The Night Manager (28 page)

The story had the team in stitches. Frisky and Tabby, launching a night raid on a deserted paddling beach, armed with duffel bags of seashells? It was too rich.

For the kidnapping, every step of the way had been rehearsed.

First Flynn and Amato had disguised themselves as yachties and made a field reconnaissance of Hunter's Island.

Back in Florida, they reconstructed the terrain on a tract of dune set aside for them in the training compound at Fort Lauderdale. Tables were laid. Tapes marked the paths. A shack was erected to denote the kitchen. A cast of diners was assembled.

Gerry and Mike, the two bad guys, were professional toughs from New York with orders to do what they were told and shut up. Mike the kidnapper was bearish. Gerry the bagman was lugubrious but agile. Hollywood could not have done better.

"Are you gentlemen fully conversant with your orders, now?" Irish Pat Flynn enquired, eyeing the brass rings on each finger of Gerry's right hand. "We're only asking for a couple of friendly belts now, Gerry. More in the line of a cosmetic alteration to the appearance is all that is required. Then we ask you to withdraw with honour. Am I making myself plain, Gerry?"

"You got it, Pat."

Then there had been the fallbacks, the what ifs. All covered. What if, at the last minute, the Pasha failed to put in at Hunter's? What if she put in at Hunter's, berthed, but the passengers decided to have dinner on board? What if the adults came ashore to dine, and the kids--perhaps as punishment for some prank--were made to stay aboard?

"Pray," said Burr.

"Pray," Strelski agreed.

But they were not really putting their trust in Providence.

They knew that the Pasha had never yet passed Hunter's Island without putting in, even if they knew there was bound to be a first time and this would probably be it. They knew that Low's Boatyard in Deep Bay held top-up stores for the Pasha, and they knew the skipper stood to take a piece of the stores bill and of the dinner bill at Low's, because he always did.

They placed great faith in Daniel's hold upon his father. Daniel had conducted several painful phone calls with Roper in recent weeks about the hellishness of adjusting to divided parents and had singled out the stopover at Hunter's Island as the high point of his forthcoming visit.

"I'm really going to get the crabs out of the basket this year, Dad," Daniel had told his father from England only ten days ago. "I don't dream about them anymore. Mums is really pleased with me."

Both Burr and Strelski had had similar upsetting conversations with their children in their time, and their guess was that Roper, though not of the English class that places children high in its priorities, would walk through fire rather than let Daniel down.

And they were right, absolutely right. And when Major Corkoran called Miss Amelia over the satcom to book the terrace table, Burr and Strelski could have hugged each other, which was what the team said they were doing these days anyway.

It was not till around eleven-thirty in the evening of the day itself that they felt the first stirrings of unease. The operation had been scheduled for 2303 hours, or as soon as the crab races had begun. The holdup, the climb to the kitchen, the descent to Goose Neck, had never taken more than twelve minutes in rehearsal. Why on earth hadn't Mike and Gerry signalled "mission accomplished"?

Then the red alarm lit up. Standing with folded arms at the centre of the communications room, Burr and Strelski listened to the playback of Corkoran's voice talking in fast order to the ship's captain, the ship's helicopter pilot, Doctors Hospital in Nassau and, lastly. Dr. Rudolf Marti at his home in Windermere Cay. Corkoran's voice was already a warning. It was cool and steady under fire: "The Chief appreciates you're not in the first-aid business, Dr. Marti. But the skull and side of the face are severely fractured, and the Chief believes they'll have to be rebuilt. And the hospital needs a doctor to refer the patient to them. The Chief would like you waiting at the hospital when he arrives, and he will wish to compensate you generously for your trouble. May I tell him you'll be there?"

A fractured skull and side of face? Rebuilt? What the hell had Mike and Gerry got up to? The relationship between Burr and Strelski was already strained by the time a call from Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami had them racing there by flashing light, with Flynn riding alongside the driver. When they arrived, Mike was still in the operating theatre. Gerry, grey with anger, was chain-smoking in the waiting room, wearing his navy life jacket.

"Fuckin" animal crucified Mike in the fuckin' door," Gerry said.

"So what did he do to you, Gerry?" Flynn asked.

"To me, nothin'."

"What did you do to him?"

"Kissed him on the fuckin' mouth. What do you think, dickhead?"

