Fear is the Key

TWELVE

The sweat poured down our faces in rivulets. The temperature had risen to almost 120° Fahrenheit, the air was humid and now almost indescribably foul. Our hoarse rasping gasps as we fought for oxygen was the only sound in that tiny steel ball resting on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico, 480 feet below the level of the sea.

‘You jinxed it?’ Vyland’s voice was a weak incredulous whisper, his eyes near-crazed with fear. ‘We’re — we’re stuck here? Here, in this—’ His voice faded away as he turned his head and started looking around with all the terror-stricken desperation of a cornered rat about to die. Which was all he was.

‘There’s no way out, Vyland,’ I assured him grimly. ‘Only through that entrance hatch. Maybe you want to try opening it? — at this depth there can only be a pressure of fifty tons or so on the outside of it. And if you could open it — well, you’d be flattened half an inch thick against the opposite bulkhead. Don’t take it too badly, Vyland — the last few minutes will be agony such as you’ve never believed man could know, you’ll be able to see your hands and your face turning blue and purple in the last few seconds before all the major blood vessels in your lungs start to rupture, but soon after that you’ll—’

‘Stop it, stop it!’ Vyland screamed. ‘For God’s sake stop it! Get us out of here, Talbot, get us out of here! I’ll give you anything you like, one million, two millions, five millions. You can have it all, Talbot, you can have it all!’ His mouth and face worked like a maniac’s, his eyes were staring out of his head.

‘You make me sick,’ I said dispassionately. ‘I wouldn’t get you out if I could, Vyland. And it was just in case that I might be tempted that I left the control switch up in the rig. We’ve got fifteen, maybe twenty minutes to live, if you can call the screaming agony we’ll know living. Or, rather, the agony you’ll know.’ I put my hand to my coat, ripped off the central button and thrust it into my mouth. ‘I won’t know a thing, I’ve been prepared for this for months. That’s no button, Vyland, it’s a concentrated cyanide capsule. One bite on that and I’ll be dead before I know I’m dying.’

That got him. Dribbling from a corner of his mouth and babbling incoherently, he flung himself on me, with what purpose in mind I don’t know. He was too crazed to know. He was too crazed to know himself. But I had been expecting it, a heavy spanner lay to hand and he’d picked it up and swung it before he even touched me. It wasn’t much of a blow, but it was enough: he reeled backwards, struck his head against the casing and collapsed heavily on the floor.

That left Royale. He was half-sitting, half-crouched on his little canvas stool, his sphinx-like control had completely snapped, he knew he had only minutes to live and his face was working overtime making up for all those expressions it hadn’t used in those many years. He saw closing in on himself what he had meted out to so many victims over so long a time and the talons of fear were squeezing deep, reaching for the innermost corners of his mind. He wasn’t panic-stricken yet, not completely out of control as Vyland had gone, but his capacity for reason, for thought, was gone. All he could think to do was what he always thought to do in an emergency and that was of using his deadly little black gun. He had it out now and it was pointing at me, but I knew it meant nothing, it was purely a reflex action and he had no intention of using it. For the first time Royale had met a problem that couldn’t be solved by a squeeze of the trigger finger.

‘You’re scared, Royale, aren’t you?’ I said softly. It was an effort now even to speak, my normal breathing rate of about sixteen was now up to fifty, and it was difficult to get the time to force out a word.

He said nothing, just looked at me, and all the devils in hell were in the depth of those black eyes. For a second time in forty-eight hours, and this time in spite of the humidity, the foul and evil-smelling air in that cabin, I could have sworn I caught the smell of new-turned, moist, fresh earth. The smell you get from an open grave.

‘The big bad hatchet-man,’ I whispered huskily. ‘Royale. Royale the killer. Think of all the people who used to tremble, who still do tremble, whenever they hear the breath of your name? Don’t you wish they could see you now? Don’t you, Royale? Don’t you wish they could see you trembling? You are trembling, Royale, aren’t you? You’re terrified as you’ve never been terrified in your life. Aren’t you, Royale?’

Again he said nothing. The devils were still in his eyes, but they weren’t watching me any more, they were riding hard on Royale, they were digging deep into the dark recesses of that dark mind, the shift and play of expression on his contorted face was evidence enough that they were pulling him every which way but the overall pull was towards the dark precipice of complete breakdown, of that overmastering fear that wears the cloak of insanity.

