sound came from the other side of the room and he saw a patch of greyness, quickly obscured and vanishing. A light suddenly stabbed at him and he blinked and screwed up his eyes against the sudden glare. A voice said in accented English, ‘So Dr Meyrick is awake – and up, too.’
Denison brought up his hands before his eyes. The voice said sharply, ‘Don’t move, Meyrick. Stay on the bed.’ Then, more coolly, ‘Do you know what this is?’
The lamp dipped a little so that he could see the vague outline of a man in back-reflected light. He saw the glint of metal in an out-thrust hand. ‘Well?’ said the voice impatiently. ‘What is it, Meyrick?’
Denison’s voice was hoarse. ‘A pistol.’ He cleared his throat. ‘I’d like to know what the hell this is all about.’
The voice was amused. ‘No doubt you would.’ As Denison tried to sort out the accent the light played over him. ‘I see you’ve hurt your side, Dr Meyrick. How did that happen?’
‘A pack of maniacs attacked me in Norway. They seem to have the same breed in Finland, too.’
‘Poor Dr Meyrick,’ mocked the voice. ‘You seem to be continually in trouble. Did you report it to the police?’
‘Of course I did. What else would you expect me to do? And to the British Embassy in Oslo.’ He remembered what Carey had said about Meyrick’s bloody-mindedness, and added irascibly, ‘Bloody incompetents – the lot of them.’
‘Who did you see at the Embassy?’
‘A man called McCready picked me up at the police station and took me to the Embassy. Look, I’ve had enough of this. I’m answering no more questions. None at all.’
The pistol moved languidly. ‘Yes, you will. Did you meet Carey?’
‘No.’
‘You’re a liar.’
‘If you think you know the answers, why ask me the questions? I don’t know anyone called Carey.’
A sigh came out of the darkness. ‘Meyrick, I think you ought to know that we have your daughter.’
Denison tensed, but sat quietly. After a moment he said, ‘Prove it.’
‘Nothing easier.’ The pistol withdrew slowly. ‘Tape recorders are made conveniently small these days, are they not?’ There was a click and a slight hissing noise in the darkness beyond the flashlight, then a man spoke:
‘Now tell me; what’s your father doing here in Finland?’
‘He’s on holiday.’
That was Lyn’s clear voice. Denison recognized it in spite of the slight distortion which was far less than that of a telephone.
‘Did he tell you that?’
‘Who else would tell me?’ She sounded amused.
‘But he went to see Professor Kääriänen this afternoon. That sounds more like business than pleasure.’
‘He wanted to find out something about his father – my grandfather.’
‘What did he want to find out?’
There was a raw silence, then the man said, ‘Come now, Miss Meyrick; nothing will happen, either to you or to your father, if you answer my questions. I assure you that you will be released unharmed.’
A switch snapped and the voices stopped. From the darkness: ‘You see, Dr Meyrick! Of course, I cannot guarantee the truthfulness of my friend regarding his last statement.’ The pistol reappeared, glinting in the light. ‘Now, to return to Mr Carey – what did he have to say?’
‘He hauled me over the coals for being in a road accident,’ said Denison.
The voice sharpened. ‘You can do better than that. Now, having put you and Carey together, I want to know just what you’re doing here in Finland. I want it truthfully, and I want it quickly. And you’d better start thinking seriously of your daughter’s health.’ The gun jerked. ‘Talk!’
Denison was never more conscious of the disadvantages of being naked; it took the pith out of a man. ‘All right,’ he said. ‘We’re here to see the Finnish government.’
‘What about?’
‘A defence project.’
‘Who in the government?’
‘Not really the government,’ said Denison inventively. ‘Someone in the army – in military intelligence.’
‘The name?’ When Denison was silent the gun jerked impatiently. ‘The name, Meyrick.’
Denison was hastily trying to slap together a name that sounded even remotely Finnish. ‘Saarinen.’
‘He’s an architect.’
‘Not this one – this one’s a colonel,’ said Denison, hoping it was a rank in the Finnish army. He was listening intently but heard no sound other than an occasional rustle of clothing from the other side of the bright light.
‘What’s the project?’
‘Electronic espionage – equipment for monitoring Russian broadcasts, especially on military wavelengths.’
There was a long silence. ‘I suppose you know that this is already done.’
‘Not the way I do it,’ said Denison.
‘All right; how do you do it? And let’s not have me extract answers like pulling teeth or that girl of yours might have some of her teeth pulled.’
‘I invented an automatic decoder,’ said Denison. A barrier broke in his mind and a wave of panic and terror swept over him. He felt sweat trickle down his chest and then deliberately pushed the panic back where it had come from – but he retained the words that had come with it.
‘It’s a stochastic process,’ he said, not even knowing what the word meant. ‘A development of the Monte Carlo method. The Russian output is repeatedly sampled and put through a series of transformations at random. Each transformation is compared with a store held in a computer memory – if a match is made a tree branching takes place leading to a further set of transformations. There are a lot of dead ends and it needs a big, fast computer – very powerful.’
The sweat poured off him. He had not understood a word of what he had said.
‘I got most of that,’ said the voice, and Denison thought he detected a touch of awe. ‘You invented this thing?’
‘I developed the circuits and helped with the programming,’ said Denison sullenly.
‘There’s one thing I don’t understand – and this I really have to know. Why give it to the Finns?’
‘We didn’t,’
