Athabasca

by Alistair MacLean

  “May I ask how old you are?”

  “Twenty-two.”

  “You must be the youngest confidential secretary of any big corporation I’ve ever come across.”

  This time she caught her lip and glanced at Reynolds, who was leaning back in his chair, hands clasped lazily behind his neck, with the air of a man who was almost enjoying himself. He smiled and said: “Mr Mackenzie is an industrial sabotage investigator. He has a job to do and asking questions is part of that job. I know he’s just made a statement, not asked a question, but it’s one of those statements that expects comment.”

  She turned back to Mackenzie, with a swing of her long chestnut hair. “I suppose I’ve been pretty lucky at that.”

  She spoke with marked coolness and Mackenzie felt it. “None of my questions are directed against you, Corinne, okay? Now, you must know the executive level people pretty well?”

  “I can hardly help it. They all come through me to get to Mr Reynolds.”

  “Including those who have business with that safe there?”

  “Of course. I know them all well.”

  “All good friends, I take it?”

  “Well.” She smiled, but the smile had an edge to it. “Lots of them are much too senior to be my friends.”

  “But on good terms, shall we say?”

  “Oh, yes.” She smiled again. “I don’t think I’ve made any enemies.”

  “Perish the thought!” This came from George Dermott, who took over the questioning on a brisker note. “Any of the people using the safe ever give you trouble? Like trying to take away what they shouldn’t?”

  “Not often, and then its only absentmindedness or because they haven’t studied the classified list. And surely, Mr Dermott, if anyone wanted to get something past me they’d hide it in their clothing.”

  Dermott nodded. “That’s true, Miss Delorme.” The girl was inspecting his rough-and-ready good looks with a spark of humour in her eyes, as if amused by his blunt approach. He caught the expression and, in his turn, watched her for a reflective moment. “What do you think now?” he asked her. “Do you think anyone might have smuggled something past you out of the safe?”

  She looked him in the eye. “They might,” she said, “but I doubt it.”

  “Could I have a list of the people who used the safe in the past four or five days?”

  “Certainly.” She left and returned with a sheet which Dermott studied briefly.

  “Good Lord! The safe appears to be the Mecca for half of Sanmobil. Twenty entries at least in the last four days.” He looked up at the girl. “This is a carbon. May I keep it?”

  “Of course.”

  “Thank you.”

  Corinne Delorme smiled at the room in general, but the blue eyes came back to Dermott before she went out.

  “Charming indeed,” said Brady.

  “Plenty of spunk,” Mackenzie said ruefully. “She built a whole generation gap between you and me, George.” He frowned. “What gave you the idea her name was Delorme?”

  “There was a plaque on her desk: ‘Corinne Delorme’, it said.” Mackenzie shook his head. “Hawkeye Dermott,” he said.

  The other men laughed. Some of the tension that had grown in the room during the questioning of the girl fell away again.

  “Well. Anything more I can do for you?” Reynolds asked.

  Dermott said: “Yes, please. Could we have a list of the names of your security staff?”

  Reynolds bent over the voice-box and spoke to Corinne. He had just finished when Brinckman arrived accompanied by a tall, red-haired man whom he introduced as Carl Jorgensen.

  Dermott said: “You were in charge of the night security shift, I understand. Were you around the sabotage area at all tonight?”

  “Several times.”

  “So often? I thought you would have been concentrating on what we regarded—mistakenly—as the more vulnerable areas.”

  “I went round them a couple of times but by jeep only. But I had this funny feeling that we might have been guarding the wrong places. Don’t ask me why.”

  “Your funny feeling didn’t turn out to be so funny after all Anything off-beat, anything to arouse suspicion?”

  “Nothing. I know everybody on the night shift and I know where they work. Nobody there that shouldn’t have been there, nobody in any place that he hadn’t any right to be.”

  “You’ve got a key to the blasting shed. Where do you keep it?”

  “Terry Brinckman mentioned this. I have it only during my tour of duty and then I hand it over. I always carry it in the same button-down pocket on my shirt.”

  “Could anybody get at it?”

