Terror's Cradle

by Duncan Kyle

  After a while, I said, 'Some damn fool phoned me last night. Told me to get out of town pronto. It made me feel like John Wayne.'

  I'd turned a little in my seat to watch his reaction and it wasn't quite what I'd expected. His jaw actually dropped, which meant he was either a very good actor or wasn't involved. He said, 'Who was it?'

  `Didn't say. They just told me to get out of town.* After a moment he said rustily, 'Why didn't you?' `Serious, is it?'

  `Have you . . . crossed some guy?'

  `Frequently. But not in this country. Certainly not in Las Vegas. I only got here last night.'

  Spinetti's jaw was tight. He reached into the dash and produced a Coke can, flipped the top open and drank. 'You thought it was some newspaperman playing tricksy, right?'

  `Right.'

  `Well, maybe.' He sounded far from convinced and I watched his eyes flicker to the rearview mirror.

  `But you think not? Who usually tells people to get out of town?'

  `How do I know? Listen—' he interrupted himself to take another swig from the can. '

  Who you think runs this town?'

  `Tell

  :Sure I'll tell you.' Spinetti's eyes darted again to the rearview mirror. 'The Mob runs it. For the Mob's benefit. Understand?'

  I said, 'I wouldn't know a mobster from a Joshua tree. And they wouldn't know me. Why should they?'

  He shrugged. 'Who knows?'

  We drove on in silence, but his knuckles were whitish on the steering wheel and though it was morning cool, there was a shine of sweat on his tanned brow. After a while I began to feel it too, and turned to look back, but the road behind was empty. We swung off to the left at a junction for Boulder City and the Oldsmobile slid along the wide highway at an easy

  seventy that would have been pleasantly relaxing if there hadn't been all that tension in the driving seat. Spinetti was brown and broody, but at last he broke the silence. 'In your shoes, Sellers,' he said, 'I'd do like the man said. Right after the interview, I'd go. Maybe I'd go before.'

  I nodded. A grey goose stamped on my grave somewhere and a little shudder ran across my shoulders. I said, 'When I've seen Susannah, there's nothing to keep me.'

  `Not if you're wise.'

  I was getting brown and broody myself. I was almost certain by now that Spinetti had had no part in the call and could think of nobody else, newsmen apart, who might have reason to want me out. Unless ...

  I said, 'Susannah. Who's she been involved with?' `Just some guys. Like always.'

  `People who wouldn't want her to talk to reporters?'

  He thought about it. 'Maybe. I doubt that. But maybe. She chooses rough company some days.'

  We came over a ridge, driving downhill towards a great sheet of smooth water. In the sunshine it looked cool and shiny-blue and beautiful, like a scene from a travel brochure, but better. We were dropping down towards the shore, where a lot of boats rode quietly at a marina. Spinetti said, `Lake Mead.'

  I looked at it with interest. Big things impress me, even if I try to resist, and this was, almost unbelievably, a manmade lake; water stretching away into the distance and desert and canyon walls all around.

  I said, 'Where do we meet her?'

  Not us, Sellers. You.'

  I had hoped I'd misunderstood him earlier. Clearly I hadn't. Suddenly the cool flat water looked a lot less inviting. 'All right. Where do I meet her?'

  `Show you the map.' He pulled the car into an almost empty car park, climbed out and set off towards one of the marina's board walks where a man was crouched at the bow of some boat. As we approached, the man rose.

  Spinetti said, 'You got a reservation for a boat hire.'

  `Name, sir?'

  `Sellers.'

  The man pointed. 'This boat here, sir. All set.' `Gas?'

  `She's full.'

  `Got a map?'

  `Right aboard, sir. You got a credit card or somethin'?' Spinetti turned to me. 'You have?'

  I fished my trusty Diner's Card out of my wallet and followed the man into the office, signed the slip and returned to the boat with the information that it had a range of -about a hundred and twenty miles.

  Spinetti was already aboard. As I climbed after him, he spread the chart. 'Due north-east,'

  he said. 'See here. The entrance to Boulder Canyon.'

  `How far?'

  He shrugged. 'Twenty miles. Can't miss it. Just keep going. She's aboard a big cruiser called Dragonfly. Okay?'

  Òkay,' I said. 'And when I come back, how do I get to Las Vegas?'

