Fear is the Key

ELEVEN

Eight minutes after Larry had died and exactly twenty minutes after I had left Kennedy and Royale in the cabin I was back there, giving the hurriedly prearranged knock. The door was unlocked, and I passed quickly inside. Kennedy immediately turned the key again while I looked down at Royale, spread-eagled and unconscious on the deck.

‘How’s the patient been?’ I inquired. My breath was coming in heaving gasps, the exertions of the past twenty minutes and the fact that I’d run all the way back there hadn’t helped my respiration any.

‘Restive.’ Kennedy grinned. ‘I had to give him another sedative.’ Then his eyes took me in and the smile slowly faded as he looked first at the blood trickling from my mouth then at the hole in the shoulder of the oilskin.

‘You look bad. You’re hurt. Trouble?’

I nodded. ‘But it’s all over now, all taken care of.’ I was wriggling out of my oilskins as fast as I could and I wasn’t liking it at all. ‘I got through on the radio. Everything is going fine. So far, that is.’

‘Fine, that’s wonderful.’ The words were automatic, Kennedy was pleased enough to hear my news but he was far from pleased with the looks of me. Carefully, gently, he was helping me out of the oilskins and I heard the quick indrawing of breath as he saw where I’d torn my shirt-sleeve off at the shoulder, the red-stained wads of gauze with which Mary had plugged both sides of the wound — the bullet had passed straight through, missing the bone but tearing half the deltoid muscle away — in the brief minute we’d stopped in the radio shack after we’d come down that ladder again. ‘My God, that must hurt.’

‘Not much.’ Not much it didn’t there were a couple of little men, working on piece-time rates, perched on either side of my shoulder and sawing away with a crosscut as if their lives depended on it, and my mouth didn’t feel very much better: the broken tooth had left an exposed nerve that sent violent jolts of pain stabbing up through my face and head every other second. Normally the combination would have had me climbing the walls: but today wasn’t a normal day.

‘You can’t carry on like this,’ Kennedy persisted. ‘You’re losing blood and—’

‘Can anyone see that I’ve been hit in the teeth?’ I asked abruptly.

He crossed to a wash-basin, wet a handkerchief and wiped my face clear of blood.

‘I don’t think so,’ he said consideringly. ‘Tomorrow your upper lip will be double size but it hasn’t started coming up yet.’ He smiled with humour. ‘And as long as the wound in your shoulder doesn’t make you laugh out loud no one can see that one of your teeth is broken.’

‘Fine. That’s all I need. You know I’ve got to do this.’ I was slipping off the oilskin leggings and had to reposition the gun in my waistband. Kennedy, beginning to dress up in the oilskins himself, saw it.

‘Larry’s?’

I nodded.

‘He did the damage?’

Another nod.

‘And Larry?’

‘He won’t need any more heroin where he’s gone.’ I struggled painfully into my coat, more than ever grateful that I’d left it off before going. ‘I broke his neck.’

Kennedy regarded me long and thoughtfully. ‘You play kind of rough, don’t you, Talbot?’

‘Not half as rough as you’d have been,’ I said grimly. ‘He’d Mary on her hands and knees on the monkey-board of the derrick, a hundred feet above the deck, and he was proposing that she go down again without benefit of the ladder.’

He stopped in the middle of tying the last button on his oilskin, crossed in two quick strides, grabbed me by the shoulders then released them again at my quick exclamation of pain.

‘Sorry, Talbot. Damn foolish of me.’ His face wasn’t as brown as usual, eyes and mouth were creased with worry. ‘How — is she all right?’

‘She’s all right,’ I said wearily. ‘She’ll be across here in ten minutes’ time and you’ll see for yourself. You’d better get going, Kennedy. They’ll be back any minute.’

‘That’s right,’ he murmured. ‘Half an hour, the general said — it’s nearly up. You — you’re sure she’s all right?’

‘Sure I’m sure,’ I said irritably, then at once regretted the irritation. This man I could get to like very much. I grinned at him. ‘Never yet saw a chauffeur so worried about his employer.’

‘I’m off,’ he said. He didn’t feel like smiling. He reached for a leather note-case lying beside my papers on the desk and thrust it into an inside pocket. ‘Mustn’t forget this. Unlock the door, will you, and see if the coast is clear?’

I opened the door, saw that it was clear and gave him the nod. He got his hands under Royale’s armpits, dragged him through the doorway and dumped him unceremoniously in the passageway outside, beside the overturned chair. Royale was stirring and moaning: he would be coming to any moment now. Kennedy looked at me for a few moments, as if searching for something to say, then he reached out and tapped me lightly on the shoulder.

