Fear is the Key

Vyland talked. In less than three gasping, coughing, choking minutes he'd told me all I ever wanted to know — how he had struck a deal with a Cuban service minister and had a plane standing by for weeks, how he had suborned the officer in charge of a radar tracking station in Western Cuba, how he suborned a very senior civil servant in Colombia, how the plane had been tracked, intercepted and shot down and how he had had Royale dispose of those who had served his purposes. He started to talk of the general, but I held up my hand.

"O.K., that'll do, Vyland. Get back to your seat." I reached for the carbon dioxide switch and turned it up to maximum.

"What's that you're doing?" Vyland whispered.-

"Bringing a little fresh air into the place. Getting rather stuffy down here, don't you think?"

They stared at each other, then at me, but remained silent. Fury I would have expected, chagrin and violence, but there was nothing of any of those. Fear was still the single predominating emotion in their minds: and they knew that they were still completely at my mercy.

"Who — who are you, Talbot?" Vyland croaked.

"I suppose you might call me a cop." I sat down on a canvas chair, I didn't want to start the delicate job of taking the bathyscaphe up till the air — and my mind — was completely clear. "I used to be a bona fide salvage man, working with my brother. The man — or what's left of the man — out there in the captain's seat, Vyland. We were a good team, we struck gold off the Tunisian coast and used the capital to start our own airline — we were both wartime bomber pilots, we both had civilian licences. We were doing very well, Vyland — until we met you.

"After you'd done this " — I jerked a thumb in the direction of the broken, weed- and barnacle-encrusted plane — " I went back to London. I was arrested, they thought I'd something to do with this. It didn't take long to clear that up and have Lloyd's of London — who'd lost the whole insurance packet — take me over as a special investigator. They were willing to spend an unlimited sum to get even a percentage of their money back. And because state money was involved both the British and American governments were behind me. Solidly behind me. Nobody ever had a better backing, the Americans even went the length of assigning a top-flight cop whole-time to the job. The cop was Jablonsky."

That jolted them, badly. They had lost sufficient of their immediate terror of death, had come far enough back into the world of reality to appreciate what I was saying, and what that meant They stared at each other, then at me; I couldn't have asked for a more attentive audience.

"That was a mistake, wasn't it, gentlemen?" I went on. "Shooting Jablonsky. That's enough to send you both to the chair; judges don't like people who murder cops. It may not be complete justice, but it's true. Murder an ordinary citizen and you may get off with it: murder a cop, and you never do. Not that that matters. We know enough to send you to the chair six times over."

I told them how Jablonsky and I had spent well over a year, mostly in Cuba, looking for traces of the bullion, how we had come to the conclusion that it still hadn't been recovered — not one of the cut emeralds had appeared anywhere in the world's markets. Interpol would have known in days.

"And we were pretty certain," I continued, "why the money hadn't been recovered. Why? Only one reason — it had been lost in the sea and someone had been a mite hasty in killing off the only person who knew exactly where it was — the pilot of the fighter plane.

"Our inquiries had narrowed down to the west coast of Florida. Somebody was looking for money sunk in the water. For that they needed a ship. The general's Temptress did just fine. But for that you also needed an extremely sensitive depth recorder, and there is where you made your one and fatal mistake, Vyland. We had requested every major marine equipment supplier in Europe and North America to notify us immediately they sold any special depth-finding equipment to any vessels other than naval, mercantile or fishing. You are following me, I trust?"

They were following me, all right. They were three parts back to normal now and there was murder in 'their eyes.

"In the four-month period concerned no fewer than six of those ultra-sensitive recorders had been sold privately. All to owners of very large yachts. Two of those yachts were on a round the world cruise. One was in Rio, one was in Long Island Sound, one on the Pacific coast — and the sixth was plodding up and down the west coast of Florida. General Blair Ruthven's Temptress.