“As opposed to the spider coming to the fly. Who also happens to be a spider.”
“Don’t be rude, Alex, you know I’m only using a rough analogy. I can’t help it if his bloody name is Spider, can I? Stop kidding around and pay attention. Your bloody life is at stake here. This cottage is where he will come looking for you. And this is where you should be waiting.”
“I agree, I suppose. But I don’t want Pelham in the house or anywhere near me until this tempest in a teakettle is over. Can he stay with you and Diana for a few days? Until this blows over?”
“Of course. I’ve a lovely guest room for him at Shadowlands, top floor, right on the sea.”
“Perfect. Spoil him rotten, will you? He deserves it, God knows.”
“We’d like nothing better. Now, what else?”
“I’d like the airport and cruise ship spotters to report to you, not me. As soon as he lands, they alert you. Then you keep track of his movements until he is about to arrive at my doorstep. Just call my house phone, let it ring three times and hang up. Spider’s not the type to lob a bomb down the chimney and hope it explodes. He’ll want a confrontation. He’ll want to talk. He’ll want all the drama. Show me how fearless and brilliant he is before he pulls a knife or a gun. That’s his style. One of those fellows who always thinks he’s the smartest, most dangerous man in the room.”
“You do realize, Alex, that if we’ve even slightly miscalculated, and this man does manage to kill you, that it is my rather prominent posterior that will be in a wringer with C?”
“I’ve considered it. Sir David will be extraordinarily pissed off with you. It won’t be pleasant. Your life won’t be worth living. Please accept my abject apologies in advance.”
“You’ll need a gun, I daresay.”
Hawke smiled.
“You know what my American pal Stokely Jones, Jr. always says when someone tells him something as obvious as that?”
“I do not.”
“I am a gun.”
CHAPTER 13
The phone rang.
Once. Twice. Three times.
Hawke waited.
It did not ring again.
Game on.
Hawke, seated in his armchair facing the door, closed his eyes and concentrated on sensory input. He listened intently, heard nothing amiss. He rested his chin in one hand, periodically sipping his cold coffee and staring into the pitch-black night beyond his windows. The crackling fire he’d lit earlier now provided barely enough heat to reach his bones.
The minutes crawled by. Interminable… He fantasized briefly about a short rum and a cigarette but forced himself to concentrate. See, hear, smell, feel …
Some fluting bird call in the night startled him awake. He sat forward and looked over at the old station clock hung crookedly above the bar. Three hours had somehow passed. It was almost midnight.
Bloody hell. He must have dozed off, despite all the coffee. The log fire had long gone out and the room felt damp and bone cold. He could see white plumes of warm breath when he exhaled. Beyond his walls, the weather was deteriorating.
The wind was up. Shrieking under the eaves and down the chimney. On the seaward side of the house he could hear the muffled echo of the rolling sea booming on the rocks far below.
That cold front he’d seen had moved in over the island after sunset; now it seemed like it had been raining all evening. The temperature had plummeted and palm fronds and banana leaves rustled and scratched against the windows. All the old wooden shutters had been made fast against the approaching storm. And any random intruder.
There was only one visible way inside, and that was through the front door.
He sat forward once more, listening.
He had heard another kind of noise this time, low and distant. An automobile, its tires hissing on the rain-wet tarmac ribbon of the coast road. He got up from his chair facing the front door. He moved quickly from one to another of the northern exposure windows, all facing the solid wall of banana trees and the coast road beyond the groves.
Turn left out of his drive and you would eventually wind your way along the coast and reach the Royal Navy Dockyards. Turn right and you had a half hour’s drive until you reached the Bermuda airport. The car seemed to be approaching from the right.
The sound of hissing tires on asphalt suddenly ended. The driver had turned off the main road and onto the sandy lane that led to Hawke’s door.
Peering out into the darkness of the groves, he could see distant flashes, hazy arrows of light in the rain-drenched night. The flashes soon resolved into steady twin beams of yellowish illumination. Periodically, they would flare up and spike the blackness deep within the impenetrable banana groves. He could see the dense trees out there, their broad green leaves waving wet and storm-tossed like the sea.
He was on full alert now.
The wavering headlamp beams would disappear for a few seconds, and then reappear after a few seconds closer still, meandering through the groves, stabbing through the trees as if reaching out for him.
Each time a little closer to his cottage …
… came the spider to the fly.
But the fly had no fear.
Moments like these were what Alex Hawke had lived and breathed for all his life. He was naturally good at war. His father had always said that he was a boy born with a heart for any fate. And the fate he’d been born for was war. He felt the reassuring weight of his weapon on his right side. A big six-shot revolver, the most reliable weapon in his limited arsenal here on Bermuda.
He was wearing loose-fitting black Kunjo pants from Korea. Strapped to his right thigh was a .357 Colt Python revolver in a nylon swivel holster. It was his “Dirty Harry Special”: the six-inch barrel, with six magnum parabellum rounds loaded in the cylinder. He wore a black Royal Navy woolen jumper, four sizes too big. It came almost to his knees, giving him freedom of movement and concealing his weapon. He’d cut a hole in the right side pocket so he could keep his hand on his gun without it being seen.
He was barefoot despite the cold tiles beneath his feet …
Hawke padded silently across the dark room, returning to the wooden armchair facing the door. He sat down and waited. He looked at the clock again. Only eight minutes had passed since Ambrose called him with the agreed upon signal. Time was elongated, stretching every minute into two or three …
A sudden flash of light stretched across the ceiling.
Outside, he heard the automobile roll to a stop some twenty or thirty feet from the entrance.
Automobile tires made a loud crunching sound on the crushed shell drive leading up to Teakettle Cottage. A primitive alarm system, perhaps, but it worked. He jumped up and went to the window again, pulling back the curtain just as the headlamps were extinguished.
A black sedan, undistinguished, a cheap rental from the airport.
Hello, Spider.
Because of the car’s misty, rain-spattered windows, he couldn’t see inside the vehicle. Only the dark silhouette of a large man behind the wheel. He waited for the car’s interior lights to illuminate. It remained dark inside. There was no movement at all from the driver and the four doors remained closed.
He went back to his chair, sat, and waited in the dark for a knock on the heavy cedar door.
It didn’t come.
The wind had suddenly died down. The cottage was stone silent save for the ticking of the clock above the bar. No noise or movement inside, nor any noise or movement outside. He tried to imagine what Spider might be doing out there. Just sitting in his car, trying to smoke out his prey? Or trying, somewhat successfully, to psyche his opponent out?
Enough of this, he thought, reaching for his weapon. He’d go outside and confront the man there.
He was about to get out of his chair when his thick wooden front door was suddenly blown inward and off its hinges by a thunderous explosion, a blast of sound and light sufficiently powerful that it blinded him momentarily and disoriented him. His chair was knocked backward and he hit the floor hard after upending a very solid oak table.