Floodgate

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Chance in a thousand, as you say. Suppose you want me to do the dirty work?’

  ‘Yes, sir.’ He spoke into the phone. ‘Tell whoever it is that’s bringing the papers round to stop by the City Surveyor’s office and pick up someone who will accompany him here. The Colonel is arranging it.’

  While de Graaf was issuing his instructions over the phone—he never made requests—van Effen turned on the radio and kept the volume low. When the Colonel hung up the phone he still kept the volume low—the cacophonous racket of the latest number one on the hit parade was not to van Effen’s taste—but turned it up when the noise stopped. The modulated voice of an announcer took over.

  ‘We interrupt this programme with a special news bulletin. The FFF, about whose activities you must have all heard or read in the past forty-eight hours, have issued another statement. It reads as follows:

  ‘ “We promised to breach the North Holland Canal or the Hagestein weir. Or both. In the event, we chose to breach the canal. The reason we did not damage the Hagestein weir is that we have never been within fifty kilometres of it. In spite of this we have to admit that the turn-out of army, police, air-force helicopters and the experts from the Rijkswaterstaat was most impressive.

  ‘ “It should now not be in doubt that we can cause flooding, of a degree according to our choosing, wherever and whenever we wish and that we can do this with impunity: the possibility of detection does not exist. The country’s authorities, as we have pointed out before and have demonstrated again, are quite powerless.

  ‘ “We are sure that the people of the Netherlands do not wish this state of affairs to continue. Neither, quite frankly, do we. We have certain terms that we wish to be met and would like to discuss those with a responsible member of the government. We suggest that an arrangement for such a meeting, time this evening, location immaterial, be broadcast over TV and radio at 6 p.m. this evening. No negotiator below the level of cabinet minister will be considered.

  ‘ “We suggest that our negotiator should not be apprehended, held as hostage or subjected to any degree of restraint. Should any of the authorities be so misguided as to do this we would warn them that mines are already in position to the north and south of Lelystad. Precisely how far north and south we choose, in this instance, not to say. The mines, in this instance, are very much larger than on previous occasions and the repair of the breaches will be a matter of days if not weeks. If our negotiator does not return to us by a certain hour to be agreed, then large portions of Oostlijk-Flevoland will be inundated. No warning will be given as to the time of those breaches: they will be some time during the night.

  ‘ “We think it almost superfluous to point out that the responsibility for the safety of the Oostlijk—Flevoland and its inhabitants lies exclusively with the government. We do not ask for a great deal—just to speak with a government representative.

  ‘ “Should the government ignore our small request and refuse to appoint a negotiator, we shall go ahead and flood the polder. After that, when next we make a similar request accompanied by a similar promise, we think the government may deem it more prudent to be a degree rather more cooperative. We are sure that the citizens of the Netherlands would agree that for the government, motivated solely by affronted pride and stiffnecked outrage, to put this large area and those who live there at such risk, would be intolerable and unforgiveable.

  ‘ “The time to cooperate is now, not when incalculable and avoidable damage has been done.

  ‘ “The mines are in position.”

  ‘That is the message in its entirety. The government has requested us—not ordered, requested—not to pass comment on or discuss this outrageous demand until they have decided what course of action to adopt. It wishes to reassure the people of this country that the government is confident that it has the resources at its command to meet this or any other threat.’

  Van Effen switched off the set. ‘God save us from politicians. The government, as is its wont, is talking through a hole in its collective hat. It’s been caught off-balance, hasn’t had time to think—one charitably assumes it can think—and can do no better than trot out old boring, meaningless platitudes. Confident, they say. Confident of what? God’s sake, they can’t possibly be confident of anything, far less of themselves. Trust us, they say. I’d sooner trust the inmates of a lunatic asylum.’

  ‘Treasonable talk, Lieutenant van Effen, treasonable talk. I could have you incarcerated for this.’ De Graaf sighed. ‘Trouble is, I’d have to incarcerate myself along with you, as I agree with every word you say. If the government honestly believes that the people will take their meaningless assertions at face value, then they’re in an even worse case than I thought. Which, I may add, I didn’t think was possible. They are in an impossible situation: do you think it even remotely possible that they don’t recognize this?’

