The Dark Crusader

Epilogue

A small dusty man in a small dusty room. That's how I always thought of him, just a small dusty man in a small dusty room.

He'd jumped to his feet when I'd entered, and now he was hurrying round the desk, coming towards me, taking me by my good arm and helping me towards the chair in front of his desk. The royal treatment for the returned hero, I'd have taken long odds that he'd never done anything like this before, he hadn't even bothered to rise from his chair the first time I'd seen Marie Hopeman walk into that room.

"Sit down, sit down, my boy." The grey lined face was alive with concern, the steady watchful green eyes mirrored the worry that this man almost never showed. "My God, Bentall, you look awful."

There was a mirror behind his desk, small, fly-blown and covered with dust like everything else in that room, and he wasn't exaggerating any that I could see. Left arm in a black linen sling, right hand holding the heavy stick that helped me along, bloodshot eyes and pale sunken cheeks with the great livid weal that ran from temple to chin, if I could get into the market quick I could make a fortune hiring myself out to haunt houses.

"I look worse than I really am, sir. I'm just tired, that's all." God only knew how tired I was, I hadn't slept a couple of hours in the two days it had taken me to fly home from Suva.

"Have you had anything to eat, Bentall?" I wondered drily when this room had last seen such a display of solicitude, not since old Raine had taken over the chair behind that desk, I'd bet.

"No, sir. I came straight here after I'd phoned from the airport. I'm not hungry."

"I see." He crossed over to the window and stood there for a few moments, shoulders bent, thin fingers laced behind his back, gazing down at the blurred reflection of the lights on the wet glistening street below. Then he sighed, drew the curtains across the stained, and dusty windows, went and sat down, hands lightly clasped on the desk before him. He said, without any preamble: "So Marie Hopeman is dead."

"Yes," I said. "She's dead."

"It's always the best who go," he murmured. "Always the best. Why couldn't an old useless man like myself have gone instead? But it's never that way, is it? If it had been, my own daughter I couldn't-" He broke off and stared down at his hands. "We'll never see a Marie Hopeman again."

"No, sir. We won't see a Marie Hopeman again."

"How did she die, Bentall?"

"I killed her, sir. I had to."

"You killed her." He said it as if it were the most natural thing in the world. "I had your cable from the Neckar. I've had a rough outline from the Admiralty about what happened on Vardu Island. I know you have done a magnificent job, but I know nothing. Please tell me everything that happened."

I told him everything that had happened. It was a long story, but he heard me out without question or interruption. When I was finished he screwed the heels of his palms into his eyes, then pushed both hands slowly up and back across the high lined forehead, the sparse grey hair.

"Fantastic," he murmured. "I have heard some strange tales in this office, but-" He broke off, reached for his pipe and penknife and started up his excavations again. "A great job, a great job-but what a price. All the speeches, all the thanks in the world can never repay you for what you've done, my boy. And no medals in a job like ours, though I have already arranged that you shall have a very special- um-reward for what you have done, and have it very soon." A little tic at the corner of the mouth, I was supposed to guess from that that he was smiling. "You will, I think, find it positively-ah-staggering."

I said nothing, and he continued: "I have, of course, a hundred and one questions to ask you and you no doubt have one or two pointed questions for a small deception I was forced to practice. But that can all wait for the morning." He glanced at his watch. "Good heavens, it's half-past ten. I've kept you too long, far too long, you look almost dead."

"It's all right," I said.

"It's not all right." He laid down pipe and knife and gave me the up from under look with those iceberg eyes of his. "I have more than a vague idea of what you have suffered, not only physically, what you've been through. After all this, Bentall-do you still wish to continue in the service?"

"More than ever, sir." I tried to smile, but it wasn't worth the pain it cost, so I gave it up. "Remember what you said about that chair of yours before I left-I'd still like to sit in it some day."

"And I'm determined you shall," he said quietly.

"So am I, sir." I put my right hand into the sling to ease my arm. "But that's not the only determination we share."

"No?" A millimetric lift of the grey eyebrows.