‘Good luck, Talbot,’ he murmured. ‘I wish to God I was coming with you.’

‘I wish you were,’ I said feelingly. ‘Don’t worry, it’s just about over now.’ I wasn’t even kidding myself, and Kennedy knew it. I nodded to him, went inside and closed the door. I heard Kennedy turn the key in the lock and leave it there. I listened, but I didn’t even hear his footsteps as he left: for so big a man he was as silent as he was fast.

Now that I was alone, with nothing to do, the pain struck with redoubled force. The pain and the nausea came at me in alternate waves, I could feel the shore of consciousness advancing and receding, it would have been so easy just to let go. But I couldn’t let go, not now. It was too late now. I would have given anything for some injection to kill the pain, something to see me through the next hour or so. I was almost glad when, less than two minutes after Kennedy had left, I heard the sound of approaching footsteps. We had cut things pretty fine. I heard an exclamation, the footsteps broke into a run and I went and sat behind my desk and picked up a pencil. The overhead light I had switched off and now I adjusted the angle extension lamp on the wall so that it shone directly overhead, throwing my face in deep shadow. Maybe, as Kennedy had said, my mouth didn’t show that it had been hit but it certainly felt as if it showed and I didn’t want to take any chances.

The key scraped harshly in the lock, the door crashed open and bounced off the bulkhead and a thug I’d never seen before, built along the same lines as Cibatti, jumped into the room. Hollywood had taught him all about opening doors in situations like this. If you damaged the panels or hinges or plaster on the wall it didn’t matter, it was the unfortunate proprietor who had to pay up. In this case, as the door was made of steel, all he had damaged was his toe and it didn’t require a very close student of human nature to see that there was nothing he would have liked better than to fire off that automatic he was waving in his hand. But all he saw was me, with a pencil in my hand and a mildly inquiring expression on my face. He scowled at me anyway, then turned and nodded to someone in the passageway.

Vyland and the general came in half-carrying a now conscious Royale. It did my heart good just to look at him as he sat heavily in a chair. Between myself a couple of nights ago and Kennedy tonight we had done a splendid job on him; it promised to be the biggest facial bruise I had ever seen. Already it was certainly the most colourful. I sat there and wondered with a kind of detached interest — for I could no longer afford to think of Royale with anything except detachment — whether the bruise would still be there when he went to the electric chair. I rather thought it would.

‘You been out of this room this evening, Talbot?’ Vyland was rattled and edgy and he was giving his urban top executive’s voice a rest.

‘Sure I dematerialized myself and oozed out through the keyhole.’ I gazed at Royale with interest. ‘What’s happened to the boyfriend? Derrick fall on him?’

‘It wasn’t Talbot.’ Royale pushed away Vyland’s supporting hand, fumbling under his coat and brought out his gun. His tiny deadly little gun, that would always be the first thought in Royale’s mind. He was about to shove it back when a thought occurred to him and he broke open the magazine. Intact, all the deadly little cupro-nickel shells there. He replaced the magazine in the automatic and the gun in his holster and then, almost as an afterthought, felt in his inside breast pocket. There was a couple of flickers of his one good eye that a highly imaginative character might have interpreted as emotions of dismay, then relief, as he said to Vyland: ‘My wallet. It’s gone.’

‘Your wallet?’ There was no mistaking Vyland’s feeling, it was one of pure relief. ‘A hit-and-run thief!’

‘Your wallet! On my rig? An outrage, a damnable outrage!’ The old boy’s moustache was waffling to and fro, he had the Method school whacked any day. ‘God knows I hold no brief for you, Royale, but on my rig! I’ll have a search instituted right away and the culprit—’

‘You can save yourself the trouble, General,’ I interrupted dryly. ‘The culprit’s got the money safely in his pants pocket and the wallet’s at the bottom of the sea. Besides, anyone who takes money away from Royale deserves a medal.’

‘You talk too much, friend,’ Vyland said coldly. He looked at me in a thoughtful way I didn’t like at all and went on softly: ‘It could have been a cover-up, a red herring, maybe Royale was knocked out for some other reason altogether. A reason you might know something about, Talbot.’

I felt cold. Vyland was nobody’s fool and I hadn’t looked for this. If they got suspicious and started searching me and found either Larry’s gun or the wound — and they would be bound to find both — then this was definitely Talbot’s farewell appearance. Next moment I felt colder still. Royale said: ‘Maybe it was a plant,’ rose groggily to his feet, crossed over to my desk and stared down at the papers in front of me.

