His glass was empty and he refilled it with one hand, the glass making a wet ring on the scuffed leather top of the desk. Fraser seemed content to wait in silence; as if he expected a favourable decision.
It wasn't that easy, he thought, swallowing the bourbon. He returned to the window above the loathed thoroughfare.
May's letter flickered in his imagination like a mocking salute. If Strickland started shooting off his mouth, the Director would personally throw him out on the street outside the J. Edgar Hoover Building and his hat after him. He needed to think… But not dismiss Fraser out of hand. He could be useful.
"OK let's talk. In the morning. I'll call at your hotel, early."
I'll be waiting, Mac. Good to talk to you—" The receiver was at once replaced, leaving Mclntyre listening to the tone. He slapped his own receiver down.
He was in a bind, he admitted. He needed money May could take him to court for the back alimony and the Bureau's puritans would want him out for that reason… Strickland could blow his ship out of the water, or Fraser could spread the word anyway, if he didn't cooperate… The bourbon burned the back of his throat. If Gant got to talk to Strickland-fax machine. He turned at its fourth ring. Then the telephone rang.
"Mclntyre it's late."
"Sorry, sir." It was Chris, still at the office.
"I'm sending through a phpto we just received' there was an edge of excitement in his voice 'from Phoenix."
Mclntyre, his breath somehow lost or disregarded, stood over the fax machine as if he might bully or interrogate it. Slowly, like oil seeping out of the instrument, Gant's features, in three-quarter profile, emerged.
"Got it?"
"Sure." Mclntyre grinned.
"It's him. When was this?"
This evening early. Sky Harbor airport. He got off a shuttle from Miami International."
' Where is he?" Mclntyre breathed.
"I checked the surveillance at Vance Aircraft. Vance's daughter and the chief research engineer, Blakey, both arrived less than an hour ago out of the blue. He must be there, mustn't he?"
"Maybe but why? Why come back? What does he want with his ex-wife?"
Gant must hate her like he hated May.
"OK tighten up surveillance. I'm coming by the office right away. Get yourself ready to take a trip and get a Bureau flight organised to Phoenix by the time I arrive." It was difficult to catch his breath, as if he had been running hard. The Ethiopian pipe and the African drumming seemed like his breathing, his heartbeat.
"Warn those hicks in Phoenix what they're dealing with no one leaves Vance Aircraft without being arrested!"
"Sir—" Mclntyre put the phone down on Chris's eager compliance and excitement, the latter like a theft of his own feelings. He whirled as if in triumph towards the studio's tall windows, glanced up at the glass roof. He had Gant he watched his hand close into a fist, fascinated. The guy had walked into a surveillance net like a four-year-old. Beautiful-He hurried into the bedroom and dragged the always packed suitcase from the back of the wardrobe. His sober suits hung to attention above his row of shoes. The wardrobe, despite all he could do, still smelt of May's perfume, which she had lavished on her clothes as well as herself.
He closed the studio windows on the street noises and locked them. He turned to the door and remembered Fraser. He hesitated for a moment, then picked up the telephone.
It wouldn't do any harm to take the guy along. He could be useful… there was a fix in, Fraser had offered him a brighter future. Maybe they could work something out. Meanwhile, why upset the guy…?
Out of the warm spread of the lights, he could look up through the glass roof of Blakey's office suite and see big stars hanging in the desert night. He felt no impatience. Blakey had put the snapshot through the computer, scanning its creased surface, and had then begun the process of blowing it up in sections. Mapmaking. There was a curious, angering sensation that lingered as the elements of Strickland's large, pale features grew, inflated, became more inscrutable. His one hand, resting on the rail of the jetty, was now the size of a baseball mitt, his shoulders huge, the brand name of his windcheater large as a neon sign above a diner.
Gant listened to the computer keyboard responding to Blakey's fingers like a small, excited bird; to the hum of machinery, the occasional purring regurgitations of the printer and photocopier. In a few more minutes, there'd be a composite enlargement, big as a map, to spread on a worktable and examine. The process of discovering where the picture had been taken was in the hands of machines, and that satisfied him.
The mountains behind Strickland were volcanic in origin, and there were three of them. From the shadows, the angle of the sun and Strickland's squint, the time of year was spring and the mountains stretched away north of the small lake into which the jetty thrust like a stick. There were pine trees in the background, on the slopes and around the tiny cuticle of shoreline that could be seen. Northern hemisphere or New Zealand not quite anywhere in the world, but you could still take your choice of the two hemispheres, outside the tropics… Gant still felt that Strickland had come home, that it was a snapshot taken in America.
The main computer at Vance Aircraft had produced, at Blakey's instructions, a relief map of the area in the background of the photograph, then a section outline of the landscape. There was a vague, newsreel-like familiarity about the rise and fall of the volcanic land, the lake, but nothing more concrete. The map and the section lay on the large table on whose edge he was perched, waiting.
"His clothing doesn't look new," Blakey called out without looking up from the huge image he was assembling delicately on the plate of the colour photocopier.
"Like he's worn it a lot. Maybe he wasn't a tourist at the time the picture was taken."
He seemed not to expect any reply. There was a high vapour trail at the edge of the sky in the snapshot. From its altitude, it was a civilian flight, Gant estimated. But then, most wilderness areas in the world were overflown by charter flights, red eyes shuttle services.
The clothing's American—"
"You can buy American in any part of the world," he replied to Blakey's observation.
"Yeah."
"Anything in writing? On the jetty, one of those huts or lodges or whatever they are?"
"Another few minutes…"
He sensed Barbara close beside him and turned to her. Her tiredness looked just as strained, less to do with the hour than with the defeat of dreams, the loss of Alan.
"You OK?"
She nodded.
"You?"
"It's going to come out right this, I mean. I feel it. Every picture tells a story and this one will tell us where Strickland lives."
Barbara seemed to dislike her eagerness.
"Is it dangerous I mean, how dangerous is it?" she asked huskily.
"Some. Maybe a lot. Strickland has killed plenty of people. He's been perfecting his talents for a long time."
"Could you, I mean, when you find him, can he be persuaded to talk? To tell you the truth?"
Gant shrugged. The machines continued to hum and chirp. Blakey was murmuring a tune as he concentrated.
"I can only ask the guy." He made as if to smile, but Barbara shuddered. He touched her arm, which jumped but she did not move away.
"I have to find him first."
The truth won't bring Alan or the company back to life." Her features arranged themselves into the now habitual grim planes that somehow sullenly refused to catch and reflect the warmth of the room's lights.
She was toying with a glass of whisky but not drinking it. Then, throwing her dark hair away from her face with her hand, she stared at him. She expected demanded? as she had so many times before, something she already doubted he could give.