Authors: Alistair MacLean
The halt was brief. A question from some unknown person, a quick, harsh authoritative reply -- tones, only, could be distinguished inside the back of the lorry, the words were quite undistinguishable -- an acknowledgment, the hiss of releasing air brakes, and they were on their way once more, Reynolds leaning back in his seat with a long, soundless sigh and pocketing his gun again. The mark gouged out on Hidas' neck by his silencer was deep and red and angry: it had been a tense, nerve-racking moment.
Once again they came to a halt, and once again Reynolds' automatic found the self-same spot in the AVO officer's neck, but the halt was this time, if anything, even briefer. After that there were no more stops, and from the gently undulating and curving nature of the road together with the lack of exhaust echo beating back from encompassing walls and buildings, Reynolds realised that they were clear of Budapest's suburbs and running into the country. He forced himself to stay awake, to cling grimly to the thread of consciousness, and he did so by constantly shifting his gaze round the interior of the truck. His eyes were now accustomed to the gloom in the rear and in the faint backwash of light he could just make out two figures, with hats pulled low over their eyes, sitting hunched and motionless over guns and torches that never wavered: there was something almost inhuman in the intensity of that vigilance, in its unflagging concentration, and Reynolds began to have his first inkling of how Jansci and his friends had come to survive so long. Now and again Reynolds' eyes would come back to the men at his feet, and he could see the uncomprehending, fearful play of expression on their faces, the trembling of their arms as their shoulder muscles ached from the long strain of holding their arms clasped above their heads: only Hidas remained immobile throughout, his features composed and empty of all expression, For all the man's cold-blooded indifference to the suffering of others, Reynolds had to admit to himself that there was something admirable about him: with no hint of either fear or self-pity ho accepted defeat with the same detached remoteness that characterised him in the moment of victory.
One of the men at the back of the truck flashed a light at his wrist -- a watch probably, though Reynolds couldn't see it at that distance -- then spoke. A deep gruff voice, muffled by the swathes of a handkerchief, it could have belonged to anyone.
'Boots and shoes off, all of you, but one at a time. Place them on the right hand bench.' For a moment it seemed that Colonel Hidas was going to refuse -- and there was no doubt that the man had sufficient courage to do just that -- but the urgent jab from Reynolds' gun made all too apparent the uselessness of any resistance. Even Coco, now sufficiently recovered to lean on an elbow and bc-1] himself, had his boots off within thirty seconds.
'Excellent,' came the dry voice from the rear. 'Now the overcoats, gentlemen, and that will be all.' A pause. "Thank you. Now listen carefully. We are at present driving along a very quiet and deserted road and will stop soon at a tiny hut by the wayside. The nearest house in any direction -- and I'm not telling you which direction -- is over three miles away. If you try to find it Tonight, in the darkness, in your stockinged feet, you will probably be frozen before you find it -- and you will almost certainly have to have both feet amputated: that is not a melodramatic threat, but a warning. If you want to find out the hard way, do so by all means.
'On the other hand,' the voice went on, 'the hut is dry, windproof and with a good stock of wood. You can keep warm arid a passing farmer's cart or truck will doubtless come your way in the morning.'
'Why are you doing all this?' Hidas' voice was quiet, almost bored.
'Leaving you in the middle of nowhere, you mean -- or just sparing your worthless lives?"
'Both.'
'You should guess easily enough. No one knows we have an AVO truck., and provided you're not let loose near a telephone box. no one will know until we reach the Austrian frontier -- and this truck in itself should grant us a safe passport all the way. As to your lives, the question is natural enough from you: those who live by the sword must expect to die by it. But we are no murderers.'
Almost as the man behind the torch finished speaking the truck drew up. A few seconds passed in complete silence, then the crunch of feet in the snow was heard and the rear doors were flung wide. Reynolds caught a glimpse of two figures standing in the road, outlined against the snow-covered walls of a tiny hut just behind them, then, at a gruff order, Hidas and his men filed out, one of them helping a still-crippled Coco. Reynolds heard a faint click as the inspection hatch behind the driver's cab was opened, but the face of the man peering through was only a grey blur in the gloom. He looked out again through the rear of the truck, saw the last of the AVO men being bundled into the hut and the door shut behind them, again heard a click, this time as the hatch was closed and, almost at once, three figures piled into the back of the truck, the doors slammed and the truck was under way again.
