Circus

by Alistair MacLean

  Five minutes later he arrived, via the detention block roof, at the north-east watch-tower. His stay there occupied him no longer than had his brief sojourn at the first tower. Leaving the second guard there as immobilized and silenced as the first, he made his way back along the east wall, lowered himself down to the breaker and gently pressed down the lever. The muffled thud could not have been heard more than a few feet away, for as he’d guessed the switch had been immersed in a bath of oil. He returned to the south-east tower, peered over the south wall and flashed his torch three times in rapid succession, then pressed it on and left it on. A recognition flash came from the south lane below.

  Bruno doused his light, produced a considerable length of weighted cord from a capacious pocket and lowered it. He felt pressure come on the end followed by a gentle tug and immediately started reeling in the cord. In very short order indeed he had in his hands the other end of the rope that Roebuck had succeeded in attaching to the spikes at the south-west corner of Lubylan. He pulled it taut but not too taut – the steel core of the nylon ensured that the sagging factor would be negligible – and fastened it securely. He now had a rope that ran the full length of the outside of the southern wall, three to four feet below the base of the spikes. For an aerialist and high-wire specialist it was as good as a public highway.

  It was a fifty-yard trip to the south-west tower and he made it in under three minutes. With the rope to walk on and the base of the curved spikes for support it was, for Bruno, a ridiculously easy passage. Once, but then only very briefly, he had to duck low when the searchlight of the watchtower he was approaching traversed the south wall, but there was never any danger of discovery. And within a minute of his arrival at his destination a third guard had lost all his conscious interest in the immediate future.

  Bruno pointed his torch down and signalled four times, this to let those waiting below know that he had arrived but to wait. There was still the final guard to be disposed of, the one in the northwest tower. It could well have been that the guards merely traversed their searchlights when and if the whim took them or there could have been some concerted arrangement, however irregular that may have been. In any event, he could not afford to arouse any degree of suspicion. He waited until the remaining guard had made a couple of perfunctory traverses with his searchlight, dropped down to the roof of the research building – like its eastern counterpart it was five feet below the level of the wall – and made his silent way across. Clearly the guard had had no suspicion at all. Bruno made his way back to the south-west watch-tower, flashed his torch twice and lowered his weighted cord again. A minute later he was securing a heavy knotted rope to the base of the spikes. He flashed again, waited a few seconds and gave the rope an experimental tug. It was bar-taut. The first of his companions was on his way up. Bruno peered downwards to try to identify the climber, but the gloom was too deep to make positive identification: from the bulk of the shadowy figure it looked like Kan Dahn.

  Bruno embarked on a more careful examination of the roof. There had to be an access hatch for the watch-tower guards, for there was no such vertical access in or near the towers themselves. He located it almost at once by a glow of light emanating from a partially covered hatchway close to the inner edge of the roof, about halfway between the north and south walls. The hatchway cover, vertically sided, curved through an arc of ninety degrees, whether to obscure the light from above, which seemed unlikely, or to give protection against the weather to the hatch below, which seemed more probable. Bruno hitched a cautious eye round the corner of the cover. The light came from a heavily meshed square of plate glass set in a hinged trapdoor. Looking down, Bruno could see only a part of the bleak room below but what he could see was enough. There were four guards there, fully clothed, three of them lying, apparently asleep, on hinged canvas bunks, the fourth, his back to Bruno and facing an open door, playing some sort of solitary card game. A vertical steel ladder ran from the floor of the room to the side of the trap-door.

  Gingerly, Bruno tried the hatch, but it was locked, probably bolted from below. The place might not, as Harper had said it was, be guarded like Fort Knox, but they certainly took every precaution against the most unlikely occurrences. Bruno moved away and looked down over a low parapet into the courtyard. There were no immediate signs of the guard dogs Harper had mentioned, but that did not preclude the possibility of their lurking in one of the several archways he could see, but that didn’t seem likely: Dobermanns are inveterate prowlers. And there was no movement or sign of life in the glass-enclosed elevated passageway that joined the two buildings on the fifth-floor level.

