Treece seemed to be having difficulty with his speech. His heavy face was livid still, pasty and blotchy with emotion. His hands shook. After a while, however, he made an effort and seemed to regain some of his old, truculent approach. He said, “I don’t see why you had to interfere, confound you. I had everything under control — all tied up, and now you’ve probably gone and mucked it! I consider you’ve grossly exceeded your orders, and the moment I reach London I shall report as much in the proper quarter—”
“The moment you reach London,” Shaw cut in pleasantly, “you’ll be handed over to the Special Branch under close escort. Meanwhile are you trying to tell me that all you’ve been doing is to gain some kudos for yourself… by side-tracking me while you took matters into your own hands?”
Treece snapped, “That’s not a very nice way of putting it.”
“It isn’t, is it? Neither was what you were doing very nice. You damn nearly left Miss MacKinlay and me to die in that ambush — but then, of course, you intended we should be killed, didn’t you?”
“I think you must be mad!”
Shaw grinned, but his eyes were like ice. “Not a bit of it, Treece! And I regret to say I don’t believe a single word of what you’ve just said. I’ve been doing just a little hard, hard thinking since you drove away from that ambush — with neither Wicks nor Fawcett trying to stop you. By the way, both those thugs are dead, but they didn’t die,” Shaw said with his tongue in his cheek, “without leaving something behind them. In brief, they talked.”
Treece’s lips were almost bloodless now, except for a spot of red where his teeth had bitten hard. But he was still putting on the big bluff, and now he demanded, “And what’s the result of this thinking of yours?”
“I’ll tell you in a minute. Where’s Kosyenko?”
Treece said, “With all the rest of the party.”
“Kindly be a little more precise, Treece. Exactly where are they now?”
“I’m not clairvoyant. I took a short cut and got here before the motorcade.” He added surlily, “As soon as they got here they went with the Chief Engineer to inspect the power-rooms. I expect they’re still there.”
“And you? Why didn’t you go, Treece?” There was no answer, but Treece suddenly began to look hunted. Shaw went on, “No doubt you had things to do up here. I’d like to know — what things?”
“Find out!” Treece snarled.
“Well, well — admissions at last! And that’s just what I intend to do.” Shaw spoke over his shoulder to Virginia. “Go in and collect all their guns, there’s a good girl. I’ll keep you covered and you don’t have to worry at all.”
Virginia nodded, walked forward calmly past Shaw and picked up the gun that the injured man had dropped, then went on and took the weapons from the others. She brought them back to Shaw, who said, “Fine. Leave them on the floor, just there — that’s it. Now you take over — keep them covered and don’t hesitate to shoot if they try anything. All right?”
“That last part apply to the Brig.?” she asked.
“You bet! But I’ve a feeling you can leave him safely to me,” Shaw answered evenly. He came away from the door, eyes watchful, body tense, the humming note dinning into his ears. He approached Treece; the heavy face was white still, the pig-like eyes watching him narrowly. Shaw jabbed the Kalashnikova into his guts. “Well,” he said genially, “and how does it feel to have a Russian gun in your belly… Mr Ivan O’Shea Conroy?”
Treece must have been expecting it by this time, but it was still clearly a shock. Shaw could see the stark terror in the man’s face now, the pinched look around his mouth. Shaw hadn’t in fact been one hundred per cent certain until now; Treece’s expression clinched it finally.
Shaw went on, “It was you who loathed Kosyenko’s guts, wasn’t it, Treece? You’d been concerned in dam construction in the days before you changed your identity, hadn’t you? You worked with Kosyenko out in Northern Persia years ago — and you fell out with him then.” He paused. “You meant to kill Kosyenko here at the dam, and then destroy the dam itself. As a Sapper you’d have the know-how for that. And that would put an end to all the Soviet plans for the area, wouldn’t it? Care to tell me what you hoped to gain by all that, Treece?”
Treece didn’t answer.
“I’ll say this for you,” Shaw went on, “I admire your organization and staff-work. Pretty good for long-range planning, even if you did have help inside Russia.” He indicated the uniformed men — and reflected that he’d hit a nail fairly closely when he’d bluffed Andreyev about the KGB being involved in the anti-Kosyenko plans. “There’s one thing that’s puzzling me badly, Treece. Why did you send me on this job — with express orders, in effect, to ferret out your own identity and then kill you?”
Still Treece didn’t answer; it could have been shock, or it could have been one last, vain attempt to carry the bluff through. Shaw’s face hardened suddenly and he pushed the barrel of the Kalashnikova deeper into Treece’s flabby stomach. He said coldly, “Come on, Treece. Let’s have it all — all you ordered me to find out! If you don’t talk and tell me the whole thing I’ll obey orders and spray your backbone over the wall behind you. You’re getting no more chances now. I told you, Wicks and Fawcett talked before they died. They shopped you good and proper, and you’ve had it anyway.”
Treece kept it up for thirty seconds more and then he broke. He said, “I’m not Conroy. You’re quite wrong there. Conroy’s dead. He died back in 1960, in South America. Brazil. And I was never in Persia.”
Shaw stared. He said, “Come off it. I don’t believe a word of it.”
Treece said, “If you don’t I can’t make you. I don’t care now, anyway. But it’s true. I put out the story about Conroy going to Moscow — put it out myself — as a red herring, you see. There wasn’t any Conroy aboard that coach. I’d had a feeling… a feeling the real story was going to break, so I had to have a false lead established first—”
“And you, no doubt, removed Conroy’s physical description from his file yourself. But why the—”
“Please let me finish. I found it… well, more convenient to have the pursuit pinpointed in a wrong direction, also to have the opposition in my sights, if you understand me, rather than not be able to control events myself—”
“As you thought you would through me?” Treece nodded. “Exactly, yes. You see, once a report was made, I would obviously have to act on it — so, at a time suitable to myself, I saw that the report was made. I was to be in charge throughout, and would know all the moves ahead—”
“Which explains, I suppose why you came out here?”
“Yes.”
“And while you were here you meant to deal with me, of course.”
Again, Treece nodded. “That is so. I meant to kill you, and the girl as well since she got herself mixed up in this… as in fact I arranged for the killing of your original London contact, the man in the cafe.” His eyes flickered towards Virginia, cold-bloodedly, almost crazily. “Wicks and Fawcett were to have seen to you two.”
“Where exactly did they fit, Treece?”
“Simply as strong-arm men. They knew little of what I meant to do, though no doubt they gleaned something along the way. Basically Wicks and Fawcett were big-time smugglers, men I found useful enough for the dirty work, men who knew the ropes—”
Virginia interrupted, “They weren’t engaged on gold smuggling this time?”