Operation Pax

by Michael Innes

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Then you may follow as soon as I’ve touched down. If it bears me it will bear you.’

  ‘In that case wouldn’t it be better–’

  ‘Be quiet. The stuff’s all right. It’s the knots. But I’ve worked each one just all I know how. Well, this is the dangerous bit – see? Every way the dangerous bit. After this the clean-up will follow.’

  ‘I believe you. Go ahead.’

  Remnant swung himself over the eye. ‘As it happens, I go down a bit fancy. But you come plain – feet, knees, both hands. No bright girl of the gym – understand?’

  ‘Agreed.’

  Remnant drew the revolver from his pocket. He still had his appearance of extraordinary concentration. And then he was gone – so quickly that whatever was fancy in his method quite eluded Jane’s analysis. Whatever it was, it took him down the improvised rope like an express elevator, and with the revolver poised ready in a free hand. He was safely on the floor – a marble floor, Jane suddenly saw – and standing quite still. He did not look up. That, she realized, would have made this yawning and suddenly horrible chasm seem somehow much deeper. He would betray no anxiety about her. His attention was absorbed in studying the circle of closed doors surrounding him. A gentle draught of air came up. It was a very chill air, and it stirred the crazy dangling thread that, minutes before, had been no more than a thin and diaphanous sheath round her own body. It looked now as if it would scarcely bear the weight of a small plummet at the end of it. But it had borne Remnant. She realized that it was now or never – both for this, and for ever looking herself in the face again. She went over and down – hand over hand, carefully, as she had been told.

  She had done it, and the marble floor was very cold on her bare feet. Remnant’s hand came out and touched hers. It was a gesture commanding absolute silence. The little cortile, with its cupola and lantern above, could be a dire acoustic trap. A mere whisper, incautiously pitched, would echo and re-echo round it, until the reiterated and amplified sound was like surf breaking on a beach. Jane strained her ears. She could hear only a low, intermittent sighing, now rising towards a whistle and now sinking to a moan. It was the wind, she thought, playing through the lantern and washing round the chill concavity of the dome.

  Remnant moved his other hand slightly. It was the one holding the revolver. She understood, and drew out the weapon in her own pocket. She gripped it firmly, imagining the clatter it would make if it fell. She looked downwards. The marble was white and faintly veined, like her own feet that rested on it. She looked around. There were five closed doors. Two of them were symmetrically placed on either side of a vaulted passage leading, she guessed, to the main doorway and the bridge, and the fifth was directly opposite this.

  She heard her own heart. Remnant’s left hand let go of hers and described a small circle in air. She understood him instantly. It was like having a twin brother with whom no speech was necessary. He disliked the way the closed doors surrounded them. Let the wrong one open, and for a fatal second they could not help being taken unawares. His finger moved, and she knew that they were to stand back to back. With infinite caution he took a step sideways. She did the same. It was like ceasing to be man and woman, and becoming a monstrous crab. They moved towards the vaulted passage, holding the doors covered on either hand. She still heard faintly the sob and wail as of invisible wind. They had traversed the breadth of the marble floor. It was patterned in concentric circles, and their slow progress had been like that of a pawn on an unfamiliar board. The open archway was now above their heads. The length of the corridor on which it opened must correspond to that of the surrounding rooms.

  She was touched lightly on the shoulder. It was her job to stand guard alone. Remnant had gone. A moment later she heard the first sound that either of them had occasioned. It might have been the scrape of iron on stone. Remnant was back and standing beside her, his revolver in front of him and his glance circling warily from door to door. His left thumb went over his shoulder. She was to make the same inspection that he had just carried out. The passage proved to be no more than eight paces long. At the far end were massive double doors, sheathed in bronze, and with their handles gripped in the jaws of bronze lions. A key stood turned in a powerful lock. And a stout steel bar, pivoting at the centre, had been swung round and engaged in niches in the surrounding stone. It had been the sound of this forced home that she had heard a moment before. Remnant had made very sure that they would not be surprised from the direction of the bridge.

