Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) (8 page)

“Is there an accident?”

“Don't really know. It may be there are just too many people. Anyway,
pas de problème,
really, as Sid Thrall has engaged a tender. So can we meet on Santal's boat instead?”

“We can, providing someone tells me how to get there.”

“
Surpass
's tender will be shuttling guests from Antibes. That much I do know. I'll find out more and text you the exact time and directions to the pickup point.”

“I'm sure the concierge will know the latter.”

“Why would he?”

“There are other people going from this hotel.”

“Well, why not?” Greg Logan said. “But how do you know? I thought you'd been keeping to yourself.”

“I have,” Ty said.

“Did a little bird tell you?”

“A couple of them,” Ty told him.

Chapter Six

At a quarter past
six, on the advice of the hotel's enthusiastic young concierge, Ty took a car not directly to the southernmost quay, from which
Surpass
's tender was to depart thirty minutes later but into the village of Antibes itself, where he strolled the narrow, cobbled main street as many of its shops were closing. With his baseball cap and Ray-Ban Wayfarers on and his pace quick, he was not recognized. He reached a café just short of the harborside parking area. There he took one of the bent-wire chairs at a round table for two near the front. The café's blue shutters had been folded back, and the salt air and the scent of ripe cheese from the
fromagerie
across the street were delicious. Lingering over a
citron pressé,
Ty watched the curious parade of locals and tourists, of French and North Africans, Americans, Russians and more exotic foreign nationals that passed before him. Because no one expected to see him, no one appeared to, which was by now a familiar dynamic as well as one for which he was thankful. Of all the things that had marked his life before he'd become famous, he missed anonymity the most. Not always, but often, certainly now. He missed youth, too, but no man could hold on to that very long. Anonymity was different. You had to give it away, and once you had, the deal could not be undone until time had faded the public's memory of you or you were no longer, in the flesh, the man the camera had once captured.

He kept an eye on his watch and with ten minutes to spare paid the bill and made his way toward the tender, past the berths of a dozen mega-yachts, each with security men stationed at its stern. Several had welcome mats bearing their ship's name spread out at the edge of the dock, but there was more suspicion than welcome in these sentries' gazes as he passed. To Ty's right, beyond the old stone harbor fortification, the sea was flecked with gold dust as the sun declined toward the Atlantic. At anchor in the distance lay
Surpass,
its cobalt hull and white bulwarks commanding deference.

To Ty's surprise there was no one else waiting on the pebbled concrete landing, nor was any tender in sight at a quarter to seven, the time he'd been assured by Greg's text message that it would depart. He had, he realized, half-expected the prostitutes from the pontoon, with a paunchy, hirsute, balding producer or two in their wake. At the
Vanity Fair
party, even on lounges beside the pool a few hours earlier, there had been any number of stars and moguls, not to mention eager starlets, who might conceivably reappear, champagne in hand, at a party aboard one of the world's most formidable motor yachts. But where were they? They couldn't all be coming directly from Cannes. Beyond the seawall only a few boats were in motion, all too large to function as tenders. Ty studied each one in the distance. Only the longest of them, a streamlined cigarette, appeared headed toward the quay, but it was far way. It was moving fast, though, and he trained his eye on it as it sped across the harbor like a sword upon the water at an incautious, no doubt unlawful rate of speed.

A few minutes later, its captain shut down its engines, and thereafter it seemed to glide alongside the stepped-down landing as if propelled by wind and current alone. The boat was at least fifty feet in length, with a sleek, low cabin beneath its bulletlike bow and a large aft deck. Its captain managed it with single-handed artfulness, looping but one stern line over a weathered cleat to hold it momentarily in place.

“Mr. Hunter?” the captain inquired in a voice—soft, feminine and English—Ty had not anticipated. “Of course you are. Will you come aboard, please?”

No sooner had Ty found his footing in the cockpit than the captain pulled in the line she had so deftly thrown, restarted the high-performance engines, and headed, at a less furious clip, for open water.

“I'm confused,” Ty told her a few seconds later, as he approached the helm. For a craft of its size and power, this one was unnaturally quiet.

The captain turned toward him, a glint in her wide but wily green eyes. “By this boat,” she asked, “by me, or by the fact that there aren't any other people?”

“All three, but I suppose it might be simplest to start with the last.”

