath. Then he tugged her forward.

His face loomed an inch from her own. His eyes had gone wide and the preposterous idea struck her that he was as intimidated as she was — that the monumental self-confidence was all facade.

Astonishingly tender, he bore her down.

Cielo walked fretfully to the edge of the cliff and peered down into the thin mist. Kruger was down there striding back and forth like a colonial officer, whipping a stick against his britches; Cielo measured the distance again with his eye and turned back toward the mountain.

Vargas’s eyebrows lifted — he was awaiting Cielo’s signal. Uneasy, Cielo shook his head and went back to the trees, crossing the flat rock where the helicopter had set down last night, passing two field guns and the crated mortars. The field pieces were small ones, three-inchers.

He had another close look at the oak to which the block-and-tackle was cabled. It was the biggest tree in the vicinity and looked as substantial and monolithic as a granite mountain and Kruger, the engineer among them, had passed on its suitability as an anchor for the cable but Cielo was troubled by doubts because water was easy in the rain forest and the rock subsurface was close beneath the soil — even the biggest trees had no need to drill roots very far down; it made for a shallow purchase.

Kruger had dismissed it. The oak, he’d pointed out, was old enough to have survived a hundred hurricanes. It would support the weight of a Sherman tank, let alone a small mountain howitzer or a crate of rockets.

Vargas came across to the oak. “Before long the sun will burn this off. We need to be under cover by then.”

“All right.” He still felt nagged by reluctance but he forced himself away from it. “Let’s get started then.”

He went to the rim and watched the cable pull taut over the guy pully. The crate — twelve hundred pounds — began to skid and tilt; then it was lifted off the ground and swung far out. Vargas and two of the men prodded it with poles to slow its pendulum swing. After a time it settled down, twisting a bit in the air, hanging clear out over the face of the cliff.

Down below Kruger was watching with his neck craned back, his face pale in the mist. He began to make beckoning gestures with both hands and Cielo relayed these signals to Julio who shifted the gears and began to pay out cable from the donkey engine’s winch drum. The heavy crate began to descend, well out away from the face of the cliff, and Cielo sat back on his haunches and relaxed; it was working splendidly.

The donkey engine banged away methodically and down at the mouth of the cave Kruger had stepped to one side and was reaching up to guide the crate to its seat on the flatbed cart that waited to receive it. Four men clustered around the swaying load while it dropped slowly amid them. There was a second donkey engine in the cave, only seven horsepower but enough to winch the dolly into the cave.

For the next hour Cielo squatted on the rim relaying hand signals from Kruger at the base of the cliff to Julio at the hoist engine. It gave him a kind of peace to perform this near-mindless repetitive job. There were two small howitzers, four mortar crates (one containing mortars and three containing ammunition), two crated rocket-launchers and four crates of rockets. The rocket-launchers doubled up on one load; at seven minutes per load Kruger had calculated it would take an hour and a quarter to finish the job but it was running a little slower than that and Cielo realized the mist probably would clear before they had everything put away. But that did not particularly exercise him.

In any event near the end of the first hour the clouds came scudding over the peaks and by half past eight it had begun to drizzle, a very fine spray that pricked his face and made him smile.

The donkey engine ran out of gas. There was always something you’d neglected. They had to pause while Cielo tossed the end of the rope down to Kruger and a man went off to the camp to bring back a five-gallon jerrycan from the Jeep. Julio came over to the rim and gave him a hand hauling it up; it was heavy and the work made him sweat. Julio said, “Almost done now — just the two guns left. Then I can get back to my book. I’ve only got a couple of chapters left — I want to find out how it comes out.”

“I can tell you how it comes out. The computers take over the universe.”

“Very funny.” Julio stumped away lugging the gasoline. He was in a good mood; the helicopter had brought him half a dozen science fictions.

Vargas and his crew hooked up the first field gun and Kruger down below waited with his arms folded on his chest, head tipped back, blinking when raindrops struck his face; brooding. To Kruger everything had come out of kilter with time. The tragedy of Kruger’s existence was that he hadn’t been born early enough to be a storm trooper.

The engine coughed and started up again. Cielo looked back toward the cliff and thought of checking up on the oak tree again but he was feeling a bit lazy and his earlier unease had been settled by a gentle calm. He wagged a finger at Vargas and then at Julio; the field gun dragged along the ground a bit and then swung aloft and swayed out over the drop.

Down below him Kruger’s men stood out well away from the cliff. Kruger walked across the hardpan and dragged the dolly aside; they wouldn’t need it this time, the gun had its own wheels. Coming back onto the drop zone Kniger looked up and watched the gun descend; he began to wave the others forward and they moved in like scavengers toward a carcass. Old men now, all of them — old for this at least; they were over forty, some of them fifty or as near to it as made no difference; Vargas was what, now — fifty-six? For men like these this kind of life was nothing more than simulation.

They’d been nurtured on patriotism and old Draga’s monstrous calumnies. Time had betrayed them. When Draga was gone Cielo would have to face up to the dismal grief of disbanding them. Some of them would take it with relief, he knew — Vargas for instance. Others would lose their moorings and be swept away by the guilt of their failure: He could picture one or two of them on skid row and he didn’t know how he could prevent that. Julio had his own plans, Cielo thought — but they involved business, not insurrection. As for Kruger, that one wouldn’t suffer; he’d find another war and go off to shoot Communists somewhere.