  “Nobody except a professional pick-pocket, and even then I’d know.”

  The two security men left and Corinne came in with a sheet of paper. Reynolds said: “That was quick.”

  “Not really. They were typed out ages ago.”

  Brady said to the girl: “You must come and meet my daughter, Stella. I’m sure you’d get on. Both the same age. Stella is very like you, actually.”

  “Thank you, Mr Brady. I think I’d like that.”

  “I’ll have her call you.”

  When she had gone, Dermott said: “What do you mean, like your daughter? I’ve never seen anyone less like Stella.”

  “Dancing eyes, my boy, dancing eyes. One must learn to probe beneath the surface.” Brady heaved himself to his feet. “The years creep on. Breakfast and bed. I’m through detecting for the day. It’s tougher than capping fires.”

  Dermott drove the rented car back to the hotel, Mackenzie sitting beside him. Brady took his ease across the entire width of the back seat. He said: “I’m afraid I wasn’t quite levelling with Reynolds there. Breakfast, yes. But it’ll be some hours before I—we—retire. I have come up with a plan.” He paused.

  Dermott said courteously: “We’re listening.”

  “I think I’ll do some listening first. Why do you think I employ you?”

  “That’s a fair question,” Mackenzie said. “Why?”

  “To investigate, to detect, to think, to plot, to scheme, to plan.”

  “All at once?” Mackenzie said.

  Brady ignored him. “I don’t want to come up with a proposal and then, if it goes wrong, have to spend the rest of my days listening to your carping reproaches. I’d like you two to come up with an idea and then if it’s a lemon we can all share the blame. Incidentally, Donald, I take it you have your bug-box with you?”

  “The electronic eavesdropping locator-detector?”

  “That’s what I said.”

  “Yes.”

  “Splendid. Now, George, let’s have your reading of the situation.”

  “My reading of the situation is that for all the good we’re doing we haven’t a hope in hell of stopping the bad guys from doing exactly what they want and when they want. There is no way to forestall attacks on Sanmobil or the Alaska pipeline. They’re calling the shots and we’re the sitting ducks, if you’ll pardon the mixing of the metaphors. They call the tune and we dance to it. They’re active, we’re passive. They’re offensive, we’re defensive. If we have any tactics, I’d say it’s time we changed them.”

  “Go on,” his leader urged him from behind.

  “If that’s meant to sound encouraging,” Dermott said, “I don’t know why. But how’s this for a positive thought? Instead of letting them keep us off-balance, why don’t we keep them off-balance? Instead of their harassing us, let us harass them.”

  “Go on, go on,” the back seat exhorted.

  “Let’s attack them and put them on the defensive. Let them start worrying, instead of us.” He paused. “I see things as through a glass darkly, but I say plant a light at the end of the tunnel. What we’ll do is, we’ll provoke them. Provoke a reaction. Provoke the hell out of them. We’ll hang it on this one factor: our own pasts, our backgrounds, can be probed until the cows come home, and nothing will be turned up: but you can say that about how many peopl
e in a hundred?”

  Dermott twisted his head briefly to locate a peculiar noise from the back of the car. Brady was actually rubbing his hands together. “Well, Donald, what’s your reading of it?”

  “Simple enough when you see it,” Mackenzie said. “All you have to do is to antagonise anywhere between sixty and eighty people to hell and back again. Investigate them as openly as possible. Deploy maximum indiscretion.”

  Brady beamed. “What sixty to eighty people do we investigate?”

  “In Alaska all the security agents. Here, the security agents again, plus everybody who’s had access to Reynolds’s safe in the past few days. Going to include Reynolds himself?”

  “Good heavens, no.”

  Mackenzie said inconsequentially: “She is a lovely girl.”

  Brady looked aloof. Mackenzie asked him: “Do you really expect to find your panjandrum among that lot?”

  “Panjandrum?”

  “The prime mover. Mr Big. Messrs Big.”

  “Not for a moment. But if there’s a rotten apple in the barrel, he may well find him for us.”

