Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

Vyland's dark eyes narrowed for a moment and he looked at the general. But it was the girl who answered the unspoken query.

"Simon won't talk," she said tonelessly. She moved towards the door. "I'll go to see him."

"Simon, eh?" Vyland scraped a thumb-nail against the corner of his moustache, and looked at her appraisingly. "Simon Kennedy, chauffeur and general handyman."

She retraced a few steps, stopped in front of Vyland and looked at him steadily, tiredly. You could just see the fifteen generations stretching back to the Mayflower and every one of the 285 million bucks was showing. She said distinctly: "I think you are the most utterly hateful man I have ever known," and walked out, closing the door behind her. "My daughter is overwrought," the general said hastily.

"Forget it, General." Vyland's voice was as urbane as ever, but he looked a bit overwrought himself. "Royale, you might show Jablonsky and Talbot their quarters for tonight. East end of the new wing — the rooms are being fixed now."

Royale nodded, but Jablonsky held up his hand. "This job Talbot is going to do for you — is it in this house?" General Ruthven glanced at Vyland, then shook his head. "Then where?" Jablonsky demanded. "If this guy is taken out of here and anybody within a hundred miles spots him, we've had it. Particularly, it would be goodbye to my money. I think I'm entitled to a little reassurance on this point, General."

Again the swift interchange of looks between the general and Vyland, again the latter's all but imperceptible nod.

"I think we can tell you that," the general said. "The job's on the X 13, my oil rig out in the gulf." He smiled faintly. "Fifteen miles from here and well out in the gulf. No passers-by to see him there, Mr. Jablonsky."

Jablonsky nodded, as though for the moment satisfied, and said no more. I stared at the ground. I didn't dare to look up. Royale said softly: "Let's be on our way."

I finished my drink and got up. The heavy library door opened outwards into the passage and Royale, gun in hand, stood to one side to let me pass through first. He should have known better. Or maybe my limp deceived him. People thought my limp slowed me up, but people were wrong.

Valentino had disappeared. I went through the doorway, slowed up and moved to one side round the edge of the door as if I were waiting for Royale to catch up and show me where to go, then whirled round and smashed the sole of my right foot against the door with all the speed and power I could muster.

Royale got nailed neatly between door and jamb. Had it been his head that was caught it would have been curtains. As it was, it caught his shoulders but even so it was enough to make him grunt in agony and send the gun spinning out of his hand to fall a couple of yards down the passage. I dived for it. I scooped it up by the barrel, swung round, still crouched, as I heard the quick step behind me. The butt of the automatic caught the diving Royale somewhere on the face, I couldn't be sure where, but it sounded like a four-pound axe sinking into the bole of a pine. He was unconscious before he hit me — but he did hit me. An axe won't stop a falling pine. It took only a couple of seconds to push him off and change my grip to the butt of the pistol, but two seconds would always be enough and more than enough for a man like Jablonsky.

His foot caught my gun-hand and the gun landed twenty feet away. I launched myself for his legs but he moved to one side with the speed of a fly-weight, lifted his knee and sent me crashing against the open door. And then it was too late, for he had the Mauser in his hand and it was pointing between my eyes.

I climbed slowly to my feet, not trying anything. The general and Vyland, the latter with a gun in his hand, came crowding through the open door, then relaxed when they saw Jablonsky with the gun on me. Vyland bent down and helped a now moaning Royale to a sitting position. Royale had a long, heavily bleeding cut above his left eye and tomorrow he'd have a duck's egg bruise there. After maybe half a minute he shook his head to clear it, wiped blood away with the back of his hand and looked slowly round till his eyes found mine. I'd been mistaken. I'd thought his the emptiest, the most expressionless eyes I'd ever seen, but I'd been mistaken. I looked in them and I could almost smell the moist freshly-turned earth of an open grave.

"I can see that you gents really do need me around," Jablonsky said jovially. "I never thought anyone would try that stuff with Royale and live to talk about it. But we learn." He dug into a side pocket and brought out a set of very slender blued-steel cuffs and slipped them expertly on my wrists. "A souvenir of the bad old days," he explained apologetically. "Would there happen to be another pair and some wire or chain round the house?"

"It might be arranged," Vyland said almost mechanically. He still couldn't credit what had happened to his infallible hatchet-man.

"Fine." Jablonsky grinned down at Royale. "You don't need to lock your door to-night, I'll keep Talbot out of your hair." Royale transferred his sombre, evil stare from my face to Jablonsky's and his expression didn't alter any that I could see. I fancied perhaps Royale was beginning to have ideas about a double grave.

The butler took us upstairs and along a narrow passage to the back of the big house, took a key from his pocket, unlocked a door and ushered us in. It was just another bedroom, sparsely but expensively furnished, with a wash-basin in one corner and a modern mahogany bed in the middle of the right wall. To the left was a communicating door to another bedroom. The butler took a second key from his pocket and unlocked this door also. It gave on to another room, the mirror image of the first, except for the bed, which was an old-fashioned iron-railed effort. It looked as if it had been made with girders left over from the Key West bridge. It looked solid. It looked as if it was going to be my bed.

We went back into the other room. Jablonsky stretched out his hand. "The keys, please."

The butler hesitated, peered uncertainly at him, then shrugged, handed over the keys and turned to leave. Jablonsky said pleasantly: "This Mauser I'm holding here, friend — want that I should bounce it off your head two three times?"

"I'm afraid I don't understand, sir."

"'Sir', hey? That's good. I wouldn't have expected them to have books on bulling in Alcatraz. The other key, my friend. The one leading to the passage from Talbot's room."

The butler scowled, handed over a third key, and left. Whatever buttling book he'd read, he'd skipped the section on closing doors, but it was a stout door and it stood up to it. Jablonsky grinned, locked the door with an ostentatious click, pulled the curtains, checked rapidly that there were no peep-holes in the walls and crossed back to where I stood. Five or six times he smacked a massive fist into a massive palm, kicked the wall and knocked over an arm-chair with a thud that shook the room. Then he said, not too softly, not too loudly: "Get up when you're ready, friend. That's just a little warning, shall we say, not to try any further tricks like you tried on Royale. Just move one finger and you'll think the Chrysler building fell on top of you."

I didn't move a finger. Neither did Jablonsky. There was a complete silence inside the room. We listened hard. The silence in the passageway outside was not complete. With his flat feet and adenoidal, broken-nosed breathing, the butler was completely miscast as the Last of the Mohicans and he was a good twenty feet away by the time the thick carpet absorbed the last of his creaking footfalls.

Jablonsky took out a key, softly opened the handcuffs, pocketed them and shook my hand as if he meant to break every finger I had. I felt like it, too, but for all that my grin was as big, as delighted as his own. We lit cigarettes and started on the two rooms with toothpicks, looking for bugs and listening devices.