The Last Frontier

SIX

Without moving, without speaking, Reynolds stood in the middle of the floor. He stood there, it seemed to him, for an eternity of time, while his mind first of all asborbed the shock, then the bitter realisation, then hunted frantically for the reason for this, for the presence of the AVO and the absence of his friends. But it was no eternity, it was probably no more than fifteen seconds altogether, and even as the seconds passed Reynolds let his jaw fall lower and lower in shock while his eyes slowly widened in fear.

‘Reynolds,’ he whispered, the word coming awkwardly, with difficulty as they would to a Hungarian. ‘Michael Reynolds? I–I do not know what you mean, comrade. What — what is wrong? Why are these guns —? I swear I have done nothing, comrade, nothing! I swear it!’ His hands were clasped together now, wringing each other till the knuckles stood white, and the tremor in his voice was the quaver of fear.

The two guards that Reynolds could see wrinkled their heavy brows and stared at each other in slow, puzzled wonder, but not even a shadow of doubt touched the dark, amused eyes of the little Jew.

‘Amnesia,’ he said kindly. ‘The shock, my friend, that is why you forget your own name. A remarkable effort, none the less, and had I not known your identity beyond any doubt, I too — like my men here who do not yet know who you are — would have been more than halfway towards belief. The British Espionage Service do us a great compliment, they send us only their best. But, then, I would have expected nothing else but the best where the — ah — recovery, shall we say — of Professor Harold Jennings is concerned.’

Reynolds could feel the sickness deep down in his stomach, the bitter taste of despair in his mouth. God, this was even worse than he had feared, if they knew this, they knew everything, it was the end of everything. But the stupid, fearful expression remained on his face: it might have been pinned there. Then he shook himself, a person throwing off the dark terror of a nightmare, and looked wildly around him.

‘Let me go, let me go!’ His voice was high-pitched now, almost a scream. ‘I’ve done nothing, I tell you, nothing, nothing! I am a good Communist, I am a member of the party.’ His mouth was working uncontrollably in a strained face. ‘I am a citizen of Budapest, comrade, I have my papers, my membership cards! I will show you, I will show you!’ His hand was reaching up to go inside his coat, when he froze at a single word from the AVO officer, a soft-pitched word, but cold and dry and cutting like the lash of a whip.

‘Stop!’ Reynolds arrested his hand just at the lapels of his coat, then let it fall slowly to his side. The little Jew smiled.

‘A pity you will not live to retire from your country’s secret service, Captain Reynolds. A pity, indeed, that you ever joined it — I feel convinced that a notable Thespian has been thereby lost to the boards and the silver screen.’ He looked over Reynolds’ shoulder at a man standing by the garage door. ‘Coco, Captain Reynolds was about to produce a pistol or some such offensive weapon. Relieve him of the temptation.’

Reynolds heard the tread of heavy boots on the concrete floor behind him, then grunted in agony as a rifle butt smashed into the small of his back, just above the kidney. He swayed dizzily on his feet, and through the red haze of pain he could feel trained hands searching his clothes, could hear the little Jew’s apologetic murmur.

‘You must excuse Coco, Captain Reynolds. A singularly direct fellow in his approach to these matters, always the same. However, experience has taught him that a sample of what misbehaviour will inevitably bring, when he is searching a prisoner, is much more effective than even the direst threats.’ His voice changed subtly. ‘Ah, Exhibit A, and most interesting. A Belgian 6.35 automatic — and a silencer — neither of which is obtainable in this country. No doubt you found them lying in the streets … And does anyone recognize this?’

Reynolds focused his eyes with difficulty. The AVO officer was tossing in his hand the blackjack Reynolds had taken from his assailant earlier in the evening.

‘I think so, I think I do, Colonel Hidas.’ The AVO man whom his superior called Coco moved into Reynolds’ line of sight — a mountain of a man, Reynolds could now see, six foot four if an inch, and built accordingly, with a broken-nosed, seamed and brutalized face — and took the blackjack, almost engulfing it in his huge, black-haired paw. ‘This is Herped’s, Colonel. Without a doubt. See, it has his initials on the base. My friend Herped. Where did you get this?’ he snarled at Reynolds.

