Alistair MacLean - Fear is the Key

Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book was nowhere to be seen, but he didn't hesitate, his hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in front of me, closed over the little book and slid it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon Kennedy.

Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating the hurricane blast that swept across the open well-deck was no easier this time than it had been the last, and in the intervening half-hour the darkness had deepened until it was almost as black as night.

At twenty past three I dropped once more down into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover tight behind me.

At half past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad to leave. If you have no work to occupy you — and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I hadn't done a stroke that afternoon — the interior of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was there, alone.

"Finished, Talbot?" he asked.

"All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I'm right — and I think I am — I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where's Vyland?"

"The general called for him five minutes ago." Good old general, dead on the dot. "They've gone off somewhere — I don't know where."

"It doesn't matter. This'll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him we'll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where's the nearest place?"

"Won't this do?" Royale asked mildly. "I'll get Cibatti to fetch some paper."

"If you imagine I'm going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you're mistaken." I thought a moment. "We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need."

"What's the harm?" Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we'd gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

Half-way along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortably furnished room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect's office, for there were a couple of large drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable arm-chair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children's nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualifications as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which we had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and he could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn't on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn't conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it — he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

"My presence here bothering you, Talbot?"

"What? Well, no, not exactly — I just don't seem to be getting—"

"Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?"

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn't going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

"Maybe I'm just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you're one of those characters who don't like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you." He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. "I'll wait outside."

I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

I didn't have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, "Sorry, Mac "in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.

The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oil-skinned figure who'd lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou'wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.

"Not at all bad," I murmured. "Both the sap and the American accent. You'd have fooled me."

"It fooled Royale." Kennedy bent and looked at the already purpling bruise above Royale's temple. "Maybe I hit him too hard." He was as deeply concerned as I would have been had I accidentally trodden on a passing tarantula. "He'll live."

"He'll live. It must have been a long deferred pleasure for you." I had shed my own coat and was struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could. "Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?"

"Look, Mr. Talbot," he said reproachfully, "I had three whole hours."

"Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any sign of coming to?"

"I'll just kind of lean on him again," Kennedy said dreamily.

I grinned and left. I'd no idea how long the general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious errand he'd called him away, but I suspected it wouldn't be very long; Vyland was beginning to become just that little bit anxious about the time factor. Maybe I hadn't done myself any good by pointing out that the government agents might only be waiting for the weather to moderate before coming out to question the general, but with Vyland pointing Ms gun at me and threatening to kill me I had had to reach out and grasp the biggest straw I could find.

The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had changed and I had to fight my way almost directly against it. It came from the north now and I knew then that the centre of the hurricane must have passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas might begin to moderate within a few hours. But, right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever been and on my way across I had my head and shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no attention. People were probably using that line all day long.