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goin g until I found a job. Besides — ’
    She was ashamed to go on.
    Blake said, ‘Besides, it was a challenge. I know. But I still don’t understand what your part in it was. What was the ankle business for, last night?’
    ‘He knew you were planning to sail, but not when. I was to find out, and arrange some way to get him aboard.’ Her face was suddenly pink. ‘He made you sound like a different kind of a challenge. And he was certain you wouldn’t be suspicious of an American.’
    ‘I see. But why did he have to get aboard - or why did he say he had to get aboard? He could serve a paper on Freddy any place.’
    ‘He had to - he said he had to - serve you both at the same time, you and Freddy, so one of you couldn’t warn the other to take the yacht away. I was to testify in court that you’d been served.’
    ‘Very neat. I can see how you might be taken in.’
    Blake tested his back muscles again. The soreness was only moderate now. He could stand up, if he tried, but there seemed to be no particular point in standing, just then. It was easier to sit against the bulkhead and try to reason the situation out. Action without a plan of some kind had already proved its futility.
    Jules was paying no attention to them. The sailor clearly understood nothing of what they were saying, and cared little that they talked together. It encouraged Marian to gesture cautiously at the open door of the pilot-house and make swimming gestures towards the shore, by then several hundred meter s away.
    ‘I can do it,’ she said. ‘I’ve swum farther than that lots of times. I’d need a chance to get out of my clothes first, but if you can think of a way to occupy his attention –’
    ‘You wouldn’t last a minute in the water even if I could. Nobody can swim faster than a thousand horse-power. They’d run you down like a waterbug .’
    ‘But we’ve got to do something ! We can’t just sit here and wait to find out what they’re going to do with us!’
    ‘I don’t think we’ll have to wait very long,’ Blake said. ‘Holtz doesn’t strike me as the kind of a man who will waste time.’
    The bridge telephone rang moments later. He got to his feet to take the call, not thinking until Jules, reaching for the phone, growled, ‘Get away!’ The sailor ’s end of the conversation was, ‘Yes ... ... Yes ... ... Yes ... ... No ... ... Yes ... ... Right.’ Instead of hanging the receiver back on its hook, he pulled it loose from the wire with a jerk, and put it in his pocket with the radiophone headset he had appropriated earlier. Afterwards he brought the Angel ’s bow around into the wind, cut the motors to let the yacht drift, and motioned the two captives ahead of him out of the pilot-house with the pistol he took from his belt for the first time.
    ‘Down to the salon, and no more horseplay, either of you,’ he warned. ‘It ’s strictly business from here on.’
    The Angel lay almost half a mile off Monte Carlo beach. Even at that distance the clarity of the Mediterranean air made figures clearly visible in the waves and beneath the brightly-striped umbrellas blooming on the sand. A white-painted pé dalo moved lazily along the shore like a distant swan, and a breeze raised small ripples on the blue water. It was all so sunny and peaceful and familiar that Blake had difficulty in facing the reality that he was a prisoner aboard his own command, with a gun in his back herding him and a girl he hardly knew into the salon to take their places with the other captives already gathered there.
    Freddy ’s tastes were apparent in the Angel ’s interior furnishings. The salon was decorated like a drawing-room. Its carpeting was thick, its lighting discreetly indirect, its polished walnut paneling flawless. Slatted blinds reduced sun glare at the windows, and a panel that pretended to be a bookcase stood aside to reveal a heavily stocked bar. Except for a barograph, a gimbaled clock and a ship ’s radio, there was