I

 

 

I

 

 

"Very little is known about the human incidence of para tuberculosis " the Indian said cheerfully. "I'll bring you some information booklets, if you like. In return, you might tell me where I can find this cow. " "Thank you... yes, O. K.... When can I leave? " He looked at his watch, but dashed my hopes.

 

 

"Sunday, " he said. "Perhaps. The tests I'm running will not be conclusive until Sunday morning, and even then I'm accelerating them. " He smiled primly. "I will eventually publish my results. Until then I will keep my findings thoroughly locked away, and I'm afraid even you won't know every detail before I publish... " "Do you mean, " I asked slowly, "that you will meanwhile lock your findings... in a safe? " "Certainly. There is fierce competition among researchers.

 

 

I do not want any competitor to scoop me, now do I? " The word scoop sat amusingly on his tongue, but did explain the purpose of the safe on Trox Island. The results from the experimental herd were worth a lifetime's fortune in prestige. I'd been grateful to those cows. Too late to wish I'd starved.

 

 

"Am I still likely to infect anyone else? " I asked.

 

 

He took longer to answer, then he said, "Just bear in mind that no one knows. Among cattle the basic disease Johne's-is only spread through ingesting either feces or infected milk. " He grinned broadly. "You should be all right here. Visitors may come without a mask. " Jett came often, usually with my grandmother's gifts of a book not too heavy for holding when sitting in a wheelchair or bed, or anywhere with gin and tonic or busted ribs. Even though upright and walking round and round a civilized room, I learned from Wednesday to Sunday an approximation of my grandmother's restricted life.

 

 

I talked to her on Thursday on the telephone, and I sent her a bowl of Christmas roses and a spray bottle of cologne.

 

 

On Friday morning early, colleagues at work called to urge my a. s. a. p. return, as it seemed I had won the annual Bracknell Meteorological Office sweepstake by guessing which day in the year would register the hottest shade temperature on the roof (September first) and they wanted to help me with un popping the cork of the prize bottle of fizz.

 

 

They had barely left me smiling when I had Bell exploding in trouble in my ear, almost unintelligibly full of a five-star disaster.

 

 

"Slow down, dearest Bell, " I begged, hoping that what she'd just told me pretty hysterically was at least only half true.

 

 

"What did you say about Glenda? " "I told you, " she shouted. "Why don't you bloody listen?

 

 

Kris is frantic. She stole his trains... " "Bell. Slow down. " "She jumped in front of a train. " The words still tumbled out.

 

 

"Glenda? " "Of course, Glenda... Stop being so stupid. An underground train. Late last night. The police came here this morning. She's.. terribly... dead. They've not long gone. " Bell swallowed between words to get them out, but she was audibly crying.

 

 

"I've talked to Dad... " , l "Bell... " I had at last, and with growing dismay, taken it in.

 

 

"Where are you? Is somebody with you? Kris? Jett could be with you... I could come myself. " "No, you can't, you're in hospital. Glenda yattered all the way to London on Wednesday and honestly I got fed up with her--oh hell... " She gulped, but the tears wouldn't stop.

 

 

"I

 

 

wish I had been nicer to her, but I've never truly liked her..

 

 

I've done my best while I've been working for George, but I was going to change jobs--but that's only half of it and the rest is worse. " It couldn't be much worse, I thought, and of course I was wrong.

 

 

Bell said, "Glenda went on and on about George being a traitor. She said she couldn't bear to be married to a traitor.

 

 

She said she'd told you all about it, and you knew it was true and she couldn't bear the shame of having a trial... she couldn't live with the disgrace... and I thought... I thought she was exaggerating, you know how she always rattles on and swings her arms about... Oh dear. Oh dear... " I'd tried Kris's flat several times without reply, so into the pause for sobs I asked again, "Bell, where are you right now? " "In your attic. " Bell said it matter-of-factly as if I should have expected it.

 

 

"We moved in here yesterday evening. Kris had a key, " she added. "He said you wouldn't mind. We'd got so utterly bored with Glenda going on and on all day yesterday, so when she finally went out at last we just came here to get away from her and of course we never dreamt... " The unstoppable sobs, I thought, might almost have a compound of guilt.

 

 

"When Glenda was with you, " I asked, "couldn't you in any way have calmed her about George? " "Perry. " Bell's voice on the telephone was a wail. "You don't understand. The Newmarket police went to George's house to tell him Glenda was dead. They didn't go to arrest him. They just went because of Glenda... " Bell fell into a silence that seemed past even sobs.

 

 

"Go on, " I said, "What did George say? " "He was dead, " Bell said.

 

 

"Dead? " Bell said jerkily, "He was upstairs in his bedroom. He had been hit on the back of his head. His skull was crushed. The police went round to see Dad because of me working for George, and they told him George was dead... and Glenda had left a letter in the bedroom saying she couldn't bear the disgrace... " She wept. "Dad told the police to look for us here because I wasn't at Kris's place. " "Are you saying, " I asked her plainly, "that while Glenda sat in Newmarket, in her kitchen, tellingJett and me how she'd given radiation sickness to the filly, George was lying dead upstairs? " "Yes. " Bell's distress carried its own measure of horror. "He must have been. When you and Jett drove off to the Equine Research place and I went home to pack a case... we left them in that state of really murderous fury... she must have killed him during that time when we weren't there... and then she packed a few things and went down to wait for us. " Bell still couldn't quite control her voice. "Kris thinks she told George she was going upstairs to pack as she was leaving him,

 

 

and telling the world about his trade in uranium, and he went upstairs after her to stop her. " One could imagine George, in a rage, leaning over Glenda's suitcase to take things out of it... and one could also imagine Glenda, snatching up a heavy object...

 

 

"What did she hit him with? " I asked.

 

 

"I don't know. Hell, Perry, what does it matter? I've hardly ever been in their bedroom... they have a heavy brass clock... modern... " Her voice was cracking, and Jett would have reckoned she needed a tranquilizer, or better, a hug.

 

 

"Is Kris with you now? " I asked.

 

 

"He went to get some food. " "Then eat it. " "Glenda! " she said miserably. "And George! " Disbelief racked her, and she felt more pain for them dead than she'd felt affection for them while they lived.

 

 

It would be no use telling her not to think about them. She had known them for most of her life.

 

 

I thought of them myself as I had seen them first at Caspar Harvey's lunch, no odder than many a bickering married couple, and I thought how their central cores had slowly begun a meltdown after that, until the bedrock character had clarified in each.

 

 

George's innate villainy had taken over from the still respected racehorse trainer until he was ready to try killing with blinding oil. Glenda with her foolish unfounded sexual suspicions had uncovered not the lover but the traitor in her house, and in shame and disillusion had both killed and died.

 

 

I thought of the manifest instinct to destroy that had throbbed between the pair of them in that kitchen. There had been, that Wednesday morning, the basic bloody urge of nature.

 

 

. all red teeth and claws.

 

 

Did a murderer, I wondered, live deep within us all?

 

 

AT AROUND NOON I ran dear disheveled Melanie to the other end of the wire and asked if I could speak to my ghostwriter about my book on storms. "Sure, " she blithely replied and in a moment Ghost himself was saying, "I thought you'd come out in spots. " "Spots don't gag you. " "So I gather you want to talk. " "There are storms present and future, " I said. "There are things you should know. " "On our way. " They both came, long John Rupert and insubstantial Ghost.

 

 

I invited them to sit down, and apologized for the imitation measles I could well have done without. Ravi Chand expected the rash would fade by Sunday, but Sunday seemed a long way off. I looked a mess.

 

 

"What's wrong with you?

 

 

"John Rupert asked.

 

 

"Mycobacterium para tuberculosis variant X. " "Ah, " one said and

 

 

"Yes, of course, " said the other. Neither had ever seen it before, but then, nor had anyone else.

 

 

"Last night, " I said, trying not to make it sound too theatrical, "Glenda Loricroft, wife of George, jumped in front of an underground train. " Their mouths opened speechlessly.

 

 

"On Wednesday morning in Newmarket it seems she had bashed in her husband's skull. He lay undiscovered in his bedroom until the police found him this morning, when they went to tell him his wife had killed herself. " John Rupert and Ghost started breathing again, and I said, "Before you ask, he had not been unduly missed by the staff of his racing stable, because he constantly traveled overseas without saying where he was going. He supervised a schooling session early on Wednesday morning--I was there myself.

 

 

So was Belladonna Harvey, his assistant, but when neither she nor George nor George's wife appeared yesterday morning, or today, the head groom simply carried on with the stable routine as he'd done several times before. " They listened intently while I told them about Glenda, the filly, the alpha-particle powder and the lead container. I asked them, after that, if they had any authority to search Loricroft's world? The answer seemed to be somewhere between

 

 

"No" and

 

 

"It depends" and

 

 

"It's up to the Newmarket police. " There was no simple

 

 

"Yes. " "Of all the possible Traders, " I remarked, "George Loricroft might have been the one most likely to handle and keep orders from foreign sources... but he's been dead two days. " John Rupert nodded,

 

 

"His Trader colleagues will have picked the body clean. But what would you have hoped to find? He would have been too careful. They always are. The real question now is, who will take his place? " A thoughtful silence ensued. Glenda's spurious snowfalls, Ghost said, had put more than a husband out of action. There would be a pause for regrouping. A vulnerable period, he thought, for the Traders.

 

 

John Rupert asked me again, "What would you have hoped to find at Loricroft's place? " "I suppose names and addresses would have been too much to hope for, " I said. "Glenda herself might have got rid of anything obviously damaging. She had time. But how about a dipstick in the trunk of his car, say, with smears of oil matching that in the crunched airplane? How about bank statements, phone bills... a paper trail? " They shook their heads, thoughtful and depressed. John Rupert said, "Even though the Traders aren't a hundred percent professional, Loricroft will have known better than to leave damning paperwork lying around. " Ghost agreed. "Do you know what I think? " he said. "I really do think we may have them undecided at this moment and not knowing what to do next, but it won't last long. So what we need now are some good sound ideas. Fruitful ideas.

 

 

It's time for genius. " John Rupert smiled lopsidedly. "We need someone they would never expect to be actively working against them. " I found both visitors turning their heads until their eyes focused on my face, and I thought that if they expected fruitful ideas from me, they had come to a dry well.

 

 

"I, " I pointed out, "originally sought you out for help. My province is as a forecaster of wind and rain and sunshine, not as an ideas man in antiterrorist country. You must know better then I do how to profit from a Trader's death. " I waited for a good while during which they un helpfully offered no suggestions even in the fruitful category, never mind genius, and with disquiet I realized that they had begun to rely on me for direction, not the other way round.

 

 

"I need a few answers, " I said reluctantly. I had to be crazy, I thought, even to begin on such a journey, but unless I knew where I was going, I would no longer agree to go anywhere at all. Only an idiot would set out without a map.

 

 

I said,

 

 

"The chief question I want answered is what exactly do you expect from me? Then... are you two part of a large organization? Do you pass on to others what I tell you? Who is Us'? Am I useful, or shall I just nurse my myco-dots and forget about the Unified Traders? " I watched their changing expressions and realized I was in effect facing them with their most difficult of decisions, the question of what did and what did not fall into the category of' need to know. " John Rupert glanced at Ghost and uncoiled slowly to his feet. Ghost followed him silently to the door.