‘Like it, Royale?’ I said hoarsely. ‘Can’t you feel your throat, your lungs starting to hurt? I can feel mine — and I can see your face starting to turn blue. Not much, yet, just starting under the eyes. The eyes and the nose, they always show up first.’ I thrust my hand into my display pocket, brought out a little rectangle of polished chrome. ‘A mirror, Royale. Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to look in it? Don’t you want to see—?’

‘Damn you to hell, Talbot!’ He knocked the mirror flying out of my hand, his voice was halfway between a sob and a scream. ‘I don’t want to die! I don’t want to die!’

‘But your victims did, didn’t they, Royale?’ I could no longer speak intelligibly, it took me four or five breaths to pant out that one sentence. ‘They all had their minds bent on suicide and you just helped them out of the depths of the kindness of your heart. Isn’t that it, Royale?’

‘You’re going to die, Talbot.’ His voice was a frenzied croak, the shaking gun was lined up on my heart. ‘It’s coming to you now.’

‘I’m laughing. I’m laughing out loud. I’ve got a Cyanide tablet between my teeth.’ My chest was hurting, the inside of the observation chamber was beginning to swim before my eyes. I knew I couldn’t last out much longer. ‘Go ahead,’ I gasped. ‘Go ahead and pull the trigger.’

He looked at me with crazy unfocused eyes that had hardly any contact left with reality and fumbled the little black gun into its holster. The beating he’d taken over his head was now beginning to take its toll, he was in an even worse state than I was. He began to sway in his seat, and suddenly fell forward on to his hands and knees, shaking his head from side to side as if to clear away a fog. I leaned across him, barely conscious myself, closed my fingers over the control knob of the carbon dioxide absorption unit and turned it from minimum all the way up to maximum. It would take two minutes, perhaps three, before there would be any noticeable improvement, maybe the best part of ten minutes before the atmosphere inside that chamber was anything like back to normal. Right then, it made no difference at all. I bent over Royale.

‘You’re dying, Royale,’ I gasped out. ‘How does it feel to die, Royale? Tell me, please, how does it feel? How does it feel to be buried in a tomb five hundred feet beneath the surface of the sea? How does it feel to know that you’ll never breathe that wonderful, clean, fresh air of the world above again? How does it feel to know that you’ll never see the sun again? How does it feel to die? Tell me, Royale, how does it feel?’ I bent still closer to him. ‘Tell me, Royale, how would you like to live?’

He didn’t get it, he was that far gone.

‘How would you like to live, Royale?’ I almost had to shout the words.

‘I want to live.’ His voice was a harsh moan of pain, his clenched right fist was beating weakly on the deck of the chamber. ‘Oh, God, I want to live.’

‘Maybe I can give you life yet. Maybe. You’re down on your hands and knees, aren’t you, Royale? You’re begging for your life, aren’t you, Royale? I’ve sworn I’d see the day when you were on your hands and knees begging for your life and now you’re doing just that, aren’t you, Royale?’

‘Damn you, Talbot!’ His voice was a hoarse, despairing, agonized shout, he was swaying on his hands and knees now, his head turning from side to side, his eyes screwed shut. Down there on the floor the air must have been foul and contaminated to a degree, almost completely without oxygen, and his face was really beginning to show the first tinges of blue. He was breathing with the rapidity of a panting dog, each brief indrawn breath a whoop of agony. ‘Get me out of here! For God’s sake get me out of here.’

‘You’re not dead yet, Royale,’ I said in his ear. ‘Maybe you will see the sun again. But maybe you won’t. I lied to Vyland, Royale. The master switch for the ballast release is still in position — I just altered a couple of wires, that’s all. It would take you hours to find out which two. I could fix it in thirty seconds.’

He stopped swaying his head, looked up at me with a blue-tinged sweat-sheened face, with bloodshot fear-darkened eyes that carried far back in them the faintest flicker of hope. ‘Get me out of here, Talbot,’ he whispered. He didn’t know whether there was any hope or whether this was just a further refinement of torture.

‘I could do it, Royale, couldn’t I? See, I’ve got the screwdriver right here.’ I showed it to him, smiled down without any compassion. ‘But I’ve still got this cyanide tablet in my mouth, Royale.’ I showed him the button, gripped between my teeth.

