Schneider fixed him with a look of sheer hatred. His small face, which Tarp had found effeminate before, looked demonic. “Your boys won’t be here, for once.”
“M-my…” The laughter faded in Pope-Ginna’s throat. “See here,” he said to Tarp, “I demand to know what the hell’s going on!”
“Why, this is your farewell delegation, Admiral — seeing you off to Argentina. Señor Schneider and Señor Kinsella want you to know how welcome you’ll be when you get back there. Now that Señ or Schneider is no longer surrounded by the mercenaries you used to guard him, he has some very strong ideas of what sort of welcome you ought to have.”
A terrible smile lighted Schneider’s face. “Yes! And Mr. Tarp himself — Monsieur Selous, as I know him — said it best: Is the death squad the purpose of wealth?”
“I don’t understand this at all,” Pope-Ginna said in a strangled, small voice.
“Oh,” Juana said in rapid Spanish, “it is not at all complicated, Admiral Pope-Ginna. It was complicated to find out, but it is not complicated to understand. Señor Kinsella and I have found it quite easy to understand, with the help of Señor Carrington here in England. Put most simply of all — it is you!” She came around the wheelchair, smiling beautifully. “It was always you. You found out who Nazdia Becker really was. You paid to bring her to England and to continue her training in science. Was she your mistress, ever? Was she? Well — you sent her to Argentina to marry Señor Schneider, who was nobody then. You have lied so much. You lied when you said Schneider was rich when you first met him; oh, no, he was a very poor young man looking for a way to be rich. And you married him to Nazdia Becker — or the woman who called herself that — and then you and she could legally get at the German money in Argentina that had been left in her father’s name. I have seen the bank records, Admiral. I have nine signed statements.” Pope-Ginna was staring at Tarp. The tic came and went. “I could deny this,” he said in an uninflected voice. “But I wouldn’t di-dignify it with a denial.”
“You were the one who wanted the habitat, Admiral.” Her voice went on, measured and accusing.”You arranged the death of Juaquin Schneider’s wife; one of your ‘boys’ told us how it was done. You made Schneider a virtual prisoner, black-mailing him with the vaccine that his own wife had discovered.”
Tarp looked at Schneider. “You are Gaucho, aren’t you?”
Schneider glared at Pope-Ginna. “I am.”
Tarp touched Pope-Ginna’s shoulder. “And it was you who invented Maxudov. For a long time, I thought that Maxudov was somebody who had gone looking for a way to sell plutonium. I had the wrong end of the stick. It really began with somebody who wanted to buy plutonium — you! And you found your man when you were arranging the purchase of the submarine. A soviet KGB bigwig who was dying of cancer.” Tarp shook his head. “You turned a man with the only thing that nobody else could promise him — a few more months of life.”
Pope-Ginna gave up trying to deny. “He took it willingly,” he said. “The whole Maxudov business was his invention. Not mine.”
“You made him a traitor.”
“I told him what I wanted, and I told him what he would get in return. How he did it was his business.” He drew himself up — the first time Tarp could remember his ever asserting himself with that gesture. “What difference does it make? I got what I wanted and now it will be used in the way that I intended.”
“The plutonium is back in Russia. I didn’t tell you that before, Admiral. For a while, I thought perhaps it really was Schneider who was behind it, and not you — but of course it wasn’t.” He looked down at Schneider. “It was you who passed us the message in Havana, wasn’t it?”
Schneider lowered his head. “It was.”
“I don’t believe you!” Pope-Ginna rasped. “The plutonium is not back in Russia! It can’t be!”
Tarp heard Carrington’s voice behind him intoning the formula. “Anthony Marcus Aurelius Pope-Ginna, I charge you with crimes most grave and heinous against the Crown and against the government. Let me warn you that anything you say—”
Pope-Ginna brushed past Carrington as if the words meant nothing. “I don’t believe, I say. Did you hear me? I don’t believe you!”
“I was in the habitat, Admiral. I took the plutonium off.”
The old man stared at him, his mouth working. “You couldn’t have.”
“Shall I repeat the charge?” Carrington murmured.
“What? What? Oh, don’t bother me!”
“Admiral Pope-Ginna, you’re under arrest. Don’t you understand?”
“Don’t bother me! Can’t you understand plain English? Doesn’t anybody here understand me? What is going on!”
Three of Carrington’s men appeared and took Pope-Ginna by the arms. He still seemed not to care about them, not even to have noticed them. Instead he turned on Schneider and Kinsella.
“You idiots!” he said in his slightly accented Spanish. “You pathetic idiots! Another year and I could have had forty atomic warheads and we could have blown the British Navy out of the water — and you started the Malvinas war too soon!”
They led him out, white-faced, muttering to himself. Carrington introduced himself to Kinsella and to Schneider, then pulled up a chair and began to explain the kind of statement he hoped to get from them. Tarp knew it would be a long, difficult process, for already Schneider was talking about a lawyer and Kinsella would say only that his work was done.
Tarp took Juana aside. She was wearing a turtleneck that hid her scar, and, except for a small depression in the skin high on her left cheekbone, she looked unmarked. “You did wonderfully,” he said.
“What happens now?”
“They’ll take depositions, testimony. It will take weeks. They’ll want statements from you, too.”
“Weeks?”
“At least. You’ll have to stay in England, I’m afraid.”
“With you?”
“I was thinking that might be a good idea, yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
There was still snow in the deepest part of the woods, but the ice had gone out of the rivers and ponds, and the winter-bound animals prowled again at night. He had found bear tracks in the soft mud along the bank of a stream, and in the mornings the badger that lived at the edge of his clearing came as far as his door for crusts. He took the old canoe out of its storage and put it on the pond and coaxed the first brook trout up from the depths; and in the deep pool below the biggest rock in the river, he took a landlocked salmon on the fly just at dusk.
He spent the days at the computer console, studying the discs from the habitat. There was much there that he did not understand about genetic research and viruses, but there was a lot in there he did understand that had been gotten from Beranyi just before he’d died. He took it all in and filed it carefully in his data banks, where it would serve him well.
He awoke in the mornings while it was still dark. Outside the big window the sky was dull red above the black treetops. The room was cold. He moved quickly, naked, feeding the wood stove, making coffee. One morning he pressed a switch on the console and the screen glowed, and the grid of his security system appeared. He pulled on blue jeans and a sweater, and he was reaching for a cup when a light began to blink rapidly in the upper right-hand corner of the CRT.