A dark, pleasant-looking woman was moving towards the tiny stage, and soon she began to sing a low, melancholy love song, her whole body tense and emotional, her eyes closed, her dark eyebrows knitted in a frown, her head thrown back.

We listened for a while, and then Fenrek threw down his knife and fork and whispered angrily:

“All right, you bastard, what did you do to that boat?”

I whispered: “I blocked the exhaust with a handful of mud and one of my best cambric handkerchiefs. Before he finds out why the motor won’t start, he’ll strip it down to every last nut and bolt, and when he reassembles it, it still won’t fire. And by then, it’ll be daylight, and he’ll have missed his only chance of skipping the country tonight. A twenty-four hour delay, with Loveless and his bacteria, which we’ll separate from him, where we can safely get at him without endangering the whole of the city. That’s all we want, isn’t it? And I don’t see why I should have to do all your work for you.”

Some people nearby, absorbed in the lovely fado, turned and shushed us. Fenrek glanced at them, lowered his voice another tone, leaned forward and whispered:

“Separate him from his toxin?”

“Of course. I don’t want him uncorking a vial as soon as he sees us and daring us to touch him.”

“I know that, damn you! But how?”

I shrugged. “We just let him send the telegram he’s got to send.”

“Go on.” The light was dawning, and Fenrek’s tanned, handsome face had lost some of its anger; but not all of it.

I said: “A boat means he’s either going to land further along the coast for a rendezvous, or else cross over to North Africa, which is most likely.”

“Why?”

“Because, once he leaves the Lisbon area, which means danger to him because of you and me, he’d be a fool to land anywhere in Portugal for more danger if he could just as easily get to the North African coastline, where there’s virtually nothing to stop him landing wherever he wants.”

Grudgingly: “Right, I suppose. Even if it is a trifle tenuous.”

“And if he intended a short trip along the coast, he’d have prepared an outboard motorboat, something small and easy to hide. Instead, he chose a damn great whaler, twenty-five feet of it, that must have been one hell of a job to maneuver into the cave at the Bocca. As Histermann said, it took all day to get it in there, right?”

“Go on.”

“He is trying to get away tonight.”

Fenrek said swiftly: “You can’t be sure of that.”

I said: “He called the lighthouse a couple of hours back, worrying about the southwest wind. He’s planning on leaving tonight, there’s no doubt of it.”

He was getting impatient again. He said testily: “And so?”

“And on the North African coast, no doubt, someone is going to pick him up by plane.”

“Why?”

“Because he’s taking his new weapon to Nigeria, Histermann told us that. And he’s sure as hell not going to walk. Or do you think he might take a commercial airline? Of course not. One of his own pilots will pick him up.”

“So far, so good. Perhaps. But a telegram?”

“Of course. Even on the deserted beaches of the North African coastline, where a plane can land and take off easily without too much official interference, the same plane can’t just set down and wait for more than a few hours in safety. Certainly, within twenty-four hours someone is going to ask what the hell goes on, and I don’t suppose for one moment Loveless and his men will risk that. He doesn’t mind taking risks in the least; but that would be just plain stupid. Ergo, he’ll send a telegram to his contact over there, telling him to delay the pickup for twenty-four hours.”

For a long time Fenrek was silent while he tried to find a hole in my reasoning. They don’t like working on assumptions at Interpol, they prefer facts. But personally, I always find that facts can be terribly misleading, while likelihoods seldom are.

I sat back and listened to the mournful plaint of the fado for a while; somehow it reminded me of the sad old pibrochs of the Scottish Highlands, the plaintive dirges they mourned the deaths of the fighting men. Here, the words were lighter, with a lilt of love to them; only the music was the same.

He said at last: “I hate it, but I’m forced to agree. Now tell me what a telegram’s going to do for us?” Before I could speak, he raised a hand and said: “Yes, I know, he’s got to use the post office in Cascais, or in Estoril, or in Guincho, and we can watch all three and take him when he shows. But, for God’s sake, why do we have to go to all that trouble? We could have taken him just as well in that cave, once we knew he was there.”

I said: “No. In the cave, he’ll have four vials of his bacteria, and if it’s the end for him and he recognizes it; what’s he going to do? I’ll tell you. He’s going to bust them the moment he sees an unfriendly face, because he just doesn’t give a damn. If he goes down, he’ll want to take us all with him, and that means half the coastal population as well. Because that’s precisely the kind of man he is. But the next few hours of daylight, for him, are just a waiting period till he can get that motor running again. He’ll hurry into Guincho, at a guess. You want to bet on that?”

“I’ll settle for Guincho, its the most likely.”

“And he’ll send his telegram, and then he’ll hurry back to the cave where everything is ready and waiting; including the vials of toxin. In other words, chose to hit him when he’s not carrying anything quite so deadly on his person.”

Fenrek said sourly: “You’ve just lost us every chance we ever had of taking that man.”

Well, that was an attitude I’d expected, and I told him so as gently as possible. I said: “I didn’t think you’d go along with my reasoning, or I’d have invited you in on the deal. But take my word for it, a man like Loveless, a man whose fight is against everything you and I stand for...we’ve got to take him when he’s defenseless, or we’ll all go down in flames together.”

“You’re working on assumptions instead of certainties.”

“On likelihoods instead of facts, they’re always better propositions.”

He looked worried and said: “I hate everything about it. Its so...so dammed...”

“Tenuous?”

“The only word for it. Histermann said he had four ounces of that toxin. Suppose he’s got more cached away, that no one else knows about? We get Loveless with the stuff he’s carrying, and unknown to us there’s another little store of it somewhere. Then, one day, a child finds a hidden bottle and opens it, what then? It could be five years from now, Or fifty, even.”

“Yes, I know that. That’s the one hole left that’s got to be plugged. At whatever the cost.”

“And no doubt you know just how to plug it?” Thinking ahead of me again, he stared at me, shocked. He said quietly: “No. It would never work, not once in a million years.”

I said: “It will. I’ve got to make it work, somehow. I’m going to talk to Loveless, undisturbed by a hundred policemen crowding the beaches and giving the game away.”

Estrilla was toying with the stem of her glass, smiling quietly. I could feel Astrid’s pale eyes on me.

Fenrek said brusquely: “Out of the question, Cain.”

“I’m going to talk with him and find out exactly that—if there’s any more of it lying around. It’s something we’ve got to know because, if we don’t...the whole thing, all the trouble we’ve gone to...it can all fall apart at the seams and put us back where we started, only more so. And this is the only way to do it.”

For a long time Fenrek said nothing. I could hear the wheels turning over and over in his mind, agreeing with this, discarding that, checking something else, and finally coming up with undeniable truth that there was no other way about it. But he made a half-hearted attempt, none the less. He said:

“When we get him, sodium pentothal would give us the truth about that.”

“Perhaps. But unhappily, pentothal is not absolutely infallible. Under the influence of any of the so-called truth drugs, there’s one chance in a hundred that he’d be able to hold back just a little bit. His subconscious fighting against his conscious will and winning out. I really wouldn’t like to take even that small chance. If he said: no, there’s no more, while in a pentothal-induced coma, you know damn well that we’d never be absolutely sure, not as long as we live. We’d be worrying forever about that child reaching out for that bottle. But if he says it while he’s wide awake and at his most alert, I’ll know whether to believe him or not.”

“And if you don’t?”

“If I don’t...then we’re back to square one. But let’s take one thing at a time. The stakes are too damned high for anything else. One careful step at a time.”

“All right,” he sighed. “Just one man on the beach to make sure you come out of there alive.”