The man stood up and pushed his chair back from the table. He tilted his head back and drained his cocktail. Even though there was no one within earshot he leaned forward and put both hands on the table, speaking very softly.
“Sheriff, I must ask you a personal question. It must be hard to go away on business and leave your poor wife all alone in a small house so far from town. Is it not?”
“Say that again?” Franklin leaned forward and put his nose inches from the man’s own.
“Sorry. I am just saying it must be difficult. For your wife. She must get frightened sometimes, without her brave husband to protect her.”
“My wife.”
“Yes. Her name is Daisy, is it not? Such a pretty name. You must tell her to be careful. The desert is full of coyotes, eh? Especially at night. A woman alone.”
Franklin’s right hand shot out and clamped around the man’s left wrist. He didn’t break any small bones, but he came close.
“If you people ever get anywhere near my wife…if she even hears a voice she doesn’t like on the phone…if you or any of your kind ever cause any harm to come to my wife, I will take off this badge and hunt you down like the worthless piece of filth that you are. I will kill you, Mr. Zamora. Do I make myself clear?”
He let go of the wrist and the man in the white suit was gone out the door and disappearing into the throng outside.
Franklin threw some money down. He got up and left his uneaten hamburger on the table. Then he, too, disappeared into the crowded carnival that was called Duval Street.
HE PUSHED UPSTREAM, bucking the tide of boisterous humanity. He was six blocks from the hotel. He could already see the big animated bird up ahead, all lit up in the misty night sky.
He looked at his watch. It was an hour earlier in Texas. Daisy would be finished with her supper. She’d be standing at the kitchen window, washing up the dishes. It would be getting dark pretty soon. The coyotes would be fixing to start singing.
At that instant, he would have about killed somebody for a cellular telephone, even though he hated the damn things.
“Excuse me,” he said to the large woman. She was standing on the corner with her right hand pressed to her ear, the way people do these days.
“What? Hey, what the hell do you think you’re doing, mister? Give me back my cell phone!”
“I’m sorry. Official police business, ma’am. I won’t be long.”
He flashed his badge and turned away from her.
“How does this thing work?” he asked her, stabbing at buttons with his index finger.
46
H awke stared into the coal fire still burning merrily in the basket grate. He and Ambrose had retired to the ship’s small book-lined library immediately following dinner. Congreve had suggested a brandy. The detective was feeling a bit homesick, Hawke thought. Missing his beloved Diana Mars and snowy walks by her side in the country. He was anxious to be home.
The conference, Hawke’s part of it anyway, was over. Next morning, Ambrose and Pippa were scheduled to fly back to Britain. Hawke himself was headed for points south. He’d given Langley and the State Department what information C had allowed him to share. What Conch and Washington chose to do with the intel he had provided was out of his hands. He was now operating on his own. He was mentally clearing his decks, well on the verge of taking the fight to the enemy.
He was sufficiently motivated. Revenge, in Hawke’s mind anyway, was a highly underrated and overly maligned emotion. He personally had found it to be vastly energizing.
On this cold and rainy Saturday night in Key West, only Pippa had elected to go ashore. One last night on the town, she’d said. The two men remained aboard to work on the Code, even though it meant foregoing a spot Hawke had chosen for its name, the Hot Tin Roof.
The small ship’s clock on the library mantel struck four silvery bells. Hawke, lost in a daydream of drum- beating savages and thick, unyielding jungle, was roused from his reverie. He had been listening to the lovely song now playing softly over the system. It was Andrea Bocelli’s haunting version of Vorrei Morire. He’d decided not to dwell for too long on why this particular lyric had such morbid appeal.
It was just ten o’clock and through the library’s starboard windows, Hawke could see that the rain had finally let up. A rind of yellow moon was visible behind tattered rags of cloud slowly sliding off to the east. The cold front had almost cleared. Tomorrow promised balmy sunshine.
A sleepy sigh was heard above the gentle music and Alex looked from the fire to his friend.
“I’m afraid I’m bloody well stumped,” Congreve said, removing his gold pince-nez glasses and pinching the bridge of his nose. He laid aside the Zimmermann letter. He’d been staring at the bloody thing for hours on end. He stood and stretched his arms above his head.
“You? Stumped?” Hawke said, holding his thistle-shaped snifter aloft so that its many facets refracted the firelight. “Where’s Miss Guinness? We need her famous Record Book!”
“Very amusing, Alex. But I tell you, if C’s Signals section can’t crack it, and I can’t crack it, it simply cannot be cracked.”
They had discussed a variety of approaches to the puzzle at dinner. They kept coming back to the deathbed letter that, for convenience sake, they now referred to simply as the Zimmermann Letter. The numeric code, so promising at first, was now deemed to be a random sequence, computer generated, and thus indecipherable.
“Everything can be cracked,” Hawke said, reaching for the damnable thing. He stared at the letter blindly for a few moments and then put it back down with a sigh of frustration. Numbers. The bane of his existence.
“Gibberish,” Hawke said, giving up any last hope of discerning some kind of repeat or pattern. “Maybe you’re right. We’re both bloody well stumped. There has to be another way.”
Congreve eyed Hawke carefully, his invisible brain wheels spinning so rapidly and obviously Hawke was surprised they weren’t audible. Ambrose stood with his back to the fire, lighting his first pipe of the evening. In a second, the familiar fragrance of Peterson’s Irish Blend was in the air.
“Before the towel is thrown,” Ambrose puffed, “Or, at least, whilst the flag of surrender is still paused mid- flight above the gaping maw of the rubbish bin, bear with me a moment longer.”
Hawke sat back in silence, waiting for Ambrose’s genius to slip silently into the room.
“Consider. The ambassador wanted a letter delivered to his wife. We both assumed, until we actually saw it, that the thing might be some kind of poetic deathbed farewell to his soon-to-be widow in Brazil. Yes?”
“Yes,” Hawke said.
“You subsequently learned from the captured Venezuelan officer, that Zimmermann’s widow has fled Rio de Janeiro for the tatty Amazon River town of Manaus, correct? Fearing for her life.”
“Correct.”
“A problem arose in Mexico City. The ambassador was abducted from his hotel in the Zona Rosa by Brazilian agents, whereupon he was quickly disappeared into the jungle.”
“Yes. Where Top tried unsuccessfully to kill him. Zimmermann was up to his neck in this thing. But he lost the heart for it, or the nerve, and escaped to England.”
“So, we have a German ambassador with links to Brazil, Venezuela, and Mexico City. And all three somehow go back to this Syrian, Muhammad Top.”
“Top stands at the crossroads,” Hawke said. “He’s the link.”
“Why Mexico, though? Why are they in bed with a Muslim terrorist?”
“Who stands to benefit most if Top succeeds? Mexico, I’d say. A few successful border skirmishes, America succumbs to the media outrage, and they have a chance to reclaim all the land they lost to the Americans in the war of 1848.”
“I suppose you’re right. Finally, Alex, one thing I may have overlooked. There was a second gift in addition to
