The Last Frontier

  The automatic was out now, the butt firmly clasped in both hands, the back of his right wrist pressed hard against the archway wall for maximum steadiness. The bulk of the silencer made sighting difficult, the swirling snow made it doubly so, but the chance had to be taken. The soldier with the torch was perhaps ten feet away, the guard in the box clearing his throat to make some remark to his companion when Reynolds slowly squeezed the trigger.

  The soft ‘plop’ of the silencer muffling the escaping gases was lost in the sudden crash as the storm lantern above the entrance door shattered into a hundred pieces, the broken fragments tinkling against the wall behind before falling into the cushioning silence of the snow. To the ears of the man at the sentry-box, the dull report of the silencer must have come a fraction of a second before the smashing of the glass, but the human ear is incapable of making such fine distinctions in time, and only the vastly louder sound could have registered. Already he was pounding across the courtyard toward the far entrance, the man with the torch close by his side.

  Reynolds wasn’t far behind them. He passed the sentry-box, turned sharply right, ran lightly along the track the circling sentry had beaten in the virgin snow, passed the first fire-escape, turned, launched himself sideways and upwards and caught the stanchion supporting the hand-rail on the first platform at the full extent of his arms. For one bad moment he felt his fingers slipping on the cold, smooth steel, tightened his grip desperately, held, then overhanded himself upwards till he caught the rail. A moment later he was standing securely on the first platform, and neither the snow round the three outer edges of the platform nor that on any of the steps leading up to it showed any signs of having been disturbed.

  Five seconds later, taking two steps at a time with his feet, each time, placed sideways in the middle of each step so as to leave no visible trace from below, he had reached the second platform, on a level now with the first floor. Here he crouched, kneeling so as to reduce his bulk to the smallest dimensions possible, for the two soldiers were returning to the archway, in no great hurry, talking to one another. They were convinced, Reynolds could hear, that the hot glass had shattered because of the extreme cold, and not disposed to worry unduly about it. Reynolds felt no surprise: the spent bullet deflected by these granite-hard walls would leave scarcely a mark, and it might lie undisturbed, undiscovered for days under the thick carpet of snow. In their position, he would probably have come to the same conclusion himself. For form’s sake, the two men walked round the parked cars and shone their torches over the lower flights of the fire-escapes, and by the time their cursory inspection was over, Reynolds was on the platform level with the second floor, standing outside a set of double glass doors.

  He tried them, cautiously, firmly. They were locked. He had expected nothing else. Slowly, with the utmost care – for his hands were now almost numbed with the cold and the slightest fumble could be his undoing – he had brought out his knife, eased the blade open without a click, slid it into the crack between the doors and pressed upwards. Seconds later he was inside locking the glass doors behind him.

  The room was pitch dark but his outstretched, inquiring hands soon told him where he was. The hard smoothness all around, the glazed feel of wall tiles, marble washbasins and chromed rails could belong only to a bathroom. He pulled the door curtains carelessly together – as far as the men below were concerned, there was no reason why a light should not appear in that room more than in any other room – fumbled his way across to the door and switched on the light.

  It was a large room with an old-fashioned bath, three of the walls tiled and the other given up to a couple of big linen cupboards, but Reynolds wasted no time in examining it. He crossed to the washbasin, ran the water till the basin was almost full of hot water and plunged his hands in. A drastic method of restoring circulation to numbed and frozen hands, and an exquisitely painful one, but what it lacked in finesse it more than compensated for in speed, and Reynolds was interested in that alone. He dried his tingling fingers, took his automatic out, switched off the light, cautiously opened the door and eased an eye round the corner of the jamb.

