Fear is the Key

EIGHT

I hadn’t enjoyed the helicopter trip out to the oil rig.

Planes I’m used to, I’ve flown my own, I once even owned a piece in a small charter airline, but helicopters are not for me. Not even in fine weather, and the weather that morning was indescribable. We swayed and rocked and plummeted and soared up again as if some drunk had us on the end of a giant yo-yo, and nine-tenths of the time we couldn’t see where we were going because the wipers couldn’t cope with the deluge of water that lashed against the windscreen: but Petersen was a fine pilot and we made it. We touched down on the landing-deck of the X 13 shortly after ten o’clock in the morning.

It took six men to hold the machine even reasonably steady while the general, Vyland, Larry and I shinned down the extension ladder. Petersen gunned his motor and took off just as the last of us reached the deck, and was lost in a blinding flurry of rain inside ten seconds. I wondered if I would ever see him again.

Out there on the exposed deck the wind was far stronger and much gustier than it had been on land and it was all that we could do to keep our balance on the slippery metal underfoot. Not that there was much chance of me falling, at least not backwards, not with Larry’s cannon jabbing into the small of my back all the time. He was wearing the big-collared, big-lapelled, belted, epauletted and leather-buttoned coat that Hollywood had taught him was the correct rig of the day for this kind of weather, and he had the gun inside one of the deep pockets. I felt nervous. Larry didn’t like me and would have counted a hole in his fine coat as a small price to pay for the privilege of pulling that trigger. I’d got right under Larry’s skin like a burr under a saddle, and I meant to stay there. I rarely spoke to him, but when I did I never failed to refer to him as ‘hophead’ or ‘junky’ and to hope that his supplies of snow were coming along all right. On the way down to the helicopter that morning I’d inquired solicitously whether or not he’d remembered to pack his grip, and when he’d asked suspiciously what the unprintable I meant by that I explained that I was concerned that he might have forgotten to pack his syringe. It took Vyland and the general all the strength of their combined efforts to pull him off me. There is nothing more dangerous and unpredictable than a drug addict, just as there is nothing more pitiable: but there was no pity in my heart then, Larry was the weakest link in the chain and I meant to keep sawing away at him until something snapped.

We staggered along against the wind till we came to a raised hatch-cover entrance which gave to a wide companionway leading to the deck below. A group of men awaited us here, and I had my collar turned up, hat-brim turned down and a handkerchief in my hand busy wiping the rain off my face, but I needn’t have bothered: Joe Curran, the roustabout foreman I’d talked to ten hours previously, was not there. I tried to imagine what would have happened had he been there, or had he asked the general whether C. C. Farnborough, his private confidential secretary, had found the missing brief-case; but I gave it up, the strain on the imagination was too great. I’d probably just have borrowed Larry’s gun and shot myself.

Two men came forward to meet us. General Ruthven did the honours: ‘Martin Jerrold, our field foreman, Tom Harrison, our petroleum engineer. Gentlemen, this is John Smith, a specialist engineer flown out from England to help Mr Vyland in his research.’ John Smith, I gathered, was the inspired choice of name for myself.

Both men made perfunctory noises of greeting. Larry prodded me in the back so I said I was delighted too, but they obviously had no interest at all in me. Both men looked worried and uneasy, and both men were doing their best to conceal the fact. But the general didn’t miss it.

‘Something bothering you, Harrison?’ Out here on the rig it was obviously the policy for Vyland to keep very much in the background.

‘Very much so, sir.’ Harrison, a crew-cut youngster with heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, looked to me as if he should still be in college, but he must have been good to hold down the responsible job he did. He produced a small chart, spread it out and pointed with a carpenter’s pencil. ‘This chart’s good, General Ruthven. It couldn’t be better, and Pride and Honeywell are the best geological team in the business. But we’re already twelve hundred feet overdue. We should have hit oil at least five hundred feet back. But there’s not even a smell of gas yet. I can’t even begin to explain it, sir.’

I could have explained it, but it was hardly the time.

