Fear is the Key (22 page)

There came the soft sound of the rubbing of chair
legs on the carpet, then Kennedy's voice, saying: ‘If
I might be permitted, sir?'

‘Thank you, Kennedy. Just a minute while my
daughter serves it out.' By and by the curtain was
pushed to one side and Kennedy carefully laid a
plate in front of me. Beside the plate he laid a small
blue leather-covered book, straightened, looked at
me expressionlessly and left.

He was gone before I had realized the significance
of what he had done. He knew very well that
whatever concessions in freedom of movement the
general had gained did not apply to me, I was going
to be under eye and gun for sixty seconds every
minute, sixty minutes every hour and that our
last chance for talking was gone. But not our last
chance for communication, not with that little
book lying around.

It wasn't strictly a book, it was that cross between
a diary and an account book, with a tiny pencil
stuck in the loop of leather, which garages and
car-dealers dole out in hundreds of thousands,
usually at Christmas time, to the more solvent
of their customers. Nearly all chauffeurs carried
one for entering up in the appropriate spaces the
cost of petrol, oil, services, repairs, mileage and fuel
consumption. None of those things interested me:
all that interested me was the empty spaces in the
diary pages and the little blue pencil.

With one eye on the book and one on the
curtain and both ears attuned to the voices and
sounds beyond that curtain I wrote steadily for
the better part of five minutes, feeding myself
blindly with fork in the left hand while with my
right I tried to set down in the briefest time and
the shortest compass everything I wanted to tell
Kennedy. When I was finished I felt reasonably
satisfied: there was still a great deal left to chance
but it was the best I could do. Accepting of chances
was the essence of this game.

Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing
Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book
was nowhere to be seen, but he didn't hesitate, his
hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in
front of me, closed over the little book and slid
it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to
have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon
Kennedy.

Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched
me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating
the hurricane blast that swept across the open
well-deck was no easier this time than it had
been the last, and in the intervening half-hour
the darkness had deepened until it was almost as
black as night.

At twenty past three I dropped once more down
into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover
tight behind me.

At half-past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad
to leave. If you have no work to occupy you –
and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I
hadn't done a stroke that afternoon – the interior
of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the
way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti
to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar
and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron
rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was
there, alone.

‘Finished, Talbot?' he asked.

‘All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil,
the book of instructions and if I'm right – and I
think I am – I can have those engines going within
five minutes of getting down there again. Where's
Vyland?'

‘The general called for him five minutes ago.'
Good old general, dead on the dot. ‘They've gone
off somewhere – I don't know where.'

It doesn't matter. This'll only take me half an
hour at the most. You can tell him we'll be ready
to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper
and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where's
the nearest place?'

‘Won't this do?' Royale asked mildly. ‘I'll get
Cibatti to fetch some paper.'

‘If you imagine I'm going to work with Cibatti
giving me the cold cod eye all the time you're
mistaken.' I thought a moment. ‘We passed a
regular office a few yards along the passage on
the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and
everything, all the paper and rules I need.'

‘What's the harm?' Royale shrugged and stood
aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged
through the trunking from the pillar and before
we'd gone ten feet along the passage I heard the
solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key
in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the
castle duties very seriously indeed.

Halfway along the passage an opened door led
into a small, fairly comfortable room. I looked over
my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in.
The room looked as if it had been used as an
architect's office, for there were a couple of large
drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting.
I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered
desk with a comfortable armchair behind it.

Royale looked round the room the way Royale
would always look round a room. It was impossible
to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with
his back to a door, overlooked by a window or
with light in his eyes. He would have behaved
the same in a children's nursery. In this case,
however, he seemed to be examining the room
more with an eye to its qualification as a prison,
and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart
from the doorway through which he had just
entered, the only other point of egress from the
room was through the plate-glass window that
overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly
under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette
and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off
his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face
in shadow. He was no more than six feet from
me and he had nothing in his hands and could
have had that little black gun out and two little
holes drilled through me before I covered half the
distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn't
on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures
on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule,
consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere
at all. I didn't conceal the fact that I was getting
nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience,
scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed
my lips and looked with mounting irritation
at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly
I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it
– he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

‘My presence here bothering you, Talbot?'

