Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  I went quickly to my seat at the tiny table behind the curtain and sat down. I felt shaken. I should have felt relieved to know that Royale had not been suspicious, that he’d merely been checking to see that the coast was clear before we went into the general’s room, but I was more concerned about my own slip-up. My attention was so taken up with immediate problems that I had forgotten that I was playing the part of a murderer. Had I been a genuine and wanted killer, I’d have kept my face hidden, walked in the middle of the group and peered fearfully round every corner we’d come to. I had done none of those things. How long would it be before it occurred to Royale to wonder why I had done none of those things?

  The outside door opened and someone, a steward, I assumed, entered. Once again it was the general who was the host, the man in charge, with Vyland his employee and guest: the general’s ability to switch roles, his unfailing command of himself in all circumstances, impressed me more every time I noticed it. I was beginning to hope that perhaps it might be a good thing to let the general in on something of what was happening, to seek his help in a certain matter, I was certain now he could carry off any deception, any duplicity where the situation demanded it. But he might as well have been a thousand miles away for any hope I had of contacting him.

  The general finished giving his orders for lunch, the door closed behind the departing steward and for perhaps a minute there was complete silence. Then someone rose to his feet and crossed the room and the next I heard was the sound of bottles and glasses clinking. Trifles like murder and forcible coercion and underwater recovery of millions weren’t going to get in the way of the observance of the customs of the old Southern hospitality. I would have taken long odds that it was the general himself who was acting as barman, and I was right: I would have taken even longer odds that he would pass up Talbot the murderer, and I was wrong. The alcove curtain was pushed back and the general himself set down a glass before me: he remained bent over my tiny table for a couple of seconds, and the look he gave me wasn’t the look you give a known murderer who has at one time kidnapped your daughter and threatened her with death. It was a long, slow, considering, speculative look: and then incredibly, but unmistakably, the corner of his mouth twitched in a smile and his eye closed in a wink. Next moment he was gone, the curtain falling into place and shutting me off from the company.

  I hadn’t imagined it, I knew I hadn’t imagined it. The general was on to me. How much he was on to me I couldn’t guess, any more than I could guess at the reasons that had led to the discovery of what he knew or suspected. One thing I was sure of, he hadn’t learned from his daughter, I’d impressed her enough with the necessity for complete secrecy.

  There was a rumble of conversation in the room and I became aware that it was General Ruthven himself who held the floor.

  ‘It’s damnably insulting and utterly ridiculous,’ he was saying in a voice that I’d never heard before. A dry, icy voice that I could just see being brought to bear for maximum effect in quelling an unruly board of directors. ‘I don’t blame Talbot, murderer though he is. This gun-waving, this guarding has got to stop. I insist on it, Vyland. Good God, man, it’s so utterly unnecessary and I don’t think a man like you would go in for cheaply melodramatic stuff like this.’ The general was warming to his theme of making a stand against being shepherded around at pistol point, or at least against constant surveillance. ‘Look at the weather, man – no one can move from here in the next twelve hours at least. We’re not in the position to make any trouble – and you know I’m the last man in the world to want to. I can vouch personally for my daughter and Kennedy.’

  The general was sharp, sharp as a needle, sharper than either Vyland or Royale. He was a bit late in the day in making his stand against surveillance, I guessed what he was really after was the power of freedom of movement – possibly for himself, even more possibly for his chauffeur. And, what was more, he was getting it. Vyland was agreeing, with the reservation that when he and Royale went in the bathyscaphe the general, his chauffeur and Mary should remain in the room above the pillar along with the rest of Vyland’s men. I still had no idea how many men Vyland actually had aboard the rig, but it seemed likely that apart from Larry, Cibatti and his friend there were at least three others. And they would be men in the mould of Cibatti.

  Conversation broke off short as a knock came again to the door. A steward – or stewards – set down covers, made to serve but were told by the general to go. As the door closed he said: ‘Mary, I wonder if you would take something to Talbot?’

  There came the soft sound of the rubbing of chair legs on the carpet, then Kennedy’s voice, saying: ‘If I might be permitted, sir?’

