by John Glasby
The last tumbler fell into place inside the locking mechanism of the safe. Carefully, he tugged at the heavy metal door. It opened ponderously on thick, oiled hinges. The muscles of his jaw clenched at what he saw inside. On the top shelf were stacks of notes, roubles, pesos, American dollars and some Bank of England five and ten pound notes. There must have been a small fortune there, he reckoned. What could all this be needed for? To bribe officials, to smooth the way for the building of this site, as well as to pay the workmen and scientists there? Every man, they said, had his price. There was enough here to satisfy all but the most avaricious of men.
He ignored the money, turned his attention instead to the papers stacked neatly on the lower shelf. He riffled quickly through them. The vast majority were in Russian and he scanned them rapidly. Reports from Moscow demanding information of a technical nature on the progress of the work. Secret despatches. Three books of codes which alone would be worth their weight in gold to London or Washington. He thrust them into his jacket. Straightening, he took a quick glance around the office. The faint sound just beyond the door reached him a moment later. He did not move. His senses seemed to sharpen themselves like those of a hunted animal’s. Then he moved quickly, stepped towards the door and switched off the light. In the darkness, every sound seemed to become magnified. Holding his breath, he strained every sense. There was nothing. The faintly humming pulse of the machinery in the distance was still there, still unchanged. Had he been mistaken? Somehow, he did not think so, but certainly that faint sound had not been repeated. He pressed his ear close to the thick metal door. Silence. He stood up, straighter. Something set his spine tingling, heightened the tension in his body.
Gently, he twisted the handle of the door, opened it a crack. A thin strip of light shone through into the room, fell on the upturned features of Vozdashevsky a few feet away, on the tongue which lolled stupidly from the open mouth and the wide, sightless eyes that seemed to stare in the dimness as if the man was still alive, looking at him with an accusing glance With an effort, he thrust the idea out of his mind, opened the door further and glanced out. The tunnel stretched away on either side of him, empty and silent. He let his breath go in a series of slight whispers. Stepping out into the tunnel, he closed the door behind him, held one arm tightly across his jacket where the code books now reposed, pressing in to his chest.
Now to get up to the surface, out into the open, and make for the plane. He did not doubt his ability to fly it once he got behind the controls. Had it been one of these new-fangled jets, there might have been some difficulty, but not with a DC-3. A further quick check of the tunnel behind him, leading down into the depths of the hillside, then he turned and began to walk quickly in the other direction.
The sudden sound behind him was a blend of a fierce hiss and a dull plop. In almost the same instant, there was a shrill whine as a bullet struck the ground near his feet, certainly within an inch of his right shoe, and went ricocheting along the tunnel.
Carradine stopped at once, knew this was a trap, and that he had somehow walked right into it. Slowly, with no expression whatever on his face, he turned his head and looked behind him. Ten yards away, three men stepped out into the tunnel. Donovsky held the pistol almost carelessly in his right hand, a thin wisp of smoke lifting from the barrel, the smooth bulge of the silencer clearly visible where it had been screwed on to the end. The two men at his back were soldiers. They held their rifles rock steady, the round holes of the muzzles pointed straight at the pit of his stomach.
Letting his arms hang loosely by his sides, Carradine flexed the fingers, held himself taut. He wondered if they would shoot him down there and then, or whether they would wait until they had questioned him. The latter seemed more likely. He felt the dryness in his mouth as he tried to swallow. There must have been a second warning alarm in that room which he had overlooked, an alarm which had sent out its warning to these men, had brought them hurrying to the office, waiting for him to step out into the tunnel where they could take him with the least amount of trouble.
He felt a feeling of anger at himself run through him. Donovsky walked right up to him, motioned the two men towards the closed door of the office, barking a sharp command as he did so. They opened the door and stepped inside, switching on the light.
“Somehow, Señor Perez — if that is your name — I had thought you would be sufficiently intelligent to take my earlier warnings seriously.” The narrowed eyes did not flicker. “For this you are going to die, but there will first be some questions to answer. We have ways of getting the truth out of you, should you decide not to co-operate with us.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Tortures of the Damned
A moment later, there was a sudden yell from inside the room. The dead bodies of Vozdashevsky and the guard had been discovered, together with the open safe. Donovsky whirled instinctively. He would have been less than human not to have done and Carradine’s actions were automatic. He knew that he could not hope to finish these three men, that by now the alarm would have been spread throughout the whole length and breadth of the site. It would be out of the question, even if he got away from these three, to reach the waiting plane.
Taking a quick step forward, he swung with his straightened hand. The side of the palm struck Donovsky hard on the wrist, almost breaking the bone. The gun clattered from his nerveless fingers and the momentum of the blow rocked him back on his heels. Donovsky shouted fiercely at the top of his voice. Savagely, Carradine hit him across the adam’s apple, but the other was turning away at the same moment and the blow did not have the paralysing force it would normally have carried. Swiftly, he tried to turn the other, saw the man’s face glistening with sweat, heard the clatter of running feet as the two soldiers burst out of the room.
