The Satanist (58 page)

Then, instead of getting on the telephone to me at once, the fool swallowed five or six aspirins to dull his pain, and got back into bed again. As he lay there he picked up Lothar in a car with Colonel Washington and Mary Morden. The car was approaching the air base, but soon after they had entered it the aspirins began to work and he dozed off. About three o’clock he woke, thought over his vision and decided that he ought not to wait until the morning to tell me about it; so he got up, dressed and came round to Dovehouse Street.

‘As soon as I had heard Otto’s story I felt sure that you were on the wrong scent about their being on their way to London. What is more, in view of the last
coup
Lothar pulled off, the idea that he had been taken into a United States air base by an Air Force Colonel who was another Satanist properly put the wind up me. I telephoned a warning to the base and asked that Colonel Washington and anyone with him should be put under preventive arrest. Then I hurried into my clothes, came up to the Office and gave the whole story over the scrambler line to H.Q. Strategic Air Command at Lakenheath in Suffolk.

‘Half an hour later they came back to me to say that we’d missed the boat. Apparently Washington is a real rough diamond, but he was an ace flyer in the war, and stayed on in the Air Force afterwards only because he is
mad-keen on flying. He has stacks of money and in addition to living like a prince in this house, the Cedars, outside the base with a team of imported coloured boys to look after him, he has his own private six-seater aircraft that he flies himself whenever he goes on leave to the Continent. He had applied for leave in the regular way and been given a fortnight. His ‘plane is fitted with equipment for night flying; so no one thought it particularly strange that he should elect to take off at one in the morning. His service record is a brilliant one and there has never been the slightest hint of anything against him on security grounds.

‘They knew nothing of anyone who might be Lothar, and the night duty-officer who was reporting to me obviously thought that I’d been sold a cock-and-bull story. No doubt that was partly because I had suggested in the first place that Washington was probably about to fly one of their super-bombers off to Russia; and it transpired that he hadn’t. I told this sceptical type to order a check-up on all secret equipment at the base to see if anything was missing; and that he had better get his Chief out of bed to take over from him, or he might regret it. After that, to fill in time I got on to Thompson to enquire how the raid on that place at Cremorne had gone off.’

Barney suddenly looked up. ‘Bejesus! My mind has been so taken up with Mary and Lothar that I’ve never given it a thought. How did it go, Sir?’

‘Ace high. We bagged the lot with their pants down. Thompson said that when they went in it was like a scene from the
Folies Bergére
, and that he hadn’t seen so many nudes since his uncle took him on a trip to Paris when he was a youngster. They were bundled up in a blanket apiece and taken off to Cannon Row. There were about thirty of them and some dozen coloured people, men and women, but they were only staff, and all appeared to be slightly loopy.’

‘Have you got the names of the Satanists yet?’

‘Not the lot. When I rang up the Special Branch boys were still grilling them. But among them there is one cop
that the Yard are particularly pleased about. He is a saintly-looking old gentleman named Bingley. His speciality is luring little girls into back-lots and strangling them. After his last murder the police had a clear case against him but before they could arrest him he disappeared. That was five years ago, and evidently he has been lying low very comfortably in the house at Cremorne ever since.’

‘How about Ratnadatta?’

‘Oh, he’s been sent up from Fulham, to join the rest of the bunch.’

‘Do you think the police will succeed in getting enough evidence to prove that some of them murdered Teddy Morden?’

Verney shook his head. ‘I rather doubt it. Our best hope of that is that one of them will turn Queen’s Evidence. But these people are not ordinary crooks. Such previous experience as I’ve had with Satanists has shown that generally they are so terrified of their Infernal Master, and of other members of their Fraternity who have escaped the net, that they prefer to face any legal punishment for obscene behaviour, and so on, rather than risk what might come to them if they spilled the beans about anything the police have failed to find out for themselves. But, of course, Special Branch are searching the place from attic to cellar, so there is a chance that they may come upon some incriminating documents.’

‘How about the photos of Tom Ruddy and Mary?’

‘Thompson got those and several dozen others of a similar nature; and the negatives. The Ruddy job was no isolated case. It is clear that they have been running a regular blackmail racket, either to get money out of people or force them into doing the Devil’s work. Now that we’ve busted the racket, with luck we may be able to persuade some of the victims to prosecute.’

