The All-Purpose Bodies: A Fast-Paced Thriller (Commander Shaw Book 11)

by Philip McCutchan

  Then that voice came up again, calm and as deeply order-prone as before. It said, “Now listen, Shaw, if Mrs Dunwoodie doesn’t do as I told her immediately, and I mean immediately, the temperature’ll be dropped another fifty degrees in as many seconds. Heat’s being sucked from you and from the airspace you’re in. You’ll die, you know that as well as I do. You’ve got five seconds from now. Don’t be a fool, Shaw. Make her do what she’s told, there’s a good chap.”

  I lifted Flair bodily and dumped her inside the door. I felt I was acting like a heel. At once the door slid shut and as it did so I felt the wonderful touch of tepid air being blown into the lobby, flowing over me so that gently I began to thaw out. As I felt that dreadful ice-cold sink away the voice spoke for the third time. “I’m going to open up the other door now, Shaw. That’s yours.”

  I didn’t waste any time in pointless obstinacy when the door opened. I went through pronto. I found a turned-down bed, just as in Flair’s room. That was all there was. Like the lobby the room, which was windowless, was lit by concealed lighting behind the top-of-the-wall recess.

  I sat on the bed, feeling weak at the knees. I listened for sounds from Flair’s room, but there was nothing. The walls would be thick, probably, too thick to hear crying. Or screams. But I was wrong in that, for after a while I did hear sounds that came, I fancied, from the corridor — a curious zrrrm, zrrrm sound and a high giggle. I didn’t know what that might be … I wondered what was happening in Flair’s room, what might happen soon in there, and in here too. I presumed I wouldn’t just be left to sit and think for long, but as it turned out I was wrong again. The voice — I realized there must be a tannoy in the lighting recess — came up a moment later and told me to undress and get into bed, which I did, and after that nothing at all happened and there were no sounds, no more voice, and no visitors. I just went to bed and that was all. I lay there and thought and worried. I didn’t get anywhere, of course. Only one thing seemed pretty certain, and that was that I had been brought to the heart of what I had to find and very likely Jake Dunwoodie was here as well.

  The knowledge, in my current helpless state, didn’t really help much.

  *

  In the end I fell asleep and when I woke I felt very muzzy and I had a sick headache like attack of liver or a bad hangover, and my nose was blocked with catarrh. I felt a mess, physically and mentally. And I found my watch had stopped, so I didn’t know how long I’d been lying in that bed waiting for something to happen. Then the tannoy came on again and a bright, breezy voice — not the authoritative one this time — said with horrible jocularity, “Good morning, boys and girls, rise and shine, rise and shine. We all hope you’ve had a nice, restful night. Welcome to our morning service from the chapel. As usual we’ll begin with our own hymn, number one on your cards.” I sat up in amazement. Maybe this was a holiday camp. Maybe I was mad. The bright little speech was repeated in French, German, Russian, and a few other languages I couldn’t positively identify, and then some canned music came on the air and I recognized a hymn tune. After some concentration I recognized the words too, though they weren’t what I’d been taught. They were in English and what I heard was:

  “All glory be to High on high

  And in the depth be praise,

  In all his works most wonderful

  Most wise in all his ways …”

  Heartily and with real emotion and spiritual uplift, the hymn was sung on to its close. Well, old Pomfret-Hopton had spoken of a God-man.

  10

  They came for me soon after morning devotions ended. I heard the door-lock being used this time. Two men came in. Like the men who had brought us from the village their arms and legs were excessively thin and as pliably unformed as a baby’s, but were longer than those other men’s — of pretty near normal length in fact. These men carried bunches of long, finger-shaped, lugless keys on chains at their belts.

  One of them, expressionless, remote, said, “Get dressed and come with us, please.”

  I asked, “Where to?”

  “You’ll see. Please get dressed.” The voice was wooden, dead-sounding, like a voice from the grave. I shrugged and pulled on my shorts and shoes and I was dressed. The door was opened and I was ordered through and out into the corridor with one of the men behind me and the other in front. We went to the lift and ascended, and came out again into another, similar corridor. There seemed to be no-one around. We were marched along and stopped at last by a door right at the end of that upper corridor, which was in fact a cul-de-sac. We waited, and the door slid open, silently like everything else in this outlandish place.

