Running Blind
by
Desmond Bagley
Chapter I
To be encumbered with a corpse is to be in a difficult position,
especial y when the corpse is without benefit of death certificate.
True, any doctor, even one just hatched from medical school, would have
been able to diagnose the cause of death. The man had died of heart
failure or what the medical boys pompously cal cardiac arrest.
The proximate cause of his pumper having stopped pumping was that
someone had slid a sharp sliver of steel between his ribs just far
enough to penetrate the great muscle of the heart and to cause a serious
and irreversible leakage of blood so that it stopped beating. Cardiac
arrest, as I said.
I wasn’t too anxious to find a doctor because the knife was mine and the
hilt had been in my hand when the point pricked out his life. I stood on
the open road with the body at my feet and I was scared, so scared that
my bowels loosened and the nausea rose in my throat to choke me. I don’t
know which is the worse – to kil someone you know or to kil a
stranger. This particular body had been a stranger ? in fact, he stil
was – I had never seen him before in my life.
And this was the way it happened.
Less than two hours previously the airliner had slid beneath the clouds
and I saw the familiar, grim landscape of Southern Iceland. The aircraft
lost height over the Reykjanes Peninsula and landed dead on time at
Keflavik International Airport, where it was raining, a thin drizzle
weeping from an iron grey sky.
I was unarmed, if you except the /sgian dubh./ Customs officers don’t
like guns so I didn’t carry a pistol, and Slade said it wasn’t
necessary. The /sgian dubh ?/ the black knife of ‘the Highlander – is a
much underrated weapon if, these days, it is ever regarded as a weapon
at al . One sees it in the stocking tops of sober Scotsmen when they are
in the glory of national dress and it is just another piece of masculine
costume jewel ery.
Mine was more functional. It had been given to me by my grandfather who
had it off his grandfather, so that made it at least a hundred and fifty
years old. Like any good piece of kil ing equipment it had no
unnecessary trimmings – even the apparent decorations had a function.
The ebony haft was ribbed on one side in the classic Celtic basket-weave
pattern to give a good grip when drawing, but smooth on the other side
so it would draw clear without catching; the blade was less than four
inches long, but long enough to reach a vital organ; even the gaudy
cairngorm stone set in the pommel had its use – it balanced the knife so
that it made a superlative throwing weapon.
It lived in a flat sheath in my left stocking top. Where else would you
expect to keep a /sgian dubb’?/ The obvious way is often the best
because most people don’t see the obvious. The Customs officer didn’t
even look, not into my luggage and certainly not into the more intimate
realms of my person. I had been in and out of the country so often that
I am tolerably wel known, and the fact I speak the language was a help
– there are only 20,000 people who speak Icelandic and the Icelanders
have a comical air of pleased surprise when they encounter a foreigner
who has taken the trouble to learn it.
‘Wil you be, fishing again, Mr Stewart?’ asked the Customs officer.
I nodded. ‘Yes, I hope to kil a few of your salmon. I’ve had my gear
sterilized – here’s the certificate.’ The Icelanders are trying to keep
out the salmon disease which has attacked the fish in British rivers.
He took the certificate and waved me through the barrier. ‘The best of
luck,’ he said.
I smiled at him and passed through into the concourse and went into the
coffee shop in accordance with the instructions Slade had given me. I
ordered coffee and presently someone sat next to me and laid down a copy
of the /New York Times./ ‘Gee!’ he said. ‘It’s colder here than in the
States.’
‘It’s even colder in Birmingham,’ I said solemnly, and then, the sil y
business of the passwords over, we got down to business.
‘It’s wrapped in the newspaper,’ he said.
He was a short, balding man with the worried look of the ulcered
executive. I tapped the newspaper. ‘What is it?’ I asked.
‘I don’t know. You know where to take it?’
‘Akureyri,’ I said. ‘But why me? Why can’t you take it?’
‘Not me,’ he said definitely. ‘I take the next flight out to the
States.’ He seemed relieved at that simple fact.
‘Let’s be normal,’ I said. ‘I’l buy you a coffee.’ I caught the eye of
a waitress.
‘Thanks,’ he said, and laid down a key-ring. ‘There’s a car in the
parking lot outside – the registration number is written alongside the
masthead of /The Times/there.’
‘Most obliging of you,’ I said. ‘I was going to take a taxi.’
‘I don’t do things to be obliging,’ he said shortly. ‘I do things
because I’m told to do them, just like you – and right now I’m doing the
tel ing and you’re doing the doing. You don’t drive along the main road
to Reykjavik; you go by way of Krysuvik and Kleifavatn.’
I was sipping coffee when he said that and I spluttered. When I came to
the surface and got my breath back I said, ‘Why the hel should I do
that? It’s double the distance and along lousy roads.’
‘I don’t know,’ he said. ‘I’m just the guy who passes the word. But it
was a last-minute instruction so maybe someone’s got wind that maybe
someone else is laying for you somewhere on the main road. I wouldn’t know.’
‘You don’t know much, do you?’ I said acidly, and tapped the newspaper.
‘You don’t know what’s in here; you don’t know why I should waste the
afternoon in driving around the Reykjanes Peninsula. If I asked you the
time of day I doubt if you’d tel me.’
He gave me a sly, sideways grin. ‘I bet one thing,’ he said. ‘I bet I
know more than you do.’
‘That wouldn’t be too difficult,’ I said grumpily. It was al of a piece
with everything Slade did; he worked on the ‘need to know’ principle and
what you didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him.
He finished his coffee. ‘That’s it, buster – except for one thing. When
you get to Reykjavik leave the car parked outside the Hotel Saga and
just walk away from it. It’l be taken care of.’
He got up without another word and walked away, seemingly in a hurry to
get away from me. All during our brief conversation he had seemed
jittery, which worried me because it didn’t square with Slade’s
description of the job. ‘It’l be simple,’ Slade had said. ‘You’re just
a messenger boy.’ The twist of his lips had added the implied sneer that
it was al I was good for.
I stood and jammed the newspaper under my arm. The concealed package was
moderately heavy but not obtrusive. I picked up my gear and went outside
to look for the car; it proved to be a Ford Cortina, and minutes later I
was on my way out of Keflavik and going south – away from Reykjavik. I
wished I knew the idiot who said, ‘The longest way round is the shortest
way there.’
When I found a quiet piece of road I pulled on to the shoulder and
picked up the newspaper from the seat where I had tossed it. The package
was as Slade had described it – smal and heavier than one would have
expected. It was covered in brown hessian, neatly stitched up, and
looked completely anonymous. Careful tapping seemed to indicate that
under the hessian was a metal box, and there were no rattles when it was
shaken.
I regarded it thoughtful y but that didn’t give me any clue, so I
wrapped it in the newspaper again, dropped it on the back seat, and
drove on. It had stopped raining and driving conditions weren’t too bad
– for Iceland. The average Icelandic road makes an English farm track
look like a super-highway. Where there are roads, that is. In the
interior, which Icelanders know as the /Obyggdir,/ there are no roads
and in winter the /Obyggdir/ is pretty near as inaccessible as the moon
unless you’re the hearty explorer type. It looks very much like the
moon, too; Neil Armstrong practised his moon-walk there.
I drove on and, at Krysuvik, I turned inland, past the distant
vapour-covered slopes where super-heated steam boils from the guts of