Fear is the Key (17 page)

I saw Vyland and Royale exchange glances,
a mere flicker, and the faint shrug of Vyland's
shoulders. They were tough all right, those two,
tough and cool and ruthless and calculating and
dangerous. For the past twelve hours they must
have lived with the knowledge or the possibility
that Federal agents would be around their necks
any moment but they had shown no awareness
of pressure, no signs of strain. I wondered what
they would have thought, how they would have
reacted, had they known that Federal agents could
have been on to them all of three months ago. But
the time had not then been ripe. Nor was it yet.

‘Well, gentlemen, is there any need for further
delay?' It was the first time the general had spoken,
and for all his calmness there was a harsh burred
edge of strain beneath. ‘Let's get it over with.
The weather is deteriorating rapidly and there's
a hurricane warning out. We should leave as soon
as possible.'

He was right about the weather, except in the
tense he used. It had deteriorated. Period. The
wind was no longer a moan, it was a high sustained
keening howl through the swaying oaks,
accompanied by intermittent squally showers of
brief duration but extraordinary intensity. There
was much low cloud in the sky, steadily thickening.
I'd glanced at the barometer in the hall, and
it was creeping down towards 27, which promised
something very unpleasant indeed. Whether the
centre of the storm was going to hit or pass by us
I didn't know: but if we stood in its path we'd have
it in less than twelve hours. Probably much less.

‘We're just leaving, General. Everything's set.
Petersen is waiting for us down in the bay.' Petersen,
I guessed, would be the helicopter pilot. ‘A couple
of fast trips and we should all be out there in an
hour or so. Then Talbot here can get to work.'

‘All?' asked the general. ‘Who?'

‘Yourself, myself, Royale, Talbot, Larry and, of
course, your daughter.'

‘Mary. Is it necessary?'

Vyland said nothing, he didn't even use the
eyebrow routine again, he just looked steadily
at the general. Five seconds, perhaps more, then
the general's hands unclenched and his shoulders
drooped a fraction of an inch. Picture without
words.

There came the quick light tap of feminine footsteps
from the passage inside and Mary Ruthven
walked in through the open door. She was dressed
in a lime-coloured two-piece costume with an
open-necked green blouse beneath. She had shadows
under her eyes, she looked pale and tired and
I thought she was wonderful. Kennedy was behind
her, but he remained respectfully in the passage,
hat in hand, a rhapsody of maroon and shining
high leather boots, his face set in the remote
unseeing, unhearing expression of the perfectly
trained family chauffeur. I started to move aimlessly
towards the door, waiting for Mary to do
what I'd told her less than two hours previously,
just before she'd gone back to her own room.

‘I'm going in to Marble Springs with Kennedy,
Father,' Mary began without preamble. It was
phrased as a statement of fact, but was in effect
a request for permission.

‘But – well, we're going to the rig, my dear,' her
father said unhappily. ‘You said last night –'

‘I'm coming,' she said with a touch of impatience.
‘But we can't all go to once. I'll come on the second
trip. We won't be more than twenty minutes. Do
you mind, Mr Vyland?' she asked sweetly.

‘I'm afraid it's rather difficult, Miss Ruthven,'
Vyland said urbanely. ‘You see, Gunther has hurt
himself –'

‘Good!'

He worked his eyebrow again. ‘Not so good for
you, Miss Ruthven. You know how your father
likes you to have protection when –'

‘Kennedy used to be all the protection I ever
needed,' she said coldly. ‘He still is. What is more,
I'm not going out to the rig with you and Royale
and that – that creature there' – she left no doubt
but that she meant Larry – ‘unless Kennedy comes
with me. And that's final. And I must go into
Marble Springs. Now.'

I wondered when anyone had last talked to Vyland
like that. But the veneer never even cracked.

‘Why must you, Miss Ruthven?'

‘There are some questions a gentleman never
asks,' she said icily.

