pool behind him like a monster coming to the surface.
Strokkur exploded violently. Steam, superheated by the molten magma far
below, drove a column of boiling water up the shaft so that it
fountained sixty feet above the pool and descended in a downpour of
deadly rain. The man screamed horribly, but his shril piping was lost
in the roar ‘ of Strokkur. He flung his arms wide and toppled into the pool.
I moved fast, casting a wide circle away from the revealing lights and
heading eventual y towards the road. There was a confused babble of
shouting and more cars were started up to add their lights to the scene,
and I saw a crowd of people running towards Strokkur. I came to a pool
and tossed the pistol into it, together with the spare clips of
ammunition. Anyone found carrying a gun that night would be likely to
spend the rest of his life in jail.
At last I got to the road and joined the crowd. Someone said, ‘What
happened?’
‘I don’t know,’ I flung my hand towards the pool. ‘I heard shooting.’
He dashed past me, avid for vicarious excitement – he would have run
just as fast to see a bloody motor smash -and I discreetly melted into
the darkness behind the line of parked cars drawn up with headlamps blazing.
After I had gone a hundred yards up the road in the direction of the
Volkswagen I turned and looked back. There was a lot of excitement and
waving of arms, and long shadows were cast on to the shifting vapour
above the hot pools, and there was a smal crowd about Strokkur, edging
closer but not too close because Strokkur has a short, seven-minute
cycle. I realized, with some astonishment, that from the time Case and I
had seen Strokkur blow when we left the hotel until the man had fallen
into the pool had been only seven minutes.
Then I saw Slade.
He was standing clearly visible in the lights of a car and looking out
towards Strokkur. I regretted throwing away the pistol because I would
have shot him there and then had I been able, regardless of the
consequences. His companion raised his arm and pointed and Slade
laughed. Then his friend turned around and I saw it was Jack Case.
I found myself trembling al over, and it was with an effort that I
dragged myself away up the road and looked for the Volkswagen. It was
where I had left it and I got behind the driving wheel, switched on the
engine, and then sat there for a moment, letting the tension drain away.
No one I know has ever been shot at from close range and retained his
equanimity ? his autonomic nervous system sees to that. The glands work
overtime and the chemicals stir in the blood, the muscles tune up and
the bel y goes loose, and it’s even worse when the danger has gone.
I found that my hands were trembling violently and rested them on the
wheel, and presently they grew stil and I felt better. I had just put
the car into gear when I felt a ring of cold metal applied to the back
of my neck, and a harsh, wel -remembered voice said, /’God dag, Herr
Stewart-sen. Var forsiktig.’/ I sighed, and switched off the engine.
‘Hel o, Vaslav,’ I said.
Chapter II
‘I am surrounded by a pack of idiots of an incomparable stupidity,’ said
Kennikin. ‘Their brains are in their trigger fingers. It was different
in our day; eh, Stewartsen?’
‘My name is Stewart now,’ I said.
‘So? Wel , Herr Stewart; you may switch on your engine and proceed. I
wil direct you. We wil let my incompetent assistants find their own way.’
The muzzle of the gun nudged me. I switched on, and said, ‘Which way?’
‘Head towards Laugarvatn.’
I drove out of Geysir slowly and careful y. The gun no longer pressed
into the back of my neck but I knew it wasn’t far away, and I knew
Kennikin wel enough not to go in for any damn-fool heroics. He was
disposed to make light conversation. ‘You’ve caused a lot of trouble,
Alan and you can solve a problem that’s been puzzling me. Whatever
happened to Tadeusz?’
‘Who the hel is Tadeusz?’
‘The day you landed at Keflavik he was supposed to stop you.’
‘So that was Tadeusz – he cal ed himself Lindholm. Tadeusz – that sounds
Polish.’
‘He’s Russian; his mother is Polish,! believe.’
‘She’l miss him,’ I said.
‘So!’ He was silent for a while, then he said, ‘Poor Yuri had his leg
amputated this morning.’
‘Poor Yuri ought to have known better than to wave a bel y gun at a man
armed with a rifle,’ I said.
‘But Yuri didn’t know you had a rifle,’ said Kennikin. ‘Not that rifle,
anyway. It came as quite a surprise.’ He clicked his tongue. ‘You real y
shouldn’t have wrecked my jeep like that. It wasn’t nice.’
Not /that/ rifle! He expected a rifle, but not the blockbuster I’d taken
from Fleet. That was interesting because the only other rifle was the
one I’d taken from Philips and how could he know about that? Only from
Slade – another piece of evidence.
I said, ‘Was the engine wrecked?’
‘There was a hole shot through the battery,’ he said. ‘And the cooling
system was wrecked. We lost al the water. That must be quite a gun.’
‘It is,’ I said. ‘I hope to use it again.’
He chuckled. ‘I doubt if you wil . That little episode was most
embarrassing; I had to talk fast to get out of it. A couple of
inquisitive Icelanders asked a lot of questions which I didn’t real y
feel like answering. Such as why the cable car was tied up, and what had
happened to the jeep. And there was the problem of keeping Yuri quiet.’
‘It must have been most uncomfortable,’ I said.
‘And now you’ve done it again,’ said Kennikin. ‘And in public this time.
What real y happened back there?’
‘One of your boys got himself parboiled,’ I said. ‘He got too close to a
spouter.’
‘You see what I mean,’ said Kennikin. ‘Incompetents, the lot of them.
You’d think three to one would be good odds, wouldn’t you? But no; they
bungled it.’
The odds had been three to two, but what had happened to Jack Case? He
hadn’t lifted a finger to help. The image of him standing and talking to
Slade stil burned brightly in my mind and I felt the rage boil up
within me. Every time I had turned to those I thought I could trust I
had been betrayed, and the knowledge burned like acid.
Buchner/Graham/Philips I could understand; he was a member of the
Department fooled by Slade. But Case knew the score – he knew my
suspicions of Slade – and he had not done one damned thing to help when
I had been jumped by Kennikin’s men. And ten minutes later he was
hobnobbing with Slade. It seemed as though the whole Department was
infiltrated although, Taggart excepted, Case was the last man I would
have thought to have gone over. I thought sourly that even Taggart might
be on the Moscow pay-roll – that would wrap the whole bundle into one
neat package.
Kennikin said, ‘I’m glad I didn’t underestimate you. I rather thought
you’d get away from the morons I’ve had wished on me, so I staked out
this car. A little forethought always pays, don’t you think?’
I said, ‘Where are we going?’
‘You don’t need to know in detail,’ he said. ‘Just concentrate on the
driving. And you wil go through Laugarvatn very careful y, observing
al the speed limits and refraining from drawing attention. No sudden
blasts on the horn, for example.’ The cold steel momentarily touched my
neck. ‘Understand?’
‘I understand.’ I felt a sudden relief. I had thought that perhaps he
knew where I had spent the last twenty-four hours and that we were
driving to Gunnar’s house. It wouldn’t have surprised me overmuch;
Kennikin seemed to know everything else. He had been lying in wait at
Geysir, ‘ and that had been a neat trick. The thought of Elin being
taken and what might have happened to Sigurlin had made my blood freeze.
We went through Laugarvatn and on to Thingvel ir, and took the Reykjavik
road, but eight kilometres out of Thingvel ir Kennikin directed me to
turn left on a secondary road. It was a road I knew wel , and it led
around the lake of Thingval avatn. I wondered where the hel we were going.
I didn’t have to wonder long because at a word from Kennikin I turned
off the road again and we went down a bumpy track towards the lake and
the lights of a smal house. One of the status symbols in Reykjavik is