The Dark Crusader (23 page)

They looked at me, then at each other, then back at me again.

"Have you gone mad, Bentall?" Hargreaves was staring at me through his pebble glasses, his mouth tight.

"It would be better for you if I had. No doubt you gentlemen imagine your wives are still in Sydney or Melbourne or wherever. No doubt you write to them regularly. No doubt you hear from them regularly. No doubt you keep their letters, or some of them. Or am I wrong, gentlemen?"

No one said I was wrong.

"So, if your wives are all writing from different homes, you would expect, by the law of averages, that most of them would use different paper, different pens, different inks, and that the different postmarks on the envelopes would not all be printed in the same colours. As scientists, you will all have respect for the law of averages. I suggest we compare your letters and envelopes. No one wants to read any private correspondence, just to make a superficial comparison of likenesses and differences. Would you like to cooperate? Or"-I glanced at the red-faced man-"are you scared to learn the truth?"

Five minutes later the red-faced man was no longer red-faced, and he had learned the truth. Of the seven envelopes produced, three had been of one brand, two of another and two of a third-enough not to make the incoming mail look suspiciously alike. The postmarks on the envelopes, so beautifully clear-cut as to suggest they had been stolen, not manufactured by unauthorised persons, were all in the same colour. Only two pens, a fountain and a ball-point, had been used for the seven letters and the last point was the final clincher-every letter but one had been written on exactly the same notepaper. They must have thought themselves safe enough there, middle-aged and elderly scientists don't usually show their letters around.

After I'd finished and given the letters back to their owners, they exchanged glances, dazed glances where the lack of understanding was matched only by the increasing fear. They believed me all right now.

"I thought my wife's tone was rather strange in recent letters," Hargreaves said slowly. "She's always been so full of humour and poking fun at scientists and now-"

"I've noticed the same," someone else murmured. "But I put it down to-"

"You can put it down to coercion," I said brutally. "It's not easy to be witty when a gun is pointing at your head. I don't pretend to know how the letters were introduced into your incoming mail, but it would be a simple matter to a mind as brilliant as that of the man who killed Witherspoon. For he is brilliant. Anyway, you can introduce mail into mailbags for a hundred years and no one will ever notice. It's only when you start taking it out that eyebrows begin to lift."

"Fairfield," the red-faced man said stupidly. "It wasn't sharks? We were told-"

"I don't have to draw a diagram to explain what happened to Fairfield, do I?" An ill-mannered interruption on my part and one that made little allowance for their state of shock, but I was feeling pretty low myself. "He knew Witherspoon well-all those archaeologists, amateurs included, know each other-and you say yourselves he visited him often. By boat, I assume. But Fairfield made one trip too many to see his friend, because by the time he made his last trip someone had killed Witherspoon and taken his place. Someone who could imitate Witherspoon well enough to deceive casual contacts. But he wouldn't have deceived Fairfield. So Fairfield had to die. Sharks made a convenient scapegoat- and they don't leave any traces. And so no need to produce a body."

"But-but what does it all mean?" Hargreaves' voice had a shake in it and his hands were clenching and unclenching in involuntary nervousness. "What will they-what are they going to do with our wives?"

"You must give me a minute," I said tiredly. "It's as big a shock for me to find you here as it is for you to find out where your wives are. I think you're safe enough now, and the rocket installation, but I believe your wives to be in deadly danger. There's no good blinking facts, expediency is all that matters to the men we're against and humanity not at all. If you move wrongly, you may never see them again. Let me think, please."

They wandered off reluctantly to complete dressing. I thought, but the first part of my thinking was far from constructive. I thought of that old fox Colonel Raine, and I thought of him with something less .than affection. I supposed that after twenty-five years in the business it was impossible for him to let his right hand know what his left was doing. But, more than that, he had made an extraordinarily accurate assessment of the Bentall character. What there was of it.