‘I found it along with the gun,’ Reynolds said sullenly. ‘In a parcel, at the corner of Brody Sador Street and—’

He saw the blackjack whipping across, but too late to duck. It smashed him back against the wall, and he slipped down to the floor and pushed himself groggily to his feet. In the silence he could hear the blood from his smashed lips dripping on the floor, could feel teeth loose in the front of his mouth.

‘Now, now, Coco.’ Hidas spoke soothingly, reprovingly. ‘Give that back to me, Coco. Thank you. Captain Reynolds, you have only yourself to blame — we do not know yet whether Herped is Coco’s friend or was Coco’s friend: he was at death’s door when he was found in that tram shelter where you left him.’ He reached up and patted the shoulder of the scowling giant by his side. ‘Do not misjudge our friend here, Mr Reynolds. He is not always thus, as you can judge from his name — not his own, but that of a famous clown and comic of whom you have doubtless heard. Coco can be most amusing, I assure you, and I have seen him convulsing his colleagues down in the Stalin Street cellars with the interesting variations in his — ah — techniques.’

Reynolds said nothing. The reference to the AVO torture-chambers, the free hand Colonel Hidas was allowing this sadistic brute were neither unconnected nor accidental. Hidas was feeling his way, shrewdly assessing Reynolds’ reaction and resistance to this line of approach. Hidas was interested only in certain results, to be achieved by the swiftest means, and if he became convinced that brutality and violence were a waste of time with a man like Reynolds, he would desist and seek out more subtle methods. Hidas looked a dangerous man, cunning and embittered, but there was no sadism that Reynolds could see in the dark, thin features. Hidas beckoned to one of his men.

‘Go to the bottom of the street — there’s a telephone there. Have a van come round here right away. They know where we are.’ He smiled at Reynolds. ‘We could not, unfortunately, park it outside the front door. Might have aroused your suspicions, eh, Captain Reynolds?’ He glanced at his watch. ‘The van should be here in ten minutes, no more, but that ten minutes can be passed profitably. Captain Reynolds might be interested in writing — and signing — an account of his recent activities. Non-fiction, of course. Bring him inside.’

They brought him inside and stood him facing the desk while Hidas sat behind it and adjusted the lamp so that it shone strongly into Reynolds’ face from a distance of less than two feet.

‘We will sing, Captain Reynolds, then we will record the words of the song for a grateful posterity, or, at least, for the People’s Court. A fair trial awaits you. Equivocation, outright lies or even delay will serve you nothing. A speedy confirmation of what we already know may yet spare your life — we would prefer to dispense with what would inevitably become an international incident. And we know everything, Captain Reynolds, everything.’ He shook his head, a man remembering and wondering. ‘Who would have thought that your friend’ — he snapped his fingers — ‘I forget his name, the squat fellow with the shoulders like a barn door — would have had such a beautiful singing voice?’ He pulled a paper out from a drawer in front of him, and Reynolds could see that it was covered with writing. ‘A somewhat unsteady hand, understandable perhaps in the circumstances, but it will serve: I think the judge will have little difficulty in deciphering it.’

In spite of the deep-seated, tearing pain in his side and puffing agony of his smashed mouth, Reynolds felt a wave of elation wash over him and spat blood on the floor to conceal the expression on his face. He knew, now, that no one had talked, because the AVO had caught none of them. The nearest they had come to Jansci and his men, probably, was a glimpse some informer had had of Sandor working about the garage … There were far too many things wrong with what Hidas had said.

