Operation Destruct

by Christopher Nicole

  And he could only keep remembering the eleven bodies still lying in the morgue.

  How long he lay on the bed he had no idea. Gradually even his misery was overtaken by his swelling hunger. He wished he’d taken Mrs. Constant’s advice and had lunch before setting off for the beach.

  Anna Cantelna turned on the light, stood above him. She held a hypodermic needle in her hand. Alexis followed her in and closed the door.

  “Well?” she asked. “Hungry?”

  “Ravenous.”

  “Good,” she said. “The drug will have no competition in your bloodstream, eh?” She sat beside him on the bed, pushed his left sleeve up to his shoulder. “Now, as I am sure you know, Mr. Anders, Sodium Pentothal is both an anaesthetic and a hypnotic. So I suggest you relax and let events take their course. Because they will in any event, you know.”

  “Like hell,” Jonathan muttered.

  She sighed, located the vein she wanted, dabbed his forearm with a piece of cotton wool, and thrust the needle into his flesh. She was an expert, and he scarcely felt the prick. She withdrew the needle, stroked his forearm once again, rolled down his sleeve. “There we are. Now please do take my advice.”

  Jonathan stared at her. Her face seemed to tremble, and divide into two, and then come back together. But this was ridiculous. Nineteen squared. Nineteen squared. Three hundred and sixty-one. That was too easy. Thirty-seven squared. “Thirty-seven squared . . .”

  “One thousand three hundred and sixty-nine,” Anna Cantelna said.

  He gazed at her. Now she had three heads, and even as he watched she grew a fourth; they loomed above him like a monstrous poker hand.

  They smiled. “Oh, I cannot read your mind, Mr. Anders. I only wish I could. But you asked the question aloud. Did no one ever tell you that attempting to occupy your brain like that only means that the drug works more quickly?”

  “It’s not working at all,” he said. “I . . .” The heads multiplied so rapidly that he lost count, as they went whirling around the room, rising and falling, seeming to carry him with them, and all the while talking in a matter of fact voice, but it was difficult to understand what they were saying. Then they ceased speaking, and seemed to go away, only to return soon afterward, this time multiplied yet again, and now they had hands as well, which poked and prodded his body, tossing and turning him, seeming to constrict his flesh.

  He awoke to a snap of her fingers, gazed up at her, now single headed. He felt remarkably tired.

  Anna Cantelna’s smile was sad. “I owe you an apology, Mr. Anders. When you claimed you knew virtually nothing about Katorzin you were telling the truth.”

  His body felt as strange as it had in his nightmare. And he was lying differently. He looked down at himself. His wrists and ankles, although still bound, were no longer secured to the bedposts. And they had removed his clothes and dressed him in his wet suit.

  He ran his tongue around dry lips. “You seem to have been having a busy time.”

  “Alexis and Robert looked after that for me,” she said.

  “And I have been answering your questions?”

  “To the best of your ability. You talked about a man named Craufurd, who I gather is your immediate superior, and also about a man named Indman, and about a man named Headly, who are also colleagues of yours, it seems. You spoke about Katorzin as well. But you don’t really seem to know very much about him, except that he had been a British agent for ten years. I find that very disturbing. Of course, as he is now dead, it is perhaps not so important as it might have been. I wish I knew, though, if he has had any means of getting regular information out of the Soviet Union, but you have to a certain extent reassured me on that point as well. I would say we have had a very satisfactory interview.”

  Jonathan gazed at her. His sense of failure was too complete for him even to hate her.

  “So now there remains only the problem of yourself, Mr. Anders,” Anna Cantelna said. “I really would like you to understand that I have found you a most charming and well-mannered young man, despite your assault on me.” She smiled. “Perhaps because of it. I only wish I could express the hope that we shall meet again, but I am afraid that is impossible. No doubt, like all of us, you understood the risk you were taking when you accepted this mission.”

  Jonathan swallowed. “You’ll never get away with it,” he whispered. “Not in Guernsey. You can’t just murder someone in a place like this.”

  “Perhaps you are still pretending that the other members of your team will be disturbed by your disappearance, Mr. Anders. You mean the two American tourists, do you not? The Bridges? You see, Edna did her task very well, found out all about them. She even got into a conversation with the young woman. I wonder if there is a budding romance there, Mr. Anders? Now that would be a tragedy.”

  “You’ll never get away with it,” Jonathan repeated stubbornly. Desperately he tried another ploy. “I’m due back in London tonight, you know. And I had better be there, else there’ll be such an investigation launched tomorrow morning you won’t be able to draw breath.”

  “But Mr. Anders,” she said reasonably. “You keep assuming that there is going to be something for someone to investigate. Your instructions were to come to Guernsey and dive to the wreck, were they not? In the furtherance of this duty you arranged with a local fisherman named Enwright to take you out to the wreck as soon as his boat floats this afternoon. Mrs. Constant knows this, and I understand you spoke with another man at Perelle Bay before you found Enwright. I am going to see that you carried out your advertised plan. Only you won’t come up again.”

  Chapter Five

  Beneath them a door banged. “Is that you, Enwright?” Anna Cantelna called. “Come up here, will you.”

