Алистер Маклин - Circus

Bruno put one arm round the violently trembling girl, the other round the stunned, terrified and uncomprehending old woman.

He said: ‘Fine. Terminé . It’s all over and you’re all safe now. I think we should leave this place now. You won’t really mind will you, Father?’ The old man gazed at the prostrate figures and said nothing. Bruno went on, to no one in particular: ‘About Van Diemen I’m sorry. But perhaps it’s best. He’d really no place left to go.’

Kan Dahn said: ‘No place?’

‘In his world, yes. In mine, not. He was completely amoral – not immoral – in devising so fiendish a weapon. A totally unheeding, irresponsible man. I know it’s a very cruel thing to say, but the world can well do without him.’

Maria said: ‘Why did Dr Harper come for me? He kept saying something about his transmitter and tapes being missing from his railway compartment.’

‘Yes. It had to be something like that. Roebuck here stole them. Can’t trust those Americans.’

‘You don’t trust me very much. You don’t tell me very much.’ There was no reproach in her voice, just a lack of understanding. ‘But perhaps you can tell me what happens when Dr Harper comes to.’

‘Dead men don’t come to. Not on this planet, anyway.’

‘Dead?’ She had no emotions left to register.

‘Those darts were tipped with lethal poison. Some form of refined curare, I should imagine. I was supposed to kill some of their own men. Fortunately, I had to use it on a guard dog. Now a very dead guard dog.’

‘Kill their own men?’

‘It would have looked very black for me – and America – if I’d killed some of the guards here, then been caught red-handed. Their own men. People like Harper and Sergius are men without hearts, without souls. They’d shoot their own parents if it served their personal political ends. It was also slated, incidentally, that you should die. I had, of course, been instructed not to use the dart gun on Van Diemen on the pretext that he had a weak heart. Well, God knows he’s got a weak enough heart now – Harper put a bullet through it.’ He looked at Maria. ‘You know how to operate the call-up on the transmitter – Roebuck has it in his bag there?’ She nodded. ‘Right, send the signal now.’ He turned to Kan Dahn, Roebuck and Manuelo. ‘Bring my folks down slowly, will you? They can’t hurry. I’ll wait below.’

Kan Dahn said with suspicion: ‘Where are you going?’

‘The entrance is time-locked so someone must have let them in. Whoever that was will still be there or thereabouts. You’re all still in the clear. I want you to stay that way.’ He picked up the Schmeisser. ‘I hope I don’t have to use this.’

When the others joined him on the ground floor some five minutes later, Bruno had already done what he had to do. Kan Dahn surveyed the two bound, gagged and for the moment unconscious guards with considerable satisfaction.

‘By my count that’s making thirteen people we’ve tied up tonight. It’s certainly been an unlucky number for some. So it’s up, up and away.’

‘Indeed.’ He asked Maria: ‘You made contact?’

She looked at her watch. ‘It’s airborne. Rendezvous in sixteen minutes.’

‘Good.’ He looked and smiled at Kan Dahn, Manuelo, Roebuck, Vladimir and Yoffe. ‘Well, it’s the van for us while you five make your own discreet way back to the Winter Palace. Au revoir and many thanks. See you all in Florida. Have a nice night at the circus.’

Bruno helped his elderly parents and youngest brother into the back of the van, climbed into the front with Maria and drove off towards the rendezvous with the helicopter. He stopped the van about thirty yards beyond the wooden bridge spanning the narrow deep river. Maria looked at the trees closely crowding on both sides.

‘ This is the rendezvous?’

‘Round the next corner. In a clearing. But I have a little chore to attend to first.’

‘Inevitably.’ She looked and sounded resigned. ‘And is one allowed to ask what it is?’

‘I’m going to blow the bridge up.’

‘I see. You’re going to blow the bridge up.’ She registered no surprise and was by now at the stage where she wouldn’t have lifted an eyebrow if he’d announced his intention of razing the Winter Palace to the ground. ‘Why?’

Carrying his clutch of amatol explosives, Bruno descended from the van. Maria followed. As they walked on to the bridge Bruno said: ‘Hasn’t it occurred to you that when they hear the chopper’s engine – and you can hear a chopper’s engine an awfully long way away – the police and army are going to come swarming out of town like enraged bees? I don’t want to get stung.’

Maria was crestfallen. ‘There seem to be an awful lot of things that don’t occur to me.’

Bruno took her arm and said nothing. Together, they walked out to the middle of the bridge, where Bruno stooped and laid the charges together between two struts on the side of the bridge. He straightened and surveyed them thoughtfully.

Maria said: ‘Are you an expert on everything ?’

‘You don’t have to be an expert to blow up a wooden bridge.’ He produced a pair of pliers from his pocket. ‘All you require is one of those to crimp the chemical fuse – and, of course, the sense to walk away immediately afterwards.’

He stood there thoughtfully and she said: ‘Well, aren’t you going to crimp the fuses, then?’

‘Two things. I only crimp one fuse: the other charges will go up through sympathetic detonation. And if I blow up the bridge now then angry bees will be out here immediately, perhaps with enough time to figure out a way to cross the river or find a nearby bridge. We wait till we hear the chopper, blow the bridge, drive round to this glade in the woods and use the van’s headlights to light up the landing area.’

She said: ‘I can hear the helicopter now.’

He nodded, stooped again, crimped a fuse, took her hand and ran off the bridge. Twenty yards beyond the bridge they turned round just on the moment that the explosion came. The noise was a very satisfactory one indeed, and so was the result: the centre of the bridge, a flimsy structure at best, simply disintegrated and fell into the river below.

The transfer to the helicopter and the flight back to the ship went without a hitch, the pilot hedgehopping all the way to keep below the radar screen. In the wardroom Bruno was being apologetic to a rather stormy Maria.

‘I know I fooled you and I’m sorry. But I didn’t want you to die, you see. I knew from the beginning that most of our conversations were being recorded. I had to make Harper think that the break-in was going to be on Tuesday. He was all set to get us that night and that meant he would have got you, too.’

‘But Kan Dahn and Roebuck and Manuelo–’

‘No risk. They were in it from the beginning.’

‘Why, you close, devious – but something must have put you on to Harper in the first place?’

‘My Slav blood. Nasty suspicious natures we Slavs have. About the only place that wasn’t bugged was the circus office back in the States. The electronic snooper that Harper brought in was an accomplice of his: this was designed to throw suspicion on the circus. If there was no internal circus contact then it had to be Harper. Only four people were really privy to what was going on – your boss, Pilgrim, Fawcett and Harper. Your boss was above suspicion, Fawcett and Pilgrim were dead. So, Harper. Aboard ship, Carter, the purser, wasn’t there to make sure that my cabin wasn’t bugged – he was there to make sure that it was. So was yours.’

‘You have no proof of this.’

‘No? He was in correspondence with Gdynia and he had fifteen hundred dollars in his cabin. New dollars. I have the serial numbers.’