Stormchild by Bernard Cornwell Page B

letter. “Tell von Rellsteb to telephone me at the number on that envelope. Tell him there’s no trap. I just want to meet him. Do you understand?”
    The man whimpered his assent. Behind us a flashlight beam slashed through the bushes, and a burning frond of palm whipped over our heads. The hotel’s fire alarm was at last silenced, though somewhere in the night’s distance I could hear the visceral wail of approaching sirens.
    “And when you next see Nicole”—I still held the Genesis man by the throat—”tell her I love her.” The man looked somewhat startled at the incongruity of those last words, but he managed to nod his comprehension.
    I pushed him away from me. “Go!” I said.
    For a split second the man stood astonished, then he twisted away and ran frantically toward the sea. He was now a messenger to my daughter, and I silently urged his escape past the angry conference delegates, who, seeing the fugitive flee from the bushes, shouted the alarm and set off in renewed pursuit.
    My messenger almost did not make it to freedom. He ran just inches ahead of his pursuers. I saw him leap off the sea wall, and I thought he must have been overwhelmed by the flood of people who jumped after him, but when Charles and I reached the wall’s top we saw that our man was still inches ahead of the hunt. We also saw that there was a large black inflatable boat a few yards offshore with people aboard who were shouting encouragement as our man splashed into the shallows. “Tell Nicole I love her!” I yelled after him, but my voice was drowned by the crackle of flames, the shouts of the crowd, the growl of the inflat-able’s outboard engine, and the scream of the sirens as Key West’s firefighters reached the hotel. The outboard engine roared as the helmsman curved toward the beach, driving the clumsy rubber bow into the surf where the bearded fugitive hurled himself into the face of a breaking wave. “There goes your letter!” Charles said.
    The crowd of angry delegates stampeded into the sea after the fugitive. Their feet churned the water white as they charged. The man was swimming now. A woman lunged after him, but fell fractionally short, then hands reached from the inflatable boat, the man was half dragged over the gunwale, and the outboard motor was throttled up so that the lopsided boat thundered away toward the open sea. The man had escaped.
    “I think you owe me a drink,” Charles said in a hurt voice. “A big drink. I’ve ruined a perfectly good pair of pants on your behalf.” His white cotton trousers had been ripped, presumably when he had tackled and overpowered our captive.
    We left the hotel before anyone could ask us questions and I bought Charles a very stiff scotch in one of the many bars that claimed to have been Ernest Hemingway’s spiritual home. I ordered myself an Irish whiskey and, as I drank it, I unfolded and read one of the leaflets that the fleeing Genesis activists had scattered in their wake. The leaflets had been handwritten and copied on an old-fashioned copier that had left smudges of ink on the glossy paper.
    “To the Traitors of the Environment,” the leaflet endearingly began, “you have Cut and Burned the world’s Rain Forests, so we shall Cut and Burn your Fancy Trees. You have Fouled the World’s Waterways with Oil, so We shall Take Away your Toy Pool. You have Soured the World’s Skies with Noxious Fumes, so We shall Make You Breathe a similar Stench. You Consort with the Enemy, with Politicians, and with their Panders, so how can you Expect a Real Warrior of the World’s Ecosystem to Address your Traitorous Conference!” The leaflet went on in a similar vein of capitalized hatred, ending with the boast “We are Genesis. We make Clean by Destroying the Dirt-Makers.”
    “Very charming,” Charles said with fastidious distaste when he had skimmed through the poorly written leaflet. “But why attack fellow environmentalists? Why don’t they attack a conference of