  So they were shut up with the enemy, lurking in some or all of the surrounding rooms. Jane thought of those gruesome pictures, beloved of persons who fabricate history books for the very young, depicting martyrs in the arena, awaiting the release of the wild beasts from their cages. She returned to Remnant. He was not – as the analogy might suggest – engaged in prayer. Nevertheless he had something of the same rapt quality. And he appeared to be listening with all his ears. It came to Jane in a flash that there was something ominous in the silence of the place. Remnant had been very sure that this whole hideous organization must be aware its hour had struck. What if it had already vanished to some other lurking place, some emergency headquarters – taking its crucial victims with it? There was nothing but dismay in the thought. A thousand times better than that would it be for every one of those five sinister doors to open simultaneously and pour the whole filthy gang upon them. Which means – thought Jane dispassionately – that at least I haven’t got cold feet… But that wasn’t true in a physical sense – for now both her feet and calves felt icy at the creeping chill of the marble.

  Remnant signed to her to stay where she was. He began to move – more rapidly now, but with absolute noiselessness – round the circumference of the circular hall. She was unable to follow him continuously with her eye, for it was her business to keep all five doors under observation. And this was the best position from which to do that. The curve of the building put even those most immediately on either hand all but simultaneously within her vision. She wondered if she was to shoot at sight. The revolver was perfectly steady in her hand, and she knew that at this range she could do what damage she was minded to… Remnant was stopping at each door, intently listening. She had a sense that he was inwardly perplexed – perhaps even that some doubt was growing in him. He paused longest at the door directly opposite. He crouched down by it, and she saw that he was licking his left hand. For a moment the effect was weirdly feline. Then she saw that he was passing the moist hand close to the floor, and then at a right-angle up the edge of the door.

  Presently he moved on and completed the circuit. She glanced swiftly at his face as he came up to her. His eyes seemed to have gone darker. There were beads of sweat on his forehead. He pointed back at the door straight ahead of her. She knew that they were to go through it.

  They moved straight across the floor, brushing as they went past it the tatter of nylon that had brought them here. Remnant paused, pointed to himself, raised one finger; he pointed to Jane and raised two; he stepped for a moment in front of her and made a gesture from his back to the space on his left. She understood that he was to go in first, and that as she followed she was to place herself on his left hand.

  He was reaching for the handle. He must be proposing to take a chance that the door wasn’t locked. The faint sob and whistle she had already heard was louder. Perhaps the wind was rising…

  Remnant flung back the door. It was of abnormal thickness, and bedded in rubber. What Jane had heard through this insulating medium was a human voice, screaming in agony.

  10

  Something whined past her ear and smacked against a wall far behind her. She knew that it was a bullet; that with formidable swiftness of response the enemy had met the assault in its first moments. Then she realized that she was again on the wrong side of the door. At that first shot Remnant had thrust her back and half closed it on her. Her impulse was to thrust at it furiously. But his shoulders were hard up against
it, and she saw that to push might be to endanger rather than help him.

  The screams of agony had mercifully ceased. Or perhaps they had only disappeared behind a curtain of more deafening sound. So confounding was the uproar that for a second she lost all clear understanding of its occasion. She recovered herself and knew that it was a gun battle. The number of shots actually fired was not, perhaps, so very many all told. But the reports chased each other wildly round the domed hall to which she was still, infuriatingly, confined, and the noise was so great as to shut out every other sensation and perception. She looked quickly round to see if anybody was emerging from the other rooms. If reinforcements did come from these she would have a part to play yet. When she turned again Remnant’s shoulders had gone. She had a horrible fear that he had been hit; that he would be lying crumpled on the floor. She pushed at the door. It swung back freely and she entered the room.

  The place reeked of powder, and of queer smells she could not identify. There was one further shot. She saw a white-coated figure in the middle of the room dive head foremost to the floor like an acrobat and lie still; and in the same instant she was aware of two similar figures dashing through a door straight in front of her and slamming it behind them. Remnant was on his feet still; he leapt at the door through which the figures had retreated, and locked it. Then he turned round and saw her. ‘Go out,’ he said.