 

 

"We'll consult, " they said. "We'll be back. " Life would be simpler, I thought, if they stayed away. Much simpler if I disentangled myself altogether. Much simpler if I'd never gone to Kensington in the first place. What did I now want to do? Extricate or dive in?

 

 

I walked over to the window and looked down into the l street that ran along the side of the building. Taxis often decanted and picked up fares there, but I was unprepared for John Rupert and Ghost to run across the sidewalk, flag down the first taxi to come along and set off to realms unknown.

 

 

Ghost's white hair, three floors down, had been unmistakable, and John Rupert's long legs exaggerated from above his stork like stride.

 

 

Their taxi had barely cleared the first corner before Jett arrived in my room, saying, "Have you heard? " and with eyes stretched wide, in disbelief, "George Loricroft was actually dead upstairs... " She brought a fax from the BBC to the hospital saying that as Dr. Chand had requested a further week of tests for my tubercular illness, I would not be expected back at work until I'd fully recovered.

 

 

"Don't worry, please, " said Ravi Chand, looking in and reassuring his protesting patient. "You can still probably leave on Sunday, but you obviously need rest. You have a strong constitution but also you don't know when you are in danger of overtaxing yourself. Illnesses like this deplete muscle power, believe me. " He swept out again at his usual speed, white coat floating, waving a hand to Jett.

 

 

"You know him well, " I commented, and added in his own chirping accent, "my dearJett. " "I've nursed several of his patients after they've left here, " Jett said, smiling from past familiar moments. "Ravi's terrifically well thought of. I brought you here because he's a top man for radiation sickness, which I thought you had, but he's mega thrilled to find you've got something he's never met before. He's going to write you up for publication, did you know? " She stayed, good company, until John Rupert and Ghost returned, and then left, saying she would be back in the evening.

 

 

The two men brought cold November air in with them, but little in the way of fruitful aid.

 

 

Ghost studied his toe caps, smoothe a hand over his hair and did his best.

 

 

"We have consulted our--er superior officer, and the answers he told us to give you are... " He still hesitated, as it seemed telling nothing at all was a near unbreakable habit. "The answers are... " He pulled a small neat sheet of paper out of his breast pocket and read in a strangled voice, "Yes, you are useful, yes, your information is passed on, and as for our ultimate aim... " He hesitated yet again, and

 

 

I

 

 

waited in persuasive silence until he managed to resume. Then, looking down at the page, he read, "We do want to put the Unified Trading Company out of business, but we also want more, we want the people behind them, the unknown mostly foreign groups who are constantly planning and putting together the threat of a bomb. It's like infiltrating a drugs ring, to get beyond the pushers to the main suppliers. " "Except, " I said dryly, "that your suppliers are trading in enriched uranium and plutonium, not in fairly harmless stuff, e cocaine.

 

 

Ghost wriggled in his chair and read again directly from his paper.

 

 

"As Dr. Stuart is primarily a meteorologist he is not expected to proceed any further in this matter. " He folded the paper and tucked it away. "That's all I have, " he said, sighing.

 

 

"John Rupert has a shorter message. " I turned to John Rupert, who, also with hesitation, issued a much briefer instruction. He read,

 

 

"Win quietly. Look sideways, at what you learn. I have faith in you. If you can swim through a hurricane, you can find a way through a maze. " I said, "Are those the exact words? " John Rupert nodded. "When I asked him what he meant, he said you would understand. " He looked uncomfortable, and I saw that even for' authorities there were baffling acres of' need to know. " One thing that these two apparently didn't know was the identity of their superior officer. I asked who he was. They numbly shook their heads and confessed ignorance, but owing to the overall secret nature of their business, I wasn't sure whether or not to believe them.

 

 

They both expected (and said) that in the absence of fully satisfactory replies to my questions, I would retire from the field at once, but in a minor fashion I was addicted to crossword puzzles, and as I'd been invited to find a way through a maze that might not exist, I thought it wouldn't hurt to discover more about how the undercover mind worked. Rather to the surprise of publisher and ghostwriter, I asked them about books.

 

 

Ghost knew hardly enough about storms to blow the head off a dandelion, but said if I talked onto a tape the way I could talk in their office, with all my best stormy dramatics topping high C, we might even hit best-sellerdom, and John Rupert good-humoredly worked out how many tons of paper it would need. The book that had started out as camouflage unexpectedly struck flint and caught fire.

 

 

I learned from my visitors' increasingly relaxed lightheartedness during the next hour that the lady "authority" at the Health and Safety Executive who had originally sent me to Kensington hadn't steered me very high up the antiterrorist ladder. John Rupert, all the same, had proved a reliable middle rung, leading upwards to a loftier level, and had given me a path now if I wanted to take it.

 

 

"What have you decided? " he asked.

 

 

"Have to think, " I said.

 

 

When he and Ghost had left I sat in an armchair in the dusk and let the meaning of the answers I'd been given filter through into a clearer understanding. { First of all, I thought, I'd been told incidentally that I might already know by sight the person who stood on the next rung up. Next-rung-up most likely had, like myself, a recognizable face... Maybe next-rung-up was a politician.

 

 

Next-rung-up, far from choking me off, had more or less urged me to go on. It seemed to me that the main message that had been delivered could be interpreted as

 

 

"Destroy the Trading operation, but don't let the Traders know how you did it. " I drifted from the possible future back to the unexpected past and tried without stress to see if a pattern would emerge that I could trust, like laying down random-seeming threads on a loom that all of a sudden revealed themselves as a piece of whole cloth in three dimensions. There had been a whole lot of "magic illusion" pictures like that once, which gave three-D effects if one looked beyond the close and obvious and focused on the distant. A lot of weather forecasting fell into atmospheric pressure pictures of close and distant fronts, three-dimensional and always on the move.

 

 

The close and obvious in Unified Trading terms--as I saw now, when it was too late had been George Loricroft with his multiple contacts on European racetracks.

 

 

If I'd been a Trader I would be searching now for either a dishonest physicist or a linguist or preferably both in the same man. Yet George Loricroft had been neither... perhaps a racehorse trainer then... perhaps the Traders were indeed solely middlemen, and George had broken the company's own rules of never taking the merchandise home, especially if you have a jealous wife.

 

 

Jett arrived when I reached that unfruitful point, slapping on hospital-bright lights and asking why I was sitting in the dark.

 

 

I blunder about in the shadows, I thought, but made do with

 

 

"Hi" and

 

 

"You know those crossword puzzles with no black squares and not even black lines? " "They're impossible,

 

 

"Jett said.

 

 

"I can't do them. " "They sometimes take me a week and a reference library, " I said.

 

 

"What exactly is the point? " "The point is, where in the world is one across. " "Do you mean you don't know where to start? " I said, "DearestJett, you're right. Where in the world would you look for a folder full of orders and invoices? Where would you keep it if it was yours? " Jett said she didn't know, but asked if I meant Vera's Equine Research Establishment folder full of records of Harvey's filly.

 

 

That folder and the box of fragrant droppings were still in her car.

 

 

"No, " I said, though struck by the similarity. "The last time I saw the one I mean, it was being stowed aboard an airplane on Trox Island. Where is it now? " "On the airplane? " She was puzzled.

 

 

I shook my head. "That plane was rented, and everything on it would have been cleared out between flights. I'd expect that one of the Traders still has that folder. Nothing else makes sense, unless... " I broke off in half sentence and only after a short-breath recovery said,

 

 

"Let's call Kris. " "You've lost me,

 

 

"Jett said, but I at least found Kris. He and Bell were both in Kris's apartment eating Thai rice and sounding glum.

 

 

Their reaction to the suggestion of a little hospital visiting brought them rapidly round with a six-pack of Heineken, though inevitably vivid memories of George and Glenda hovered over the room, forbidding much in the way of laughter.

 

 

Bell had brought Glenda's suitcase with her, as I'd asked, and it was Bell who opened it, but inside there were only rudimentary overnight clothes and no folder. A good idea, but no good fruit.

 

 

"Funny you should ask about a folder, " Bell said. "You know I talked to Dad this morning about Glenda and George and I'm so sorry that I couldn't stop crying--well, Dad called again and asked me if there was a folder in Glenda's case and he positively begged me to go and look at once--" "And was the folder there? " I interrupted.

 

 

"You're as bad as Dad. He was in a frightful tizzy. And, if = you want to know, everything that's in the case is more or less all she brought with her, which isn't much, but then she'd just killed George... Oh dear... " Tears welled in her eyes, unstoppable.

 

 

"You didn't even like him, " Kris said crossly, handing her tissues.

 

 

Kris liked Robin Darcy.

 

 

"Robin Darcy was in Newmarket... wasn't he? " I asked Bell.

 

 

"Yes, he was, " she said, "But he went back to Florida. " "Which day? " "Ask Kris. " Kris said, "Tuesday, " sounding bored. "Long before Glenda pinched the folder. " "Why do you all fuss so much over a folder? " Bell asked, irritated. "You'd think it held the crown jewels. All it had in it was a bunch of shopping lists, but they were mostly in German, or some language like that. " She seemed unaware of my own state of pole-ax and blithely continued. "Dad practically zoomed off to outer space, but he came down to earth again when I told him the folder had gone back to Newmarket and was quite safe. " I took a steadying breath and asked more or less calmly who had taken it back to Newmarket?

 

 

"One of those motorbike delivery boys, " she said. "A courier. " "And... er, " I asked, "where was he going with it? " "It was a bit odd, really, " Bell thought, "considering Glenda was practically scratching his eyes out at Doncaster races. " "Oliver Quigley? " I said it jerkily, enlightened but horrified.

 

 

Bell nodded. "That's right. The courier came with a big envelope for it this morning, with everything paid for in advance, so of course Kris put the folder into the envelope and stuck it up, and we gave it to him. Actually I haven't thought about it since. The courier came before we knew about George. Before we knew he was dead. When we heard, it put everything else out of our heads. " "Um... " I cautiously asked, "did Glenda herself say anything about sending a folder to Oliver Quigley? " "It was about all she didn't gabble on about, but yes, she did talk to Oliver, but not for long. Talk... it was more like a shouting match... but she told us to give the folder to the courier if he came for it, and then she went out for some air... and oh dear, poor Glenda... She didn't come back..

 

 

Kris raised his eyes heavenwards and passed tissues. He said, "The courier was waiting here on my doorstep when we got back from your place. He'd been waiting for ages, he said. He wasn't best pleased, but we gave him coffee and toast and stuff, and I gave him a big tip when he left because he'd recognized me, and he went off quite happy. " "Ridiculous really, " Bell said, "but we were pleased to have done something for Glenda, even though she was dead. " Bell meant it seriously but Kris hid a giggle.

 

 

"Drink the beer, " I told him, but he gave his second can to Bell.

 

 

He was perched on the windowsill, long-bodied, pale skinned and incredibly sane. His own near-death at Luton and Glenda's actual acting out of the chief threat of his suicidal nature had, in an extraordinary way, flattened out his wilder self, and it was he who gave me a thoughtful stare and said, "Let's start at the beginning, kiddo, and we'll find your bits of paper for you, and you'll explain why you want them, and then I'll give them to Bell's father, to make him like me a bit...

 

 

as a son-m-law.

 

 

"So the wedding's on? " I asked.

 

 

"At the moment, " Bell agreed.

