Alistair MacLean: Fear is the Key

"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 heart-beat. "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.

"O.K., 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.

"After you'd done this" — I jerked a thumb in the direction of the broken, weed- and barnacle-encrusted plane — "I went back to London. I was arrested, they thought I'd something to do with this. It didn't take long to clear that up and have Lloyd's of London — who'd lost the whole insurance packet — take me over as a special investigator. They were willing to spend an unlimited sum to get even a percentage of their money back. And because state money was involved both the British and American governments were behind me. Solidly behind me. Nobody ever had a better backing, the Americans even went the length of assigning a top-flight cop whole-time to the job. The cop was Jablonsky."

That jolted them, badly. They had lost sufficient of their immediate terror of death, had come far enough back into the world of reality to appreciate what I was saying, and what that meant They stared at each other, then at me; I couldn't have asked for a more attentive audience.

"That was a mistake, wasn't it, gentlemen?" I went on. "Shooting Jablonsky. That's enough to send you both to the chair; judges don't like people who murder cops. It may not be complete justice, but it's true. Murder an ordinary citizen and you may get off with it: murder a cop, and you never do. Not that that matters. We know enough to send you to the chair six times over."

I told them how Jablonsky and I had spent well over a year, mostly in Cuba, looking for traces of the bullion, how we had come to the conclusion that it still hadn't been recovered — not one of the cut emeralds had appeared anywhere in the world's markets. Interpol would have known in days.

"And we were pretty certain," I continued, "why the money hadn't been recovered. Why? Only one reason — it had been lost in the sea and someone had been a mite hasty in killing off the only person who knew exactly where it was — the pilot of the fighter plane.

"Our inquiries had narrowed down to the west coast of Florida. Somebody was looking for money sunk in the water. For that they needed a ship. The general's Temptress did just fine. But for that you also needed an extremely sensitive depth recorder, and there is where you made your one and fatal mistake, Vyland. We had requested every major marine equipment supplier in Europe and North America to notify us immediately they sold any special depth-finding equipment to any vessels other than naval, mercantile or fishing. You are following me, I trust?"

They were following me, all right. They were three parts back to normal now and there was murder in their eyes.

"In the four-month period concerned no fewer than six of those ultra-sensitive recorders had been sold privately. All to owners of very large yachts. Two of those yachts were on a round the world cruise. One was in Rio, one was in Long Island Sound, one on the Pacific coast — and the sixth was plodding up and down the west coast of Florida. General Blair Ruthven's Temptress.

"It was brilliant. I admit it. What better cover could you ever have had for quartering every square yard of sea off the Florida coast without arousing suspicion? While the general's geologists were busy setting off their little bombs and making seismological maps of the under-sea rock strata, you were busy mapping every tiniest contour of the ocean floor with the depth recorder. It took you almost six weeks, because you started operating too far to the north — we were watching your every move even then and had fitted out a special boat for night prowling — that was the boat I came out on early this morning. Well, you found the plane. You even spent three nights dragging for it with grapples but all you could drag up was a small section of the left wing-tip." I gestured through the window. "You can see how comparatively recent that break is."

"How do you know all this?" Vyland whispered.

"Because I had secured a job as a replacement engineer aboard the Temptress." I ignored the startled oath, the involuntary clenching of Vyland's hands. "You and the general thought you had seen me aboard that Havana salvage vessel, but you hadn't, though I had been with the firm. I was five weeks on the Temptress and it wasn't till I left that I dyed my hair this hellish colour, had a plastic surgeon fix up this scar and affected a limp. Even so, you weren't very observant, were you, Vyland? You should have cottoned on.

"So there you were. You knew where the treasure was, but you couldn't get your hands on it — anyone who started using diving bells and all the complicated recovery gear necessary for a job like this would have been putting a noose round his own neck. But then someone had another brilliant idea — this one, I'd wager anything, came from the mind of our deceased engineer friend, Bryson. He'd read all about those bathyscaphe trials that were being carried out in the West Indies and came up with the idea of using it in conjunction with this rig."

The air was almost back to normal inside the observation chamber and though the atmosphere was still stuffy and far too warm for comfort there was plenty of oxygen in the air and breathing was no longer any problem. Royale and Vyland were getting their meanness and courage back with the passing of every moment.

"So, you see, everyone was having brilliant ideas," I continued. "But the real beauty, the one that's brought you two to the end of the road, was Jablonsky's. It was Jablonsky who thought that it would be real kind and helpful of us if we could provide a bathyscaphe for you to do the job."