Then Flynn picked Gerry straight off his chair as if he were a rude child and slapped him hard once across the face, then sat him down again in the same indolent attitude as before.

"You whip him, Gerry?" Flynn asked kindly.

"Fucker went crazy. Played it for real. Held a fuckin' carving knife to Mike's throat, got his arm in the fuckin' door like he's choppin' firewood."

They returned to the operations room in time to listen to Daniel talking to his mother in England over the Pasha's satcom.

"Mums, it's me. I'm all right. I really am."

Long silence while she wakes up.

"Daniel? Darling, you haven't come back to England, have you?"

"I'm on the Pasha, Mums."

"Daniel, really. Do you know the time? Where's your father?"

"I didn't get the crabs out of the basket, Mums. I chickened. They make me sick. I'm all right, Mums. Honestly."

"Danny?"

"Yes?"

"Danny, what are you trying to tell me?"

"Only we were on Hunter's Island, you see, Mums. There was this man who smelled of garlic and took me prisoner, and another man who took Jed's necklace. But the cook saved me and they let me go."

"Daniel, is your father there?"

"Paula. Hi. Sorry about that. He was determined to tell you he's okay. We got held up at gunpoint by a couple of thugs at Mama Low's. Dans was taken hostage for ten minutes, but he's totally unharmed."

"Wait," said Paula. Like his son before him, Roper waited for her to collect herself. "Daniel's been kidnapped and released. But he's all right. Now go on."

"They marched him up the path to the kitchen. Remember the kitchen, up the path on the hill?"

"You're sure all this happened, are you? We all know Daniel's stories."

"Yes, of course I'm sure. I saw it."

"At gunpoint? They marched him up a hill at gunpoint? A boy of eight?"

"They were going for the cash in the kitchen. But there was this cook up there, a white chap, who had a go at them. He winged one, but the other one came back, and they beat him up while Daniel escaped. God knows what would have happened if they'd taken Dans with them, but they didn't. All over now. We even got the loot back. Thank God for cooks. Come on, Dans, tell her how we're giving you the Victoria Cross for gallantry. Here he is again."

It was five in the morning. Burr sat motionless as a Buddha at his desk. Rooke smoked his pipe and wrestled with the Miami Herald crossword. Burr let the phone ring several times before he was able to pick it up.

"Leonard?" said Goodhew's voice.

"Hullo, Rex."

"Did something go wrong? I thought you were going to ring me. You sound as if you're in shock. Did they swallow the bait, then? Leonard?"

"Oh, they swallowed it, all right."

"So what's wrong? You don't sound victorious, you sound funereal. What happened?"

"I'm just trying to work out whether we're still holding the rod."

Mr. Lamont is in intensive care, said the hospital. Mr. Lamont is stable.

Not for long. Twenty-four hours later Mr. Lamont had vanished.

Has he discharged himself? The hospital says he has. Has Dr. Marti had him shifted to his clinic? Apparently so, but only briefly, and the clinic gives no information about the destination of discharged patients. And when Amato telephones in the guise of a newspaper reporter, Dr. Marti himself replies that Mr. Lamont has left without leaving an address. Suddenly, outlandish theories are being passed round the ops room. Jonathan has confessed to everything! Roper has rumbled him and dumped him in the sea! On Strelski's orders, the watch on Nassau airport has been suspended. He fears Amato's team is becoming too visible.

"We're engineering human nature, Leonard," says Strelski consolingly, in an effort to lift the burden from Burr's soul. "Can't get it right every time."

"Thanks."

Evening comes. Burr and Strelski sit in a roadside barbecue house with their cellular telephones on their laps, eating ribs and Cajun rice and watching well-fed America come and go.

A summons from the telephone monitors has them racing back to headquarters in mid-mouthful.

Corkoran to a senior editor of the leading Bahamian newspaper: "Old love! It's me. Corky. How are we? How are the dancing girls?"

Coarse intimacies are exchanged. Then the nub: "Sweetheart, listen, the Chief wants a story killed... pressing reasons why the hero of the hour doesn't need the spotlight... young Daniel, very hyper boy... I'm talking serious gratitude, a mega-improvement to your retirement plans. How about 'a practical joke that came unstuck'? Can you do that, lover?"