 

 

"Folder, " Kris said flatly, coming back to basics. "Glenda brought one with her in her suitcase, and I'd guess from the ruckus that she'd pinched it. How am I doing? " "Terrific, " I said.

 

 

"How about this, then? There were things in the folder that she knew Oliver Quigley wanted back... " Kris stopped and scratched his head and then doubtfully went on. "They had a slanging match which Glenda lost, and she agreed to courier the folder back to Oliver if he sent a prepaid envelope for it, which he did, but it was just one thing too much for poor old Glenda. " Both Bell andJett were nodding and I wondered if Kris really believed his edition of things, or was deliberately trying to mislead us all... and I regretted how suspicious I had become after barely four hours as an unofficial snoop.

 

 

By nine o'clock all three of my visitors had voted for more lively entertainments than rash-watching, and by midnight I'd discovered the loneliness woven into problem-solving, when success meant that no one knew there was a problem to begin with.

 

 

On Saturday morning a spot check persuaded me that perhaps there was an improvement there, though the rash now itched under a three-day beard. A week after Luton, I still had black rib bruises with accompanying painful reminders if I forgot to move slowly. Only in the vomit department had things unmistakably improved. All in all, apart from Jeff's cheerful visits, it hadn't been the grandest seven days ever.

 

 

More like a long lesson in my grandmother's lifetime philosophy, if you can't fix it, think about something else.

 

 

I spent most of Saturday morning running up a frightening hospital telephone bill in a search for a motorcyclist who had, on Thursday, ferried a large envelope to Oliver Quigley in Newmarket, but learned, when I at last found a courier company who'd even heard of Oliver Quigley, that they were now being accused of nondelivery, even though the package had been duly delivered and signed for.

 

 

They were upset, and at times incoherent with anger. Would they please, I asked them, slow down and start again?

 

 

Yes, agreed the Zipalong Couriers. Yes, they had been engaged to collect and deliver the package I described, and yes, their man had unfortunately had to charge a good deal extra for waiting time. But Mr. Ironside had made it worth his while. Yes, their man motorcycled to Newmarket and identified Mr. Quigley's house, and yes, a Mr. Quigley had received the envelope, and signed for it, and it wasn't their fault that Mr.

 

 

Quigley was now complaining that the Zipalong courier hadn't arrived, and that at the time of delivery he, Quigley, had been at Cheltenham races.

 

 

"What had been the delivery time? " I asked.

 

 

"Noon. " By the time they thought of asking what my interest was in the affair, I'd learned enough courier etiquette to fill a "how to" book for Ghost.

 

 

I disconnected from Zipalong with fulsome thanks, and called the cell phone number of Oliver Quigley, anxious racehorse trainer, all now, it seemed, restored to his normal self of trembles and shakes.

 

 

When my phone caught up with his phone, he was again at Cheltenham races, outside the Golden Miller bar. He offered a stuttery greeting that ignored the stripped-down personality I'd seen at Doncaster.

 

 

"As a matter of fact, " I said, "I wondered what happened with Zipalong Couriers. " The stuttering reply included stable yard language at its roughest, but meant in essence that when Oliver Quigley was reported to be receiving and signing for couriered envelopes in Newmarket at noon yesterday, Friday, he had been at Cheltenham races saddling his runner in the three-year-old hurdle.

 

 

A pointless exercise, as the horse in question had one speed only slow--and wouldn't have won even if Perry Stuart had been where he ought to have been--in front of the cameras with details of the weather--instead of fussing over a couple of bruises in hospital.

 

 

At my third try of

 

 

"Mr. Quigley? " he slowed down and said

 

 

"What--what? " If he had been at Cheltenham, I asked, who had signed for Glenda's package?

 

 

Oliver was inclined in bad temper to think it was none of my business. I would be happy to help him with last-minute underfoot forecasts, I murmured. In that case... Oliver Quigley believed that when the courier found no one at home yet again, he was so pissed off (Oliver said), he just signed as if he were Quigley, and took the package away with him and chucked it in a ditch.

 

 

"Do you really think so? " I asked.

 

 

"Mark my words, " Oliver said, the receiver clattering with shakes against his teeth, "they never delivered that parcel and I'll sue the pants off them until I get it back. " "Good luck, " I said.

 

 

"I could kill that bitch Glenda, " he said. "If she weren't already dead I'd kill her. If Zipalong don't find my package soon it won't be worth suing them... but I'd do it anyway. I'll get that thief of a motorcyclist run off the road. " I was glad, while listening to him moaning on and on, that Cheltenham racetrack was a hundred or more miles west of where I sat.

 

 

After Oliver I spent a silent hour or two by myself while smooth cogwheels like quiet fruit machines clicked gently into place, and I made at the end of that time two telephone calls, one to the Bedford Arms Hotel in Newmarket and the other to the Meteorological Office at Bracknell.

 

 

John Rupert and Ghost had got things right. The murder of one of the Traders was splitting the others apart.

 

 

As John Rupert had given me his own cell phone number ("in case, " he explained), I called him in the middle of a golf game, which he put on hold with good grace.

 

 

"You're not worse, I hope, " he said.

 

 

"No, the opposite. Can I ask you a question? " "Always ask. " "Then how serious are you about the book on storms? " - "Oh! " I'd really surprised him. He said guardedly, "Why? " I said frankly, "Because I need a contract... actually I don't need a contract, I need an advance. " "An advance... for anything special? I mean, is this urgent?

 

 

It's Saturday afternoon. " "I think I can get you another Trader, but I need a ticket to Miami. " He took barely ten seconds to make up his mind.

 

 

"Tomorrow do? " he said.

 

 

By lunchtime on Sunday ("tomorrow") Ravi Chand was peering at my fading rash with a magnifying glass, a bright light and a disappointed expression.

 

 

"What's wrong? " I asked anxiously.

 

 

"From your point of view, nothing. From mine, my laboratory animal is walking out with only half of my investigations complete.

 

 

" He sighed. "Jett promises she will week by week bring you back for continuing treatment. I will publish as soon as I can. " I asked diffidently, "What about the owners of the herd that gave me this disease? Doesn't my rash belong to them? " "The owners, whoever they are, are using that herd as a living laboratory totally isolated from outside factors. Ideal.

 

 

They might stand to make millions from new pasteurization methods. " "How so? " I said.

 

 

"The present law states that raw milk has to be raised to 71. 7 degrees centigrade, that's 161 degrees Fahrenheit, for a minimum of fifteen seconds to be pasteurized. If anyone could patent a new procedure which reduced the temperature or the time, then they would make a fortune due to the fuel saving.

 

 

That's what they're after. They are not interested in, or experimenting on, a new disease infecting humans. If they were, there would be immense interest in any affliction resembling your illness. Instead, there has been no reaction at all to your progress. The incubation time was short, the onset sudden, and now the speed of your recovery is conclusive. This illness is new. It's different. You are unique. I have incidentally named your illness in our joint honor, Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X. " He shook my hand warmly. "I cannot lock you in a safe with my notes, but please, please, dear Dr. Stuart, dear Perry, keep yourself alive until I publish. " When Jett drove her car to collect me, Ravi Chand in his white coat stood on his doorstep waving us a sorrowful if temporary goodbye. I'd been in his care so far only from Wednesday to Sunday, but the swift Chand-Stuart disease (curable, thank the fates) struggled in many a Petri dish in his laboratory towards universal recognition.

 

 

Jett drove to my grandmother's apartment, where she was due to start work again the next day. She seemed pleased at the prospect, but to me it meant an end to the nearness I'd valued all week. Jett had definitely burrowed far under my unattractive skin.

 

 

My grandmother exclaimed in alarm at my thinness but was enjoying the company of John Rupert, who had postponed another game of golf on my behalf and was covering every surface in sight with contracts for a gathering of Storm.

 

 

With everything signed he shook hands with my grandmother and left me with a vast check made out to a credit card company to cover every expense.

 

 

"Instant money and more to come, " he promised, "when Ghost starts Page One. " When he'd gone my grandmother asked the resident "dear girl" to give me the little parcel the postman had delivered for me the morning before. According to its postmark it had been sent from Miami, and only to one person there had I given my grandmother's address.

 

 

Unwin of the yellow-too the grin had amazingly sent me the best gift he could, because when I'd threaded a way through yards of bubble packing I found a note wrapped round a plastic sandwich bag, and, inside that, my small old familiar mud-filled camera. With surprise and jubilation I opened and read the note.

 

 

Perry, Iflew a load of people to Trox. There was a woman in charge.

 

 

She says the island is hers. She was the pits. If ound your camera where you said. All the par were bloody rude all day, so

 

 

I

 

 

didn't tell them I'dfound it. Best of luck.

 

 

Unwin.

 

 

Explaining to the others where it came from, I put the camera contentedly in my pocket and on a different tack set about making calls to find Kris and Bell. Result, Bell had gone home to Newmarket, where she and her father were now presently in unofficial charge of the Loricroft stable.

 

 

"It's all dreadful, " Bell said, tears in the offing. "Oliver Quigley and Dad are single minded about this wretched folder, which still hasn't turned up anywhere. They've both gone to Cheltenham again today and left me looking after things. Dad's berserk with worry and he won't tell me why. " "Where's Kris? " I asked with sympathy, and she said he would be at the Weather Center doing radio forecasts until midnight, and he would be sleeping in his own apartment, as far as she knew.

 

 

"Are you better? " she remembered to ask, and I thanked her and said I'd been let out of the cage.

 

 

"What does pax mean?

 

 

"Jett asked, reading Unwin's notes.

 

 

"Passenger, " said my grandmother, who'd been one most of her life. "And Perry, after supper from the take-away, and when you've said good night later to our dear Jett van Els, you can lie down here on the sofa and have a good restful sleep. Don't think of going home. You look far too frail for climbing all those very steep stairs. " I never entirely disobeyed her but I wasn't bad at finding ways to modify the format, so that when I asked to borrow her warm deep-pocketed Edwardian Sherlock Holmes look-alike cloak, all she said was

 

 

"Take some gloves" and

 

 

"Come back safe. " Nothing, I was encouraged to hear, about heebies or ,.

 

 

JeeDleS.

 

 

I kissed her on her forehead, our tiredness mutual, and traveled with Jett in her car to Paddington Station, terminus of trains to the west, playground of suicidal manic-depressives (but not of Glenda) and home of a simple coin-in-the-slot photocopying machine.

 

 

After a Romeo and Juliet length and intensity of good nights, Jett confessed to receiving a Ravi Chand medical opin 11-. l

 

 

I

 

 

on, runaay morning ealtlon.

 

 

"What was it? " "Wait a week. " I had already waited too long.

 

 

"With such a slow start, " I said, "our disengagement should take fifty years. " Smiling with shiny eyes she helped me make a set of copies of Vera's equine research work, and when she finally left me two short streets later I had a set of Vera-copies in a buff folder in one deep front pocket, and Vera's originals in a paper clip in the other.

 

 

By midnight or soon after I was sitting on Kris's doorstep waiting like the Zipalong rider for the weatherman to come home.

 

 

He stopped, key in hand, surprised to see me there so late.

 

 

"I locked myself out, " I said, shrugging. "Do you mind if I sleep here? " He looked at his watch. He said

 

 

"O. K. , " without huge enthusiasm, but he'd landed on my own doorstep often enough at midnight.

