Who would notice he was missing? So far as the staff knew, he had left the hotel for his monthly six days off. The inventory belonged technically to his free time, a bad bargain wheedled out of him by Herr Meister. His landlady would assume he had decided to sleep at the hotel, a thing he did occasionally when there were spare rooms. If no chance-millionaire came to his aid by ordering a bottle of fine wine, he would be dead before anyone noticed his absence. And millionaires were grounded by the impending war.
Willing himself into a calmer state, Jonathan sat to attention on what felt like a cardboard crate and strove with all his might to make order of his life till now, a last tidying before he died: the good times he had had, the lessons he had drawn, the improvements he had wrought upon his personality, the good women. There were none. Times, women, lessons. None. None but Sophie, who was dead. Look at himself how he might, he saw nothing but half-measures, failures and undignified withdrawals, and Sophie was the monument to all of them. In childhood he had struggled night and day to be an inadequate adult. As a special serviceman he had cloaked himself in blind obedience and, with occasional lapses, endured. As a lover, husband and adulterer, his record was quite as thin: a burst or two of wary pleasure, followed by years of abuse and craven apology.
And gradually it dawned on him, if a dawning can take place in total blackness, that his life had consisted of a run of rehearsals for a play he had failed to take part in. And that what he needed to do from now on, if there was going to be a now on, was abandon his morbid quest for order and treat himself to a little chaos, on the grounds that while order was demonstrably no substitute for happiness, chaos might open the way to it.
He would leave Meister's.
He would buy a boat, something he could manage single-handed.
He would find the one girl he cared about and love her in present time, a Sophie without the betrayal.
He would make friends.
He would find a home. And, for want of parents of his own, become a parent himself.
He would do anything, absolutely anything, rather than cringe any longer in the gloom of servile equivocation where, as it now seemed to him, he had wasted his life, and Sophie's.
His saviour was Frau Loring. With her customary vigilance, she had noticed him through her net curtains on his way to the cellar, and realised belatedly that he had not returned. When the posse arrived to release him, shouting "Herr Pine! Herr Jonathan!" and led by Herr Meister wearing a hair net and armed with a twelve-watt car lamp, Jonathan was not, as might have been expected, mad-eyed with terror but at his ease.
Only the English, they assured one another as they led him to the light, were capable of such composure.
FOUR
The recruitment of Jonathan Pine, former undercover soldier, by Leonard Burr, former intelligence officer, was conceived by Burr immediately after Jonathan presented himself to Wing Commander Quayle but only accomplished after tense weeks of Whitehall infighting, despite the mounting clamour from Washington and Whitehall's perpetual urge to earn merit in the fickle corridors of Capitol Hill.
The title of Jonathan's part of the project was first Trojan, then hastily changed to Limpet ― the reason being that while some members of the joint team might not know much about Homer's wooden horse, they all knew that Trojan was the brand name of one of America's most popular condoms. But Limpet was fine. A limpet attaches itself through thick and thin.
Jonathan was a godsend, and nobody knew this better than Burr, who from the moment the first reports from Miami started landing on his desk had been beating his brains for some way, any way, into the Roper camp. But how? Even Burr's mandate to operate hung by a thread, as he discovered when he took his first soundings about the feasibility of his plan.
"My master is a bit chary, frankly, Leonard," a mandarin called Goodhew confided skittishly to Burr over the secure telephone. "Yesterday it was all about the cost, today he's not keen on aggravating an uneasy situation in a former colony."
The Sunday papers had once described Rex Goodhew as Whitehall's Talleyrand without the limp. But as usual they had it wrong, for Goodhew was nothing that he seemed. If there was a separateness about him, it came of virtue, not intrigue.
His mangy smile, flat cap and bicycle concealed nothing more sinister than a high-minded Anglican of reforming zeal. And if you were ever lucky enough to penetrate his private life, you found, instead of mystery, a pretty wife and clever children who adored him.
"Uneasy, my Aunt Fanny, Rex!" Burr exploded. "The Bahamas is the easiest country in the hemisphere. There's hardly a bigwig in Nassau isn't up to his ears in cocaine. There's more bent politicians and shady arms dealers on that one island ― "
"Steady down, Leonard," Rooke warned him. from across the room. Rob Rooke was Burr's restraining hand, a retired soldier of fifty with grizzled hair and a rugged, weather-beaten jaw. But Burr was in no mood to heed him.
"As to the rest of your premise, Leonard," Goodhew resumed, undaunted, "which personally I thought you presented with tremendous brio, even if you were a trifle long on adjectives, my master called that 'reading tea leaves with a dash of special pleading for good measure.' "
Goodhew was referring to his minister, a silky politician not yet turned forty.
"Tea leaves?" Burr echoed in furious bewilderment. "What's he bleating about tea leaves for? That's a five-star, chapter-and-verse, verifiable report from a highly placed informant of American Enforcement. It's a miracle Strelski ever showed it to us! What's tea leaves about that?"
Once more Goodhew waited for Burr to finish his tirade.
"Now for the next question ― my master's again, Leonard, not mine, so don't shoot the messenger! When do you propose to advise our friends across the river?"
He was referring this time to Burr's former service and present rival, which traded in Pure Intelligence from a grim tower block on the South Bank.
"Never," Burr retorted belligerently.
"Well, I think you should."
"Why?"
"My master regards your old colleagues as realists. Far too easy, in a small, very new and, dare he say it, idealistic new agency such as yours, not to see beyond one's fence. He'd feel more comfortable if you had the River boys aboard."
The last of Burr's self-restraint gave way. "You mean your master would like to see someone else bludgeoned to death in a Cairo flat, is that it?"
Rooke had risen to his feet and was standing like a traffic policeman, his right hand raised for "halt." On the telephone, Goodhew's flippancy gave way to something harder.
"What are you suggesting, Leonard? Perhaps you'd better not explain."
"I'm suggesting nothing. I'm telling you. I've worked with your master's realists, Rex. I've lived with them. Lied with them. I know them. I know Geoffrey Darker. And I know his Procurement Studies Group. I know their houses in Marbella, and their second Porsches in the garage, and their unstinted devotion to the free market economy, provided it's their freedom and somebody else's economy. Because I've been there!"