I said to Mai: “I can’t get back past you, can you lug the anchor in here?”
In the darkness, I could not even hear her slithering away, but in a moment there was the horrible noise of the anchor dragging on the floor of the passage as she pushed it ahead of her. I dragged it up past my legs, wedged the bill of the fluke firmly under the bars. It was a Martin’s anchor, close-stowing type—which was fortunate. (There was no room to maneuver a standard Admiralty-pattern anchor, but these were not used much on the junks for lack of suitable space.) On the Martin’s, the flukes swing through an angle of 43 degrees, and with the pea tucked under a bar, there was good leverage on the shank; I worked it out rapidly in my head, more as an academic exercise than anything else, and came up with the answer that, given an angle of about forty percent at the fulcrum, a shank about thirty-six inches long, a coefficient of shrinkage in the cement of about 0.0765, then I should require about two hundred pounds of pressure at the end of the lever, or maybe two hundred and twenty if I took into account the curve of the bill. It didn’t matter very much, but it kept me busy while I was getting the setup at just the right angle.
Mai whispered: “Can you shift it, you think?”
I said: “Yes, I can. Move back.”
She slithered out of my way so that I could slide along into a better position. I put one flat hand against the granite above the grille, took hold of the end of the shank in the other, and merely pushed with one hand and pulled with the other. It wasn’t as easy as it sounds, (maybe I was wrong about that coefficient of shrinkage, though I don’t think so), and the upper bar started to bend a little as I sweated. This was not going to help, since it would merely tighten up the lug by twisting it, so I shifted the bill up to the corner and tried again. I wished I were facing the other way and could have used my legs, but while I was wondering if I should back out and start over arsy-tarsy, the iron bar suddenly bent at the corner and the lug came clear out. I was sweating profusely in the confined space, and my hands were wet. I dried them off on my sweater, shifted the anchor round to the second upper-corner, and repeated the process. This one was easier—the cement had been carelessly rammed in here—and it came free in less than three minutes. And five minutes later, Mai was backing out behind me with the grille in her hands. She brought the rope when she came back.
We both slithered through in the darkness until, leading the way, I came to an abrupt falling-off into nothingness. Robert Hart had given the height of the vent in the storage room as ten feet six inches from the ground, and I didn’t expect that he would be wrong. But it occurred to me that all kinds of things might be down there that might impede our landing, so I lowered my hunting knife on the end of a measured ten feet-six rope, touched it to the surface delicately, and heard the soft-hard sound of metal on granite—clear but muted by the lightness of the touch. I found a small cleft in the vent wall, wedged a knot tight in it, coiled the rope there ready for an emergency, and then slipped over the edge, held on by my hands for a moment, and dropped.
Hard floor. I fell lightly on the balls of my feet, held out my arms, and waited. In a moment Mai’s lightweight body was tight in my arms. I kissed her quickly, lowered her to the floor, and we set off together in the absolute blackness and silence, moving slowly on rubber-soled feet, a step at a time, a small wait, another step.
The image of the map was burned into my mind, and after eighteen paces I began to feel for the right-hand turn which ought to be here, with a gentle slope leading down. The turn was there, and so was the slope; and the steps down, twenty-one of them, were precisely where they were supposed to be too. I began to bless Sir Robert Hart’s love of precision. And there, at the bottom, was a glimmer of light. The passage was long and narrow, and the light was at the end of it, casting a pale reflection along the corridor; we crept towards it.
At the end, the passage opened into a small chamber, and to the left, there was a wide doorway with no door in it, and the light was a quite pale neon strip, set into its lintel. It gave off an eerie glow down here, deep in the granite rocks, where you would think there ought to be nothing but old-fashioned flares and suits of armor waiting for the medieval troops to step into them.
Neon? It didn’t seem right. And it was also suspicious. Why would they want a light kept burning here, placed just so? A camera set up nearby? Closed-circuit television perhaps? The lonely, ancient aura of the place made these fears seem absurd; but we were not dealing with the Manchus now; we were dealing with one of the wealthiest and most determined criminal organizations in all history. I listened for, and fancied I heard, the distant hum of machinery. A generator? I whispered to Mai: “You hear it?” She nodded, and in the half-light, she pointed down to the lower part of the doorway.
