The Tightrope Men / The Enemy

by Desmond Bagley

  I said, ‘Had any success with Ashton’s computer programs?’

  ‘Oh, my God, they’re fantastic. Everyone has claimed the man was a genius and he’s proved it.’

  ‘How?’

  Ogilvie scratched his head. ‘I don’t know if I can explain—I’m no scientist—but it seems that Ashton has done for genetics what Einstein did for physics. He analysed the DNA molecule in a theoretical way and came up with a series of rather complicated equations. By applying these you can predict exactly which genes go where and why, and which genetic configurations are possible or not possible. It’s a startling breakthrough; it’s put genetics on a firm and mathematical grounding.’

  ‘That should make Lumsden happy,’ I said.

  Ogilvie ate a grape. ‘He doesn’t know. It’s still confidential. It hasn’t been released publicly yet.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘The Minister seems to feel…well, there are reasons why it shouldn’t be released yet. Or so he says.’

  That saddened me. The bloody politicians with their bloody reasons made me sick to the stomach. The Minister was another Cregar. He had found a power lever and wanted to stick to it.

  Ogilvie took another grape. ‘I asked Starkie when you’d be coming out but he isn’t prepared to say. However, when you do I’ve a new job for you. As you may know, Kerr is retiring in two years. I want to groom you for his job.’ Kerr was Ogilvie’s second-in-command. He smiled. ‘In seven years, when I go, you could be running the department.’

  I said bluntly, ‘Get lost.’

  He was not a man who showed astonishment easily, but he did then. ‘What did you say?’

  ‘You heard me. Get lost. You can take Kerr’s job and your job and stuff them wherever you like. The Minister’s backside might be a good place.’

  ‘What the devil’s got into you?’ he demanded.

  ‘I’ll tell you,’ I said. ‘You were going to do a deal with Cregar.’

  ‘Who said that?’

  ‘Cregar.’

  ‘And you believed him? The man lies as naturally as he breathes.’

  ‘Yes, I believed him because at that point he had no reason to lie. He did proposition you, didn’t he?’

  ‘Well, we talked—yes.’

  I nodded. ‘That’s why you won’t get me back in the department. I’m tired of lies and evasions; I’m tired of self-interest masquerading as patriotism. It came to me when Cregar called me an honest man, not as a compliment but as someone to corrupt. I realized then that he was wrong. How could an honest man do what I did to Ashton?’

  ‘I think you’re being over-emotional about this,’ Ogilvie said stiffly.

  ‘I’m emotional because I’m a man with feelings and not a bloody robot,’ I retorted. ‘And now you can take your bloody grapes and get the hell out of here.’

  He went away moderately unhappy.

  FORTY

  And they all lived happily ever after. The hero married the principal girl, the second hero got the second girl, and they moved out of the poor woodcutter’s cottage into the east wing of the king’s palace.

  But this is not a fairy tale.

  On the day Penny came out of hospital she, Peter Michaelis and I went on a wing-ding in the East End and the three of us became moderately alcoholic and distinctly merry. On the day Gillian arrived back from New York the four of us went on another wing-ding with similar effects. That American plastic surgeon must have been a genius because Gillian’s new face was an improvement on the one she had before the acid was thrown. I was very glad for Peter.

  The clanging of wedding bells could be heard in the near future. Penny and Gillian were dashing about London denuding the better stores of dresses and frillies for their trousseaux, while I scouted around for a house, introduced it to Penny, and then secured it with a cash deposit against the time the lawyers had finished their expensive wrangling over the deeds. It was all very exhilarating.

  Ten days before the wedding I felt it incumbent on me to go back to see Starkie. He heard what I had to say and frowned, then took me into a laboratory where I was subjected to a battery of tests. He told me to go away and return in a week.

  On the day I went back I read of Cregar’s death in The Times. The obituary was sickening. Described as a faithful public servant who had served his country with no thought of self for many years, he was lauded as an example for coming generations to follow. I threw the paper out of the train window and was immediately sorry; that sort of stuff could pollute the countryside very seriously.