For himself there was simply the money Draga would leave him. There was something curious in that — not long ago he’d had ten million dollars in his hands but he’d turned it over to the old man. When Julio had questioned that he’d explained that they couldn’t double-cross the old man and survive it; the old man had tentacles everywhere and how could you spend money without his getting wind of it? But that was only a half truth. In a way he loved the old man. After the old man died it wouldn’t matter if Cielo turned traitor to his cause but while Draga lived Cielo would humor him because these dreams were all the old man had left.

A boat. That was his own dream. Not a Greek yacht; just a boat — fifty feet, maybe sixty, an old one would do if it didn’t have dry rot. Something with plenty of canvas and a little diesel auxiliary. A boat and a warm-water landing where he could moor it; a house by the landing where he could moor Soledad and the children and bask away his days in a soft warm nesty feeling of family and love. All he really wanted was the old man’s half million dollars to see him through. Ah, he thought, I’m one hell of a revolutionary.

Musing, he watched Kruger’s men drag the field gun out of sight into the cave. The cable came back up and Vargas hooked it to the last gun.

The drizzle tapered off. Steam in the air now; he could hardly see the oak back there and beneath him Kruger’s face was leached of color by the gray mist. There was always rain in El Yunque but it seemed to have been heavier than usual this year — every day a half dozen squalls, some of them drenching. It was a wonder the whole mountain didn’t wash away. Everywhere you saw trees with their root systems exposed to the air where floods had carried the earth away.

He didn’t like it up here. Cabin fever was another danger; he couldn’t keep the men here forever. The schedule of rotations permitted each man a two-day furlough in the fleshpots; the men were away two at a time on overlapping days; their discipline was strong and he knew none of them would get drunk enough to let anything slip. Nevertheless they were beginning to think of themselves as prisoners. A few had their own resources: Julio would last as long as the supply of science fiction held out and Vargas had the methodical patience of a saint and Kruger, the good soldier, obeyed orders to the end but the others were restless and soon a listless apathy would infect them; they would begin to quarrel among themselves and things would begin to disintegrate. And there was Emil, if he ever returned from the city. But he saw no solution to it unless the old man died soon.

The idea had occurred to him that if push came to shove he might mount an attempt to invade Cuba, then abort it for some reason. That would push things back toward Square One for a while. It would take time to reorganize and re-equip. The thought remained in his mind as a workable contingency but he preferred to avoid it; anything like that might cause injuries and jeopardy. What was the sense in exposing the men to pointless risks? Besides, an aborted attack would disappoint the old man acutely.

Something snapped — very loud. The earth seemed to quake under him. He was watching Kruger, waiting for signals, but the noisy tremor spun him around and he was in time to see Vargas diving toward a man nearby, tackling the man, driving him down and back from the cliff — and then it registered on Cielo’s consciousness that the derrick was coming apart.

He saw in an instant what was happening: The one thing they hadn’t been able to test — the rim of the cliff itself was buckling. A fissure must have opened; rot in the rock. The telegraph pole that had been pinned into the ledge by cables and rock drills was letting go and in that split instant of time he saw the great logs scatter like toothpicks,

He whipped around to scream a warning at Kruger but Kruger had seen it, too, and was scrambling to get out from under the plummeting field gun. For a moment Cielo thought there was time, believed Kruger would make it; the angle of perspective gave him false hope. Kruger launched himself like an Olympic swimmer — a flat dive to get away from the impact area — but his soles skidded on the wet and he bellyflopped and the gun came down on him — bounced horribly and tipped over, its cable whipping like a snake, lashing its heavy loop back toward the cliff where it knocked a man — Ramirez — clear off his feet; Cielo wasn’t certain but he had the terrible feeling the cable had struck Ramirez right in the face. The man pirouetted back out of sight.

Stunned by shock and the suddenness of it Cielo climbed to his feet on rubber knees and looked left: Vargas was standing up, the man he’d rescued dusting himself off, someone else lying askew with the butt end of a telegraph pole across his chest. The donkey engine died with a sputter and Julio stared at Cielo in horror. Vargas on his big legs stumbled from side to side like a man concussed; but Cielo believed he’d not been hurt.

Juices pumped through him but he forced himself to behave with leaderly calm. He went jogging across to the man pinned under the pole. It was Ordovara and he was quite dead, his rib cage crushed; Cielo turned away, then turned back and laid a finger along Ordovara’s throat to feel for a pulse. There was none. A stink of excrement hung in the air.

He went to the lip and looked down. Two men were manhandling the capsized field gun away from Kruger who lay on his belly with both legs splayed out at weird angles. Even from up here Cielo could hear Kruger’s moans. Well, at least he was still alive but it looked as if both legs had been crushed.

He felt weight behind him. When he turned Vargas was there. Cielo pointed toward the body of Ordovara. “Get that thing off him and bring him down to the camp. Tell the others to clear up — get the equipment out of sight. Put Julio in charge. I’m going down.”

He strode along the rim, not hurrying, heading for the trail they’d cut down the side slope. It would take him fifteen minutes to cover the circuitous course but it was the only way down, short of rappelling down the cliff on a rope.

