Circus (24 page)

Kan Dahn said with suspicion: ‘Where are you going?'

‘The entrance is time-locked so someone must have let them in. Whoever that was will still be there or thereabouts. You're all still in the clear. I want you to stay that way.' He picked up the Schmeisser. ‘I hope I don't have to use this.'

When the others joined him on the ground floor some five minutes later, Bruno had already done what he had to do. Kan Dahn surveyed the two bound, gagged and for the moment unconscious guards with considerable satisfaction.

‘By my count that's making thirteen people we've tied up tonight. It's certainly been an unlucky number for some. So it's up, up and away.'

‘Indeed.' He asked Maria: ‘You made contact?'

She looked at her watch. ‘It's airborne. Rendezvous in sixteen minutes.'

‘Good.' He looked and smiled at Kan Dahn, Manuelo, Roebuck, Vladimir and Yoffe. ‘Well, it's the van for us while you five make your own discreet way back to the Winter Palace.
Au revoir
and many thanks. See you all in Florida. Have a nice night at the circus.'

Bruno helped his elderly parents and youngest brother into the back of the van, climbed into the front with Maria and drove off towards the rendezvous with the helicopter. He stopped the van about thirty yards beyond the wooden bridge spanning the narrow deep river. Maria looked at the trees closely crowding on both sides.

‘
This
is the rendezvous?'

‘Round the next corner. In a clearing. But I have a little chore to attend to first.'

‘Inevitably.' She looked and sounded resigned. ‘And is one allowed to ask what it is?'

‘I'm going to blow the bridge up.'

‘I see. You're going to blow the bridge up.' She registered no surprise and was by now at the stage where she wouldn't have lifted an eyebrow if he'd announced his intention of razing the Winter Palace to the ground. ‘Why?'

Carrying his clutch of amatol explosives, Bruno descended from the van. Maria followed. As they walked on to the bridge Bruno said: ‘Hasn't it occurred to you that when they hear the chopper's engine – and you can hear a chopper's engine an awfully long way away – the police and army
are going to come swarming out of town like enraged bees? I don't want to get stung.'

Maria was crestfallen. ‘There seem to be an awful lot of things that don't occur to me.'

Bruno took her arm and said nothing. Together, they walked out to the middle of the bridge, where Bruno stooped and laid the charges together between two struts on the side of the bridge. He straightened and surveyed them thoughtfully.

Maria said: ‘Are you an expert on
everything
?'

‘You don't have to be an expert to blow up a wooden bridge.' He produced a pair of pliers from his pocket. ‘All you require is one of those to crimp the chemical fuse – and, of course, the sense to walk away immediately afterwards.'

He stood there thoughtfully and she said: ‘Well, aren't you going to crimp the fuses, then?'

‘Two things. I only crimp one fuse: the other charges will go up through sympathetic detonation. And if I blow up the bridge now then angry bees will be out here immediately, perhaps with enough time to figure out a way to cross the river or find a nearby bridge. We wait till we hear the chopper, blow the bridge, drive round to this glade in the woods and use the van's headlights to light up the landing area.'

She said: ‘I can hear the helicopter now.'

He nodded, stooped again, crimped a fuse, took her hand and ran off the bridge. Twenty yards beyond the bridge they turned round just on the moment that the explosion came. The noise was a
very satisfactory one indeed, and so was the result: the centre of the bridge, a flimsy structure at best, simply disintegrated and fell into the river below.

The transfer to the helicopter and the flight back to the ship went without a hitch, the pilot hedgehopping all the way to keep below the radar screen. In the wardroom Bruno was being apologetic to a rather stormy Maria.

‘I know I fooled you and I'm sorry. But I didn't want you to die, you see. I knew from the beginning that most of our conversations were being recorded. I had to make Harper think that the break-in was going to be on Tuesday. He was all set to get us that night and that meant he would have got you, too.'

‘But Kan Dahn and Roebuck and Manuelo – '

‘No risk. They were in it from the beginning.'

‘Why, you close, devious – but something must have put you on to Harper in the first place?'

