Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘They filed a false flight plan, Vyland, but that didn’t do them any good at all for one of those noble and high-minded civil servants who had been so anxious to pay the debt to Britain and America was as crooked as they come and a creature of yours, Vyland. He knew of the true flight plan, and radioed you. You were in Havana, and you’d everything laid on, hadn’t you, Vyland?’

  ‘How do you know all this?’ Vyland croaked.

  ‘Because I am – I was – the owner of the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co.’ I felt unutterably tired, I don’t know whether it was because of the pain or the foul air or just because of the overwhelming sense of the emptiness of living. ‘I was grounded at Belize, in British Honduras, at the time, but I managed to pick them up on the radio – after they had repaired it. They told me then that someone had tried to blow up the plane, but I know now that wasn’t quite true, all they had tried to do was to wreck the radio, to cut the DC off from the outer world. They almost succeeded – but not quite. You never knew, did you, Vyland, that someone was in radio contact with that plane just before it was shot out of the sky. But I was. Just for two minutes, Vyland.’ I looked at him slowly, consideringly, emptily. ‘Two little minutes that mean you die tonight.’

  Vyland stared at me with sick terror in his eyes. He knew what was coming all right, or thought he knew: he knew now who I was, he knew now what it was to meet a man who had lost everything, a man to whom pity and compassion were no longer even words. Slowly, as if at the expense of great effort and pain, he twisted his head to look at Royale, but, for the first time ever, there was no comfort, no security, no knowledge of safety to be found there, for the incredible was happening at last: Royale was afraid.

  I half-turned and pointed at the shattered cabin of the DC.

  ‘Take a good look, Vyland,’ I said quietly. ‘Take a good look at what you’ve done and feel proud of yourself. In the captain’s seat – that skeleton was once Peter Talbot, my twin brother. The other is Elizabeth Talbot – she was my wife, Vyland. In the back of the plane will be all that’s left of a very little boy. John Talbot, my son. He was three and a half years old. I’ve thought a thousand times about how my little boy died, Vyland. The bullets that killed my wife and brother wouldn’t have got him, he’d have been alive till the plane hit the water. Maybe two or three minutes, the plane tumbling and falling through the sky, Vyland, and the little boy sobbing and screaming and terrified out of his mind, and his mother not coming when he called her name. When he called her name over and over again. But she couldn’t come, could she, Vyland? She was sitting in her seat, dead. And then the plane hit the water and even then, perhaps, Johny was still alive. Maybe the fuselage took time to sink – it happens that way often, you know, Vyland – or had it air trapped inside it when it sank. I wonder how long it was before the waters closed over him. Can’t you see it, Vyland, three years old, screaming and struggling and dying and no one near him? And then the screaming and struggling stopped and my little boy was drowned.’

  I looked out at the smashed plane cabin for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, and when I turned away Vyland caught my right arm. I pushed him off and he fell on the duckboard floor, staring up at me with wide, panic-stricken eyes. His mouth was open, his breathing coming in quick, harsh gasps, and his entire body was trembling. Royale was still in control of himself, but only just: ivory knuckled hands rested on his knees and his eyes were moving constantly about the observation chamber, a hunted animal seeking a way to escape.

  ‘I’ve waited a long time for this, Vyland,’ I went on. ‘I’ve waited two years and four months and I don’t believe I’ve ever thought for five minutes about anything else in all that time.

  ‘I’ve nothing left to live for, Vyland, you can understand that. I’ve had enough. I suppose it’s macabre, but I’d kind of like to stay here beside them. I’ve stopped kidding myself about the point in carrying on living. There’s none, not any more, so I might as well stay here. There’s no point now, because all that’s kept me going was the promise I made myself on the third of May, 1958, that I’d never rest again till I’d sought out and destroyed the man who had destroyed life for me. That I’ve done, and there’s no more now. It should spoil it for me, I suppose, the thought that you’ll be here also, but on the other hand I suppose it’s kind of fitting. The killers and their victims, all together in the end.’

  ‘You’re mad,’ Vyland whispered. ‘You’re mad. What are you saying?’

