Operation Pax (6 page)

Squire fell back with an exclamation. Squire’s companion, seated still at his desk, quite feebly echoed it. Routh had undeniably caught his adversaries off balance. The sense of this enabled him to nod briskly at the seated man and to wave Squire casually back. ‘Good afternoon,’ he said.

The words came out with nothing of the anxious calculation that had marked his attempt at a similar greeting in the bank that morning. Had he not always known he would carry the big moment when it came? Routh glanced round the room with the easy command of an important person; with the sort of glance that makes enormous leather armchairs propel themselves forward, corks pop, syphons spurt, cigar boxes fly open. ‘Director not here?’ he asked briskly. ‘It’s really with him that I’d better have a word.’

Squire and his companion glanced at each other. At length the seated man spoke. ‘I don’t know you from Adam,’ he said. ‘And apparently you don’t know me.
I
am the Director.’

Routh again gave an assured glance round him. The room went some way to substantiate this false claim. The furniture was handsome, and all round the walls were the sort of heavily tooled books you see in expensive shop windows in the West End. Over the fireplace was a high-class dirty picture: a lot of naked women lolloping around a pool. Underneath this a bright fire burned in an open grate. Routh walked across to it and warmed his hands. ‘Nice place you have here,’ he said. ‘Plenty of books. Nice picture.’

‘I fear I have not the pleasure of your acquaintance.’ Squire’s companion was a small man with a high domed forehead and almost no hair. His fine hands still lay passively before him. The rest of him was insignificant and even meagre, as if his body had no other function than that of providing a line of communication between that big brain and those long and powerful fingers. He had bleak grey eyes which he now turned from Routh to Squire. ‘Presumably this is the gentleman whom you supposed that you had – um – accommodated in number eight?’

‘Of course it is.’ Squire, who had still by no means recovered his self-possession, stared at his late prisoner with mingled bewilderment and malice. ‘But I can’t think how he managed–’

‘We learn that sort of thing very early in my crowd.’ Routh put both hands in his trouser pockets and chinked the few coins in the one without a hole in it. ‘But you had no idea of that, had you, Squire?’

‘Your crowd?’ The white-coated man spoke sharply, and as he did so swung round upon Squire. ‘Did I understand you to say that your encounter with this fellow was a perfectly casual one?’

Before Squire could reply, Routh laughed harshly. ‘So your poor friend believed,’ he said. ‘Mind you, there’s an excuse for him. The idea of attacking the girl and then hanging round until somebody appeared – well, it wasn’t too bad, was it? Squire was convinced he had me where he wanted me. And so in I came. Not my own notion, I must confess. Quite a junior colleague’s, as it happens.’

On the mantelpiece behind Routh’s head, and just below the dirty picture, a clock was ticking softly. At any moment, he realized, it might begin to affect him as had the clock in the bank that morning; it might begin to pound like a hammer inside his head. And if his nerve went he was done for. For certainly the ice on which he was now skating was paper-thin. That he had fooled Squire from the start was a notion that might now take in Squire himself. But could it conceivably take in this other fellow? Only – Routh saw – if it
attracted
the other fellow. If this egg-headed scientist disliked Squire enough to be willing to see him in a mug’s role, then any cock-and-bull story having that effect might convince him for a while. The thing to do, then, was to make Squire look a perfect fool.

‘Poor old Squire! Has he told you about my father in the asylum and my mother gone off to New Zealand? It would have made a cat laugh, the way it all took him in. Thought he was getting a waif and stray to keep under his thumb at some of your dirtiest work here. And all the time he was getting
us
.’

The clock was still behaving normally behind him. Squire was flushed and his shoulders had gone even more unnaturally high and square. The other fellow rose from his desk and walked away from it. ‘Haven’t you,’ he asked, ‘taken on rather a dangerous mission? The colleagues you speak of must be uncommonly obliged to you. It’s a pity’ – and with sudden dangerous sweetness the egg-headed man smiled – ‘that they won’t be in a position even to send a wreath.’

Once more Routh contrived a convincing laugh. ‘If you ask me,’ he said, ‘it’s your friend Squire here that’s about due for a wreath. If he were with our crowd he’d have been taken for a ride long ago. But as for me – well, naturally I’ve taken my precautions.’

