This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
[Part 3]
And now, as it slowly sucked the morsels of beetle-flesh off its feeding pincers, the signal for the scorpion's own death sounded from far away on the eastern horizon, audible to a human, but made up of vibrations which were far outside the range of the scorpion's sensory system.
A few feet away, a heavy, blunt hand, with bitten fingernails, slowly raised a jagged piece of rock.
There was no noise, but the scorpion felt a tiny movement in the air above it. At once its fighting claws were up and its sting was erect in the rigid tail, its near-sighted eyes staring up for a glimpse of the enemy.
The heavy stone came down.
"Black bastard."
The man watched as the broken insect whipped in death agony.
The man yawned and got to his knees in the sandy depression against the trunk of the bush where he had been sitting for nearly two hours and, his arms bent protectingly over his head, scrambled out into the open.
The noise of the engine which the man had been waiting for and which had signed the scorpion's death warrant was louder. As the man stood and stared up the path of the moon, he could just make out a clumsy black shape coming fast towards him out of the east, and for a moment, the moonlight glinted on whirling rotor blades.
The man rubbed hands down the sides of his dirty khaki shorts and moved quickly around the bush to where the rear wheel of a battered motorcycle protruded from the hiding place. Below the pillion on either side were leather toolboxes. From one of these, he extracted a small heavy package which he stowed inside his open shirt next to his skin. From the other he took four cheap flashlights. He then strode to an area fifty yards from the big thornbush where there was a clear patch of flat ground about the size of a tennis court. At three corners of the landing ground, he screwed the butt end of a flashlight into the ground and switched it on. Then, the last one alight in his hand, he took up his position at the fourth corner and waited.
Chapter 1 - The Pipe Line Opens
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Mashed-Up Music
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· Score: -1, Offtopic
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
[Part 2]
The great thornbush under which the scorpion killed the beetle was a landmark in the wide expanse of rolling veldt some forty miles south of Kissidougou in the southwestern corner of French Guinea. On all horizons ther were hills and jungle, but here, over twenty square miles, there was flat rocky ground which was almost desert; and amongst the tropical scrub only this one thornbush, perhaps because there was water deep beneath its roots, had grown to the height of a house and could be seen many miles away.
The bush grew more or less at the junction of three African states. It was in French Guinea, but only about ten miles north of the northernmost tip of Liberia and five miles east of the frontier in Sierra Leone. Across this frontier are the great diamond mines around Sefadu. These are the property of Sierra International, which is part of the powerful mining empire of Afric International, which in turn is a rich capital asset of the British Commonwealth.
An hour earlier, in its hole among the roots of the great thornbush, the scorpion had been alerted by two sets of vibrations. First there had been the tiny scraping of the beetle's movements, and these belonged to the vibrations which the scorpion immediately recognized and diagnosed. Then there had been a series of incomprehensible thuds round the bush followed by a final heavy quake which had caved in part of the scorpion's hole. These were followed by a soft rhythmic trembling of the ground which was so regular that it soon became a background vibration of no urgency. After a pause, the tiny scraping of the beetle had continued, and it was greed for the beetle that, after a day of sheltering from its deadliest enemy, the sun, finally got the upper hand against the scorpion's memory of the other noises and impelled it out of its lair and into the filtering moonlight.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
[Part 1]
With its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler's arms, the big pandenus scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole under the rock.
There was a small patch of hard flat earth outside the hole, and the scorpion stood in the centre of this on the tips of its four pairs of legs, its nerves and muscles braced for a quick retreat and its senses questing for the minute vibrations which would decide its next move.
The moonlight, glittering down through the great thornbush, threw sapphire highlights off the hard black polish of the six-inch body and glinted palely on the moist white sting which protruded from the last segment of the tail, now curved over parallel with the scorpion's flat back.
Slowly the sting slid home into its sheath and the nerves in the poison sac at its base relaxed. The scorpion had decided. Greed had won over fear.
Twelve inches away, at the bottom of a sharp slope of sand, the small beetle was concerned only with trudging on towards better pastures than he had found under the thornbush, and the swift rush of the scorpion down the slope gave him no time to open his wings. The beetle's legs waved in protest as the sharp claw snapped around his body, and then the sting lanced into him from over the scorpion's head and immediately he was dead.
After it had killed the beetle, the scorpion stood motionless for nearly five minutes. During this time it identified the nature of its prey and again tested the ground and the air for hostile vibrations. Reassured, its fighting claw withdrew from the half severed beetle and its two small feeding pincers reached out and into the beetle's flesh. Then for an hour, and with extreme fastidiousness, the scorpion ate its victim.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot Series
[Part 1]
Three weeks later, in London, March came in like a rattlesnake.
From first light on March 1st, hail and icy sleet, with a Force 8 gale behind them, lashed at the city and went on lashing as the people streamed miserably to work, their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes and their faces blotching with the cold.
It was a filthy day and everybody said so - even M, who rarely admitted the existence of weather even in its extreme forms. When the old black Silver Wraith Rolls with the nondescript number-plate stopped outside the tall building in Regent's Park and he climbed stiffly out on to the pavement, hail hit him in the face like a whiff of small-shot. Instead of hurrying inside the building, he walked deliberately round the car to the window beside the chauffeur.