This was it. I remembered now the far too carefully casual glance Royale had given the papers as he had left the room. I’d covered maybe half a sheet with letters and figures before he had gone and hadn’t added a single letter or figure since. It would be all the proof that Royale would ever want. I kept looking at his face, not daring to glance down at the papers, wondering how many bullets Royale could pump into me before I could even start dragging Larry’s cannon from my waistband. And then, incredulously, I heard Royale speak.

‘We’re barking up the wrong tree. Talbot’s in the clear, he’s been working, Mr Vyland. Pretty well nonstop, I should say.’

I glanced at the papers in front of me. Where I’d left half a page of scribbled figures and letters there were now two and a half pages. They had been written with the same pen and it would have taken a pretty close look to see that they hadn’t been written by the same hand — and it was upside down to Royale. The scribbled nonsense was as meaningless as my own had been, but it was enough, it was more than enough, it was my passport to life, given me by Kennedy, whose acute foresight in this case had far outstripped my own. I wished I had met Kennedy months ago.

‘OK. So it’s somebody short of cash.’ Vyland was satisfied, the matter dismissed from his mind. ‘How did you make out, Talbot? We’re getting pushed for time.’

‘No worry,’ I assured him. ‘All worked out. Guaranteed. Five minutes buttoning-up down in the scaphe and we’re set to go.’

‘Excellent.’ Vyland looked pleased but that was only because he didn’t know what I knew. He turned to the thug who had kicked the door open. ‘The general’s daughter and his chauffeur — you’ll find them in the general’s stateroom. They’re to come here at once. Ready, Talbot?’

‘Ready.’ I got to my feet, a bit shakily, but compared to Royale I looked positively healthy and nobody noticed. ‘I’ve had a long hard day, Vyland. I could do with something to fortify me before we go below.’

‘I’ll be surprised if Cibatti and his friends haven’t enough supplies to stock a bar.’ Vyland was seeing the end of the road, he was all good humour now. ‘Come along.’

We trooped out into the corridor and along to the door of the room that gave access to the caisson. Vyland gave his secret knock — I was glad to note that it was still the same — and we went inside.

Vyland had been right, Cibatti and his friend did indeed do themselves well in the liquor line and by the time I had three stiff fingers of Scotch inside me the two little men sawing with the crosscut on my shoulder had given up the piece-work and were back on time rates and I no longer felt like banging my head against the wall. It seemed logical to expect that the improvement might be maintained if I poured myself another shot of anaesthetic and I’d just done this when the door opened and the thug Vyland had sent to the other side of the rig appeared, ushering in Mary and Kennedy. My heart had been through a lot that night, heavy overtime stuff to which it wasn’t accustomed, but it only required one look at Mary and it started doing its handsprings again. My mind wasn’t doing handsprings, though, I looked at her face and my mind was filled with all sorts of pleasant thoughts about what I’d like to do to Vyland and Royale. There were big bluish-dark patches under her eyes, and she looked white and strained and more than a little sick. I’d have taken any odds that that last half-hour with me had scared and shaken her as she’d never been scared and shaken before. It had certainly scared and shaken me enough. But neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to notice anything amiss, people forced to associate with them and not scared and shaken would be the exception rather than the rule.

Kennedy didn’t look scared and shaken, he didn’t look anything at all except the perfect chauffeur. But Royale wasn’t any more fooled than I was. He turned to Cibatti and his side-kick and said: ‘Just go over this bird here, will you, and see that he’s not wearing anything that he shouldn’t be wearing.’

Vyland gave him a questioning look.

‘He may be as harmless as he looks — but I doubt it,’ Royale explained. ‘He’s had the run of the rig this afternoon. He might just possibly have picked up a gun and if he has he might just possibly get the drop on Cibatti and the others when they weren’t looking.’ Royale nodded to the door in the convex wall. ‘I just wouldn’t fancy climbing a hundred feet up an iron ladder with Kennedy pointing a gun down the way all the time.’

They searched Kennedy and found nothing. Royale was smart all right, you could have put in your eye all the bits he missed. But he just wasn’t smart enough. He should have searched me.

‘We don’t want to hurry you, Talbot,’ Vyland said with elaborate sarcasm.

‘Right away,’ I said. I sent down the last of the anaesthetic, frowned owlishly at the notes in my hand, folded them away in a pocket and turned towards the entrance door to the pillar. I carefully avoided looking at Mary, the general or Kennedy.

Vyland touched me on my bad shoulder and if it hadn’t been for the anaesthetic I’d have gone through the deckhead. As it was I jumped a couple of inches and the two lumberjacks on my shoulder started up again, sawing away more industriously than ever.

‘Getting nervous, aren’t we?’ Vyland sneered. He nodded at a mechanism on the table, a simple solenoid switch that I’d brought up from the scaphe. ‘Forgotten something, haven’t you?’

