Saint and the Fiction Makers (16 page)

Thomas was referring to a waist-high barrier of aluminium rails which lined the concrete walk on either side. The walk was like the single bridge crossing the moat between a fortress’s outer defensive walls and its central structure. The moat in Hermetico’s case was a thirty-foot-deep band of grass surrounding the building. The moat of grass was heavily decorated with red-lettered signs shouting Danger! Do Not Leave Paved Lanes! The only paved lane Simon could see in addition to the one on which he was walking seemed to make a circuit of the Hermetico building directly outside the building’s walls. That circular walk, forming the inner limit of the grass moat, was also separated from the grass by a waist-high fence of aluminium rails.

‘That must be a very high quality of grass you have,’ Simon said, indicating the heavily protected green strip. (His own faked accent was considerably more subtle than Warlock’s.) ‘I have never seen such zeal for preventing people to walk on the lawn.’

Thomas chuckled as he led them to the building.

‘The zeal isn’t to protect the grass,’ he said. ‘It’s to protect the people who might walk on it.’

‘Wot ezz hoppen?’ said Warlock.

Thomas looked puzzled.

‘My associate is not gifted in languages,’ the Saint said apologetically. ‘He means to ask what takes place if one walks on the grass?’

Thomas, smiling slyly, shook his head.

‘I’m afraid that has to be our secret,’ he said. ‘If you knew, however, you’d agree already that our vaults are absolutely theft-proof. Come inside, please.’

A small plainly furnished antechamber was the first stop inside the building. There was a second use of red plastic cards, and then Thomas took his guests down a corridor to an elevator. Beside it was a guardroom with a glass observation window on the corridor.

‘Lister,’ Thomas said to the uniformed man inside, ‘I’m taking these gentlemen down.’

‘Yes, sir,’ came Lister’s voice through a grating. ‘Come in, please.’

Lister unlocked the guardroom door from the inside and Thomas stepped forward to enter it. Warlock started to follow, but Thomas shook his head and pointed to a sign.

‘Only I go in here,’ he explained. His voice continued to come to them through the grating after he was in the guardroom and the door was locked behind him. ‘It’s one of our precautions. Once I’m in here, you see, I’m protected from the hall by bullet-proof glass. If by some chance you should have forced yourselves in here and been secretly holding me at gun point—as happens in so many films—you would have been found out by the guard now, since he’s not allowed to release the elevator until I’ve had this chance to prove my freedom … and your innocence.’

A moment later Thomas, joined by two uniformed guards whom he referred to as ‘Duty Key Men’, emerged from the guardroom and took Simon and Warlock down the elevator.

‘This is the only shaft,’ Thomas explained as they travelled downwards. ‘All the others have been filled in. This is the only means of getting below—three hundred feet beneath the surface. Now, gentlemen, would you please slip these badges on to your lapels. They’ll prevent alarms from sounding. Without the badges, an intruder would never get four feet without detection. Immediately on leaving the elevator I’ll have to ask you to submit to a search. If you object, all I can do is give you a look through a grille.’

‘Oh, no objection,’ Simon said quickly. ‘Your precautions are most impressive.’

Thank you. We’re very proud of them.’

Warlock merely grunted.

‘This will be a brief stop, and you’ll soon see the vaults,’ said Thomas.

The elevator’s doors slid open, revealing a narrow chamber whose only other exit was a six-foot-high grille of heavy bars.

‘Before we can leave here, the search,’ Thomas said apologetically.

The two guards carried out the frisking with tact and thoroughness. Messrs. Dubray and Challons accepted the operation with good-natured and innocent calm. Having expected such a search, they had carried nothing with them that could arouse any suspicion—with one significant exception. The Saint, before leaving S.W.O.R.D. headquarters—as he had come to think of Warlock’s house—had written a short note which, if read by Hermetico’s personnel, would not only have aroused suspicion but would have given Warlock’s whole scheme away. The note was concealed under the lining inside Simon’s Homburg. He hoped to find a means of leaving the message behind, in Hermetico, but in such a way that it would not be read until he and Warlock were outside the gates. For Amity’s sake, Simon could not do anything which would result in his and Warlock’s detention. He would have to leave the note, if possible, as he was going out of the building. He was not terribly optimistic, for that matter, that he would find a means of leaving it at all.