"Won't be needing the car again today, Smith. Take it away and go home. I'll use the tube this evening. No weather for driving a car. Worse than even one of those PQ convoys."
Ex-Leading Stoker Smith grinned gratefully. "Aye-aye, sir. And thanks." He watched the elderly erect figure walk around the bonnet of the Rolls and across the pavement and into the building. Just like the old boy. He'd always see the men right first. Smith clicked the gear lever into first and moved off, peering forward through the streaming windscreen. They didn't come like that anymore.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot Series
[Part 6]
Behind her there was an explosion. Something hit her on the ankle. She looked down. It was the lock of the door.
Mary Trueblood swivelled sharply on her chair. A man stood in the doorway. It wasn't Strangways. It was a big negro with yellowish skin and slanting eyes. There was a gun in his hand. It ended in a thick black cylinder.
Mary Trueblood opened her mouth to scream.
The man smiled broadly. Slowly, lovingly, he lifted the gun and shot her three times in and aroundthe left breast.
The girl slumped sideways off her chair. The earphonesslipped off her golden hair on to the floor. For perhaps a second the tiny chirrup of London sounded out into the room. Then it stopped. The buzzer at the Controller's desk in Radio Security has signalled that something was wrong with WXN.
The killer walked out the door. He came back carrying a box with a coloured label on it that said PRESTO FIRE, and a big sugarsack marked TATE & LYLE. He put the box down on the floor and went to the body and roughly forced the sack over the head and down to the ankles. The feet stuck out. He dragged the bulky sack out into the hall and came back. In the corner of the room, the safe stood open, as he had been told it would, and the sipher books had been taken out and laid on the desk ready for work on the London signals. The man threw these and all the papers in the safe into the centre of the room. He tore down the curtains and added them to the pile. He topped it off with a couple of chairs. He opened the box of Presto firelighters and took out a handful and tucked them into the pile and lit them. Then he went out into the hall and lit similar bonfires in appropriate places. The tinder dry furniture caught quickly and the flames began to lick up the panelling. The man went to the front door and opened it. Through the hibiscus hedge he could see the glint of the hearse. There was no noise except for the zing of crickets and the soft tick-over of the car's engine. Up and down the road there was no other sign of life. The man went back into the smoke-filled hall and easily shouldered the sack and came out again, leaving the door open to make a draught. He walked swiftly down the path to the road. The back doors of the hearse were open. He handed in the sack and watched the two men force it into the coffin on top of Strangways's body. Then he climbed and shut the doors and put on his top hat. As the first flames showed in the upper windows of the bungalow, the hearse moved quietly from the sidewalk and went on its way up towards the Mona Reservoir. There the weighted coffin would slip down into its fifty-fathom grave and, in just forty-five minutes, the personnel and records of the Carribbean station of the Secret Service would have been utterly destroyed.
The centre finger of Mary Trueblood's right hand stabbed softly, elegantly, at the key. She lifted her wrist. Six twenty-eight. He was a minute late. Mary Trueblood smiled at the thought of the little open Sunbeam tearing up the road towards her. Now, in a second, she would hear the quick step, then the key in the lock and he would be sitting beside her. There would be the apologetic smile as he reached for the earphones. "Sorry Mary. Damned car wouldn't start." Or, "You'd think the blasted police knew the number by now. Stopped me at Halfway Tree." Mary Trueblood took the second pair of earphones off their hook and put them on his chair to save him half a second.
"WXN calling WWW.... WXN calling WWW." She tuned the dial a hair's breadth and tried again. Her watch said six twenty-nine. She began to worry. In a matter of seconds, London would be coming in. Suddenly she thought, God, what could she do if Strangways wasn't on time! It was useless for her to acknowledge London and pretend she was him - useless and dangerous. Radio Security would be monitoring this call, as they monitored every call from an agent. Those instruments which measured the minute pecularities in an operator's "fist" would at once detect it wasn't Strangways at the key. Mary Trueblood had been shown the forest of dials in the quiet room on the top floor at headquarters, had watched as the dancing hands registered the weight of each pulse, the speed of each cipher group, the stumble over a particular letter. The Controller had explained it all to her when she had joined the Carribbean station five years before - how a buzzer would sound and the contact would be automatically broken if the wrong operator had come on the air. It was the basic protection against a Secret Service transmitter falling into enemy hands. And, if an agent had been captured and was being forced to contact London under torture, he had only to add a few hairbreadth peculiarities to his usual "fist" and they would tell the story of his capture as clearly as if he had announced it en clair.
Now it had come! Now she was hearing the hollowness in the ether that meant London was coming in. Mary Trueblood glanced at her watch. Six-thirty. Panic! But now, at last, there were footsteps in the hall. Thank God! In a second he would come in. She must protect him! Desperately she decided to take a chance and keep the circuit open.
"WWW calling WXN.... WWW calling WXN.... Can you hear me?... can you hear me?" London was coming over strong, searching for the Jamaica station.
