The Last Frontier

SEVEN

It was still dark when Reynolds awoke, but the first grey tinges of dawn were beginning to steal through the tiny window facing the east. Reynolds had known that the room had a window, but until then he hadn’t known where it was: when they had arrived in the abandoned farmhouse last night — or early that morning, it had been almost two o’clock — after a mile-long, freezing trudge in the snow, Jansci had forbidden lights in all rooms without shutters, and Reynolds’ had been one of these.

He could see the whole of the room from where he lay without even moving his head. It wasn’t difficult — the entire floor area was no more than twice that of the bed, and the bed only a narrow canvas cot. A chair, a washbasin and a mildewed mirror and the furnishings of the room were complete: there would have been no room for more.

The light was beginning to filter in more strongly now through the single pane of glass above the washbasin, and Reynolds could see in the distance, perhaps a quarter of a mile away, the heavily snow-weighted branches of pine trees: the trees must have been well downhill, the feathery white tops appeared to be almost on level with his eyes. The air was so clear that he could make out every tiny detail of the branches. The greying sky was changing to a very pale blue hue, empty of all snow and clouds: the first cloudless sky, indeed the first patch of blue sky he had seen at all since he had come to Hungary: perhaps it was a good omen, he needed all the good omens he could get. The wind had dropped, not the slightest zephyr stirring across the great plains, and the silence everywhere was profound with that frozen stillness that comes only with a sub-zero dawn and the snow lying deeply across the land.

The silence was interrupted — one could not say ended, for afterwards it seemed even deeper than before — by a thin, whip-like crack, like a distant rifle shot, and now that Reyonlds searched back through his memory he knew that was what had wakened him in the first place. He waited, listening, then after a minute or so he heard it again, perhaps closer this time. After even a shorter interval, he heard it a third time and decided to investigate. He flung back the bedclothes and swung his legs out of bed.

Only seconds afterwards he decided not to investigate and that flinging his legs over the side of the cot without due forethought was not to be recommended: with the sudden movement his back felt as if somebody had stuck in a giant hook and pulled with vicious force. Gently, carefully, he pulled his legs back into the cot and lay down with a sigh: most of the trouble, he thought, came from the large area of stiffness that extended even up past his shoulder blades, but the sudden jerking of stiffened muscles could be as agonizing as any other pain. The noise outside could wait, no one else appeared unduly worried: and even his brief contact with the outer air — all he wore was a pair of borrowed pyjama trousers — had convinced him that a further acquaintance should be postponed as long as possible: there was no heating of any kind and the little room was bitterly cold.

He lay back, staring at the ceiling, and wondered if the Count and Imre had made it safely back to Budapest last night, after they had dropped the others. It had been essential that the truck be abandoned in the anonymity of the big city: just to park it in some empty lane near at hand would have invited disaster. As Jansci had said, the hunt would be up for that truck this morning over all Western Hungary, and no better place could be found for it than some deserted alley in a large town.

Further, it had been essential that the Count return also. The Count was now as near certain as he could be that no suspicion had fallen on him, and if they were ever to find out where Dr Jennings had been taken — it was unlikely that the Russians would risk keeping him in a hotel, no matter how heavy a guard they mounted — he would have to return to the AVO offices, where he was due on duty anyway after lunchtime. There was no other way they could find out. There was always an element of risk in his going there, but then there always had been.

Reynolds did not deceive himself. With the finest help in the world — and with Jansci and the Count he believed that he had just that — the chances of ultimate success were still pretty poor. Forewarned was forearmed, and the Communists — he thought of the tape recorder with a deep chagrin that would long remain with him — had been well and truly forewarned. They could block all the roads, they could stop all traffic in and out of Budapest. They could remove the professor to the security of the remote and impregnable fortified prison or concentration camp in the country, they might even ship him back to Russia. And, over and above all that, there was the keystone to the whole conjectural edifice, the overriding question of what had happened to young Brian Jennings in Stettin: the Baltic port, Reynolds was grimly aware, would be combed that day as it had seldom been combed before, and it required only one tiny miscalculation, the slightest relaxation of vigilance by the two agents responsible for the boy’s safety — and they had no means of knowing that the alarm-call was out, that hundreds of the Polish UB would be searching every hole and corner in the city — for everything to be lost. It was frustrating, maddening, to have to lie there, to wait helplessly while the net closed a thousand miles away.

The fire in his back gradually ceased, the sharp, stabbing pains finally stopping altogether. Not so, however, the whiplike cracks from just outside the window: they were becoming clearer and more frequent with the passing of every minute. Finally Reynolds could restrain his curiosity no longer, and, moreover, a wash was urgently needed — on arrival that night he had just tumbled, exhausted, into bed and been asleep in a moment. With infinite care he slowly levered his legs over the side of the bed, sat on its edge, pulled on the trousers of his grey suit — now considerably less immaculate than when he had left London three days previously — pushed himself gingerly to his feet and hobbled across to the tiny window above the washbasin.

