'You'd better be more interested in where it's going. Have you got a safe - a really secure one?'
'Sure.' He did a double-take. 'You want me to keep this? 'For forty-eight hours,' I said. 'If I don't claim it in that time you'd better give it to your superior officer together with all your forebodings, and let him take care of it.'
Nordlinger looked at me with a cold eye. 'I don't know but what I shouldn't give it to him right now. Forty-eight hours might mean my neck.'
'You part with it now and it will be my neck,' I said grimly.
He picked up the gadget. 'This is American and it doesn't belong here at Keflavik. I'd like to know where it does belong.'
'You're right about it not belonging here,' I said. 'But I'm betting it's Russian - and they want it back.'
'For God's sake!' he said. 'It's full of American components.'
'Maybe the Russians learned a lesson from Macnamara on cost-effectiveness. Maybe they're shopping in the best market. I don't give two bloody hoots if the components were made in the Congo I still want you to hold on to it.'
He laid the gadget on his desk again very carefully. 'Okay - but I'll split the difference; I'll give you twenty-four hours. And even then you don't get it back without a full explanation.'
'Then I'll have to be satisfied with that,' I said. 'Providing you lend me your car. I left the Land-Rover in Laugarvatn.'
'You've got a goddamn nerve.' Nordlinger put his hand in his pocket and tossed the car key on the desk.
'You'll find it in the car park near the gate - the blue Chevrolet.'
'I know it.' I put on my jacket and went to the corner to pick up the rifles. 'Lee, do you know a man called Fleet?'
He thought for a moment. 'No.'
'Or McCarthy?'
'The CPO you met in the shop is McCarthy.'
'Not the same one,' I said. 'I'll be seeing you, Lee. We'll go fishing sometime.'
'Stay out of jail.'
I paused at the door. 'What makes you say a thing like that?'
His hand closed over the gadget. 'Anyone who walks around with a thing like this ought to be in jail,' he said feelingly.
I laughed, and left him staring at it. Nordlinger's sense of what was right had been offended. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and an engineer usually works to the rule book - that long list of verities tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was originally compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken rules other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition from Newtonian to quantum physics without breaking his stride can believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays. Lee Nordlinger was not one of these men, but I'd bet the man who designed the gadget was.
I found the car and put the rifles and the ammunition into the boot. 1 was still wearing Jack Case's pistol in the shoulder holster and so now there was nothing to spoil the set of my coat. Not that I was any more presentable; there were scorch marks on the front from the burning peat of Kennikin's fire, and a torn sleeve from where a bullet had come a shade too close at Geysir. It was stained with mud and so were my trousers, I was looking more and more like a tramp - but a clean-shaven tramp.
I climbed into the car and trickled in the direction of the International Airport, thinking of what Nordlinger hadn't been able to tell me about the gadget. According to Lee it was an impossible object and that made it scientifically important - so important that men had died and had their legs blown off and had been cooked in boiling water because 'of it.
And one thing made me shiver. By Kennikin's last words just before I escaped from the house at Thingvallavatn he had made it quite clear that I was now more important than the gadget. He had been prepared to kill me without first laying his hands on it and, for all he knew, once I was dead the gadget would have been gone forever with me.
I had Nordlinger's evidence that the gadget was of outstanding scientific importance, so what was it about me that made me even more important than that? It's not often in this drear, technological world that a single man becomes of more importance than a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we were returning to sanity at last, but I didn't think so.
There was a side entrance to the Icelandair office which one could use without going through the public concourse, so I parked the car and went in. I bumped pleasantly into a hostess, and asked, 'Is Elin Ragnarsdottir around?'
'Elin? She's in the waiting-room.'
I walked into the waiting-room and found her alone. She jumped up quickly. 'Alan, you've been so long!'
'It took longer than I expected.' Her face was strained and there seemed to be a sense of urgency about her. 'You didn't have trouble?'
'No trouble - not for me. Here's the newspaper.'