‘No. We won’t be needing that any more.’

‘Right, on your way. You first … Watch them real close, Cibatti, won’t you?’

‘I’ll watch them, boss,’ Cibatti assured him. He would, too, he’d bend his gun over the head of the first person to breathe too deeply. The general and Kennedy weren’t going to pull any fast ones when Vyland and Royale were down there with me in the bathyscaphe, they’d stay there under gun-point until we returned. I was sure that Vyland would even have preferred to have the general with us in the bathyscaphe as extra security, but apart from the fact that the scaphe held only three in comfort and Vyland would never move into the least danger without his hatchetman by his side, that 180-rung descent was far too much for the old general to look at.

It almost proved too much for me, too. Before I was halfway down, my shoulder, arm and neck felt as if they were bathed in a mould of molten lead, and the waves of fiery pain were shooting up into my head and there the fire turned to darkness, and down into my chest and stomach and there they turned to nausea. Several times the pain and the darkness and the nausea all but engulfed me. I had to cling on desperately with my good hand until the waves subsided and full consciousness returned. With every rung descended the periods of darkness grew longer and awareness shorter, and I must have descended the last thirty or forty rungs like an automaton, from instinct and memory and some strange sort of subconscious willpower. The only point in my favour was that, courteous as ever, they had sent me down first so that I wouldn’t have to fight the temptation of dropping something heavy on their heads, and so they weren’t able to see how I was suffering. By the time I had reached the platform at the bottom and the last of them — Cibatti’s friend, who was to close the platform hatch — had arrived, I was at least able to stand up without swaying. My face, I think, must have been the colour of paper and it was bathed in sweat, but the illumination from the tiny lamp at the foot of the cylindrical tomb was so faint, that there was little danger of Vyland or Royale detecting anything unusual. I suspected that Royale wouldn’t be feeling so good after the trip either, any man who has sustained a blow or blows sufficient to put him away for half an hour isn’t going to be feeling on top of his form a mere fifteen minutes after he recovers. As for Vyland, I had a faint suspicion that he was more than a little scared and that his primary concern, at the moment, would be himself and the journey that lay ahead of us.

The platform hatch was opened and we clambered down through the entrance flooding chamber of the bathyscaphe into the steel ball below. I took the greatest care to favour my bad shoulder when I was negotiating the sharp, almost right-angle bend into the observation chamber and the journey wasn’t any more than agonizing. I switched on the overhead light and made for the circuit boxes leaving Vyland to secure the flooding-chamber hatch. Half a minute later he wriggled into the observation chamber and shut the heavy wedge-shaped circular door behind him.

They were both suitably impressed by the profusion and confusion of the wires dangling from the circuit boxes and if they weren’t equally impressed by the speed and efficiency with which, barely consulting my notes, I buttoned them all back in place again, they ought to have been. Fortunately, the circuit boxes were no higher than waist level, my left arm was now so far gone that I could use it only from the elbow downwards.

I screwed home the last lead, shut the box covers and started to test all the circuits. Vyland watched me impatiently; Royale was watching me with a face, which, in its expressionlessness and battered appearance, was a fair match for the great Sphinx of Giza; but I remained unmoved by Vyland’s anxiety for haste — I was in this bathyscaphe too and I was in no mind to take chances. Then I turned on the control rheostats for the two battery-powered engines, turned to Vyland and pointed at a pair of flickering dials.

‘The engines. You can hardly hear them in here but they’re running just as they should. Ready to go?’

‘Yes.’ He licked his lips. ‘Ready when you are.’

I nodded, turned the valve control to flood the entrance chamber, pointed to the microphone which rested on a bracket at the head-height between Royale and myself and turned the wall-switch to the ‘on’ position. ‘Maybe you’d like to give the word to blow the air from the retaining rubber ring?’

He nodded, gave the necessary order and replaced the microphone. I switched it off and waited.

The bathyscaphe had been rocking gently, through maybe a three-or four-degree arc in a fore-and-aft line when suddenly the movement ceased altogether. I glanced at the depth gauge. It had been registering erratically, we were close enough to the surface for it to be affected by the great deep-troughed waves rolling by overhead, but even so there could be no doubt that the average depths of the readings had perceptibly increased.

‘We’ve dropped clear of the leg,’ I told Vyland. I switched on the vertical searchlight and pointed through the Plexiglas window at our feet. The sandy bottom was now only a fathom away. ‘What direction, quick — I don’t want to settle in that.’

‘Straight ahead, just how you’re pointing.’

