The Satan Bug (32 page)

Finding this man here didn't give me any feeling of dismay and frustration because of the possible threat and setback he offered, all it afforded me was the sense of profound satisfaction and relief that could not be described. I had gambled, but I had won. Dr. Gregori was doing exactly what I'd told the General and Hardanger he would be doing.

The knife came free of its sheath and I brushed the blade with the ball of my thumb. It had a point like a lancet and an edge like a scalpel. It was only a very little knife, but three and a half inches of steel can kill you just as dead as the longest stiletto or the heaviest broadsword. If you know where to hit, that is. I had a fair idea where to hit, and how. And at anything up to ten paces I was twice as accurate with a knife as with a gun.

I covered sixteen of the intervening twenty feet in just over ten seconds, making no more sound than the moonlit shadow of a drifting snowflake. And now I could see him, quite clearly. He was directly under the first platform of the fire-escape to get what shelter he could from the rain. His back was to the wall. His head was bowed, as if his chin was resting on his chest, as if he was half-asleep on his feet. He'd only to glance sideways under raised eyelids and he'd have had me.

He wasn't going to remain so obligingly unseeing for an indefinite period.

I twisted the knife until the blade pointed upwards, then found myself hesitating. Even with Mary's life in the balance I found myself hesitating. Whoever this character was I'd little doubt but that he deserved to die anyway. But to knife an unsuspecting and half-asleep man, however much he deserved it? This wasn't the war any more. I slid out the Webley, quiet as a mouse tiptoeing past a sleeping cat, caught the barrel and swung for a spot just below the dripping brim of his hat, just behind the left ear, and because I was feeling illogically angry about my uneasiness in knifing him I struck him very hard indeed. The sound was the sound of an axe sinking deep into the bole of a pine. I caught and lowered him gently to the ground. He wouldn't wake up before dawn.

Maybe he'd never waken again. It didn't seem to matter. I started up the fire-escape.

There was no hurry, no haste, in my going. Haste could be the end of it all. I went up the steps slowly, one at a time, always staring upwards. I was too near the end of the road now to let rashness be the ruin of everything.

After the sixth or seventh flight of steps I slowed down even more, not because my leg and queer shortness of breath were troubling me, which they were, but because I had become suddenly aware of an area of diffused light in the darkness of the wall above me, where a light had no right to be. There shouldn't have been any light anywhere, for all the lights of Central London were out.

If ghosts were allowed to have black faces—though I suspected mine was getting pretty streaky by this time—then I went up the next flight of steps like a ghost. As I approached the light I could see that it came not from a window but from a grille-work door set in the wall. Cautiously, I raised my head to the level of this door and peered inside.

It was on a level with the massive iron girders that spanned and supported the roof of the station. At least a dozen lights were burning inside the station, small, weak, isolated sources of illumination that served only to emphasize the depth of the gloom that lay over most of the huge and cavernous building. Six of the lights were directly above sets of hydraulic buffers at the end of tracks, and I suddenly realized why they were burning there: some lights are essential to the safe operation of a railway station and those must have been battery-powered lamps designed to come on in the event of a power failure. A prosaic enough explanation and, I was sure, the correct one.

I looked for some moments at the geometric tracery of soot-blackened girders that dwindled and vanished into impenetrable darkness at the farthest reaches of the station, then put a slight experimental pressure on the door. It gave under my hand. And the damned thing squeaked, like a gibbet creaking in the night wind. A gibbet with a corpse on it. I put the thought of corpses out of my mind and withdrew my hand from the door. Enough was enough.

But the door was sufficiently open to let me see a couple of vertical iron ladders leading away from the steel platform just inside. One led upwards to a long gangway immediately below the vast skylights, the other down to another gangway about the level of the highest of the lights inside the station: the former would be for the window-cleaners, the latter for the electricians. It was a great help to me to know that. I straightened. At least six nights of stairs to go yet before I started getting really interested.

