The Final Programme Read online

  “You don’t trust him because you haven’t met him and given him the Brunner Test, is that it?” Mr Lucas kicked at a log sticking from the fire. “We couldn’t get into that house without Cornelius’s knowledge of those booby traps of his father’s. If Cornelius doesn’t come, then we’ll have to give up the whole idea.”

  Miss Brunner’s sharp teeth showed as she smiled again. “You’re getting old and cautious, Mr Lucas. And Mr Smiles, by the sound of it, is getting soft as well. As far as I’m concerned, the risk is part of it.”

  “You silly cow!” Dimitri was often rude to Miss Brunner in public, much as he loved to fear her. Public insults; private punishments. “We’re not all in it for the risks; we’re in it for what old Cornelius hid in his house. Without Jerry Cornelius, we’ll never get it. We need him. That’s the truth.”

  “I’m pleased to hear it.” Jerry’s voice was sardonic. He entered the room rather theatrically and closed the door behind him.

  Miss Brunner looked him over. He was very tall, and the pale face, framed by the hair, resembled the young Swinburne’s. His black eyes did not seem at all kindly. He was about twenty-seven and had been, so they said, a Jesuit. He had something of a Church intellectual’s decadent, ascetic appearance. He had possibilities, she thought.

  Jerry dropped his head a trifle as he turned and gave Miss Brunner a slightly amused stare, half-chiding. She crossed her legs and began tapping. He walked gracefully towards Mr Smiles and with a certain degree of pleasure shook hands.

  Mr Smiles sighed. “I’m glad you could make it, Mr Cornelius. How soon can we start?”

  Jerry shrugged. “As soon as you like. I need a day or so to do a few things.”

  “Tomorrow?” Miss Brunner’s voice was pitched somewhat higher than usual.

  “In three days.” Cornelius pursed his lips. “Sunday.”

  Mr Powys spoke from behind his glass. “Three days is too much. The longer we wait, the more chance there is of someone getting to know what we’re planning. Don’t forget that Simons and Harvey both backed out, and Harvey in particular isn’t well known for his tact and diplomacy.”

  “Don’t worry about them,” Cornelius said with finality.

  “What have you done?” Miss Brunner’s voice was still sharp.

  “Nothing much. They’re taking a cruise on a tramp bound for Odessa. It’ll be a long trip, and they won’t mix with the crew.”

  “How did you get them to go?” Mr Lucas dropped his eyes as Cornelius turned.

  “Well,” said Jerry, “there were one or two things they wanted. On condition that they took the trip, I fixed them up.”

  “What things?” asked Mr Crookshank with interest. Jerry ignored him.

  “What have you to do that’s so important?” Miss Brunner enquired.

  “I want to visit the house before our trip.”

  “Why?”

  “For my own reasons, Miss Brunner.”

  Mr Powys’s brooding Welsh face didn’t look up. “I’d like to know just why you’re helping us, mind you, Mr Cornelius.”

  “Would you understand if I told you that it was for revenge?”

  “Revenge.” Mr Powys shook his head rapidly. “Oh, yes. We all get these grudges from time to time, don’t we?”

  “Then it’s revenge,” Jerry said lightly. “Now, Mr Smiles has told you my conditions, I think. You must burn the house to the ground when you’ve got what you wanted, and you must leave my brother Francis and my sister Catherine unharmed. There is also an old servant, John. He must not be hurt in any way.”

  “The rest of the staff?” Dimitri waved an impolite and questioning hand.

  “Do whatever you like. You’ll be taking on some help, I understand?”

  “About twenty men. Mr Smiles has arranged them. He says they’ll be sufficient.” Mr Lucas glanced at Mr Smiles, who nodded.

  “They should be,” Jerry said thoughtfully. “The house is well guarded, but naturally they won’t call the police. With our special equipment you ought to be all right. Don’t forget to burn the house.”

  “Mr Smiles has already reminded us of that, Mr Cornelius,” said Dimitri. “We will do exactly as you say.”

  Jerry turned up the wide collar of his coat. “Right. I’ll be off.”