 

 

"Come on in, " he said. "Take your coat off. You look awfully ill. Coffee or tea? " I said I was too cold to take my coat off. He boiled water and clattered some mugs.

 

 

I said, faintly smiling, "Whatever you sent to Newmarket with Zipalong's motorbike, it wasn't what Glenda took from George. " He stared.

 

 

"How the hell do you know? " "Well... who else but you could make sure that Zipalong's motorcyclist reached Quigley's house at the right time? You kept the poor man eating toast and generally waiting about until you were sure that he would arrive after Quigley had gone to Cheltenham races. " Kris said, laughing, "It was only a joke on fussy old Oliver. " I nodded.

 

 

"He's easy to make fun of. " "Glenda, " Kris said, "drove us half crazy all day Thursday saying she'd got a whole lot of George's papers that were proof of his out-and-out treason in Germany. We got fed up with it.

 

 

Then Oliver called and he and Glenda had a frightful row. He told her what she'd taken was a list of horses that would be running in Germany, and it was his, Oliver's, and he wanted it back. " "But you didn't send it back, " I said.

 

 

"Well, no. " He grinned. "It stirred silly old Oliver up a treat. " "What did you send with the courier to Newmarket? " "A list of horses. I clipped them out of newspapers. What else? " "Did you read the list you were supposed to have sent? " Kris said, "Of course not. It's all in German. " "Show me, " I asked persuasively.

 

 

He nodded, and, willingly moving into his spartan bedroom, pulled open a drawer and picked out a completely ordinary buff folder from underneath his socks.

 

 

Without any sort of dismay he handed it to me, and one brief glance verified its contents. Different from those on Trox but for the same purpose.

 

 

"There you are, " Kris said. "Love letters, Glenda had once

 

 

I

 

 

thought. But they're really only lists of horses. See that word?

 

 

" He pointed. "That word means racehorses. " The word he pointed to was Iffierderenebahn.

 

 

"That word, " I contradicted mildly, "is Horseracetrack. " "Well? So what? " "So... er, " I asked, "who met the motorcyclist at Oliver's house to sign for the package? " "Guess. " "I'd guess... how about Robin Darcy? " "You're too bloody smart. " "You and Robin are friends and he was staying at the Bedford Arms Hotel, which is barely a hundred yards down the road from Quigley's stable, I'm told. So who else was more likely? It was obvious, not smart. " "Yeah... well, it was only a joke. How did you get it right? " "You told us Robin left for Miami on Tuesday... what does it matter? I happened to be phoning that hotel and they said he left yesterday. Never mind. How about if we made a copy of these German letters. We can do it easily along at Paddington, and then you can see Oliver's face when you show him you've got his precious list safe after all. It's always prudent to make copies. It would be a disaster if Oliver could sue you because you'd lost the originals. " Kris yawned, sighed and agreed.

 

 

"I'll do it for you, " I said, "if you like. " "I suppose I'd better come. Let's go now and get it over. " "Right. " I picked up the folder and, summoning energy I didn't think I had, headed out of Kris's bedroom, down the hall and out of the front door without looking back, happily humming a marching tune as if the whole thing were a prearranged jaunt.

 

 

I could hear Kris behind me saying, "Well... " doubtfully, but it wasn't far to the station, and my enthusiasm kept us both going the whole way.

 

 

I sent Kris off to get more coins for the machine and made copies quickly with a German list on top for all the world-and Kris--to see. We set off back to his apartment with me grasping a folder inside my grandmother's cloak and Kris clutching Glenda's folder to his chest.

 

 

The impetus was draining away in us both and the night suddenly felt very cold indeed when Kris uneasily said, "I hope Robin will think these copies a good idea. Anyway, he'll be coming for the folder at any minute now. Any time after one o'clock, he said, when I'd finished my shift for the day. " "I thought he was in Miami, " I said, uneasy in my turn.

 

 

"No, he's going tomorrow. He changed his plans, I think. " He looked at his watch again. "Any time from now on, he'll be here. " "Really? " I didn't like that. I needed a peaceful retreat, and a gentle walk away.

 

 

Kris was in front of me, suddenly deeper in doubt, equally suddenly taking quick steps ahead and saying, "I don't know... There he is! " he joyfully shouted, pointing.

 

 

"Let's tell him now... " I stopped walking, stopped listening, turned fast on my heel and started back towards the station at a para tuberculosis effort of a shambling run.

 

 

It was my day for spending another of those twenty-nine lives.

 

 

Kris could always run faster than I could, but not faster than a roving taxi whose driver was convinced he was saving his passenger from a mugging. As I scrambled untidily into the cab it circled on two wheels into a side road, and I glimpsed the two figures stop running after me and stand with arms akimbo just short of Kris's apartment, looking along the road in my wake, deprived of their quarry.

 

 

Under the lights the heavy dark spectacle frames flashed on the round head of the short, unmistakable Robin. Behind him stood the tall, blond, frustrated, godlike Norseman.

 

 

Kris still firmly clutched Glenda's buff older though it now contained, not dangerous requisites in German, but the plain English copies made, with Jeff's help, of Vera's records of the filly's radiation history at the Equine Research Establishment.

 

 

In one deep pocket, I carried Vera's originals, as before, and in the other a true Trading gift to mankind, the Loricroft legacy of the where, the how much, the how soon and the strength of available U-235 and Pu-239.

 

 

THE CAB DRIVER asked where I wanted to go, which if answered literally would have meant to bed with Jett, warm, loved and healthy. Instead I opted for round the block and back to the station, where warmth in some places kept total misery at bay.

 

 

I sat on a bench in a waiting room, sharing limbo with bona-fide travelers and the hungry dispossessed.

 

 

My immediate impulsive reaction, to run away from Kris and Robin, was on reflection stupid, and could quite likely never be explained or given an adequate apology. Temporary madness, that flight had been. True, I had in my pocket lists of illegal materials, a damning piece of evidence, but evidence against whom? To whom should I give the folder? To someone one rung up from John Rupert? So where would I find him? And who would he be?

 

 

I thought for a long time about the enigmas that had been handed down.

 

 

Win quietly.

 

 

Look sideways at what you learn.

 

 

I had done neither.

 

 

If there was a path through a maze if there were a maze would the riddle be solved by going outward, or by searching deeper in?

 

 

The folder with the Vera copies in it could have been explained as a further teasing of Oliver Quigley. I had meant to laugh it off and could have done. My had I run from Robin?

 

 

I chased the reason in the end to a dream of delirium, when Robin and Kris stood hand in hand beckoning me towards a gun to end my life. Subconsciously from then on I'd thought of them as allies, yet not believing Kris capable of real atrocious crime. Believing two opposite things at once was highly common though, like people who couldn't abide the rich but bought lottery tickets every week, hoping to become what they said they despised.

 

 

Look at things sideways... What did he mean?

 

 

I tried looking sideways at the island of Trox. At mushrooms and cattle and worldwide anarchy.

 

 

Looked sideways at Odin...

 

 

Went to sleep.

 

 

When I woke at six I found that my sleeping brain had sorted out the sideways factor. Sideways, I yawned, was fast asleep.

 

 

No one had disturbed me during the four or five hours I'd spent in my huddled corner, but a quick glance in a looking glass disguised as a beer advertisement on the wall there revealed that although the rash had faded to a mottled pinkish brown, my eyes had now swollen to pufiballs and my unshaven chin was a stubble field in black. As no one, I imagined, would recognize this wreck as the well-brushed me, I left things as they were and sorted out the contents of my grandmother's Sherlock Holmes cape-coat pockets, which I'd filled the evening before.

 

 

Apart from the folder of Loricroft's German papers and copies, they chieXly contained Vera's originals, my camera and my wallet. Camera contained Trox Island mud, but the wallet, more helpfully, disgorged passport, credit card, check, phone card, international driver's licence and a fistful of cash borrowed from Jett.

 

 

As soon as lights came on in a nearby photo shop which boasted of its eight o'clock "instant passport photos, " I was knocking on its door, aiming to test the abilities of the sloppy looking teenage boy in charge, who astonished me by actually waking up to interest when I asked if he knew anywhere that I could get specialty work done at this early time of day. He looked at the camera and peered more closely at me.

 

 

"I say, aren't you Perry Stuart? " he said. "Something wrong with your face, isn't there? " "It's getting better, " I said.

 

 

"I can lend you a razor, " he offered, absentmindedly prodding the camera with a pencil. "Do you want to see if there are still O. K. exposures under this muck? " "Do you know anyone who could do it? " "Do me a favor! " He took my question as an affront. "I spent four years in night school learning this job. Come back in an hour. And it's an honor to do your work, Mr. Stuart. I'll give it my best shot. " My expectations sank. A sloppy voice, a sloppy mouth. I wished I'd gone somewhere else.

 

 

There were more advantages, though, than drawbacks in a face. When I went back an hour later I found a tray, laid with a cloth, bearing a pot of coffee, a basket of hot rolls, and many other comforts. Even a cleaned electric razor in a folded and frilled paper napkin. I thanked the shop's incumbent for his thoughtfulness and then had to listen to multiple detail while he told me how to resurrect negatives from a cow-pat tomb.

 

 

I ate, I shaved, I admired his skill sincerely. I watched him make expert color prints, and I signed autographs for him by the dozen when he refused to be paid any other way. His name, he said, was Jason Wells. I shook his hand, speechless, and asked for a card with an address.

 

 

"It's my uncle's shop, " he said. "I'll get my own, someday. Do you mind if I take a photo of you, so I can hang it on the wall? " He snapped and snapped away, and seemed to think himself well rewarded for the thirty-six clear clean negatives and the amazing enlargements I presently bore away.

 

 

' - - - |N SOME STRANGE way the adulation and respect shining out of Jason Wells's sloppy face, together with his professionalism and dedication, reawoke in me the feelings of self-worth that had slept through a wretchedly debilitating illness and had for far too long let a brain used to ten thousand revs a minute waste time looking for one across.

 

 

Jason Wells might find that a sloppy exterior was right for him, but it didn't match my normal on screen self. It was time, I decided, for the on screen self to go to work.

 

 

My grandmother's grand tweed cape-coat wasn't just Edwardian, it was splendid, it had presence. My clean-shaved chin was after all much better smooth. My hair, recombed, fell naturally again into its usual shapely BBC cut. I bought enough in a pharmacy for cleanliness, and a shirt, tie and pants in an outfitters, in order to look pressed. I acquired an overnight bag to contain everything, and some films, a new camera and batteries from Jason Wells.

 

 

All I needed after that was to stand up straight, give out my name, explain my needs and ask. Never mind that I still felt uncomfortably queasy. I'd forgotten, during the past battering weeks, the extent of my clout.

 

 

I wish to take a train to Heathrow airport, I said.

 

 

"Certainly, Dr. Stuart, this way. We have the Heathrow Express which takes fifteen minutes nonstop to the airport. " I want to fly to Miami.

 

 

"Certainly, Dr. Stuart. First class, of course? " I need to deposit this check with the credit card company in order to be in funds for the whole of my trip.

 

 

"Certainly, Dr. Stuart, the credit card company will send a representative to the first-class lounge at once to arrange it.

 

 

And you'll need some dollars, of course. " I have time for a shower before boarding.