The arm that locked round my throat and started throttling the life out of me belonged to a gorilla, a gorilla with a shirt and jacket on, but a gorilla for all that. In those first two hellish seconds of immobilized shock and pain I thought my neck was going to snap, and before I could even begin to react something hard and metallic smacked down on my right wrist and sent the Webley flying from my grasp. It struck the iron platform and then spun off into space.

I never heard it land on the roadway beneath. I was too busy fighting for my life. With my left hand—my right hand was momentarily paralyzed and quite useless—I reached up, caught his wrist and tried to tear his arm away. I might as well have tried to tear a four-inch bough from an oak tree.

He was phenomenally strong and he was squeezing the life out of me.

And not slowly.

Something ground savagely into my back, just above the kidney. The unspoken order was clear as day but for all that I didn't stop struggling, a few more seconds of that pressure and I knew my neck would go. I smashed my right foot against the grille door and sent us both staggering back against the outside platform rail. I felt his feet leave the platform as the rail struck him about hip-level, and for a moment we both teetered there on the point of imbalance, his arm still locked around my neck, then the pressures on neck and back were simultaneously released as he grabbed desperately for the rail to save himself.

I staggered away from him, whooping painfully for bream, and fell heavily against the next flight of steps leading upwards. I landed on my right side, just where the ribs were gone, and the world darkened and dimmed in a haze of pain and if I'd then let myself go, relaxed even for the briefest moment and yielded to the body's clamorous demands for rest, I should have passed out. But passing out was the one luxury I couldn't afford. Not with this character anyway. I knew who I had now.

If he'd wanted merely to knock me out he could have tapped me over the head with his gun: if he'd wanted to kill me he could have shot me in the back or, if he'd no silencer and didn't want noise, a tap on the head and a heave over the rail to the roadway sixty feet below would have served his purpose equally well. But this lad didn't want anything so quiet and simple and painless. If I was to die, he wanted me to know I was dying: for me he wanted the tearing agony of death by violence, for himself the delight of savouring my agony. A vicious and evil sadist with a dark mind crimsoned by the lust for blood. Gregori's hatchet-man, Henriques. The deaf mute with the crazy eyes.

Half-lying, half-standing against the steps, I twisted to face him as he came at me again. He was crouched low and he had his gun in front of him. But he didn't want to use that gun. Not if he could help it. From a bullet you died too quickly, unless, of course, you were very careful with the placing of the bullet. Suddenly I knew this was just what he had in mind, the muzzle was ranging down my body as he searched for the spot where a bullet would mean that I would take quite some time dying, unpleasantly. I straightened my arms on the step behind me and if the scything upward sweep of my right foot had caught him where I had intended Henriques wouldn't have worried me any more. But my vision was fuzzy and co-ordination poor. My foot glanced off his right .thigh, swept on and struck his forearm, jarring the gun from his hand: the gun carried over the edge of the platform and clattered down a couple of steps on the flight below.

He turned like a cat to retrieve it and I was hardly any slower myself.

As he leaned over the top step, scrabbled for and found his gun, I jumped and caught him with both feet. He grunted, an ugly hoarse sound, then crashed and cart wheeled down the steps to the platform below.

But he landed on his feet: and he still had the gun.

I didn't hesitate. If I'd tried running up the remaining flights to the heliport on top of the station roof, he'd have caught me in seconds or picked me off at his leisure: even had I managed to reach the top, assuming that the days of miracles were not yet over, secrecy and silence would have vanished and Gregori would be waiting for me, I'd be trapped between two fires and everything would be over for Mary. It would have been just as suicidal to go down and meet him or wait for him where I was: I'd only the knife strapped to my left forearm and my numbed right hand was not sufficiently recovered to ease it out from its sheath, far less use it, and even had we both been weaponless, even had I been at my fittest and best, I doubt whether I could have coped with the dark violence of that phenomenally powerful deaf mute. And I was a very long way from my fittest and best. I went through the grille door like a rabbit bolting from its hole with a ferret only half a length behind.