An astonishing spectacle met his eyes — not so much the spectacle, perhaps, as its central figure. The man below his window, no more than a youngster really, looked as if he had stepped directly from the stage of some Ruritanian musical comedy: with his high-plumed velvet hat, long, flowing cloak of yellow blanket cloth and magnificently embroidered high boots fitted with gleaming silver spurs all so sharply limned against and emphasized by the dazzling white background of snow, he was a colourful figure indeed, in that drab, grey Communist country, colourful even to the point of the bizarre.

His pastime was no less singular than his appearance. In his gauntleted hand he held the grey-horned stock of a long, thin whip, and even as Reynolds watched he flicked his wrist with casual ease and a cork lying on the snow fifteen feet away jumped ten feet to one side. With the next flick it jumped back to exactly where it had lain before. A dozen times this was repeated, and not once did Reynolds see the whip touch the cork, or go anywhere near the cork, the lash was too fast for his eyes to follow. The youngster’s accuracy was fantastic, his concentration absolute.

Reynolds, too, became absorbed in the performance, so absorbed that he failed to hear the door behind him open softly. But he heard the startled ‘Oh!’ and swung round away from the window, the sudden jerk screwing up his face as the pain knifed sharply across his back.

‘I’m sorry.’ Julia was confused. ‘I didn’t know—’ Reynolds cut her off with a grin.

‘Come in. It’s all right — I’m quite respectable. Besides, you ought to know that we agents are accustomed to entertaining all sorts of feminine company in our bedrooms.’ He glanced at the tray she had laid on his bed. ‘Sustenance for the invalid? Very kind of you.’

‘More of an invalid than he’ll admit.’ She was dressed in a belted blue woollen dress, with white at the wrists and throat, her golden hair had been brushed till it gleamed and her face and eyes looked as if they had just been washed in the snow. Her fingertips, as they touched the tender swelling on his back, were as fresh and cool as her appearance. He heard the quick, indrawn breath.

‘We must get a doctor, Mr Reynolds. Red, blue, purple — every colour you could think of. You can’t leave this as it is — it looks terrible.’ She turned him round gently and looked up at his unshaven face. ‘You should go back to bed. It hurts badly, doesn’t it?’

‘Only when I laugh, as the bloke said with the harpoon through his middle.’ He moved back from the washbasin, and nodded through the window.

‘Who’s the circus artist?’

‘I don’t have to look,’ she laughed. ‘I can hear him. That’s the Cossack — one of my father’s men.’

‘The Cossack?’

‘That’s what he calls himself. His real name is Alexander Moritz — he thinks we don’t know that, but my father knows everything about him, the same way he knows everything about nearly everybody. He thinks Alexander is a sissy’s name, so he calls himself the Cossack. He’s only eighteen.’

‘What’s the comic opera get-up for?’

‘Insular ignorance,’ she reproved. ‘Nothing comic about it. Our Cossack is a genuine csikós — a cow-boy, you would say, from the puszta, the prairie land to the east, round Debrecen, and that’s exactly how they dress. Even to the whip. The Cossack represents another side to Jansci’s activities that you haven’t heard of yet — feeding starving people.’ Her voice was quiet now. ‘When winter comes, Mr Reynolds, many people of Hungary starve. The Government takes away far too much meat and potatoes from the farms — they have to meet terribly high surrender quotas — and it’s worst of all in the wheat areas, where the Government takes all. It was so bad at one time that the people of Budapest were actually sending bread to the country. And Jansci feeds these hungry people. He decides from which Government farm the cattle shall be taken, and where they’ll be taken: the Cossack takes them there. He was across the border only last night.’

‘Just as simple as that?’

‘It is for the Cossack: he has a strange gift for handling cattle. Most of them come from Czechoslovakia — the border is only twenty kilometres from here. The Cossack just chloroforms them or gives them a good drink of bran mash laced with cheap brandy. When he’s got them half-drunk or half-anaesthetised, he just walks across the border with them with as little trouble as you or I would cross a street.’

‘Pity you can’t handle humans the same way,’ Reynolds said dryly.

‘That’s what the Cossack wants — to help Jansci and the Count with people, I mean, not chloroform them. He will soon.’ She lost interest in the Cossack, gazed unseeingly out of the window for some moments, then looked up at Reynolds, the remarkable blue eyes grave and still. She said, tentatively, ‘Mr Reynolds, I—’

Reynolds knew what was coming and hastened to forestall her. It had needed no perspicuity last night to see that her acceptance of their decision not to give up the search for Jennings was a token one and only for the moment: he had been waiting for this, for the inevitable appeal, had known it was in her mind from the moment she had entered the room.

‘Try Michael,’ he suggested. ‘I find it difficult to be formal and stand on my dignity with my shirt off.’

