Authors: Dennis Wheatley
It had a small hall, but a good big sitting-room which he had furnished with his own things, and a casual glance round it was enough to reveal his main interests. Two fishing rods, a creel and a gaff stood in one corner, and a high proportion of the books in a bookcase at the far end of the room were to do with birds. In the window there stood a gate-legged mahogany dining table which was already laid for dinner and, on the right of the door, a smaller table on which stood the usual selection of drinks. Waving a hand towards it, he asked:
‘What will you have?’ Then, while helping them to the drinks they chose, he went on, ‘In the Mess tonight they are giving a special party for our visiting American. I didn’t feel that you would particularly want to be in on that; and, anyhow, it might be better if you didn’t meet Khune until you have decided what to do about him. So I’ve laid on dinner for us here.’
‘Couldn’t be better, Dick,’ Verney nodded. ‘We’ll be able to natter on without interruption about this pretty kettle of fish with which we’ve been landed.’
Forsby gave him a far from happy look. ‘It’s the queerest business I’ve ever been involved in. I’ve handled plenty of spies and would-be traitors in my time; but I’ve never before found myself up against a Black Magician, and I suppose that is what you’d call this man Lothar.’
‘You’ve said it, chum. He’s a Black Magician all right,’ Verney agreed. ‘The way he has used his psychic powers on this wretched brother of his suggested that he might be, and Sullivan here, having discovered that the house in Cremorne where they were going to meet is a Satanic Temple, clinched the matter. The thing that infuriates me is that they didn’t meet there at midday today as arranged. We had everything set to pick up Otto quietly as he came out. If Lothar had left the place we could have picked him up too. But Saturday is the night of the week that these degenerates meet to hold their orgies, and today is May Day eve, the biggest Satanic feast in the whole year; so we can be pretty sure that Lothar would have stayed on for that, and that it will be a bumper meeting. I’d been hoping to give them the surprise of their lives and get him and all the rest of the unholy crew in the bag by a Special Branch swoop at midnight.’
‘Do you mean to have the swoop carried out anyhow?’
‘No. I cancelled it, because there’s a chance that if Lothar gives us the slip, he may use the place as a bolt hole. I’m having a round-the-clock watch kept on it, so if he does we’ll know, and can go in and get him. His Satanist pals can’t possibly be aware that we have tied him up with them;
so, if we do pinch him here tomorrow and he uses his psychic powers to tell them that he’s in the bag, they won’t take alarm. We’ll be able to go in and mop them up any Saturday.’
Little Forsby ran a hand over his greying hair. ‘I must say I still find communication by psychic means a bit hard to take. I mean, not just odd snatches of telepathy, but when carried on with the same ease as two signallers miles apart could exchange thoughts through their morse buzzers.’
‘Like everything else it’s largely a matter of practice; that is, of course, given that the people concerned have the right apparatus – psychic sensitivity in this case – to start with. Anyhow, I should have thought the tape recordings that you have taken during the past ten days of Otto’s, well - for the lack of a better word – nightmares, would have accustomed you to the idea by now.’
‘They have, in a way. But at times, when I play them back, I’m almost inclined to believe that I’m imagining them; that I’ve taken to drink through having been cooped up for so long between the sea and the mountains, and have got D.T.s, or something! They send shivers down my spine.’
Verney nodded. ‘I can well believe it. All the same, I’d like you to run them through for us after dinner.’
‘Of course. I was expecting that you would want to hear them. I’m sorry that it should be necessary, and that you should have had to make this trip; but hearing a playover of the recordings may help you to decide how best to tackle the situation.’
‘This Lone Tree Hill,’ C.B. asked, ‘whereabouts is it, and what is it like?’
‘It is about four miles to north-eastward of the Station, and quite a well-known landmark in these parts. To reach it one leaves by the main gate and drives for some three miles until reaching a side road, leading north across a bridge that spans a small river. I quite often fish there. Beyond the bridge is moorland with a certain amount of stony outcrop and the ground slopes up fairly steeply. The track does not go up the hill but goes round it to a farm
that lies on the far side, a good two-and-a-half miles from the main road. The hill is easy to climb and its top is rounded with just this one big pine on its crest. The tree must be a hundred years old by now, or more, as most of its branches are dead. Beyond it, about two hundred yards down the farther slope, there is a wood, and beyond that another, steeper hill. That’s as good a description as I can give you, but I’ll take you there tomorrow morning.’
