That was the worst bit, and Mackintosh would rip open my guts for it if ever I got past Fatface. His instructions had been oblique but clear; if there was any possibility of Slade getting clear then I was to kill him. I could have cut his throat with a blunt table knife while he slept, or strangled him with a length of electrical wire from the table lamp. I had done neither.
Of course, if I had killed Slade one night then next morning I would have been a dead man, but that wasn't why I'd refrained. I had weighed the odds and made a number of assumptions -- that Slade and I would be going out together; that I still had a chance of escape, taking Slade with me; that my cover was still secure. Not one of those assumptions had proved valid and now things were in one hell of a mess.
I lay on the bed with my hands clasped behind my head and wondered how they had tumbled to the substitution. Fatface was trying to convince me that he knew I wasn't Rearden because of Rearden's fingerprints extracted from his file at John Vorster Square. I knew that to be a damned lie because I had personally substituted my own fingerprints for Rearden's in that very file, with Mackintosh looking on, and any prints coming from that file would match mine.
If Fatface knew I wasn't Rearden it certainly wasn't on account of fingerprints -- so why in hell was he trying to kid me?
I thought hard, trying one hypothesis after another. For instance supposing Fatface only suspected I wasn't Rearden -he might try to pull a bluff in the hope that I'd crack. I hadn't cracked, and I'd put him in the position of having to produce those fingerprints which I knew damned well he hadn't got or, if he had, would certainly match mine.
That was one hypothesis among many, but they all boiled down to the same thing -- that either Fatface knew for a certainty I wasn't Rearden, or he merely suspected it. And in both cases the problem was how the devil had he done it? Where had I slipped up?
I went back over my actions since my arrival in England and found no flaw. I had done nothing, in either word or deed, to break my cover, and that led me to the nasty suspicion that there had been a leak -- a flaw in security.
I thought about Mackintosh. Now there was a tough, ruthless, conniving bastard who would sell his grandmother to boil down for soap if that soap would grease the runway of the Ship of State. I shook' my head irritably. That was straining a metaphor pretty far which showed I was tired -- but it was true, all the same. If Mackintosh thought it would serve his, purpose to break security on me he would do it without hesitation.
I thought about it hard then rejected the possibility for the time being because I could see no purpose to it. And that left the super-efficient Lucy Smith whom Mackintosh trusted so much and about whom I knew damn-all. There were other possibilities, of course; either of them could have inadvertently broken security, his office could have been bugged by an interested third party, and so on.
I went into the bathroom and doused my face in cold water. To hell with Mackintosh's devious ways! What I had to do now was to find a way out of this trap. There must be less thinking of how I had got into it and more on how to get out.
I wiped my face dry, went back into the bedroom, and sat at the table to review my armoury of weapons. A trained man in my position assembles his weapons as and when he can from the materials at hand. For instance, I had three meals a day at which pepper was on the table. In my pocket was a twist of paper containing enough pepper to blind a man, which could come in useful on an appropriate occasion.
After a few minutes' thought I went to the wardrobe and took out a sock which I half-filled with earth from the row of pot plants on the window ledge, taking a little from each. I hefted the sock, whirled it, and swung it against the palm of my hand. It made a satisfying thump. It wasn't as good as a sandbag -- it wasn't all that heavy -- but it would do.
There are many ways of getting out of a locked room. You can shoot your way out -- if you have a gun. You can set fire to the place, but that's risky; there's no guarantee you'll get out, and it can have disastrous consequences -- I've always kept in mind Charles Lamb's story of burnt pig. You can use deception in its many forms but I didn't think these boys would be deceived easily; I'd already tried to con Fatface into letting me walk in the courtyard and he hadn't fallen for it.
That led me to think of Fatface and what he did when he came into the room. He was very careful; the door would click open and he would walk in, closing it behind him and always facing into the room with his back to the door. The man outside would then lock it. Fatface always kept his front to me. I had experimented a bit -- trying to get behind him -- but he'd never let me. He also carried a gun. When your life may depend on it you notice little details like that, and, no matter how carefully tailored the suit, the bulge shows.