  ‘They’ll recognize it all right. Just as soon as they begin to think in terms of political survival. If they bury their heads in the sand they’ll be turfed out of power within a week. An acute concern about preserving the status quo—their status quo—can work wonders. They have already blundered by having the commentator say that they have been requested—not ordered—to discuss the affair. They have been ordered, not requested, otherwise the commentator, the news-reader, would not have used the term “outrageous demand”. There’s nothing outrageous in their demand. It’s the demands that will be made when the meeting takes place—as, of course, it will do—that will almost certainly be outrageous.’

  ‘Any discussion about this matter can only be speculative,’ the Colonel said heavily. ‘So it’s not worth the speculation. We have other and more urgent matters to attend to.’

  ‘There’s a matter I should be attending to at this moment,’ van Effen said. ‘I have an appointment at the Trianon. Well, a kind of appointment. There’s a fellow there who will be expecting me but doesn’t know that I’m expecting him. One of Agnelli’s stake-outs. He’s expecting to see me in my full criminal regalia—he’s under the impression that I’ve been asleep all afternoon, which might have been no bad thing—and I mustn’t disappoint him.’

  The phone rang. De Graaf answered it and handed it to van Effen.

  ‘Yes. Yes, Lieutenant van Effen…I’ll wait…Why should I?’ He held the phone some inches from his ear. ‘Some clown advising me to avoid damage to my ear-drums and to—’ He broke off as a high-pitched scream, a feminine scream, not of fear but of agony, came from the earpiece. Van Effen jammed the phone against his ear, listened for a few seconds then hung up.

  De Graaf said: ‘What in God’s name was that?’

  ‘Julie. At least that’s what the man said. Well, his words were: “Your sister is a bit slow in cooperating. We’ll call again when she does.” ’

  ‘Torture,’ the Colonel said. His voice was steady but his eyes were mad. ‘Torturing my Julie.’

  Van Effen smiled faindy. ‘Mine, too, remember? Possibly. The Annecy brothers’ speciality. But it was just a shade too crude, too pat, too theatrical.’

  ‘God, Peter, she’s your sister!’

  ‘Yes, sir. I’ll remind the brothers of that when I meet them.’

  ‘Trace the call, man! Trace the call!’

  ‘No point, sir. I have good ears. I could just detect the faint overlay hiss of a recorder. That could have come from anywhere. And it’s what makes me think it’s a phoney put-together job.’

  ‘Then why the devil was the call made?’

  ‘Two reasons, perhaps, although I can only guess at the first. I don’t think they thought that I would even suspect that the call was not what it purported to be, that I would be so upset over my sister’s kidnapping that I would take anything in its connection at face value. Second thing, of course, is that they’re not after Julie, they’re after me. This—at least to their highly suspect way of psychological reasoning—is part of the softening-up process.’

  De Graaf sat in silence, rose, poured himself another Van der
Hum, returned to his seat, thought some more then said: ‘I hardly like to bring up this point, Lieutenant, but has it occurred to you that next time, or maybe the time after next, the Annecys may decide to abandon the psychological approach and say: “Surrender to us, Lieutenant van Effen, or your sister will die and we’ll see to it that she dies very very slowly.” Would you do it?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give yourself up to them?’

  ‘Of course. My appointment at the Trianon is overdue, sir. If there is any message for me, would you call me there. Stephan Danilov, if you remember. How long do you intend to remain here, sir?’

  ‘Until I see those maps or charts or whatever that Sergeant Oudshoorn found, and until I can get Lieutenant Valken here to take over. I’ll put him in the picture as far as I can.’

  ‘You have all the facts, sir.’

  ‘One would hope so,’ de Graaf said rather enigmatically.

  When van Effen had gone, Thyssen said curiously: ‘I know it’s not my place to speak, sir, but would the Lieutenant really do that?’

  ‘Do what?’

  ‘Give himself up.’

