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Sister Maria Teresa knelt at the altar in prayer. 'Still at it, is she?' I said. 'Faith unshaken.'

Joanna gave me a cigarette and sat back, waiting for the water to boil. 'What happened, Neil?'

'To me?' I said. 'Oh, I jumped ship as the Navy say, before I got to where they were taking me.'

'Won't they be after you - the authorities, I mean?'

'Not any more. You see, strange to relate, I didn't do it. I was framed. Isn't that what Cagney's always saying in those gangster movies?'

She nodded slowly. 'I think I knew from the beginning. It never did make any kind of sense.'

'Thanks for the vote of confidence,' I said. 'You and Mannie both. I could have done with it a little earlier, mind you, but that's all water under the bridge.'

'And Sam?'

'Poured out the whole story in front of Figueiredo and his wife and Mannie in the hotel bar earlier this afternoon when I confronted him. So drunk he didn't know what he was doing. He's finished, Joanna.'

She poured coffee into a mug and handed it to me. 'I think he was finished a long, long time ago, Neil.'

She sat there, sitting on her heels, looking genuinely sad, a different sort of person altogether from the woman I was accustomed to. Somehow it seemed the right moment to break it to her.

'I've got something for you.' I took the identity disc on its chain from my pocket and held it out to her.

The skin of her face tightened visibly before my eyes. She started to tremble. 'Anna?' she said hoarsely.

I nodded. 'I found what was left of her and her friend in a canoe on the riverbank. They must have been killed in the original attack after all and drifted down-river.'

'Thank God,' she whispered. 'Oh, thank God.'

She reached out for the disc and chain, got to her feet and fled to the other end of the church. Sister Maria Teresa turned to meet her and I saw Joanna hold out the identity disc to her.

At the same moment Avila called to me urgently. 'I'm getting something. Come quickly.'

He kept the headphones on and turned up the speaker for me. We all heard Figueiredo at once quite clearly in spite of some static.

'Santa Helena, are you receiving me?'

'Mallory here,' I said. 'Can you hear me?'

'I hear you clearly, Senhor Mallory. How are things?'

'As bad as they can be. The Huna were waiting for me when I landed and set fire to the plane. I'm in the church at the mission now, with Avila and the two women. We're completely stranded. No boats.'

'Mother of God.' I could almost see him crossing himself.

'We've only one hope,' I said. 'You'll have to raise some sort of volunteer force and come up-river in that launch of yours. We'll try to hang on till you get here.'

'But even if I managed to find men willing to accompany me, it would take us ten or twelve hours to get there.'

'I know. You'll just have to do the best you can.'

There was more from his end, but so drowned in static that I couldn't make any sense out of it and after a while I lost him altogether. When I turned I found that Joanna and Sister Maria Teresa had joined Avila. They all looked roughly the same, strained, anxious, afraid. Even Sister Maria Teresa had lost her customary expression of quiet joy.

'What happens now, Neil?' Joanna said. 'You'd better tell us the worst.'

'You heard most of it. I've asked Figueiredo to try and raise a few men and attempt to break through to us in the government launch. At least twelve hours if everything goes right for him. To be perfectly frank, my own feeling is we'd be lucky to see them before dawn tomorrow.'

Avila laughed harshly. 'A miracle if they even started, senhor. You think they are heroes in Landro, to come looking for a Huna arrow in the back?'

'You came, Senhor Avila,' Sister Maria Teresa said.

'For money, Sister,' he told her. 'Because you paid well and in the end what has it brought me? Only death.'

*

I stood by the window, peering out through the half-open shutter across the compound, past the hospital and the bungalows to the edge of the forest, dark in the evening light. The sun was a smear of orange beyond the trees