Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and weighted the ends to keep them from curling up again. It was a large and highly complicated diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth. He stood back and looked at me.

‘Ever seen that before, Talbot?’

I bent over the table. The diagram represented a peculiar object shaped halfway between a cylinder and a cigar, about four times as long as its average width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it appeared to be given up to some kind of storage tanks – I could see the fuel lines leading to the tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed on the top side. This same bridge housed the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber which ran clear through the body of the machine, passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this oval chamber and attached to the underside of the cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left, towards the narrower and more tapering end, were what appeared to be searchlights and long slender remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along the side.

I took a good long look at all of this, then straightened. ‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘Never seen it in my life.’

I needn’t have bothered straightening for next moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees and was shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol held by the barrel.

‘I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.’ A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at the vicar’s afternoon tea-table and he was asking me to pass along the muffins. ‘Your memory, Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a little, eh?’

‘Is all this really necessary?’ General Ruthven sounded distressed. He looked distressed. ‘Surely, Vyland, we–’

‘Shut up!’ Vyland snapped. We were no longer calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed to my feet. ‘Well?’

‘What’s the good of beating me over the head?’ I said savagely. ‘How will that make me remember something I never–?’

This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my hand up to the side of my head and was riding the blow, going fast away from it, when it connected. I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all show and to complete the effect I slid down to the deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two hoodlums were looking at me with a detached interest, the general was white and he had his lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry’s face was a mask of unholy glee.

‘Remember anything now?’

I called him an unprintable name and rose shakily to my feet.

‘Very well.’ Vyland shrugged. ‘I think Larry here would like to persuade you.’

‘Can I? Can I really?’ The eagerness on Larry’s face was revolting, frightening. ‘Want that I make him talk?’

Vyland smiled and nodded. ‘Remember he’s got to work for us when you’re finished.’

‘I’ll remember.’ This was Larry’s big moment. To be in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic streak wide as a barn door – this was going to be one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting his lips continuously and giggling in a high and horrible falsetto. ‘The inside of the right thigh, high up. He’ll scream like – like a pig going under the knife. Then the left. And he’ll still be able to work.’ The eyes were wide and staring and mad, and for the first time in my life I was confronted by a human being drooling at the mouth.

Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I would be ten times more scared of Larry’s viciousness, his neurotic instability, than of any coldly calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides, I’d put up a good enough front, it would have been expected of me, but there was no point in overdoing it.

‘It’s a development of the early French bathyscaphes,’ I said rapidly. ‘This model is a combined British and French naval project, designed to reach only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors – it’s good for about 2,500 feet – but it’s faster, more manoeuvrable and it’s equipped for actual underwater salvage which its predecessors weren’t.’

Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it came within his grasp. He could have wept with rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his disappointment. He was still prancing in front of me and waving the gun around.

‘He’s lying!’ His voice was shrill, almost a scream. ‘He’s just trying–’

‘He’s not lying,’ Vyland interrupted coldly. No triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had been achieved and the past was done with. ‘Put that gun away.’

‘But I tell you–’ Larry broke off in an exclamation of pain as one of the two big silent men caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it was pointing at the floor.

‘Put that heater away, punk,’ the man growled, ‘or I’ll take it off you.’

Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the byplay. ‘And you not only know what this is, Talbot, but you’ve actually worked on it. The general has impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word this morning.’ He bent forward and went on softly: ‘And you also worked on it later on. Recently. Our sources in Cuba are even better than those in Europe.’

‘I didn’t work on it recently.’ I held up my hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. ‘When this bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered waters off Nassau, the British and French thought it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn’t work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be the point in denying it if it wasn’t so?’ I smiled faintly. ‘Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship for a week or so. They got wind that I was there, I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a hurry.’

‘They?’ Vyland’s eyebrow was still working as smoothly as ever.

‘What does it matter now?’ Even to myself I sounded tired, defeated.

‘True, true,’ Vyland smiled. ‘From what we know of your record it might have been any one of the police forces of half a dozen countries. Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has been worrying us – where we saw Talbot’s face before.’

General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I’d needed conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland’s I needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy and clearly wished to have no part whatever in what was going on.

I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: ‘Have you – were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the–’

‘You didn’t think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?’ Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. ‘Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that.’ He smiled again – he was spoiling himself this morning. ‘It wasn’t difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht.’