  “Take care, Mr Cornelius,” Miss Brunner said smoothly as he went out.

  “Oh, I will, I think,” he said.

  The six people did not talk much after Cornelius had left. Only Miss Brunner moved to another chair. She seemed out of sorts.

  “What do we know,” she said, “about his mother?”

  2

  Music filled the old Duesenberg as Jerry Cornelius drove towards the Kent coast—Zoot Money, The Who, The Beatles. Jerry played only the best.

  The volume was turned up to full blast. There were four speakers in the car, and it was impossible for Jerry to hear the sound of the engine. In the spring clip near the steering wheel the contents of a glass danced to the thud of the bass. From time to time Cornelius would reach for the glass, take a sip, and fix it back in the clip. Once he put his hand inside the glove compartment and brought it out full of pills. He had not slept for the best part of a week, and the pills no longer stopped him from feeling edgy; but he crammed his mouth with them, just the same, washing them down. A little later he took out a half-bottle of Bell’s and refilled the glass.

  The road ahead was wet, and rain still beat at the windscreen. The two pairs of wipers swished away in time with the music. Though the heater was on, he felt cold.

  Just outside Dover he stopped at a filling station while he rolled himself a thin cigarette out of liquorice paper and Old Holborn. He paid the man, lit his cigarette, and rode on in the general direction of the coast, turning off onto a side road and eventually driving down the main street of the harbour village of Southquay, strains of guitars, organs and high voices drifting in the car’s wake. The sea was black under the overcast sky. He drove slowly along the quayside, the car’s wheels bumping on cobbles. He switched off the tape.

  There was a small hotel set back from the road. It was called The Yachtsman. Its sign showed a smiling man in yachting gear. Behind him was a view of the harbour as seen from the hotel. The sign moved a little in the wind. Jerry backed the Duesenberg into the hotel’s courtyard, left the keys in the ignition, and got out. He put his hands in the high pockets of his coat and stood stretching his legs by the car for a moment, looking over the black water at the moored boats. One of them was his launch, which he’d had converted from a modern lifeboat.

  He glanced back at the hotel, noting that no lights had gone on and that no-one seemed to be stirring. He crossed to the waterside. A metal ladder led down into the sea. He climbed down a few rungs and then jumped from the ladder to the deck of his launch. Pausing for a moment to get his sea legs, he made straight for the well-kept bridge. He didn’t switch on the lights, but by finding the instruments by touch got the motor warming up.

  He went out on deck again and cast off.

  Soon he was steering his way out of the harbour towards the open sea.

  * * *

  Only the man in the harbourmaster’s office saw him leave. Happily for Jerry, the man was quite as corrupt as the six people who had been at the house in Blackheath. He had, as they used to say, his price.

  Steering a familiar course, Jerry headed the boat towards the coast of Normandy, where his late father had built his fake Le Corbusier château. It was an ancient building, built well before the Second World War.

  Once outside the three-mile limit, Jerry switched on the radio and got the latest station, Radio K-Nine (“The Station With Bite”). There was some funny stuff on; it sounded like a mixture of Greek and Persian music very badly played. It was probably by one of the new groups the publicity people were still trying in vain to push. They were completely non-musical themselves, so still found it a mystery that one group should be popular and another unpopular, were convinced that a new sound would start things movi
ng for them again. All that was over—for the time being at least, thought Jerry. He changed stations until he got a reasonable one.

  The music echoed over the water. Although he was careful not to show any lights, Jerry could be heard half a mile away; but when he saw the faint outline of the coast ahead, he switched off the radio.

  After a while his father’s fake Le Corbusier château came in sight, a large six-storey building with that quaint, dated appearance that all the ‘futuristic’ buildings of the twenties and thirties had. To boot, this château had a dash of German expressionism in its architecture.

  For Jerry the house symbolised the very spirit of transience, and he enjoyed the feeling he got from looking at its silhouette, much as he sometimes enjoyed listening to last year’s hits. The house stood on the very edge of a cliff that curved steeply above the nearest village, some four miles distant. A searchlight was trained on the house, making it look rather like some grotesque war memorial. Jerry knew the house was staffed by a small private army of German mercenaries, men who were as much part of the past as the house and yet intratemporally reflected something of the spirit of the 1970s.