The footsteps were at the door.
Coolly, confidently, she tapped back, "Hear you loud and clear.... Hear you loud and clear.... hear you..."
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series
[Part 4]
Strangways shrugged his shoulders. Of course it wouldn't turn out like that. The fantastic never materialized in his line of business. There would be some drab solution that had been embroidered by overheated imaginations and the usual hysteria of the Chinese.
Automatically, another part of Strangways's mind took in the three blind men. They were tapping slowly towards him down the sidewalk. They were about twenty yards away. He calculated that they would pass him a second or two before he reached his car. Out of shame for his own health and gratitude for it, Strangways felt for a coin. He ran his thumbnail down the edge to make sure it was a florin and not a penny. He took it out. He was parallel with the beggars. How odd that they were all Chigroes! How very odd! Strangways's hand went out. The coin clanged in the tin cup.
'Bless you, Master,' said the leading man. 'Bless you,' echoed the other two.
The car key was in Strangways's hand. Vaguely he registered the moment of silence as the tapping of the white sticks ceased. It was too late.
As Strangways had passed the last man, all three swivelled. The back two had fanned out a step to have a clear field of fire. Three revolvers, ungainly with their sausage-shaped silencers, whipped out of holsters concealed among the rags. With disciplined precision, the three men aimed at different parts of Strangways's spine - one between the shoulders, one in the small of the back, one at the pelvis.
The three heavy coughs were almost one. Strangways's body was hurled forward as if it had been kicked. It lay absolutely still in the small puff of dust from the sidewalk.
It was six-seventeen. With a squeal of tyres, a dingy motor hearse with black plumes flying from the four corners of its roof took the T-intersection into Richmond Road and shot down towards the group on the pavement. The three men just had time to pick up Strangways's body when the hearse pulled to a stop abreast of them. The double doors at the back were open. So was the plain deal coffin inside. The three men manhandled the body through the doors and into the coffin. They climbed in. The line was put on and the doors pulled shut. The three negroes sat down on three of the four little seats at the corner of the coffin and unhurriedly laid their white sticks beside them. Roomy black alpaca coats hung over the back of the seats. They put the coats on over their rags. Then they took off their baseball caps and reached down to the floor and picked up black top hats and put them on their heads.
The driver, who was also a Chinese negro, looked nervously over his shoulder.
'Go man. Go!' said the biggest of the killers. He glanced down at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. It said six-twenty. Just three minutes for the job. Dead on time.
The hearse made a decorous U-turn and moved at a sedate speed up to the intersection. There it turned right and at thirty miles an hour it cruised genteelly up the tarmac highway towards the hills, its black plumes streaming the doleful signal of its burden and the three mourners sitting bolt upright with their arms crossed respectfully over their hearts.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series
[Part 3]
In fact this was the most important moment in Strangways's day - the time of the duty radio contact with the powerful transmitter on the roof of the building in Regent's Park that is the headquarters of the Secret Service. Every day, at eighteen-thirty local time, unless he gave warning the day before that he would not be on the air - when he had business on one of the other islands in his territory, for instance, or was seriously ill - he would transmit his daily report and receive his orders. If he failed to coe on the air precisely at six-thirty, there would be a second call, the 'Blue' call, at seven, and, finally, the 'Red' call at seven-thirty. After this, if his transmitter remained silent, it was 'Emergency', and Section III, his controlling authority in London, would urgently get on the job of finding out what had happened to him.
Even a 'Blue' call means a bad mark for an agent unless his 'Reasons in Writing' are unanswerable. London's radio schedules round the world are desperately tight adn their minute disruption by even one extra call is a dangerous nuisance. Strangways had never suffered the ignominy of a 'Blue' call, let alone a 'Red', and was as certain as could be that he never would do so. Every evening, at precisely six-fifteen, he left Queen's Club, got into his car and drove for ten minutes up into foothills of the Blue Mountains to his neat bungalow with the fabulous view over Kingston harbour. At six twenty-five he walked through the hall to the office at the back. He unlocked the door and locked it again behind him. Miss Trueblood, who passed as his secretary, but was in fact his No. 2 and a former Chief Officer W.R.N.S., would already be sitting in front of the dials inside the dummy filing cabinet. She would have the earphones on and would be making first contact, tapping out his call-sign, WXN, on 14 megacycles. There would be a shorthand pad on her elegant knees. Strangways would drop into the chair beside her and pick up the other pair of headphones and, at exactly six twenty-eight, he would take over from her and wait for the sudden hollowness in the ether which meant that WWW in London was coming in to acknowledge.
It was an iron routine. Strangways was a man of iron routine. Unfortunately, strict patterns of behavior can be deadly if they are read by an enemy.
Strangways, a tall lean man with a black patch over the right eye and the sort of aquiline good looks you associate with the bridge of a destroyer, walked quickly across the mahogany paneled hallway of Queen's Club and pushed through the light mosquito-wired doors and ran down the three steps to the path.