Sandor, Reynolds was sure, did not know enough to tell Hidas everything he wanted to know. They wouldn’t have started on Sandor anyway, not with the girl and Imre around. Nor was Hidas the man to forget the name of any person, especially a name that he had only that evening learned. Besides, the whole idea of Sandor talking under physical torture — there had been time for nothing else — was incomprehensible. Hidas, Reynolds reflected grimly, had never been crushed in Sandor’s grip and gazed into those gentle, implacable eyes from a range of six inches. Reynolds stared at the document on the table, then looked slowly around him. If they had tried to torture Sandor in that room, he doubted very much whether even the walls would be still standing.

‘Suppose you begin by telling us how you entered the country,’ Hidas suggested. ‘Were the canals frozen, Mr Reynolds?’

‘Entered the country? Canals?’ Reynolds’ voice came thick and blurred through his swollen lips, and he shook his head slowly. ‘I’m afraid I don’t know—’

He broke off, jumped sideways and twisted round in one convulsive movement, a movement that sliced fresh agony through his side and back: even in the relative gloom where Hidas was sitting, he had caught the sudden shift of eyes, the tiny nod to Coco, and it was not until afterwards that Reynolds realised that he had probably been meant to catch both. Coco’s downward clubbing fist missed him almost completely, the burred edge of a signet ring burning a thin line from temple to jaw, but Reynolds, with the giant guard completely off balance, made no mistake.

Hidas was on his feet now, his pistol showing. His eyes over the tableau: the other two guards moving in with carbines ready. Reynolds leaning heavily on one foot — the other felt as if it were broken — and Coco rolling about the floor, writhing in a silent agony; then he smiled, thinly.

‘You condemn yourself, Captain Reynolds. A harmless citizen of Budapest would have been where the unfortunate Coco now lies: the savate is not taught in the schools hereabouts.’ Reynolds realised, with a chill wonder, that Hidas had deliberately provoked the incident, indifferent to the consequences to his subordinate. ‘I know all I want — and I do you the compliment of realizing that breaking your bones is just a waste of time. Stalin Street for us, Captain Reynolds, and some gentler forms of persuasion.’

Three minutes later they were all inside the lorry that had just drawn up outside the garage. The giant Coco, grey-faced and still breathing stertorously, was stretched his length on one fore-and-aft bench seat, while Colonel Hidas and two of the guards sat on the opposite bench, with Reynolds sitting on the floor between with his back to the cab: the fourth AVO man was in the cab with the driver.

The smash, the grinding crash that flung all the men in the back of the lorry off their seats and catapulted one of the guards on top of Reynolds, came within twenty seconds of starting off, just as they were rounding the first corner. There was no warning, not even a split second in which to prepare themselves, just a squealing of brakes and tearing of metal as the truck’s tyres slithered across the hard-packed snow of the street and bumped softly into the opposite kerb.

They were still sprawled anyhow across the floor of the truck, still recovering their wits to make the first move, when the doors at the back of the truck were flung open, the light switched off and the suddenly darkened interior illuminated a moment afterwards by the white, blinding light from a pair of powerful torches. The long, slender snouts of two gun-barrels, gleaming evilly, slid forward into the narrow arcs of the torch beams, and a deep, hoarse-sounding voice ordered them to clasp their hands above their heads. Then, at some low murmur from the road outside, the two torches and guns moved farther apart and a man — Reynolds recognized him as the fourth AVO man — came stumbling into the pool of light, followed almost at once by an unconscious form that was bundled unceremoniously on the floor. Then the doors slammed shut, the truck engine revved furiously in reverse, there came a thin, screeching sound as if the truck were freeing itself from some metal obstruction and a moment later they were on their way again. The whole operation hadn’t taken twenty seconds from first to last, and Reynolds mentally saluted the high-speed, smoothly functioning efficiency of a group of experts.

The identity of the experts he did not for a moment doubt, but even so it was not until he had caught a momentary glimpse of the hand that held one of the guns — a gnarled, scarred hand with a curious bluish-purple mark in the middle, a hand that no sooner appeared than it was snatched back again — that the relief of certainty swept over him like a warm and releasing wave: only then, and not till then, could he appreciate how tense and how keyed-up he had been, how steeled his every nerve and thought against the nameless horrors that awaited all the luckless beings who were ever interrogated in the cellars of Stalin Street.