So I had to get behind Fatface and club him with a sockful of wet leaf mould. And that involved a conjuror's trick -- he had to believe I was in front of him when I was really behind him. Short of hypnosis I didn't see how I could do it but I tackled the problem.
Presently I went into the bathroom and flushed the water closet. It had no chain being one of those low cistern contraptions operated by a short lever. Then I hunted around for i cord. What I really needed was a ball of string, but that I hadn't got, so I had to improvise.
The light switch in the bathroom was operated, as good buildings regulations insist, by a ceiling pull-switch from which ft strong cord hung to a convenient hand level. That gave me four feet. The bedside lamp was wired to a plug on the skirting board behind the bed, and the wire was two-strand, plastic coated, the strands spiralling around each other. When I separated the strands I had a good bit more cord.
There was another lamp on the dressing table which contributed more, but still not enough, so I was forced to consider other sources. My dressing-gown was of terry-towelling and had a cord which went around the waist. This cord unravelled into several strands which I plaited and, at last, I had enough. In fact, there was enough wire to make a garrotting loop -- not as efficient as piano wire, it's true -- but I was in no position to complain.
I made a loop on the end of my long cord and slipped it over the lever of the cistern, then ran the cord from the bathroom, around the walls of the bedroom and right up to the door. I could have done with some small pulleys but, instead, I used the insulated staples which had held down the electric wiring and hoped they would hold.
They didn't.
A gentle tug and nothing happened. A harder tug gave the same result. A very hard tug and a staple sprang from the skirting board.
This wasn't working at all.
I went back to the bathroom and flushed the water closet again, using as little pressure on the lever as possible. It was obviously too stiff to be pulled down by my improvised cord, so I had to think of something else. I studied the cistern for a while, and then removed the top, revealing its guts -- the ball valve and associated gimmickry invented by that unsung genius, Thomas Crapper. The action of the lever downwards resulted in the movement of a plunger upwards, and I figured it was the friction involved in this mechanism that stiffened the lever action. If I could disconnect the lever and work on the plunger directly I thought I could do it.
Half an hour later I was ready to try again. I had lengthened my cord by means of a strip torn from the sheet; it would show, but that didn't matter in the bathroom. I left the bathroom door ajar and returned to my post at the other end of the cord. I picked it up, crossed my fingers, and pulled with a steady pressure.
The toilet flushed with a welcome and loud squirt of water.
I dropped the cord and carefully surveyed the room, making sure that nothing was out of place, that nothing would give the game away to Fatface when he entered. Everything was neat and tidy except for the bed I had stripped. I took the sheet I had ripped and tore it into long lengths. I would have a use for those. Then I remade the bed.
There still remained a few things to do. I opened the wardrobe and considered the contents. There was a suit of a decent dark grey, and there was a sports coat with non-matching trouse
rs and brown shoes. I didn't know where I was -- country or town -- and if I emerged into a town then the suit would be more appropriate; but if I was in the heart of the country the suit would stick out a mile whereas the more informal dress would not be out of place in a town. So I plumped for the sports coat and associated trimmings. I'd also take the hat and the raincoat.
I'd been on the run before and I knew that one of the most difficult things to do is the apparently simple act of washing and the general idea of keeping clean. If my beard grew out a different colour than my hair I'd be an object of attention -that blonde had warned me to shave twice a day. This question of cleanliness is something of which the police are well aware, and in searching for a man on the run a check is routinely made on all public washrooms in railway stations and large hotels.
So I was taking the shaver, a tablet of soap, a face cloth and a hand towel-all of which would fit conveniently into the pockets of the raincoat without bulging too much. I coiled my garrotting wire loosely and fitted it into the sweatband of the hat. Any copper worthy of the name knows one of those when he sees it, and if I was searched I didn't want it to be obvious -- I'd be thrown in the nick immediately if it were found.