  ‘Thank you, Kennedy. Just a minute while my daughter serves it out.’ By and by the curtain was pushed to one side and Kennedy carefully laid a plate in front of me. Beside the plate he laid a small blue leather-covered book, straightened, looked at me expressionlessly and left.

  He was gone before I had realized the significance of what he had done. He knew very well that whatever concessions in freedom of movement the general had gained did not apply to me, I was going to be under eye and gun for sixty seconds every minute, sixty minutes every hour and that our last chance for talking was gone. But not our last chance for communication, not with that little book lying around.

  It wasn’t strictly a book, it was that cross between a diary and an account book, with a tiny pencil stuck in the loop of leather, which garages and car-dealers dole out in hundreds of thousands, usually at Christmas time, to the more solvent of their customers. Nearly all chauffeurs carried one for entering up in the appropriate spaces the cost of petrol, oil, services, repairs, mileage and fuel consumption. None of those things interested me: all that interested me was the empty spaces in the diary pages and the little blue pencil.

  With one eye on the book and one on the curtain and both ears attuned to the voices and sounds beyond that curtain I wrote steadily for the better part of five minutes, feeding myself blindly with fork in the left hand while with my right I tried to set down in the briefest time and the shortest compass everything I wanted to tell Kennedy. When I was finished I felt reasonably satisfied: there was still a great deal left to chance but it was the best I could do. Accepting of chances was the essence of this game.

  Perhaps ten minutes after I had finished writing Kennedy brought me in a cup of coffee. The book was nowhere to be seen, but he didn’t hesitate, his hand went straight under the crumpled napkin in front of me, closed over the little book and slid it smoothly inside his tunic. I was beginning to have a great deal of confidence indeed in Simon Kennedy.

  Five minutes later Vyland and Royale marched me back to the other side of the rig. Negotiating the hurricane blast that swept across the open well-deck was no easier this time than it had been the last, and in the intervening half-hour the darkness had deepened until it was almost as black as night.

  At twenty past three I dropped once more down into the bathyscaphe and pulled the hatch cover tight behind me.

  TEN

  At half-past six I left the bathyscaphe. I was glad to leave. If you have no work to occupy you – and apart from a task lasting exactly one minute I hadn’t done a stroke that afternoon – the interior of a bathyscaphe has singularly little to offer in the way of entertainment and relaxation. I left Cibatti to screw down the hatch in the floor of the pillar and climbed alone up the hundred and eighty iron rungs to the compartment at the top. Royale was there, alone.

  ‘Finished, Talbot?’ he asked.

  ‘All I can do down there. I need paper, pencil, the book of instructions and if I’m right – and I think I am – I can have those engines going within five minutes of getting down there again. Where’s Vyland?’

  ‘The general called for him five minutes ago.’ Good old general, dead on the dot. ‘They’ve gone off somewhere – I don’t know where.’

  It doesn’t matter. This’ll only take me half an hour at the most. You can tell him
we’ll be ready to go shortly after seven. Now I want some paper and peace and quiet for my calculations. Where’s the nearest place?’

  ‘Won’t this do?’ Royale asked mildly. ‘I’ll get Cibatti to fetch some paper.’

  ‘If you imagine I’m going to work with Cibatti giving me the cold cod eye all the time you’re mistaken.’ I thought a moment. ‘We passed a regular office a few yards along the passage on the way back here. It was open. Proper desk and everything, all the paper and rules I need.’

  ‘What’s the harm?’ Royale shrugged and stood aside to let me pass. As I went out Cibatti emerged through the trunking from the pillar and before we’d gone ten feet along the passage I heard the solid thudding home of a bolt, the turning of a key in the lock behind us. Cibatti took his keeper of the castle duties very seriously indeed.

  Halfway along the passage an opened door led into a small, fairly comfortable room. I looked over my shoulder at Royale, saw his nod and went in. The room looked as if it had been used as an architect’s office, for there were a couple of large drawing boards on easels topped by strip lighting. I passed those up in favour of a big leather-covered desk with a comfortable armchair behind it.

