Алистер Маклин - Circus

They left the four guards there, securely bound and taped, three of them even more deeply asleep than they had been a few minutes previously. They bolted the trap-door, a probably unnecessary precaution, locked the guard-room door behind them and removed the key. Bruno said: ‘So far, so good.’ He hefted the Schmeisser he had borrowed from the guard-room. ‘Let’s call on Van Diemen.’

Kan Dahn paused in the passageway and looked puzzled. ‘Van Diemen? Why do we have to attend to him first – or at all? You know where his offices and laboratories are. Why don’t we go straight in there now, find out the papers you want – you’re quite sure you’ll recognize those–’

‘I’ll recognize them.’

‘Then fold our tents and steal away into the night. Like the Arabs, you know. A classy job, smooth, slick and noiseless. That’s what I like.’

Bruno looked his disbelief. ‘What you would like is to crack every skull in the Lubylan. I can give you four reasons for not doing it your way and then no arguing – the change of the guard may be due at any moment. Time is not on our side.’

‘The change of guard is all nicely asleep in the guard-room.’

‘That may not be the change of guard. They may have to report to some kind of HQ at change-over. There may be an officer who carries out a routine inspection. I don’t know. Reason one: what we want may be in his private quarters. Reason two: we may be able to persuade him to tell us where the papers are. Reason three: if his filing cabinets are locked – and it would be astonishing if they aren’t – we may make quite a noise in opening them up and his quarters are right next door. But reason four is most important. You should have guessed.’ From their expressions it was apparent that no one had guessed. ‘I’m taking him back to the States with me.’

‘Taking him back–’ Roebuck looked his incredulity. ‘You’ve been through too much. It’s your mind.’

‘Is it? What the hell’s the point in taking the papers back home and leaving him here? He’s the only man who knows those damned formulas or whatever they are – and all he’d do is just sit down and write them out again.’

Roebuck said in slow comprehension: ‘You know, that had never occurred to me.’

‘Hadn’t occurred to a lot of other people either, it would seem. Very odd, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m sure that Uncle Sam can always find him a nice congenial job.’

‘Such as supervising the development of this damnable anti-matter?’

‘From what I’ve heard of Van Diemen, he’d die first. He’s a renegade, you know that. It must have taken some awfully compelling political and ideological reasons for him to defect from West Germany to here. He’d never co-operate.’

‘But you can’t do this to a man,’ Kan Dahn said. ‘Kidnapping is a crime in any country.’

‘True. But better than death, I would have thought. What do you want me to do? Have him swear on the Bible – or any handy Marxist treatise that we can lay hands on – that he’ll never again reproduce any of those formulas? You know damned well that he’d never consent to that. Or just leave him in peace to write his memoirs – all about how to construct this hellish weapon?’

The silence was very loud.

‘You haven’t left me much choice, have you? So what would you have me do? Execute him in the sacred name of patriotism?’

There was no immediate answer to this because he’d left them without the option of an answer. Then Kan Dahn said: ‘You have to take him back home.’

Van Diemen’s door was locked. Kan Dahn leaned on it and it was no longer locked. It crashed back against its hinges and Bruno was the first in, Schmeisser levelled – it had occurred to him, not, fortunately, too belatedly, that, without some recognizably offensive weapon, they were at a distinct disadvantage – a wandering guard, seeing them apparently unarmed, would be sorely tempted to cut loose with whatever weapon he might possess.

The startled man, propped on one elbow and rubbing sleep from his eyes, had a lean aristocratic face, grey hair, grey moustache and grey beard: he looked the exact antithesis of the mad scientist of popular conception. His unbelieving eyes switched from the intruders to a bell-push on his bedside table.

‘Touch that and you’re dead.’ Bruno’s voice carried utter conviction. Van Diemen was convinced. Roebuck advanced to the bell-push and sliced the flexible lead with the wire-cutters.

‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Van Diemen’s voice was steady, seemingly without fear: he had about him the look of a man who has suffered too much to be afraid of anything any more.

‘We want you. We want the plans of your anti-matter invention.’

‘I see. You can have me any time. Alive or dead. To get the plans you’ll have to kill me first. They’re not here anyway.’

‘You said the last two sentences the wrong way round. Tape his mouth and tie his hands behind his back. Then we look. For papers, keys, perhaps even one key.’

The search, which lasted perhaps ten minutes and left Van Diemen’s quarters in an indescribable shambles, yielded precisely nothing. Bruno stood in momentary indecision. For all he knew, time might be running out very fast indeed.

‘Let’s try his clothes.’

They tried his clothes. Again they found nothing. Bruno advanced on the bound and gagged figure sitting up in bed, regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then reached down and gently lifted the gold chain he wore round his neck. No crucifix for Van Diemen, no Star of David, but something that was probably even more precious to him than those could have been to a Catholic or Jew: dangling from the end of the chain was a bright and intricately-cut bronze key.

Two whole walls of Van Diemen’s main office were lined with metal filing cabinets. Fourteen in all, each with four sliding drawers. Fifty-six holes. Roebuck was unsuccessfully trying his thirtieth. Every pair of eyes in the office looked at him intently. All except Bruno’s. His did not leave Van Diemen’s face, which had remained expressionless throughout. Suddenly there was a tic at the corner of his mouth.

‘That one,’ Bruno said.

That one it was. The key turned easily and Roebuck pulled the drawer out. Van Diemen tried to throw himself forward, which, if an understandable reaction, was a futile one, for Kan Dahn had one massive arm around him. Bruno advanced to the drawer, started leafing quickly through the files. He picked out one sheaf of papers, checked the other files, double-checked them and closed the drawer.

Roebuck said: ‘Yes?’

‘Yes.’ Bruno thrust the files deep inside the inner pocket of his garish suit.

Roebuck said complainingly: ‘Seems like a bit of an anticlimax.’

‘I wouldn’t worry about that,’ Bruno said encouragingly. ‘The climax may still be to come.’

They descended to the eighth floor. Van Diemen had his mouth taped and hands bound behind his back, for the prison staff lived there and it seemed highly likely that Van Diemen might have wished to call attention to their presence. There were no guards here, either asleep or awake, and no reason why there should have been: guards were expendable but Van Diemen’s papers were not.

Bruno headed directly for the door at the foot of the stairs. It was not locked and neither were the filing cabinets inside, and again there was no reason why any of them should have been. Bruno began opening filing drawers in swift succession, extracting files, leafing through them rapidly and discarding them in turn by the elementary process of dropping them on the floor.

Roebuck looked at him in some puzzlement and said: ‘A moment ago you were in one Godalmighty damned hurry to get out. What place is this anyway?’