"No. We're both of us determined on something else. We're both of us determined that the other will never leave this room alive." I took my hand from the sling and showed him my gun. "That Luger under your seat. Leave it where it is."

He stared at me, his mouth slowly tightening.

"Have you taken leave of your senses, Bentall?"

"No, I just found them again, four days ago." I rose awkwardly to my feet and hobbled round to his side of the desk. My eye and my gun never left him. "Get out of that chair."

"You're overstrained," he said quietly. "You've been through too much-"

I struck him across the face with the barrel of my gun.

"Get out of that chair."

He wiped some blood from his cheek and rose slowly to his feet.

"Lay the chair on its side." He did as he was told. The Luger was there all right, held by a spring clip. "Lift it out with the forefinger and thumb of the left hand. By the point of the barrel. And lay it on the desk."

Once more he did as he was directed.

"Get back to the window and turn round."

"What in the name of God is-"

I took a step towards him, gun swinging. He moved quickly backward, four steps till he felt the curtains behind him, and turned round. I glanced down at the Luger. Heavy silencer, safety catch off, loading indicator registering full. I pocketed my own gun, picked up the Luger and told him to turn round. I hefted the Luger in my hand.

"The staggering reward I was to get very soon, eh?" I asked. "A slug in the middle of the guts from a 7.65 Luger would make anyone stagger. Only I wasn't quite as unsuspecting as the last poor devil you murdered when he was sitting in that chair, was I?"

He exhaled his breath in a long silent sigh, and shook his head, very slowly. "I suppose you know what you're talking about, Bentall?"

"Unfortunately for you, I do. Sit down." I waited till he had straightened the chair and seated himself, then leaned against a corner of the desk. "How long have you been playing this double game, Raine?"

"Whatever on earth are you talking about?" he demanded wearily.

"I suppose you know I'm going to kill you," I said. "With this nice silenced Luger. Nobody will hear a thing. The building is deserted. No one saw me come in: and no one will see me go out. They'll find you in the morning, Raine. Dead. Suicide, they'll say. Your responsibilities were too heavy."

Raine licked his lips. He wasn't saying I was mad any more.

"I suppose you've been engaged in treason all your life, Raine. God knows how you got off with it for so long, I suppose you must be brilliant or they'd have caught on to you years ago. Do you want to tell me about it, Raine?"

The green eyes blazed into mine. I had never before seen such concentrated malignity in a human face. He said nothing.

"Very well," I said, "I'll tell you. I'll tell it as a little short story, a bed-time story before you go to sleep. Listen well, Raine, for it's the last story you'll ever hear before the last sleep you'll ever have.

"Twenty-five years you spent in the Far East, Raine, the last ten as chief of counter-espionage. Running with the hare and chasing with the hounds all the time, I suppose, God alone knows how much tragedy and suffering you caused out there, how many people died because of you. Then two years ago you came home.

"But before you came you were approached by one of the powers for whom you were working while you were supposed to be our counter-espionage chief. They told you they had heard rumours that English scientists were making preliminary investigations into solid fuel as a power source for missiles and rockets. They asked you to find out what you could. You agreed. I don't pretend to know what they promised you, power, money, heaven only knows.

"Nor do I pretend to know how exactly you set up your spying organisation. Contacts across Europe were easy for you to arrange, and the actual clearing-house was Istanbul, where my investigations finally took me. I suspect that the way you acquired your information was by introducing into the Hepworth Ordnance and Research Establishment, the place with the highest security rating in Britain, men whom you yourself, in your official capacity, had thoroughly 'screened'.

"The months passed and information was gradually acquired, sent to Istanbul and re-transmitted to the Far East. But your predecessor got wind of what was happening, suspected a security leak and told the Government: they instructed him, I imagine, that the business of investigating this leakage was to be given the highest priority. He started getting too close to the truth and his plane crashed into the Irish Sea and was never traced. He was seen off on that flight, at London Airport. He was seen off by you. Some time-bomb in his luggage, I suspect-our luggage is immune from Customs examination. It was a pity that there were thirty others in that plane, but that wasn't really important, was it, Raine?