‘My Slav blood. Nasty suspicious natures we Slavs have. About the only place that wasn't bugged was the circus office back in the States. The electronic snooper that Harper brought in was an accomplice of his: this was designed to throw suspicion on the circus. If there was no internal circus contact then it
had
to be Harper. Only four people were really privy to what was going on – your boss, Pilgrim, Fawcett and Harper. Your boss was above suspicion, Fawcett and Pilgrim were dead. So, Harper. Aboard ship, Carter, the purser,
wasn't there to make sure that my cabin wasn't bugged – he was there to make sure that it was. So was yours.'

‘You have no proof of this.'

‘No? He was in correspondence with Gdynia and he had fifteen hundred dollars in his cabin. New dollars. I have the serial numbers.'

‘That night he met with the accident on deck – '

‘Kan Dahn was the accident. Then Harper told me he had keys for Van Diemen's offices. He must have thought me a simpleton. You'd have needed a hundred skeleton keys to cover every lock. He'd keys for one reason only – he'd access to Van Diemen's keys. And he kept asking me about my plans for entry. I kept saying I'd play it by ear. So eventually I gave him all my plans – a tissue of lies – by giving them to you in your cabin. You may remember Harper suggested your cabin as a rendezvous. And, of course, I didn't trust you either.'

‘What!'

‘I didn't
distrust
you. I just didn't trust anyone. I didn't know you were clean until you insisted that Harper had personally appointed you to this job. If you had been in cahoots, you'd have said your boss did.'

‘I'll never trust
you
again.'

‘And why were we followed by the secret police everywhere.
Someone
gave them the tip-off. When I knew it wasn't you, there wasn't anyone else very much to suspect.'

‘And you still expect me to marry you?'

‘I'll have to. For your own sake. After you've resigned, that is. This may be the day of women's lib, but I think all this is a bit too lib for you. Do you know why Harper picked you – because he reckoned you were the person least likely to give him any trouble. He was right. My God, it's never even occurred to you how Harper managed to drag Fawcett inside the tiger's cage without being savaged.'

‘Well, since you're so clever – '

‘He anaesthetized the tigers with a dart gun.'

‘Of course. Maybe I should retire at that. You don't make many mistakes, do you?'

‘Yes. A major one. One that could have been fatal for many people. I assumed that the red dart-gun was the same as he'd used on the tigers. It wasn't. It was lethal. If it hadn't been for that Dobermann pinscher – ah well, it was fitting that he died by his own hand, so to speak. Hoisted by his own petard, or those who live by the sword die by the sword or something like that.'

‘One thing – among, seemingly, many others – I don't understand. This business of you having to take Van Diemen prisoner. Surely Van Diemen's almost certain ability to reproduce the formulas would have been foreseen by the CIA back in Washington?'

‘It was foreseen. It was intended that I kill him with the lethal red pen. If not, Harper – who probably carried a vest pocketful of red pens – was slated to attend to him on Tuesday night, the
supposed time of the break-in. He would have got off with it – he was as cunning as he was brilliant – and there would have been no one to testify against him. I would have been dead.'

She looked at him and shuddered.

He smiled. ‘It's all over now. Harper told me a fairy story about Van Diemen's heart condition and insisted that I used the black gas pen against him. The need to use either did not arise. It was Harper's – and, of course, his masters' – intention that Van Diemen should survive. As I said, Harper died by his own hand – and Van Diemen by Harper's. Harper is totally responsible for the deaths of both Van Diemen and himself.'

‘But why –
why
did he do it?'

‘Who knows? Who will ever know? A dedicated anti-American? A million dollars on the nail? The motivation – or motivations – of a double agent lie beyond comprehension. Not that it matters now. Sorry, incidentally, that I jumped on you that night in New York – I had no means of knowing whether my family was alive or dead. You know, of course, why Harper sent us to the restaurant that night – so that he could have my stateroom bugged. Which reminds me – I must send a telegram to have Carter arrested. And Morley – Harper's bogus electronics friend who bugged my stateroom on the train. And now, I have a delicate question for you.'

