Deep Ice (21 page)

She handed the phone to Henry.

The conversation was short. Henry said very little beyond an occasional “yes” or “no”.

“The general sounds upset,” said Henry after he’d hung up. “He’s still on the
Enterprise
. He says they’ll be picking us up in a few days unless the situation changes.

Any further contact will be through Enrique.”

“Weird.”

“I think he’s worried about us – about me.”

“What’s to worry about?” she asked. Then her eyes widened. “Has something bad happened?”

Henry shook his head. “No – at least, he didn’t say so. He just said he wanted to hear my voice for himself and that we should keep our heads down.”

“Hmm,” said Sarah. “I was wondering just a few minutes ago when we’d hear from them.”

“Well, it’s about time something happened.” Henry walked to the window and parted the curtain to look at the street.

He quickly closed it again and stepped to the side.

“Shit.”

“What, Henry? What did you see?”

“A guy. He was looking up at me.”

Cautiously Sarah opened the curtain a fraction of an inch and peered at the street below. “A man in fatigues?”

“Shit,” said Henry again. “I wonder if. . .?”

“Tell me!”

“He’s one of the guys I noticed in the lobby watching us when we arrived. I wish I could be sure he’s not one of those bastards I met out on the ice.”

“You said you’d know them if you ever saw them again.”

“Easy for me to say. Now I’m not so sure. That call from Hayes sounded really ominous. Wish I had a cigarette.”

Sarah sat down on a stuffed chair next to the curtain and stared at the window. “You don’t want a cigarette, Henry – you just
think
you do.” It was obviously the least of her concerns.

He didn’t respond, just kept pacing back and forth, thinking hard. Shep lifted his head and watched his master worriedly.

“If it was the terrorists who were watching us,” said Sarah, “we’d be dead by now.”

“Then who the hell
is
it?” Henry threw himself down in a gold-cushioned antique across from her.

“My guess is it’s Navy Intelligence.” Sarah smiled.

“They must surely be watching us, and now we’ve spotted one of the watchers.”

He nodded. “But how do we find out for sure? We can’t just go up to them and ask.”

Re-energized, he leapt out of the chair and went to the window, deftly parting the curtains again.

“Hell, Sarah, I don’t even have a gun.”

“Is he still there?”

“Yeah. And he’s been joined by a buddy. One of them was pointing up here.”

“Did you see the new guy in the lobby too?”

“I don’t know.”

She tried to keep her voice calm. “Let’s walk the dog and see what they do. Maybe we can find a way to speak to one of them – ask the time, something like that – and see how they react.”

“I guess they wouldn’t just shoot us down in plain sight, would they?”

She frowned. “How would I know?”

“You’re FBI, dammit. Don’t they teach you these things?”

“I’m an artist, not an operative. I just work for them.”

He stared at her blankly. “Okay, well. Let’s go and have lunch somewhere.”

“Cool down, Henry.”

Henry took a deep breath. “Jeez, I’m sorry I’m so strung up about this. I guess I’m acting like an idiot. Shit, Sarah, I’ve never acted this way before. I don’t know what’s got into me.”

“A bullet,” she said absently.

“What do you mean?”

“If you’ve never acted like this before, then I’d say you’re experiencing some kind of delayed trauma- related reaction. Shock can take days to manifest. You were
shot
, Henry. That’s
got
to affect you somehow.”

He took another deep breath. “I guess you’re right. That must be it. I do feel weird.”

She grabbed his arm. “Let’s go walk your little doggy.”

As soon as Henry clipped Shep’s leash to the collar the dog started pacing excitedly in front of the door. Outside the room, he pulled Henry towards the elevator and, when they reached the lobby, he dragged his master towards the front door of the hotel.

As they neared it, Henry could see Enrique’s limo parked by the side of the loading area. Enrique himself was snoozing behind the wheel, a newspaper spread across his chest.

“Should we wake him up?” asked Sarah as they paused in the lobby entrance.

Henry’s first instinct was to say yes. But he glanced around, as though checking the weather. Seeing no evidence they were being scrutinized, he felt less paranoid. “Nawww. The hell with it. Let’s just go scout the area.”