The light clicked on, fumbling hands were busily undoing handkerchiefs that concealed their faces, then Reynolds heard a girl's gasp of horror -- understandable enough, Reynolds thought wryly, if his face looked anything like it felt -- but it was the Count who spoke first.
'You would appear to have fallen under a bus, Mr. Reynolds. Either that or spent an entertaining half-hour with our good friend Coco.'
'You know him?" Reynolds' voice was hoarse and indistinct.
'Everybody in the AVO knows him -- and half of Budapest, to their cost. Makes friends wherever he goes. What happened to our vast friend, incidentally? He did not seem to be in his usual high spirits.'
'I hit him.'
'You hit him!' The Count raised an eyebrow -- a gesture equivalent to blank astonishment in any other man. 'Even to lay a finger on Coco is itself a feat, but to render him hors de combat -- '
'Oh, will you stop talking!' Julia's voice held a mixture of exasperation and distress. 'Look at his face! We must do something.'
'It isn't pretty,' the Count admitted. He reached for his hip flask. "The universal specific.'
'Tell Imre to stop.' It was Jansci speaking, his voice deep and low and authorative. He looked closely at Reynolds, who was coughing and spluttering as the fiery liquid burnt his mouth and throat, and screwing tight his eyes with every cough. 'You are badly hurt, Mr. Reynolds. Where?'
Reynolds told him and the Count swore. 'My apologies, my boy. I should have realised. That damned Coco.... Come, some more barack. It hurts, but it helps.'
The truck stopped, Jansci jumped out and returned a minute later with one of the AVO's overcoats packed with snow.
'Woman's work, my dear.' He handed Julia the coat and a handkerchief. 'See if you can't make our friend look a bit more presentable.'
She took the handkerchief from Jansci and turned towards Reynolds. Her touch was as gentle as her face was concerned, but even so the freezing snow stung cruelly at the open cuts on cheek and lips as she washed the matted blood away and Reynolds winced in spite of himself. The Count cleared his throat.
'Perhaps you should try the more direct method, Julia,' he suggested. 'Like when the policeman was watching you Tonight in the Margitsziget. For almost three minutes, Mr. Reynolds, she told us -- '
'A lying minx.' Reynolds tried to smile, but it hurt too much. 'Thirty seconds, and in self-defence only....' He looked at Jansci. 'What happened Tonight? What went wrong?'
'You may well ask,' Jansci said quietly. 'What went wrong? Everything, my boy, just everything. Blunders everywhere, by everyone -- by you, by us, by the AVO. The first mistake was ours. You know that the house was being watched and that we had assumed that the watchers were just common informers. A bad mistake on my part -- they were nothing of the sort. They were AVO, and the Count here recognised the two men Sandor had caught as soon as he came off duty Tonight and came to the house. But by that time Julia had gone to meet you, we couldn't get word to you by her, and later we decided not to bother anyway: the Count knows the ways of the AVO as well as any man, and was certain that if they were going to move in on us they wouldn't do it until the early hours of the morning.... That's how they invariably work. We were going to leave in the middle of the night.'
'So the man who had followed Julia to the White Angel had probably trailed her from the house?'
'Yes. An efficient job of disposal on your part, by the way, but no more than I have come to expect.... but the worst mistake of the night had come earlier, when you were talking to Dr. Jennings.'
'When I was -- I don.t understand.'
'It was as much my fault as his,' the Count said heavily. 'I knew -- I should have warned him.'
'What are you talking about?' Reynolds demanded.
'This.' Jansci looked down on his hands, then raised his eyes slowly. 'Did you look for microphones in his room?'
'Yes, I did. It was behind the ventilation grille.'
'And the bathroom?.
'Nothing there.'
"There was, I'm afraid. Built into the shower. The Count says there's one in the shower in every bathroom in the Three Crowns. None of the showers work: you should have tried it.'
'In the Shower!' Oblivious of the shooting pain in his back, Reynolds jerked upright, brushing the startled girl to one side. 'A microphone! Oh, my God!"
'Exactly,' Jansci said heavily.
'Then every word, everything I said to the professor -- ' Reynolds broke off and leaned back against the side of the truck, overcome for the moment by the enormity of the implications, the surely fatal blunder he had made. No wonder Hidas had known who he was, and why he was there. Hidas knew everything now. As far as any hope that now remained of rescuing the professor was concerned, he might as well have remained in London. He had suspected as much, had almost known as much from what Hidas had said to him in Jansci's garage, but the confirmation that Hidas knew, why he knew and how he came to have proof, seemed to set the final seal of inevitability and defeat on everything.
