The Last Frontier

by Alistair MacLean

  ‘Then every word, everything I said to the professor –’ Reynolds broke off and leaned back against the side of the truck, overcome for the moment by the enormity of the implications, the surely fatal blunder he had made. No wonder Hidas had known who he was, and why he was there. Hidas knew everything now. As far as any hope that now remained of rescuing the professor was concerned, he might as well have remained in London. He had suspected as much, had almost known as much from what Hidas had said to him in Jansci’s garage, but the confirmation that Hidas knew, why he knew and how he came to have proof, seemed to set the final seal of inevitability and defeat on everything.

  ‘It is a bitter blow,’ Jansci said gently.

  ‘You did all you could,’ Julia murmured. She brought his head forward to be sponged again, and he made no resistance. ‘You are not to blame yourself.’

  A minute passed in silence, while the truck bumped and bounced along the snow-rutted road. The pain in Reynolds’ side and head was lessening now, dulling down to a nagging, throbbing ache, and he was beginning to think clearly for the first time since Coco had hit him.

  ‘The security guard will have been clamped on Jennings – he may already be on his way back to Russia,’ he said to Jansci. ‘I spoke to Jennings of Brian, so the word will have already gone to Stettin to try to stop him. The game is lost.’ He stopped, probed two loose teeth in his lower jaw with an exploring tongue. ‘The game is lost, but otherwise I don’t think any great harm has been done. I didn’t mention the name – or the activities – of any person in your house, although I did give the professor the address. Not that that makes them any the wiser – they knew anyway. But so far as you people, personally, are concerned, the AVO don’t know you exist. A couple of points trouble me.’

  ‘Yes?’

  ‘Yes. First, why, if they were listening in the hotel, didn’t they nail me there and then.’

  ‘Simple. Almost every microphone in the place is wired to tape recorders.’ The Count grinned. ‘I’d have given a fortune to see their faces when they ran off that reel.’

  ‘Why didn’t you phone to stop me? You must have known from what Julia said that the AVO would come round to your place right away.’

  ‘They did – almost. We got out only ten minutes before them. And we did phone you – but there was no reply.’

  ‘I had left my room early.’ Reynolds remembered the ringing of the telephone bell as he had reached the bottom of the fire-escape. ‘You could still have stopped me on the street.’

  ‘We could.’ It was Jansci speaking. ‘You’d better tell him, Count.’

  ‘Very well.’ For a moment the Count looked almost uncomfortable – so unexpected an expression to find on his face that Reynolds for a moment doubted he had read it correctly. But he had.

  ‘You met my friend Colonel Hidas tonight,’ the Count began obliquely. ‘Second-in-command of the AVO, a dangerous and clever man – no more dangerous and clever man in all Budapest. A dedicated man, Mr Reynolds, who has achieved more – and more remarkable – success than any police officer in Hungary. I said he was clever – he’s more, he’s brilliant, an ingenious, resourceful man, entirely without emotion, who never gives up. A man, obviously, for whom I have the highest respect – you will observe that I was at considerable pains not to let him see me tonight, even although I was disguised. And that Jansci was at even more pains to direct his line of thinking towards the Austrian border, where, I assure you, we have no intention of going.’

  ‘Get to the point,’ Reynolds said impatiently.

  ‘I have arrived. For several years past our activities have been far the greatest thorn in his flesh, and lately, I have had just the tiniest suspicion that Hidas was taking just a little too much interest in me.’ He waved a deprecatory hand. ‘Of course, we officers at the AVO expect to be ourselves checked and shadowed from time to time, but perhaps I have become just a trifle hypersensitive about these things. I thought perhaps that my trips to police blocks had not been so unobserved as I would have wished, and that Hidas had deliberately planted you on me, to break us up.’ He smiled slightly, ignoring the astonishment on the faces of both Reynolds and Julia. ‘We survive by never taking a chance, Mr Reynolds – it was really too opportune, a western spy so ready to hand. We thought, as I say, you were a plant. The fact that you knew – or said Colonel Mackintosh knew – that Jennings was in Budapest while we didn’t was another point against you: all the questions you asked Julia tonight about us and our organization might have been friendly interest – but it might equally well have been from a more sinister reason and the policemen might have left you alone because they knew who you were, not because of your – ah – activities in the watchman’s box.’

  ‘You never told any of this to me!’ Julia’s face was flushed, the blue eyes cold and angry.

  ‘We seek,’ said the Count gallantly, ‘to shelter you from the harsher realities of this life … Then, Mr Reynolds, when there was no reply to our telephone call, we suspected you might be elsewhere – the Andrassy Ut, for example. We weren’t sure, not by a long way, but suspicious enough to take no chances. So we let you walk into the spider’s web – I regret to say that we actually saw you walking. We weren’t a hundred yards away, lying low in the car – not mine, I’m glad to say – which Imre later crashed into the truck.’ He looked regretfully at Reynolds’ face. ‘We did not expect you to get the full treatment right away.’

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  SEVEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  ‘Who’s the circus artist?’

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

  ‘The Cossack?’

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

  ‘What’s the comic opera get-up for?’

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