The waiter arrived with Alex’s drink. He picked up the glass. Even the feel of it, cold against his skin, came as a relief. He drank some. It was sweet and surprisingly refreshing. He set the glass down.
“I want to come with you,” he said.
“Forget it. No way!” Troy sounded incredulous. “Why do you think I’ve told you all this? Only because you know too much already and I need you to understand that we mean business. You have to keep out of the way. This is not a child’s game. We’re not zapping the bad guy on a computer screen! This is the real thing, Alex. And you’re going to stay in the hotel and wait for us to get back!”
“I’m coming with you,” Alex insisted. “Maybe you’ve forgotten, but this is meant to be a family holiday. You dump me on my own in the hotel a second time, maybe somebody’s going to notice. Maybe they’re going to start wondering where you are.”
Turner fiddled with the collar of his shirt. Troy looked away.
“I won’t get in your way,” Alex sighed. “I’m not asking to come scuba-diving with you. Or climbing. I just want to be on the boat. Think about it. If the three of us go together, it’ll look more like a family cruise.”
Turner nodded slowly. “You know, Troy, the kid has a point.”
Troy picked up her drink and gazed into it moodily, as if trying to find an answer inside the glass. “All right,” she said at last. “You can come with us if that’s what you really want. But you’re not part of this, Alex. Your job was to help get us onto the island and if you ask me, we didn’t even need you for that. You saw the security at the airport, it was a joke! But OK, since you’re here, you might as well come along for the ride. But I don’t want to hear you. I don’t want to see you. I don’t want to know you’re there.”
“Whatever you say,” Alex sat back. He had got what he wanted, but he had to ask himself why he wanted it at all. Given the choice, he would have preferred to take the first plane off the island and put as much distance as possible between himself and the CIA and Sarov and the whole lot of them.
But that was a choice he didn’t have. All Alex knew was that he didn’t want to spend time in the hotel on his own, worrying. If there really was a bomb somewhere on the island, he wanted to be the first to hear about it. And there was something else. Turner and Troy seemed confident enough about this Devil’s Chimney. They had assumed that it wasn’t guarded and that it would take them all the way to the top. But they had been equally confident when they had gone to the Salesman’s birthday party, and that had almost got Turner killed.
Alex finished his drink. “All right,” he said. “So when do we go?”
Troy fell silent. Turner took out his wallet and paid for the drinks. “Straight away,” he said. “We’re doing it tonight.”
THE DEVIL’S CHIMNEY
It was late afternoon when they set out from Puerto Madre, leaving the port with its fish markets and pleasure cruisers behind them. Turner and Troy were going to make the dive while it was still light. They would find the cave and wait there until sunset, then climb up into Casa de Oro under cover of darkness. That was the plan.
The man called Garcia had a boat that had known the sea too long. It wheezed and spluttered out of the harbour, trailing a cloud of evil-smelling black smoke. Rust had rippled and then burst through every surface like some bad skin disease. The boat had no visible name. A few flags fluttered from the mast, but they were little more than rags, with any trace of their original colours faded long ago. There were six air cylinders lashed to a bench underneath a canopy. They were the only new equipment in sight.
Garcia himself had greeted Alex with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. Then he had spoken at length, in Spanish, with Turner. Alex had spent the best part of a year in Barcelona with his uncle and understood enough of the language to follow what they were saying.
“You never talked about a boy. What do you think this is? A tourist excursion? Who is he? Why did you bring him here?”
“It’s none of your business, Garcia. Let’s go.”
“You paid for two passengers.” Garcia held up two withered fingers, every bone and sinew showing through. “Two passengers… that was what we agreed.”
“You’re being paid well enough. There’s no point arguing. The boy’s coming and that’s the end of it!”
After that, Garcia fell into sullen silence. Not that there would have been any point talking anyway. The noise of the engine was too great.
Alex watched as the coastline of Cayo Esqueleto slipped past. He had to admit that Blunt had been right-the island was strangely beautiful with its extraordinary, deep colours; the palm trees packed together, separated from the sea by a brilliant ribbon of white sand. The sun was hovering, a perfect circle, over the horizon. A brown pelican, clumsy and comical on the ground, shot out of a pine tree and soared gracefully over their heads. Alex felt strangely at peace. Even the noise of the engine seemed to have drifted away.
After about half an hour, the land began to rise up and he realized they had reached the north point of the island. The vegetation fell back and suddenly he was looking at a sheer rock wall that dropped all the way, without interruption, to the sea. This must be the isthmus that he had been told about, with the road leading to the Casa de Oro somewhere at the top. There was no sign of the house itself but, craning his neck, he could just make out the top of a tower, white and elegant, with a pointed red slate roof. A watch-tower. There was a single figure framed in an archway, barely more than a speck. Somehow Alex knew that it was an armed guard.
Garcia turned off the engine and moved to the back of the boat. For such an old man, he seemed very agile. He picked up an anchor and threw it over the side, then hoisted a flag-this one more identifiable than the others. It showed a diagonal white stripe on a red background. Alex recognized the international scuba-diving sign.
Troy came over to him. “We’ll go down here and swim in to the coast,” she said.
Alex looked up at the figure in the tower. There was a glint of sunlight reflecting off something. A pair of binoculars? “I think we’re being watched,” he said.
Troy nodded. “Yes. But it doesn’t matter. Dive boats aren’t allowed to come here but they sometimes do. They’re used to it. The shore is strictly off-limits but there’s a wreck somewhere… people swim to that. We’ll be fine, provided we don’t draw attention to ourselves. Just don’t do anything stupid, Alex.”
Even now she couldn’t resist lecturing him. Alex wondered what he would have to do to impress these people. He said nothing.
Turner had taken off his shirt, showing a hairless, muscular chest. Alex watched as he stripped down to his trunks, then pulled on a wetsuit which he had taken from a small cabin below. Quickly the two CIA agents got ready, attaching air cylinders to their buoyancy jackets-BCDs-then adding weight belts, masks and snorkels. Garcia was smoking, sitting to one side and watching all this with quiet amusement, as if it really had nothing to do with him.
At last they were ready. Turner had brought a waterproof bag with him and he unzipped it. Alex noticed the Game Boy sealed in a plastic bag inside. There were also maps, torches, knives and a harpoon gun.
“Leave it all, Turner,” Troy said.
“The Game Boy…?”
“We’ll come back for it.” Troy turned to Alex. “Right, Alex,” she said. “Listen up! We’re going to make an exploratory dive to begin with. We’ll be gone about twenty minutes. No longer. We need to find the cave entrance and check there are no security devices in operation.” She glanced at her watch. It was only half past six. “The sun won’t set for another hour,” she continued. “We don’t want to spend that long sitting in the cave, so we’ll come back to the boat for the rest of our equipment, change tanks and make a second journey back. You don’t have to worry about anything. As far as the people in the villa are concerned, we’re just tourists doing a sunset dive.”
“I’m a qualified diver,” Alex said.
“The hell with that!” Turner cut in.
Troy agreed. “You talked your way onto the boat,” she said. “Fine. Personally, I wish you’d stayed in the hotel. But maybe you were right about that, it might have raised suspicions.”
“You’re not coming with us,” Turner said. He looked at Alex coldly. “We don’t want any more people killed. You stay here with Garcia and leave the rest to us.”
The two agents made their all-important buddy checks, each one looking over the other’s equipment. No pipes twisted. Air in the tanks. Weights and releases. Finally, they went over to the side of the boat and sat with their
