Salvage for the Saint (21 page)

“One hundred and sixty-five,” Lebec translated. “So, we shall have perhaps two hundred bars, a weight of two thousand kilograms.”

Presently there was a tug on the line, and the lugubrious crewman started the winch to haul the penultimate load up and aboard.

“Monsieur Templar has done well,” Lebec conceded. “It is hard work, I think.”

Simon Templar would have been the first to agree. All the long afternoon he had laboured steadily on the sea bed, loading the gold into the net, bar by bar, jerking the rope each time he had filled and secured it, gradually emptying the boat of its weighty treasure. Four times he had surfaced—once, after the first loading, to report the discovery of Bernadotti’s anchored corpse, and three times to renew the air cylinders on his back. And then he had gone down one more time into the deepening green silence, for the last consignment of ingots he intended to send up. The bottom layer he had decided to leave where it was, all for himself, to be collected at some future date.

He glanced at his air gauge as the net came down on its last trip. Fifteen minutes left. It would be enough, and with several minutes to spare. He steered the net into the cabin and began loading.

The discovery of a thoroughly irrigated Bernadotti had unquestionably solved the immediate mystery of his whereabouts, but the other questions still crowded Simon’s mind. The enigma of Finnegan was deeper than ever, with things looking blacker for him, by the Saint’s previous reasoning. Except that it was all somehow lacking in neatness; it had the untidiness of a theory which the facts would only fit if they were wrenched into shape with Procrustean efforts. And there was now one other loose scrap of fact which suddenly exploded into his consciousness.

Bernadotti’s body had manifestly been anchored where it was by someone; and that led by ineluctable logic to the conclusion that there must be another diver somewhere, or at least there must have been another diver.

And that deduction reminded him of something which had only half-registered on his attention when he was getting the one remaining scuba outfit from the store-room to being the work of the afternoon.

That was it. The one remaining scuba outfit. There had originally been three—the Saint was sure of that. And one, or most of one, had been lost in the incident with the dinghy.

When he had surfaced that afternoon for the first time, he had gone to the store-room and checked again. There was definitely and positively no sign of the third scuba outfit; and although he had not previously counted the spare air tanks he was fairly certain that some of them, too, had gone.

Not being a believer in the ability of diving gear to grow little legs and wander off on its own, any more than in that of corpses to tie themselves to the sea bed, Simon was obliged to believe, by the logic aforesaid, that somebody must have removed the scuba equipment and used it while conveying Bernadotti’s body down to its watery burial place.

Which meant, the same logic went on to tell him, that somewhere somebody must still be at large, lurking and hiding, with the gold still his objective.

So they would need to have all their wits about them when they were back on the Phoenix.

Who was the Somebody? Simon’s thoughts swung back to Finnegan. If the mystery of how he might have come to be locked in the store-room could be allowed to pass for the moment—and Simon decided that for the sake of making some mental headway it could—then all the rest was not quite impossible, even including the trick of taking Bernadotti’s body down to the bottom of the sea.

The Saint went over the events which had followed on that unguarded moment when the dinghy had been capsized. He pictured it all vividly, in a kind of action replay, with an imaginary stopwatch going in the background. First the collision; then the short period, a minute perhaps, when they had bobbed up and down in the sea, watching the Phoenix plough on; then the brief swim; then the pickup by Lebec in the launch; the hauling aboard of Descartes’ mangled body; and finally the warily circuitous approach to the Phoenix, where she lay at anchor near the sunken boat. In all, perhaps fifteen minutes—twenty at the outside. That could have been enough. Finnegan could have slung the body of Bernadotti overboard, suitably weighted; he could have followed it down, secured it beside the boat, and got back on board and out of his diving gear—all within ten or twelve minutes.

Finnegan could have done it—in theory. The case against him might have been strengthened, but it remained unproved. One point in his favour, although a small point, was that the third set of scuba gear hadn’t been found on board. The Captain might yet turn out to be an innocently genuine toper.

In which case, the continuing logic told Simon, there must be someone else at large with the diving gear—perhaps lurking about underwater somewhere nearby.