‘Michael.’ She said the name slowly, pronouncing it ‘Meechail.’

‘Mike?’

‘I’ll murder you,’ he threatened.

‘Very well. Michael.’

‘Meechail,’ he mimicked, and smiled down at her. ‘You were going to say something?’

For a moment the dark eyes and the blue ones met and held mute understanding. The girl knew the answer to her question without ever having to ask it, and the slender shoulders drooped fractionally in defeat as she turned away.

‘Nothing.’ The life had gone out of her voice. ‘I’ll see about a doctor. Jansci says to be down in twenty minutes.’

‘Good lord, yes!’ Reynolds exclaimed. ‘The broadcast. I’d forgotten all about it.’

‘That’s something anyway.’ She smiled faintly and closed the door behind her.

Jansci rose slowly to his feet, turned off the radio and looked down at Reynolds.

‘It is bad you think?’

‘It’s bad enough.’ Reynolds stirred in his chair to try to ease his aching back: even the effort of washing, dressing and coming downstairs had taken more out of him than he cared to admit, and the pain was constant now. ‘The call-out word was definitely promised for today.’

‘Perhaps they have arrived in Sweden and haven’t yet been able to get word through to your people?’ Jansci suggested.

‘I’m afraid not.’ Reynolds had banked heavily on the call-word coming through that morning, and the disappointment ran deep. ‘Everything was laid on for that: a contact from the consul’s office at Hälsingborg is waiting all the time.’

‘Ah, so … But if these agents are as good as you said they were, they may have become suspicious and are lying low in Stettin for a day or two. Till — how do you say — the heat is off.’

‘What else can we hope for? … My God, to think I should have fallen for that mike in the shower,’ he said bitterly. ‘What’s to be done now?’

‘Nothing, except possess our souls in patience,’ Jansci counselled. ‘Us, that is. For you, bed — and no arguments. I’ve seen too much sickness not to know a sick man when I see one. The doctor has been sent for. A friend of mine for years,’ he smiled, seeing the question in Reynold’s face. ‘We can trust him completely.’

The doctor came up to Reynolds’ room with Jansci twenty minutes later. A big, burly, red-faced man with a clipped moustache, he had the professionally cheerful voice that invariably made patients suspect the worst, and radiated a magnificent self-confidence — in fact, Reynolds thought dryly, he was very much like doctors the world over. Like many doctors also, he was a man of strong opinions and not unduly backward about expressing them: he roundly cursed those damned Communists half a dozen times within the first minute of entering the room.

‘How have you managed to survive so long?’ Reynolds smiled. ‘I mean, if you express your opinions—’

‘Tchah! Everybody knows what I think of these damned Communists. Daren’t touch us quacks, my boy. Indispensable. Especially the good ones.’ He clamped a stethoscope to his ears. ‘Not that I’m any damned good. The whole trick lies in making them think you are.’

The doctor did himself considerably less than justice. The examination was skilled, thorough and swift.

‘You’ll live,’ he announced. ‘Probably some internal haemorrhaging, but very slight. Considerable inflammation and really magnificent bruising. A pillow-case, Jansci, if you please. The effectiveness of this remedy,’ he continued, ‘is in direct proportion to the pain it inflicts. You’ll probably go through the roof, but you’ll be better tomorrow.’ He spooned a liberal amount of greyish paste on to the pillow-case and spread it evenly. ‘A form of horse liniment,’ he explained. ‘Centuries old recipe. Use it everywhere. Not only do patients have trust in the doctor that sticks to the good old-fashioned remedies, but it also enables me to dispense with the tedious and laborious necessity of keeping abreast of all the latest developments. Besides, it’s just about all these damned Communists have left us.’

Reynolds winced as the liniment burnt in through his skin, and he could feel the sweat coming to his brow. The doctor seemed pleased.

‘What did I tell you? Fit as a fiddle tomorrow! Just swallow a couple of these white tablets, my boy — they’ll ease the pain internally — and the blue one. Make you sleep — if you don’t, you’ll have that poultice off in ten minutes. Quick-acting, I assure you.’

They were indeed, and Reynolds’ last conscious recollection was of hearing the doctor loudly declaiming against those damned Communists as he went down the stairs. After that, he remembered nothing more for almost twelve hours.

When he awoke night had come again, but this time his window had been curtained and a small oil lamp was burning. He awoke quickly and completely, as he had long trained himself to do, without movement or change in his rate of breathing, and his eyes were on Julia’s face, a face with an expression he had not seen on it before, for a full second; she was aware he was awake and looking at her. He could see the dull colour touching throat and face as she slowly withdrew from his shoulder the hand that had been shaking him awake, but he twisted his wrist and glanced at his watch, a man who had observed nothing unusual.

‘Eight o’clock!’ He sat up abruptly in bed, and it was only after he had done so that he remembered the agony that had followed the last precipitate move he had made. The surprise on his face was obvious.

