Vanderdecker had a shrewd idea that it wasn’t a coincidence. He didn’t know much about these things, but it stood to reason that the sea next to a power station absorbs quite a fair amount of any escaping vapours or things of that sort. Until a few days ago, Professor Montalban had been doing experiments inside that very same power station. If that’s a coincidence, Vanderdecker said to himself, then I’m not a Dutchman.
An hour later, it had worn off. The cloud of avaricious gulls which had formed over the ship suddenly evaporated. The fumes from Wilhelm Triegaart’s repulsive pipe were once again the sweetest-smelling things on the ship. Because he had had his immersion later than the others, Vanderdecker was slightly more wholesome than they were; only slightly. He would still have been barred from any fashionable sewer as a health hazard.
Vanderdecker said, “Get me all the empty barrels you can find. Then fill them up in the sea where you lot were all having your swim.”
Antonius, who was a conscientious man, felt it his duty to point out to Vanderdecker that you can’t drink seawater. Vanderdecker ignored him politely. He was thinking again.
It no longer matters, he said to himself. Geneva can be on top of the Alps for all I care—if we can keep ourselves from smelling for just a couple of days, we could make it to Geneva and go see Montalban.
♦
While we’re on the subject of coincidences, how else would you account for the fact that the Dow Jones’ second biggest slide in twenty years started that same afternoon?
♦
The most direct route by sea from Dounreay to Geneva, so to speak, is straight down the North Sea and into the Channel. Vanderdecker, however, was extremely unhappy about going anywhere near the Channel now that it was so depressingly full of ships. He made for Den Helder.
Yet another of these wretched coincidences; MV
♦
“Now then,” said Mr Gleeson, “the Vanderdecker Policy.”
Mr Gleeson was not what Jane had expected, but then she shouldn’t have expected him to be; not if she’d thought about it for a moment. What she should have expected was an extraordinary man; and for all his shortcomings, he was certainly that.
He was short; maybe half an inch shorter than Jane, who was a quintessential size 12. He was round but not fat, and his head had hair in more or less the same way a mountain has grass—sparse and short and harassed-looking. He had bright, quick, precise eyes and a smile that told you that he would make jokes but not laugh at yours. As to ninety per cent of him he looked like somebody’s nice uncle. The other ten per cent, you felt, was probably pure barracuda.
“I don’t know,” said Mr Gleeson, “how much you’ve found out for yourself, so I’d better start at the beginning. Would you like something before we start? Cup of tea? Gin and tonic? Sherry?”
Jane had never been in Mr Gleeson’s office before, and she didn’t feel at all comfortable. It was an unsettling place—just comfortable enough to make you start to feel at home, and just businesslike enough to make you suddenly realise that you weren’t. Jane had the perception to understand that this effect was deliberate.
“No, thank you;” she said. Her mouth was like emery paper. Mr Gleeson reclined in his chair and looked at his fingernails for a moment. “The Vanderdecker Policy,” he said, “is the single most important secret in the world. I don’t want to worry you unduly, but when you leave this office tonight you’ll be taking with you enough information to wipe out every major financial institution and destabilise every economy in the world. I just thought you ought to know that. You can keep a secret, can’t you?”
Jane mumbled that she could. Mr Gleeson nodded. He accepted her word on this point. He was a good judge of character, and could read people.