  `Plenty of buses.'

  `Well, thanks!'

  `Look, bud, I got other things—'

  I, nodded and watched him step on to the boards and set off towards the car. As he moved away, my sense of loneliness increased; the wide water looked hostile rather than welcoming. It all seemed so crazy. Just another show business interview: two-thousand words of bromides. And a joker who thought it was funny to warn me off. That made me think of telephones and reminded me of Alsa. I climbed out of the boat and went back to the office.

  `Telephone?'

  `Right over there.'

  I searched my pockets but the little piece of paper wasn't there. Damn! I must have left it at the Dime Palace. I'd have to call Alsa later in the day, I remember wondering why in hell Alsa was calling me from Sweden, anyway. I don't know about presentiments.

  But I sensed something was wrong and as I walked back to the boat in the rapidly warming air and watched the bright sun bouncing off the lake, the world seemed to me to be quiet and peaceful and very beautiful — and yet haloed with inexplicable menace. I stood for a moment on the boards, watching a few big lake trout nosing around just under the surface, and thinking about Scown, trying to imagine his reaction if I ducked out and tried to explain why. He'd sit and stare at me in silence, but the words would come across telepathically, and the message would be

  Over the hill. Then there'd be a ritual burst of anger and the rest of my life tied by one leg to a desk. Scown himself could, would and had walked through walls chasing stories. There'd been wounds as a war correspondent, arraignment at the bar of the House of Commons for well justified contempt, and all the time the steady upward climb. Finally the thought of telling Scown I'd been scared off by a bright lonely morning and a trick phone call actually made me grin to myself and I walked across to the boat and got in while the mood held.

  For a few minutes the unfamiliar mechanics of handling the boat in a confined space kept my mind off everything else. There were some large and expensive toys parked in the marina and I have a phobia about damaged paint and insurance companies and negligence, but finally I was nosing out on to Lake Mead with the engine burbling happily and the water swishing beneath. There wasn't a cloud or a breath of wind. All that was missing from the whole adman's set-up was the blonde and the long cool drink, and both were waiting twenty miles up the lake. If I knew that particular blonde the long, cool drink would already be in her hand, and it wouldn't be the first of the day. Susannah Rhodes breakfasted off Bloody Marys.

  A bit more throttle and the boat tucked her tail down determinedly. I glanced round. I was still alone on the water. More throttle still;, the engine snarled happily, the bow lifted and quite suddenly I was enjoying myself. It's funny how the mind changes gear; the thoughts of a few minutes

  before had been blasted away by nothing more concrete than the roar of a healthy engine and the hiss of flying water. No wonder supermarkets use sweet sounds to sell groceries. I sat back, consciously straightening my arms against the steering wheel like a grand prix driver. If Alsa'd been there she'd have said, 'Your great baby!' and laughed at me. I'd have purred like a kitten and asked her to marry me and she'd have refused again and said, like someone reciting Tennyson, that her heart belonged to another. She'd said it so many times I was beginning to believe it, in spite of the mock nineteenth century earnestness.

  •

  The sheer exhilaration of driving that speedboat was inducing
its own kind of weird optimism and it occurred to me suddenly that she might have phoned from Gothenburg to say yes. But it wasn't true and I knew it. If Alsa'd intended to say yes, she'd have spent the money the phone call cost on a table cloth for her bottom drawer and written a quiet, letter.

  So why had she phoned? To, let me know she'd actually reached Gothenburg, perhaps. A feminine cry of triumph —I've done it, and you didn't! Well, if she was in Gothenburg, it. must be true; she'd worked Scown's little deal for him without being slung out of Russia the way they'd heaved me out. Two hours to pack and an escort to the plane, because I'd got a little tight and made a few mildly uncomplimentary remarks. Scown's Russian scheme was typical of him. He wasn't content that the Daily News sold four million in Britain; he had his eye on larger horizons: Common Market editions, electronic print-out news eventually and a curious little quirk of ambition that made him want his to be the first Western newspaper on open sale in Russia. You could tell him the Russians wouldn't allow it in a million years, and he'd say, like a stockbroker, that it was a matter of confidence. As a start, he'd cornered some visiting Soviet Minister and offered to publish a magazine about Russia in Britain, using Russian material. Naturally enough they liked the idea and made very faintly encouraging hum-and-ha noises about the Daily News going on sale in Russia. One of these days. Eventually. So I'

