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ALISTAIR MACLEAN

The Last Frontier

Copyright

Harper

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London SE1 9GF

www.harpercollins.co.uk

First published in Great Britain by Collins 1959

Copyright © HarperCollinsPublishers 1959

Alistair MacLean asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

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Source ISBN: 9780006157496

Ebook Edition © JANUARY 2014 ISBN: 9780007289455

Version: 2018-05-17

Dedication

To Gilleasburg

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

One

Two

Three

Four

Five

Six

Seven

Eight

Nine

Ten

Eleven

Twelve

Thirteen

Fourteen

Fifteen

About the Author

Other Books By

About the Publisher

ONE

The wind blew steadily out of the north and the night air was bitterly chill. Nothing moved across the snow. Under the high cold stars the frozen plain empty, desolate, stretched endlessly away on every side until it vanished into the blurred distance of an empty horizon. Over everything lay the silence of death.

But the emptiness, Reynolds knew, was illusion. So was the desolation and the silence. Only the snow was real, the snow and that bone-deep, sub-zero cold that shrouded him from head to toe in a blanket of ice and continuously shook his entire body in violent, uncontrollable spasms of shivering, like a man suffering from ague. Perhaps that feeling of drowsiness that was beginning to creep over him was only an illusion also, but he was aware that it, too, was no illusion, it was real and he knew only too well the meaning it carried with it. Resolutely, desperately almost, he crushed down all thought of the cold, the snow and sleep, and concentrated on the problem of survival.

Slowly, painstakingly, careful to make not the slightest unnecessary sound or movement, he slid one frozen hand under the lapels of his trench-coat, fumbled his handkerchief out of his breast pocket, rolled it into a crushed ball and stuffed it into his mouth: betrayal of his position could come only by sight or sound, and the folds of the handkerchief would break up the heavy condensation of his breath in the frosty air and muffle the chattering of his teeth. Then he twisted round cautiously in the deep, snow-filled ditch by the roadside into which he had fallen, reached out an exploratory hand – now curiously mottled blue and white by the cold – for the trilby hat that had been knocked from his head when he had tumbled off the overhanging branch of the tree above him, found it and inched it slowly towards him. As thoroughly as his numbed, now almost useless fingers would permit, he covered crown and brim with a thick layer of snow, crammed the trilby deep over the giveaway black thatch of his head and lifted head and shoulders in almost grotesque slow motion until first the hat brim and then the eyes cleared the level of the ditch.

In spite of its violent shivering, his whole body was as taut as a bow-string as he waited, in tense, sickening expectation, for the shout that betokened discovery, or the shot or the numbing crash that carried oblivion with it as a bullet found the exposed target of his head. But there was no sound, no shot and his awareness only heightened with the passing of every moment. His first quick scanning of the circuit of the horizon was now complete, and there could be no doubt about it: there was no one there, at least close at hand, either to see or to be seen.

Moving just as carefully, just as slowly, but with a long drawn-out easing of his pent-up breath, Reynolds straightened until he was kneeling upright in the ditch. He was cold and shivering still, but was no longer aware of it, and the sleepiness had vanished as if it had been a dream. Once again his gaze travelled in a full circle around the horizon, but slowly, probingly, this time, the keen brown eyes missing nothing, and once more the answer was the same. There was nobody to be seen. There was nothing to be seen, nothing at all but the icy twinkle of the stars in the dark velvet of the sky, the level white plain, a few small isolated groves of trees and the curving ribbon of road beside him, its surface hard-packed by the snow-treads of heavy trucks.

Reynolds lowered himself back down into the deep trench which the impact of his falling body had carved out in the drifted snow in the ditch. He had to have time. He had to have time to recover his breath, to ease his still gasping lungs’ demands for air and more air: a scant ten minutes had passed since the truck in which he had stolen a lift had been stopped by the police block, and the brief, fierce scuffle, clubbed automatic in hand, with the two unsuspecting policemen who had investigated the rear of the truck, the sprint round the providential bend in the road and then the mile-long, grinding run till he had reached the grove of trees beside which he now lay had brought him to the point of exhausted collapse. He had to have time to figure out why the police had given up the pursuit so easily – they must have known that he would be bound to keep to the road: leaving the road for the deep, virgin snow on either side of it would not only have slowed him to a trudging walk but also, by virtue of the fresh tracks so easily visible on that starlit night, would have instantly given him away. And, above all, he had to have time to think, to plan out what he must do next.

It was typical of Michael Reynolds that he spent no time in self-recrimination or in wondering what might have happened had he chosen some other course of action. He had been trained in a hard and bitter school, where such idle luxuries as self-blame for what was irrevocably past and done with, useless post-mortems, crying over spilt milk and all negative speculations and emotions which might possibly contribute to a lessening of overall efficiency, were rigidly proscribed. He spent perhaps five seconds considering the past twelve hours, then dismissed the matter completely from his mind. He would have done the same thing over again. He had had every reason to believe his informant in Vienna that air travel to Budapest was temporarily out – airport security precautions during the fortnight of the forthcoming International Scientific Conference were reported to be the most stringent ever. The same applied to all the main railway stations, and all long-distance passenger trains were reported to be heavily patrolled by Security Police. That left only the road: first an illegal crossing of the frontier – no great feat if one had expert help and Reynolds had had the best there was – and then a stolen ride on some eastward bound truck. A road-block, the same Viennese informant had warned him, would almost certainly be in operation on the outskirts of Budapest, and Reynolds had been prepared for this: what he hadn’t been prepared for, and what none of his informants had known of, was the block east of Komarom, some forty miles outside the capital. Just one of those things – it could have happened to anyone and it just so chanced that it had happened to him. Reynolds gave the mental equivalent of a philosophic shrug and the past ceased to exist for him.

It was equally typical of him – more precisely, perhaps, it was typical of the rigorous mental conditioning he had undergone in his long training – that his thoughts about the future were rigidly canalized, channelled along one all-exclusive, particular line of thought, towards the achievement of one specific objective. Again, the emotional colourings which would normally accompany the thought of the potentialities of a successful mission or the tragic consequences of failure had no part in his racing mind as he lay there in the freezing snow, thinking, calculating, planning, assessing chances with a cold and remote detachment. ‘The job, the job, always the job on hand,’ the colonel had repeated once, twice, a thousand times. ‘Success or failure in what you do may be desperately important to others, but it must never matter a damn to you. For you, Reynolds, consequences do not exist and must never be allowed to exist, and for two reasons: thinking about them upsets your balance and impairs your judgment – and every second you give up to thinking along these negative lines is always a second that should and must be used to working out how you’re going to achieve the job on hand.’

