“With heat. What happens when Loveless turns up at Guincho?”
“They don’t touch him, in case he was carrying that toxin’ with him. And the big question—is there any more of it?”
I said: “No more.”
“Are you sure?”
“Absolutely.”
“Good. So now it’s up to us.”
I said mildly: “It always was.”
“The men at Guincho have orders to take no risks, to keep him under surveillance and let us know where he is.”
I said: “Some silly bastard is going to take a crack at him, you’ll see. He’ll make a dive for a gun, and that someone will fire, and he’ll be just too late. Because Loveless will have shot him dead before he can even think of pulling the trigger.”
Fenrek shook his head. “No. We told them that he might be carrying that botulin on him, in his pockets. If it had been in a simple glass vial, a shot could have busted it open and given us a real lively epidemic. So there’ll be no shooting.”
“That doesn’t go for him.”
He said gently, looking at the heights of the sandstone cliff: “The chances are that he is up there now, watching us. What’s his weapon?”
“Sawed-off shotgun. A Lames over-under, 12-bore and cut down to a fourteen-inch barrel. Dangerous toy at close quarters, but not much good from up there.”
Estrilla was fitting an improvised sling for Fenrek’s wrist.
He said: “Get rid of that toxin. Now. I want to know it’s gone.”
“All right.”
While they were helping him to a shelter under the lea of the cliff, close in among the rocks where Estrilla had been, out of the wind and the sun, I clambered up to the little shack, or what was left of it, and ripped off a piece of dry cedar and walked back to the rocks with it, shaving it with my pocketknife into tiny slivers, some not so tiny, and then a few sticks of kindling. I set fire to them with my lighter, in a small hollow of rock, fanned them till they were beginning to blaze, then went back for some heavier pieces, which I wrenched out from the foundations, and lugged them back down there.
In fifteen minutes, the hot embers were glowing nicely, turned by a funneled breeze into a blowtorch. I unwound the wire from the little steel box, and said: “Now everybody keeps well away.” I tipped the four glass vials carefully into the middle of the fire, found a long stick and heaped live embers over them, and then got the hell out of there fast. I didn’t know whether they’d pop or not, and if they did, I didn’t want to be too close.
But they didn’t. I took another look in five minutes. The glass had melted already, and I realized that the smart boys who had made these deadly weapons up had taken just that precaution. A fire in the Research Center, otherwise, might have blown loose oddments of toxin all over the landscape. The melted glass had taken on a strange green tinge, and I realized that it had been impregnated with something to absorb enough heat to ensure a rapid melting. Of the powder itself, there was nothing visible at all.
Heat in excess of eight hundred degrees Fahrenheit is about the only thing that will destroy botulinum spores, but to be doubly sure I piled more and more embers up, and threw on more wood; and watching me. Fenrek said (mind reading again!):
“What kind of heat is the minimum?”
I told him: “Eight hundred Fahrenheit, which works out at four hundred and twenty-seven or so in Centigrade,”
Astrid was still worried. She said: “And a driftwood fire is hot enough?”
“Wood burns at twenty-seven hundred and thirty-two degrees, Fahrenheit. Or would you rather have it in Centigrade?”
Estrilla said promptly: “That’s exactly fifteen hundred, we’re not all stupid, you know.”
I was glad to see the enormous change that had come over her. She was bubbling around like a frenzied schoolgirl, fussing over Fenrek and then sitting down, then getting up quickly to fuss some more.
I said: “And the only problem now is where to leave you all while I go and find Loveless. The Alentejano? Are they open for breakfast?”
Fenrek was already struggling to his feet, not without difficulty. Estrilla had found him a long stave, grey-washed by the sea, crooked as a shillelagh, and she was helping him up too, not arguing with his implied authority; the number-two man, just moving out of position as the widowed mistress and getting back into shape again.
Astrid looked at him, worried, and said dubiously: “Well...Estrilla and I can help Cabot, of course, but I really think you ought to...I don’t know, to rest up, Uncle? Please?”
He snorted. He said calmly: “No. It’s time someone played this game who knows what the score is. I’m taking over now.”
Estrilla was delighted; but I thought that was rather unfair of him.
I wanted to carry him up to the top of the cliff where the Jensen was, but he preferred to lean on the two girls, his arm at Estrilla’s plump little waist and gloating over it, with Astrid holding uselessly onto the elbow above his broken wrist and the shillelagh under his armpit. He hobbled along happily; and I kept my eyes open for the Major. There was still time for us to come out of all this badly, so I climbed on ahead of them, searching each bush and cluster of boulders very carefully indeed.
I didn’t for one moment imagine that he would be there. Fenrek was quite wrong when he suggested that Loveless might even be watching us; it was too much out of character for that sad and reckless man.
Sad and reckless...it was a strange combination, and perhaps the key to his character. Somehow, I was half sure that I knew what Loveless would do now, though I couldn’t guess how he would do it; or more importantly, when. I couldn’t get out of my mind the memory of that appalling loneliness, a loneliness that perhaps he wasn’t fully aware of. Was that the force that had driven him, in the first place, into his profession? How does a man survive when he’s at odds with the whole world, even with God himself?
We found the Jensen where I’d left it, and I took the spare key from its hiding place under the dash, and checked the car over carefully first. I didn’t suppose anyone had tampered with it, because if Loveless had truly believed that he and I were leaving the country together as soon as the diminishing wind and the darkness of the night allowed us to get the whaler out of its underground pool, then obviously the car would have been just abandoned; and what a terrible thought that was! Or if he’d decided it wouldn’t be worth the risk of trusting me, then just as obviously I’d never have use for a car again, I would be lying there dead in a lost lake that had been closed off from public view and was likely to stay that way for eternity.
So I was surprised when I saw the tops of the spark plugs; a thin line had been drawn down them with an ordinary graphite pencil. Nothing serious, just enough to stop the motor from firing. It was a foolish, naïve little trick that wasn’t ever going to pay off one way or the other; but somehow, it pleased me. In one respect at least, I’d missed one tiny little value in the man’s makeup; I’d never suspected that he had a sense of humor, however fragmentary.
I wiped off the graphite and started the car. We pulled back the passenger’s seat to its utmost, to give Fenrek room for his leg, and we put Astrid and Estrilla in the back. I found the flask of cognac still locked in the console at the back of the squab and handed it silently to Fenrek. He shook his head and said: “I need all my wits about me now.”
“Since when does one drink deprive you of them? Go on, take a swig, it’ll take some of that pain away.”
He’d shown no sign of any pain at all, but that leg...and that shattered wrist? They must have been giving him hell. He was about to insist in his refusal, but I said, needling him: “You’re not impressing anybody. Drink it, a good long one.”
Grumpily, he glared at me. He looked back over his shoulder at Estrilla, saw that she was beaming at him, sighed, and drank.
