The Insulators

by John Creasey

  She stopped, abruptly, drawing in her breath so sharply that it hissed between her lips. Then, silence fell, utter and complete. The picture faded from the mirror and the lights went low. Gradually, her own breathing and that of the men sounded, but seemed to add to the silence, not to break it.

  At last, the man said: “Go on, Janey.”

  She closed her eyes, and said huskily: “Is The Project a cal—” She checked herself and went on: “Does Palfrey think The Project a calamity?”

  “I have no doubt that he does,” the man answered. “And it would be, for him and for his outworn concepts of human society. What Palfrey and his friends, what the governments of the world don’t understand, is that today’s world is outworn.”

  Across his words came another voice, one she hadn’t heard before; a deep and resonant voice which seemed to come from about the man’s head although no one was there.

  “Stop there, Ramon.”

  The man with the lean features and the thin lips broke off and said quickly: “At once, sir.”

  “Show Miss Wylie the other photographs.”

  “At once,” the man repeated; and he sounded as much in awe of the unseen speaker as Janey was.

  There were moments of silence before another, remarkably handsome, face appeared, but one with which she was not familiar. Quietly, a name was uttered, broken into syllables: “An-drom-o-vitch.” But it meant nothing to her. “Stefan An-drom-o-vitch,” the speaker intoned, and the name appeared on the mirror beneath the face. She was vaguely aware of having heard it before, and the fact that it was Russian suddenly reminded her.

  “Isn’t he a very big man? Palfrey’s friend or—or—deputy,” she burst out. “That’s it! His deputy.”

  “You are quite right,” Ramon said. “Did Carr ever mention him?”

  “No.”

  “Or Palfrey?”

  “I’ve told you – no.”

  “Or this woman?” asked Ramon, as the picture changed.

  The woman whose head and shoulders appeared on the mirror looked to be in her mid-thirties, but she might be forty. She was attractive, in a particularly English way: soft looking and wholesome. She had dark hair, groomed rather formally, as if she had come from the same hairdresser as Barbara Castle, a Cabinet minister in Britain for so long. She had blue eyes and full, well-shaped lips, rather a short nose with a short upper lip. She wore a dress with a shallow V at the neck and although the photograph was cut above the breast line there was a hint of a full figure.

  “Joyce Morgan,” the announcer stated, and the name appeared beneath the picture.

  “No,” said Janey, with hardly a pause.

  “Are you quite sure?” demanded Ramon.

  “Yes, absolutely.”

  “Very well.”

  Other pictures appeared, other names were uttered and shown, but she recognised none. As she watched, she became aware of two things. First, that she liked all the faces, particularly Palfrey’s, the Russian’s whose name she could not recall properly, and the woman’s, Joyce Morgan. Second, there were many non-English faces, one or two she placed from features as well as from names as French, Italian, German and Spanish; but there were many who might be from any country in the world.

  At long, long last, the pictures were finished and a brighter light came on but not with the fierce brightness of the floodlights. Everything in the room seemed normal, she was now so used to the mirrors and the men.

  The man who had been called Ramon, said: “If you recall any of these names, you must tell Mr Ashley at once.”

  “I will,” Janey promised. And immediately felt shame that she should be so eager to.

  “And if you recall anything that Carr said you must report at once.”

  “I will,” she assured him, mechanically.

  “All right,” he said. “You may go back to your apartment.”

  The man behind her came and helped her to her feet, then led her to one of the mirrors, which proved to be a door. She was very unsteady and could not have walked without his aid, and he did not seem surprised, for at the end of a long, narrow passage there was a hallway, and on one side, two wheelchairs with canvas backs and seats, invalid chairs. He helped her into one, and pushed her. She was so mortified that tears stung her eyes, and soon she was crying.

  Suddenly, they stopped in front of an open lift, and he pushed her into it, followed, and pressed a button for the door to close, and the lift went slowly upwards. She had nothing with which to dry her eyes, until, still standing behind her, the man gave her a paper handkerchief. As she dried both cheeks and eyes, the lift stopped and the door opened. Only then did she realise that she was in the passage which led to her own apartment. He pushed her towards the rooms and opened the door; once inside, he came to the front of the chair and helped her out.

