Krysalis: Krysalis (53 page)
“That figures.”
“Something else. A few days ago, the woman he’s with this year made some trouble here at the port. From the description, it sounds as if it could be Anna Lescombe.”
“Why the devil didn’t he report that before?”
“He says no one asked him.”
No one does their duty anymore!
Albert wanted to shout. But he contented himself with saying, “I thought you’d issued an alert?”
“He didn’t read it until this evening.” Vassili hesitated. “Pay on the islands is low, and perhaps this man is more friendly with Kleist than he should be. But that can wait for later. Right now, we’re wasting time.”
“What about David Lescombe?”
“Nothing.”
“But you did put out an alert on him, too?”
“Of course. As I’ve told you, a hundred boats go in and out of here every day. Not all of them use the port. There are beaches, coves … Lescombe is maybe here, maybe not.”
Albert knew already that an air search had failed to locate David’s speedboat. Three-quarters of an hour had elapsed between his climbing out of the water and the first chopper taking off, seventy miles away on the mainland. Lescombe could have defected to Albania in that time; he could have
swum
to bloody Albania….
“God damn!”
“Do you want to go up to the villa? It’s called the ‘Little House,’ by the way.”
“How charming. Let’s get a move on, shall we.”
But it took a while to organize enough transport for everyone, another quarter of an hour lost frigging about, Albert thought savagely. These people wanted to join the Common Market, when all they were fit for was taking long, long siestas. Eventually, however, he was on his way, sandwiched between Vassili and Hayes in the back seat of a Fiat.
“What are you doing about the Coast Guard?” he asked.
“They have been told—”
The car swerved violently to avoid a motorcyclist; for a moment all was cursing and confusion. Albert gritted his teeth at the agony that suddenly boiled through his injured hand.
“We’ve ordered the Coast Guard to stay on watch, but don’t expect too much. When we first put out a
description of that speedboat we got three sightings in the first quarter of an hour. Trouble is, they were all in different places.”
“But one of them indicated a course to this island, you did say that.”
“En daxi.”
Got him, thought Albert. Got everyone. Never mind the ifs and the buts, forget about the sea, the watery bit’s behind you now, think positive. What idiot drives a motorcycle like that at night? Not a motorcycle, a moped.
At last the convoy slowed to a halt. Everyone got out. The six black-clad newcomers were already in a huddle when Albert and Hayes came up. Albert looked around for Vassili to do some translating, but he had disappeared.
Suddenly there were just three of them: Hayes, Albert, and the policeman.
“We’re being set up,” Hayes muttered.
“What?”
“They’re running this thing for themselves. Although it may have passed you by, we don’t figure any longer.”
“Then we shall wait,” Albert said calmly, “until they collect us again.” But Hayes’ words jarred him.
He moved away, deliberately distancing himself from the other two in order to listen. He had not experienced such stillness since his last foray into the Empty Quarter, and as for the stars! Albert, enveloped in a velvety darkness that seemed neither moist nor dry, gazed up at them in awe.
How did the inhabitants of this remote place manage for transport, he wondered? Perhaps they all owned bicycles, mopeds …
His memory kept looping back to the barely avoided accident on the road as they were coming out of the port. What sort of maniac rode a motorbike in that way on a hot night
while wearing gray flannels and a long-sleeved white shirt?
The thump might have been anything, except that Albert’s instincts were honed to recognize a stun grenade when one went off. As he crashed down he heard five rounds of automatic fire, muffled by distance, something more than distance. Interior, two o’clock, seventy degrees,
go!
Less than twenty seconds after he’d risen to the crouch, his back was jammed hard up against an outside wall of the Little House. Listen. Wait.
Go!
Roll around the corner, down, monkey crawl to door, Christ, what a stench! Mayhem …
Albert stood up silently, raising both hands above his head. These men were as professional as any he’d encountered, but sometimes the best of us make mistakes….
Vassili was standing inside the hallway. Hearing the Englishman clear his throat he swung around, holding in both hands a pistol aimed at Albert’s stomach.
The next seconds seemed inordinately long.
“Come in,” Vassili said softly, holstering the gun. “Watch your feet.”
A living room, once cozy, now disordered. On the table by the fireplace, two large, empty suitcases and a radio set, powerful, not plugged in. It looked as if someone had been setting up an aerial. They’d interrupted him before he could complete the job, however; he lay on the floor, his legs entangled with the chair on which he must have been sitting when the five rounds drilled through his chest. Face a mess, too, had he been in a fist
fight? Halfway between him and Albert lay a Luger, beside that a holster. It had been a case of “No Surrender,” then.
“You okay?” Hayes asked as he came through the front door.
Albert nodded. “Too late. Birds flown.”
Vassili and his squad were already taking the house apart, aided by the policeman, who had entered as soon as Hayes demonstrated by his own example that it was safe to do so. Nothing showed up, except the radio. Albert wandered about, trying to picture what had gone on here.
Only in the last bedroom did anything attract his interest: a vase of bluebells, now somewhat limp, on the windowsill. He went over to look. Then he saw something else. There was a small square of card under the vase, not aligned like a coaster, but slightly askew, as if someone had put the vase down hurriedly to stop the card from blowing away.
Or to hide it.
Albert lifted the vase to one side and picked up the card, turning it over as he did so. A photograph. David Lescombe, wearing a white, long-sleeved shirt—
you moron get after him!
“Vassili,” he yelled. “The guy on the moped, it was Lescombe, out, out,
out!”
In the car they tried to make sense of it, paint a picture they could all believe in, but nothing worked. If Lescombe was part of the opposition, why didn’t he escape with the Germans? If he was straight up, why did he lie to Albert in Corfu? Where was Anna now? Who had her?
