Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

"Right." He was on balance again, and there was no harm in admitting something to a person who would never live to repeat it to anyone. "How do you know all this, Talbot?"

"That footman up in the general's house. I've seen many cases. He's suffering from what used to be called caisson disease — and he'll never recover from it. The diver's bends, Vyland. When people are working under a high air or sea pressure and that pressure is released too quickly they get nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Those men in the leg were working in about four atmospheres, about sixty pounds to the square inch. If they'd been down there more than half an hour they should have spent at least half an hour decompressing, but as it was some criminal idiot released the built-up pressure far too fast — as fast as it could escape, probably. At the best of times caisson work, or its equivalent, is only for fit young men. Your engineer friend was no longer a fit young man. And you had, of course, no decompressor. So he died. The footman may live Song enough but he'll never again know what a pain-free existence is. But I don't suppose that troubles you, does it, Vyland?"

"We're wasting time." I could see the relief on Vyland's face, for a moment there he'd suspected that I — and possibly others as well — knew too much about the happenings on the X 13. But he was satisfied now — and very relieved. But I wasn't interested in his expression, only in the general's.

General Ruthven was regarding me in a very peculiar fashion indeed: there was puzzlement in his face, some thought that was troubling him, but worse than that there was the beginnings of the first faint incredulous stirrings of understanding.

I didn't like that, I didn't like it at all. Swiftly I reviewed everything I'd said, everything I'd implied, and in those matters I have an almost total recall, but I couldn't think of a single word that might have been responsible for that expression on his face. And if he'd noticed something, then perhaps Vyland had also. But Vyland's face showed no sign of any knowledge or suspicion of anything untoward and it didn't necessarily follow that any off-beat word or circumstance noted by the general would also be noted by Vyland. The general was a very clever man indeed: fools don't start from scratch and accumulate close on three hundred million dollars in a single lifetime.

But I wasn't going to give Vyland time to look at and read the expression on the general's face — he might fee smart enough for that. I said: "So your engineer is dead and now you need a driver, shall we say, for your bathyscaphe?"

"Wrong. We know how to operate it ourselves. You don't think we'd be so everlastingly stupid as to steal a bathyscaphe without at the same time knowing what to do with it. From an office in Nassau we had obtained a complete set of maintenance and operation instructions in both French and English. Don't worry, we know how to operate it."

"Indeed? This is most interesting." I sat down on a bench without as much as a by-your-leave and lit a cigarette. Some such gesture would be expected from me. "Then what precisely do you want with me?"

For the first time in our brief acquaintance Vyland looked embarrassed. After a few seconds he scowled and said harshly: "We can't get the damned engines to start."

I took a deep draw on my cigarette and tried to blow a smoke-ring. It didn't come off — with me it never came off.

"Well, well, well," I murmured. "How most inconvenient, For you, that is. For me, it couldn't be more convenient. All you've got to do is to start those two little engines and hey presto! you pick up a fortune for the asking. I assume that you aren't playing for peanuts — not operating on this scale. And you can't start them up without me. As I said, how convenient — for me."

"You know how to make that machine run?" he asked coldly.

"I might. Should be simple enough — they're just battery-powered electric motors." I smiled. "But the electric circuits and switches and fuse boxes are pretty complicated. Surely they're listed in the maintenance instructions?"

"They are." The smooth polished veneer was showing a distinct crack and his voice was almost a snarl. "They're coded for a key. We haven't got a key."

"Wonderful, just wonderful." I rose leisurely to my feet and stood in front of Vyland. "Without me you're lost, is that it?"

He made no answer.

"Then I have my price, Vyland. A guarantee of my life." This angle didn't worry me at all but I knew I had to make the play or he'd have been as suspicious as hell. "What guarantee do you offer, Vyland?"

"Good God, man, you don't need any guarantee." The general was indignant, astonished. "Why would anyone want to kill you?'"

"Look, General," I said patiently. "You may be a big, big tiger when you're prowling along the jungles of Wall Street, but as far as the other side of the legal divide is concerned you're not even in the kitten class. Anyone not in your friend Vyland's employ who knows too much will always come to the same sticky end — when he can no longer be of any use to him, of course. Vyland likes his money's worth, even when it costs him nothing."

"You're suggesting, by inference, that I might also come to the same end?" Ruthven inquired.

"Not you, General. You're safe. I don't know what the stinking tie-up between you and Vyland is and I don't care. He may have a hold on you or you may be up to the ears in cahoots with him but either way it makes no difference. You're safe. The disappearance of the richest man in the country would touch off the biggest man-hunt of the decade. Sorry to appear cynical, General, but there it is. An awful lot of money buys an awful lot of police activity. There would be an awful lot of pressure, General, and snowbirds like our hopped-up young friend here " — I jerked a finger over my shoulder in the general direction of Larry — " are very apt indeed to talk under pressure. Vyland knows it. You're safe, and when it's all over, if you're not really Vyland's ever-loving partner, he'll find ways to ensure your silence. There would be nothing you could prove against him, it would only be your word against his and many others and I don't suppose even your own daughter knows what's going on. And then, of course, there's Royale — the knowledge that Royale is prowling around on the loose waiting for a man to make just one slip is enough to guarantee that man putting on an act that would make a clam seem positively garrulous." I turned from him and smiled at Vyland. "But I'm expendable, am I not?" I snapped my fingers. "The guarantee, Vyland, the guarantee."

"I'll guarantee it, Talbot," General Ruthven said quietly. "I know who you are. I know you're a killer. But I won't have even a killer murdered out of hand. If anything happens to you I'll talk, regardless of the consequences. Vyland is first and foremost a business man. Killing you wouldn't even begin to be compensation for the millions he'd lose. You need have no fear."

Millions. It was the first time there had been any mention of the amounts involved. Millions. And I was to get it for them.

"Thanks, General, that puts you on the side of the angels," I murmured. I stubbed out my cigarette, turned and smiled at Vyland. "Bring along the bag of tools, friend, and we'll go and have a look at your new toy."

It isn't the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glowworms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgment. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.