The fault, he thought, was no one’s but his own; he could lay the blame at no one else’s door. And how do I expiate this sin?

The message at the hotel desk advised Glenn Anders to call a phone number between four and six. He took it to be the number of a public telephone. He made the call from a booth in the lobby of the Sheraton; Harry Crobey answered on the fourth ring.

“We heard about Rosalia.” It was, in its tone, sufficient expression of shared sorrow. Crobey’s voice went on: “We should meet.”

“I agree. Where and when?”

Crobey gave him instructions and Anders broke the connection. He made another call immediately, to the Department of Agriculture office where they’d given him a desk. The GS-8 on the front desk, a pale man whose name he kept having trouble remembering, exchanged identifying greetings with him and said, “We’re all awful sorry about that young lady, Mr. Anders.”

“Did Langley call back after I left?”

“No sir.”

“No messages of any kind from O’Hillary?”

“There’s a Telex, sir. Plain English. It’s only a confirmation.”

“Read it to me anyway.”

“Yes sir. Message reads, ‘Prior instructions remain in effect until further notice. No change in orders.’ That’s it, sir — just the signature.”

“All right. Thanks.”

He went outside with his hand on the flat automatic pistol in his pocket. There were taxis at the curb; he boarded the first one and rode it to the north gate of the university and paid it off there and walked through the campus, stopping twice to check behind him. Students milled about the lawns and a couple was necking under a palm tree; a fat youth sat on the grass reading a comic book. Anders drifted aimlessly among the buildings, going in and out, upstairs and down, from one building to another, staying within crowds when he could; he kept an eye on his watch and at exactly half past five he emerged from the south gate of the campus and walked a block to Calle de Diego where a taxi was just pulling up: Anders stepped in and the car pulled away and Crobey, on the other side of the seat, twisted around to look back through the window.

“Nobody came with me,” Anders said

“All right.”

Crobey dismissed the taxi and they walked together through a dusty passage, bordered with scrubby bougainvillea and oleander; Crobey led him erratically through the turnings and kept looking back. No one was following them; Anders was beginning to be annoyed by the excessiveness of the precautions when Crobey led him out onto a paved street where a Ford Bronco waited at the curb with Carole Marchand behind the wheel. Anders tipped the passenger seat forward and climbed into the back; Crobey got in and Anders said, “Good evening.”

“My condolences,” she said, “and I mean that.”

“Were you two followed last night?”

“Yes,” Crobey said. “We shook them.”

His hands wrenched at each other; he turned his stare out the window because he didn’t want to cry again, not in front of them. “You know she was a little wacky, all right, she was far too young for the likes of me, none of it made any sense anyway — just a kid from the office they assigned to run errands for me. She was Cuban herself, you know. For a while I even suspected she might be a plant. Then after a while I didn’t give a damn.”

“Now you know she wasn’t a plant,” Carole Marchand said mildly.

No, he thought, actually he didn’t know that at all. Maybe Rosalia had been the target after all — how could he be sure they weren’t afraid she’d expose them? Maybe they’d known she was falling in love with Anders. Maybe they’d killed her to keep her silent.

What he said was, “They’re going to pay for it. I don’t much care why they did it.”

Then he thought, Pull yourself together, you’ve got to be cold now. He needed dispassion. He said, “This bastard Cielo — presumably Rodriguez — bought some fairly heavy weapons from a dealer in Mayaguez. Mainly mortars and a couple of small artillery pieces. They were delivered to a farm. That’s all the dealer knew about it — he took the money and delivered the merchandise. I ran a check on the serial numbers of the banknotes. They match the numbers on some of the ransom bills — if we need more confirmation of that kind. I had a look at the farm where he delivered the guns. Nothing there now, they’ve cleared out. Most likely they used it just once and they’ll never use it again.”

“Do you mind coming to the point?”

Anders said, “I reported to O’Hillary. A few hours later he got back to me. This is off the record now. Officially we’re still engaged in the hunt for these terrorists. But unofficially my orders, as of noon today, are to lose the file down behind the file cabinet somewhere. You see the connection?”

“Right,” Crobey said. “The arms buy makes our boy respectable.”

“Spell it out for me,” Carole Marchand commanded.

“They’re picking up heavy ordnance,” Anders said. “This buy will be one of dozens, I imagine. They’ll spread the purchases around to avoid drawing too much attention. It begins to look like a major paramilitary operation. You can buy a lot of weapons for ten million dollars. O’Hillary’s analysts likely have it sized up that Rodriguez shows every sign of intending to mount a well-equipped mobile striking force for an attack on Castro’s headquarters.”

“With a handful of men?”

“We don’t know for sure how many men there are, do we. Anyhow look what the Israelis accomplished at Entebbe with a handful of troops. It’s not numbers that count in a palace coup — it’s tactics and planning. They could wipe out the Cuban leadership if they handle it with enough sophistication.”

She said, “That’s a farfetched extrapolation from a few flimsy clues, isn’t it?”

“The agency works that kind of scenario all the time.”

“In other words O’Hillary thinks Rodriguez may have a chance of overthrowing Castro so he’s ordering you to keep hands off?”

“It’s one possibility.”

“It’s what I thought all along,” she said, “more or less.”

