Fear is the Key (19 page)

‘In every detail.' Vyland permitted himself one
of his rare smiles. ‘Brilliant, you might call it?'

‘No. The only brilliant thing was stealing the
bathyscaphe. The rest is within the scope of any
moderately competent underwater operator. Just
an application of the double-chambered submarine
rescue diving bell which can fit in much the same
way over the escape hatch of practically any
submarine. And a fairly similar principle has been
used for caisson work – sinking underwater piers
for bridges and the like. But smart enough for all
that. Your engineer friend was no fool. A pity about
him, wasn't it?'

‘A pity?' Vyland was no longer smiling.

‘Yes. He's dead, isn't he?'

The room became very still. After perhaps ten
seconds Vyland said very quietly: ‘What did you
say?'

‘I said he was dead. When anyone in your
employ dies suddenly, Vyland, I would say it was
because he had outlived his usefulness. But with
your treasure unrecovered, he obviously hadn't.
There was an accident.'

Another long pause. ‘What makes you think
there was an accident?'

‘And he was an elderly man, wasn't he, Vyland?'

‘What makes you think there was an accident?'
A soft menace in every word. Larry was licking his
lips again.

‘The waterproof floor you had put in in the
bottom of the pillar was not quite as waterproof as
you had thought. It leaked, didn't it, Vyland? Only
a very small hole, possibly, and in the perimeter of
the floor where it joined the side of the leg. Bad
welding. But you were lucky. Somewhere above
where we're standing there must be another transverse
seal in the leg – to give structural strength, no
doubt. So you used this machine here' – I pointed
to one of the generators bolted to the deck – ‘to
drive in compressed air after you'd sent someone
inside the leg and sealed this door off. When you'd
driven in enough compressed air the accumulated
water was driven out the bottom and then the
man – or men – inside were able to repair the
hole. Right, Vyland?'

‘Right,' He was on balance again, and there was
no harm in admitting something to a person who
would never live to repeat it to anyone. ‘How do
you know all this, Talbot?'

‘That footman up in the general's house. I've
seen many cases. He's suffering from what used to
be called caisson disease – and he'll never recover
from it. The diver's bends, Vyland. When people
are working under a high air or sea pressure and
that pressure is released too quickly they get nitrogen
bubbles in the blood. Those men in the leg
were working in about four atmospheres, about
sixty pounds to the square inch. If they'd been
down there more than half an hour they should
have spent at least half an hour decompressing, but
as it was some criminal idiot released the built-up
pressure far too fast – as fast as it could escape,
probably. At the best of times caisson work, or
its equivalent, is only for fit young men. Your
engineer friend was no longer a fit young man.
And you had, of course, no decompressor. So he
died. The footman may live long enough but he'll
never again know what a pain-free existence is.
But I don't suppose that troubles you, does it,
Vyland?'

‘We're wasting time.' I could see the relief on
Vyland's face, for a moment there he'd suspected
that I – and possibly others as well – knew too
much about the happenings on the X 13. But he
was satisfied now – and very relieved. But I wasn't
interested in his expression, only in the general's.

General Ruthven was regarding me in a very
peculiar fashion indeed: there was puzzlement in
his face, some thought that was troubling him, but
worse than that there were the beginnings of the
first faint incredulous stirrings of understanding.

I didn't like that, I didn't like that at all. Swiftly I
reviewed everything I'd said, everything I'd implied,
and in those matters I have an almost total recall,
but I couldn't think of a single word that might
have been responsible for that expression on his
face. And if he'd noticed something, then perhaps
Vyland had also. But Vyland's face showed no
sign of any knowledge or suspicion of anything
untoward and it didn't necessarily follow that any
off-beat word or circumstance noted by the general
would also be noted by Vyland. The general was
a very clever man indeed: fools don't start from
scratch and accumulate close on 300 million dollars
in a single lifetime.

But I wasn't going to give Vyland time to look
at and read the expression on the general's face –
he might be smart enough for that. I said: ‘So your
engineer is dead and now you need a driver, shall
we say, for your bathyscaphe?'

‘Wrong. We know how to operate it ourselves:
You don't think we'd be so everlastingly stupid as
to steal a scaphe without at the same time knowing
what to do with it. From an office in Nassau we
had obtained a complete set of maintenance and
operation instructions in both French and English.
Don't worry, we know how to operate it.'

‘Indeed? This is most interesting.' I sat down
on a bench without as much as a by-your-leave
and lit a cigarette. Some such gesture would be
expected from me. ‘Then what precisely do you
want with me?'

For the first time in our brief acquaintance
Vyland looked embarrassed. After a few seconds
he scowled and said harshly: ‘We can't get the
damned engines to start.'