The sensational robbery on Hunter's Island is laid to rest in the great cemetery for stories permanently spiked by Higher Authority.

Corkoran to the desk of a senior Nassau police officer known for his understanding of the peccadilloes of the rich: "Heart, how are we? Listen, in re Brother Lamont, last seen at Doctors Hospital by one of your heavier-footed brethren... can we just kind of lose that one from the menu--do you mind? The Chief would greatly prefer the lower profile, feels it's better for Daniel's health... wouldn't wish to prefer charges, even if you found the culprits, hates the fuss... bless you.... Oh, and by the by, don't believe all that crap you're reading about Ironbrand shares going through the floor....

Chief's considering a very nice little divi this Christmas; we should all be able to buy ourselves a piece of whatever we like best."

The strong arm of the law agrees to withdraw its claws.

Burr wonders whether he is listening to Jonathan's obituary.

And from the rest of the world, not a peep.

Should Burr return to London? Should Rooke? Logically, it made no difference whether they hung by a thread in Miami or in London. Illogically, Burr needed nearness to the place where his agent was last seen. In the end, he sent Rooke to London and the same day checked out of his steel-and-glass hotel and moved to humbler premises in a sleazy part of town.

"Leonard's putting on the hair shirt while he waits this thing out," Strelski told Flynn.

"Tough," said Flynn, still trying to come to terms with the experience of having his agent immolated by Burr's ewe lamb.

Burr's new cell was a pastel-painted art deco box beside the beach, with a bedside light made out of a chrome Atlas holding up the globe, and steel-framed windows that buzzed to every passing car, and a doped-out Cuban security guard with dark glasses and an elephant gun, lounging in the lobby. Burr slept there lightly, with his cellular phone on the spare pillow.

One dawn, unable to sleep, he took his phone for a walk down a great boulevard. A regiment of cocaine banks loomed at him out of the misted sea. But as he went toward them he found himself in a building site full of coloured birds screaming from the scaffolding, and Latinos sleeping like war dead beside their parked bulldozers.

Jonathan was not the only one who had disappeared. Roper too had entered a black hole. Deliberately or not, he had given Amato's watchers the slip. The tap on the Ironbrand headquarters in Nassau revealed only that the Chief was away selling farms--"selling farms" being Roperspeak for "mind your own damn business."

The supersnitch Apostoll, urgently consulted by Flynn, offered no consolation. He had heard vaguely that his clients might be holding a business conference on the island of Aruba, but he had not been invited. No, he had no idea where Mr. Roper was. He was a lawyer, not a travel agent. He was Mary's soldier.

Another evening came, and Strelski and Flynn determined to take Burr out of himself. They collected him from his hotel and, cellular phones in hand, made him stroll among the crowds on the promenade beside the beach. They sat him at a pavement cafe and fed him margaritas and forced him to take an interest in the people who went by, in vain. They watched muscular blacks in multicoloured shirts and gold rings, rolling with the majesty of high life for as long as the highs and the living lasted, their dolls in skintight miniskirts and thigh boots toppling between them, their shaven-headed bodyguards in robes of mullah grey to conceal their automatic weapons. A swarm of beachboys on skateboards raced past, and the wiser ladies whisked their handbags out of reach. But two old lesbians in straw trilbies refused to be daunted and marched their poodles straight at them, causing them to veer. After the beach-boys came a shoal of long-necked fashion models on roller skates, each more gorgeous than the last. At the sight of them, Burr, who loved women, did for a moment come alive--only to lapse again into his melancholy abstractions.

"Hey, Leonard," said Strelski, making a last gallant effort. "Let's go see where the Roper does his weekend shopping."

In a big hotel, in a conference room protected by men with padded shoulders, Burr and Strelski mingled with the buyers of all nations and listened to the sales talk of wholesome young men with name tags pinned to their lapels. Behind the men sat girls with order books. And behind the girls, in shrines cordoned off with blood-coloured ropes, stood their wares, each polished like a loved possession, each guaranteed to make a man of whoever owned them: from the most cost-effective cluster bomb through the all-plastic undetectable Glock automatic pistol to the latest thing in hand-held rocket launchers, mortars and anti-personnel mines. And for your reading man, standard works on how to build yourself a rocket-propelled gun in your own backyard or make a one-time silencer out of a tubular can of tennis balls.