 

 

"Certainly, Dr. Stuart. Our Special Services Department will see to your every need. " I have to make a phone call to my publishers in Kensington, and I would like to use a private room for a business meeting.

 

 

"No trouble at all, Dr. Stuart. Our business center is in the Executive Club lounge. " Cosseted in every way I found myself inevitably watching a television set. Equally inevitably, someone had switched on a channel showing the weather in store across the Atlantic.

 

 

"Bad weather ahead in Miami, Dr. Stuart, " I was told, with happy nods. They thought bad weather was naturally the motive for my journey, though only my last call, to the Met Office, had given me even a five-day notice of coming trouble.

 

 

Standing in front of Heathrow's best accurate weather update I heard that a weak cyclonic system might be developing in the Caribbean very late in the season. If it developed, which on past probability was unlikely, it would be designated tropical storm Sheila.

 

 

At present the millibar pressure of 1002 looked bound for a fizzle-out, but then so had Odin not so very long ago.

 

 

An announcer was explaining how modern methods of storm prediction saved money and lives. Preparedness, he said, couldn't deflect a storm but it could lessen some of its effects.

 

 

Knowing in advance was invaluable.

 

 

A world-weary businessman standing beside me, glass with ice in hand, looked with cynicism at real advances in atmospheric technology, and in boredom said, "So what else is new? " Doppler radar was new, I thought, and research had led to new satellites and computer generated three-D models... and there were idiots like hurricane hunters who flew into hurricane eyes and all but drowned. All those tremendous efforts had been made so that bored cynical businessmen could keep their gin and tonics dry.

 

 

Special Services collected me from there, offering armchairs, things to eat, newspapers with crosswords... London area telephone calls. I punched in my grandmother's number and, as I'd rather hoped, found my call answered byJett, who'd started her week there and sounded relieved to hear my voice.

 

 

"Where did you get to last night? " she asked anxiously.

 

 

"Kris says he has been looking for you everywhere. I was talking to him just ten minutes ago. He thought you might be here. "

 

 

"And I don't suppose, " I said regretfully, "that he was at all pleased with me. " "I wouldn't have told you, but no, he was very very angry.

 

 

So where are you, anyway? " I thought, if I can swim through a hurricane I can find my way through a labyrinth. I'd begun to understand where I was going, and I felt a shade reckless and lightheaded.

 

 

"Wait for me, " I said, smiling, "Forsaking all others... " "You'll be lucky! " "Keep the only unto me. " Why in hell, I thought, did I ever say that?

 

 

"For as long as we live? Do you know what you're quoting from? " I answered her this time with conviction, "For better or worse. " "Are you sure? " she said uncertainly. "Or is this just a joke? " "No one jokes about marriage on a Monday morning. No --, , or yesf "Then... yes. " "Good! Tell my gran that this time it's for keeps... and.

 

 

.

 

 

er... if I solve that crossword I'll be back later this week.

 

 

" "Perry! Is that all? It's not enough. " "Take care of yourselves, both of you, " I said, and put down the receiver as she said protestingly, "Perry! " not wanting me to go.

 

 

Did I mean it, I thought wildly? Did one really coolly suggest marriage on a Monday morning? Was it a stupid impulse or a forever sort of thing? Impulses like that, I answered myself, that seemed to come from nowhere, they weren't really impulses at all, they were decisions already made but waiting for an opportunity to be spoken aloud.

 

 

WHILE I DAYDREAMED aboutJett both John Rupert and Ghost traveled to Heathrow, finding their way to the business center, and both, from their expressions, were unprepared for the grandeur of my grandmother's cape-coat and the tidiness, strength of purpose and revived power of Stuart P. I smiled. How did they think I had ever climbed the meteorology ladder? And, thinking about ladders, were my publisher and my ghostwriter on rungs going up or going down?

 

 

On the telephone I had promised them an interesting package if they would drive to Terminal 4, and when they arrived I gave them the German orders and invoices, and also fresh copies I'd just made on the machines all around us.

 

 

I said, "These copies are enough to madden Oliver Quigley and Caspar Harvey, the Traders who are searching for them day and night. The originals were the collected works of George Loricroft, Trader deceased. He collected these orders from customers who met him for the purpose on racecourses, mainly in Germany. If he hadn't died he would have distributed these orders, one by one, to those who could either fill the order themselves, or pass it to someone who could. I suppose the contents of these folders are always fluid--I should think the number of buy or sell items is sometimes small, but this time, by good luck, there are fourteen. " I briefly paused.

 

 

"Belladonna Harvey, " I said, "doesn't know what's going on.

 

 

Nor does my fellow meteorologist, Kris Ironside. If you have any influence at all with whoever you call in to unzip the Traders, see if you can keep those two out of trouble. " My "authorities" said they would try, but even if they succeeded, I thought, I'd lost two friends for ever.

 

 

I looked at John Rupert and at Ghost with respect and growing affection. Few enough people gave their time as they did, living double lives without recognition. Ghost, as if feeling for me something of the same emotion at the same time, said he hoped we really would, one day, get to writing Storm.

 

 

"You'd better, after that huge advance,

 

 

"John Rupert said with irony.

 

 

Ghost, with a sudden urge, broke all secret-operative rules.

 

 

"Perry, " he said, his face full of private liking and professional indiscretion. "Feel better, your friends aren't likely to be prosecuted. Nor are Harvey or Quigley, unless they do something foolish. Our superior officer has decided to leave those two in place to start again. What we actually stalk the Traders for is what you've just given us, the written lists of the materials they are currently expecting their clients to buy and sell. If we manage to acquire a list--like this one, pure gold--we send each order, each component of the package, to our counterparts in Germany or wherever the activity is taking place, and they prosecute or close down or use whatever force they like.

 

 

We, John Rupert and I and some others, we see our job as identifying Traders (or whatever they happen to be calling themselves this year, this month, whatever) and then from that identification we set out to obtain or copy their requisitions, preferably without them knowing. Very often, like we'll do this time, we leave the Traders in place and active, so we can steal from them again. Those German letters you've found for us will put all those people who wrote them, who aimed to buy or sell--it will put all those people in court or out of business, some in a violent way, and it will collect and put into safe storage the materials they were offering for sale. Acquiring papers like those you have just given us, that is our job. That's how we choke off acts of terrorism, even before the terrorists get as far as their own detailed planning stage. You can't make a nuclear bomb if you can't get the hot stuff. " He stopped, but not from regret at what he'd said, more in satisfaction.

 

 

John Rupert, the one who might more likely have disapproved of this frank disclosure and have tried to stop Ghost's abandonment of "need to know"--even John Rupert was nodding in approval.

 

 

"You'll see now that we know more about uranium and so on than we admit to, " he confessed. "We hide behind ignorance to be safe. We wanted to enlighten you on Friday in the hospital. Our superior officer won't be pleased that we have. " "Don't tell him, " I said.

 

 

I shook their hands, one by one, with commitment and warmth.

 

 

John Rupert said, "What we're always looking for are red hot letters like those in the folder you first came to tell us about. All those foreign scripts! " "As far as we know they've never resurfaced, " Ghost said.

 

 

"They are so sensitive they must be in someone's safekeeping.

 

 

Funny if they're back where they started. " John Rupert thought the idea frivolous. Ignorins it, he said, "There are antiterrorist governments in Russia and in Germany and of course in many other countries. They welcome what we can send them. We never know exactly when we prevent sabotage or blackmail, but we receive intense expressions of thanks. " "But, " Ghost warned, "do you remember we told you about the man in the Everglades? " "The one who was shot for seeing too much? " "That's right, " Ghost said. "We knew him. So take care, Perry. The Traders are sometimes not lethal, as you know, but the basic bomb merchants, the ones who physically write their orders for enriched uranium, they almost always are. " Before I could make any promise the Special Services man bustled up kindly to fetch me, and he set off at a fast walk, carrying my holdall and telling me the airplane had boarded all except for me.

 

 

I waved briefly to John Rupert and my ghost. They'd told me for certain what I'd mostly surmised. The Traders were middlemen, and John Rupert, Ghost and others like them, were middlemen catchers.

 

 

I walked into the humming engine noise of the almost full airplane to be greeted by a chorus of knowledgeable eyes staring and elbows going nudge-nudge, and I wondered how many million years made up the half-life of a Trader-hunter.

 

 

THE SPECIAL SERVICES Department had outdone itself by arranging a rental car to be ready for me to collect at Miami, and the one I picked up had the added unexpected blessing of a talking map display. "Turn left at the next intersection for the Federal Highway to Sand Dollar Beach... " I twiddled knobs and found a radio weather channel busy with things to come.

 

 

An extremely rapid voice rattled off, "There has been a weakening trend and a change in the direction of the upper winds over the western end of the Caribbean, with a consequent strengthening of the cyclonic system further east, which we have just heard has now officially been designated tropical storm Sheila, with sustained winds of over fifty miles an hour. Coordinates of Sheila, as of four o'clock Eastern Standard Time this afternoon, were sixteen degrees north, seventy-eight west, moving northwest at approximately ten miles an hour. Now we'll bring you your local forecast, after these messages... " The voice sounded as if he were uninterested, except for trying to complete the weather bulletin as quickly as possible, so as to get back to the commercials, always (as the source of the channel's income) more important than the formation of gale-force winds.

 

 

The coordinates given put Sheila about four hundred miles southeast of Grand Cayman Island, not enough of a threat yet for Michael and Amy Ford to nail onto their huge house panels of sea-repelling plywood.

 

 

I switched channels.

 

 

"Continue down Federal Highway, straight ahead over the next intersection, take the left fork ahead... " The car took me to the street and a memory for numbers took me to Robin Darcy's spreading house.

 

 

It was dark by then. I rang the bell with a feeling of stepping off a cliff.

 

 

It wasn't Robin himself who opened the heavy medieval type front door. Evelyn, slender in floor-length black and iridescent with long ropes of bugle beads and pearls, had been expecting someone else. Her welcoming smile faded to a shrewd inspection of me from toes to eyebrows while she acknowledged unwillingly to herself that she knew my name, that I'd been a guest in her house three weeks earlier and that she now regretted it. "Perry Stuart, " she said accusingly, "why are you here? Surely Robin can't be expecting you. " Robin himself appeared, framed in a double doorway across the marble-floored hall. There was an essential stillness in him, none of the flutter of host toward valued guest.

 

 

"Yes, " he said calmly. "Perry Stuart. Yes, I was expecting you. Maybe not tonight, maybe tomorrow, but yes, expecting you. How did you get here? " "British Airways and Hertz, " I said. "And you? " He smiled faintly. "Come in, " he said. "American Airlines and wife. " I walked forward into the center of the entrance hall and stopped under the lit chandelier. Ahead, as I remembered, lay the sitting room, with, beyond that, the terrace where we'd sat in the evening, and below that, the pool. Standing where I was, I had the bedroom I'd slept in on my right. Robin and Evelyn inhabited un mapped regions to my left, along with kitchens by the square mile and, in its furthest reaches, the big room allotted to Kris.

 

 

"Well? " Darcy asked.

 

 

Behind me, unmistakably, Evelyn cocked a handgun.

 

 

"Don't shoot him. " Darcy said it without heat. "It would be , , unwise.

 

 

Evelyn protested,

 

 

"But isn't he the one... ? " "He's the one, " Robin Darcy agreed, "but he's not much use to us dead. " I was wearing the new white shirt and dark gray pants, but not the Edwardian greatcoat, and in general looked as I had at Caspar Harvey's lunch.

