“La Trinitaria!” Paula’s face had suddenly gone white and pinched. “That is the name of the resistance group that all our men belonged to! What kind of joke can that be, when all the men are dead?”
“Paula, I think he did not even understand himself, Padilla. But I believe it was not just a joke. I think it may mean something for us. I do not know what.” Evita heaved a tired sigh and licked her lips. “Enough, now!” Marie said sharply. “She must rest.” “One more thing,” Evita breathed. “This Chinaman, Tsing-fu…. He kept saying something about Alonzo, that he had seen Alonzo. He said Alonzo had given him information. About us. I think he did not know much, but he kept saying something about Alonzo. And there was something about the way he talked that made me think he was working some way with the Fidelistas and that he had come to doubt them.” Nick shot a glance at Paula. “My Cuban?” he murmured. Her face was even whiter now. “Yes. We thought he was a friend of ours. Of one of us, especially. We must get back at once. Marie? You will look after Evita?”
“But yes, of course, of course! Now finish your talking somewhere else.”
She chased them briskly out of the room and settled them in the kitchen with a pot of coffee.
“The boat is always there,” said Jacques, when Marie had left them. “In an abandoned boatshed in Toury. Paula knows. Henri Duclos will take you there and back. The arrangement is that he is there at two o’clock each morning, so he will be there quite soon. You have a little time to rest, though, if you wish.”
Nick shook his head. “The sooner we leave here the better for everyone. We can walk there in an hour, wouldn’t you say?” Jacques nodded. “Then we can leave the horses here,” said Nick, glancing at his watch. “It will be quieter that way. All right with you, Paula?”
“Yes.” She rose abruptly from the table. “I think we are ahead now, and we must stay ahead.”
“Jacques.” Nick’s voice was quiet but compelling. “Take care. I still think we were followed. And if they don’t get me and Paula they may come after you. Don’t let them reach you.”
Jacques clapped him on the shoulder. “I won’t, my friend,” he said quietly.
Tom Kee was in a quandary. It was vital that he get word to Tsing-fu Shu, but it was equally vital that these people be stopped. All of them. Not only the two who were heading for the boatshed at Toury, but also those remaining. They knew far too much. He was still wondering what to do when his earphones picked up the last goodbyes and the sound of the back door opening. The door closed quietly and a bolt slid into place. Then he heard nothing. But he vaguely saw two indistinct figures dart across the open space between the houses opposite and disappear into the shadows.
Should he No, he decided. By the time he got his message to Tsing-fu it would be too late. He must act, himself, and quickly. From within the house came the small sounds of people preparing for bed. He grinned to himself in the darkness as he removed his earphones. There were two or three aces up his sleeve that would send his stock soaring in Peking if he played them right. First, he knew the way to Toury without having to be led. Second, the man and the woman were walking, and that gave him time. And finally, he had certain equipment in his saddlebag that he had always known would be useful to him some day.
He stole quietly to his saddlebag and took out what he needed, checked it in the darkness with his expert fingers, then waited in silence for a full ten minutes before making his next move. Then he mounted his horse and guided it toward the house of the LeClerqs at a slow and almost noiseless walk. There was a faint light glowing through a heavily curtained window, and it made an excellent target.
Tom Kee raised his right arm and aimed a device that looked much like a flare pistol. It acted like one, too, but its flame was contained in a miniature rocket and its head was deadly. He squeezed the trigger and rammed a second projectile into the barrel. The first landed on the thick thatch of the roof and dug in like a bullet before shattering and spewing out tongues of white-hot flame. The second soared straight toward the window. He watched it blast its way in while he slammed a third one after it, and then another at the thatched eaves over the front door. The blazing thermite compound streamed and spread into rivers of fire, clawing voraciously into the heart of the thing it was attacking. A series of small explosions ripped through the silence as the flame bit into Jacques LeClerqs’ useless store of ammunition, the little armory that was supposed to have kept them safe from all attack. It only added, now, to the holocaust.
Tom Kee lowered his grenade-thrower and gathered the reins of his startled horse. He felt a warm glow of triumph and satisfaction. His little toys were blindingly effective. Within seconds that house of mud and wood and thatch was an inferno, a blaze of unbearable heat and searing flame. It was like napalm on sun-dried timber, like a giant flame-thrower on a gasoline dump. A sheet of fire draped the walls from one end to the other.
No one came screaming out of the house. After the very first moment, no one screamed at all. The flames ate hungrily into the thatch and woodwork and clawed in savagely, looking for more.
Tom Kee nudged his prancing horse into a trot and then into a gallop. The sky was red behind him.
He could still make Toury well ahead of the others and lie in wait for them. There could not be many abandoned boatsheds in that tiny fishing village.
And So We Say Farewell
The ancient Ford took the curve like a racer at Le Mans.
“How much further?” Nick shouted above the sound of his own speed.
“About thirty seconds worth, at the rate you’re going,” Paula yelled back. “I don’t understand you at all. First you want to walk because it’s quieter and then you steal a car from some wretched dirt farmer with five banana trees and a mortgage on his shack. Slow up, will you? You’ll go right past the village! There’s Toury, down the slope to the right.”
Nick slowed and looked at the tiny cluster of houses huddled together near the waterline. He drove on for several hundred yards and swerved sharply into the rough driveway of a small coffee plantation. He glanced at his watch in the dashboard light before tugging loose the wires he’d crossed several minutes before when he’d helped himself to the parked car. Twelve forty-five. Not bad. Twenty minutes to take a quick and silent walk, hijack an antique buggy, and park two minutes’ walk away from a boatdock in Toury.
“We weren’t followed when we left,” he said. “But I know we were followed earlier. Doesn’t make sense. Why weren’t we followed again when we left LeClerqs? Because somebody already knew where we were going?”
“That’s impossible,” Paula said coolly. “Who could know? And don’t tell me Marie and Jacques.”
“I won’t. Show me to the boatshed and we’ll wait and see who comes. Unless of course we’ve been beaten to the punch.”
He slid out of the car, closed the door lightly, and waited for Paula to join him. She was not the sort of woman who liked to have doors held open for her.
She led him down the hillside past the back doors of the sleeping village to a sagging boardwalk at the water’s edge. From the center of it a dilapidated dock jutted out into the sea, and to either side of the dock’s landward end there were several sheds in various stages of disrepair. Each of the sheds had two doors, one leading into its rear from the boardwalk and another, almost the width of the shed itself, opening into the sea. Some of the sheds were open and empty. One or two of them were too ramshackle for use.