by John Glasby
She nodded towards the gun in her hand, then let her glance flicker momentarily towards Ubyenkov. “You didn’t know that I had this gun with me. If you had come back with that man I would have shot the professor.” Cautiously, she went on: “You don’t know how close to death you were then, Professor Ubyenkov.”
“And now?” Carradine said very softly. “What do you intend to do now?”
“We have a place on the outskirts of Paris where you will be quite safe until dark. Then you will be taken to the Seine. By the time your body is washed up, we shall be back in Russia and this, rather unpleasant, chapter will have been closed.”
“I see.” He rubbed his mouth, saw the gun lift a fraction as the girl followed the move. Her knuckles were white as she tightened her finger on the trigger. “Be very careful,” she warned. “I don’t want to have to shoot you here, but if you make any move that I don’t like, I will.”
Yes, thought Carradine, you would. How could he have been so mistaken about this girl? He glanced through the window of the car. They were slowing now, moving through one of the slum districts of Paris. Long warehouses, lay along either side of the dingy streets, doors hanging lopsidedly on twisted hinges. The river probably lay on the other side of them, he reflected. This was a section of the city he did not know.
They turned a corner. The car stopped a short distance around it. In front of them the road narrowed sharply. Garbage lay in piles down either side of it and a couple of mangy cats ran swiftly away from the car, clambered out of sight of the broken, stone wall to one side.
“All right,” snapped the girl. She waved the gun negligently. “Outside, both of you. And I ought to warn you that Boris here has some very special methods of dealing with anyone who doesn’t do exactly as he is told.”
“So I can imagine,” murmured Carradine through his teeth. He thrust his legs out of the car, stood up. The smell of the river was in his nostrils now and he knew he had been right about it being close by.
“Stand there for a moment,” ordered the girl sharply as he made to move forward, “and place your hands behind your neck.”
Carradine did as he was told. The chauffeur padded up behind him, ran his hand expertly over his body, located the gun the girl had given him and took it from his pocket.
“You’re both taking a bit of a gamble, aren’t you?” Carradine said. “Suppose that the Deuxieme Bureau have someone watching the station for the Orient Express. They could have followed us here.”
The girl shook her head. The possibility did not seem to worry her. She said patiently, as explaining things to a little child: “There was no one to let them know you were on the train, I’m afraid. If you want my opinion, I would say they still believe we are somewhere in Austria or Yugoslavia. They won’t to get around to worrying about us until it’s far too late. Now follow Boris and keep your hands were I can see them.”
The chauffeur led the way up a rickety wooden stairway, into the top floor of one of the long buildings. As he went inside, into the dark, cool shadow of the place, Carradine looked about him carefully, taking in every detail, filing it away in his mind. He did not know what might be important and what was not, but if they were to have any chance of getting out of this mess alive, then he could afford to overlook nothing.
Boxes lined one wall of the long room reaching all the way to the ceiling. There was plenty of open space on one side, the side facing the alley. Light came from four skylights, set at regular intervals in the sloping ceiling. There was a musty smell of a long-abandoned place in his nostrils, of dust that had lain on the floor, undisturbed, for a long time.
“I suppose that we make ourselves comfortable while we wait,” he said quietly.
Francesca motioned to the packing cases. “I’m afraid that here we are not exactly used to luxury. But if you get to make yourself comfortable, you have only a few hours to wait. It may, of course, interest you to know that your demise has been carefully planned down to the last detail.”
“The thoroughness of the Russian Secret Service,” he said.
“Exactly.”
The chauffeur moved over to the door, stood there with his shoulders leaning against the wooden upright. He took out a cigarette, and lit it and stood quite relaxed, smoking. But his eyes never strayed for very long from Carradine and Ubyenkov, who sat slumped on one of the cases, his shoulders hunched forward. Carradine eyed Ubyenkov out of the corner of his eye, wondering whether the other would back him up if he made any move. Somehow, he doubted it. The other had seemed broken, as if he had already resigned himself to being taken back to Russia. God alone knew what would happen to the poor bastard when they got him there, he thought grimly. The tales told about the salt mines in Siberia were undoubtedly exaggerated, but they still existed and if he wasn’t executed for a crime against the state, or put in prison for the rest of his life, then that was where they might send him. Ubyenkov would pay dearly for his attempt to escape from Russia.
Carefully, he measured the distance to the chauffeur of the door. Too far for him to hope to reach the other before the man killed him. The girl would be easier. She was standing less than a couple of feet away, watching him out of coldly amused eyes. Use her as a shield? It was a possibility, but even that might not work. He hadn’t any guarantee that the chauffeur would not shoot her just to make sure that he and Ubyenkov did not escape. The girl herself had said that it mattered little if they lost a man, many men, so long as they carried out their assignment.
There was the muffled hoot of a boat on the river nearby. The rattle of a tram in the distance sounded. The everyday sounds of Paris, he thought vaguely. The girl took a quick glance at her wristwatch.
