“You think he will remember it all?” Repin said as they leaned on the rail. “Our lives depend on that man doing it all just right.”
“He ran the United States for four years, Repin.”
“Da — and look at the United States!”
The marine detachment came aboard next morning when the sun was barely clear of the dry hills behind the bay. A sweet-scented land breeze was still blowing, causing a ripple on the water as their craft came across. Tarp inhaled the faintly spicy odor of the land and waited for them. They came up the ladder on the run, weapons ready but not loaded, and then Tarp and the captain took the marine commander on a tour of the Global Clipper. He knew nothing of either Maxudov or the plutonium, but he knew that he was supposed to secure the ship and everything on it.
“You understand that this part of the operation is not a mock-up, Captain?” Tarp said.
“You bet.” He wasn’t yet thirty, but he had that hard-nosed, humorless look that made for authority. “That’s live ammo those guys are carrying.”
Tarp had noticed. Still, he hoped they would have no cause to load it into their weapons.
He went to Repin’s suite, where Pope-Ginna, in borrowed pajamas, was sitting with an enormous breakfast spread around him. Repin was dressed but unshaven, and his face was puffy with sleep.
Pope-Ginna always flinched now when he saw Tarp. He seemed comfortable with Repin, but he could not restrain his distaste for Tarp; like a dog who has been kicked, he was always shy of a certain kind of boot. Still, he managed a smile and said vaguely, “Grapefruit?”
“I’ll have a papaw.” Like Repin, he relished the fresh fruit. He began to peel it. “Do you feel ready to travel, Admiral?” he said easily.
Pope-Ginna’s face tightened again; his response to Tarp had become a tic. “Where to?” He tried to say it rather gaily, as if it were a joke. In a bright, very false voice, he said, “I didn’t bring my resort clothes,” and laughed and looked from one to the other of them.
“There’s something that has to be done. Some telephone calls to make. In London.”
“I see.”
Pope-Ginna licked his lips and sat back from the table and looked at Repin, who said smoothly, “Admiral Pope-Ginna may be concerned, perhaps, about security people in Britain. About what maybe is said to them.”
“People might think the wrong thing,” Pope-Ginna said quickly. “If they were told only about — you know. About the Homburg. The general run of people wouldn’t understand about my, my role in the, ah, big picture. With MI-six, I mean. And during the Falklands crisis.”
“Yes.” Tarp ate a slice of the papaw. “I’ll arrange for you to give a statement to British security, but not on British soil, Admiral. You can make whatever deal with them you like. That’s not my business. I want you to make some phone calls.”
“Yes. I see. Well… I don’t have much choice, I suppose.”
“None at all.”
“Whom am I to telephone?”
“John Bull.”
“Ah. Hmm. Yes, I see.” He looked appealingly at Repin and then turned to Tarp. “I don’t want to be pushed out someplace where Jock can do whatever he likes with me! Do you understand? That may sound cowardly, but — it’s the truth. I don’t want to make your telephone call and then be… abandoned.”
“You won’t be abandoned.”
“If you just chuck me back to Argentina, you know, I won’t last a day. Not a day. Jock’s a very powerful man.”
“There’s no plan to send you back to Argentina just yet. You could probably stay in England, for that matter. Never go back. You can make a deal with the British, I’m sure.”
“My money’s in Argentina,” Pope-Ginna said thinly.
“You could live comfortably in England, I imagine.”
Pope-Ginna seemed to shrink. “Comfortably, yes. But I wouldn’t be rich.”
“You wouldn’t be dead, either.”
After many seconds of silent thought, Pope-Ginna joined his hands on the table and said, “I will do whatever is necessary. But I really have to return to Argentina. I demand it. In my own time, in my own way, I have a score to settle there.”
Tarp wiped his fingers on a napkin. “We leave in two hours.”
The sunshine was thin and without warmth in France, and the earth looked as if it might never let a seed sprout in it again. The views around the farmhouse were all of the bleak kinds of landscape that had taken all the romance out of farming in the paintings of the late nineteenth century: black, gray, and brown, and above them a sky of watery blue.
Tarp was sitting in the other farmhouse, where the French security guards lived, and he could just see the roofs of the tumbledown farm from where he sat. He had a telephone and a scrambler, and he was trying to talk to Juana for the first time in many days, trying to forget the sharp presence of her and to make sense of the half-garbled, inhuman sounds that came out of the scrambler.
“I cannot understand!” he shouted into the telephone. “Repeat!”
“Schneider’s wife!” Her voice sounded faraway and not at all like her.
“Yes, I got that. Schneider’s wife!”
“Was killed in an auto accident. Understand?”
“Yes! Got it. Any chance it was anything but an accident?”
“What?”
“Was it an accident?”
“The police said so. But Kinsella says the police would say anything they were paid to say.”
“Could it have been murder?”
“Kinsella says yes.”
She had made contact with Kinsella in Buenos Aires almost immediately. Kinsella was part of an intelligence cell that was trying to bring the air force to power in the ruling military junta; above all, Juana told him, the navy was their prime enemy.
“Anything new on Schneider?”
“I’m checking the men you call his ‘butlers.’ His bodyguards.” The line had cleared, and, although the voice still did not sound like hers, it was at least understandable. “Is there anything else?”
“Yes! Check the code name Gaucho. See what you can find.”
“All right. Anything else?”
“No!”
“Yes!”
“What?”
“I love you!”
Tarp was embarrassed. “Good,” he said lamely, and hung up. He sat and looked at the instrument, hating it, as people must have been hating it since the day it became the means for putting a man and a woman into the illusion of communication.
“Done, monsieur?” the communications man said. He reached for the unit.
“Yes, thank you.” The man mumbled something; Tarp slipped out of the chair. He hesitated in the doorway, looking over a muddy yard where cars had left watery ruts, feeling in himself the opposing pulls of the desire for action and the desire for this woman. The telephone call was an annoyance, for it reminded him of her without making him close to her; it intensified the pull without allowing him to yield to it. Given that impasse, he let himself yield to the desire for action. He breathed deeply, looked once around the cheerless landscape, and then launched himself into it as if he meant to do battle with it. As perhaps he did, for he marched over the field with enormous strides, his rubber boots sucking up great gobs of mud that he ignored in his eagerness to get to the place where action started.
He came to the rocky track and started up it, passing the place where he had found Juana the first day after he had come back from Moscow. There was nobody there now; the place looked deserted. As he came closer, however, a hatless man in a long overcoat came out and stood waiting for him.