Running Blind / The Freedom Trap

Elin looked up at the radio mast. ‘The big set in the hut will give us more power.’

I shook my head. ‘Don’t use it – Slade might be monitoring the telephone bands. He can listen to what I have to say to Taggart but he mustn’t know where it’s coming from. A call from the Land-Rover could be coming from anywhere.’

Elin walked over to the Land-Rover, switched on that set and tried to raise Gufunes. The only result was a crackle of static through which a few lonely souls wailed like damned spirits, too drowned by noise to be understandable. ‘There must be storms in the western mountains,’ she said. ‘Should I try Akureyri?’ That was the nearest of the four radiotelephone stations.

‘No,’ I said. ‘If Slade is monitoring at all he’ll be concentrating on Akureyri. Try Seydisfjördur.’

Contacting Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland was much easier and Elin was soon patched into the landline network to Reykjavik and spoke to her telephone friend, Svein. There was a fair amount of incredulous argument but she got her way. ‘There’s a delay of an hour,’ she said.

‘Good enough. Ask Seydisfjördur to contact us when the call comes through.’ I looked at my watch. In an hour it would be 3:45 p.m. British Standard Time – a good hour to catch Taggart.

We packed up and on we pushed south towards the distant ice blink of Vatnajökull. I left the receiver switched on but turned it low and there was a subdued babble from the speaker.

Elin said, ‘What good will it do to speak to this man, Taggart?’

‘He’s Slade’s boss,’ I said. ‘He can get Slade off my back.’

‘But will he?’ she asked. ‘You were supposed to hand over the package and you didn’t. You disobeyed orders. Will Taggart like that?’

‘I don’t think Taggart knows what’s going on here. I don’t think he knows that Slade tried to kill me – and you. I think Slade is working on his own, and he’s out on a limb. I could be wrong, of course, but that’s one of the things I want to get from Taggart.’

‘And if you are wrong? If Taggart instructs you to give the package to Slade? Will you do it?’

I hesitated. ‘I don’t know.’

Elin said. ‘Perhaps Graham was right. Perhaps Slade really thought you’d defected – you must admit he would have every right to think so. Would he then …?’

‘Send a man with a gun? He would.’

‘Then I think you’ve been stupid, Alan; very, very stupid. I think you’ve allowed your hatred of Slade to cloud your judgment, and I think you’re in very great trouble.’

I was beginning to think so myself. I said, ‘I’ll find that out when I talk to Taggart. If he backs Slade … ’ If Taggart backed Slade then I was Johnny-in-the-middle in danger of being squeezed between the Department and the opposition. The Department doesn’t like its plans being messed around, and the wrath of Taggart would be mighty.

And yet there were things that didn’t fit – the pointlessness of the whole exercise in the first place, Slade’s lack of any real animosity when I apparently boobed, the ambivalence of Graham’s role. And there was something else which prickled at the back of my mind but which I could not bring to the surface. Something which Slade had done or had not done, or had said or had not said – something which had rung a warning bell deep in my unconscious.

I braked and brought the Land-Rover to a halt, and Elin looked at me in surprise. I said, ‘I’d better know what cards I hold before I talk to Taggart. Dig out the can-opener – I’m going to open the package.’

‘Is that wise? You said yourself that it might be better not to know.’

‘You may be right. But if you play stud poker without looking at your hole card you’ll probably lose. I think I’d better know what it is that everyone wants so much.’

I got out and went to the rear bumper where I stripped the tape from the metal box and pulled it loose. When I got back behind the wheel Elin already had the can-opener – I think she was really as curious as I was.

The box was made of ordinary shiny metal of the type used for cans, but it was now flecked with a few rust spots due to its exposure. A soldered seam ran along four edges so I presumed that face to be the top. I tapped and pressed experimentally and found that the top flexed a little more under pressure than any of the other five sides, so it was probably safe to stab the blade of the can-opener into it.