That floored him. He didn't know what she
meant, the same as I wouldn't have known what
she meant, and the net result was to leave him
stranded. Every eye in the room was on the two
of them, except mine: mine were on Kennedy's
and his were on mine. I was near the door now,
with my back turned to the company. It had been
easy to slip out the piece of paper from under my
collar and now I held it against my chest so that
he could see Judge Mollison's name on it. His
expression didn't alter and it would have taken
a micrometer to measure his nod. But he was
with me. Everything was fine – but for the chance
that Royale might get me with a snapshot before I
cleared the doorway.

And it was Royale who broke the tension in the
room, giving Vyland an easy out. ‘I'd like some
fresh air, Mr Vyland. I could go along with them
for the ride.'

I went out through that doorway the way a
torpedo leaves its tube. Kennedy had his arm
outstretched and I caught it: we crashed heavily
to the floor and went rolling along the passageway
together. Inside the first two seconds I had the
letter stuck deep inside his tunic and we were still
threshing about and belabouring each other on the
shoulders and back and everywhere it didn't hurt
very much when we heard the unmistakable flat
click of a safety catch.

‘Break it up, you two.'

We broke it up and I got to my feet under
the steady menace of Royale's gun. Larry, too,
was hopping around in the background, waving a
revolver in his hand: had I been Vyland I wouldn't
even have let him have a catapult in his hand.

‘That was a good job of work, Kennedy,' Vyland
was saying warmly. ‘I won't forget it.'

‘Thank you, sir,' Kennedy said woodenly. ‘I
don't like killers.'

‘Neither do I, my boy, neither do I,' Vyland
said approvingly. He only employed them himself
because he wanted to rehabilitate them. ‘Very
well, Miss Ruthven. Mr Royale will go along. But
be as quick as you can.'

She swept by without a word to him or a glance
at me. Her head was high. I still thought she was
wonderful.

I hadn't enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil
rig.

Planes I'm used to, I've flown my own, I once
even owned a piece in a small charter airline,
but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine
weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable.
We swayed and rocked and plummeted
and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the
end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time
we couldn't see where we were going because the
wipers couldn't cope with the deluge of water that
lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was
a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down
on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten
o'clock in the morning.

It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably
steady while the general, Vyland, Larry
and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen
gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us
reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry
of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would
ever see him again.

Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far
stronger and much gustier than it had been on land
and it was all that we could do to keep our balance
on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was
much chance of me falling, at least not backwards,
not with Larry's cannon jabbing into the small
of my back all the time. He was wearing the
big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and
leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught
him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of
weather, and he had the gun inside one of the
deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn't like me
and would have counted a hole in his fine coat
as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling
that trigger. I'd got right under Larry's skin like a
burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I
rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed
to refer to him as ‘hophead' or ‘junky' and to hope
that his supplies of snow were coming along all
right. On the way down to the helicopter that
morning I'd inquired solicitously whether or not
he'd remembered to pack his grip, and when he'd
asked suspiciously what the unprintable I meant
by that I explained that I was concerned that
he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It
took Vyland and the general all the strength of
their combined efforts to pull him off me. There
is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than
a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable:
but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was
the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep
sawing away at him until something snapped.

We staggered along against the wind till we came
to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a
wide companionway leading to the deck below.
A group of men awaited us here, and I had my
collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a
handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off
my face, but I needn't have bothered: Joe Curran,
the roustabout foreman I'd talked to ten hours
previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what
would have happened had he been there, or had
he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough,
his private confidential secretary, had found the
missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on
the imagination was too great. I'd probably just
have borrowed Larry's gun and shot myself.

Two men came forward to meet us. General
Ruthven did the honours: ‘Martin Jerrold, our field
foreman, Tom Harrison, our petroleum engineer.
Gentlemen, this is John Smith, a specialist engineer
flown out from England to help Mr Vyland
in his research.' John Smith, I gathered, was the
inspired choice of name for myself.

