The Satan Bug (3 page)

It was the soldier, not Hardanger, who supplied this information. I listened to him and said, " Why you? What's your interest in all this?"

" Major-General Cliveden is the second-in-command of the Royal Army Medical Corps," Hardanger explained. " Which automatically makes him the director of the Mordon Microbiological Research Establishment."

" He wasn't when I was there."

"My predecessor has retired," Cliveden said curtly, but the underlying worry was clear to see. "Ill health. First reports naturally came to me. I was in London. I notified the Superintendent immediately. And on my own initiative I ordered an oxy-acetylene team from Aldershot to rush there: they will open the door under Special Branch supervision."

" An oxy-acetylene team." I stared at him. " Are you quite mad?"

" I don't understand."

"Cancel it, man. Cancel it at once. What in God's name made you do that?

Don't you know anything about that door? Apart from the fact that no acetylene equipment in existence could get through that special steel of that door inside hours, don't you know that the door itself is lethal?

That it's filled with a near-lethal gas? That there's a central insulator mounted plate inside the door that damn well is lethal—charged with two thousand volts?"

"I didn't know that, Cavell." His voice was low. "I've only just taken over."

"And even if they did get inside? Have you thought of what would happen then? You're scared, aren't you, Major-General Clivedon, you're terrified at the thought that someone has already been inside. Maybe that someone was careless. Maybe that someone was very careless, maybe he knocked over a container or cracked a sealed culture tank. A tank or container, for instance, with botulinus toxin—which is one of the viruses both made and stored in number one lab. It takes a minimum of twelve hours exposure to air to oxidise the toxin and render it harmless.

If anyone comes into contact with it before oxidisation, they're dead men. Before midday, that is. And Clandon, had you thought of him? How do you know the botulinus didn't get him? The symptoms are exactly the same as those of prussic acid poisoning. How do you know the two guards weren't affected? The senior guard who spoke to you—if he had been affected, the botulinus would have got him as soon as he'd taken off his mask to speak to you. He'd have died in agonies a minute later. Have you checked that he's still alive?"

Cliveden reached for the phone. His hand was shaking. While he was dialling, I said to Hardanger, " Right, Superintendent, the explanation."

"Martin here?"

I nodded.

"Two good reasons. The first was that you are number one suspect."

"Say that again."

" You'd been sacked," he said bluntly. " Left under a cloud. Your opinion of Mordon's place in the scheme of things was well known. You have a reputation for taking the law into your own hands." He smiled without humour, " I've had plenty of experience of that from you."

" You're loony. Would I murder my best friend?" I said savagely.

" You were the only outsider who knew the whole security set-up in Mordon. The only one, Cavell. If anyone could get into and out of that place it was you." He paused for a significant moment. " And you are now the only man alive who knows the combinations for the various laboratory doors. The combinations, as you know, can only be altered in the factory where the doors are made. After your departure, the precaution of changing was not thought necessary."

" Dr. Baxter, the civilian director, knows the combinations."

" Dr. Baxter is missing. We can't trace him anywhere. We had to find out fast how the land lay. This was the best way. The only way.

Immediately after you left home this morning we checked with your wife.

She said-----"

" You've been round at my house." I stared at him. " Bothering Mary?

Questioning her? I rather think-----"

" Don't trouble," Hardanger said dryly. " You'd get no satisfaction from breaking in false teeth. I wasn't there, sent a junior officer. Silly of me, I admit, asking a bride of two months to turn in her husband. Of course she said you hadn't left the house all night."

I looked at him without speaking. His eyes were exactly on a level with mine. He said, " Are you wondering whether to haul off at me for even suggesting that Mary may be a liar or why she didn't phone to tip you off?"

" Both."

" She's no liar. You forget how well I know her. And she didn't tip you off because we disconnected your phone, both home and here. We also bugged this phone before you arrived this morning—I heard every word you said to Martin on the phone in your outer office." He smiled. " You had me worried for a few minutes there."

" How did you get in? I didn't hear you. The bell didn’t go off."

" The fuse box is in the outer corridor. All very illegal, I'm afraid."