  She found herself trembling with anger as she looked at him. ‘I’ll never forgive you – never!’

  ‘Go outside.’ His voice was low – but it fell on her like a strong hand. She turned and walked unsteadily into the circular hall, her temples hammering. Things that she had momentarily glimpsed and instinctively refused to acknowledge the meaning of swayed before her inward vision, and she felt, like an actual physical thing, an icy and invisible hand on her heart.

  ‘Jane – please come back now.’

  She turned again and re-entered the room. ‘I’m sorry,’ she said.

  Remnant raised the ghost of a smile. ‘We’re getting on pretty well. I think the child’s all right.’ And he pointed to a corner of the room. Jane took one look and ran to it. Rudi Tatistchev, the small boy whom they had already glimpsed once that morning, was lying there, curled up, his face stained with tears, and apparently in a deep sleep. She knelt beside him and took him in her arms – with a surge of deep feeling such as she had never known.

  ‘He really is all right. They hadn’t got going on all that.’ Remnant had come up beside her. ‘They were busy instead with your poor devil from the Bodleian.’

  ‘They wanted to experiment–’

  ‘No – not that.’ Remnant’s voice was quiet. ‘They were trying to get something out of him. He’s been pretty filthily handled. That was why I pushed you out the second time. I wanted to tidy him up a bit. He’ll be quite all right – in time. I’ve put him over on that bench.’

  Jane set the sleeping child down gently and turned round. The battlefield – for it was like that – was a large wedge-shaped room that had been turned elaborately into an operating theatre. It was lit by sundry impressive electrical contrivances, and the only daylight – as presumably with all the rooms in the temple – was from shallow windows high up under the architrave. There was blood now all over the place. In the middle of the floor, huddled on his side, the man she had seen fall there lay in a pool of it. He was alive; his body was spasmodically twitching; when it did this it emitted noises that were not human but merely mechanical or hydraulic; and his face was hideously grey behind a neatly trimmed red beard.

  Her eye passed swiftly on, very fearful of what it might next see. But there was now only one other figure in the room: the little man into whom she had so fatefully bumped upon leaving Dr Ourglass and the inquisitive Mark Bultitude. Fate had decreed that he should be one of Nature’s meaner and more insignificant creations; man had lately seen to it that he should be much less even than this. He half lay, half sat on a bench by the wall where Remnant had shoved him, wrapped in a sheet patched with blood. His eyes were open, but it was impossible to tell if they saw.

  ‘Stay here and keep an eye on things – and particularly for anybody coming to monkey with the door.’ Remnant was moving across the room again. ‘I’m going to make sure there’s nobody lurking – of his own will or otherwise – elsewhere in the building.’

  She watched him go out, understanding very well the meaning of his move. They had rescued the little man she had seen kidnapped in Radcliffe Square – or at least they had rescued what was left of him. And – what would have been worth crossing the world for – they had rescued the little boy. But of her lover whom she had set out to seek there was still no sign… She looked at the shambles about her – the product of the heat of battle and partly of madness and cold cruelty – and her whole body shivered as if in ague. The resources of the desperate people and whom destiny had brought her appeared endless. Perhaps about England, about Europe, they had half a dozen places like this; and perhaps they were already hurrying to one of them now, bearing Geoffrey with them. Remnant was back. The chill of the ghastly place seemed mitigated as he entered. ‘Nobody and nothing’, he said. ‘On one side a room rather like Cline’s but grander, and with a laboratory next door. On the other side a bedroom and a slap-up bathroom. And there’s a surprisingly dry cellar used as a store.’

  ‘I see.’ Jane’s voice trembled. Her eye fell on the bearded man on the floor. ‘Can we do anything for him?’

  ‘Unfortunately he’s past getting anything from.’ Remnant’s tone held a momentary savagery that startled her. ‘He’s going to die.’

