Алистер Маклин - Fear Is the Key

‘Damn you, Talbot!’ His voice was a hoarse, despairing, agonized shout, he was swaying on his hands and knees now, his head turning from side to side, his eyes screwed shut. Down there on the floor the air must have been foul and contaminated to a degree, almost completely without oxygen, and his face was really beginning to show the first tinges of blue. He was breathing with the rapidity of a panting dog, each brief indrawn breath a whoop of agony. ‘Get me out of here! For God’s sake get me out of here.’

‘You’re not dead yet, Royale,’ I said in his ear. ‘Maybe you will see the sun again. But maybe you won’t. I lied to Vyland, Royale. The master switch for the ballast release is still in position – I just altered a couple of wires, that’s all. It would take you hours to find out which two. I could fix it in thirty seconds.’

He stopped swaying his head, looked up at me with a blue-tinged sweat-sheened face, with bloodshot fear-darkened eyes that carried far back in them the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Get me out of here, Talbot,’ he whispered. He didn’t know whether there was any hope or whether this was just a further refinement of torture.

‘I could do it, Royale, couldn’t I? See, I’ve got the screwdriver right here.’ I showed it to him, smiled down without any compassion. ‘But I’ve still got this cyanide tablet in my mouth, Royale.’ I showed him the button, gripped between my teeth.

‘Don’t!’ A hoarse cry. ‘Don’t bite on that! You’re mad, Talbot, mad. God, you’re not human.’ Coming from Royale that was good.

‘Who killed Jablonsky?’ I asked quietly. It was becoming easier to breathe now, but not down where Royale was.

‘I did. I killed him,’ Royale moaned.

‘How?’

‘I shot him. Through the head. He was asleep.’

‘And then?’

‘We buried him in the kitchen garden.’ Royale was still moaning and swaying, but he was putting everything he could muster into his reeling thoughts to try to express them coherently: his nerve, for the moment, was gone beyond recall, he was talking for his life and he knew it.

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’ I repeated implacably.

‘Nobody.’ His voice was almost a scream he was so desperate to convince me. ‘There were two men, a Cuban minister in the government, and Houras, a permanent civil servant in Colombia. But not now.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘They were – they were eliminated,’ Royale said wearily. ‘I did it.’

‘Who else did you eliminate since you’ve been working for Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

I showed him the button between my teeth and he shuddered.

‘The pilot. The pilot flying the fighter that shot down this plane. He – he knew too much.’

‘That’s why we could never find that pilot,’ I nodded. ‘My God, you’re a sweet bunch. But you made a mistake Royale, didn’t you? You shot him too soon. Before he’d told you exactly where the DC had crashed … Vyland give you orders for all this?’

He nodded.

‘Did you hear my question?’ I demanded.

‘Vyland gave me orders for all of that.’

There was a brief silence. I stared out of the window, saw some strange shark-like creature swim into sight, stare incuriously at both bathyscaphe and plane, then vanish into the stygian blackness beyond with a lazy flick of its tail. I turned and tapped Royale on the shoulder.

‘Vyland,’ I said. ‘Try to bring him round.’

While Royale stooped over his employer I reached above him for the oxygen regenerating switch. I didn’t want the air getting too fresh too soon.

After maybe a minute or so Royale managed to bring Vyland to. Vyland’s breathing was very distressed, he was pretty far gone in the first stages of anoxia, but for all that he still had some breath left, for when he opened his eyes, stared wildly around and saw me with the button still between my teeth he started screaming, time and again, a horrible nerve-drilling sound in that tiny confined metal space. I reached forward to smack his face to jolt him out of his panic-stricken hysteria, but Royale got there first. Royale had had his tiny fleeting glimpse of hope and he meant to play that hope to the end of the way. He lifted his hand and he wasn’t any too gentle with Vyland.

‘Stop it!’ Royale shook him violently. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! Talbot says he can fix this machine. Do you hear me? Talbot says he can fix it!’

Slowly the screaming died away and Vyland stared at Royale with eyes where the first faint flicker of comprehension was beginning to edge in on the fear and the madness.

‘What did you say?’ he whimpered hoarsely. ‘What was that, Royale?’

‘Talbot says he can fix this machine,’ Royale repeated urgently. ‘He says he lied to us, he says that the switch he left up top wasn’t important. He can fix it!’

‘You – you can fix it, Talbot?’ Vyland’s eyes widened until I could see a ring of white all round the irises, his shaking voice was a prayer, the whole curve of his body a gesture of supplication. He wasn’t even daring to hope yet, his mind had gone too deeply into the shadow of the valley of death to glimpse the light above: or rather he didn’t dare to look, in case there was no light there. ‘You can get us out of this? Now – even now you–’

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’ My voice, for all its rasping hoarseness, had just the right shade of indifference. ‘I’ve said I’d rather stay down here, I mean I’d rather stay down here. It all depends. Come here, Vyland.’

He rose trembling to his feet and crossed to where I was standing. His legs, his whole body were shaking so violently that he could barely support himself. I caught him by the lapels with my good hand and pulled him close.

‘There’s maybe five minutes’ air left; Vyland. Perhaps less. Just tell me, and tell me quickly, the part you played in this business up until the time you met the general. Hurry it up!’

‘Get us out of here,’ he moaned. ‘There’s no air, no air! My lungs are going, I can’t – I can’t breathe.’ He was hardly exaggerating at that, the foul air was rasping in and out his throat with the frequency of a normal heartbeat. ‘I can’t talk. ‘I can’t!’

‘Talk, damn you, talk!’ Royale had him round the throat from behind, was shaking him to and fro till Vyland’s head bounced backwards and forwards like that of a broken doll. ‘Talk! Do you want to die, Vyland? Do you think I want to die because of you? Talk!’

Vyland talked. In less than three gasping, coughing, choking minutes he’d told me all I ever wanted to know – how he had struck a deal with a Cuban service minister and had a plane standing by for weeks, how he had suborned the officer in charge of a radar tracking station in Western Cuba, how he suborned a very senior civil servant in Colombia, how the plane had been tracked, intercepted and shot down and how he had had Royale dispose of those who had served his purposes. He started to talk of the general, but I held up my hand.

‘OK, that’ll do, Vyland. Get back to your seat.’ I reached for the carbon dioxide switch and turned it up to maximum.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’ Vyland whispered.

‘Bringing a little fresh air into the place. Getting rather stuffy down here, don’t you think?’

They stared at each other, then at me, but remained silent. Fury I would have expected, chagrin and violence, but there was nothing of any of those. Fear was still the single predominating emotion in their minds: and they knew that they were still completely at my mercy.

‘Who – who are you, Talbot?’ Vyland croaked.

‘I suppose you might call me a cop.’ I sat down on a canvas chair, I didn’t want to start the delicate job of taking the bathyscaphe up till the air – and my mind – was completely clear. ‘I used to be a bona fide salvage man, working with my brother. The man – or what’s left of the man – out there in the captain’s seat, Vyland. We were a good team, we struck gold off the Tunisian coast and used the capital to start our own airline – we were both wartime bomber pilots, we both had civilian licences. We were doing very well, Vyland – until we met you.