With Shep pulling him along, Henry was more at ease. It occurred to him every time he walked Shep that the animal was a kind of social bul dozer. People parted willingly and quickly when Shep came roaring up behind. His sheer size and wolfish appearance were quite forbidding, touching in most people a primal instinct to flee. Yet a careful study of his face gave one the sense that Shep was really a benevolent spirit. His colouring was light and his few grey-and-black facial markings were sparse and well defined. His countenance was almost toylike.

Henry thought Shep would be attracted to a group of chic-looking office girls seated together eating their lunch on a park bench. But, instead of snuffling up to them to beg food, the dog pulled him towards the curb and sniffed the gutter. Then he crouched.

Henry took the opportunity to look around again. Finally he spotted the two men – about a block away, near the hotel. They seemed not to have noticed Henry and Sarah coming out the door. From this vantage point the men looked to Henry like US servicemen in plain clothes. He began to believe that, after all, they were indeed military intelligence, and considered getting their attention somehow. Then he nixed the idea. All he was really sure of was that they were two of the men he’d seen in the lobby and from the window.

Sarah was reading a plaque on the base of a heroic statue. He called to her, and signalled she should look at the two men. He saw her eyes narrow. She looked away as soon as she’d spotted them and came towards him.

“I think they’re from the
Enterprise
,” she said.

“You’re a good sneak.”

The men were focused on the hotel lobby. After a while, Henry decided the agents really hadn’t seen them leave, and grinned at the notion that he and Sarah had managed to elude the US military.

Luckily Sarah had stuffed a couple of the hotel’s paper towels into her handbag just in case Shep “performed”. Henry dropped the towels and turds into a nearby litterbin.

Shep began hauling Henry happily down the boulevard, and Sarah tagged along close behind. Up ahead of them were the umbrellas and chairs of a small street cantina they’d noted during their first drive around the square. The smell of hot coffee and cooking food drew Shep and Henry to the place, and Sarah was more than happy to follow their lead. The noon crowd from the Modena and other office buildings had thinned considerably, and there were empty tables near the hedges and the street, so that Shep could be conveniently tied up by their table. When the waiter came, a twenty-dollar bill stifled any complaints about the dog.

The waiter accepted the money without thanks and handed them menus and a wine list.

“Coffee for two,
por favor
.” said Henry.

The waiter told them in Spanish about the daily specials. “Once again, please, er, in English,” said Henry at the end of the rapid recitation.

The man paused a moment, then smiled politely and in perfect New York English described sea trout with pistachio nuts and a savoury mutton dish. Henry ordered the trout; Sarah went for blackened chicken with pesto and rice from the menu, with a “not-so-very-dry” white wine.

When the waiter had left, Henry complained the kid was a rude collegiate snot who talked a mile a minute – but it was the lack of a thankyou for the twenty that had really annoyed him.

As he sat grumbling, he happened to catch sight of a group of men walking on the other side of the street. One of them had a bushy red moustache. Henry’s eyes froze on him. A smartly dressed man strolled close behind the moustached one.

Perhaps it was in the way this man leaned slightly to the left when he walked, or perhaps it was his well groomed, greying beard and olive complexion; or maybe it was simply the haughty style he exuded, as though he lived in a different universe, physical y and psychological y.

Whatever the reason, Henry knew this was the man who’d left him for dead on the ice.

Before he could react, the men had disappeared. Had he hallucinated them?

Sarah had been wiping crumbs off the tablecloth. When she finally looked at him she saw his face had paled by at least two shades.

“What’s the matter? You look like you’ve seen a ghost!”

He didn’t answer. Adrenaline was surging through his body.

Suddenly he got up and walked quickly towards the street.

Sarah gaped. “What’s happening?”

Henry stood staring at the place where the men should have been but they’d vanished utterly. They must have gone into one of the office buildings, he guessed, but which?

After a long moment he went back to his seat. He sat silent for a full minute, ignoring Sarah’s urgent queries, his hands clasped in front of him on the table.

“I real y
do
need a cigarette,” he said at last.

