Split Code

by Dorothy Dunnett

  It was like a space puppet film. My hoarse voice died away, and the machine rattled out its tidy, bright green reply. Your father is head of a British Intelligence department. We need money, but we need weapons more. Your father can supply us with weapons. You will ask him for them.

  I sat staring at the screen. Then I picked up the microphone. ‘My father can’t send you weapons! How could he possibly do that?’

  That is his concern, said the screen. He will send them if he wants to see you alive. You will read the message if you want to stay alive.

  ‘I shan’t,’ I said baldly. ‘I’d rather be dead than see my father ruined.’

  It sounded all right. I waited, feeling queasy, to see how they were going to persuade me.

  I didn’t have to wait long. The screen remained blank. But from the loudspeaker behind came, loudly and urgently and appallingly, the squalling screams of a hurt baby.

  It was Benedict. Not the Benedict of Johnson’s innocuous tape but Benedict now, reacting as I had never heard him react to treatment he had never faced before. I found I was screaming myself: ‘What are you doing? Stop it! Stop it!’ and shaking the microphone in my frenzy as if I would throttle it. The screams went on, and then broke up into short, gasping cries. The ill treatment had stopped, but the shocked crying continued. I said, ‘It’s stupid to hurt him. Very little will kill him. You must give him something to eat if you want any money. You said you needed money as well.’

  There was a click. Against the blare of Benedict crying, the green words ran into place. We want weapons. The child has had no food. The child will have no food unless you send this message. We shall continue to hurt the child until you do. You have one minute to make up your mind.

  The crying went on and on. His voice was hoarse, he had been crying so much. Long before the minute was up, I said into the microphone, ‘Give me the message. I’ll send it.’

  They ran it on the screen, and repeated it every time I made a stumble. The slightest change in inflection meant a back-track. It was a fairly standard demand, addressing my father by name, and saying that I was being well treated at present, but that I should be killed if my father told the police or anyone else in authority. They specified all the arms and ammunition they wanted. Some of it seemed very advanced: they knew, it seemed, what they were talking about.

  On the other hand, they didn’t appear to grasp the difficulty of what they were asking. The stuff was to be landed at a certain airstrip at a certain time three days from now, and my father was to cable his acceptance in a certain form.

  The message didn’t refer to Hugo by name, but simply said that I was being held by the Croation Liberation Army and that by aiding them my father would be serving the causes of justice and freedom, without any prejudice to his own country. There was no reason, the message said, why his action need ever be known by his government. I should be back, free and well at his side and his work could continue without interruption. A free Yugoslavia wished nothing but good to her neighbour Britain.

  It took an hour to do, and they cut off the crying while it was going on. At the end I sat drained of feeling, my eyes resting on the eight lit screens above while the green letters ticked and fussed over below. One of the rooms was now occupied. A man in butler’s dress was bending over the fireplace in the library, which now had a fire in it. And the light of the fire lit something I hadn’t seen before: a long table covered with white linen and laden with glassware and bottles. A movement on another screen caught my eye. A woman in overalls was in one of the bedrooms, lifting off the sheets. As I watched, she began to make up the bed. I said into the microphone, ‘Can I have Benedict now?’ My voice was very flat.

  The green letters ran off and none came in their place. I sat waiting to be given my reward. One of the other bedrooms now had a fire in it. I wondered if the servants knew what was going on, or if Hugo’s love nest was quite separate. Under the Castle of Kalk, the screen had said.

  It was still blank. I leaned back a little, easing my aching muscles, and saw for the first time in a while the video view of the banqueting hall. There was a fire in the ceiling-high chimney-piece in this room also, but that wasn’t all. The round rosewood table was laid for a meal, with silver and flowers and candles. I counted seven covers.

  For Hugo and all his helpers? Surely not, unless all the staff were also accomplices. I couldn’t see Rudi of the sharpshooters’ stall really settling down to a baronial banquet.

  The silence was maddening. I picked up the mike again and said, ‘I’ve done what you asked me. I want to give the baby his feed. And I’m hungry too, as it happens.’

  The screen said, There is another task we require of you.