I took a deep draw on my cigarette and tried to
blow a smoke-ring. It didn't come off – with me it
never came off.

‘Well, well, well,' I murmured. ‘How most inconvenient.
For you, that is. For me, it couldn't be
more convenient. All you've got to do is to start
those two little engines and hey presto! you pick
up a fortune for the asking. I assume that you
aren't playing for peanuts – not operating on this
scale. And you can't start them up without me. As
I said, how convenient – for me.'

‘You know how to make that machine run?' he
asked coldly.

‘I might. Should be simple enough – they're just
battery-powered electric motors.' I smiled. ‘But
the electric circuits and switches and fuse boxes
are pretty complicated. Surely they're listed in the
maintenance instructions?'

‘They are.' The smooth polished veneer was
showing a distinct crack and his voice was almost
a snarl. ‘They're coded for a key. We haven't
got a key.'

‘Wonderful, just wonderful.' I rose leisurely to
my feet and stood in front of Vyland. ‘Without me
you're lost, is that it?'

He made no answer.

‘Then I have my price, Vyland. A guarantee of
my life.' This angle didn't worry me at all but I
knew I had to make the play or he'd have been as
suspicious as hell. ‘What guarantee do you offer,
Vyland?'

‘Good God, man, you don't need any guarantee.' The general
was indignant, astonished. ‘Why
would anyone want to kill you?'

‘Look, General,' I said patiently. ‘You may be
a big, big tiger when you're prowling along the
jungles of Wall Street, but as far as the other side of
the legal divide is concerned you're not even in the
kitten class. Anyone not in your friend Vyland's
employ who knows too much will always come
to the same sticky end – when he can no longer
be of any use to him, of course. Vyland likes his
money's worth, even when it costs him nothing.'

‘You're suggesting, by inference, that
I
might
also come to the same end?' Ruthven inquired.

‘Not you, General. You're safe. I don't know
what the stinking tie-up between you and Vyland
is and I don't care. He may have a hold on you
and you may be up to the ears in cahoots with
him but either way it makes no difference. You're
safe. The disappearance of the richest man in the
country would touch off the biggest man-hunt
of the decade. Sorry to appear cynical, General,
but there it is. An awful lot of money buys an
awful lot of police activity. There would be an
awful lot of pressure, General, and snowbirds like
our hopped-up young friend here' – I jerked a
finger over my shoulder in the general direction
of Larry – ‘are very apt indeed to talk under pressure.
Vyland knows it. You're safe, and when it's
all over, if you're not really Vyland's ever-loving
partner, he'll find ways to ensure your silence.
There would be nothing you could prove against
him, it would only be your word against his and
many others and I don't suppose even your own
daughter knows what's going on. And then, of
course, there's Royale – the knowledge that Royale
is prowling around on the loose waiting for a man
to make just one slip is enough to guarantee that
man putting on an act that would make a clam
seem positively garrulous.' I turned from him and
smiled at Vyland. ‘But I'm expandable, am I not?'
I snapped my fingers. ‘The guarantee, Vyland, the
guarantee.'

‘I'll guarantee it, Talbot,' General Ruthven said
quietly. ‘I know who you are. I know you're a
killer. But I won't have even a killer murdered
out of hand. If anything happens to you I'll talk,
regardless of the consequences. Vyland is first and
foremost a business man. Killing you wouldn't
even begin to be compensation for the millions
he'd lose. You need have no fear.'

Millions. It was the first time there had been any
mention of the amounts involved. Millions. And I
was to get it for them.

‘Thanks, General, that puts you on the side of the
angels,' I murmured. I stubbed out my cigarette,
turned and smiled at Vyland. ‘Bring along the bag
of tools, friend, and we'll go and have a look at
your new toy.'

It isn't the fashion to design tombs in the form
of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if
it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been
a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything.
It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not
so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny
glow-worms of light at top, middle and bottom:
it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the
hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice
in those black and cavernous confines held all
the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic
finality of the dark angel calling your name on the
day of judgement. It should have been, I thought
bleakly, a place you went through after you died,
not just before you died. Not that the question of
precedence mattered at the end of the day.

As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere,
terrible. The only connection between top and bottom
lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on
to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve
of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one
break or resting place between top and bottom.
What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing
bridge Megger hanging down my back and the
fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that
I had to grip them with considerable force to keep
myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on
forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice
that distance and I wouldn't have made it.

It is customary for the host to lead the way in
strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his
privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded
me down the ladder I'd take the opportunity
of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred
and more feet to his death on the iron platform
below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland
and the two cold-eyed men we'd found waiting
in the little steel room following close behind.
That left Larry and the general up above, and
no one was under the impression that Larry was
fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move
around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have
no fears that the general might use his freedom to
queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I
knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if
I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I
put the thought out of my mind.

