‘Numerous reasons, Captain Reynolds, but none that would convince an enemy agent from the west.’
It was the word ‘west’ that did it — but Reynolds was not to realize that until long afterwards. All he knew was that something had triggered open a flood gate, released a spate of pictures and memories in his mind, pictures of Jansci talking to him in his house in Budapest, in the dark agony of that torture cell in the Szarháza prison, with the firelight on his face in the cottage in the country, memories of what Jansci had said, what he had said over and over again with a repetitive persistence, with a passionate conviction that had hammered his ideas more deeply home into his mind than Reynolds had ever suspected. Everything he had said about — deliberately, desperately, Reynolds forced the thoughts and pictures from his mind. His carbine jabbed forward another six inches.
‘On your feet, Colonel Hidas.’
Hidas rose and stood facing him, his hands hanging by his sides, and stared down at the gun.
‘Clean and quick, Colonel Hidas, eh?’
‘As you wish.’ His eyes lifted from Reynolds’ whitening trigger finger and found his face. ‘I would not beg for myself what had been denied so many of my victims.’
For a fraction of a second longer Reynolds continued to increase the pressure on the trigger, then, almost as if something had snapped inside him, he relaxed and took one pace back. The white flame of anger still burnt within him, burnt as brightly as ever, but with these last words, the words of a man quite unafraid to die, he had felt the bitterness of defeat welling in him so powerfully that he could taste it in his mouth. When he spoke his voice was strained and hoarse, he scarcely recognized it as his own.
‘Turn round!’
‘Thank you, but no. I prefer to die this way.’
‘Turn round,’ Reynolds said savagely, ‘or I’ll smash both your kneecaps and turn you round myself.’
Hidas looked at his face, saw the implacability, shrugged to the inevitable, turned away and collapsed without a sound across his desk as the butt of the rifle caught him behind the ear. For a long moment Reynolds stared down at the fallen man, swore in a bitter fury that was directed not against the man at his feet but at himself, turned and left the caravan.
There was a feeling of emptiness, almost of despair, in Reynolds’ mind as he descended the steps. He was no longer particularly careful to conceal his presence, that fury within him had still not found its outlet, and though he would not have admitted it, even to himself, he would have welcomed the chance to turn his automatic carbine on the armed AVO men within that other truck, cut them down without compunction as they came pouring out the door silhouetted against the light behind, just as they had cut down Jansci’s wife silhouetted in the light of the door of the ferryman’s cottage. And then suddenly he broke step and stood still, stood very still indeed: he had just realized something that he should have realized minutes ago had he not been so bent on his reckoning with Colonel Hidas. The brown lorry was not only quiet: it was far too quiet to be true.
In three steps he had reached the side of the truck and pressed his ear against it. There was nothing to be heard, just nothing at all. He ran round to the back, flung open a door and peered inside. He could see nothing, it was pitch dark inside, but he did not need to see anything: the truck was empty, and no one moved or even breathed inside.
The truth struck with such suddenness, such savage force, that he was for the moment numbed, incapable of all action, capable of nothing but the realization of the enormity of his blunder, the thoroughness, the appalling ease with which he had been deceived. He might have known, he might have guessed — the Count had been suspicious of it even at the beginning — that Colonel Hidas would never have accepted defeat, never have given up, far less given up with such submissive ease. The Count would never have fallen for it, never. Hidas’ men must have been on their way to make the crossing of the river to the south even when the flare had been fired, and both he and the Cossack had blindly accepted as genuine the noisily faked withdrawal through the woods. They would be there by now, they were bound to be there by now, and he, Reynolds, was missing at the very moment his friends needed him as they had never done before — and, to crown the folly of his night’s work, he had sent Sandor, the one man who might have saved them, to collect the truck. Jansci had only the boy and the old man to help him — and Julia was there. When he thought of Julia, when he thought of her and the leering gargoyle face of the giant Coco, something snapped inside Reynolds’ mind and released him from his motionless thrall.
Two hundred metres lay between him and the bank of the river, two hundred metres covered in deep, frozen snow, he was exhausted from sleeplessness and privations and weighed down by heavy boots and saturated clothes, but he covered the distance in less time than he had ever done before. It was not anger now — although it was still there — that lent wings to his heels, and kicked the flying gouts of snow head-high as he pounded along, it was not anger, it was fear, fear such as he had never known before.
But it was not numbing, paralyzing fear, but a fear, instead, that seemed to sharpen all his senses and lend him an abnormal clarity of mind. He braked suddenly, arms windmilling violently, as he approached the bank of the river, slid noiselessly over the edge on to the shingle, cat-footed down to the water’s edge and pushed himself out into the icy current without even the tiniest splash. He was almost half-way across, swimming smoothly and powerfully, one arm holding the carbine far above his head, when he heard the first shot from the ferryman’s cottage, followed immediately afterwards by another and another.
The time for caution was gone — if ever there had been such a time. Churning the water madly, Reynolds reached the far side in a few seconds, touched bottom, scrambled up the far shore with his driving feet slipping desperately on the sliding shingle, swarmed over the bank, clicked over the carbine switch from automatic to single shot firing — a machine-gun was less than useless, it was positively dangerous, if friend and enemy were fighting in the same confined space — and ran, crouching, through the pale oblong of light that was the ferryman’s front door. Ten minutes, at the most, had elapsed since he had walked out through that door.
Jansci’s wife was no longer in the corridor, but the corridor was not empty. An AVO man, carbine in hand, had just come out of the living-room and was shutting the door behind him, and even at that moment Reynolds realized that that could mean only one thing — the fight inside, if there had been a fight and not just a massacre, was over. The AVO man saw him, tried to bring his gun up, realized he could not make it in time and the warning shout died in his throat as the stock of Reynolds’ carbine caught him terribly across the head and side of the face.
Carbine again reversed in his hands, Reynolds gently toed open the door. One swift, all-encompassing glance at the tableau before him and he knew that the fight was indeed over. Six AVO men Reynolds could see inside the room, four of them still alive: one lay almost at his feet in that strangely crumpled relaxation that only the dead can achieve, another by the wall on the right-hand side, not far from where Jennings was sitting with his head almost on his knees as he shook it slowly from side to side. In one far corner a man held a carbine on a bleeding Jansci while another bound his hands to the chair on which he was sitting, while in the other corner the Cossack, lying on his back, was struggling desperately with the man who, lying on top of him, was bludgeoning him with short arm blows to the head: but the Cossack fought on, and Reynolds could see how he was fighting: he was pulling with all his strength on the stock of his whip whose sixteen-foot length was wrapped round and round the throat of the man above, inexorably turning his face a strange bluish colour and slowly strangling him. Near the centre of the room stood the giant Coco, contemptuously ignoring the girl who struggled so futilely in the crook of one great arm, grinning with wolfish expectation as the AVO man fighting with the Cossack stopped belabouring him, reached back with his right hand, fumbled with his belt and came clear with a sheath knife.