‘Those things happen, my boy,’ the general said easily. I had to admire the old coot; I was beginning to have more than a fair idea of the almost inhuman strain he was labouring under, but the control, the self-possession were admirable. ‘We’re lucky if we make it two out of five. And no geologist would claim to be 100 per cent accurate, or even within shouting distance of it. Give it another thousand. The responsibility’s mine.’

‘Thank you, sir.’ Harrison looked relieved, but there was still a certain uneasiness about him and the general was quick to get on to it.

‘Still something worrying you, Harrison?’

‘No, sir, of course not.’ He was too quick, too emphatic, he wasn’t half the actor the old boy was. ‘Nothing at all.’

‘Hmm.’ The general considered him thoughtfully, then looked at Jerrold. ‘Something on your mind, too?’

‘The weather, sir.’

‘Of course.’ The general nodded understandingly. ‘Latest reports are that Hurricane Diane is going to hit Marble Springs fair and square. And that means the X 13. You don’t have to ask me, Jerrold. You know that. You’re the captain of this ship, I’m only a passenger. I don’t like losing ten thousand dollars a day, but you must suspend drilling the moment you think it’s right to.’

‘It’s not that, sir,’ Jerrold said unhappily. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder. ‘That experimental leg you’re working on, sir — shouldn’t it be lowered to give maximum stability?’

So the drilling crew did know there was something going on in that pillar I’d investigated the previous night. When I came to think of it, although it wasn’t inevitable that they should know, it was advisable. So much easier to give the crew a specious explanation for the activities taking place there than to cordon off a section and raise suspicion and unwanted and possibly dangerous speculation. I wondered what sort of yarn had been spun to them. I was to find that out right away.

‘Vyland?’ The general had turned to the man by his side and raised a questioning eyebrow.

‘I’ll accept full responsibility, General Ruthven.’ He spoke in the quiet, precise, confident tones that a top-flight engineer might have employed, although it would have surprised me if he knew a nut from a bolt. But he could use reason, too, for he added: ‘This storm is going to hit from the west and the maximum strain is going to be on the other, the landward, side. The effect on this side will merely be to lift it.’ He made a deprecating gesture. ‘It does seem rather pointless, doesn’t it, to lower an additional leg just when the other legs on that same side will have far less strain than normal to carry? Besides, General, we are now so near the perfection of this technique which is going to revolutionize underwater drilling that it would be a crime to set it back, maybe several months, by lowering the leg and perhaps destroying all our delicate equipment.’

So that was the line. It was well done, I had to admit: the dedicated enthusiasm in his voice was so exactly right, without being in any way overdone.

‘That’s good enough for me,’ Jerrold said. He turned back to the general. ‘Coming across to your quarters, sir?’

‘Later. To eat, but don’t wait lunch for us. Order it for my stateroom, will you? Mr Smith here is keen to get to work right away.’ Like hell I was.

We left them and made our way down a broad passage. Deep inside the platform here the sound of the wind and the rising waves crashing and breaking against the pillars was completely inaudible. Perhaps some faint murmur of sound might have been heard if the air in that brightly-lit steel passage hadn’t been filled with the hum of powerful generators: we appeared to be passing by some diesel engine room.

At the far end of the passage we turned left and walked almost to its far cul-de-sac limits before stopping outside a door on the right-hand side. On this door, printed in large white letters, was the legend: ‘Drilling Research Project’ followed, in letters scarcely less large, by the words: ‘Private. Most Secret. Positively No Admittance’.

Vyland rapped on the door in a long code knock — I made a mental note of it: four shorts, two long, four shorts — waited till there came three long knocks from the inside, then knocked again, four times in rapid succession. Ten seconds later we had all passed through the door and it was double locked and bolted behind us. It made all the signs about ‘Private’ and ‘No Admittance’ seem rather superfluous.

