Circus (9 page)

She shivered. ‘Day-dreaming. I must have been. It's cold.'

‘Come inside. They have a beautiful old-fashioned bar aboard. And warm. A brandy will make you warmer.'

‘Bed would make me warmer still. Time I was there.'

‘You spurn a nightcap with the last of the Wrinfields?'

‘Never!' She laughed and took his arm. ‘Show me the way.'

The lounge – it could hardly have been called a bar – had deep green leather armchairs, brass tables, a very attentive steward and excellent brandy. Maria had one of those, Henry had three and at the end of the third Henry, who clearly had no head for alcohol, had developed a distinct, if gentlemanly, yearning look about the eyes. He took one of her hands in his and yearned some more. Maria looked at his hand.

‘It's unfair,' she said. ‘Custom dictates that a lady wears an engagement ring when she is engaged, a wedding ring when she is married. No such duty devolves upon a man. I think it's wrong.'

‘So do I.' If she'd said he ought to wear a cowbell around his neck he'd have agreed to that, too.

‘Then where's yours?'

‘My what?'

‘Your engagement ring. Cecily wears one. Your fiancée. Remember? The green-eyed one at Bryn Mawr. Surely you can't have forgotten?'

The fumes evaporated from Henry's head. ‘You've been asking questions about me?'

‘Never a one and no need to ask either. You forget I spend a couple of hours a day with your uncle. No children of his own so his nieces and nephews have become his pride and joy.' She gathered her handbag and rose. ‘Thank you for the nightcap. Good night and sweet dreams. Be sure to dream about the right person.'

Henry watched her go with a moody eye.

Maria had been in bed no more than five minutes when a knock came at her cabin door. She called: ‘Come in. It's not locked.'

Bruno entered and closed the door behind him.

‘It should be locked. What with characters like myself and Henry prowling around – '

‘Henry?'

‘Last seen calling for a double brandy. Looks like a Romeo who's just found out that he's been serenading the wrong balcony. Nice chair.'

‘You've come to discuss décor at this time of night?'

‘You allocated this room?'

‘Funny question. As a matter of fact, no. There were seven or eight cabins to choose from, the steward, a very nice old boy, offered me my pick. I took this one.'

‘Like the décor, eh?'

‘Why did you come, Bruno?'

‘To say good night, I guess.' He sat beside her, put an arm around her shoulders and held her close. ‘And to apologize for snapping at you in the restaurant. I'll explain to you later – when we're on our way home.' He rose as abruptly as he had sat down, opened the door, said: ‘Lock it!' and closed the door behind him. Maria stared at the door in total astonishment.

The
Carpentaria
was big – close on thirty thousand tons – and had been built primarily as a bulk ore ship capable of immediate conversion into a
container vessel. She was also capable of carrying nearly two hundred passengers, though hardly in transatlantic passenger line style. Her two front holds were at the moment taken up by twenty circus train coaches, animal and crew member coaches mainly, while the contents of a dozen others had been unloaded on the quay and carefully stowed away in the holds. The flat-cars were securely clamped on the reinforced foredeck. In Italy they were to be met by a sufficiency of empty coaches and a locomotive powerful enough to haul them across the mountains of central Europe.

At six o'clock on the following evening the
Carpentaria
, in driving rain and a heavy swell – she was stabilized to reduce roll to a minimum – was seven hours out from New York. Bruno was stretched out on a settee in his cabin – one of the very few rather sumptuous staterooms available on the vessel – when a knock came to the door and a uniformed purser entered. To Bruno's total lack of surprise he was carrying a thick black brief-case.

He said: ‘Good evening, sir. Were you expecting me?'

‘I was expecting someone. I suppose that's you.'

‘Thank you, sir. May I?' He locked the door behind him, turned to Bruno and tapped his case. ‘The paperwork for a modern purser,' he said sadly, ‘is endless.'

He opened the brief-case, extracted a flat, rectangular metal box, liberally covered with dials and controls, extended an antenna from it, clamped on
a pair of earphones and began, slowly, to traverse first the stateroom and then the bathroom, assiduously twirling his controls as he went. He looked like a cross between a mine detector and a water diviner. After about ten minutes he divested himself of his equipment and stowed it away in his brief-case.

