The Dark Crusader

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘But before you came you were approached by one of the powers for whom you were working while you were supposed to be our counterespionage chief. They told you they had heard rumours that English scientists were making preliminary investigations into solid fuel as a power source for missiles and rockets. They asked you to find out what you could. You agreed. I don’t pretend to know what they promised you, power, money, heaven only knows.

  ‘Nor do I pretend to know how exactly you set up your spying organization. Contacts across Europe were easy for you to arrange, and the actual clearing-house was Istanbul, where my investigations finally took me. I suspect that the way you acquired your information was by introducing into the Hepworth Ordinance and Research Establishment, the place with the highest security rating in Britain, men whom you yourself, in your official capacity, had thoroughly “screened”.

  ‘The months passed and information was gradually acquired, sent to Istanbul and re-transmitted to the Far East. But your predecessor got wind of what was happening, suspected a security leak and told the government: they instructed him, I imagine, that the business of investigating this leakage was to be given the highest priority. He started getting too close to the truth and his plane crashed into the Irish Sea and was never traced. He was seen off on that flight, at London Airport. He was seen off by you. Some time-bomb in his luggage, I suspect – our luggage is immune from Customs examination. It was a pity that there were thirty others in that plane, but that wasn’t really important, was it Raine?

  ‘You were then promoted. The obvious choice, a brilliant and devoted man who had given a lifetime to serving his country. You then found yourself in the fantastic position of having to send out agents to track down yourself. And, of course, you had to. One man you sent found out too much. He came back here and into this room with a gun in his hand to confront you with this evidence. He didn’t know about the hidden Luger, did he, Raine? And then you spread this story about how he’d been subverted and ordered to kill you. How am I doing, Colonel Raine.’

  He had no comment to make on how I was doing.

  ‘Now the Government was getting really anxious. You persuaded them that the difficulty lay in the complex nature of the technical information that was being passed, that only a scientist could really understand it. Your own agents, the honest ones, were all right in their own way, but there was one great objection to them – they were too damn good at finding things out. So, having kidded the Government, you shopped around until you found the most stupid scientist you could. The one least likely to succeed. You picked me. I can understand your reasons.

  ‘And you picked Marie Hopeman. You tried to convince me that she was a first-class agent, tough, capable and highly-experienced. She was nothing of the sort. She was just a nice girl, with a beautiful face and figure, and a considerable capacity for acting which made her ideal for the passive and undemanding position of receiving and passing on information without arousing suspicions. But that was all she had. No great intelligence, no marked degree of inventiveness, certainly not the mental ruthlessness and physical toughness essential for success in this job.

  ‘So you sent the two of us to Europe to find out what we could about this fuel leak. You must have been convinced that if there was any pair in the world who could never find anything it was Marie Hopeman and I.

  ‘But you made one mistake, Colonel Raine. You checked up on my intelligence and inventiveness, and thought you’d nothing to fear on that score. But you forgot to check on other things. Toughness and ruthlessness. I am tough and I can be completely ruthless. You’ll see that when I pull this trigger. I’ll stop at nothing to finish something I’ve started. I began finding out things, far too many things. You panicked and called us back to London.’

  Colonel Raine showed no reaction to any of this. His green unblinking eyes never left my face. He was waiting, waiting for a chance. He knew I was a sick man, and very tired. One false move, one slow reaction and he’d be on to me like an express train, and the way I felt that night I couldn’t have fought off a teddy bear.

  ‘Because of my activities,’ I went on, ‘the fuel leak had practically stopped. Your eastern friends were getting worried. But you had another string to your bow, hadn’t you, Colonel Raine? Some months before that the Government had set up a testing station for the Dark Crusader on Vardu. Security was essential and you, of course, were the man responsible for all the security arrangements. You arranged the set-up with Professor Witherspoon to have the island barred to visitors for a perfectly good and innocuous reason: you arranged for the scientists and their wives to go to Australia without arousing suspicion: you arranged for a security clearance for Captain Fleck – my God, who else but you could ever have given that rogue a clearance? – and then you told your eastern friends, under the leadership of LeClerc, to move in, eliminate and replace Witherspoon. Finally, probably by telling them that they were going to see their husbands and emphasizing to all of them the need for complete secrecy, you arranged for the transport of the scientists’ wives to Vardu. But they were landed on the wrong side of the island, weren’t they, Raine?

  ‘So now you had the two strings to your bow. If you couldn’t give your friends every detail of the new fuel, you could give them the fuel itself. Only there was one snag. Dr Fairfield got himself killed, and you had to have someone to arm the rocket.

  ‘It was brilliant, I admit it. Two birds with one stone. I had already found out too much in Europe and you knew now I was the type who wouldn’t stop till the answer was there. You told Marie Hopeman that I was the one man you could be afraid of and maybe for once you weren’t lying. I knew too much and I had to be eliminated. So did Marie Hopeman. But before my elimination, a duty you’d arranged that your friend LeClerc would carry out, I had a job to do. I was to arm the Crusader.