‘Don’t!’ A hoarse cry. ‘Don’t bite on that! You’re mad, Talbot, mad. God, you’re not human.’ Coming from Royale that was good.

‘Who killed Jablonsky?’ I asked quietly. It was becoming easier to breathe now, but not down where Royale was.

‘I did. I killed him,’ Royale moaned.

‘How?’

‘I shot him. Through the head. He was asleep.’

‘And then?’

‘We buried him in the kitchen garden.’ Royale was still moaning and swaying, but he was putting everything he could muster into his reeling thoughts to try to express them coherently: his nerve, for the moment, was gone beyond recall, he was talking for his life and he knew it.

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

‘Who’s behind Vyland?’ I repeated implacably.

‘Nobody.’ His voice was almost a scream he was so desperate to convince me. ‘There were two men, a Cuban minister in the government, and Houras, a permanent civil servant in Colombia. But not now.’

‘What happened to them?’

‘They were — they were eliminated,’ Royale said wearily. ‘I did it.’

‘Who else did you eliminate since you’ve been working for Vyland?’

‘Nobody.’

I showed him the button between my teeth and he shuddered.

‘The pilot. The pilot flying the fighter that shot down this plane. He — he knew too much.’

‘That’s why we could never find that pilot,’ I nodded. ‘My God, you’re a sweet bunch. But you made a mistake Royale, didn’t you? You shot him too soon. Before he’d told you exactly where the DC had crashed … Vyland give you orders for all this?’

He nodded.

‘Did you hear my question?’ I demanded.

‘Vyland gave me orders for all of that.’

There was a brief silence. I stared out of the window, saw some strange shark-like creature swim into sight, stare incuriously at both bathyscaphe and plane, then vanish into the stygian blackness beyond with a lazy flick of its tail. I turned and tapped Royale on the shoulder.

‘Vyland,’ I said. ‘Try to bring him round.’

While Royale stooped over his employer I reached above him for the oxygen regenerating switch. I didn’t want the air getting too fresh too soon.

After maybe a minute or so Royale managed to bring Vyland to. Vyland’s breathing was very distressed, he was pretty far gone in the first stages of anoxia, but for all that he still had some breath left, for when he opened his eyes, stared wildly around and saw me with the button still between my teeth he started screaming, time and again, a horrible nerve-drilling sound in that tiny confined metal space. I reached forward to smack his face to jolt him out of his panic-stricken hysteria, but Royale got there first. Royale had had his tiny fleeting glimpse of hope and he meant to play that hope to the end of the way. He lifted his hand and he wasn’t any too gentle with Vyland.

‘Stop it!’ Royale shook him violently. ‘Stop it, stop it, stop it! Talbot says he can fix this machine. Do you hear me? Talbot says he can fix it!’

Slowly the screaming died away and Vyland stared at Royale with eyes where the first faint flicker of comprehension was beginning to edge in on the fear and the madness.

‘What did you say?’ he whimpered hoarsely. ‘What was that, Royale?’

‘Talbot says he can fix this machine,’ Royale repeated urgently. ‘He says he lied to us, he says that the switch he left up top wasn’t important. He can fix it!’

‘You — you can fix it, Talbot?’ Vyland’s eyes widened until I could see a ring of white all round the irises, his shaking voice was a prayer, the whole curve of his body a gesture of supplication. He wasn’t even daring to hope yet, his mind had gone too deeply into the shadow of the valley of death to glimpse the light above: or rather he didn’t dare to look, in case there was no light there. ‘You can get us out of this? Now — even now you—’

‘Maybe I will, maybe I won’t.’ My voice, for all its rasping hoarseness, had just the right shade of indifference. ‘I’ve said I’d rather stay down here, I mean I’d rather stay down here. It all depends. Come here, Vyland.’

He rose trembling to his feet and crossed to where I was standing. His legs, his whole body were shaking so violently that he could barely support himself. I caught him by the lapels with my good hand and pulled him close.

‘There’s maybe five minutes’ air left; Vyland. Perhaps less. Just tell me, and tell me quickly, the part you played in this business up until the time you met the general. Hurry it up!’

