‘Go on,’ he said, ‘what’s the rest of it?’
Kile licked his dry lips.
‘I wil pay ten thousand to anyone who can get this man out of prison and bring him to me,’ he went on. ‘That’s the proposition. It won’t be easy, and I don’t want to know how it is to be done. When the man is brought to me, I will pay the ten thousand in cash.’
Baird flicked ash on to the floor. He didn’t show his surprise, but he was surprised. This was something he hadn’t expected, and his shrewd brain looked for snags.
‘That’s a lot of dough,’ he said, studying Kile. ‘You could get the job done for a lot less than that.
What’s the idea?’
Kile touched his sweating temples with his handkerchief.
‘It’s very probable,’ he said, his voice thickening, ‘this man won’t want to leave jail, and that makes it doubly difficult. Apart from that, the prison is extremely well guarded, and the territory is bad.’
Rico was listening now, dumbfounded. He had been expecting Kile to propose a big jewel robbery.
This business about getting a man out of prison made him uneasy.