Authors: Alistair MacLean
"It was Dr. Charles Fairfield."
"Fairfield? My old chief? The second-in-command at Hepworth?"
"Who else?"
I didn't answer immediately. I knew Fairfield well, a brilliant scientist and a highly-gifted amateur archaeologist. I liked this less and less and my expression should have told Colonel Raine so. But he was examining the ceiling with the minute scrutiny of a man who expected to see it fall down any second.
"And you're asking me to-" I began.
"That's what I'm doing," he interrupted. He sounded suddenly tired, it was impossible not to feel a quick sympathy for the man, for the heavy burden he had to carry. "I'm not ordering, my boy. I'm only asking." His eyes were still on the ceiling.
I pulled the paper towards me and looked at the red-ringed advertisement. It was almost but not quite the duplicate of one I'd read a few minutes earlier.
"Our friends required an immediate cable answer," I said slowly. "I suppose they must be getting pushed for time. You answered by cable?"
"In your name and from your home address. I trust you will pardon the liberty," he murmured drily.
"The Allison and Holden Engineering Company, Sydney," I went on. "A genuine and respected firm, of course?"
"Of course. We checked. And the name is that of their personnel manager and an airmail letter that arrived four days ago confirming the appointment was on the genuine letterhead of the firm. Signed in the name of the personnel manager. Only it wasn't his signature."
"What else do you know, sir?"
"Nothing. I'm sorry. Absolutely nothing. I wish to God I could help more."
There was a brief silence. Then I pushed the paper back to him and said: "Haven't you rather overlooked the fact that this advert is like the rest-it calls for a married man?"
"I never overlook the obvious," he said flatly.
I stared at him. "You never-" I broke off, then continued: "I suppose you've got the banns already called and the bride waiting at the church."
"I've done better than that." Again the faint tic in the cheek. He reached into a drawer, pulled out a nine by four buff envelope and tossed it across to me. "Take care of that, Bentall. Your marriage certificate. Caxton Hall, ten weeks ago. You may examine it if you wish but I think you'll find everything perfectly in order."
"I'm sure I will," I muttered mechanically. "I should hate to be a party to anything illegal."
"And now," he said briskly, "you would, of course, like to meet your wife." He lifted a phone and said: "Ask Mrs. Bentall to come here, please."
His pipe had gone out and he'd resumed the excavations with the pen-knife, examining the bowl with great care. There was nothing for me to examine so I let my eye wander until I saw again the light-coloured panel in the wood facing me. I knew the story behind that. Less than nine months ago, shortly after Colonel Raine's predecessor had been killed in an air crash, another man had sat in the chair I was sitting in now. It had been one of Raine's own men, but what Raine had not known was that that man had been subverted in Central Europe and persuaded to act as a double agent. His first task-which would also probably have been his last- was simple and staggering in its audacity: nothing less than the murder of Raine himself. Had it been successful, the removal of Colonel Raine-I never knew his real name- chief of security and the receptacle of a thousand secrets, would have been an irreparable loss. The colonel had suspected nothing of this until the agent had pulled out his gun. But what the agent did not know-what nobody had known before then-was that Colonel Raine kept a silenced Luger with the safety catch permanently off fastened to the underside of his chair by a spring clip. I did think he might have had a better job made of repairing that splintered panel in the front of his desk.
Colonel Raine had had no option, of course. But even had he had the chance of disarming or just wounding the man, he would probably still have killed him. He was, without exception, the most utterly ruthless man I had ever met. Not cruel, just ruthless. The end justified the means and if the end were important enough there were no sacrifices he would not make to achieve it. That was why he was sitting in that chair. But when ruthlessness became inhumanity, I felt it was time to protest.
I said: "Are you seriously considering sending this woman out with me, sir?"
"I'm not considering it." He peered into the bowl of his pipe with all the absorbed concentration of a geologist scanning the depths of an extinct volcano. "The decision is made."
My blood pressure went up a couple of points.
"Even though you must know that whatever happened to Dr. Fairfield probably happened to his wife, too?"
He laid pipe and knife on the desk and gave me what he probably imagined was a quizzical look: with those eyes of his it felt more as if a couple of stilettos were coming my way.
"You question the wisdom of my decisions, Bentall?"