‘Get us out of here,’ he moaned. ‘There’s no air, no air! My lungs are going, I can’t — I can’t breathe.’ He was hardly exaggerating at that, the foul air was rasping in and out his throat with the frequency of a normal heartbeat. ‘I can’t talk. ‘I can’t!’

‘Talk, damn you, talk!’ Royale had him round the throat from behind, was shaking him to and fro till Vyland’s head bounced backwards and forwards like that of a broken doll. ‘Talk! Do you want to die, Vyland? Do you think I want to die because of you? Talk!’

Vyland talked. In less than three gasping, coughing, choking minutes he’d told me all I ever wanted to know — how he had struck a deal with a Cuban service minister and had a plane standing by for weeks, how he had suborned the officer in charge of a radar tracking station in Western Cuba, how he suborned a very senior civil servant in Colombia, how the plane had been tracked, intercepted and shot down and how he had had Royale dispose of those who had served his purposes. He started to talk of the general, but I held up my hand.

‘OK, that’ll do, Vyland. Get back to your seat.’ I reached for the carbon dioxide switch and turned it up to maximum.

‘What’s that you’re doing?’ Vyland whispered.

‘Bringing a little fresh air into the place. Getting rather stuffy down here, don’t you think?’

They stared at each other, then at me, but remained silent. Fury I would have expected, chagrin and violence, but there was nothing of any of those. Fear was still the single predominating emotion in their minds: and they knew that they were still completely at my mercy.

‘Who — who are you, Talbot?’ Vyland croaked.

‘I suppose you might call me a cop.’ I sat down on a canvas chair, I didn’t want to start the delicate job of taking the bathyscaphe up till the air — and my mind — was completely clear. ‘I used to be a bona fide salvage man, working with my brother. The man — or what’s left of the man — out there in the captain’s seat, Vyland. We were a good team, we struck gold off the Tunisian coast and used the capital to start our own airline — we were both wartime bomber pilots, we both had civilian licences. We were doing very well, Vyland — until we met you.

‘After you’d done this’ — I jerked a thumb in the direction of the broken, weed-and barnacle-encrusted plane — ‘I went back to London. I was arrested, they thought I’d something to do with this. It didn’t take long to clear that up and have Lloyd’s of London — who’d lost the whole insurance packet — take me over as a special investigator. They were willing to spend an unlimited sum to get even a percentage of their money back. And because state money was involved both the British and American governments were behind me. Solidly behind me. Nobody ever had a better backing, the Americans even went to the length of assigning a top-flight cop whole-time to the job. The cop was Jablonsky,’

That jolted them, badly. They had lost sufficient of their immediate terror of death, they had come far enough back into the world of reality to appreciate what I was saying, and what that meant. They stared at each other, then at me; I couldn’t have asked for a more attentive audience.

‘That was a mistake, wasn’t it, gentlemen?’ I went on. ‘Shooting Jablonsky. That’s enough to send you both to the chair; judges don’t like people who murder cops. It may not be complete justice, but it’s true. Murder an ordinary citizen and you may get off with it: murder a cop, and you never do. Not that that matters. We know enough to send you to the chair six times over.’

I told them how Jablonsky and I had spent well over a year, mostly in Cuba, looking for traces of the bullion, how we had come to the conclusion that it still hadn’t been recovered — not one of the cut emeralds had appeared anywhere in the world’s markets. Interpol would have known in days.

‘And we were pretty certain,’ I continued, ‘why the money hadn’t been recovered. Why? Only one reason — it had been lost in the sea and someone had been a mite hasty in killing off the only person who knew exactly where it was — the pilot of the fighter plane.

‘Our inquiries had narrowed down to the west coast of Florida. Somebody was looking for money sunk in the water. For that they needed a ship. The general’s Temptress did just fine. But for that you also needed an extremely sensitive depth recorder, and there is where you made your one and fatal mistake, Vyland. We had requested every major marine equipment supplier in Europe and North America to notify us immediately they sold any special depth-finding equipment to any vessels other than naval, mercantile or fishing. You are following me, I trust?’

They were following me all right. They were three parts back to normal now and there was murder in their eyes.

‘In the four-month period concerned no fewer than six of those ultra-sensitive recorders had been sold privately. All to owners of very large yachts. Two of those yachts were on a round-the-world cruise. One was in Rio, one was in Long Island Sound, one on the Pacific coast — and the sixth was plodding up and down the west of Florida. General Blair Ruthven’s Temptress.

