The Tightrope Men / The Enemy (12 page)

He awoke to darkness.

For a long time he just lay there, unable to think because of the throbbing pain in his head. Then his head cleared a little and he stirred and knew he was lying on a bed. When he moved he heard a metallic clinking noise. He moved again and became aware that he was naked, and a recollection of the sauna came back.

His first thought was that he had collapsed of heat prostration and had been taken to his own room, but when he lifted his hand that theory disintegrated quickly. There was a tug on both wrists and he felt cold metal, and when he twisted his hands around he heard that clinking sound again and felt the handcuffs.

He lay quiet for a while before he levered himself up on one elbow to stare into the blackness, then he swung his legs over the side of the bed and sat up. Tentatively he moved his feet apart; at least they were not manacled and he could walk. But walk where? He held his arms out before him and moved them sideways, first to the left and then to the right, until he encountered an object. It was flat with square edges and he concluded it was a bedside table. Exploring the top brought no joy; there was nothing on it.

Although his headache had eased he felt as weak as a kitten and he sat for a few moments to conserve his strength.
Whether his weakness was a natural result of the heat of the sauna was debatable. He reasoned that if the sauna did that to everyone then it would not be so popular in Finland. Apart from that, he had no idea of how long he had been unconscious. He felt his skin and found it cool and with no moisture.

After a while he stood up with his arms out in front of him and began to shuffle forward. He had gone only a few feet when he stubbed his toe on something and the pain was agonizing. ‘Damn!’ he said viciously, and stepped back until he felt the bed behind his legs. He sat down and nursed his foot.

A sound came from the other side of the room and he saw a patch of greyness, quickly obscured and vanishing. A light suddenly stabbed at him and he blinked and screwed up his eyes against the sudden glare. A voice said in accented English, ‘So Dr Meyrick is awake—and up, too.’

Denison brought up his hands before his eyes. The voice said sharply, ‘Don’t move, Meyrick. Stay on the bed.’ Then, more coolly, ‘Do you know what this is?’

The lamp dipped a little so that he could see the vague outline of a man in back-reflected light. He saw the glint of metal in an out-thrust hand. ‘Well?’ said the voice impatiently. ‘What is it, Meyrick?’

Denison’s voice was hoarse. ‘A pistol.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to know what the hell this is all about.’

The voice was amused. ‘No doubt you would.’ As Denison tried to sort out the accent the light played over him. ‘I see you’ve hurt your side, Dr Meyrick. How did that happen?’

‘A pack of maniacs attacked me in Norway. They seem to have the same breed in Finland, too.’

‘Poor Dr Meyrick,’ mocked the voice. ‘You seem to be continually in trouble. Did you report it to the police?’

‘Of course I did. What else would you expect me to do? And to the British Embassy in Oslo.’ He remembered what Carey had said about Meyrick’s bloody-mindedness, and added irascibly, ‘Bloody incompetents—the lot of them.’

‘Who did you see at the Embassy?’

‘A man called McCready picked me up at the police station and took me to the Embassy. Look, I’ve had enough of this. I’m answering no more questions. None at all.’

The pistol moved languidly. ‘Yes, you will. Did you meet Carey?’

‘No.’

‘You’re a liar.’

‘If you think you know the answers, why ask me the questions? I don’t know anyone called Carey.’

A sigh came out of the darkness. ‘Meyrick, I think you ought to know that we have your daughter.’

Denison tensed, but sat quietly. After a moment he said, ‘Prove it.’

‘Nothing easier.’ The pistol withdrew slowly. ‘Tape recorders are made conveniently small these days, are they not?’ There was a click and a slight hissing noise in the darkness beyond the flashlight, then a man spoke:

‘Now tell me; what’s your father doing here in Finland?’

‘He’s on holiday.’

That was Lyn’s clear voice. Denison recognized it in spite of the slight distortion which was far less than that of a telephone.

‘Did
he
tell you that?’

‘Who else would tell me?’
She sounded amused.

‘But he went to see Professor Kääriänen this afternoon. That sounds more like business than pleasure.’

‘He wanted to find out something about his father—my grandfather.’

‘What did he want to find out?’

There was a raw silence, then the man said,
‘Come now, Miss Meyrick; nothing will happen, either to you or to your father, if you answer my questions. I assure you that you will be released unharmed.’

A switch snapped and the voices stopped. From the darkness: ‘You see, Dr Meyrick! Of course, I cannot guarantee the truthfulness of my friend regarding his last statement.’
The pistol reappeared, glinting in the light. ‘Now, to return to Mr Carey—what did he have to say?’

‘He hauled me over the coals for being in a road accident,’ said Denison.

