“Brava, my dear Jennifer!”
“So I made an appointment with him for the day after tomorrow-Wednesday. We’re to meet at-well, the exact spot where I met your Dr. E-at eleven in the morning.”
“Fine. Tell him nothing.”
“You should know Ripley Forte better than that by now, David, after the way he tied you into knots on the iceberg Alamo project. He’s very persuasive, and unless I have quite a convincing story to tell, he may go blundering into the matter and compromise your security.”
“True, true… Look, Jennifer, this matter requires some thought. It’s ten-twenty Washington time. Give me a few hours-say, until midnight your time-and I’ll figure out the best approach to use with Forte and call you on the Apache before you fly off. Agreed?”
“Very well, David. I don’t know what you have in mind, but it’d better be good.”
“Have I ever failed you?”
“Good-bye, David,” she said, hanging up before her answer to that question brought a chill to the proceedings.
It was 1 a.m. when the taxi rolled through the gates of the U.S. Naval Observatory and stopped before the mansion, the official residence of the Vice-President of the United States. Ilse Freemann, who had been summoned by Vice-President Castle for “an exclusive backgrounder,” strode up the steps and was conducted to the study where the vice-president awaited her.
“You must be out of your mind,” she grated when they were alone. “Vice-presidents don’t give exclusive backgrounders at this time of morning. How do you think I’m going to explain this?”
“You’re the brains,” said Castle contemptuously.
“You’re the control. You’ll think of something. And while you’re thinking, listen to this.” He switched on a tape recording of his conversation with Jennifer Red Cloud.
Ilse Freemann listened with a frown, enveloped in cigarette smoke, as the tape played through. When it was finished, she sat staring ahead, nibbling thoughtfully on her knuckle. “Well, it could be worse,” she said finally.
“I don’t see how,” replied Castle. “She didn’t tell him about my connection with the El Centro operation, but she will, when Forte starts working on her under that romantic Caribbean moon. It will only take one word, and I-we-will go down in flames.”
“Yes.”
“Well?”
The New York Times diplomatic correspondent shrugged. “It could have been worse,” she repeated. “At least we have thirty-six hours to take remedial measures.”
“Such as?”
She smiled sadly. “Somehow, I don’t think you really want to know.”
It was three-thirty in the morning when Ripley Forte’s corporate jet landed at Newark International Airport. The pilot taxied the aircraft to its designated tie-down and shut down its engines. He and the rest of the crew exited by the forward hatch, leaving Forte, who had turned in before the plane reached the Nevada border, to sleep on his king-sized bed aft. The grind of international intrigue, running one of the world’s biggest corporations, trying to lead what passed for a love life, and now the new and unexpected battle with Jennifer Red Cloud to share their son were taking their toll. He was tired, and he needed his nine hours a night, preferably alone.
He awoke to a rainy, dismal, New Jersey Tuesday, and taking the chopper to a rainy, dismal Manhattan only made matters worse. He had scheduled a full day: board meetings, a business lunch, an appearance at the opening of Texas’ refurbished New York Consulate, and hearings with the State of New York Commerce Commission, which had offered to dredge the East River and provide berthing facilities if Triple Eye would agree to bring a minimum of six one-billion-ton bergs to New York annually.
Between the Consulate inauguration and the Commerce Commission hearings, Forte took a taxi to Sleight-o’-Hand, on Sixth Avenue, the foremost magician’s prop suppliers in North America. By prearrangement, he met with the proprietor of the shop and Danno the Magnificent, a leading practitioner of illusions. He stayed an hour, and left with a large package and a thoughtful scowl adorning his pleasantly ugly features.
The chopper hovered five feet above the roiled waters of Montego Bay. A figure in fins and goggles poised for a moment on the starboard skid, then plunged into the emerald sea. The chopper whipped around a half turn and roared away toward Kingston. The sea became smooth, disturbed only at twenty-second intervals as the swimmer broke the surface, took a breath, and plunged again into the coral depths. Each time he came up, he was closer to the beach.