‘How does it feel?’ she smiled. ‘Better, isn’t it?’

‘Better? It’s miraculous!’ His back felt almost as if it were on fire, but the pain was quite gone. ‘Eight o’clock!’ he repeated incredulously. ‘I’ve been asleep for twelve hours?’

‘You have indeed. Even your face looks better.’ Her composure was back again. ‘The evening meal is ready. Shall I bring it up?’

‘I’ll be down in a couple of minutes,’ Reynolds promised.

He was as good as his word. A cheerful wood fire was burning in the small kitchen, and the table, set for five, was over against the fire. Sandor and Jansci greeted him, were pleased to hear of the progress made in his recovery, and introduced him to the Cossack. The Cossack shook hands briefly, nodded, scowled, sat down to his bread soup and said nothing, not a word throughout the course of the meal: he kept his head lowered all the time so that though Reynolds had an excellent view of his thick, black Magyar hair, brushed straight back from the forehead, it was not until the Cossack rose with his last mouthful and left, with a muttered word to Jansci, that Reynolds caught his first sight of the open, good-looking, boyish face, with its ill-concealed expression of truculence. That the expression was meant for him, Reynolds was left in no doubt. Seconds after the door was slammed, they heard the roar of what seemed to be a powerful motorcycle that swept past the house and faded swiftly away in the distance, soon to be lost in silence. Reynolds looked round the others at table.

‘Will somebody please tell me what I’m supposed to have done? Your young friend just tried to incinerate me by will power alone.’

He looked at Jansci, but Jansci was having trouble in getting his pipe to light. Sandor was staring into the fire, lost apparently in his own thoughts. When the explanation finally came, it came from Julia, her voice edged with an irritation and annoyance so foreign to her that Reynolds glanced at her in surprise.

‘Very well, if these two cowards won’t tell you, it seems I must. The only thing about you that annoys the Cossack is the fact that you’re here at all. You see, he — well, he fancies he’s in love with me — me, six years older than he is.’

‘What’s six years, after all,’ Reynolds began judicially. ‘If you—’

‘Oh, do be quiet! Then one night he got hold of the remains of a bottle of szilvorium the Count had left lying around and he told me. I was surprised and confused, but he’s such a nice boy and I was wanting to be kind so like a fool I said something about waiting until he was grown up. He was furious …’

Reynolds wrinkled his brow. ‘What has all this—?’

‘Don’t be so dense! He thinks you are a — well, a rival for my affections!’

‘May the best man win,’ Reynolds said solemnly. Jansci choked on his pipe, Sandor covered his face with one massive hand, and the stony silence from the head of the table made Reynolds think that he himself had better look elsewhere. But the silence stretched out, he felt compelled to look eventually, and when he did so he found neither the anger nor the blushing confusion he had expected, but a composed Julia, chin on hand, regarding him with a thoughtfulness and just possibly the faintest trace of mockery that he found vaguely disquieting. Not for the first time, he had to remind himself that underestimating the daughter of such a man as Jansci might be foolish in the extreme.

Finally she rose to clear away the dishes and Reynolds turned to Jansci.

‘I take it that was the Cossack we heard departing. Where has he gone?’

‘Budapest. He has a rendezvous with the Count on the outskirts of the town.’

‘What! On a big powerful motor-bike you can hear miles away — and in those clothes that can be seen from about the same distance?’

‘A small motor-bike only — the Cossack removed the silencer some time ago because not enough people could hear him coming … He has the vanity of extreme youth. But the loudness of both machine and clothes is his surest safeguard. He is so conspicuous that no one would ever dream of suspecting him.’

‘How long?’

‘On good roads, he’d be there and back in just over half an hour — we’re only about 15 kilometres from the town. But tonight?’ Jansci thought. ‘Perhaps an hour and a half.’

It took in fact two hours — two of the most unforgettable hours Reynolds had ever spent. Jansci talked nearly all the time, and Reynolds listened with the intentness of a man aware that he was being accorded a rare privilege which might never come his way again. The mood of expansiveness, Reynolds divined, came seldom to this man, so much the most remarkable, the most extraordinary man Reynolds had ever met in a chequered and dangerous lifetime that all others, with the possible exception of Jansci’s alter ego, the Count, seemed to fade away into insignificance. And for two unbroken hours Julia sat on a cushion by his side: the mischief and laughter that were never long absent from her eyes were gone as if they had never been, and she was grave and unsmiling as Reynolds had imagined she could never be: during those hours her eyes left her father’s face hardly at all, and even then only to gaze at the scarred and shattered ruins that were Jansci’s hands before seeking his face again. It was as if she, too, shared Reynolds’ irrational presentiment that this privilege would never come her way again, as if she were seeking to memorize every detail of her father’s face and hands so that she would never forget them: and Reynolds, remembering the strange, fey look in her eyes in the truck the previous night, felt queerly unaccountably cold. It cost him almost physical effort to shake off this abnormal feeling, to dismiss from his mind what he knew could only be the first tentative stirrings of superstitious nonsense.