  Mackenzie said: “Right. So we get all their names and past histories. Later on—sooner rather than later—we’ll have the lot fingerprinted. Sure, they’re going to stand on their civic rights and yell blue murder, and that will please you no end—refusal to co-operate will point the finger of suspicion at the refusee, if that’s the word I want. Then you feed the information to your investigators in Houston, Washington and New York: cost no object, urgency desperate. Not that you’ll care a damn whether the investigators come up with anything or not. All that matters is that the suspects get to hear such enquiries are under way. That’s all the provocation they’ll need.”

  “What kind of reactions do we expect to provoke?” Dermott asked.

  “Unpleasant ones, I should hope. For the villains, I mean.”

  “The first thing I’d do,” Dermott told Brady, “is send your family back to Houston. Jean and Stella could really become a liability. The scheme might rebound on you. Can’t you see the word coming through: lay off, Brady, or something unpleasant’s going to happen to your family? These people are playing for high stakes. They’ve killed once, they won’t hesitate to kill again. They can’t be hung twice.”

  “Same thought occurred to me.” Mackenzie turned to face the back seat. “Either get the girls right back home, or have the RCMP protect them.”

  “Hell—I need them!” Brady sat forward with indignation. “Number one, I have to be looked after. Number two, Stella’s handling the Ekofisk business for me.”

  “Ekofisk?” Dermott almost turned backwards. “What’s that?”

  “Big fire in the North Sea, Norwegian half. Started after you’d come north. We have a team going in there today.”

  “Well, okay,” Dermott gave way a little. “So you have to keep in touch. But why not work through the locals? That red-head of Reynolds’s—Corinne. She could field calls for you.”

  “What happens when we go back to Alaska?”

  “Use somebody up there. Finlayson’s got a secretary—must have.”

  “No substitute for the personal touch,” said Brady magisterially. He sank back in the seat as though the argument were over.

  His two heavyweights turned forward again with an exchange of looks. Having been through all this a hundred times before, they knew that further pressure would be useless for the moment. Wherever he went, Brady maintained the fiction that his wife and daughter were part of his essential life-support system, and he kept them with him regardless of the expense. Or danger.

  7

  Not that Dermott and Mackenzie in the least minded having Jean and Stella around. Like mother, like daughter: whereas Jean was a strikingly handsome woman in her middle-forties, with that lovely, naturally blonde hair and intelligent grey eyes, Stella looked the spitting image of her mother, only younger, and even livelier, with, as her father was so fond of claiming, dancing eyes.

  The men found Jean awaiting their return in the lounge bar of the Peter Pond Hotel. Tall and elegant, she advanced to meet them with her usual expression of tolerant, kindly amusement. This look, Dermott knew from experience, reflected her genuine feelings: an equable temperament was no small advantage for someone who had to spend her life humouring Jim Brady.

  “Hi, honey!” He reached up slightly to kiss her on the forehead. “Where’s Stella?”

  “In your room. She’s got some messages for you—been pretty busy on the phone.”

  “Excuse me, then, gentlemen. Maybe one of you would be so kind as to buy my wife a drink.”

  He waddled off along the corridor, while Dermott and Mackenzie settled comfortably into the warmth of the bar. In marked contrast to her husband, Jean scarcely drank alcohol at all, and she sipped carefully at a pineapple juice while the two men addressed themselves to the Scotch. Nor did she try to talk shop in Brady’s absence: instead, she chatted pleasantly about Fort McMurray and its modest midwinter pleasures until her husband returned.

  When he came back, Stella was with him, swinging along with her easy, loose-hipped walk. Dermott—not normally given to flights of fancy—was suddenly struck by the absurd disparity between the two figures. Jesus, he thought to himself: a hippo and a gazelle. What a pair!

  Scarcely had Brady subsided into an armchair, with an outsize glass of daiquiri in his podgy hand, than he made a slight sign to Dermott and Mackenzie, who muttered something and slipped off.

  Brady seemed in buoyant form, and began to regale his family with an edited account of his movements around the far north. After a while Jean said doubtfully: “It doesn’t seem to me you’ve accomplished very much.”