  Starkie was serious, too, when I saw him, and I said, ‘It’s bad news.’

  ‘Yes, it is,’ he said directly. ‘It’s cancer.’

  It was a blow, but I had half-expected it. ‘How long do I have?’

  He shrugged. ‘Six months to a year, I’d say. Could be longer, but not much.’

  I walked to his office window and looked out. I can’t remember what I saw there. ‘Cregar’s dead,’ I said. ‘Same thing?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How?’

  Starkie sighed. ‘That damned fool, Carter, was doing shotgun experiments. That means he was chopping up DNA molecules into short lengths, putting them into E.coli, and standing back to see what happened. It’s not a bad technique if you know what you’re doing and take the proper precautions.’

  ‘He was taking precautions,’ I said. ‘The stuff got loose because of my own damned foolishness.’

  ‘He wasn’t,’ snapped Starkie. ‘Cregar was putting pressure on him—wanting fast results. He couldn’t wait for a consignment of genetically weakened E.coli from the States so he used the normal bug. There was no biological containment at all. The stuff went straight into your gut and started to breed happily.’

  ‘To cause cancer?’ It didn’t seem likely.

  ‘I’ll try to explain this as simply as possible,’ said Starkie. ‘We believe that in the genetic material of all normal cells there are genes which can produce tumour-forming chemicals, but they are normally repressed by other genes. Now, if you do a shotgun experiment and introduce a short length of DNA into E.coli you’re in danger of introducing a tumour gene without the one that represses it. That’s what’s happened to you. The E.coli in your gut was producing tumourforming chemicals.’

  ‘But you said the E.coli coming out of me was normal,’ I objected.

  ‘I know I did, and so it was. One of the most difficult things to do in these experiments is to get a new strain to breed true. They’re very unstable. What happened was that this strain began to breed back to normal E.coli almost immediately. But it was in your gut long enough to do the damage.’

  ‘I see.’ I felt a sudden chill. ‘What about Penny?’

  ‘She’s all right. That was a different bug entirely. We made sure of that.’

  I said, ‘Thank you, Dr Starkie. You’ve been very direct and I appreciate it. What’s the next step?’

  He rubbed his jaw. ‘If you hadn’t come to see me I’d have sent for you—on the basis of what happened to Lord Cregar. This is a type of cancer we haven’t come across before; at least it hasn’t been reported in the literature in this particular form. Cregar went very fast, but that may have been because of his age. Older cellular structures are more susceptible to cancers. I think you have a better chance.’

  But not much better, I thought. Starkie spoke in the flat, even tone used by doctors when they want to break the bad news slowly. He scribbled on a sheet of paper. ‘Go to this man. He’s very good and knows about your case. He’ll probably put you on tumour-reducing drugs and, possibly, radiation therapy.’ He paused. ‘And put your affairs in order as any sensible man should.’

  I thanked him again, took the address, and went back to London where I heard another instalment of bad news. Then I told Penny. I had no need to give her Starkie’s explanation because she grasped that immediately. It was her job, after all. I said, ‘Of course, the marriage is off.’

  ‘Oh, no; Malcolm!’

  And so
we had another row—which I won. I said, ‘I have no objection to living in sin. Come live with me and be my love. I know a place in the south of Ireland where the mountains are green and the sea is blue when the sun shines, which it does quite often, and green when it’s cloudy and the rollers come in from the Atlantic. I could do with six months of that if you’re with me.’

  We went to Ireland immediately after Peter and Gillian were married. It was not the happy occasion one would have wished; the men were sombre and the women weepy, but it had to be gone through.

  At one time I thought of suicide; taking the Hemingway out, to perpetrate a bad pun. But then I thought I had a job to do, which was to write an account of the Ashton case, leaving nothing out and making it as truthful as possible, and certainly not putting any cosmetics on my own blemishes. God knows I’m not proud of my own part in it. Penny has read the manuscript; parts of it have amused her, other parts have shattered her. She has typed it all herself.

