The Last Frontier. Alistair MacLean

for Pravda. Our friends here lugging Jennings by the heels across the border and the caption “British Secret Agent Liberates Western Scientist.” Can’t you just see it, Mr Reynolds?’

      Reynolds shrugged and said nothing. He was only too keenly aware of the change of atmosphere in the past five minutes, the undercurrent of hostility that now ran strongly towards himself. But he had had to tell Jansci everything – Colonel Mackintosh had been insistent on that point, and it had been inevitable if they were to have Jansci’s help. The offer of help, if it were to be made at all, now hung in the balance – and without it, Reynolds knew, he might as well have saved himself the trouble of coming at all … Two minutes passed in silence, then Jansci and the Count looked at one another and exchanged an almost imperceptible nod. Jansci looked squarely at Reynolds.

      ‘If all your countrymen were like you, Mr Reynolds, I wouldn’t lift a finger to help you: cold-blooded, emotionless people to whom right and wrong, justice and injustice, and suffering are matters of academic disinterest are as guilty, by silence of consent, as the barbarous murderers of whom you so recently spoke: but I know they are not all like you: neither would I help if it were only to enable your scientists to make machines of war. But Colonel Mackintosh was – is – my friend and I think it inhuman, no matter what the cause, that an old man should die in a foreign land, among uncaring strangers, far from his family and those he loves. If it lies in our power, in any way at all, we will see to it, with God’s help, that the old man comes safely home again.’

FOUR

      The inevitable cigarette holder clipped between his teeth, the inevitable Russian cigarette well alight, the Count leaned a heavy elbow on the buzzer and kept on leaning until a shirt-sleeved little man, unshaven and still rubbing the sleep from his eyes, came scurrying out from the little cubicle behind the hotel’s reception desk. The Count eyed him with disfavour.

      ‘Night-porters should sleep in the daytime,’ he said coldly. ‘The manager, little man, and at once.’

      ‘The manager? At this hour of the night?’ The night-porter stared with ill-concealed insolence at the clock above his head, transferred his stare to the Count, now innocuously dressed in a grey suit and grey raglan raincoat, and made no effort at all to conceal the truculence in his voice. ‘The manager is asleep. Come back in the morning.’

      There came a sudden sound of ripping linen, a gasp of pain, and the Count, his right hand gripping the bunched folds of the porter’s shirt, had him halfway across the desk: the blood-shot, sleep-filmed eyes, widened first with surprise and then with fear, were only inches away from the wallet that had magically appeared in the Count’s free hand. A moment of stillness, a contemptuous shove and the porter was scrabbling frantically at the pigeon-holed mail racks behind him in an attempt to keep his balance.