I made the interlock switch for the two engines, advanced to half-speed and adjusted the planes to give us the maximum forward lift. It was little enough, not more than two degrees: unlike the lateral rudder the depth planes on the bathyscaphe gave the bare minimum of control, being quite secondary for the purpose of surfacing and diving. I slowly advanced the engines to maximum.

‘Almost due south-west.’ Vyland was consulting a slip of paper he had brought from his pocket. ‘Course 222°.’

‘True?’

‘What do you mean “true”, he snapped angrily. Now that he had his wishes answered and the bathyscaphe a going concern Vyland didn’t like it at all. Claustrophobic, at a guess.

‘Is that the true direction or is it for this compass?’ I asked patiently.

‘For this compass.’

‘Has it been corrected for deviation?’

He consulted his slip of paper again. ‘Yes. And Bryson said that as long as we took off straight in this direction the metal in the rig’s legs wouldn’t affect us.’

I said nothing. Bryson, the engineer who had died from the bends, where was he now? Not a couple of hundred feet away, I felt pretty certain. To drill an oil well maybe two and a half miles deep they’d have needed at least six thousand bags of cement and the two bucketsful of that needed to ensure that Bryson would remain at the bottom of the ocean until long after he was an unidentifiable skeleton wouldn’t even have been missed.

‘Five hundred and twenty metres,’ Vyland was saying. ‘From the leg we’ve left to the plane.’ The first mention ever of a plane. ‘Horizontal distance, that is. Allowing for the drop to the bottom of the deep, about six hundred and twenty metres. Or so Bryson said.’

‘Where does this deep begin?’

‘About two-thirds of the distance from here. At a hundred and forty feet — almost the same depth as the rig is standing in. Then it goes down about thirty degrees to four hundred and eighty feet.’

I nodded, but said nothing. I had always heard that you couldn’t feel two major sources of pain at the same time but people were wrong. You could. My arm, shoulder and back were a wide sea of pain, a pain punctuated by jolting stabbing spear-points of agony from my upper jaw. I didn’t feel like conversation, I didn’t feel like anything at all. I tried to forget the pain by concentrating on the job on hand.

The tow-rope attaching us to the pillar was, I had discovered, wound round an electrically driven power drum. But the power was unidirectional only, for reeling in the wire on the return journey. As we were moving just then it was being paid out against a weak spring carrying with it the insulated phone cable which ran through the centre of the wire, and the number of revolutions made by the drum showed on a counter inside the observation chamber, giving us a fairly accurate idea of the distance covered. It also gave us an idea of our speed. The maximum the bathyscaphe could do was two knots, but even the slight drag offered by the tow-cable paying out behind reduced this to one knot. But it was fast enough. We hadn’t far to go.

Vyland seemed more than content to leave the running of the bathyscaphe to me. He spent most of his time peering rather apprehensively out of a side window. Royale’s one good cold unwinking eye never left me; he watched every separate tiny movement and adjustment I made but it was only pure habit; I think his ignorance of the principles and controls of the bathyscaphe were pretty well complete. They must have been: even when I turned the intake control of the carbon dioxide absorption apparatus right down to its minimum operating figure it meant nothing to him.

We were drifting slowly along about ten feet above the floor of the sea, nose tilted slightly upwards by the drag of the wire, our guide-rope dangling down below the observation chamber and just brushing the rock and the coral formations or dragging over a sponge-bar. The darkness of the water was absolute, but our two searchlights and the light streaming out through the Plexiglas windows gave us light enough to see by. One or two groupers loafed lazily by the windows, absentmindedly intent on their own business; a snake-bodied barracuda writhed its lean grey body towards us, thrust its evil head against a side window and stared in unblinkingly for almost a minute; a school of what looked like Spanish mackerel kept us company for some time, then abruptly vanished in an exploding flurry of motion as a bottle-nosed shark cruised majestically into view, propelling itself along with a barely perceptible motion of its long powerful tail. But, for the most part, the sea floor seemed deserted; perhaps the storm raging above had sent most fish off to seek deeper waters.

Exactly ten minutes after we had left, the sea-floor abruptly dropped away beneath us in what seemed, in the sudden yawning darkness that our searchlight could not penetrate, an almost vertical cliff-face. I knew this to be only illusion; Vyland would have surveyed the ocean bed a dozen times and if he said the angle was only 30° it was almost certainly so, but nevertheless the impression of a sudden bottomless chasm was overwhelming.

‘This is it,’ Vyland said in a low voice. On his smooth polished face I could make out the faint sheen of sweat. ‘Take her down, Talbot.’