‘What? Well no, not exactly – I just don't seem
to be getting –'

‘Not working out as easily as you thought it
would, eh?'

I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn't
going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved
me the trouble.

‘Maybe I'm just as anxious as you to get this
thing over. I guess you're one of those characters
who don't like distraction. And I seem to be distracting
you.' He rose easily to his feet, glanced
at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair
with one hand and made for the door. ‘I'll wait
outside.'

I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the
key from the inside of the door, went out into
the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got
up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

I didn't have to wait long. Within a minute I
heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the
passage outside, the sound of somebody saying,
‘Sorry, Mac' in a pronounced and unmistakably
American accent and then, almost in the same
instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact
of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious
suffering. A moment later the key turned in the
lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy
load into the room.

The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a
flounder. I hauled him inside while the oilskinned
figure who'd lifted him through the door reversed
the key and turned it in the lock. At once he
started throwing off sou'wester, coat and leggings,
and beneath everything his maroon uniform was
as immaculate as ever.

‘Not at all bad,' I murmured. ‘Both the sap and
the American accent. You'd have fooled me.'

‘It fooled Royale.' Kennedy bent and looked at
the already purpling bruise above Royale's temple.
‘Maybe I hit him too hard.' He was as deeply
concerned as I would have been had I accidentally
trodden on a passing tarantula. ‘He'll live.'

‘He'll live. It must have been a long deferred
pleasure for you.' I had shed my own coat and was
struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could.
‘Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?'

‘Look, Mr Talbot,' he said reproachfully, ‘I had
three whole hours.'

‘Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any
sign of coming to?'

‘I'll just kind of lean on him again,' Kennedy
said dreamily.

I grinned and left. I'd no idea how long the
general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious
errand he'd called him away, but I suspected it
wouldn't be very long; Vyland was beginning to
become just that little bit anxious about the time
factor. Maybe I hadn't done myself any good by
pointing out that the government agents might
only be waiting for the weather to moderate
before coming out to question the general, but with
Vyland pointing his gun at me and threatening to
kill me I had to reach out and grasp the biggest
straw I could find.

The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and
gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had
changed and I had to fight my way almost directly
against it. It came from the north now and I knew
then that the centre of the hurricane must have
passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving
in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas
might begin to moderate within a few hours. But,
right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever
been and on my way across I had my head and
shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I
was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in
the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its
way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no
attention. People were probably using that line all
day long.

The time for circumspection, for the careful
reconnoitring of every potential danger in my
path, was past. It was all or nothing now. Arrived
at the other side I strode down the long corridor
where I had whispered to Kennedy earlier in
the afternoon, turned right at its end instead of
left as we had done before, stopped to orientate
myself and headed in the direction of the broad
companionway which, Mary had said, led up to
the actual drilling deck itself. There were several
people wandering around, one of the open doors
I passed gave on to a recreation room full of blue
smoke and crowded with men: obviously all work
on drilling and the upper deck was completely
stopped. It didn't worry the drillers, their ten-day
tour of duty was paid from the time they left shore
till they set foot on it again, and it didn't worry me
for it was to the working deck I was going and the
absence of all traffic that I'd find up there would
make my task all the easier.

Rounding another corner I all but cannoned
into a couple of people who seemed to be arguing
rather vehemently about something or other:
Vyland and the general. Vyland was the man who
was doing the talking but he broke off to give
me a glare as I apologized for bumping him and
continued down the passage. I was certain he could
not have recognized me, my sou'wester had been
pulled right down to my eyes, the high flyaway
collar of my oilskin was up to my nose and, best
disguise of all, I had dispensed with my limp, but
for all that I had the most uncomfortable sensation
between the shoulder blades until I had rounded
another corner and was lost to their sight. I wasn't
sure whether this obvious argument between the
general and Vyland was a good thing or not. If
the general had managed to get him deeply interested
in some controversial subject of immediate
and personal importance to them both, then well
and good; but if Vyland had been expostulating
over what he regarded as some unnecessary delay,
things might get very rough indeed. If he got back
to the other side of the rig before I did, I didn't
like to think what the consequences would be. So
I didn't think about them. Instead, I broke into
a run, regardless of the astonished looks from
passers-by at a complete loss to understand the
reason for this violent activity on what was in
effect a well-paid holiday; reached the companion
way and went up two steps at a time.