  It was November 196–, however, as Jerry cut the engine and drifted on the current he knew would carry him towards the cliff beneath the house.

  The cliff was worse than sheer. It sloped outward about a hundred feet up and was loaded with alarm devices. Not even Wolfe could have taken it. The nature of the cliff was to Jerry Cornelius an advantage, for it hid his boat from the TV scanners in the house. The radar did not sweep low enough to find his launch, but the TV cameras were trained on any likely place where someone might attempt a landing. Jerry’s brother Frank did not know of the secret entrance.

  He moored the boat to the cliff by means of the powerful suction cups he had brought for the purpose. The cups had metal rings in them, and Jerry tied his mooring lines to the rings. He would be away again before the tide went out.

  Part of the cliff was made of plastic. Cornelius tapped lightly on it, waiting a couple of moments as it inched inward and a gaunt, anxious face peered out at him. It was the face of a lugubrious Scot, Jerry’s old servant and mentor, John Gnatbeelson.

  “Ah, sir!”

  The face retreated, leaving the entrance clear.

  “Is she all right, John?” Jerry asked as he eased himself into the metal-walled cubicle behind the plastic door. John Gnatbeelson stepped backward and then forward to close the door. He was about six feet four, a gangling man with almost non-existent cheekbones and a wisp of chin whiskers. He wore an old Norfolk jacket and corduroy trousers. His bones seemed barely joined together, and he moved loosely like a badly controlled puppet.

  “She’s not dead, sir, I think,” Gnatbeelson assured Jerry. “It’s fine to see you, sir. I hope you’ve returned for good this time, sir, to kick Mr Frank out of our house.” He glared into the middle distance. “He had… had…” The old man’s eyes filled with tears.

  “Cheer up, John. What’s he been doing now?”

  “That’s what I don’t know, sir. I haven’t been allowed to see Miss Catherine for the past week. He says she’s sleeping. Sleeping. What kind of sleep lasts for a week, sir?”

  “Could be a number of kinds.” Jerry spoke calmly enough. “Drugs, I expect.”

  “God knows he uses enough of them himself, sir. He lives on them. All he ever eats is bars of chocolate.”

  “Catherine wouldn’t use sleepers voluntarily, I shouldn’t think.”

  “She never would, sir.”

  “Is she still in her old rooms?”

  “Yes, sir. But there’s a guard on the door.”

  “Have you prepared for that?”

  “I have, but I am worried.”

  “Of course you are. And you’ve switched off the master control for this entrance?”

  “It seemed unnecessary, sir, but I have done it.”

  “Better safe than sorry, John.”

  “I suppose so, aye. But there again, it would only be a matter of time before…”

  “It’s all a matter of time, John. Let’s get going. If the control’s dead, we won’t be able to use the lift.”

  “No, sir. We must climb.”

  “Off we go, then.”

  They left the metal chamber and entered a similar, slightly larger one. John lit the way with his torch. A lift cage became visible, the shaft rising above it. Paralleling the cables and running up one side into the darkness was a metal ladder. John tucked the torch into the waistband of his trousers and stepped back. Jerry reached the ladder and began to climb.

  They went up in silence for more than fifty feet until they stood at the top of the shaft. Ahead of them were five entrances to corridors. They took the central entrance. The corridor twisted and turned for a long time. It formed part of a complicated maze and, even though the two men were familiar with it, they sometimes hesitated at various turnings and forks.

  Eventually, and with some relief, they entered a white, neon-lighted room, which housed a small control console. The Scotsman went to the panel and clicked a switch. A red light above the panel went off and a green one went on. Dials quivered, and several monitor screens focused on various parts of the route they had just taken. Views of the room at the bottom of the shaft, the shaft itself, the corridors in the maze—now brilliantly lit—came and went on the screens. The equipment operated in silence.