  When Bruno returned to the south-west tower Kan Dahn was already there. The ninety-foot climb hadn’t even altered his rate of breathing. He said: ‘How was the trip across?’

  ‘A good performer always quits at the top. I can’t ever top that, so I’ve just quit.’

  ‘And not a soul to see you. Alas, life’s little ironies. I mean, with an audience there, we could have cleaned up twenty thousand bucks tonight.’ He appeared in no way surprised by Bruno’s decision. ‘The watch-tower guards?’

  ‘Asleep.’

  ‘All?’ Bruno nodded. ‘So there’s no rush?’

  ‘There’s no time to hang around either. I don’t know when the reliefs come on duty.’

  ‘7 p.m. seems an unlikely hour.’

  ‘Yes. But we haven’t come all this way to take what looks even like a ghost of a chance.’ He turned as first Roebuck and then Manuelo appeared in rapid succession. In contrast with Kan Dahn they appeared to be experiencing some difficulty with their breathing. Roebuck, the double canvas bag still slung over a shoulder, said: ‘Thank God we go down that rope instead of up when we leave.’

  ‘We don’t leave that way.’

  ‘We don’t?’ Roebuck paled beneath the tan. ‘You mean there’s another way? I’m not sure if I’m looking forward to that.’

  Bruno said soothingly, ‘A Sunday walk, that’s all. Now, access. There’s only one way in from the roof and that’s locked.’

  Kan Dahn said: ‘A door?’

  ‘A trap-door.’

  Kan Dahn brandished his crowbar. ‘Poof! No trap-door.’

  ‘There are guards in the room below. One, at least, is wide awake.’ He led the way halfway along the west perimeter wall, knelt, caught hold of a curved spike and leaned out over the main street. The others did the same.

  ‘I know the geography of this place. That first window down – I want to get in through there.’

  ‘That first window down,’ Roebuck said, ‘has got big thick iron bars protecting it.’

  ‘It won’t have in a little while.’ Bruno knelt upright and produced the plastic packet from his pocket. He unrolled this to reveal two small polythene-wrapped packages. ‘For iron bars, the ultimate persuader. Turns them into a form of putty near enough.’

  Roebuck said: ‘What kind of hocus-pocus is this?’

  ‘No hocus, no pocus. You can apologize at your leisure. Every professional magician worth his salt knows about it. You can soften and bend practically any metal by smearing it with this stuff – oddly enough, with reasonable care, it doesn’t affect the human skin. The plastic inside this polythene contains an acid that eats into the interstices between the molecules of metal and softens it up. There’s an Israeli magician who says that given time and enough of the stuff he could bend a Sherman tank. Here we have only two iron bars.’

  ‘How long does it take to work?’

  ‘Five minutes should be enough. I’m not certain.’

  Manuelo said: ‘Burglar alarms?’

  ‘Those I can fix.’

  Bruno tied a double bowline, slipped his legs through them until they reached the top of his thighs, secured a bight round his waist and eased himself out and over the curving spikes. He lowered himself to the full extent of his arms while Kan Dahn took a turn of the rope round a spike; then he exchanged his grip on the spikes for one on the rope, and Kan Dahn eased him d
own.

  With the rope round his thighs and waist, his feet on the window sill and one hand grasping an iron bar, Bruno was as safe as a man in church. There were four bars on the window, each pair about eight inches apart. He removed the two cylinders of plastic compound from his pocket, opened them halfway and, careful not to remove the polythene covering, wrapped the plastic round the middle of the two centre bars, closing and smoothing the polythene round each in turn so that the compound was again completely sealed off. He climbed the few feet up the rope to the metal fence: Kan Dahn reached down, caught him under the armpits and lifted him easily over the wickedly out-curving spikes.

  He said: ‘Five minutes. Manuelo, you’ll come down with Kan Dahn and myself. Roebuck will stay here. And watch that canvas bag of yours – that’s the last thing we can afford to lose at this stage of the game. Could I have the wire-cutters, please, Manuelo?’