  ‘You heard the Lieutenant.’

  ‘But—but that would be suicide, sir.’ Thyssen seemed almost agitated. ‘That would be the end of him.’

  ‘It would be the end of someone, and that’s a fact.’ De Graaf didn’t seem overly concerned.

  Van Effen returned, via the rear entrance, to his room in the Trianon, called the desk and asked for Charles.

  ‘Charles? Van Effen. Has our friend returned?…Good. He will, I know, be in a position to hear every word you say. Kindly say the following into the phone. “Certainly, Mr Danilov. Coffee immediately and not to be disturbed afterwards. Expecting a visitor at six-thirty.” Let me know when he’s gone.’

  Some thirty seconds later Charles called to inform him that the lobby was now empty.

  Van Effen had just completed his metamorphosis into Stephan Danilov when the phone rang. It was de Graaf, who was still at Julie’s flat. He said he had something of interest to show van Effen and could he, van Effen, step round. Ten minutes, van Effen said.

  When van Effen returned to the flat he found Thyssen gone and his place taken by Lieutenant Valken. Valken was a short, stout, rubicund character, easy-going and a trencherman of some note, which may have accounted for the fact that although he was several years older than van Effen he was his junior in the service, a fact that worried Valken not at all. They were good friends. Valken was, at that moment, surveying van Effen and speaking to the Colonel.

  ‘A reversal to type, wouldn’t you say, sir? Cross between a con man and a white slaver, with just a soupçon of a Mississippi river-boat gambler thrown in. Definitely criminal, anyway.’

  De Graaf looked at van Effen and winced. ‘Wouldn’t trust him within a kilometre of either of my daughters. I don’t even trust the sound of his voice.’ He indicated the pile of papers on the table before him. ‘Like to sift through all of those, Peter. Or shall I just call attention to the ones that interest me?’

  ‘Just the ones that interest you, sir.’

  ‘God, that voice. Fine. Top five.’

  Van Effen examined each in turn. They showed plans of what were clearly different levels of the same building: the number of compartments in each plan left no doubt that it was a very large building indeed. Van Effen looked up and said: ‘And where’s van Rees?’

  ‘Well, damn your eyes!’ de Graaf was aggrieved. ‘How the hell did you know those were the plans of the royal palace?’

  ‘Didn’t you?’

  ‘No I didn’t.’ De Graaf scowled, which he did very rarely and with difficulty. ‘Not until that young architect or whatever from the City Surveyor’s office told me. You do rob an old man of his pleasures, Peter.’ De Graaf regarded himself as merely approaching the prime of his life.

  ‘I didn’t know. Just guessed. As I shall be inside that building within three hours you can understand that my thoughts turn to it from time to time. Van Rees?’

  ‘My old and trusted friend.’ De Graaf, understandably, sounded very bitter indeed. ‘Put him up for my club, by God! Should have listened to you earlier, my boy, much earlier. And we should have expedited the examination of his bank account.’

  ‘No bank account?’

  ‘Gone. Gone.’

  ‘And so, one supposes, has van Rees.’

  ‘Four million guilders,’ de Graaf said. ‘Four million. Bank manager thought it a highly unusual step to take but—well—’

  ‘One does not question the motives and the integrity of a pillar of the community?’

  ‘Blackballed,’ de Graaf said gloomily. ‘Inevitable.’

  ‘There are other clubs, sir. Schiphol, I assume, is still not open for operations?’

  ‘You assume wrongly.’ The gloom remained in de Graaf’s face. ‘Heard ten—fifteen minutes ago. First plane out, a KLM for Paris, took off about twenty minutes ago.’

  ‘Van Rees, clutching his millions, relaxing in the first class?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And no grounds for extradition. No charges against him. In fact, no hard evidence against him. That we’ll get the evidence, I don’t doubt. Then I’ll go and get him. When all this is over, I mean.’