  He was still masked, as when he had held the lash.

  He bowed from the waist, as if he were a servitor, not an executioner.

  He drew away and went out with the chair, and as the door closed behind him she realised he had not uttered a word, had been as silent as a dumb man would be.

  Almost choking, she moved slowly, effortfully, to her bedroom. The bed had been made and turned down, everything was exactly as she would expect to find it after coming back from the laboratory. She was so physically exhausted that she almost collapsed into bed, had hardly the strength to draw the clothes over her. Yet her mind was alert enough for her to realise how right Philip had been. This was a prison – was a form of concentration camp.

  Would she ever see him again?

  Would she ever get out of here?

  Had he escaped?

  Her last waking thought was almost of exhilaration with a sudden flash of realisation. Philip must surely have got safely away or they would not have been so desperately anxious for her to talk.

  At last, she fell asleep; and slept, as she had grown accustomed to sleeping with the thunderous roaring in her ears and the whole room, the whole building, roaring and vibrating.

  She did not dream.

  When she woke, it was dark and silent.

  She had a sense of movement but not of vibration, but was too drowsy to worry about that.

  When she woke again, it was pitch dark, but this time she could not doze, so she got out of bed and banged against the wall, hurting her toe. Who on earth had moved her bed? She groped for the light switch on the bedside table, but could not find it. As she groped about the room, her heart began to thump with unnameable fears. Even before she found a light switch, set in the wall, she felt sure she was not in the same room.

  And she was not, for a single bulb shed a yellow light about a room with pale green walls and metal furniture – more like a cell or a hospital ward than the pleasant apartment she had lived in for so long.

  BOOK II

  The Fear

  7: Move and Counter-Move

  Philip Carr walked slowly along the platform at Euston Station.

  He heard people behind him and his body was tense, lest one of these should attack him. There was something ominous about the sharp clap-clap-clap-clap of metal tips, the faintly squelching sound of rubber, even the firm impact of leather. Men hurried; women hurried. There was the metallic rattle of the tall hand baggage carts onto which so many people piled their suitcases, and pushed. Two couples, arm in arm, passed him; and one woman in her twenties was clutching her companion as if afraid that he would run away.

  As he, Philip Carr, had run away from Janey.

  He gritted his teeth at the memory of her; and of leaving her. There had been no other way, but how it hurt; and how it must hurt her. But without the love affair, he would never have lulled the leaders of The Project into a sense of security. She would never know what value she had been to him: and to so many others.

  He wondered: is she safe?

  He was as aware of her and his betrayal as he was of these never-ending footsteps, as if with never-ending threat. A woman came running. A porter caught up with
him, pushing a heavily laden truck, with tartan suitcases and a heavy leather trunk, as well as some attractive-looking pale green luggage. He was a young-looking negro wearing the British Rail uniform and Teutonic-type cap. As he passed he looked straight ahead but spoke out of the side of his mouth. “You’re okay, sir. The doctor’s having you watched.”

  Carr’s heart leapt, and the porter went on at the same steady but fast gait. The end of the platform drew near and the ramp where passengers had to go for the main hall and the taxis. A girl in the pale grey uniform of Mid-Eastern Airways came up to him; dark-haired, Jewish, with beautiful, olive-coloured skin.

  “Excuse me, sir.” She made him pause and also made him very wary. “Take an ordinary taxi to Number 1, Romain Square, Pimlico. The doctor will be there.”

  “Which doctor?” he asked.

  “Palfrey,” she said.