Both men made perfunctory noises of greeting.
Larry prodded me in the back so I said I was
delighted too, but they obviously had no interest
at all in me. Both men looked worried and uneasy,
and both men were doing their best to conceal the
fact. But the general didn't miss it.

‘Something bothering you, Harrison?' Out here
on the rig it was obviously the policy for Vyland
to keep very much in the background.

‘Very much so, sir.' Harrison, a crew-cut youngster
with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, looked to
me as if he should still be in college, but he must
have been good to hold down the responsible job
he did. He produced a small chart, spread it out
and pointed with a carpenter's pencil. ‘This chart's
good, General Ruthven. It couldn't be better, and
Pride and Honeywell are the best geological team
in the business. But we're already twelve hundred
feet overdue. We should have hit oil at least five
hundred feet back. But there's not even a smell of
gas yet. I can't even begin to explain it, sir.'

I could have explained it, but it was hardly
the time.

‘Those things happen, my boy,' the general said
easily. I had to admire the old coot; I was beginning
to have more than a fair idea of the almost
inhuman strain he was labouring under, but the
control, the self-possession were admirable. ‘We're
lucky if we make it two out of five. And no geologist
would claim to be 100 per cent accurate, or
even within shouting distance of it. Give it another
thousand. The responsibility's mine.'

‘Thank you, sir.' Harrison looked relieved, but
there was still a certain uneasiness about him and
the general was quick to get on to it.

‘Still something worrying you, Harrison?'

‘No, sir, of course not.' He was too quick, too
emphatic, he wasn't half the actor the old boy was.
‘Nothing at all.'

‘Hmm.' The general considered him thoughtfully,
then looked at Jerrold. ‘Something on your
mind, too?'

‘The weather, sir.'

‘Of course.' The general nodded understandingly.
‘Latest reports are that Hurricane Diane is
going to hit Marble Springs fair and square. And
that means the X 13. You don't have to ask me,
Jerrold. You know that. You're the captain of this
ship, I'm only a passenger. I don't like losing ten
thousand dollars a day, but you must suspend
drilling the moment you think it's right to.'

‘It's not that, sir,' Jerrold said unhappily. He
jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘That experimental
leg you're working on, sir – shouldn't it
be lowered to give maximum stability?'

So the drilling crew did know there was something
going on in that pillar I'd investigated the previous
night. When I came to think of it, although
it wasn't inevitable that they should know, it
was advisable. So much easier to give the crew
a specious explanation for the activities taking
place there than to cordon off a section and raise
suspicion and unwanted and possibly dangerous
speculation. I wondered what sort of yarn had been
spun to them. I was to find that out right away.

‘Vyland?' The general had turned to the man by
his side and raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘I'll accept full responsibility, General Ruthven.'
He spoke in the quiet, precise, confident tones
that a top-flight engineer might have employed,
although it would have surprised me if he knew
a nut from a bolt. But he could use reason, too,
for he added: ‘This storm is going to hit from the
west and the maximum strain is going to be on the
other, the landward, side. The effect on this side
will merely be to lift it.' He made a deprecating
gesture. ‘It does seem rather pointless, doesn't it,
to lower an additional leg just when the other legs
on that same side will have far less strain than
normal to carry? Besides, General, we are now so
near the perfection of this technique which is going
to revolutionize underwater drilling that it would
be a crime to set it back, maybe several months,
by lowering the leg and perhaps destroying all our
delicate equipment.'

So that was the line. It was well done, I had
to admit: the dedicated enthusiasm in his voice
was so exactly right, without being in any way
overdone.

‘That's good enough for me,' Jerrold said. He
turned back to the general. ‘Coming across to your
quarters, sir?'

‘Later. To eat, but don't wait lunch for us. Order
it for my stateroom, will you? Mr Smith here
is keen to get to work right away.' Like hell I
was.