 

 

Robin too, conventional, unimpressive, chubbily round, Robin with tepid eyes behind the black owl frames--he too looked as if his day-to-day business occupation, his propagation of sods, made up the total pattern of his life.

 

 

I stood quietly under the chandelier thinking I would have miscalculated disastrously if his curiosity wasn't strong enough to keep me alive. After a tense little pause he walked round to his wife, and although I couldn't stifle an involuntary swallow altogether, I managed not to move or speak.

 

 

"Hmph, " he said. "Cold under fire. " He walked round in front of me, holding the gun loosely and removing the bullets.

 

 

"What do you think of, " he asked with evident interest, "when you're not sure the next instant won't be your last? I've een you twice stand motionless like that. " "Petrifaction, " I said. "Fear. " He twitched his mouth and shook his head. "Not in my book. Want a drink? " Evelyn made a no-no gesture, but Robin turned and walked back into the sitting room where a champagne bottle stood open alongside four crystal glasses.

 

 

"As you ran away from me last night in London, " he said to me as I followed him, "or to put it more accurately, early this morning, I am to conclude, am I not, that you have come to apologize and return what Kris wanted to give me? " I tasted the champagne, dry but with too many bubbles. I jL set the narrow flute down. "I don't think you should conclude anything like that, " I said peacefully.

 

 

"Get rid of him, " Evelyn urged, looking at her watch.

 

 

Robin also looked at his watch and then, nodding to Evelyn, said, "Of course you're right, my dear, " and to me, "Can you come back tomorrow? Same sort of time? " It sounded a most normal invitation. Which of us, I wondered, looked the more trusting and meant candor least?

 

 

Evelyn ushered me fast to the front door. Robin, when I glanced back, was watching my departure with expressionless eyes. Whatever he wanted to say to me could not be said in front of his wife.

 

 

Outside in the warm night, with the door closed firmly behind my back, I retrieved the rental car, drove it to the nearest busy shops, parked it outside a four-screen cinema and walked the short distance back to the Darcys'.

 

 

Bright lights now shone on the driveway and on the heavy door. I waited concealed in rampant greenery across the road as near as possible to the house, knowing the expected guests could be strangers but from Evelyn's urgency, hoping not.

 

 

Evelyn the Pearls had done a splendid semaphore act with her watch, and also Robin with his four waiting champagne glasses, but they had flagged only half of the story. When the guests arrived both Evelyn and Robin appeared in the brightly lit doorway to greet them.

 

 

The guests, unmistakable anywhere, were Michael Ford and Amy. Evelyn and Robin welcomed them effusively, and the car's driver, in a black baseball cap, slipped quietly out of the long vehicle and into hiding not far from where I crouched, stepping out later from deep cover to move in and out of the striped shadows of palm fronds, slowly making a bodyguard's circuit to keep his employers safe.

 

 

The only real difference between him and me was that he carried a gun and I didn't.

 

 

The bodyguard-chauffeur finished one of his mostly invisible circuits and stopped in the roadway by Darcy's gates, directly opposite my own patch of concealment. In the deep starlight he leaned against a tree and lit a cigarette, and there he stayed on watch, without alarm of any sort, the sweet smell of burning tobacco drifting across as the evening's sole entertainment.

 

 

He and I both waited two and a half hours for Michael and Amy to reappear. The chauffeur came to life with ease to open rear car doors and drive away, and I, still pinned with stiff muscles, was about to cross the road to where Robin stood in his doorway looking at his guests' departing car when Evelyn, appearing behind him, put her hand persuasively on his shoulder and drew him into the house.

 

 

The inside lights went off progressively until they shone only in their owners' bedroom, and I saw no likelihood that night of getting Robin on his own. Evelyn was a complication and a nuisance.

 

 

Thanks to her I'd wasted a long time learning the leaf shapes of enveloping Florida bushes, and thought them a poor exchange for the rear end registration number of the visitors' car, which showed its home state unsurprisingly to be Florida.

 

 

To Michael and Amy, I learned later, the Cayman Island house was a weekend cottage. An equally grand house north of Miami was home.

 

 

My rental car, collected from outside the cinema, had been too far away for me to be able to follow Michael and Amy if I'd tried, but it was Robin alone I wanted. I hadn't known Michael and Amy wouldn't be in their house on Grand Cayman, and they weren't anywhere in sight when I returned to the middling motel one road back from the beach that had seemed to me a faceless place to stay.

 

 

In the frugal but reasonably comfortable motel room I wrote a long letter to Jett, telling her on paper all the loving things I found it difficult to say to her face. My dear grandmother might warn her that I'd loved and left three times in the past, but Jett was different... and how did one define "different"? Except that anyone who could love Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X was as different as Pu-239.

 

 

The television in my room predicted a short life for tropical storm Sheila, now located over open water at sixteen degrees north, seventy-nine degrees west, and still traveling northwest at ten miles an hour. A map was screened briefly, with a storm warning issued for a place called Rosalind Bank.

 

 

By morning it was raining on poor old Rosalind Bank, but tropical storm Sheila, although now circling with sixty-mi lean-hour winds, showed few serious signs of organization and was traveling north.

 

 

Tropical storm Sheila, I mentally calculated, was about six hundred miles due south of Sand Dollar Beach. If she went on traveling due north (very unlikely), she would hit the Darcy house in roughly sixty hours, or nine o'clock in the evening on Thursday, two and a half days ahead.

 

 

Tropical storm Sheila perversely then wriggled round to northwest again and, speeding up, earned hurricane status, Category I. Apart from swimming in the still blue and tranquil Atlantic , spent a good part of the day filling hours as profitably as posiible by buying and making revealing lists from a detailed Florida racing form newspaper. I sent a copy of my labors to West Kensington by courier and then spent time repacking both clothes and mind, and used some of the hours left talking to Will on the phone at the Miami Hurricane Center (Sheila strengthening nicely) and to Unwin to thank him for the camera.

 

 

Unwin had an answering service that said he was out, but at my third try he lifted his receiver and after surprised hellos said he was real pleased to hear I'd got pictures out of that little mud-bucket.

 

 

I asked him about Amy's day on Trox and learned some new four-letter profanities. Never again, Unwin said, would he fly that woman anywhere. And yes, he agreed, she had had the safe open and shut again, and wouldn't let anyone else near it.

 

 

He listened carefully to what I suggested, and after he'd thoroughly sucked his long yellow teeth and considered things he said there would be no difficulty, and he would call me back.

 

 

It was much later than I'd intended to be still at the motel when he at length came on the line, but the delay had been worth it. Tomorrow was all fixed. He'd completed the paperwork.

 

 

"Sleep well, Perry, " he said.

 

 

DROVE AND walked to the same place as the evening re fore and at Robin Darcy's house pressed the bell.

 

 

F

 

 

b i] t, -..

 

 

This time, as if he'd been waiting there, Robin Darcy opened the heavy door himself immediately, and stood there unmoving, the light from inside shining on his back making his whole body immobile in silhouette.

 

 

He looked not exactly deadly, but most definitely a threat.

 

 

From his point of view he saw, lit from in front against darkness beyond, a man taller than he, and younger and thinner and certainly with better eyesight, but one with only a fraction of the knowledge and experience he needed.

 

 

Darcy didn't ask me in. He said,

 

 

"Where are George Loricroft's letters? " I replied flatly, "Germany. " "For whose benefit? " "If you don't know, " I said, "I'll go home. " A triumphant voice of West Berkshire origin grated suddenly and loudly behind me, "You're going nowhere, mate.

 

 

And this bit of hardware jamming into your kidneys, this is no toy, it makes holes in silly boys. " I said lightly to Robin Darcy, "Do you have an endless supply of these things? " and I saw the flash behind the glasses that perhaps meant a warning. In any case he turned on his heel, jerked his head at me to follow and walked silently in felt slippers across the marble and into the distant sitting room.

 

 

I didn't need to be told that it was Michael Ford's shoes squeaking behind me, nor that it was Amy's sandals tip-tapping away beside him in an echo of Glenda Loricroft's high-heeled boots.

 

 

"Stop there and turn round, " Michael ordered, and the brief view I had of anxiety on Darcy's face, as I did what I was told, reminded me unsettlingly of alligators.

 

 

Michael wore khaki-colored knee-length shorts with a white short-sleeved top that purposefully revealed his weight trained biceps. The slight bow to his legs gave, as before, the impression that his muscular shoulders were too heavy for his knees, and his thick neck left no doubt that, in general, opposing his strength was futile.

 

 

Amy, her small-boned pared-down little face smiling with satisfaction, clearly thought me a total fool to have walked into such a simple ambush. She, in fawn pants and look-alike white shirt like Michael's, carried also a look-alike gun.

 

 

Ignoring the gun as if it were invisible I said to her with gushing pleasure, "Hello Amy, how lovely to see you! It seems so long since I stayed with you the night I was rescued from Trox Island. " I meant what I said as simply a way towards sheathing the swords, so to speak, but Amy frowned and snapped back very sharply, "You were never, " she said, "on Trox Island. " Into my obvious amazement, she said,

 

 

"Trox Island is mine, and no one has any claim to anything on it since Hurricane Odin. I repeat, you were NEVER there. You must have been saved from some other island. You have got them mixed up. " Michael nodded in agreement with watchful eyes, and said, "Everything on Trox Island is Amy's. If you have never been there, which of course you have not, you cannot claim it or anything on it. " "Kris... " I began.

 

 

"Your friend Kris agrees he never went there either. " My friend Unwin might tell it differently, I thought, and put Trox for the while on hold. The immediate present needed more like an intensive care unit, emergency-room treatment.

 

 

I still wanted to get Darcy alone.

 

 

Michael, Amy and Robin Darcy, I thought in clarification, these three were active Traders, active middlemen. Then there were three more, at least, in their group. There was Evelyn, and the one who had done bodyguard duty the evening before, patient and loyal and carrying a gun. A sixth was perhaps the pilot who had flown the Downsouth rental aircraft that I had ridden in blindfold.

 

 

All of them at times had borne arms, but I judged Evelyn in her jewels and grooming and forceful opinions to be most trigger-happy. She, of them all, I feared most at my back.

 

 

I said to Michael, turning in the sitting room to face him, "Why the artillery? What's the point? " "Letters in German. " I said,

 

 

"What letters? " Even Robin Darcy didn't know exactly, I saw. If Kris hadn't told him about his joke on Oliver Quigley, the others probably wouldn't have known the German letters existed.

 

 

Probably... but nothing was certain in their mixed-up world.

 

 

Michael said, "Who did you sell those letters to? " Shit, I thought. I said again,

 

 

"What letters? " Darcy said to me, "Tell him for your own good. " I thought only that the conversation, if one could call it that, was on many levels unsatisfactory. They wanted one thing, and I another. My turn. Plunge in.

 

 

I h

 

 

I

 

 

i L s- -- I said to Amy, "How did your horse run at Calder races on Saturday? " I might as well have thrown a bomb myself. Shock waves visibly ran down Amy's shooting arm until the round black hole at the end of the barrel pointed to the floor instead of my navel. Her intense reaction proved satisfactorily to me that she too used racecourses as trading posts. The long list that I had sent to Kensington had been of dates and places where, as an owner, Amy had cover. The lists had been, in my mind, one of the possibilities awaiting proof. After this, I thought, John Rupert and Ghost might know where to look.