  “That’s fine,” he responded, warmly, but he felt more wary still. There was still so much danger; but then, working with Palfrey was all danger. But it paid off! He now knew what Palfrey and others had suspected for some time, that The Project was much more than it had been – or appeared to be – when it had started. Then the consortium of industrialists seeking a way of creating nuclear power had seemed innocent enough. So had their insistence on absolute secrecy, their right to hire their own staff in terms of strictest confidence. The first anxiety had been when some had not returned after their first year’s contract was over, although many – never from the research departments – had come home. Then, there was evidence found by Palfrey and his men, that letters were opened and resealed, an obvious form of censorship.

  Enough of this thinking back!

  Philip reached the huge, white-floored, white-ceilinged hall, with its bare austerity and the shops on either side, saw the sign: TELEPHONES and went towards it. He reached an empty booth, sat down and glanced round; the Jewish girl was not in sight and no one appeared to be watching. He dialled a number which he knew off by heart and a woman’s voice responded at once: “Z5.”

  “Carr,” he said. “Philip Carr. Number 107.”

  “Just one moment,” the girl said. “Dr Palfrey’s expecting a call from you.” The moment proved a long one – too long? Several people drew close to the telephones as if anxious to make a call, and from time to time each one of them looked at him; and each one, like the porter and the airline hostess, could be from The Project. Then he heard Palfrey’s voice, clear and distinct yet gentle; a voice which could not possibly be mistaken.

  “Hallo, Philip,” he said. “It’s good to know you’re in London. You’ve nothing to worry about at the moment. The Jamaican porter and the Jewish air hostess are our people. Do you see a man close to the telephone booth, holding a brown briefcase with Qantas and a T.W.A. label tied to the handle?”

  There was such a man, in his early thirties, athletic-looking and of medium height.

  “Yes,” Philip answered, forcing his voice down low.

  “He will follow you to Number 1, Romain Square, and I will be there to see you as soon as I possibly can. Very good to have you back,” repeated Palfrey, and rang off.

  Very slowly, and almost dizzy with relief, Philip put up the receiver and stepped out of the booth. A young girl with silky fair hair curling down to her shoulders and a black maxi coat reaching her ankles, pushed past him to get in. The man with the briefcase made a beeline for another booth which became empty, and Philip wondered how he could follow; but on such things he had never known Palfrey wrong. He walked down the stairs to the concrete caverns where taxis arrived, it seemed, from all directions. A dozen people waited, the young Jamaican porter was there with his truckload of baggage.

  Philip’s taxi driver was also a Jamaican.

  “Where to, sir?” he asked, making the ‘sir’ sound very like ‘sah’.

  “Number 1, Romain Square, Pimlico,” answered Philip; it must be like asking the man to find a needle in a haystack, and he wasn’t surprised when the man asked: “Do you know where Romain Square is, sir?”

  “I’m afraid I don’t.”

  “Never mind, then; we’ll find it.” The taxi started off, and Philip sat back and watched the streaming traffic and the crowded pavements, the huge red buses and the heavy lorries. There was a heavy smell inside the cab, in fact everywhere, smell caused by smog of a million exhaust pipes which spewed their poison, and tens of thousands of factory chimneys.

  And there was noise.

  It struck at him when he pulled a window down, hoping vainly for fresh air, ear-shattering noise from a lorry and a bus and a heavy motorcycle – noise which made the streets shudder and vibrate, a constant roar almost as bad as the roar at The Project. Even when he pushed the window up, it wasn’t much better. But he saw a car draw alongside in a traffic block at some control lights, and also recognised the driver as the man who had held the briefcase which Palfrey had described.

  So from the moment he had stepped off the train, Palfrey’s men and women had been watching him, probably while he had been on the train, too. He had caught it at Wolverhampton after catching a bus from a village called Sibley, which was about six miles from the ‘prison’ from which he had escaped. Before going into The Project he had learned the times of buses, and exactly where to go. He had telephoned Palfrey from an Automobile Association box, outside the village, spent the night in a small hotel near the station at Wolverhampton and caught the train which had arrived a few minutes late at Euston – at 1.52 p.m. It was amazing how quickly things had happened once he had escaped.

  This same time must have seemed an age to Janey.

  Especially if they had used torture to make her talk.

