The Dark Frontier (11 page)

He returned reverently to his food. Carruthers ordered a
tyroler rostbraten
and did some quick thinking.

That Groom was in touch with “the right people” probably meant that he had managed to reach someone able and willing, as Rovzidski had been, to surrender vital information in return for a substantial bribe. The implications of this possibility depressed him. Obviously, if so many people were in the position of knowing enough for Groom’s purpose, his own difficulties were enormously increased. It would be harder than ever to prevent manufacture of the Kassen explosive permanently. He could probably hinder Groom’s plans by pretending that any account of the process submitted for his inspection was worthless, but that was only playing for time. It accomplished nothing definite. His thoughts revolved round the problem again and again without reaching any conclusion.

Groom laid down his knife and fork with a sigh of satisfaction.

“You may or may not know,” he said, “that Zovgorod boasts an Opera House. Tonight they are doing
The Magic Flute
. I have told the head waiter to get me two seats. If you are fond of
Mozart you might care to join me. I asked for grand tier stalls. Dress is not necessary.”

Carruthers accepted with alacrity. Half an hour later they stepped into a taxi.

They were about to move off when Groom suddenly ordered the driver to wait. He turned to Carruthers apologetically.

“You will excuse the delay, Professor, but I don’t want to lose our bodyguard.”

With a chuckle he drew Carruthers’ attention to two men on the pavement a few yards from them. They were gesticulating wildly to a passing taxi.

Carruthers turned to him.

“Cator & Bliss?” he inquired facetiously.

“No, our friend the Countess,” said Groom solemnly. “She is taking no chances, you will observe.”

Seeing that the “bodyguard” had secured the taxi, he nodded to the driver. They drove off.

The first act was nearly over when they arrived at the Opera House. In the interval, his companion drew Carruthers’ attention to the Countess Schverzinski sitting in a box with a man wearing formal evening dress and a sash of office. Carruthers watched her, fascinated by her beauty and the ease of her manner, as she received visitors to her box. He found it painfully difficult to identify her, however indirectly, with the murder of Rovzidski.

Her companion in the box was, he was told, her brother Prince Ladislaus. A benevolent old gentleman with a single order on his shirt-front in the next box kissed her hand over the intervening ledge. Groom whispered that it was the President. Carruthers noted the arms of Ixania on the front of his box. An insignificant little man with a monocle was pointed out as the Minister of the Interior. He was, Groom explained, the son of a café proprietor, a fact which accounted, no doubt, for his assumption of a monocle, the symbol of military caste.

The roar of conversation died away as the lights dimmed. The leader of the orchestra raised his bâton. There was silence. Then Mozart began again.

It was music that was to remain with Carruthers for many days afterwards; flowing through his mind, a constant soft-voiced obbligato to the thoughts that crowded there; gently guiding and directing them as the banks of a river guide and direct the swollen stream that rushes between them to the sea. When it was finished he sat through the wild applause that broke out in silence. A sudden calm confidence seemed to fill him. It was as though he had been granted a new lease on life. But somewhere in his brain words were forming. They took shape for a moment and faded; but in that moment he saw a semblance of the truth. For he saw that the days of the man who called himself Conway Carruthers were numbered and that he was soon to die. Under his breath he whispered urgently to himself, “I must hurry.”

The company crowded on to the stage to take their final curtain. More bouquets were handed up to them. The applause was subsiding. A few “
Bravas
” still hung in the air. The orchestra leader raised his bâton. The drums rolled. The audience rose to its feet. The first triumphant chord of the Ixanian National Anthem shattered the silence. At that moment, every light in the Opera House flickered once and went out.

C
arruthers was awake early the following morning. As he lay in bed contemplating the sunlight already pouring through his window, the incident at the theatre was still impressed upon his mind. The picture of Groom fighting madly for the exit, the terrified faces, the vision of all he had seen in a few seconds by the light of a hastily struck match, floated before his eyes. Yet it was now not so much the panic itself that occupied his thoughts as the cause of it all, the electricity failure. That sudden flicker before the light went out was curious. It suggested a gradual overload rather than a sudden power surge.

He pressed the bell for the Swiss waiter, ordered breakfast and then called the man back as he was going.

“You heard about the electricity failure at the Opera House last night?”

“But yes, Monsieur, terrible.”

“Has it happened before?” he asked. “Except in bad storms, I mean. Do you have many power failures?”

“No, Monsieur, I remember only one before. But that was in the night. I could not sleep and switched on the light to read. It went out for about ten minutes only. The electricity is very reliable here. It is in charge of Swiss engineers.”

“When was that?”

“About two months ago, Monsieur. I remember well. My wife was having a baby.”

Carruthers was thoughtful. The waiter hastened to reassure him.

“There is no cause for alarm, Monsieur. It will not happen again.” He went on at length. Doubtless, if it had not been for Ixanian stupidity there would be no breakdown at all. Swiss engineers were of the finest. But these pigs of Ixanians …

Suddenly Carruthers had an idea, a strange idea. Waving the waiter away he leapt out of bed and hurried into the bathroom.

By the time his breakfast had arrived he was half-dressed. In ten minutes he had finished both his breakfast and his dressing.

Stuffing his wallet into his pocket, his fingers encountered a piece of paper. He drew it out. It was the Young Peasants’ Party’s “manifesto.” Without thinking, he returned it hastily to his pocket and left the hotel.

His first thought was for a newspaper.

The electricity failure of the night before was mentioned in a few lines chiefly taken up by the names of the distinguished persons who had experienced what was described, a trifle extravagantly, as “the Y.P.P. outrage.” But it told him what he wanted to know.