  We live here very simply if you discount the resident medical staff of a doctor and three nurses which Penny insisted upon. The doctor is a mild young American who plays bad chess and the nurses are pretty which Penny doesn’t mind. It helps to have a wealthy woman for a mistress. For the first few months I used to go to Dublin once a fortnight where they’d prod and probe and shoot atoms into me. But I stopped that because it wasn’t doing any good.

  Now time is becoming short. This account and myself are coming to an end. I have written it for publication, partly because I think people ought to know what is done in their names, and partly because the work of Ashton on genetics has not yet been released. It would be a pity if his work, which could do so much good in the right hands, should be withheld and perhaps diverted to malignant uses in the hands of another Cregar. There are many Cregars about in high office.

  Whether publication will be possible at all I don’t know. The wrath of the Establishment can be mighty and its instruments of suppression strong and subtle. Nevertheless Penny and I have been plotting our campaign to ensure that these words are not lost.

  A wise one-legged American, in adapting the words of a naval hero, once said, ‘We have met the enemy, and he is us.’

  God help you all if he is right.

  ‘DESMOND BAGLEY’

  This illuminating pen portrait of the author was written by Desmond Bagley himself for the original release of The Tightrope Men. It is the first time it has appeared in any of his books.

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  ‘I want to write - Galsworthy’s dead and there’s only Maugham left, so there’s a chance for me,’ fourteen-year old Desmond Bagley told his mother when she enquired about his future career. Today, slight, bearded, bespectacled Bagley is among the biggest-selling novelists of the ‘sixties - and ‘seventies.

  ‘Desmond Bagley must be just about the fastest developing writer in the thriller business,’ said Gavin Lyall in 1966 reviewing Bagley’s third successive best-seller, Wyatt’s Hurricane. Then by November 1971, Vogue reviewing his last novel, The Freedom Trap, wrote: ‘The most exciting to date of the tough, literate, fast-paced spy thrillers which have become the unchallenged territory of Desmond Bagley.’

  Since the publication in 1963 of his first novel, The Golden Keel, Bagley has not only built up a reputation which puts him in the top bracket of thriller writers, but he has notched up sales of over two and a half million copies: all nine of his titles have been Book Club choices; editions of his books have appeared in ten European countries and in the United States; and his first eight titles have been published in paperback by Fontana.

  Desmond Bagley was a freelance journalist living in South Africa when he sat down to write his first novel. Like many readers, he had often felt as he laid a book aside that he could do as well - but he did not leave it there. With the help of his wife, director of a bookshop in Johannesburg, he set to work systematically to see what kind of book sold well and who published it. The result was that he decided to write a thriller for Collins (he thinks a would-be writer should always choose his publisher first and write to suit that publisher’s list). He then analysed many thrillers to isolate what seemed to him the ingredients of success, and produced The Golden Keel. Collins accepted it at once.

  An American publisher who saw the manuscript immediately gave Bagley a three-book contract and a five-figure advance. Since then, Desmond Bagley has averaged a novel a year - his latest being The Tightrope Men, which was published on 19th March 1973. He makes almost no notes, writes his first draft straight on to an electric typewriter, and carries his vast store of technical and geographical information in his head. But query his facts and he is likely to come up with an article from some obscure mining journal; ask him how he gets his plots and he will produce a newspaper cutting or the notebook, no bigger than a pocket diary, in which he occasionally jots down an idea.

  The plot of The Golden Keel, his first novel now in its tenth reprint, which deals with an attempt to smuggle Mussolini’s hidden gold out of Italy, dates back to 1949, soon after Bagley arrived in South Africa. He was working in an office in Natal and struck up a friendship with the man at the next desk. This man, a South African who had been captured at Tobruk, had joined a band of Italian partisans after the Germans invaded Italy and had helped to ambush a German convoy which turned out to be full of gold. The South African was the last survivor who knew where the gold lay hidden. He and Bagley discussed returning to fetch it, but when Bagley moved to Johannesburg, the two men lost touch.