'It is a bitter blow,' Jansci said gently.
'You did all you could,' Julia murmured. She brought his head forward to be sponged again, and he made no resistance. 'You are not to blame yourself.'
A minute passed in silence, while the truck bumped and jounced along the snow-rutted road. The pain in Reynolds' side and head was lessening now, dulling down to a nagging, throbbing ache, and he was beginning to think clearly for the first time since Coco had hit him.
"The security guard will have been clamped on Jennings -- he.may already be on his way back to Russia,. he said to Jansci. 'I spoke to Jennings of Brian, so the word will have already gone to Stettin to try to stop him. The game is lost.' He stopped, probed two loose teeth in his lower jaw with an exploring tongue. 'The game is lost, but otherwise I don't think any great harm has been done. I didn't mention the name -- or the activities -- of any person in your house, although I did give the professor the address. Not that that makes them any the wiser -- they knew anyway. But so far as you people, personally, are concerned, the AVO don't know you exist. A couple of points trouble me.'
'Yes?'
'Yes. First, why, if they were listening in the hotel, didn't they nail me there and then.'
'Simple. Almost every microphone in the place is wired to tape recorders.' The Count grinned. 'I'd have given a fortune to see their faces when they ran off that reel.'
'Why didn't you phone to stop me? You must have known from what Julia said that the AVO would come round to your place right away.'
"They did -- almost. We got out only ten minutes before them. And we did phone you -- but there was no reply.'
'I had left my room early.' Reynolds remembered the ringing of the telephone bell as he had reached the bottom of the fire-escape. 'You could still have stopped me on the street.'
'We could.' It was Jansci speaking. 'You'd better tell him, Count.'
'Very well.' For a moment the Count looked almost uncomfortable -- so unexpected an expression to find on his face that Reynolds for a moment doubted he had read it correctly. But he had.
'You met my friend Colonel Hidas Tonight,' the Count began obliquely. 'Second-in-command of the AVO, a dangerous and clever man -- no more dangerous and clever man in all Budapest. A dedicated man, Mr. Reynolds, who has achieved more -- and more remarkable -- success than any police officer in Hungary. I said he was clever -- he's more, he's brilliant, an ingenious, resourceful man, entirely without emotion, who never gives up. A man, obviously, for whom I have the highest respect -- you will observe that I was at considerable pains not to let him see me Tonight, even although I was disguised. And that Jansci was at even more pains to direct his line of thinking towards the Austrian border, where, I assure you, we have no intention of going.'
'Get to the point,' Reynolds said impatiently.
'I have arrived. For several years past our activities have been far the greatest thorn in his flesh, and lately, I have had just the tiniest suspicion that Hidas was taking just a little too much interest in me.' He waved a deprecatory hand. 'Of course, we officers at the AVO expect to be ourselves checked and shadowed from time to time, but perhaps I have become just a trifle hypersensitive about these things. I thought perhaps that my trips to police blocks had not been so unobserved as I would have wished, and that Hidas had deliberately planted you on me, to break us up.' He smiled slightly, ignoring the astonishment on the faces of both Reynolds and Julia. 'We survive by never taking a chance, Mr. Reynolds -- it was really too opportune, a western spy so ready to hand. We thought, as I say, you were a plant. The fact that you knew -- or said Colonel Mackintosh knew -- that Jennings was in Budapest while we didn't was another point against you: all the questions you asked Julia Tonight about us and our organisation might have been friendly interest -- but it might equally well have been from a more sinister reason and the policemen might have left you alone because they knew who you were, not because of your -- ah -- activities in the watchman's box.'
'You never told any of this to me!' Julia's face was flushed, the blue eyes cold and angry.
'We seek,' said the Count gallantly, 'to shelter you from the harsher realities of this life.... Then, Mr. Reynolds, when there was no reply to our telephone call, we suspected you might be elsewhere -- the Andrassy Ut, for example. We weren't sure, not by a long way, but suspicious enough to take no chances. So we let you walk into the spider's web -- I regret to say that we actually saw you walking. We weren't a hundred yards away, lying low in the car -- not mine, I'm glad to say -- which Imre later crashed into the truck.' He looked regretfully at Reynolds' face. 'We did not expect you to get the full treatment right away.'