Her eyes were sharp. There was the tiniest scar on the smooth face of the rock, about twelve inches from the ground. I signaled her to wait, and went over to examine it, keeping close to the wall and feeling carefully for any tripwires as I moved round the chamber. I dropped to my knees by the doorway, and looked for what there was to see.
The scar was an incision in the rock, and there was a minute pinpoint of black light coming out of it, barely strong enough to reach the facing wall, the kind of thing, on a miniaturized scale, that opens a supermarket door. I worried about the height, a mere foot off the ground, too easy to step over. And, searching, I found the second one, even less visible except through careful search, three feet above it. I crept quietly back to Mai.
My lips close to her ear, I whispered: “A trip-light one foot off the ground, another four feet off the ground. That means we have to dive through them, perfectly horizontal, you get the idea?”
Her lovely eyes were bright, amused, expectant, excited. She nodded, and we went to the doorway together, and I pointed out the two eyes that were waiting to watch us go through them. Beyond, there was just enough light to see that the corridor continued out into the darkness again. I bent down close to the wall, held one hand at the level of the lower light and the other at the upper, just to give her a better visual aiming-point, holding my arms apart as though she were to dive through them but a little to one side. She stepped back a few paces and threw herself forward, passing neatly and lithely between my two hands, like a diver heading for the pool. On the other side, I saw her double up and roll over, and she was on her feet and waiting for me in a split second. I stepped back, worried about it just long enough to be sure of accuracy—my bulk was a problem here—and then followed her.
No bells rang, no lights flashed, no portcullis came clanging down; and we were through; and still there was no sign of any life at all. There was only the faint hum, more distinctive now, and just the whiff of diesel oil on the air, hardly noticeable to any but the keenest nose. I suddenly had a craving for a glass of good cognac; I’d brought none with me.
For half an hour we explored those caverns and passages, keeping the picture of the map well in our imaginations; they were clean, aseptic, and air-conditioned, with none of the traces of hundred-year-old dust you would have expected. Then, at last, we came to the area that was described on the map as the lower armories, the quarters that had once been used as the personal suite of the wicked Sumanu Fu, the pirate who had fought the Manchus for nearly sixty years till they finally chopped off his eighty-three-year-old head in 1809.
The old sybarite had liked good living, and I’d somehow suspected that if Ming did indeed use the old fortress for a hideout, the Sumanu Fu suite, so to speak, would have offered the best possibilities for conversion into the kind of place Ming would demand—a place he could defend if necessary and yet would offer the kind of comfort not usually found on a barren rock.
And what else did I expect to find here? It didn’t seem very likely, but somehow I had a premonition that I would find Sally Hyde in much the same kind of torment as that which had been Bettina’s when I’d found her in the warehouse cellar. I dreaded to think of what I just might have to tell her father.
I took a little time out to stop and think; it’s so easy to rush in when the going seems to be good. We were on the verge of entering a fortress; and had the protection, up to this point, been as good as it ought to have been? That was the question.
Or had we simply found the obstacles that we were expected to find? And were there, therefore, others?
There’d been an un-scalable cliff, a guard halfway up its face, an iron grille set in granite, a nearly invisible trip-light to warn of entry. And, above all, there was the undeniable fact that no one was supposed to know that the crumbling old fortress was functioning again there, at its lowest levels.
But wait a moment; if the Red Chinese knew that Ming was using it, and if they were keeping quiet about their knowledge, just how quiet could they be? How good was their own security? I thought it over and decided that Ming could count on at least an adequate protection, a combination of secrecy with security, if the secrecy alone should fail.
I said to Mai, whispering: “We’re here, and they don’t know we could possibly have done it. It’s good.” I hoped I was right.
And now, there was the door leading to the suite that I knew would hold; one way or the other; all the answers to all the questions.