Steel floor, steel bulkheads, steel ceiling, it was a black cheerless box of a room. At least, three sides of it formed a box — the bulkhead we’d just passed through, the blank bulkhead on the left and the one to the right, with a high grilled door in its centre. The fourth side was convex, bulging out into the room in an almost perfect semicircle, with a butterfly-clamped hatchway in its middle: the trunking, I felt certain, of the big steel pillar reaching down to the floor of the sea. On either side of the hatchway hung large drums with neatly coiled rubber tubes armoured in flexible steel. Below each drum, and bolted to the floor, was a large motor: the one on the right was, I knew, an air compressor — that’s what I’d heard when I’d been out there during the night — and the one on the left probably a forced-suction water pump. As for the furnishings of the room, even the Spartans would have found it rugged: a deal table, two benches and a metal wall-rack.

There were two men in the room — the one who had opened the door and another sitting at the table, dead cigar in his mouth and a pack of greasy cards spread out on the table in front of him — and both cast in the same mould. It wasn’t the fact that they were both shirt-sleeved and had leather holsters strapped across their chests and high up on their left sides that gave them close similarity, not even their evenly-matched height and weight and broad bulky shoulders. The sameness lay in their faces, hard expressionless faces with cold, still, watchful eyes. I’d seen men out of the same mould before, the top-notch professionals of the strong-arm underworld, all that Larry would have given his life to be and could never hope to be. They were so exactly the type of men I would have expected Vyland to employ that the presence of Larry was all the more mysterious indeed.

Vyland grunted a greeting and that was all the time he wasted in the next ten minutes. He walked across to the wall-rack, reached down a long roll of canvas-backed paper that was wrapped round a wooden stick, unrolled it flat on the table and weighted the ends to keep them from curling up again. It was a large and highly complicated diagram, sixty inches long by about thirty in depth. He stood back and looked at me.

‘Ever seen that before, Talbot?’

I bent over the table. The diagram represented a peculiar object shaped halfway between a cylinder and a cigar, about four times as long as its average width. It was flat on top, flat along the middle third of the bottom, then tapering slightly upwards towards either end. At least eighty per cent of it appeared to be given up to some kind of storage tanks — I could see the fuel lines leading to the tanks from a raised bridge-like structure superimposed on the top side. This same bridge housed the beginnings of a vertical cylindrical chamber which ran clear through the body of the machine, passed out through the bottom, angled sharply left and entered an oval-shaped chamber suspended beneath the body of the cigar. On either side of this oval chamber and attached to the underside of the cigar were large rectangular containers. To the left, towards the narrower and more tapering end, were what appeared to be searchlights and long slender remote-control grabs housed in spring clips along the side.

I took a good long look at all of this, then straightened. ‘Sorry.’ I shook my head. ‘Never seen it in my life.’

I needn’t have bothered straightening for next moment I was lying on the deck: maybe five seconds later I had pushed myself to my knees and was shaking my head from side to side in an attempt to clear it. I looked up, groaned with the pain just behind my ear, and tried to focus my eyes. I focused one of them, at any rate, for I made out Vyland standing above me, his pistol held by the barrel.

‘I kind of thought you might say that, Talbot.’ A nice quiet controlled voice, we were sitting at the vicar’s afternoon tea-table and he was asking me to pass along the muffins. ‘Your memory, Talbot. Perhaps you would like to jog it again a little, eh?’

‘Is all this really necessary?’ General Ruthven sounded distressed. He looked distressed. ‘Surely, Vyland, we—’

‘Shut up!’ Vyland snapped. We were no longer calling on the vicar. He turned to me as I climbed to my feet. ‘Well?’

‘What’s the good of beating me over the head?’ I said savagely. ‘How will that make me remember something I never—?’

This time I saw it coming, got the palm of my hand up to the side of my head and was riding the blow, going fast away from it, when it connected. I staggered and hit the bulkhead. It was nearly all show and to complete the effect I slid down to the deck. Nobody said anything. Vyland and his two hoodlums were looking at me with a detached interest, the general was white and he had his lower lip caught in his teeth; Larry’s face was a mask of unholy glee.

‘Remember anything now?’

I called him an unprintable name and rose shakily to my feet.

‘Very well.’ Vyland shrugged. ‘I think Larry here would like to persuade you.’