The agony of his side and mouth was back again, redoubled in its acuteness now that the dread of the future was removed and he could think again of the present. Waves of nausea swept over him, he could feel the blood pounding in his dizzily swimming head, and he knew that it required only the slightest deliberate relaxation of his will for the grateful oblivion of unconsciousness to sweep over him. But there would come a time for that, later.

Grey-faced with the pain, setting his teeth against the groan that came to his mouth, he pushed away the guard who was leaning against and on top of him, bent over and took his carbine away: this he placed on the bench by his left and sent sliding down to the rear where an unseen hand drew it into the darkness. Another two carbines went the same way, followed by Hidas’ pistol: his own gun Reynolds retrieved from Hidas’ tunic, thrust under his coat, and sat up on the bench opposite Coco.

After a few minutes they heard the truck engine changing down and felt the truck itself braking to a stop. The guns at the back of the truck poked forward a few suggestive inches, and a hoarse voice warned him to keep absolute silence. Reynolds took out his automatic, screwed on the silencer and pressed the barrel none too softly into the base of Hidas’ neck: the faint, appreciative murmur from the rear reached him just as the truck ground to a halt.

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 realized 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 coldblooded 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, he accepted defeat with the same detached remoteness that characterized 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 help 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 and 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 authoritative. 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 recognized 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 bounced 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 organization 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.’

‘Just so long as you don’t expect me to go through it all again.’ Reynolds pulled at a loose tooth, winced as it came out and threw it on the floor. ‘I trust you’re satisfied now.’

‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’ Julia demanded. Her eyes, hostile as they looked both at the Count and Jansci, softened as she looked at the battered mouth. ‘After all that’s been done to you?’

‘What do you expect me to do?’ Reynolds asked mildly. ‘Try to knock out a few of the Count’s teeth? I’d have done the same in his position.’

‘Professional understanding, my dear,’ Jansci murmured. ‘Nevertheless, we are extremely sorry for what has happened. And the next move, Mr Reynolds — now that that tape recording will have started off the biggest man-hunt for months? The Austrian frontier, I take it, with all speed.’

‘The Austrian frontier, yes. With all speed — I don’t know.’ Reynolds looked at the two men sitting there, thought of their fantastic histories as Julia had recounted them and knew there was only one possible answer to Jansci’s question. He gave another tentative wrench, sighed with relief as a second tooth came clear and looked at Jansci. ‘It all depends how long I take to find Professor Jennings.’

Ten seconds, twenty, half a minute passed and the only sounds were the whirr of the snow tyres on the road, the low murmur from the cab of Sandor’s and Imre’s voices above the steady roar of the engine, then the girl reached out and turned Reynolds’ face towards her, her fingertips gentle against the cut and swollen face.

‘You’re mad.’ She stared at him, her eyes empty of belief. ‘You must be mad.’

‘Beyond all question.’ The Count unstopped his flask, gulped and replaced the stopper. ‘He has been through a great deal tonight.’

‘Insanity,’ Jansci agreed. He gazed down at his scarred hands, and his voice was very soft. ‘There is no disease half so contagious.’

‘And very sudden in its onset.’ The Count gazed down sadly at his hip flask. ‘The universal specific, but this time I left it too late.’

For a long moment the girl stared at the three men, her face a study of bewildered incomprehension, then understanding came and with it some certainty of foreknowledge, some evil vision that drained all the colour from her cheeks, darkened the cornflower blue of her eyes and left them filled with tears. She made no protest, no slightest gesture of dissent — it was as if the same foreknowledge had warned her of the uselessness of dissent — and, as the first tears brimmed over the edge of her eyes, turned away so that they could not see her face.

Reynolds reached out a hand to comfort her, hesitated, caught Jansci’s troubled eye and the slow shake of the white head, nodded and withdrew his hand.

He drew out a pack of cigarettes, placed one between his smashed lips and lit it. It tasted like burnt paper.