Fear is the Key

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘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.’

  NINE

  It isn’t the fashion to design tombs in the form of two-hundred-foot-high metal cylinders, but if it were that pillar on the X 13 would have been a sensation. As a tomb, I mean. It had everything. It was cold and dank and dark, the gloom not so much relieved as accentuated by three tiny glow-worms of light at top, middle and bottom: it was eerie and sinister and terrifying and the hollow, reverberating echoing boom of a voice in those black and cavernous confines held all the dark resonance, the doom-filled apocalyptic finality of the dark angel calling your name on the day of judgement. It should have been, I thought bleakly, a place you went through after you died, not just before you died. Not that the question of precedence mattered at the end of the day.

  As a tomb, fine: as a means of getting anywhere, terrible. The only connection between top and bottom lay in a succession of iron ladders welded on to the riveted sides of the pillar. There were twelve of those ladders, each with fifteen rungs, not one break or resting place between top and bottom. What with the weight of a heavy circuit-testing bridge Megger hanging down my back and the fact that the rungs were so wet and slippery that I had to grip them with considerable force to keep myself from falling off the ladder, the strain on forearm and shoulder muscles was severe; twice that distance and I wouldn’t have made it.

  It is customary for the host to lead the way in strange surroundings but Vyland passed up his privilege. Maybe he was frightened that if he preceded me down the ladder I’d take the opportunity of kicking his head off and sending him a hundred and more feet to his death on the iron platform below. However it was, I went first, with Vyland and the two cold-eyed men we’d found waiting in the little steel room following close behind. That left Larry and the general up above, and no one was under the impression that Larry was fit to guard anyone. The general was free to move around as he wished, yet Vyland appeared to have no fears that the general might use his freedom to queer his pitch. This I had found inexplicable: but I knew the answer to it now. Or I thought I knew: if I were wrong, innocent people would surely die. I put the thought out of my mind.

  ‘Right, open it up, Cibatti,’ Vyland ordered.

  The larger of the two men bent down and unscrewed the hatch, swinging it up and back on its hinges to lock into a standing catch. I peered down the narrow steel cylinder that led to the steel cabin beneath the bathyscaphe and said to Vyland: ‘I suppose you know you’ll have to flood this entrance chamber when you go looking for your Blackbeard’s treasure?’

  ‘What’s that?’ He looked at me narrowly, suspiciously. ‘Why?’

  ‘Were you thinking of leaving it unflooded?’ I asked incredulously. ‘This entrance chamber is usually flooded the minute you start descending – and that’s normally surface level, not a hundred and thirty feet down as you are here. Sure, sure, I know it looks solid, it might even hold at double this depth, I don’t know. But what I do know is that it is completely surrounded by your gasoline buoyancy tanks, about eight thousand gallons of it, and those are open to the sea at the bottom. The pressure inside those tanks corresponds exactly to the sea pressure outside – which is why only the thinnest sheet metal is required to hold the gasoline. But with only air inside your entrance chamber you’re going to have at least two hundred pounds to the square inch pressing on the outside of this entrance chamber. And it won’t stand that. It’ll burst inwards, your gasoline will escape, your positive buoyancy will be gone for ever and there you are, four hundred and eighty feet below the surface of the sea. And there you would remain until the end of time.’ It was hard to be positive in that thinly-lit gloom, but I could have sworn that the colour had drained from Vyland’s face.

  ‘Bryson never told me this.’ Vyland’s voice was a vicious whisper and there was a shake in it.

  ‘Bryson? Your engineering friend?’ There was no answer, so I went on: ‘No, I don’t suppose he would. He was no friend, was he, Vyland: he had a gun in his back, didn’t he, and he knew that when his usefulness was over someone was going to pull the trigger of that gun? Why the hell should he tell you?’ I looked away from him and shouldered the bridge Megger again. ‘No need for anyone to come down with me – it’ll only make me nervous.’

  ‘Think I’m going to let you go down there on your own?’ he asked coldly. ‘To get up to your tricks?’

  ‘Don’t be stupid,’ I said wearily. ‘I could stand there in front of an electrical switchboard or fuse-box and sabotage the bathyscaphe so that it would never move again, and neither you nor your friends would ever know anything about it. It’s in my own interests to get this machine going and have the whole thing over as soon as possible. The quicker the better for me.’ I glanced at my watch. ‘Twenty to eleven. It’ll take me three hours to find out what’s wrong. At least. I’ll have a break at two. I’ll knock on the hatch so that you can let me out.’

  ‘No need.’ Vyland wasn’t happy, but as long as he couldn’t put his finger on any possibility of treachery he wasn’t going to deny me – he wasn’t in any position to. ‘There’s a microphone in the cabin, with its extension cable wound round a drum on the outside and a lead through a gland in the side of the leg that’s carried up to that room where we were. There’s a button call-up. Let us know when you’re ready.’