I nodded. " I’ll have to change that." , " So you're in the clear, Cavell. An Oscar for Inspector Martin, I should say. Twelve minutes flat to find out what we wanted to know. But we had to know."

"Why? Why that way? A few hours leg-work by your men, checking taxis, restaurants, theatres and you'd have known I couldn't possibly have been in Mordon last night."

" I couldn't wait." He cleared his throat with unnecessary force. "

Which brings me to my second reason. If you're not the killer, then you're the man I want to find the killer. Now that Clandon is dead, you are the only man who knows the entire security set-up at Mordon. No one else does. Damned awkward, but there it is. If anyone can find anything, you can."

" Not to mention the fact that I'm the only man who can open that door now that Clandon is dead and Baxter missing."

" There's that too," he admitted.

" There's that, too," I mimicked " That's all you really want. And when the door is open I can run along and be a good boy."

" Not unless you want to."

" You mean that? First Derry, now Clandon. I'd like to do something."

" I know. I'll give you a free hand."

"The General won't like it." No one ever called Hardanger's ultimate superior by his name: very few even knew it.

" I've already fixed it with the General. You're right, he doesn't like it.

I suspect he doesn't like you." Hardanger grinned sourly. " Often the way with relatives."

" You did that in advance? Well, thanks for the compliment."

" You were the number one suspect. But I never suspected you. All the same, I had to be sure. So many of our best men have gone over the wall in the past few years."

"When do we leave?" I said. "Now?" Cliveden had just replaced the receiver on its rest. His hand still wasn't very steady.

"If you're ready."

"I will be in a moment." Hardanger was a past master at keeping his expressions buttoned up, but there was a speculative curiosity in those eyes that he couldn't hide. The sort of look he'd give a man who'd just put a foot wrong. I said to Cliveden, " The guards at the plant? Any word?"

"They're all right. So it can't have been botulinus that got Clandon. The central laboratories are completely sealed up."

"And Dr. Baxter?"

" Still no signs of him. He-----"

"Still no signs? That makes two of them now. Coincidence General. If that's the word I want."

" I don't know what you're talking about," he said irritably.

" Easton Deny. My predecessor in Mordon. He vanished a couple of months ago—just six days after he was the best man at my wedding and he still hasn't turned up. Surely you knew?"

" How the hell should I?" A very testy little man indeed, I was glad he wasn't a civilian doctor and myself one of his patients. " I've only been able to get down there twice since my appointment... Anyway, Baxter. He left the laboratories all right, checking out slightly later than usual. He didn't return. He lives with a widowed sister in a bungalow near Alfringham, five miles away. He didn't come home at all last night, she says." He turned to Hardanger. " We must get down there immediately, Superintendent."

"Right away, sir. Cavell is going to come with us."

" Glad to hear it." Cliveden said. He didn't look it and I couldn't blame him. You don't make major-general without developing an army mind in the process and the army mind sees the world as a neat, orderly and regimented place with no place at all in it for private detectives. But he was trying to be courteous and making the best of a bad job for he went on, " We'll need all the assistance we can get. Shall we go?"

"Just as soon as I've phoned my wife to let her know what's happening—

if her phone’s been reconnected." Hardanger nodded. I reached for the receiver but Cliveden's hand was on it first, pressing it firmly down on its cradle.

" No phoning, Cavell. Sorry. Must have absolute security on this. It's imperative that no one—no one—knows that anything has happened at Mordon."

I lifted his wrist, the phone came up in his hand and I took it from him.

I said, " Tell him, Superintendent."

Hardanger looked uncomfortable. As I dialled he said apologetically, "

I'm afraid Cavell is no longer in the Army sir. Not under the jurisdiction of the Special Branch. He is —um—allergic to authority."

"Under the Official Secrets Act we could demand-----"

" Sorry, sir." Hardanger shook his head heavily. " Classified information voluntarily disclosed to a civilian outwith a government department is no longer an official secret. No one made us tell Cavell anything and he never asked us to. He's under no obligation. And we want his cooperation."

