Spy Who Jumped Off the Screen : A Novel (9781101565766) by Thomas Caplan

about money. He’s old-fashioned that way. He thinks it bad manners.” Observing Ty’s reaction, she added, “Oh, I’ve heard the stories, most of them anyway, about what a fierce, intimidating, enigmatic figure he is to so many. Knowing him, however, I discount them. The people who tell them are hardly friends or intimates. In most cases they’ve probably never so much as met him. Perhaps they’ve caught a glimpse, but, trust me, that would be all. What they are is either mischievous or jealous, or else they’re simply people who like to hear themselves sounding knowledgeable about someone so famous and famously inaccessible. Where I am—and have been—concerned, he has always shown the gentlest of souls.”
    Ty smiled. He had no reason or inclination to dispute the opinion of such an attractive woman.
    The tender was rising, although it was difficult for Ty to tell exactly why, impossible for anyone to hear seawater flowing into the bay, as though it were the lock of a canal. When the boat had lifted so that deck and dock were level, Isabella took the lead, and they stepped easily onto a narrow treadway floored with tightly woven steel mesh that both facilitated drainage and impeded slipping. The wall before them, in whose sheer metallic surface they could make out reflections of themselves, opened as they approached it, and they entered a compact octagonal lift that moved with the same eerie absence of noise as everything else aboard
Surpass.
Ty was certain that the yacht’s machinery must have been installed with the double-resilient mounting he had encountered previously only on naval vessels, but he decided not to mention the fact for fear it could direct their conversation toward areas he had sworn never to discuss.
    According to the lift’s control panel, they were ascending from Level One. Apparently this particular carriage terminated at Level Two, but there was also a heat-sensitive square labeled LEVEL ONE—SUB .
    â€œSub?” Ty inquired. “Any lower and we’d be in the sea.”
    â€œIt stands for ‘submarine,’” Isabella explained.
    â€œHow dull of me not to have guessed,” Ty told her.
    â€œGo ahead, push the button. It won’t work. It will only work for Ian. It has his iris stored in its memory, no one else’s.”
    â€œI’ll take your word for it,” Ty said. “Have you been in the submarine?”
    Isabella shook her head. “No one has,” she replied. “It’s there for escape in an emergency, not pleasure. For that, Ian has the tender we came in and another a bit smaller that’s better for skiing, as well as a small sloop, several Windsurfers, and lots of Jet Skis.”
    â€œA girl could have fun.”
    Isabella smiled. “It’s the name of the game, isn’t it?”
    â€œFor some people,” Ty said.
    Now they were in a narrow passage whose walls were covered in soft, tufted suede trimmed with a bronze handrail and whose floors were teak-and-wenge parquet. It was subtly but amply lit. They followed it forward, several times making sharp right-angle turns before arriving at another, more commodious lift that took them to Level Seven, which was known as the owner’s deck. It was smaller, more intimate than the decks below, sections of which Ty could survey from the guardrail.
    â€œIan?” Isabella called out.
    â€œOnly be a second, darling,” came her godfather’s reply from the recesses of his cabin.
    When he appeared, he was wearing carefully cut linen trousers, a French dress shirt with its top two horn buttons left undone, a light silk jacket of robin’s-egg blue and new espadrilles. An imposing man, he had a body that was thickly set and callused, as though from years of heavy labor, but he moved with an agility and a grace that belied appearances, and the lines of his face were as lean and chiseled as his well-known arguments.