  I was told to go in. I did so and the men followed me and the door shut behind them. I entered a large, well-furnished room, as windowless as mine. The first person I saw was Flair — to my relief. She looked as if she’d been crying; her eyes were red and puffy, but otherwise she was, I think, unharmed. The other person in the room was a man who, as I came in, got up from behind a large desk with his right hand outstretched to greet me. He was a tall man, with a big, rather rubbery face, a mobile mouth, and shrewd grey eyes. He was wearing a long white coat and heavy horn-rimmed glasses and instinct told me I was now in the presence of Dr High.

  There was something about him, some kind of personal magnetism I think, that made me take his hand in spite of my thoughts. His grip was firm and friendly and his manner put one at one’s ease. He seemed a typical upper-income-bracket consultant, the sort who would make a fortune in Harley Street. He said, and I recognized the deep voice, the voice of authority on the tannoy, “How d’you do, Shaw. I’m terribly glad to meet you at last.”

  I asked, “Are you Dr High?”

  He smiled, and the smile broadened into a jovial laugh. “It’s what they call me,” he said. “As a matter of fact, it’s not my real name, the name I practised under in London. You’ll forgive me if we stick to it, though, won’t you, my dear chap — I’ve become so accustomed to it by now. Oh, I say, do sit down, won’t you?” He motioned me to a chair of a striking modern design that one of the stunted men had brought up. I sat, and he turned and went back to his desk with a springy, bouncing step. He looked like an athlete — or a retired one, anyway, since in spite of having no grey hairs the lines on his face and neck told me he probably wasn’t far short of sixty.

  As he sat down I said, “You don’t look to me as if you were of divine origin.”

  He seemed amused; tiny lines spider-webbed away from the corners of his eyes. “I beg your pardon?” he said.

  “I was referring to the adulation session earlier.”

  “Oh — that!” He was still smiling, and now he waved a hand carelessly. “The people here, people I’ve helped, like to show their appreciation. I don’t let it go to my head too much! After all, you know, it’s not so very different, if differently put of course, from the aura of divinity that surrounds any senior consultant in any major London teaching hospital, and believe me, I’ve done my stint at that all right!”

  I couldn’t think up anything better to say than to ask, “Have you?”

  “I have indeed,” he said, and named one of the best known. “I was senior consultant in neurosurgery there —”

  “Surgery?”

  “Yes. Oh — you’re thinking of the ‘Doctor’, of course. When I established myself here on Kimbau, Shaw, I went back to that — to the laity it does tend to have a more learned ring than ‘Mister’, especially the laity out here, of course.” He lay back in his chair with his fingers linked behind his head, and went on reminiscing. “I was Director of Surgical Studies at the same time, actually. Other appointments from time to time have included a Lectureship in Anatomy at Cambridge … oh, and various other things, you know. I’m not boasting, by the way. I’ve told you all that so you know I’m a genuine practitioner, that’s all.”

  “Do you really need to be … on Kimbau?”

  He laughed good-humouredly. “My dear chap — I run a hospital here!”

  “A hospit
al?” I glanced at Flair; she seemed as astonished as I was.

  “Yes indeed,” the doctor said. He unlinked his hands and sat forward and there was suddenly a more purposeful look about him. “Now I’ve told you about myself, I’m going to tell you about yourself, Shaw.”

  I said, “Oh, yes.” I didn’t particularly want to hear about myself if, as I suspected, I was in for a résumé of my past history, which in my experience the man who gives it considers impresses his victim with his perspicacity or thoroughness — or simply his ability to pry. But I had to listen and I had to admit he’d done a pretty good job because he had the lot, even down to the exact date my resignation from the British Defence Intelligence outfit had taken effect and he even knew the state of my bank balance as of the date I’d agreed to join 6D2 — which was important insofar as my overdraft had been responsible for my having been damn stupid enough to take up undercover work again. It seemed I’d been cased back for quite a while; he couldn’t have known what he did unless the process had been going on since before I’d made the change. And not very surprisingly in the circumstances, he knew all my movements since I’d arrived in Australia. In detail.

