The man with the empty hands says, 'You laid out these three. You found them trying to steal your bikes and you laid them out. Now call the police.'
'The coppers won't believe it,' says Jigger.
The sleepy one says: 'They will, I promise you,' and I believe him. Then he takes out a wallet the size of a briefcase and distributes five-pound notes—two each, except Lonesome. The All-England halitosis champ gets four.
Then the two men and the bird get into the Jag and go, and I realize how dull the rest of my life is going to be.
* * *
They telephoned Loomis from a call box, and he told them to go back to the nursing home. He wanted Selina where she would be safe. It was Schiebel's one piece of luck. Another search party in a Mercedes spotted them, and followed them, then radioed to Schiebel, who used two more cars, an old Peugeot with an astonishing engine, driven by a very fair Albanian, and a Mini-Cooper S which he drove himself. They took it in turn to follow the Jaguar, and never stayed behind it for long. Once the Peugeot cut out and passed it, and shadowed it for a while from in front, until Schiebel called the driver on the radio to leave the hunt, and it was the Cooper's turn to hang on and to leave when the Jaguar left the main road, and Schiebel followed until they turned off again, then switched off his lights and felt his way through the darkness, his eyes straining for the ruby tail lights ahead, until at last the Jaguar stopped at a lodge gate. There was a pause, then the car went through, the lodge gate swung back, and Schiebel waited in the darkness, then slipped out, wary, silent, to look at the defenses of the house.
The lodge gate was a sheet of steel, the windows of the lodge itself were tiny, and the men inside it would be armed. The lodge was built of solid stone, and would withstand direct assault from anything less than a tank. The walls were of smooth stone, ten feet high, and, he discovered when he climbed on to his car roof, wired for alarm bells. Above the powerline was barbed wire, held in position by steel angle irons, and in each of the angle irons was a photoelectric cell. From inside the house he could hear the hum of a generator. It would do no good to try to cut off their power supply; they made their own, and guarded it. The place was impregnable.
Schiebel let the Cooper coast down the road past the house, then switched on the ignition and drove back to London, flogging the car as if it had been a horse, yelling obscenities in his mind in German, Russian, Arabic, repeating them solemnly, as if it were a ritual, dragging out each phrase in an ecstasy of fury, then ceasing at last, braking, easing his speed as the houses began, driving decorously, cautious of policemen, while his mind grappled with the problem that the princess of the Haram had sent him.
He had underestimated her. She had warned him when he had hunted her down that night in Zaarb, and he had believed in her courage, but not her competence. That had been a mistake. She would have been so useful too, for acquiring the cobalt. Her father would surely have— Schiebel closed his mind to that thought. He had made a mistake. If it proved to be too great, he would answer for it, not to Zaarb but to Peking. That must not happen; the mistake must be rectified. He thought again of the two women. Selina would have been useful, but Mrs. Naxos was vital, if he were to get the British out of Zaarb. Somehow he must get Phihppa Naxos. Somehow, and soon. She was in a fortress, but her husband had left it—gone back to his yacht ready for the treaty negotiations that opened next day. Mrs. Naxos's place, he decided, was with her husband.
He went back to the embassy, up to the radio room where Selina and Sherif had escaped, and had a long, snarling conversation with Zaarb's president and commanding general. Their displeasure didn't worry him, so long as they would move when the time came. The army had some tanks now, old Russian stuff, and Chinese crews for them. They had field guns too, and a squadron of MIG-15's. The Haram had nothing bigger than a machine gun, in a country made for modem war. If the British didn't interfere, the whole operation would take a couple of days at most —and if he could get at Naxos the British wouldn't interfere. He extracted his promises at last, and gave his in return, then switched off on the cursing president. He began to imitate Loomis's voice using the carefully remembered words and phrases he had heard when the big man had interviewed him as Andrews. At last the speeches came together, and sounded right.
'Look, cock,' he began, 'we can't afford to offend Naxos now d'you see.'
