Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

The general was sharp, sharp as a needle, sharper than either Vyland or Royale. He was a bit late in the day in making his stand against surveillance, I guessed what he was really after was the power of freedom of movement – possibly for himself, even more possibly for his chauffeur. And, what was more, he was getting it. Vyland was agreeing, with the reservation that when he and Royale went in the bathyscaphe the general, his chauffeur and Mary should remain in the room above the pillar along with the rest of Vyland’s men. I still had no idea how many men Vyland actually had aboard the rig, but it seemed likely that apart from Larry, Cibatti and his friend there were at least three others. And they would be men in the mould of Cibatti.

Conversation broke off short as a knock came again to the door. A steward – or stewards – set down covers, made to serve but were told by the general to go. As the door closed he said: ‘Mary, I wonder if you would take something to Talbot?’

There came the soft sound of the rubbing of chair legs on the carpet, then Kennedy’s voice, saying: ‘If I might be permitted, sir?’

‘Thank you, Kennedy. Just a minute while my daughter serves it out.’ By and by the curtain was pushed to one side and Kennedy carefully laid a plate in front of me. Beside the plate he laid a small blue leather-covered book, straightened, looked at me expressionlessly and left.

He was gone before I had realized the significance of what he had done. He knew very well that whatever concessions in freedom of movement the general had gained did not apply to me, I was going to be under eye and gun for sixty seconds every minute, sixty minutes every hour and that our last chance for talking was gone. But not our last chance for communication, not with that little book lying around.

It wasn’t strictly a book, it was that cross between a diary and an account book, with a tiny pencil stuck in the loop of leather, which garages and car-dealers dole out in hundreds of thousands, usually at Christmas time, to the more solvent of their customers. Nearly all chauffeurs carried one for entering up in the appropriate spaces the cost of petrol, oil, services, repairs, mileage and fuel consumption. None of those things interested me: all that interested me was the empty spaces in the diary pages and the little blue pencil.

With one eye on the book and one on the curtain and both ears attuned to the voices and sounds beyond that curtain I wrote steadily for the better part of five minutes, feeding myself blindly with fork in the left hand while with my right I tried to set down in the briefest time and the shortest compass everything I wanted to tell Kennedy. When I was finished I felt reasonably satisfied: there was still a great deal left to chance but it was the best I could do. Accepting of chances was the essence of this game.

Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book was nowhere to be seen, but he didn’t hesitate, his hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in front of me, closed over the little book and slid it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon Kennedy.

Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating the hurricane blast that swept across the open well-deck was no easier this time than it had been the last, and in the intervening half-hour the darkness had deepened until it was almost as black as night.

At twenty past three I dropped once more down into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover tight behind me.

At half-past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad to leave. If you have no work to occupy you – and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I hadn’t done a stroke that afternoon – the interior of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was there, alone.

‘Finished, Talbot?’ he asked.

‘All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I’m right – and I think I am – I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where’s Vyland?’

‘The general called for him five minutes ago.’ Good old general, dead on the dot. ‘They’ve gone off somewhere – I don’t know where.’

‘It doesn’t matter. This’ll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him we’ll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where’s the nearest place?’

‘Won’t this do?’ Royale asked mildly. ‘I’ll get Cibatti to fetch some paper.’

‘If you imagine I’m going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you’re mistaken.’ I thought a moment. ‘We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need.’

‘What’s the harm?’ Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we’d gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

Halfway along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortable room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect’s office, for there were a couple of large drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable armchair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children’s nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualification as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which he had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn’t on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it – he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

‘My presence here bothering you, Talbot?’

‘What? Well no, not exactly – I just don’t seem to be getting–’

‘Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?’

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn’t going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

‘Maybe I’m just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you’re one of those characters who don’t like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you.’ He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. ‘I’ll wait outside.’