Running Blind / The Freedom Trap (19 page)

‘There’s no output.’

‘Is that bad?’

He looked at me oddly. In a gentle voice he said, ‘It’s impossible.’

I said, ‘Maybe there’s something broken in there.’

‘You don’t get it,’ said Nordlinger. ‘A circuit is just what it says—a circle. You break the circle anywhere you get no current flow anywhere.’ He applied the probe again. ‘Here there’s a current of a pulsed and extremely complex form.’ Again the screen jumped into life. ‘And here, in the same circuit, what do we get?’

I looked at the blank screen. ‘Nothing?’

‘Nothing,’ he said firmly. He hesitated. ‘Or, to put it more precisely, nothing that can show on this test rig.’ He tapped the gadget. ‘Mind if I take this thing away for a while?’

‘Why?’

‘I’d like to put it through some rather more rigorous tests. We have another shop.’ He cleared his throat and appeared to be a little embarrassed. ‘Uh…you won’t be allowed in there.’

‘Oh—secret stuff.’ That would be in one of the areas to which Fleet’s pass would give access. ‘All right, Lee; you put the gadget through its paces and I’ll go and shave. I’ll wait for you in your office.’

‘Wait a minute,’ he said. ‘Where did you get it, Alan?’

I said, ‘You tell me what it does and I’ll tell you where it came from.’

He grinned. ‘It’s a deal.’

I left him disconnecting the gadget from the test rig and went back to his office where I picked up the electric shaver. Fifteen minutes later I felt a lot better after having got rid of the hair. I waited in Nordlinger’s office for a long time—over an hour and a half—before he came back.

He came in carrying the gadget as though it was a stick of dynamite and laid it gently on his desk. ‘I’ll have to ask you where you got this,’ he said briefly.

‘Not until you tell me what it does,’ I said.

He sat behind his desk and looked at the complex of metal and plastic with something like loathing in his eyes. ‘It does nothing,’ he said flatly. ‘Absolutely nothing.’

‘Come off it,’ I said. ‘It must do
something
.’

‘Nothing!’ he repeated. ‘There is no measurable output.’ He leaned forward and said softly, ‘Alan, out there I have instruments that can measure any damn part of the electromagnetic spectrum from radio waves of such low frequency you wouldn’t believe possible right up to cosmic radiation—and there’s nothing coming out of this contraption.’

‘As I said before—maybe something has broken.’

‘That cat won’t jump; I tested everything.’ He pushed at it and it moved sideways on the desk. ‘There are three things I don’t like about this. Firstly, there are components in here that are not remotely like anything I’ve seen before, components of which I don’t even understand the function. I’m supposed to be pretty good at my job, and that, in itself, is enough to disturb me. Secondly, it’s obviously incomplete—it’s just part of a bigger complex—and yet I doubt if I would understand it even if I had everything. Thirdly—and this is the serious one—it shouldn’t work.’

‘But it isn’t working,’ I said.

He waved his hand distractedly. ‘Perhaps I put it wrong. There should be an output of some kind. Good Christ, you can’t keep pushing electricity into a machine—juice that gets used up—without getting something out. That’s impossible.’

I said, ‘Maybe it’s coming out in the form of heat.’

He shook his head sadly. ‘I got mad and went to extreme measures. I pushed a thousand watts of current through it in the end. If the energy output was in heat then the goddamn thing would have glowed like an electric heater. But no—it stayed as cool as ever.’

‘A bloody sight cooler than you’re behaving,’ I said.

He threw up his hands in exasperation. ‘Alan, if you were a mathematician and one day you came across an equation in which two and two made five without giving a nonsensical result then you’d feel exactly as I do. It’s as though a physicist were confronted by a perpetual motion machine which works.’

‘Hold on,’ I said. ‘A perpetual motion machine gets something for nothing—energy usually. This is the other way round.’

‘It makes no difference,’ he said. ‘Energy can neither be created nor destroyed.’ As I opened my mouth he said quickly, ‘And don’t start talking about atomic energy. Matter can be regarded as frozen, concentrated energy.’ He looked at the gadget with grim eyes. ‘This thing is destroying energy.’

Destroying energy!
I rolled the concept around my cerebrum to see what I could make of it. The answer came up fast—nothing much. I said, ‘Let’s not go overboard. Let’s see what we have. You put an input into it and you get out…’

‘Nothing,’ said Nordlinger.