 

 

Robin Darcy stiffened.

 

 

Michael Ford flexed his awesome muscles.

 

 

Evelyn walked in with the uniformed chauffeur bodyguard-general purpose help. No one introduced him, though the others called him Arnold. He no longer wore the baseball cap or showed any sign of being a servant, and I wouldn't have recognized him if I hadn't watched him smoking a whole packet of cigarettes for nearing two hours.

 

 

Arnold, in his black shirt, wore his pistol holstered under his left arm with straps like braces to hold its weight.

 

 

Brought up from childhood in a no-handguns culture, I'd never fired a shot, and had never before regretted it, but in the Darcy house I felt naked. To go barehanded into a gunfight promised a shortcut to the hearse.

 

 

Evelyn carried--of cour sc her weapon of yesterday, presumably now refilled with bullets. It would be pointless to ask her to lower the rising temperature of threat in the room when she was more likely with her loud menacing voice to stoke things up.

 

 

Only Robin Darcy, at the moment unarmed, made anxious attempts at common sense.

 

 

Michael Ford's opening attitude of belligerence had increased as if self-generating. He bunched his muscles repeatedly until it seemed it was solely for destruction's sake that he had developed them. Those descriptive words "spoiling for a fight" flickered across my own pacific mind and I sought automatically for body language that would defuse him.

 

 

The Perry Stuart of his grandmother's greatcoat, however, thought cringing to be not much of an option. Whatever Michael read of involuntary defiance in my face, it only enraged him more.

 

 

Amy, who seemed to read her husband as clearly as the Racing Form, quite obviously put her money on the champ, not just to win but to deter any thought I might have had of taking him on again afterwards. She was smiling. She likes to see him fight, I thought. She's aroused by it. She would have howled for blood in the Colosseum.

 

 

"Go on, Michael, " she urged him. "Make him tell you what he really did with those German orders. You can't let him get away with it. Chop him up, Michael. " None of them bar Robin Darcy showed any wish or indeed any ability to discuss anything, including the German letters, except at the point of a waving firearm. They violently invented gruesome threats (but not about alligators) until, encouraged and wound up by noise and shouting from the others, Michael's core of basic lawlessness let go like an avalanche, at first beginning in a slow slide and then pouring itself out at an increasing speed until its momentum couldn't be stopped.

 

 

In Michael Ford terms an avalanche meant a full heavy attack with bunched fists and with lifting his victim clean off the floor and throwing him against sharp-edged furniture to the accompaniment of cheering from his wife.

 

 

Evelyn and Arnold applauded.

 

 

Only my host was silent.

 

 

My efforts at lessening Michael's onslaught by punching where I could, at dodging and at kicking or crashing his head on the wall, weren't enough. I couldn't ever at the best of times have beaten him at his own professional skill.

 

 

He took his time. He was deliberate. He made every contact count.

 

 

At one point when I'd escaped from him across the room, and he was pausing to take breath, I rolled on Evelyn's best rug and kicked Darcy's feet from under him, pulling his head down by the hair, his ear to my mouth, and I said clearly but intensely, and with no little desperation, "Open the terrace door and go to bed. " I saw his eye-widening astonishment before Michael came roaring back from his breather, and with increasing mindless urging from his cohorts set about proving again the pulping potential of his muscles, and it seemed that he himself was unleashing his maximum power simply because he had so few opportunities for it in real life.

 

 

Exhausted defeat was already a close certainty, and I was on my knees, both in fact and metaphorically, when Darcy | reached the heavy sliding glass doors to the terrace. I couldn't by then have pulled even one those open myself at any speed, but when I saw Robin Darcy yank a huge glass panel aside against friction and heard the grate of the door's gliders, when I heard the waves down below on the shore and smelled the salt air, when a way out of being kicked to extinction lay there for the taking, then from somewhere I scraped up every vestige of resilience uneaten by myco-bugs, and I rolled under Michael's hammering foot and crawled a yard like an infant and thrust every enfeebled sinew into panic action... and I was out through the glass door and halfway across the terrace before they began with shouts to follow.

 

 

I stumbled as if inebriated down the stone staircase from terrace to pool deck, and untidily fell rather than dived into the water, horrified by the weakness that made a futility of my efforts to swim at even half of my normal speed in my own natural element.

 

 

If I'd hoped the one-sided fight would end at that point, I was wrong. Michael Ford's appetite merely changed direction.

 

 

He decided against following me fully clothe into the water but instead snatched his gun back from Amy and shot at me, the bullets splashing with appalling heat a great deal too close.

 

 

The prospect of a dead well-known meteorologist in a private pool in Florida, a body moreover plugged with bullets from a registered gun, still seemed not to deter Michael, nor get it through the thick skulls of Michael's pack that his success would be their time in jail.

 

 

I no longer tried swimming in fast circles to avoid straight lines from his barrel. I could no longer work out lines of refraction. I simply clung in wretched feebleness to the bar round the inside of the top of the pool and I shrank into the too-small shadow of the tiled overhang while Michael whooped with undiminished bloodlust, and, having no success from where he stood, galloped round the pool deck to get at me from the other side.

 

 

The water slowed the bullets' speed, but not enough. Refraction as a really useful shield in water worked better the deeper the target, as the bent rays of light made the target appear where it was not. If one shot at the apparent victim, one would miss the real one. Deep water... I gulped air and swam downwards, and the bullets missed, but Odin hadn't taxed my lungs more.

 

 

It seemed ages, this time, before the floodlights poured onto the terrace and pool, until the swarm of navy blue uniforms erupted from the bushes with sirens and bullhorns and shouts and meaningful guns... It seemed familiar that I should be ordered at rough gunpoint to get out of the water and to kneel and be pressed down with a heavy hand at my neck, and be screamed at in gibberish in my ear and have handcuffs clicked onto my wrists behind my back.

 

 

The police weren't the same ones as those that had come before. These were if anything more afraid and in consequence more bullying. As I'd virtually summoned them to save my life, I couldn't complain.

 

 

Across the pool, Michael, in the same ignominious kneeling position, was talking his way out, "A bit of fun, officer, merely a game, " and claiming friendship with the police captain and with the commissioner further up the scale.

 

 

Arnold, along with Evelyn and Amy, could none of them understand why they should be treated this way. It was outrageous.

 

 

The police would be demoted, every one.

 

 

"What's your take-home pay? " Michael was asking. "I could double it. " Into this over dramatic scene ambled Robin Darcy, yawning, clad in a silk dressing robe, seeking out the highest blue rank and apologizing that his guests should have set off all the intruder alarms. "Very sorry, lieutenant. The alarm sets itself on a timer to summon you automatically. " Darcy promised the false alarm wouldn't happen again. He was afraid his guests had been playing boisterous party games. It was his fault entirely for having forgotten to switch off the system. He would of course be pleased to contribute as usual to the Police Ball Fund.

 

 

Robin Darcy, with small anxious-looking steps, then accompanied the lieutenant around, followed by a disappointed blue uniform wielding an undo-handcuffs key. They came with liberation via a spitting-mad Amy, a loudly furious Evelyn ("in my own house! ") and a growling deep bass from Arnold.

 

 

Michael, though violently threatening unspecified revenge on everyone, was unlocked also, to my extreme dismay.

 

 

"We might have booked all your guests for aggressive behavior, " the top rank said, slotting away his notebook and pen, "if it weren't for Sheila. " Darcy reminded him that I still knelt there patiently, though in fact at the time the patience was at least half too much tiredness to do anything else.

 

 

"Who is Sheila? " Darcy asked.

 

 

The blue uniform raised his eyebrows. "Hurricane, " he said succinctly. "We don't want our cells filled with playboys. " His assistant unlocked my wrists, but Michael had more or less pulverized my ability to stand. The lieutenant, seeing it, warned that hurricane or no hurricane Mr. Ford would find himself behind bars if there was any more trouble.

 

 

The policemen, job done, put up their guns and departed, and Evelyn, in bossy hostess mode, shepherded her guests, even including Michael, back into the house. She gave me merely a furious glance and left me outside.

 

 

s AT I N one of the pool chairs and gazed at the peaceful sky.

 

 

I supposed I could put up with the discomfort that washed in waves through my protesting body, I could put up with it better if anything had been achieved, but it was too soon to say.

 

 

Somewhere distant in the house a telephone rang and was answered. The security firm, I remembered, checked that all was well in the household, after a police raid ending without arrest.

 

 

It was thanks to Sheila that there had been no arrest.

 

 

Robin Darcy, alone, came down from the terrace and took the chair beside me.

 

 

"Thank you, " I said, and he nodded.

 

 

He sat for a while without speaking, watching me as if I were some kind of beetle. All he could see, I imagined, was the stiff soreness that made movement a trial, the legacy of Michael's ferocious fists and feet.

 

 

I asked if Michael was still around, and Darcy said no, because of the police warning Michael had gone tail-down to the house he and Amy owned north of Miami.

 

 

Like a fed lion, I thought. Sated.

 

 

"He can be brutal when he gets going, " Darcy said.

 

 

Ye-.

 

 

Pc Minutes passed.

 

 

I said, "Will you fly with me tomorrow to Trox Island? " He stood up abruptly, as if I'd drawn a knife on him, and jerkily walked a circuit round the pool. Returning, he sat as before and asked, to my surprise, "How do you see me? " I smiled involuntarily.

 

 

"When I went to Caspar Harvey's lunch that Sunday, " I said, "Bell Harvey told me you'd been born clever, and I wasn't to be fooled by your cozy appearance. " "Bella! I didn't think of her as so perceptive. " He sounded put out by it.

 

 

"I listened to her, " I said, "but on that day I didn't imagine I needed to pay much attention to what she said. " "And on the whole, I thought you were hardly bright enough for your job. " He sounded suddenly depressed, saddened beyond expectation, as if he'd lost a major game. He had believed in himself too much, I thought.

 

 

"I listened to Bell, " I said, "and during our stay with you and with Michael and Amy, and after our disaster in Odin, where I learned about the Unified Trading Company, I saw that you were the one who knew how to achieve things, and because I liked you, I regretted very much that you dealt in deadly metals. " He said,

 

 

"And do you now think I don't deal in those metals? " "Oh, no, " I said. "I'm certain you do. " "I don't understand you. " I said, "Your purpose is inside out. " "Perry... " He was restless. "You talk in riddles. " "Yes, so do you. You sent me a message to find my way through a labyrinth, and... well... I have. " Robin Darcy looked stunned.

 

 

I said, "You are John Rupert's superior officer. " I waited for him to deny it, but he didn't. He looked pale.

 

 

Breathless. Horrified.

 

 

"John Rupert and Ghost consult you, " I said, "and you tell them what to do. They are part of a hierarchy of which you are the top. " Robin Darcy stared, blinked, took off his owl frames, polished them needlessly, replaced them, cleared his throat and asked how I came to such a conclusion.

 

 

I merely said that that morning I'd understood the workings of instinct and impulse. "And it simply crept into my mind, " I said, "that if I trusted my instinct in liking you, then you weren't evil, and if you weren't evil you weren't selling death, you were more likely defeating those that did. If you see things that way round it means that when you gather together a whole lot of destructive transfers, you prevent the worst ones from going through, and sometimes you manage to lose others, but you yourself remain unsuspected by your fellow Traders. You lead a very dangerous double life. Michael would probably kill you if he found out. So you needed me... or someone like me... to be your eyes, without me knowing it.