‘It was brilliant. I admit it. What better cover could you ever have had for quartering every square yard of sea off the Florida Coast without arousing suspicion? While the general’s geologists were busy setting off their little bombs and making seismological maps of the under-sea rock strata, you were busy mapping every tiniest contour of the ocean floor with the depth recorder. It took you almost six weeks, because you started operating too far to the north — we were watching your every move even then and had fitted out a special boat for night prowling — that was the boat I came out on early this morning. Well, you found the plane. You even spent three nights dragging for it with grapples but all you could drag up was a small section of the left wing-tip.’ I gestured through the window. ‘You can see how comparatively recent that break is.’

‘How do you know all this?’ Vyland whispered.

‘Because I had secured a job as a replacement engineer aboard the Temptress.’ I ignored the startled oath, the involuntary clenching of Vyland’s hands. ‘You and the general thought you had seen me aboard that Havana salvage vessel, but you hadn’t, though I had been with the firm. I was five weeks on the Temptress and it wasn’t till I left that I dyed my hair this hellish colour, had a plastic surgeon fix up this scar and affected a limp. Even so, you weren’t very observant, were you, Vyland? You should have cottoned on.

‘So there you were. You knew where the treasure was, but you couldn’t get your hands on it — anyone who started using diving bells and all the complicated recovery gear necessary for a job like this would have been putting a noose round his own neck. But then someone had another brilliant idea — this one, I’d wager anything, came from the mind of our deceased engineer friend, Bryson. He’d read all about those bathyscaphe trials that were being carried out in the West Indies and came up with the idea of using it in conjunction with this rig.’

The air was almost back to normal inside the observation chamber and though the atmosphere was still stuffy and far too warm for comfort there was plenty of oxygen in the air and breathing was no longer any problem. Royale and Vyland were getting their meanness and courage back with the passing of every moment.

‘So, you see, everyone was having brilliant ideas,’ I continued. ‘But the real beauty, the one that’s brought you two to the end of the road, was Jablonsky’s. It was Jablonsky who thought that it would be real kind and helpful of us if we could provide a bathyscaphe for you to do the job.’

Vyland swore, softly and vilely, looked slowly at Royale then back to me. ‘You mean—?’ he began.

‘It was all laid on,’ I said tiredly. I was taking no pleasure in any of this. ‘The French and British Navies were carrying out tests with it in the Gulf of Lions, but they readily agreed to continue those tests out here. We made sure that it got terrific publicity, we made sure that its advantages were pointed out time and time again, that not even the biggest moron could fail to understand how good it was for stealthy underwater salvage and recovery of buried treasure. We knew it would be a matter of time before the Temptress turned up, and she did. So we left it in a nice lonely place. But before we left it I jinxed it so thoroughly that no one apart from the electrician who’d wired it in the first place and myself could ever have got it going again. You had to have someone to unjinx it, didn’t you, Vyland? Wasn’t it a fortunate coincidence that I happened to turn up at the right time? Incidentally, I wonder what our friends the field foreman and petroleum engineer are going to say when they find that they’ve spent the better part of three months drilling a couple of miles away from where the geologists told them to: I suppose it was you and Bryson who altered the reference navigation marks on the charts to bring you within shouting distance of the treasure and miles away from where the oil strata lie. At the present rate they’ll end up with the pipe in the Indian Ocean and still no oil.’

‘You’re not going to get off with this,’ Vyland said savagely. ‘By God, you’re not—’

‘Shut up!’ I interrupted contemptuously. ‘Shut up or I’ll turn a knob here, pull a switch there and have the two of you grovelling on your hands and knees and begging for your lives as you were doing not five minutes ago.’

They could have killed me there and then, they could have watched me die in screaming agony and the tears of joy would have rolled down their cheeks. Nobody had ever talked like this to them before, and they had just no idea what to say, what to do about it: for their lives were still in my hands. Then, after a long moment, Vyland leaned back in his stool and smiled. His mind was working again.

‘I suppose, Talbot, that you were entertaining some idea of turning us over to the authorities. Is that it?’ He waited for a reply, but when none came he went on: ‘If you were, I’d change my mind about it. For such a clever cop, Talbot, you’ve been very blind in one spot. I’m sure you wouldn’t want to be responsible for the deaths of two innocent people, would you now, Talbot?’