  d gone out to rifle the files at the Moscow Number One State Magazine Publishing House for suitable stories and pictures. The scheme looked like lapsing when they threw me out, but Scown had breathed fire and life back into it and sent Alsa to pick up. where I'd left off, in the certain knowledge that the Russians, like everybody else, would lay down their coats in icy puddles so Alsa could keep her feet dry. Well, good for her! And if I were the woman's editor of the Daily News, I'd start watching my back. Alsa wouldn't stick a knife in anybody, but Scown would see Alsa as deserving of reward and he was as quick with a blade as D'Artagnan, without the same fine line in scruple.

  I also felt a sharp stab of envy for whichever slick young Swede at the Gothenburg printers was assigned to look after her while the magazine was produced. No, on second thoughts, I felt no envy at all, because in a few days he'd find himself waving goodbye at the airport and wondering why the world was so empty and forlorn all of a sudden. I returned my attention to my own empty world, feeling the need for a cigarette, and crouched behind the windscreen to light it. Then I straightened and looked around. A couple of big concrete towers had come into view behind me, presumably part of the works at the Hoover Dam, which banks up the water to form Lake Mead. Over on my right, what looked like a sheer rock wall rose away from the lake shore, but I didn't look that way too long because the sunlight flashed more dazzingly by the minute off the shiny water. And still there was nobody on the lake. The only sign of man was a high white contrail rigid as a ruler in the substratosphere.

  After about another twenty minutes, the lake began to marrow and the high walls marched towards me. I seemed to be heading directly for the end of the lake, but the chart told me the water swung to the right into the neck of Boulder Canyon a few miles ahead. I began to keep my eyes skinned, feeling a reluctant admiration for Spinetti for choosing to hide Susannah Rhodes here on the lake, where comfort, privacy and a first-class means of escape could exist in the single convenient shape of a big, fast boat. Soon there was a giant rearing rock bluff to my right and I swung the boat around it, waiting for Susannah's floating hide-out to come into view. My course seemed to make the bluff move aside like a curtain, unveiling ever more of the shadowed water behind, and it kept coming until there was no new water to see. There was no sign of a cruiser either, or any other boat for that matter; just the vast, precipitous gorge of Boulder Canyon reaching emptily to the northeast, with sunlight high on one rock wall and the other darkly shaded.

  I throttled well back until my boat was barely nudging ahead and looked around, but there was nothing ahead, nothing behind. I hadn't passed the cruiser on the way, so maybe she was coming from the other direction, down the canyon from the upper part of the lake. If so, perhaps I should go ahead and rendezvous in the canyon. I set the boat moving fast ahead and slid rapidly in between the towering walls, leaving the vee of my wake to wash against them.

  Ten minutes later I was still going fast, the canyon was funnelling wider and the great sweep of the upper lake was spreading before me. But no cruiser. I shrugged. This wasn't where we were supposed to rendezvous. She was late, that's all, and I'd better go back to the right place.

  I spun the steering wheel to bring the bow round, and five yards ahead of me something plucked at the water. A fish, probably, rising for a fly. But a second later the same thing happened again and it was no fish. Above the engine's burble I heard sharp cracks echoing between the rock walls. Christ, was it an avalanche? I looked upward scanning the cliffs anxiously, and saw a man's coloured shirt way up high. Then there was another crack. Something smacked my bow and there was a sudden tiny hole in the white paint. Bewildered, I looked upward again and saw the figure on the cliff extend an arm to point up the lake. His other hand held the rifle.

  CHAPTER THREE

  I gunned the throttle and spun the wheel to try and get in beneath the cliff, but rifle bullets are faster than speedboats and another one smacked into the superstructure warningly. I glanced up at him again. The distance wasn't much more than eighty yards and I was worried the boat would already be taking water. Maybe that was what he intended: to sink the boat and let me drown. But no, he was pointing again, pointing up to the huge sheet of the upper lake.

