‘Because I had to have evidence. I had to have evidence to send you both to the chair. Up till now we had no evidence whatsoever, all along the way your back trail was divided into a series of water-tight compartments with locked doors. Royale locked the doors by killing everybody and anybody who might talk. Incredibly, there wasn’t a single solitary thing we could pin on you, there wasn’t a person who could split on you for the sufficient reason that all those who could were dead. The locked doors. But you opened them all today. Fear was the key to all the doors.’
‘You’ve got no evidence, Talbot,’ Royale said. ‘It’s only your word against ours – and you won’t live to give your word.’
‘I expected something like that,’ I nodded. We were at a depth of about 250 feet now. ‘Getting your courage back, Royale, aren’t you? But you don’t dare do anything. You can’t get this scaphe back to the rig without me, and you know it. Besides, I have some concrete evidence. Taped under my toes is the bullet that killed Jablonsky.’ They exchanged quick startled looks. ‘Shakes you, doesn’t it? I know it all, I even dug Jablonsky’s body up in the kitchen garden. That bullet will match up with your automatic, Royale. That alone would send you to the chair.’
‘Give it to me, Talbot. Give it to me now.’ The flat marbled eyes were glistening, his hand sliding for his gun.
‘Don’t be stupid. What are you going to do with it – throw it out the window? You can’t get rid of it, you know it. And even if you could, there’s something else that you can never get rid of. The real reason for our trip today, the reason that means you both die.’
There was something in my tone that got them. Royale was very still, Vyland still grey, still shaking. They knew, without knowing why, that the end had come.
‘The tow-rope,’ I said. ‘The wire with the microphone cable leading back to the speaker in the rig. You see the microphone switch here, you see it’s at “Off”? I jinxed it, I fixed it this afternoon so that the microphone was always live. That’s why I made you speak up, made you repeat most things, that’s why I dragged you, Vyland, close up to me so that you were right against the mike when you were making your confession. Every word that’s been spoken down here today, every word we’re speaking now is going through live to that speaker. And every word is being taken down three times: by tape-recorder, by a civil stenographer and by a police stenographer from Miami. I phoned the police on the way back from the rig this morning, they were aboard the rig before daylight – which probably accounts for the field foreman and the petroleum engineer looking so nervous when we came aboard today. They’ve been hidden for twelve hours – but Kennedy knew where they were. And at lunchtime, Vyland, I gave Kennedy your secret knock. Cibatti and his men would have fallen for it, they were bound to. And it’s all over now.’
They said nothing. There was nothing they could say, at least not yet, not until the full significance of what I had said had become irrevocably clear to them.
‘And don’t worry about the tape recording,’ I went on. ‘They’re not normally acceptable as court evidence but those will be. Every statement you made was volunteered by yourselves – think back and you’ll see that: and there’ll be at least ten witnesses inside the caisson who can swear to the genuineness of the recordings, who will swear that they could not have come from any source other than the bathyscaphe. Any prosecutor in the Union will call for and get a verdict of guilty without the jury leaving the box. You know what that means.’
‘So.’ Royale had his gun out, he must have had some crazy notion of trying to snap the tow-rope and sailing the scaphe off to safety. ‘So we were all wrong about you, Talbot, so you were smarter than we were. All right, I admit it. You have what it takes – but you’ll never live to hear the jury give their verdict. As well hung for a sheep as a lamb.’ His trigger finger began to tighten. ‘So long, Talbot.’
‘I wouldn’t,’ I said. ‘Not if I were you. Wouldn’t you like to be able to grip the arm-rests of the electric chair with both hands when the time comes?’
‘It’s no good talking, Talbot, I said –’
‘Look down the barrel,’ I advised him. ‘If you want to blow your hand off, you know what to do. When you were unconscious this evening Kennedy used a hammer and punch to jam a lead cylinder right down the barrel. Do you think I’d be so crazy as to come down here and you with a loaded gun in your hand? Don’t take my word for it, Royale – just pull the trigger.’
