Alistair MacLean - Bear Island

I looked at them each in turn. Clearly, it didn't look like toffee to any of them.

"A total lack of reaction, a total lack of surprise." I put my knife back in my pocket and smiled at the stiffening attitudes of three out of the four of them. "Scout's honour, we civil servants never carry guns. And why should there be surprise even at the fact of my knowledge-all four of you have been perfectly well aware for some time that I am not what I was engaged to be. And why should any of you express surprise at the sight of this gold-after all, that was the only reason for your coming to Bear Island in the first place."

They said nothing. Curiously enough, they weren't even looking at me, they were all looking at the gold ingot as if it were vastly more important than I was, which, from their point of view, was probably a perfectly understandable priority preference.

"Dear me, dear me," I said. "Where are all the instant denials, the holier than-thou clutching of the hearts, the outraged cries of "What in God's name are you talking about'? I would think, wouldn't you, that the unbiassed observer would find this negative reaction every bit as incriminating as a written confession?" I looked at them with what might have been interpreted as an encouraging expression but again-apart from Heissman's apparently finding it necessary to lubricate his lower lip with the tip of his tongue-I elicited no response, so I went on: "It was, as even your defending counsel will have to admit in court, a clever and well-thoughtout scheme. Would any of you care to tell me what the scheme was?"

It is my opinion, Dr. Marlowe," Otto said magisterially, "that the strain of the past few days has made you mentally unbalanced."

"Not a bad reaction at all," I said approvingly. "Unfortunately, you're about two minutes too late in coming up with it. No volunteers to set the scene, then? Do we suffer from an excess of modesty or just a lack of cooperation? Wouldn't you, for instance, Mr. Goin, care to say a few words?

After all, you are in my debt. Without me, without our dramatic little confrontation, you'd have been dead before the week was out."

I think Mr. Gerran is right," Goin said in that measured voice he knew so well how to use. "Me? About to die?" He shook his head. "The strain for you must have been intolerable. Under such circumstances, as a medical man, you should know that a person's imagination can easily-"

"Imagination? Am I imagining this forty-pound gold ingot?" I pointed to the ballast bars below the battens. "Am I imagining those other fifteen ingots there? Am I imagining the hundred-odd ingots piled in a rock shelf inside the Perleporten? Am I imagining the fact that your total lack of reaction to the word Perleporten demonstrates beyond question that you all know what Perleporten is, where it is, and what its significance is? Am I imagining the scores of other lead-sheathed ingots still under water in the Perleporten? Let's stop playing silly little games for your own game is up. As I say, quite a clever little game while it lasted. What better cover for a bullion-recovery trip to the Arctic than a film unit-after all, film people are widely regarded as being eccentric to the extent of being lunatic so that even their most ludicrous behaviour is accepted as being normal within its own abnormal context? What better time to set out to achieve the recovery of this bullion than when there are only a few hours" daylight so that the recovery operation can be carried out through the long hours of darkness? What better way of bringing the bullion back to Britain than by switching it with this vessel's ballast so that it can be slipped into the country under the eyes of the Customs authorities?" I surveyed the ballast. "Four tons, according to this splendid brochure that Mr. Heissman wrote. I'd put it nearer five. Say ten million dollars, justifies a trip to even an out-of-the-way resort like Bear Island, I'd say. Wouldn't you?"

They wouldn't say anything.

"By and by," I went on, "you'd probably have manufactured some excuse for towing this vessel down to Perleporten so as to make the transshipment of the gold all that easier. And then heigh-ho for Merry England and the just enjoyment of the fruits of your labours. Could I he wrong?"

"No." Otto was very calm. "You're right. But I think you'd find it very hard to make a criminal case out of this. What could we possibly be charged with? Theft? Ridiculous. Finders, keepers."

"Finders, keepers? A few miserable tons of gold? Your ambitions are only paltry, you're only swimming the surface of the available loot. Isn't that so, Heissman?"

They all looked at Heissman. Heissman, in turn, didn't appear particularly anxious to look at anyone.

"Why do you silly people think I'm here?" I said. "Why do you think that, in spite of the elaborate smoke screen you set up, that the British Government not only knew that you were going to Bear Island but also knew that your purpose in going there was not as advertised? Don't you know that, in certain matters, European governments co-operate very closely? Don't you know that most of them share a keen interest in the activities of Johann Heissman? For what you don't know is that most of them know a great deal more about Johann Heissman than you do. Perhaps, Heissman, you'd like to tell them yourself-starting, shall we say, with the thirty-odd years you've been working for the Soviet Government?"

Otto stared at Heissman, his huge jowls seeming to fall apart. Goin's facial muscles tightened until the habitual smooth blandness had vanished from his face. The Count's expression didn't change, he just nodded slowly as if understanding at last the solution of a long-standing problem. Heissman looked acutely unhappy.

"Well, ", I said, "as Heissman doesn't appear to have any intention of telling anyone anything, I suppose that leaves it up to me. Heissman, here, is a remarkably gifted specialist in an extremely specialised field. He is, purely and simply, a treasure-hunter and there's no one in the business who can hold a candle to him. But he doesn't just hunt for the type of treasure that you people think he does: I fear he may have been deceiving you on this point, as, indeed, he has been deceiving you on another. I refer to the fact that a precondition of his cutting you into a share of the loot was that his niece, Mary Stuart, be employed by Olympus Productions. Having the nasty and suspicious minds that you do, you probably and rapidly arrived at the conclusion that she wasn't his niece at all-which she isn't-and was along for some other purposes, which she is. But not for the purposes which your nasty and suspicious minds attributed to her. For Heissman, Miss Stuart was essential for the achievement of an entirely different purpose which he kind of forgot to tell you about.

"Miss Stuart's father, you have to understand, was just as unscrupulous and unprincipled a rogue as any of you. He held very senior positions in both the German Navy and the Nazi Party and, like others similarly placed, used his power to feather his own nest-just as Hermann Goering did-when the war was seen to be lost, although he was smarter than Goering and managed to get out from under before the war criminal roundup. The gold, although this will probably never be proved, almost certainly came from the vaults of Norwegian banks and a man with all the resources of the German Navy behind him would have had no trouble in choosing such a splendidly isolated spot as Perleporten in Bear Island and having the stuff transferred there. Probably by submarine. Not that it matters. "But it wasn't just the gold that was transported to Perleporten, which is why Mary Stuart is here. Feathers weren't enough for Dad's nest, nothing less than swansdown would do. The swansdown almost certainly took the form of either bank bonds or securities, probably obtained-I wouldn't say purchased-in the late "30s- Such securities are perfectly redeemable even today. An attempt was recently made to sell 30,000,000 worth of such securities through foreign exchanges but the West German Federal Bank wouldn't play ball because proper owner identification was lacking. But there wouldn't be any problem about owner identification this time, would there, Heissman?"