“There’s another possibility,” Anders said. He felt so weary he could hardly get the words out. “Your idea that there had to be someone here in San Juan with enough political clout to sic the local police on Harry — somebody with that much clout might also have enough influence in Washington to put pressure on the agency to soft-pedal the investigation.”

She said, “And the murder of Rosalia — one of your own agents — doesn’t even put a dent in those policies. You folks sure are expendable.”

Anders managed a lopsided hint of a smile; and Crobey said, “Are you filing for a divorce from O’Hillary?”

“Not yet. Officially I’m still under orders to locate the terrorists. Locate ’em but keep hands off. Those are the orders I’m obliged to obey, aren’t they? After we locate them — we’ll see.”

Crobey said to Carole Marchand, “The first rule is cover your ass. Glenn doesn’t think of himself as a bureaucrat but it rubs off on everybody.”

“As opposed to Harry here, who’s of pure and noble character,” Anders said without heat. “You’re both missing the point. If I can show legitimate orders then I can maintain my freedom of action. There’s no point going out of my way to shut off communications. I may as well keep making use of the apparatus as long as it’s available to me. And to hell with O’Hillary’s private instructions.”

“Watch closely, ducks, and you’ll notice that amazingly enough, at no time do his hands leave his arms.”

“As of now,” Anders went on, feeling the anger rise within him, “I’m in this right up to my hairline. No more reservations. I want to nail these bastards and to hell with Fidel Castro. Put a gun in my hand and Rodriguez in the sights — that should settle the question quick enough.”

Something made a sudden noise — a slam of sound: The truck jiggled and Anders went into his pocket for his gun, whipping his eyes around — it was two kids: Their baseball had bounced off the truck fender.

“Jesus.”

Crobey climbed out and the kids scuttled back. Crobey went along the curb and picked up the baseball. He talked in Spanish to the kids and tossed the baseball to one of them; the kids swallowed and nodded their heads and put their backs to him and ran like hell. Crobey got back into the truck. He glanced at Anders. “Shooting them wouldn’t have done a whole lot for your image, Glenn.”

Anders was rattled; it was clear to all of them; excuses or apologies wouldn’t change it. He didn’t really care. His future had been shot down last night with a bullet on the steps of El Convento. That had been his second chance; now he’d missed it. It was time to quit: Take early retirement and put O’Hillary out of his life and mark time in an Arizona suburb ranchette writing letters to the editor and taking up hobbies.

There was only one possible escape from that: The sense of justification he might derive from destroying the destroyers who’d taken Rosalia from him.

Crobey said mildly, “That house in the next block with the pink Pinto in the carport — that’s Rodriguez’s house.”

“What?”

“He hasn’t been back since that night he ditched your plainclothes cop,” Crobey said. “Will you relax a little?” He tipped his head toward the house he’d indicated. “The wife’s name is Soledad. They’ve got three girls, various ages, the oldest about fourteen I think. Or maybe twelve — kids grow up faster these days, don’t they. The family name on the mailbox is Mendez. Ernesto Mendez, that’s the name he goes by when he’s not being Cielo and/or Rodrigo Rodriguez.”

A battered camper-bodied pickup truck came crunching down the street, turned in at a driveway and let off a woman with her hair in yellow plastic curlers who began to unload brown grocery bags from the seat. Crobey’s voice went on, droning in his ear with that faint Liverpudlian overlay: “The neighbors believe him to be an adjuster for a casualty insurance company, which is a fair dodge because it explains his absences — he’s away investigating claims. He belongs to a local National Guard regiment, the kind where they train every Thursday night and one weekend a month. A couple of old pals of mine have been asking questions around. They’ve come up with some interesting bits and pieces. This National Guard outfit has a little rat-pack of noncommissioned officers all of whom seem to have served with Mendez-Rodriguez at some unspecified time in the past, for which I tend to read Bay of Pigs. It turns out, on inquiry, that every last one of the members of this little rat-pack happens to be away on important business at the moment — extended business trips.”

“You’ve been busy. What else have you found?”

“We’re still about thirty bricks short of a full load but we’re getting there,” Crobey told him. “These two buddies who’ve been working for us on Carole’s payroll have talked to several of the National Guardsmen in that outfit. Not rat-pack types but other chaps in the same unit. It seems the first lieutenant in command of that particular platoon is one Emil Draga, age twenty-four, graduate of the University of Florida at Coral Gables.”

“The name sounds familiar.”

“The family name ought to. Try this on — Jorge Vandemeer Draga-Ruiz.”

“Ah. The boy’s father?”

“Grandfather. The old boy’s pushing ninety.”

Anders looked at Carole Marchand. She hadn’t spoken for a long time. Between the bucket seats her hand lay across Crobey’s; Anders marked that and drew its meaning. He said to her, “That could be the source of the police clout you were looking for.”

“I know.”

Carole Marchand said, “What if we asked him a few hard questions at the end of a gun?”

Anders smiled a little at her naïveté. “I’m sure that man’s guarded by a security system as heavy as a medieval baron’s moat. You’d never get within half a mile of him.”

“We could get him to come to us,” Crobey said.

“How?”

“Leave that aside a minute. The question is, if we get the old goat under a gun, do you go along with it or do you blow the whistle on us? He’s a powerful old bastard. He’s probably got four senators and a dozen congressmen in his pocket.”