‘Clear,' he said. ‘No guarantee, mind you – but as sure as I can be.'

Bruno indicated the brief-case. ‘I know nothing about those things but I thought they were foolproof.'

‘So they are. On dry land. But on a ship you have so much iron, the hull being used as a conductor, magnetic fields from all the heavy power cables – well, anyone can be fooled. I can. So can my electronic friend here.' He put out a hand to a bulkhead to steady himself as the
Carpentaria
, apparently forgetting all about its stabilizers, gave an unexpected lurch. ‘Looks like a nasty night coming up. Shouldn't be surprised if we have a few sprains and bruises this evening. First night out, you know – people haven't had time to find their sea-legs.' Bruno wondered if he had seen a wink or not, it could have been imagination and he had no means of knowing how much the purser was in Harper's confidence. He made a noncommittal remark to the purser, who thanked him politely, unlocked the door and left.

Precisely at six-thirty Bruno stepped out into the passageway. It was, fortunately, quite deserted.
The foot of the companionway was only six feet away. Half-seated, half-lying, he arranged himself as comfortably as possible in the most suitably uncomfortable-looking position on the deck and awaited developments. Five minutes passed, and he was beginning to develop an acute cramp in his right knee, when a couple of stewards appeared and rescued him from his misery. To the accompaniment of much tongue-clucking they assisted him sympathetically to his stateroom and lowered him tenderly to his settee.

‘Just you hang on a minute, guv'nor,' one of them said. He had a powerful Cockney accent. ‘I'll have Dr Berenson here in a jiffy.'

It hadn't occurred to Bruno – as it apparently hadn't occurred to Harper – that the
Carpentaria
would be carrying its own doctor, which was an elementary oversight on both their parts: over and above a certain passenger capacity international law made the carrying of a ship's doctor mandatory. He said quickly: ‘Could I have our own doctor, please – the circus doctor? His name is Dr Harper.'

‘I know his cabin, next deck down. At once, sir.'

Harper must have been waiting in his cabin, medical bag in hand, for he arrived in Bruno's cabin, tongue-clucking and looking suitably concerned, inside thirty seconds. He locked the stateroom door after the stewards' departure, then set to work on Bruno's ankle with some extremely pungent salve and about a yard of elasticized bandage.

He said: ‘Mr Carter was on schedule?'

‘If Mr Carter is the purser – he didn't introduce himself – yes.'

Harper paused in his ministrations and looked around. ‘Clean?'

‘Did you expect anything else?'

‘Not really.' Harper inspected his completed handiwork: both the visual and olfactory aspects were suitably impressive.

Harper brought over a low table, reached into an inside pocket, brought out and smoothed two detailed plans and set some photographs down beside them. He tapped one of the plans.

‘This one first. The plan outline of the Lubylan Advanced Research Centre. Know it?'

Bruno eyed Harper without enthusiasm. ‘I hope that's the last stupidly unnecessary question you ask this evening.' Harper assumed the look of a man trying not to look hurt. ‘Before the CIA recruited me for this job – '

‘How do you know it's the CIA?'

Bruno rolled his eyes upwards then clearly opted for restraint. ‘Before the Boy Scouts recruited me for this job they'd have checked every step I've taken from the cradle. To your certain knowledge you know I spent the first twenty-four years of my life in Crau. How should I not know Lubylan?'

‘Yes. Well. Oddly enough, they do carry out advanced research in Lubylan, most of it, regrettably, associated with chemical warfare, nerve gas and the like.'

‘Regrettably? The United States doesn't engage in similar research?'

Harper looked pained. ‘That's not my province.'

Bruno said patiently: ‘Look, Doctor, if you can't trust me how can you expect me to repose implicit trust in you? It is your province and you damned well know it. Remember the Armed Forces courier service at Orly Airport? All the top-secret classified communications between the Pentagon and the American Army in Europe were channelled through there. Remember?'

‘I remember.'