  ‘Over the years,’ says Bagley, ‘the story kept coming back to me and, as an imaginative exercise, I mulled over the problems of smuggling treasure from Italy. The problem seemed insurmountable until I hit on the idea that finally formed the basis of The Golden Keel. By this time I was a journalist writing extensively for the South African press as a freelance, and during a slack period in 1962 I sat down to put my imaginings on paper.’

  Normally, Desmond Bagley’s meticulous research is very necessary, for he does not usually visit the areas where his novels are set. For instance, before writing Landslide, set in British Columbia, Bagley took out a three months’ subscription to the Vancouver Sun and soaked himself in the Canadian atmosphere for three months before he even started to write.

  However, in 1972, Desmond Bagley went to Finland to see if he could find a book there. He did. In fact he fell in love with the place; the gay, volatile people with a high regard for individuality, which is reflected in their politics by a new government every year, and the country itself, with its beautiful lakes and trees, and its freedom. Now the book has come, where action, pace and suspense dominate the story of a man who wakes up to find he is somebody else - and Finland is one of the characters. The book is The Tightrope Men.

  Other elements of success in Bagley’s novels are his plots, which are strong action stories with their full share of violence (but without the sadism that too often accompanies it) and his characters, who are human and sharply differentiated, yet fitted neatly to their allotted tasks.

  Born in 1923 in Kendal, Westmorland, where his parents kept a theatrical boarding house, Bagley can recall being dangled on Basil Rathbone’s knee when that actor was on tour. This early contact with the stage had no lasting effect on him, and when he was four the family moved first to Bolton, and then to Blackpool. On leaving school, Bagley became a printer’s devil. He hated it, so he took a job in a factory making plastic electrical fittings, transferring when war broke out to one making aircraft components instead.

  In 1946, tired of austerity England and fired by the tales of Air Force friends who had trained overseas, he decided to emigrate to South Africa. The problem was that in 1946 shipping and airlines were booked up for two years solid. Bagley’s solution was to journey to South Africa by road. He prepared with his usual systematic thoroughness, and on 7th January 1947 left Blackpool in a blizzard, accompanied by the good wishes of the Mayor and Corporation.

  Crossing the Sahara so soon after the war was a risky business, s
ince it did not then have the roads and safety precautions it does today, but Bagley reached Kampala, Uganda, took a job, went down at once with malaria - and left hastily for a better climate. He worked his way down Africa, taking jobs in asbestos and gold mines, mainly in store-keeping and store accounts, and in 1957 decided to try his hand at freelance journalism.

  In 1964, following the success of his first two books, he and his wife Joan (whom he married in 1960) returned to England, where they now live in Totnes, Devon. As a fulltime writer, Desmond Bagley now has time to indulge his hobbies of sailing, motor-boating, reading and what he calls ‘just plain loafing’.

  A friend of Bagley’s once said that his books read like fictionalised versions of the National Geographic Magazine. Bagley believes he meant this in praise and not in disapproval. He says: ‘For myself, I am an entertainer and not a pedagogue. I don’t know if my readers are instructed while reading my books - that is not my aim. I do know that while doing research in odd corners of the world I am giving myself a liberal education.’

  March 1973

  About the Author

  THE TIGHTROPE MEN

  THE ENEMY

  Desmond Bagley was born in 1923 in Kendal, Westmorland, and brought up in Blackpool. He began his working life, aged 14, in the printing industry and then did a variety of jobs until going into an aircraft factory at the start of the Second World War.

  When the war ended, he decided to travel to southern Africa, going overland through Europe and the Sahara. He worked en route, reaching South Africa in 1951.

  Bagley became a fréelance journalist in Johannesburg and wrote his first published novel, The Golden Keel, in 1962. In 1964 he returned to England and lived in Totnes, Devon, for twelve years. He and his wife Joan then moved to Guernsey in the Channel Islands. Here he found the ideal place for combining his writing and his other interests, which included computers, mathematics, military history, and entertaining friends from all over the world.