  ‘Only this. Remember that electrical switch that was left on the table? The one you asked about and I said “We won’t be needing that any more”? Well we won’t. Not any more. That was the master control for the ballast release switches and without it the ballast release is completely jinxed. And without releasing ballast we can never rise again. Here we are, Vyland, and here we stay. For ever.’

  TWELVE

  The sweat poured down our faces in rivulets. The temperature had risen to almost 120° Fahrenheit, the air was humid and now almost indescribably foul. Our hoarse rasping gasps as we fought for oxygen was the only sound in that tiny steel ball resting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, 480 feet below the level of the sea.

  ‘You jinxed it?’ Vyland’s voice was a weak incredulous whisper, his eyes near-crazed with fear. ‘We’re – we’re stuck here? Here, in this––’ His voice faded away as he turned his head and started looking around with all the terror-stricken desperation of a cornered rat about to die. Which was all he was.

  ‘There’s no way out, Vyland,’ I assured him grimly. ‘Only through that entrance hatch. Maybe you want to try opening it? – at this depth there can only be a pressure of fifty tons or so on the outside of it. And if you could open it – well, you’d be flattened half an inch thick against the opposite bulkhead. Don’t take it too badly, Vyland – the last few minutes will be agony such as you’ve never believed man could know, you’ll be able to see your hands and your face turning blue and purple in the last few seconds before all the major blood vessels in your lungs start to rupture, but soon after that you’ll –’

  ‘Stop it, stop it!’ Vyland screamed. ‘For God’s sake stop it! Get us out of here, Talbot, get us out of here! I’ll give you anything you like, one million, two millions, five millions. You can have it all, Talbot, you can have it all!’ His mouth and face worked like a maniac’s, his eyes were staring out of his head.

  ‘You make me sick,’ I said dispassionately. ‘I wouldn’t get you out if I could, Vyland. And it was just in case that I might be tempted that I left the control switch up in the rig. We’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to live, if you can call the screaming agony we’ll know living. Or, rather, the agony you’ll know.’ I put my hand to my coat, ripped off the central button and thrust it into my mouth. ‘I won’t know a thing, I’ve been prepared for this for months. That’s no button, Vyland, it’s a concentrated cyanide capsule. One bite on that and I’ll be dead before I know I’m dying.’

  That got him. Dribbling from a corner of his mouth and babbling incoherently, he flung himself on me, with what purpose in mind I don’t know. He was too crazed to know. He was too crazed to know himself. But I had been expecting it, a heavy spanner lay to hand and he’d picked it up and swung it before he even touched me. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it was enough: he reeled backwards, struck his head against the casing and collapsed heavily on the floor.

  That left Royale. He was half-sitting, half-crouched on his little canvas stool, his sphinx-like control had completely snapped, he knew he had only minutes to live and his face was working overtime making up for all those expressions it hadn’t used in those many years. He saw closing in on himself what he had meted out to so many victims over so long a time and the talons of fear were squeezing deep, reaching for the innermost corners of his mind. He wasn’t panic-stricken yet, not completely out of control as Vyland had gone, but his capacity for reason, for thought, was gone. All he could think to do was what he always thought to do in an emergency and that
was of using his deadly little black gun. He had it out now and it was pointing at me, but I knew it meant nothing, it was purely a reflex action and he had no intention of using it. For the first time Royale had met a problem that couldn’t be solved by a squeeze of the trigger finger.

  ‘You’re scared, Royale, aren’t you?’ I said softly. It was an effort now even to speak, my normal breathing rate of about sixteen was now up to fifty, and it was difficult to get the time to force out a word.

  He said nothing, just looked at me, and all the devils in hell were in the depth of those black eyes. For a second time in forty-eight hours, and this time in spite of the humidity, the foul and evil-smelling air in that cabin, I could have sworn I caught the smell of new-turned, moist, fresh earth. The smell you get from an open grave.

  ‘The big bad hatchet-man,’ I whispered huskily. ‘Royale. Royale the killer. Think of all the people who used to tremble, who still do tremble, whenever they hear the breath of your name? Don’t you wish they could see you now? Don’t you, Royale? Don’t you wish they could see you trembling? You are trembling, Royale, aren’t you? You’re terrified as you’ve never been terrified in your life. Aren’t you, Royale?’