The voice sharpened. ‘You can do better than that. Now, having put you and Carey together, I want to know just what you’re doing here in Finland. I want it truthfully, and I want it quickly. And you’d better start thinking seriously of your daughter’s health.’ The gun jerked. ‘Talk!’

Denison was never more conscious of the disadvantages of being naked; it took the pith out of a man. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re here to see the Finnish government.’

‘What about?’

‘A defence project.’

‘Who in the government?’

‘Not really the government,’ said Denison inventively. ‘Someone in the army—in military intelligence.’

‘The name?’ When Denison was silent the gun jerked impatiently. ‘The name, Meyrick.’

Denison was hastily trying to slap together a name that sounded even remotely Finnish. ‘Saarinen.’

‘He’s an architect.’

‘Not this one—this one’s a colonel,’ said Denison, hoping it was a rank in the Finnish army. He was listening intently but heard no sound other than an occasional rustle of clothing from the other side of the bright light.

‘What’s the project?’

‘Electronic espionage—equipment for monitoring Russian broadcasts, especially on military wavelengths.’

There was a long silence. ‘I suppose you know that this is already done.’

‘Not the way I do it,’ said Denison.

‘All right; how do you do it? And let’s not have me extract answers like pulling teeth or that girl of yours might have some of her teeth pulled.’

‘I invented an automatic decoder,’ said Denison. A barrier broke in his mind and a wave of panic and terror swept over him. He felt sweat trickle down his chest and then deliberately pushed the panic back where it had come from—but he retained the words that had come with it.

‘It’s a stochastic process,’ he said, not even knowing what the word meant. ‘A development of the Monte Carlo method. The Russian output is repeatedly sampled and put through a series of transformations at random. Each transformation is compared with a store held in a computer memory—if a match is made a tree branching takes place leading to a further set of transformations. There are a lot of dead ends and it needs a big, fast computer—very powerful.’

The sweat poured off him. He had not understood a word of what he had said.

‘I got most of that,’ said the voice, and Denison thought he detected a touch of awe. ‘You invented this thing?’

‘I developed the circuits and helped with the programming,’ said Denison sullenly.

‘There’s one thing I don’t understand—and this I really have to know. Why give it to the Finns?’

‘We didn’t,’ said Denison. ‘They gave it to us. They developed the basics. They didn’t have the resources to follow up, so they gave it to us.’

‘Professor Kääriänen?’

‘Look,’ said Denison. ‘Let me hear that tape again.’

‘Why?’

‘I’m not saying another bloody word until I hear it,’ said Denison stubbornly.

A pause. ‘All right; here’s a re-run.’

The gun vanished and there was a click.

‘Now tell me; what’s your father doing here in Finland?’

‘He’s on holiday.’

Denison strained his ears as he listened to the conversation and evaluated the voices. He raised his hands and slowly parted them so that the link of the handcuffs tightened.

‘He wanted to find out something about his father—my grandfather.’

‘What did he want to find out?’
A pause.
‘Come now, Miss Meyrick; nothing will happen, either to you or to your father, if you ans…’

Denison lunged, moving fast. He had moved his legs under the bed, so that when he moved he was on the balls of his feet and utilizing the maximum thrust of his thighs. His hands were as wide apart as he could spread them and he rammed them forward as though to grab the man by the ears. The link between the handcuffs caught the man right across the larynx.

Both tape recorder and flashlight dropped to the floor; the flashlight rolled, sending grotesque shadows about the room, and the recorder babbled. Denison kept up his pressure on the man’s throat and was aware of cloth as he pressed his hands to his opponent’s face. In the shifting light he saw the glint of metal as the man raised the pistol from his pocket and he twisted his hand frantically and managed to grab the wrist as it came up.

With his left hand holding firmly on to his opponent’s right wrist he thrust firmly so that the steel link cut into the man’s throat. The gun was thus held close to the man’s right ear, and when it went off with a blinding flare and a deafening explosion the man reeled away and dropped it.

Denison dived for it and came up again quickly. The door banged closed and the recorder chattered insanely. He made for the door and opened it, to find himself in a narrow corridor with another door at the end. As he ran for it he heard Diana Hansen say, from behind him,
…Lyn, if you take this attitude it will be the worse for you.’

He heard the words but they made little sense and he had no time to evaluate them. He burst through the door and found himself in the brightly lit hotel corridor. There was no one to be seen, so he ran to the corner where the corridor turned and came to the lifts, and skidded to a halt in front of an astonished couple in evening dress. One lift was going down.