I hadn't even bothered to ask the scientists whether they bad been a party to those advertisements in the 'Telegraph'. Obviously, they must have been. The men for this job had been picked long before the advertisements had appeared and the adverts had merely been a device to have them removed from the country without raising any questions, and the fact that their wives had accompanied them had merely lent colour to the belief that they had gone abroad permanently. Obviously, too, as it had been a government project, Raine had known all about it, in fact he was probably the man who had made all the necessary undercover arrangements. I thought of how I had completely swallowed the old Colonel's story and I cursed him for his devious and twisted mind.

But, for Raine, it had been necessary, because, somehow or other-his contacts, his sources of information were legion-he had discovered or strongly suspected that the wives of the men who had gone to Vardu Island were no longer in their Australian homes. He would have come to the conclusion that they were being held captive or hostage. He would have worked out why and come to the same conclusion as I recently had.

But he would never have guessed that they were on Vardu, for it was almost certainly Colonel Raine himself who had worked out with the now murdered Witherspoon the scheme to have Vardu used as a protected area based on archaeological discovery: whether the discoveries were genuine or not was a matter of complete unimportance: old Witherspoon and his associates would have been screened with a toothcomb and the idea of associating any skullduggery with that part of the island would have been fantastic. Vardu would have been the last place Raine would have thought of to look for them: he had just no idea at all where they were.

So he had fed me this yarn about sending me out to find the missing scientists but what he had actually intended was that Marie should find the missing scientists' wives. She would find them, he reasoned, by being seized as they had been and for the same reasons, and all he could hope for was that she or I or both could do something about it: but if he had let me think for a moment that that was what he had in mind he knew I would never have gone along with it. He knew what I thought about throwing women to the wolves. Instead of Marie coming along as local colour for me, I was going as local colour, little better than a stooge, for her. I remembered now what he had said about her being much more experienced than I was, that it might end up with her looking after me, not vice versa, and I felt about six inches tall. I wondered how much of all of this, if any, was known to Marie herself.

At this moment Marie made her appearance. She had dried and combed her hair and fitted into slacks and T-shirt that fitted only where they touched, but they touched in enough places to show that it wasn't the original owner who was inside them. She smiled at me and I smiled back but it was a pretty mechanical sort of effort on my part, the more I thought of it the more I suspected she must have known just how the land lay with Colonel Raine. Maybe neither she nor Raine regarded me as anything other than a lucky amateur, and in this business amateurs weren't trusted. Not even lucky ones. But what hurt was not the lack of trust but the fact that if I were right then she'd fooled me throughout. And if she could fool me about that, then she could fool me about many other things, too. I was tired and weak and the thought was acid in my mind. She was looking at me with the kind of expression on her face with which I'd always dreamed that someone just like Marie would look at me, and I knew it was impossible that I was being fooled. I knew it for all of two seconds, which was all the time it took me to remember that she had survived five years in one of the most hazardous professions in the world simply through an extremely highly-developed gift of fooling everyone all the time.

I was about to ask her some leading questions when Dr. Hargreaves came up to me. The others trailed behind him. They were now all dressed in their day clothes. They were worried stiff, all of them, and they looked it.

"We've been talking, and we've no doubt left in our minds that our wives are captive and in great danger," Hargreaves began without preamble. "Our-our wives are our sole concern at this moment. What do you suggest we do?" He was holding himself well in check, but the tight mouth, the straining tendons of his clasped hands gave him away.

"Damn it all, man!" The elderly butcher had the choler back in his face again. "We rescue them, that's what we do."

"Sure," I agreed. "We rescue them. How?"

"Well-"

"Look, friend, you don't begin to know the score. Let me explain. There are three things we can do. We can let the Chinese break through the tunnel into the open, then a few of us nip smartly in there, go through to the other end, release your wives and then what? Hewell's killers would be loose among the sailors here, and with all due respect to the Navy, it would be wolves among chickens. And after they'd gobbled up the chickens they'd find we were missing and come back to finish us off-and your wives as well: and they might take some time finishing off your wives. Or we can blockade the tunnel exit and prevent them from coming out. We can prevent them for about an hour which is all the time it will take for them to go back and collect your wives and by either using them as shields or putting a gun to their heads force us to lay down our arms."