‘What are you talking about?’ I asked slowly.

‘I’m talking about the general.’ Vyland flicked a glance at Royale, a glance for the first time empty of fear, a look of triumph. ‘General Blair Ruthven. The general, his wife, and his younger daughter. Do you know what I’m talking about, Talbot?’

‘What’s the general’s wife got to do—?’

‘My God! And for a moment I thought you had us!’ The relief in Vyland’s face was almost tangible quality. ‘You fool, Talbot. You blind fool! The general — did it never occur to you to think how we got him to come in with us? Did it never occur to you to wonder why a man like that would let us use his yacht, his rig and anything else we wanted to? Didn’t it, Talbot? Didn’t it?’

‘Well, I thought—’

‘You thought!’ he sneered. ‘You poor fool, old Ruthven had to help us whether he wanted to or not. He helped us because he knew the lives of his wife and young daughter depended on us.’

‘His wife and young daughter? But — but they’ve had a legal separation, haven’t they — the general and his wife, I mean. I read all about it—’

‘Sure. Sure you read all about it.’ Vyland, his terror forgotten, was almost jovial now. ‘So did a hundred million others. The general made good and sure that the story got around. It would have been just too bad if the story hadn’t got around. They’re hostages, Talbot. We’ve got them in a place of safety where they’ll stay till we’re finished here. Or else.’

‘You — you kidnapped them?’

‘At last the penny drops,’ Vyland sneered. ‘Sure we kidnapped them.’

‘You and Royale?’

‘Me and Royale.’

‘You admit it? A federal and capital offence — kidnapping — you freely and openly admit it. Is that it?’

‘That’s it. Why shouldn’t we admit it?’ Vyland blustered. But he had become suddenly uneasy. ‘So you’d better forget about the cops and any ideas you have about delivering us to them. Besides, how do you think you’re going to get us up the caisson and off the rig without being chopped into little pieces? I reckon you’re mad, Talbot.’

‘The general’s wife and daughter,’ I mused, as if I hadn’t heard him. ‘It wasn’t a bad idea. You’d have let them go in the end, you couldn’t afford not to, it would have been the Lindbergh case ten times over had you tried anything. On the other hand you knew the general wouldn’t start anything afterwards: it would only be his word against yours, and up your sleeve you always carried the trump card — Royale. As long as Royale walked the face of America the general would never speak. This whole operation probably cost him a cool million — for the general a bagatelle compared to the value of wife and children. A sweet set-up.’

‘Correct. I hold the trumps, Talbot.’

‘Yes,’ I said absently. ‘And every day, just on noon, you sent a coded telegram — in the general’s company code — to your watchdogs who kept an eye on Mrs Ruthven and Jean. You see, Vyland, I even know the daughter’s name. And if the coded telegram didn’t arrive in twenty-four hours they had instructions to shift them to another place, a safer hide-out. Atlanta wasn’t too safe, I’m afraid.’

‘Vyland’s face was grey, his hands beginning to shake again. His voice came as a strained whisper. ‘What are you saying?’

‘I only caught on twenty-four hours ago.’ I replied. ‘We’d been blind — we’d been checking every outgoing cable from Marble Springs for weeks, but forgot all about the inland telegrams. When I did catch on, a message to Judge Mollison from me — through Kennedy, remember that fight we had, I slipped it to him then — started off what must have been the most concentrated and ruthless man hunt for years. The FBI would stop at nothing, not since Jablonsky got his, and obviously they stopped at nothing. Mrs Ruthven and Jean are safe and well — your friends, Vyland, are under lock and key and talking their heads off to beat the rap.’ This last bit was guesswork, but I thought my guess wouldn’t be so far out.

‘You’re making this up,’ Vyland said huskily. Fear was back in his face and he was clutching at straws. ‘You’ve been under guard all day and—’

‘If you were up in the radio shack and could see the state of that creature of yours who tried to stop me from putting through a radio call to the sheriff, you wouldn’t say that. It was Kennedy who gave Royale here his sore head. It was Kennedy who dragged him inside the room and kept on making those calculations on the papers on my desk while I went up to attend to things. You see, I didn’t dare move till they were free. But they are free.’