‘Now,’ said Thomas, when the search was completed, ‘we can have a look at the vaults.’

The two Duty Key Men brought chains from their pockets on which were fastened several elaborately shaped pieces of metal that only distantly resembled orthodox keys. One of the guards inserted his key at the top of the grille while the other inserted his at the bottom.

‘Two keys have to be used simultaneously,’ Thomas said. ‘That way, no one man can ever get through a single door.’

The grille swung open and the party went through. To the left was a metal door with a small square of glass in the centre.

‘That’s the master security control room,’ Thomas explained. ‘There are sensing devices and alarms all over Hermetico. They’re co-ordinated here. So are the defensive devices. For example, gas can be pumped through the ventilating system, knocking out intruders in a few seconds. The vault itself can be completely flooded.’

‘Fantastique,’ Warlock said gravely.

‘And most discouraging,’ the Saint added.

Warlock shot him a warning look.

‘Discouraging?’ Thomas asked.

‘To anyone idiotic enough to attempt a robbery,’ the Saint said suavely.

‘Quite so,’ Thomas said.

The guardians of the keys took them through another two grilles, and then they entered the vault itself. It was a long chamber containing rows of stacked metal boxes almost as high as a man’s head. The place was the size of a small auditorium. A hissing torrent of fresh air gushed from an inlet grille at the far end of the huge room. The Saint’s eyes immediately fell on that grille, and he immediately knew that if Hermetico had a chink in its armour, the ventilating system must be it. He had studied the plans and the model of the place already without finding any other weakness in the defences, and he had become convinced that only the ventilation ducts offered any chance at all. Now he was more sure than ever that his conviction had been correct.

Two guards with submachine guns slung over their shoulders had appeared from among the metal storage boxes. They nodded pleasantly but kept their distance.

‘You may think our precautions have been carried to the point of the ridiculous, gentlemen,’ Thomas said, ‘but I think you’ll also agree that there’s no safer place on earth for valuables than this.’

‘I am more zan sateesfied,’ said Warlock.

‘Indubitably,’ said the Saint. ‘Just one more question, please. How do you know that my associate and myself are not imposters?’

Warlock’s flinch could have been detected only by someone who was looking for it. Thomas merely shrugged.

‘I suppose it’s quite possible for people to gain access under false pretences, but as I said, it’s obvious they could do no harm. We allow only two visitors below the surface at any one time, and what could they do against our precautions?’

‘Quite,’ the Saint agreed.

Thomas took them back to the elevator.

‘Besides, I think nothing could be a better guarantee against attempted thefts than to let potential thieves see our set-up here,’ he said with a confident smile. ‘Don’t you agree?’

‘Absolutement,’ said Warlock.

At the entrance of the elevator they underwent a second swift and perfunctory search—apparently in case they had managed to slip a bar of bullion under their shirts—and then returned to the surface. A minute later they were standing outside the Hermetico building at the foot of the concrete lane which led across the grass to the main gate. The brisk wind whipped their clothes and gave Simon an excuse to hold his Homburg close against his body as his fingers worked the note he had written out of the lining. He wedged the bit of paper securely in the inner band so that its upper part would be visible to anybody picking up the hat.

‘Any questions, gentlemen?’ Thomas asked.

‘We are quite satisfied,’ the Saint said.

He allowed Thomas and Warlock to go slightly ahead of him to the lane, intending to drop the hat in the shadows of the entranceway of the building. He would have left the note behind simply by dropping it in a corridor or the elevator if his every move had not been constantly under the eyes of either a guard or Thomas himself, not to mention the wary Warlock.

The dropping of the hat would be a risky last chance. If it was seen immediately, Simon could retrieve it himself. If Warlock noticed later that it was missing, Simon could feign innocence: he would have no idea where it was. If Warlock sent back to Hermetico for it, the note would (hopefully) have been found, and according to its instructions the personnel at Hermetico would return the Homburg to S.W.O.R.D.‘s messenger with no hint that it had served as Simon Templar’s private postal service. If the note had not been found by Hermetico, and S.W.O.R.D.‘s people found it when retrieving the hat—which was quite unlikely—Warlock’s already strong distrust would just have to become a little stronger.