  She lit a cigarette, walked round the bed, back again. For all her seeming confidence she was restless, and nervous. But Jonathan realized that even were he free he was not really capable of movement. His head swung to and fro, and the bed seem to be rising and falling. He listened to heavy feet on the stairs, and Robert and Enwright entered, carrying a large canvas bag.

  “Tell me about the beach,” Anna Cantelna said.

  “There’s nothing to worry about there, ma’am,” Enwright said. “I’ve been down at the slipway all afternoon, talking about this trip. Crazy nonsense, I’ve said a dozen times. But he sure seems keen, I said.”

  “I hope you did not overdo it. And Mrs. Constant?”

  “I haven’t actually been to see her. I thought that might have been a bit obvious, like. But I rang her up, see, to ask her if she knew anything about this chap Anders. ‘Insists on going out to the wreck,’ I said. ‘This very afternoon, soon as the tide’s right. And I don’t even know if he can swim proper.’ And she said, ‘Yes, he was that keen. But he must be able to swim, Ted. He’s got the gear and everything. And, anyway, it’s not your responsibility. What I’d like to know is why he didn’t come in to lunch.’ ‘The young blighter,’ I said. ‘Didn’t he tell you he was going in to a restaurant in St. Peter Port?’ And she said, ‘There’s these modem young people all over. Just thoughtless, they are.’ You’ve nothing to worry about there.”

  “You should have been an actor,” Anna Cantelna said. “There is no possibility she might go down to the bay? She is the one person who would be able to tell the difference between Alexis and Mr. Anders.”

  “That old witch come down to the bay? Not her, ma’am. You can rely on that.”

  “I suppose I have to,” Anna Cantelna said coldly. “Now show me the equipment, Robert.”

  “Oh, it’s all here, Madam Cantelna. I do a bit of diving myself, when the ormers are in season. I’ve a waterproof lamp, with a magnetized base. See?” He sucked up the steel ashtray on the dressing table. “Just the job, eh? And the hammer, and the knife, both attached to the belt. And the rope you wanted. And the lead weight.”

  “Good. Now you must listen to me very carefully, Alexis. I am going to give you a full dose of Pentothal, but you must not inject
Mr. Anders with it until three minutes before you reach the waterfront. Otherwise it may wear off before you are ready. Enwright will tell you when. Enwright, say what you will do afterward.”

  “Well, ma’am, it’s four now, so it’ll be half past by the time we get off. That’s one of the crazy aspects of this business, as I was telling my mates, that, although there’s only an hour’s daylight available with the tide as it is, his nibs still wants to dive this afternoon. So we stay out there for over an hour, until it’s pretty dark. By then I figure we’ll be invisible from the shore, and the tide will be coming up to slack. So we take Anders down to the wreck and leave him there, and then I go round the outside of Lihou Island, as close as I can to the rocks, drop the captain, and motor into Perelle Bay at full speed, shouting for help, because Anders has gone down once too often and ain’t come up again.”

  “That’s very good, Enwright. Alexis?”

  “I will remain hidden on Lihou Island until the tide has gone down sufficiently for me to walk back over the causeway. Enwright says that will be about eleven tonight. I’ll come straight here.”

  “Taking care that no one sees you,” Anna Cantelna said. “I’ll be waiting with a hot bath and warm drink. Robert?”

  “As soon as Enwright leaves, Edna and I will go downtown and do some shopping until five-thirty. Then I’m going to have an accident. I’ll hit another car when coming out of parking, so there’ll be no question as to what we were doing this afternoon. Although, you know, there is absolutely no reason for anyone even to connect us with Enwright. He comes up here occasionally to sell fish, and that’s all.”

  “One cannot be too careful, Robert.” Anna Cantelna looked at her watch. “That seems to be everything. I think you could be on your way now. Fetch the sail-bag, Enwright.” She rolled her handkerchief into a ball, stood above Jonathan. “I very much doubt whether the second injection will have worn off by the time you enter the water, Mr. Anders,” she said. “It will be added to the residue of the first which is still in your system. But even if you are awake, I can assure you that drowning is a quick and pleasant way to die. I will wish you good luck.”

  Jonathan gazed at her. Strange that at their first meeting he had not thought her beautiful. Now her personality seemed to fill the room, as if she were a puppeteer, and everyone else present was merely moving in response to her fingers on the strings. And she was murdering him, tenderly and compassionately, but without a spark of doubt or regret, much as she might put down a favorite cat which had become incurably ill.

  “There’ll be a post mortem,” he said. “The police won’t be happy about a corpse full of Sodium Pentothal.”

  “But that depends upon how rapidly they recover your body,” she said. “I doubt very much whether they will find anything identifiable as Pentothal in your system. Some ethyl residue, I imagine, but then you young people are fond of using various ethyl products, are you not? You call it freaking out, I believe. Now I am afraid we must gag you, else you could make a nuisance of yourself. Open wide.”

  Robert and Enwright stood ready to force his jaws apart. He sighed, opened his mouth, and she stuffed the handkerchief in, secured it with a length of clothesline. Then the two men picked him up and thrust him into the large canvas sailbag Enwright had brought upstairs.