‘Can I? Can I really?’ The eagerness on Larry’s face was revolting, frightening. ‘Want that I make him talk?’

Vyland smiled and nodded. ‘Remember he’s got to work for us when you’re finished.’

‘I’ll remember.’ This was Larry’s big moment. To be in the centre of the stage, to get his own back for my sneers and gibes, above all to indulge a sadistic streak wide as a barn door — this was going to be one of the high spots of his existence. He advanced towards me, big gun wavering slightly, wetting his lips continuously and giggling in a high and horrible falsetto. ‘The inside of the right thigh, high up. He’ll scream like — like a pig going under the knife. Then the left. And he’ll still be able to work.’ The eyes were wide and staring and mad, and for the first time in my life I was confronted by a human being drooling at the mouth.

Vyland was a good psychologist; he knew I would be ten times more scared of Larry’s viciousness, his neurotic instability, than of any coldly calculated brutality he or his two thugs would have brought to bear. I was scared all right. Besides, I’d put up a good enough front, it would have been expected of me, but there was no point in overdoing it.

‘It’s a development of the early French bathyscaphes,’ I said rapidly. ‘This model is a combined British and French naval project, designed to reach only about twenty per cent of the depths of its predecessors — it’s good for about 2,500 feet — but it’s faster, more manoeuvrable and it’s equipped for actual underwater salvage which its predecessors weren’t.’

Nobody ever hated anyone more than Larry hated me at that moment. He was a little boy, I was a promised toy, the most wonderful he had ever seen, and he was being robbed of it just as it came within his grasp. He could have wept with rage and frustration and the sheer bitterness of his disappointment. He was still prancing in front of me and waving the gun around.

‘He’s lying!’ His voice was shrill, almost a scream. ‘He’s just trying—’

‘He’s not lying,’ Vyland interrupted coldly. No triumph, no satisfaction in his voice, the end had been achieved and the past was done with. ‘Put that gun away.’

‘But I tell you—’ Larry broke off in an exclamation of pain as one of the two big silent men caught his wrist and forced the gun down till it was pointing at the floor.

‘Put that heater away, punk,’ the man growled, ‘or I’ll take it off you.’

Vyland glanced at them, then ignored the byplay. ‘And you not only know what this is, Talbot, but you’ve actually worked on it. The general has impeccable sources in Europe and we got the word this morning.’ He bent forward and went on softly: ‘And you also worked on it later on. Recently. Our sources in Cuba are even better than those in Europe.’

‘I didn’t work on it recently.’ I held up my hand as Vyland tightened his mouth. ‘When this bathyscaphe was brought out in a freighter to do its preliminary unmanned dives in the sheltered waters off Nassau, the British and French thought it would be cheaper and more sensible to hire a local vessel suitable for the job instead of bringing one out from Europe. I was working with a salvage firm in Havana at the time and they had a ship with a heavy crane and boom right aft. It was ideal for the job. I was aboard it, but I didn’t work on the bathyscaphe itself. What would be the point in denying it if it wasn’t so?’ I smiled faintly. ‘Besides, I was only aboard the salvage ship for a week or so. They got wind that I was there, I knew they were after me and I had to leave in a hurry.’

‘They?’ Vyland’s eyebrow was still working as smoothly as ever.

‘What does it matter now?’ Even to myself I sounded tired, defeated.

‘True, true,’ Vyland smiled. ‘From what we know of your record it might have been any one of the police forces of half a dozen countries. Anyway, General, it explains one thing that has been worrying us — where we saw Talbot’s face before.’

General Ruthven said nothing. If ever I’d needed conviction that he was a tool, a pawn of Vyland’s I needed it no longer. He was miserable, unhappy and clearly wished to have no part whatever in what was going on.