Then the roof of the tunnel seemed to fall on him from a tremendous height. Something struck him with a sudden stunning force on the nape of the neck. His hand reached down to try to grab at Donovsky’s tunic, then kept on going, his body pitching after it. He was unconscious before he hit the floor, did not feel the impact as he fell at Donovsky’s feet, hands still curled as he sought to grab the other and pull him down with him.
How long he was unconscious, he did not know. The first conscious impression he had was of a whirling, shining haze of light somewhere at the back of his eyes and a hammering pain in his skull which seemed to beat in time to the thudding of his heart. Cautiously, he opened his eyes, then squeezed them tightly shut again as light, stronger and sharper than that which beat in his brain, sent a stab of red agony searing through into his forehead. His stomach heaved, brought a wave of sickness into his chest. There was the taste of vomit in his mouth. He tried to swallow, to force it away, and failed. Slowly, carefully he managed to control his breathing. That was the first step towards clearing his brain. Gradually, he was able to think properly. Gingerly, he opened his eyes the merest fraction of an inch. The harsh, glaring light was still there, shining directly on to his face, but this time, he was able to keep his eyes open and to focus them on the object. It seemed to be suspended over his upturned face, so close to him that he could distinctly feel the heat from the powerful bulb.
Carefully, he tried to move his hands and legs but they refused to obey him. For a second, the thought came to him that he had been partly paralysed by a blow to some part of the body. Then he realised that he had been strapped down by his wrists and ankles so that it was almost impossible to move an inch.
“Now, Señor Perez,” said a voice which he dimly recognised, “we can begin with the questioning. There is much that I wish to know and I feel quite sure that you are going to tell me everything.”
“What makes you think that there is anything to tell?” Carradine spoke through lips strangely swollen. He tried to turn his head, to shield his eyes against the powerful glare of the light, but his head seemed to be held in some way.
“Come now, you must take me for a fool. You carefully plan things so that your d
oor does not lock properly this evening, you then hide yourself in the passage leading to the storeroom and wait for the Lieutenant-General to arrive. After killing both him and the guard you open the safe and steal some extremely important papers. There is only one conclusion I can draw from that. What did you intend to do with those papers if you had succeeded in getting away from here? Who is your contact? Where is he now?”
“I intended to sell them to the highest bidder.” Carradine tried to infuse some measure of conviction into his voice.
“I see.” The other’s tone sounded almost bored. “That is not a very satisfactory answer. All of this was planned, and planned very carefully. For you to get here, you had to pass our agents in Montevideo and they are not easily duped. Yet your papers, your background, were all checked, and found to be impeccable. Again, there is only one explanation. I do not believe you are speaking the truth. I do not believe that you are the man you represent yourself to be and consequently, there must be a very large and well-organised group behind you, who have provided you with a fake background which was sufficiently authentic and far-reaching to fool us.”
“And what have you gathered from that?”
The other ignored the interruption, went on quietly. “With an organisation of that size and ability behind you, I consider you are working either for the American or the British Secret Service”
With an effort. Carradine gave a harsh laugh. “If you care to think that then you are quite at liberty to do so. But if it were true. I would get nothing whatever out of this. I reckoned those papers in that safe were worth at least ten, maybe twenty thousand pesos.”
Donovsky shook his head slowly. He said in a quiet, well-modulated voice: “I’m afraid that you still do not understand. Whatever you have managed to discover about our work here, which I suspect may perhaps embarrass us, will be of no use whatever to you now. There is no way for you to communicate with your contact outside. Very soon, we shall dispose of you and your death will not be very pleasant I assure you.”
“I can imagine that,” said Carradine grimly. He tried to ease his tortured body into a more comfortable position, but with the straps binding his wrists and ankles effectively, it was impossible to do so. He let his muscles relax. There was one thing in his favour. These men did not know his true identity. So long as he was able to keep that information from them, there was a slender chance that something might be salvaged from the ruins of his mission. Although he might not be able to see it through to its completion, when it became obvious that there would be no report from him, someone else might be able to pick up the threads back in Montevideo. There was Merton’s death which the FBI must surely be following up. One of their top agents could not just die like that without someone being detailed to look into it and whatever else might be said about them, when it came to having one of their men killed, they were not fools.
Whether they would find out anything in time was a debatable point. He closed his eyes, tried to think clearly. A sudden sharp pain on the top of his skull forced him to open them wide again. He sucked air in through his parted teeth, heard it whistle down his throat. The tight-fisted grasp had almost pulled his hair out by the roots, bringing tears to his eyes. The harsh light wavered in front of his vision.
“You still have not answered my questions.” The calm, inexorable voice penetrated the wall of pain around him.
“As I said, we have ways of making you talk, and ways of knowing whether you are telling us the truth. It will be very unwise of you to go on lying to me.”
The man behind him twisted his fingers, jerked his head around so that the agony in his neck was almost unbearable. Fire tore along his muscles. He fought for control. Sweat trickled down his cheeks, dripped off his chin. The pull on his head increased. Through his tear-blurred vision, he saw Donovsky’s face peering at him through the shimmering glare. The other smiled, drawing back his lips over his teeth.
“This is all so very distressing,” Donovsky said softly. “I personally do not like to have to use these measures. But you force me to do so. Now, who are you? What is your real name? Who are you working for?”