‘They might,’ Barney agreed, ‘seeing that in such cases the victim is protected from having his name made public; and if they did we’d be able to get some of these Satanist swine much longer sentences than any they would receive
for moral turpitude. But what about the air base, Sir? You must have heard something further?’

‘Of course. About seven o’clock Colonel Richter rang up. He is the U.S. top security man, and by then they knew they’d had it. The base had made their check and reported a nuclear war-head missing. Richter sounded nearly as explosive as if he were an atomic war-head himself. He was just leaving to drive there to conduct a personal enquiry, and he promised to telephone me again as soon as he had got from his people the facts about Washington’s departure. It is to hear from him I am waiting now.’

‘May I wait here, too, Sir,’ Barney asked.

‘Certainly. I’ll send for some more coffee. I expect you could do with a cup. As it is Sunday I have no appointments and I’ve already asked my No. 2 to attend to any special business, other than this, that might turn up. This thing is too big for either of us to take our mind off it until we are quite certain that there is no hope of retrieving the situation.’

Barney’s face brightened. ‘You think there might be, then?’

C.B. laid a finger alongside his big nose in a familiar gesture. ‘From Cambridgeshire to Moscow is all of fifteen hundred miles. He couldn’t fly that far in an ordinary aircraft without coming down somewhere on the way to refuel. As soon as Otto told me about his vision I saw the red light and I didn’t wait for the Americans to do any checking. I got straight through to the Security Chief at N.A.T.O., and passsed on to him Otto’s description of Colonel Washington. I said I thought he had got away with a big bomber, but it might be a smaller aircraft, in which case he would have to come down to refuel and could easily be recognised on account of his unusual height and features. In any case, all stations were to be alerted to watch for any unscheduled aircraft crossing Europe in the direction of the Iron Curtain, and if spotted fighters were to be sent up to intercept and force it down.’

‘You’re certainly jolly quick off the mark, Sir.’ Barney
said with a note of admiration.

The older man shrugged. ‘But not quick enough in this case, I’m afraid. If only Otto had come round to me at once we would have caught them for certain; but it was four o’clock before I could get cracking, and they had been in the air for three hours by then. If they were in anything that had the speed of an average airliner, they would have needed only another half hour’s flying to cross the Iron Curtain. And once over it, of course, they would be in the clear; they could refuel without risk and fly on to Moscow. Still, there is just a chance that they had to come down this side of the Curtain and, if so, they may be being held pending a check up on them. If they are, we should hear pretty soon; or Richter may have done so already, as this is really a U.S. responsibility and he too will have been in touch with N.A.T.O.’

They had their coffee and some sandwiches and, to keep Barney from sitting brooding about Mary, C.B. made him give a much more detailed account of his doings the previous night. At eleven o’clock, as Colonel Richter had not come through, Verney phoned the Fulgoham air base and learnt that the Colonel was on his way up to London. At half past he was announced over the buzzer, and C.B. had him shown in at once.

The American Security Chief was short, tubby and round-faced, but there was nothing soft about him. His mouth was a hard line and his brown eyes, half veiled by heavy lids, were shrew and calculating, yet he was not without a sense of humour. With a wry twist of his rat-trap mouth he declared that he would not waste time letting off steam. He had already done that by leaving a score of people down at the air base under close arrest for negligence; but he doubted if there was any case against most of them, as they had broken no regulation by allowing their Commanding Officer to fly off at any hour he liked in his own aircraft.

The aircraft had been a twin-engined six-seater. Recently it had had extra fuel tanks fitted and with these had a
comfortable range of seven hundred miles. It had taken off on a north-easterly course and automatic radar plots showed that it had continued on that course out over the North Sea for at least a hundred miles. If the course was held that meant that the aircraft should, at about five o’clock in the morning, have been over Southern Norway. The questioning of Colonel Washington’s officers had brought out the fact that he had told several of them that he intended to spend his leave fishing in Norway. Richter therefore suggested the possibility that Washington was innocent and that someone else had stolen the atomic warhead earlier in the day; or perhaps several days ago.’