  On the door leading out of the room was a fairly large ovoid of a milky greenish colour. John pressed his palm against it. Responding to the palm print, which it recognised, the door slid open. They entered a short tunnel, which led them to an identical door. This John opened in the same way.

  Now they stood in a dark library. Through a transparent wall to their right they could see the sea, like black marble streaked with veins of grey and white.

  Most of the other three walls were covered with shelves of pink fibreglass. They were filled mainly with paperbacks. The half-dozen or so books bound in leather and titled in gold stood out incongruously. John shone his light on them and smiled at Jerry, who was embarrassed.

  “They’re still there, sir. He doesn’t often come here; otherwise he might have got rid of them. Not that it would matter that much, for I have another set.”

  Jerry winced and looked at the books. One of the titles was Time Search Through the Declining West by Jeremiah Cornelius, MAHS; another was called Toward the Ultimate Paradox, and beside it was The Ethical Simulation. Jerry felt he was right to be embarrassed.

  Part of the library wall, naturally enough, was false. It swung back to show a white metal door and a button. Jerry pressed the button and the door opened.

  Another lift cage.

  John stooped and picked up a small case before they got in and went up. It was one of the few lifts in the house that, as far as they knew, did not register on one of the many control panels located in the château.

  On the sixth floor the lift stopped, and John opened the door and looked cautiously out. The landing was empty. They both left the lift, and the door (a wall-length painting reminiscent of Picasso at his latest and tritest) slid back into place.

  The room they wanted was in a passage off the main landing. They walked silently to the corner, glanced round, and ducked back again.

  They had seen the guard. He had an automatic rifle crooked in his arm. He was a big, fat German with the appearance of a eunuch. He had looked very wakeful—hoping, perhaps, for an opportunity to use his Belgian gun.

  Now John opened the case he’d been carrying. He took out a small steel crossbow, very modern and beautifully made, and handed it to Jerry Cornelius. Jerry held it in one hand, waiting for the moment when the guard would look completely away from him. Shortly, the man’s attention shifted towards the window at the end of the passage.

  Jerry stepped out, aimed the crossbow, and pulled the trigger. But the guard had heard him and jumped. The bolt grazed his neck. There was only one bolt.

  As the guard began to bring up h
is gun, Jerry ran towards him and grabbed the fingers of his right hand, hauling them off the gun. One finger snapped. The guard gurgled and his mouth gaped, showing that he was tongueless. He kicked at Jerry as John came in with a knife, missed his neck, and stabbed him through the left eye. The blade went in for almost its entire six inches, driving downward and coming out just below the left ear. As the German’s CNS packed it in, his body was momentarily paralysed.

  It softened as Jerry lowered it to the floor; he reached down and slid the knife out of the German’s face, handing it to John who was as limp as the corpse.

  “Get away from here, John,” Jerry muttered. “If I make it, I’ll see you in the cliff room.”

  As John Gnatbeelson rolled off, Jerry turned the handle of the door. It was of the conventional kind, and the key was in the lock. He turned the key when the door resisted. The door opened. Jerry took the key out of the lock. Inside the room he closed the door quietly and locked it again.

  He stood in a woman’s bedroom.

  The heavy curtains were drawn across the big windows. The place smelled of stale air and misery. He crossed the familiar room and found the bedside lamp, switching it on.

  Red light filled the place. A beautiful girl lay in a pale dress on the bed. Her features were delicate and resembled his own. Her black hair was tangled. Her small breasts rose and fell jerkily, and her breathing was shallow. She was not sleeping at all naturally. Jerry looked for hypodermic marks and found them in her upper right arm. Plainly she hadn’t used a needle on herself. Frank had done that.

  Jerry stroked her bared shoulder. “Catherine.” He bent down and kissed her cold, soft lips, caressing her. Anger, self-pity, despair, passion were all there then, flooding up to the surface, and for once he didn’t stop them. “Catherine.”

  She didn’t move. Jerry was crying now. His body trembled. He tried to control the trembling and failed. He gripped her hand, and it was like holding hands with a corpse. He tightened his grip, as if hoping pain would wake her. Then he dropped it and stood up.