  “Who told you?” I asked. “Tracy Learoyd? Pomfret-Hopton? Summers? The DO on Logatau?” I paused. “Or Dunwoodie?”

  His eyes flickered and he said, “We’ll come to Dunwoodie later, if you don’t mind —”

  “Is he here?” I asked, and glanced at Flair. I could see she didn’t know the answer any more than I did.

  High said, “I told you, we’ll come to him later.” Then he gave an airy wave of his hand. “It’s not important who told me, my dear chap. I’ve many sources of information, as a matter of fact. But I’m interested in one thing, I’ll admit: it seems from what you say that Pomfret-Hopton really did talk?”

  “Just as he was dying,” I said, “and I don’t suppose I need to ask who ordered that turnip-headed bastard Summers to kill him.”

  “Quite, quite,” the doctor murmured. “It was a simple precaution, and you’ve just confirmed that it was a very necessary one. As a matter of fact … I’m sorry it had to be done. The old man was a medical colleague after all, and he’d been a good friend, and —”

  “He really was part of your set-up here?”

  High hesitated, then said, “Well, strictly speaking, the answer to that is yes — but that’s not what I meant when I said he was a medical colleague. I meant simply that we were both members of the same profession. But — yes, he was working with me up to a point. Naturally, he had no idea what I was really doing — he was a simple old fellow, fond of drink, easy to persuade. I dare say you saw that for yourself. It so happens I have a house on the northern shore of Kimbau — a nice place on a very pleasant bay, with native servants and all that, you know the sort of thing. Old Pomfret used to come over — it was a longish haul, but I used to send a boat for him now and again — and d’you know, I let him believe he’d discovered a real whizzer of a secret!” He laughed. “Namely — that I was a retired surgeon now interested in acquiring a modest amount of wealth by dealing illicitly in pearls which strictly speaking were the property of the Australian Commonwealth Government!” He gave another deep laugh and lit a cigarette. “It was a harmless belief, and it suited both of us and provided me with an excuse to pay him money in exchange for reports on what visitors came to Logatau — and to act as a check on other informants of mine, who in their turn acted as a check on him.” He smiled. “The district officer, for one! A useful official to be on terms with, as you’ll agree.”

  I agreed, all right; and thought to myself that poor old Pomfret-Hopton hadn’t really meant to give any secrets away when he’d come out with that statement about funny goings-on and God-men. That must have been something, quite detached from his dealings with Dr High, that he’d picked up via idle gossip somewhere along the line. But he’d had to die just the same once I had appeared on the scene with Dunwoodie’s wife. It almost made me feel responsible for his death, did that. I asked, “What exactly are you doing here on Kimbau, Doctor?”

  He leaned forward, farther across his desk. As the light from the desk lamp fell more fully on his face I saw the intensity in his eyes, as though his whole soul, if he had one, was just behind the pupils and was trying to fight its way out. It was a quite extraordinary look and not a reassuring one. He said, “Commander Shaw, you and I are old antagonists.”

  “We are?” I said in surprise. “I don’t remember ever meeting you before.”

  “No,” he said, “it’s true we haven’t met till now. Perhaps I should explain a little more.” He smiled, and there was an enigmatic, inward-looking quality in his eyes as he did so. “My last London job was … oh, some years ago.” He paused. “Since then I’ve been in Hungary.”

  “Hungary,” I repeated. At first I didn’t see what the man was driving at; then I saw his sardonic, meaningful look and, incredulously at first, I began to get there. And remembered, without a precise name coming to me, that an eminent London surgeon had gone on holiday to Austria some years ago and had never come back. So far as I recalled his disappearance had remained a mystery but there had been whispers of political involvements, whispers that he had crossed a communist frontier. Just as a shot in the dark I said, “Don’t tell me this is another of WUSWIPP’s little schemes?”

  High nodded. “As a matter of fact it is. I’m working for WUSWIPP. Have been for some years. You find it surprising?”