  He tried to shut the vision of such torture out of his mind, and settled back in a corner. There were the good things, such as the evidence of Z5’s concentration on him and on the problem. Palfrey’s name was legendary, and everything Carr knew about the man was supporting evidence for that legend.

  They reached Oxford Street, then Park Lane, bowled fast alongside the Park, the noise different now because of greater speed but still very loud. Hyde Park Corner was a mass of slow-moving traffic, and he looked across at the steel spike protection on top of the walls of Buckingham Palace, then out of the other window at the Quadriga statue, which, as with so many people, inevitably recalled that of Boadicea who had led the early Britons in the savage attacks against the occupying Romans. He thought of the cold, stone replicas of the knives fastened to the hubs of her chariot wheels as she had destroyed and plundered Londinium to avenge her Roman-ravaged daughters and restore the pride of her kingdom and the lands of kings, enemies before the Romans came, brief but passionate allies against the Roman legions.

  Ever since there had been wars; as many waged today. And there was the war being waged between Palfrey’s Z5 and the unknowns of The Project who poised a new threat at the heart of the world and its hard-won, blood-coated partial freedom.

  What if men and women had to be sacrificed in these wars?

  What if Janey had to be tortured, lacerated, mutilated, killed? What else could he have done but offer her as a sacrifice after such constant planning?

  They were in the King’s Road, with its boutiques and its flower-happy people and shops filled with gay clothes and boots and exotic spices and perfumes in the shadow of the wall of the Royal Chelsea Hospital, where the pensioners still lived out their lives, and on fine days came out and watched and must have marvelled at the long bare-looking legs and the inviting thighs and the sheep-and-goat-skinned youths, the hippies, with hair as long as the hair of any of those old-time warriors.

  “I seem to remember Romain Square now, sir.” The driver turned his head as they paused at traffic lights.

  “Good,” Philip said – and sat back, and froze.

  The man in a little blue car was just behind the taxi, and another man, whom he had seen among the guards at The Project, was in a car alongside him. In this car were two others, and one of them, next to the driver, had a r
adio-telephone microphone in his left hand, and was talking.

  If they wanted to kill him, they could easily do so.

  How had they been allowed to get so close? Why weren’t Palfrey’s men on the alert? Why—

  He choked off his thoughts.

  The taxi turned left, towards the river, to drive along the small and narrow streets, the houses where modern terraces stood close to tall Victorian dwellings and here and there a small but graceful Georgian house as well as tiny cottages which had stood in the same tiny gardens for at least three hundred years.

  The car with the three men from The Project was close behind but there was no sign of the little blue car or of the man with the Qantas and T.W.A. labelled briefcase. Philip found his hands clenching and his teeth gritting.

  Suddenly, men appeared from the nearby houses – not one or two, but dozens. One car pulled in front of the blue one, and on the instant the car behind him was surrounded. Before the occupants had time to lock the doors they were wrenched open, the men inside yanked out. Philip twisted round in his seat to see out of the back window, one of The Project men put his hand to his mouth, one of the invaders dragged his hand away. Philip saw the distortion of his face as whatever he had swallowed made him writhe and scream.

  The taxi driver appeared to notice nothing, but turned two corners. A man wearing a peaked cap and a raincoat within an upturned collar, stepped out of a little blue-painted house which seemed to match the sky, and the driver asked in his soft voice: “Can you tell me where Romain Square is, sir?”

  “Why, yes,” said the man. “First left, then first left again.” And he smiled.

  Philip recognised him; it was Palfrey.

  Number 1, Romain Square, was a Georgian house, the walls painted white with black woodwork, black doors and burnished brass knocker, letterbox and bell push. There were some smaller, pleasant houses on two sides of the square, as well as a Victorian period public house with weathered red brick and bright blue paint and a magnificent inn sign of a seventeenth century sailor in vivid colours, and the name of the inn in letters in red: The River Smugglers. The cab pulled close to the driveway of the house, Philip got out and asked: “How much?”