“Everyone else was asked for seven-thirty. Once we're aboard
Surpass,
one of the crew will take this boat back to the landing and collect them.”

“One of the crew?” Ty inquired. “The way you say that—”

“Rather than me, though I could be one of them. I've certainly had enough experience.”

“If you're not one of the crew, who are you?”

“Isabella Cavill,” she said as she extended her hand. “In theory, the party you're on your way to is being given for me.” She removed the captain's cap she'd been wearing, letting her long, auburn hair fall from it.

“In theory?” Ty repeated, memorizing the scene.

“It's hardly a secret that my godfather is a man of many simultaneous motives.”

“Your godfather is Ian Santal?”

“He is,” she said. The edges of her hair were now wet with sea spray, and she shook her head, lifting her face to the light.

“You're the jewelry designer,” Ty inquired, “for Guardi, in Rome?”

“You've heard of it.”

“Who hasn't?”

“You'd be surprised. Never mind, Mr. Hunter, you seem very well informed.”

“I'm the curious type.” Ty smiled. “Anyway, Miss Cavill, I look forward to seeing your collection.”

“I look forward to showing it to you.”

“Is that why I've been invited ahead of the others? So that you can give me an advance preview?”

“Hardly! You're the first because I'm a fan and I wanted to meet you. If I'd waited, there was always a chance I wouldn't. You know how people are at parties, especially when there's a film star and the festival is on.”

“To tell you the truth, I'm still getting used to it.”

“Good for you,” Isabella said. “Now, tell me something else I've been wondering about. In
The Boy Who Understood Women—
”

“Did I actually lay down my life or was I simply in the wrong place at the wrong time?”

“You've been asked the question before?”

“Variations of it,” Ty said. “The director wanted people to decide for themselves.”

“I don't think you were in the wrong place at the wrong time. Something tells me you wouldn't be capable of that.”

“You'd be mistaken. I've been there more than once.”

“When you gave your life for that girl's, half the world fell in love with you. You must know that.”

“From the cinema to the parking lot,” Ty said. “A very short-lived, one-sided affair.”

“Why are you alone?”

Her question startled him. He could not decide if it was innocent or blunt. He said, “My mother would say I'm particular.”

“You're Ty Hunter. Surely a man like you can afford to be
very
particular.”

Ty hesitated. “Can I?”

“I'm sorry,” Isabella said. “I'm out of order.”

“Don't let it worry you.”

“I won't, if you say not to.”

“I wasn't always alone.”

“No surprise there, surely, but the way you say that . . .”

“She died,” Ty said, before he realized he had. His voice choked.

Isabella turned from the wheel, her eyes suddenly sympathetic. “Recently?” she asked.

“Neither yesterday nor all that long ago.”

“I'm sorry.”

“She was a journalist—a photojournalist, actually, and a very fine one, too. In fact, she was just remarkable, so amazingly gifted . . . observant and brave. She'd won all kinds of awards for her pictures.”

“What was her name?”

“Carolyn.”

“That was my grandmother's name.”

Ty smiled. “You would have loved her. And she would have admired your style, the way you pilot this boat. I mean, she had less fear and more spirit than anyone I've ever known. She died in the war in Afghanistan.”

Ty's hand rested on the dashboard, and for an instant, by instinct and at a loss for other words, Isabella covered it with her palm.

“We're almost there,” she told him at last, deliberately buoying her tone. “Watch carefully. You're going to enjoy this.”

Surpass
's bow was pointed into the wind. A smooth, elongated plane that rose, curling into a snarl, it appeared as menacing as a warship's. Isabella gave it a wide berth, as she had the stabilizer put out to the ship's starboard and now the one to port. Slowing her speed until the tender's wake ceased to disturb the sea, she circled in on the stern, where the ship's name rose in bold steel letters from an angled escutcheon. Two seamen in dark commando dress stood at attention on the low deck. As soon as Isabella had made the final turn of her approach, with no exchange of signal the seamen stepped away from the center, toward opposite gunwales as the gates of the deck drifted open and the stern itself began to lift.

Isabella steered the tender toward the shadowy bay, which immediately brightened as they entered it. As the stern closed again behind them and Isabella killed the engines, Ty was struck by the absolute silence that all at once enveloped them. When, in search of an exit, he stirred, Isabella gestured for him to remain still. The tender was at least four feet below the deck above, with no ladder in sight.

