Chad Hill kept trotting back and forth bringing items of useless news to him from the various knots of technicians. “It’s American gum—spearmint. No fingerprint on it—he must’ve pressed it with a rag. The alarm clock’s a Benrus.”
“A Benrus.” Lime had learned how to repeat the last word or two whether he was listening or not. It made people go on talking. It was even possible Hill might eventually tell him something he could use.
The 500 KC transmitter was a fishing-boat model. The Wollensak recorder was an old model but a common brand. The mylar tape was also German, available anywhere on the continent; the alarm clock had been used to trigger the broadcast. The tape was reeled onto five-inch spools, Hill explained. It ran at one and seven-eighths inches per second. It was long enough to play about an hour. All three of Fairlie’s speeches were on it, separated by five-minute intervals of blank tape.
It was a simple robot device. The ordinary alarm clock was evidence the kidnappers had set the transmitter not more than twelve hours before the broadcast; but that was meaningless—you could travel forever in twelve hours, and by the time Fairlie’s voice had been aired at 12:30 P.M. local time last Tuesday the kidnappers could have been anywhere. And by now they had a lead of fifty-six hours on Lime.…
They’ve moved, Lime thought. They didn’t stay around here, they’d have known the search would be too intense. They went out: how? Not by public transport; Fairlie was too recognizable. Not by car. Helicopter, airplane or boat—it had to be one of those.
Boat, he thought. Because Palamos was a sea-front town, and because the Basque fisherman had seen Arabs on a boat. There had been Arabs around the garage; too much coincidence unless they were the same Arabs. All right then. Boat. What next?
A commotion in the corner: Chad Hill bouncing on his feet, wheeling, loping across with his loud voice preceding him:
“A fingerprint!”
Hill was very excited and Lime stared bleakly. When Hill came to an awkward stop above him he threw his head back. “Chad it could be anybody’s fingerprint. Maybe the owner of the place.”
“Well of course. But I mean they seem to have wiped the whole place clean before they left—but they missed this one.”
“Where is it?” So many people were crowded into the corner he couldn’t see.
“On the panel where the light switch is.”
It was a possibility to be conceded. He got to his feet with an effort. Their last act would have been to switch off the lights before driving out. They’d have done that after having wiped the place. Yes; a possibility. He went across.
One of the Spanish technicians looked up. He smiled but his eyes were ready to show fear. “She look like they ef-forgot thees wan.” He was very proud of his English.
These Spaniards were all James Bonds, trying to decode every laundry list they found in somebody’s trash basket. But you couldn’t tell; you had to check everything out. Give us this day our daily break.
“Put it on the wire.”
“Ahjess.”
It would be cabled out to Madrid and London and Washington. In a few hours they would have an answer.
7:30 A.M. North African Time The two engines made a racket in the plane like the thunder of a Second World War bomber, Fairlie thought. The fuselage vibrated a great deal. Some loose piece of metal in the cabin kept chattering.
Fingers closed on his wrist: Lady’s hand, checking his pulse again. She seemed to do it quite frequently. Perhaps they were worried about the effects of the drugs they had given him earlier on.
He wasn’t drugged now. Blindfolded, his mouth gagged with tape, his hands bound with wire. They didn’t want him throwing tantrums. They weren’t sure of him yet, they weren’t sure he wasn’t about to go berserk.
He wasn’t sure of it himself.
Lady had warned him not to struggle because he might make himself sick; vomit could make him choke to death. They had taken him ashore in a dinghy and from snatches of talk he pieced it together that they were sinking the boat. A stranger’s voice then—an unfamiliar tongue, but the voice had a husky gravel quality, a high-pitched wheezing sort of voice, as if its owner had a bad case of catarrh.
Back into the dinghy again. They’d rowed him out into a fierce chop. He had tried to keep relaxed: he wasn’t ordinarily susceptible to seasickness but the young woman’s cool warning about vomit had fixed his mind on the subject and it was almost impossible to ignore. He remembered one of McNeely’s jokes: All right, you can do anything in the world as long as you don’t think of a white hippopotamus. Then the McNeely grin: Ever tried to not think of a white hippopotamus before?
McNeely. That was in some other world.
They had lifted him, with some strugglings and mouthings of oaths, into a cramped cabin of some kind; helped him feel his way into a seat and settled him into it. Then they had wired his ankles together.
The gravel-voiced wheeze taking its leave; Fairlie had heard oarlocks squeak—evidently the wheezer rowing back to shore alone.
He had thought he was aboard a boat—the same boat or a new one—until he’d heard the engine choke and sputter and begin to roar; he realized immediately it was an airplane.
A seaplane, then.
The second engine had whined into life and there was a great deal of gunning before he felt it begin to move. Taking off seemed to be touch and go: the sea had a wicked slap to it, the cabin lurched and pitched. The epithets of Abdul the black pilot were intense. Fairlie remembered Abdul’s cool handling of the helicopter when Abdul had somehow killed the engine while pretending something had gone wrong with it; Abdul’s anger now terrified Fairlie but finally they were airborne and he felt the seat tip under him as the plane climbed steeply.
There was no accurate way to estimate the length of time they had been in the air or which way they were heading or even where they had started from, but there was enough talk for Fairlie to identify the various voices and realize there were at least four of them in the plane with him: Abdul, flying it; Sélim, the leader who spoke with a Slavic accent; Lady, who attended him with a professional detachment; Ahmed, who had a Spanish sort of accent and tended to talk in dogmatic clichés.
It was very hard to concentrate. He thought there must be plans he ought to be making. Spotty recollections of all those Second World War memoirs by British aviators who had spent five years organizing incredibly elaborate schemes to escape from Nazi POW camps. We have a duty to escape.
There was no we, there was only Fairlie, and escape was beyond question; his duty appeared clear enough for the moment—to maintain sanity. He could demand nothing more of himself, not now.
8:10 A.M. Continental European Time Lime was still on his packing crate. One of the Spanish uniformed cops came into the garage and beckoned: there was a radiophone call from Fleet. Lime took it in the Guardia jeep.
The Admiral. “I thought you’d better know—the rival firms are moving in.”
Lime went back inside, somewhat depressed. It was not to be avoided that agents for the other side would come into the case. The Russians, the Chinese, an indeterminate number of others. Suppose an Albanian hard-line field agent got in ahead of you, rescued Fairlie—suppose the Albanians decided to keep Fairlie? Farfetched, but it was a risk; you didn’t want to exchange one set of kidnappers for another. What it amounted to was that you had to try and prevent the rival firms from finding out what you had found out. It wasn’t easy, not with communications tapped routinely and areas of the world where members of the opposing teams sat on the corners of one another’s desks. It meant Lime had to tighten his communications, use safe lines whenever possible, code his transmissions—another time-consuming chore.
More likely the rival firms were eager to help out. For a Russian or a Chinese team to rescue Fairlie would be a propaganda victory unprecedented in decades—a triumph of public relations if nothing else. But you still couldn’t afford to work with them. Once you admitted them to partnership you would be delayed at every junction place; your partners would be required to check back with superiors and clear every decision through layers of bureaucracy.