I took a deep breath and jabbed the blade into one corner and heard the hiss of air as the metal was penetrated. That indicated that the contents had been vacuum-packed and I hoped I wasn’t going to end up with a couple of pounds of pipe tobacco. The belated thought came to me that it could have been booby-trapped; there are detonators that operate on air pressure and that sudden equalization could have made the bloody thing blow up in my face.

But it hadn’t, so I took another deep breath and began to lever the can-opener. Luckily it was one of the old-fashioned type that didn’t need a rim to operate against; it made a jagged, sharp-edged cut – a really messy job – but it opened up the box inside two minutes.

I took off the top and looked inside and saw a piece of brown, shiny plastic with a somewhat electrical look about it – you can see bits of it in any radio repair shop. I tipped the contents of the box into the palm of my hand and looked at the gadget speculatively and somewhat hopelessly.

The piece of brown plastic was the base plate for an electronic circuit, a very complex one. I recognized resistors and transistors but most of it was incomprehensible. It had been a long time since I had studied radio and the technological avalanche of advances had long since passed me by. In my day a component was a component, but the microcircuitry boys are now putting an entire and complicated circuit with dozens of components on to a chip of silicon you’d need a microscope to see.

‘What is it?’ asked Elin with sublime faith that I would know the answer.

‘I’m damned if I know,’ I admitted. I looked closer and tried to trace some of the circuits but it was impossible. Part of it was of modular construction with plates of printed circuits set on edge, each plate bristled with dozens of components; elsewhere it was of more conventional design, and set in the middle was a curious metal shape for which there was no accounting – not by me, anyway.

The only thing that made sense were the two ordinary screw terminals at the end of the base plate with a small engraved brass plate screwed over them. One terminal was marked ’ + ’ and the other ’ - ‘, and above was engraved, ‘110 v. 60~.’ I said, ‘That’s an American voltage and frequency. In England we use 240 volts and 50 cycles. Let’s assume that’s the input end.’

‘So whatever it is, it’s American.’

‘Possibly American,’ I said cautiously. There was no power pack and the two terminals were not connected so that the gadget was not working at the moment. Presumably it would do what it was supposed to do when a 110 volt, 60 cycle current was applied across those terminals. But what it would do I had no idea at all.

Whatever kind of a whatsit it was, it was an advanced whatsit. The electronic whiz-kids have gone so far and fast that this dohickey, small enough to fit in the palm of my hand, could very well be an advanced computer capable of proving that eVmc

or, alternatively, disproving it.

It could also have been something that a whiz-kid might have jack-legged together to cool his coffee, but I didn’t think so. It didn’t have the jack-leg look about it; it was coolly professional, highly sophisticated and had the air of coming off a very long production line – a production line in a building without windows and guarded by hard-faced men with guns.

I said thoughtfully, ‘Is Lee Nordlinger still at the base at Keflavik?’

‘Yes,’ said Elin. ‘I saw him two weeks ago.’

I poked at the gadget. ‘He’s the only man in Iceland who might have the faintest idea of what this is.’

‘Are you going to show it to him?’

‘I don’t know,’ I said slowly. ‘He might recognize it as a piece of missing US government property and, since he’s a commander in the US Navy, he might think he has to take action. After all, I’m not supposed to have it, and there’d be a lot of questions.’

I put the gadget back into its box, laid the lid on top and taped it into place. ‘I don’t think this had better go underneath again now that I’ve opened it.’

‘Listen!’ said Elin. ‘That’s our number.’

I reached up and twisted the volume control and the voice became louder. ‘Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five; Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five.’

I unhooked the handset. ‘Seven, zero, five answering Seydisfjördur.’

‘Seydisfjördur calling seven, zero, five; your call to London has come through. I am connecting.’

‘Thank you, Seydisfjördur.’

The characteristics of the noise coming through the speaker changed suddenly and a very faraway voice said, ‘David Taggart here. Is that you, Slade?’

I said. ‘I’m speaking on an open line – a very open line. Be careful.’

There was a pause, then Taggart said, ‘I understand. Who is speaking? This is a very bad line.’

He was right, it was a bad line. His voice advanced and receded in volume and was mauled by an occasional burst of static. I said, ‘This is Stewart here.’