‘And that is?'

‘May I go to the men's room?'

So he went to the men's room. There he extracted from his inside pocket the papers he had taken from Van Diemen's filing cabinet. He did not even look at them. He tore them into tiny pieces and flushed them down the toilet.

Captain Kodes knocked on the circus's office door and entered without invitation. Wrinfield looked up in mild surprise.

‘I'm looking for Colonel Sergius, Mr Wrinfield. Have you seen him?'

‘I've just arrived from the train. If he's inside he'll be in his usual seat.'

Kodes nodded and hurried into the large exhibition hall. The late-night performance was in full swing and, as usual, it was a capacity house. Kodes made his way along to the section of the seats opposite the centre ring, but there was no sign of Sergius. For a few moments he stood there irresolute, then instinctively, almost inevitably, his eyes followed the gaze of ten thousand other pairs of eyes.

For long moments Kodes stood stock still, as if petrified, his mind at first blankly refusing to accept the evidence of his eyes. But his eyes were making no mistake. What he was witnessing was the impossible but the impossible was indubitably there: two of The Blind Eagles were going through their customary hair-raising trapeze act.

Kodes turned and ran. As he went through the exit he was met by Kan Dahn, who greeted him in
genial fashion. It was questionable whether Kodes saw him. He burst into Wrinfield's office, this time without the benefit of knocking.

‘The Blind Eagles! The Blind Eagles! Where in God's name have they come from?'

Wrinfield looked at him mildly. ‘Their kidnappers released them. We notified the police. Didn't you know?'

‘No, I damn well didn't know!' Kodes ran from the office and into his car.

Ashen-faced and stunned, Kodes stood on the seventh floor of the Lubylan detention block. The shock of finding gagged and bound men both at the open entrance below and in the guard-room had been shattering enough: but nothing could have prepared him for the sight of the three dead men lying there, Sergius and Van Diemen and Angelo.

A sure instinct led Kodes to the undertaker's emporium. He was hardly conscious of the fact that the lights were on in the front office. They were also on in the back parlour. He made his way to the coffin that had been so briefly occupied by Bruno, and slowly removed the lid.

Dr Harper, hands crossed on his chest, looked curiously peaceful. The hands held the large black-bordered box that had been cut from the paper that had announced Bruno's death.

The admiral leaned back in his chair in his Washington office and stared in disbelief as Bruno and Maria entered.

‘God! That suit!'

‘Beggars can't be choosers.' Bruno surveyed his suit without enthusiasm. ‘Chap in Crau gave it to me.'

‘He did? Anyway, welcome home, Bruno. And Miss Hopkins.'

‘Mrs Wildermann,' Bruno said.

‘What the devil do you mean?'

‘Holy matrimony. They give you a special licence for people in a hurry. We are in a hurry.'

The admiral contained his near-apoplexy. ‘I have the outline of the past few days. The details, please.'

Bruno gave him the details and when he had finished the admiral said: ‘Magnificent. Well, well, it took a long time before we could put it all together. Van Diemen and your family.'

‘A long time.'

Maria stared from one to the other in puzzlement.

The admiral said briskly: ‘And now. The plans.'

‘Destroyed.'

‘Naturally. But your mentalist mind isn't.'

‘My mentalist mind, sir, has gone into a state of total shock. Amnesia.'

The admiral leaned forward, his eyes narrowing, his hands tightening on the desk. ‘Repeat that.'

‘I destroyed them without looking at them.'

‘You destroyed them without looking at them.' It was a statement not a question. His voice was very quiet. ‘Why?'

‘What did you want, sir? Another mutual balance of terror throughout the world?'

‘Why?'

‘I told you why. Remember? I hate war.'

For long moments the admiral looked at him without enthusiasm, then he slowly relaxed, leaned back and astonished them both by laughing.

‘I've a damned good mind to fire you.' He sighed, still smiling. ‘But you're probably right on the whole.'

Maria said blankly: ‘Fire him?'

‘Didn't you know? Bruno has been one of my top, and certainly most trusted, agents for the past five years.'