I said, as if a great light had suddenly dawned upon me: ‘Have you — were you the people responsible for the loss of this bathyscaphe? My God, it was you! How in the—’

‘You didn’t think we brought you here just to discuss the diagrammatic layout of this vessel?’ Vyland permitted himself a small pleased smile. ‘Of course it was us. It was easy. The fools moored it on a wire hawser in ten fathoms of water. We unhitched it, substituted a frayed hawser so that they would think that it had broken its moorings and that the tide had carried it out to deep water, then we towed it away. We made most of the trip in darkness, and the few ships we saw we just slowed down, pulled the bathyscaphe up on the side remote from the approaching vessel and towed it like that.’ He smiled again — he was spoiling himself this morning. ‘It wasn’t difficult. People do not expect to see a bathyscaphe being towed by a private yacht.’

‘A private yacht. You mean the—?’ I could feel the hairs on the back of my neck prickling, I’d almost made the blunder that would have finished everything. It had been on the tip of my tongue to say the Temptress — but no one knew I’d ever heard that name, except Mary Ruthven, who’d told me. ‘You mean the general’s private yacht? He has one?’

‘Larry and I certainly haven’t one,’ he grinned. ‘Larry and I’ — an off-beat phrase, but there was nothing in it for me, so I let it pass. ‘Of course it’s the general’s yacht.’

I nodded. ‘And equally of course you have the bathyscaphe somewhere near here. Would you mind telling me what in the world you want a bathyscaphe for?’

‘Certainly not. You’ll have to know anyhow. We are — ah — treasure-hunting, Talbot.’

‘Don’t tell me you believe this Captain Kidd and Blackbeard nonsense,’ I sneered.

‘Recovering your courage, eh, Talbot? No, it’s rather more recent than that and very close to here.’

‘How did you find it?’

‘How did we find it?’ Vyland seemed to have forgotten his urgency; like every criminal who ever lived he had a streak of the ham in him and wouldn’t pass up the chance of basking in the glow of his own glory. ‘We had a vague idea where it was. We tried trawling for it — in the days before I met the general, that was — but had no success. Then we met the general. As you may not know, the general provides his yacht for his geologists when they plod around setting off their little bombs on the bottom of the ocean tuning in with their seismographic instruments to find out where the oil strata are. And while they were doing this we were plotting the ocean bed with an extremely sensitive depth recorder. We found it all right.’

‘Near here?’

‘Very near.’

‘Then why haven’t you recovered it?’ Talbot giving his impression of a salvage specialist so engrossed in a problem that he has forgotten his own circumstances.

‘How would you recover it, Talbot?’

‘Diving for it, of course. Should be easy in those waters. After all, there’s a huge continental shelf here, you have to go a hundred miles out from any point off the west coast of Florida before you even reach five hundred feet. We’re close inshore here. Hundred feet, hundred fifty?’

‘The X 13 is standing in how much, General?’

‘One-thirty feet low tide,’ Ruthven said mechanically.

I shrugged. ‘There you are then.’

‘There we are not.’ Vyland shook his head. ‘What’s the greatest depth at which you can expect divers to perform really useful work, Talbot?’

‘Perhaps three hundred feet.’ I thought a moment. ‘The deepest I know was by US divers off Honolulu. Two hundred and seventy-five feet. US Submarine F4.’

‘You really are a specialist, aren’t you, Talbot?’

‘Every diver and salvage man worth his salt knows that.’

‘Two hundred and seventy-five feet, eh? Unfortunately, what we’re after is in the bottom of a big hole, a deep chasm in the sea bed. The general’s geologists were very interested indeed when we located this hole. Said it was just like — what was it, General?’

‘The Hurd Deep.’

‘That’s it. The Hurd Deep. In the English Channel. Deep valley in the sea-bed where the Limeys dump all their old explosives. This one here is four hundred and eighty feet in depth.’

‘That makes a difference,’ I said slowly.

‘Doesn’t it now? And how would you get at that?’

