And once again, it suited the Saint to be useful.
He stood up and stretched.
“Well,” he said, “why don’t we go and fetch the Phoenix — and get to work?”
There was no dissent to that suggestion; and as he started up the dinghy and turned it around to head back the way they had come, he told them briefly about the sunken boat.
“One of those coastguard shells must have hit it,” he said. “The boat must have been sinking as he came around the headland here.”
“The luck of the man!” Descartes exclaimed. “He could have done it no better if he had planned it. To finish with such a cache which only he could find again!”
The Saint nodded.
“It was perfect. And the gold he left there was even earning a dividend, in a way.”
“A dividend? How do you mean?” Arabella’s brow creased.
“The value of gold fluctuates,” Simon said. “But it’s usually risen in the long run, and by more than the cost of living. So in real terms the gold he kept was an appreciating asset, year by year.”
Descartes leaned over with narrowed eyes, and tugged reflectively at his moustache.
“Then how does it happen, Monsieur Templar,” he said with a slow intentness of curiosity, “that the gold was worth five million dollars eleven years ago, and is now, according to your estimate, worth less?”
“That’s easy,” said the Saint, without batting an eyelid. “Our Karl was spending it. Maybe he was greedy. Or maybe he took a risk in the beginning, and cashed a big slice of it in, right away. Maybe he’s got a few million stashed away in numbered Swiss bank accounts that we’ll never know about. Maybe he did keep it all as gold, but moved some elsewhere. Maybe he was nervous about keeping all his golden eggs in one basket. Maybe—”
The Saint’s glibly assured string of “maybes” stopped in mid-air, not because his fertile brain had run out of postulated reasons why the quality of gold eventually brought up might be less by a hefty margin than Descartes might like, but because, as they approached the headland, they had just caught sight of the Phoenix coming around it towards them.
“Enrico, the fool! What is that suspicious idiot doing?” Descartes shouted.
He glared, jumped up off-centre in the dinghy, and again very nearly capsized it. For a moment he teetered comically, and then he sat heavily down.
The Phoenix was perhaps three or four hundred yards away and making good speed as she came towards them. Descartes had gone as red as the proverbial lobster at the thought that Bernadotti had taken it upon himself to bring the Phoenix around the point ahead of time, or had had Finnegan do it, in defiance of his instructions; but to Simon it seemed a fairly unimportant piece of self-assertion. Within seconds, he had adjusted his mind to the minor change of plan, and it was in that adaptive frame of mind that he throttled back the engine of the dinghy and began a leisurely turn to retrace their tracks towards the orange marker, which was presumably the yacht’s destination also, now that it was within sight. As he did so, he let his mind dwell on the practical task ahead. He had already assessed the number of gold bars — weighing exactly one kilogram each on dry land — that lay down there in the cargo hold under the sea; and now he occupied himself for a few seconds with some mental arithmetic.
There had been many moments in his adventure-crammed life when he had smelt danger ahead of time — when some seventh sense had tipped him off while there was yet a tissue-thin margin of milliseconds remaining — before the ground fell away as a sheer cliff-edge, or the bomb burst, or someone squeezed a trigger behind him or opened a trap-door to oblivion in front of him. But there were also times when, since he was human too, that early-warning system simply failed to operate — or operated only in the very last scintilla of time, when there was no space for considered action or decision, but only the autonomic “flight or fight” reaction of instinct to a threat too sudden to allow the intervention of anything as slow as thought.
And it was something like that for Simon Templar now, as his mind busied itself with thoughts of the gold bars awaiting collection, and of the means to be employed for that collection and of the number of dives he might have to make... while the Phoenix turned slightly so as to continue bearing down directly on the small rubber dinghy.
He had her in his field of vision the whole time, but his full attention was aroused only when Descartes and Arabella let out strangled yells at the same moment; and then the bows of the Phoenix were almost upon them.
Before he realised what he had done, Simon had grabbed Arabella’s hand and yanked her over the side with him in a double dive that took them some five feet under.
They surfaced, with Arabella spluttering and coughing from the water she had inhaled, and looked around. The Phoenix had tossed the little dinghy aside like a cork, and they could see it still bobbing about, now upside down on the sea, but holed and sinking fast, as the yacht continued on her course. But of Descartes there was no sign.
Simon duck-dived as the stern of the Phoenix passed them, perhaps twenty feet away. And under the waves he saw the great gross form of Jacques Descartes being drawn inexorably into the churning propellers.
There was absolutely nothing that anyone could have done at this point. Simon surfaced again and waited for Descartes’ body to appear, which it did after a few seconds, with a blood-red stain spreading around it, as the Phoenix ploughed on away from them.
2
Whatever else this new and totally unforseen development might mean, for the Saint and Arabella it certainly meant that their business with Jacques Descartes had been concluded in the most dramatic and final way possible. But it was by no means clear to either of them that their new situation represented an improvement over the uneasy bond of necessity which they — or at any rate Simon on behalf of them both — had had with the not totally dislikeable Frenchman whose gross and mangled body now floated belly-down on the surface of the sea.
Whoever was at the helm of the Phoenix had inexorably staked his own claim to the gold, and had demonstrated at the same time, with the chilling clarity of ice, his attitude to any competing claims. He had simply and efficiently mown the three of them down; and that he had not bothered to stop to see whether they were alive or dead was evidence of a singlemindedness which made even Simon Templar catch his breath.
It had not escaped him, however, that he was lucky to have breath to catch, after having allowed himself to be caught so thoroughly off his guard by the Phoenix on her deliberate collision course. And it had not escaped either him or Arabella that on an immediate practical level the options now open to them were starkly limited. Either they could stay where they were, treading water until they eventually drowned, or they could start swimming for the shore.
They started swimming.
But they had swum no more than a hundred yards when they heard the drumming of another boat’s engines behind them. They turned, and waved and splashed and shouted, but clearly they had already been seen.
The boat was a motor launch bearing the markings of the French coastguard; and as it came towards them they recognised the slightly pudgy form of Inspector Gerard Lebec.
“Thanks,” Simon said as they were helped aboard. “Small world, isn’t it?”
Lebec’s pale green eyes looked expressionlessly at the Saint. He nodded, then barked an order in French to the man at the helm. The man gunned the motor briefly and took the launch around in a tight turn to where the body of Descartes floated on the waves.