I took it from her. 'Then what's the matter?'
'I think you'd better . . . you'd better read the paper.' She turned away.
I shook it open and saw a photograph on the front page, a life-size reproduction of my sgian dubh. Underneath, the black headline screamed: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS KNIFE?
The knife had been found embedded in the heart of a man sitting in a car parked in the driveway of a house in Laugarvatn. The man had been identified as a British tourist called John Case. The house and the Volkswagen in which Case had been found belonged to Gunnar Arnarsson who was absent, being in charge of a pony-trekking expedition. The house had been broken into and apparently searched. In the absence of Gunnar Arnarsson and his wife, Sigurlin Asgeirsdottir, it was impossible to tell if anything had been stolen. Both were expected to be contacted by the police.
The knife was so unusual in form that the police had requested the newspaper to publish a photograph of it. Anyone who had seen this knife or a similar knife was requested to call at his nearest police station. There was a boxed paragraph in which the knife was correctly identified as a Scottish sgian dubh, and after that the paragraph degenerated into pseudo-historical blather.
The police were also trying to find a grey Volvo registered in Reykjavik; anyone having seen it was requested to communicate with the police at once. The registration number was given.
I looked at Elin. 'It's a mess, isn't it?' I said quietly.
'It is the man you went to see at Geysir?'
'Yes.' I thought of how I had mistrusted Jack Case and left him unconscious near Kennikin's house. Perhaps he had not been untrustworthy at all because I had no illusions about who had killed him. Kennikin had the sgian dubh and Kennikin had the Volkswagen - and probably Kennikin had stumbled across Case in his search for me.
But why had Case been killed?
'This is dreadful,' said Elin. 'Another man killed.' Her voice was filled with despair.
'I didn't kill him,' I said baldly.
She picked up the paper. 'How did the police know about the Volvo?'
'Standard procedure,' I said. 'As soon as Case was identified the police would dig into whatever he'd been doing since he entered the country. They'd soon find he hired a car - and it wasn't the Volkswagen he was found in.'
I was glad the Volvo was tucked away out of sight in Valtyr's garage in Vik. 'When is Valtyr going back to Vik?' I asked.
'Tomorrow,' said Elin.
It seemed as though everything was closing in on me. Lee Nordlinger had given me a twenty-four hour ultimatum; it was too much to hope that Valtyr wouldn't check on the Volvo as soon as he got back to Vik he might even go to the Reykjavik police if he felt certain it was the car they were searching for. And when the police laid their hands on Sigurlin then the balloon would certainly go up -I couldn't see her keeping silent in the face of a corpse parked in her home.
Elin touched my arm. 'What are you going to do?'
'I don't know,' I said. 'Right now I just want to sit and think.'
I began to piece the fragments together and gradually they made some kind of sense which hinged around Kennikin's sudden switch of attitude after he had captured me. At fi
rst he had been all for extracting the gadget from me and he was looking forward with unwholesome delight to the operation. But then he lost interest in the gadget and announced that my death was the more important, and that was just after he had received a telephone call.
I ticked off the sequence of events. At Geysir I had told Case of my suspicions of Slade, and Case had agreed to pass them on to Taggart. No matter what happened Slade would then be thoroughly investigated. But I had seen Slade talking to Case just before Kennikin took me. Suppose that Case had aroused Slade's suspicions in some way? Slade was a clever man - a handler of men - and maybe Case had shown his hand.
What would Slade do? He would contact Kennikin to find if I had been captured. He would insist that his cover next to Taggart should remain unbroken at all costs and that this was more important than the gadget. He would say, 'Kill the bastard!' That was why Kennikin had switched.
And it would be just as important to kill Jack Case before be talked to Taggart. I had played right into Slade's hands and left Case for Kennikin to find, and Kennikin had stabbed him with my knife. Kennikin had traced where the Volkswagen had come from and gone looking for me, and he had left the body of Case. Terrorist tactics.