‘All depends how difficult it is to reach. The newest Neufeldt-Kuhnke rigid diving-suit, armour-plated in cast steel, could just about make it. I doubt if any diver could accomplish anything at that depth. He’d be under a pressure of two hundred pounds to the square inch and any movement would be like a barrel of heavy tar. Anything except the simplest manoeuvre would be beyond him. The way to do it would be with observation turrets — Galeazzi and my old firm, Siebe-Gorman, produce the best — and use those. They can go down about one thousand five hundred feet. You get inside one of these and use a phone to guide laying of explosives or dredgers or grapnels or power grabs. That’s the way they took over ten million dollars’ worth of gold from the Niagara, from about the same depth, off New Zealand, and about four million dollars’ worth of gold from the Egypt, lying four hundred feet off Ushant. Those are the two classic cases of modern times and that’s how I would do it.’

‘And of course that would require at least a couple of surface vessels and much specialized equipment,’ Vyland said softly. ‘Do you think we can go around buying up observation turrets — if there are any available in this country — and dredgers and then sit anchored in the same spot for weeks without exciting suspicion?’

‘You have a point,’ I admitted.

‘So the bathyscaphe,’ Vyland smiled. ‘The valley in the sea floor is less than six hundred yards from here. We take with us grabs and hooks attached to wires on drums fastened to the outside of the scaphe, fix them on — you can do some very fancy work with those extension arms and graphs fitted in front — then come back here, unreeling the wire as we go. Then we haul the wire in from the X 13.’

‘As easy as that, eh?’

‘Just as easy as that, Talbot. Clever, you would say?’

‘Very.’ I didn’t think it clever at all, I didn’t think Vyland had even begun to appreciate the difficulties involved, the endless slow-motion try, try, try again frustration of underwater salvage, the scope of the initial preparation, the skill and experience of years required. I tried to remember how long it had taken to salvage two and a half million dollars’ worth of gold and silver from the Laurentic, sunk in only just over a hundred feet of water — something like six years if I remembered rightly. And Vyland spoke as if he was going to do it in an afternoon. ‘And where exactly is the scaphe?’ I asked.

Vyland pointed at the semi-circular trunking. ‘That’s one of the support legs of this rig — but it happens to be raised twenty feet above the sea bed. The bathyscaphe is moored below that.’

‘Moored below it?’ I stared at him. ‘What do you mean? It’s beneath the bottom of that leg? How did you get it there? How do you get into it? How in the world—?’

‘Simple,’ he interrupted. ‘I am not, as you may have gathered, much of an engineer but I do have an — ah — professional friend who is. He devised the simple expedient of fitting a reinforced and completely waterproof steel floor of great strength across the bottom of this leg — about six feet from the bottom, actually — and letting into this a tapering steel cylinder about six feet long and not quite three feet in diameter, projecting downwards, open top and bottom, but the top capable of being sealed off flush with the waterproof floor by a screwed hatch. In a recession about two feet from the top of this cylinder is a reinforced rubber tube … You begin to see daylight, I think, Talbot?’

‘I see daylight.’ They were an ingenious bunch, if nothing else. ‘Somehow — almost certainly at night — you got the rig’s engineer’s to co-operate with you in the lowering of this leg — I suppose you told them the yarn about top secret research, so secret that no one was allowed to see what was going on. You had the bathyscaphe on the surface, unbolted its bridge cover, lowered the leg slowly until this cylinder fitted over the bathyscaphe’s entrance hatch, pumped this rubber ring full of compressed air to make a perfect seal, then lowered the leg into the water, pushing the bathyscaphe down before it while someone inside the bathyscaphe, probably your engineering friend, adjusted the hydrostatic valve for one of the adjacent flooding chambers enough to let it sink easily but not so much as to rob it of its slight positive buoyancy necessary to keep the top of the entrance chamber jammed into the cylinder at the foot of the leg. And when you want to take off you just climb into the bathyscaphe, seal both the cylinder and the bathyscaphe hatches, have someone on the rig blow the air from the rubber seal gripping the entrance chamber of the bathyscaphe, flood your tanks to get enough negative buoyancy to drop clear of the leg and there you are. Reverse process when you come back except that you’ll need a suction pump to clear the water that’s accumulated in the cylinder. Right?’

‘In every detail.’ Vyland permitted himself one of his rare smiles. ‘Brilliant, you might call it?’