  Again he said nothing. The devils were still in his eyes, but they weren’t watching me any more, they were riding hard on Royale, they were digging deep into the dark recesses of that dark mind, the shift and play of expression on his contorted face was evidence enough that they were pulling him every which way but the overall pull was towards the dark precipice of complete breakdown, of that overmastering fear that wears the cloak of insanity.

  ‘Like it, Royale?’ I said hoarsely. ‘Can’t you feel your throat, your lungs starting to hurt? I can feel mine – and I can see your face starting to turn blue. Not much, yet, just starting under the eyes. The eyes and the nose, they always show up first.’ I thrust my hand into my display pocket, brought out a little rectangle of polished chrome. ‘A mirror, Royale. Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to see –?’

  ‘Damn you to hell, Talbot!’ He knocked the mirror flying out of my hand, his voice was halfway between a sob and a scream. ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’

  ‘But your victims did, didn’t they, Royale?’ I could no longer speak intelligibly, it took me four or five breaths to pant out that one sentence. ‘They all had their minds bent on suicide and you just helped them out of the depths of the kindness of your heart. Isn’t that it, Royale?’

  ‘You’re going to die, Talbot.’ His voice was a frenzied croak, the shaking gun was lined up on my heart. ‘It’s coming to you now.’

  ‘I’m laughing. I’m laughing out loud. I’ve got a Cyanide tablet between my teeth.’ My chest was hurting, the inside of the observation chamber was beginning to swim before my eyes. I knew I couldn’t last out much longer. ‘Go ahead,’ I gasped. ‘Go ahead and pull the trigger.’

  He looked at me with crazy unfocused eyes that had hardly any contact left with reality and fumbled the little black gun into its holster. The beating he’d taken over his head was now beginning to take its toll, he was in an even worse state than I was. He began to sway in his seat, and suddenly fell forward on to his hands and knees, shaking his head from side to side as if to clear away a fog. I leaned across him, barely conscious myself, closed my fingers over the control knob of the carbon dioxide absorption unit and turned it from minimum all the way up to maximum. It would take two minutes, perhaps three, before there would be any noticeable improvement, maybe the best part of ten minutes before the atmosphere inside that chamber was anything like back to normal. Right then, it made no difference at all. I bent over Royale.

  ‘You’re dying, Royale,’ I gasped out. ‘How does it feel to die, Royale? Tell me, please, how does it feel? How does it feel to be buried in a tomb five hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea? How does it feel to know that you’ll never breathe that wonderful, clean, fresh air of the world above again? How does it feel to know that you’ll never see the sun again? How does it feel to die? Tell me, Royale, how does it feel?’ I bent still closer to him. ‘Tell me, Royale, how would you like to live?’

  He didn’t get it, he was that far gone.

  ‘How would you like to live, Royale?’ I almost had to shout the words.

  ‘I want to live.’ His voice was a harsh moan of pain, his clenched right fist was beating weakly on the deck of the chamber. ‘Oh, God, I want to live.’

  ‘Maybe I can give you life yet. Maybe. You’re down on your hands and knees, aren’t you, Royale? You’re begging for your life, aren’t you, Royale? I’ve sworn I’d see the day when you were on your hands and knees begging for your life and now you’re doing just that, aren’t you, Royale?’

  ‘Damn you, Talbot!’ His voice was a hoarse, despairing, agonized shout, he was swaying on his hands and knees now, his head turning from side to side, his eyes screwed shut. Down there on the floor the air must have been foul and contaminated to a degree, almost completely without oxygen, and his face was really beginning to show the first tinges of blue. He was breathing with the rapidity of a panting dog, each brief indrawn breath a whoop of agony. ‘Get me out of here! For God’s sake get me out of here.’

  ‘You’re not dead yet, Royale,’ I said in his ear. ‘Maybe you will see the sun again. But maybe you won’t. I lied to Vyland, Royale. The master switch for the ballast release is still in position – I just altered a couple of wires, that’s all. It would take you hours to find out which two. I could fix it in thirty seconds.’

