It was two in the morning before he eased aching muscles from layers of cloth and rubber. He wiped the Pontiac's interior with a cloth wherever some stray print might have clung, scrubbed his skin with the blue jacket to warm himself. What had he forgotten? Nothing.
Fool! The HP and the Llama both. The cold had made him stupid. He shoved the pistol into a rubber bag, leaving the zipper open for instant recovery, and set the HP alarm for a three-hour delay.
First light proved the Parisienne abandoned, strewn with expensive clothing and an empty attaché case under a mummy bag. Charles Graham spent most of the morning belowdecks with his spare mains'l, applying spurious United States Registration. He was tempted to abandon this business; it was one thing to snuff someone you actively disliked or who—you suspected—might be setting you up. But it was something else to kill some poor old helpless stranger. It would be a pleasure to put little Baztan over the side into Juan De Fuca—but Baztan, he thought, might not be the one who went over. Baztan might also become downright unpleasant if Graham did not show up at Port Angeles in the State of Washington. Sighing, Graham scanned the wharf for loiterers while he brewed tea in the galley. He did not think about the Pontiac, or about nearby boathouses.
At half-past eleven Graham cast off, easing the hull back on her inboard diesel. He was too busy to notice the splop and swirl from a neighboring boathouse, and got underway without the sails. He could crowd on plenty of sail once away from the Inner Harbour and into Victoria Harbour proper, but proceeded slowly until he could get some leeway. The diesel made a scant wake, but enough to hide the myriad of tiny bubbles that closed the gap toward his rudder, then disappeared torpedolike beneath his portside rail as he lounged at the tiller.
The Islander's sleek hull was designed to slip easily through the water and Graham assumed that some vagrant current was responsible for her sluggish performance. He would have reconsidered if he had seen the excrescences that rode her keel. A fathom below her waterline, rock-climber's carabiners snapped into place one by one as the manfish struggled to place himself in such a way that he felt minimal force from the water. He was fairly warm in his wetsuit under cotton clothing, but he had not yet felt the currents of Juan De Fuca, cold and treacherous as a spider's bride.
He felt more vulnerable as the sloop forged ahead. It might have been better to risk a border crossing afoot into Montana or Washington, he thought, but increased border patrols and sensing devices had made that chancy, even for Quebecois, who had provoked those precautions. He fumbled for a spare tank in the nearest B-four bag, letting the sling straps bite under his shoulders. It might not be such a bad trip, this way—unless his suit heater batteries failed.
The sloop coursed out from the city, under sail now, on a sou'easterly heading. Near the corner of St. Lawrence and Dallas streets a man watched her progress as he spoke into a telephone. "Yes-sir, no mistake, it's Graham's Bitch. Well, that's her name, Inspector, can I help it? Nossir, she could be on a tack toward Port Townsend or just on a pleasure cruise. Right, sir; not very likely for Charles Graham. All right, I have twenty-power glasses; I'll let you know if he heads for Dungeness or Port Angeles." He replaced the receiver, took up the glasses again. For an hour he watched the sloop. Then he made another call.
Near Buffalo, New York, a tiny craft plunged upward from the concrete airstrip, its pusher engine shrilling eagerly. Small by normal standards, the single-place Bede Five was also ridiculously fast. Its thin airfoils carried the additional burden of a long-range tank cupped flat against its belly. The Bede arrowed westward over Lake Erie, soon overtaking the ancient Republic Seabee amphibian that galumphed along on VFR at one thousand meters altitude. The Bede's pilot throttled back, lazing several kilometers in arrears, radioing his position as he passed the New York State shoreline and Route Ninety. He turned back only after learning that the big float-equipped Cessna from Erie, Pennsylvania was closing from the West and had the Seabee on radar.
Moments after the Bede had curved away on its homeward leg, the Cessna surged ahead. Its quarry was sinking toward the northern end of Lake Chautauqua, making no effort to pretend otherwise. The Cessna swept over the lake high enough for maneuvering advantage, yet low enough to land quickly. All three men in the Cessna were equipped with chutes and government-issue automatic weapons befitting agents of the FBI. The attaché in Ottawa had forwarded an RCMP sergeant's opinion that only a pilot was aboard the Seabee, but it was a capacious craft and might hide a stowaway for days. The pilot had filed a flight plan but had not contacted Customs. The Cessna hung back, waiting for the amphib to flare out for its controlled bellyflop.
And hung back. And hung back. The old Seabee droned down the narrow lake, swooping near the shore at picturesque spots and banking out again from time to time. At the southeast end of the lake, the Seabee began its sluggish return, and eventually passed northward back toward Lake Erie. In the Cessna, the three agents traded shrugs; for all its suspicious behavior, the Seabee had broken no law.
In Juan De Fuca Strait, Charles Graham waited until he was fifteen kilometers from the Canadian shore, then started the diesel again and changed mains'ls. Directly below, the manfish fought to free a spare tank from its lashings. Switching tanks under such conditions was a peril he had not fully appreciated and, his hands numb even with the heating elements, he was clumsy. The empty tank, moved by vagaries of the current, bumped hard against the keel and was gone, bobbing in the wake of the Bitch, a perfectly obvious sign to anyone who saw it. Graham was grunting over his halyards and saw nothing else; the huge dacron sail lay flaccid along the mains'l boom and required all his concentration. The manfish nearly lost his fresh tank as well but finally lashed it to his chest and hung in his straps, hands tucked under his armpits for warmth.
The crossing took nearly five hours. At one point the manfish saw, with a terror he denied, a great gray mass that levitated toward him from below. He fingered the Sharkill. No fish, he hoped, could possibly be so vast—and then he saw that it was a sandbar, the Bitch gliding so near it she could have run aground. He debated cutting loose to swim for shore which, he felt, must be very near. He waited for surer signs; a wise decision. He was two kilometers from land.
Port Angeles, huddled in the protecting arm of Angeles Point, sprawls along the Washington State side of Juan De Fuca Strait with its back to the rain-sodden Olympic Mountains. Charles Graham rounded the point in a subtle riptide to see the town, coming about expertly despite the odd sluggishness of the Bitch. He scanned the wharves for `Baztan,' who was much nearer than he knew, and offered a line to a friendly idler who caught it and made it fast. When he had secured the Bitch fore and aft, Graham stepped up to resecure the idler's clumsy work, then strolled away alert for a frail old man with a tough little man.
The friendly idler waited for a few moments, then shifted the toothpick in his mouth and dallied behind Graham. The FBI was better at tails than at knot-tying.
Fifty meters from the Bitch, a burly man under a long-billed cap nodded to another man, who adjusted his face plate, clamped his mouthpiece, and slid from his boat into the water. Once they bonded their transmitter just under the water-line near the stern of the Bitch, they could fix her location whenever they liked for as long as the battery lasted. The transmitter was disguised as marine growth. If Graham noticed it he would, at worst, only remove it. Customs and Immigration fretted about Graham on both sides of the border. The burgundy mains'l had almost fooled the watchers in Port Angeles but hull lettering and Graham's features had not changed. His mains'l could be explained as borrowed; a minor violation. Better to give him a long leash and, while they were at it, to check his hull. It would not be the first time a man had run contraband in his keel.