 

 

Everything I told John Rupert and Ghost went straight to you. " I smiled ruefully. "We'd have done better if we'd talked face to face. " Robin was shocked. "I couldn't have done that. " I guessed,

 

 

"It was outside need to know'? " He heard my irony, but he'd long trodden a double path where "need to know" divided life from death.

 

 

"So... will you come to Trox? " I asked again.

 

 

"What about Sheila? " "I'm afraid she may be along for the ride. " "Who's going with you? " he asked.

 

 

"You, me and the pilot. " "What pilot? Not Kris? " "Not Kris, " I agreed.

 

 

He sat in another long silence, then he said, "You're not fit to go anywhere. Why are we going? " "Hope, " was all I said, but he turned up the next morning at the General Aviation aircraft park at Miami Airport, early, as arranged.

 

 

I INTRODUCED HIM to Unwin and reunited him with the airplane, which was the same one, chartered from Downsouth, that he had flown in to Trox before.

 

 

Unwin gave me a broad grin and patted Robin Darcy on the back. Amused at the mixed Darcy expression at this piece of presumption, I checked again with our pilot how our trip looked for weather as I stowed my holdall in the cabin.

 

 

"The lady Sheila, " he said, "has overnight picked up her skirts and hiked northeast. She's Category 2 and building, and if I lived on Grand Cayman Island, I'd be hiring me this morning to go and fly me out. " Long years a professional, Unwin moved economically around the airplane and forgot nothing. I'd thought Kris a good pilot, but Unwin flew like silk. In his hands Trox Island appeared punctually in its coordinates and the solidified grass strip accepted the rented turbo-prop twin without lurch or slither. When he had braked to a standstill near the ruined church, Unwin climbed down alone and walked off by himself towards the remains of the village.

 

 

It seemed strange for me to be back on that land and stranger still to have Robin Darcy beside me.

 

 

As we sat in the seats behind the pilot's, I said to Robin, "You heard Amy say the island's hers? " He nodded.

 

 

"She maintains it's hers as no one else had set foot on it for months. Some sort of ancient law, I believe. " "She said I'd never been here. " "Yes, " Robin said, explaining, "she wants her claim unopposed.

 

 

" "I suppose you know, " I said to Darcy, "she stands to make a million or so from pasteurization techniques if she can keep that herd of cattle isolated. You must actually know that, as you helped her chase off the whole population with your radioactive mushrooms. You came back and tested that herd again in radiation protection suits the day you took me blindfolded to Cayman. The herd isn't radioactive and will be worth several fortunes... maybe. " "How do you mean... maybe? " I said, resigned, "I drank the milk of those cows, and it gave me a unique illness now called Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X. " He said with understanding, "So that's why you were in that hospital! But you've obviously thrown it off. That won't prove that you were on the island. " "The antibodies will. " He said, "Oh, " and then, "Oh, " again. "And culture dishes by the hundred, I suppose. " "Those too. " "So you can prove you were on the island. " I said, "Not only that. Amy won't like the illness you can get if there is a glitch in pasteurization. It's a fierce disease, acute at first and lingering after. It seems I still have weeks of treatment ahead before I'm cured. " I didn't care much to think about it, and to change the subject I said to Robin, "What became of the original folder full of letters in strange foreign scripts? " "The one you saw here, that you managed to get out of the safe? " "That one, " I agreed.

 

 

"I was astounded when John Rupert reported you'd seen it. " "But you came back here for it, " I said. "And you took it away the day you shipped me blindfolded to Cayman, and thank you for that. " He smiled. "It didn't fool you, though. " "Just saved me from a watery grave. " "Michael was all for dumping you"--Robin nodded, and went on with gloom--"and he was also keen to get on with making profits from the orders in the folder, as there had already been too many delays, so he took it when I wasn't looking. " Robin had had trouble with the Traders insisting on doing their own thing. He said, "Only last night Michael told me he wasn't very good with all those different scripts so he had given the folder to Amy to put it back in the safe here on Trox Island with all her cow stuff while he worked out what to do, and as far as I know it's still there. That must be one of the reasons why Michael will fight anyone anywhere, because he's made a fool of himself. " "Do you want that folder? " I asked.

 

 

"Of course. But the safe won't open. " "Who says? " I asked.

 

 

"Amy says it won't open so no one can take her cattle records. " "It might not matter, " I said. I brought Jason Wells's careful envelope of photos out of my holdall. "I took all of these on the island, " I said.

 

 

"The first ones are of the raked clean mushroom sheds before the hurricane, and of the village and cattle before the hurricane, and the last one of cows and the three of the foreign scripts are from after. " Robin looked with fascination at the pictures of the scripts.

 

 

"I'll use these, " he said. "Better than nothing. " I opened the aircraft's rear unfolding door and stairs and, blown sideways by the wind, I walked down them, not blindfolded and with clothes and shoes on, and Robin hesitantly stopped, holding onto the handrails.

 

 

"Come on, " I encouraged him. "There's no danger of radi|

 

 

- L

 

 

at ion The residents here were scared away by something like George Loricroft's little packet of alpha particle powder, which gave off a lot of noise but made no one sick. " Robin shrugged and followed me down the steps, and we walked in the blustery wind together towards the second of the thick-walled huts.

 

 

There were bulls about in the ruined village, and Friesian cows that mooed and rubbed against me, as I patted them with fondness despite the rotten time they'd given me. They were, after all, the world's only source of Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X. Robin and I went into the hut away from the gathering gale, and looked at the safe.

 

 

Robin tried 4373 3673 (HERE FORD) and nothing happened.

 

 

"Amy's right, " he said, frustrated. "It doesn't open. " "Try 3673 4373, " I said, "FORD HERE. " Robin gave me a gruesome look of skepticism but punched in the numbers. Still nothing, still immovable door.

 

 

"Hopeless, " Robin said. "Amy was right. " "Amy was right, " I agreed. "Amy knows her way about video rentals, and she may know about pasteurization, and she also knows about safes. " "How do you mean? " "There's no electricity on this island, " I said.

 

 

"I know that... " "So what powers the safe door? " Robin, clever in all ways except in elementary science, frowned and didn't answer.

 

 

"Batteries, " I said.

 

 

I slid downwards the small metal plate located under the display of numbers and letters, and there, side by side, stood a row of three very ordinary double-A batteries.

 

 

"But, " Robin objected, "it's got batteries in it, and it still doesn't open. " I said, "It's got three batteries, but it's got space for four.

 

 

"

 

 

I

 

 

fished in my holdall, brought out the unopened pack of four double A's that I had bought with my camera, and, removing the three old ones, I pushed the four new ones into place and closed the flap.

 

 

I pressed 4373 3673, listened to the sharp click, lifted the flat lever upwards and opened the door.

 

 

Inside there was Amy's row of cattle files and one familiar buff folder. I lifted it out, checked its contents and with a slightly ceremonial gesture handed it to Robin.

 

 

Astonished, he said, "How did you know how to open it? " I answered him,

 

 

"I spent four days alone on this island. I know this safe well. I discovered its password. I checked its batteries. I just couldn't decipher the scripts. " "I'll get that done, " Robin said. "I'll use them. Nothing you have done will be wasted. "

 

 

I

 

 

- L

 

 

EPILOCUE

 

 

VNWIN FLEW THROUGH Hurricane Sheila.

 

 

He flew three straight passes through the eye at ten thousand feet and leveled the fuel in the tanks as a matter of course.

 

 

Downsouth's turbo-prop twin, in his hands, took Category 3 pressures and wind speeds as merely numbers that he dictated for me to write down.

 

 

I didn't weep in the eye. The science was accurate, but the heart-wrench was missing.

 

 

Robin looked thoughtful and was airsick.

 

 

I carried the rescued folder in the holdall and Robin showed me, a few weeks later, several short handwritten notes in Hebrew, Greek, Russian and Arabic.

 

 

"They say thank you, " he said.

 

 

By then I'd returned to the BBC and put on for the winter the Edwardian cape-coat version of me, and over in Kensington John Rupert in pleased surprise said his superior officer wanted Perry Stuart raised to "need to know" status.

 

 

I and Ghost, thin white-haired grandfather, bounced vigorous young tempests into unputdownable textbooks that I signed by the hundreds in schools, and after that in five hundreds in bookstores.

 

 

I seldom saw Kris. One sordid anecdote too many scuppered his job finally with the BBC, despite his Norse god look-alike presence. No longer talking of trains, he spent the insurance from the Luton crunch on a drama course and let out his extravagant nature playing super heroes

 

 

Bell, who phoned me often for advice as a brother, swung as ever between love and exasperation, nuptials on, nuptials off, indecision rules, O. K. Behind my back my faithfulJett van Els conspired with my grandmother to make my Monday morning impulse irreversible, but with contentment we came in time to

 

 

"I do, ""I do, " and I gave her a ring and a promise.

 

 

Under the successful exterior, the damage inflicted on me by Michael Ford still stung as a painful memory, try as I might to ignore it. To have been smashed to a standstill by a thug, I told myself, wasn't an abject disgrace, it was one of life's little hiccups. Try telling that to the winds!

 

 

In Robin's dangerous double life, the Unified Trading Company faded away, to be replaced by new recruits who understood from day one that action first, report later was the wrong way round.

 

 

The Traders atrophied, the Select Group bloomed.

 

 

Evelyn left Robin with a goodbye note.

 

 

Jett stayed at home when Robin Darcy and I drove from his home in Miami to Florida's capital, Tallahassee, to hear Amy's claim to be the owner of Trox Island.

 

 

I gave evidence with photographs of having been there.

 

 

Ravi Chand clinched things with New Delhi grins, and Amy lost her claim but kept her cows.

 

 

Michael came to the hearing, too close on my horizon.

 

 

Michael's hunger, like a lion's, was awake and prowling.

 

 

He hadn't properly understood Ravi Chand's explanation of antibodies and in fury began taunting the Indian birth and skin color of the world expert witness. Who was he, Michael shouted, to interfere and to say his wife's cattle carried a sickness?

 

 

I left Ravi trying in vain to explain pasteurization techniques and went back into the room where the hearing had been held. I picked up the small churn of raw unpasteurized Trox milk that Amy had lied on oath was safe, and I took it outside and put it on the table near to Michael, and using a dipper, filled a glass and set it down.

 

 

Michael looked at the glass with disgust and at me with a sneer as an adversary well beaten and now afraid of a replay.

 

 

It was worth a try, I thought.

 

 

"Don't drink that, " I warned Michael. "It's unpasteurized.

 

 

It will make you ill. " I spoke the truth but, as I hoped, he didn't believe me.

 

 

Michael wouldn't have believed me if I'd said the sun was hot, and in arrogance and bravado, he drank the milk.

 

 

THAT EVENING, MICHAEL, about to become the second ever case of Mycobacterium para tuberculosis Chand-Stuart X lost his cool, shot an intruder and was having to answer the difficult question--why did the bullet in the intruder match the one removed from a man discovered facedown in the Everglades with his legs half eaten by alligators?

 

 

It wasn't Michael's day.

 

 

The End

 

.