  Royale looked round the room the way Royale would always look round a room. It was impossible to imagine Royale sitting down anywhere with his back to a door, overlooked by a window or with light in his eyes. He would have behaved the same in a children’s nursery. In this case, however, he seemed to be examining the room more with an eye to its qualification as a prison, and what he saw must have satisfied him: apart from the doorway through which he had just entered, the only other point of egress from the room was through the plate-glass window that overlooked the sea. He picked a chair directly under the central overhead light, lit a cigarette and sat there quietly, the lamplight gleaming off his dark blond slick hair, his expressionless face in shadow. He was no more than six feet from me and he had nothing in his hands and could have had that little black gun out and two little holes drilled through me before I covered half the distance towards his chair. Besides, violence wasn’t on the cards just then: not, at least, for me.

  I spent ten minutes in scribbling down figures on a sheet of paper, fiddling with a slide rule, consulting a wiring diagram and getting nowhere at all. I didn’t conceal the fact that I was getting nowhere at all. I clicked my tongue in impatience, scratched my head with the end of my pencil, compressed my lips and looked with mounting irritation at the walls, the door, the window. But mostly I looked in irritation at Royale. Eventually he got it – he would have been hard pressed not to get it.

  ‘My presence here bothering you, Talbot?’

  ‘What? Well no, not exactly – I just don’t seem to be getting –’

  ‘Not working out as easily as you thought it would, eh?’

  I stared at him in irritable silence. If he wasn’t going to suggest it I would have to, but he saved me the trouble.

  ‘Maybe I’m just as anxious as you to get this thing over. I guess you’re one of those characters who don’t like distraction. And I seem to be distracting you.’ He rose easily to his feet, glanced at the paper in front of me, picked up his chair with one hand and made for the door. ‘I’ll wait outside.’

  I said nothing, just nodded briefly. He took the key from the inside of the door, went out into the passage, shut the door and locked it. I got up, crossed to the door on cat feet and waited.

  I didn’t have to wait long. Within a minute I heard the sound of feet walking briskly along the passage outside, the sound of somebody saying, ‘Sorry, Mac’ in a pronounced and unmistakably American accent and then, almost in the same instant, the solid, faintly hollow sounding impact of a heavy blow that had me wincing in vicarious suffering. A moment later the key turned in the lock, the door opened and I helped drag a heavy load into the room.

  The load was Royale and he was out, cold as a flounder. I hauled him inside while the oilskinned figure who’d lifted him through the door reversed the key and turned it in the lock. At once he started throwing off sou’wester, coat and leggings, and beneath everything his maroon uniform was as immaculate as ever.

  ‘Not at all bad,’ I murmured. ‘Both the sap and the American accent. You’d have fooled me.’

  ‘It fooled Royale.’ Kennedy bent and looked at the already purpling bruise above Royale’s temple. ‘Maybe I hit him too hard.’ He was as deeply concerned as I would have been had I accidentally trodden on a passing tarantula. ‘He’ll live.’

  ‘He’ll live. It must have been a long deferred pleasure for you.’ I had shed my own coat and was struggling into the oilskin rig-out as fast as I could. ‘Everything fixed? Get the stuff in the workshop?’

  ‘Look, Mr Talbot,’ he said reproachfully, ‘I had three whole hours.’

  ‘Fair enough. And if our friend here shows any sign of coming to?’

  ‘I’ll just kind of lean on him again,’ Kennedy said dreamily.

  I grinned and left. I’d no idea how long the general could detain Vyland on whatever spurious errand he’d called him away, but I suspected it wouldn’t be very long; Vyland was beginning to become just that little bit anxious about the time factor. Maybe I hadn’t done myself any good by pointing out that the government agents might only be waiting for the weather to moderate before coming out to question the general, but with Vyland pointing his gun at me and threatening to kill me I had to reach out and grasp the biggest straw I could find.