Desperately I glanced round the tiny platform. Up the vertical ladder to the window cleaners' catwalk or down to the electricians'? It took me all of half a second to realize I couldn't do either. Not with one hand still out of commission and hope to reach either the top or bottom of the ladder before Henriques came through that door and picked me off in his own sweet time.

Six feet away from the platform was one of the giant girders that spanned the entire width of the station roof. I didn't stop to think of it, subconsciously I must have known that if I had stopped to think, even for a second, I'd have chosen to remain there and have it out with Henriques on that platform, gun or no gun. But I didn't stop. I ducked under the waist-high chain surrounding the platform and launched myself across that sixty foot drop.

My good foot landed fair and square on the girder, the other came just short and slipped off the thickly treacherous coating of soot deposited there by generations of steam locomotives. As my shin cracked painfully against the edge of the metal I grabbed the beam with my left hand and for two or three dreadful seconds I just teetered there while the great empty station swam dizzily around me. Then I steadied and was safe. For the moment. I rose shakily to my feet.

I didn't crawl along the girder. I didn't pussyfoot along with arms outstretched to aid my balance. I just put down my head and ran. The beam was only eight or nine inches wide, it was covered with this dangerous layer of soot and the two rows of smooth rivet-heads running along its entire length would have been my death had I stepped on their slippery convexities. But I ran. It took me seconds only to cover the seventy feet to the great central vertical girder that disappeared into the darkness above. I grabbed it, edged recklessly round, and stared back in the direction from which I'd come.

Henriques was on the platform by the grille door. His gun was extended at the full stretch of his right arm, pointing directly at me, but he was lowering it even as I looked: he'd seen me, all right, but too late to draw a bead before I'd vanished behind the shelter of the vertical girder.

He looked around him, seemed to hesitate. I stood where I was, clinging on to the girder while some of the numbness drained from my right hand, and while Henriques was making up his mind I cursed myself for my folly.

All the way up that fire-escape from street level I'd never once thought to look behind. The deaf mute must have been making a round of the posted guards, found the unconscious man at the foot of the fire-escape and drawn the inevitable conclusions.

Henriques had made up his mind. The idea of the leap from the platform across to the girder didn't appeal to him, and I couldn't blame him. He swarmed up the iron ladder to the window cleaners' catwalk above, moved over to a position directly above the girder I was standing on, crossed the catwalk rail and lowered himself until his feet were only inches above the girder. He dropped, steadying himself with his hands on the wall, turned carefully and started coming towards me, his hands outstretched like a tight-rope walker's. I didn't wait for him. I turned and started walking also.

I didn't walk far for there wasn't far to walk. The beam I was on stretched to the other side of the main hall of the station and there it ended, vanishing into the grimy brickwork. There was no convenient platform here. No catwalk above or below. Just the beam vanishing into the wall. And sixty feet below the dull gleam of rails and hydraulic buffers. Just myself and the girder and the blank wall. The end of the road and no way out. I turned and made ready to die.

Henriques had reached the vertical girder in the centre, had safely negotiated his way past it and was advancing on me. Fifty feet away he stopped and even in the gloom I could see the white glimmer of his teeth as he smiled. He had seen how it was with me, that I was trapped and quite at his mercy. It must have been one of the highlights in the life of that crazy man.

He started moving again, slowly closing the distance between us. Twenty feet away he stopped, stooped, lowered his hands to the girder and sat down, locking his legs securely under the beam. He was wearing a very smooth line in Italian sacking and all that soot wouldn't be doing it any good at all but he didn't seem to care. He raised his pistol, holding it with both hands, and pointed it at the middle of my body.

There was nothing I could do. With my hands at my back, bracing myself against the wall, I stiffened in futile preparation for the slamming rending impact of the shock. I stared at his hands and imagined I could see the fingers whiten. In spite of myself I winced and closed my eyes.

Only for a second or two. When I opened them again he'd lowered the gun until his hand was resting on the beam and was grinning at me.