"I question the justification for sending a woman on a job where the odds on chances are that she'll get herself killed." There was anger in my voice now and I wasn't bothering very much about concealing it. "And I do question the wisdom of sending her with me. You know I'm a loner, Colonel Raine. I could go by myself, explain that my wife had taken ill. I don't want any female hanging round my neck, sir."
"With this particular female," Raine said drily, "most men would consider that a privilege. I advise you to forget your concern. I consider it essential that she go. This young lady has volunteered for this assignment. She's shrewd, very, very able and most experienced in this business-much more so than you are, Bentall. It may not be a case of you looking after her, but vice versa. She can take care of herself admirably. She has a gun and she never moves without it. I think you'll find-"
He broke off as a side door opened and a girl walked into the room. I say 'walked' because it is the usual word to describe human locomotion, but this girl didn't locomote, she seemed to glide with all the grace and more than the suggestion of something else of a Balinese dancing girl. She wore a light grey ribbed wool dress that clung to every inch of her hour-and-a-half-glass figure as if it fully appreciated its privilege, and round her waist she wore a narrow belt of darker grey to match her court shoes and lizard handbag. That would be where the gun was, in the bag, she couldn't have concealed a pea-shooter under that dress. She had smooth fair gleaming hair parted far over on the left and brushed almost straight back, dark eyebrows and lashes, clear hazel eyes and a delicately tanned fair skin.
I knew where the tan came from, I knew who she was. She'd worked on the same assignment as I had for the past six months but had been in Greece all the time and I'd only seen her twice, in Athens: in all, this was only the fourth time I'd ever met her. I knew her, but knew nothing of her, except for the fact that her name was Marie Hopeman, that she had been born in Belgium but hadn't lived there since her father, a technician in the Fairey Aviation factory in that country, had brought her and her Belgian mother out of the continent at the time of the fall of France. Both her parents had been lost in the 'Lancastria'. An orphan child brought up in what was to her a foreign country, she must have learned fast how to look after herself. Or so I supposed.
I pushed back my chair and rose. Colonel Raine waved a vaguely introductory hand and said: "Mr. and-ah-Mrs. Bentall. You have met before, have you not?"
"Yes, sir." He knew damned well we'd met before. Marie Hopeman gave me a cool firm hand and a cool level look, maybe this chance to work so closely with me was the realisation of a life's ambition for her but she was holding her enthusiasm pretty well in check. I'd noticed this in Athens, this remote and rather aloof self-sufficiency which I found vaguely irritating, but that wasn't going to stop me from saying what I was going to say.
"Nice to see you again, Miss Hopeman. Or it should be. But not here and not now. Don't you know what you're letting yourself in for?"
She looked at me with big hazel eyes wide open under her raised dark brows, then the mouth curved slowly into an amused smile as she turned away.
"Has Mr. Bentall been coming all over chivalrous and noble on my account, Colonel Raine?" she asked sweetly.
"Well, yes, I'm afraid he has, rather," the colonel admitted. "And, please, we must have none of this Mr. Bentall-Miss Hopeman talk. Among young married couples, I mean." He poked a pipe-cleaner through the stem of his pipe, nodded in satisfaction as it emerged from the bowl black as a chimney sweep's brush, and went on almost dreamily. "John and Marie Bentall. I think the names go rather well together."
"Do you feel that, too?" the girl said with interest. She turned to me again and smiled brightly. "I do so appreciate your concern. It's really most kind of you." A pause, then she added: "John."
I didn't hit her because I hold the view that that sort of thing went out with the cavemen, but I could appreciate how the old boys felt. I gave her what I hoped was a cool and enigmatic smile and turned away.
"Clothes, sir," I said to Raine. "I'll need to buy some. It's high summer out there now."
"You'll find two new suitcases in your flat, Bentall, packed with everything you need."
"Tickets?"
"Here." He slid a packet across. "They were mailed to you four days ago by Wagons/Lits Cook. Paid by cheque. Man called Tobias Smith. No one has ever heard of him, but his bank account is healthy enough. You don't fly east, as you might expect, but west, via New York, San Francisco, Hawaii and Fiji. I suppose the man who pays the piper calls the tune."
"Passports?"