He squinted down the barrel and his face twisted into a malevolent mask of hate. He was using up ten years’ quota of expressions in one day – and he was telegraphing his signals. I knew that gun was coming before he did. I managed to dodge, the gun struck the Plexiglas behind me and fell harmlessly to the floor at my feet.
‘No one tampered with my gun,’ Vyland said hoarsely. He was almost unrecognizable as the smooth urbane slightly florid top executive he’d been, his face was haggard now, curiously aged and covered in a greyish sheen of sweat. ‘Made a mistake at last, haven’t you, Talbot?’ His breath was coming in brief shallow gasps. ‘You’re not going –’
He broke off, hand halfway inside his coat, and stared down into the muzzle of the heavy Colt pointing in between his eyes.
‘Where – where did you get that? It – it’s Larry’s gun?’
‘Was. You should have searched me, shouldn’t you – not Kennedy? Fools. Sure it’s Larry’s gun – that dope-headed junky who claimed he was your son.’ I looked steadily at him, I didn’t want any gunfire 150 feet below sea level. I didn’t know what might happen. ‘I took it off him this evening, Vyland, just about an hour ago. Just before I killed him.’
‘Just – just before –?’
‘Just before I killed him. I broke his neck.’
With something between a sob and a moan Vyland flung himself at me across the width of the chamber. But his reactions were slow, his movements even slower and he collapsed soundlessly to the floor as the barrel of Larry’s Colt caught him across the temple.
‘Tie him up,’ I said to Royale. There was plenty of spare flex lying around and Royale wasn’t fool enough to get tough about it. He tied him up, while I was blowing gasoline through a valve and slowing our ascent about 120 feet, and just as he finished and before he could straighten I let him have it behind the ear with the butt of Larry’s Colt. If ever there had been a time for playing it like a gentleman, that time was long gone, I was now so weak, so lost in that flooding sea of pain, that I knew it would be impossible for me to bring that scaphe back to the rig and watch Royale at the same time. I doubted whether I could even make it at all.
I made it, but only just. I remember easing the hatch of the bathyscaphe up inside the caisson, asking through the mike, in a slurred stumbling voice that wasn’t mine, for the annular rubber ring to be inflated and then lurching across to twist open the handle of the entrance door. I don’t remember any more. I am told they found the three of us lying unconscious on the floor of the bathyscaphe.
EPILOGUE
I walked down the court-house steps out into the still, warm October sunshine. They’d just sentenced Royale to death and everybody knew there would be no appeal, no reversal of the decision. The jury, as I had prophesied, had convicted without leaving the box. The trial had lasted only one day and during the entire day Royale had sat as though carved from stone, his eyes fixed on the same spot for hour after interminable hour. That spot had been me. Those blank, flat, marbled eyes had been as expressionless as ever, they hadn’t even altered a fraction when the prosecution had played the recording of Royale begging for his life on his hands and knees in the scaphe at the bottom of the sea, they hadn’t altered when the death sentence had come but for all the lack of expression a blind man could have read his message. ‘Eternity’s a long time, Talbot,’ his eyes had said. ‘Eternity is forever. But I’ll be waiting.’
Let him wait: eternity was too long for me to worry about.
They hadn’t sentenced Vyland, for they never even had the chance to tr
y him. On the way up the caisson from the bathyscaphe, 170 steps from the bottom, Vyland had simply let go his grip on the ladder and leaned back into space: he hadn’t even screamed on the long way down.
I passed the general and his wife on the steps. I had met Mrs Ruthven for the first time on my first day out of hospital, which had been yesterday. She had been very charming and gracious and endlessly grateful. They had offered me everything, from a job at the top of the tree in Ruthven’s oil companies to enough money to last any man half a dozen lifetimes, but I just smiled and thanked them and turned them all down. There was nothing in them for me, all the fancy directorships and money in the world couldn’t buy me back the days that were gone. And money couldn’t buy the only thing I wanted out of the world today.