He made for the stairs, hearing a startled scream from behind him, and ran down two flights of stairs, causing quite a commotion as he emerged into the lobby yelling for the police and wearing nothing but a pair of handcuffs and an automatic pistol.

‘Incredible!’ said Carey. His voice was dead as though he, himself, did not believe what he was saying, and the single word made no echo in the quiet room.

‘That’s what happened,’ said Denison simply.

McCready stirred. ‘It would seem that more than water was thrown on to the hot stones in the sauna.’

‘Yes,’ said Carey. ‘I have heard that some Finns, in an experimental mood, have used koskenkorva as
Iöylyä.’

‘What’s that?’ asked Denison.

‘A sort of Finnish vodka.’ Carey put down his dead pipe. ‘I dare say some smart chemist could come up with a vaporizing knock-out mixture. I accept that.’ He frowned and shook his head. ‘Could you repeat what you told this fellow about your bloody decoder?’

‘It’s engraved on my memory,’ said Denison bitterly. ‘I said, “It’s a stochastic process—a development of the Monte Carlo method. The Russian output is repeatedly sampled and put through a series of transformations at random. Each transformation is compared with a store held in a computer memory—if a match is made a tree branching takes place leading to a further set of transformations. There are a lot of dead ends and it needs a big, fast computer—very powerful.”’

‘It would,’ said Carey drily.

‘I don’t even know what stochastic means,’ said Denison helplessly.

Carey took a smoker’s compendium from his pocket and began to clean his pipe, making a dry scraping sound. ‘I know what it means. A stochastic process has an element of probability in it. The Monte Carlo method was first devised as a means of predicting the rate of diffusion of uranium hexafluoride through a porous barrier—it’s been put to other uses since.’

‘But I don’t know anything about that,’ expostulated Denison.

‘Apparently you do,’ said Carey. ‘If you thought you were talking gobbledegook you were wrong. It would make sense to a mathematician or a computer man. And you were right about something else; you’d need a bloody powerful computer to handle it—the transformations would run into millions for even a short message. In fact, I don’t think there is that kind of a computer, unless the programming method is equally powerful.’

Denison developed the shakes. ‘Was I a mathematician? Did I work on computers?’ he whispered.

‘No,’ said Carey levelly. ‘What did you think you were doing when you reeled off all that stuff?’

‘I was spinning a yarn—I couldn’t tell him why we were really here.’

McCready leaned forward. ‘What did you feel like when you were spouting like that?’

‘I was scared to death,’ confessed Denison.

‘Of the man?’

There was violence in Denison’s headshake. ‘Not of the man—of myself. What was in
me.’
His hands began to quiver again.

Carey caught McCready’s eye and shook his head slightly; that line of questioning was too dangerous for
Denison. He said, ‘We’ll leave that for a moment and move on. You say this chap accepted you as Meyrick?’

‘He didn’t question it.’

‘What made you go for him? That was a brave thing to do when he had a gun.’

‘He wasn’t holding the gun,’ said Denison. ‘He was holding the recorder. I suddenly tumbled to it that the recording was a fake. The threatening bit at the end had a different quality—a dead sound. All the other stuff was just ordinary conversation and could have happened quite naturally. It followed that this chap couldn’t have Lyn, and that left me free to act.’

‘Quite logical,’ said Carey. ‘And quite right.’ There was a bemused look on his face as he muttered to himself,
‘Competent!’

McCready said, ‘Lyn was in the hotel lounge yesterday afternoon and a chap sat at the table and began to pump her. Either the flower pot or the ashtray was bugged and the conversation recorded. Diana Hansen was around and caught on to what was happening and butted in, spoiling the game. Of course, she didn’t know about the bug at the time.’

A look of comprehension came over Denison’s face. ‘I heard Diana’s voice on the tape. She was threatening Lyn, too.’

McCready grinned. ‘When this character was foiled he went away, and Diana and Lyn had a row. The bug was still there so that, too, was picked up on the tape. It seems that your daughter is trying to protect her father against the wiles of a wicked woman of the world.’

‘Oh, no!’ moaned Denison.

‘You’ll have to come the heavy father,’ McCready advised.

‘Does Lyn know what happened?’

Carey grunted and glanced at his watch. ‘Six in the morning—she’ll still be asleep. When you went missing I
had Mrs Hansen tell her that the two of you were going on the town and you’d be late back. I didn’t want her alarmed.’

‘She’s certain to find out,’ said McCready. ‘This is too good a story to suppress—the eminent Dr Meyrick capering in the lobby of the city’s best hotel as naked as the day he was born and waving a gun. Impossible to keep out of the papers.’

‘Why in hell did you do it?’ demanded Carey. ‘You were bawling for the police, too.’