‘Nothing you can measure,’ I corrected. ‘You may have some good instrumentation here, Lee, but I don’t think you’ve got the whole works. I’ll bet that there’s some genius somewhere who not only knows what’s coming out of there but has an equally involved gadget that can measure it.’

‘Then I’d like to know what it is,’ he said. ‘Because it’s right outside my experience.’

I said, ‘Lee, you’re a technician, not a scientist. You’ll admit that?’

‘Sure; I’m an engineer from way back.’

‘That’s why you have a crew-cut—but this was designed by a long-hair.’ I grinned. ‘Or an egghead.’

‘I’d still like to know where you got it.’

‘You’d better be more interested in where it’s going. Have you got a safe—a really secure one?’

‘Sure.’ He did a double-take. ‘You want
me
to keep
this?’

‘For forty-eight hours,’ I said. ‘If I don’t claim it in that time you’d better give it to your superior officer together with all your forebodings, and let him take care of it.’

Nordlinger looked at me with a cold eye.’ I don’t know but what I shouldn’t give it to him right now. Forty-eight hours might mean my neck.’

‘You part with it now and it will be my neck,’ I said grimly.

He picked up the gadget. ‘This is American and it doesn’t belong here at Keflavik. I’d like to know where it does belong.’

‘You’re right about it not belonging here,’ I said. ‘But I’m betting it’s Russian—and they want it back.’

‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘It’s full of American components.’

‘Maybe the Russians learned a lesson from Macnamara on cost-effectiveness. Maybe they’re shopping in the best market. I don’t give two bloody hoots if the components were made in the Congo—I still want you to hold on to it.’

He laid the gadget on his desk again very carefully. ‘Okay—but I’ll split the difference; I’ll give you twenty-four hours. And even then you don’t get it back without a full explanation.’

‘Then I’ll have to be satisfied with that,’ I said. ‘Providing you lend me your car. I left the Land-Rover in Laugarvatn.’

‘You’ve got a goddamn nerve.’ Nordlinger put his hand in his pocket and tossed the car key on the desk.

‘You’ll find it in the car park near the gate—the blue Chevrolet.’

‘I know it.’ I put on my jacket and went to the corner to pick up the rifles. ‘Lee, do you know a man called Fleet?’

He thought for a moment. ‘No.’

‘Or McCarthy?’

‘The CPO you met in the shop is McCarthy.’

‘Not the same one,’ I said. ‘I’ll be seeing you, Lee. We’ll go fishing sometime.’

‘Stay out of jail.’

I paused at the door. ‘What makes you say a thing like that?’

His hand closed over the gadget. ‘Anyone who walks around with a thing like this ought to be in jail,’ he said feelingly.

I laughed, and left him staring at it. Nordlinger’s sense of what was right had been offended. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and an engineer usually works to the rule book—that long list of verities tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was originally compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken rules other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition from Newtonian to quantum physics without breaking his stride can believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays. Lee Nordlinger was not one of these men, but I’d bet the man who designed the gadget was.

I found the car and put the rifles and the ammunition into the boot. I was still wearing Jack Case’s pistol in the shoulder holster and so now there was nothing to spoil the set of my coat. Not that I was any more presentable; there were scorch marks on the front from the burning peat of Kennikin’s fire, and a torn sleeve from where a bullet had come a shade too close at Geysir. It was stained with mud and so were my trousers, I was looking more and more like a tramp—but a clean-shaven tramp.

I climbed into the car and trickled in the direction of the International Airport, thinking of what Nordlinger hadn’t been able to tell me about the gadget. According to Lee it was an impossible object and that made it scientifically important—so important that men had died and had their legs blown off and had been cooked in boiling water because of it.

And one thing made me shiver. By Kennikin’s last words just before I escaped from the house at Thingvallavatn he had made it quite clear that I was now more important than
the gadget. He had been prepared to kill me without first laying his hands on it and, for all he knew, once I was dead the gadget would have been gone forever with me.

I had Nordlinger’s evidence that the gadget was of outstanding scientific importance, so what was it about me that made me even more important than that? It’s not often in this drear, technological world that a single man becomes of more importance than a scientific breakthrough. Maybe we were returning to sanity at last, but I didn’t think so.

