The Last Frontier. Alistair MacLean

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      Colonel Szendrô looked at the vivid magenta of the tie lying on the table, winced, nodded and looked away without speaking. Reynolds felt the first faint stirrings of anger.

      ‘Why ask if you already know?’ The edged voice betrayed the irritation in his mind.

      ‘No offence.’ Jansci answered for Szendrô. ‘Endless suspicion, Mr Reynolds, is our sole guarantee of survival. We suspect everyone. Everyone who lives, everyone who moves – we suspect them every minute of every hour. But, as you see, we survive. We had been asked to contact you in that café – Imre has practically lived there for the past three days – but the request had come from an anonymous source in Vienna. There was no mention of Colonel Mackintosh – he is an old fox, that one … And when you had been met in the café?’

      ‘I was told that I would be led to you – or to one of two others: Hridas and the White Mouse.’

      ‘This has been a happy short-cut,’ Jansci murmured. ‘But I am afraid you would have found neither Hridas nor the White Mouse.’

      ‘They are no longer in Budapest?’

      ‘The White Mouse is in Siberia. We shall never see him again. Hridas died three weeks ago, not two kilometres from here, in the torture chambers of the AVO. They were careless for a moment, and he snatched a gun. He put it in his mouth. He was glad to die.’

      ‘How – but how do you know these things?’

      ‘Colonel Szendrô – the man you know as Colonel Szendrô – was there. He saw him die. It was Szendrô’s gun he took.’

      Reynolds carefully crushed his cigarette stub in an ashtray. He looked up at Jansci, across to Szendrô and back at Jansci again: his face was empty of all expression.

      ‘Szendrô has been a member of the AVO for eighteen months,’ Jansci said quietly. ‘One of their most efficient and respected officers, and when things mysteriously go wrong and wanted men escape at the last moment, there is no one more terrible in his anger than Szendrô, no one who drives his men so cruelly till they literally collapse with exhaustion. The speeches he makes to newly indoctrinated recruits and cadets to the AVO have already been compiled in book form. He is known as The Scourge. His chief, Furmint, is at a loss to understand Szendrô’s pathological hatred for his own countrymen, but declares he is the only indispensable member of the Political Police in Budapest … A hundred, two hundred Hungarians alive to-day, still here or in the west, owe their lives to Colonel Szendrô.’

      Reynolds stared at Szendrô, examining every line of that face as if he were seeing it for the first time, wondering what manner of man might pass his life in such incredibly difficult and dangerous circumstances, never knowing whether he was being watched or suspected or betrayed, never knowing whether or not the next shoulder for the tap of the executioner might be his own, and all at once, without at all knowing why, Reynolds knew that this was indeed such a man as Jansci claimed. All other considerations apart, he had to be or he, Reynolds, might even then have been screaming on the torture racks, deep down below the basement of Stalin Street …

      ‘It must indeed be as you say, General Illyurin,’ Reynolds murmured. ‘He runs incredible risks.’

      ‘Jansci, if you please. Always Jansci. Major-General Illyurin is dead.’

      ‘I’m sorry … And to-night, how about tonight?’

      ‘Your – ah – arrest by our friend here?’

      ‘Yes.’

      ‘It is simple. He has access to all but a few secret master files. Also he is privy to all proposed plans and operations in Budapest and Western Hungary. He knew of the road-block, the closing of the frontier … And he knew you were on the way.’

      ‘But surely – surely they weren’t after me? How could –’

      ‘Don’t flatter yourself, my dear Reynolds.’ Szendrô carefully fitted another brown and black Russian cigarette into his holder – Reynolds was to discover that he chain-smoked a hundred of these every day – and struck a match. ‘The arm of coincidence is not all that long. They weren’t looking for you, they weren’t looking for anyone. They were stopping only trucks, searching for large quantities of ferro-wolfram that are being smuggled into the country.’

      ‘I should have thought they would have been damned glad to get all the ferro-wolfram they could lay their hands on,’ Reynolds murmured.

      ‘And so they are, my dear boy, and so they are. However, there are proper channels to be gone through, certain customs to be observed. Not to put too fine a point on it, several of our top party officials and highly-respected members of the government were being deprived of their usual cut. An intolerable state of affairs.’

      ‘Unthinkable,’ Reynolds agreed. ‘Action was imperative.’

      ‘Exactly!’ Szendrô grinned, the first time Reynolds had seen him smile, and the sudden flash of white, even teeth and the crinkling of the eyes quite transformed the cold aloofness of the man. ‘Unfortunately, on such occasions as these some fish other than the ones we are trawling for get caught in the net.’

      ‘Such as myself?’

      ‘Such as yourself. So I have made it my practice to be in the vicinity of certain police blocks at such times: a fruitless vigil, I fear, on all but very few occasions: you are only the fifth person I’ve taken away from the police inside a year. Unfortunately, you will also be the last. On the previous occasions I warned the country bumpkins who man these posts that they were to forget that I or the prisoner I had taken from them ever existed. To-night, as you know, their headquarters had been informed and the word will be out to all block posts to beware of a man posing as an AVO officer.’

      Reynolds stared at him.

      ‘But good God, man, they saw you! Five of them, at least. Your description will be in Budapest before –’

      ‘Pah!’ Szendrô flicked off some ash with a careless forefinger. ‘Much good it will do the fools! Besides, I’m no imposter – I am an AVO officer. Did you doubt it?’

      ‘I did not,’ Reynolds said feelingly. Szendrô hitched an immaculately trousered leg and sat on the desk, smiling.

      ‘There you are, then. Incidentally, Mr Reynolds, my apologies for my rather intimidating conduct on the way here to-night. As far as Budapest, I was concerned only with finding out whether you really were a foreign agent and the man we were looking for or whether I should throw you out at a street corner and tell you to lose yourself. But by the time I had reached the middle of the town another and most disquieting possibility had struck me.’

      ‘When you stopped in the Andrassy Ut?’ Reynolds nodded. ‘You looked at me in a rather peculiar fashion, to say the least.’

      ‘I know. The thought had just occurred that you might have been an AVO member deliberately planted on me and therefore had no cause to fear a visit to the Andrassy Ut: I confess I should have thought of it earlier. However, when I said I was going to take you to a secret cellar, you would have known at once what I suspected, known I could not now afford to let you live and screamed your head off. But you said nothing, so I knew you were at least no plant … Jansci, could I be excused for a few minutes? You know why.’

      ‘Certainly, СКАЧАТЬ