Alistair MacLean: Fear is the Key

I made it, but only just. I remember easing the hatch of the bathyscaphe up inside the caisson, asking through the mike, in a slurred stumbling voice that wasn't mine, for the annular rubber ring to be inflated and then lurching across to twist open the handle of the entrance door. I don't remember any more. I am told they found the three of us lying unconscious on the floor of the bathyscaphe.

I walked down the courthouse steps out into the still, warm October sunshine. They'd just sentenced Royale to death and everybody knew there would be no appeal, no reversal of the decision. The jury, as I had prophesied, had convicted without leaving the box. The trial had-lasted only one day and during that entire day Royale had sat as though carved from stone, his eyes fixed on the same spot for hour after interminable hour. That spot had been me. Those blank, flat, marbled eyes had been as expressionless as ever, they hadn't even altered a fraction when the prosecution had played the recording of Royale begging for his life on his hands and knees in the scaphe at the bottom of the sea, they hadn't altered when the death sentence had come tout for all the lack of expression a blind man could have read his message. "Eternity's a long time, Talbot," his eyes had said. "Eternity is forever. But I'll be waiting."

Let him wait: eternity was too long for me to worry about.

They hadn't sentenced Vyland, for they never even had the chance to try him. On the way up the caisson from the bathyscaphe, 170 steps from the bottom, Vyland had simply let go his grip on the ladder and leaned back into space: he hadn't even screamed on the long way down.

I passed the general and his wife on the steps. I had met Mrs. Ruthven for the first time on my first day out of hospital, which had been yesterday. She had been very charming and gracious and endlessly grateful. They had offered me everything, from a job at the top of the tree in Ruthven's oil companies to enough money to last any man half a dozen lifetimes, but I'd just smiled and thanked them and turned them all down. There was nothing in them for me, all the fancy directorships and money in the world couldn't buy me back the days that were gone. And money couldn't buy the only thing I wanted out of the world today.

Mary Ruthven was standing on the sidewalk beside her father's sand and beige Rolls-Royce. She was dressed in a plain white, simple one-piece dress that couldn't have cost more than a thousand bucks, her braided wheat-coloured hair was piled high on her head and I had never seen her looking so lovely. Behind her was Kennedy. For the first time I saw him dressed in a lounge suit, dark blue and immaculately cut, and when you saw him like that it was impossible to imagine him any other way. His chauffeuring days were over: the general knew how much the Ruthven family owed him and you couldn't pay a debt like that with chauffeur's wages. I wished him all the luck in the world: he was a nice guy.

I halted at the foot of the steps. A little wind was blowing in from the blue sparkling shimmer that was the Gulf of Mexico, sending tiny little dust devils and small pieces of paper dancing across the street.

Mary saw me, hesitated a moment, then came across the sidewalk to where I was standing. Her eyes seemed dark and curiously -blurred but maybe I was imagining it. She murmured something, I couldn't make out what it was, then suddenly, careful not to hurt my left arm still in its sling, she put her two arms round my neck, pulled down my head and kissed me. Next moment she was gone, making her way back to the Rolls like a person who couldn't see too well. Kennedy looked at her coming towards him, then lifted his eyes to mine, his face still and empty of all expression. I smiled at him and he smiled back. A nice guy.

I walked down the street, along towards the shore, and turned into a bar. I hadn't intended to, I didn't really need a drink, but the bar was there so I went in anyway. I had a couple of drinks, double Scotches, but it was just a waste of good liquor; I left and made my way down to a bench by the shore.

An hour, two hours, I don't know how long I sat there. The sun sank down close to the rim of the ocean, the sea and the sky turned to orange and gold, and I could see, faintly on the horizon and weirdly silhouetted against this flaming backdrop, the massively grotesque angularity of the oil-rig X 13.

X 13. I supposed that would always be a part of me now, that and the broken-winged DC that lay 580 yards to its south-west, buried under 480 feet of water. For better or for worse, it would always be a part of me. For worse, I thought, for worse. It was all over and done with and empty now and it all meant nothing, for that was all that was left

The sun was on the rim of the sea now and the western world a great red flame, a flame that would soon be extinguished and vanish as if it had never been. And so it had been with my red rose, before it had turned to white.

The sun was gone and the night rushed across the sea. With the dark came the cold so I rose stiffly to my feet and walked back to the hotel.