Jansci spoke of himself not at all, and of his organization and its method of operation only where necessary: the only concrete fact that Reynolds gathered in the course of the evening was that his H.Q. was not here but in a farmhouse that lay in the low hills between Szombathely and the Neusiedler See, not far from the Austrian frontier — the only frontier of any interest to the great majority of those escaping to the west. He talked instead of people, hundreds of people whom he and the Count and Sandor had helped to safety, of their hopes and fears and terrors of this world. He talked of peace, of his hope for the world, of his conviction that that peace would ultimately come for the world if only one good man in a thousand worked for it, of the folly of imagining that there was anything else in the world worth working for, not even the ultimate peace, for that could only come from this. He spoke of Communists and non-Communists, and of the distinctions between them that existed only in the tiny minds of men, of the intolerance and the infinite littleness of minds that knew beyond question that all men were inescapably different by virtue of their births and beliefs, their creeds and religions, and that the God who said that every man was the brother of the next man was really a pretty poor judge of these things. He spoke of the tragedies of the various creeds that knew beyond doubt that theirs was the only way that was the right way, of the religious sects that usurped the gates of heaven against all comers, of the tragedy of his own Russian people who were perfectly willing to let others do this, for there were no gates anyway.

Jansci was wandering, not arguing, and he drifted from his own people to his youth amongst them. The transition seemed pointless, inconsequential at first, but Jansci was not an aimless wanderer, almost everything he did or said or thought was concerned with reinforcing and consolidating, both in himself and all his listeners, his almost obsessive faith in the oneness of humanity. When he spoke of his boyhood and young manhood in his own country, it could have been any person, of any creed, remembering with a fond nostalgia the happiest hours of a happy land. The picture he painted of the Ukraine was one touched, perhaps, with the sentimentality felt for that which is irrecoverably lost, but none the less Reynolds felt it to be a true picture, for the sadly remembered gladness in those tired and gentle eyes could never have arisen from self-deception, however unaware. Jansci did not deny the hardships of the life, the long hours in the fields, the occasional famines, the burning heat of summer and the bitter cold when the Siberian wind blew across the steppes: but it was essentially a picture of a happy land, a golden land untouched by fear or repression, a picture of far horizons with the golden wheat waving into the blurred and purpling distance, a picture of laughter and singing and dancing, of jingling horse-drawn, fur-collared troika rides under the frozen stars, of a steamboat drifting gently down the Dnieper in the warmth of a summer’s night and the soft music dying away across the water. And it was then, when Jansci was talking wistfully of the night-time scents of honeysuckle and wheat, of jasmine and new-mown hay drifting across the river that Julia rose quickly to her feet, murmuring something about coffee and hurried from the room. Reynolds caught only a glimpse of her face as she went, but he saw her eyes were dimmed with tears.

The spell was broken, but somehow a trace of its magic lingered on. Reynolds was under no illusion. For all his apparently aimless generalizations, Jansci had been talking directly to him, trying to undermine beliefs and prejudices, trying to make him see the glaringly tragic contrasts between the happy people whose portrait he had just drawn and the sinister apostles of world revolution, making him question whether so complete reversal lay within the bounds of credulity or even possibility, and it had been no accident, Reynolds thought wryly, that the first part of Jansci’s rambling had been devoted to the intolerance and wilful blindness of humanity at large. Jansci had deliberately intended that Reynolds should see in himself a microcosm of that humanity, and Reynolds was uncomfortably aware that he had not entirely failed. He did not like the unsettling, questioning half-doubts that were beginning to trouble him, and pushed them deliberately aside. For all his old friendship with Jansci, Colonel Mackintosh, Reynolds thought grimly, would not have approved of tonight’s performance: Colonel Mackintosh did not like to have his agents unsettled, they were to keep their thoughts on the ultimate objective, the job on hand and only the job on hand, and not concern themselves with side issues. Side issues, Reynolds thought incredulously, then pushed the matter from his mind.

Jansci and Sandor were talking now, in low, friendly tones, and as he listened Reynolds realized that he had misjudged the relationship between these two men. There was nothing of the master and the man, the employer and the employed about it, the atmosphere was too easy, too informal for that, and Jansci listened as carefully and considerately to what Sandor had to say as Sandor did to him. There was a bond between them, Reynolds realized, unseen but no less powerful for that, the bond of a devotion to a common ideal, a devotion which, on Sandor’s side, made no distinction between the ideal and the man who was the inspiration of it: Jansci, Reynolds was slowly beginning to discover, had the unconscious gift of inspiring a loyalty which barely stopped this side of idolatry, and even Reynolds himself, uncompromising individualist that nature and training had inescapably made him, could feel that magnetism of its subtle pull.

