“Tim?” she said, as though she did not really believe her eyes.
“It’s me,” I said, then I bent down and pulled Stephen into a sitting position, before, not without difficulty, hoisting him onto my shoulders. I could have released his ankles and forced him to walk, but I could not afford the time to let him struggle and it was simpler just to carry him. “By the way,” I said to Jackie when I had settled Stephen comfortably on my shoulders, “it really is wonderful to see you again.”
She immediately started crying again.
It took me ten minutes to get Stephen up to my crevice in the rocks. Once in my deep hiding place I pushed him deep down under the threatening overhang of wet rock. “Shoot the bugger if he gives you any trouble,” I told Jackie, then went and retrieved Stephen’s assault rifle that turned out to be an American M-16 with two spare magazines. I wriggled back into the crevice where a shivering Jackie had already taken shelter, and where Stephen, still inextricably knotted in my extravagant lengths of nylon rope, lay terrified in the deepest part of the narrow cave. Far beneath us, in the big courtyard of the farm settlement, the worried Genesis people gazed up at the ridge line.
“They probably think Stephen is taking a good long time to rape you,” I told Jackie, “but in a few minutes it’ll dawn on them that something has gone wrong, and then they’ll start looking for him. But I think we’ll be safe here as long as we keep our heads down.”
“Tim,” Jackie said. She was still shedding tears.
“I’ve been meaning to apologize to you,” I said, because I had decided that, on the childish principle of eating the vegetables first, I might as well eat my humble pie quickly. “I should have told you about the guns on Stormchild. It was stupid of me. I’m sorry, I really am. I don’t blame you for jumping ship, because I really should have been honest with you.”
“It wasn’t the guns,” Jackie said, then, after a sniff, she must have decided that her words had not made much sense. “That wasn’t why I ran away,” she explained.
“Oh,” I said feebly, and I knew I would have to make a much more embarrassing and comprehensive apology, in anticipation of which I felt my face reddening. I was tempted to drop the whole subject, but somehow it seemed important to clear what was left of our relationship, and so I took a deep breath, then launched myself into remorse. “I’m also sorry about what I said to you on Antigua, about wishing you’d stay with me. I never meant to upset you, but sometimes we say things that are stupid, and I’m sorry.” The apology sounded lame, but it had been heartfelt and the best I could achieve under these weird circumstances.
Jackie stared at me with her huge and solemn eyes. “I didn’t think it was stupid,” she said.
“It was a stupid thing to say,” I insisted, “because all it achieved was to drive you away from me, so it was clearly out of place and I’m really very sorry.” My embarrassment had made me turn away from her as I spoke. I was watching Lisl and two men walk toward the escarpment. All three carried rifles. “By the way,” I glanced at Jackie, “where the hell did you hide that day on Antigua? I looked everywhere for you. I even took a taxi to the airport in an attempt to find you.”
“I was on that Dutch boat. You remember? The couple we ate dinner with on your birthday?” She sniffed. “I waited with them until you sailed away, then I flew home. I’m sorry, Tim.” She sounded close to tears.
“I’m the one who should be sorry,” I said very robustly, “because I should never have been so clumsy as to say what I did.” I frowned at Stephen who was listening avidly to this exchange of mutual self-blame. His eyes, wide above the loops of gagging rope, seemed to express incredulity for what he heard. “Still”—I went on talking to Jackie—“it really is good to see you again. I missed you.”
“I missed you, too,” she said.
My heart skipped a beat, but I was determined not to make another fool of myself, so I did not respond to her words, which I was fairly sure were nothing but an expression of politeness. “I’m rather in the habit of missing things at the moment,” I told her instead. “David’s taken Stormchild off to sea, and if I don’t get him on the radio soon he’s going to sail off and ask for help. He’s got your friend with him, Berenice.”
“Berenice Tetterman?” Jackie asked in utter astonishment.
“The very same. She ran away. The bastards shot at her, but missed, and we took her on board.”
“But that’s her mother who was with me!” Jackie paused to take breath. “Molly came because I couldn’t persuade any newspaper to send me down here, so Molly sold her car and we used the money to fly to Santiago, and then we had to find our way down here and it was really hard because the car didn’t fetch a lot of money, and—”
“Quiet!” I said.
“I’m talking too much,” she said in bitter self-reproach.
“No.” I pointed down the escarpment to where Lisl and her two companions were climbing toward us. There had been little chance of Jackie’s voice carrying that far down the slope, but I wanted Jackie to be aware of the danger. “If we’re quiet and still,” I said, “they won’t find us. Then tonight we’ll rescue Molly, if she’s still alive.”
“Alive?” Jackie said. “You mean…” She could not continue.
“I mean they’re a murderous bloody bunch, but I don’t think they’ll kill Molly because they know the San Rafael is coming back for you both. But they are killers. I’ve got proof of it. I also killed one of them. I didn’t really, I just shot him and they did the rest, but I suppose it’s the same thing.” I stopped talking because Jackie was looking so very miserable. “I’m sorry,” I said after a while, “but you really don’t understand how bad these people are. And Nicole’s one of them.”
“Nicole?” Jackie stared at me with huge eyes. “You found her?”
I shook my head. “She’s at sea.” I sounded bleak.
“Maybe she isn’t like the others?” Jackie said tentatively.
“She is,” I said, “in fact, she may be one of the worst.”
“I’m sorry, Tim. God, I’m so sorry.” Jackie rested her face on her forearm and I thought she was praying, but then she spoke in a muffled voice. “I’m sorry for everything. I really am.”
“Quiet now,” I warned her, and I touched Jackie’s elbow to reinforce the warning, and she raised her tear-stained face to see that Lisl had climbed onto the dam’s embankment not forty yards from our hiding place. “Stephen!” Lisl peered into the rain, seeking her lost gunman. “Stephen!” Lisl shouted again as her two companions joined her on the dam’s wall. “Stephen!” They all shouted together.
“Make one little sound, Stephen,” I spoke very softly, “and I’ll dig your eyes out with a marlinespike.”
Stephen, who was staring at us from the cave’s recess, made a gurgling sound, which I took to mean his eager agreement to stay silent. “Good boy,” I said encouragingly.
Jackie had gone very white. Lisl was close enough for us to hear the click as she cocked her rifle. She raised it in the air and fired off a whole magazine of bullets, then waited for any response from the missing Stephen.
The rain billowed across the reservoir, but no reply came to Lisl’s shots. She swore, then scrambled up to the flat-topped rock that Stephen had used as his bastion. She found no sign of him there, nor, from her new vantage point, could she see any evidence of him. “Fuck him,” she snapped to her waiting companions, then she jumped down to the path and turned back toward the house. I sympathized with her reluctance to search the torn landscape, for such a search could have taken all day and still have missed hundreds of hiding places such as the one where Jackie and I now sheltered.