Simon continued to chew it over as he completed the loading of the net. He gazed up for a moment through the deepening emerald gloom to where the pale underbellies of the two boats hung down below the surface. Nearest him, the Phoenix’s big white keel projected down perhaps ten feet, and on the far side of her the much smaller shape of the coastguard launch was tucked in close beside it like a small daughter whale sheltering in her cetacean mother’s lee. There was just one place in the immediate area of the two vessels where a diver could feasibly be hiding, or have stayed hidden for any length of time. On the far side of the launch there was a narrow wedge of water, extending a few feet down from the surface, that was invisible both from the Saint’s viewpoint on the sea bed, and also from the decks of the Phoenix; and that was where Simon intended to look before he finally surfaced.

He had already made a careful inspection all around the sunken wreck itself, with his fingers alert on the hilt of the knife tucked into his weightbelt. He had not seriously expected to find anyone lurking there, figuring that the enemy, whoever that was, would not make his move until the gold had all been loaded aboard.

Therefore the Saint had shelved the problem of the diver, and where he might be concealed, and had simply got on with doing what had to be done. The diver might have gone ashore—the nearest point of land being no more than a hundred yards off— or, as Simon had now realised, he just might be skulking on the blind side of the launch.

The Saint glanced at his air gauge again as he secured the net and tugged on the rope for the last load to be hauled up. He had five minutes left, perhaps six; and that would be enough. Enough to close the hatch, and to investigate that wedge of blind water on his way up.

It was not the first time that Simon Templar had underestimated the opposition; nor was it the first time his calculating of an opponent’s next move had been incomplete in some small but potentially disastrous particular. He had reasoned that the enemy would make his move only after the gold had been secured; but he should have realised that the enemy could make up his own mind about when enough gold for his plans had been hauled up.

Of course, when it was all over, it was absurdly obvious. But when foresight was needed, he had missed it.

He had not seen the other diver who slid silently along the sea bed from the shore a few minutes before; neither did he see that diver now, emerging from a thicket of the viridescent weed nearby to take up silent station by the sunken boat’s stern, as the Saint steadied the load from deep inside.

Simon saw the laden net clear the hatchway above him; he saw it swing to one side, as each load before it had done; he saw it begin to recede upwards, off-centre in the greenish rectangle of light framed by the hatchway. And then he saw, with a dumbstruck horror such as he had seldom known in his life before, that rectangle of light suddenly shrink and narrow to a slit, and then to nothing, as the hatch was closed on him from above.

-4-

In the Stygian blackness of his underwater dungeon, Simon Templar heard the sound that must surely seal his fate. He heard the grinding and scraping of the heavy locking mechanism as someone secured the hatch above him; and in that instant he could hardly avoid the conviction that destiny must surely have come to claim him at last.

Death had started towards him often enough before, and perhaps half a dozen times had come close enough for him to have felt that his chances of survival were worse than even. But somehow, by a happy combination of luck and resourcefulness, he had always won through, even in circumstances where his prospects looked about as good as those of a three-legged donkey in the Grand National. But never until now had he had to give himself up for dead. On those other occasions, he had always had some reserve of his own, however tenuous, which he might somehow press into service, or some human support in the background to give at least a glimmer of hope; but this time he could think of nothing that would ever get him out.

In the first few seconds, as he realised with that sickening numbness what had happened and would happen yet, he tried, with the desperate strength of three men, to force open the locked hatch. But the attempt was useless. There was nothing for him to brace himself against while he kicked at the hatch, and he could get no real power behind the effort against the resistance of the water.

Perhaps it had been written in the stars, from the very beginning, that this was where his life was to end. He had long known that he could not go on blithely cheating death for ever and a day. That was in the nature of his hazardous trade, which he had chosen freely; and if his nemesis had caught up with him at last, he had no right now to bewail his lot. He had played the game gladly, and won gladly; and now, he had lost. It was as simple as that. There at the bottom of the sea he was alone with his ultimate fate, with not the remotest prospect of the cavalry appearing over the hill at the last minute … nor of any other miracle.