The job on hand. Always the job on hand. In spite of himself, Reynolds grimaced as he lay there waiting for his breathing to return to normal. There never had been more than one chance in a hundred, and now the odds had lengthened astronomically. But the job was still there, Jennings and all his priceless knowledge must be reached and brought out and that was all that mattered. But if he, Reynolds, failed in this, then he had failed and that was all there was to it. He might even fail to-night, on his first day of the assignment after eighteen months of the most rigorous and ruthless specialist training aimed at the accomplishment of this task alone, but that made no difference whatsoever.

Reynolds was superbly fit – he had to be, all the colonel’s specialist handful of men had to be – and his breathing was again as near normal as made no difference. As for the police mounting the road-block – there must be half a dozen of them, he had caught a glimpse of several others emerging from the hut just as he had rounded the bend – he would have to take a chance on them: there was nothing else he could do. Possibly they had only been stopping and searching eastbound trucks for contraband, and had no interest in panic-stricken passengers who fled away into the night – although it seemed likely enough that the two policemen he had left groaning in the snow might take a rather more personal interest in him. As for the immediate future he couldn’t lie there indefinitely to freeze in the snow or risk discovery by the sharp-eyed drivers of passing cars or trucks.

He would have to make for Budapest on foot – for the first part of the journey, at least. Three or four miles’ heavy trudging through the fields and then regain the road – that, at least, he would need to take him well clear of the road-block before he dared try a lift. The road to the east curved left before the block, and it would be easier for him to go to the left also, to short-circuit the bend of the road across the base of the triangle. But to the left, the north, that was, lay the Danube at no great distance, and he baulked from finding himself trapped in a narrow strip of land between river and road. There was nothing for it but to strike off to the south and round the apex of the triangle at a discreet distance – and on a clear night like that, a discreet distance meant a very considerable distance indeed. The detour would take hours to complete.

Teeth again chattering violently – he had removed the handkerchief to draw in the great, gasping breaths of air his lungs had demanded – chilled to the bone and with his hands and feet useless and empty of all feeling, Reynolds pushed himself shakily to his feet and began to brush the frozen snow off his clothes, glancing down the road in the direction of the police road-block. A second later he was once more flat on his face in the snow-filled ditch, his heart thumping heavily in his chest, his right hand struggling desperately to free his gun from the pocket in his coat where he had stuck it after his fight with the police.

He could understand now why the police had taken their time in looking for him – they could afford to. What he could not understand was his own folly in supposing that discovery could result only from some betraying movement or incautious sound made by himself. He had forgotten that there was such a thing as a sense of smell – he had forgotten all about the dogs. And there had been no mistaking the identity of the leading dog as it nosed eagerly along the road, not even in the semi-darkness: a bloodhound was unmistakable where there was any light at all.

With the sudden shout from one of the approaching men and the excited jabber of voices, he was on his feet again, reaching the grove of trees behind him in three short steps: it had been too much to hope that he hadn’t been spotted against that vast backcloth of white. He himself, in turn, had seen in that last quick glimpse that there were four men, each with a dog on leash: the other three dogs weren’t bloodhounds, he was sure of that.

He drew in behind the bole of the tree whose branches had lately given him such brief and treacherous refuge, freed the gun from his pocket and looked down at it. A specially made, beautifully machined version of a Belgian 6.35 automatic, it was a precise and deadly little gun and with it he could hit a target smaller than a man’s hand, at twenty paces, ten times out of ten. To-night, he knew, he would have difficulty even in hitting a man at half that distance, so unresponsive to the mind’s demands had his numbed and shaking hands become. Then some instinct made him lift the gun up before his eyes, and his mouth tightened: even in the faint starlight he could see that the barrel of the gun was blocked with frozen slush and snow.

He took off his hat, held it by the brim, and about shoulder height, jutting out from one side of the tree, waited a couple of seconds, then stooped as low as he could and risked a quick glance round the others. Fifty paces away now, if that, the four men were walking along in line abreast, the dogs still straining on their leashes. Reynolds straightened, dug out a Biro pen from his inside pocket and quickly, but without haste, began to free the barrel of the automatic of the frozen slush. But his numbed hands betrayed him, and when the Biro slipped from his fumbling fingers and disappeared point downwards in the deep snow, he knew it was useless to search for it, too late for anything more.

He could hear the brittle-soft crunch of steel-shod boots on the hard-packed snow of the road. Thirty paces, perhaps even less. He slid a white, pinched forefinger through the trigger guard, placed the inside of his wrist against the hard rough bark of the tree, ready to slide it round the trunk – he would have to press hard against the bole to keep his shaking hand even reasonably steady – and with his left hand fumbled at his belt to release the knife with its spring-loaded blade. The gun was for the men, the knife for the dogs, the chances about even, for the policemen were advancing towards him shoulder to shoulder across the width of the road, rifles dangling loose in the crooks of their arms, unskilled amateurs who knew what neither war nor death was. Or, rather, the chances would have been about even, but for the gun in his hand: the first shot might clear the blocked barrel, it might equally well blow his hand off. On balance, then, the chances were heavily against him, but then, on a mission such as this, the chances would always be against him: the job on hand was still on hand, and its accomplishment justified all risks short of the suicidal.

The knife spring clicked loudly and released the blade, a five-inch sliver of double-edged blued steel that gleamed evilly in the starlight as Reynolds edged round the bole of the tree and lined up his automatic on the nearest of the advancing policemen. His trigger finger tightened, held, slackened and a moment later he was back behind the tree trunk. Another and fresh tremor had seized his hand, and his mouth had gone suddenly dry: for the first time he had recognized the other three dogs for what they were.