It was exactly eleven o’clock when the door was flung open and the Cossack strode in, bringing with him a snow-laden flurry of freezing air, dropped a large paper parcel in one corner and clapped his gauntlets vigorously together. His face and hands were blue with cold, but he affected to be unaware of it, not even seeking the warmth of the fire. Instead, he sat at the table, lit a cigarette, rolled it into the corner of his mouth and let it stay there. Reynolds noted with amusement that though the smoke laced upward and brought tears to one eye, the Cossack made no attempt to remove it: there he had placed it and there it would stay.

His report was brief and to the point. He had met the Count as arranged. Jennings was no longer in his hotel, and already a precautionary rumour was circulating to the effect that he was unwell. The Count did not know where he was — he certainly had not been removed to the AVO H.Q. or any of their known centres in Budapest: he had either been taken directly back to Russia, the Count thought, or to some place of safety outside the city, he would try to find out where, but he had little hope. The Count, the Cossack said, was almost certain that they would not be taking him directly home: he was much too important a figure at the conference: they were probably hiding him in a place of absolute security until they heard from Stettin, and if Brian was still there the Russians would still let him participate in the conference — after letting him hear his son on the phone. But if Jennings’ son had escaped, then Jennings himself would almost certainly be immediately removed to Russia. Budapest was too near the frontier, and the Russians couldn’t afford the incalculable prestige loss of having him escape … And there was one other extremely disquieting bit of information. Imre had disappeared, and the Count could not find him anywhere.

The day that followed, an interminable, wonderful Sunday with an azure, cloudless, windless sky and a dazzling white sun turning the undulating plains and heavy-laden pines into an impossibly lovely Christmas card, was never afterwards clear in Reynolds’ mind. It was as if everything that day had been seen through a haze, or in a dimly remembered dream: it was almost as if it had been a day lived by someone else, so remote it was, so detached from all reality, whenever he later tried to recall it.

And it wasn’t because of his health, the injuries he had received, that all this was so: the doctor had claimed no more than the truth for the effectiveness of his liniment, and though Reynolds’ back was still stiff, the pain had gone: his mouth and jaw, too, were healing fast with only an occasional throb to remind him of where his teeth had been before he had run foul of the giant Coco. He knew himself, and admitted to himself, that it all stemmed from the tearing anxiety in his mind, a savage restlessness that would not let him be still a moment but led him to pacing through the house and over the hard frozen snow outside the house until even the phlegmatic Sandor begged him to take a rest.

Once again, that morning, they had listened to the BBC 7 o’clock broadcast, and once again the message had failed to come through. Brian Jennings had failed to arrive in Sweden, and Reynolds knew that there could be little hope left: but he had been on missions before that had ended in failure, and the failure had never troubled him. What troubled him was Jansci, for he knew that that gentle man, having given his promise to help, meant to carry it out at all costs, even although he must have known, more clearly even than Reynolds himself, just what the cost of trying to rescue the most heavily guarded man in Communist Hungary must almost inevitably be. And then, beyond that again, he knew that his worry wasn’t solely on Jansci’s behalf, deep as was his admiration and respect for the man, it wasn’t even mainly on his behalf: it was on account of his daughter, who worshipped her father and would be broken-hearted and inconsolable at the loss of the last member of her family left alive. And worst still, she would regard him as the sole instrument of her father’s death, the barrier between them would for ever remain, and Reynolds looking for the hundredth time at the smiling curve of the mouth and the grave, troubled eyes above that belied the smile, realized, with a slow wonder and a profound sense of shock, that was what he feared above all. They were together much of the day, and Reynolds came to love the slow smile and the outlandish way she pronounced his name, but once when she said ‘Meechail’ and smiled with her eyes as well as her lips, he had been brusque to her, even rude, and he had seen the uncomprehending hurt in her eyes as the smile faded and vanished and he himself had felt sick to his heart and more confused than he had been all day … Reynolds could only feel profoundly thankful that Colonel Mackintosh could not see just then the man whom he regarded as the person most likely to succeed himself some day: but the colonel probably wouldn’t have believed it anyway.

The interminable day wheeled slowly to its close, the sun setting over the distant hills to the west burnished the snowcapped pine tops with a brush of flame and gold, and darkness fell swiftly over the land as the stars stood white in the frozen sky. The evening meal came and went almost in complete silence, then Jansci and Reynolds tried on, and altered with Julia’s help, the contents of the parcel the Cossack had brought home the previous night — a couple of AVO uniforms. There had been no question of the Count’s gambling that these might prove useful when he had sent them, no matter where old Jennings was, they would be essential: they were the ‘Open Sesame’ to every door in Hungary. And they could only be for Jansci and Reynolds. No uniform Reynolds had ever seen could have stretched across Sandor’s shoulders.

