He glanced at Hewell and said: "Well?"
"Well," Hewell said. Every man in the room, except the red-haired lieutenant, was staring at him. I'd forgotten the impact that the first sight of this moving Neanderthalic mountain could make. "We got them. They were suspicious and waiting,but we got them. I lost one man."
"So." Witherspoon turned to the captain. "That accounts for everyone?"
"You murdering fiends," the grey-haired man whispered. "You fiends! Ten of my men killed."
Witherspoon gave a slight signal with his cane and one of his guards stepped forward and placed his carbine barrel against the back of the neck of the rating next to the one who lay with his head pillowed on his arms.
"That's all," Captain Griffiths said quickly. "I swear that is all."
Witherspoon gave another signal and the man stepped back. I could see the white mark where the gun had been Dressing in the man's neck, the slow droop of the shoulders as he exhaled in a long soundless breath. Hewell nodded at the dead man beside him.
"What happened?"
"I asked this young fool here"-Witherspoon pointed at the red-haired lieutenant-"where all the guns and ammunition were stored. The young fool wouldn't tell me. I had that man there shot. Next time I asked he told me."
Hewell nodded absently as if it were the most right and natural thing in the world to shoot a man if another withheld information, but I wasn't interested in Hewell, I was interested in Witherspoon. The absence of spectacles apart, he hadn't changed externally at alclass="underline" but for all that the change was complete. The quick bird-like movements, the falsetto affected voice, the repetitive habit of speech had vanished: here now was a calm assured ruthless man, absolute master of himself and all around him, a man who never wasted an action or a word.
"Those the scientists?" Witherspoon went on.
Hewell nodded and Witherspoon waved his cane towards the far end of the room.
"They're in there."
Hewell and a guard started to shepherd the seven men towards the P. O's mess. As they passed by Witherspoon, Farley stopped and stood before him with clenched hands.
"You monster," he said thickly. "You damned-"
Witherspoon didn't seem even to look at him. His malacca cane whistled through the air and Farley screamed in agony and staggered back against the bunks, clutching his face with both hands. Hewell caught him by the collar and sent him staggering and stumbling the length of the room. Witherspoon never even looked at him. I had the vague idea that Witherspoon and I weren't going to get along very well in the near future.
The door at the far end opened, the men were bundled inside and then the door was closed again, but not before we all heard the high-pitched excited disbelieving voices of women.
"So you kept them under wraps while the Navy was doing your work for you," I said slowly to Witherspoon. "Now that you no longer need the Navy but do need the scientists-no doubt to supervise and develop the building of fresh rockets wherever you're going-well, you need the wives too. How else could you make their husbands work for you?"
He turned to face me, the long thin whippy cane swinging gently in his hand. "Who asked you to speak?"
"You hit me with that cane," I said, "and I'll choke out your life with it."
Everything was suddenly peculiarly still. Hewell, on his way back, halted in mid-stride. Everybody, for some reason best known to himself, had stopped breathing. The thunder of a feather falling on the floor would have had them all airborne. Ten seconds, each second about five minutes long, passed. Everyone was still holding his breath. Then Wither-spoon laughed softly and turned to Captain Griffiths^.
"I'm afraid Bentall here is of a rather different calibre from your men and our scientists," he said, as if in explanation. "Bentall is, for instance, an excellent actor: no other man has ever fooled me so long or so successfully. Bentall allows himself to be savaged by wild dogs and never shows a sign. Bentall, with one arm out of commission, meets up with two experienced knife-fighters in a darkened cave and kills them both. He is also, for good measure, highly skilled in burning down houses." He shrugged, almost apologetically. "But, then, of course, it requires a very special man to become a member of Britain's Secret Service."
Another peculiar silence, even more peculiar than the one that had gone before. Everybody was looking at their first Secret Service man, and they couldn't have been unduly impressed. With a drawn haggard face like that of a cadaver and a body that looked even more so, I wouldn't have done at all as a subject for a poster to attract fresh recruits to the service. Not, of course, that they used posters. I wondered how on earth Witherspoon had known. The Chinese guard, Hang, had heard us, of course, but he hadn't yet spoken to Witherspoon.
"You are a government agent, Bentall, aren't you?" Witherspoon asked softly.
"I'm a scientist," I said, just to see how it would go. "A fuel research technician. Liquid fuel," I added pointedly.
A sign that I didn't see and a guard advanced and pressed his gun-barrel against Captain Griffith's neck.
"Counter-espionage," I said.
"Thank you." The guard fell back. "Honest to goodness plain scientists aren't expert in codes, wireless telegraphy and Morse. You appear to be well versed in all of them, don't you, Bentall?"
I looked at Lieutenant Brookman. "I wonder if you would be kind enough to fix up this arm of mine?"
Witherspoon took a long step towards me. His mouth was as white as the knuckles of the hand that held the malacca cane, but his voice was as unperturbed as ever. "When I'm finished. It may interest you to know that within two minutes of my returning home tonight after the fire a message started coming through on our radio transmitter. From a vessel by the name of the Pelican, in which I have a considerable interest."
If it wasn't for the fact that my nervous system seemed to have completely stopped working, I'd probably have jumped a foot. If I'd the strength for any gymnastics like that, which I hadn't. As it was, I didn't move a muscle of my face. The Pelican! That had been the first name I'd seen on that list under the blotter, the copied list that now lay between my sock and the sole of my right foot.
"The Pelican was listening in on a certain frequency," he continued. "It had instructions to do so. You may imagine the radio operator's astonishment when an S.O.S. started coming through on that frequency, a frequency far removed from the distress channels."
I still didn't move any facial muscles, but it called for no will-power this time, the shock of realization was enough, the shock of appreciating the enormity of my blunder. But it wasn't really my fault. I had had no means of knowing that the 46 in the list I had picked up meant that the Pelican and the other ships-probably all the other names were ships' names too-were to begin listening in, to keep a radio watch at forty-six minutes past every hour. And, as nearly as I could remember, I had begun to transmit my first experimental S.O.S., when I was trying to line up the receiver and transmitter, at almost exactly that time and on the pre-set wave-length of Foochow, which just happened to be the transmitting wave-length they were using.
"He was a clever man, this operator," Witherspoon continued. "He lost you, and guessed it was because you had dropped down to the distress frequencies. He found you there and followed you. He heard the name Vardu mentioned twice, and knew something was far wrong. He copied down letter for letter your signal to the Annandale. And then he waited ten minutes and called back."
I was still giving my impression of one of the statues on Easter Island, carved from stone and badly battered. This wasn't the end, this wasn't necessarily the end. But it was the end, I knew it was.