Untrained country policemen, however armed, he could deal with: bloodhounds, too, he could handle, and with a fair chance of success: but only a madman would try conclusions with three trained Dobermann pinschers, the most vicious and terrible fighting dogs in the world. Fast as a wolf, powerful as an Alsatian and a ruthless killer utterly without fear, only death could stop a Dobermann. Reynolds didn’t even hesitate. The chance he had been about to take was no longer a chance but a certain way to suicide. The job on hand was still all that mattered. Alive, though a prisoner, there was always hope: with his throat torn out by a Dobermann pinscher, neither Jennings nor all the old man’s secrets would ever come home again.

Reynolds placed the point of his knife against a tree, pushed the spring-loaded blade home into its leather scabbard, placed it on the crown of his head and crammed his trilby on top of it. Then he tossed his automatic at the feet of the startled policemen and stepped out into the road and the starlight, both hands held high above his head.

Twenty minutes later they arrived at the police block hut. Both the arrest and the long cold walk back had been completely uneventful. Reynolds had expected, at the least, a rough handling, at the most a severe beating-up from rifle butts and steel-shod boots. But they had been perfunctory, almost polite in their behaviour, and had shown no ill-will or animosity of any kind, not even the man with his jaw blue and red and already badly swelling from the earlier impact of Reynold’s clubbed automatic. Beyond a token search of his clothing for further arms, they had molested him in no way at all, had neither asked any questions nor demanded to see and inspect his papers. The restraint, the punctiliousness, made Reynolds feel uneasy; this was not what one expected in a police state.

The truck in which he had stolen a lift was still there, its driver vehemently arguing and gesticulating with both hands as he sought to convince two policemen of his innocence – almost certainly, Reynolds guessed, he was suspected of having some knowledge of Reynolds’ presence in the back of the truck. Reynolds stopped, made to speak and if possible clear the driver, but had no chance: two of the policemen, all brisk officiousness now that they were once more in the presence of headquarters and immediate authority, caught his arms and hustled him in through the doors of the hut.

The hut was small, square and ill-made, the chinks in its walls closed up with wadded wet newspaper, and sparsely furnished: a portable wood stove with its chimney sticking through the roof, a telephone, two chairs and a battered little desk. Behind the desk sat the officer in charge, a small fat man, middle-aged, red-faced and insignificant. He would have liked his porcine little eyes to have had a cold, penetrating stare, but it didn’t quite come off: his air of spurious authority he wore like a threadbare cloak. A nonentity, Reynolds judged, possibly even, in given circumstances – such as the present – a dangerous little nonentity, but ready for all that to collapse like a pricked balloon at the first contact with real authority. A little bluster could do no harm.

Reynolds broke away from the hands of the men holding him, reached the desk in two paces and smashed down his fist so heavily that the telephone on the rickety little desk jumped and gave a tiny, chime-like ring.

‘Are you the officer in charge here?’ he demanded harshly.

The man behind the desk blinked in alarm, hurriedly sat back in his chair and had just begun to raise his hands in instinctive self-defence when he recovered himself and checked the movement. But he knew his men had seen it, and the red neck and cheeks turned an even darker hue.

‘Of course I’m in charge!’ His voice started off as a high squeak, dropped an octave as he came on balance again. ‘What do you think?’

‘Then what the devil do you mean by this outrage?’ Reynolds cut him short in mid-sentence, drew his pass and identification papers from his wallet and flung them on the table. ‘Go on, examine these! Check the photograph and thumb-print, and be quick about it. I’m late already, and I haven’t all night to argue with you. Go on! Hurry up!’

If he had failed to be impressed by the display of confidence and righteous indignation, the little man behind the desk would have been less than human – and he was very human indeed. Slowly, reluctantly, he drew the papers towards him and picked them up.

‘Johann Buhl,’ he read out. ‘Born Linz 1923, now resident Vienna, businessman, Import-Export dealer machine parts.’

‘And here by the express invitation of your Economic Ministry,’ Reynolds added softly. The letter he now threw on the table was written on the Ministry’s official notepaper, the envelope date-stamped Budapest four days previously. Negligently, Reynolds reached out a leg, hooked a chair towards him, sat and lit a cigarette – cigarette, case, lighter all made in Austria: the easy self-confidence could not be other than genuine. ‘I wonder what your superiors in Budapest will think of this night’s work?’ he murmured. ‘It will hardly increase your chances of promotion, I should think.’

‘Zeal, even misplaced zeal, is not a punishable offence in our country.’ The officer’s voice was controlled enough, but the pudgy white hands trembled slightly as he returned the letter to its envelope and pushed the papers back to Reynolds. He clasped his hands on the desk before him, stared at them, then looked up at Reynolds, his forehead creased. ‘Why did you run away?’

‘Oh, my God!’ Reynolds shook his head in despair: the obvious question had been a long time coming, and he’d had plenty of time to prepare. ‘What would you do if a couple of thugs, waving their guns around, set on you in the darkness? Lie down and let them butcher you?’

‘They were police officers. You could –’

‘Certainly they’re police officers,’ Reynolds interrupted acidly. ‘I can see that now – but it was as black as night inside the back of the truck.’ He was stretched out at his ease now, calm and relaxed, his mind racing. He had to end this interview quickly. The little man behind the desk was, after all, a lieutenant in the police or its equivalent. He couldn’t possibly be as stupid as he looked, he might stumble across an awkward question at any moment. Quickly Reynolds decided that his best hope lay in audacity: the hostility was gone from his manner, and his voice was friendly as he went on.

‘Look, let’s forget about this. I don’t think it’s your fault. You were just doing your duty – unfortunate though the consequences of your zeal might be for you. Let’s make a deal: you provide me with transport to Budapest, and I’ll forget it all. No reason why this should ever reach the ears of your superiors.’

‘Thank you. You are very kind.’ The police officer’s reception of the proposal was less enthusiastic than Reynolds had expected, one might even have imagined a hint of dryness in the tone. ‘Tell me, Buhl, why were you in that truck? Hardly a normal method of transport for businessmen as important as yourself. And you didn’t even let the driver know.’

‘He would probably have refused me – he had a notice forbidding unauthorized passengers.’ Far back in Reynolds’ mind a tiny little warning bell was ringing. ‘My appointment is urgent.’

‘But why –’

‘The truck?’ Reynolds smiled ruefully. ‘Your roads are treacherous. A skid on ice, a deep ditch and there you were – my Borgward with a broken front axle.’