“And that’s supposed to scare me off?”

“It’s the kind of thing that’ll cost you your job and your pension.”

“I doubt that. These old Cuban families aren’t that influential anymore. They’ve turned into White Russian emigrés — nobody pays that much attention to them.”

“Draga’s just a little bit different from most of them,” Crobey said. “To the tune of maybe three hundred million dollars.”

Anders kept glancing fitfully up the street toward the Mendez-Rodriguez house, reassuring himself that no one was going in or out. He said, “I’d be happier if we had better evidence the old man’s involved. Suppose we get him under a gun, as you say — suppose he turns out to be the wrong man? Suppose he doesn’t know anything about this business? We’ll have made ourselves an enemy strong enough to blast us out of Puerto Rico permanently. Then what happens to the hunt for Rodriguez?”

Carole Marchand said, “Harry and I are willing to take the chance. We believe Jorge Draga has got to be the power behind Rodriguez.”

“A minute ago you were accusing the CIA of jumping to conclusions on the basis of flimsy fragments.”

“All right, the shoe’s changed feet — we bought your reasoning. Why shouldn’t you buy ours?”

Anders picked at a ragged fingernail. Carole Marchand said, “You can get out of the car right now if you like. We’ll do this by ourselves if we have to. But we’re a little short of manpower and we could use your help. I thought, in view of what happened to Rosalia, you might be inclined to throw in with us...”

The last of the day’s sunlight was creeping up toward the low roofs across the street. The two young baseball players had disappeared — gone inside for dinner, probably.

Crobey said, “The two blokes I’ve been using here are Cubans. They owe me favors and I’ve been collecting. But they hate Castro. I don’t think we ought to depend on them to help us do anything except collect information. I’m sure they won’t go up against Rodriguez in a firefight — there’s a limit to their obligations to me. They wouldn’t have strung along this far except that Carole’s paying them good money. What I’m doing is giving you the full picture. Odds against. There’s only the three of us, unless you can recruit people from the agency.”

“Not much chance of that. I couldn’t do it without O’Hillary getting wind of it.”

Carole Marchand said, “Then it’s just three of us. If you’re in.”

“And just two of you if I’m not. What happens then? How can you fight him by yourselves?”

Her reply was a defiant stare.

“I think you’re nuts.” He looked at Crobey. “She’s nuts. I never thought you were. What’s in this for you? I hope it’s enough to pay your funeral expenses.”

“Don’t worry about it. I’ve arranged to sell my body to science.”

“Come on, Harry. If I buy in, how do I know you won’t disappear when we need you?”

“I trust him,” Carole Marchand said.

“Sure — but you’re infatuated with him.”

It only made her smile, a reckless bawdy sort of grin. She was, he thought, a remarkably likable woman. Clearly she had captivated Crobey; and he found that to be an amazing thing.

Anders sighed out a long exasperated breath. His chin dropped toward his chest and he contemplated the veins in the backs of his hands. He made a few faces and glimpsed the tail ends of various rationalizations and in the end he said, “All right. How do we get our hands on Draga?”

She felt cramped in the truck seat — too many hours of sitting. The night was muggy and the shirt was pasted to her; she felt unclean. She said, “What if someone has to pee?”

“You go in the bushes, ducks.”

The armory was a low pink stucco shoebox. A high chainlink fence enclosed a paved yard on which squatted two dark green tanks, their cleated treads glistening under the lights, and several trucks and Jeeps. Beyond the armory the road rolled away through open fields.

Anders, in the back seat, yawned audibly. It was the only sound any of them made until Carole shifted in her seat to ease her rump. They had run out of conversation more than an hour ago.

Harry seemed imperturbable but she’d detected signs of unease in Glenn Anders. The death of the girl had unraveled his nerves.

Along both shoulders of the dusty road cars were parked — she’d counted forty-odd. Crobey had told her to ignore the rest, they were only interested in one of them. Nobody intended to start a fight with the entire platoon.

She felt conflicting pulls toward Anders. There was an urge to comfort him; but something else held her back — a lingering distrust. He was one of them, the apparatchiks. She dealt with his kind all the time: the people who ran the studios. A movie executive was a sorry creature whose guiding principle was fear: “Let’s take another meeting. We want to keep our options open.” Things were stalled forever by their dithering. And in the end the decision usually was negative; very few heads of production had ever been fired for turning down a project. It was always safer to say no. Soon Anders might begin to remember he was an organization man. He had never altogether forgotten it: I’d be happier if we had better evidence...

Harry’s hand dropped casually upon her shoulder and she tipped her cheek against his knuckles, wondering what would become of them.

There was a plan of sorts — she wasn’t sure she had faith in it. The first step was to isolate the old tycoon and force information out of him. That was dicey, as Harry put it. But if they could pry the location of Rodriguez’s hiding place out of the old man then they would keep the old man on ice while they made their way to what Harry with a straight face had designated as the Bad Guy’s Hideout.

The weapon of Harry’s choice was gas and they’d spent nearly twenty-four hours and the major part of Carole’s cash to obtain cartons of Mace canisters, tear-gas grenades and the military handcuffs that now crowded the rear compartment of the Bronco beside Anders’ seat. Ballistic arms were there as well — the light automatic guns Harry had been disassembling in Santana’s house — but if they had to resort to those they would fail. The guns were only for defense: to cover a running retreat.

