The Boy Who Liked Monsters (Commander Shaw Book 19)

by Philip McCutchan

  “You’ve got it all tied up, haven’t you, Perro?”

  He smiled again. “I believe so, yes. Now you will wait. Sit over there.” He indicated a chair well away from the control set-up. The electric hum continued; the boy was crying now. There would be enormous tension as he waited to speak to his grandfather. I felt it in myself as well as Perro prepared to connect the call across the Atlantic.

  The sound was being amplified: I could hear the dialling tone loud and clear. It stopped quickly as thousands of miles away Ross Mackenzie answered. “Mackenzie here.”

  “Good, Mr Mackenzie. You know who this is, I think.”

  “Sure I know. Go ahead.” There was an already defeated note in the voice.

  “You have told no one of this contact?”

  “No one.” Mackenzie, of course, would know the call was being tapped; he was presumably prepared to take the risk – or knew, as I did now, that all that was being taken care of. In any case, he wouldn’t be able to pass up the chance of contact with his grandson. “I said, go ahead.”

  “Very well, Mr Mackenzie. You know what is wanted of you. Have you given thought to this?”

  “I have.” I looked across at the boy; he was trembling uncontrollably as he heard his grandfather’s voice, loud in the compartment. The woman Tanya had her hand across his mouth. Tears were streaming down. I looked away again; it was more than I wanted to see.

  “And so?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Perro laughed. “Oh, come now, Mr Mackenzie. You must soon decide. You must have yourself ready. You know what we want.”

  “I haven’t decided yet. I must have time.” I caught the sound of desperation. “I can’t be hurried.” There was a pause, then Mackenzie asked about the boy.

  “Oh, he is well! Well, I assure you, but worried about what may be going to happen if you do not co-operate, Mr Mackenzie. Very worried about that.”

  Mackenzie began to break down a little. He said, “You bastard,” and again Perro laughed, saying that to call him that served no useful purpose. The boy, he said, would speak to him himself, and James was called over, with Tanya behind him, ready to clamp his mouth again with her hand if he looked like saying too much.

  He was told to sit in front of the instrument. He was crying bitterly, so much that he could hardly speak, but he managed to say, “Please get me out … please, Grandad!”

  “I’ll do my best, son. I’ll do my best. Bear up like a man. Don’t lose heart. I’m rooting for you, so will the whole world when they know.”

  “Granddad … ” Tears choked the small voice.

  “Yes, James?”

  Perro said, “That’s enough,” and Tanya clamped the boy’s mouth with her hand and pulled him away. Perro said into the radio telephone, “That’s all, Mr Mackenzie. You told the boy you would do your best. That was wise. Do just that, Mr Mackenzie.”

  He cut the call. The boy was taken away, sobbing his heart out, small body wriggling desperately in the woman’s iron grip.

  To Perro I said, “Mackenzie had it right, hadn’t he?”

  “In what way?”

  “When he spoke of the world reaction afterwards. That’ll kind of dish Kulachev’s enemies, won’t it? You don’t throw the blame at a man when his failure’s been engineered by a kidnap and a threat.”

  Perro laughed; he seemed to find that really funny. “A western plot,” he said. “A trick on the part of the USA, to explain Mackenzie’s intransigence that Kulachev was unable to overcome.” He laughed again, and laid a hand on my shoulder, in high good humour. “There was no kidnap, Commander Shaw. No kidnap at all. I think perhaps you are beginning to understand now?”

  I wasn’t surprised; my imagination got to work. The body of the English nanny, the body of James Jervolino … they could be found, say on a mountainside somewhere. There were vultures, and in some of the remoter areas of France wolves still roamed. Such tragedies could occur: from time to time tourists had vanished and a long while afterwards their bodies had been found, or the remains of their bodies, identifiable by their possessions. And as well as vultures and wolves there were bandits … perhaps the blame would be laid on them, backed by a couple of bullets fired from a Perro revolver.

  Perro would leave nothing to chance. The boy would never go back to America. And Perro, once the whole thing had been brought off, would hot-foot it for the Soviet Union and total safety.

