Алистер Маклин - The Golden Rendezvous

“Of course. Foolish of me. Ten knots.”

“Ten knots. Seventeen hours. One hundred and seventy nautical miles. The interception point would be here.”

“Exactly.” He’d consulted his own chart again. “Exactly. Most gratifying.” He looked at a slip of paper in his hand. “Our present position is 26.52 north, 76.33 west, near enough, anyway. How long would it take us to get to this interception spot?”

“What is that hammering outside?” I demanded. “What devilry are you up to now, Carreras?”

“Answer my question!” he said sharply.

He held all the cards. I said: “What’s our speed just now?”

“Fourteen knots.”

“Forty three hours,” I said after a minute. “Just under.”

“Forty-three hours,” he said slowly. “It’s now 10 a.m. Thursday and I have to rendezvous at 5 a.m. on Saturday. My God, that is only forty-three hours.” The first shadow of worry crossed his face. “What is the maximum speed of the Campari ?”

“Eighteen knots.” I caught a glimpse of Susan’s face. She was fast losing all her illusions about Chief Officer Carter.

“Ah! Eighteen?” His face cleared. “And at eighteen knots?”

“At eighteen knots you’ll probably tear the stabilisers off and break up the Campari ,” I told him.

He didn’t like that. He said: “What do you mean?”

“I mean you’ve got trouble coming. Carreras. Big trouble.” I looked at the window. “I can’t see that sea, but I can feel it. An abnormally long deep swell. Ask any fisherman in the Bahamas what that means at this time of the year and he’ll tell you. It can mean only one thing, Carreras – tropical storm, pretty certainly a hurricane. The swell is coming from the east and that’s where the heart of the storm lies. Maybe a couple of hundred miles away yet, but it’s there. And the swell’s getting worse. Have you noticed? It’s getting worse because the classic path of a hurricane in those parts is west-north-west, at a speed of ten to fifteen miles an hour. And we’re heading north by east. In other words the hurricane and the Campari are on a collision course. Time you started listening to some weather reports, Carreras.”

“How long would it take at eighteen knots?”

“Thirty-three hours. About. In good weather.”

“And the course?”

I laid it off and looked at him. “The same as you have on that chart, undoubtedly.”

“It is. What wave-length for weather reports?”

“No wave-length,” I said dryly. “If there’s a hurricane moving in westwards from the Atlantic every commercial station on the eastern seaboard will be broadcasting practically nothing else.”

He moved across to Marston’s phone, spoke to the bridge, gave instructions for maximum speed and for listening-in to weather reports. When he’d finished, I said: “Eighteen knots? Well, I warned you.”

“I must have as much time as possible in hand.” He looked down at Bullen, who was still rambling on incoherently in his sleep. “What would your captain do in those circumstances?”

“Turn and run in any direction except north. We have our passengers to think of. They don’t like getting sea-sick.”

“They’re going to be very very sea-sick, I’m afraid. But all in a good cause.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. I knew now the source of the hammering on the deck. “A good cause. For a patriot such as yourself, Carreras, what better cause could there be? The generalissimo’s coffers are empty. Not a sou in sight – and his régime is tottering. Only one thing can save the sick man of the Caribbean – a transfusion. A transfusion of gold. This ship that we’re going to intercept, Carreras – how many millions in gold bullion is she carrying?”

Marston was back in the surgery now and he and Susan looked at me, then at each other, and you could see their mutual diagnosis: delayed shock had made me light-headed. Carreras, I could see, wasn’t thinking anything of the kind: his face, like his body, had gone very still.

“You have access to sources of information of which I am completely unaware.” His voice was hardly more than a whisper. “What sources, Carter? Quickly?”

“There are no sources, Carreras.” I grinned at him. “Should there be?”

“No one plays cat and mouse with me.” He was still very quiet. “The sources, Carter?”

“Here.” I tapped my head. “Only here. This source.”

He regarded me for some seconds in cold silence, then nodded fractionally. “I knew it the first time I saw you. There is a – a quality about you. A champion boxer looks a champion boxer even in repose. A dangerous man cannot look anything else but dangerous, even in the most domestic situations, the most harmless surroundings. You have that quality. I have trained myself to recognise such things.”

“Hear that?” I said to Susan. “You never even suspected it, hey? Thought I was just like everybody else, didn’t you?”

“You are even more astute than I thought, Mr. Carter,” Carreras murmured.

“If adding two and two to make an obvious four is what you call being astute, then, sure, I’m astute. My God, if I were astute, I wouldn’t be lying here now with a shattered leg.” An occasional reminder of my helplessness would do no harm. “The generalissimo needing cash – I should have worked it out long ago.”

“Yes?”

“Yes. Shall I tell you why Brownell, our radio officer, was killed?”

“I should be interested.”

“Because you had intercepted a message from the Harrisons and Curtises, the two families recalled by cable from Kingston: this message said that the cables had been a hoax, and if we knew it had been a hoax we would have started looking very closely at Messrs. Carreras and Cerdan, the people who had taken their places. The point is that the cables they had received came through your capital city, Carreras, which argues Post Office connivance and, by inference, government knowledge. The government owns the Post Office.

“Secondly, there is a long waiting list in your country for berths on the Campari : you were near the bottom but were mysteriously jumped to the top. You said you were the only people who could take immediate advantage of the availability of the two suddenly vacant suites. Poppycock. Somebody in authority – in great authority – said ‘Carreras and Cerdan go to the top.’ And no one squawked. I wonder why?

“Thirdly, although there is a waiting list, none of the people on it are your nationals, Carreras. They are not permitted to travel on foreign-going vessels – and, in addition, find themselves immediately in prison if caught in possession of foreign currency. But you were permitted to travel – and you paid in U.S. dollars. You’re still with me?”

He nodded. “We had to take the chance of paying in dollars.”

“Fourthly, the Customs closed their eyes to those crates with your men aboard – and those crates with the cannons. That shows–”

“Cannons?” Marston interrupted. He was looking almost completely dazed. “Cannons?”

“The noise you can hear outside,” Carreras said equably. “Mr Carter will explain by and by. I wish,” he went on almost with regret, “that we were on the same side of the fence. You would have made an incomparable lieutenant, Mr. Carter. You could have named your own price.”

“That’s just about what Mr. Beresford said to me yesterday,” I agreed. “Everybody’s offering me jobs these days. The timing of the offers could have been improved.”

“Do you mean to tell me,” Susan said, “that Daddy offered–”

“Don’t panic,” I said. “He changed his mind. So, Carreras, there we have it. Government connivance on all sides. And what do the government want? Money. Completely desperate. Paid 350 million dollars to Iron Curtain countries in the past year or two, for arms. Trouble was, the generalissimo never had 350 million dollars in the first place. Now nobody will buy his sugar, trade’s practically non-existent, so how does an honest man raise money? Easy. He steals it.”