We left them and made our way down a broad
passage. Deep inside the platform here the sound
of the wind and the rising waves crashing and
breaking against the pillars was completely inaudible.
Perhaps some faint murmur of sound might
have been heard if the air in that brightly-lit steel
passage hadn't been filled with the hum of powerful
generators: we appeared to be passing by some
diesel engine room.

At the far end of the passage we turned left and
walked almost to its far cul-de-sac limits before
stopping outside a door on the right-hand side.
On this door, printed in large white letters, was
the legend: ‘Drilling Research Project' followed, in
letters scarcely less large, by the words: ‘Private.
Most Secret. Positively No Admittance'.

Vyland rapped on the door in a long code knock
– I made a mental note of it: four shorts, two
long, four shorts – waited till there came three
long knocks from the inside, then knocked again,
four times in rapid succession. Ten seconds later we
had all passed through the door and it was double
locked and bolted behind us. It made all the signs
about ‘Private' and ‘No Admittance' seem rather
superfluous.

Steel floor, steel bulkheads, steel ceiling, it was a
black cheerless box of a room. At least, three sides
of it formed a box – the bulkhead we'd just passed
through, the blank bulkhead on the left and the
one to the right, with a high grilled door in its
centre. The fourth side was convex, bulging out
into the room in an almost perfect semicircle,
with a butterfly-clamped hatchway in its middle:
the trunking, I felt certain, of the big steel pillar
reaching down to the floor of the sea. On either
side of the hatchway hung large drums with neatly
coiled rubber tubes armoured in flexible steel.
Below each drum, and bolted to the floor, was
a large motor: the one on the right was, I knew,
an air compressor – that's what I'd heard when
I'd been out there during the night – and the
one on the left probably a forced-suction water
pump. As for the furnishings of the room, even
the Spartans would have found it rugged: a deal
table, two benches and a metal wall-rack.

There were two men in the room – the one who
had opened the door and another sitting at the
table, dead cigar in his mouth and a pack of greasy
cards spread out on the table in front of him – and
both cast in the same mould. It wasn't the fact
that they were both shirt-sleeved and had leather
holsters strapped across their chests and high up
on their left sides that gave them close similarity,
not even their evenly-matched height and
weight and broad bulky shoulders. The sameness
lay in their faces, hard expressionless faces with
cold, still, watchful eyes. I'd seen men out of the
same mould before, the top-notch professionals of
the strong-arm underworld, all that Larry would
have given his life to be and could never hope
to be. They were so exactly the type of men I
would have expected Vyland to employ that the
presence of Larry was all the more mysterious
indeed.

Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the
time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked
across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll
of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round
a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and
weighted the ends to keep them from curling
up again. It was a large and highly complicated
diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth.
He stood back and looked at me.

‘Ever seen that before, Talbot?'

I bent over the table. The diagram represented a
peculiar object shaped halfway between a cylinder
and a cigar, about four times as long as its average
width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle
third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards
towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it
appeared to be given up to some kind of storage
tanks – I could see the fuel lines leading to the
tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed
on the top side. This same bridge housed
the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber
which ran clear through the body of the machine,
passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left
and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended
beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this
oval chamber and attached to the underside of the
cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left,
towards the narrower and more tapering end, were
what appeared to be searchlights and long slender
remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along
the side.

I took a good long look at all of this, then
straightened. ‘Sorry.' I shook my head. ‘Never
seen it in my life.'

I needn't have bothered straightening for next
moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five
seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees
and was shaking my head from side to side in
an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with
the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus
my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for
I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol
held by the barrel.

‘I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.'
A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at
the vicar's afternoon tea-table and he was asking
me to pass along the muffins. ‘Your memory,
Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a
little, eh?'

‘Is all this really necessary?' General Ruthven
sounded distressed. He looked distressed. ‘Surely,
Vyland, we –'

‘Shut up!' Vyland snapped. We were no longer
calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed
to my feet. ‘Well?'