better give it to your superior officer together with al your
forebodings, and let him take care of it.’
Nordlinger looked at me with a cold eye. ‘I don’t know but what I
shouldn’t give it to him right now. Forty-eight hours might mean my neck.’
‘You part with it now and it wil be my neck,’ I said grimly.
He picked up the gadget. ‘This is American and it doesn’t belong here at
Keflavik. I’d like to know where it does belong.’
‘You’re right about it not belonging here,’ I said. ‘But I’m betting
it’s Russian – and they want it back.’
‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘It’s ful of American components.’
‘Maybe the Russians learned a lesson from Macnamara on
cost-effectiveness. Maybe they’re shopping in the best market. I don’t
give two bloody hoots if the components were made in the Congo ? I stil
want you to hold on to it.’
He laid the gadget on his desk again very careful y. ‘Okay – but I’l
split the difference; I’l give you twenty-four hours. And even then you
don’t get it back without a ful explanation.’
‘Then I’l have to be satisfied with that,’ I said. ‘Providing you lend
me your car. I left the Land-Rover in Laugarvatn.’
‘You’ve got a goddamn nerve.’ Nordlinger put his hand in his pocket and
tossed the car key on the desk.
‘You’l find it in the car park near the gate – the blue Chevrolet.’
‘I know it.’ I put on my jacket and went to the corner to pick up the
rifles. ‘Lee, do you know a man cal ed Fleet?’
He thought for a moment. ‘No.’
‘Or McCarthy?’
‘The CPO you met in the shop is McCarthy.’
‘Not the same one,’ I said. ‘I’l be seeing you, Lee. We’l go fishing
sometime.’
‘Stay out of jail.’
I paused at the door. ‘What makes you say a thing like that?’
His hand closed over the gadget. ‘Anyone who walks around with a thing
like this ought to be in jail,’ he said feelingly.
I laughed, and left him staring at it. Nordlinger’s sense of what was
right had been offended. He was an engineer, not a scientist, and an
engineer usual y works to the rule book – that long list of verities
tested through the centuries. He tends to forget that the rule book was
original y compiled by scientists, men who see nothing strange in broken
rules other than an opportunity to probe a little deeper into the
inexplicable universe. Any man who can make the successful transition
from Newtonian to quantum physics without breaking his stride can
believe anything any day of the week and twice as much on Sundays. Lee
Nordlinger was not one of these men, but I’d bet the man who designed
the gadget was.
I found the car and put the rifles and the ammunition into the boot. 1
was stil wearing Jack Case’s pistol in the shoulder holster and so now
there was nothing to spoil the set of my coat. Not that I was any more
presentable; there were scorch marks on the front from the burning peat
of Kennikin’s fire, and a torn sleeve from where a bullet had come a
shade too close at Geysir. It was stained with mud and so were my
trousers, I was looking more and more like a tramp – but a clean-shaven
tramp.
I climbed into the car and trickled in the direction of the
International Airport, thinking of what Nordlinger hadn’t been able to
tel me about the gadget. According to Lee it was an impossible object
and that made it scientifical y important – so important that men had
died and had their legs blown off and had been cooked in boiling water
because ‘of it.
And one thing made me shiver. By Kennikin’s last words just before I
escaped from the house at Thingval avatn he had made it quite clear that
I was now more important than the gadget. He had been prepared to kil
me without first laying his hands on it and, for al he knew, once I was
dead the gadget would have been gone forever with me.
I had Nordlinger’s evidence that the gadget was of outstanding
scientific importance, so what was it about me that made me even more
important than that? It’s not often in this drear, technological world
that a single man becomes of more importance than a scientific
breakthrough. Maybe we were returning to sanity at last, but I didn’t
think so.
There was a side entrance to the Icelandair office which one could use
without going through the public concourse, so I parked the car and went
in. I bumped pleasantly into a hostess, and asked, ‘Is Elin
Ragnarsdottir around?’
‘Elin? She’s in the waiting-room.’
I walked into the waiting-room and found her alone. She jumped up
quickly. ‘Alan, you’ve been so long!’
‘It took longer than I expected.’ Her face was strained and there seemed
to be a sense of urgency about her. ‘You didn’t have trouble?’
‘No trouble – not for me. Here’s the newspaper.’
I took it from her. ‘Then what’s the matter?’
‘I think you’d better . . . you’d better read the paper.’ She turned away.
I shook it open and saw a photograph on the front page, a life-size
reproduction of my /sgian dubh./ Underneath, the black headline
screamed: HAVE YOU SEEN THIS KNIFE?
The knife had been found embedded in the heart of a man sitting in a car
parked in the driveway of a house in Laugarvatn. The man had been
identified as a British tourist cal ed John Case. The house and the
Volkswagen in which Case had been found belonged to Gunnar Arnarsson who
was absent, being in charge of a pony-trekking expedition. The house had
been broken into and apparently searched. In the absence of Gunnar
Arnarsson and his wife, Sigurlin Asgeirsdottir, it was impossible to
tel if anything had been stolen. Both were expected to be contacted by
the police.
The knife was so unusual in form that the police had requested the
newspaper to publish a photograph of it. Anyone who had seen this knife
or a similar knife was requested to cal at his nearest police station.
There was a boxed paragraph in which the knife was correctly identified
as a Scottish /sgian dubh,/ and after that the paragraph degenerated
into pseudo-historical blather.
The police were also trying to find a grey Volvo registered in
Reykjavik; anyone having seen it was requested to communicate with the
police at once. The registration number was given.
I looked at Elin. ‘It’s a mess, isn’t it?’ I said quietly.
‘It /is/ the man you went to see at Geysir?’
‘Yes.’ I thought of how I had mistrusted Jack Case and left him
unconscious near Kennikin’s house. Perhaps he had not been untrustworthy
at al because I had no il usions about who had kil ed him. Kennikin had
the /sgian dubh/ and Kennikin had the Volkswagen – and probably Kennikin
had stumbled across Case in his search for me.
But why had Case been kil ed?
‘This is dreadful,’ said Elin. ‘Another man kil ed.’ Her voice was
fil ed with despair.
‘I didn’t kil him,’ I said baldly.
She picked up the paper. ‘How did the police know about the Volvo?’
‘Standard procedure,’ I said. ‘As soon as Case was identified the police
would dig into whatever he’d been doing since he entered the country.
They’d soon find he hired a car – and it wasn’t the Volkswagen he was
found in.’
I was glad the Volvo was tucked away out of sight in Valtyr’s garage in
Vik. ‘When is Valtyr going back to Vik?’ I asked.
‘Tomorrow,’ said Elin.
It seemed as though everything was closing in on me. Lee Nordlinger had
given me a twenty-four hour ultimatum; it was too much to hope that
Valtyr wouldn’t check on the Volvo as soon as he got back to Vik ? he
might even go to the Reykjavik police if he felt certain it was the car
they were searching for. And when the police laid their hands on
Sigurlin then the bal oon would certainly go up -I couldn’t see her
keeping silent in the face of a corpse parked in her home.
Elin touched my arm. ‘What are you going to do?’
‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘Right now I just want to sit and think.’
I began to piece the fragments together and gradual y they made some
kind of sense which hinged around Kennikin’s sudden switch of attitude
after he had captured me. At first he had been al for extracting the
gadget from me and he was looking forward with unwholesome delight to
the operation. But then he lost interest in the gadget and announced
that my death was the more important, and that was just after he had
received a telephone cal .