“I’ve never seen you so upset, Nicky,” Gloria told him as she poured a second cup of coffee.
“Sandra Paris beat me twice in three days. She stole both of those flags from under my nose and I don’t even know how she did it. The only flag I managed to steal was the wrong one.”
“What did Mr. Schraeder say?”
“I haven’t told him yet.”
When he took the train back to Manhattan that afternoon, Nick fully expected his meeting with Art Schraeder to be a total disaster. He was prepared for the first real failure in his long career, prepared for the news to travel quickly among the people who were most likely to hire him.
He was not prepared for Schraeder to grant him one more chance. The man listened to his story with a sour expression on his face and finally said, “I would have done better hiring this Sandra Paris, apparently. There is one last opportunity to steal an old flag before they’re destroyed at the end of the month, but you’d have to fly to Coronado to do it. What do you think?”
Nick would have traveled to the South Pole to redeem himself at that point. “Where is the flag?”
“In front of the presidential palace in Coronado City. The place is well guarded, of course. Stealing this one will be even harder than stealing the first two.”
“Those first two were pretty difficult for me. It can’t be any worse in Coronado City.”
He arrived there the following Monday morning and took a taxi to the presidential palace. His confidence dwindled when he saw the military guards surrounding the place, and he realized he knew very little about the island nation of Coronado. He picked up a guidebook for tourists and took it along to his hotel room to read. The hotel itself was a white-stucco structure of vaguely Spanish architecture, with balconies overlooking the palace across the square. Around the back was a patio lined with palm trees surrounding a large, inviting swimming pool. Nick changed into his trunks and relaxed there while he read the tourist’s guide.
The island had been discovered by Columbus on his second voyage, which accounted for the three sailing ships at anchor on the nation’s seal — even though, as the book explained, there had really been seventeen ships on that second voyage. The exact point of their anchorage was unknown. Coronado had been a Spanish possession until the late Nineteenth century, when it won its independence. And independent was the right word for Coronado. Nick knew from recent newspaper headlines that both the United States and Cuba were actively courting the tiny nation in an attempt to win rights to a naval base there.
Nick’s reading was interrupted by a gentle tap on his shoulder. “It seems we’re fated to keep meeting like this,” a voice above him said.
He looked up into the pale-blue eyes of Sandra Paris.
She was wearing a one-piece black bathing suit cut fashionably high on her hips — and might have been any young American tourist spending a few days away from the stress of her job. Her smile was both teasing and tempting as she enjoyed the surprise of her sudden appearance.
“What are you doing here?” Nick asked, rising to his feet.
“Can’t a working woman relax once in a while?”
“You’re not here to relax. You’re here to steal another flag.”
“My, my! You have a terrible opinion of me, Nick. Let’s go for a swim and cool off.” Without another word, she dove into the pool.
Nick followed reluctantly, diving deep and then surfacing next to her. “How did you do it?” he asked, treading water. “You were the bum in the doorway, weren’t you?”
“Of course. I wanted to reach out and grab your ankle, but I controlled myself.”
“Still, you were in the doorway and the flag was on the pole. How did you get it without my seeing anything?”
“The same way I did it in Washington. The same way I’ll do it here.”
“The flag at the presidential palace is a lot larger, and there are armed guards all over the place.”
“No problem.” She did a backflip and disappeared from view.
When she surfaced again, some distance away, Nick swam over to her. “This feuding between us is foolish. In a sense we’re both on the same side. Why don’t we team up and split the fees?”
Her pale eyes twinkled. “How would we split the flag?”
“You’ve got two already. Let me have this one.”
“My client needs all three.”
“What for? They’re just like the new ones.”
“No, not quite.”
“Tell me who you’re working for.”
“That’s against the rules.” She swam effortlessly to the ladder and pulled herself up. He followed along and when he reached her side she was toweling droplets of water from her long legs. “But the least I can do is tell you why the flags are important, since your own client obviously hasn’t. Want to come up to my room, or would that compromise you?”
“I’ll take my chances,” he said, as she slipped into a short terry-cloth robe.
She was on the eighth floor, two levels above Nick’s own room, with a perfect view across the park to the presidential palace. He settled into a chair by the balcony and watched while she removed two carefully folded flags from her luggage. Both were the familiar rainbow banners of Coronado, but one was clearly faded, with a tattered edge. “This one is from the Washington embassy,” she explained. “I bought the other one at a flag shop in Manhattan for comparison.” She unfolded the two flags on the bed where Nick could examine them.
“They look alike to me, except for the fading,” he said.
“Look at the seal in the middle.”
“Three sailing ships at anchor. What’s—? Oh, I see what you mean. The shape of the coastline is a little bit different. On the old seal they’re in a sort of cove. On the new flag they’re just along a shoreline.”
“That’s it.”
“That’s what? Why would that make the old flags so important to anyone?”
“Certain factions must want to preserve them. They don’t want them burned.”
“But flags are printed in full color in most almanacs and dictionaries. Anyone could see the old design without stealing the flag itself.”
“Not in this much detail. That seal would only be a tiny spot of color in reproductions. Even a printed description, ‘three sailing ships at anchor,’ wouldn’t tell the whole story. The ships are still there. It’s the coastline that’s changed.”
“You may be right,” Nick admitted, remembering how the mural on the wall of the New York consulate was being altered when he was there.
“Of course I’m right. There are two factions involved. One faction wants to keep the change secret, so it hired me to steal the remaining three flags. The other faction wants to reveal the change for its own purpose, so it only needs one of the flags.”
“What’s so important about the shape of the coastline?”
“That I don’t know,” she admitted.
Nick watched her fold the flags and return them to her suitcase. “Where’s the one from the New York consulate?”
“That’s already been delivered to my client.”
Her bedside telephone rang and she scooped it up with a quick motion. “Hello. Yes. Yes. I can’t talk now. Tomorrow, that’s right. Bye.”
“Your client?” Nick asked as she hung up.
She merely smiled. “I’ll have to ask you to leave now. I’m sure we both have a great deal to do.”
“I have a feeling I’ll see you tomorrow,” Nick said as he departed.
Nick wandered over to the palace at sundown and watched while the flag was lowered and folded by an honor guard of four soldiers. He knew that Sandra would make her move the following morning, true to her motto of impossible things before breakfast. If he hoped to steal the flag himself he would have to act first.