  ‘Do you think that Geoffrey–’

  ‘Your young man? Don’t worry. I’m afraid they’re holding him still. But he’s in no danger. Or in no danger of – this.’ He glanced round. Jane saw that, beneath his reassuring manner, he was fighting mad. ‘We’ve smashed all that for good.’

  ‘They may have the means of starting it up elsewhere.’

  ‘Don’t be dismal. And they’ve got something coming to them yet.’ He looked at the locked door that gave on the farther end of the island, and frowned. ‘Only we’ve got to think… I wonder if the poor chap over there can tell us anything.’

  They both crossed the room. Jane’s bare feet were like metal dragged at by some powerful magnet under the floor. With an immense effort she looked straight at the man and walked on. His eyes were still open. And as they reached him his lips moved.

  ‘Others…there was a kid.’

  Remnant spoke clearly. ‘The kid’s all right. He’s over there. Was there anyone else?’

  ‘The little place beyond this… I didn’t see it the first time.’ The man’s face contorted itself with the effort of speaking. ‘They put me in there first… a young chap…prisoner–’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Asked–’ The man gave a deep groan. ‘But I didn’t–’ his eyes turned to Jane. ‘Bicycle’, he murmured, with a queer inflection of recognition. And his eyes closed.

  Jane looked at Remnant. ‘He means the little square temple?’

  ‘Clearly. A couple got away there when they’d had enough of the shooting game here. And there might be one or two more. You sent a telegram to this top-ranking policeman brother of yours?’

  ‘Yes.’ Jane looked at her watch. ‘And he must have got it well over an hour ago.’

  ‘Of course they don’t know about that. But it seems they do know that Anna What’s-her-name got out a telephone call. So they can’t reckon on much more grace. On the other hand, they can no doubt communicate with the rest of the gang – those that are real in-on-the-thing accomplices, I mean – who are now milling round our fire. They may have found poor old Cline in his cupboard.’

  ‘I suppose those people in the other temple can get away if they want to?’

  ‘Good Lord, yes. The lake would be no obstacle to them at all. Ten to one, they’re gone by now. They’ve got precious little motive not to quit. Unless–’ Remnant frowned. ‘I think we’ll try
a little experiment.’ He moved across to the door leading to the open air and studied it. ‘Metal-sheathed too,’ he said. ‘So there’s not much risk. Come over here.’ Jane joined him. ‘Now, listen. While I–’

  A high, hoarse scream from behind them froze the words on Remnant’s lips. They whirled round. The savagely manhandled figure, who a minute before possessed scarcely the strength to whisper, had flung off the sheet enveloping him. Bloody and almost naked, he was staggering across the room. In an instant they saw why. The bearded man had got on his knees and was crawling along the floor, clutching in one hand a short, gleaming knife. He glanced sidelong as he moved – and Jane, catching his eye, saw that in his last moments humanity had left him and he was become a beast.

  ‘Not the kid!’ The little man, as he screamed the words, flung himself upon the insane creature on the floor. Rudi Tatistchev, in his deep drugged sleep, lay no more than a yard away, and the bright surgical knife had been poised in air. There was a second’s violent struggle as Remnant rushed forward. The two figures on the floor were a tangle of flailing and twitching limbs. Then there was a single deep groan. Remnant took the bearded form by the shoulders and flung it aside. It lay quite still. The little man turned over on his back with a low wail. The knife was buried in his breast.

  Jane dropped down at his side. He opened his eyes on her and his lips moved. ‘Your kid’, he whispered. ‘Your kid’s safe…across the…weir… They can’t…can’t pull the plug on him…Dar–’ His lips became motionless, and his eyes closed.

  Remnant moved from one inert form to the other. ‘Both dead.’ He looked down at the torn body of the little man whose name was unknown to them. ‘I don’t suppose he ever got high marks as a citizen’, he said soberly. ‘But he wasn’t a bad chap.’