Back in the port Albert and Hayes stayed by the car, watching the Greeks fan out. Albert kept his eyes on
Vassili, who was on the point of entering the biggest taverna when a woman in the doorway of a nearby boutique said something that made him pause.
Albert, sensing game, drew closer.
Vassili was having an expressive conversation with the boutique lady, who wore large, round spectacles that made her look distinctly owlish. She seemed angry, perhaps a touch scared. Vassili was pushing her too hard. It ended abruptly, with him throwing up his hands in a gesture of despair.
“The man next door,” he said to Albert, “runs some kind of travel company. He has boats.”
Albert took in the chalked notices. “Yes?”
“This woman saw a foreigner come up to him. The foreigner could speak some Greek. He wanted a boat to go to Antipaxos, right then. The woman got interested: it’s forbidden to take a boat to Antipaxos after dark, too dangerous. But the foreigner had a lot of money, seemed really desperate, so in the end they did a deal.”
“How long ago?”
“Maybe half an hour, she’s not sure.”
“What is this Anti-place?”
“A smaller island, uninhabited, due south, one mile.”
“Time to go,” said Albert.
44
David had traveled a long way without knowing real fear. When it hit him it came out of nowhere, hard, like an iron force of nature.
Stiff gusts whipped up the channel between the two islands, sending huge surges of sea against the side of the boat, and hampering the Greek helmsman’s efforts to keep her on course. The boat was small, powered only by an outboard motor. David sat on the middle thwart, gripping the sides. His hands ached with strain.
He knew he might die out here.
The travel agent had warned him: the strait between the two islands was unpredictable, hazardous even to those with years of experience on Greek inshore waters. Night was worst. At certain times the sea glittered beneath the moon like a millpond, with scarcely an eddy to marble its silver surface; at others it would dissolve into fury at the behest of some whimsical gale or freak tide. If you were caught up in it, there was no
going back, all you could do was run before the waves, praying they would not swamp your boat.
In the end, greed overcame caution. The man said he would try a crossing. At £ 100 for one mile, it made the
Concorde
seem like a cheap day excursion.
It had not felt too bad at first. The sea looked choppy, rather than rough; David was an experienced sailor, so this did not daunt him. Shortly after they left the lee of the big island, however, the screw began to leave the water with each pitch and toss. The first wave broke over the prow of the boat. Then another, high enough to soak David’s shoes and ankles. He tightened his already painful grip on the planking. If the boat shipped too much water it would founder and sink. He was a strong swimmer, but he was realistic, too, and he was sure he would not be able to survive a sea running this high.
He distrusted the boat’s owner. Now he understood the man’s cupidity: he was terrified. He kept up a low, monotonous litany, its burden seemed to be not so much that what they were doing was dangerous as that it was illegal, for at night the port police closed this strait to traffic. That didn’t worry David. The most welcome sight in the world, right then, would have been an irate harbor master in his cutter.
They were three-quarters of the way across when they started to ship water in alarming quantities.
Crosscurrents.
The land mass in front of David lurched from side to side, all scrambled up with black sea and white horses, like a demented television screen. The wind had risen. When David felt the boat smash against the first V of converging waters, he panicked. He could no longer hear the Greek helmsman’s chant against the howl of
the wind, but the sound of his own voice echoed inside his head like a ghoul’s.
He was screaming. He was going to die.
No conscious thoughts. No prayers. Just the fear, the shit inside him welling up in animal protest at the honor of it. The totality of “me.” Bottom line:
save me.
His legs were soaked to the knees; water swished about everywhere, slowing them down, making them unstable. The boat began to rock forward and back, like a swing. Sometimes a wave took her sideways as well, bringing her to a crazy kind of halt, but then the weight of sea on one side would yield, abandoning them to the mercies of the next watery trench. The Ionian, no longer an azure, picture-postcard lake, was black and chill.
This penetrating cold did more than anything else to keep David thinking clearly. The small island lay dead ahead, less than a quarter of a mile off. Anna had already landed. He’d found her. Triumph. And he wasn’t going to let the sea rob him of it now.
He launched himself forward, feeling in the wintry bath for something to bail with. The boat plunged, banging his head against a thwart, and he temporarily lost control, stunned. He was floundering around, soaked to the skin, at the mercy of waves that flung themselves down in a whirl of destruction, of malice concentrated against himself.
God damn,
there must be a bailer somewhere….
He found a plastic pot barely larger than a tooth mug and frantically hurled water left and right until his arms were ready to drop out of their sockets. Useless. Ten, twenty quarts of water landed in the boat for every one he managed to displace. Suddenly the panic he’d conquered earlier had him by the throat. He couldn’t draw
breath. He cried out, exhausting the last reserves of oxygen inside his lungs. With that, the sea moved in for the kill. The starboard side of the boat slowly sank down, allowing water to pour over its edge. David had no time to take evasive action. His feet kept in contact with wood for a few seconds longer; he felt the boat sink away from him, kicked against the hull one last time, and then he was fighting for his life.
The sea was a mindless creature, home to other mindless creatures. It slaughtered blindly, like justice. And always the place was of the sea’s own choosing. By embarking upon it, you accepted its challenge on its own terms. David could not win this struggle.
He swallowed a lot of water and vomited it up. As he surfaced he realized that what he could see was land. He began to swim toward it, hauling himself through the swell about as effectually as if he were already wrapped in his winding sheet.
A wave came down on his head, leaving him breathless. He trod water. The land seemed closer. David struck out once more.