She came up three times to breathe and dived three times, surfacing closer to the boat than before and breaking the pattern, floating across the circle they were making and lifting suddenly from the surface as one of them rose from below and glanced across her back and I had a rope ready in my hands before she got her balance and crawl-stroked to the side of the boat and I helped her across the rail, 'He wasn't there,' with the water streaming from her body, 'the one I was looking for wasn't there,' streaming from her hair as she faced me with her green eyes shimmering as she lived through this little time in that particular state of grace that comes with a release from close communion with death, and then her hands were on me and she drew me down with her and the knife dropped to the hot scented timbers of the deck and lay beside us.
Blood on the deck.
'Yes?'
'I'm at sea, south of Cape Florida, ten miles from the mainland.'
In a moment: 'Condition?'
'Fully active.' The knife wound I'd taken last night had slashed the hip but hadn't cut deep muscle. I could still run if I had to.
She was wiping the blood off the deck over there by the starboard rail – the shark had grazed her shoulder blades when it had lifted her from the surface.
'The chief of the Miami Mafia,' Ferris said, 'has put out a contract on you, effective immediately. Did you know?'
'I could have guessed.' It explained the Nicko thing.
He caught the tone. 'They've made contact?'
'Yes.'
Another pause and then he said, 'In any case it's too dangerous for you to disembark at the quay as you did before. You're on board the tug?'
'Yes.'
He was keeping the exchange of information as brief as he could: we weren't using a scrambler. 'Stay there till dark and I'll have you taken off. They'll ask for your exact position later. Understood?'
'Yes.'
'Anything to add?'
'Yes. We're under surveillance.' The motor yacht with the limp sails had furled her canvas and had come within a mile of us under power and I'd caught the glint of twin lenses.
In a moment he said, 'Wait for the dark.'
Chapter 15: NIGHTFALL
'So who was firing on you?'
She was splicing a rope, making a loop-end, sitting on a box; she had a pair of khaki shorts on, nothing else, letting her back heal; all she'd asked me to do was throw sea-water over the abrasions.
'I don't know,' I said.
'I saw the whole thing. The fire and everything.' She worked at the rope. 'Did you think I'd set you up, Richard?'
'Why should I?'
'You were so wary of me, that day, is what I mean. So untrusting.' With a brief glance at me, 'But then I suppose you're wary of everyone, in your business, whatever that is.' Her tone changed, became more formal. 'There's nothing you want to tell me, and I understand that, but I need to know enough about last night, the boat crash, to satisfy myself that I'm not an accessory after the fact or concealing evidence or harbouring a criminal. I've got a good record and I work for the Miami police whenever they can use an extra diver, so I want to make sure I'm not getting involved in anything illegal. You've shown me your Foreign Office card but you can get those printed by some backstreet forger if you know where to find one.'
There were two steps down into the cabin and we were sitting at the forward end, out of sight from the sea. She knew about the surveillance: she'd seen the field glasses too.
The head of the Mafia,' I said, 'has put out a contract on me. Hence the shooting on the quay and hence my boat trip last night.' I told her about it. 'Hence also the surveillance they've put on us again. I want you to know,' leaning forward, 'that as soon as I'm taken off this boat I shall keep well out of your way.'
She looked up. 'Why?'
'Because it puts you at risk.'
'I know that. But I want to see you again.'
'One day.'
'Look, I'm hardly a tender blushing rose. I know Luigi Toufexis. I've met him. I did -'
'He's the Mafia chief?'
'Yes. I did a bit of undercover work for the police here once, got involved by accident and made myself useful. Toufexis is deadly, but you don't need telling that. Look, I pick up quite a bit of scuttlebut in my job – I know most of the boat owners and some of the Coastguard crews.' She looked down, making another splice. 'And the rumour that started going around a couple of days ago is that you're an international cocaine dealer working under UK Government cover and you came here to put Toufexis out of business. Hence, as you say, the contract.' She looked up to catch my expression. Wasn't any.
What she'd told me fell right into place: it had Proctor's signature on it. He wanted me blown away and he'd picked the most powerful weapon in Miami to do it with. Logical Bureau procedure.
'Is it true?' Kim asked me.
'No. George Proctor put that story out to bring Toufexis down on me.'
'You know that?'
'I know Proctor.' He would have preferred to make the kill personally, as a matter of honour, but he was obviously too occupied with other things. 'Does he use cocaine?'
'Yes. Or he did when I knew him.'
That fell into place too. Proctor had been known for his integrity, and that was why Croder was concerned about his lapses in signals to London. And he wasn't a man to blow his mind on cocaine just for kicks, so it must have been a response to his increasing frustration: the bullet near the heart had left him unusable as a shadow executive and he'd felt out of it, a has-been, felt emasculated, and the coke had given him back the strength-of-ten-men feeling, the grand illusion.
'Was he subject,' I asked Kim, 'to illusions of grandeur?'
'Sometimes. He told me once that he could run for the presidency if he weren't a foreigner.'
For the presidency. Fell into place again: he'd been exposed to subliminal influence and knew enough about Senator Mathieson Judd to imagine himself in Judd's position as a presidential candidate.
'Tell me about this man Judd, will you?'
Her mouth came open and for a moment she seemed disoriented; then she said without hesitation, 'Judd is not to be underestimated. He's a statesman with a world view that we haven't seen since Nixon, and he's not a megalomaniac. He's got to get into the White House because he's the only man in this country who can give it a new direction…'
My own thoughts dipped away and her voice sounded fainter; then I surfaced to the full light of consciousness and knew without any question that there hadn't been any time lapse: I hadn't missed anything she'd been saying.
'… It's not just the Americans who are concerned, this time – the whole world's involved, and much more than usual when there's a change of administration here. I very much hope the Thatcher government realises what we've got in Mathieson Judd, because the outcome of this election's going to have a major effect on the UK.'
It was word perfect: I could hear the echo of my own voice in my head. 'His understanding of the internecine struggle for power inside the Kremlin is infinitely deeper than we've seen before in any US president, thanks partly to the lifting of the veil by glasnost, sure, but Judd isn't missing a trick.'
She stopped, and in a moment looked down and pulled another strand into the splice. The swell lifted the boat again and I leaned lower, sighting along the stern rail. The yacht was still at the same distance. I couldn't see the light on the lenses this time.
'Go on,' I said.
She looked up. 'What?'
Tell me more about Judd.'
'That's all I know.'
A point, then, for the debriefing: Kim Harvester had come under the subliminal influence only in Proctor's flat, and not for very long. We could assume there was no radionic device on board the tug. She was not therefore a target, like Proctor. My own exposure had been different: I'd picked up some background material on Judd and also picked up instructions, which hadn't necessarily been for me.