Лесли Чартерис - The Saint in Trouble

If punctuality was any virtue of guerillas, the Waterloo Bridge contact should already have been made.

He took the stairs two at a time and was on the halfway landing when the noise of a door slamming somewhere immediately above made him freeze in mid-stride. The beam of a torch stabbed a circle of light on the wall above his head and grew wider as the man approached. Bending almost double, Simon leapt up the remaining steps. The man was no more than a dozen feet from the top of the stairs. Crouched by the wall, the Saint held his breath as he waited for him to draw level.

A rat scuffled somewhere in the darkness below, and the man stopped and turned his head. The Saint needed no better invitation.

He stepped out directly into the man’s path.

“Good evening,” he said courteously.

The man’s mouth opened, but whether to emit an equally well-mannered reply or shout the Saint did not wait to find out. His fist swung upwards with a force that lifted the recipient off his feet, and the Saint caught him as he fell and lowered him gently to the ground, prising the torch from his grasp in the process.

“And then there were two,” he observed to his strictly personal audience.

A ribbon of light beneath a door at the far end of the passage indicated his destination. Now he did not bother to muffle the sound of his approach, confident that the men inside would assume that it was their colleague returning. He turned the handle and entered as casually as if he were in his own home.

Leila sat in a chair in the centre of the room, her arms and legs tightly bound. Khaldun was at the window looking down into the courtyard, while another man whom the Saint had not seen before sat on an upturned packing case cleaning a rifle.

Khaldun turned as the door opened, and at the sight of the Saint recoiled as if he had been hit. The rifleman dropped his cloth and stared in amazement. Only Leila managed to contain her surprise.

“I thought you were never going to get here,” she said calmly.

The Saint smiled.

“You didn’t leave a forwarding address,” he complained. “Excuse me...”

His automatic barked, and the rifle flew from its cleaner’s grip and clattered to the floor with the Saint’s bullet embedded in its stock.

“That was your first and only warning,” he said quietly. “Both of you face down on the floor, now. Move!”

The men did as they were told, and he knelt between them to relieve Khaldun of a revolver and his companion of a small, snub-nosed automatic. He put both guns in his pockets as he stood up. Without taking his eyes off the two men, he untied Leila’s wrists and gave her the automatic to control the situation while he freed her legs.

“Have either of these specimens done anything to you?” he asked gently.

Leila shook her head as she vigorously rubbed the circulation back into her arms and flexed her legs.

“No. I think they were keeping that for later.”

“What was the plan?”

“When Hakim arrived, I was to walk across the courtyard towards him so that it would look as if they were keeping their bargain. As soon as we met in the middle they were going to start shooting — Khaldun and this one up here with rifles, another of them downstairs, plus the two in the car.”

“Quite an ambush,” Simon observed reflectively. “It seems almost a pity to spoil it.”

While she kept the two Arabs covered, he picked up the lengths of rope that had bound her, and expertly tied the new captives together, passing the cords from their ankles and wrists behind their backs to finish around their necks. He regarded his handiwork with grim satisfaction.

“You can have great fun trying to unravel yourselves,” he told them, “though I wouldn’t try too hard if I were you. One pull in the wrong direction, and you’ll find that breathing is only a memory.”

The two men lay perfectly still, and the Saint’s smile widened as he bowed and touched his forehead and lips in the traditional salute.

“Maha-ssaldama,” he murmured with genial derision, and turned back to Leila. “Come on, darling — let’s keep that date.”

He led the way down the stairs to the front door and pulled it open, and they stood together just inside the opening.

“Simon,” she said huskily, “I don’t know how you got here, but it was so wonderful—”

The roar of two approaching cars cut off her words. The station wagon swung into the courtyard, but the Hirondel stopped just outside the entrance. Yakovitz and Hakim climbed out and stood beside it; Garvi himself got out of the driving seat. The Red Sabbath car pulled up a few yards from the factory door.

The Saint pressed his lips to Leila’s ear.

“Do just as they told you,” he whispered. “And good luck.”

Leila took his hand off her shoulder, giving it a tight squeeze, and began to walk towards the centre of the courtyard as Hakim approached awkwardly from the other side. The converging headlights of the Hirondel and the wagon lit up the scene like a macabre stage set.

There was only a yard between Leila and Hakim when the Saint yelled: “Now!”

Leila brought up her automatic and pushed it into Hakim’s chest. The terrorist wavered in blank bewilderment, but whatever she said combined with the menace of the gun to make him turn and run back towards the courtyard entrance with her at his heels.

In the same instant that he shouted the Saint had also moved. He burst out of the doorway with a gun in each hand, firing at the station wagon. Having heard the terrorists’ plan, he was more concerned with creating a diversion that would get Leila Zabin to safety than with making target scores. He saw the wagon’s windscreen shatter, but it was Impossible to tell if either of the men inside was hit. But even if unscathed, they could only have been in a state of shock after finding themselves the targets instead of part of the supporting fire.

Simon only paused in his run across the courtyard to place a bullet accurately in each of the station wagon’s front tires.

He saw Yakovitz bundling Hakim into the back of the Hirondel, as Garvi opened the front passenger door for Leila. The Saint grabbed Garvi by the arm.

“You in the back, too!” he snapped. “I’ll drive.”

He threw himself in behind the wheel and hit the accelerator in one continuous movement, to take the car hurtling away.

The Hirondel — if any fault in such a classic vehicle can be acknowledged — was never designed to be a family car, adaptable to the transport of friends, relatives, and/or assorted offspring. The nominal rear seat might, at a pinch, have accommodated a couple of not too well-nourished children; but with the combination of Yakovitz, Hakim, and Garvi the pinch became a highly painful compression. But their ordeal lasted less than a minute, while the Saint whisked them around to where he had left Garvi’s Mercedes. There was no pursuit from the factory.

“You’d better take your own car back,” he said as he braked behind it, “even if it won’t be so cosy.”

While Yakovitz, as poker-faced as ever, hustled Hakim into the back of the Mercedes, Garvi found a moment to smile.

“Well done, Simon. You too, Captain. You both gave me some very worrying moments back there. What happened?”

The Saint condensed the account of his actions up to the moment when Leila had started her walk across the courtyard into three rapid sentences.

“I’ll keep Leila for company,” he concluded. “But I’ll stay on your tail back to Epping — just in case of anything.”

Following the rear lights of Garvi’s car, Simon drove mechanically without consciously noticing the route as his mind raced ahead to consider questions that still had to be answered. Leila sat silently beside him with her eyes closed, and he wondered just how much the events of the day had cost her in terms of stamina.