‘You came by car? But for businessmen in a hurry –’

‘I know, I know!’ Reynolds let a little testiness, a little impatience, creep into his voice. ‘They come by plane. But I had 250 kilos of machine samples in the boot and back of my car: you can’t lug a damned great weight like that aboard a plane.’ Angrily, now, he stubbed out his cigarette. ‘This questioning is ridiculous. I’ve established my bona-fides and I’m in a great hurry. What about that transport?’

‘Two more little questions, and then you shall go,’ the officer promised. He was leaning back comfortably in his chair now, fingers steepled across his chest, and Reynolds felt his uneasiness deepen. ‘You came direct from Vienna? The main road?’

‘Of course! How else would I come?’

‘This morning?’

‘Don’t be silly.’ Vienna was less than 120 miles from where they were. ‘This afternoon.’

‘Four o’clock? Five o’clock?’

‘Later. Ten past six exactly. I remember looking at my watch as I passed through your customs post.’

‘You could swear to that?’

‘If necessary, yes.’

The police officer’s nod, the quick shifting of his eyes, took Reynolds by surprise, and, before he could move, three pairs of hands had pinioned his from behind, dragged him to his feet, twisted his arms in front of him and snapped on a pair of shiny steel handcuffs.

‘What the devil does this mean?’ In spite of the shock, the cold fury in Reynolds’ tone could hardly have been bettered.

‘It just means that a successful liar can never afford to be unsure of his facts.’ The policeman tried to speak equably, but the triumph in his voice and eyes were unmistakable. ‘I have news for you, Buhl – if that is your name, which I don’t for a moment believe. The Austrian frontier has been closed to all traffic for twenty-four hours – a normal security check, I believe – as from three o’clock this afternoon. Ten past six by your watch indeed!’ Grinning openly, now, he stretched out a hand for the telephone. ‘You’ll get your transport to Budapest, all right, you insolent imposter – in the back of a guarded police car. We haven’t had a Western spy on our hands for a long time now: I’m sure they’ll be delighted to send transport for you, just especially for you, all the way from Budapest.’

He broke off suddenly, frowned, jiggled the receiver up and down, listened again, muttered something under his breath and replaced the receiver with an angry gesture.

‘Out of order again! That damned thing is always out of order.’ He was unable to conceal his disappointment, to have made the important announcement personally would have been one of the highlights of his life. He beckoned the nearest of the men.

‘Where is the nearest telephone?’

‘In the village. Three kilometres.’

‘Go there as fast as you can.’ He scribbled furiously on a sheet of paper. ‘Here is the number and the message. Don’t forget to say it comes from me. Hurry, now.’

The man folded the message, stuffed it into his pocket, buttoned his coat to the neck and left. Through the momentarily opened door, Reynolds could see that, even in the short time that had elapsed since his capture, clouds had moved across the stars and slow, heavy snowflakes were beginning to swirl across the silhouetted oblong of darkening sky. He shivered involuntarily, then looked back at the police officer.

‘I’m afraid that you’ll pay heavily for this,’ he said quietly. ‘You’re making a very grave mistake.’

‘Persistence is an admirable thing in itself, but the wise man knows when to stop trying.’ The little fat man was enjoying himself. ‘The only mistake I made was ever to believe a word you said.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘An hour and a half, perhaps two, on these snowy roads, before your – ah – transport arrives. We can fill in that time very profitably. Information, if you please. We’ll start off with your name – your real one this time, if you don’t mind.’

‘You’ve already had it. You’ve seen my papers.’ Unasked, Reynolds resumed his seat, unobtrusively testing his handcuffs: strong, close-fitting over the wrist and no hope there. Even so, even with bound hands, he could have disposed of the little man – the spring-knife was still under his trilby – but it was hopeless to think of it, not with three armed policemen behind him. ‘That information, those papers, are accurate and true. I can tell lies to oblige you.’

‘No one is asking you to tell lies, just to, shall we say, refresh your memory? Alas, it probably needs some jogging.’ He pushed back from the desk, levered himself heavily to his feet – he was even shorter and fatter standing upright than he had seemed sitting down – and walked round his desk. ‘Your name, if you please?’

‘I told you –’ Reynolds broke off with a grunt of pain as a heavily ringed hand caught him twice across the face, back-handed and forehanded. He shook his head to clear it, lifted his bound arms and wiped some blood from the corner of his mouth with the back of his hand. His face was expressionless.

‘Second thoughts are always wiser thoughts,’ the little man beamed. ‘I think I detect the beginning of wisdom. Come now, let us have no more of this disagreeable foolishness.’

Reynolds called him an unprintable name. The heavily-jowled face darkened with blood almost as if at the touch of a switch, he stepped forward, ringed hand clubbing down viciously, then collapsed backwards across his desk, gasping and retching with agony, propelled by the scythe-like sweep of Reynolds’ upward swinging leg. For seconds the police officer remained where he had fallen, moaning and fighting for breath, half-lying, half-kneeling across his own desk, while his own men still stood motionless, the suddenness, the unbelievable shock of it holding them in thrall. It was just at this moment that the door crashed open and a gust of icy air swept into the hut.

Reynolds twisted round in his chair. The man who had flung open the door stood framed in the opening, his intensely cold blue eyes – a very pale blue indeed – taking in every detail of the scene. A lean, broad-shouldered man so tall that the uncovered thick brown hair almost touched the lintel of the doorway, he was dressed in a military, high-collared trench-coat, belted and epauleted, vaguely greenish under a dusting of snow, so long-skirted that it hid the top of his high, gleaming jackboots. The face matched the eyes: the bushy eyebrows, the flaring nostrils above the clipped moustache, the thin chiselled mouth all lent to the hard, handsome face that indefinable air of cold authority of one long accustomed to immediate and unquestioning obedience.

Two seconds were enough to complete his survey – two seconds would always be enough for this man, Reynolds guessed: no astonished looks, no ‘What’s going on here?’ or ‘What the devil does all this mean?’ He strode into the room, unhooked one of his thumbs from the leather belt that secured his revolver, butt forward, to his left waist, bent down and hauled the police officer to his feet, indifferent to his white face, his whooping gasps of pain as he fought for breath.