‘It’s damned nonsense.’ Squire had taken a stride forward. ‘The little rat’s bluffing. He’s simply making fools of us.’

‘It may be nonsense. But it’s a sort of nonsense that requires getting to the bottom of.’ Egg-Head turned his eyes slowly on Routh. ‘You have a crowd,’ he said. ‘You have colleagues. You have come here by design. You have taken precautions to ensure your personal safety. If there is any sense in all this, I am quite ready to hear it.’ He turned with a sudden flash of temper upon Squire. ‘And as this whole piece of folly is your responsibility, you had better do so too.’

‘I tell you, it’s all–’

‘Be quiet and hear the fellow out… Now then, what do you mean by your crowd?’

‘I mean a crowd that knows about
your
crowd. All that science stuff.’ He jerked his head in the direction of the long line of laboratories he had shortly before traversed. ‘We know what it’s about. We know what you’re making. Valuable stuff, I’d call it. We think it needs protection. And that you need protection too.’

‘Expensive protection, no doubt?’

‘You mayn’t like the bill, I agree. But it’s probably very much in your interest to pay up, all the same.’

‘I see.’ The meagre man in the white coat again gave his disturbingly sweet smile. ‘But suppose we are not interested? And suppose we are minded to give these precious colleagues of yours a little practical demonstration that they rather need protection on their own account? If they exist – which is something I am by no means convinced of – we can certainly make you tell us where to find them. We could then return you to them – or return some significant part of you – just as an indication that we are not minded to do business with them. Don’t you agree with me?’

Beneath the unfamiliar Routh a Routh all too fully known stirred uneasily. He knew that one falter meant that he was done for. Conversely, however wild his story, unflawed assurance might yet carry him triumphantly through. ‘You just can’t afford it,’ he said. ‘If our lot simply let the truth about you seep out, where would you be? The moment we simply
knew
, don’t you see, we had you where we wanted you.’

There was a brief silence. Squire and his companion were once more exchanging what was a purely disconcerted glance.

‘Perhaps you wouldn’t mind telling us what you
do
know? Particularly if I admit frankly that there is a good deal of force in your proposition?’ Egg-Head spoke with a new mildness.

‘Know? Why, that you have the means of making gold, of course.’

‘Thank you.’ For the first time Egg-Head looked really nonplussed. He was staring at Routh as if considering whether here was something really very deep indeed. ‘And Squire here is a sort of mad Midas? In imagining that he was luring you here it was his intention to transmute you into a full-size statue – the Golden Dustman, perhaps – and exhibit you at the Royal Academy?’

‘I don’t know what Squire was fool enough to think.’ Routh spoke almost at random. Had he made some wrong move? Perhaps the concern of these people was not with gold at all. Gold, after all, had been no more than a clever guess. Quickly he endeavoured to retrieve himself. ‘We’ll call it gold,’ he said. ‘Perhaps we don’t know for certain – and then again perhaps we do. But it’s certainly something you can’t afford to have talked about. And – mind you – I’m no more than a messenger.’ Routh paused, displeased at thus having demoted himself. ‘Or say an envoy – that’s about it. And what I require now is simply this: a substantial sum on leaving as an earnest of good faith–’

‘I beg your pardon? Of what?’ Egg-Head had returned to his desk and sat down again.

‘There’s no need to be funny.’ Routh’s voice rose to a pitch. He realized that he was near the end of his tether, and that he must bring the thing off within the next few minutes if he was to bring it off at all. ‘I’m to have a reasonable sum down. And after that my crowd will communicate with you by means that you will be told about later.’

‘I see. Well, I think we can settle this matter almost at once. Only we shall first have to consult higher authority.’ Egg-Head had a new note in his voice; it was almost a note of humour, and Routh was unable to find it reassuring. ‘As you very acutely suspected, I am not the Director. Squire, will you slip across and explain matters? No, my dear fellow, you need not be apprehensive. I can keep a very sufficient eye on our friend. And although I dislike firearms…’ Egg-Head’s right hand vanished into a drawer of his desk, to reappear again holding an automatic pistol. ‘Explain to the Director that we shall not occupy his time for more than five minutes.’