There was nothing much on his mind except the sensual pleasure of the clean fresh evening air and the memory of the finesse that had given him his three spades. There was a case, of course, the case he was working on, a curious and complicated affair that M had rather nonchalantly tossed over the air at him two weeks earlier. But it was going well. A chance lead into the Chinese community had paid off. Some odd angles had come to light - for the present the merest shadows of angles - but if they jelled, thought Strangways as he strode down the gravel path and into Richmond Road, he might find himself involved in something very odd indeed.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series
[Part 2]
Just before six-fifteen, the silence of RIchmond Road was softly broken. Three blind beggars came round the corner of the intersection and moved slowly down the pavement towards the four cars. They were Chigroes - Chinese negroes - bulky men, but bowed as they shuffled along, tapping at the kerb with their white sticks. THey walked in file. The first man, who wore the blue glasses and could presumably see better than the others, walked in front holding a tin cup against the crook of the stick with his left hand. The right hand of the second man rested on his shoulder and the right hand of the third rested on the shoulder of the second. The eyes of the second and third men were shut. The three men were dressed in rags and wore dirty jippa-jappa baseball caps with long peaks. They said nothing and no noise came from them except for the soft tapping of their sticks on as they came slowly down the shadowed pavement towards the group of cars.
The three blind men would not have been incongruous in Kingston, where there are many diseased people on the streets, but in this quiet rich empty street, they made an unpleasant impression. And it was odd that they should all be Chinese negroes. This is not a common mixture of bloods.
In the cardroom, the sunburned hand reached out into the green pool of the centre table and gathered up the four cards. There was a quiet snap as the trick went to join the rest. 'Hundred honours,' said Strangways, 'and ninety below!' He looked at his watch and stood up. 'Back in twenty minutes. Your deal, Bill. Order some drinks. Usual for me. Don't bother to cook a hand while I'm gone. I always spot them.'
Bill Templar, the Brigadier, laughed shortly. He pinged the bell by his side and raked the cards in towards him. He said, 'Hurry up, blast you. You always let your cards go cold just as your partner's in the money.'
Strangways was already out the door. The three men sat back resignedly in their chairs. The coloured steward came in and they ordered drinks for themselves and a whisky and water for Strangways.
There was this maddening interruption every evening at six-fifteen, about halfway through their second rubber. At this time precisely, even if they were in the middle of a hand, Strangways had to 'go to his office' and 'make a call'. It was a damned nuisance. But Strangways was a vital part of their four and they put up with it. It was never explained what 'the call' was, and no one asked. Strangway's job was 'hush' and that was that. He was rarely away for more than twenty minutes and it was understood that he would pay for his absence with a round of drinks.
The drinks came and the three men began to talk racing.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot Series
[Part 1]
Punctually at six o'clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.
Apart from the background noise of the insects, the wide empty street was quiet. The wealthy owners of the big, withdrawn houses - the bank managers, company directors and top civil servants - had been at home since five o'clock and they would be discussing the day with their wives or or taking a shower and changing their clothes. In half an hour the street would come to life again with the cocktail traffic, but now this very superior half-mile of 'Rich Road', as it was known to the tradesmen of Kingston, held nothing but the suspense of an empty stage and the heavy perfume of night-scented jasmine.
Richmond Road is the 'best' road in Jamaica. It is Jamaica's Park Avenue, its Kensington Palace Gardens, its Avenue D'Iena. The 'best' people live in its big old-fashioned houses, each in an acre or two of beautiful lawn set, too trimly, with the finest trees and flowers from the Botanical Gardens at Hope. The long, straight road is cool and quiet and withdrawn from the vulgar sprawl of Kingston where its residents earn their money, and on the other side of the T-intersection at its top, lie the grounds of King's House, where the Governor and Commander-in-chief of Jamaica lives with his family. In Jamaica, no road could have a finer ending.
On the eastern corner of the top intersection stands No. 1 Richmond Road, a substantial two-storey house with broad white-painted verandas running round both floors. From the road, a gravel path leads up to the pillared entrance through wide lawns marked with tennis courts on which this evening, as on all evenings, the sprinklers are at work. This mansion is the social Mecca of Kingston. It is Queen's Club, which for fifty years has boasted the power and frequency of its black balls.
Such stubborn retreats will not long survive in modern Jamaica. One day Queen's Club will have its windows smashed and perhaps be burned to the ground, but for the time being, it is a useful place to find in a sub-tropical island - well run, well staffed and with the finest cuisine and cellar in the Caribbean.
At that time of day, on most evenings of the year, you would find the same four motor cars standing in the road outside the club. They were the cars belonging to the high bridge game that assembled punctually at five and played until around midnight. You could almost set your watch by these cars. They belonged, reading from the order in which they now stood against the kerb, to the Brigadier in command of the Caribbean Defence Force, to Kingston's leading criminal lawyer, and to the Mathematics Professor from Kingston University. At the tail of the line stood the black Sunbeam Alpine of Commander John Strangways, R.N. (Ret.), Regional Control Officer of the Caribbean - or, less discreetly, the local representative of the British Secret Service.