Verney promptly shot down that theory by making Barney give an account of Washington’s association with Lothar, and stating that within his own knowledge Lothar had only a week earlier stolen a quantity of secret rocket fuel from the Experimental Station in Wales.

Richter blinked a little at Barney’s description of the Black Magic ceremony from which he had narrowly escaped with his life; but he knew that such circles existed and, as a man answering Lothar’s description had entered the air base with Washington, he agreed that the association left no doubt that it was they who had made off with the war-head.

Anxiously Barney asked, ‘Was there a girl with them? A good-looking dark-haired young woman of about twentythree?’

‘Yep,’ the Colonel replied. ‘She was sitting in the back of the car. Washington told the gate guard that his two passengers were accompanying him on his leave. According to regulations they should have been signed in and given temporary passes, but seeing they were with the C.O., and he was in a hurry, the guard skipped that formality. He is sitting in the cooler now, wishing he hadn’t. Both passengers were later seen to board Colonel Washington’s aircraft.’

That killed Barney’s last hope that Mary might have got away and was somewhere in hiding. Instead she was still a prisoner of the two Satanists and perhaps by now behind
the Iron Curtain. To hide his sick misery, he turned away to the big window that looked out over London’s roof-tops.

‘The course from Cambridgeshire to Moscow is North by East,’ C.B. remarked, ‘so, after flying about half-way to Norway, Washington would have had only to alter course to due East to be heading for his real destination. But he’d have to fly over Denmark, and she is a member of N.A.T.O. I had a hope that the ‘plane might be picked up before it got through, and forced down.’

Richter shook his head. ‘No dice, friend. His seven hundred mile range would have enabled him to get over the Iron Curtain before he had to come down to refuel. Still, I would have thought our observation posts would have had some record of an unscheduled aircraft flying over. But they haven’t. I was on to N.A.T.O. H.Q. before I left Fulgoham and from round four o’clock on they had alerted every station from the Northern tip of Denmark down to Frankfurt, and they’ve registered nothing crossing the line that might have been our man.’

Barney turned back from the window and said to his Chief, ‘I know it has always been your opinion, Sir, that Lothar is a Soviet agent; but Squadron-Leader Forsby takes a different view. He thinks that Lothar has broken with the Russians and has become just a scientist with cranky views, who is anxious to try out some private experiment. And Otto, you will recall, did report last week seeing him up in a cave among snow-covered mountains. If Forsby is right it seems possible that it really was to some secret hide-out in Norway that Washington has flown Lothar.’

‘Maybe you’re right, young feller,’ Verney admitted. ‘I only hope to God you are. That would account for his aircraft never having flown through the radio check, as the Norway stations were considered too far North to be worth alerting. Anyway, Otto intended to do an all-out concentration this morning on trying to locate his brother; so let’s go down and find out if he has anything fresh to tell us.’

Five minutes later the three of them were in Verney’s car on their way to Chelsea. Barney sat with the chauffeur and
the other two in the back; so during the run C.B. was able to give Richter an idea of the strange bond that linked the Khune twins, and enabled them to contact each other on the psychic plane. While listening, the American eyed him somewhat dubiously but, in view of what he had already been told of the Satanic background to the whole business, he remarked: ‘Well, there are stranger things … and so on, as it says in Hamlet; so it’s not for me to question your beliefs about this business.’

At the small hotel at which C.B. had secured accommodation for Otto, Verney told his friend the landlord that he wanted to have a quiet talk with his guest; so the landlord placed his private sitting-room at their disposal, and a few minutes later Otto came down to it.

After he had been introduced to Colonel Richter, and been told that they still had no definite information concerning Lothar’s whereabouts, he said, ‘He has not gone into Russia. I’m sure of that. He is back in the mountain hide-out where I saw him last week. I saw him there again this morning about nine o’clock, just after I woke up. And it can’t be in the Caucasus because he wouldn’t have had time to fly that far. He could hardly have got so far as Dalmatia, either; so it must be either in Norway or the Alps. It is a cave, high up above snow level. There is a cable railway up to the broad platform at its entrance, and inside the cave a number of lean-to’s have been made and furnished as bedrooms and living quarters. I saw him there as clearly as I see you; and with him were the hook-nosed giant in American uniform and a pretty dark-haired woman.’