There was a side entrance to the Icelandair office which one could use without going through the public concourse, so I parked the car and went in. I bumped pleasantly into a hostess, and asked, ‘Is Elin Ragnarsdottir around?’

‘Elin? She’s in the waiting-room.’

I walked into the waiting-room and found her alone. She jumped up quickly. ‘Alan, you’ve been so long!’

‘It took longer than I expected.’ Her face was strained and there seemed to be a sense of urgency about her. ‘You didn’t have trouble?’

‘No trouble—not for me. Here’s the newspaper.’

I took it from her. ‘Then what’s the matter?’

‘I think you’d better…you’d better read the paper.’ She turned away.

I shook it open and saw a photograph on the front page, a life-size reproduction of my
sgian dubh.
Underneath, the black headline screamed:
HAVE YOU SEEN THIS KNIFE
?

The knife had been found embedded in the heart of a man sitting in a car parked in the driveway of a house in Laugarvatn. The man had been identified as a British tourist called John Case. The house and the Volkswagen in which Case had been found belonged to Gunnar Arnarsson who was absent, being in charge of a pony-trekking expedition. The house had been broken into and apparently searched. In the absence of Gunnar Arnarsson and his wife, Sigurlin Asgeirsdottir, it was impossible to tell if anything
had been stolen. Both were expected to be contacted by the police.

The knife was so unusual in form that the police had requested the newspaper to publish a photograph of it. Anyone who had seen this knife or a similar knife was requested to call at his nearest police station. There was a boxed paragraph in which the knife was correctly identified as a Scottish
sgian dubh,
and after that the paragraph degenerated into pseudo-historical blather.

The police were also trying to find a grey Volvo registered in Reykjavik; anyone having seen it was requested to communicate with the police at once. The registration number was given.

I looked at Elin. ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ I said quietly.

‘It
is
the man you went to see at Geysir?’

‘Yes.’ I thought of how I had mistrusted Jack Case and left him unconscious near Kennikin’s house. Perhaps he had not been untrustworthy at all because I had no illusions about who had killed him. Kennikin had the
sgian dubh
and Kennikin had the Volkswagen—and probably Kennikin had stumbled across Case in his search for me.

But why had Case been killed?

‘This is dreadful,’ said Elin. ‘Another man killed.’ Her voice was filled with despair.

‘I didn’t kill him,’ I said baldly.

She picked up the paper. ‘How did the police know about the Volvo?’

‘Standard procedure,’ I said. ‘As soon as Case was identified the police would dig into whatever he’d been doing since he entered the country. They’d soon find he hired a car—and it wasn’t the Volkswagen he was found in.’

I was glad the Volvo was tucked away out of sight in Valtyýr’s garage in Vik. ‘When is Valtyýr going back to Vik?’ I asked.

‘Tomorrow,’ said Elin.

It seemed as though everything was closing in on me. Lee Nordlinger had given me a twenty-four hour ultimatum; it was too much to hope that Valtyýr wouldn’t check on the Volvo as soon as he got back to Vik—he might even go to the Reykjavik police if he felt certain it was the car they were searching for. And when the police laid hands on Sigurlin then the balloon would certainly go up—I couldn’t see her keeping silent in the face of a corpse parked in her home.

Elin touched my arm. ‘What are you going to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Right now I just want to sit and think.’

I began to piece the fragments together and gradually they made some kind of sense which hinged around Kennikin’s sudden switch of attitude after he had captured me. At first he had been all for extracting the gadget from me and he was looking forward with unwholesome delight to the operation. But then he lost interest in the gadget and announced that my death was the more important, and that was just after he had received a telephone call.

I ticked off the sequence of events. At Geysir I had told Case of my suspicions of Slade, and Case had agreed to pass them on to Taggart. No matter what happened Slade would then be thoroughly investigated. But I had seen Slade talking to Case just before Kennikin took me. Suppose that Case had aroused Slade’s suspicions in some way? Slade was a clever man—a handler of men—and maybe Case had shown his hand.

What would Slade do? He would contact Kennikin to find if I had been captured. He would insist that his cover next to Taggart should remain unbroken at all costs and that this was more important than the gadget. He would say, ‘Kill the bastard!’ That was why Kennikin had switched.