It all tied together except for one loose end which worried me. Why, when I had been jumped at Geysir by Kennikin's mob, had Jack Case run out on me? He hadn't lifted a finger to help; he hadn't fired a shot in my defence even though he was armed. I knew Jack Case and that was very unlike him, and that, together with his apparent chumminess with Slade, had been the basis of my mistrust of him. It worried me very much.
But it was all past history and I had the future to face and decisions to make. I said, 'Did you check on Bjarni?'
Elin nodded listlessly. 'He's on the Reykjavik-Hofn run. He'll be in Reykjavik this afternoon.'
'I want him over here,' I said. 'And you're to stick in this office until he comes. You're not to move out of it even for meals. You can have those sent up. And most emphatically you're not to go out into the concourse of the airport; there are too many eyes down there looking for you and me.'
'But I can't stay here forever,' she protested.
'Only until Bjarni comes. Then you can tell him anything you think fit - you can even tell him the truth. Then you're to tell him what he must do.'
She frowned. 'And that is?'
'He's got to get you on a plane and out of here, and he has to do it discreetly without going through normal channels. I don't care if he has to dress you up as a hostess and smuggle you aboard as one of the crew, but you mustn't go down into the concourse as an ordinary passenger.'
'But I don't think he could do that.'
'Christ!' I said. 'If he can smuggle in crates of Carlsberg from Greenland he can smuggle you out. Come to think of ' it, going to Greenland might not be such a bad idea; you could stay in Narsassuaq until all this blows over. Not even Slade, clever though he is, would think of looking there.'
'I don't want to go.'
'You're going,' I said. 'I want you from underfoot. If you think things have been rough for the last few days then compared to the next twenty-four hours they'll seem like an idyllic holiday. I want you out of it, Elin, and, by God, you'll obey me.'
'So you think I'm useless,' she said bitterly.
'No, I don't; and you've proved it during the last few days. Everything you've done in that time has been against your better judgment, but you've stuck by me. You've been shot and you've been shot at, but you still helped out.'
'Because I love you,' she said.
'I know - and I love you. That's why I want you out of here. I don't want you killed.'
'And what about you?' she demanded.
'I'm different,' I said. 'I'm a professional. I know what to do and how to do it; you don't.'
'Case was a professional too and he's dead. So was Graham, or whatever his name really was. And that man, Volkov, was hurt at Geysir - and he was a professional. You said yourself that the only people hurt so far have been the professionals. I don't want you hurt, Alan.'
'I also said that no innocent bystanders have been hurt,' I said. 'You're an innocent bystander - and I want to keep it that way.'
I had to do something to impress the gravity of the situation upon her. I looked around the room to check its emptiness, then quickly took off my jacket and unslung Case's shoulder holster complete with gun. I held it in my hand and said, 'Do you know how to use this?'
Her eyes dilated. 'No!'
I pointed out the slide. 'If you pull this back a bullet is injected into the breech. You push over this lever, the safety catch, then you point it and pull the trigger. Every time you pull a bullet comes out, up to a maximum of eight. Got that?'
'I think so.' 'Repeat it.'
'I pull back the top of the gun, push over the safety catch and pull the trigger.'
'That's it. It would be better if you squeezed the trigger but this is no time for finesse.' I put the pistol back into the holster and pressed it into her reluctant hands. 'If anyone tries to make you do anything you don't want to do just point the gun and start shooting. You might not hit anyone but you'll cause some grey hairs.'
The one thing that scares a professional is a gun in the hands of an amateur. If another professional is shooting at you at least you know he's accurate and you have a chance of out-manoeuvring him. An amateur can kill you by accident.
I said, 'Go into the loo and put on the holster under your jacket. When you come back I'll be gone.'
She accepted the finality of the situation along with the pistol. 'Where are you going?'
'The worm is turning,' I said. 'I'm tired of running, so I'm going hunting. Wish me luck.'