“Don't worry,” she said. “It's all been thought out. That's how it is with Ian.”

“Ian?” Ty asked.

Isabella smiled. “Very early on, he made it clear he preferred I call him by his Christian name.”

“So he's
that
kind of man?”

“Men are one way or the other in my experience. Anyhow, who knew then that he'd become so much more than a godfather? He and my father were fast friends in their days together as young Cambridge dons, and after my dad's death he stepped in. Unlike my father, for whom the English language always remained a source of wonder and who was most at home in libraries and tutorials, Ian eventually strayed from academia.”

“That's what the evidence would suggest.” Ty smiled.

“He was too picaresque for it. I suppose he actually pioneered the idea of cramming successive careers into the same life: scholar, merchant banker, deal maker. Exactly how it's all added up to quite so splendid a life as the one he now lives remains something of a puzzle to me.”

“Even to you?”

“Ian never talks about money. He's old-fashioned that way. He thinks it bad manners.” Observing Ty's reaction, she added, “Oh, I've heard the stories, most of them anyway, about what a fierce, intimidating, enigmatic figure he is to so many. Knowing him, however, I discount them. The people who tell them are hardly friends or intimates. In most cases they've probably never so much as met him. Perhaps they've caught a glimpse, but, trust me, that would be all. What they are is either mischievous or jealous, or else they're simply people who like to hear themselves sounding knowledgeable about someone so famous and famously inaccessible. Where I am—and have been—concerned, he has always shown the gentlest of souls.”

Ty smiled. He had no reason or inclination to dispute the opinion of such an attractive woman.

The tender was rising, although it was difficult for Ty to tell exactly why, impossible for anyone to hear seawater flowing into the bay, as though it were the lock of a canal. When the boat had lifted so that deck and dock were level, Isabella took the lead, and they stepped easily onto a narrow treadway floored with tightly woven steel mesh that both facilitated drainage and impeded slipping. The wall before them, in whose sheer metallic surface they could make out reflections of themselves, opened as they approached it, and they entered a compact octagonal lift that moved with the same eerie absence of noise as everything else aboard
Surpass.
Ty was certain that the yacht's machinery must have been installed with the double-resilient mounting he had encountered previously only on naval vessels, but he decided not to mention the fact for fear it could direct their conversation toward areas he had sworn never to discuss.

According to the lift's control panel, they were ascending from Level One. Apparently this particular carriage terminated at Level Two, but there was also a heat-sensitive square labeled
LEVEL ONE—SUB
.

“Sub?” Ty inquired. “Any lower and we'd be in the sea.”

“It stands for ‘submarine,'” Isabella explained.

“How dull of me not to have guessed,” Ty told her.

“Go ahead, push the button. It won't work. It will only work for Ian. It has his iris stored in its memory, no one else's.”

“I'll take your word for it,” Ty said. “Have you been in the submarine?”

Isabella shook her head. “No one has,” she replied. “It's there for escape in an emergency, not pleasure. For that, Ian has the tender we came in and another a bit smaller that's better for skiing, as well as a small sloop, several Windsurfers, and lots of Jet Skis.”

“A girl could have fun.”

Isabella smiled. “It's the name of the game, isn't it?”

“For some people,” Ty said.

Now they were in a narrow passage whose walls were covered in soft, tufted suede trimmed with a bronze handrail and whose floors were teak-and-wenge parquet. It was subtly but amply lit. They followed it forward, several times making sharp right-angle turns before arriving at another, more commodious lift that took them to Level Seven, which was known as the owner's deck. It was smaller, more intimate than the decks below, sections of which Ty could survey from the guardrail.

“Ian?” Isabella called out.

“Only be a second, darling,” came her godfather's reply from the recesses of his cabin.

When he appeared, he was wearing carefully cut linen trousers, a French dress shirt with its top two horn buttons left undone, a light silk jacket of robin's-egg blue and new espadrilles. An imposing man, he had a body that was thickly set and callused, as though from years of heavy labor, but he moved with an agility and a grace that belied appearances, and the lines of his face were as lean and chiseled as his well-known arguments. “There!” he exclaimed, as though relieved to be done with whatever preparations he had undertaken. “You are obviously Mr. Hunter, about whom Isabella has told me so much.”