‘No. The only brilliant thing was stealing the bathyscaphe. The rest is within the scope of any moderately competent underwater operator. Just an application of the double-chambered submarine rescue diving bell which can fit in much the same way over the escape hatch of practically any submarine. And a fairly similar principle has been used for caisson work — sinking underwater piers for bridges and the like. But smart enough for all that. Your engineer friend was no fool. A pity about him, wasn’t it?’

‘A pity?’ Vyland was no longer smiling.

‘Yes. He’s dead, isn’t he?’

The room became very still. After perhaps ten seconds Vyland said very quietly: ‘What did you say?’

‘I said he was dead. When anyone in your employ dies suddenly, Vyland, I would say it was because he had outlived his usefulness. But with your treasure unrecovered, he obviously hadn’t. There was an accident.’

Another long pause. ‘What makes you think there was an accident?’

‘And he was an elderly man, wasn’t he, Vyland?’

‘What makes you think there was an accident?’ A soft menace in every word. Larry was licking his lips again.

‘The waterproof floor you had put in in the bottom of the pillar was not quite as waterproof as you had thought. It leaked, didn’t it, Vyland? Only a very small hole, possibly, and in the perimeter of the floor where it joined the side of the leg. Bad welding. But you were lucky. Somewhere above where we’re standing there must be another transverse seal in the leg — to give structural strength, no doubt. So you used this machine here’ — I pointed to one of the generators bolted to the deck — ‘to drive in compressed air after you’d sent someone inside the leg and sealed this door off. When you’d driven in enough compressed air the accumulated water was driven out the bottom and then the man — or men — inside were able to repair the hole. Right, Vyland?’

‘Right,’ He was on balance again, and there was no harm in admitting something to a person who would never live to repeat it to anyone. ‘How do you know all this, Talbot?’

‘That footman up in the general’s house. I’ve seen many cases. He’s suffering from what used to be called caisson disease — and he’ll never recover from it. The diver’s bends, Vyland. When people are working under a high air or sea pressure and that pressure is released too quickly they get nitrogen bubbles in the blood. Those men in the leg were working in about four atmospheres, about sixty pounds to the square inch. If they’d been down there more than half an hour they should have spent at least half an hour decompressing, but as it was some criminal idiot released the built-up pressure far too fast — as fast as it could escape, probably. At the best of times caisson work, or its equivalent, is only for fit young men. Your engineer friend was no longer a fit young man. And you had, of course, no decompressor. So he died. The footman may live long enough but he’ll never again know what a pain-free existence is. But I don’t suppose that troubles you, does it, Vyland?’

‘We’re wasting time.’ I could see the relief on Vyland’s face, for a moment there he’d suspected that I — and possibly others as well — knew too much about the happenings on the X 13. But he was satisfied now — and very relieved. But I wasn’t interested in his expression, only in the general’s.

General Ruthven was regarding me in a very peculiar fashion indeed: there was puzzlement in his face, some thought that was troubling him, but worse than that there were the beginnings of the first faint incredulous stirrings of understanding.

I didn’t like that, I didn’t like that at all. Swiftly I reviewed everything I’d said, everything I’d implied, and in those matters I have an almost total recall, but I couldn’t think of a single word that might have been responsible for that expression on his face. And if he’d noticed something, then perhaps Vyland had also. But Vyland’s face showed no sign of any knowledge or suspicion of anything untoward and it didn’t necessarily follow that any off-beat word or circumstance noted by the general would also be noted by Vyland. The general was a very clever man indeed: fools don’t start from scratch and accumulate close on 300 million dollars in a single lifetime.

But I wasn’t going to give Vyland time to look at and read the expression on the general’s face — he might be smart enough for that. I said: ‘So your engineer is dead and now you need a driver, shall we say, for your bathyscaphe?’

‘Wrong. We know how to operate it ourselves: You don’t think we’d be so everlastingly stupid as to steal a scaphe without at the same time knowing what to do with it. From an office in Nassau we had obtained a complete set of maintenance and operation instructions in both French and English. Don’t worry, we know how to operate it.’

