Shaw said, “Yes, Miss Lange, it could help. It could fit. You don’t happen to know his present whereabouts, I suppose?”
“No,” she said, “I do not. From what you say, he could obviously be in London, but I would not know where to look for him. Which is perhaps just as well, Smith.”
He looked at her sharply. “Why’s that?”
In a low voice she said, “Smith, three years ago in Switzerland, I was forced to watch while Rudolf Rencke raped my sister and then murdered her. I do not wish to go into details… but somehow I got away from him, and I went to the police and reported what had happened, but Rencke had too many friends, if one can call them that, in high places — men whom he had in his pocket, men he could blackmail. What happened to my sister took place in Vevey on the Lake of Geneva.. and next day Rencke had produced no less than five prominent persons, one of them a banker and another a member of the Ständerat, who swore that he had never left Zurish and that I must be mad — or vengeful, as a cast-off mistress, which in fact I never was. Since then he has believed me powerless — had he not believed that, he would have tried to kill me. He wants my body, that I know… I swear to you, Smith, if ever I met Rudolf Rencke again, I would do all in my power to kill him.”
She was quite a girl, Shaw reflected as he drove away from the Savoy, but she hadn’t been able to help much. Once again, it seemed that with Spalinski all leads ended in complete blanks, which experience had taught him was the fate of most leads. This time, however, the impasse seemed unbreakable. He wasn’t even within sight of getting off the ground on this job. No-one knew a thing about Spalinski; Fetters was dead and most likely anybody else who might have any knowledge was in danger of dying at any moment. And meanwhile Skyprobe IV had just another seven days to go to splashdown.
Shaw drove along the Strand, headed up for Piccadilly and on to his flat, and when he let himself in and went into his sitting-room he found someone had got there before him and was reclining grandly in an easy chair, drinking Shaw’s own whisky from one of his own crystal tumblers and holding a nasty-looking semi-automatic weapon pointing straight at him as he came through the door. His visitor was big and bald and square-headed, with a mouthful of teeth, and he looked a bastard. He had a puffy white face and moist red lips, very full and sensual, and in general looked unhealthy as well as a bastard.…
Calmly Shaw walked up to him, into the snout of the gun. “Rudolf Rencke, I presume?” he asked.
EIGHT
“At your service, Commander Shaw.” Rencke smiled, showing three gold teeth among the white. “You will please take your gun from your shoulder-holster and drop it by your feet.”
“If you want it, you’ll have to come and get it.”
The bald man said, “I prefer waiter service.”
“Then you can get knotted.”
Rencke smiled puffily and said, “Moss.”
Shaw turned in a flash, his hand already inside his jacket for what the Beretta was worth against that heavy gun, but he was a fraction too late. Two men came at him from behind the door and each seemed to land on his shoulders. He crashed over backwards. Reacting fast, he brought his legs back and sent one of the men flying into a china cabinet. The other man had a lock on his neck and arms. The man in the cabinet emerged from the wreckage shaken but intact and came back to help his companion. Shaw was lifted to his feet and held up in front of Rudolf Rencke. Rencke fit a cigar and smiled gendy. In a soft voice he said, “What a troublesome man. Moss, you and Horn hold him tight and bring him nearer to me… that’s right.”
Rencke took a pull at his cigar and closed his eyes. Then he opened them again, smiled as charmingly as he knew how, and lashed out with his right shoe. His leg muscles must have been enormously strong. The kick took Shaw right in the groin and he whitened with agony as the men kept his body upright. Twice more Rencke repeated the performance and then, through a drumming in his ears, Shaw heard him say, “That will be all for now, thank you, Moss. We shall remain here until after dark, then it will be quite safe to remove him.”
Shaw was slugged from behind and given a jab with a hypodermic that put him out like a light and he didn’t know another thing until he came to in the back of a large car travelling fast through the night. There was a blinding pain in his head and he felt sick. Vaguely in the lights from passing cars he saw that Moss was driving. He himself was flanked by the other man and by Rudolf Rencke who, when he felt Shaw stirring, pushed a gun hard into his side.
Rencke said in that soft, suave voice, “No movements, please, and no sound.”
“Where are we going?”
“There will be no questions.”
“Have it your way,” Shaw answered. He closed his eyes, tried to ignore the throbbing in his head. Everything swung around him and he opened his eyes again, looked out at the tracery of trees and hedges as they came up ghost-like in the white beams of the headlights. Wherever they were heading, they were certainly well outside London already. In front Moss wound his window down a little way and cool air, refreshing air, swept over Shaw. The night was very dark, with a hint of rain to come. The land looked flat and low-lying and Shaw picked up the smell of the sea and ships; they were probably somewhere around the Thames estuary. A little after this they came to Purfleet, thus roughly confirming his geographical estimate, went on through and then came upon scattered houses. Moss swung the car into the drive of a big early-Victorian house standing isolated in its own ground about half a mile beyond its nearest neighbour. The car was driven to earth in a garage and Shaw was ordered out and escorted across a cobbled yard that had evidently once been a stableyard,
towards the kitchen regions of the house. Once inside he was led to a cellar entry. His hands were tied behind his back and he was thrust through the doorway. A light was burning and he saw that he was at the top of a greasy, crumbling stone stairway. He moved gingerly down five steps and then something shifted under his feet and he fell the rest of the way. It was quite a long descent and he landed up on large lumps of coal. But he knew how to fall; he wasn’t hurt. Before he could take a look at his surroundings the light went out. He was left in pitch blackness. A voice from up top called down, “You can’t get away, so don’t try. If you do, we’ll know all about it. Just remember, we have a very effective alarm system but we won’t be too pleased if it sounds off in the night.” After that the door was slammed shut and Shaw heard the lock and bolts operate.
Across the Atlantic, down south in the soft early-evening air of Florida, a four-seater aircraft made a neat landing at the Kennedy base and its occupants hurried to a waiting Thunderbird that drove them fast to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration executive building. The top brass of NASA was getting rattled and the executive chief had called yet another conference and had asked that a representative be sent from the Joint Chiefs of Staff. Washington had sent the Vice-Chief of Staff, US Air Force, and three aides. The Chief of Staff, together with the Secretary of Defense, had already been working almost non-stop on the report that had come through from Whitehall.
Also present at the Kennedy conference were physicists and space-research men from Professor Danvers-Marshall’s own ground team, the top aeromedic and an assistant, and technical and executive officers from mission control. The aeromedics affirmed that the routine checks showed the men in the capsule to be fit and well, if tired; they had reported feelings of sickness but there had been no vomiting. Everything was going according to schedule and there was no suggestion of even the smallest degree of anoxia, which was one of the biggest worries in the health line. Mission control, too, said there were no problems