‘Idiot!’ The voice was in keeping with the appearance, cold, dispassionate, all but devoid of inflection. ‘Next time you – ah – interrogate a man, stand clear of his feet.’ He nodded curtly in Reynolds’ direction. ‘Who is this man, what were you asking him and why?’

The police officer glared malevolently at Reynolds, sucked some air down into his tortured lungs and whimpered huskily through a strangled throat.

‘His name is Johann Buhl, a Viennese businessman – but I don’t believe it. He’s a spy, a filthy Fascist spy,’ he spat out viciously. ‘A filthy Fascist spy!’

‘Naturally.’ The tall man smiled coldly. ‘All spies are filthy Fascists. But I don’t want your opinions, I want facts. First, how did you find out his name?’

‘He said so, and he had papers. Forgeries, of course.’

‘Give them to me.’

The police officer gestured towards the table. He could stand almost upright now. ‘There they are.’

‘Give them to me.’ The request, in tone, inflection, in every way, was a carbon copy of the first. The policeman reached out hastily, wincing with the pain of the sudden movement and handed him the paper.

‘Excellent. Yes, excellent.’ The newcomer rifled expertly through the pages. ‘Might even be genuine – but they’re not. He’s our man all right.’

Reynolds had to make a conscious effort to relax his clenching fists. This man was infinitely dangerous, more dangerous than a division of stupid bunglers like the little policeman. Even trying to fool this man would be a waste of time.

‘Your man? Your man?’ The policeman was groping, completely out of his depth. ‘What do you mean?’

‘I ask the questions, little man. You say he is a spy. Why?’

‘He says he crossed the frontier this evening.’ The little man was learning lessons in brevity. ‘The frontier was closed.’

‘It was indeed.’ The stranger leaned against the wall, selected a Russian cigarette from a thin gold case – no brass or chromium for the top boys, Reynolds thought bleakly – lit a cigarette and looked thoughtfully at Reynolds. It was the policeman who finally broke the silence. Twenty or thirty seconds had given him time to recover his thoughts and a shred of his courage.

‘Why should I take orders from you?’ he blustered. ‘I’ve never seen you in my life before. I am in charge here. Who the devil are you?’

Perhaps ten seconds, ten seconds spent minutely examining Reynolds’ clothes and face, elapsed before the newcomer turned lazily away and looked down at the little policeman. The eyes were glacial, dispassionate, but the expression on the face showed no change: the policeman seemed to shrink curiously inside his clothes and he pressed back hard against the edge of the desk.

‘I have my rare moments of generosity. We will forget, for the present, what you said and how you said it.’ He nodded towards Reynolds, and his tone hardened almost imperceptibly. ‘This man is bleeding from the mouth. He tried, perhaps, to resist arrest?’

‘He wouldn’t answer my questions and …’

‘Who gave you authority either to question or injure prisoners?’ The tone of the voice cut like a whip. ‘You stupid bungling idiot, you might have done irreparable harm! Overstep your authority once again and I personally will see to it that you have a rest from your exacting duties. The seaside, perhaps – Constanta, for a start?’

The policeman tried to lick his dry lips and his eyes were sick with fear. Constanta, the area of the Danube-Black Sea Canal slave labour camps, was notorious throughout Central Europe: many had gone there but no one ever returned.

‘I – I only thought –’

‘Leave thinking to those capable of such difficult feats.’ He jerked a thumb at Reynolds. ‘Have this man taken out to my car. He has been searched, of course?’

‘But of course!’ The policeman was almost trembling in his eagerness. ‘Thoroughly, I assure you.’

‘That statement coming from such as you makes a further search imperative,’ the tall man said dryly. He looked at Reynolds, one heavy eyebrow lifting slightly. ‘Must we be reduced to this mutual indignity – my having to search you personally, I mean.’

‘There’s a knife under my hat.’

‘Thank you.’ The tall man lifted the hat, removed the knife, courteously replaced the hat, pressed the release catch, thoughtfully inspected the blade, closed the knife, slid it into his coat pocket and looked at the white-faced policeman.

‘There is no conceivable reason why you should not rise to the topmost heights of your profession.’ He glanced at his watch – as unmistakably gold as the cigarette case. ‘Come, I must be on my way. I see you have the telephone here. Get me the Andrassy Ut, and be quick about it!’

The Andrassy Ut! Even though he had been becoming surer of the identity of the man with the passing of every moment, confirmation of his suspicions still came to Reynolds with a sense of shock and he could feel his face tightening in spite of himself under the speculative gaze of the tall stranger. Headquarters of the dreaded AVO, the Hungarian Secret Police currently reckoned the most ruthless and implacably efficient behind the iron curtain, the Andressy Ut was the one place on earth he wanted at all costs to avoid.

‘Ah! I see the name is not new to you.’ The stranger smiled. ‘That bodes no good for you, Mr Buhl, or for your bona-fides: the Andrassy Ut is hardly a name on every western businessman’s lips.’ He turned to the policeman. ‘Well, what are you stuttering about now?’

‘The – the telephone.’ The voice was high and squeaking again and faltering badly: he was afraid now to the point of terror. ‘It’s out of action.’

‘Inevitably. Matchless efficiency on every hand. May the gods help our unfortunate country.’ He produced a wallet from his pocket, opened it briefly for inspection. ‘Sufficiently good authority for the removal of your prisoner?’

‘Of course, Colonel, of course.’ The words tripped over one another. ‘Whatever you say, Colonel.’

‘Good.’ The wallet snapped shut, and the stranger turned to Reynolds and bowed with ironic courtesy.

‘Colonel Szendrô, Headquarters, Hungarian Political Police. I am at your service, Mr Buhl, and my car at your disposal. We leave for Budapest, immediately. My colleagues and I have been expecting you for some weeks now, and are most anxious to discuss certain matters with you.’

TWO

It was pitch dark outside now, but light streaming from the open door and uncovered window of the hut gave them enough visibility to see by. Colonel Szendrô’s car was parked on the other side of the road – a black, left-hand drive Mercedes saloon already covered with a deep layer of snow, all except the front part of the bonnet where the engine heat melted the snow as it fell. There was a minute’s delay while the colonel told them to release the truck driver and search the inside of the truck for any personal luggage Buhl might have been forced to abandon there – they found his overnight bag almost immediately and stuffed his gun into it – then Szendrô opened the front right-hand door of the car and gestured Reynolds to his seat.