  “I shouldn’t,” I said. “Not at my age. Scratch a plot and you find WUSWIPP. It seems to be fairly inevitable these days. But why you? From what you tell me of your background you don’t sound much like communist, anti-West material.”

  High said contemptuously, “Backgrounds, my God, what are they worth — what do they really tell you about a man? Only vegetables stay rooted in their opinions right through their lives. As a matter of fact, I’d always had a left bias, right from my student days. I never made any particular secret of it. Frankly, I despised Western values, Western standards. I still do.” He shrugged. “We don’t want to go into all that. I’ll just say that over the years in London I got to know people from the East, some of them medical men, others of varying backgrounds. I got along with them. I built up my contacts. When I was ready, I went on holiday and I didn’t come back. I had a very good appointment all ready for me in Budapest. I was, as I thought at first, given every possible facility for research. But in time I found that even these extensive facilities could be broadened tremendously if I followed the advice of certain of my friends. From then on I developed an interest in politics. It’s really quite simple.”

  “Yes,” I said, “I expect it is.” Well, Max back in London had been dead right not to rule out politics. WUSWIPP stood for World Union of Socialist Scientific Workers for International Progress in Peace, and those same peaceful workers were just about as ripe a bunch of murderous bastards you could ever expect to find anywhere on the globe, and if this man was one of them, then this place was no hospital, not that I had ever believed it was, of course. “What,” I asked, “are you doing on WUSWIPP’s behalf, Doctor?”

  “I’ll tell you.” He got up again and walked across the electrically lit room towards a section of the wall where there was a red plastic panel containing a set of pushbuttons. Smiling, he pressed one of the buttons. “Voilà!” he said.

  Something happened to the whole wall. It seemed to roll down upon itself — that’s the best way I can find to describe it anyway — and in its place appeared a glass screen, blank and dark until a greenish glow appeared from behind it, dimly at first and then becoming stronger, a shrill whining noise came from it, and then suddenly black outlines appeared, trembled, jumped — and then settled down into a representation of the Lifeforce complex at Cape Scott.

  The doctor said, “Well, there you are. I dare say it’s what you expected, isn’t it?”

  I said, “Yes, it is.” I didn’t feel any surprise; it had really stuck out a mile, I suppose, all along since
I’d first heard about Learoyd. I caught Flair’s eye. She didn’t seem surprised either. “What do you mean to do to the place? Blow it up?”

  “Not so fast,” High said cheerfully. “What d’you think of this picture?”

  I said, “Not very much really. Is it a photograph?”

  “Good heavens, no, of course it isn’t! Look more closely — you’ll see a flag flying from the top of the administration building. The Australian flag. It’s fluttering — see it?”

  “Yes,” I said. “There are such things as motion pictures, Doctor.”

  “It’s not that either. Neither of course is it television. It’s a brand-new process, developed by WUSWIPP scientists — it’s called signal-vision. What happens is this. I transmit a series of VHF signals, thousands of them, from my base hospital here — I have a radio mast I can send up through the rock above, you know — and these signals hit whatever they’re beamed at, which of course in this case is the Lifeforce complex. There’s nothing higher than my vision-transmission mast between here and Cape Scott — we’re very high up here as it is and I clear even the Great Divide. The vision-signals then rebound to make a picture on this screen. Basically I suppose it’s the radar principle, adapted and developed so that it produces an actual picture. As you can see —”

  I interrupted, “What’s the point of it? What are you planning to do to Lifeforce?”

  High said, “It has to be destroyed, as you’ve already guessed. But it won’t be WUSWIPP that brings that about. There’ll be no attack from outside, and I don’t suppose I need to tell you why.” He gestured towards the screen. “Any attack from outside would lead to a good deal of unpleasantness, wouldn’t it? I’m sure you know for yourself how vital Lifeforce has become to Australia? Its destruction by outside forces would almost certainly lead to full-scale war — I’d say that would be quite inevitable. Our leaders share that view, naturally. Well now — you know as well as I do, my dear chap, that WUSWIPP doesn’t want war. Not by any means.”