  ‘Your illegal penchants are well known, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Yes, sir. Meantime, I suggest that my penchants, your blackballing and the fact that van Rees is at the present moment probably entering French air space are not quite of primary importance. What does matter is that van Rees—who has by this time passed over to the dyke-breakers all they’ll ever want to know about sluices, weirs and locks so that they won’t even miss him now—was also tied in with the would-be palace bombers. And we are as convinced as can be that the Annecy brothers are in league with the bombers. It was Julie who first expressed the possibility of this idea, how too much of a coincidence can be too much of a coincidence, although I must say—with all due modesty and not with hindsight—that this possibility had occurred to me before.’

  ‘Your modesty does you credit, Lieutenant.’

  ‘Thank you, sir. Well, what we’re faced with now is the probability—I would put it as high as certainty—that we are faced not with three different organizations but only with one. That should make things much simpler for us and easier to cope with.’

  ‘Oh. Of course, of course.’ De Graaf gave van Effen the kind of look that stops a long way short of being admiring. ‘How?’

  ‘How?’ Van Effen pondered. ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘Heaven help Amsterdam,’ de Graaf muttered.

  ‘Sir?’

  De Graaf was saved from enlarging on his brief statement by a knock on the door. Valken opened it to admit a tall, lean gentleman with greying hair, rimless glasses and a faintly aristocratic air. De Graaf rose to his feet and greeted him warmly.

  ‘Hugh, my good friend. So kind of you to come and to come so quickly. At great inconvenience to yourself, I have no doubt.’

  ‘Not at all, my dear chief, not at all. The patients of a plastic surgeon do not expire upon the spot if not attended to immediately. With a six-month waiting list one can squeeze in the odd patient here and there.’

  De Graaf made the introductions. ‘Professor Johnson. Lieutenant van Effen. Lieutenant Valken.’

  ‘Ah. Lieutenant van Effen. The Colonel has explained your requirements to me. Rather unusual requirements, I may say, even in our at-times somewhat bizarre profession—we tend to be called upon to remove scars, not inflict them. However.’

  He looked at the scar on van Effen’s face, produced a magnifying glass and peered more closely. ‘Not bad, not bad at all. You have quite an artistic bent, my dear fellow. Wouldn’t deceive me—not when you’ve spent all your life studying thousands of different scars of every conceivable variety. But a layman is not a plastic surgeon and I doubt very much whether any layman would question the authenticity of that scar. Let me see the dreadful wound concealed by that glov
e on your left hand.’ He did some peering. ‘By Jove, even better. You are to be congratulated. Very convenient to have it on your left hand, isn’t it? But a trifle suspicious to the nasty criminal mind, perhaps? You are, of course, right-handed.’

  Van Effen smiled. ‘You can tell just by looking at me?’

  ‘I can tell that left-handed persons don’t carry barely concealed pistols under their left armpit.’

  ‘Too late for a transfer now, sir. I’m already identified as being a left-hand-glove wearer.’

  ‘Yes. Well. I see. Your scars more than pass muster. The trouble, I suppose, is that you suspect that those scars might be subjected to some kind of test, such as with a scrubbing brush or even a hot soapy sponge?’

  ‘A hot soapy sponge is all that is needed.’

  ‘Normally, you understand, the perfect non-removable scar would take some weeks to achieve. I gather, however, that time is not on your side. Ah, Colonel. Is that Van der Hum I see?’

  ‘It is indeed.’ The Colonel poured a glass.

  ‘Thank you. We don’t generally advertise the fact, but members of our profession—well, before an operation, you understand?’

  ‘Operation?’ said van Effen.

  ‘A trifle,’ Johnson said soothingly. He took some brandy, then opened a small metal case to reveal a gleaming array of surgical instruments, most of them of a very delicate nature. ‘A series of subcutaneous injections with a variety of inert dyes. There will be no weals, no puffiness, I promise you. There will also be no local anaesthetic. Takes better that way.’ He looked very closely at the facial scar. ‘Must have the position, size and colour as before, you understand. Your left hand is unimportant. Nobody, I assume, has seen that scar. I can give you a much more satisfyingly horrific scar than you have now. Now, if I could have some hot water, sponge, soap.’