Reynolds would have sworn that no one man driving a car could have held him captive for fifty miles, only to find out how wrong he was even before the car started. While a soldier with a rifle covered Reynolds from the left-hand side, Szendrô stooped inside the other door, opened the glove compartment in front of Reynolds, fetched out two lengths of thin chain and left the glove box open.

‘A somewhat unusual car, my dear Buhl,’ the colonel said apologetically. ‘But you understand. From time to time I feel that I must give certain of my passengers a feeling of – ah – security.’ Rapidly he unlocked one of the handcuffs, passed the end link of one of the chains through it, locked it, passed the chain through a ring or eye bolt in the back of the glove box and secured it to the other handcuff. Then he looped the second chain round Reynolds’ legs, just above the knees and, closing the door and leaning in through the opened window, secured it with a small padlock to the arm-rest. He stood back to survey his work.

‘Satisfactory, I think. You should be perfectly comfortable and have ample freedom of movement – but not enough, I assure you, to reach me. At the same time you will find it difficult to throw yourself out of the door, which you would find far from easy to push open anyway: you will observe that the pull-out handle is missing from your door.’ The tone was light, even bantering, but Reynolds knew better than to be deceived. ‘Also, kindly refrain from damaging yourself by surreptitiously testing the strength of the chains and their anchors: the chains have a breaking load of just over a ton, the arm-rest is specially reinforced and that ring in the glove box bolted through on to the chassis … Well, what on earth do you want now?’

‘I forgot to tell you, Colonel.’ The policeman’s voice was quick, nervous. ‘I sent a message to our Budapest Office asking to send a car for this man.’

‘You did?’ Szendrô’s voice was sharp. ‘When?’

‘Ten, perhaps fifteen minutes ago.’

‘Fool! You should have told me immediately. However, it’s too late now. No harm done, possibly some good. If they are as thick in the head as you are, a circumstance of which it is admittedly difficult to conceive, a long drive in the cold night air should clear their minds admirably.’

Colonel Szendrô banged the door shut, switched on the roof light above the windscreen so that he should have no difficulty in seeing his prisoner, and drove off for Budapest. The Mercedes was equipped with snow tyres on all four wheels, and, in spite of the hard-packed snow on the road, Szendrô made good time. He drove with the casual, easy precision of an expert, his cold blue eyes for ever shifting to his right, very frequently and at varying intervals.

Reynolds sat very still, staring right ahead. He had already, in spite of the colonel’s admonitions, tested the chains; the colonel hadn’t exaggerated. Now he was forcing his mind to think coldly, clearly and as constructively as possible. His position was almost hopeless – it would be completely so when they reached Budapest. Miracles happened, but only a certain kind of miracle: no one had ever escaped from the AVO Headquarters, from the torture chambers in Stalin Street. Once there he was lost: if he was ever to escape it would have to be from this car, inside the next hour.

There was no window winding handle on the door – the colonel had thoughtfully removed all such temptations: even if the window had been open he couldn’t have reached the handle on the outside. His hands couldn’t reach the wheel; he had already measured the arc of radius of the chain and his straining fingers would have been at least two inches away. He could move his legs to a certain extent, but couldn’t raise them high enough to kick in the windscreen, shatter the toughened glass throughout its length and perhaps cause a crash at fairly high speed. He could have placed his feet against the dashboard, and he knew of some cars where he could have heaved the front seat backwards off the rails. But everything in this car spelt solidity, and if he tried and failed, as he almost certainly would, all he’d probably get for his pains would be a tap on the head that would keep him quiet till they got to the Andrassy Ut. All the time he deliberately compelled himself to keep his mind off what was going to happen to him when he got there: that way lay only weakness and ultimate destruction.

His pockets – had he anything in his pockets he could use? Anything solid enough to throw at Szendrô’s head, shock him for a length of time necessary to lose control and crash the car: Reynolds was aware that he himself might be hurt as seriously as the colonel, even though he had the advantage of preparation: but a fifty-fifty chance was better than the one in a million he had without it. He knew exactly where Szendrô had put the key to the handcuffs.

But a rapid mental inventory dismissed that hope: he had nothing heavier in his pocket than a handful of forints. His shoes, then – could he remove a shoe and get Szendrô in the face with it before the colonel knew what he was doing? But that thought came only a second ahead of the realization of its futility; with his wrists handcuffed, the only way he could reach his shoes in any way unobtrusively was between his legs – and his knees were lashed tightly together … Another idea, desperate but with a chance of success, had just occurred to him when the colonel spoke for the first time in the fifteen minutes since they had left the police block.

‘You are a dangerous man, Mr Buhl,’ he remarked conversationally. ‘You think too much – Cassius – you know your Shakespeare, of course.’

Reynolds said nothing. Every word this man said was a potential trap.

‘The most dangerous man I’ve ever had in this car, I should say, and a few desperate characters have sat from time to time where you’re sitting now,’ Szendrô went on ruminatively. ‘You know where you’re going, and you don’t appear to care. But you must, of course.’

Again Reynolds kept silent. The plan might work – the chance of success was enough to justify the risk.

‘The silence is uncompanionable, to say the least,’ Colonel Szendrô observed. He lit a cigarette, sent the match spinning through the ventilation window. Reynolds stiffened slightly – the very opening he wanted. Szendrô went on: ‘You are quite comfortable, I trust?’

‘Quite.’ Reynolds’ conversational tone matched Szendrô’s own. ‘But I’d appreciate a cigarette too, if you don’t mind.’

‘By all means.’ Szendrô was hospitality itself. ‘One must cater for one’s guests – you’ll find half a dozen lying loose inside the glove compartment. A cheap and undistinguished brand, I fear, but I’ve always found that people in your – ah – position do not tend to be over-critical about these things. A cigarette – any cigarette – is a great help in times of stress.’

‘Thank you.’ Reynolds nodded at the projection on top of the dashboard at his own side. ‘Cigar lighter, is it not?’

‘It is. Use it by all means.’