I made my call, told Mary that no, I wasn't under arrest, that I was going down to Mordon and would call her later in the day. After I hung up I took off my jacket, strapped on a felt shoulder holster and stuck the Hanyatti into it. It was a big gun, but it was a big jacket with plenty of room in it, unlike Inspector Martin I didn't go in much for the Italian line. Hardanger watched me expressionlessly, Cliveden disapprovingly: twice he made to say something, twice he thought better of it. It was all very irregular indeed. But so was murder.

CHAPTER TWO

The Army had a helicopter waiting for us, but the fog was too heavy.

Instead we went down to Wiltshire in a big Jaguar saloon driven by a plain-clothes policeman who took far too much satisfaction in leaning with all his weight on both accelerator and siren button. But the fog lifted as we cleared Middlesex, the roads were fairly clear and we made it intact to Mordon by just after midday.

Mordon is an architectural monstrosity, a guaranteed blot on any landscape. Had the designer—if it had a designer— based it on an early nineteenth-century prison, which it exactly resembles he couldn't have achieved an uglier or more repulsive structure. But Mordon is only ten years old.

Grim, grey and gaunt under the darkly lowering October skies of that day, Mordon consisted of four parellel rows of squat, flat-topped concrete buildings, three stories high, each row, in its repellent forbidding lifelessness, for all the world like condemned and abandoned Victorian tenements in the worst slums of a great city. But a fitting enough facade for the work that went on behind the walls.

Each row of buildings was about a quarter of a mile in length, with about two hundred yards separating the rows. The space between buildings and boundary fence, five hundred yards at the nearest approach, was completely open, completely clear. No trees, no bushes, no shrubs, not even a clump of flowers. A man can hide behind a bush. He might even be able to hide behind a clump of flowers. But he can't hide behind a blade of grass two inches high—and nothing higher grew in the bleak desolation of the grounds of Mordon. The term boundary fence—not a wall, people can hide behind walls—was a misnomer. Any World War 2 concentration camp commandant would have sold his soul for Mordon: with fences like those a man could sleep soundly at nights.

The outer barbed-wire fence was fifteen feet high and sloped outwards at so sharp an angle that the top was four feet out of line with the foot.

A similar fence, only sloping the other way, paralleled the outer for its entire perimeter at a distance of about twenty feet. The space between those fences was patrolled at night by alsatians and dobermann-pinschers, trained man-hunters—and if need be, man-killers —answerable only to their own Army handlers. Three feet inside the second fence and actually below its overhang, was a two-strand trip-wire fence, of so fine a metal as to be normally almost invisible—and certainly would be invisible to anyone climbing down at night-time from the top of that second fence. And then, another ten feet away, was the last fence, each of its five strands running through insulators mounted on concrete posts.

The electric current passing through those wires was supposed to be less than lethal if, that is, you were in good health.

To make sure that everyone got the general idea the Army had put up notice-boards at ten-yard intervals round the entire perimeter of the outer fence. There were five different types of notices. Four of them, black on white, read, " DANGER

KEEP OUT BY ORDER ": " WARNING GUARD DOGS IN USE ":

" PROHIBITED PLACE" and " ELECTRIFIED FENCES ": the fifth, a violent red on yellow, said simply: "W. D. PROPERTY: TRESPASSERS

WILL BE SHOT." Only a madman or complete illiterate would have attempted to break his way into Mordon. We came on the public ring road that completely surrounded the camp, bore right by the gorse-covered fields and after a quarter of a mile turned into the main entrance. The police driver stopped just short of the lowered boom and wound down his window as a sergeant approached. The sergeant had a machine-pistol slung over his shoulder and it wasn't pointing at the ground either.

Then he caught sight of Cliveden, lowered his gun, gave a signal to a man we couldn't see. The boom rose, the car moved on, halted before heavy steel crash-gates. We left the car, passed through a steel side door and made our way into a one-storey block marked " Reception."

Three men waited for us there. Two I knew—Colonel Weybridge, deputy commandant of Mordon, and Dr. Gregori, Dr. Baxter's chief assistant in