It wasn't quite Loomis, but it was near enough, particularly as the telephone he would use would have a bad fine. Tomorrow he would make two calls, and perhaps have Phihppa Naxos as a result. Now it was time to deal with a traitor.
He dressed himself in black sweater and pants, stuck a Russian automatic in his pocket, and drove to a street near the mews behind Swyven's house. His shoes were rubber-soled, and made no noise. Schiebel moved like a shadow to the mews itself, and waited for the tiny sound he needed. He was lucky. The man on duty struck a match, and Schiebel heard his sigh as he inhaled smoke, then began to walk slowly up and down. Twenty paces. Turn. Back. Twenty paces. Schiebel grinned. This one had been too long in the army. Schiebel waited until he moved down again, then sped to the doorway the watcher had used. He made no sound at all. When he came back—seventeen, eighteen, nineteen, twenty—Schiebel waited till he turned, then struck with the barrel of his pistol along the side of the man's head, jumped from the shadows to catch him as he fell, and dragged him into the doorway. Then he broke into the house next door to Swyven's.
The whole operation took seven minutes. Break in, go up to the attic—past the master bedroom, the nursery, the empty guest room, the maid's room where the au pair girl dreamed of warmth and sunshine and lemon trees in unattainable Sicily, up to the deserted attics, a litter of toys, books, discarded furniture, the squeak of a rusty window hinge, and Schiebel was on the roof, moving velvet-pawed across the leaded guttering to the attic window in Swyven's house. He used a diamond with four neat strokes, waited for the glass to fall—a tiny brittle whisper of noise— then put his hand into the hole he had made, opened the window and lowered himself into the house. In the comfortable darkness he checked his pistol by touch, screwed on the silencer, then moved into the house, past the attics full of unacceptable souvenirs, the maid's room where Ara-paro dreamed of warmth and sunshine and lemon trees in unattainable Burgos. The stairs were carpeted and the noise he made was less than a sigh; he went down to the drawing room and the sound of voices. Swyven's voice, then an older female voice, and then another older voice, a man's. Schiebel heard words in his mind he thought he had forgotten. 'Visiting the sins of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generations of them that hate me,' said the voice in his mind, 'but showing mercy unto thousands of them that love me and keep my commandments.' The voice spoke in German.
Schiebel grinned in the darkness. The voice had got it wrong. He was going to visit the sins of the child on the father—and mother. Two parents had chosen to spend an evening with their son, and there was nothing wrong with that, except that it meant their death. He couldn't wait for another chance, and there must be no survivors to send for the police until his work was accomplished. Schiebel listened, concentrating on the clipped, half-swallowed noises that English bourgeois made. They were quarreling.
Mark Swyven was saying: 'But you say yourself I haven't done anything illegal—and that chap Craig admits it. If I choose not to go back to Venice, they couldn't make me.'
'Don't be a fool,' said his father.
Lady Swyven said: 'Mark's right, you know, dear. He hasn't committed a crime.'
'He's a traitor,' said Lord Swyven. 'There aren't many worse crimes, surely? He's betrayed bis own country.'
'I don't believe in countries,' said Swyven. T believe in mankind.'
'And you've done your best to put fifty millions of them in a damned difficult position.'
'Fifty million 'haves.' I wanted to do something for the 'have-nots.' It's about time somebody did. And anyway it's not your business. It's mine.'
'And theirs.'
'The point is there's nothing Britain can do about it.'
'Mark,' said his father. 'Use your brains. Just this once. You've got them. Use them. They want you out, and you must go out. If you insist on staying here—good God, man, can't you
Schiebel went into the room then. It was interesting stuff, and Swyven's concern with the masses was correct enough, even touching, but he hadn't got all night. Lady Swyven and Mark were facing him. Their reactions were obvious at once. Lady Swyven, bewildered yet indignant, Mark abject with terror. The father, because he was deaf and had his back to the door, took a little longer to understand. When at last he did turn, and saw the gun, he