  I nodded and started down the rungs welded into the side of the cylinder, unscrewed the upper hatch of the bathyscaphe’s flooding and entrance chamber, managed to wriggle down past it – the downward projecting cylinder which encompassed the top of the entrance chamber was only a few inches wider and didn’t give enough room to open the hatch fully – felt for the rungs below, pulled down the hatch, clamped it shut and then worked my way down the constricting narrowness of that chamber to the cabin below. The last few feet involved an almost right-angle bend, but I managed to ease myself and the Megger round it. I opened the heavy steel door to the cabin, wriggled through the tiny entrance, then closed and locked the door behind me.

  Nothing had changed, it was as I had remembered it. The cabin was c
onsiderably bigger than that of the earlier FRNS from which it had been developed, and slightly oval in shape instead of round: but what was lost in structural power was more than compensated for in the scope and ease of movement inside, and as it was only intended for salvage operations up to about 2,500 feet, the relative loss in strength was unimportant. There were three windows, one set in the floor, cone-shaped inwards as was the entrance door, so that sea pressure only tightened them in their seats: they looked fragile, those windows, but I knew that the specially constructed Plexiglas in the largest of them – and that was no more than a foot in its external diameter – could take a pressure of 250 tons without fracturing, many times the strain it would ever be required to withstand in the depths in which that bathyscaphe would operate.

  The cabin itself was a masterpiece of design. One wall – if approximately one-sixth on the surface area of the inside of a sphere could be called a wall – was covered with instruments, dial, fuse-boxes, switchboards and a variety of scientific equipment which we would not be called upon to use: set to one side were the controls for engine starting, engine speed, advance and reverse, for the searchlights, remote-controlled grabs, the dangling guiderope which could hold the bathyscaphe stable near the bottom by resting part of its length on the sea-bed and so relieving the scaphe of that tiny percentage of weight which was sufficient to hold it in perfect equilibrium; and, finally, there were the fine adjustments for the device for absorbing exhaled carbon dioxide and regenerating oxygen.

  One control there was that I hadn’t seen before, and it puzzled me for some time. It was a rheostat with advance and retard positions graded on either side of the central knob and below this was the brass legend ‘Tow-rope control’. I had no idea what this could be for, but after a couple of minutes I could make a pretty sure guess. Vyland – or rather, Bryson on Vyland’s orders – must have fitted a power-operated drum to the top, and almost certainly the rear, of the bathyscaphe, the wire of which would have been attached, before the leg had been lowered into the water, to some heavy bolt or ring secured near the base of the leg. The idea, I now saw, was not that they could thereby haul the bathyscaphe back to the rig if anything went wrong – it would have required many more times the power that was available in the bathyscaphe’s engines to haul that big machine along the ocean bed – but purely to overcome the very tricky navigational problem of finding their way back to the leg. I switched on a searchlight, adjusted the beam and stared down through the window at my feet. The deep circular ring in the ocean floor where the leg had originally been bedded was still there, a trench over a foot in depth: with that to guide, re-engaging the top of the entrance chamber in the cylinder inside leg shouldn’t be too difficult.

  At least I understood now why Vyland hadn’t objected too strongly to my being left by myself inside the scaphe: by flooding the entrance chamber and rocking the scaphe to and fro if and when Igot the engines started, I might easily have managed to tear clear of the rubber seal and sail the bathyscaphe away to freedom and safety: but I wouldn’t get very far with a heavy cable attaching me to the leg of the X 13. Vyland might be a phoney in the ways of dress, mannerisms and speech, but that didn’t alter the fact that he was a very smart boy indeed.

  Apart from the instruments on that one wall, the rest of the cabin was practically bare except for three small canvas seats that hinged on the outer wall and a rack where there was stored a variety of cameras and photo-flood equipment.

  My initial comprehensive look round the interior didn’t take long. The first thing that called for attention was the control box of the hand microphone by one of the canvas seats. Vyland was just the sort of person who would want to check whether I really was working, and I wouldn’t have put it past him to change over wires in the control box so that when the switch was in the off position the microphone would be continuously live and so let him know that I was at least working, even if he didn’t know what kind of work it was. But I’d misjudged or over-rated him, the wiring was as it should have been.

  In the next five minutes or so I tested every item of equipment inside that cabin except the engine controls – should I have been able to start them anyone still waiting on the bottom floor of that leg would have been sure to feel the vibration.

  After that I unscrewed the cover of the largest of the circuit boxes, removed almost twenty coloured wires from their sockets and let them hang down in the wildest confusion and disorder. I attached a lead from the Megger to one of those wires, opened the covers of another two circuits and fuse-boxes and emptied most of my tools on to the small work-bench beneath. The impression of honest toil was highly convincing.

