“He calls himself Robertson, says he’s English, a retiree who was formerly in the computer business.”
Holly sat up. “I like it,” she said.
“And get this: he lives on Black Mountain, at number 56.”
“Irene is number 100, so I guess he’s halfway up?”
Dino came out of the cottage and joined them. “You woke me up,” he said accusingly.
“Sorry about that. It’s good that you’re here, anyway; we have something to talk about.” He brought Dino up to date on Robertson.
“He sounds good to me,” Dino said.
“Yeah, well, we need to have Lance have his London station check him out, and thoroughly. There’s something else, though.”
“What?” Holly asked.
“Leslie has identified who may have bugged our cottage; his name is Colonel Croyden Croft, and he runs a department called Internal Investigations, which is part of the Home Office, but he really works for Sir Winston Sutherland.”
“Why does Sir Leslie think he bugged our cottage?” Holly asked.
“Because that’s what he does. Leslie thinks he might even have bugged all the cottages when they were built, but that doesn’t take any heat off us.”
“Heat?”
“Leslie says that Sir Winston would welcome an opportunity to throw us all in jail for a while, then expel us from the island. Apparently, he holds a grudge against me from our previous courtroom encounters.”
“Well, thanks, Stone,” Dino said, “for pissing off the powers that be. That’s a great help.”
“My point is, we’ve got to be very careful to be no more than tourists while we’re here. And, of course, we have to be very careful what we say inside the cottage.”
“I’m glad we didn’t yank the bugs,” Holly said. “That would have really pissed them off.”
“I think you have to be careful, too, not to be seen using the satellite phone to call Lance. The sight of the thing by someone who reports to Colonel Croft might just give them the excuse they need to bust us.”
“Good point,” Holly said. “I think I’ll go behind the cottage and phone Lance now; I want to get him working on this Robertson guy. If we can identify him as Teddy, then we can get out of here before Sir Winston falls on us.”
“Go ahead.” He handed her a slip of paper. “This is the British registration number of his airplane.”
Holly picked up her towel, wrapped it around her sarong-style and grabbed her handbag. She went into the cottage, then out the back door into a fenced-in area where the gas bottle and the garbage cans were, then she dug the satphone out of her bag and called Lance’s direct line at Langley.
“Lance Cabot.”
“It’s Holly.”
“Your second call today; something new?”
She told him about Robertson and asked for a background check, then explain
ed their situation with Sir Winston.
“For Christ’s sake, don’t get yourselves arrested,” Lance said. “If we had to bring pressure on the St. Marks government to get you out of there, we’d have to involve the State Department, and then questions might arise as to your presence there, and we wouldn’t want that.”
“I understand; we’ll be careful.”
“I don’t want you sniffing around this Robertson while I’m checking him out. It’s already late in London, so it’s going to be tomorrow before anything can be done. I’ll call the duty officer now and leave instructions so that they can get started first thing in the morning, while we’re still sleeping.”
“Great, but don’t call me, I’ll call you.”