  He was standing, he found, at the end of a long corridor, luxuriously carpeted as he would have expected of any hotel run by the AVO. Both sides of the corridor were lined with doors, the one opposite him bearing the number 56 and the next but one 57: luck was beginning to break his way and chance had brought him directly into the wing where Jennings and, probably, a handful of other top scientists were quartered. But as his glance reached the end of the corridor, his mouth tightened and he drew back swiftly, noiselessly inside the door, shutting it softly behind him. Self-congratulations were a trifle premature, he thought grimly. There had been no mistaking the identity of that uniformed figure standing at the far end of the corridor, hands clasped behind his back and staring out through a frost-rimmed window: there was no mistaking an AVO guard anywhere.

  Reynolds sat on the edge of the bath, lit a cigarette and tried to figure out his next move. The need for haste was urgent, but not desperate enough for rashness: at this stage, rashness could ruin everything.

  The guard, obviously, was there to stay – he had that curiously settled look about him. Equally obviously, he, Reynolds, could not hope to break his way into No. 59 as long as the guard remained there. Problem, remove the guard. No good trying to rush him or even stalk him down the brightly lit length of the 120-foot corridor: there were other ways of committing suicide but few more foolish. The guard would have come to him, and he would have to come unsuspectingly. Suddenly Reynolds grinned, crushed out his cigarette and rose quickly to his feet. The Count, he thought, would have appreciated this.

  He stripped off hat, jacket, tie and shirt, tossing them into the bath, ran hot water into the basin, took a bar of soap and lathered his face vigorously till it was covered in a deep white film up to his eyes: for all he knew his description had been issued to every policeman and AVO man in Budapest. Then he dried his hands thoroughly, took the gun in his left hand, draped a towel over it and opened the door. His voice, when he called, was low-pitched enough but it carried down the length of the corridor with remarkable clarity.

  The guard whirled round at once, his hand automatically reaching down for his gun, but he checked the movement as he saw the harmless appearance of the singlet-clad, gesticulating figure at the other end of the corridor. He opened his mouth to speak, but Reynolds urgently gestured him to silence with the universal dumb-show of a forefinger raised to pursed lips. For a second the guard hesitated, saw Reynolds beckoning him frantically, then came running down the corridor, his rubber soles silent on the deep pile of the carpet. He had his gun in his hand as he drew up alongside Reynolds.

  ‘There’s a man on the fire-escape outside,’ Reynolds whispered. His nervous fumbling with the towel concealed the transfer of the gun, barrel foremost, to his right hand. ‘He’s trying to force the doors open.’

  ‘You are sure of this?’ The man’s voice was no more than a hoarse, guttural murmur. ‘You saw him?’

  ‘I saw him.’ Reynolds’ whisper was shaking with nervous excitement. ‘He can’t see in, though. The curtains are drawn.’

  The guard’s eyes narrowed and the thick lips drew back in a smile of almost wolfish anticipation. Heaven only knew what wild dreams of glory and promotion were whirling through his mind. Whatever his thoughts, none was of suspicion or caution. Roughly he pushed Reynolds to one side and pushed open the bathroom door and Reynolds, his right hand coming clear of the towel, followed on his heels.

  He caught the guard as he crumpled and lowered him gently to the floor. To open up the linen cupboard, rip up a couple of sheets, bind and gag the unconscious guard, lift him into the cupboard and lock the door on him took Reynolds’ trained hands only two minutes.

  Two minutes later, hat in hand and overcoat over his arm, very much in the manner of an hotel guest returning to his room, Reynolds was outside the door of No. 59. He had half a dozen skeleton keys, togethe
r with four masters the manager of his own hotel had given him – and not one of them fitted.

  Reynolds stood quite still. This was the last thing he had expected – he would have guaranteed the entry to any hotel door with these keys. And he couldn’t risk forcing the door – breaking it open was out of the question, and a lock tripped by force can’t be closed again. If a guard accompanied the professor back to his room, as might well happen, and found unlocked a door he had left locked, suspicion and immediate search would follow.

  Reynolds moved on to the next door. On both sides of this corridor only every other door bore a number, and it was a safe assumption that the numberless doors were the corridor entrances to the private bathrooms adjoining each room – the Russians accorded to their top scientists facilities and accommodation commonly reserved in other and less realistic countries for film stars, aristocracy and the leading lights of society.