  So small was the floor area of that steel cabin that there was no room for me to stretch out my length on the narrow mesh duckboard but I didn’t care. I hadn’t slept at all the previous night, I’d been through a great deal in the past twelve hours and I felt very tired indeed. I’d sleep all right.

  I slept. My last impression before drifting off was that the wind and the seas must be really acting up. At depths of a hundred feet or over, wave-motion is rarely or never felt: but the rocking of that bathyscaphe was unmistakable, though very gentle indeed. It rocked me to sleep.

  My watch said half-past two when I awoke. For me, this was most unusual: I’d normally the ability to set a mental alarm-clock and wake up almost to the pre-selected moment. This time I’d slipped, but I was hardly surprised. My head ached fiercely, the air in that tiny cabin was foul. It was my own fault, I’d been careless. I reached for the switch controlling carbon dioxide absorption and turned it up to maximum. After five minutes, when my head began to clear, I switched on the microphone and asked for someone to loosen the hatch-cover set into the floor of the leg. The man they called Cibatti came down and let me out and three minutes later I was up again in that little steel room.

  ‘Late, aren’t you?’ Vyland snapped. He and Royale – the helicopter must have made the double trip safely – were the only people there, apart from Cibatti who had just closed the trunking door behind me.

  ‘You want the damn thing to go sometime, don’t you?’ I said irritably. ‘I’m not in this for the fun of the thing, Vyland.’

  ‘That’s so.’ The top executive criminal, he wasn’t going to antagonize anyone unnecessarily. He peered closely at me. ‘Anything the matter with you?’

  ‘Working for hours on end in a cramped coffin is the matter with me,’ I said sourly. ‘That and the fact that the air purifier was maladjusted. But it’s OK now.’

  ‘Progress?’

  ‘Damn little.’ I lifted my hand as the eyebrow went up and the face began to darken in a scowl. ‘It’s not for want of trying. I’ve tested every single contact and circuit in the scaphe and it’s only in the past twenty minutes that I began to find out what’s the matter with it.’

  ‘Well, what was the matter with it?’

  ‘Your late engineer friend Bryson was the matter with it, that’s what.’ I looked at him speculatively. ‘Had you intended taking Bryson with you when you were going to recover this stuff? Or were you going to go it alone?’

  ‘Just Royale and myself. We thought –’

  ‘Yes, I know. Not much point in taking him along with you. A dead man can’t accomplish much. Either you dropped a hint that he wouldn’t be coming along and he knew why he wouldn’t be coming along so he’d fixed it so that he’d get a nice little posthumous revenge, or he hated you so much that if he had to go along he was determined that he was going to take you with him. Out of this world, I mean. Your friend had made a very clever little fix indeed, only he hadn’t quite time to finish it before the bends knocked him off – which is why the engines are still out of commission. He’d fixed it so that the bathyscaphe would have operated perfectly; would have gone backwards and forwards, up and down, anything you liked – until you had taken it down to a depth of just over three hundred feet. Then he had fixed that certain hydro-static cut-outs would come into operation. A beautiful job.’ I wasn
’t gambling much, I knew their ignorance of those matters was profound.

  ‘And then what?’ Vyland asked tightly.

  ‘Then nothing. The bathyscaphe would never have been able to get above three hundred feet again. When either the batteries had been exhausted or the oxygen regenerating unit had failed, as it would have to in a few hours – well, you’d have died of suffocation.’ I looked at him consideringly. ‘After, that is, you had screamed your way into madness.’

  On a previous occasion I had thought I had seen Vyland losing some colour from his rather ruddy cheeks, but on this occasion there was no doubt: he turned white and to conceal his agitation fumbled a pack of cigarettes out of his pocket and lit a cigarette with hands whose tremor he could not conceal. Royale, sitting on the table, just smiled his little secret smile and went on unconcernedly swinging his foot. That didn’t make Royale any braver than Vyland, maybe it only meant he was less imaginative. The last thing a professional killer could ever afford was imagination; he had to live with himself and the ghosts of all his victims. I looked at Royale again. I swore to myself that one day I would see that face the mask and mirror of fear, as Royale himself had seen so many other faces the masks and mirrors of fear in that last second of awareness and knowingness before he pulled the trigger of his deadly little gun.

  ‘Neat, eh?’ Vyland said harshly. He had regained a measure of composure.

  ‘It wasn’t bad,’ I admitted. ‘At least I sympathize with his outlook, the object he had in mind.’

  ‘Funny. Very funny indeed.’ There were times when Vyland forgot that the well-bred business tycoon never snarls. He looked at me with sudden speculation in his eyes. ‘You wouldn’t be thinking along the same lines yourself, Talbot? Of pulling a fast one like Bryson tried to pull?’

  ‘It’s an attractive idea,’ I grinned at him, ‘but you insult my intelligence. In the first place, had I had any ideas along those lines do you think I would have given you any hint of them? Besides, I intend to go along with you on this little trip. At least, hope to.’