  Kan Dahn slipped into a double bowline, secured a bight round his waist, belayed the rope round three spikes – probably a sensible precaution for a man of his massive weight – and lowered himself down to the window ledge. He clenched a massive fist round each of the central bars and began to pull them apart. The contest was brief and unequal. The bars bent as if made from some inferior putty, but Kan Dahn wasn’t content with just making a gap: he leaned some more on the bars and both came free from their anchorages. He handed them up to the roof.

  Bruno joined Kan Dahn by means of a separate rope. Arrived opposite the window, he used his flash and peered through the glass. It appeared to be a perfectly innocuous office, bleakly furnished with metal cabinets, metal tables and padded metal seats. It certainly offered no hint of danger.

  While Kan Dahn held the torch Bruno produced a roll of brown paper, unrolled it and pressed one side against a pane of glass. That side was clearly adhesive. He waited a few seconds then struck the centre of the glass quite firmly with the heel of his fist. The glass came away and fell into the room, making practically no noise at all. Bruno took the torch from Kan Dahn and, holding both torch and wire-cutters in the same hand, thrust his head and one of his arms through the hole he had made. He located the unconcealed alarm wires at once, severed them, reached up and opened the window catch and pushed the lower window upwards. Ten seconds and both he and Kan Dahn were inside the room: another ten and Manuelo had joined them. He was carrying Kan Dahn’s crowbar with him.

  The office door was unlocked, the corridor beyond deserted. The three men made their way along until they came to an open door on the left. Bruno signalled to Manuelo to move forward. He did so and, holding a knife by the blade, cautiously showed an inch of the hilt round the edge of the jamb. Almost at once came the sound of discreet tapping on the glass of the hatch-cover above, enough to alert the card-playing soldier but not enough to disturb the three sleeping men. The guard at the table looked up questioningly, and then it was over. The hilt of Manuelo’s knife caught him over the ear and Kan Dahn caught him before he even had time to strike the ground. Bruno picked up one of several guns stacked in a ramp and covered the three others with it. The last thing he wanted or intended to do was to use it, but the three men were not to know that and a man waking from his sleep is not going to argue with a Schmeisser machine-pistol. But they kept on sleeping soundly even when Kan Dahn unbolted the trap-door to allow Roebuck – and his canvas bag – down into the guard-room. Bruno took out his gas pen and advanced upon the three sleeping guards: Roebuck, armed with a suitable amount of rope, followed him.

  They left the four guards there, securely bound and taped, three of them even more deeply asleep than they had been a few minutes previously. They bolted the trap-door, a probably unnecessary precaution, locked the guard-room door behind them and removed the key. Bruno said: ‘So far, so good.’ He hefted the Schmeisser he had borrowed from the guard-room. ‘Let’s call on Van Diemen.’

  Kan Dahn paused in the passageway and looked puzzled. ‘Van Diemen? Why do we have to attend to him first – or at all? You know where his offices and laboratories are. Why don’t we go straight in there now, find out the papers you want – you’re quite sure you’ll recognize those – ’

  ‘I’ll recognize them.’

  ‘Then fold our tents and steal away into the night. Like the Arabs, you know. A classy job, smooth, slick and noiseless. That’s what I like.’

  Bruno looked his disbelief. ‘What you would like is to crack every skull in the Lubylan. I can give you four reasons for not doing it your way and then no arguing – the change of the guard may be due at any moment. Time is not on our side.’

  ‘The change of guard is all nicely asleep in the guard-room.’

  ‘That may not be the change of guard. They may have to report to some kind of HQ at change-over. There may be an officer who carries out a routine inspection. I don’t know. Reason one: what we want may be in his private quarters. Reason two: we may be able to persuade him to tell us where the papers are. Reason three: if his filing cabinets are locked – and it would be astonishing if they aren’t – we may make quite a noise in opening them up and his quarters are right next door. But reason four is most important. You should have guessed.’ From their expressions it was apparent that no one had guessed. ‘I’m taking him back to the States with me.’

  ‘Taking him back –’ Roebuck looked his incredulity. ‘You’ve been through too much. It’s your mind.’

  ‘Is it? What the hell’s the point in taking the papers back home and leaving him here? He’s the only man who knows those damned formulas or whatever they are – and all he’d do is just sit down and write them out again.’