  “Do not secure the neck until you are ready to leave the van,” Anna Cantelna said. “It would not be so good were he to suffocate.”

  “Stop worrying,” Alexis said. “One would suppose you had never killed before.”

  “I do not enjoy killing,” she said. “Not even the fish. Now take him out to the van.”

  “He’s quite a weight,” Robert said. “Suppose someone asks what you’ve got in there, captain?”

  “Mr. Anders has established himself as a very enthusiastic diver,” Alexis said. “Although he intends firstly to go down with only goggles, he plans eventually to use lungs, to give the wreck a thorough inspection. They weigh a great deal.”

  “And he brought them by plane? The police will be able to establish he didn’t hire them here.”

  “There is a certain amount of risk in every operation of this nature, Robert,” Anna Cantelna said. “It is up to the captain and Enwright to make the bag seem as light as possible, and to avoid people, if possible. Now please hurry.”

  The mouth of the bag closed. Jonathan felt himself being lifted from the ground. His head was clearing all the time, and the tendency to panic became overwhelming, calling on him to scream silently into his gag, to tell himself over and over again, no, this cannot be happening, this has to be some sort of a nightmare, from which I will awaken at any moment . . . but now, if at no previous time in his life, he had to keep calm, and think. He remembered crouching in the box under the stairs at the house in Wiltshire, thinking that job was a piece of cake, and hearing Headly strike the floor and tell him to come out. He had thought then, like greased lightning, and with complete confidence. Because he had not known the bullets were real. Now he knew his life was at stake, and he had to think with absolute accuracy and absolute clarity and absolute speed. Think as if he were playing the game which would give him the British Championship, and his opponent threatened a mate in three, and there were only a few seconds left on his clock in which to find a solution. Think!

  He felt himself being carried down the corridor, and smelled the perpetual damp of the garage. Then once again he was in the back of the van, with a man, presumably Alexis, sitting beside him, his hand resting on the sailbag. He inhaled a variety of odors, tar, mildew, even stale fish.

  Think! They were going to drive down to Perelle Bay. That would take about five minutes, as he remembered. There was nothing he could do while he was trussed like a chicken ready for the oven. Once they approached Perelle Bay he was going to be given another small dose of Sodium Pentothal, to make sure he remained unconscious while they were transferring him to Enwright’s boat. There was no hope of combating that.

  The time! The time would be about a quarter to five, and Enwright would motor out to the wreck. That would take about fifteen minutes, he calculated, probably too short a time for him to recover consciousness, as Anna Cantelna had suggested. Everything depended upon how soon they decided to put him into the water, how soon they untied his hands.

  “I figure you should give him that injection about now,” Enwright said.

  “Then you drive slowly,” Alexis said, and opened the sailbag. He pulled the rubber jacket away from Jonathan’s neck. “I am not so expert at this sort of thing as Madam Cantelna,” he said. “So this will probably hurt you.” He drove the needle downward.

  *

  Jonathan awoke to a blast of cold air on his face. The fishing boat jumped to each wave, and the engine spluttered. A flicker of spray came over the bow, stung his face. They had opened the top of the sailbag.

  It was still daylight, and quite bright, although the sun was well down in the west. It was a brilliantly clear afternoon, but the breeze had got up. He could not see Enwright, behind him at the tiller; Alexis, already changed into his wet suit, leaned over the bows.

  “What’s it feel like, to be out here again?” Enwright asked.

  Alexis shrugged. “It’s not the same. The sea and the wind are not so bad. Besides, I saw very little that night. Tell me, that man we spoke to just now, at the slipway, did I convince him I was Jonathan Anders? I would say he observed that my accent was not English.”

  “I’ll do the identifying of the body, captain, and Mrs. Constant as well. Old George will suppose he must have made a mistake. There’s no reason for anyone to suppose there’s something funny about this, unless they’re involved.”

  “And the British Government will certainly wish to hush the whole affair up,” Alexis said thoughtfully. “Anna is a very clever woman.”

  “She gives me the creeps.” The engine slowed, and the boat’s actions eased; instead of pitching she started to roll. “You putting him over now?”

  “I would like to
go down myself, first. It is something I have wanted to do since she sank, and it will add realism should anyone be watching us from the shore.”

  “They’ll have a job spotting us, even with glasses. See those rocks just showing over there? That’s where she struck, I reckon. She’s maybe twenty yards south of them. Now you want to be careful, captain. There’s a bit of a bobble.” He chuckled. “We don’t want to drown the wrong man, eh? It’d upset the madam.”

  “You have a delightful sense of humor, Enwright. But I have done this sort of thing before.” Alexis pulled on his goggles, took the magnetized lamp, rolled over the gunwale, and entered the water with a small splash.

  Enwright scrambled forward, a knife in his hand. Two strokes split the bag open, and Jonathan fell out. “Awake, are you? How do you feel?”

  Jonathan gazed at him.

  Enwright grinned, leaned forward, and with another stroke of the knife severed the cord holding the handkerchief in place. This he removed, stuffing it into his pocket. “We’re a mile from the beach, so if you feel like hollering, you go right ahead.”