"Both in your cases in your flat." The little tic touched the side of his face. "Yours, for a change, is in your own name. Had to be. They'd check on you, university, subsequent career and so forth. We fixed it so that no enquirer would know you left Hepworth a year ago. Also in your case you'll find a thousand dollars in American Express cheques."
"I hope I live to spend it," I said. "Who's travelling with us, sir?"
There was a small silence, a brittle silence, and two pairs of eyes were on me, the narrow cold ice-green ones and the large warm hazel eyes. Marie Hopeman spoke first.
"Perhaps you would explain-"
"Hah!" I interrupted. "Perhaps I would explain. And you're the person-well, never mind. Sixteen people leave from here for Australia or New Zealand. Eight never arrive. Fifty percent. Which means that there's a fifty percent chance that
we
don't arrive. So there will be an observer in the plane so that Colonel Raine can erect a tombstone over the spot where we're buried. Or more likely just a wreath flung on the Pacific."
"The possibility of a little trouble en route had occurred to me," the colonel said carefully. "There will be an observer with you-not the same one all the way, naturally. It is better that you do not know who those observers are." He rose to his feet and walked round the table. The briefing was over.
"I am sincerely sorry," he finished. "I do not like any of this, but I am a blind man in a dark room and there is no other course open to me. I hope things go well." He offered his hand briefly to both of us, shook his head, murmured: "I'm sorry. Goodbye," and walked back to his desk.
I opened the door for Marie Hopeman and glanced back over my shoulder to see how sorry he was. But he wasn't looking sorry, he was just looking earnestly into the bowl of his pipe, so I closed the door with a quiet hand and left him sitting there, a small dusty man in a small dusty room.
CHAPTER ONE
Tuesday 3 A.M.-5:30 A.M.
Fellow-passengers on the plane, the old hands on the America-Australia run, had spoken of the Grand Pacific Hotel in Viti Levu as the finest in the Western Pacific, and a very brief acquaintance with it had persuaded me that they were probably right. Old-fashioned but magnificent and shining like a newly-minted silver cein, it was run with a quiet and courteous efficiency that would have horrified the average English hotelier. The bedrooms were luxurious, the food superb-the memory of the seven-course dinner we'd had that night would linger for years-and the view from the verandah of the haze-softened mountains across the moonlit bay belonged to another world.
But there's no perfection in a very imperfect world: the locks on the bedroom doors of the Grand Pacific Hotel were just no good at all.
My first intimation of this came when I woke up in the middle of the night in response to someone prodding my shoulder. But my first thought was not of the door-locks but of the finger prodding me. It was the hardest finger I'd ever felt. It felt like a piece of steel. I struggled to open my eyes against weariness and the glare of the overhead light and finally managed to focus them on my left shoulder. It was a piece of steel. It was a dully-gleaming .38 Colt automatic and, just in case I should have made any mistake in identification, whoever was holding it shifted the gun as soon as he saw me stir so that my right eye could stare down the centre of the barrel. It was a gun all right. My gaze travelled up past the gun, the hairy brown wrist, the white-coated arm to the brown cold still face with the battered yachting cap above, then back to the automatic again.
"O.K., friend," I said. I meant it to sound cool and casual but it came out more like the raven-the hoarse one- croaking on the battlements of Macbeth's castle. "I can see it's a gun. Cleaned and oiled and everything. But take it away, please. Guns are dangerous things."
"A wise guy, eh?" he said coldly. "Showing the little wife what a hero he is. But you wouldn't really like to be a hero, would you, Bentall? You wouldn't really like to start something?"
I would have loved to start something. I would have loved to take his gun away and beat him over the head with it. Having guns pointed at my eye gives me a nasty dry mouth, makes my heart work overtime and uses up a great deal of adrenalin. I was just starting out to think what else I would like to do to him when he nodded across the bed.
"Because if you are, you might have a look there first."
I turned slowly, so as not to excite anyone. Except only for the yellow of his eyes, the man on the other side of the bed was a symphony in black. Black suit, black sailor's jersey under it, black hat and one of the blackest faces I had ever seen: a thin, taut, pinch-nosed face, the face of a pure Indian. He was very narrow and very short but he didn't have to be big on account of what he held in his hands, a twelve-bore shotgun which had had almost two-thirds of its original length sawn off at stock and barrels. It was like looking down a couple of unlit railway tunnels. I turned away slowly and looked at the white man.