‘Right, open it up, Cibatti,' Vyland ordered.

The larger of the two men bent down and
unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back
on its hinges to lock into a standing catch. I
peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led
to the steel cabin beneath the bathyscaphe and
said to Vyland: ‘I suppose you know you'll have to
flood this entrance chamber when you go looking
for your Blackbeard's treasure?'

‘What's that?' He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously.
‘Why?'

‘Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?'
I asked incredulously. ‘This entrance chamber is
usually flooded the minute you start descending
– and that's normally surface level, not a hundred
and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure,
sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold
at double this depth, I don't know. But what I
do know is that it is completely surrounded by
your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand
gallons of it, and those are open to the sea
at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks
corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside
– which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is
required to hold the gasoline. But with only air
inside your entrance chamber you're going to have
at least two hundred pounds to the square inch
pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber.
And it won't stand that. It'll burst inwards, your
gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will
be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred
and eighty feet below the surface of the
sea. And there you would remain until the end
of time.'
It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom,
but I could have sworn that the colour had drained
from Vyland's face.

‘Bryson never told me this.' Vyland's voice was
a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

‘Bryson? Your engineering friend?' There was
no answer, so I went on: ‘No, I don't suppose he
would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a
gun in his back, didn't he, and he knew that when
his usefulness was over someone was going to pull
the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell
you?' I looked away from him and shouldered the
bridge Megger again. ‘No need for anyone to come
down with me – it'll only make me nervous.'

‘Think I'm going to let you go down there on
your own?' he asked coldly. ‘To get up to your
tricks?'

‘Don't be stupid,' I said wearily. ‘I could stand
there in front of an electrical switchboard or
fuse-box and sabotage the bathyscaphe so that
it would never move again, and neither you nor
your friends would ever know anything about it.
It's in my own interests to get this machine going
and have the whole thing over as soon as possible.
The quicker the better for me.' I glanced at my
watch. ‘Twenty to eleven. It'll take me three hours
to find out what's wrong. At least. I'll have a break
at two. I'll knock on the hatch so that you can let
me out.'

‘No need.' Vyland wasn't happy, but as long
as he couldn't put his finger on any possibility
of treachery he wasn't going to deny me – he
wasn't in any position to. ‘There's a microphone
in the cabin, with its extension cable wound round
a drum on the outside and a lead through a gland
in the side of the leg that's carried up to that room
where we were. There's a button call-up. Let us
know when you're ready.'

I nodded and started down the rungs welded
into the side of the cylinder, unscrewed the upper
hatch of the bathyscaphe's flooding and entrance
chamber, managed to wriggle down past it – the
downward projecting cylinder which encompassed
the top of the entrance chamber was only a few
inches wider and didn't give enough room to
open the hatch fully – felt for the rungs below,
pulled down the hatch, clamped it shut and then
worked my way down the constricting narrowness
of that chamber to the cabin below. The last few
feet involved an almost right-angle bend, but I
managed to ease myself and the Megger round
it. I opened the heavy steel door to the cabin,
wriggled through the tiny entrance, then closed
and locked the door behind me.

Nothing had changed, it was as I had remembered it.
The cabin was considerably bigger than
that of the earlier FRNS from which it had been
developed, and slightly oval in shape instead of
round: but what was lost in structural power was
more than compensated for in the scope and ease
of movement inside, and as it was only intended
for salvage operations up to about 2,500 feet,
the relative loss in strength was unimportant.
There were three windows, one set in the floor,
cone-shaped inwards as was the entrance door, so
that sea pressure only tightened them in their seats:
they looked fragile, those windows, but I knew that
the specially constructed Plexiglas in the largest of
them – and that was no more than a foot in its
external diameter – could take a pressure of 250
tons without fracturing, many times the strain it
would ever be required to withstand in the depths
in which that bathyscaphe would operate.

The cabin itself was a masterpiece of design.
One wall – if approximately one-sixth on the
surface area of the inside of a sphere could be
called a wall – was covered with instruments, dial,
fuse-boxes, switchboards and a variety of scientific
equipment which we would not be called upon to
use: set to one side were the controls for engine
starting, engine speed, advance and reverse, for the
searchlights, remote-controlled grabs, the dangling
guiderope which could hold the bathyscaphe stable
near the bottom by resting part of its length on
the sea-bed and so relieving the scaphe of that tiny
percentage of weight which was sufficient to hold
it in perfect equilibrium; and, finally, there were
the fine adjustments for the device for absorbing
exhaled carbon dioxide and regenerating oxygen.

