Алистер Маклин - The Last Frontier

‘This is my last mission. No more.’

‘And going to marry the fair Julia?’

‘Good God!’ Reynolds stared at him. ‘Is it – is it as obvious as that?’

‘You were the last to see it. It was obvious to everyone else.’

‘Well, then, yes. Of course.’ He frowned in surprise. ‘I haven’t asked her yet.’

‘No need. I know women.’ The Count waved a lackadaisical hand. ‘She probably has faint hopes of making something of you.’

‘I hope she has.’ Reynolds paused, hesitated, then looked directly at the Count. ‘You put me off beautifully, there, didn’t you?’

‘Yes, I did. It was unfair – I was personal, and you had the grace not to rebuff me. Sometimes I think pride is a damnable thing.’ The Count poured a half-tumbler full of brandy, drank from it, chain-lit another Russian cigarette, then went on abruptly, ‘Jansci was looking for his wife, I for my little boy. Little boy! He would be twenty next month – maybe he is twenty. I don’t know, I don’t know. I hope he lived.’

‘He was not your only child?’

‘I had five children, and the children had a mother and grandfather and uncles, but I do not worry about them, they are all safe.’

Reynolds said nothing, there was no need to say anything. He knew from what Jansci had said that the Count had lost everything and everybody in the world – except his little boy.

‘They took me away when he was only three years old,’ the Count went on softly. ‘I can still see him standing there in the snow, wondering, not understanding. I have thought of him since, every night, every day of my life. Did he survive? Who looked after him? Had he clothes to keep the cold out, has he still clothes to keep the cold out? Does he get enough to eat, or is he thin and wasted? Perhaps no one wanted him, but surely to God – he was such a little boy, Mr Reynolds. I wonder what he looks like, I always wondered what he looked like. I wondered how he smiled and laughed and played and ran, I wanted all the time to be by his side, to see him every day of my life, to see all the wonderful things you see when your child is growing up, but I have missed it all, all the wonderful years are gone, and it is too late now. Yesterday, all our yesterdays, can never come again. He was all that I have lived for, but to every man there comes a moment of truth, and mine came this morning. I shall never see him again. May God look after my little boy.’

‘I’m sorry I asked,’ murmured Reynolds. I’m terribly sorry.’ He paused then he said: ‘That’s not true, I don’t know why I said that. I’m glad I asked.’

‘It’s strange, but I’m glad I told you.’ The Count drained his glass, refilled it, glanced at his watch and when he spoke again he was the old Count, his voice brisk and assertive and ironic. ‘ Barack brings self-pity, but it also dispels it. Time we were moving, my friend. The hour is almost up. We cannot stay here – only a madman would trust Hidas.’

‘So Jennings must go?’

‘Jennings must go. If they don’t get him, then Catherine and Julia …’

‘Finish. Is that it?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Hidas must want him badly.’

‘He wants him desperately. The Communists are mortally afraid that if he escapes to the west and talks – and that would be a blow from which they would not recover for a long time – the damage would be irreparable. That is why I phoned and offered myself. I knew how badly they wanted me, I wanted to find out how badly they wanted Jennings. As I said, they want him desperately.’

‘Why?’ Reynolds’ voice was strained.

‘He will never work for them again,’ the Count answered obliquely. ‘They know that.’

‘What you mean is–’

‘What I mean is that they only want his everlasting silence,’ the Count said harshly. ‘There is only one way you can ensure that.’

‘God above!’ Reynolds cried. ‘We can’t let him go, we can’t let him walk to his death and not do–’

‘You forget about Julia,’ the Count said softly.

Reynolds buried his face in his hands, too confused, too dazed to think any more. Half a minute passed, perhaps a minute, then he jerked upright as the harsh, strident ring of the telephone bell cut through the silence of the room. The Count had the receiver off its rest within two seconds.

‘Howarth here. Colonel Hidas?’

Again the listeners – Jansci and Sandor had just hurried in through the doorway, heads and shoulders matted with snow – could hear the metallic murmur of the voices in the earpiece, but were unable to distinguish anything. All they could do was watch the Count as he leaned negligently against the wall, his eyes moving idly, unseeingly around the room. Suddenly he straightened off the wall, the contracting muscles of his eyebrows etching a deep, vertical line on his forehead.

‘Impossible! I said an hour, Colonel Hidas. We cannot wait any longer. Do you think we are madmen to sit here till you can take us at your leisure?’

He paused as the voice at the other end interrupted him, listened for a few moments to the urgent, staccato chatter, stiffened as he heard the click of a receiver being replaced, looked for a moment at the lifeless phone, then slowly returned it to his hook. His right thumb, as he turned to face the others, was rubbing slowly, gratingly against the side of his forefinger and his lower lip was caught between his teeth.

‘Something’s wrong.’ The voice reflected the anxiety in his face. ‘Something’s very wrong. Hidas says the minister responsible is at his country retreat, the telephone lines are down, they’ve had to send a car to fetch him and it might be another half-hour, or possibly – you damned idiot!’

‘What do you mean?’ Jansci demanded. ‘Who–’

‘Me.’ The uncertainty had vanished from the Count’s face, and the low controlled voice was alive with a desperate urgency that Reynolds had never heard before. ‘Sandor, start the truck – now. Grenades, ammonium nitrate to take care of that little bridge at the foot of the road and the field telephone. Hurry, all of you. For God’s sake, hurry!’

No one stopped to question the Count. Ten seconds later they were all outside in the heavily falling snow, piling equipment into the truck, and within a minute the truck was jolting down the bumpy path towards the road. Jansci turned to the Count, one eyebrow raised in mute interrogation.

‘That last call came from a call-box,’ the Count said quietly. ‘Criminal negligence on my part not to catch on to it right away. Why is Colonel Hidas of the AVO telephoning from a call-box? Because he’s no longer in his Budapest office. It’s a hundred to one that the previous call wasn’t from Budapest either, but from our divisional H.Q. in Györ. Hidas has been on his way here all the time, desperately trying to delay us, to keep us here with these bogus phone calls. The minister, government permission, broken phone lines – lies, all lies. My God, to think that we fell for that sort of thing! Budapest – Hidas left Budapest hours ago! I’ll wager he’s no more than five miles from here at this very moment. Another fifteen minutes and he would have nailed us all, six good little flies waiting patiently in the spider’s parlour.’

They waited at the foot of the telephone pole by the side of the wood, peering through the momentarily thinning snow and shivering almost continuously. Too little sleep, too much exhaustion and the treacherous, quickly-evaporating warmth of the brandy were no fit preparation for even so brief a vigil in the bitter cold.

And it had been a brief vigil, so far. A scant fifteen minutes had elapsed since they had left the house, driven down the dirt-track across the little hump-backed bridge then turned west along the main road till they had come to this wood, perhaps two hundred yards from the turn-off, with its hiding-place for the truck. The Count and Sandor had been dropped at the bridge, to place the charges of ammonium nitrate, while Reynolds and the professor had run into the wood, improvised rough and ready switches from dead branches, hurried back to the bridge and helped the Count and Sandor to conceal their tyre tracks and the wiring which led from the nitrate to the wood where Sandor was now in hiding with the plunger in his hand. By the time the others had returned to the truck Jansci and the Cossack, the latter agile as a monkey on any pole or tree, had already connected up their field set to the overhead telephone wires leading to the house.