"You were then promoted. The obvious choice, a brilliant and devoted man who had given a lifetime to serving his country. You then found yourself in the fantastic position of having to send out agents to track down yourself. And, of course, you had to. One man you sent found out too much. He came back here and into this room with a gun in his hand to confront you with this evidence. He didn't know about the hidden Luger, did he, Raine? And then you spread this story about how he'd been subverted and ordered to kill you. How am I doing, Colonel Raine?"

He had no comment to make on how I was doing.

"Now the Government was getting really anxious. You persuaded them that the difficulty lay in the complex nature of the technical information that was being passed, that only a scientist could really understand it. Your own agents, the honest ones, were all right in their own way, but there was one great objection to them-they were too damn good at finding things out. So, having kidded the government, you shopped around until you found the most stupid scientist you could. The one least likely to succeed. You picked me. I can understand your reasons.

"And you picked Marie Hopeman. You tried to convince me that she was a first-class agent, tough, capable and highly-experienced. She was nothing of the sort. She was just a nice girl, with a beautiful face and figure, and a considerable capacity for acting which made her ideal for the passive and undemanding position of receiving and passing on information without arousing suspicions. But that was all she had. No great intelligence, no marked degree of inventiveness, certainly not the mental ruthlessness and physical toughness essential for success in this job.

"So you sent the two of us into Europe to find out what we could about this fuel leak. You must have been convinced that if there was any pair in the world who could never find anything it was Marie Hopeman and I.

"But you made a mistake, Colonel Raine. You checked up on my intelligence and inventiveness, and thought you'd nothing to fear on that score. But you forgot to check on other things. Toughness and ruthlessness. I am tough and I can be completely ruthless. You'll see that when I pull this trigger, I'll stop at nothing to finish something I've started. I began finding out things, far too many things. You panicked and called us back to London."

Colonel Raine showed no reaction to any of this. His green unblinking eyes never left my face. He was waiting, waiting for a chance. He knew I was a sick man, and very tired. One false move, one slow reaction and he'd be on to me like an express train, and the way I felt that night I couldn't have fought off a teddy bear.

"Because of my activities," I went on, "the fuel leak had practically stopped. Your eastern friends were getting worried. But you had another string to your bow, hadn't you, Colonel Raine? Some months before that the government had set up a testing station for the Black Shrike on Vardu. Security was essential and you, of course, were the man responsible for all the security arrangements. You arranged the set-up with Professor Witherspoon to have the island barred to visitors for a perfectly good and innocuous reason: you arranged for the scientists and their wives to go to Australia without arousing suspicion: you arranged for a security clearance for Captain Fleck-my God, who else but you could ever have given that rogue a clearance? — and then you told your eastern friends, under the leadership of LeClerc, to move in, eliminate and replace Witherspoon. Finally, probably by telling them that they were going to see their husbands and emphasising to all of them the need for complete secrecy, you arranged for the transport of the scientists' wives to Vardu. But they were landed on the wrong side of the island, weren't they, Raine?

"So now you had the two strings to your bow. If you couldn't give your friends every detail of the new fuel, you could give them the fuel itself. Only there was one snag. Dr. Fairfield got himself killed, and you had to have someone to arm the rocket.

"It was brilliant, I admit it. Two birds with one stone. I had already found out too much in Europe and you knew now I was the type who wouldn't stop till the answer was there. You told Marie Hopeman that I was the one man you could be afraid of and maybe for once you weren't lying. I knew too much and I had to be eliminated. So did Marie Hopeman. But before my elimination, a duty you'd arranged that your friend LeClerc would carry out, I had a job to do. I was to arm the Shrike.

"You could have sent me direct to the rocket installation, in a perfectly straight-forward fashion, while the Navy was still there. But you knew I'd be as suspicious as hell if I was pulled off a security job and put on a civilian job. I'd be doubly suspicious because there are more qualified men in the country than I am. And, of course, there would then be no reason for Marie Hopeman to accompany me. And you wanted her killed too. So you inserted this final and phoney advert in the 'Telegraph', showed it to me, spun us this cock-and-bull story and sent us off to the Pacific.