I looked at the grey and stricken and hunted face and looked away again. It wasn’t a pretty sight. The time had come to get back, I had found out all I wanted to know, got all the evidence I would ever want. I opened up a circuit box, unbuttoned and repositioned four wires, closed the box again and pulled the first of the four electro-magnetic releases for the lead shot ballast.

It worked. Two clouds of grey pellets showered mistily by the side observation windows and disappeared into the black mud on the seabed. It worked, but the lightening of the weight made no difference, the bathyscaphe didn’t budge.

I pulled the second switch, emptied the second pair of containers: still we remained immovable. We were sunk pretty deep into that mud, how deep I didn’t know, but this had never happened before on tests. I sat down to work out if there was any factor I had forgotten, and now that the strain was over the pain was back in my shoulder and mouth and I wasn’t thinking so well any more. I removed the button from between my teeth and absent-mindedly placed it in a pocket.

‘Was — was that cyanide?’ Vyland’s face was still grey.

‘Don’t be silly. Antler-horn, best quality.’ I rose, pulled the other two switches simultaneously. They worked — but again nothing happened. I looked at Vyland and Royale, and saw reflected in their faces the fear that was beginning to touch in my own mind. God, I thought, how ironic it would be if, after all I had said and done, we were to die down here. There was no point in putting off the moment of decision. I started up both motors, inclined the planes to the maximum upwards elevation, started up the tow-rope motor and at the same moment pressed the switch that jettisoned the two big electric batteries mounted on the outside of the scaphe. They fell simultaneously with a thud that jarred the bathyscaphe, sending up a dark spreading cloud of black viscous-looking mud: for two moments of eternity nothing happened, the bolt was shot, the last hope was gone, when, all in a second, the scaphe trembled, broke suction aft and started to rise. I heard Vyland sobbing with relief and terror.

I switched off the engines and we rose steadily, smoothly, on an even keel, now and again starting the tow-rope motor to take in some slack. We were about a hundred feet up when Royale spoke.

‘So it was all a plant, Talbot. You never had any intention of keeping us down there.’ His voice was an evil whisper, the one good side of his face back to its expressionless normal again.

‘That’s it,’ I agreed.

‘Why, Talbot?’

‘To find out exactly where the treasure was. But that was really secondary, I knew it wasn’t far away, a government survey ship could have found it in a day.’

‘Why, Talbot?’ he repeated in the same monotone.

‘Because I had to have evidence. I had to have evidence to send you both to the chair. Up till now we had no evidence whatsoever, all along the way your back trail was divided into a series of water-tight compartments with locked doors. Royale locked the doors by killing everybody and anybody who might talk. Incredibly, there wasn’t a single solitary thing we could pin on you, there wasn’t a person who could split on you for the sufficient reason that all those who could were dead. The locked doors. But you opened them all today. Fear was the key to all the doors.’

‘You’ve got no evidence, Talbot,’ Royale said. ‘It’s only your word against ours — and you won’t live to give your word.’

‘I expected something like that,’ I nodded. We were at a depth of about 250 feet now. ‘Getting your courage back, Royale, aren’t you? But you don’t dare do anything. You can’t get this scaphe back to the rig without me, and you know it. Besides, I have some concrete evidence. Taped under my toes is the bullet that killed Jablonsky.’ They exchanged quick startled looks. ‘Shakes you, doesn’t it? I know it all, I even dug Jablonsky’s body up in the kitchen garden. That bullet will match up with your automatic, Royale. That alone would send you to the chair.’

‘Give it to me, Talbot. Give it to me now.’ The flat marbled eyes were glistening, his hand sliding for his gun.

‘Don’t be stupid. What are you going to do with it — throw it out the window? You can’t get rid of it, you know it. And even if you could, there’s something else that you can never get rid of. The real reason for our trip today, the reason that means you both die.’

There was something in my tone that got them. Royale was very still, Vyland still grey, still shaking. They knew, without knowing why, that the end had come.

