The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (24 page)

‘It’s bloody hard work. Unnatural position. I’ll be all right.’

From the land came a series of rapid shots, the stammer of an automatic rifle. McCready breathed, ‘They’re still at it. I’d like to know what…’

There was another shot, so shockingly close that McCready instinctively ducked and Denison flattened himself even closer to the bottom of the punt. There was a splashing noise to the left as though someone was running in shallow water; the sound receded and everything was quiet again.

McCready eased himself up. ‘That was right here in the marsh. Let’s move.’

Denison pushed off again quietly and the punt ghosted into the mist. He was aware that Harding had not said anything, so he turned his head. ‘Are you okay?’

‘Carry on,’ said Harding. ‘A bit more to the left.’

As they penetrated the marsh there were flaws in the mist—sudden thinnings and thickenings of the vapour apparently caused by a light air which stroked Denison’s cheek with a delicate touch. Visibility would be no more than five yards and then, ten seconds later, the mist would swirl aside so that he could see, perhaps, forty yards. He did not like it; it was unpredictable and could not be relied on.

Behind, McCready plodded thigh-deep in the water. The footing was treacherous—mostly rotting vegetation but with the occasional ankle-twisting stone or, sometimes, an unexpected hole. He cast a glance over his shoulder and saw that Lyn, much shorter than he, had the water to her waist. He grinned at her and she smiled back at him weakly. Diana brought up the rear, turning her head constantly to look back.

They went on for fifteen minutes and then there was a choked cry from behind McCready. He looked back and saw that Lyn was neck-deep and already beginning to swim. Since he himself was in the water to his armpits this was not surprising so he gave two sharp tugs on the string. The punt ahead drifted back silently as Denison back-paddled gently, and came to a halt alongside McCready.

‘You’ll have to change course. We’re getting out of our depth.’

Denison nodded and silently pointed the way he intended to go, keeping close to the reeds and heading towards what seemed to be a promontory about fifty yards away. As the mist closed in again to blot it out he commenced paddling again.

Once more the gentle, vagrant wind parted the mist and Denison, peering forward along the barrel of the gun, saw a movement and dug both paddles into the water as quietly as he could. The punt slowed to a halt. Again the mist closed in but he waited, hoping that McCready would have the sense not to come forward again to find out what was wrong.

When he felt the slight air pressure on his cheek increase he was ready for the diminution of the mist and the suddenly increased visibility. There was a man standing on the promontory which was just a shingle bank outthrust into the channel. Another man was walking towards him, splashing through water, and they waved to each other.

Denison put forth his hand and slipped the detonator cap on the nipple below the hammer, and with his other hand wielded a paddle gently. The punt came around slowly and with it the gun barrel. As the primitive foresight drifted across the target he back-paddled one stroke to arrest the movement.

His finger was on the trigger but he was hesitant about firing. For all he knew these men were innocent Finns caught up in a fortuitous battle with those gun-happy, crazy Czechs. One of the men turned and there was a sharp cry and Denison knew the punt had been seen. The other man brought up his arm stiffly and he saw two brief flashes just as the mist began to close in again.

That did it—no innocent Finn would shoot on sight. He squeezed the trigger, only remembering at the last moment to pull back his head and jerk up his knees from the bottom boards.

There was a pause of a single heart beat and then the gun went off. Flame flared from the touch-hole under the hammer and dazzled him but not so much that he could not see the monstrous flame that bloomed from the muzzle of the gun. Orange and yellow with white at its heart, it shot out twelve feet ahead of the punt, blinding him, and was accompanied by a deep-throated
booom.
The punt shivered and jerked back violently in the water and the bottom boards leaped convulsively under him. Then it was gone and a cloud of black smoke lazily ascended and there was the acrid stink of burnt powder in the air.

Although deafened by the concussion he thought he heard a shriek from ahead. Retinal images danced before his eyes as he tried to penetrate the suddenly dense mist and he could see nothing. An automatic rifle hammered from behind and suddenly the water ahead fountained in spurts right across the channel as someone traversed in a blind burst. There was a whipping sound overhead and bits of reed dropped on to his face as he looked up.

The rifle fire stopped.

After a moment Harding said weakly, ‘What about reloading?’

‘How long?’

‘Five minutes.’