She stirred, lifted Harry’s hand off her shoulder and tried to read the luminous dial of his diver’s watch. “How much longer, for God’s sake?”

“Settle down. This is mañana country. A couple hours of lectures and then the boys probably shoot a few racks of pool — most of them haven’t got all that much to go home to.”

It was frightfully hot, a night for long cool drinks; she squirmed in her sweat and poked her head half out the open window in the search for air. Below the truck a crowd of red ants were dragging a huge dung beetle stubbornly across the earth. She had done her hair up with a few pins in an attempt to leave her neck bare and cool but it hadn’t helped. She desperately wanted a shower.

Harry had withdrawn his hand and she sat far over on her side of the seat, not so much watching the armory as thinking about Harry. It was always her tendency to expose the ludicrous side of things: Can you honestly picture yourself facing this man across the breakfast table every day for the rest of your life? If what she felt toward him was infatuation, what would happen when it wore out? God knew she was not at ease in Harry’s world. She could not bear the thought of losing him — but what was the alternative? Think about the derivation of that word “wedlock.”

Then she thought, I am putting the cart ahead of an unborn horse. But she had no pride left. She would demand that he marry her. Or at least live with her. It came to the same thing; in her tradition — inescapable — marriage was not an experiment but a contract. And now she felt like a Victorian belle — setting her cap for him.

And then what?

Abruptly she turned to face his profile. “Harry?”

“What, ducks?”

“You could be a stunt director.”

“A what?”

“In the movies. Stunts. Airplanes, special effects. You know.”

“I did that a couple of times. In Yugoslavia a few years ago. A guy I knew was making war pictures.”

“Didn’t you like it?”

“The truth. I love it. But I felt like a damn silly ass, play-acting at war.”

“You were young then.”

From the back seat Anders said with a nervous laugh, “Harry’ll never be old.”

But Harry kept his eyes on Carole, grave and gentle — she felt an outpouring of love: She touched his cheek fondly. She was thinking that in nature, no matter what the species, only one male in a hundred was any good. I’m not about to let him go. And to hell with the impossibility of it.

Harry said, “If that’s a job offer I think I’ll take it. This was going to be my last caper anyhow, wasn’t it?”

She breathed, “Oh, Harry!” — like an ingenue; and threw herself into his arms.

“Heads up,” Glenn Anders said, very mild. “Here they come.”

Entangled with Harry she twisted her head to bring the armory into her field of vision. Men emerged in clusters, all of them in fatigues. A good deal of talk; some calling back and forth, good nights and hasta luegos. She straightened in the seat in abrupt alarm. “How do we know which one he is?”

“He’ll be wearing a silver bar,” Harry said. “Scrunch down a little.”

She slid down in the seat until she could barely see over the rim of the windowsill. Anders hissed, “I don’t see him!”

“Give him time.”

The soldiers were separating, going to their cars. Right in front of the Bronco the battered ruin of a pickup truck started up, flicked on its headlights and gnashed away down the two-lane. By ones and twos the Guardsmen climbed into vehicles and the parking shoulders gradually emptied, streams of red tail-lights retreating in both directions. No one paid any attention to the Bronco. After five minutes nothing was left on the road shoulder except a glossy Trans Am with discreet racing stripes, parked directly opposite the entrance to the armory.

Anders said, “I guess he didn’t come to the meeting then.” Was it relief in his voice?

“Wait it out,” Harry said.

“That’s the only car left. It must belong to the night guard.”

“No. Leave a car alone on this road overnight and you’d come out in the morning and find you didn’t have any tires or battery. The night guard’s car must be parked inside the compound.”

“That’s a point.”

The scheme had been to follow the car and, given the opportunity, run it off the road and trap the driver. Apparently that no longer was going to be necessary — if in fact the Trans Am didn’t belong to a watchman.

The armory door opened. Harry tensed beside her and she heard a quiet click behind her — Anders getting out a pair of handcuffs.

For a moment the man stood silhouetted in the open doorway — she had an impression of size: big shoulders, a squarish head, legs too short for the powerful torso. Then the door closed and the man came down the steps under the exterior light; she saw then that he was quite young. The lights glinted off the insignia on the collar of his fatigues.

“My God in Heaven,” Glenn Anders whispered. “Him!”

“What?”

“That’s the guy. That’s the guy who killed her.”

There was rain. In the cave Cielo sat on a crate chewing on a pencil and watching it flood down like a beaded string-curtain. The radio stuttered at him — a lightning bolt not too far away interrupted the message entirely with a burst of static and then the thunder deafened him to another few words but he had the gist of the message and Julio, switching it off at the end of the transmission, sat back against the wheel of the howitzer and said, “I wonder what drew them off?” According to the wireless message “Butch and Sundance and Etta” had vanished. But Butch hadn’t checked out of his hotel. Did that mean Glenn Anders intended to return shortly?

It was unnerving. He felt entrapped, not only by isolation but also by unknowing.

Julio sat absorbed in something on the jacket of which was painted a lurid creature that looked a bit like a feathered octopus with the head of a vulture, its hues running from silver to electric orange.

