Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘OK. So it’s somebody short of cash.’ Vyland was satisfied, the matter dismissed from his mind. ‘How did you make out, Talbot? We’re getting pushed for time.’

‘No worry,’ I assured him. ‘All worked out. Guaranteed. Five minutes buttoning-up down in the scaphe and we’re set to go.’

‘Excellent.’ Vyland looked pleased but that was only because he didn’t know what I knew. He turned to the thug who had kicked the door open. ‘The general’s daughter and his chauffeur – you’ll find them in the general’s stateroom. They’re to come here at once. Ready, Talbot?’

‘Ready.’ I got to my feet, a bit shakily, but compared to Royale I looked positively healthy and nobody noticed. ‘I’ve had a long hard day, Vyland. I could do with something to fortify me before we go below.’

‘I’ll be surprised if Cibatti and his friends haven’t enough supplies to stock a bar.’ Vyland was seeing the end of the road, he was all good humour now. ‘Come along.’

We trooped out into the corridor and along to the door of the room that gave access to the caisson. Vyland gave his secret knock – I was glad to note that it was still the same – and we went inside.

Vyland had been right, Cibatti and his friend did indeed do themselves well in the liquor line and by the time I had three stiff fingers of Scotch inside me the two little men sawing with the crosscut on my shoulder had given up the piece-work and were back on time rates and I no longer felt like banging my head against the wall. It seemed logical to expect that the improvement might be maintained if I poured myself another shot of anaesthetic and I’d just done this when the door opened and the thug Vyland had sent to the other side of the rig appeared, ushering in Mary and Kennedy. My heart had been through a lot that night, heavy overtime stuff to which it wasn’t accustomed, but it only required one look at Mary and it started doing its handsprings again. My mind wasn’t doing handsprings, though, I looked at her face and my mind was filled with all sorts of pleasant thoughts about what I’d like to do to Vyland and Royale. There were big bluish-dark patches under her eyes, and she looked white and strained and more than a little sick. I’d have taken any odds that that last half-hour with me had scared and shaken her as she’d never been scared and shaken before. It had certainly scared and shaken me enough. But neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to notice anything amiss, people forced to associate with them and not scared and shaken would be the exception rather than the rule.

Kennedy didn’t look scared and shaken, he didn’t look anything at all except the perfect chauffeur. But Royale wasn’t any more fooled than I was. He turned to Cibatti and his side-kick and said: ‘Just go over this bird here, will you, and see that he’s not wearing anything that he shouldn’t be wearing.’

Vyland gave him a questioning look.

‘He may be as harmless as he looks – but I doubt it,’ Royale explained. ‘He’s had the run of the rig this afternoon. He might just possibly have picked up a gun and if he has he might just possibly get the drop on Cibatti and the others when they weren’t looking.’ Royale nodded to the door in the convex wall. ‘I just wouldn’t fancy climbing a hundred feet up an iron ladder with Kennedy pointing a gun down the way all the time.’

They searched Kennedy and found nothing. Royale was smart all right, you could have put in your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn’t smart enough. He should have searched me.

‘We don’t want to hurry you, Talbot,’ Vyland said with elaborate sarcasm.

‘Right away,’ I said. I sent down the last of the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or Kennedy.

Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if it hadn’t been for the anaesthetic I’d have gone through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder started up again, sawing away more industriously than ever.

‘Getting nervous, aren’t we?’ Vyland sneered. He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple solenoid switch that I’d brought up from the scaphe. ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you?’

‘No. We won’t be needing that any more.’

‘Right, on your way. You first … Watch them real close, Cibatti, won’t you?’

‘I’ll watch them, boss,’ Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he’d bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren’t going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they’d stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of subconscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn’t have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy on their heads, and so they weren’t able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them – Cibatti’s friend, who was to close the platform hatch – had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of the cylindrical tomb was so faint, that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn’t be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn’t going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn’t any more than agonizing. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren’t equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.