‘Christ, no!’ Denison burst into activity. ‘We’ve got to move and bloody fast.’ He brought up his legs and sat on his haunches so as to give the paddles a better grip in the water. This was no time to hang around and dead silence was not as important as getting clear. He jabbed the paddles into the water and made the punt move. As he skirted the promontory he kept a careful watch, not wanting to run aground, and still less wanting to meet whoever had been there.

The violence of that single shot was seared into him. What, in God’s name, could it have been like at the receiving end? He looked sideways but there was only the drifting mist, and all he could hear was the quickened splashing of the others as they increased their pace to his speed.

He paddled until he was thoroughly weary, occasionally changing course as the channel wound among marshy islands or as Harding dictated from the compass. After half an hour at top speed he was exhausted and stopped with his shoulders bowed and paddles trailing in the water. His breath rasped in his throat and his chest felt sore.

Harding touched him on the shoulder. ‘Rest,’ he said. ‘You’ve done enough.’

McCready came up, half wading and half swimming. ‘Jesus!’ he said. ‘You set a pace.’

Denison grinned weakly. ‘It was that last rifle burst. A bit too much for me. All I wanted to do was to get away.’

McCready held on to the side of the punt and surveyed the gun. ‘When this thing went off I was sure the barrel had burst. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

‘How far have we come?’ asked Denison.

Harding used his good hand to fish in the bottom of the punt. He came up with the map, soggy and running with water, and gave it to Denison who unfolded it. He pointed over Denison’s shoulder. ‘I think we’ve just crossed that wide bit of water.’

‘It was deep as well as wide,’ said McCready. ‘We had to swim.’

‘That’s much more than half-way,’ said Denison. ‘Dry land not far ahead.’

Diana and Lyn splashed up along the reeds in the shallower water. They were soaked and bedraggled. Denison pushed with a paddle and eased the punt towards them. ‘You all right?’ he asked quietly.

Diana nodded wearily and Lyn said, ‘How much more of this?’

‘Not far,’ said Denison. ‘You can travel the rest of the way in the punt.’

McCready nodded. ‘I think we’ve got clear. I haven’t heard any shooting for quite a while.’

Harding was still doing something at the bottom of the punt. ‘I’m afraid we’re in trouble,’ he said. ‘I thought this water was the accumulated drips from the paddles, but I think we have a leak. The punt is sinking.’

‘Oh, hell!’ said McCready.

‘My fault,’ said Harding unhappily. ‘I think I overloaded the gun. The strain on the punt was too much.’

Denison blew out his breath. McCready could have been right; the barrel
could
have burst. He said, ‘It seems you’ll have to walk the rest of the way, Doctor. Do you think you can make it?’

‘I’ll be all right when I’ve given myself another injection.’

‘We’ll jam the boat into the reeds,’ said McCready. ‘And then get going. I think the mist is lifting and I want to be out of this swamp by then.’

Carey strolled through a stand of tall timber and looked towards the house. It was not the sort of house you’d expect to see in Britain because the architecture was all wrong, mainly in matters of detail, but he supposed that if it had been in England it would have been called a manor house—one of the lesser stately homes.

He stopped and lit his pipe, ruminating on history. In the days when Finland was a Grand Duchy and part of Imperial Russia the house would have been the residence of one of the minor nobility or, possibly, a bourgeois Swedish Finn of the merchant class. More recently it had belonged to a company in Helsinki who used it as a holiday home for top staff and as a venue for executive conferences. Now it was rented by British Intelligence for their own undisclosed purposes.

Certainly Carey, as he strolled in the grounds clad in Harris tweed and puffing contemplatively on his pipe, looked every inch—or centimetre—the squire or whatever was the Finnish equivalent. He struck another match and, shielding it with his hand, applied it to his recalcitrant pipe. If he was worried it did not show in his manner. With the back of his mind he worried about McCready and his party who had not yet shown up, but with the forefront he worried about what was happening back in London. Apparently his boss, Sir William Lyng, had been unable to
do much about Thornton and the in-fighting in Whitehall was becoming severe.

He achieved satisfaction with the drawing of his pipe and glanced towards the house again to see Armstrong approaching. He waited until he was within easy conversational reach, then said, ‘Is that boffin still fiddling with those equations?’

‘He’s finished.’

‘About time. Has he found it?’

‘No one tells me anything,’ said Armstrong. ‘But he wants to see you. Another thing—George McCready phoned in. He couldn’t say much on the phone but I gather he has a tale to tell. He wants medical supplies for a bullet in the arm.’

‘Who?’