Simon could not lose the hat as near the threshold as he would have liked because the guard delayed closing the door. By the time there were no eyes on the Saint, Warlock and Thomas were already entering the path to the main gate, and the Saint had to stay not far behind them. He tossed the hat behind him, hoping it would skid along the cement and lodge next to the building near the door.

The Saint had chosen his moment as well as he could. If the results of his manoeuvre were far from what he expected, it was probably because the gods who take an interest in such things were in a playful mood. The wind suddenly gusted violently, caught the hat in mid-air, and tossed it above Simon’s head. When he saw where it was going, which was certainly not where he had intended, he could only grab for it and shout with a certain tinge of genuine anguish, ‘My hat!’

Warlock and Thomas turned in time to see the Homburg flip in the wind as it arched above Simon’s reach. Suddenly there was an outburst of alarm bells, klaxons, and sirens, wild and earsplitting enough to have alerted a whole city.

‘Oh, no!’ Thomas exclaimed.

Warlock looked panic-stricken and Simon tried to look distressed as the hat, to the cacophonous accompaniment its flight had set off, dropped towards the forbidden strip of green grass.

Before it touched the ground there was the bright flash and sharp roar of an explosion. The hat, along with several square yards of turf, disappeared, and all that was left was a shallow blackened crater.

‘Oh, dear!’ cried Thomas.

The alarm system was still howling and hooting and clanging away. Thomas dashed for the telephone box at the main gate and shouted into it. A few seconds later the alarms stopped. In the meantime, two guards with drawn guns had hurried out of the building and were confusedly trying to decide exactly what was wrong.

‘It’s all right,’ Thomas told them. ‘An accident. This gentleman’s hat blew into the green strip.’

Warlock was struggling to preserve some semblance of calm and a French accent.

‘Eez … eez … eez eet …’ he stammered.

‘I am so sorry!’ Simon exclaimed in apologetic alarm. ‘What is happening?’

Thomas was beginning to breathe normally. He tried to smile.

‘We have a radar scanner,’ he said. ‘It warns against something like a helicopter raid. Anything moving above the height of the fence sets off the alarm … excluding birds, of course. It’s programmed not to react to them.’

‘But ze explosion?’ Warlock asked.

‘We don’t tell people, but this whole green area is crisscrossed by hundreds of invisible infra-red beams. A break in any one of them causes the mine directly below it to explode.’

‘Wonderful!’ Simon said. ‘I’m sorry, though, that I could have caused …’

Thomas waved away the apology but made it obvious that he wished to shepherd his visitors out of the gate as soon as possible.

‘Think nothing of it,’ he said. ‘I only hope that we’ll be hearing from you again in due course.’

‘I zink we can guarantee eet,’ Warlock assured him. ‘Zank you very moch.’

‘Indeed yes,’ Simon said. ‘Thank you.’

In the limousine Frug, who had been reading a movie magazine which was now face down on the front seat beside him, was sitting bolt upright.

‘I thought you’d had it!’ he said in a hushed voice.

‘I just had a little accident,’ Simon said. ‘Nothing to be alarmed about.’

‘Not very funny, Mr. Klein!’ snapped Warlock. ‘What happened exactly?’

‘My hat blew away,’ Simon said casually.

Both men were in the back seat of the limousine. Frug turned it around and started for the main road.

‘All that because of a hat?’ he asked in an awed voice.

‘Because of a hat,’ the Saint repeated. ‘And if that can happen on an innocent visit, think what it will be like when you try to break in …’

CHAPTER FIVE

HOW WARLOCK CONTRIBUTED SOME

SCIENCE, AND ALLOWED OTHERS TO

BECOME PHYSICAL

1

Simon’s remark had the effect he intended. Frug glanced nervously into the rearview mirror as he steered the limousine away from Hermetico. His thin jockey’s face was taut with worry.

‘This is no safe-cracking job,’ he said to the men behind him. ‘It’s like a war. We’d need an army to smash into that place.’

‘And even then the losses would be pretty heavy,’ said the Saint.

Warlock’s cheeks were getting blotchy.

‘Stop talking nonsense, both of you!’ he barked. ‘I give the orders, Frug, and you obey. Would I get us into this if I thought we’d fail? I’ve more to lose than anybody. Mr. Klein is perfectly capable of planning a sound way of getting into that place. He’s just trying to scare you … which is obviously quite easy.’