“Worried that someone might happen along and see the car?” he said softly. “If they do, they might start asking questions, may even come along looking for the owner and – ”
“Shut up!” snapped the girl sharply. “Another interruption from you and I shall kill you here and now. There is very little point in keeping you alive. Come to think of it, that might be the best thing to do. No doubt your mind is working overtime trying to think of some way out of this, of turning the tables on us.”
“The idea has occurred to me,” he said quietly. He felt tense, but tried not to show it in his voice. Inwardly, he was thinking: What a bloody stupid way for him to die. Here in this dusty, abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Paris, with everyone in London no doubt thinking he was still somewhere in Eastern Europe, not worrying unduly about him or Ubyenkov. By the time they got around to worrying, it would be too late. He would be dead and Ubyenkov would be beyond the Iron Curtain, out of reach of anyone from the West.
The chauffeur pushed himself away from the doorway, tossed a cigarette butt down into the alley below and moved nearer. Carradine felt the muscles of his chest tighten. If only he could entice the other closer to him, get both him and the girl within range of that lighter of his. He was suddenly very glad that he had not fully explained this to the girl. He had been on the point of doing so when they had met in Balchik.
Getting to his feet, he stretched himself, yawning. The girl stiffened, pulled up the barrel of the gun.
He slipped his hand into his pocket, pulled out the cigarette case and extracted a cigarette, thrusting it between his lips, glad to notice his fingers were stone steady. The chauffeur had moved towards him, eyes alert. Now he was less than six feet away, a tall, looming shadow in the grey dimness.
Carradine lit the cigarette, blew smoke into the air. He held the lighter loosely in his hand. “You know, Francesca,” he said very softly, “you made one big mistake that gave you away long before we reached Paris. A mistake that is going to prove to be your undoing.”
“Oh?” The girl's voice sounded bored. “May I ask what it was? Perhaps the next time I will be able to ensure that it doesn’t happen again.”
“You made it so obvious that the man who was following us had to be killed once we discovered he was on the train. I suppose it was b
ecause he was the one person who could spoil everything for you.” He smiled. “And you also forgot that I had a chance to talk with the conductor. How do you know I didn’t ask him to send a message through to the Headquarters of the Deuxieme Bureau in Paris, asking for them to keep a watch on the station, to follow us?”
For a second, there was a look of alarm in the girl’s eyes, then she shook her head. “No, you didn’t do that,” she said. “Besides, even if you did it would make no difference now. The minute there is any sound outside, you both die. By the time anyone gets here, Boris and I will be gone and – ”
Carefully, turning the lighter slightly in his fingers, Carradine pressed down on it with his thumb, keeping it there. The chauffeur uttered a sharp cry of pain, staggered back as the liquid struck him, vaporising instantly on his skin. The gun in the girl’s hand went off with a loud roar and Carradine felt a red-hot poker lay a searing finger along his arm. Then the potent chemical had struck her and the gun dropped from her fingers as she reeled back, falling over the body of the chauffeur.
Bending swiftly, he took the gun from beneath the girl’s body, straightened up, holding his breath so as not to inhale more of the fumes than was necessary. He stepped back quickly. Tears half-blinded him and there was a stabbing pain in his chest, a tightness. Turning, he grabbed Ubyenkov by an arm and dragged him to the door.
He sucked the clean, pure air down into his lungs, felt the pounding ache in his head fade perceptibly. God, but that stuff was potent. Just a few whiffs and he had almost been out.
A quarter of an hour later, he was seated in the Headquarters of the Deuxieme Bureau in the heart of Paris. Francesca and Boris were safely tucked away in one of the other rooms in the building where they would be interrogated once they recovered from the effects of the tear gas.
“I have sent word to London,” said the tall man behind the desk softly. “They will send a special plane to meet you at Orly in an hour. Two hours from now, and you should both be back in London.” He smiled. “I suppose I am right in saying that you will be glad to see the last of Europe for a little while?”
Carradine nodded, drank down the last of the whisky, set the empty glass down on the desk in front of him. He felt wonderful now, far better than at any time since he had left London.
“And those two?” he asked, making a gesture to the other room.
The man waved a negligent hand. “You do not have to worry about them, mon ami. I shall personally see that everything is taken care of. They will tell us all that we want to know of their organisation. When they are of no further use to us, then...” He deliberately left the remainder of his sentence and said, but Carradine could guess at it. He felt a stab of regret. She had been a very beautiful girl. If only things could have been different, if only they had not been working on opposite sides, if only...
But there were too many ‘ifs’ in the world for him to worry about this one. He tried to tell himself that the girl must have known what the consequences of failure were, whether from her own people, or those of the West. This was the cold war and there were casualties in it just as there had been in the hot one. He rubbed his chin, felt the beard under his fingers. He needed a bath and a shave before he went back to London to report.
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