The Tightrope Men / The Enemy. Desmond Bagley
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,’