  He stopped swaying his head, looked up at me with a blue-tinged sweat-sheened face, with bloodshot fear-darkened eyes that carried far back in them the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Get me out of here, Talbot,’ he whispered. He didn’t know whether there was any hope or whether this was just a further refinement of torture.

  ‘I could do it, Royale, couldn’t I? See, I’ve got the screwdriver right here.’ I showed it to him, smiled down without any compassion. ‘But I’ve still got this cyanide tablet in my mouth, Royale.’ I showed him the button, gripped between my teeth.

  ‘Don’t!’ A hoarse cry. ‘Don’t bite on that! You’re mad, Talbot, mad. God, you’re not human.’ Coming from Royale that was good.

  ‘Who killed Jablonsky?’ I asked quietly. It was becoming easier to breathe now, but not down where Royale was.

  ‘I did. I killed him,’ Royale moaned.

  ‘How?’

  ‘I shot him. Through the head. He was asleep.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘We buried him in the kitchen garden.’ Royale was still moaning and swaying, but he was putting everything he could muster into his reeling thoughts to try to express them coherently: his nerve, for the moment, was gone beyond recall, he was talking for his life and he knew it.

  ‘Who’s behind Vyland?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  ‘Who’s behind Vyland?’ I repeated implacably.

  ‘Nobody.’ His voice was almost a scream he was so desperate to convince me. ‘There were two men, a Cuban minister in the government, and Houras, a permanent civil servant in Colombia. But not now.’

  ‘What happened to them?’

  ‘They were – they were eliminated,’ Royale said wearily. ‘I did it.’

  ‘Who else did you eliminate since you’ve been working for Vyland?’

  ‘Nobody.’

  I showed him the button between my teeth and he shuddered.

  ‘The pilot. The pilot flying the fighter that shot down this plane. He – he knew too much.’

  ‘That’s why we could never find that pilot,’ I nodded. ‘My God, you’re a sweet bunch. But you made a mistake Royale, didn’t you? You shot him too soon. Before he’d told you exactly where the DC had crashed … Vyland give you orders for all this?’

  He nodded.

  ‘Did you hear my question?’ I demanded.

  ‘Vyland gave me orders for all of that.’

  There was a brief
silence. I stared out of the window, saw some strange shark-like creature swim into sight, stare incuriously at both bathyscaphe and plane, then vanish into the stygian blackness beyond with a lazy flick of its tail. I turned and tapped Royale on the shoulder.

  ‘Vyland,’ I said. ‘Try to bring him round.’

  While Royale stooped over his employer I reached above him for the oxygen regenerating switch. I didn’t want the air getting too fresh too soon.

  After maybe a minute or so Royale managed to bring Vyland to. Vyland’s breathing was very distressed, he was pretty far gone in the first stages of anoxia, but for all that he still had some breath left, for when he opened his eyes, stared wildly around and saw me with the button still between my teeth he started screaming, time and again, a horrible nerve-drilling sound in that tiny confined metal space. I reached forward to smack his face to jolt him out of his panic-stricken hysteria, but Royale got there first. Royale had had his tiny fleeting glimpse of hope and he meant to play that hope to the end of the way. He lifted his hand and he wasn’t any too gentle with Vyland.

  ‘Stop it!’ Royale shook him violently. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! Talbot says he can fix this machine. Do you hear me? Talbot says he can fix it!’

  Slowly the screaming died away and Vyland stared at Royale with eyes where the first faint flicker of comprehension was beginning to edge in on the fear and the madness.

  ‘What did you say?’ he whimpered hoarsely. ‘What was that, Royale?’

  ‘Talbot says he can fix this machine,’ Royale repeated urgently. ‘He says he lied to us, he says that the switch he left up top wasn’t important. He can fix it!’

  ‘You – you can fix it, Talbot?’ Vyland’s eyes widened until I could see a ring of white all round the irises, his shaking voice was a prayer, the whole curve of his body a gesture of supplication. He wasn’t even daring to hope yet, his mind had gone too deeply into the shadow of the valley of death to glimpse the light above: or rather he didn’t dare to look, in case there was no light there. ‘You can get us out of this? Now – even now you –’