Mary, tightly wrapped in a hooded plastic raincoat,
was waiting behind the closed doors at the
top of the steps. She shrank back and gave a little
gasp as I stopped abruptly in front of her and pulled
down the collar of my oilskin for a moment to
identify myself.

‘You!' She stared at me. ‘You – your bad leg –
what's happened to your limp?'

‘Never had one. Local colour. Guaranteed to
fool the most suspicious. Kennedy told you what
I wanted you for?'

‘A – a watchdog. To keep guard.'

‘That's it. I don't want a bullet or a knife in my
back in that radio shack. Sorry it had to be you,
but there was no one else. Where's the shack?'

‘Through the door.' She pointed. ‘About fifty
feet that way.'

‘Come on.' I grabbed the door handle, incautiously
twisted it open, and if I hadn't had a strong
grip on it I'd have been catapulted head over heels
to the foot of the stairs. As it was, the hammerblow
blast of that shrieking wind smashed both door
and myself back against the bulkhead with a force
that drove all the breath out of my lungs in an
explosive gasp and would possibly have stunned
me if the sou'wester hadn't cushioned the impact
as the back of my head struck painfully against
the steel. For a moment I hung there, my head a
kaleidoscopic whirl of shooting colour, bent double
against the hurricane force of the wind, whooping
painfully as I fought to overcome the shock of the
blow and the sucking effect of the wind and to
draw some breath into my aching lungs: then I
straightened up and lurched out through the door,
pulling Mary behind me. Twice I tried to heave
the door close, but against the sustained pressure
of that wind I couldn't even pull it halfway to. I
gave it up. They could, and no doubt very shortly
would, send up a platoon from below and heave
it shut: I had more urgent things to attend to.

It was a nightmare of a night. A dark howling
nightmare. I screwed my eye almost shut against
the hurricane-driven knife-lash of the rain and
stared up into the black sky. Two hundred feet
above my head I could just distinguish the intermittent
flicker of the derrick-top aircraft warning
lights, utterly unnecessary on a night such as this
unless there were some lunatic pilots around, and
quite useless as far as giving any illumination at
deck-level was concerned. The absence of light was
a mixed blessing but on the whole, I felt, favour
able: I might run into dangerous, even crippling
obstacles because I couldn't see where I was going
but on the other hand no one else could see where
I was going either.

Arm in arm we lurched and staggered across the
deck like a couple of drunks, heading for a square
patch of light shining on the deck from a concealed
window. We reached a door on the south side, on
the near corner and sheltered from the wind, and
I was on the point of bending down and having a
squint through the keyhole when Mary caught the
handle, pushed the door and walked into a small
unlit corridor. Feeling rather foolish, I straightened
and followed. She pulled the door softly to.

‘The entrance door is on the far end on the
right,' she whispered. She'd reached both arms
up round my neck to murmur in my ear, her
voice couldn't have been heard a foot away. ‘I
think there's someone inside.'

I stood stock still and listened, with her arms still
round my neck. Given a more favourable time I
could have stayed there all night, but the time
wasn't favourable. I said: ‘Couldn't it be that they
just leave that light on to guide the operator to the
shack when his call-up bell rings?'

‘I thought I heard a movement,' she whispered.

‘No time to play it safe. Stay out in the passage,'
I murmured. ‘It'll be all right.' I gave her hands
a reassuring squeeze as I disengaged them from
my neck, reflecting bitterly that Talbot luck was
running typically true to form, padded up the
passage, opened the door and walked into the
radio room.