  Brady was unruffled. “Ninety per cent of our business is cerebral, my dear. When we move into action, what happens is merely the almost mechanical and inevitable culmination of all the invisible hard work that’s gone on before.” He tapped his head. “The wise general doesn’t fling his troops into battle without reconnoitring beforehand. We’ve been reconnoitring.”

  Jean smiled. “Let us know when you’ve identified the enemy.” Suddenly she became serious. “It’s a nasty business, isn’t it?”

  “Murder always is, my dear.”

  “I don’t like it, Jim. I don’t like you being in it. Surely this is for the law. You’ve never come across murder before in your business.”

  “So I run away?”

  She looked at his ample frame and laughed: “That’s one thing you’re not built for.”

  “Run?” Stella said, mock-scornfully. “Dad couldn’t jog from here to the John!”

  “Please!” Brady beamed. “I trust no such haste will be necessary.”

  “Where did Donald go?” Jean asked.

  “Upstairs, doing a little job for me.”

  Mackenzie was at that moment moving slowly round Brady’s apartment with a calibrated metal box in one hand, a portable antenna in the other, and a pair of earphones on his head. He moved purposefully, a man who knew what he was about. He soon found what he was looking for.

  When he came back to the bar he headed straight for Brady’s family encampment.

  “Two,” he reported.

  “Two what, Uncle Donald?” Stella asked sweetly.

  Mackenzie appealed to his boss. “When are you going to start training this incorrigibly nosey daughter of yours?”

  “I’ve stopped. Failed. Mother’s job, anyway.” He jerked his head upwards. “Got them all, did you?”

  “Guess so.”

  Dermott also reappeared to report.

  “Ah, George,” Brady greeted him. “How did it go?”

  “Reynolds seems very co-operative. Unfortunately all records are stored at the head office in Edmonton. He says by the time they’ve been dug out and flown up here, it may be late this evening or even tomorrow morning.”

  “What records?” Stella asked.

  “Affairs of state,” Brady told her. “Well, can’t be helped. Anything else?”


  “Naturally enough he’s got no fingerprinting equipment.”

  “Fix it after lunch.”

  “He says he’ll fix it himself—the police chiefs a pal of his, apparently. Thinks the chief might be a bit shirty about the delay in reporting the crime.” He grinned across at Stella. “And don’t ask ‘what crime?’”

  “No, sir, Mr Dermott, sir!” She wrinkled her upper lip in a fetching manner. “I never ask questions! I’m just permitted to fetch and carry, mend and clean.”

  Brady went on: “Reynolds can always claim that at first he thought it was an industrial accident.”

  “I understand the chief of police has 20-20 vision and intelligence to match.”

  “Well—Reynolds’ll have to handle it as best he can. What about Prudhoe Bay?”

  “An hour’s hold. They’ll page me.”

  “Fair enough.” Brady shifted his attention to Stella. “We met an enchanting girl this morning—didn’t we, George? Knock spots off you, any day. Wouldn’t she, gentlemen?”

  “Unquestionably,” said Mackenzie.

  Stella looked at Dermott. “Foul, aren’t they?”

  “Dead heat,” said Dermott. “But she’s very nice.”

  “The manager’s secretary,” Brady said. “Corinne Delorme. I thought maybe you’d like to meet her. She said she’d like to meet you. She must know all the night-clubs, discos and other iniquitous dens in Fort McMurray.”

  Stella said: “News for you, Dad. You’ve got to be talking about another town. I don’t know what this place is like in summer, but whatever it is, it’s a dead city in mid-winter. You might have warned us that this is an Arctic town.”

  “Lovely choice of phrase. Wonderful sense of geography. That’s education for you,” Brady said to no-one in particular. “Maybe you should have stayed in Houston.”

  Stella looked at her mother. “Did you hear what I just heard, Mummy?” she asked with a scornful shake of the head at her father which brought the pale blonde hair swinging round her face.

  Jean smiled. “I heard. Sooner or later, my dear, you have to face up to the fact that your father is no more and no less than a fearful old hypocrite.”

  “But he dragged us up here, kicking and screaming against our will, and now…” Remarkably, words failed her.