Now, the expression was changing; Van Reck was grinning to himself, enjoying the joke.

Loveless said to him: “All right, just keep your eyes open, he’s not as big a fool as he looks.” He switched on the S-phone and said: “Jerry? I’m going down to Guinco myself. Stay out of sight, stay at the entrance. Van is standing guard down here. If anybody shows his nose near the cave, or comes out of it while I’m away, you know what to do. And if I’m not back in an hour, you know what to do then too. I’ve put the stuff...” He looked at me and said into the receiver: “You remember where we hid the money that time? There.”

He switched off and, not taking his eyes off me, trying hard to find out what I was thinking and not succeeding, he said slowly: “This just might be the biggest mistake I ever made in my life. But risks—you have to take them sometimes, don’t you?”

I said politely: “Indeed you do.”

“And to tell you the truth, I just don’t give a damn. Maybe if you think about that enough, it’ll slow you down. We can all go to hell and I just don’t give a damn, Now start the motor.”

“I thought you didn’t want the sound of it.”

“Start it.”

I shrugged, leaned over and pushed the button. It roared into life immediately, a muffled roar that sounded, in the confines of the cavern, more than it really was. I knew that we were too deep in the bowels of the earth to be heard out there where the bright sun was.

He said at once, shouting: “Cut it!”

I switched off, and he looked at me and half laughed, and walked away to leave me there alone with a madman perched up on a ledge twenty feet above my head, with a poisoned arrow ready to loose off if I even wanted to scratch my head.

At the entrance to the cave, Loveless turned back. He looked the cave and the boat over thoroughly, looked up at Van Reck and said: “Don’t let him get behind the boat. If he does, just wait for him to show his head again. He can’t get out, you’ve got a clear line of fire to the entrance.”

I saw Van Reck nodding slowly. The grin had gone, and he was his own phlegmatic self again. Loveless turned on his heel and was gone. I thought I’d give him ten minutes.

I looked up at Van Reck and met his eye. I said: “Don’t get excited, no one’s going to get hurt.”

Very slowly, I put my palms out and bent my knees, and leaned on the deck with my hands and slowly straightened my legs. I started doing push-ups, quite slowly, not to get the archer up there too worried. Not that I thought he would be. There was a clear field of fire to every point in the cave except behind the boat. And there, as Loveless had said, there could be no safety either—all he had to do was wait for me to show myself again as I’d have to if I were trying to get out of there. At thirty push-ups to the minute, I thought three hundred would be about right, and it was good to feel the blood coursing through my shoulders.

And then, when I’d counted a hundred and forty-seven, there was a very slight sound, and Loveless was there again, standing in the entrance and staring at me in surprise.

He said: “What the...what the hell goes on?”

I turned my head and smiled at him, not stopping.

I said gently: “Just getting my exercise, Major. I’m a nut about keeping fit. Too easy to get fat and flabby, isn’t it?” Moving up and down, I said: “And I didn’t expect you back quite so soon either.”

I saw him shrug. “Just checking.”

I’d half expected it. Ten more minutes then, another three hundred. He turned on his heels and was gone again. I went on pushing.

And then, at the count of two hundred and nine, my timing was forced up a bit, fortuitously. A shot sounded out there; or was it two, impossibly close together? I knew that Van Reck must have been as startled as I was—perhaps startled enough to loose off a shaft in my direction; or perhaps, with luck, startled enough to look off at the entrance where the sound of the shot came from.

I didn’t check to see what he was doing; I knew there wouldn’t be time. I did at once what I was preparing to do two or three moments later. I shoved hard with my foot against the deck rail and threw myself backward at the same time. As I went over the side and hit the water, I heard the arrow thud into the deck where I’d been; the sharp steel had pierced the sleeve of my jacket and I tore myself free and was under the water even before the second shaft hit close beside the first.

And I knew that he still wouldn’t leave the safety of his defensive perch; he didn’t have to. I dived deep and went under the hull, going as deep as I could while I was about it, killing two birds with one stone by checking the depth of the water at the same time. It was a good twenty feet or more, to judge by the feeling of my ears. Deep enough, at any rate. I came up at last on the other side, where at least for the moment it was safe, knowing that Van Reck would be on his feet now, waiting for me to reappear, as I must, or merely hold me there till his boss got back. I pulled myself silently up, hidden from him by the superstructure of the cabin’s top, slid over the scuppers on my belly, and rolled down the four steps into the cabin.

I decided that I had plenty of time now, and I searched long and carefully. There was no danger unless I showed myself again. A trap, Van Reck would be thinking, and the idiot’s put his head into it, let’s see what happens when he pokes it out again, as sooner or later he’s got to do.

It took me less than a minute to find the small steel box, hidden away in the bottom of a large can of coffee. It was empty, of course, and it took me another three minutes to find the vials, wrapped in oily rags and stashed away in the pipe berth, wedged in the bottom section near the inner cover of the bilges. Thinking of the terrible, indiscriminate death they represented, I couldn’t help shuddering; a little play in the pipes as the boat swayed, and one of the glass vials, armored or not, might easily have cracked. I thought grimly: by God, he really does need someone with a little more respect for the most deadly toxin in the world’s whole alarming arsenal. I replaced them carefully in the box and wrapped a length of stout wire round it to make sure it stayed good and shut.

But it took me longer to undo the seacocks with my bare hands. With a good heavy wrench I’d have opened them up quickly, but they were fastened down tight and not oiled. I used my belt as a sort of wrench, tightening it round the four-inch lugs and twisting till they came free.

There was a pleasant gurgling sound, and the water rushed up into the cabin, flooding it in less than a minute. I slipped the steel box into my pocket, not without certain qualms which I knew to be foolish, and soon there was only a foot of headroom above the level of the inrushing water.