‘Dr Harding.’

Carey grunted. ‘Any other casualties?’

‘None that George mentioned.’

‘Good! Let’s go to see the boffin.’

Armstrong fell in step with him. ‘And there’s a man to see you—a chap called Thornton.’

Carey’s pace faltered. ‘He’s here now?’

‘I put him in the library.’

‘Has he seen the boffin?’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘He mustn’t.’ Carey looked sideways at Armstrong. ‘Do you know anything about Thornton?’

‘I’ve seen him around,’ said Armstrong. ‘But not to speak to. He’s a bit above my level on the totem pole.’

‘Yes,’ said Carey. ‘One of the Whitehall manipulators and as tricky as they come. These are my specific instructions regarding Thornton. You’re to go back to the library and offer him tea—he’ll like that. You’re to keep him busy until I see him. I don’t want him prowling around; he makes me nervous. Got that?’

‘Yes,’ said Armstrong. ‘What’s the trouble?’

‘There’s a bit of an argument about policy going on back home and Thornton is pushing a bit too hard. It’s nothing that should concern you as long as you obey orders—my orders. If Thornton tries to order you around refer him to me.’

‘All right,’ said Armstrong.

‘I’ll tell you something about Thornton,’ said Carey candidly. ‘He’s a bastrich—that’s a word worthy of Lewis Carroll. It means a combination of a bastard and a son of a bitch. So you don’t say a word about this operation in Thornton’s presence. That’s another order from me.’

‘Not even if he asks me directly?’

‘Refer him to me,’ said Carey. ‘And you won’t get into trouble. I know he’s high-powered and you are but an underling, but you are in a different department. If he tries anything on just tell him to go to hell in a polite way, and I’ll back you up.’ He smiled. ‘And Lyng will back me so you have support all the way to the top.’

Armstrong looked relieved. ‘That’s clear enough.’

Carey nodded shortly. ‘Good. You attend to Thornton. I’ll see the boffin.’

The man whom Carey called the boffin was Sir Charles Hastings, F.R.S., a physicist not without eminence. Carey, whose opinion of scientists was low, treated him robustly and with a lack of deference which Sir Charles, who had a sense of humour, found refreshing. Carey now, on entering the room, said, “What’s the score?’

Sir Charles picked up a set of papers. ‘The answer is unequivocal. This is the crucial document. In it Dr Merikken outlines the germ of an idea, and develops it in a most interesting way. As you may know, the concept of the grazing angle has been utilized in the X-ray telescopes we now use, but Merikken took the idea much farther—which is strange considering he worked so many years ago.’

Sir Charles paused, contemplating a vision of genius. ‘Merikken not only worked out the theory but subjected it to tests in the laboratory—the only way, of course. Here is a list of his tests, the results of which are frankly astounding. In his first test he was able to obtain an X-ray reflectance of nearly 25 per cent of the incident illumination.’

‘Hold on a minute,’ said Carey. ‘How does that compare with what we’ve been able to do up to now?’

Sir Charles laughed shortly. ‘There’s absolutely no comparison. Apart from anything else, this is going to revolutionize X-ray astronomy; it makes possible an X-ray lens of considerable resolution. But that was just the first of Merikken’s tests; in his final test before he ended the series he’d done considerably better than that—and his apparatus was not up to modern standards.’

Carey felt his hands empty and took out his pipe. ‘So if we put a team on to this, gave it a hell of a lot of money and a reasonable amount of time, we could improve on what Merikken did. Would you agree with that, Sir Charles?’

‘Indeed I would. There’s nothing in here that offends any of the laws of physics. It reduces itself to a matter of engineering—advanced engineering, mark you, but nothing more than that.’ He spread his hands. ‘The X-ray laser has now moved from the barely possible to the probable.’

Carey gestured with his pipe. ‘Anything else of value in those papers?’

Sir Charles shook his head. ‘Nothing at all. This, for instance—’ he picked up the hardbound exercise book—‘…this is a series of calculations of nuclear cross-sections. Quite primitive and totally useless.’ His voice was a trifle disparaging. ‘All the rest is the same.’

‘Thank you, Sir Charles.’ Carey hesitated. ‘I’d be obliged if you would stay in this room until I return. I don’t think I’ll be more than a few minutes.’ He ignored Sir Charles’s expression of polite surprise and left the room.