Squire’s departure was by the green baize door that Routh had first become aware of when peering through the keyhole. There could be no doubt that the Director lived, or at least worked, on the island at the farther end of the enclosed wooden bridge. Supposing that there was no delay, Squire would presumably be back with him within five minutes. Meanwhile Egg-Head continued to sit at his desk, his back to the baize door, the revolver ready in his hand, and his eye never straying from Routh for an instant. A minute went by in silence, and Routh became aware that the clock behind him was beginning to misbehave. Looking at those two bleak eyes and the muzzle of the pistol, he found it, in fact difficult to remain convinced that he commanded the situation. And no sooner was doubt admitted than it grew. Routh realized that he had shot his bolt. When a fresh mind was brought in – and moreover a powerful mind such as the Director presumably possessed – it would be all up with him.

Egg-Head broke the silence. ‘Do you know, I think you have put up rather a good show? I no longer have the slightest inclination to believe your story, but as an improvisation it is thoroughly creditable to you. You are presumably just what poor Squire took you for: a mere vagabond that nobody is going to worry about, and regularly in some petty way on the wrong side of the law. That’s it, is it not?’

Routh made no answer. He was chiefly aware that his stomach felt bad, just as it had in the bank.

‘What I like is the way you really have tried to exploit the situation rather than simply wriggle out of it. I wish we could take you on, my man. You’d at least, one day, be more use than Squire. Unfortunately it’s dead against the rules. So you see where you stand.’

Routh heard his own faint voice, speaking as if in the air above him. ‘You can’t do that! You can’t do
that
to me!’

‘Be very sure that we can. And look here – there’s no need to drag it out. Take a rush at me, man. I can promise you that your death will be instantaneous.’

The room had begun to sway before Routh. Egg-Head’s words had been altogether impassively spoken. It was impossible to tell whether compassion, or mockery, or the depraved wish for a moment’s mortal excitement had prompted them. It was only clear that the game was indeed wholly up. He was to be murdered.

‘You poor devil.’ This time the accent came through. It really was compassion – compassion tinged with embarrassment at the mere sight of anything so miserable and so shabby and so helpless as Routh. And in Routh it lit a last desperate flare of rage. He felt, without any volition of his own, his whole body tauten to spring. If even with a burst of bullets in him he could get his dying fingers round that throat…

The baize door opened. A split second longer and he would have sprung. As it was he stared over Egg-Head’s shoulder, fascinated. For the door had opened only a little, and what had entered the room was a cat. It leapt noiselessly to the back of a chair close to the man’s back. He was totally unaware of it. If only… And then the thing happened. The cat took a further leap to Egg-Head’s shoulder. It was evidently a familiar domestic trick – but for the moment it caught the man unaware and helpless. Routh sprang. The two men went down together with a crash, struggling for the weapon. Routh had it – and in the same instant became aware of Egg-Head’s mouth before him, wide open and screaming. Routh thrust the muzzle in it and pulled the trigger. And the great domed head exploded under his eyes like a bomb.

Routh tried to rise. One of his knees, slipping from the body, grated painfully on a hard object on the floor. It was a bunch of keys, similar to that which Squire had used in coming through the park and gardens. Routh grabbed it and hauled himself to his feet. He must get out. The man who was to have killed him instantaneously he had himself instantaneously killed. The automatic as it emptied itself into the grey pulp of Egg-Head’s brain must have alarmed the whole place. Within seconds not only Squire and the Director but everybody in the building – even the people whom he had watched playing croquet – would be about his ears. He had seconds to get out of this house; minutes to escape from this whole infernal region and reach the salvation of the hidden Douglas.

Routh turned to the door by which he had entered. As he did so he saw the cat once more. It was crouched on the dead man’s desk with humped back and waving tail. He thought it was going to spring at him. But the cat remained immobile – a great honey-coloured creature with long curling white whiskers. Its two forepaws lay on a folded sheet of quarto paper.

As if from very far back in time, the memory of what he had learnt about Formula Ten swam in Routh’s mind. What lay there on the desk was something that Egg-Head ought not to have had access to except amid the most elaborate precautions for its security, something worth millions. Realization of his opportunity came to Routh like a great flood of white light. To snatch this paper from out of the paws of the cat might be to wrest unspeakable triumph from what had seconds before appeared defeat and death.