‘Later.’ I shook my head. ‘If we start descending now that tow-rope we’re trailing is going to pull our tail right up. Our searchlights can’t shine ahead, only vertically downwards. Want that we should crash our nose into some outcrop of rock that we can’t see? Want to rupture the for’ard gasoline tank? — don’t forget the shell of those tanks is only thin sheet metal. It only needs one split tank and we’ll have so much negative buoyancy that we can never rise again. You appreciate that, don’t you, Vyland?’

His face gleamed with sweat. He wet his lips again and said: ‘Do it your way, Talbot.’

I did it my way. I kept on course 222° until the tow-wire recorder showed 600 metres, stopped the engine and let our slight preponderance of negative buoyancy, which our forward movement and angled planes had so far overcome, take over. We settled gradually, in a maddeningly deliberate slow motion, the fathometer needle hardly appearing to move. The hanging weight of the tow-wire aft tended to pull us astern, and at every ten fathoms, between thirty and seventy, I had to ease ahead on the motors and pay out a little more wire.

At exactly seventy-six fathoms our searchlights picked up the bed of the sea. No rock or coral or sponge bars here, just little patches of greyish sand and long black stretches of mud. I started the two motors again, advanced them almost to half speed, trimmed the planes and began to creep forward very slowly indeed. We had to move only five yards. Bryson’s estimate had been almost exactly right; with 625 metres showing on the tow-wire indicator I caught a glimpse of something thrusting up from the bed of the sea, almost out of our line of vision to the left. It was the tailplane of an aircraft, we had overshot our target to the right, the nose of the plane was pointing back in the direction from which we had come … I put the motors in reverse, started up the tow-wire drum, backed about twenty yards then came forward again, angling to the left. Arrived at what I judged to be the right spot, I put the motors momentarily into reverse, then cut them out altogether. Slowly, surely, the bathyscaphe began to sink: the dangling guide rope touched bottom, but this lessening of weight failed to overcome the slight degree of negative buoyancy as it should have done, and the base of the observation chamber sank heavily into the black mud of the ocean floor.

Only fifteen minutes had elapsed since I’d turned down the intake control of the carbon monoxide absorption unit but already the air in the cabin was growing foul. Neither Vyland nor Royale seemed to be affected; maybe they thought that that was the normal atmospheric condition, but they probably didn’t even notice it. Both of them were completely absorbed in what could be seen, brightly illuminated by the for’ard searchlight, through our for’ard observation window.

I was absorbed in it myself, God only knew. A hundred times I had wondered how I’d feel, how I’d react when I finally saw, if ever I saw, what was lying half-buried in the mud outside. Anger I had expected, anger and fury and horror and heartbreak and maybe more than a little of fear. But there was none of those things in me, not any more, I was aware only of pity and sadness, of the most abysmal melancholy I had ever known. Maybe my reactions were not what I had expected because my mind was befogged by the swirling mists of pain, but I knew it wasn’t that: and it made things no better to know that the pity and the melancholy were no longer for others but for myself, melancholy for the memories that were all I would ever have, the pity a self-pity of a man irretrievably lost in his loneliness.

The plane had sunk about four feet into the mud. The right wing had vanished — it must have broken off on impact with the water. The left wing-tip was gone, but the tail unit and fuselage were still completely intact except for the riddled nose, the starred and broken glass that showed how the DC had died. We were close up to the fuselage, the bow of the bathyscaphe was overhanging the sunken cabin of the plane and the observation chamber no more than six feet distant from those shattered windows and almost on the same level. Behind the smashed windscreens I could see two skeletons: the one in the captain’s seat was still upright, leaning against the broken side window and held in position by the seat belt, the one in the co-pilot’s seat was bent far over forward and almost out of sight.

‘Wonderful, eh, Talbot? Isn’t that just something?’ Vyland, his claustrophobic fear in momentary abeyance, was actually rubbing his hands together. ‘After all this time — but it’s been worth it, it’s been worth it! And intact, too! I was scared it might have been scattered all over the floor of the sea. Should be no bother for an experienced salvage man like yourself, eh, Talbot?’ He didn’t wait for an answer but turned away immediately to stare out of the window and gloat. ‘Wonderful,’ he repeated again. ‘Just wonderful.’

‘It’s wonderful,’ I agreed. I was surprised at the steadiness, the indifference in my own voice. ‘With the exception of the British frigate De Braak, sunk in a storm off the Delaware coast in 1798, it’s probably the biggest underwater treasure in the western hemisphere. Ten million, two hundred and fifty thousand dollars in gold specie, emeralds and uncut diamonds.’

‘Yes, sir.’ Vyland had forgotten he was an urbane top executive and he was back at the hand-washing again. ‘Ten million, two hundred and—’ His voice trailed off slowly, faltered to a stop. ‘How — how did you know that, Talbot?’ he whispered.