He hailed a taxi and told the man to take him to the National Library. There he asked for the
Encyclopaedia Universalia
. The library was able to produce it and, moreover, in an English edition. The brief biography of Professor Barstow that Casey had quoted so ironically in the café told him where to look. He turned to “Atoms, Structure of.”

It was a long article occupying nearly three columns in the
Encyclopaedia
’s six-point type. He read it through carefully. He found it surprisingly easy to understand and was soon in possession of the information he sought. There, in Professor Barstow’s careful prose, were the sentences that instinctively he had known he would find:

Carruthers shut the book and left the library.

His next step was to buy a panorama map of Zovgorod and the surrounding country. Armed with this he retired to a public garden and found a quiet seat. As he did so, he noticed a man whose face seemed vaguely familiar, seated a short way away. Then he remembered. It was one of the men whom Groom had pointed out the previous evening; one of the “bodyguard.” Obviously, this man had been set to watch him alone. His colleague was Groom’s shadow. He, Carruthers, must have had his movements followed for the past fortnight; stupid of him not to have noticed it before. He dismissed the matter from his mind for the time being and opened his map.

His objective was the electricity distribution station at Zovgorod. He quickly found it on the map. It was on the outskirts of the city on the north-east side. He sat back and thought.

Zovgorod, like most other towns, would be fed with electricity distributed from the central station by means of several subsidiary mains each carrying the supply for a different quarter of the city. Each subsidiary would carry its own system of
fuses and “breakers” to deal with short circuits, overloads or surges. It was thus obvious that an overload such as might well result from anyone utilising the process referred to by Professor Barstow in the
Encyclopaedia
, would, if applied anywhere inside the city, cause an electricity breakdown only in the quarter served by the subsidiary main in question. Now the Opera House and the Hotel Europa were set far apart on the map. With the evidence of the newspaper, which reported a failure throughout the city, plus that of the Swiss waiter at the hotel, he concluded that Zovgorod’s electricity failures were not confined to any particular quarter.

From this it followed that the source of the overloads must lie between the Zovgorod distribution station and the hydroelectric power station at the dam higher up the valley. Once the source could be located the chances were that Kassen’s laboratory would be found. The times of the failures were suggestive in themselves. In the case of the waiter it had been in the early hours of the morning; in the case of the Opera it had been close on midnight. Both were times when the city’s electricity requirements were small; times, therefore, most likely to be chosen by Kassen for his experiments.

He considered his plan of action.

The power from the dam would almost certainly be carried down into Zovgorod by means of overhead lines. Somewhere along those lines there must be a branch main to the laboratory. The lines would lead him to it. He would start at the distribution station.

The first thing, however, was to get rid of the man following him. He glanced at his map again, then rose and left the gardens. A quick glance as he stopped to light his pipe told him that the Countess’s agent was about twenty yards behind him.

Walking leisurely, he turned towards the Kudbek and, hailing a taxi, told the man to drive to the Greek Church which
the map had shown at the opposite end of the city to the electricity station. Out of the corner of his eye he noted that the agent had also found a taxi.

As they bowled along the Kudbek, Carruthers looked through the small window at the back of the cab at the taxi behind him. The agent, evidently bored by a fortnight’s uneventful pottering, was lounging back, leaving it to his driver to keep Carruthers’ taxi in sight. Carruthers, too, sat back and awaited his opportunity.

They turned out of the Kudbek into the tangle of side streets south of the Palace. Choosing a moment when his taxi was nosing its way between a thronged pavement and a stationary cart facing in the opposite direction, Carruthers softly unlatched the left-hand door and, tossing a note for the fare on the seat, slipped out into the roadway behind the cart, gently shutting the door of the taxi again as it left him behind.

It was all over in a few seconds. Mingling with the crowd he saw the unwary agent driving away towards the Greek Church. Carruthers himself was soon back in the Kudbek where he chartered another taxi, this time to take him to the distribution station. He paid the taxi off at the end of the road in which it stood and walked down.

Zovgorod, like many other European cities, still retains the sharp line of demarcation between town and country which is the legacy of the walled-city period. The road to the distribution station started in the city and went out over a hill among fields. The station itself, a box-like concrete building, lay some way back from the road. A spiked fence surrounded it, but Carruthers could see enough. Through the windows he made out the outlines of two large oil-cooled transformers. It was, as he had thought, only a distribution plant. On the far side, supported by a large steel structure, were the insulators and oil-immersed switch-gear for the main power intake from the overhead lines. He moved a little higher up the hill and was
rewarded by the sight of a long procession of pylons striding away up the side of the valley until the curve hid them.

He looked about him.

High above the grassland and the dark green patches of fir woods rose massive snow-capped peaks that cast long shadows down the sunlit slopes below them. Here and there he could discern shepherds’ huts, their flaked stone walls almost invisible against the grey-brown hills from which they had been quarried, and mountain streams looking like white smudges as they rushed down to the river. But he had no time to contemplate the grandeur of the Kuder valley; he must follow the pylons.

He turned and went back into the town. It was then about eleven o’clock. He would need food on his journey. He bought some provisions and a bottle of red wine and set out.

For the first hour he kept to the road which ran along the bottom of the valley by the river and for some distance along which he could keep the pylons well in view. The valley wound in a series of S bends. The power lines, taking the shortest practicable route from one end of each S to the other, crossed and recrossed the valley, alternately rising five hundred feet or more up the hillside and descending almost to river-level. If the sides of the valley had been regular and the path of the pylons had been consistent, he could have followed them entirely from the road; but soon a huge buttress of rock obtruding into the valley deflected the lines which took a sharp turn upwards and disappeared behind a belt of firs.

Carruthers halted and surveyed the side of the valley. About a hundred yards farther on there was a path leading up. He walked towards it. It was a rough track about eighteen inches wide and obviously very little used; but it led in the right direction and he began to climb.