  *

  It was back again to the stinking, fetid cell with the scummy water that had seeped in through the brickwork. The atmosphere was thick, horrible, and I wondered if the water had seeped from beneath that cemetery, bringing with it the miasma of the dead, but of course the dead would be no more than clean bones. The cemetery had had a fairly ancient look and Marcus Bright had told me that old Gallepe had said it was disused now; and once again I remembered the dried-up skull that had leered at me with its bony grin through the decayed brickwork of the tunnel that led to the underground control room.

  I was not sent for again to talk to Max. That last contact had told Perro that the heat was on, and I could serve no further purpose in allaying Max’s anxieties – that simply didn’t matter any more now. And Perro had made it plain that he had his own sources of information. But something was telling me that he hadn’t finished with me yet; not entirely. We were all being kept alive in order to come in as it were at the end. I was convinced of that, and Marcus Bright agreed. None of us said anything about the afterwards: just one guess was enough and it didn’t need stressing.

  Food of a sort, and water, continued to be brought. We ate and drank one at a time, with the handcuffs removed and the guns of the guards ready. There wasn’t a hope of any fight-back. The vigilance was intense and every movement brought the risk of a wounding bullet. At intervals we were taken singly to a lavatory; there too the guard was strong. We heard nothing of the boy, no cries now, and the woman Tanya didn’t appear, nor did Perro himself. We existed mostly in a foul-smelling world of darkness, cut off from all except ourselves and the armed guards who didn’t speak except for the giving of orders.

  Then in the end they came for me alone; I was taken ahead of the guns from the cellar, leaving Felicity and Marcus Bright behind. I assumed it was for some other contact, perhaps once again to hear the boy pleading with his impotent grandfather, and I expected to rejoin Felicity quite soon.

  But it wasn’t that.

  In the hall, with the door to the cellar shut and bolted, I was brought face to face with James Jervolino and his woman jailer. The boy was asking pathetically about his teddy, which was missing. He was looking ill now, his face yellow rather than white, and deep shadows beneath his eyes, and weals across his cheek from blows, and scarcely the spirit left even to cry. I said, “Hello, James,” and he just stared back at me without responding. Then Perro appeared, with the tall man, the one with the black beard, and two others.

  He said there was a journey to be made. This surprised me; it sounded as though, after all, Perro might be quitting his HQ and moving out. Or maybe he was just shifting the boy and, for the sake of the as yet unknown use I believed he meant to make of me, me as well. I asked, “Is the pressure coming on, Perro?”

  He said crisply, “There will be no answers, so you may save your breath.”

  I did; I fancied Perro was a little harassed. His sources of information could have rattled him, the French authorities could be coming a little close. Someone could even, after all, have been to call on old Gallepe – his record as a Resistance fighter would be known and the French counter-espionage services might have talked to him about his local knowledge. That at least gave hope, but it was a very long shot, and it didn’t look as though it would be of much help to the boy or me. Not if we were being moved out.

  We were taken through to the garage and put into a car. It was the old routine: me on the floor in the back, beneath the booted feet of the armed men, Perro himself now driving, the boy crammed into a bundle with me, and covered with a
rug, and Tanya’s feet resting on his body. It was a crowded car; but the journey was not a long one. It came to an end within about a quarter of an hour, and we were ordered out. We emerged into open country with a light wind blowing and a hint of rain in the air. It was dark but there was a fitful moon showing through dispersed cloud from time to time and I saw that we were on a patch of concrete alongside a river – the Vezere, presumably.

  Secured to bollards on the concrete hard I saw a boat, a power-boat with knifing bows and a high midship superstructure above which was a mass of aerials, radio and radar. There was a hum of dynamos as there had been back in the underground HQ. The boat was big, very expensive, with a row of ports along the side, extending for most of the hull from for’ard to aft. The craft looked very seaworthy, and seemed to tower above the bank, almost a liner in miniature towering above a quay.