I paused a moment to let this sink in, but one glance round the tense still faces let me see that it had already sunk. They were looking at me as if they didn't like me very much, but I suppose that it was what I was saying that they really didn't like.

"You said there was a third alternative," Hargreaves pressed me.

"Yes." I rose stiffly to my feet, glanced at Anderson. "Sorry, Lieutenant, can't wait any longer for your M.O. Time enough wasted. There is a third alternative, gentlemen. The only practicable one. As soon as they break through the mountain-side-or as soon as we hear them trying to break through-a party of us, three or four, with sledges and crowbars to force locks and armed in case guards have been left behind to look after your wives, will go round the south of the island by boat, land and hope to get your wives clear before Witherspoon and Hewell get the idea of sending back for your wives to use as hostages. In this day and age I assume the Navy no longer depends on oars and sails. A fast power boat should get us there in fifteen minutes."

"I've no doubt it would," Anderson said unhappily. There was an embarrassed silence, then he went on reluctantly: "The fact is, Mr. Bentall, we haven't got any boats."

"Say that again?"

"No boats. Not even a rowing boat. I'm sorry."

"Look," I said heavily. "I know there have been some pretty drastic cut-backs in naval estimates, but if you'll tell me how a Navy can function without-"

"We did have boats," Anderson interrupted. "Four of them, attached to the light cruiser
Neckar
which has been anchored in the lagoon off and on for the past three months. The
Neckar
left two days ago with Rear-Admiral Harrison, who is in overall charge, and Dr. Davies, who has been in charge of the development of the Black Shrike throughout. The work on it-"

"The Black Shrike?"

"The name of the rocket. Not quite in firing readiness yet, but we had an urgent cable from London forty-eight hours ago saying it was essential to complete the work at once and ordering the
Neckar
to the firing range immediately-about 1,000 miles south-west of here. That's why this particular island was chosen-all open water to the south-east if anything goes wrong with the rocket."

"Well, well," I said heavily. "What a lovely coincidence. A cable all the way from London. All the correct codes, hidden identification figures and telegraphic addresses, I'll bet. It wasn't the fault of your communication and coding boys that they fell for it."

"I'm afraid I don't understand-"

"And why should the
Neckar
leave if the rocket wasn't in complete readiness?" I interrupted.

"It wasn't much," Hargreaves put in. "Dr. Fairfield had all his part of the job finished before he-ah-disappeared, all that was required was that someone with a knowledge of solid fuels-I admit there aren't many-should complete the wiring up and fusing of the firing circuitry. The cable giving the sailing orders said that a solid fuel expert would arrive on the island today."

I refrained from introducing myself. That cable must have been sent off within hours of Witherspoon's being told that Bentall was spending a wet and uncomfortable night on a reef out in the lagoon. There was no question but that the man was a criminal: but there was equally no question but that he was a criminal genius. I was no criminal, but I was no genius either. We belonged in different leagues-the top and the bottom. I felt the way David would have felt if he had happened across Goliath and discovered that he had left his sling at home. I became vaguely aware that Anderson and the red-faced man, whom he addressed as Farley, were talking together, and then the vagueness vanished, I heard a couple of words that caught and transfixed my attention the way a tarantula in my soup would have done.

"Did I hear someone mention 'Captain Fleck'?" I asked carefully.

"Yes," Anderson nodded. "Fleck. Chap who runs a schooner and transfers all our stores and mail from Kandavu to here. But he's not due again until this afternoon."

It was as well that I had risen to my feet, had I still been sitting in my chair I would probably have fallen out of it. I said stupidly: "Transfers your stores and mail, eh?"