“We might do worse than stay here,” Simon said. “For a while, anyway. Driving around in the middle of the night, we could always be unlucky enough to get stopped by a police patrol looking for somebody to try their breathalyser on, and then Shortwave might be an embarrassment.”
“But what if the others come back?” she asked.
“They weren’t planning to, apparently, but if they do, so much the better. The last thing they’ll be expecting to find is me with a rifle and Mahmud up to his scalp in instant quicksand.”
“Delightful.”
Simon countered her shudder with a cool shrug.
“You may find the idea easier to swallow if you’ll recall that you and I would have been hamburger or roasted pigeon if your car had cracked up the way he wanted it to. Now why don’t you curl up and rest a bit while I take care of Mahmud and stand the first watch. You can keep Short-wave’s popgun for a comforter. When I’m finished outside I’ll see that you’re okay and then guard our little nest with my trusty blunderbuss. I hope Fowler or Kalki does come back. They’d save us a lot of chasing around.”
Tammy brushed her blond hair wearily away from her face.
“I’m exhausted, but I’ll never sleep here,” she complained. “On the other hand, how can you be sure you’ll stay awake all night?”
“My strength is as the strength of ten because my heart is pure,” Simon explained. “And the blood of Lancelot and Siegfried surges in my iron veins, reinforced by charms and talismans which make me impervious to all human weakness...” His eyes held hers for a moment. “Or almost all.”
He went back downstairs, again checked the trussing of Shortwave, who still showed no signs of returning animation, and took off his coat and draped it over the back of a chair. Then he went outside and turned to the necessary job that was waiting for him.
When he had finished almost an hour had passed, and his shoulders ached a little from the unaccustomed effort of stirring wet cement and shovelling it into the two big metal drums. One of the drums took more cement, because Mahmud’s body helped to fill up the other. In the second container the Saint put a partial stuffing of leafy twigs cut from nearby bushes, so as to make the weight of the two drums not too greatly different.
He left the two steel barrels brimming with concrete near the side door, where anybody arriving would see them right away and — assuming the arriver was in on the plot — think that Shortwave and Mahmud had done their jobs according to plan. He mentally ran over the current situation: Kalki and Fowler on their way to parts unknown, Fowler planning a “pick-up” at the end of the day which would presently be dawning, which undoubtedly meant the joyous arrival on England’s shores of another misguided batch of reverse-order colonists. Meanwhile, a pair of minor pests had been taken out of circulation, one of them permanently, but the major miscreants still had their bill to pay — to which, Simon reflected, could fairly be added the write-off of Tammy Rowan’s car.
He pondered his next move as he watched the branches of the big trees behind the boathouse quiver and flail in the wind against the barely perceptible luminescent background of the sky. Once more in his miracle-punctuated life he was standing with the good earth beneath his feet and sniffing the good air when by all acceptable guesses he ought to have shuffled off this mortal coil and — as the mystically minded might say — begun operations in another sphere. He savoured the sensation with the quiet gratitude of a man who has come to accept marvels as a part of his everyday experience without ever losing his respectful appreciation of them.
But while one such escape would have been more than enough in the life of most men, Simon Templar was already thinking of courses of action that would more than likely bring him face to face with death again within twenty-four hours. He could not afford to waste time. Men like Fowler, who apparently took care of the nautical end of the immigration game, were not likely to continue their normal routine once persistent investigators started showing up in upsetting numbers. If the Saint was not able to trace Fowler and Kalki before this same time tomorrow, a lot more sunrises might follow before he was able to pick up their trail again.
Shortwave knew where Fowler would be during the crucial day that was now on its way towards dawning, so it was to Shortwave’s health and immediate future that Simon turned his consideration.
He picked up Mahmud’s Winchester, which he had already emptied, tested, and reloaded for use in case he had been interrupted during his work, and went back into the boathouse.
The scrawny killer lay as still as ever in his windings of secondhand rope. The Saint began to fear that his two-legged kick might have had fatal consequences, which would undoubtedly have brought satisfaction to the grim gods of justice, but not to anybody wanting to dredge Shortwave’s transistor brain for information.
A brief medical examination told Simon that the worst his charge could be suffering was concussion, accompanied by minor modifications of the facial profile which could be nothing but an improvement. But he had no way to tell how much longer the coma might last, so Simon gagged him with his own handkerchief and necktie and went to look for Tammy.
He found her in the upstairs living room, asleep in one of those bulbous overstuffed short-haired chairs that looks as if it had been grown in a cellar along with mushrooms. Her position hinted at exhausted collapse in spite of her assertion that sleep would be impossible.
Simon tried not to disturb her while he moved quietly about the place, checking the drawers of a cabinet and a writing table for any useful information. He found nothing more enlightening than a spider or two and a few ancient and much-thumbed girlie magazines. The rest of the apartment was no more rewarding. The kitchen shelves were stocked with only a can of beans and a can of sardines, and the antique refrigerator offered nothing more nourishing than a bottle of beer. If the flat served as a meeting place for Fowler and associates, it apparently was not regularly inhabited.
Only mildly disappointed and not much surprised by his lack of success, the Saint turned out all the lights and sat down by the window, and watched till the sky began to pale, while Tammy breathed heavily near by. He had made up his mind to rest and relax without dozing off, and his reserves of fitness and strength and mental energy were so great that when he stood up again he was able to confront the day with as much alertness and enthusiasm as he could have garnered from six hours’ sleep.
After a visit to the bathroom, he came back and spoke gently to Tammy.
“Time to get up.”
She groaned and tried to burrow farther down into the cushions. He jigged her shoulder.
“You’ve just been made editor of the Evening Record, and Kalki has offered to divorce Fowler and marry you.”
Her eyes opened slightly and she suddenly jerked upright.
“Oh! What’s happening? I fell asleep!”
“Rose-fingered dawn is about to glide through the fields and glens,” Simon said, “and we want to beat the morning traffic rush into London.”
He took her hand and helped her to her feet. Her cheek was creased lightly from contact with the chair, her hair was in platinum tangles, and her eyes were puffy from sleep. As she stood up she saw her face in a mottled mirror over the fireplace.
“Oh, I look awful!”
“Only the least bit ghastly,” he concurred encouragingly. “Go and see what you can do to repair the damage while I see if Shortwave is still snoring.”
Still holding one hand to her face, she wobbled to the door and glanced back.
“I didn’t mean to go to sleep,” she said. “Did anything happen?”
“Nothing you don’t know about already.”