Cielo was getting hungry but he wasn’t quite ready to brave the downpour across the distance to the chow tent. It would require a change of boots afterward and he wasn’t sure the others had dried out from the morning’s storm. Fifteen years ago he’d have taken such discomforts as a matter of course but the passage of years had taught him that there were all kinds of ways to prove one’s manhood and that in the end nobody cared much anyway. By now dry feet were more important than demonstrating he was unafraid of the squall.

She soaked small wads of cotton in the last of the witch hazel and placed them on her eyes and tried to relax. She’d only slept in fits and starts for the past two nights and it looked as if this one would be no different. At midnight she’d gone around the house checking the restraints on the two prisoners — Emil Draga in the front room and Stefano, who was small and ruddy and middle-aged and not frightening at all, in the bedroom. He had a fuzzy mustache and comical buck teeth and a wart on his lip and he told amusing stories about his family in south Florida. It was Stefano who had told her the sequence of incidents that had climaxed in Robert’s death.

And these, she thought, were the terrorists who had so exercised her.

She had spent a great deal of the past twenty-four hours resisting what Stefano had told her. She did not want to believe any of it and it was quite possible Stefano was lying: He had every reason to coat the truth with opaque paint. He claimed he didn’t know which man had actually shot Robert.

Robert...

Before dark she had made sure all the lights were extinguished. Now, making her hourly rounds, she carried the revolver into the front room and had a look at Emil Draga. The smell of his sweat clouded the room. He seemed asleep. She went back to the kitchen. The waiting had gone far past dragging on her nerves; it had numbed her. She drank coffee and sat with her hands flat on the table, drooping in the humid heat, listening to the rain drum against the roof. It must be two or three in the morning. She had the jitters but attributed that to the coffee; fatigue prevented her from stirring. This afternoon she’d gone into the bathroom and studied herself in the mirror and judged she must have added a minimum of five years to her visible age in the past week’s time. I look older than Harry does.

It didn’t matter. She’d taken three showers today but nothing helped. She felt sticky — the heat perhaps, but a Freudian would have found interesting speculations in that persistent feeling of un-cleanness. You see, Doctor, I feel like Lady Macbeth.

Was it possible that one day — if she lived to be old enough — she would be able to forget this nightmare aberration? The absurdities of it piled up one upon the next and she could not cope with them any longer. She cast a dulled eye at the coffee cup between her hands. Harry, come back here and take me away from all this. I’ll show you Las Vegas and Palm Springs and we’ll never be without Dewar’s and cologne and clean sheets again.

It had gone beyond the unreality of a dream. It had become the unreality of a failed movie: The kind where the director, the producer, the writer and each player in the cast had a completely different notion of what the movie was about. The sort of movie — A Touch of Class came to mind — that started out as a farce and ended up a dreary melodrama.

Something alerted her. She snatched up the gun and went to the window, stumbling against the sink in the dark. Nothing out there but blackness; the rain pummeling the house. She felt her way to the corridor and looked both ways. She’d left the twenty-five-watt light burning in the hall closet, the door open two inches, and it threw a bit of light both ways, enough to see the hall was empty. She looked in the bedroom: Stefano smiled, his buck teeth glistening in the soft light. She went on to the front room and Emil Draga was tugging petulantly at the handcuffs and he wasn’t going to strip them off over those big knobby hands and she left him to it, prowling back through the house, wondering if perhaps it hadn’t been merely the faint metallic struggle of Emil’s manacles.

The back door began to open.

She lifted the revolver in both hands and pulled the hammer back.

“Don’t shoot me.” Glenn Anders stumbled inside, nearly capsized, shoved the door shut behind him and stood swaying, dripping, an apparition. A puddle formed at his feet and began to spread, soaking into the floorboards. “Don’t shoot me.”

She kept looking past him, looking for Harry. She lowered the gun slowly, easing the hammer down, waiting.

“He’s not coming.” Anders, visibly in the last stages of exhaustion, lifted both hands a few inches from his sides in a gesture of helplessness. “I’m alone.” Then he staggered past her, pushing himself along the wall with both hands, lurching into the kitchen. She heard the muted crash when he dropped into one of the chairs; its legs scraping the floor. She went in and Anders’ arms slid out across the table, knocking the coffee cup off — it shattered on the floor and Anders dropped his head onto the table.

For the longest time she only stared at him. Then with somnambulistic deliberation she opened the refrigerator door and propped a chair there to keep it open. The light exposed Anders’ profile and she saw his eye was swollen almost shut and scabbed with blood.

He muttered, slurring the words so badly she could barely make them out, “They didn’t spot me. I don’t think they spotted me. They were banging around up there, looking for tracks I guess, but it started raining again, harder than hell and I’m sure that must have washed my tracks out. They didn’t follow me. I guess they think he was alone.”

In a fury she snatched a handful of his hair and jerked his head up off the table. Anders whimpered. She threw him back so that he sat more or less upright in the chair. Now she could see his face clearly for the first time: His eye was a mess and something had clawed great red welts down his cheek.

“Where’s Harry?”