One control there was that I hadn't seen before,
and it puzzled me for some time. It was a rheostat
with advance and retard positions graded on either
side of the central knob and below this was the
brass legend ‘Tow-rope control'. I had no idea what
this could be for, but after a couple of minutes I
could make a pretty sure guess. Vyland – or rather,
Bryson on Vyland's orders – must have fitted
a power-operated drum to the top, and almost
certainly the rear, of the bathyscaphe, the wire
of which would have been attached, before the
leg had been lowered into the water, to some
heavy bolt or ring secured near the base of the
leg. The idea, I now saw, was not that they could
thereby haul the bathyscaphe back to the rig if
anything went wrong – it would have required
many more times the power that was available in
the bathyscaphe's engines to haul that big machine
along the ocean bed – but purely to overcome the
very tricky navigational problem of finding their
way back to the leg. I switched on a searchlight,
adjusted the beam and stared down through the
window at my feet. The deep circular ring in the
ocean floor where the leg had originally been
bedded was still there, a trench over a foot in
depth: with that to guide, re-engaging the top of
the entrance chamber in the cylinder inside leg
shouldn't be too difficult.

At least I understood now why Vyland hadn't
objected too strongly to my being left by myself
inside the scaphe: by flooding the entrance chamber
and rocking the scaphe to and fro if and when Igot
the engines started, I might easily have managed to
tear clear of the rubber seal and sail the bathyscaphe
away to freedom and safety: but I wouldn't get very
far with a heavy cable attaching me to the leg of the
X 13. Vyland might be a phoney in the ways of dress,
mannerisms and speech, but that didn't alter the fact
that he was a very smart boy indeed.

Apart from the instruments on that one wall,
the rest of the cabin was practically bare except
for three small canvas seats that hinged on the
outer wall and a rack where there was stored a
variety of cameras and photo-flood equipment.

My initial comprehensive look round the interior
didn't take long. The first thing that called
for attention was the control box of the hand
microphone by one of the canvas seats. Vyland was
just the sort of person who would want to check
whether I really was working, and I wouldn't have
put it past him to change over wires in the control
box so that when the switch was in the off position
the microphone would be continuously live and so
let him know that I was at least working, even if
he didn't know what kind of work it was. But I'd
misjudged or over-rated him, the wiring was as it
should have been.

In the next five minutes or so I tested every item
of equipment inside that cabin except the engine
controls – should I have been able to start them
anyone still waiting on the bottom floor of that leg
would have been sure to feel the vibration.

After that I unscrewed the cover of the largest of
the circuit boxes, removed almost twenty coloured
wires from their sockets and let them hang down
in the wildest confusion and disorder. I attached
a lead from the Megger to one of those wires,
opened the covers of another two circuits and
fuse-boxes and emptied most of my tools on to
the small work-bench beneath. The impression of
honest toil was highly convincing.

So small was the floor area of that steel cabin that
there was no room for me to stretch out my length
on the narrow mesh duckboard but I didn't care.
I hadn't slept at all the previous night, I'd been
through a great deal in the past twelve hours and
I felt very tired indeed. I'd sleep all right.

I slept. My last impression before drifting off was
that the wind and the seas must be really acting
up. At depths of a hundred feet or over, wave-
motion is rarely or never felt: but the rocking of
that bathyscaphe was unmistakable, though very
gentle indeed. It rocked me to sleep.

My watch said half-past two when I awoke. For
me, this was most unusual: I'd normally the ability
to set a mental alarm-clock and wake up almost
to the pre-selected moment. This time I'd slipped,
but I was hardly surprised. My head ached fiercely,
the air in that tiny cabin was foul. It was my own
fault, I'd been careless. I reached for the switch
controlling carbon dioxide absorption and turned
it up to maximum. After five minutes, when my
head began to clear, I switched on the microphone
and asked for someone to loosen the hatch-cover
set into the floor of the leg. The man they called
Cibatti came down and let me out and three minutes
later I was up again in that little steel room.

‘Late, aren't you?' Vyland snapped. He and
Royale – the helicopter must have made the double
trip safely – were the only people there, apart from
Cibatti who had just closed the trunking door
behind me.

‘You want the damn thing to go sometime, don't
you?' I said irritably. ‘I'm not in this for the fun of
the thing, Vyland.'

‘That's so.' The top executive criminal, he wasn't
going to antagonize anyone unnecessarily. He
peered closely at me. ‘Anything the matter with
you?'

‘Working for hours on end in a cramped coffin
is the matter with me,' I said sourly. ‘That and the
fact that the air purifier was maladjusted. But it's
OK now.'

‘Progress?'

‘Damn little.' I lifted my hand as the eyebrow
went up and the face began to darken in a scowl.
‘It's not for want of trying. I've tested every single
contact and circuit in the scaphe and it's only in
the past twenty minutes that I began to find out
what's the matter with it.'