‘The tow-rope,’ I said. ‘The wire with the microphone cable leading back to the speaker in the rig. You see the microphone switch here, you see it’s at “Off”? I jinxed it, I fixed it this afternoon so that the microphone was always live. That’s why I made you speak up, made you repeat most things, that’s why I dragged you, Vyland, close up to me so that you were right against the mike when you were making your confession. Every word that’s been spoken down here today, every word we’re speaking now is going through live to that speaker. And every word is being taken down three times: by tape-recorder, by a civil stenographer and by a police stenographer from Miami. I phoned the police on the way back from the rig this morning, they were aboard the rig before daylight — which probably accounts for the field foreman and the petroleum engineer looking so nervous when we came aboard today. They’ve been hidden for twelve hours — but Kennedy knew where they were. And at lunchtime, Vyland, I gave Kennedy your secret knock. Cibatti and his men would have fallen for it, they were bound to. And it’s all over now.’

They said nothing. There was nothing they could say, at least not yet, not until the full significance of what I had said had become irrevocably clear to them.

‘And don’t worry about the tape recording,’ I went on. ‘They’re not normally acceptable as court evidence but those will be. Every statement you made was volunteered by yourselves — think back and you’ll see that: and there’ll be at least ten witnesses inside the caisson who can swear to the genuineness of the recordings, who will swear that they could not have come from any source other than the bathyscaphe. Any prosecutor in the Union will call for and get a verdict of guilty without the jury leaving the box. You know what that means.’

‘So.’ Royale had his gun out, he must have had some crazy notion of trying to snap the tow-rope and sailing the scaphe off to safety. ‘So we were all wrong about you, Talbot, so you were smarter than we were. All right, I admit it. You have what it takes — but you’ll never live to hear the jury give their verdict. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ His trigger finger began to tighten. ‘So long, Talbot.’

‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Not if I were you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to grip the arm-rests of the electric chair with both hands when the time comes?’

‘It’s no good talking, Talbot, I said—’

‘Look down the barrel,’ I advised him. ‘If you want to blow your hand off, you know what to do. When you were unconscious this evening Kennedy used a hammer and punch to jam a lead cylinder right down the barrel. Do you think I’d be so crazy as to come down here and you with a loaded gun in your hand? Don’t take my word for it, Royale — just pull the trigger.’

He squinted down the barrel and his face twisted into a malevolent mask of hate. He was using up ten years’ quota of expressions in one day — and he was telegraphing his signals. I knew that gun was coming before he did. I managed to dodge, the gun struck the Plexiglas behind me and fell harmlessly to the floor at my feet.

‘No one tampered with my gun,’ Vyland said hoarsely. He was almost unrecognizable as the smooth urbane slightly florid top executive he’d been, his face was haggard now, curiously aged and covered in a greyish sheen of sweat. ‘Made a mistake at last, haven’t you, Talbot?’ His breath was coming in brief shallow gasps. ‘You’re not going—’

He broke off, hand halfway inside his coat, and stared down into the muzzle of the heavy Colt pointing in between his eyes.

‘Where — where did you get that? It — it’s Larry’s gun?’

‘Was. You should have searched me, shouldn’t you — not Kennedy? Fools. Sure it’s Larry’s gun — that dope-headed junky who claimed he was your son.’ I looked steadily at him, I didn’t want any gunfire 150 feet below sea level. I didn’t know what might happen. ‘I took it off him this evening, Vyland, just about an hour ago. Just before I killed him.’

‘Just — just before—?’

‘Just before I killed him. I broke his neck.’

With something between a sob and a moan Vyland flung himself at me across the width of the chamber. But his reactions were slow, his movements even slower and he collapsed soundlessly to the floor as the barrel of Larry’s Colt caught him across the temple.

‘Tie him up,’ I said to Royale. There was plenty of spare flex lying around and Royale wasn’t fool enough to get tough about it. He tied him up, while I was blowing gasoline through a valve and slowing our ascent about 120 feet, and just as he finished and before he could straighten I let him have it behind the ear with the butt of Larry’s Colt. If ever there had been a time for playing it like a gentleman, that time was long gone, I was now so weak, so lost in that flooding sea of pain, that I knew it would be impossible for me to bring that scaphe back to the rig and watch Royale at the same time. I doubted whether I could even make it at all.

I made it, but only just. I remember easing the hatch of the bathyscaphe up inside the caisson, asking through the mike, in a slurred stumbling voice that wasn’t mine, for the annular rubber ring to be inflated and then lurching across to twist open the handle of the entrance door. I don’t remember any more. I am told they found the three of us lying unconscious on the floor of the bathyscaphe.