"Hell's she calling him Lamont for?" Roper was complaining while he leaned his head this way and that to get a better look at Jonathan's face beneath the blood. "He's Pine from Meister's. The night flunky chap they had. Englishman. Recognise him, Tabby?"
"That's who it is, Chief," Tabby confirmed, kneeling at Jonathan's side and holding his pulse.
Somewhere at the edge of his screen, Jonathan saw Frisky pick up the abandoned briefcase and peer inside.
"It's all here, Chief," he was saying soothingly. "No harm except to life and limb."
But Roper was still crouching over Jonathan, and whatever he saw must have been more impressive than the jewellery, for he kept wrinkling his nose as if the wine were corked. Jed had decided Daniel had seen enough and was walking him sedately down the steps.
"You hear me all right. Pine?" Roper asked.
"Yes," said Jonathan.
"Can you feel my hand okay?"
"Yes."
"Here too?"
"Yes."
"Here?"
"Yes."
"How's his pulse, Tabby?"
"Quite sporting, considering, Chief."
"You still hearing me, Pine?"
"Yes."
"You're going to be okay. Help's on its way. We'll get you the best there is. You talking to the boat there, Corky?"
"On line, Chief."
In the back of his mind, Jonathan had a notion of Major Corkoran holding a portable telephone to his ear, one hand propped on his hip and his elbow raised for extra authority.
"We'll fly him to Nassau on the chopper now," Roper was saying, in the gruff voice he had for Corkoran. "Tell the pilot, then call the hospital. Not that lower-class place. T'other one. Ours."
"Doctors Hospital, Collins Avenue," said Corkoran.
"Book him in. Who's that pompous Swiss surgeon, got a house at Windermere Cay, always trying to put his money in our companies?"
"Marti," said Corkoran.
"Call Marti, get him up there."
"Will do."
"After that, call the coast guards, the police and all the usual idiots. Raise some serious hell. Got a stretcher, Low? Go and get it. You married or anything, Pine? Got a wife or anyone?"
"I'm fine, sir," said Jonathan.
But it was the equestrienne, typically, who had to have the last word. She must have done first aid at convent school.
"Move him as little as possible," she was telling someone, in a voice that seemed to float into his sleep.
THIRTEEN
Jonathan had vanished from their screens, missing believed killed by friendly fire. All their planning, all their listening and watching, all their supposed mastery of the game, lay like a trashed limousine at the roadside. They were deaf and blind and ridiculous. The windowless headquarters in Miami was a ghosthouse, and Burr walked its grim corridors like a haunted man.
Roper's yacht, planes, houses, helicopters and cars were on constant watch; so was the stylish colonial mansion in downtown Nassau where the Ironbrand Land, Ore & Precious Metals Company had its prestigious headquarters. So were the telephone and facsimile lines belonging to Roper's contacts round the globe: from Lord Langbourne in Tortola to Swiss bankers in Zug and semi-anonymous collaborators in Warsaw; from a mysterious "Rafi" in Rio de Janeiro to "Misha" in Prague and a firm of Dutch notaries in Curaçao and an as yet unidentified government official in Panama who, even when speaking from his desk in the presidential palace, affected a drugged murmur and the alias of Charlie.
But of Jonathan Pine, alias Lamont, last heard of in intensive care at Nassau's Doctors Hospital, not a whisper from any of them.
"He's deserted," Burr told Strelski, through the spread fingers of his hands. "First he goes mad, then he escapes from hospital. A week from now we'll be reading his story in the Sunday newspapers."
Yet everything so perfectly planned. Nothing left to chance, from the moment of the Pasha's departure from Nassau to the night of the faked kidnapping at Mama Low's. The arrival of the cruise guests and their children ― the bloodstock English girls of twelve with lolling faces, eating crisps and drawling about gymkhanas, the confident sons with whiplash bodies and the side-of-mouth slur that tells the world to go to hell, the Langbourne family with sullen wife and over-pretty nanny ― all had been secretly welcomed, trailed, housed and hated by Amato's watchers, and finally seen aboard the Pasha, nothing left to chance.
"You know something? Those rich kids had the Rolls pull up at Joe's Easy, just so they could buy their grass!" Arnato the proud new father protested to Strelski over his handset. The story duly entered the legend of the operation.
So did the story of the seashells. On the eve of the Pasha's departure, one of Ironbrand's bright young men ― MacArthur, who had made his debut with a nonspeaking part at Meister's ― was heard telephoning a dubious banking contact on the other side of town: "Jeremy, in God's name, help me, who sells seashells these days? I need a thousand of the bloody things by yesterday. Jeremy, I'm serious."
The listeners became unusually vocal. Seashells? Literally seashells? Shell ― like missile? Sea-to-air projectile perhaps? Nowhere in the lexicon of Roper's weaponspeak had anyone before referred to seashells. They were put out of their misery later the same day when MacArthur explained his problem to the manager of Nassau's luxury store: "Lord Langbourne's twin daughters are having a birthday on the second day of the cruise. The Chief wants to hold a shell hunt on one of the uninhabited islands and give prizes for the best collections, but last year nobody found any shells, so this year the Chief is taking no chances. He intends to have his security staff bury a thousand of the things in the sand the night before. So please, Mr. Manzini, where can I get hold of shells in bulk?"
The story had the team in stitches. Frisky and Tabby, launching a night raid on a deserted paddling beach, armed with duffel bags of seashells? It was too rich.
For the kidnapping, every step of the way had been rehearsed. First Flynn and Amato had disguised themselves as yachties and made a field reconnaissance of Hunter's Island. Back in Florida, they reconstructed the terrain on a tract of dune set aside for them in the training compound at Fort Lauderdale. Tables were laid. Tapes marked the paths. A shack was erected to denote the kitchen. A cast of diners was assembled. Gerry and Mike, the two bad guys, were professional toughs from New York with orders to do what they were told and shut up. Mike the kidnapper was bearish. Gerry the bagman was lugubrious but agile. Hollywood could not have done better.
"Are you gentlemen fully conversant with your orders, now?" Irish Pat Flynn enquired, eyeing the brass rings on each finger of Gerry's right hand. "We're only asking for a couple of friendly belts now, Gerry. More in the line of a cosmetic alteration to the appearance is all that is required. Then we ask you to withdraw with honour. Am I making myself plain, Gerry?"
"You got it, Pat."
Then there had been the fallbacks, the what ifs. All covered. What if, at the last minute, the Pasha failed to put in at Hunter's? What if she put in at Hunter's, berthed, but the passengers decided to have dinner on board? What if the adults came ashore to dine, and the kids ― perhaps as punishment for some prank ― were made to stay aboard?