The Guardiano was a captain by rank, a precise cop with a professional voice. It droned on, filling Lime in, while a cool gray wind ruffled the sea and blew sand in Lime’s face. Tire tracks had been found between the highway and the beach, indicating that a vehicle had pulled off the road and driven up onto the small promontory overlooking the beach. It had parked there, pointed toward the sea, possibly to flash its headlights out to sea in signal. High tide had come and gone between the murder and the discovery; the only footprints found were high up, near the body and the tire tracks. The vehicle had been considerably heavier when it left than it had been when it arrived, and the departure tracks merged with the highway in a southerly direction, indicating the vehicle had arrived from the south and departed toward the south, retracing its course. Unfortunately the sand was too soft to reveal a tread pattern. The width between tires indicated a standard wheelbase for medium-sized automobile or small van.
As for the reason for the abandonment of the boat, it appeared the engine-oil line had rusted through; the oil had leaked out and the engine had seized up.
To Lime there was only one clue in all this that wasn’t ambiguous; it was a straightforward indication of the kidnappers’ intent. The Lopez boat had cracked up north of its point of departure. Assumption: they had been heading for France, or Italy.
It was there in plain sight and because the kidnappers weren’t careless men it had to be assumed they meant it to be seen: they could have sunk the boat easily enough and left no traces. That was the thing. They had put it on display, they hadn’t concealed it. Lopez’s body, the boat. These had been meant to be found.
He had to read something into that. They told him they were heading north. Now it was a question whether they wanted him to hunt north or, conversely, whether they wanted him to think that far ahead and hunt south.
There were many layers of bluff. First leveclass="underline" if a clue appears it should be believed. Second leveclass="underline" if it is an obvious clue it must be a red herring designed to waste time and resources; it is so obvious it had better be dismissed. Third leveclass="underline" if it is so obviously an invitation to dismiss it and do the opposite then perhaps it ought to be obeyed after all because the kidnappers made it blatantly obvious just to confuse. Fourth leveclass="underline" the kidnappers, anticipating this dilemma in his mind, want him to think it through all the way to the end and then go ahead and investigate the clue exhaustively because, all other things being equal, a clue is a clue and even if it is a deliberate plant it may give away something it wasn’t intended to reveal.
It came down to a question of the order of subtlety of the bluff and he knew once he became trapped analyzing levels of possibility he could burn his brain out trying to guess the truth.
The one thing that stood out was that the kidnappers were professionals. Or at least they were led by a professional. A professional was a man who didn’t leave clues unless he intended to. This entire operation had been set up not by any amateur revolutionary but by a pro who had planned every step and timed every movement. The snatch caper at Perdido had been a model of economical efficiency. The mountain farm had been selected with exact precision for its proximity to the Mediterranean coast and its flying distance from Perdido because the kidnappers knew they had to get the chopper under cover before the authorities got a search operation under way. The kidnappers knew just how much time they had for each step of their operation and obviously they hadn’t rushed anything. They had taken Fairlie, concealed the chopper, driven openly by car from the farm to the garage outside Palamos—all this during the period of time when the authorities were still organizing for a search, still absorbing the impact of the incredibly simple crime that had been committed. But once under cover in that Palamos garage the kidnappers had stayed put, not allowing panic to push them into movement again until after dark. By that time they had to assume the police and security of a dozen nations were searching for them but they acted with aplomb, delivering Fairlie by hearse to the waterfront, getting aboard Lopez’s boat and heading out to sea.
They hadn’t left things to chance at any other step and there was no reason to assume the abandonment of Lopez’s boat had been an accident. If the engine had frozen up it was probably because the kidnappers had poked a hole through the rusty oil pipe to make it look like an accidental failure.
They might have left one inadvertent clue: the fingerprint on the light switch in the Palamos garage—if in fact the print belonged to one of the kidnappers and not the owner of the garage or one of its customers.
It was the fingerprint that gave him the impression the kidnappers were amateurs led by a professional. A professional developed habit patterns, he never left fingerprints on anything and never had to think about it. By reflex he always went back and wiped things off.
The light switch was the last thing they had touched on their way out and someone had forgotten to wipe it.
If the print turned out to be Fairlie’s then Lime would believe it had been left on purpose to attest to the fact that Fairlie was alive. But he doubted it was Fairlie’s fingerprint; they wouldn’t have allowed Fairlie near a light switch. If the print belonged to any of the kidnappers then it hadn’t been left there deliberately; leaving misleading clues was part of the game but giving away the identity of your own man was not.
Barcelona in winter was a distressing gray city of industrial blight and waterfront rot.
The Spaniards had provided an office in an overflow annex a block from the government admin building; it was a quarter of bleak narrow streets—cobblestones and soot-black walls. From the aircraft carrier a whaleboat had brought ashore a Navy UHF scrambler transceiver; it had been manhandled into the office.
The crew had arrived ahead of him and the office crawled with personnel but what took Lime by surprise was the presence of William T. Satterthwaite—rumpled, tired, his curly black hair awry.
There was a small private room set aside for Lime’s use but Lime took a quick look at it and declined. “Have you got a car outside?”
“Yes. Why?” Satterthwaite pushed his glasses up.
“Let’s sit in the car and talk.”
In the car Satterthwaite said, “Do you honestly think they’d have the nerve to bug that office?”
“It’s what I’d do. You don’t want foreigners running king-size security operations on your turf without finding out what they’re up to.”
Satterthwaite was capable of dismissing the problem instantly: “All right. What about this coffin they carried Fairlie in? Do you think he’s dead?”
“I doubt it. You don’t kill your ace in the hole until you have to—or until you’ve run out of a use for it. There’s a better question than that, though—how do we know it was Fairlie? It may have been a hundred fifty pounds of bricks.”
“You mean you’re not buying the Lopez boat thing at all?”
“Suppose they had accomplices who took Lopez’s boat to make it look as if they took Fairlie that way?” Lime hunted around the dashboard for the ashtray. “The only thing definite is they’ve given us two pieces we were meant to see.”
“The Arab costumes and the boat headed north. One suggesting North Africa and the other suggesting western Europe. Do you think they could both be phonies? Maybe they’re going for the Balkans?”
“It’s all guesswork right now. We’re chasing our tails.”
“Don’t get so damned defeatist, David. There are hundreds of thousands of people working on this. Someone’s bound to come up with something.”
“Why? We’re not dealing with wild-eyed freaks.”
Satterthwaite’s eyes burned behind the high magnification of the lenses. “Who are we dealing with?”
“A pro and a cell of well-trained amateurs. Not a government job, not a people’s liberation-movement thing. We won’t find an organization working the caper, although we may find one paying the bills.”