  Roebuck said in slow comprehension: ‘You know, that had never occurred to me.’

  ‘Hadn’t occurred to a lot of other people either, it would seem. Very odd, isn’t it? Anyway, I’m sure that Uncle Sam can always find him a nice congenial job.’

  ‘Such as supervising the development of this damnable anti-matter?’

  ‘From what I’ve heard of Van Diemen, he’d die first. He’s a renegade, you know that. It must have taken some awfully compelling political and ideological reasons for him to defect from West Germany to here. He’d never co-operate.’

  ‘But you can’t do this to a man,’ Kan Dahn said. ‘Kidnapping is a crime in any country.’

  ‘True. But better than death, I would have thought. What do you want me to do? Have him swear on the Bible – or any handy Marxist treatise that we can lay hands on – that he’ll never again reproduce any of those formulas? You know damned well that he’d never consent to that. Or just leave him in peace to write his memoirs – all about how to construct this hellish weapon?’

  The silence was very loud.

  ‘You haven’t left me much choice, have you? So what would you have me do? Execute him in the sacred name of patriotism?’

  There was no immediate answer to this because he’d left them without the option of an answer. Then Kan Dahn said: ‘You have to take him back home.’

  CHAPTER TEN

  Van Diemen’s door was locked. Ran Dahn leaned on it and it was no longer locked. It crashed back against its hinges and Bruno was the first in, Schmeisser levelled – it had occurred to him, not, fortunately, too belatedly, that, without some recognizably offensive weapon, they were at a distinct disadvantage – a wandering guard, seeing them apparently unarmed, would be sorely tempted to cut loose with whatever weapon he might possess.

  The startled man, propped on one elbow and rubbing sleep from his eyes, had a lean aristocratic face, grey hair, grey moustache and grey beard: he looked the exact antithesis of the mad scientist of popular conception. His unbelieving eyes switched from the intruders to a bell-push on his bedside table.

  ‘Touch that and you’re dead.’ Bruno’s voice carried utter conviction. Van Diemen was convinced. Roebuck advanced to the bell-push and sliced the flexible lead with the wire-cutters.

  ‘Who are you? What do you want?’ Van Diemen’s voice was steady, seemingly without fear: he had about
him the look of a man who has suffered too much to be afraid of anything any more.

  ‘We want you. We want the plans of your antigravity invention.’

  ‘I see. You can have me any time. Alive or dead. To get the plans you’ll have to kill me first. They’re not here anyway.’

  ‘You said the last two sentences the wrong way round. Tape his mouth and tie his hands behind his back. Then we look. For papers, keys, perhaps even one key.’

  The search, which lasted perhaps ten minutes and left Van Diemen’s quarters in an indescribable shambles, yielded precisely nothing. Bruno stood in momentary indecision. For all he knew, time might be running out very fast indeed.

  ‘Let’s try his clothes.’

  They tried his clothes. Again they found nothing. Bruno advanced on the bound and gagged figure sitting up in bed, regarded him thoughtfully for a moment, then reached down and gently lifted the gold chain he wore round his neck. No crucifix for Van Diemen, no Star of David, but something that was probably even more precious to him than those could have been to a Catholic or Jew: dangling from the end of the chain was a bright and intricately-cut bronze key.

  * * *

  Two whole walls of Van Diemen’s main office were lined with metal filing cabinets. Fourteen in all, each with four sliding drawers. Fifty-six holes. Roebuck was unsuccessfully trying his thirtieth. Every pair of eyes in the office looked at him intently. All except Bruno’s. His did not leave Van Diemen’s face, which had remained expressionless throughout. Suddenly there was a tic at the corner of his mouth.

  ‘That one,’ Bruno said.

  That one it was. The key turned easily and Roebuck pulled the drawer out. Van Diemen tried to throw himself forward, which, if an understandable reaction, was a futile one, for Kan Dahn had one massive arm around him. Bruno advanced to the drawer, started leafing quickly through the files. He picked out one sheaf of papers, checked the other files, double-checked them and closed the drawer.