That also went for the gun -- if I could get hold of Fatface's artillery. Which brought me to another question. How far was I justified in using a gun if the occasion arose?
The cult of James Bond has given rise to a lot of nonsense. There are no double-o numbers and there is no 'licence to kill'. As far as I knew I didn't have a number at all, except perhaps a file number like any other employee; certainly no one ever referred to me as number 56, or whatever it was -or even 0056. And agents don't kill just for the hell of it. That doesn't mean that agents never kill, but they kill strictly to order under carefully specified conditions. Elimination by death is regarded with distaste; it's messy and irretrievable, and there are usually other ways of silencing a man which are almost as effective.
Yet sometimes it has to be done and an agent is detailed to do it. Whether this constitutes a licence to kill I wouldn't know; it certainly doesn't grant a general licence to commit unrestricted mayhem. You leave too many unexplained bodies lying around and the secret service stops being secret.
Now, Mackintosh hadn't told me to kill anyone apart from Slade and that meant, generally speaking, no killing. Such unordered deaths are known in the trade as 'accidental' and any agent who is crass enough to cause such an accidental death quickly gets the chop as being unreliable and inept. For an agent to leave a trail of corpses in his wake would cause untold consternation in those little hole-in-the-corner offices in Whitehall which have the innocuous and deceptive names on the doors.
In fact, it came back to the old moral problem -- when is a man justified in killing another man? I resolved it by quoting the phrase -- 'Kill or be killed!' If I were in danger of being killed then I would kill in self-defence -- and not until then. I had killed only one man in my life and that had made me sick to my stomach for two days afterwards.
That settled in my mind, I began planning arson. An inspection of the liquor cabinet showed a bottle and a half of South African brandy, the best part of a bottle of Scotch, ditto gin, and a half-bottle of Drambuie. A few tests showed the brandy and the Drambuie as being most flammable, although not as fiery as I would have wished. I was sorry I hadn't developed a taste for rum -- there's some nice 100 per cent stuff on the market which would have suited me fine -- although God knows what it does to the lining of the stomach.
Then I went to bed and slept the sleep of the morally just.
II There was no breakfast next morning. Instead of Taafe trundling his trolley before him he came in empty-handed and jerked his thumb at the door. I shrugged and walked out. It seemed as though the party was over.
I was taken downstairs and across the hall into the closely curtained room where I had signed the cheque. In the hall I passed an elderly couple, Darby and Joan types, who were sitting nervously on the edges of their chairs as though they thought it was a dentist's waiting room. They looked at me incuriously as I walked past the m into the room where Fat-face was waiting for me.
There was a bleak look on his face. 'You've had a night to think about it,' he said. 'Your story had better be very good, Mr Whoever-you-are.'
I went on the attack. 'Where's that dab-sheet?'
'We don't keep it here,' he said shortly. 'In any case, it isn't necessary.'
'I still don't know what you're talking about,' I said. 'And if you think I've spent all night cooking up a cock-and-bull story just to satisfy you then you're crazy. I don't have much to do with my time, but I've better things to do than that.' I was telling him the exact truth.
He made a noise expressive of disgust. 'You're a liar. Can't you get it into your thick skull that the gaff has been blown? There's just one little detail missing -- your identity.' He shook his head pityingly. 'We know you're not Rearden. All we want to know is who the devil you really are.'
Now, why did he want to know that? I had a fair idea, and I didn't like it at all. If I wasn't Rearden then he'd want to know if I'd be seriously missed. That's an important thing to know if you're contemplating murdering anyone. Was I important? Did I have important connections? For whom was I working? And why? All those were questions he would want answering.
And he was too damned certain that I wasn't Rearden, which was faintly alarming. I heaved a deep sigh. 'I'm Joseph Rearden. From what Cosgrove told me before you got me out of the nick you've done a thorough check on me. Why this sudden switch, Fatface? Are you trying to slip out of your obligations?'
