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which anything might crack. And yet it was without the tense wearing
raggedness that he had felt before he had a crazy breathless presentiment of
success, waiting for him to grasp if he risked the movement. It had come
miraculously, incredibly, literally out of the blue; and it was all
personified in the broad-shouldered blue-eyed shape of the dangerous young man
whose leather coat filled his armchair. Renway wiped his mouth on a silk
handkerchief and tucked it away.
"Tomorrow morning," he said, "an aeroplane will leave Croydon for Paris with
about ten tons of gold on board as a matter of fact, the value will be exactly
three million pounds. It is going to be shot down over the Channel, and the
gold is going to be stolen. If you were desperate enough, you would be the man
to do it."
VII
Simon Templar did not need to act. The peculiar stillness that settled over
him called for no simulation. It was as starkly genuine as any expression his
face had ever worn.
And far back in the dim detached recesses of consciousness he was bowing down
before the ever-lasting generosity of fortune. He had taken that wide sweep
out over the sea and choked his engine over the cliffs at the southern
boundary of March House, staged his whole subsequent demonstration of guilt
and truculence, rolled the dice down the board from beginning to end with
nothing more substantial behind the play than a vast open-minded optimism; but
the little he knew and the little he had guessed, the entire nebulous theory
which had given him the idea of establishing himself as a disreputable airman,
was revealed to be so grotesquely inadequate that he was temporarily
speechless. His puerile stratagem ought to have gained him nothing more than a
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glimpse of March House from the inside and a quick passage to the nearest
police station; instead of which, it had flung doors wide open into something
which even now he could scarcely believe in cold blood.
"It couldn't be done," he said at length.
"It can be done by a few men with the courage to take big chances for a share
in three million pounds," said Renway. "I have all the necessary information.
I have everything organized. The only thing I need to make it certain is the
perfect pilot."
Simon tapped his cigarette.
"I should have thought that was the first thing."
"It was the first thing." Renway drank again. He was speaking with more
steadiness now, with a conviction that was strengthening through every
sentence; his faded stare weaved endlessly over the Saint's face, changing
from one eye to the other. "I had the ideal man; but he met with an accident.
There wasn't time to find anyone else. I was going to try it myself, but I'm
not an expert pilot. I have no fighting experience. I might have bungled it.
You wouldn't."
Meeting the gaze of those unequally staring eyes, Simon had an eerie
intuition that Renway was mad. He had to make a deliberate effort to separate
a part of his mind from that precogni-tion while he pieced his scanty facts
together again in the light of what Renway had said.
There had been a pilot. That would have been(Manuel Enrique, who died on the
Brighton road. A new pilot swooped down out of the sky, and within twenty
minutes was being offered the vacant post. With all due deference to the gods
of luck, it seemed as if that new aviator were having a remarkable red carpet
laid out for him.
"You don't only need a pilot," said the Saint mechanically. "You need a
proper fighting ship, with geared machine guns and all the rest of it."
"There is one," said Renway. "I took it from Hawker's factory last night.
It's one of a new flight they're building for the Moravian government. The one
I took had been out on range tests, and the guns were still fitted. I also
took three spare drums of ammunition. I flew it over here myself it was the
first night landing I've ever made."
It had not been a particularly clean one, Simon remembered; and then he saw
the continual tensing and twitching of Renway's hands and suddenly understood
much more.
There had been a pilot; but he had met with an accident. And yet the plot in
which he had a vital role could not be given up. Therefore it had grown in
Renway's mind to the dimensions of an obsession, until the point had been
reached where it loomed up as the needle's eye of an insanely conceived
salvation. Although Enrique was dead, the aeroplane had still been stolen:
Renway had flown it himself, and the ordeal of that untutored night flight had
cut into the marrow of his nerves. Still the goal could not be given up. The
new pilot arrived at the crisis of an eight-hour sleepless nightmare of
strain a solution, an escape, a straw which he could grapple even while
preserving the delusion that he was a superman irresistibly turning a chance
tool to his need. Simon recalled Renway's abrupt defiant plunge into the
subject after that long awkward silence, and hypothesis merged into certainty.
It was queer, he reflected, how that superman complex, that delusion of being
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able to enslave human instruments body and soul by the power of a hypnotic
personality which usually existed only in the paranoiac's own grandiose
imagination, had been the downfall of so many promising criminals.
"You did that?" said the Saint, in a tone which contained exactly the right
blend of incredulous admiration and sober awe.
"Of course."
Simon put out his cigarette and helped himself to a second.
"That's a beginning," he said. "But the pilots will be armed they'rein touch
with the shore by radio all the way------"
"What is the good of that?" asked Renway calmly. "The conditions aren't the
same as they would be in war time. They aren't really expecting to be
attacked. They see another aeroplane overtaking them, that's all there's
always plenty of traffic on that route, and they wouldn't think anything of
it. Then you dive. With your experience, they'd be an easy target. It ought to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]