  ‘You could have sent me direct to the rocket installation, in a perfectly straightforward fashion, while the Navy was still there. But you knew I’d be as suspicious as hell if I was pulled off a security job and put on a civilian job. I’d be doubly suspicious because there are more qualified men in the country than I am. And of course, there would then be no reason for Marie Hopeman to accompany me. And you wanted her killed too. So you inserted this final and phoney advert in the Telegraph, showed it to me, spun us this cock-andbull story and sent us off to the Pacific.

  ‘There was only one potential snag, the vital matter on which everything else depended, and your psychological handling of this was perfect. The snag – and if you couldn’t find an answer to it everything would have been lost – was how to get me to wire up the firing circuitry and fuses of the Dark Crusader. The lamb you’d thought you’d caught had turned out to be a tiger. You knew by that time how stubborn and ruthless I could be. You guessed that threats of torture or torture itself wouldn’t make me do it. You knew, if I thought it important enough, that I could stand by and watch others being tortured or threatened with death, as Captain Griffiths and his men were, and still not do it. But you knew a man in love will do anything to protect the one he loves. And so you arranged that I fall in love with Marie Hopeman. You reckoned that no one could sit side by side in planes with Marie Hopeman for two days, spend a night in the same room, spend a night and a day in the hold of a ship, a night huddled together on a reef and two more days side by side in the same hut without falling in love with her. My God, even going to the length of having the bogus Witherspoon trying to make me jealous. Damn your black heart, Raine, you gave us the time, the situation and every opportunity to fall in love. And so we did. They tortured her, and let me see her. They threatened to do it again. And so, God help me, I armed the Dark Crusader. And God help you too, Colonel Raine, for it’s because of Marie that you’re going to die. Not because of all the deaths you’ve caused, the misery, the heartbreak, the suffering. But for Marie.’

  I pushed myself painfully off the table and limped round till I was within three feet of him.

  ‘You can’t prove any of thi
s.’ Raine said hoarsely.

  ‘That’s why I have to kill you here,’ I agreed indifferently. ‘No court in the country would look at my case. No proof, but there were many things that pointed to your guilt, Raine, things that I didn’t see till it was too late. How did Fleck know Marie had a gun in the false bottom of her bag? – scientists’ wives don’t usually carry guns. Why did LeClerc – Witherspoon, as I knew him – say we weren’t long married – we didn’t behave that way. Later, why did he show no surprise when I told him we weren’t married? He said I’d a photographic memory – how the hell did he know that unless you told him? Why did LeClerc and Hewell try to cripple me with a heavy safe? – they knew I was an intelligence agent, you told them and they didn’t want me snooping around. Who gave Fleck security clearance from London? How did they know the Crusader was about to be tested, if the word hadn’t been relayed from London? Why was no attention paid to the SOS cable I sent to London, no action taken? LeClerc spun a yarn about sending a second message cancelling the first, but you know every message to this office, coded or plain, must have my identification word “Bilex” in the middle. Why were no inquiries made at the Grand Pacific Hotel after our disappearance? I checked on my way home and neither the government house nor police had been asked to investigate. The observer who was supposed to accompany us on the plane never reported our disappearance – for there was no observer, was there, Colonel Raine? Pointers, only, not proof: you’re right, I couldn’t prove a thing.’

  Raine smiled: the man seemed to have no nerves at all.

  ‘How would you feel, Bentall, if you killed me and found out you were completely wrong?’ He leaned forward and said softly: ‘How would you feel if I gave you absolute proof, here and now, that you’re completely, terribly wrong?’

  ‘You’re wasting your time, Colonel Raine. Here it comes.’

  ‘But damn it, man, I’ve got the proof!’ he shouted. ‘I’ve got it right here. My wallet – ’

  He lifted his left lapel with his left hand, reached for the inside pocket with his right, the small black automatic was clear of his coat and the finger tightening on the trigger when I shot him through the head at point-blank range. The automatic spun from his hand, he jerked back violently in his seat, then fell forward, head and shoulders striking heavily on the dusty desk.

  I took out my handkerchief, pulling with it a piece of paper that fluttered to the floor. I let it lie. Handkerchief in hand I picked up the fallen gun, replaced it in his inside pocket, wiped the Luger, pushed it into the dead man’s hand, pressed his thumb and fingers against the butt and trigger, then let gun and hand fall loosely to the table. I then smeared the door-knobs, armrests, wherever I had touched, and picked up the fallen paper.

  It was the note from Marie. I opened it, held it by a corner above Raine’s ashtray, struck a match and watched it slowly burn away, the tiny flame creeping inexorably down the paper until it reached the words at the foot, ‘You and me and the lights of London,’ until those, too, one by one, were burnt and blackened and gone. I crushed the ash in the tray and went.

  I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him lying there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.