'Don't call me Fatface,' he snapped. 'I don't need fingerprints to tell me you're not Rearden because you've just proved it yourself. Out there in the hall you passed a couple of old people, Mr and Mrs Rearden from Brakpan, South Africa. Your dear old father and your sainted old mother, you son of a bitch. You didn't recognize them and they didn't recognize you.'
There wasn't much to say to that, so I kept my mouth shut. But my stomach did a back flip.
Fatface showed his teeth in a savage grin. 'I said the gaff has been blown, and I meant it. We know about Mackintosh, and there's no point in you denying you know him. We know all about that tricky little set-up, so you'd better get ready to tell the truth for a change.'
This time I really was jolted -- and badly. I felt as though I'd just grabbed a live wire and I hoped it didn't show on my face. For my cover to be blown could have meant any number of things; for Mackintosh's cover to be blown sky-high was bloody serious.
I said, 'For God's sake -- who is Mackintosh?'
'Very funny,' said Fatface acidly. He looked at his watch. 'I can see we'll have to take stronger measures but, unfortunately, I have an appointment and I don't have the time now. I'll give you two hours to think about those stronger measures; I can assure you they will be most unpleasant.'
Depressed as I was I nearly laughed in his face. He was acting like the villain in a 'B' picture. He had no appointment and the two hours were intended to break me down thinking of very imaginable tortures. And he wouldn't be away for two hours, either; he'd be back in an hour, or possibly three hours.
It was supposed to add to the uncertainty of the situation. Fatface was an amateur who seemed to get his ideas from watching TV. I think he was too soft-centred to get down to the torture bit and he was hoping I'd break down more-or-less spontaneously.
'All right,' I said. 'If you want me to cook up a story, then I'll cook up a story. It will take me two hours to think it up.'
'We don't want a story -- as you put it. We want the truth.'
'But you've got the truth, damn it!'
He merely shrugged and waved to the man behind me who took me upstairs again. The Reardens -- if that's who they were -- had vanished from the hall. It struck me that Fatface might very well have been bluffing about them. But he still knew about Mackintosh.
Once locked in the bedroom I got on with what I had to do.
I shaved quic
kly and put the shaver and the rest of the stuff into the pockets of the raincoat. I dressed and put on the tweed sports coat, grabbed my weighted sock and took up position behind the door, the end of the improvised cord held in my fingers.
It was a long wait and it seemed to be hours, but I had to stay there, exactly in that place, because in this thing timing was everything. I looked about the bedroom, checking to see that all was in order, and found it good. The bathroom door was ajar, but looked closed; the cord going around the room was invisible and wouldn't be noticed by the casual eye. All I had to do was to stay behind that door and wait.
Although it seemed a long time he was back on the hour -I'd been right in predicting that. I heard the murmur of voices on the other side of the door and tightened my fingers on the cord. As soon as I heard the key in the lock I began to pull, exerting a steady and growing pressure on the piston in the cistern.
As the door opened the cistern flushed noisily.
Fatface came into the room alone and cautiously, but relaxed visibly as he heard the noise from the bathroom. He took a step forward, pushing the door closed behind him, and I heard the key turn as the outside guard locked it. He took another step forward without looking behind him. He could easily have seen me by a half turn of his head but the thought never came to him. After all, wasn't I in the bathroom?
I wasn't! I hit him with the weighted sock very hard, much harder than I'd hit the postman in the Kiddykar office. He gasped and his knees buckled but he kept his feet and he twisted his head slightly so that I could see his mouth was open and he was gasping for air and struggling to shout. I knew the sock wasn't too efficient -- not like a proper sandbag -so I hit him even harder, and then again, pounding unconsciousness into his skull.
I caught him as he fell. I didn't want him thumping on the floor with a noise which might be heard outside. Even then, the repeated thud of the sock hitting his head had seemed to echo around the room and I 'paused for a moment, holding him in my arms, and waited to see if anything would happen.
Bagley, Desmond - The Freedom Trap Page 13