  Inevitably, this door too was locked. So long a corridor in so busy a hotel couldn’t remain empty indefinitely and Reynolds was sliding the keys in and out of the lock with the speed and precision of a sleight-of-hand artist. Luck was against him again. He pulled out his torch, dropped to his knees and peered into the crack between the door and the jamb; this time luck was with him. Most continental doors fit over a jamb, leaving the lock bolt inaccessible, but this one fitted into the jamb. Reynolds quickly took from his wallet a three by two oblong of fairly stiff celluloid – in some countries the discovery of such an article on a known thief would be sufficient to bring him before a judge on a charge of being in possession of a burglarious implement – and slipped it between door and jamb. He caught the door handle, pulling towards himself and in the direction of the hinges, worked the celluloid in behind the bolt, eased the door and jerked it back again. The bolt slid back with a loud click, and a moment later Reynolds was inside.

  The bathroom, for such it was, resembled in every detail the one he had just left, except for the position of the doors. The double cupboard was to his right as he entered between the two doors. He opened the cupboards, saw that one side was given over to shelves and the other, with a full-length mirror to its door, empty, then closed them again. A convenient bolt-hole, but one he hoped he would have no occasion to use.

  He crossed to the bedroom connecting door and peered in through the keyhole. The room beyond was in darkness. The door yielded to his touch on the handle and he stepped inside, the pencil beam of his torch swiftly circling the room. Empty. He crossed to the window, saw that no chink of light could possibly escape through the shutters and heavy curtains, crossed over to the door, switched on the light and hung his hat over the handle to block off the keyhole.

  Reynolds was a trained searcher. It took only a minute’s meticulous examination of walls, pictures and ceilings to convince him that there was no spy-hole into the room, and less than twenty seconds thereafter to find the inevitable microphone, concealed behind the ventilation grill above the window. He transferred his attention to this bathroom, and the examination there took only seconds. The bath was built in, so there could be nothing there. There was nothing behind the washbasin or the water closet, and behind the shower curtains were only the brass handgrip and the old-fashioned spray nozzle fixed to the ceiling.

  He was just pulling back the curtains when he heard footsteps approaching in the corridor outside – only feet away, the deep carpet had muffled their approach. He ran through the connecting door into the bedroom, switched off the light – there were two people coming, he could hear them talking and could only hope that their voices drowned the click of the switch – picked up his hat, moved swiftly back into the bathroom, had the door three parts shut and was peering through the crack between jamb and door when the key turned in the lock and Professor Jennings walked into the room. And, hard on his heels, a tall, bulky man in a brown suit followed him through the doorway. Whether he was some AVO appointed guard or just a colleague of Jennings’, it was impossible to say. But one thing was clear enough: he carried with him a bottle and two glasses, and he intended to stay.

  FIVE

  Reynolds’ gun was in his hand, almost without his being aware of it. If Jennings’ companion chose to make an inspection of the bathroom, there was no time for him, Reynolds, to move into the shelter of the big cupboard. And if he was discovered, then Reynolds would be left without any option, and with the guard – and for safety’s sake he had to assume that it was a guard – unconscious or dead, his boats would have been burnt behind him. There would never then be another chance of contacting Jennings, the old professor would have to come with him that night whether he liked it or not, and Reynolds rated as almost non-existent his chances of escaping unobserved from the Three Crowns with an unwilling prisoner at the point of a gun and getting any distance at all through the hostile dark of Budapest.