  There was no alternative; I brought the boat round again and began to move pbediently out of the canyon's funnel mouth, wondering where the hell I was supposed to be going, and why and who was sending me there. Presumably this all fitted in with last night's phone call. It also seemed to involve Susannah Rhodes, but for the life of me, I couldn't see why.. Susannah was a mixed-up, stupid blonde who happened to have been neatly assembled to a genetic pattern of current public appeal, but she had neither the willpower nor the reason to be involved in this kind of situation. Spinetti must be involved, though. A lot of fingers pointed to Spinetti. But I couldn't understand why, in that case, he'd been so surprised when I told him about the warning.

  Glancing back, I could still see the rifleman, a dwindling figure now, high on the cliff, waiting to make sure I didn't turn and make a dash for it. But suicidal I'm not. War correspondents have to chance their lives; so sometimes do crime reporters and air correspondents; showbusiness writers never risk anything but cirrhosis. And for the moment, though not by choice, I was pure showbiz. I kept moving forward, swivelling my eyes across the water in the unjustified hope of finding some clue to what was happening. But there was nothing for several minutes. Then, from a dark gap in the rocks, two boats appeared behind me, power 'cruisers with rakish lines. They took up station perhaps half a mile back. Was one of them Dragonfly? Perhaps this whole stupid rigmarole was part of the rendezvous arrangements? Nonsense! Film stars do have bodyguards, but not to take pot shots at reporters arriving to keep an appointment for a story on which money is changing hands. All the same, I slowed. When the boats came near, my eyes would tell me if one was Dragonfly. They didn't, though. It must have been a moment or two before they realized what I was doing, because the gap closed a little, but then they slowed, too. All right. What would happen if I speeded up? I opened the throttle and my speedboat surged forward, bow rising to skim the water. In a minute or so I must have been doing forty miles an hour. But so were the cruisers.

  That answered another question anyway. I couldn't outrun them. But why on earth were they just keeping station? I reached for the map and began to examine possibilities. There was something called Bonelli Landing more or less due south and ten miles away, but the indications were that it was just a place to go ashore and was surrounded by desert. For the rest, three places lay ahead. The names were Echo Bay, Rogers Spring and Overton Beach and none of them meant anything to
me. Apart from them there was nothing but the water and empty desert country.

  All I could do was to keep heading north,

  After a few minutes I rounded a sharp foreland and the whole length of the upper lake came into view. I'd been heading east. Now I swung more or less due north and for a moment I entertained a faint and fatuous hope tht I was wrong about the cruisers, that their presence half a mile behind me was just coincidence and that they'd sheer off elsewhere. But the way they swung smoothly after me, they could have been under tow. How far to Echo Bay, then? Twelve or thirteen miles. All right, we'd see what happened there.

  What happened was that a couple of miles short of Echo Bay one of the cruisers tore up on my left and inserted

  itself between me and the shore. A man then appeared on the decking. He was holding a long thin something that was presumably a rifle and his arm pointed northward. So there was a purpose of some kind to all this! I tried to understand where and why, but the equation was insoluble; query plus query equals plus or minus query. Who the hell were those bastards!

  Whoever they were, they had control. I'd turned the boat's nose a bit. Now I turned it back again and continued up Lake Mead. The cruiser between me and the shore remained between me and the shore; the other had moved out slightly. Four or five miles later Rogers Spring came and went. That left only Overton Beach. Beyond there, so the map told me, the lake forked in two: left fork blind, right leading into the. Virgin River. Well, they'd want me to steer one way or the other; no doubt they'd let me know. Now the cruiser to my right was closing, the other one dropping back, and Overton Beach was visible maybe a mile and a half ahead. The two cruisers were perhaps six hundred yards behind me, the three of us making the points of a neat equilateral triangle on the water.

  It occurred to me that on sudden full throttle I might nip into Overton Beach before them. I stared ahead, wondering what I'd do when I got there. The cruisers wouldn't be far behind; there was at least one rifle aboard one of them, and perhaps more. On the other hand, north of Overton Beach the lake shore was uninhabited and there'd be nowhere to run. Along the Virgin River there wasn't even a road for twenty miles. Should I? Dare I? In the end it wasn't really a conscious decision at all; some instinct made the movement for me and the throttle was snapped open, the engine roaring and I was creaming in towards Overton Beach as fast as the speedboat could go. I crouched low, making as small a target as possible, uncomfortably aware that the petrol tank was squarely behind me. As the boat blasted towards Overton Beach I made out a jetty of sorts and a long, low modern building