Reynolds stretched forward with his handcuffed wrists, pressed it down for a few seconds then lifted it out, its spiral tip glowing red in the faint light from above. Then, just as it cleared the fascia, his hands fumbled and he dropped it on the floor. He reached down to get it, but the chain brought his hands up with a sharp jerk inches from the floor. He swore softly to himself.

Szendrô laughed, and Reynolds, straightening, looked at him. There was no malice in the colonel’s face, just a mixture of amusement and admiration, the admiration predominating.

‘Very, very clever, Mr Buhl. I said you were a dangerous man, and now I’m surer than ever.’ He drew deeply on his cigarette. ‘We are now presented with a choice of three possible lines of action, are we not? None of them, I may say, has any marked appeal for me.’

‘I don’t know what you are talking about.’

‘Magnificent again!’ Szendrô was smiling broadly. ‘The puzzlement in your voice couldn’t be improved upon. Three courses are open, I say. First, I could courteously bend over and down to retrieve it, whereupon you would do your best to crush in the back of my head with your handcuffs. You would certainly knock me senseless – and you observed very keenly, without in any way appearing to do so, exactly where I put the key to these handcuffs.’ Reynolds looked at him uncomprehendingly, but already he could taste defeat in his mouth.

‘Secondly I could toss you a box of matches. You would strike one, ignite the heads of all the other matches in the box, throw it in my face, crash the car and who knows what might happen then? Or you could just hope that I’d give you a light, either from the lighter or cigarette; then the finger judo lock, a couple of broken fingers, a transfer to a wrist lock and then the key at your leisure. Mr Buhl, you will bear watching.’

‘You’re talking nonsense,’ Reynolds said roughly.

‘Perhaps, perhaps. I have a suspicious mind, but I survive.’ He tossed something on to the lap of Reynolds’ coat. ‘Herewith one single match. You can light it on the metal hinge of the glove box.’

Reynolds sat and smoked in silence. He couldn’t give up, he wouldn’t give up, although he knew in his heart that the man at the wheel knew all the answers – and the answers to many questions which he, Reynolds, probably didn’t know ever existed. Half a dozen separate plans occurred to him, each one more fantastic and with less chance of success than the previous one, and he was just coming to the end of his second cigarette – he had lit it off the butt end of the first – when the colonel changed down into third gear, peered at the near side of the road, braked suddenly and swung off into a small lane. Half a minute later, on a stretch of the lane parallel to and barely twenty yards from the highway, but almost entirely screened from it by thick, snow-covered bushes, Szendrô stopped the car and switched off the ignition. Then he turned off his head and side lights, wound his window right down in spite of the bitter cold and turned to face Reynolds. The roof light above the windscreen still burned in the darkness.

Here it comes, Reynolds thought bleakly. Thirty miles yet to Budapest, but Szendrô just can’t bear to wait any longer. Reynolds had no illusions, no hope. He had had access to secret files concerning the activities of the Hungarian Political Police in the year that had elapsed since the bloody October rising of 1956, and they had made ghastly reading: it was difficult to think of the AVO – the AVH, as they were more lately known – as people belonging to the human race. Wherever they went they carried with them terror and destruction, a living death and death itself, the slow death of the aged in deportee camps and the young in the slave labour camps, the quick death of the summary executions and the ghastly, insane screaming deaths of those who succumbed to the most abominable tortures ever conceived of the evil that lay buried deep in the hearts of the satanic perverts who find their way into the political police of dictatorships the world over. And no secret police in modern times excelled or even matched Hungary’s AVO in the nameless barbarities, the inhuman cruelties and all-pervading terror with which they held hopeless people in fear-ridden thrall: they had learnt much from Hitler’s Gestapo during the Second World War, and had that knowledge refined by their current nominal masters, the NKVD of Russia. But now the pupils had outdistanced their mentors, and they had developed fleshcrawling refinements and more terribly effective methods of terrorization such as the others had not dreamed of.

But Colonel Szendrô was still at the talking stage. He turned round in his seat, lifted Reynolds’ bag from the back, set it on his lap and tried to open it. It was locked.

‘The key,’ Szendrô said. ‘And don’t tell me there isn’t one, or that it’s lost. Both you and I, I suspect, Mr Buhl, are long past that kindergarten stage.’

They were indeed, Reynolds thought grimly. ‘Inside ticket pocket of my jacket.’

‘Get it. And your papers at the same time.’

‘I can’t get at these.’

‘Allow me.’ Reynolds winced as Szendrô’s pistol barrel pushed hard against lips and teeth, felt the colonel slip the papers from his breast pocket with a professional ease that would have done credit to a skilled pickpocket. And then Szendrô was back on his own side of the car, the bag open: almost, it seemed, without pausing to think, he had slit open the canvas lining and extracted a slim fold of papers, and was now comparing them with those he had taken from Reynolds’ pockets.

‘Well, well, well, Mr Buhl. Interesting, most interesting. Chameleon-like, you change your identity in a moment of time. Name, birthplace, occupation, even your nationality all altered in an instant. A remarkable transformation.’ He studied the two sets of documents, one in either hand. ‘Which, if any, are we to believe?’

‘The Austrian papers are fakes,’ Reynolds growled. For the first time he stopped speaking in German and switched to fluent idiomatic Hungarian. ‘I had word that my mother, who has lived in Vienna for many years, was dying. I had to have them.’

‘Ah, of course. And your mother?’

‘No more.’ Reynolds crossed himself. ‘You can find her obituary in Tuesday’s paper. Maria Rakosi.’

‘I’m at the stage now where I would be astonished if I didn’t.’ Szendrô spoke also in Hungarian, but his accent was not that of Budapest, Reynolds was sure of that – he had spent too many agonizing months learning every last Budapest inflection and idiom from an ex-Professor of Central European languages of Budapest University. Szendrô was speaking again. ‘A tragic interlude, I am sure. I bare my head in silent sympathy – metaphorically, you understand. So you claim your real name is Lajos Rakosi? A very well-known name indeed.’

‘And a common one. And genuine. You’ll find my name, date of birth, address, date of marriage all in the records. Also my –’

‘Spare me.’ Szendrô held up a protesting hand. ‘I don’t doubt it. I don’t doubt you could show me the very school desk on which your initials are carved and produce the once-little girl whose books you once carried home from school. None of which would impress me in the slightest. What does impress me is the extraordinary thoroughness and care of not only yourself but the superiors who have so magnificently trained you for whatever purpose they have in mind. I do not think I have ever met anything quite like it.’