‘I knew it before you ever heard of it, Vyland,’ I said quietly. Both of them had turned away from the window and were staring at me, Vyland with a mixture of puzzlement, suspicion and the beginnings of fear, Royale with his one good, cold, flat, marbled eye wider than I had ever seen it. ‘You’re not quite so smart as the general, I’m afraid, Vyland. Neither am I for that matter. He caught on to me this morning, Vyland. I’ve worked out why. Do you know why, Vyland? Do you want to know why?’

‘What are you talking about?’ he demanded hoarsely.

‘He’s smart, is the general.’ I went on as if I hadn’t heard the interruption. ‘He saw when we landed on the rig this morning that I only hid my face until I was certain that a certain person wasn’t among the reception committee and that then I didn’t bother any longer. Careless of me, I admit. But that tipped him off to the fact that I wasn’t a murderer — if I were I’d have hidden my face from everybody — and it also tipped him off to the fact that I had been out on the rig before and was frightened someone there would recognize me. He was right on both counts — I wasn’t a murderer, and I had been out on the rig before. In the early hours of this morning.’

Vyland had nothing to say, the shattering effect of my words, the limitless avenues of dark possibilities they were opening up had him completely off balance, too confused even to begin to put his conflicting thoughts into words.

‘And the general noticed something else,’ I went on. ‘He noticed that when you were telling me about this salvage job that I never once asked the first, the most obvious question in the world — what was the treasure to be salvaged, what kind of vessel or aircraft the treasure was in, if any. I never once asked one of those questions, did I, Vyland? Again careless of me, wasn’t it, Vyland? But you never noticed. But General Ruthven noticed, and he knew there could only be one answer — I already knew.’

There was a pause of perhaps ten seconds, then Vyland whispered: ‘Who are you, Talbot?’

‘No friend of yours, Vyland.’ I smiled at him, as near as my aching upper jaw would allow. ‘You’re going to die, Vyland, you’re going to die in agony and you’re going to use your last breath on earth cursing my name and the day you ever met me.’

Another silence, deeper even than the one that had gone before. I wished I could smoke, but it was impossible inside that cabin, and heaven only knew the air there was foul enough already, our breathing was already unnaturally quickened, and sweat was beginning to trickle down our faces.

‘Let me tell you a little story,’ I went on. ‘It’s not a fairy story but we’ll start it with “Once upon a time” for all that.

‘Once upon a time there was a certain country with a very small navy — a couple of destroyers, a frigate, a gunboat. Not much of a navy, is it, Vyland? So the rulers decided to double it. They were doing pretty well in the petroleum and coffee export markets, and they thought they could afford it. Mind you, they could have spent the money in a hundred more profitable ways but this was a country much given to revolution and the strength of any current government largely depended on the strength of the armed forces under their control. Let’s double our navy, they said. Who said, Vyland?’

He tried to speak, but only a croak came out. He wet his lips and said: ‘Colombia.’

‘However did you know, I wonder? That’s it, Colombia. They arranged to get a couple of secondhand destroyers from Britain, some frigates, mine sweepers and gunboats from the United States. Considering that those second-hand ships were almost brand new, they got them dead cheap: 10,250,000 dollars. But then the snag: Colombia was in a state of threatened revolution, civil war and anarchy, the value of the peso was tumbling abroad and Britain and the United States, to whom a combined payment was to be made, refused to deliver against the peso. No international bank would look at Colombia. So it was agreed that the payment be made in kind. Some previous government had imported, for industrial purposes, two million dollars’ worth of uncut Brazilian diamonds which had never been used. To that was added about two and a half million dollars’ worth of Colombian gold, near enough two tons in 28-lb ingots: the bulk of the payment, however, was in cut emeralds — I need hardly remind you, Vyland, that the Muzo mines in the Eastern Andes are the most famous and important source of emeralds in the world. Or perhaps you know?’

Vyland said nothing. He pulled out his display handkerchief and mopped his face. He looked sick.

‘No matter. And then came the question of transport. It was supposed to have been flown out to Tampa on its first leg, by an Avianca or Lansa freighter but all the domestic national airlines were temporarily grounded at the beginning of May, 1958, when the new elections were coming up. Some members of the permanent civil service were desperately anxious to get rid of this money in case it fell into the wrong hands, so they looked around for a foreign-owned freight airline operating only external flights. They picked on the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co. Lloyd’s agreed to transfer the insurance. The Trans-Carib freighter filed a false flight plan and took off from Barranquilla, heading for Tampa via the Yucatan Strait.