Slashdot Mirror
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
And now, as it slowly sucked the morsels of beetle-flesh off its feeding pincers, the signal for the scorpion's own death sounded from far away on the eastern horizon, audible to a human, but made up of vibrations which were far outside the range of the scorpion's sensory system.
A few feet away, a heavy, blunt hand, with bitten fingernails, slowly raised a jagged piece of rock.
There was no noise, but the scorpion felt a tiny movement in the air above it. At once its fighting claws were up and its sting was erect in the rigid tail, its near-sighted eyes staring up for a glimpse of the enemy.
The heavy stone came down.
"Black bastard."
The man watched as the broken insect whipped in death agony.
The man yawned and got to his knees in the sandy depression against the trunk of the bush where he had been sitting for nearly two hours and, his arms bent protectingly over his head, scrambled out into the open.
The noise of the engine which the man had been waiting for and which had signed the scorpion's death warrant was louder. As the man stood and stared up the path of the moon, he could just make out a clumsy black shape coming fast towards him out of the east, and for a moment, the moonlight glinted on whirling rotor blades.
The man rubbed hands down the sides of his dirty khaki shorts and moved quickly around the bush to where the rear wheel of a battered motorcycle protruded from the hiding place. Below the pillion on either side were leather toolboxes. From one of these, he extracted a small heavy package which he stowed inside his open shirt next to his skin. From the other he took four cheap flashlights. He then strode to an area fifty yards from the big thornbush where there was a clear patch of flat ground about the size of a tennis court. At three corners of the landing ground, he screwed the butt end of a flashlight into the ground and switched it on. Then, the last one alight in his hand, he took up his position at the fourth corner and waited.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
The great thornbush under which the scorpion killed the beetle was a landmark in the wide expanse of rolling veldt some forty miles south of Kissidougou in the southwestern corner of French Guinea. On all horizons ther were hills and jungle, but here, over twenty square miles, there was flat rocky ground which was almost desert; and amongst the tropical scrub only this one thornbush, perhaps because there was water deep beneath its roots, had grown to the height of a house and could be seen many miles away.
The bush grew more or less at the junction of three African states. It was in French Guinea, but only about ten miles north of the northernmost tip of Liberia and five miles east of the frontier in Sierra Leone. Across this frontier are the great diamond mines around Sefadu. These are the property of Sierra International, which is part of the powerful mining empire of Afric International, which in turn is a rich capital asset of the British Commonwealth.
An hour earlier, in its hole among the roots of the great thornbush, the scorpion had been alerted by two sets of vibrations. First there had been the tiny scraping of the beetle's movements, and these belonged to the vibrations which the scorpion immediately recognized and diagnosed. Then there had been a series of incomprehensible thuds round the bush followed by a final heavy quake which had caved in part of the scorpion's hole. These were followed by a soft rhythmic trembling of the ground which was so regular that it soon became a background vibration of no urgency. After a pause, the tiny scraping of the beetle had continued, and it was greed for the beetle that, after a day of sheltering from its deadliest enemy, the sun, finally got the upper hand against the scorpion's memory of the other noises and impelled it out of its lair and into the filtering moonlight.
This is part of the Great Literature of Slashdot series.
With its two fighting claws held forward like a wrestler's arms, the big pandenus scorpion emerged with a dry rustle from the finger-sized hole under the rock.
There was a small patch of hard flat earth outside the hole, and the scorpion stood in the centre of this on the tips of its four pairs of legs, its nerves and muscles braced for a quick retreat and its senses questing for the minute vibrations which would decide its next move.
The moonlight, glittering down through the great thornbush, threw sapphire highlights off the hard black polish of the six-inch body and glinted palely on the moist white sting which protruded from the last segment of the tail, now curved over parallel with the scorpion's flat back.
Slowly the sting slid home into its sheath and the nerves in the poison sac at its base relaxed. The scorpion had decided. Greed had won over fear.
Twelve inches away, at the bottom of a sharp slope of sand, the small beetle was concerned only with trudging on towards better pastures than he had found under the thornbush, and the swift rush of the scorpion down the slope gave him no time to open his wings. The beetle's legs waved in protest as the sharp claw snapped around his body, and then the sting lanced into him from over the scorpion's head and immediately he was dead.
After it had killed the beetle, the scorpion stood motionless for nearly five minutes. During this time it identified the nature of its prey and again tested the ground and the air for hostile vibrations. Reassured, its fighting claw withdrew from the half severed beetle and its two small feeding pincers reached out and into the beetle's flesh. Then for an hour, and with extreme fastidiousness, the scorpion ate its victim.
[Part 1]
Three weeks later, in London, March came in like a rattlesnake.
From first light on March 1st, hail and icy sleet, with a Force 8 gale behind them, lashed at the city and went on lashing as the people streamed miserably to work, their legs whipped by the wet hems of their macintoshes and their faces blotching with the cold.
It was a filthy day and everybody said so - even M, who rarely admitted the existence of weather even in its extreme forms. When the old black Silver Wraith Rolls with the nondescript number-plate stopped outside the tall building in Regent's Park and he climbed stiffly out on to the pavement, hail hit him in the face like a whiff of small-shot. Instead of hurrying inside the building, he walked deliberately round the car to the window beside the chauffeur.