"There was only one potential snag, one vital matter on which everything else depended, and your psychological handling of this was perfect. The snag-and if you couldn't find an answer to it everything would have been lost-was how to get me to wire up the firing circuitry and fuses of the Black Shrike. The lamb you'd thought you'd caught had turned out to be a tiger. You knew by that time how stubborn and ruthless I could be. You guessed that threats of torture or torture itself wouldn't make me do it. You knew, if I thought it important enough, that I could stand by and watch others being tortured or threatened with death, as Captain Griffiths and his men were, and still not do it. But you knew a man in love will do anything to protect the one he loves. And so you arranged it that I fall in love with Marie Hopeman. You reckoned that no one could sit side by side in planes with Marie Hopeman for two days, spend a night in the same room, spend a night and a day in the hold of a ship, a night huddled together on a reef and two more days side by side in the same hut without falling in love with her. My God, even going to the length of having the bogus Witherspoon trying to make me jealous. Damn your black heart, Raine, you gave us the time, the situation and every opportunity to fall in love. And so we did. They tortured her, and let me see her. They threatened to do it again. And so, God help me, I armed the Black Shrike. And God help you, too, Colonel Raine, for it's because of Marie that you're going to die. Not because of all the deaths you've caused, the misery, the heartbreak, the suffering. But for Marie."

I pushed myself painfully off the table and limped round till I was within three feet of him.

"You can't prove any of this," Raine said hoarsely.

"That's why I have to kill you here," I agreed indifferently. "No court in the country would look at my case. No proof, but there were many things that pointed to your guilt, Raine, things that I didn't see till it was too late. How did Fleck know that Marie had a gun in the false bottom of her bag-scientists' wives don't usually carry guns. Why did LeClerc-Witherspoon, as I knew him then-say we weren't long married, we didn't behave that way? Later, why did he show no surprise when I told him we weren't married? He said I'd a photographic memory-how the hell did he know that unless you told him? Why did LeClerc and Hewell try to cripple me with a heavy safe-they knew I was an intelligence agent, you told them and they didn't want me snooping around? Who gave Fleck security clearance from London? How did they know the Shrike was about to be tested, if the word hadn't been relayed from London? Why was no attention paid to the S.O.S. cable I sent to London, no action taken? LeClerc spun a yarn about sending a second message cancelling the first, but you know every message to this office, coded or plain, must have my identification word 'Bilex' in the middle. Why were no enquiries made at the Grand Pacific Hotel after our disappearance: I checked on the way home and neither the government house nor the police had been asked to investigate? The observer who was supposed to accompany us on the plane never reported our disappearance-for there was no observer, was there Colonel Raine? Pointers, only, not proof: you're right, I couldn't prove a thing."

Raine smiled: the man seemed to have no nerves at all.

"How would you feel, Bentall, if you killed me and found out you were completely wrong?" He leaned forward and said softly: "How would you feel if I gave you absolute proof, here and now, that you're completely, terribly wrong?"

"You're wasting your time, Colonel Raine. Here it comes."

"But damn it, man, I've got the proof!" he shouted. "I've got it right here. My wallet-"

He lifted his left lapel with his left hand, reached for the inside pocket with his right, the small black automatic was clear of his coat and the finger tightening on the trigger when I shot him through the head at point-blank range. The automatic spun from his hand, he jerked back violently in his seat, then fell forward, head and shoulders striking heavily on the dusty desk.

I took out my handkerchief, pulling with it a piece of paper that fluttered to the floor. I let it lie. Handkerchief in hand I picked up the fallen gun, replaced it in his inside pocket, wiped the Luger, pushed it in the dead man's hand, pressed his thumb and fingers against the butt and trigger, then let gun and hand fall loosely to the table. I then smeared doorknobs, armrests, wherever I had touched, and picked up the fallen paper.

It was the note from Marie. I opened it, held it by a corner above Raine's ashtray, struck a match and watched it slowly burn away, the tiny flame creeping inexorably down the paper until it reached the words at the-foot, "You and me and the lights of London", until those, too, one by one, were burnt and blackened and gone. I crushed the ash in the tray and went.

I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him lying there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.