At shortly after ten-thirty, the figure reached the shallows and waded ashore. Ripley Forte stripped off his fins and mask and tossed them on the sands near the beach chairs, already shaded by a striped beach umbrella. He picked up a big beach towel from the stack beside the chairs and dried himself. From the cottage two hundred meters up the sloping beach, shielded from the sea by a thicket of palms, a small brown man in a white jacket came toward him, bearing a tray with things that glittered in the sun.
Forte took a glass from the tray, passed a few words with Luis, Mrs. Red Cloud’s personal manservant, as he arranged glasses, pitcher, and ice bucket on the low table between the chairs, and drank it down. Luis bowed, not so deferentially as to break the sharp creases in his whites, and trudged back up the beach toward the house. Forte was alone, except for the sea and the semicircle of palms that afforded Jennifer Red Cloud the privacy that allowed her to bathe undisturbed in the nude.
Ten minutes later, as Forte soaked in the hot morning sun, a woman in a one-piece white satin bathing suit came out of the trees and walked toward him with a springy, hip-swinging stride. Her long black hair was swept back by the breeze, and her lithe legs contrasted nicely with her swelling breasts, like twin spinnakers in a thirty-knot wind.
Forte rose at her approach, and they exchanged a few words before the woman took off at a run for the sea, followed by Forte. She hit the water in a shallow dive, and surfaced fifty feet offshore. Every time Forte nearly caught up with her, she plunged toward bottom and emerged, laughing, at some unexpected spot. At last, tiring of the game, she swam toward the beach with regular, powerful strokes and was toweling herself dry when Forte came up behind her, wrapped her in the towel and his embraces, and deposited her gently in one of the deck chairs. He picked up another towel, straddled her chair, and wrapped it about her head. When he stepped back, her legs were outstretched, her arms folded behind her head, luxuriating in the sun. Forte sat beside her looking out at the blue waters and far horizon.
They sat like this for some time, immobile, as the morning sun rose toward its zenith.
Shortly after eleven the surface of the shallows, some two hundred feet from where they sat, gave birth to a figure all in black. The figure broke the surface, stood on the shallow bottom with head and shoulders exposed, and without haste pulled back the mask, raised a carbine to its shoulder, and squeezed off four shots in rapid succession into the body of the woman next to Ripley Forte. Four gushers of red poured out on the white suit as Forte, startled by the shots, hit the sand with arms and legs outspread to offer the smallest target, instinctively following the lessons of his Marine training.
The figure dropped the rifle and disappeared beneath the sea. From the line of trees armed men came running down to the water’s edge where they searched for a trace of the vanished assassin. Almost at once the waters began to churn not far from where the rifleman had stood, and three frogmen broke the surface, dragging the figure, struggling in vain, toward the shore. From the deeper waters other frogmen came into view at intervals, and now swam ashore.
“Let’s have a look,” said Forte.
While two frogmen held the rifleman’s arms, the other stripped off the mask and rubber hood.
The rifleman was a tall, handsome black woman of about thirty-five.
She smiled, her dark eyes luminous with satisfaction. “Tough luck, man,” she said.
“Good luck, you mean. You missed me completely.”
She laughed. “Hell, I wasn’t supposed to shoot you.”
Forte nodded to the dozen men who had come running from the trees. “She’s all yours. See what you can beat out of her.”
The black woman snorted. “Try a gang bang. That way we’ll all have some fun. And believe me, fun’s all you’re going to get out of this baby.”
Forte turned away as the men escorted their prisoner up the beach to the house. He lifted the red-stained dummy from the deck chair and threw it to one side. Then he hit the spring lever, the chair flip-flopped, and a sweaty female appeared. She released the transparent belts that had held her in place and wiped the sweat from her forehead with the black wig she had worn over her short-cropped blond hair.