The Cossack departed on his motor-bicycle shortly after nine o’clock. He departed dressed in his usual flamboyant clothes, a cigarette over each ear and another unlit in the corner of his mouth, and in high good humour: he could not have failed to observe the strain between Reynolds and Julia during the course of the evening, and had reason for his cheerful smile.

He should have been back by eleven o’clock, by midnight at the latest. Midnight came and went, but there was no sign of the Cossack. One o’clock struck, half past one, anxiety had changed to tension and almost despair, when he made his appearance a few moments before two o’clock. He arrived not on his motor-bike, but at the wheel of a big, grey Opel Kapitan, braked, stopped the engine and climbed out with the unconcerned indifference of one who was accustomed to this sort of thing to the point of boredom. It was not until later that they discovered that this was the first time in his life that the Cossack had ever driven a car, a fact which wholly accounted for his delay in arrival.

The Cossack brought with him good news, bad news, papers and instructions. The good news was that the Count had discovered Jennings’ whereabouts with almost ridiculous ease — Furmint, the Chief of the AVO had told him personally, in the course of conversation. The bad news was two-fold: the place where the professor had been taken was the notorious Szarháza prison about 100 kilometres south of Budapest, considered the most impregnable fortress in Hungary, and generally reserved for such enemies of the state as were destined never to be seen again; but the Count himself, unfortunately, could not help them: Colonel Hidas himself had personally put him in charge of a loyalty investigation in the town of Gödöllö where disaffected elements had been giving trouble for some time. Also on the debit account was the fact that Imre was still missing: the Count feared that his nerve had gone altogether and that he had run out on them.

The Count, the Cossack said, regretted that he could provide them with practically no detail at all of the Szarháza, as he himself had never been there, his sphere of operations being limited to Budapest and north-west Hungary. The internal geography and routine of the prison, the Count had added, were unimportant anyway: only complete and brazen bluff could hope to serve their purposes. Hence the papers. The papers were for Jansci and Reynolds, and masterpieces of their kind. Complete AVO identity cards for both, and a document, on the Allám Védelmi Hátoság’s own headed, unreproduceable notepaper, signed by Furmint and countersigned by a cabinet minister, with the appropriate and correct stamps for each office, authorizing the Commandant of the Szarháza prison to hand over Professor Harold Jennings to the bearers of the document.

It was the Count’s suggestion that, should the rescue of the professor still be on the cards, they stood a fair chance: no higher authority could be produced for the release of a prisoner than the document he had provided: and the idea of anyone willingly penetrating the walls of the dreaded Szarháza was so fantastic as to be beyond sane contemplation.

It was the Count’s further suggestion that the Cossack and Sandor should accompany them as far as the inn of Petoli, a small village about five miles north of the prison, and wait there by the telephone: that way all members of the organization could keep in touch with each other. And, to complete a magnificent day’s work, the Count had provided the essential transport. He had omitted to say where he had obtained it.

Reynolds shook his head in wonder.

‘The man’s a marvel! Heaven only knows how he managed to do all this in one day — you’d think they’d given him a holiday just to concentrate on our business.’ He gazed at Jansci, his face carefully empty of expression. ‘What do you think?’

‘We will go in,’ Jansci said quietly. He was looking at Reynolds, but Reynolds knew he was talking to Julia. ‘If there is any hope left of good news from Sweden, we will go in. He is an old man, and it’s inhuman that he should die so far from his wife and from his homeland. If we did not go in …’ He broke off and smiled. ‘You know what the good Lord — or maybe I would only get the length of St Peter — do you know what St Peter would say to me? He’d say, “Jansci, we have no place for you here. You cannot expect kindness and mercy from us — what kindness and mercy had you in your heart for Harold Jennings?”’

Reynolds looked at him, and thought of the man he had revealed himself to be last night, a man to whom compassion in and for his fellow man, and a belief in an all-embracing supernatural compassion, were the keystones of existence, and knew that he lied. He glanced at Julia, and saw the smile of understanding on her face, then he saw below the shadowing hand and knew that she, too, had not been deceived, for her eyes were dark and stricken and numb.

‘… the conference in Paris ends this evening, when an official statement will be issued. It is expected that the Foreign Minister will fly home tonight — I beg your pardon, that should read tomorrow night — and report to the Cabinet. It is not yet known …’

The announcer’s voice trailed away into silence, and died away altogether as the radio switch clicked off and for a long moment no one looked at each other. It was Julia who finally broke the silence, her voice unnaturally calm and matter-of-fact.

‘Well, that’s it, isn’t it? That’s the password that’s been so long in coming. “Tonight — tomorrow night”. The boy is free, he’s safe in Sweden. You had better go at once.’

‘Yes.’ Reynolds rose to his feet. He felt none of the relief, none of the elation that he had expected now that the green light had been given them at last, just a numbness, such as he had seen in Julia’s eyes that night, and a strange heaviness of heart. ‘If we know, the Communists are bound to know by this time also; he may be leaving for Russia at any hour. We have no time to waste.’

