Алистер Маклин - Athabasca

“Could I have a list of the people who used the safe in the past four or five days?”

“Certainly.” She left and returned with a sheet which Dermott studied briefly.

“Good Lord! The safe appears to be the Mecca for half of Sanmobil. Twenty entries at least in the last four days.” He looked up at the girl. “This is a carbon. May I keep it?”

“Of course.”

“Thank you.”

Corinne Delorme smiled at the room in general, but the blue eyes came back to Dermott before she went out.

“Charming indeed,” said Brady.

“Plenty of spunk,” Mackenzie said ruefully. “She built a whole generation gap between you and me, George.” He frowned. “What gave you the idea her name was Delorme?”

“There was a plaque on her desk: ‘Corinne Delorme’, it said.”

Mackenzie shook his head. “Hawkeye Dermott,” he said.

The other men laughed. Some of the tension that had grown in the room during the questioning of the girl fell away again.

“Well. Anything more I can do for you?” Reynolds asked.

Dermott said: “Yes, please. Could we have a list of the names of your security staff?”

Reynolds bent over the voice-box and spoke to Corinne. He had just finished when Brinckman arrived accompanied by a tall, red-haired man whom he introduced as Carl Jorgensen.

Dermott said: “You were in charge of the night security shift, I understand. Were you around the sabotage area at all tonight?”

“Several times.”

“So often? I thought you would have been concentrating on what we regarded – mistakenly – as the more vulnerable areas.”

“I went round them a couple of times but by jeep only. But I had this funny feeling that we might have been guarding the wrong places. Don’t ask me why.”

“Your funny feeling didn’t turn out to be so funny after all Anything off-beat, anything to arouse suspicion?”

“Nothing. I know everybody on the night shift and I know where they work. Nobody there that shouldn’t have been there, nobody in any place that he hadn’t any right to be.”

“You’ve got a key to the blasting shed. Where do you keep it?”

“Terry Brinckman mentioned this. I have it only during my tour of duty and then I hand it over. I always carry it in the same button-down pocket on my shirt.”

“Could anybody get at it?”

“Nobody except a professional pick-pocket, and even then I’d know.”

The two security men left and Corinne came in with a sheet of paper. Reynolds said: “That was quick.”

“Not really. They were typed out ages ago.”

Brady said to the girl: “You must come and meet my daughter, Stella. I’m sure you’d get on. Both the same age. Stella is very like you, actually.”

“Thank you, Mr Brady. I think I’d like that.”

“I’ll have her call you.”

When she had gone, Dermott said: “What do you mean, like your daughter? I’ve never seen anyone less like Stella.”

“Dancing eyes, my boy, dancing eyes. One must learn to probe beneath the surface.” Brady heaved himself to his feet. “The years creep on. Breakfast and bed. I’m through detecting for the day. It’s tougher than capping fires.”

Dermott drove the rented car back to the hotel, Mackenzie sitting beside him. Brady took his ease across the entire width of the back seat. He said: “I’m afraid I wasn’t quite levelling with Reynolds there. Breakfast, yes. But it’ll be some hours before I – we – retire. I have come up with a plan.” He paused.

Dermott said courteously: “We’re listening.”

“I think I’ll do some listening first. Why do you think I employ you?”

“That’s a fair question,” Mackenzie said. “Why?”

“To investigate, to detect, to think, to plot, to scheme, to plan.”

“All at once?” Mackenzie said.

Brady ignored him. “I don’t want to come up with a proposal and then, if it goes wrong, have to spend the rest of my days listening to your carping reproaches. I’d like you two to come up with an idea and then if it’s a lemon we can all share the blame. Incidentally, Donald, I take it you have your bug-box with you?”

“The electronic eavesdropping locator-detector?”

“That’s what I said.”

“Yes.”

“Splendid. Now, George, let’s have your reading of the situation.”

“My reading of the situation is that for all the good we’re doing we haven’t a hope in hell of stopping the bad guys from doing exactly what they want and when they want. There is no way to forestall attacks on Sanmobil or the Alaska pipeline. They’re calling the shots and we’re the sitting ducks, if you’ll pardon the mixing of the metaphors. They call the tune and we dance to it. They’re active, we’re passive. They’re offensive, we’re defensive. If we have any tactics, I’d say it’s time we changed them.”

“Go on,” his leader urged him from behind.

“If that’s meant to sound encouraging,” Dermott said, “I don’t know why. But how’s this for a positive thought? Instead of letting them keep us off-balance, why don’t we keep them off-balance? Instead of their harassing us, let us harass them.”

“Go on, go on,” the back seat exhorted.

“Let’s attack them and put them on the defensive. Let them start worrying, instead of us.” He paused. “I see things as through a glass darkly, but I say plant a light at the end of the tunnel. What we’ll do is, we’ll provoke them. Provoke a reaction. Provoke the hell out of them. We’ll hang it on this one factor: our own pasts, our backgrounds, can be probed until the cows come home, and nothing will be turned up: but you can say that about how many people in a hundred?”

Dermott twisted his head briefly to locate a peculiar noise from the back of the car. Brady was actually rubbing his hands together. “Well, Donald, what’s your reading of it?”

“Simple enough when you see it,” Mackenzie said. “All you have to do is to antagonise anywhere between sixty and eighty people to hell and back again. Investigate them as openly as possible. Deploy maximum indiscretion.”

Brady beamed. “What sixty to eighty people do we investigate?”

“In Alaska all the security agents. Here, the security agents again, plus everybody who’s had access to Reynolds’s safe in the past few days. Going to include Reynolds himself?”

“Good heavens, no.”

Mackenzie said inconsequentially: “She is a lovely girl.”

Brady looked aloof. Mackenzie asked him: “Do you really expect to find your panjandrum among that lot?”

“Panjandrum?”

“The prime mover. Mr Big. Messrs Big.”

“Not for a moment. But if there’s a rotten apple in the barrel, he may well find him for us.”

Mackenzie said: “Right. So we get all their names and past histories. Later on – sooner rather than later – we’ll have the lot fingerprinted. Sure, they’re going to stand on their civic rights and yell blue murder, and that will please you no end – refusal to co-operate will point the finger of suspicion at the refusee, if that’s the word I want. Then you feed the information to your investigators in Houston, Washington and New York: cost no object, urgency desperate. Not that you’ll care a damn whether the investigators come up with anything or not. All that matters is that the suspects get to hear such enquiries are under way. That’s all the provocation they’ll need.”

“What kind of reactions do we expect to provoke?” Dermott asked.

“Unpleasant ones, I should hope. For the villains, I mean.”

“The first thing I’d do,” Dermott told Brady, “is send your family back to Houston. Jean and Stella could really become a liability. The scheme might rebound on you. Can’t you see the word coming through: lay off, Brady, or something unpleasant’s going to happen to your family? These people are playing for high stakes. They’ve killed once, they won’t hesitate to kill again. They can’t be hung twice.”