‘What is the ground like – the open part from the bridge on? Are there gorse bushes and gullies, or is it just flat heather land?’
‘There is a certain amount of gorse, and some gullies. Those and the lumps of outcrop would provide a fair degree of cover, if you are thinking of putting a cordon round it.’
‘It’s that I have in mind. If I do decide to risk it, how is the personnel situation? How many could you muster?’
‘I’ve a score of R.A.F. police, and, if you were agreeable to my having a quiet word with certain other people, I could probably raise double that number.’
‘No; we had better confine this to the police, your assistants and ourselves. That should give us twenty-five or so; enough, if they understand how to handle a rifle. What sort of marksmen are they?’
Forsby shook his head. ‘Sorry, C.B., but I wouldn’t know. I suppose by admitting that I’m putting up a black, because in theory I should be able to tell you. But you know how things go in peacetime. They are allowed five rounds per annum apiece to bang off on a range and, if they miss the target altogether, what can one do about it? Does your question mean that you would order my boys to fire on Lothar?’
‘I would, if Otto had given him the formula and he looked like getting away with it. The thing I have to decide is whether we dare risk even giving him a chance to do so.’
‘Better leave that until you’ve made a recce of the ground for yourself tomorrow morning.’ The Squadron-Leader stood up. ‘How about a breath of air before dinner? As you
are here, it might interest you both to have a look round the Station.’
They agreed, finished their drinks and went out with him. He took them down to the foreshore where, just above springtide level, there were steel and concrete platforms for launching various types of rocket; then to a covered gun-park, lined up in which stood half-a-dozen pieces of artillery, all of experimental types designed either to fire rockets from ground to air targets, or for tactical use with small atomic warheads against ground troops. Towards one end of the curving bay he pointed out the cluster of villas that gave the married quarters the appearance of a small village; then led them in the opposite direction to a much nearer long, low building that was the Station Club. In it there were a dance-hall, cinema, library, lounge, writing-room and bar, provided by the Ministry of Supply with the intention of relieving from boredom, as far as that was possible, the men and women stationed in this lonely spot.
After the best part of an hour’s walk, Forsby brought them back to ‘Bachelors Avenue’ and the bungalow they were to occupy for the night. There they found that Harlow had unpacked their bags and put everything ready for them. When they had freshened themselves up with a wash, they walked down to Forsby’s bungalow and drank a glass of good dry Sherry with him while his man set out the grape fruit that was the first course for their dinner.
Over it, owing to Forsby’s insistence, Verney talked about the Black Art and gave them an account of a most desperate affair in which, a few years before, he had found himself up against a most powerful Black Magician in the South of France. However, he declared that he really knew very little about the subject, apart from the principles on which it worked; but he assured them that the occasions on which his job had brought him up against Satanic groups had given him ample proof that it did work if operated by a really knowledgeable occultist who was well-versed in its mysteries. He added that, in his opinion, most cases of reported
Black Magic were nothing of the kind, but clever trickery skilfully put over by highly intelligent gangs of crooks who, by such measures, got wealthy credulous people who were interested in the occult into their clutches for the purpose of blackmail; but he left them in no doubt that he believed Lothar Khune to be a genuine member of the Devil’s fraternity.
When the table had been cleared, Forsby produced the tape recorder and, as they settled down in the easy chairs, he said; ‘You will appreciate that for the greater part of each night the tapes recorded nothing. They have been cut to retain only the parts which will play back sound. Much of the stuff you’ll find quite unintelligible; at least, I have. But now and then there occur conversations which it is easy to follow. I don’t pretend to understand it, but during these nightmares, or whatever they are, Otto Khune speaks with two different voices: his own and, presumably, Lothar’s. One can only assume that they carry on a sort of argument, in which Lothar uses Otto’s vocal chords to express his views alternately with Otto voicing protests in his own. I should warn you that it will be a pretty long session, as there is an awful lot about the state the world is in and what could be done to better it.’
