Алистер Маклин - The Last Frontier

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, together 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.