  The wind on the open well-deck shrieked and gusted as powerfully as ever, but its direction had changed and I had to fight my way almost directly against it. It came from the north now and I knew then that the centre of the hurricane must have passed somewhere also to the north of us, curving in on Tampa. It looked as if the wind and the seas might begin to moderate within a few hours. But, right then, the wind was as strong as it had ever been and on my way across I had my head and shoulders so far hunched into the wind that I was looking back the way I came. I fancied, in the near darkness, that I saw a figure clawing its way along the life-line behind me, but I paid no attention. People were probably using that line all day long.

  The time for circumspection, for the careful reconnoitring of every potential danger in my path, was past. It was all or nothing now. Arrived at the other side I strode down the long corridor where I had whispered to Kennedy earlier in the afternoon, turned right at its end instead of left as we had done before, stopped to orientate myself and headed in the direction of the broad companionway which, Mary had said, led up to the actual drilling deck itself. There were several people wandering around, one of the open doors I passed gave on to a recreation room full of blue smoke and crowded with men: obviously all work on drilling and the upper deck was completely stopped. It didn’t worry the drillers, their ten-day tour of duty was paid from the time they left shore till they set foot on it again, and it didn’t worry me for it was to the working deck I was going and the absence of all traffic that I’d find up there would make my task all the easier.

  Rounding another corner I all but cannoned into a couple of people who seemed to be arguing rather vehemently about something or other: Vyland and the general. Vyland was the man who was doing the talking but he broke off to give me a glare as I apologized for bumping him and continued down the passage. I was certain he could not have recognized me, my sou’wester had been pulled right down to my eyes, the high flyaway collar of my oilskin was up to my nose and, best disguise of all, I had dispensed with my limp, but for all that I had the most uncomfortable sensation between the shoulder blades until I had rounded another corner and was lost to their sight. I wasn’t sure whether this obvious argument between the general and Vyland was a good thing or not. If the general had managed to get him deeply interested in some controversial subject of immediate and personal importance to them both, then well and good; but if Vyland had been expostulating over what he regarded as some unnecessary delay, things might get very rough indeed. If he got back to the other side of the r
ig before I did, I didn’t like to think what the consequences would be. So I didn’t think about them. Instead, I broke into a run, regardless of the astonished looks from passers-by at a complete loss to understand the reason for this violent activity on what was in effect a well-paid holiday; reached the companion way and went up two steps at a time.

  Mary, tightly wrapped in a hooded plastic raincoat, was waiting behind the closed doors at the top of the steps. She shrank back and gave a little gasp as I stopped abruptly in front of her and pulled down the collar of my oilskin for a moment to identify myself.

  ‘You!’ She stared at me. ‘You – your bad leg – what’s happened to your limp?’

  ‘Never had one. Local colour. Guaranteed to fool the most suspicious. Kennedy told you what I wanted you for?’

  ‘A – a watchdog. To keep guard.’

  ‘That’s it. I don’t want a bullet or a knife in my back in that radio shack. Sorry it had to be you, but there was no one else. Where’s the shack?’

  ‘Through the door.’ She pointed. ‘About fifty feet that way.’

  ‘Come on.’ I grabbed the door handle, incautiously twisted it open, and if I hadn’t had a strong grip on it I’d have been catapulted head over heels to the foot of the stairs. As it was, the hammerblow blast of that shrieking wind smashed both door and myself back against the bulkhead with a force that drove all the breath out of my lungs in an explosive gasp and would possibly have stunned me if the sou’wester hadn’t cushioned the impact as the back of my head struck painfully against the steel. For a moment I hung there, my head a kaleidoscopic whirl of shooting colour, bent double against the hurricane force of the wind, whooping painfully as I fought to overcome the shock of the blow and the sucking effect of the wind and to draw some breath into my aching lungs: then I straightened up and lurched out through the door, pulling Mary behind me. Twice I tried to heave the door close, but against the sustained pressure of that wind I couldn’t even pull it halfway to. I gave it up. They could, and no doubt very shortly would, send up a platoon from below and heave it shut: I had more urgent things to attend to.