‘I take it you mean by that,’ Verney remarked, ‘Lothar producing all the old arguments about how much better it would be for the masses if every country accepted Communism?’
‘No,’ Forsby replied, and on his face there was a puzzled frown. That is what one would expect, but somehow the line he takes does not strike me in that way. He says more than once that he is fed up with the Communists and regards their impetus as burnt out. That may be bluff, of course, with the idea of inclining Otto more readily to do the swap of data on secret fuels with him. But he insists that he wants the results of the work done by Otto’s team only to carry out some experiment of his own, which will bring about a new state of things and relieve people on both sides of the Iron Curtain from their fears of being blown to blazes
by H-bombs. Anyhow, you can judge for yourself. Here goes.’
He switched on the machine, refilled their glasses with a pleasant Tawny Port, and sat down in his own chair. Then, for the next hour and a half, while he changed the tapes from time to time, they listened, almost without comment. The recordings all began with grunts, shouts, curses and protests, often followed by an unintelligible rigmarole, but then settled down into arguments during which two different voices were clearly perceptible – Otto’s in English, as spontaneous and unaccented as though he had spoken no other tongue since his birth; Lothar’s, also speaking fluent English, but with a faintly nasal twang. Otto’s was almost always angry; Lothar’s persuasive and sweetly reasonable, except for occasional outbursts in the later recordings when he resorted to violent threats.
At length the recordings were over, and Forsby mixed his guests and himself whiskies and sodas before they got down to discussing them.
Verney said: ‘You are right, Dick, about Lothar giving the impression that he is fed up with Moscow. If one can believe what he says it seems that he hoped the Russians would launch a war against the N.A.T.O. Powers and established a New Order, more or less on Nazi lines, in Western Europe and later in the United States. But he has come to the conclusion that the Kremlin is not prepared to play it that way and prefers a policy aimed at bringing the democracies to ruin by gradually gaining control of the whole of Asia and Africa and closing all the markets in them to the nations of the West.’
‘To me, Lothar sounded like a megalomaniac,’ Barney remarked. ‘My guess is that personal power is what he is after. He wants to see some sort of drastic upheaval before he is too old to play a part in it.’
‘I don’t altogether agree,’ Forsby countered. ‘You may be right to the extent that he no longer sees eye to eye with his Russian masters because he thinks that he’ll be dead before their policy of peaceful penetration begins to pay
really big dividends; but to me his aim seems to be to bring about a completely new world order. When I was in Spain during the Civil War there, I talked with quite a number of anarchists, and some of the things he says tally with the views they expressed. It’s a topsy-turvy sort of doctrine based on the old idea that out of evil cometh good. They want to destroy all forms of government and start again from scratch.’
‘He is a destroyer, all right,’ said C.B. grimly. ‘But I think we must regard all this “good of mankind – brotherhood of nations” stuff as eye-wash. Whatever he may say, there’s not much question about his being a Soviet agent.’
‘I suppose so,’ Forsby agreed, a shade doubtfully. ‘Although, in one passage, he did say that having left Russia he did not mean ever to go back there.’
‘Come, come, Dick. If he is not a secret agent, what reason could he have for wanting to get hold of this fuel formula? And if he is a secret agent, knowing his background as we do, what country would he be working for other than Russia?’
‘It’s a hundred to one you’re right, Sir,’ Barney put in. ‘But, as he is a scientist and worked first in the States, then in Germany, then in Russia, there is just a possibility that he’s got some box of tricks of his own and wants our fuel to try it out with – a flying saucer, or something.’
‘You’re off the mark there, young feller. Such formulae are extraordinarily complicated things, and no private person could get one of them made up.’
Forsby shook his head. ‘I don’t agree with you there, C.B. The ingredients are all procurable from any big manufacturer of chemicals. The only secret is in the combination and proportions. It would be expensive, of course; but I’m pretty sure he could get the job done without being brought to book for having illegal possession of the formula in any of several countries outside the N.A.T.O. group – Sweden, Switzerland or Spain, for example. And if he has the money, there would be nothing to stop him from having built to his
own designs some revolutionary type of aircraft as Sullivan suggests.