She came close to me and kissed me gently and there were unshed tears in her eyes and the gun in its holster was iron-hard between us. I patted her bottom and said, 'Get along with you,' and watched as she turned and walked away. When the door closed behind her I also left.
Chapter I
Nordlinger's Chevrolet was too long, too wide and too soft-sprung and I wouldn't have given a thank you for it in the Obyggdir, but it was just what I needed to get into Reykjavik fast along the International Highway which is the only good bit of paved road in Iceland. I did the twenty-five miles to Hafnarfjordur at 80 mph and cursed when I was slowed down by the heavy traffic building up around Kopavogur. I had an appointment at midday in the souvenir shop of the Nordri Travel Agency and I didn't want to miss it.
The Nordri Travel Agency was in Hafnarstraeti. I parked the car in a side street near Naust and walked down the hill towards the centre of town. I had no intention at all of going into Nordri; why would I when Nordlinger had the gadget tucked away in his safe? I came into Hafnarstraeti and ducked into a bookshop opposite Nordri. There was a cafe above the shop with a flight of stairs leading directly to it so that one could read over a cup of coffee. I bought a newspaper as cover and went upstairs.
It was still before the midday rush so I got a seat at the window and ordered pancakes and coffee. I spread open the paper and then glanced through the window at the crowded street below and found that, as I had planned, I had a good view of the travel agency which was on the other side of the street. The thin gauze curtains didn't obstruct my view but made it impossible for anyone to recognize me from the street.
The street was fairly busy. The tourist season had begun and the first hardy travellers had already started to ransack the souvenir shops and carry home their loot. Camera-hung and map in hand they were easy to spot, yet I inspected every one of them because the man I was looking for would probably find it convenient to be mistaken for a tourist.
This was a long shot based on the fact that everywhere I had gone in Iceland the opposition had shown up. I had followed instructions on arrival and gone the long way around to Reykjavik and Lindholm had been there. I had gone to earth in Asbyrgi and Graham had pitched up out of the blue. True, that was because of the radio bug planted on the Land-Rover, but it had happened. Fleet had la
in in wait and had shot up the Land-Rover in a deliberate ambush, the purpose of which was still a mystery. Yet he, like Lindholm, had known where to wait. Kennikin had jumped me at Geysir and I'd got away from that awkward situation by the thickness of a gnat's whisker.
And now I was expected to call at the Nordri Travel Agency. It was a thin chance but it seemed logical to suppose that if past form was anything to go on then the place would be staked out. So I took a more than ordinary interest in those below who window-shopped assiduously, and I hoped that if Kennikin was laying for me I'd be able to recognize his man. He couldn't have brought a whole army to Iceland and, one way or another, I'd already laid eyes on a lot of his men.
Even so, it was a full half-hour before I spotted him, and that was because I was looking at him from an unfamiliar angle from above. It is very hard to forget a face first seen past the cross hairs of a telescopic sight yet it was only when he lifted his head that I recognized one of the men who had been with Kennikin on the other side of the Tungnaa River.
He was pottering about and looking into the window of the shop next to Nordri and appeared to be the perfect tourist complete with camera, street map and sheaf of picture postcards. I whistled up the waitress and paid my bill so that I could make a quick getaway, but reserved the table for a little longer by ordering another coffee.
He wouldn't be alone on a job like this and so I was 'interested in his relationship with the passers-by. As the minutes ticked on he appeared to become increasingly restless and consulted his watch frequently and, at one o'clock exactly, he made a decisive move. He lifted his hand and beckoned, and another man came into my line of sight and crossed the street towards him.
I gulped my coffee and went downstairs to lurk at the newspaper counter while observing my friends through the glass doors of the bookshop. They had been joined by a third man whom I recognized immediately - none other than Ilyich who had unwittingly provided me with the butane bomb. They nattered for a while and then Ilyich stuck out his arm and tapped his wrist-watch, shrugging expressively. They all set off up the street towards Posthusstraeti and I followed.
Bagley, Desmond - Running Blind Page 19