Skeleton Key

into it moodily, as if trying to find an answer inside the glass. “All right,” she said at last. “You can come with us if that‟s what you really want. But you‟re not part of this, Alex. Your job was to help get us onto the island and if you ask me, we didn‟t even need you for that. You saw the security at the airport, it was a joke! But OK, since you‟re here, you might as well come along for the ride. But I don‟t want to hear you. I don‟t want to see you. I don‟t want to know you‟re there.”
    “Whatever you say,” Alex sat back. He had got what he wanted, but he had to ask himself why he wanted it at all. Given the choice, he would have preferred to take the first plane off the island and put as much distance as possible between himself and the CIA and Sarov and the whole lot of them.
    But that was a choice he didn‟t have. All Alex knew was that he didn‟t want to spend time in the hotel on his own, worrying. If there really was a bomb somewhere on the island, he wanted to be the first to hear about it. And there was something else. Turner and Troy seemed confident enough about this Devil‟s Chimney. They had assumed that it wasn‟t guarded and that it would take them all the way to the top. But they had been equally confident when they had gone to the Salesman‟s birthday party, and that had almost got Turner killed.
    Alex finished his drink. “All right,” he said. “So when do we go?”
    Troy fell silent. Turner took out his wallet and paid for the drinks. “Straight away,” he said.
    “We‟re doing it tonight.”
    THE DEVIL’S CHIMNEY
    « ^ »
    It was late afternoon when they set out from Puerto Madre, leaving the port with its fish markets and pleasure cruisers behind them. Turner and Troy were going to make the dive while it was still light. They would find the cave and wait there until sunset, then climb up into Casa de Oro under cover of darkness. That was the plan.
    The man called Garcia had a boat that had known the sea too long. It wheezed and spluttered out of the harbour, trailing a cloud of evil-smelling black smoke. Rust had rippled and then burst through every surface like some bad skin disease. The boat had no visible name. A few flags fluttered from the mast, but they were little more than rags, with any trace of their original colours faded long ago. There were six air cylinders lashed to a bench underneath a canopy.
    They were the only new equipment in sight.
    Garcia himself had greeted Alex with a mixture of hostility and suspicion. Then he had spoken at length, in Spanish, with Turner. Alex had spent the best part of a year in Barcelona with his uncle and understood enough of the language to follow what they were saying.
    “You never talked about a boy. What do you think this is? A tourist excursion? Who is he? Why did you bring him here?”
    “It‟s none of your business, Garcia. Let‟s go.”
    “You paid for two passengers.” Garcia held up two withered fingers, every bone and sinew showing through. “Two passengers … that was what we agreed.”
    “You‟re being paid well enough. There‟s no point arguing. The boy‟s coming and that‟s the end of it!”
    After that, Garcia fell into sullen silence. Not that there would have been any point talking anyway. The noise of the engine was too great.
    Alex watched as the coastline of Cayo Esqueleto slipped past. He had to admit that Blunt had been right—the island was strangely beautiful with its extraordinary, deep colours; the palm trees packed together, separated from the sea by a brilliant ribbon of white sand. The sun was hovering, a perfect circle, over the horizon. A brown pelican, clumsy and comical on the ground, shot out of a pine tree and soared gracefully over their heads. Alex felt strangely at peace. Even the noise of the engine seemed to have drifted away.
    After about half an hour, the land began to rise up and he realized they had reached the north point of the island. The vegetation fell back and suddenly he was looking at a sheer rock wall that dropped all the way, without interruption, to the sea. This must be the isthmus that he had been told about, with the road leading to the Casa de Oro somewhere at the top. There was no sign of the house itself but, craning his neck, he could just make out the top of a tower, white and elegant, with a pointed red slate roof. A watch-tower. There was a single figure framed in an archway, barely more than a speck. Somehow Alex knew that it