  We were ordered aboard behind Perro – the boy, Tanya, me and one of the armed men. Perro was helped over the bow by one of his crew. The car was driven away by the bearded man. As soon as we were aboard, the securing ropes were cast off and we moved out, heading down river towards Bordeaux. Bordeaux had been one of Captain Kubat’s ports of call in the Zonguldak: I wondered if Robert Alexander Neskuke had made his last journey down this river, from the cellar where I’d found the evidence of his possible stay, to be placed, dead already, in the ship’s funnel, with the connivance of Alphonse Freyard.

  Eleven

  I was taken below decks, with the boy. The power-boat wasn’t in fact as spacious as I’d thought from that first look; a number of the ports gave light to just one long compartment into which I looked as I was taken past. It was a dining saloon, containing a long table and a number of chairs. A good deal of the rest of the boat was taken up with radio equipment: Perro’s secondary HQ, nicely mobile? That seemed likely. I was put into a cabin with the boy and Tanya. There were two bunks and these we sat on. My handcuffs were still in place and an armed man kept a constant watch in the open doorway.

  The vessel was moving at a fair speed, as I judged from the beat of the engines and the hiss of water past the hull below the ports. After a while James Jervolino fell into a sleep of what looked like exhaustion. Now and again the woman chatted with the guard, speaking French, but nothing of any consequence. She was suffering from boredom, that was all.

  I was still awake when dawn came but soon after this sleep hit me and I went out like a light, rolling back on the bunk without even realising it. I was unaware of the power-boat’s engines easing and then stopping, and after an interval starting again; but when I awoke we were rolling quite heavily, and pitching, and I knew we had reached the open sea beyond Bordeaux.

  *

  Breakfast was brought by a white-jacketed steward: fried eggs and bacon, rolls and marmalade, strong coffee as only the French can produce it. After the cellar, this was luxury and, with the handcuffs temporarily removed, I made up for the past privations.

  I encouraged James to eat; his grandparents, I said, would expect him to keep his strength up. Tanya helped; they didn’t want the boy to sicken, not yet. But in fact he had little appetite and he didn’t like the rolling and pitching, and after eating a little he was sick. Tanya slapped his face angrily, and the steward was summoned to clear up.

  Perro came down after breakfast was finished. He was in good spirits; I didn’t need to ask if he’d had any difficulty with the Bordeaux authorities who would have needed to give him outward clearance. Even if the strike-back was under way, Perro had not so far been named, and in any case the Perro name, at any rate as represented by the father, was a respected one. Besides which, a man who claimed support in the Soviet Union and even in Washington via suborned men would have had little difficulty in squaring the French customs and immigration and so on, had he needed to.

  He said, “You are wondering where we are going, Commander Shaw.”

  “It crossed my mind.”

  He smiled. “We are simply going to sea. We shall head out into the North Atlantic, to be lost in the sea wastes.” “And the shore set-up?”

  “It remains.”

  “But won’t be used now?”

  “I can do all that is required from aboard this boat.”

  I said, “You mean you’re being pressured, Perro. You’re being closed in. What if that set-up’s discovered before you’re ready? Doesn’t that give the game away, let both Mackenzie and Kulachev off the hook?”

  “No,” he said, still smiling, still confident. “It will not be found.”

  “But – ”

  “I said it remains. I did not say for how long.”

  That puzzled me and I said as much, but I suppose I might have made a good guess. The house, Perro now said, contained high explosive, widely sited. There was a contact system that had been set up; the moment any entry was made, either by way of the well-concealed pit that led to the slippery slope or by any door or window or other means of entry or attack, then the high explosive would blow and the building would be reduced to rubble. Before that happened, the house would have been evacuated by his thugs, who would vanish very capably.

  My mouth had gone dry. I asked, “Miss Mandrake?”

  “She remains. As does your man from Barfleur.”

  I said, “You bastard.”

  Again he smiled: he could well afford to. “It is their own fault,” he said. “My plans are not to be interfered with, by you or them or anybody else. And you will be in no position to help, as you can see.”

