The Devastators (19 page)

Right now I didn’t know if she was looking at me as an enemy, as a specimen, or as a man. She could have been thinking about something completely dissociated from the subject of Matthew Helm, or she could have been thinking that she’d like to try this peculiar Western creature in bed, just for kicks, before slitting its throat and having it tossed into the ocean. I didn’t know. She gave me no clue. She just turned away and started toward the cliff-edge ruins, accompanied by the dark-faced man.

Basil gave me a shove from behind, reminding me of his presence. I looked at him at last. He hadn’t changed his appearance much since I’d seen him in London masquerading as Ernest Walling, except that he’d apparently got bounced around a bit when the Austin-Cooper went off the road: he had a black eye and a cut lip. I didn’t grin, but he must have guessed I felt like it, and he pushed at me again.

“Move on, Helm. Don’t try any of your tricks. These men would just love to shoot you. Human life means very little to them.”

I looked at the two men he indicated. They were short, stocky men dressed in rough work clothes, like Scottish farmers or fishermen, so that at a distance they would have attracted no attention in this part of the world, except for the arms they carried—stubby machine pistols of the standard PPSh41 Russian pattern, the burp gun, that’s been copied by a lot of Communist countries. The weapons were cheap and crude, no jewels of the gunsmith’s art, but they were, I knew, reliable and effective. Well, as effective as any of those squirt guns can be. I still have the old-fashioned notion that there’s something sloppy about killing a man with seventeen bullets when one will do the job.

The ugly weapons looked shockingly out of place against the sunny Scottish coastal landscape, just as the Oriental faces looked strange under the soft cloth caps. One of the men motioned imperatively with the barrel of his piece, and I turned and moved along after Madame Ling and her companion, but not fast enough to suit the man behind me. He shoved his gun barrel into my back to hurry me along. Off balance, I stepped into some kind of a hole and fell, wrenching my knee. Madame Ling looked back and called out an order, and the men yanked me to my feet and marched me, limping, up to where she had stopped to wait.

“You must be careful where you step, Mr. Helm,” she said in her precise, liquid English. “This bluff is riddled with holes and caverns. One day it will all slide into the sea, as parts of it have done already. Once, I am told, that castle stood several hundred meters back from the edge of the cliff; now half of it is gone.”

A shout from inland, where three men were systematically combing the heather for Vadya, made her look quickly in that direction. I wasn’t in quite so much of a hurry. I figured they’d caught the girl, and I’d already heard the death sentence passed on her, and I didn’t really want to see her again. I mean, what with one thing and another—like drugs and guns—we’d said about everything we needed to say to each other.

But it wasn’t a wounded girl they’d found, but the big yellow ox. They seemed to find it impressive, even frightening, and they were covering it with their burp guns from a safe distance and, apparently, requesting permission to shoot it.

“No shooting,” Madame Ling said to the man beside her. “There has been one shot here already, and the sound of machine-gun fire carries a long way. The beast is doing us no harm. Despite its barbaric appearance, it is presumably classified as domestic livestock, and some farmer may come looking for it. Let it live.”

The dark man raised an arm and gave a wave-off signal, and the men, rather reluctantly, bypassed the shaggy ox and went on searching the heath. As we started on toward the castle ruins, a couple of good-sized birds flushed noisily from under our feet, probably grouse. They almost got me killed by one of the boys behind me; I heard the metallic sound as he released his safety, and I stood quite still until I heard him put it back on again. He didn’t look like the nervous type, but he was a long way from home, and I guess it put an edge on his reflexes.

Then we were picking our way over the rubble that marked the walls of the ruin. Madame Ling gestured to her man Friday, and he poked around a bit on what seemed to be an old stone floor, well carpeted with damp moss. Surprisingly, he took this carpet and rolled it up like an ordinary rug, revealing a big stone equipped with a lifting ring. This seemed to be genuinely ancient, but it swung upwards at a pull with an ease that no centuries-old hinges would have permitted. Obviously the old trapdoor had been equipped with modern hinges and counterweights.