‘I thought I could catch the chap,’ said Denison. ‘When I didn’t I thought of what Meyrick would have done—the real Meyrick. If an innocent man is threatened with a gun the first thing he does is to yell for the coppers. An innocent Meyrick would be bloody outraged—so I blew my top in the hotel lobby.’

‘Still logical,’ muttered Carey. He raised his voice. ‘All right; the man in the sauna. Description?’

‘He was hairy—he had a pelt like a bear.’

‘I don’t care if he was as hairy as Esau,’ said Carey caustically. ‘We can’t go stripping the clothes off suspects to find how hairy they are. His face, man!’

‘Brown eyes,’ said Denison tiredly. ‘Square face—a bit battered. Nose on one side. Dimple in chin.’

‘That’s the bloke who was quizzing Lyn Meyrick,’ said McCready.

‘The other man—the one with the gun.’

‘I never saw him,’ said Denison. ‘The room was darkened and when I got my hands on him I found he was wearing some kind of a mask. But I…’ He stopped on a doubtful note.

‘Carry on,’ said Carey encouragingly.

‘He spoke English but with an accent.’

‘What sort of accent?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Denison desperately. ‘Call it a generalized middle-European accent. The thing is that I think I’ve heard the voice before.’

At that, Carey proceeded to put Denison through the wringer. Fifteen minutes later Denison yelled, ‘I tell you I don’t know.’ He put his head in his hands. ‘I’m tired.’

Carey stood up. ‘All right; you can go to bed. We’ll let you sleep, but I can’t answer for the local cops—they’ll want to see you again. Got your story ready?’

‘Just the truth.’

‘I’d leave out that bit about the decoder you invented,’ advised Carey. ‘It’s a bit too much.’ He jerked his head at McCready. ‘Come on, George.’

They left Denison to his bed. In the lift Carey passed his hand over his face. ‘I didn’t think this job would call for so many sleepless nights.’

‘Let’s find some coffee,’ proposed McCready. ‘There’s sure to be an early morning place open by now.’

They left the hotel in silence and walked along Mannerheimintie. The street was quiet with only the occasional taxi and the odd cyclist on his way to an early start at work. Carey said suddenly, ‘Denison worries me.’

‘You mean that stuff he came out with?’

‘What the hell else?’ The corners of Carey’s mouth turned down. ‘And more—but principally that. A man like Meyrick might design just such a contraption—but where did Denison get it from?’

‘I’ve been thinking about it,’ said McCready. His voice was careful. ‘Have you considered the possibility of a double shuffle?’

Carey broke stride. ‘Speak plainly.’

‘Well, here we have a man whom we think is Denison. His past is blocked out and every time he tries to probe it he breaks into a muck sweat. You saw that.’

‘Well?’

‘But supposing he really is Meyrick—also with the past blocked out—who only thinks he’s Denison. Harding said it
was possible. Then anything brought out of the past in an emergency would be pure Meyrick.’

Carey groaned. ‘What a bloody roundabout to be on.’ He shook his head decisively. ‘That won’t wear. Iredale said he wasn’t Meyrick.’

‘No, he didn’t,’ said McCready softly. ‘I can quote his exact words. Iredale said, “He’s not Meyrick—not unless Meyrick has had plastic surgery recently.” ’

Carey thought that out. ‘Stop trying to confuse me. That would mean that the man we had in the hotel in Oslo for three weeks was
not
Meyrick—that the ringer was the other way round.’

He stopped dead on the pavement. ‘Look, George; let’s get one thing quite clear.’ He stabbed a finger back at the hotel. ‘That man there is
not
Meyrick. I
know
Meyrick—he fights with his tongue and uses sarcasm as a weapon, but if you put him in a real fight he’d collapse. Denison is a quietspoken, civil man who, in an emergency, seems to have the instincts of a born killer. He’s the antithesis of Meyrick. Ram that into your mind and hold on to it fast.’

McCready shrugged. ‘It leaves a lot to be explained.’

‘It will be explained. I want Giles Denison sorted out once and for all back in London. I want his life sifted day by day and minute by minute, if necessary, to find out how he knows that mathematical jargon. And I want Harding brought here
tout de suite.’

‘He’ll like that,’ said McCready sardonically. ‘I’ll pass the word on.’

They walked for another hundred yards and McCready said, ‘Denison is quite a boy. Who else would think of handcuffs as a weapon?’ He chuckled. ‘I think he’s neither Meyrick nor Denison—I think he’s Clark Kent.’

Carey’s jaw dropped. ‘And who the blazes is that?’

‘Superman,’ said McCready blandly.