"Won't be needing the car again today, Smith. Take it away and go home. I'll use the tube this evening. No weather for driving a car. Worse than even one of those PQ convoys."
Ex-Leading Stoker Smith grinned gratefully. "Aye-aye, sir. And thanks." He watched the elderly erect figure walk around the bonnet of the Rolls and across the pavement and into the building. Just like the old boy. He'd always see the men right first. Smith clicked the gear lever into first and moved off, peering forward through the streaming windscreen. They didn't come like that anymore.
[Part 6]
Behind her there was an explosion. Something hit her on the ankle. She looked down. It was the lock of the door.
Mary Trueblood swivelled sharply on her chair. A man stood in the doorway. It wasn't Strangways. It was a big negro with yellowish skin and slanting eyes. There was a gun in his hand. It ended in a thick black cylinder.
Mary Trueblood opened her mouth to scream.
The man smiled broadly. Slowly, lovingly, he lifted the gun and shot her three times in and aroundthe left breast.
The girl slumped sideways off her chair. The earphonesslipped off her golden hair on to the floor. For perhaps a second the tiny chirrup of London sounded out into the room. Then it stopped. The buzzer at the Controller's desk in Radio Security has signalled that something was wrong with WXN.
The killer walked out the door. He came back carrying a box with a coloured label on it that said PRESTO FIRE, and a big sugarsack marked TATE & LYLE. He put the box down on the floor and went to the body and roughly forced the sack over the head and down to the ankles. The feet stuck out. He dragged the bulky sack out into the hall and came back. In the corner of the room, the safe stood open, as he had been told it would, and the sipher books had been taken out and laid on the desk ready for work on the London signals. The man threw these and all the papers in the safe into the centre of the room. He tore down the curtains and added them to the pile. He topped it off with a couple of chairs. He opened the box of Presto firelighters and took out a handful and tucked them into the pile and lit them. Then he went out into the hall and lit similar bonfires in appropriate places. The tinder dry furniture caught quickly and the flames began to lick up the panelling. The man went to the front door and opened it. Through the hibiscus hedge he could see the glint of the hearse. There was no noise except for the zing of crickets and the soft tick-over of the car's engine. Up and down the road there was no other sign of life. The man went back into the smoke-filled hall and easily shouldered the sack and came out again, leaving the door open to make a draught. He walked swiftly down the path to the road. The back doors of the hearse were open. He handed in the sack and watched the two men force it into the coffin on top of Strangways's body. Then he climbed and shut the doors and put on his top hat. As the first flames showed in the upper windows of the bungalow, the hearse moved quietly from the sidewalk and went on its way up towards the Mona Reservoir. There the weighted coffin would slip down into its fifty-fathom grave and, in just forty-five minutes, the personnel and records of the Carribbean station of the Secret Service would have been utterly destroyed.
[Part 5]
"WXN calling WWW.... WXN calling WWW.... WXN... WXN... WXN..."
The centre finger of Mary Trueblood's right hand stabbed softly, elegantly, at the key. She lifted her wrist. Six twenty-eight. He was a minute late. Mary Trueblood smiled at the thought of the little open Sunbeam tearing up the road towards her. Now, in a second, she would hear the quick step, then the key in the lock and he would be sitting beside her. There would be the apologetic smile as he reached for the earphones. "Sorry Mary. Damned car wouldn't start." Or, "You'd think the blasted police knew the number by now. Stopped me at Halfway Tree." Mary Trueblood took the second pair of earphones off their hook and put them on his chair to save him half a second.
"WXN calling WWW.... WXN calling WWW." She tuned the dial a hair's breadth and tried again. Her watch said six twenty-nine. She began to worry. In a matter of seconds, London would be coming in. Suddenly she thought, God, what could she do if Strangways wasn't on time! It was useless for her to acknowledge London and pretend she was him - useless and dangerous. Radio Security would be monitoring this call, as they monitored every call from an agent. Those instruments which measured the minute pecularities in an operator's "fist" would at once detect it wasn't Strangways at the key. Mary Trueblood had been shown the forest of dials in the quiet room on the top floor at headquarters, had watched as the dancing hands registered the weight of each pulse, the speed of each cipher group, the stumble over a particular letter. The Controller had explained it all to her when she had joined the Carribbean station five years before - how a buzzer would sound and the contact would be automatically broken if the wrong operator had come on the air. It was the basic protection against a Secret Service transmitter falling into enemy hands. And, if an agent had been captured and was being forced to contact London under torture, he had only to add a few hairbreadth peculiarities to his usual "fist" and they would tell the story of his capture as clearly as if he had announced it en clair.
Now it had come! Now she was hearing the hollowness in the ether that meant London was coming in. Mary Trueblood glanced at her watch. Six-thirty. Panic! But now, at last, there were footsteps in the hall. Thank God! In a second he would come in. She must protect him! Desperately she decided to take a chance and keep the circuit open.
"WWW calling WXN.... WWW calling WXN.... Can you hear me?... can you hear me?" London was coming over strong, searching for the Jamaica station.