‘Remember a certain Sergeant Johnson? Fellow with the splendidly patriotic Christian names of Robert Lee? Russia's most successfully planted spy in a generation, passed every US-Europe top military secret to the KGB for God knows how long. Remember?'

Harper nodded unhappily. ‘I remember.' Bruno's briefing was not going exactly as he'd planned it.

‘Then you won't have forgotten that the Russians published photocopies of one of the top-secret directives that Johnson had stolen. It was the ultimate US contingency plan if the Soviet Union should ever overrun Western Europe. It suggested that in that event the United States intended to devastate the Continent by waging bacteriological, chemical and nuclear warfare: the fact that the entire civilian population would be virtually wiped out was taken for granted. This
caused a tremendous furore in Europe at the time and cost the Americans the odd European friend, about two hundred million of them: I doubt whether it even made the back page of the
Washington Post
.'

‘You're very well informed.'

‘Not being a member of the CIA doesn't mean you have to be illiterate. I can read. German is my second language – my mother was a Berliner. Two German magazines carried the story at the same time.'

Harper was resigned. ‘
Der Spiegel
and
Stern
, September 1969. Does it give you any particular pleasure in putting me on a hook and watching me wriggle?'

‘That wasn't my intention. I just want to point up two things. If you don't level with me all the time and on every subject you can expect no cooperation from me. Then I want you to know why I've really gone along with this. I have no idea whether the Americans really would go ahead with this holocaust. I can't believe it but what I believe doesn't matter: it's what the East believes and if they believe that America would not hesitate to implement this threat then they might be sorely tempted to carry out a pre-emptive strike. From what I understood from Colonel Fawcett a millionth of a gram of this anti-matter would settle America's hash once and for all. I don't think anyone should have this weapon, but, for me, it's the lesser of two evils: I'm European by birth but
American by adoption. I'll stick by my adopted parents. And now, could we get on with it. Lay it all on the line. Let's say I've never heard of or seen Crau and go on from there.'

Harper looked at him without enthusiasm. He said sourly: ‘If it was your intention to introduce a subtle change in our relationships you have succeeded beyond any expectation you might have had. Only, I wouldn't call it very subtle. Well. Lubylan. Conveniently enough, it's situated only a quarter of a mile from the auditorium where the circus will be held: both buildings, though in the town, are, as one would expect, on the outskirts. Lubylan, as you can see, faces on to a main street.'

‘There are two buildings shown on that diagram.'

‘I'm coming to that. Those two buildings, incidentally, are connected by two high walls which are not shown in the plan.' Harper quickly sketched them in. ‘At the back of Lubylan is only wasteland. The nearest building in that direction is an oil-fired electric power station.

‘This building that abuts on the main street – let's call it the west building – is where the actual research is carried out. In the east building, the one abutting the wasteland at the back, research is also carried out, but research of a different kind and almost certainly much nastier than that carried out in the west building. In the east building they carry out a series of highly unpleasant experiments – on human beings. It's run entirely by the secret police and is the maximum security detention centre for
the enemies of the State, who may range from a would-be assassin of the Premier to a weak-minded dissident poet. The mortality rate, I understand, is rather higher than normal.'

‘I suppose it's my turn to say that you are very well informed.'

‘We don't send a man in blindfolded and with his hands tied behind his back. This, crossing the courtyard here, is an elevated fifth-floor corridor connecting the two buildings. It is glass-sided and glass-topped and kept brightly illuminated from dusk to dawn. It is impossible for anyone to use it without being seen.

‘Every window in both buildings is heavily barred. All are nevertheless fitted with burglar alarms. There are only two entrances, one for each building, both time-locked and heavily guarded. The buildings are both nine storeys high and the connecting walls are the same height. The whole upper perimeter of the walls is lined with closely spaced, outward curving metal spikes, the whole with two thousand volts running through them. There's a watch-tower at every corner. The guards there have machine-guns, searchlights and klaxons. The courtyard between the two buildings, like the elevated glass corridor, is brightly lit at night – not that that matters so much: killer Dobermann pinschers roam the place all the time.'