‘Indeed? This is most interesting.’ I sat down on a bench without as much as a by-your-leave and lit a cigarette. Some such gesture would be expected from me. ‘Then what precisely do you want with me?’

For the first time in our brief acquaintance Vyland looked embarrassed. After a few seconds he scowled and said harshly: ‘We can’t get the damned engines to start.’

I took a deep draw on my cigarette and tried to blow a smoke-ring. It didn’t come off — with me it never came off.

‘Well, well, well,’ I murmured. ‘How most inconvenient. For you, that is. For me, it couldn’t be more convenient. All you’ve got to do is to start those two little engines and hey presto! you pick up a fortune for the asking. I assume that you aren’t playing for peanuts — not operating on this scale. And you can’t start them up without me. As I said, how convenient — for me.’

‘You know how to make that machine run?’ he asked coldly.

‘I might. Should be simple enough — they’re just battery-powered electric motors.’ I smiled. ‘But the electric circuits and switches and fuse boxes are pretty complicated. Surely they’re listed in the maintenance instructions?’

‘They are.’ The smooth polished veneer was showing a distinct crack and his voice was almost a snarl. ‘They’re coded for a key. We haven’t got a key.’

‘Wonderful, just wonderful.’ I rose leisurely to my feet and stood in front of Vyland. ‘Without me you’re lost, is that it?’

He made no answer.

‘Then I have my price, Vyland. A guarantee of my life.’ This angle didn’t worry me at all but I knew I had to make the play or he’d have been as suspicious as hell. ‘What guarantee do you offer, Vyland?’

‘Good God, man, you don’t need any guarantee.’ The general was indignant, astonished. ‘Why would anyone want to kill you?’

‘Look, General,’ I said patiently. ‘You may be a big, big tiger when you’re prowling along the jungles of Wall Street, but as far as the other side of the legal divide is concerned you’re not even in the kitten class. Anyone not in your friend Vyland’s employ who knows too much will always come to the same sticky end — when he can no longer be of any use to him, of course. Vyland likes his money’s worth, even when it costs him nothing.’

‘You’re suggesting, by inference, that I might also come to the same end?’ Ruthven inquired.

‘Not you, General. You’re safe. I don’t know what the stinking tie-up between you and Vyland is and I don’t care. He may have a hold on you and you may be up to the ears in cahoots with him but either way it makes no difference. You’re safe. The disappearance of the richest man in the country would touch off the biggest man-hunt of the decade. Sorry to appear cynical, General, but there it is. An awful lot of money buys an awful lot of police activity. There would be an awful lot of pressure, General, and snowbirds like our hopped-up young friend here’ — I jerked a finger over my shoulder in the general direction of Larry — ‘are very apt indeed to talk under pressure. Vyland knows it. You’re safe, and when it’s all over, if you’re not really Vyland’s ever-loving partner, he’ll find ways to ensure your silence. There would be nothing you could prove against him, it would only be your word against his and many others and I don’t suppose even your own daughter knows what’s going on. And then, of course, there’s Royale — the knowledge that Royale is prowling around on the loose waiting for a man to make just one slip is enough to guarantee that man putting on an act that would make a clam seem positively garrulous.’ I turned from him and smiled at Vyland. ‘But I’m expandable, am I not?’ I snapped my fingers. ‘The guarantee, Vyland, the guarantee.’

‘I’ll guarantee it, Talbot,’ General Ruthven said quietly. ‘I know who you are. I know you’re a killer. But I won’t have even a killer murdered out of hand. If anything happens to you I’ll talk, regardless of the consequences. Vyland is first and foremost a business man. Killing you wouldn’t even begin to be compensation for the millions he’d lose. You need have no fear.’

Millions. It was the first time there had been any mention of the amounts involved. Millions. And I was to get it for them.

‘Thanks, General, that puts you on the side of the angels,’ I murmured. I stubbed out my cigarette, turned and smiled at Vyland. ‘Bring along the bag of tools, friend, and we’ll go and have a look at your new toy.’