Yesterday at dawn Lime had landed at Barcelona in an Air Force jet with Chad Hill and a team of agents and technicians sent along by Satterthwaite. At the airport they had been collected by a delegation of American and Spanish types and it had been tedious; Lime disliked the boredom of establishing credentials.
The Spanish Fuerza Aérea had flown them up to Perdido and Lime had talked with Liam McNeely, who had told him President Brewster had announced that European governments were cooperating with Washington in a vastly expanded program of “protective surveillance” on suspected revolutionaries throughout the Western world. From Perdido Lime had reached Bill Satterthwaite by telephone: he had not tried to conceal his anger. “You’re only driving them deeper into their holes. How do you expect me to make contacts if they’ve all gone to ground?”
“Contacts?” Satterthwaite had sounded confused. Lime had explained it tersely—you had to hope there were scraps of information floating around the Maoist underground; you had to look for pigeons willing to tell you things. One revolutionary could lead you to another—but not if he’d been scared into hiding.
“I’m sorry.” Satterthwaite had been cool. “It was a matter of policy—hoping to forestall any further violence from the left. We can hardly rescind it now. You’ll have to do the best you can, that’s all.”
Before ending the transatlantic dialogue Lime had said, “Find out Fairlie’s blood type for me, will you?”
“You haven’t found blood.”
“No. But we might.”
“All right. I’ll check—where can I get back to you?”
“I’ll get back to you.” And he had rung off.
There had been an insider at Perdido obviously but he had got away, possibly in the confusion of departures that had attended the end of the Spanish ministers’ visit an hour or two before the kidnapping. At any rate no one had kept tabs on the parking lot or the exit road until after the kidnapping and by that time the insider was gone. Careful interrogations by Spanish Guardianos had produced the likely possibility the insider had been a handyman who’d been hired on the day before the kidnapping—a Spanish-speaking mestizo with a Venezuelan passport who had paid the chief grounds-keeper fifty thousand pesetas to give him the job, saying he had to prove he had employment or the Spanish government would deport him at the expiration of his alien labor registration. Evidently the Venezuelan had been very persuasive and had triggered the groundskeeper’s sympathies—either that or the groundskeeper’s price was cynically low. Now the groundskeeper was filled with contrition; he was being held by the Guardia, he had been fired by the spa, he probably would be subjected to brutal interrogations for weeks. That would keep a small army of bureaucrats occupied for a while but would produce no useful results.
Lime had gone over the ground at the mountain farm where the kidnappers had abandoned the phony Navy helicopter. The serial numbers had been filed off and acid-eaten but a team of Spanish detectives had etched them out with alcohol and hydrochloric; the helicopter belonged to the Pamplona branch of a German rental concern used by wealthy skiers seeking untouched slopes in the high areas inaccessible by road. The manager of the office had been found dead Monday morning in his bed in Pamplona—at first glance from a heart attack, but autopsy showed he had been murdered with a long thin needle jabbed between the upper ribs into the heart. Only a tiny scab on the skin gave clue. Perhaps he had seen the kidnappers’ faces too clearly, or had found out something he shouldn’t have—or perhaps he had refused to rent the helicopter to them. At any rate that chain of investigation was broken by the manager’s death.
The helicopter had been painted Navy colors and the ID numbers proved to have been splashed on by means of hand-cut stencils. From more than a few feet away they looked perfect and of course at the time no one had had reason to inspect them closely.
The helicopter had been left inside the barn; its rotor blades had been removed crudely by the use of hand tools. The bodies of two Secret Service Agents were in the barn with the chopper, shot by 9mm slugs fired from two different handguns, neither of which had been found.
The helicopter abounded with fingerprints of Fairlie and the two Secret Service men; those were the only identifiable prints found anywhere except for a variety of small partials in and around the house; they were being checked out but were probably the prints of children and wanderers who had stopped by the deserted farm last summer.
The farm did offer one clue: a pair of black leather gloves a Guardiano had discovered while sifting through the powder snow piled up by the helicopter’s movements. The descending chopper had swept a barnyard area free of snow; this was the clue that had attracted the searchers’ attention from the air and had brought investigators here late on the afternoon of the kidnapping. Half buried in one of the loose drifts the gloves had gone unseen until the following morning; a Spanish inspector was studying them when Lime arrived. Handling them gingerly with tweezers.
Lime had told Chad Hill, “Send them to London.”
“Why London?”
“Scotland Yard. They’ve worked out a glove-print identification scheme. They can get glove prints off the helicopter controls,” he had explained. “If they match these gloves then we know these were worn by the pilot. About half the time London’s been able to pick up latent fingerprints—enough for an ID—from the inside surfaces of the gloves. These are plain leather, they’re not lined—I think we’ve got a pretty good chance.”
So the gloves had been flown to London aboard a United States Navy Phantom Jet, along with the dismantled control stick of the helicopter, and Lime and Chad Hill had proceeded to Palamos.
Now in the garage he sat on an upturned packing box wearing a rumpled tweed suit the color of cigarette ashes and a five-o’clock shadow. He felt customarily benumbed, subject to dull pains of resentment—Dominguez, the top man in the Guardia, had wasted hours of his time during the night by insisting that Lime address himself personally to the variety of woebegone witnesses the Spaniards had rounded up. There was nothing for it but to comply; not so much because of the demands of international courtesy but because it was indeed possible one of them had something to offer by way of information.
It had consumed most of the night. An old woman who claimed to have seen a hearse drive in and out of the garage. (An old hearse was found near the waterfront; whether it was a clue was indeterminate since it had been wiped clean of fingerprints.) A young man who claimed to have seen several Arabs in the vicinity of the garage. (Immigration was checking; questions were being asked in Palamos. No results yet.) A bus driver who had passed the hearse Monday night and seen its driver—a black man in chauffeur’s uniform. (The phony helicopter pilot? Possibly; but what did it add?)
There was also a Basque fisherman with a strange tale about several Arabs and a coffin and a fishing boat. The story was unclear. The fisherman had been taken before Dominguez and Lime had watched as Dominguez infuriated the fisherman to the point of stubborn silence. Dominguez had fired his questions arrogantly and impatiently; Dominguez’s accent was Castilian, the fisherman was a Basque. Lime had fumed silently: surely the Guardia had a Basque member who could do this interrogation more successfully? But Dominguez wasn’t the sort to whom that kind of suggestion would be welcome. Dominguez thought he had a natural gift for intimidating people; with the Basque it produced only defiance but Dominguez couldn’t see that.
On his way out Lime had dropped a word to an R.N. subaltern: “See if you can bring that fisherman around to see me when he’s through with him, will you? I’ll be at the garage.”
Three hours ago. Now he sat on the packing box still awaiting the Basque because there was nowhere in particular to go.