The footsteps were at the door.
Coolly, confidently, she tapped back, "Hear you loud and clear.... Hear you loud and clear.... hear you..."
Strangways shrugged his shoulders. Of course it wouldn't turn out like that. The fantastic never materialized in his line of business. There would be some drab solution that had been embroidered by overheated imaginations and the usual hysteria of the Chinese.
Automatically, another part of Strangways's mind took in the three blind men. They were tapping slowly towards him down the sidewalk. They were about twenty yards away. He calculated that they would pass him a second or two before he reached his car. Out of shame for his own health and gratitude for it, Strangways felt for a coin. He ran his thumbnail down the edge to make sure it was a florin and not a penny. He took it out. He was parallel with the beggars. How odd that they were all Chigroes! How very odd! Strangways's hand went out. The coin clanged in the tin cup.
'Bless you, Master,' said the leading man. 'Bless you,' echoed the other two.
The car key was in Strangways's hand. Vaguely he registered the moment of silence as the tapping of the white sticks ceased. It was too late.
As Strangways had passed the last man, all three swivelled. The back two had fanned out a step to have a clear field of fire. Three revolvers, ungainly with their sausage-shaped silencers, whipped out of holsters concealed among the rags. With disciplined precision, the three men aimed at different parts of Strangways's spine - one between the shoulders, one in the small of the back, one at the pelvis.
The three heavy coughs were almost one. Strangways's body was hurled forward as if it had been kicked. It lay absolutely still in the small puff of dust from the sidewalk.
It was six-seventeen. With a squeal of tyres, a dingy motor hearse with black plumes flying from the four corners of its roof took the T-intersection into Richmond Road and shot down towards the group on the pavement. The three men just had time to pick up Strangways's body when the hearse pulled to a stop abreast of them. The double doors at the back were open. So was the plain deal coffin inside. The three men manhandled the body through the doors and into the coffin. They climbed in. The line was put on and the doors pulled shut. The three negroes sat down on three of the four little seats at the corner of the coffin and unhurriedly laid their white sticks beside them. Roomy black alpaca coats hung over the back of the seats. They put the coats on over their rags. Then they took off their baseball caps and reached down to the floor and picked up black top hats and put them on their heads.
The driver, who was also a Chinese negro, looked nervously over his shoulder.
'Go man. Go!' said the biggest of the killers. He glanced down at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. It said six-twenty. Just three minutes for the job. Dead on time.
The hearse made a decorous U-turn and moved at a sedate speed up to the intersection. There it turned right and at thirty miles an hour it cruised genteelly up the tarmac highway towards the hills, its black plumes streaming the doleful signal of its burden and the three mourners sitting bolt upright with their arms crossed respectfully over their hearts.
In fact this was the most important moment in Strangways's day - the time of the duty radio contact with the powerful transmitter on the roof of the building in Regent's Park that is the headquarters of the Secret Service. Every day, at eighteen-thirty local time, unless he gave warning the day before that he would not be on the air - when he had business on one of the other islands in his territory, for instance, or was seriously ill - he would transmit his daily report and receive his orders. If he failed to coe on the air precisely at six-thirty, there would be a second call, the 'Blue' call, at seven, and, finally, the 'Red' call at seven-thirty. After this, if his transmitter remained silent, it was 'Emergency', and Section III, his controlling authority in London, would urgently get on the job of finding out what had happened to him.
Even a 'Blue' call means a bad mark for an agent unless his 'Reasons in Writing' are unanswerable. London's radio schedules round the world are desperately tight adn their minute disruption by even one extra call is a dangerous nuisance. Strangways had never suffered the ignominy of a 'Blue' call, let alone a 'Red', and was as certain as could be that he never would do so. Every evening, at precisely six-fifteen, he left Queen's Club, got into his car and drove for ten minutes up into foothills of the Blue Mountains to his neat bungalow with the fabulous view over Kingston harbour. At six twenty-five he walked through the hall to the office at the back. He unlocked the door and locked it again behind him. Miss Trueblood, who passed as his secretary, but was in fact his No. 2 and a former Chief Officer W.R.N.S., would already be sitting in front of the dials inside the dummy filing cabinet. She would have the earphones on and would be making first contact, tapping out his call-sign, WXN, on 14 megacycles. There would be a shorthand pad on her elegant knees. Strangways would drop into the chair beside her and pick up the other pair of headphones and, at exactly six twenty-eight, he would take over from her and wait for the sudden hollowness in the ether which meant that WWW in London was coming in to acknowledge.
It was an iron routine. Strangways was a man of iron routine. Unfortunately, strict patterns of behavior can be deadly if they are read by an enemy.
Strangways, a tall lean man with a black patch over the right eye and the sort of aquiline good looks you associate with the bridge of a destroyer, walked quickly across the mahogany paneled hallway of Queen's Club and pushed through the light mosquito-wired doors and ran down the three steps to the path.
