The engine purred and she let it run for a moment then slipped in the clutch, turned the car and headed it through a gap in the wall, down a rough track. Robbie twisted round to stare anxiously out of the back window; but no lights came on in the upper part of the house, which was all that he could see over the two walls.
When they reached the highway, Stephanie put on speed and, as the road was an open one, they were soon doing seventy miies an hour in the direction of Pirgos.
'Where do you intend to drop me?' Robbie asked.
'Athens,' she replied laconically.
'Athens!' he repeated in surprise. 'That means then that you don't trust me to go there under my own steam?'
'I don't see why I should trust you in anything.'
'No,' he agreed, as a guilty memory of their last encounter rushed back to his mind. 'I suppose not. But we can't possibly make Athens in a night. We'll have to stop off at various places, so I could easily give you th$ slip.'
'I don't advise you to try it. You would have cause to regret it if you did.'
'Apart from having broken my pledge, I don't see why. That is, unless you are toting a gun, with which you mean to shoot me if I run off into the bushes.'
'Yes; I have got a gun with me; and I would have shot you if you had set on me after I released you. But you had better not try to get hold of it. Yesterday you took me completely by surprise; otherwise things would have gone very differently. I've told you that I'm against murder, but I wouldn't hesitate to put a bullet through your leg; so I advise you not to attempt any monkey tricks.'
By then they had reached Pirgos. There were still people sitting drinking in the cafes, but the streets were almost deserted, and, reducing her speed only to forty, Stephanie drove through the town. When they had come out on the road to Olympia, she continued:
'I may as well tell you, though, that making sure that you don't feel tempted to go back on your word is not the only reason that I am taking you to Athens. For one thing, although you succeeded in driving the car twenty-odd miles this afternoon, you couldn't have hoped to get very far with it in the dark without an accident; and if you had a smash, the odds are that Barak would have caught you. Having risked my own skin to get you out, I'd naturally have felt pretty sick if I found afterwards that I had done so to no purpose.'
'Risked your skin!' Robbie turned to stare at her. 'Do you mean they would have killed you?'
'Oh no; they wouldn't do that. But Barak can be a real devil when he is angry. When he learned that I had enabled you to escape, he would have beaten hell out of me and might quite well have marked me for life.'
'But he is bound to find out . . . That letter you left.'
'Of course, and that's why I left it. If I hadn't, they would anyhow have assumed that it was I who freed you. Who else would have? You couldn't possibly have got away without help. Barak would have believed that, having spent three weeks driving you round Greece, I had fallen for you. He would then have every reason to do his utmost to recapture you. And when he got back, with or without you, he would have put me through the hoop.'
She paused for a moment, then went on: 'By leaving your pledge and my letter, I hope to show that, although I freed you, I am still doing the right thing by my own people. In the letter, I've said that I am taking you to Athens myself, to keep you, one way or the other, to your promise, and that on the 20th I intend to see you aboard a plane that will take you out of Greece. To put an end to your poking your nose into our business is the only thing that really matters and no one but Barak is going to be disappointed at being deprived of the pleasure of watching you drown.'
'I see,' said Robbie thoughtfully. 'But won't he try to take it out on you later on, when he sees you again?'
'By then, I'll be among friends at our Legation. Besides, he will have had time to calm down. That was one of my reasons for deciding that if I did mean to free you I had better accompany you to Athens. Of course, when I do come face to face with him, there will be a fine old dust-up. But that's not your worry.'
Robbie fell silent and remained so for some while. Then he remarked: 'Your room at the Spap was still unoccupied when I left, so-'
'So what!' she cut him short. 'Surely you don't suppose that I mean to spend the night at Olympia? I hope to get to Argos.'
At the thought of the road by which they had come to Olympia, Robbie exclaimed: 'What! You mean to drive through those awful mountains in the dark?'
'Why not?' she shrugged. 'Plenty of lorries and other cars make the trip by night. If I find it too much for me, we'll have to stop at Tripolis; but in case Barak does come after us, I want to keep as big a lead as I can. Argos is well over half-way to Athens—the worst half, too—but with luck we'll reach there in about six or seven hours. We'll sleep through the morning, and do the remaining hundred and twenty kilometres to Athens in the afternoon.'
The idea of skirting those terrifying precipices for hour after hour with only their headlights to keep them on the road did not seem to intimidate Stephanie and, although it appalled Robbie, he realized he was in her hands. Since she had the courage to face it, he must too, and without showing his fears. After a minute, he said:
'Well, you're doing the driving. All I ask is that, when you do feel tired, you won't press on at the risk of breaking both our necks. We could always pull off the road at some level spot and you could sleep for an hour in the car. I give you my solemn promise that I won't try to sneak off while you were sleeping. Anyhow, you'll get a first quarter of an hour's easy at the Spap while I pay my bill and throw my clothes into my suitcases.'
Stephanie gave an unpleasant little laugh. 'I always thought you were a little off the beam; now I know that you're right round the bend. You have just had a very narrow escape from death, yet you suggest risking your life again for the sake of collecting a few clothes.'
'If they did hear us drive off, Barak would have caught up with us by now; if they didn't, he won't even be getting dressed for another two and a half hours,' Robbie argued, 'so what do fifteen minutes matter?'
'They matter because I mean to keep every minute of lead I've got.'
Robbie made a face. 'All right, then. But I was hoping to get a drink at the hotel. It's over twelve hours since I had one, and I'm absolutely parched.'
'Put a hand over the back of the seat,' she told him. 'If you feel round, you'll find a basket with some biscuits and a Thermos that has milk in it. I'd have liked to have made some coffee to warm us up when we are in the mountains, but I didn't dare. One of them might have come down and found me in the kitchen with my suitcase beside me, and that would not have been at all easy to explain.'
After Robbie had found the Thermos and gratefully drunk some of the milk, he said: 'You had two suitcases and, from what you say, it sounds as if getting away with one was as much as you could manage. I hope you put my manuscript in it.'
'No,' she replied promptly. 'I didn't.'
'What . . . what have you done with it?' he asked, striving to keep out of his voice the acute anxiety he felt.
'It will serve a most useful purpose.' She paused for a moment, then went on with malicious amusement: 'In that little house there were fourteen of us, and they were running short of toilet paper; so I left it in the lavatory.'
'Oh God! You didn't!' The cry came from Robbie's heart.
For a good two minutes she let him remain a prey to utter misery, then she said quietly: 'No; as a matter of fact, I didn't, though it would have served you right if I had. The truth is that I took it in to Pirgos this evening and sent it poste restante to the G.P.O., Athens. Knowing how much you value your book, I did that as a much sounder precaution than carrying a gun against your being tempted to double-cross me. If you behave like a good little boy, I'll arrange for it to be handed back to you at the airport on your way out of Greece.'