Outside the library he paused and squared his shoulders before opening the door. Thornton was lounging in a leather chair and Armstrong stood at the window. Armstrong looked harassed and was visibly relieved when he saw Carey. ‘Good morning,’ said Thornton. His voice was cheerful. ‘I must say you have your staff well trained, Carey. Mr Armstrong is a positive oyster.’

‘Morning,’ said Carey curtly.

‘I just popped in to find out how Sir Charles Hastings is doing. You must know we’re all very keen to see the results of your labours.’

Carey sat down, wondering how Thornton knew about Sir Charles. More and more he was certain there was a leak in Lyng’s office. He said blandly, ‘You’ll have to get that from Sir William Lyng.’

Thornton’s cheerfulness diminished a shade. ‘Well, I’m sure we can excuse Mr Armstrong while we have a discussion on that matter.’ He turned to Armstrong. ‘If you don’t mind.’

Armstrong made as though to move to the door but stopped as Carey snapped, ‘Stay where you are, Ian.’

Thornton frowned. ‘As you know, there are certain…er…details which Mr Armstrong is not entitled to know.’

‘He stays,’ said Carey flatly. ‘I want a witness.’

‘A witness!’ Thornton’s eyebrows rose.

‘Come off it,’ said Carey. ‘When this operation is finished I make out a final report—including what I hear in this room. So does Armstrong—independently. Got the picture?’

‘I can’t agree to that,’ said Thornton stiffly.

‘Then you don’t have to talk. What you don’t say Armstrong can’t hear.’ Carey smiled pleasantly. ‘What time is your plane back to London?’

‘I must say you’re not making things easy,’ said Thornton querulously.

Carey was blunt. ‘It’s not my intention to make things easy. You’ve been getting underfoot all through this operation. I haven’t liked that and neither has Lyng.’

All cheerfulness had deserted Thornton. ‘I think you misunderstood your position, Carey,’ he said. ‘You’re not yet so big that you can’t be knocked over. When the Minister reads my report I think you’ll be in for a shock.’

Carey shrugged. ‘You make your report and I’ll make mine. As for the Minister I wouldn’t know. I don’t rub shoulders with the Cabinet—I leave that to Lyng.’

Thornton stood up. ‘After this is over Lyng may not be around. I wouldn’t rely on him to protect you.’

‘Lyng can fight his own battles,’ said Carey. ‘He’s been very good at it so far. Ian, will you escort Mr Thornton to his car. I don’t think he has anything more to say.’

‘Just one small item,’ said Thornton. ‘There are, of course, people other than those in your department who have been involved. You had better make sure that Denison and the Meyrick girl are silenced. That’s all I have to say.’

He stalked out, followed by Armstrong. Carey sighed and took out his matches to light his pipe but stared at it in disgust and put it down unlit. Presently he heard a car door slam and the sound of tyres on gravel. When Armstrong came back he said, ‘He’s gone?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then give me a cigarette, for God’s sake!’

Armstrong looked surprised but produced a packet of cigarettes. As he held a match for Carey, he said, ‘You were a bit rough on Thornton, weren’t you?’

Carey puffed inexpertly, and coughed. ‘It’s the only way to handle a bastard like that. He’s the biggest con man in Whitehall, but if you hit him over the head hard enough he gets the message.’

‘I’m surprised he took it from you. Aren’t you afraid he’ll jerk the rug from under you? I thought he was a big boy in the corridors of power.’

‘Corridors of power!’ Carey looked as though he was about to spit. ‘I wonder if C. P. Snow knew he was coining
the
cliché of the twentieth century. I’m not afraid of Thornton; he can’t get at me directly. Anyway, I’m coming up to retirement and I’ll spit in his eye any time I feel like it.’

He drew on the cigarette and expelled smoke without inhaling. ‘It’s nothing to do with you, Ian. You just soldier on and don’t worry your head about policy.’

‘I don’t even know what it’s all about,’ said Armstrong with a smile.

‘You’re better off that way.’ Carey stood up and stared out of the window. ‘Did you notice anything odd about that conversation?’

Armstrong thought back. ‘I can’t say that I did.’

‘I did. Thornton got so mad at me that he slipped.’ Carey drew on the cigarette and blew a plume of smoke. ‘How did he know about Denison? You tell me that, my son, and you’ll win a big cigar.’ He held out the cigarette and looked at it distastefully, then stubbed it out in an ashtray with unnecessary violence. He said curtly, ‘Let me know when Denison and McCready arrive.’