  It shows how tired I was, that for a moment I couldn’t imagine what it could be. Then I remembered.

  The Malted Milk Folio. The photographed lists which must on no account be decoded. Which, if they stayed in enemy hands, meant that my life would never be free of danger. The list of agents in alphabetical order with, under the Js, the man with the bifocal glasses who was here in Yugoslavia at the end of their guns.

  I protested, of course, into the microphone, but I didn’t need much persuading to get up and cross to a bureau, or to take from it the manila folder as instructed. I slid out the thick stapled document it contained, and returned with it to the console.

  The screen said, You will type on the attached keyboard the coding formula used for this document. You will then decode it line by line, transmitting on the keyboard as you do so.

  I said,’I can’t type.’

  The screen said. You will learn. Your mistakes can be monitored. There is one duplicate here, and I have it.

  Which was hard luck. For that being so. I couldn’t now feed him gibberish. In fact, since I didn’t intend to decode, I couldn’t do anything at all except refuse, which I did.

  The link was made. The ransom message would go to my father. However long it took them to beat out the territory, Johnson’s ring of watchers eventually would close in on Hugo, if only by eliminating one by one everyone else. And finally, in three days’ time there would be another chance, when the spurious drop of weapons was made, to capture some of the Army and trace Hugo and his conspirators. We had dismissed the castle so lightly because he had never been at pains to conceal it. We had done what he counted on us to do and it had all worked out to his benefit - even the smallpox.

  I sat still after my refusal, watching the other screens while waiting for them to threaten or to cajole me into agreeing. Of course, they did neither. Instead of words, it was the screaming of Benedict that poured from the set. On and on and on and on.

  I know all the sensible arguments. The life, health and sanity of one three-month-old infant of doubtful parentage against the lives of all the men on that list, plus the tearing open of the whole international espionage system with all the harm it could do.

  And the personal arguments. My life was safe so long as the list was uncoded. The moment I gave them the code, I was merely something that could be bartered with if it was convenient, and dispensed with if as it happened it wasn’t. The tape of my voice was on its way to my father. They didn’t need me for that either. And from their point of view, my father could hardly make a fuss if in the end I went missing permanently. He had allowed himself to be blackmailed, hadn’t he, into supplying weapons to another country?

  I walked round and round the bedroom and bathroom. I threw things. I lay on the bed with blankets dragged round my ears. The screams of pain died to a whimper and then gave way to the loud, snarling wails of a baby in total distress: angry, frightened and starving.

  And there one had to face reality too. The hardest heart may relent for a toddler, who has known nothing but love and trust, calling over and over for the parents it thinks have deserted it.

  A baby of three months knows nothing except that it has needs, and they have to be made known by demanding. It cries angrily, redfaced and wet, with its nose running. Distress and fr
ight mean soiled nappies. Filthy, intolerable mess, making the air in a closed room unbreathable.

  Pick up a toddler and you enjoy, instantly, the power to soothe and reassure.

  Pick up a screaming three-month-old and you have a squirming bundle of wet, unpleasant, concentrated essence of resentment, with roughly the same effect on the Samaritan’s ego as a well-marshalled kick in the molars.

  To put up with that, you need to know the truth about babies and be prepared despite all that to lump it. Or you need to be by nature angelic. Not the habit of Hugo Panadek as I knew him.

  I think I stuck it for half an hour and then I sat down and began typing out the coding formula. If that is a betrayal of mankind, then I’m sorry. The fault is in me: not in Maggie Bee; not in my parents.

  They left the crying on, even then, even when I started on the actual decoding of the documents.

  I stopped once and said into the microphone, ‘Is this what you want?’ And the machine typed, under the last name, an address in Melbourne, just the two words, Go on. The next time I asked, it didn’t answer.

  I was a third of the way through, when the No. I video picture of the hallway showed a change and I stopped and glanced up. A man, the butler I had seen before, was crossing the floor to the doorway. The sound picked up the noise of his footsteps, then other steps out of the line of the camera. There was a confusion of voices. Then a second man stepped within camera range. He was saying, ‘We have proved to you that the wind can blow in Yugoslavia. Let us now prove that in spite of it, our hearts are warm and hospitable.’ The camera, as he turned, picked up the heavy jowl, the bald head, the trendy moustache of Hugo Panadek, picturesque as ever in black velvet with a high buttoned collar. It explained why the green letters had been so unwilling of late to answer my questions.