‘You talk in riddles, Colonel Szendrô. I’m just an ordinary Budapest citizen. I can prove it. All right, I did have fake Austrian papers. But my mother was dying, and I was prepared to risk indiscretion. But I’ve committed no crime against our country. Surely you can see that. If I wished, I could have gone over to the west. But I did not so wish. My country is my country, and Budapest is my home. So I came back.’

‘A slight correction,’ Szendrô murmured. ‘You’re not coming back to Budapest – you’re going, and probably for the first time in your life.’ He was looking Reynolds straight in the eyes when his expression changed. ‘Behind you!’

Reynolds twisted round, a split second before he realized Szendrô had shouted in English – and there had been nothing in Szendrô ’s eyes or tone to betray his meaning. Reynold’s turned back slowly, an expression almost of boredom on his face.

‘A schoolboyish trick. I speak English’ – he was using English now – ‘why should I deny it? My dear Colonel, if you belonged to Budapest, which you don’t, you would know that there are at least fifty thousand of us who speak English. Why should so common an accomplishment be regarded with suspicion?’

‘By all the gods!’ Szendrô slapped his hand on his thigh. It’s magnificent, it’s really magnificent. My professional jealousy is aroused. To have a Britisher or an American – British, I think, the American intonation is almost impossible to conceal – talk Hungarian with a Budapest accent as perfectly as you do is no small feat. But to have an Englishman talk English with a Budapest accent – that is superb!’

‘For heaven’s sake, there’s nothing superb about it.’ Reynolds almost shouted in exasperation. ‘I am Hungarian.’

‘I fear not.’ Szendrô shook his head. ‘Your masters taught you, and taught you magnificently – you, Mr Buhl, are worth a fortune to any espionage system in the world. But one thing they didn’t teach you, one thing they couldn’t teach you – because they don’t know what it is – is the mentality of the people. I think we may speak openly, as two intelligent men, and dispense with the fancy patriotic phrases employed for the benefit of the – ah – proletariat. It is, in brief, the mentality of the vanquished, of the fear-ridden, the cowed shoulder that never knows when the long hand of death is going to reach out and touch it.’ Reynolds was looking at him in astonishment – this man must be tremendously sure of himself – but Szendrô ignored him. ‘I have seen too many of our countrymen, Mr Buhl, going as you are, to excruciating torture and death. Most of them are just paralysed: some of them are plainly terror-stricken and weeping; and a handful are consumed by fury. You could not possibly fit in any of these categories – you should, but, as I say, there are things your masters cannot know. You are cold and without emotion, planning, calculating all the time, supremely confident of your own ability to extract the maximum advantage from the slightest opportunity that arises, and never tired of watching for that opportunity to come. Had you been a lesser man, Mr Buhl, self-betrayal would not have come so easily …’

He broke off suddenly, reached and switched off the roof light, just as Reynolds’ ears caught the hum of an approaching car engine, wound up his window, deftly removed a cigarette from Reynolds’ hand and crushed it beneath his shoe. He said nothing and made no move until the approaching car, a barely perceptible blur behind the sweep of its blazing headlights, its tyres silent on the snow-packed road, had passed by and vanished to the west. As soon as it was lost to sight and sound Szendrô had reversed out on the highway again and was on his way, pushing the big car almost to the limit of safety along the treacherous road and through the gently falling snow.

Over an hour and a half elapsed before they reached Budapest – a long, slow journey that could normally have been done in half the time. But the snow, a curtain of great feathery flakes that swirled whitely, suddenly, into the flat-topped beams of the headlights, had become steadily heavier and slowed them up, at times almost to walking pace as the labouring wipers, pushing the clogging snow into corrugated ridges on the middle and at the sides of the windscreen, swept through narrower and narrower arcs until finally they had stopped altogether; a dozen times, at least, Szendrô had had to stop to clear the mass of snow off the screen.

And then, a few miles short of the city limits, Szendrô had left the highway again, and plunged into a mass of narrow, twisting roads: on many stretches where the snow lay smooth and deep and treacherously masking the border between road and ditch, theirs was obviously the first car that had passed since the snow had begun to fall, but despite the care and concentrated attention Szendrô gave the roads, his flickering eyes found Reynolds every few seconds; the man’s unflagging vigilance was almost inhuman.

Why the colonel had left the main road Reynolds couldn’t guess, any more than he could guess why he had stopped and drawn off the road earlier on. That he wanted, in the earlier instance, to avoid the big police car racing west to Komarom and now to bypass the police block on the city limits of which Reynolds had been warned at Vienna, was obvious enough: but the reason for these actions was a different thing altogether. Reynolds wasted no time on the problem: he had problems enough of his own. He had perhaps ten minutes left.

They were passing now through the winding, villa-lined streets and steeply-cobbled residential avenues of Buda, the western half of the city, and dropping down to the Danube. The snow was easing again, and, twisting round in his seat, Reynolds could just vaguely see the rock-bound promontory of the Gellert Hill, its grey, sharp granite jutting through the windblown snow, the vast bulk of the St Gellert Hotel and, as they approached the Ferenc Jozsef Bridge, the St Gellert Mount where some old-time bishop, who had incurred the wrath of his fellowman, had been shoved into a spiked barrel and heaved into the Danube. Bungling amateurs in those days, Reynolds thought grimly, the old bishop couldn’t have lasted a couple of minutes: down in the Andrassy Ut things would doubtless be much better arranged.

Already they were across the Danube and turning left into the Corso, the one-time fashionable embankment of open-air cafés on the Pest side of the river. But it was black and desolate now, as deserted as were nearly all the streets, and it seemed dated, anachronistic, a nostalgic and pathetic survival from an earlier and happier age. It was difficult, it was impossible to conjure up the ghosts of those who had promenaded there only two decades ago, carefree and gay and knowing that another to-morrow would never come, that all the other to-morrows could only be the same as today. It was impossible to visualize, however dimly, the Budapest of yesterday, the loveliest and happiest of cities, all that Vienna never was, the city to which so many westerners, of so many nations, came to visit briefly, for a day, for two days, and never went home again. But all that was gone, even the memory was almost gone.