He turned to the Captain, who obviously spoke little if any English, and who had been listening uncomprehendingly to this lengthy dialogue while his crew men waited for a lead for him.
“Kill him!” he commanded, in Greek. “Skotoseton!”
And the Captain pulled a revolver from his hip pocket, showing only relief at receiving such a simple order.
But the Saint had long foreseen how desperate his situation might become, and had resolved that if he was destined to end his career down in that cargo hold, trapped like a rat behind a pile of boxes, it would only be after he had given the ungodly a show for their money; after he had gathered up in himself and released every last milligram of furious fighting energy that was to be found in his body. And when the testing moment came, his sinew did not fail him.
Every tight-strung dyne of pent-up alertness and determination went into gauging the arrival of that moment and responding to it with almost supernatural speed so as to avoid the deadly lump of lead that would hurtle out of the gun barrel that was swinging up towards him in the Captain’s hand. And in the fraction of a second before the Captain completed his pressure on the trigger, the Saint dived sideways; and the bullet sang past his left ear and thudded into a crate.
Overlaid on the loud reverberations he heard Patroclos shout: “Fool! Be careful! The ammunition!”
And then in what seemed like a mere fluent continuation of that dive, the Saint swept up the metal-shears he had been using with his right hand and hurled them at the Captain. They smashed point first into the Captain’s right arm, and he dropped the gun with a yelp, and then before any of the seamen could reach him the Saint had snatched up a grenade from one of the broken crates.
He held it aloft in both hands, and there was cold steel in his voice as he spoke.
“If anyone makes a move, I’ll pull out the pin and throw this pineapple without the slightest hesitation. You may succeed in getting me, but this whole lot’ll go up with a bang — and all of you with it.”
Patroclos and the Captain and crew froze. The Saint began to edge towards the ladder.
“Don’t look so worried, Dio,” he mocked. “I’m sure you can buy enough sympathy from the Greek authorities to stay out of serious trouble. Of course, you’ll never be persona grata in America again, but there are still other continents for you to operate in. Any of them must be better than being scattered around Piraeus in small pieces.”
“Wait!” Patroclos said hoarsely. “Let us not be hasty. Why can we not come to an arrangement?”
The Saint shook his head.
“No dice,” he said. “You may find it hard to believe, but I’ve still got a few silly old-fashioned principles propping up my halo. I’m just not on the side of the Commies, even when they call themselves North Koreans, and nothing you can offer would persuade me to help them to anything deadlier than a peashooter.”
He had almost reached the foot of the ladder, his glance constantly shifting from one man to another, alert for the slightest hint of a hostile move. If he had to, he was prepared in the last resort to use the grenade as he had threatened... But only if it positively was the very last resort.
Out of the corner of an eye he saw Patroclos crawling on all fours between two crates towards the Captain’s revolver where it had fallen. Simon leapt across the intervening space and got one foot on the gun just as the mogul, his face a mask of vengeful fury, snatched at it. Then the Saint scooped a steel-fingered hand down to grasp the butt, and jerked it savagely. Patroclos kept his grip, and the gun came up off the floor; somehow in the struggle, the gun went off, and Diogenes Patroclos crumpled and rolled slackly over with a bright red stain slowly spreading across his white linen shirt-front.
Simon straightened up, with the revolver now reinforcing the menace of the grenade he still held in his other hand.
“Anyone else want to try his luck?” he inquired grimly, and saw no takers.
14
Simon Templar refilled Ariadne’s glass and his own from the ouzo bottle, and put his feet on the desk.
“It was about the nearest thing you could have to a perfect impersonation. An amazing idea, if you think about it — a man impersonating himself. What a show! And I was the leading player — in the audience!”
The Patroclos empire was in disarray and confusion; with the consent of the Greek government the American Navy, acting for the United Nations, had intercepted the other five ships and seized all the cargoes. Simon was resigned to staying around for a few days longer in Athens to make further statements to the police; Ariadne was similarly resigned to helping to sort out the loose ends in the office; and both had made up their minds to enjoy the enforced stay.
“That poor girl,” mused Ariadne. “He was her boss, and she stayed loyal to him. I feel sorry for her.”
“So do I,” agreed the Saint. “He exploited her as he exploited everyone else. She played her part magnificently, right down to the tears when the news of the plane crash came in.”
The girl toyed with her glass reflectively. It was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that they had shared a need to recapitulate and review some of the complications of the extraordinary conspiracy which the late Diogenes Patroclos had developed without sharing any of its threads completely with anyone.
“I’m still puzzled about the codebook,” she said. “I don’t see why he pretended not to know you’d taken it.”
Simon lounged back in his chair.
“The codebook was a very interesting, not to say a crucial part of the whole set-up. And of course, it was partly the codebook, in the end, that gave the game away. Remember that what he had in mind when he first briefed me was to get me into contact with his supposed impersonator for just long enough to convince me that there was a double. My main job was to get the codebook back. That gave me a specific goal — and it gave him the perfect pretext for hauling me off the job before I got too nosey. Once I’d delivered it, he could tell me to quit—”
“Of course,” broke in the girl. “And that’s why he faked the telegram from Athens — or I suppose he had my namesake send it — and made sure you saw it.”
Simon nodded.
“Exactly.”
“But why did he commission you anyway — I mean the second time, in London — and then insist you stayed in the house?”
“That was an absolute master-stroke. It was a plausible enough move anyway, ‘in the interests of security’ as he put it, but his real reason was simply to make it easy for me to pinch the codebook. And he knew I’d bite.”
“So where did he go wrong?”
“Apart from the weak basic premise, and my scepticism, there was something else. His own vanity — and a kind of melodramatic cloak-and-dagger streak. He did keep just one copy of the codebook as I figure it—”
“Yes, as far as I know. He always took it with him when he went away or out of the house for more than a few hours.”
“Well,” Simon continued, “When I stole it from his safe, he wanted me to think I’d succeeded in getting it to Athens. But he also wanted it there in London — because he was stuck without it. He could have had it sent back, of course, but he preferred to play games by following me at a distance and bringing it back the same night. But I spotted the car behind, and that was when I really started putting the picture together.”
“But what about the photos? A lucky accident, you said?”
He nodded.