In real life there were no miracles; and real life for the Saint had dwindled down into perhaps two hundred cubic feet of underwater blackness, and a couple of minutes of breathing before his air ran out. And then the cabin would become his water tomb, and he would pass out of the living legend and into the historic. And so there was nothing left but to resign himself to the inevitable.

Above the hull, the other diver had continued swiftly and decisively with the execution of his plan. Silently, he surfaced in the blind water on the far side of the launch. He climbed aboard and released an extra length of the boat’s anchor rope. He dived again, following the rope to the anchor itself. He dragged it along the sea bed, passed the rope twice around the rail of the sunken cruiser, and then silently swam back to surface again beside the launch. Lebec, Arabella, and the crewmen were busy unloading the gold on to the Phoenix’s deck; there was no reason for them to turn to the launch, and they did not see the diver stealthily setting fire to the cushions in its cabin, before he silently slipped back into and under the water.

A minute or so later Lebec suddenly stood still and sniffed the air like a pointer dog. He turned towards the source of the acrid smoke.

“My ship! Vile!” he bellowed.

He grabbed a bucket and leapt across to the launch. The crewman followed with a second bucket, and after a momentary hesitation Arabella joined them.

While they were preoccupied with trying to douse the flames, the diver resurfaced between the two boats to proceed to the next stage of his plan. He cut the rope with which Lebec had tied the launch close up to the Phoenix. Then he braced himself against the bigger boat, and with his feet he pushed the launch well clear. He boarded the Phoenix, and made for the wheelhouse.

Lebec felt the movement of the launch, shouted, then turned in rage and astonishment as the Phoenix’s engines came to throbbing life. And the Phoenix began to pull away, with someone visible at the wheel who, from that distance, could be recognisable only as a man wearing a diver’s wet-suit and mask.

“Templar!” Lebec roared. “Stop! As a police officer I command you to stop!”

The error was pardonable, as Lebec had no way of knowing that the Saint was still at the bottom of the sea.

The seat cushions on the launch were still smouldering, but the fire had done no serious damage. Lebec barked a new order at his crewman; and as the man complied the diesel engines of the launch awoke to drumming life.

“Allez! Vite!” Lebec snapped, stabbing an outraged finger in the direction of the Phoenix as she headed for the open sea. “After him! Templar shall not get away with the gold!”

He flung himself on the anchor cable and hauled. At first the rope began to come easily aboard as Lebec took up the slack; then the rope tautened, stretched, and held fast.

With a string of Gallic profanities Lebec shouted another order. The man said something back, and Lebec took over the helm and opened the throttle. The launch’s propeller churned the water into a froth; and its nose tilted up as it strained against the creaking wet rope that tethered it. But it remained tethered; and the enraged Lebec frantically piled on more power as he watched the Phoenix heading out to sea.

Down below, in what he had accepted would soon become his sodden sepulchre, Simon Templar had heard the last hiss of air released by his tanks. Then there was nothing left but to re-breathe what remained in the tubes and in his face mask.

A stubborn instinctive will to live compelled him to try to make it last as long as possible by controlled shallow breathing, even though common sense told him that it could only postpone oblivion by a few futile minutes.

His ribs ached, and a kind of merciful red mist came up before his eyes to distance him from what was happening in the final seconds …

As the red mist darkened, somewhere above him a man at the helm of a boat switched to reverse gear and crammed on full power again, and held the throttle wide open while the turbulent water boiled around the boat with a frustrated churning of the screws, and a suffocating fog of diesel fumes engulfed it.

Simon Templar did not hear the straining of the stretched anchor rope, nor the slow sucking and splintering and rending sound made by the rotten timbers of the sunken wreck as the sustained traction on the tethered cable pulled it apart. Nor was he conscious enough to see clearly the gaping aperture of greenish light that opened up like a heaven above his head as the stern-rail and a torn-off section of deck were dragged slowly upward. It could only have been by blind reflexes that he groped his way out and up towards that light, strengthened by some reawakened spark of hope which had defiantly survived in him.