Medusa

‘If you mean what I think you mean, the answer is no, they were too bloody tired. But they did something worse. They ate up everything I had, all my stores, then went off with my tent, even my sleeping bag. I think they’d have had the clothes off my back if I’d been a man, they were that ragged and desperate. Only their guns looked in good condition.’

I thought I saw the glow of a cigarette. It was there for a second, then Lennie knocked against me and I lost it. It had come from the last arch of the villa’s colonnaded front, and focusing on it, I thought I could just make out the darker outline of a figure standing there. I heard Petra say something about trekking more than twenty miles through snow and ice and a blazing midday sun before she managed to hitch a ride with some geologists into La Paz.

‘And what happened to the men who pillaged your camp?’ Lennie asked.

‘Oh, the Army caught up with them in the end. About a dozen of them were gunned down from a helicopter, the rest were tracked down, tortured and hanged. The usual thing. There’s no mercy in the Andes.’

‘I never experienced anything like that,’ Lennie said quietly. ‘And I’ve been around. But nothing like that.’ And he added, leaning his head further forward between us, ‘You think there’s going to be a revolution here?’

She didn’t tell him not to be ridiculous. She didn’t comment. She just sat there, not saying a word, and at that moment a bright star shot up from the sea to our right, blazing a vertical trail that burst into a blob of white so bright that even at that distance it lit up our faces. ‘Bloody hell!’ Lennie pushed his nose almost against the windscreen. ‘What is it?’

‘Pyrotechnic.’ The pop of its burst came to us faintly as I jumped out of the car, steadying my elbow on the top of it and searching with the glasses for the ship that had fired it. A second stream of sparks flew up, a second burst, but this time green. I still couldn’t pick out the shape of the vessel, so it was presumably close in below the line of the cliffs.

‘That a distress signal?’ Petra asked, but I think she knew it wasn’t, because her head was turned towards the villa. Through the glasses I saw shadows moving, followed almost immediately by the sound of a car engine starting up. Doors slammed, the cars emerging on to the road. Then the truck’s diesel roared into life and it began to move, one car in front, the other behind. The time was 01.32. Miguel’s estate stayed parked against the wall.

‘What now?’ Petra had already started the engine.

‘Go back,’ I told her. ‘Back down towards Arenal, then take the main development road and we’ll wait for them just short of where it joins the Alayor highway.’ Either they were meeting up with a ship at Macaret or else somewhere further up the long inlet that finished at the new quay just beyond Addaia.

‘I don’t get it, mate,’ Lennie muttered in my ear as Petra felt her way along the dark strip of the road without lights. ‘What do they want with a ship when their truck’s already loaded? They can’t be picking up more.’ But I was thinking about Wade then, that first visit of Gareth’s to Menorca, the questions he had asked me over that lunch. And on board Medusa, the suddenness with which we had left Malta, the way he had looked that evening when I went back down to his cabin from the bridge, his sudden decision to tell me about Evans.

We reached the crossroads and Petra pulled in to the verge. We sat there for perhaps five minutes, but there was no sound and nothing passed. I told her to drive straight across and head for the high point above the entrance to the Addaia inlet. From there we would have a clear view of Macaret itself and the seaward entrance to the harbour. We would also be able to look southwards down the length of the inlet to the two small islands that protected the final anchorage.

When we got there we were just in time to catch a glimpse of a small vessel heading down the pale ribbon of the inlet. ‘Fishing boat by the look of it,’ Lennie muttered.

Out of the car again, I was able to fix the glasses on it. No doubt about it. The boat was the Santa Maria. I jumped back into the passenger seat and told Petra to turn the car, go back to the main road, then take the cut-off down the steep little hill to Port d’Addaia itself. ‘But go carefully,’ I warned her as she swung the Beetle round. They may have dropped somebody off to keep watch. And stop near the top so that we can check if they’re there or not.’