Frederick Forsyth - The Deceiver

The trouble was that so far, the population seemed to have no interest at all in the prospect of freedom from the Empire. Two news teams that had tried to put together a documentary on local reaction to independence had not been able to secure a single interviewee who would talk. People just walked away when the cameras, microphones, and notepads came out. Still, they picked up their gear and sauntered toward the docks.

McCready took time to make a single call to the British Consulate in Miami from the portable phone he kept in the attaché case under his bed. He asked for a seven-seater charter plane to land on Sunshine at four P.M. It was a long shot, but he hoped it would work.

Livingstone’s cavalcade arrived from Shantytown at a quarter to twelve. One aide boomed through a megaphone, “Come and hear Horatio Livingstone, the people’s candidate.” Oth­ers erected two trestles and a stout plank to lift the people’s candidate above the people.

At noon, Horatio Livingstone hoisted his bulk up the steps to the makeshift platform. He spoke into a megaphone on a stem in front of him, held up by one of the safari suits. Four TV cameras had secured elevated positions around the meet­ing, from which they could cover the candidate or, hopefully, the hecklers and the fighting.

The BSB cameraman had borrowed the cabin roof of the Gulf Lady . To back up his TV camera, he had a Nikon camera with a telephoto lens slung across his back. The reporter, Sabrina Tennant, stood beside him.

McCready climbed up to join them. “Hello,” he said.

“Hi,” said Sabrina Tennant. She took no notice of him.

“Tell me,” he asked quietly. “Would you like a story that would blow your colleagues out of the water?”

Now she took notice. The cameraman looked across inquis­itively.

“Can you use that Nikon to get in close, really close, on any face in that crowd?” asked McCready.

“Sure,” said the cameraman. “I can get their tonsils if they open wide.”

“Why not get full-face pictures of all the men in gray safari suits helping the candidate?” suggested McCready. The cam­eraman looked at Sabrina. She nodded. Why not?

The cameraman unhooked his Nikon and began to focus it. “Start with the pale-faced black standing along by the van,” said McCready. “The one they call Mr. Brown.”

“What have you got in mind?” asked Sabrina.

“Step into the cabin, and I’ll tell you.”

She did, and McCready talked for several minutes.

“You’re joking,” she said at length.

“No, I’m not, and I think I can prove it. But not here. The answers lie in Miami.”

He talked to her again for a while. When he had finished, Sabrina Tennant went back to the roof. “Got them?” she asked.

The Londoner nodded. “A dozen close shots of every one, every angle. There are seven of them.”

“Right, now let’s shoot the entire meeting. Get me some footage for background and cutting.”

She knew she already had eight magazines of footage, including shots of both candidates, the capital town, the beaches, the palm trees, and the airstrip—enough, skillfully cut, to make a great fifteen-minute story. What she needed now was a lead angle, and if the crumpled man with the apologetic air was right, she had it.

Her only problem was time. Her main feature spot was on Countdown , the flagship program of the BSB current affairs channel, which went out at noon on Sunday in England. She would need to send her material by satellite from Miami by no later than four P.M. on Saturday, the next day. So she had to be in Miami that night. It was nearly one o’clock now, extremely tight to get back to the hotel and book a Miami-based charter to be in Sunshine before sundown.

“Actually, I’m due to leave myself at four this afternoon,” said McCready. “I’ve ordered my own plane from Miami. Happy to offer you a lift.”

“Who the hell are you?” she asked.

“Just a holidaymaker. But I do know the islands. And their people. Trust me.”

She had no bloody choice, thought Sabrina. If his story was true, this one was too good to miss. She went back to her cameraman to show him what she wanted. The telephoto lens of the camera lazed over the crowd, pausing there, there, and there. Against the van, Mr. Brown saw the lens pointing at him and climbed inside. The camera caught that too.

Inspector Jones reported to Desmond Hannah during the lunch hour. Every visitor to the islands for the past three months had been checked through passport records taken at the airstrip. No one answered either to the name of Francisco Mendes or to the description of a Latin American. Hannah sighed.

If the dead American Gomez had not been mistaken—and he might well have been—the elusive Mendes could have slipped into the Barclays in a dozen ways. The weekly tramp steamer brought occasional passengers from “down island,” and official coverage of the docks was sporadic. Yachts occa­sionally stopped by, mooring in bays and creeks around Sunshine and the other islands, their guests and crews dis­porting themselves in the crystal waters above the coral reefs until they hoisted sail and passed on. Anyone could slip ashore—or leave. Hannah suspected this Mendes, once he had been spotted and knew it, had flown the coop. If he had ever even been there.

Hannah rang Nassau, but Dr. West told him he could not start the autopsy until four that afternoon, when the body of the Governor would have finally returned to normal consis­tency.

“Call me as soon as you have that bullet,” Hannah urged.

At two, an even more disgruntled press corps assembled in Parliament Square. From the point of view of sensations, the morning rally had been a flop. The speech had been the usual nationalize-everything rubbish that the British had discarded a decade earlier. The voters-to-be had been apathetic. As a world story, it was all cutting-room-floor material. If Hannah did not make an arrest soon, they thought, they might as well pack up and go home.

At ten past two, Marcus Johnson arrived in his long white convertible. He wore an ice-blue tropical suit and an open-neck Sea Island shirt as he mounted the back of the flatbed truck that served as his platform. More sophisticated than Livingstone, he had a microphone with two amplifiers strung from nearby palm trees.

As Johnson began speaking, McCready sidled up to Sean Whittaker, the free-lance stringer who covered the whole Caribbean from his Kingston, Jamaica, base for London’s Sunday Express .

“Boring?” murmured McCready.

Whittaker gave him a glance. “Tripe,” he agreed. “I think I’m going home tomorrow.”

Whittaker reported stories and took his own pictures as well. A long-lens Yashica hung around his neck.

“Would you,” asked McCready, “like a story that would blow your rivals out of the water?”

Whittaker turned and cocked an eyebrow. “What do you know that nobody else does?”

“Since the speech is a bore, why not come with me and find out?”

The two men proceeded across the square, into the hotel, and up to McCready’s second-floor room. From the balcony, they could see the whole square below them.

“The minders, the men in multicolored beach shirts and dark glasses,” said McCready. “Can you get full-face close-ups of them from here?”

“Sure,” said Whittaker. “Why?”

“Do it, and I’ll tell you.”

Whittaker shrugged. He was an old hand; he had had tips in his time from the most unlikely sources. Some worked out, some did not. He adjusted his zoom lens and ran off two rolls of color prints and two of black-and-white.

McCready took him down to the bar, stood him a beer, and talked for thirty minutes.

Whittaker whistled. “Is this on the level?” he asked.