  He left the cabin then and I heard him clumping back up the ladder to the deck, a man confident of a life of ease and honour in the Soviet Union, well in with the new leadership once Kulachev had been disposed of. With Felicity and Marcus Bright fragmented, and me, of course, disposed of at sea, probably with the helpless, innocent little boy. As for the still current chances of world peace under reduced armaments, reduced nuclear capabilities all round, there was just the one, solitary hope: that Ross Mackenzie would put the hopes of the western alliance, all the western world, before his grandson. Looking now at James Jervolino, I doubted if he could ever do it. I was pretty sure I couldn’t if I had been in Ross Mackenzie’s position.

  *

  We continued heading out to sea on a steady course which I reckoned would most likely be due west, or maybe a little north of west, out to where, these days, passing ships would be few. Perro would know the shipping lanes and they could easily be steered clear of, and, as he had said, we would become lost in the vastness, totally unsuspected, with the French police and army having only that house as their possible target the slim evidence of the sketch-map. I still believed they wouldn’t in fact find it; I wasn’t too worried about a blow-up. But if they never found it, Felicity and Marcus Bright would face death just the same, a slow death from starvation and probably, in time, disease.

  I tried to forget that aspect; I couldn’t do anything about it and I needed to keep my mind attuned to the present and my current position. A chance could come; but it was very remote.

  I talked to the boy. I wanted to keep his mind busy, to stop him thinking. No one stopped us talking, and in fact Tanya was all ears. I believe she felt she just might pick up something about the grandfather that might be useful to Perro, but I kept off Ross Mackenzie so far as I could. But all I could find to talk about was America, and I asked him what he did, what were his interests down there at his home in California. He said he liked swimming, and he’d been taken to Disneyland which was great. There were monsters there, he said, and for the first time his eyes lit up.

  “You like monsters, James?”

  “Sure I do.” He paused. “You ever been to Scotland, Mr Shaw?”

  “Yes,” I said. “Lots of times.”

  “That’s where my granddad came from. He says it’s great.”

  I agreed that it was; he asked me about it. I told him of the great, deep lochs, of the glens and the mountains, and the haunting skirl of the bagpipes sounding from the battlements of Stirling Castle, of the spl
endid scenes of Scottish regiments each year at the Edinburgh tattoo; but that was not his interest.

  He asked, “You ever see the Loch Ness Monster, Mr Shaw?”

  “No,” I said.

  “My granddad did. Years ago. He went to Scotland and he saw the monster.”

  I grinned. “I’m sure it was great. You’re really into monsters, aren’t you, James?”

  He said he was. He’d met a man, he said, a friend of his dad’s, who’d seen all the monsters of Scotland and had described them to him in some detail, hundreds of arms and legs, long tails, wings, fire coming out of the mouths of some of them who’d been half monster and half dragon. He told me about them all: the monsters of Loch Etive, Loch Tay, Loch Torridon, Loch Leven, the Gareloch where the monster chased the US Navy’s nuclear submarines, and a monster who lived in a drum, and another who lived in a tin of haggis, the last two being capable of much self-magnification when they emerged from their dwellings. He was really happy in telling me all this, eyes big with information being imparted to a willing listener and believer, forgetting his anxieties until the woman cut in on him impatiently and told him to hold his tongue: she wasn’t getting the helpful chat she’d hoped for. But I felt I had at least begun to establish some sort of rapport with the boy through the medium of his monsters. I hoped that would be of some help to him as time began to run out, run down towards a climax.

  *

  From time to time, Perro kept me informed: there had been a number of contacts with Ross Mackenzie, who was stalling.

  “Playing for time,” Perro said. “It will get him nowhere, and in the end he will agree. I have myself put ideas to him … ideas to bring the talks to a sudden end.”

  “Such as?”

  Perro shrugged. “It is easy. All he has to do is, for instance, to deny the right of inspection. Deny the Soviets the essential access to the American dismantlement of their nuclear arsenal, the viewing that will prove to the Soviet Union that the western alliance is not dissembling. Then – ”