Madame Ling spoke to the two men behind me, and then to me: “They will cover our traces, and then join the search for the girl. We try not to use this entrance often, only when it is absolutely necessary to come here and the tide is unfavorable. It was the old escape door of the keep, to be used as a last resort when the enemy had breached the walls and resistance was no longer possible. I believe the room in which we stand was originally the main hall.” She moved toward the opening, drawing her coat about her. “I will go first. I will be waiting below with a pistol. There is a sentry below as well. These men will cover you from above. Please do not force us to shoot. You will live longer that way. Not much longer, of course, but a little longer.”

I could see no need to comment on that, and I just watched her feel for a footing on the ladder or stairway below. She had by far the smallest foot I had ever seen on an adult human being. I looked around. The ocean to the west was empty to the horizon, blue-green and glinting in the sunlight. Inland, the rough expanse of gray rock and gray-green heather rose toward a bunch of stony hills. It wasn’t exactly a lush and inviting country, but I couldn’t help feeling that it beat a hole in the ground.

The dark-faced man had a gun out; another of those pocket automatics. He looked as if he might know how to use it. He gestured toward the trapdoor into which Madame Ling had disappeared. Beyond him I could see the men hunting for Vadya and the yellow ox regarding us in a thoughtful way, as if it had not yet made up its mind about us and wouldn’t let its judgment be hurried. It looked, I decided, like a Texas longhorn in a fur coat and a Beatle wig. On this thought, I made my way into the hole, finding a steep stone stairway that led to a kind of chamber in the rock. Madame Ling was standing there with a little automatic in her hand. Behind her stood a man with a submachine gun, and beside her was a chubby individual in a dirty white laboratory coat.

“Here is another guinea pig for you,” Madame Ling said to this man. “You can have him as soon as I have finished questioning him, Dr. McRow.”

In a way, it was a moment of achievement. I had gone the long way around the barn with the hatchet, but I had my chicken in sight at last.

Now all I had to do was figure out how to finish the job, alone in this cave with my hands tied. It would also be nice if I could manage to get out alive afterwards, but it wasn’t, I knew, considered absolutely essential to a satisfactory operation. Mac had made that clear enough.

Madame Ling motioned me away from the foot of the stairs so the dark-faced man could descend. I moved back in a docile manner. I was careful not to look too long or too hard at the plump man in the white coat. I didn’t want to scare him prematurely. It was McRow, all right, a little thinner both as to hair and figure than the description I’d been given—as if they’d been working him hard—but unmistakably the man I’d been sent to find.

“On second thought,” Madame Ling said, “perhaps you had better inoculate him right away, Doctor. There is no time to waste. I would like to have our statistics as complete as possible when I send in my report.”

McRow said, “We should wait six hours after administering the serum. And then we can’t be sure of his reaction to the culture for two days, at least not if it should be negative.”

She said impatiently, “I know all that. Cut the six hours to four; give him the culture just before we embark. We will take him on board the ship with us; we will bring along all the negative ones, so you can watch them for symptoms up to the last possible moment. I have arranged for a trustworthy courier to meet us at sea, but the ship is not very fast, and it will be a few days before we reach an area where he can safely make contact. Get what you need right away, and bring it down to my quarters.”

“Yes, Madame.”

McRow turned quickly and hurried out of the chamber, his dirty coat flapping about his knees. The dark-faced man signaled to the men above, and the shaft of daylight was cut off as the trapdoor settled into place solidly, like the lid of a well-made coffin.

“This way, Mr. Helm,” said the Chinese woman. “Be careful. These passages were not made for people your height. The McRows—McRues as they were then called—have apparently always been short men, like our scientific friend, whom you obviously recognized.”

She gestured toward the opening through which McRow had vanished. I moved that way, bending over so as not to crack my skull. An electric conduit had been strung along the rocky roof of the tunnel—presumably not by the ancient McRues—with a neat glass globe every fifteen feet or so: a gasketed, damp-proof installation, I noticed. The lights gave adequate illumination, but I had to be careful not to scalp myself on them.

I said, without looking around, “Then he really is descended from the chiefs of Clan McRue?”

“Oh, yes,” the woman behind me said. “That is not a fantasy, although he has many of them. There are a great many mad Scotsmen, you know. I think the damp climate must affect the brain. Certainly it would drive me to insanity if I had to endure a lifetime of it.”

