“He’s dead. Blew his own head off.”
“Cowardly way out. Found any treasure?”
“A whole room full of it. Top of the tower.”
“Splendid! Go fetch, lads!” Cochrane snapped his fingers and his three men ran out into the corridor.
Sharpe walked to the table and leaned over Cochrane’s two pieces of paper. One he had never seen before, but he recognized the other as the coded message that had been concealed in Bonaparte’s portrait. Bautista must have kept the coded message, and Cochrane had found it. Sharpe suspected that the message was the most important thing in all the Citadel for Cochrane. The Scotsman talked of whores and gold, but really he had come for this scrap of paper that he was now translating by using the code that was written on the other sheet of paper. “Is there a Colonel Charles?” Sharpe asked.
“Oh, yes, but it wouldn’t have done for anyone to think that Boney was writing to me, would it? So Charles was our go-between.” Cochrane smiled happily, then copied another letter from the code’s key.
“Where’s Vivar?” Sharpe asked.
“He’s safe. He’s not a happy man, but he’s safe.”
“You made a bloody fool of me, didn’t you?”
Cochrane heard the dangerous bite in Sharpe’s voice, and leaned back. “No, I didn’t. I don’t think anyone could make a fool of you, Sharpe. I deceived you, yes, but I had to. I’ve deceived most people here. That doesn’t make them fools.”
“And Marcos? The soldier who told the story of Vivar being a prisoner in the Angel Tower? You put him up to it?”
Cochrane grinned. “Yes. Sorry. But it worked! I rather wanted your help during the assault.”
Sharpe turned the coded message around so that it faced him. “So this was meant for you, then?”
“Yes.”
Cochrane had only unlocked the first sentence of the Emperor’s message. The words were in French, but Sharpe translated them into English as he read them aloud. “‘I agree to your proposal, and urge haste.’ What proposal?”
Cochrane stood. An excited Major Miller had come to the door, but Cochrane waved him away. His Lordship lit a cigar, then walked to a window that looked down into the main courtyard where two hundred Spaniards had surrendered to a handful of rebels. “It was all the Emperor’s fault,” Cochrane said. “He thought Captain-General Vivar was the same Count of Mouromorto who had fought for him at the war’s beginning. We didn’t know Mouromorto had a brother.”
“‘We’?” Sharpe asked.
Cochrane made a dismissive gesture with the cigar. “A handful of us, Sharpe. Men who believe the world should not be handed over to dull lawyers and avaricious politicians and fat merchants. Men who believe that glory should be undimmed and brilliant!” He smiled. “Men like you!”
“Just go on,” Sharpe shrugged the compliment away, if indeed it was a compliment.
Cochrane smiled. “The Emperor doesn’t like being cooped up on Saint Helena. Why should he? He’s looking for allies, Sharpe, so he ordered me to arrange a meeting with the Count of Mouromorto, which I did, but the weather was shit-terrible, and Mouromorto couldn’t get to Talcahuana. So we made a second rendezvous and, of course, he arrived and he heard me out, and then he told me I was thinking of his brother, not him, and, one way or another, it turned out that I was fumbling up the wrong set of skirts. So, of course, I had to take him prisoner. Which was a pity, because we’d met under a flag of truce.” Cochrane laughed ruefully. “It would have been easier to kill Vivar, but not under a flag of truce, so I took him to sea, and we stranded him with a score of guards, six pigs and a tribe of goats on one of the Juan Fernandez islands.” Cochrane drew on the cigar and watched its smoke drift out the window. “The islands are three hundred fifty miles off the coast, in the middle of nothing! They’re where Robinson Crusoe was marooned, or rather where Alexander Selkirk, who was the original of Crusoe, spent four not uncomfortable years. I last saw Vivar eight weeks ago, and he was well and as comfortable as a man could be. He tried to escape a couple of times in this last year, but it’s very hard to get off an island if you’re not a seaman.”