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slightly retired, who asked for a little consideration from his fellow government agents and didn’t get it. Now he’s making his own rules and to hell with yours. To put it another way, he’s giving you one more chance to be reasonable; and speaking for myself, why can’t you do it? We have a fairly efficient and useful organization, Captain Sanderson or whatever your rank is. One day you may need a little help from us. So leave it now; let him go. Forget those two ounces of pot or however much it was, or go find the man to whom it really belonged; and we’ll forget the way you pushed our man around and beat him up when all he did was ask for a little break as a colleague recently retired from government service. Just one little phone call, but he wasn’t allowed to make it!”
    After a moment, Sanderson spoke without expression: “So you think Barnett is heading for Matanilla Shoal, at the upper end of the Bahamas. But that’s well over a hundred miles, closer to a hundred and twenty, if I remember the chart correctly.”
    I looked at him bleakly and shrugged. “Very well, sir. If that’s the way you want it. You’ll find your quarry somewhere on a line between here and Matanilla Shoal, wherever the hell that is. Probably about halfway there.”
    “Why are you telling me this?”
    I said, “Hell, finding him is no problem. You’d eventually have spread your search wide enough to manage it without my help. But just what do you plan to do when you find him?”
    His gray eyes studied me thoughtfully. “An unarmed man in a slow boat shouldn’t present a tremendous problem, Mr. Helm.”
    I laughed in his face. “You’re dreaming, Sanderson. What makes you think he’s unarmed?”
    “We confiscated a rather fancy stainless-steel pump shotgun hidden behind the backrest of the main cabin settee.”
    “So now you’re guilty of robbing him of his boat, his liberty, his eyesight, his future,
and
his gun. Haven’t you done enough to him?” The brown-faced man watched me without speaking. I said, “Don’t count on dealing with an unarmed man,
amigo.
That shiny, obvious pumpgun was just something to keep you happy if you looked. Or any other official interested in firearms. There’ll be other weapons on board—you can bet on it—hidden away well enough that even your hotshot searchers couldn’t find them. We make enemies in our line of work. Doug would be prepared to deal with a vengeful character settling an old grudge. And I understand there are real pirates around these days in certain waters, not just the ones in fancy seacop uniforms hijacking people’s boats under a pretense of legality. No, don’t think for a moment he’ll be an easy, unarmed mark a second time. One way or another he’ll be ready for you. So I ask you again, how do you plan to deal with him?”
    “Just a minute.”
    Sanderson moved forward to where the young officer in command of the boat stood beside the helmsman. There was a brief conference, which was moved to the chart table. Presently one of the radios was activated. The sound of the motors made it impossible for me to eavesdrop. It was full daylight now, and we were out in open water with the wedding-cake skyline of Miami Beach receding astern. I saw that Amy Barnett was regarding me with hostility.
    “What’s the matter with you?” I asked.
    “You don’t have to
help
them track him down, do you?”
    I sighed. “For God’s sake! What do you think this is, a Boy Scout jamboree? First of all, as I just said, they’ll find him easily enough without my help now that it’s daylight; why be obstructive for nothing? Second, Doug knows perfectly well that we—I—have to cooperate with the local authorities even though we don’t like it. He wouldn’t want it otherwise. He’s spent most of his working life with us; he wouldn’t want us to jeopardize the whole agency just for him. As a matter of fact, that’s the one bright spot in this hassle. We’re the ones who got