Read Online The Last Frontier by Alistair MacLean - Free Book Online Page B

was just two and a half years ago, less than a month after we had come. Julia, thank God, was staying with friends in the country. I was away that night, I had left about midnight, and when she went to make herself coffee after I had gone, the gas had been turned off and she did not know what that meant. So they took her away.'

'The gas? I'm afraid -- '

'You don't understand? A chink in your armour the AVO would soon have prised open, Mr. Reynolds. Everybody else in Budapest understands. It is the practice of the AVO to turn off the gas supply to a block of houses or flats before serving deportation notices there: a pillow on the bottom shelf of a gas oven is comfortable enough, and there is no pain. They stopped the sale of poisons in all chemists, they even tried to ban the sale of razor blades. They found it difficult, however, to prevent people from jumping from top story flats....'

'She had no warning?'

'No warning. A blue slip of paper thrust in her hand, a small suitcase, the brown lorry and then the locked cattle trucks of the railway.'

'But she may yet be alive. You have heard nothing?'

'Nothing, nothing at all. We can only hope she lives. But so many died in these trucks, stifling or freezing to death, and the work in the fields, the factories or mines is brutal, killing, even for one fit and well: she had just been discharged from hospital after a serious operation. Chest-surgery -- she had tuberculosis: her convalescence had not even begun.'

Reynolds swore softly. How often one read, one heard about this sort of thing, how easily, how casually, almost callously, one dismissed it -- and how different when one was confronted with reality.

'You have looked for her -- for your wife?' Reynolds asked harshly. He hadn't meant to speak that way, it was just the way the words came out.

'I have looked for her. I cannot find her.'

Reynolds felt the stirring of anger. Jansci seemed to take it all so easily, he was to calm, too unaffected.

'The AVO must know where she is,' Reynolds persisted. They have lists, files. Colonel Szendro -- '

'He has no access to top secret files,' Jansci interrupted. He smiled. 'And his rank is only equivalent to that of major. The promotion was self-awarded and for Tonight only. So was the name.... I think I heard him coming now.'

But it was the youngster with the dark hair who entered -- or partially entered. He poked his head round the door, reported that everything was clear and vanished. But even in that brief moment Reynolds had had time to notice the pronounced nervous tic on the left cheek, just below the darting black eyes. Jansci must have seen the expression on Reynolds' face, and when he spoke his voice was apologetic.

'Poor Imre! He was not always like this, Mr. Reynolds, not always so restless, so disturbed.'

'Restless! I shouldn't say it, but because my safety and plans are involved too, I must: he's a neurotic of the first order.' Reynolds looked hard at Jansci, but Jansci was his usual mild and gentle self. 'A man like that in a set-up like this! To say he's a potential danger is the understatement of the month.'

'I know, don't think I don't know.' Jansci sighed. 'You should have seen him just over two years ago, Mr. Reynolds, fighting the Russian tanks on Castle Hill, just north of Gellert. He hadn't a nerve in his entire body. When it came to spreading liquid soap at the corners -- and the steep, dangerous slopes of the Hill saw to the rest as far as the tanks were concerned -- or prising up loose cobbles, filling the holes with petrol and touching it off as a tank passed across, Imre had no equal. But he became too rash, and one night one of the big T-54 tanks, slipping backwards down a hill with all the crew dead inside, pinned him, kneeling on all fours, against the wall of a house. He was there for thirty-six hours before anyone noticed him -- and twice during that time the tank had been hit by high-explosive rockets from Russian fighter planes -- they didn't