Anders said, “Did you know this Lundquist kid?”

“No.”

“Who did?”

“Allerton did, I think. Over at the consulate.”

“We’ll talk to him. What have we got?”

“Not much since we sent the last report to O’Hillary. They haven’t turned up but one or two items out of that old oil camp.” Wilkins talked with a slow prairie twang. Kansas? “A Gauloise butt, for instance, and a corner of a page, out of a paperback book. Been dog-eared a few times and broke off, you know how they do. A whole gang of bright scholars are trying to find out what book it’s from. Only got about four complete words on it and bits of a few others so it may take them a while and then I expect they’ll come up with something like Gone with the Wind or How to Have a Happier Sex Life.”

“It’s in English?”

“Yeah. We already knew they spoke English, didn’t we. Let’s see, what else. Oh yes—debriefing on Velez, he came up with an item—”

Rosalia looked up from her notebook. “Velez who?”

“Juan-Pedro Velez. Mexican Ministry of Agriculture. One of the hostages, you know. The one that had to go into the hospital with dysentery.”

“Coals to Newcastle,” Anders observed.

“He’s all right now. They turned him loose yesterday and we interrogated him. Anyhow he seems to remember one of the gang talked Spanish with a German accent. Thin guy, he says. Not very big.” Wilkins blinked slowly; he looked tired. “They’re scraps but it’s the best we can do right now. Any of it help you?”

“Who knows,” Anders said.

He told Rosalia to go around and see the consulate attaché who’d known Robert Lundquist. Nothing would come of that but he wanted to accrete more of an impression of the dead boy. Why had Lundquist been chosen as the exemplary victim? Was it simply because he’d been the least important of the hostages or had there been something abrasive about him that might have provoked them to kill him? If the latter, would this tell him anything about the nature of the terrorists? He doubted it but believed in thoroughness.

She was putting on wraparound sunglasses. Anders glanced at her notebook. “Your handwriting’s an atrocity.”

“I can read it,” she said defiantly. She slipped the notebook into her shiny red plastic handbag.

“They used to teach us that penmanship was a matter of communication, not self-expression. But I guess that was back in the days when you still hadn’t grown a chest.”

“Yes, you’re so old you’re creaking with age.” With her hand at the doorknob she said, “If I get drunk tonight will you promise to take advantage of me?”

He spent a largely fruitless afternoon shambling around Mexico City interviewing informants he’d cultivated over the years. He hadn’t expected anything to come of it. He had nothing like the network of contacts that the local station personnel had developed. Anders had a few people in each of most of the Third World capitals—acquaintances rather than agents; they weren’t spies but favors were exchanged and Anders had built up a rudimentary list. One of the men he went to see was an export broker of the kind who admitted to a degree of knowledge about the traffic in arms and narcotics. Another was a printer who vehemently claimed he did not deal in false passports and identity papers. Neither of them purported to know anything about the terrorists.

At four he went around to the Federal Police barracks and was granted an audience with Chief Inspector Ainsa who was burly and sly—he might have been assigned to his role by Central Casting. Ainsa had charge of Mexico’s harbor police activities. Glenn Anders had not known him before so there was the monotony of establishing credentials and exchanging amenities; then Anders said, “Ambassador Gordon’s a yachtsman. He had a feeling the boat was a ketch. They were blindfolded but I suppose sailors have intuitions for these things. I don’t know much about it myself—a ketch is usually what, a forty-or fifty-foot sailboat?”

“They vary in size,” Ainsa said. “It’s a two-masted design with the taller mast forward and the rear mast above the rudder. In English cómo se dice—mizzenmast. Quite graceful. Usually there is a low cabin amidships. They tend to be long and narrow, being designed for speed and sport rather than capacity.”

“This one must have been big enough to accommodate about twenty people.”

“That’s possible. With some crowding below decks.”

“It occurred to me,” Anders said, treading gingerly because it wouldn’t do to get the policeman’s back up, “that perhaps the boat was stolen or hired.”

“Hired? Ah, you mean rented. Yes, I see.”

“It’s hard to picture a terrorist group owning a sporty sailboat.”

“Yes.”

“There can’t be too many vessels of that size stolen or available for hire in the Gulf of Mexico.”

Ainsa’s smile was indicative of low cunning. It was a pose, for nothing he said was suggestive of stupidity. “Especially,” he said, “ketches stolen or rented during, say, the month of August?”

“That would be the framework,” Anders agreed. “I’ve already asked the United States police to check around the Texas and Louisiana ports.”

“Honduras, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia …”

“We’re checking them all.”

“Leave it to me. I’ll put out the word immediately.” Ainsa stood up and pressed against the desk to reach across for Anders’ hand.

He called Rosalia from a pay phone. “What did Allerton tell you?”

“He only met Lundquist once or twice. Sorting out his papers when he first arrived for the Peace Corps. He couldn’t tell me anything we didn’t already know. I’ll type up the notes for you but I certainly didn’t see anything in it. Incidentally Mr. Wilkins says they’ve identified that torn page from the paperback book. It’s a science-fiction novel.”

“Good grief.”

“One of those adventures about intergalactic wars or something.”

It came as no particular surprise to Anders. Once in Nam he’d dived into a bunker and thrown himself flat, terrified by the exploding rockets and bullets cracking everywhere; he’d looked up and discovered a grunt who, in the midst of that madness, was reading a paperback Western shoot-’em-up, enthralled.

Rosalia on the telephone said, “I’ve got it all doped out. The whole thing. You know what we’re up against, don’t you?”

“No. What?”

“A nest of aliens. Martian invaders.”

“Right,” he said. “I’m on my way to Wilkins’ office. Meet me there in an hour. Stop by the newspaper on your way and see if they’ll let you have another photocopy of that ransom note.”

He went along toward the embassy on foot; it was rush hour and he made better progress that way. Traffic was clotted in the boulevards and there was a dry chill in the thin air. Two blocks short of the embassy he espied Harry Crobey.

He wouldn’t have noticed Crobey in the throng of commuters but for the peculiar roll of Crobey’s limp. It gave him a swaying gait that made him noticeable because he didn’t move with the same rhythm as the others in the crowd.

“Harry.”

Crobey gave him a startled glance; a bit furtive, Anders thought. A quick distracted smile twitched back and forth across Crobey’s lips. Crobey shook his hand; the crowd milled past, jostling them both.

“Let’s get out of this jam.” Anders selected the empty pocket beside an office building’s revolving door and pried his way toward the opening. The building was emptying out and people eddied past them into the stream.

Crobey seemed to have gone a bit to seed but then, Anders recalled, Crobey had always managed to look that way. “What’re you doing here, Harry?”

“You know. This and that. You look good—lost some weight.”

“Not as much as I ought to.” Anders looked at his watch. “They told me you’d signed on in Ethiopia.”

“Contract ran out. So did I.”

“You never did have much of an attention span.” Anders studied the hard face. “I didn’t know Mexico was at war with anybody.”