He looked over at the next table. The businessman there was smoking. Henry had bummed a cigarette before Sarah could protest. The man even lit it for him. When Henry returned to the table he slumped back in the white wrought-iron chair and blew a ponderous cloud of smoke into the green leaves of the tree sheltering the patio.

“Henry, remember, you don’t smoke.”

“Oh yes I do.
Now
I do. . .”

He took another drag and coughed violently.

“Goddamit, these things’ll loop ya.” He stared at the cigarette. “You know, I’m getting high from this, I think. I can feel the rush.”

He laughed and took another drag.

The waiter brought the wine and uncorked it. Then he poured some into a glass and handed it to Henry.

Henry sipped it and nodded. “
Bene
,” he said in Italian.

The instant the waiter had left, Sarah mustered all her steel and said firmly, “What is going
on
? Tell me.”

“It was them.” His voice was barely audible.

“It was them,” he repeated. “It was them.”

#

Sarah stared at the buildings across the street.

“How can you be so sure?”

Just then the waiter came back with their food and an assortment of breads. He added that the wine was to be compliments of the house.

Delighted by the waiter’s apparent change of heart, Henry asked the boy a few questions about the food, the spices used – anything to get his mind off the apparent spectre he’d just witnessed. Maybe Sarah was right: he
couldn’t
be sure.

Except he knew in his bones he was right.

The waiter, who introduced himself as Antonio, was pleased to give them a blow-by-blow description of the food and its preparation. He told them he wanted to become a chef but had to finish his education before his father would allow him even to think about such a career.

Henry smiled and nodded, but every few seconds he glanced at the people walking in and out of the buildings across the street.

After Antonio had finally torn himself away, Henry moved his place setting to have a better view. “If it
was
those bastards, there’s more than just payback at stake. I’m the only one who. . .”

“Henry, the odds against it having been those same men are astronomical.”

They finished their meal, paid Antonio and gave him another twenty of President Frei’s cash, telling him to save it for cooking school. Then they walked back to the hotel and the limo, where Enrique still slept.

“Feel like tooling around Santiago, Enrique?” said Henry as he climbed in and slammed the door hard enough to waken the driver.

Enrique’s newspaper exploded onto the dashboard and he looked around in embarrassment.

“Sir Henry!” he shouted through the closed window. Then he lowered it and looked back at them, blinking sleepily but trying to seem awake.

Henry laughed and pointed to the driver’s mouth.

“Drooling a bit?”

The remark drew him a punch in the ribs from Sarah.

“Where shall we be going, Sir Henry?” asked Enrique, wiping his face with a handkerchief.

“I don’t know, just pick a direction and drive. God, you’re heavy,” he added to Shep, who was leaning hard against his leg.

Enrique adjusted his cap and started the engine. As they pulled away, Henry caught sight of the two agents across the street scrambling into a car to follow them.

“We have a convoy.”

Sarah looked out the rear window and studied the car pulling out into traffic behind them. “I’m
sure
they’re US military. It makes sense for them to tail us. You’re a primary player in the situation.”

Enrique followed a long straight thoroughfare that headed towards the Andes. “Have you decided where you’d like to go?”

“I don’t know,” said Henry. “Just drive. By the way, have you noticed we’re being followed?”

Enrique nodded. “I’ve been watching them. They’re the same two men who were watching the hotel, Sir Henry. I have talked with the President’s office. They are from the
Enterprise
. Naval intelligence. Actual y I was told there are five agents assigned to watch you.

Not counting myself, of course.”

“Why didn’t you tell us?” asked Sarah.

“I thought you knew about them, Miss Sarah. Were you not informed?”

Henry and Sarah looked at each other in disgust.

“Why tell us?” said Henry. “We’re just targets.”

He debated in his mind for a moment, then told Enrique they’d apparently eluded the surveillance team when they left the hotel. “Walked right by them.”

“And you eluded me too, Sir Henry. Forgive me, but I think that you should be more careful and let us know where you are going.”

Suddenly annoyed, Henry tersely explained that no one had bothered to tell them they were being tailed, and pointed out that it was
their
lack of communications that had made him avoid the surveillance team. “I saw them watching our window!” he said. “What was I
supposed
to think?” He went on to describe what had happened at the cantina.