There was nothing much on his mind except the sensual pleasure of the clean fresh evening air and the memory of the finesse that had given him his three spades. There was a case, of course, the case he was working on, a curious and complicated affair that M had rather nonchalantly tossed over the air at him two weeks earlier. But it was going well. A chance lead into the Chinese community had paid off. Some odd angles had come to light - for the present the merest shadows of angles - but if they jelled, thought Strangways as he strode down the gravel path and into Richmond Road, he might find himself involved in something very odd indeed.
Just before six-fifteen, the silence of RIchmond Road was softly broken. Three blind beggars came round the corner of the intersection and moved slowly down the pavement towards the four cars. They were Chigroes - Chinese negroes - bulky men, but bowed as they shuffled along, tapping at the kerb with their white sticks. THey walked in file. The first man, who wore the blue glasses and could presumably see better than the others, walked in front holding a tin cup against the crook of the stick with his left hand. The right hand of the second man rested on his shoulder and the right hand of the third rested on the shoulder of the second. The eyes of the second and third men were shut. The three men were dressed in rags and wore dirty jippa-jappa baseball caps with long peaks. They said nothing and no noise came from them except for the soft tapping of their sticks on as they came slowly down the shadowed pavement towards the group of cars.
The three blind men would not have been incongruous in Kingston, where there are many diseased people on the streets, but in this quiet rich empty street, they made an unpleasant impression. And it was odd that they should all be Chinese negroes. This is not a common mixture of bloods.
In the cardroom, the sunburned hand reached out into the green pool of the centre table and gathered up the four cards. There was a quiet snap as the trick went to join the rest. 'Hundred honours,' said Strangways, 'and ninety below!' He looked at his watch and stood up. 'Back in twenty minutes. Your deal, Bill. Order some drinks. Usual for me. Don't bother to cook a hand while I'm gone. I always spot them.'
Bill Templar, the Brigadier, laughed shortly. He pinged the bell by his side and raked the cards in towards him. He said, 'Hurry up, blast you. You always let your cards go cold just as your partner's in the money.'
Strangways was already out the door. The three men sat back resignedly in their chairs. The coloured steward came in and they ordered drinks for themselves and a whisky and water for Strangways.
There was this maddening interruption every evening at six-fifteen, about halfway through their second rubber. At this time precisely, even if they were in the middle of a hand, Strangways had to 'go to his office' and 'make a call'. It was a damned nuisance. But Strangways was a vital part of their four and they put up with it. It was never explained what 'the call' was, and no one asked. Strangway's job was 'hush' and that was that. He was rarely away for more than twenty minutes and it was understood that he would pay for his absence with a round of drinks.
The drinks came and the three men began to talk racing.
Punctually at six o'clock the sun set with a last yellow flash behind the Blue Mountains, a wave of violet shadow poured down Richmond Road, and the crickets and tree frogs in the fine gardens began to zing and tinkle.
Apart from the background noise of the insects, the wide empty street was quiet. The wealthy owners of the big, withdrawn houses - the bank managers, company directors and top civil servants - had been at home since five o'clock and they would be discussing the day with their wives or or taking a shower and changing their clothes. In half an hour the street would come to life again with the cocktail traffic, but now this very superior half-mile of 'Rich Road', as it was known to the tradesmen of Kingston, held nothing but the suspense of an empty stage and the heavy perfume of night-scented jasmine.
Richmond Road is the 'best' road in Jamaica. It is Jamaica's Park Avenue, its Kensington Palace Gardens, its Avenue D'Iena. The 'best' people live in its big old-fashioned houses, each in an acre or two of beautiful lawn set, too trimly, with the finest trees and flowers from the Botanical Gardens at Hope. The long, straight road is cool and quiet and withdrawn from the vulgar sprawl of Kingston where its residents earn their money, and on the other side of the T-intersection at its top, lie the grounds of King's House, where the Governor and Commander-in-chief of Jamaica lives with his family. In Jamaica, no road could have a finer ending.
On the eastern corner of the top intersection stands No. 1 Richmond Road, a substantial two-storey house with broad white-painted verandas running round both floors. From the road, a gravel path leads up to the pillared entrance through wide lawns marked with tennis courts on which this evening, as on all evenings, the sprinklers are at work. This mansion is the social Mecca of Kingston. It is Queen's Club, which for fifty years has boasted the power and frequency of its black balls.
Such stubborn retreats will not long survive in modern Jamaica. One day Queen's Club will have its windows smashed and perhaps be burned to the ground, but for the time being, it is a useful place to find in a sub-tropical island - well run, well staffed and with the finest cuisine and cellar in the Caribbean.
At that time of day, on most evenings of the year, you would find the same four motor cars standing in the road outside the club. They were the cars belonging to the high bridge game that assembled punctually at five and played until around midnight. You could almost set your watch by these cars. They belonged, reading from the order in which they now stood against the kerb, to the Brigadier in command of the Caribbean Defence Force, to Kingston's leading criminal lawyer, and to the Mathematics Professor from Kingston University. At the tail of the line stood the black Sunbeam Alpine of Commander John Strangways, R.N. (Ret.), Regional Control Officer of the Caribbean - or, less discreetly, the local representative of the British Secret Service.