  Then I saw stepping into the hall the guests to whom his mocking words had been directed. Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff, her silver hair swept to one side, discarded chinchillas to reveal another dress in hand-painted Bakst pink with rubies this time on the fragile arm bones. Dr Gibbings was with her; and behind her, the handsome eyes black-lined and lowered, came her daughter Rosamund Booker-Readman, tall and thin in a pin-tucked cream chiffon blouse and cardigan over a cream georgette skirt and strapped shoes.

  By contrast the third woman, Beverley Eisenkopp, looked pretty as marzipan with her golden hair and one-shoulder scarlet dress that would have raised a few eyebrows in Tuscaloosa. Behind her, a long way behind, in a silk suit and flowered crepe-de-chine shirt walked Ingmar’s artistic son-in-law Sultry Simon. And with him, in a crested naval blazer with a pipe deforming the hopeless hang of his grey flannel bags, came the man whose name was among the next dozen to be decoded on my long list. Johnson Johnson, with his black hair brushed and his stupid bifocals glimmering artlessly round at his surroundings.

  Seven of them. The Seven Worthies of the Bamboo Grove, decanted from the M/S Glycera as she unloaded her revelling passengers and invited by Hugo, it appeared, to fill the place settings at dinner and to stay the night before setting out for the airport next morning. Seven guests invited with a daring and a panache beyond all belief, even for Hugo, to cover his actions. A cover which had for its focal point the presence over my head of Benedict Booker-Readman’s parents, his grandmother and his kidnapper, while below, Benedict’s voice cried on and on, so that I tried, drearily, to force myself to go on with my decoding, typing line after slow line with my attention never moving far from what was happening on the eight spying square screens above me.

  Dr Gibbings had been here before. He went upstairs to the bedroom in screen No. 8 while Hugo escorted Ingmar and Rosamund to Nos. 6 and 4, with Johnson trailing behind. I saw him enter the bedroom on the seventh screen, and place his overnight case tidily on its crutch. Then my attention was drawn by voices on the first screen, in the hall, where Simon had been stopped by Comer’s wife Beverley. He said, ‘Don’t be a fool. Not now.’

  She had never looked lovelier. Even on the small screen I could see the slender, tiptilted nose, the artless eyes, the perfect bones with a trace of Clear Gel highlighting the cheeks and the nostrils. She said, ‘You kept saying that on the boat. Simon, Comer’s gone home. I’m free. We’re both free. Rosamund’s too busy fawning round Ingmar to notice what happens to you.’

  She had begun to embrace him when he spat out ‘Be careful,’ and a maid went by, smiling. He turned for the stairs. Beverley said, ‘I don’t care about money,’ and Simon swung round.

  ‘I do,’ he said. ‘What the hell do you think I married Rosamund for? O.K.: so we have fun now and then. I don’t mind. It doesn’t harm anyone. But Rosamund knows, and Comer suspects, and if we’re not careful, Ingmar’s going to be told, and then the fat’ll be in the fire, won’t it?’

  He turned round and took her by the arm and putting his hand under her chin, looked down into those prodigious blue eyes with no love in his own face at all, or even desire. ‘There isn’t going to be a divorce. Get that into your head. I’m not going to leave the Warr Beckenstaffs, and you aren’t going to leave Comer. Try and change that, Beverley, and you’ll regret it. Play along, and there may be other parties like the Glycera. I like you. You’re good in bed and sometimes out of it. But that’s all. Understand me?’

  He didn’t wait to hear whether she understood, but turned and ran up the stairs. A moment later, I saw him enter Rosamund’s bedroom. No one spoke. I typed three more names and addresses. A voice above the crying said, ‘Are you sure? I don’t mean to decry your knowledge of ikons, of course. But are you sure?’

