The Deceiver

At ten past two, Marcus Johnson arrived in his long white convertible. He wore an ice-blue tropical suit and an open-neck Sea Island shirt as he mounted the back of the flatbed truck that served as his platform. More sophisticated than Livingstone, he had a microphone with two amplifiers strung from nearby palm trees.

As Johnson began speaking, McCready sidled up to Sean Whittaker, the free-lance stringer who covered the whole Caribbean from his Kingston, Jamaica, base for London’s Sunday Express.

“Boring?” murmured McCready.

Whittaker gave him a glance. “Tripe,” he agreed. “I think I’m going home tomorrow.”

Whittaker reported stories and took his own pictures as well. A long-lens Yashica hung around his neck.

“Would you,” asked McCready, “like a story that would blow your rivals out of the water?”

Whittaker turned and cocked an eyebrow. “What do you know that nobody else does?”

“Since the speech is a bore, why not come with me and find out?”

The two men proceeded across the square, into the hotel, and up to McCready’s second-floor room. From the balcony, they could see the whole square below them.

“The minders, the men in multicolored beach shirts and dark glasses,” said McCready. “Can you get full-face close-ups of them from here?”

“Sure,” said Whittaker. “Why?”

“Do it, and I’ll tell you.”

Whittaker shrugged. He was an old hand; he had had tips in his time from the most unlikely sources. Some worked out, some did not. He adjusted his zoom lens and ran off two rolls of color prints and two of black-and- white.

McCready took him down to the bar, stood him a beer, and talked for thirty minutes.

Whittaker whistled. “Is this on the level?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Can you prove it?” Running this sort of story was going to need some hard-sourced quotes, or Robin Esser, the editor in London, would not use it.

“Not here,” said McCready. “The proof lies in Kingston. You could get back tonight, finalize it tomorrow morning, and file by four P.M. Nine o’clock in London—just in time.”

Whittaker shook his head. “Too late. The last Miami-Kingston flight is at seven-thirty. I’d need to be in Miami by six o’clock. Via Nassau, I’d never make it.”

“As a matter of fact, I have my own plane leaving for Miami at four—in seventy minutes’ time. I’d be happy to offer you a lift.”

Whittaker rose to go and pack his suitcase. “Who the hell are you Mr. Dillon?” he asked.

“Oh, just someone who knows these islands, and this part of the world. Almost as well as you.”

“Better,” growled Whittaker, and left.

* * *

At four o’clock, Sabrina Tennant arrived at the airstrip with her cameraman. McCready and Whittaker were already there. The air taxi from Miami drifted down at ten past the hour.

When it was about to take off, McCready explained, “I’m afraid I can’t make it. A last-minute phone call at the hotel. Such a pity, but the air taxi is paid for, and I can’t get a rebate. It’s too late. So please be my guests. Good- bye, and good luck.”

Whittaker and Sabrina Tennant eyed each other suspi­ciously throughout the flight. Neither of them mentioned to the other what they had or where they were going. At Miami the television team headed into town; Whittaker transferred to the last flight to Kingston.

McCready returned to the Quarter Deck, extracted his portable phone, programmed it to a secure mode, and made a series of calls. One was to the British High Commission in Kingston, where he spoke to a colleague who promised to use his contacts to secure the appropriate interviews. Another was to the headquarters of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Ad­ministration, the DEA, in Miami, where he had a contact of long standing since the international drug trade has links with international terrorism. His third call was to the head of the CIA office in Miami. By the time he had finished, he had reason to hope his new-found friends of the press would be accorded every facility.

Just before six, the orange globe of the sun dropped toward the Dry Tortugas in the west, and darkness, as always in the tropics, came with remarkable speed. True dusk lasted only fifteen minutes. At six, Dr. West called from Nassau. Des­mond Hannah took the call in the Governor’s private office, where Bannister had set up the secure link to the High Commission across the water.

“You’ve got the bullet?” Hannah asked eagerly. Without forensic backup, his inquiry was running dry. He had several possible suspects but no eyewitnesses, no clearly guilty party, no confession.

“No bullet,” said the distant voice from Nassau.

“What?”

“It went clean through him,” said the forensic pathologist. He had finished his work at the mortuary half an hour earlier and had gone straight to the High Commission to make the call. “Do you want the medical jargon or the basics?”

“The basics will do,” said Hannah. “What happened?”

“There was a single bullet. It entered between the second and third ribs, left-hand side, traveled through muscle and tissue, perforated the upper left ventricle of the heart, causing immediate death. It exited through the ribs at the back. I’m surprised you didn’t see the exit hole.”

“I didn’t see either bloody hole,” growled Hannah. “The flesh was so frozen, it had closed over both of them.”

“Well,” said Dr. West down the line, “the good news is, it touched no bone on the way through. A fluke, but that’s the way it was. If you can find it, the slug should be intact—no distortion at all.”

“No deflection off bone?”

“None.”

“But that’s impossible,” protested Hannah. “The man had a wall behind him. We’ve searched the wall inch by inch. There’s not a mark on it, except for the clearly visible dent made by the other bullet, the one that went through the sleeve. We’ve searched the gravel path beneath the wall. We’ve taken it up and sifted it. There is one bullet only, the second bullet, badly smashed up by the impact.”

“Well, it came out all right,” said the doctor. “The bullet that killed him, I mean. Someone must have stolen it.”

“Could it have been slowed up to the point that it fell to the lawn between the Governor and the wall?” asked Hannah.

“How far behind the man was the wall situated?”

“No more than fifteen feet,” said Hannah.

“Then, not in my view,” said the pathologist. “I’m not into ballistics, but I believe the gun was a heavy-caliber handgun, fired at a range of more than five feet from the chest. There are no powder burns on the shirt, you see. But it was probably not more than twenty feet. The wound is neat and clean, and the slug would have been traveling fast. It would have been slowed by its passage through the body, but nowhere near enough to drop to the ground within fifteen feet. It must have hit the wall.”

“But it didn’t,” Hannah protested. Unless, of course, someone had stolen it. If so, that someone had to be within the household. “Anything else?”

“Not a lot. The man was facing his assailant when he was shot. He didn’t turn away.”

Either he was a very brave man, thought Hannah, or more likely, he just couldn’t believe his eyes.

“One last thing,” said the doctor. “The bullet was traveling in an upward trajectory. The assassin must have been crouch­ing or kneeling. If the ranges are right, the gun was fired about thirty inches off the ground.”

Damn, thought Hannah. It must have gone clean over the wall. Or possibly it hit the house, but much higher up, near the guttering. In the morning Parker would have to start all over again, with ladders.

Hannah thanked the doctor and put the phone down. The full written report would reach him by the scheduled flight the next day.

Parker had now lost his four-man forensic team from the Bahamian Police, so he had to work alone the next