‘Indeed we haven’t.’ Jansci pulled on his greatcoat — like Reynolds he was already dressed in his borrowed uniform — and pulled his military gauntlets on. ‘Please don’t worry about us, my dear. Just be at our H.Q. twenty-four hours from now — and don’t go through Budapest.’ He kissed her and went out into the dark, bitter morning. Reynolds hesitated, half-turned towards her, saw her avert her head and stare into the fire, and left without a word. As he climbed into the back seat of the Opel, he caught a glimpse of the Cossack’s face, following him into the car: he was beaming from ear to ear.

Three hours later, under a dark and lowering sky heavy with its burden of unshed snow, Sandor and the Cossack were dropped at the roadside, not far from the Poteli Inn. The journey had been completely uneventful, and although they had been prepared for roadblocks there had been none. The Communists were very sure of themselves, they had no reason to be anything else.

Ten minutes later, the great, grey forbidding mass of the Szarháza came into sight, an old, impregnably walled building surrounded now by three concentric rings of barbed wire with ploughed earth between, the wire no doubt electrified and the earth heavily sown with fragmentation mines. The inner and outer rings were dotted with manned machine-gun towers raised high on wooden stilts, and, gazing at it for the first time, Reynolds felt the first touch of fear, the realization of the madness of what they were doing.

Jansci might well have divined his feelings, for he made no comment, increased speed over the last halfmile and skidded to a stop outside the great arched gateway. One of the guards came rushing forward, gun in hand, demanding to know their identity and see their papers, but stepped back respectfully as Jansci emerged in his AVO uniform, froze him with a single contemptuous glance and demanded to see the commandant. It spoke well for the terror inspired by that uniform, even among those who had no reasonable cause to fear it, that Jansci and Reynolds were inside the commandant’s office in five minutes’ time. The commandant was the last kind of person Reynolds would have expected to see in that position. He was a tall, slightly stooped man in a well-cut dark suit, with a high-domed, thin, intellectual face. He wore a pince-nez, had lean capable hands and looked to Reynolds more like an outstanding surgeon or scientist. In point of fact he was both, and reckoned the greatest expert on psychological and physiological breakdown procedures outside the Soviet Union.

He had no suspicions as to their genuineness, Reynolds could see. He offered them a drink, smiled when they refused it, gestured them to a seat and took the release paper that Jansci handed him.

‘Hm! No doubt about the validity of this document, is there, gentlemen?’

‘Gentlemen,’ Reynolds noted. A man had to be very sure of himself before he used that word in place of the ubiquitous ‘comrade.’

‘I have been expecting this from my good friend Furmint. After all, the conference opens today, does it not? We cannot afford to have Professor Jennings absent. The brightest jewel in our crown, if one may use a somewhat — ah — outmoded expression. You have your own papers, gentlemen?’

‘Naturally.’ Jansci produced his, Reynolds did the same, and the commandant nodded, apparently satisfied. He looked at Jansci, then nodded at his phone.

‘You know, of course, that I have a direct line into the Andrassy Ut. I can take no chances with a prisoner of Jennings’ — ah — magnitude. You will not be offended if I phone for confirmation of this release — and of your identity papers?’

Reynolds felt his heart miss a beat, felt the skin on his face tighten till it seemed like waxed paper. God, how could they possibly have overlooked so obvious a precaution? Their pistols — there was only the one chance, their pistols, the commandant as hostage … His hand was actually beginning to move when Jansci spoke, his voice magnificent in its assured confidence, his face unclouded by the slightest trace of worry.

‘But of course, Commandant! A prisoner of Jennings’ importance? We should have expected nothing else.’

‘In that case there is no need.’ The commandant smiled, pushing the papers across the desk, and Reynolds could feel every stiffened muscle in his body relax as relief poured over him, flooded him like a great wave. He was beginning to realize, just vaguely realize, what manner of man Jansci really was: in comparison, he himself had not yet started to learn.

The commandant reached for a sheet of paper, scribbled on it and stamped it with an official seal. He rang a bell, handed it to a warder and dismissed the man with a wave of his hand.

‘Three minutes, gentlemen, no more. He is not far from here.’

But the commandant overestimated. It was not three minutes, it was less than thirty seconds before the door opened, and it opened to admit not Jennings but half a dozen armed swift-moving guards who had Jansci and Reynolds pinned helplessly to their seats before they had recovered from their state of lulled security and could properly begin to realize what was happening. The commandant shook his head and smiled sadly.

‘Forgive me, gentlemen. A subterfuge, I fear — unpleasant as are all subterfuges, but essential. That document I signed was not for the professor’s release but your arrest.’ He took off his pince-nez, polished them and sighed. ‘Captain Reynolds, you are an uncommonly persistent young man.’