  Ingmar, in her own room, talking to Dr Gibbings. And Dr Gibbings replying. ‘It was the genuine ikon. Booker-Readman’s story was that he had lost it, and it had been recovered. It was so unlikely that I took the chance to visit the Eisenkopps with a friend who does know about these things. It was the Lesnovo. Whatever you want to accuse Simon of, it can’t be fraud in this respect.’

  She said, ‘That is very surprising.’ She was sitting upright as I had seen her in her cabin on the Glycera. However onerous or wild the preceding twenty-four hours had been, there was no trace of it on her desiccated, superbly made-up features. She continued, ‘I should prefer, as you know, that there should be grounds for a divorce, ideally of a criminal kind.’

  Dr Gibbings sat down. He said, ‘Rosamund, as you also know, is still very fond of her husband. Perhaps now he will conduct himself better. He is weak. Placed in a difficult position, he might easily blurt out the truth about Benedict.’

  Benedict’s voice, exhausted, whimpered and trailed into silence, and then with a hiccoughing sob, began crying again. I had forgotten . . . heaven help me, until that moment I had forgotten he was Hugo Panadek’s son.

  Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff said, ‘There is one way of resolving the problem. Panadek would not be averse to marrying Rosamund.’

  I watched without typing.

  Gibbings said, ‘He is, of course a man of many affairs and one would conclude wealthy, by the evidence of this castle. But would Rosamund be happy? One imagines that, had it been a match, they would have stayed together at the time of the baby’s conception. Forgive me.’

  She was fitting, at leisure, a cigarette into her holder, ‘There is no need. Hugo is a designer. He goes where there are rich men to employ him. Sometimes to the Warr Beckenstaff Corporation: sometimes to other rich European companies. I arranged they should meet; I was not surprised when they parted. All I was concerned about was that Rosamund should have an heir, and that she should have her eyes opened to someone other than Booker-Readman. She had the son. Unfortunately, she failed to find a cure for her infatuation.’

  Dr Gibbings stared at the straight figure. He said, ‘I thought Rosamund got pregnant to spite you. To force her marriage through against your wishes?’

  It was what Ingmar had told me. Ingmar had told me, I now knew, just what she wanted me to believe.

  For a long time Ingmar Warr Beckenstaff looked at him. Then with one of her graceful, sp
are gestures she leaned forwards and tipped the ash from her cigarette into the fireplace. ‘Hermann,’ she said. ‘When you found an empire it is your duty, after a certain age, to find and train a crown prince for your successors. There are many competent people about me, but none of my blood. I had only a daughter, a dilettante who disliked business. There are various time-honoured ways to make a woman breed. I chose the quickest.’

  Dr Gibbings said, ‘Ingmar: you may be dead before that child is walking.’

  ‘I know it,’ she said. ‘But while he is alive, my people - including you, Hermann - know that one day there will be an accounting. Meanwhile, I am taking him with me to England with Rosamund. Where is the painter’s yacht? The Dolly?’

  ‘Off Dubrovnik harbour,’ Gibbings said. ‘Will you take the girl and the bodyguard also?’

  ‘Both. The bodyguard is a fool, but the girl is good,’ Ingmar said. ‘I want them ready to travel tomorrow. Ask Mr Johnson to telephone and prepare them. I take it a telephone message can reach them?’

  ‘By radio telephone, yes.’ Dr Gibbings hesitated. Mrs Warr Beckenstaff smoked calmly, watching him, and then said, ‘But you think the request should come from me. Yes?’

  Gibbings smiled. ‘He is not impressive to look at, but...’

  ‘Say no more.’ She picked up her phone. And on the screen above, after a moment, Johnson crossed his room and picked up his. He was speaking into it when his door opened and Hugo came in.

  He didn’t know, yet, who Johnson was, but a pain ran through my stomach. Soon he would know: just as soon as he had time to come down below, and read the long list I was decoding. To see Johnson walk into the castle should have been the finest God-given event of the day.

  Instead it was the worst. He wasn’t here to rescue me or the baby. He had no idea we were here. If his men had tracked the Dolly at all, they had followed her no further than Gospa od škrpjela. If they had picked up my radio dental signal, they would have been led well away from the fortress of Kalk.