She was getting quite chatty. I decided that she must have a reason for trying to establish friendly relations—well, friendly for the circumstances—and that I might as well cash in on it, whatever it was.

I said, challengingly, “There’s no record of an American branch of the family. I checked in a library in London.”

“I know. They were all supposed to have been wiped out in a bloody feud, were they not? But apparently, when the castle was about to be overwhelmed, the young McRue sent his wife and baby to safety down these passages and went back to conceal the trapdoor and fight to the death beside his father. The wife never dared to reveal herself. She fled to America, taking the boy with her. The family name became corrupted over there as the family fortunes fell. But the story was passed on. He told it to me one night, boasting of his ancient lineage. Ancient!” Madame Ling laughed softly. “A mere two or three centuries! But his description of this place, as he had heard it, interested me, and I investigated and found that the ruins and caves actually did exist, almost unknown, and were suitable for our purposes… Just a moment. Stop, please. Open that door to your right.”

I glanced at her, shrugged, and pulled the door open. It moved sluggishly, not so much because it was heavy, as because it seemed to be hooked onto a lot of machinery. There was a fine-mesh screen door beyond. The first thing I noticed was the smell. It reminded me of my childhood, when I’d raised white mice for some reason I can’t recall.

Then I saw the cages, rows upon rows of them, on each side of the long, narrow room. Above them, down each side of the room, ran a long rod in bearings, geared to an electric motor at the end nearest the door. On each rod, above each vertical stack of cages, was a pulley, and from each pulley a chain ran down to the upper cage door, which in turn was linked to the one below it, and so on clear to the bottom.

That was the mechanical part of the display. The rest was just rats—or maybe I should say rodents. The cages held big rats, little rats, big mice, little mice, moles, ground squirrels, and real, honest-to-God squirrels, both gray and red, with fine bushy tails. There were other small ratty animals I couldn’t identify, and I may have got some of the first ones wrong, since they didn’t seem to be the American varieties with which I was familiar.

“I would not go any closer, Mr. Helm,” Madame Ling said quietly. “You have not yet received your inoculation. In theory, the disease is transmitted from rats to humans by fleas, and we have tried to make sure there are no fleas here, to simplify the matter of control. We are assuming that a rodent will eventually pick up suitable fleas wherever he may be transported. However, there have been a few unfortunate occurrences indicating that Dr. McRow’s hyper-active variety of the disease manages to find other means of transmission—perhaps flies or mosquitoes, we are not sure—when there are no fleas available. So I would not open the screen door if I were you.”

I hadn’t the slightest intention of opening it. I looked at the collection of twittering, scratching, nose-twitching, stinking rodents. I drew a long breath, wondering if I were breathing death, and said, “They are all infected?”

“Of course.” She laughed softly. “You have been wondering why I have been telling you so much, Mr. Helm. This is our secret weapon, and our insurance. If Colonel Stark should manage to locate us before we make our escape tonight, I want you to be able to confirm what I radio him about this. You have noticed the motors? There is a switch in a room below. It can be actuated either manually or electronically. If there is any threat to this place before we leave, or to the ship afterward, I will close that switch—either by hand or by remote control—and all these cages will open. They will also open automatically, after we have departed, if anyone disturbs certain warning devices hidden throughout these caves, which I will energize as I leave.”

“Tricky,” I said.

“Very tricky, Mr. Helm. You will note that the room narrows at the far end; it is actually only a crevice in the rock, which we have widened. The crevice goes on into the hill and meets other crevices, which come to the surface in various holes, like the one into which you fell. The switch also opens this door, allowing the animals to find other tunnels throughout the bluff. To accelerate their dispersal, a harmless gas is released that they find most unpleasant. Once they are loose, do you think anyone will ever catch them all? And if one, just one, escapes with the disease it carries, the population of Scotland is doomed. The population of Britain is doomed. And only rigorous quarantine measures will prevent the plague from spreading over the water to the Continent and further. And that is what will happen if the Colonel should act rashly. I am sure that, if the occasion arises, you will be glad to help me persuade him to be reasonable.”