Where would he be now, Van Reck? Would he have come down at last, knowing what I was doing and peering down into the water, not here, but at the entrance? That damned reflected sunlight on the water wasn’t going to be much help; or was it? Would he see me ten feet down swimming strongly past him? And if he did, would he accurately gauge the effect of the water’s refraction, and get at least one good shot in? One was all he needed.

The boat was keeling over now, the water on one side reaching the roof. I took in the last few gulps of air before she went down, then eased my way out of the cabin. I’d dearly have liked to come up just once for one more breath of air, but the risk was too great. Instead, I struck out hard along the channel, swimming down as well as along, getting deeper and deeper till my ears were bursting. I felt bottom and kicked my way hard along, then turned over on my back when I calculated that I’d reached the overhang where there’d be light. Could he see me here, I wondered?

My lungs were bursting now too, but there was still a long way to go and no hope of more air till I was clear out in open water, I swam hard and fast and deep. I heard a rush of sound as a shaft went spinning through the water four feet or more ahead of me.

He could see me, then; but the refraction of the water was worrying him. It’s a simple enough equation if you’ve got any sort of an education at all; the sine of the angle of incidence above the water (or any other isotropic medium for that matter), bears the same ratio to the angle of distortion below as the speed of light in air does to the speed of light in water, and all you have to do is work it out. Simple. But I didn’t really expect him to know much about the formulae for refractive indices, and to be fair, the water was turbulent anyway, which meant that the index was constantly changing.

So he was just guessing how far behind me he should aim, and being thrown completely out of kilter by a mathematical problem he knew nothing about. He wasn’t even sure whether he should be aiming where I was going or where I’d been, and was trying to find out by trial and error, which is always a slow process.

I could almost sympathize with him. To a man of his proved expertise it must have been very frustrating to see those expensive broadheads so widely missing their mark.

Another shot went very wide. He was aiming ahead of me now, quite wrongly, with only a vague, refracted shape for his target, deep under ten feet of pounding waves. But the next was terrifyingly close when he realized his mistake and was lucky enough, perhaps, to shoot through a pool of momentarily-still water; it was no more than a few inches to my side. I went deeper and turned hard to the left till I bumped my head savagely into the rock wall. I could feel the turbulence of the sea now, with the water above me lighter in color, a blinding blue-white, and the waves dashing onto the rocks there. But I still did not dare to surface.

Another shaft went by me, and another, so fast on its heels that it was hard to believe they had both been loosed from the same bow. I wondered how many more he had left, and remembered the quiver I’d noticed the first time I’d seen him, in the lagosteria, a quiver with ten, twelve, maybe fifteen or more of his deadly red-tipped arrows. I tried to get deeper and couldn’t; there was a steel bar bent around my legs, a steel bar that was cemented into the channel’s bottom with a heavy rope tied to it and leading off to the right. I knew at once what it was.

I hauled hard on the rope and pulled myself into a narrow tunnel, so narrow that my shoulders were brushing on both sides, I thought: What happens if I take a deep breath now? The pain in my lungs was almost insupportable. The passage went on and on and on and on as I hauled fast on the rope; it was too tight a fit for swimming now, and the claustrophobic feeling added very considerably to my worries. But I knew the rope led to the lagosteria; it was the guideline for the baskets that would be hauled in there from the open sea.

And then, suddenly, the rope swerved upward over a cluster of big smooth boulders, and my head was up above water in cold, musty air, bumping against the heavy concrete upper floor of the lobster beds. There was a moment of panic when I wondered if someone had closed the trap again, but there it was to one side, wide open and inviting. I treaded water for a moment while I got my lungs filled up and working once more, and then swam slowly towards it and pulled myself up. I rolled over on my back and lay there, gasping for air and knowing that it was all over now, that there was air to breathe once more...

In the semi-darkness, a shadow stirred; and a sound disturbed the silence. Someone said, a hollow little voice: “Cain?”

I rolled over fast and was on my feet at once.

It was Astrid. She stood there, staring at me, her face white, her eyes startled. Close behind her, Estrilla was crouched as though she were ready for some sort of action, and I saw that her eyes were filled with tears.

I said: “For God’s sake. How did you get here? And why?”

For a moment, nobody spoke. I said, a wave of sudden fear sweeping over me: “Where’s Fenrek?”

Estrilla suddenly started to cry, quite uncontrollably, hiding her face in her hands, her shoulders shaking. She was no longer the calm and cool and competent young agent from Interpol; she was, instead, a broken, shattered woman for whom the end of the world has suddenly come, terribly and unexpectedly.

Astrid said, her voice low and soft and infinitely sad: “My uncle is dead. They shot him.”

CHAPTER 12

Astrid was suddenly in my arms. I could feel the sobs she was trying to stifle. She said nothing. There was nothing to be said. The shot I had heard? I just held her to me for a while, her face buried in my chest.

I saw Estrilla sink to her knees on the hard floor, as though now that I was there with them there was no need for any support of her own anymore; it was as though the foundation had given way, completely, and the dam was about to burst. It was already bursting. Her grief seemed to well up inside her, almost bloating her as she sank down, quite helplessly. I wondered if Fenrek had loved her as much as she loved him...He was always extricating himself from some affair or other, getting close, too close, to an attractive woman and then pulling away from her, always too late.

I asked gently: “What happened? I heard a shot.”

Astrid pulled away from me then, and dried her eyes. She looked at Estrilla and knew that it was up to her, to Astrid herself, to tell me. She took a deep breath and said, haltingly:

“He was coming down himself to find you. As soon...soon as it got light.”