‘There were only four people in that plane, Vyland. There was the pilot, a twin brother of the owner of the Trans-Carib Line. There was the co-pilot, who also doubled as navigator, and a woman and a small child whom it was thought wiser not to leave behind in case things went wrong at the elections and it was found out the part played by the Trans-Carib in getting the money out of the country.

‘They filed a false flight plan, Vyland, but that didn’t do them any good at all for one of those noble and high-minded civil servants who had been so anxious to pay the debt to Britain and America was as crooked as they come and a creature of yours, Vyland. He knew of the true flight plan, and radioed you. You were in Havana, and you’d everything laid on, hadn’t you, Vyland?’

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

‘Because I am — I was — the owner of the Trans-Carib Air Charter Co.’ I felt unutterably tired, I don’t know whether it was because of the pain or the foul air or just because of the overwhelming sense of the emptiness of living. ‘I was grounded at Belize, in British Honduras, at the time, but I managed to pick them up on the radio — after they had repaired it. They told me then that someone had tried to blow up the plane, but I know now that wasn’t quite true, all they had tried to do was to wreck the radio, to cut the DC off from the outer world. They almost succeeded — but not quite. You never knew, did you, Vyland, that someone was in radio contact with that plane just before it was shot out of the sky. But I was. Just for two minutes, Vyland.’ I looked at him slowly, consideringly, emptily. ‘Two little minutes that mean you die tonight.’

Vyland stared at me with sick terror in his eyes. He knew what was coming all right, or thought he knew: he knew now who I was, he knew now what it was to meet a man who had lost everything, a man to whom pity and compassion were no longer even words. Slowly, as if at the expense of great effort and pain, he twisted his head to look at Royale, but, for the first time ever, there was no comfort, no security, no knowledge of safety to be found there, for the incredible was happening at last: Royale was afraid.

I half-turned and pointed at the shattered cabin of the DC.

‘Take a good look, Vyland,’ I said quietly. ‘Take a good look at what you’ve done and feel proud of yourself. In the captain’s seat — that skeleton was once Peter Talbot, my twin brother. The other is Elizabeth Talbot — she was my wife, Vyland. In the back of the plane will be all that’s left of a very little boy. John Talbot, my son. He was three and a half years old. I’ve thought a thousand times about how my little boy died, Vyland. The bullets that killed my wife and brother wouldn’t have got him, he’d have been alive till the plane hit the water. Maybe two or three minutes, the plane tumbling and falling through the sky, Vyland, and the little boy sobbing and screaming and terrified out of his mind, and his mother not coming when he called her name. When he called her name over and over again. But she couldn’t come, could she, Vyland? She was sitting in her seat, dead. And then the plane hit the water and even then, perhaps, Johny was still alive. Maybe the fuselage took time to sink — it happens that way often, you know, Vyland — or had it air trapped inside it when it sank. I wonder how long it was before the waters closed over him. Can’t you see it, Vyland, three years old, screaming and struggling and dying and no one near him? And then the screaming and struggling stopped and my little boy was drowned.’

I looked out at the smashed plane cabin for a long time, or what seemed like a long time, and when I turned away Vyland caught my right arm. I pushed him off and he fell on the duckboard floor, staring up at me with wide, panic-stricken eyes. His mouth was open, his breathing coming in quick, harsh gasps, and his entire body was trembling. Royale was still in control of himself, but only just: ivory knuckled hands rested on his knees and his eyes were moving constantly about the observation chamber, a hunted animal seeking a way to escape.

‘I’ve waited a long time for this, Vyland,’ I went on. ‘I’ve waited two years and four months and I don’t believe I’ve ever thought for five minutes about anything else in all that time.

‘I’ve nothing left to live for, Vyland, you can understand that. I’ve had enough. I suppose it’s macabre, but I’d kind of like to stay here beside them. I’ve stopped kidding myself about the point in carrying on living. There’s none, not any more, so I might as well stay here. There’s no point now, because all that’s kept me going was the promise I made myself on the third of May, 1958, that I’d never rest again till I’d sought out and destroyed the man who had destroyed life for me. That I’ve done, and there’s no more now. It should spoil it for me, I suppose, the thought that you’ll be here also, but on the other hand I suppose it’s kind of fitting. The killers and their victims, all together in the end.’

‘You’re mad,’ Vyland whispered. ‘You’re mad. What are you saying?’

‘Only this. Remember that electrical switch that was left on the table? The one you asked about and I said “We won’t be needing that any more”? Well we won’t. Not any more. That was the master control for the ballast release switches and without it the ballast release is completely jinxed. And without releasing ballast we can never rise again. Here we are, Vyland, and here we stay. For ever.’