Mary Ruthven was standing on the sidewalk beside her father’s sand and beige Rolls-Royce. She was dressed in a plain white, simple one-piece dress that couldn’t have cost more than a thousand bucks, her braided wheat-coloured hair was piled high on her head and I had never seen her looking so lovely. Behind her was Kennedy. For the first time I saw him dressed in a lounge suit, dark blue and immaculately cut, and when you saw him like that it was impossible to imagine him any other way. His chauffeuring days were over: the general knew how much the Ruthven family owed him and you couldn’t pay a debt like that with chauffeur’s wages. I wished him all the luck in the world: he was a nice guy.
I halted at the foot of the steps. A little wind was blowing in from the blue sparkling shimmer that was the Gulf of Mexico, sending tiny little dust devils and small pieces of paper dancing across the street.
Mary saw me, hesitated a moment, then came across the sidewalk to where I was standing. Her eyes seemed dark and curiously blurred but maybe I was imagining it. She murmured something, I couldn’t make out what it was, then suddenly, careful not to hurt my left arm still in its sling, she put her two arms round my neck, pulled down my head and kissed me. Next moment she was gone, making her way back to the Rolls like a person who couldn’t see too well. Kennedy looked at her coming towards him, then lifted his eyes to mine, his face still and empty of all expression. I smiled at him and he smiled back. A nice guy.
I walked down the street, along towards the shore, and turned into a bar. I hadn’t intended to, I didn’t really need a drink, but the bar was there so I went in anyway. I had a couple of drinks, double Scotches, but it was just a waste of good liquor; I left and made my way down to a bench by the shore.
An hour, two hours, I don’t know how long I sat there. The sun sank down close to the rim of the ocean, the sea and the sky turned to orange and gold, and I could see, faintly on the horizon and weirdly silhouetted against this flaming backdrop, the massively grotesque angularity of the oil rig X 13.
X 13. I suppose that would always be a part of me now, that and the broken-winged DC that lay 580 yards to its south-west, buried under 480 feet of water. For better or for worse, it would always be part of me. For worse, I thought, for worse. It was all over and done with and empty now and it meant nothing, for that was all that was left.
The sun was on the rim of the sea now and the western world a great red flame, a flame that would soon be extinguished and vanish as if it had never been. And so it had been with my red rose, before it had turned to white.
The sun was gone and the night rushed across the sea. With the dark came the cold so I rose stiffly to my feet and walked back to the hotel.
ALISTAIR MACLEAN
Alistair MacLean, the son of a Scots minister, was brought up in the Scottish Highlands. In 1941, at the age of eighteen, he joined the Royal Navy. After the war he read English at Glasgow University and became a schoolmaster. The two and a half years he spent aboard a wartime cruiser were to give him the background for HMS Ulysses, his remarkably successful first novel, published in 1955. He is now recognized as one of the outstanding popular writers of the 20th century, the author of twenty-nine worldwide bestsellers, many of which have been filmed, including The Guns of Navarone, Where Eagles Dare, Fear is the Key and Ice Station Zebra. In 1983, he was awarded a D.Litt. from Glasgow University. Alistair MacLean died in 1987.
By Alistair MacLean
HMS Ulysses
The Guns of Navarone
South by Java Head
The Last Frontier
Night Without End
Fear is the Key
The Dark Crusader
The Golden Rendezvous
The Satan Bug
Ice Station Zebra
When Eight Bells Toll
Where Eagles Dare
Force 10 from Navarone
Puppet on a Chain
Caravan to Vaccares
Bear Island
The Way to Dusty Death
Breakheart Pass
Circus
The Golden Gate
Seawitch
Goodbye California
Athabasca
River of Death
Partisans
Floodgate
San Andreas
The Lonely Sea (stories)
Santorini
Copyright
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This paperback edition 2004
Previously published in paperback by Fontana 1963
First published in Great Britain by
Collins 1961
Copyright. © Devoran Trustees Ltd 1961
Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to
be identified as the author of this work
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ePub edition June 2008 ISBN-9780007289264
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Alistair MacLean, Fear is the Key
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