I’d begun to use my flashlight again, because the corridors here were short and bisected everywhere by other passages, and it seemed that I’d hear danger first; rather than see it. I found the door, which was made of finely finished teak and studded with iron nails, just where the map said it ought to be. And there was a pinpoint of light coming through the keyhole. I bent down and peeked through it; I could see no living thing, but the room was comfortably furnished in American rather than Oriental style. I could see the end of a green velvet sofa, a pale blue velvet chair, an oak refectory table on which there was a pink princess-telephone. As I looked, I heard the sudden sound of its ring muted by the heavy timber of the door, I waited, and the ring went on. I badly wanted to see who would answer it. Nobody did. It was singing to itself there in the lonely, femininely plush room.
It stopped ringing, and I waited a while, and then quickly picked the lock and went inside, signaling to Mai to wait for me in the corridor. I closed the door softly and looked around.
There were no windows here—we were deep underground—but drapes of pale mauve silk had been hung over simulated shutters where windows would normally be placed. There was another velvet sofa, this one in bright yellow, and three more velvet chairs in pastel shades of apricot, salmon, and burnt sienna. A pair of emerald satin drapes hung over a doorway, and the high ceiling was stained the same color. The net effect was extraordinary, a riot of color straight out of one of the women s magazines that teach the bored housewife the finer points of what is loosely called “decorating”; there was a riot of color, and most of it told me this was not the sort of place where I would find a man like Ming.
A Dual 1019 turntable with a Fischer amplifier was in a recessed alcove, and the albums scattered around it were modern, up-to-the-minute, and offbeat, the kind that require no studied knowledge of music to enjoy. There was a shelf of books, a small one, containing nothing but Gothic romances—again, not very likely to be Ming’s choice at all.
And there was something that interested me more than anything else in the room—the only item there of any possible and very considerable value; it was a neatly framed case on the wall that contained, under glass, three postage stamps.
One of them was the Penny Black from England, undated, but which I knew to have been issued in 1840, the first adhesive stamp ever made. The second was a circular Brazil Thirty, the first stamp from the Western Hemisphere. And the third was, incredibly, the famous “inverted center” 24-cent airmail stamp from the U.S.A, with the biplane in the center printed upside down.
I thought that all the case needed was a Penny Magenta from British Guiana, and there’d be a cool quarter million dollars right there. It was a marvelous display, and somehow it made me suddenly realize just who had been lying and who had been telling the truth. There was a great sadness in the realization; and at this moment I knew, somehow, exactly what the next step would be.
And it came, almost at once.
As I was looking at the beautiful Penny Black with its wonderful portrait of Queen Victoria, a voice behind me, hard and metallic but still feminine, said sharply in the silence: “Keep absolutely still. Don’t even turn round.”
I said: “Sally Hyde? I’m glad to know you. I’d thought for a while that you were a prisoner. I should have known better.”
I turned round and was about to say: I’m Cabot Cain. But I couldn’t speak. The woman standing there was indeed Sally Hyde, a gun in hand—a foolish little .32 revolver with too short a barrel, the kind of thing that would make a big enough hole in you ten feet away but had no range at all—with her eyes an angry fire and her body tensed and excited. It couldn’t have been anybody else.
The words froze in my throat with a sudden shock of something that was closely akin to anguish.
She was tall and angular, and so indescribably thin that there wasn’t enough sympathy anywhere in the world for her. Her face was a yellow-painted skull with huge, bright brown eyes that shone obscenely. Her hands were five thin twigs, her neck a piece of string. The rest of her body was covered with a loose woolen sweater and slacks, but the way she stood there, the way the clothes hung on her...I knew that if I’d been able to see the belt that was keeping her slacks up; it would have been a circle of no more than fifteen or sixteen inches. She moved quickly to one side, towards the telephone, and the illusion was heightened; the woolen sweater swayed as if there were nothing under it at all, a cover draped over a stick; a scarecrow would have had more body. I looked at the neck and could see the spine, with the Adam’s apple sticking out like a chicken’s giblets tight-wrapped in dried flesh.
I held up a hand and said: urgently: “No! Don’t call anyone, no one, not till you hear what I have to say.”
Her composure; though there was no sign of it when she had first spoken, seemed to be coming back; the excitement was lessening, the anger growing. But she stopped the movement and stared at me, hesitant.
I said quietly: “I’m not alone, Sally. We’re all over the place.” I saw her eyes, mad, distorted eyes, flicker anxiously for just a second, but then she recovered and said sharply:
