By sunrise, with the orange sun sitting fat and happy on indigo water, I knew there was no decision to make. The decision had been long made for me. Because for hours now I had not thought at all about the whether, but only about the how. The decision made itself while I was looking the other way.
I made two cans of coffee and split the remaining shine between them. I gave George’s can the best of it, figuring he would need it. I carried his coffee to the shack, shook him awake. He was alert instantly, a good sign. I gave him his coffee, and while he gulped it I told him I was in.
We were off the island by noon.
We spent the hours until then talking. Good talk this time, crisp and clear, no interruptions, no cuteness, nothing in the way. We would make a part of a plan and fix it firmly and permanently in our minds, but at the same time we avoided getting married to any of our plans — whenever one of us spotted a hitch somewhere, we backed off and checked connections all the way down the line. Everything was loose and flexible and hypothetical, with more if-this-then-that then a twelve-horse parley. It had to be that way because of the glut of unknown factors. But at the same time these hours were more time than we would have together until the play was halfway home, and we had to get as much communicating out of the way now as possible.
It wasn’t nonstop talking. We broke twice to swim and once to race around the island. I beat him with no trouble, but he was in better shape than I might have guessed, and this was another good omen.
We worked out codes and schedules. The first hurdle was making do with as little communication as possible. By the middle of the day he said he couldn’t think of anything else, and neither could I.
“We’ll go over the rest of it on the boat,” he said. “I’ve got most of your things aboard. Clothes and all, ID. The pictures I used of you showed you in a crew cut. And no beard, of course. And no tan, but that doesn’t matter in a picture. We can get your fingerprints in place aboard ship.”
“You took a lot for granted.”
“No, not really. It was a time problem, Paul. I couldn’t find out first and then start building a depth cover for you. If you weren’t what I wanted, or if you wouldn’t play, I was out a couple of thousand. It’s like putting a dime on a number, the odds are so long you don’t cry if you never hit. Let’s go.”
“Go on ahead. It’ll take me a few minutes.”
“Take your time.”
I did little cleanup jobs until he was well out of sight. Then I unburied my money belt and put it on. It was lighter now. I left a couple of thousand in the hole, neatly wrapped in a triple thickness of aluminum foil along with my personal papers and my list. When I took down the list I thought of the moonshine I’d added to my morning coffee, and the breakfast and lunch I hadn’t had, and everything else.
I left my unbaited lines in the water. The third fish, which we hadn’t eaten, was beginning to smell. I left it where it lay. The tides would deposit dead fish all over my island while I was gone. There would be no one around to throw them out to sea. The birds would eat some of them, the tide would take some away, and the rest would rot.
I went to the boat. He was standing alongside it smoking a cigarette. We shoved it free of its moorings and got in. The engine caught first try, and I stood in the bow and looked where I was going, not where I had been.
More talk and more plans. He was going to run the boat straight down to Key West and let the owner send a cab for it. I would have to shave on the boat; he had a battery razor I could use. It wouldn’t work on my beard, but he also had a safety razor and a can of lather. I managed to get all but an eighth inch of stubble that way, then used the electric to eat up the rest.
From Key West you can fly to Miami. I let him have the first plane out and agreed to take the next one. By the time I got to Miami he would be somewhere over the Carolinas.
We went over everything a last time, and it looked tight.
“One thing,” he said. “Last night, when I kept going underwater.” He made it sound light enough but that only showed that he was good at the game. “I didn’t know you would get that rough, of course. Or that you would have bought the straight story to begin with. But the part that gets me is this — you were supposed to spot holes in my opening story. I allowed for that, I set it up. If you hadn’t tumbled I would have found a way to make it even more obvious.”
“I’m not surprised. You work that way, you like one cover on top of another. Layers.”
“Wheels within wheels. It works, Paul. No, to get back to it, I used the first pitch to set you up for the second. That was the real curveball, and you didn’t even bother tearing it up. You tore me up instead.”
“So?”
“I thought it was a fairly solid story.”
“I suppose it was.”
“And one two three and I’m in the middle of the ocean. What tipped you off? How did you know I was lying?”
“I didn’t.”
“You—”
“I figured if you stuck to it through three duckings it was true, and if you changed it you would come up with the straight thing. It was a cheap investment.” I smiled. “Like buying clothes for me and setting up my cover in advance. Same thing. Give a little to get a lot.”
He gave me a lot of silence. Then he told me he was glad we were on the same team. So was I.
Nine
the morning after I wished T.J. Morrison a happy birthday, I received a return telegram at my office in the compound. It was coded, a box cipher constructed upon the key word Superman, with the additional complication of a letters-for-numbers substitution cipher to back it up. I don’t think anyone on base could have cracked it, and doubt if anyone thought of trying, but this is what they would have read:
The first four words meant that our outlet was prepared to take delivery at our price. Baker four nineteen was a rendezvous — I should meet him at seven p.m. at the second of our proposed meeting places on the fourth day following. Meanwhile, in two days I could reach him with a wire to Howard Carson at the Hotel Cameron.
I burned the telegram, along with the three sheets of paper used to decode it. Then I left my office and wandered around the area trying not to look too much like a spy. After a day of this the word got out, and the base personnel went to great lengths to ignore me when I meandered into their areas of responsibility.
Local security was not as weak as I had expected. General Baldwin Winden might be a clown, but the base ran itself fairly well in spite of his hand at the helm. No vehicle went in or out of the main gate without getting close scrutiny from the guard. On the inside, each of the concrete block buildings had its own informal security set-up. You didn’t need a pass to go from Point A to Point B, but if there was no obvious motive for the trip, someone was likely to take a second look at you. This happened to me the first day, until the word got around that I was a civilian snooper, and from then on I felt like the invisible man.
It didn’t take too long to find out where the goods were being stored for shipment, and how they were guarded, and just how much space they occupied. Nor was it difficult to pick out the on-post intelligence types. They didn’t quite wear signs, but they might as well have. I kept moving, kept noticing things, and spent my night adding up all the bits and pieces and making a total picture out of them. It was a little like working a jigsaw puzzle — I wouldn’t know exactly where we were until the last piece went into place, but the closer I got, the better idea I had. I was learning things that cut down our variables, and the comforting thing was that no obvious flaw in our basic planning had yet emerged.