“They took him...” She watched him gather himself with a terrible effort of will. “He was alive the last I saw of him. I heard a shot — by the time I got to where I could see through the jungle they were marching him down into the camp. He was limping but then he always limps. I don’t think he was hurt. They’ve captured him, see. I guess they’ll work on him till he talks. We found the guard they’d posted on the trail, you see, we hit him with Mace and handcuffed him to a tree with a gag in his mouth and then we went in to scout the place but one way or another Harry got unlucky and they spotted him. I don’t know how it happened, I didn’t see it. I was still back in the woods and there wasn’t a damn thing I could do for him, there were eight or ten of them scattered around the camp and mostly they had guns. I thought about shooting the camp up, driving them to cover and giving him a chance to run for it but Harry can’t run with that leg of his and it just wasn’t any use. Honest to God I’d have tried if there’d been any chance. But what was the sense of getting myself killed if it couldn’t do him any good? I got the hell out of there, didn’t make any noise at all...”

“He’s alive?”

“He was the last I saw of him.”

“Were they hurting him?”

“Not that I saw. Nobody was beating up on him or anything. They had him at gunpoint — they took him prisoner.”

“What happened to your face?”

“I got lost in the dark. Slipped in the mud and fell into a goddamned cactus. I can still see — it didn’t blind me, maybe it looks worse than it is. But Jesus, I feel sick as a dog.”

“Why don’t you see a vet,” she said with a violent contempt. She wheeled away from him and kicked the chair aside and slammed the fridge shut and tried to think.

At daybreak it was still raining when she brought Anders and Emil Draga out of the farmhouse. Draga’s feet prodded the earth tentatively; he was still blindfolded and manacled. Anders rubbed his jaw and came to a stop when he reached the Bronco. “What now?”

“Get in. You drive. You know the way.”

“Up there?”

She pushed the Cuban into the back seat and wasn’t particularly gentle about it: Rage swirled in her and Emil Draga was the nearest available target.

Anders stumbled. He reached for the door handle for support. The bruise around his eye was big, dark and ugly. He looked half dead. It was more than just the physical injuries; probably he was suffering from some sort of shock not to mention exhaustion and fear and dejection. She didn’t know anything she could do about it except snap at him to keep him awake and functioning.

“Go on — get in. You can drive.”

“I can try,” he muttered, and hauled himself up onto the seat.

She went around and climbed in and sat sideways with her gun and half her attention on Draga. He sat twisted awkwardly because his hands were cuffed behind him. But he was a big brute and his feet were free now and she didn’t trust him to stay still.

The Bronco lurched uphill and she sat in a chilled fury with the revolver in her fist, thinking it out. They had Harry up there — hostage or dead. Very well. Now she had a hostage, too. They’d have to tread easy where Emil Draga was concerned: The power of his grandfather’s wealth would force them to take no chances with Emil’s life and as long as she had her gun to his throat she could go among them and stay alive long enough to get Harry out if Harry was alive. If Harry wasn’t alive she’d use Draga as her shield to get out of there and then, she thought, God help me I’ll kill him.

But it wasn’t going to come to that because she couldn’t really believe Harry wasn’t alive.

Because if he was dead it was her fault.

Emil Draga sat rigidly upright, his shoulders wedged in the corner between seat and window, and Anders wrestled drunkenly with the wheel, driving poorly, failing to anticipate rocks and potholes in the trail; Carole clung one-handed to the armrest.

They rolled onto a flat shelf of rock and Anders pointed vaguely to the right. “That trail’s a phony. We wasted two hours on it yesterday.” He swung left into the bed of a stream and the four-wheel-drive whined high. He was hunched forward, using the wheel for support; he was past the end of his endurance and she steeled herself against pity.

“How much farther?”

“Maybe an hour, hour and a half.”

“Describe the camp again for me.”

“What can you possibly accomplish except to get our stupid heads blown off?”

“Tell me about the camp. Do it now.”

The distributor cap had popped its clips and one of the main battery leads had slipped off its lug; that was the extent of the damage that Anders could see but he didn’t know much about automobile engines and he had little confidence in his repairs until he turned the key and it actually started up.

Then he sat at the wheel engaged in sluggish debate with himself. He could do one of three things. He could follow Carole up the road — they’d been gone only an hour or so and he still might catch up before they reached the camp. Or he could do as she’d asked — remain here and wait for them. If they showed up. Or he could turn the damn thing around and do the sensible sane thing: Head for the nearest telephone and call the cops.

There wasn’t much point in this first option. By the time he got up there with the Bronco they’d be in the thick of it and there wasn’t much assistance he could render; he was unarmed and woozy with infection and his eyesight was going every which way. And as for the second option, it would be a few more hours at least before anything could happen here — even if by some miracle she got Crobey out alive it would take them that long to make their way back to this point. By then Anders could make it to a phone, summon help, and return to meet them. Get the cops in there: Try to rescue Crobey and Carole, and wipe out the nest of Cuban bastards who’d murdered Rosalia. There was more than enough of a case now. The murder of Rosalia and the cache of heavy weapons up there — not even old man Draga’s influence could persuade the Puerto Rican cops to ignore that.

There were some bad dangers in this last possibility though — suppose Carole showed up in fifteen minutes’ time, having changed her mind or having been chased by one of Rodriguez’s scouts? Suppose she ran this far seeking sanctuary and found Anders and the Bronco gone?

In the end he decided that he might as well play it for keeps. By the time help came the outcome would be decided anyway, and he couldn’t risk abandoning Crobey and Carole. He wasn’t that far gone.