Not for long. Twenty-four hours later Mr. Lamont had vanished.
* * *
Has he discharged himself? The hospital says he has. Has Dr. Marti had him shifted to his clinic? Apparently so, but only briefly, and the clinic gives no information about the destination of discharged patients. And when Amato telephones in the guise of a newspaper reporter, Dr. Marti himself replies that Mr. Lamont has left without leaving an address. Suddenly, outlandish theories are being passed round the ops room. Jonathan has confessed to everything! Roper has rumbled him and dumped him in the sea! On Strelski's orders, the watch on Nassau airport has been suspended. He fears Amato's team is becoming too visible.
"We're engineering human nature, Leonard," says Strelski consolingly, in an effort to lift the burden from Burr's soul. "Can't get it right every time."
"Thanks."
* * *
Evening comes. Burr and Strelski sit in a roadside barbecue house with their cellular telephones on their laps, eating ribs and Cajun rice and watching well-fed America come and go. A summons from the telephone monitors has them racing back to headquarters in mid-mouthful.
"Old love! It's me. Corky. How are we? How are the dancing girls?"
Coarse intimacies are exchanged. Then the nub:
"Sweetheart, listen, the Chief wants a story killed... pressing reasons why the hero of the hour doesn't need the spotlight... young Daniel, very hyper boy... I'm talking serious gratitude, a mega-improvement to your retirement plans. How about 'a practical joke that came unstuck'? Can you do that, lover?"
The sensational robbery on Hunter's Island is laid to rest in the great cemetery for stories permanently spiked by Higher Authority.
"Heart, how are we? Listen, in re Brother Lamont, last seen at Doctors Hospital by one of your heavier-footed brethren... can we just kind of lose that one from the menu ― do you mind? The Chief would greatly prefer the lower profile, feels it's better for Daniel's health... wouldn't wish to prefer charges, even if you found the culprits, hates the fuss... bless you.... Oh, and by the by, don't believe all that crap you're reading about Ironbrand shares going through the floor.... Chief's considering a very nice little divi this Christmas; we should all be able to buy ourselves a piece of whatever we like best..."
The strong arm of the law agrees to withdraw its claws. Burr wonders whether he is listening to Jonathan's obituary.
And from the rest of the world, not a peep.
* * *
Should Burr return to London? Should Rooke? Logically, it made no difference whether they hung by a thread in Miami or in London. Illogically, Burr needed nearness to the place where his agent was last seen. In the end, he sent Rooke to London and the same day checked out of his steel-and-glass hotel and moved to humbler premises in a sleazy part of town.
"Leonard's putting on the hair shirt while he waits this thing out," Strelski told Flynn.
"Tough," said Flynn, still trying to come to terms with the experience of having his agent immolated by Burr's ewe-lamb.
Burr's new cell was a pastel-painted art deco box beside the beach, with a bedside light made out of a chrome Atlas holding up the globe, and steel-framed windows that buzzed to every passing car, and a doped-out Cuban security guard with dark glasses and an elephant gun, lounging in the lobby. Burr slept there lightly, with his cellular phone on the spare pillow.
One dawn, unable to sleep, he took his phone for a walk down a great boulevard. A regiment of cocaine banks loomed at him out of the misted sea. But as he went toward them he found himself in a building site full of coloured birds screaming from the scaffolding, and Latinos sleeping like war dead beside their parked bulldozers.
* * *
Jonathan was not the only one who had disappeared. Roper too had entered a black hole. Deliberately or not, he had given Amato's watchers the slip. The tap on the Ironbrand headquarters in Nassau revealed only that the Chief was away selling farms ― "selling farms" being Roperspeak for "mind your own damn business."
The supersnitch Apostoll, urgently consulted by Flynn, offered no consolation. He had heard vaguely that his clients might be holding a business conference on the island of Aruba, but he had not been invited. No, he had no idea where Mr. Roper was. He was a lawyer, not a travel agent. He was Mary's soldier.
* * *