  But the man with Jennings made no move to enter the bathroom, and it soon became apparent that he was no guard. Jennings appeared to be on friendly enough terms with the man, called him Jozef, and discussed with him, in English, some highly technical subjects that Reynolds couldn’t even begin to understand. A scientific colleague, beyond doubt. For a moment, Reynolds was conscious of astonishment that the Russians should allow two scientists, one a foreigner, to discuss so freely; then he remembered the microphone, and he wasn’t astonished any more. It was the man in the brown suit who was doing most of the talking, and this was at first surprising, for Harold Jennings had the reputation of being talkative to the point of garrulousness, forthright to the point of indiscretion. But Reynolds, peering through the jamb of the door, could see that Jennings was a vastly changed Jennings from the person whose figure and face he had memorised from a hundred photographs. Two years in exile had added more than ten in age to his appearance. He seemed smaller, somehow, curiously shrunken, and in place of a once splendid mane of white hair were now only a few straggling locks across a balding head: his face was unhealthily pale, and only his eyes, dark, sunken pools in a deeply lined and etched face, had lost none of their fire and authority. Reynolds smiled to himself in the darkness. Whatever the Russians had done to the old man, they hadn’t broken his spirit: that would have been altogether too much to expect.

  Reynolds glanced down at the face of his luminous watch, and his smile vanished. Time was running out. He must see Jennings, see him alone, and soon. Half a dozen different ideas occurred to him within the space of a minute, but he dismissed them all as unpractical or too dangerous. He must take no chances. For all the apparent friendliness of the man in the brown suit, he was a Russian and must be treated as an enemy.

  Finally he came up with an idea that carried with it at least a fair chance. It was far from foolproof, it could fail as easily as it could succeed, but the chance had to be taken. He crossed the bathroom on noiseless feet, picked up a piece of soap, made his silent way back to the big cupboard, opened the door with the long mirror inside and started to write on the glass.

  It was no good. The dry soap slid smoothly over the smooth surface and made scarcely a mark. Reynolds swore softly, as he softly recrossed to the washbasin, turned the tap with infinite care till a little trickle of water came out, then wet the soap thoroughly. This time the writing on the glass was all he could have wished for, and he wrote in clear, block letters:

  ‘I AM FROM ENGLAND – GET RID OF YOUR FRIEND AT ONCE.’

  Then, gently, careful to guard against even the smallest metallic sound or creak of hinges, he eased open the bathroom corridor door and peered out. The corridor was deserted. Two long paces took him outside Jennings’ bedroom door, a very soft, quick tap-tap on the wood and he was back inside the bathroom as noiselessly as he had gone, picking his torch up from the floor.

  The man in the brown suit was already on his feet, walking towards the door, when Reynolds stuck his head through the partly open bathroom door, one finger in urgent warning at his lips, another pressing down on the morse button of his torch, the beam striking Jennings’ eyes – a fraction of a s
econd only, but long enough. Jennings glanced up, startled, saw the face at the door, and not even Reynolds’ warning forefinger could stifle the exclamation that leapt to his lips. The man in the brown suit, with the door open now and glancing uncomprehendingly along the length of the corridor, swung round.

  ‘Something is wrong, Professor?’

  Jennings nodded. ‘This damned head of mine – you know how it troubles me … No one there?’

  ‘No one – no one at all. I could have sworn – you do not look well, Professor Jennings.’

  ‘No. Excuse me.’ Jennings smiled wanly and rose to his feet. ‘A little water, I think, and some of my migraine tablets.’

  Reynolds was standing inside the big cupboard, the door just ajar. As soon as he saw Jennings come into the bathroom, he pushed the door wide open. Jennings couldn’t fail to see the mirror with its message: he nodded almost imperceptibly, glanced warningly at Reynolds, and continued towards the washbasin without breaking his stride. For an old man unaccustomed to this sort of thing, it was a remarkable performance.

  Reynolds interpreted the warning glance correctly, and the cupboard door had hardly closed before the professor’s companion was in the room.

  ‘Perhaps I should get the hotel doctor,’ he said worriedly. ‘He would be only too willing.’

  ‘No, no.’ Jennings swallowed a tablet and washed it down with a gulp of water. ‘I know these damned migraines of mine better than any doctor. Three of these tablets, three hours lying down in absolute darkness. I’m really terribly sorry, Jozef, our discussion was just beginning to become really interesting, but if you would excuse me –’