“My name is Perez. You know that already. Why persist in trying to find something when there is nothing else?” Carradine spoke through tightly-clenched teeth. A questing finger reached down the side of his neck, sought for a particular nerve and then applied a gently increasing pressure. The sweat broke out afresh on his face, ran into his eyes. More pain. More sweat, More questions. How long would this go on before he broke down, told everything, just so that the body-searing agony might stop, even for a moment?
Desperately, he tried to pull himself upright, fought against the bonds which held him down. It was useless even to attempt to move. The pressure on his throat increased momentarily. Fire burned its way along the nerves down one side of his body. A thin, high-pitched scream forced its way through his lips and after that, he knew nothing for a long time.
*****
When he regained consciousness a second time, it was darkness which had taken the place of the glaring, actinic light. He opened his eyes with an effort, held them open, felt the blackness push down against his eyeballs like a huge piece of velvet. Was it really dark here, or was he blind? Panic went through him for a second. Swiftly, he fought it down. He found that he could move his hands and legs now. Somehow, he sat up, then swung his legs to the floor and stood up. The blood rushed pounding sickly to his head and he swayed, would have fallen again had not his outstretched hand struck the wall nearby. With a tremendous effort, he remained on his feet, shaking in his arms and legs. Where was he? What had they done with him after he had lost consciousness?
Blindly, he groped forward, touching various objects without being able to recognise them. Gingerly, he felt his way around the wall of the room until his fingers probed around the edge of the door. There ought to be a light switch somewhere on the wall close by, he told himself. Running the palm of his hands over the smooth wall, he located it a moment later, pressed it down. Light flooded the room and the quick look around hurt his head. He was dazzled by the light, unable to see clearly for a long moment. Then he saw that he was back in his quarters. He went over to the long iron bed and sank down on it with a sigh. Sweat had pooled on his body and his clothing was sticking to his skin, chafing it painfully with every movement he made. He felt as if he had been pummelled and beaten all over, yet there were no bruises on his flesh. That man who had carried out the punishment at Donovsky’s command had known his job. He had, in all probability, been specially imported for this one task. His talents would only be required on certain occasions, but when they were needed, he would apply all of the dread knowledge which the Russians had built up in the years since the Revolution, combining the worst of the Gestapo and the Japanese Kempe Tai in their methods.
He felt a shiver go through him as he sat and stared about him, still dazed by what had happened. Clearly they have placed him here to recover from his ordeal until they were ready for him again. Unconscious or half dead, he was of no use to the torturer. It was essential that he should have all of his wits about him, should be able to feel pain. Was there any way in which he could kill himself before the next period of torture came? A sudden thought came to him and he got to his feet, moved slowly to the bureau. Opening the topmost drawer, he reached for his shaving kit. That at least would provide him with one way out. He found himself staring down at the empty drawer, only vaguely comprehending.
He went back to the bed and stretched his aching body out on it. He did not know how long he was going to be given to recover. But he needed time in which to think. In spite of his intention to think things out, he fell asleep almost at once. The next thing he knew, there was a slight touch of cold wind on his face, and he was awake almost at once. Even before he opened his eyes, he knew that the door of the room had been opened and that one of the guards was standing there. He feigned sleep, but it was no use. The other came forward and prodded him roughly on the shoulder.
Turning over on to his side, he opened his eyes, looked blankly at the other. The man’s face bore no trace of expression. His rifle was slung over his shoulder but he kept well back from the bed, evidently taking no chances with this man who had already killed two men on the site and who might still be dangerous.
The guard pointed towards the bureau with a quick motion of his hand. Screwing up his eyes, Carradine forced himself into a sitting position on the bed. His skull threatened to split open and for a moment dizziness swept through him. He saw the tray which had been left for him, nodded his head with a conscious effort, and watched the man go out. This time, the other checked that the door was securely locked.
Realising that he was both hungry and thirsty, Carradine staggered across the room. As he reached the bureau, a wave of sickness went through him and he had to clutch at the side of the drawers to steady himself. Sweat lay cold on his forehead as the spasm worked its way through him. Conquering the sudden dizziness, he straightened up, swallowed, then glanced down at the food in front of him. There was a bowl of thick soup, two slices of bread and a mug of steaming coffee. He chewed the food slowly and mechanically, swallowing at intervals. His mind was beginning to function again. Evidently Donovsky meant to keep him alive for the time being. Possibly he had some other fate in store for him, rather than starving him.
Seating himself on the edge of one of the chairs, he sipped the scalding coffee. Whatever happened, he must have upset the smooth running of this place by what he had done. He wondered how Donovsky would explain to his superiors, the death of Lieutenant-General Vozdashevsky and the guard, the fact that one of the employees here had been able to get into that office and the carefully locked safe. Donovsky would be a very worried man at that moment, he thought with a touch of grim amusement. His report to Moscow would take a lot of writing and it was extremely doubtful if he would be able to satisfy his superiors in his section of the M.G.B. All of this would combine to force the other to any lengths to get what information he could from Carradine. Perhaps, in that way, he might be able to justify himself in the eyes of the men in Moscow.
