“Mr. Sanderson?” Durell asked.
“Quite,” said the little bald man. “Come on down, old boy. Forgive us, but we really do have to be careful around here. Shake a leg, eh?”
36
“DURELL?”
He was flying.
“Can you hear me, Durell?”
He could feel the vibration of the aircraft. He had the worst headache he had ever experienced. His mouth and tongue felt numb. He was paralyzed. He could move neither arms nor legs. Somehow, he felt a great satisfaction in this.
“You can play doggo all you like, Durell. It will do you no good. You will answer all our questions. You will cooperate, and gladly. Do you understand?”
Durell slid backward into silky blackness.
For how long?
“Mr. Durell, surely you can hear me now.”
He opened his eyes. He was blind.
“The possum is a strange little beast, Durell. He plays deaf, dumb and blind until he is killed. Is that plain enough?”
Durell opened his mouth, closed it, took a deep breath. His ribs ached. He wondered if any were broken. He heard a thundering in his ears, and thought it was his heart, and then, listening carefully, with cunning, he thought it might be the crash of surf on rock. The problem with orienting himself was that he could not tell which end was up, literally, and he seemed to float on the surges of sea sound all around him. He was also very cold. He shuddered regularly, almost an echo of the crash of the sea. He raised an arm and put a hand on his chest. He was naked.
“Ah,” the voice said. “Very good. Very good, indeed. You hear me, then.”
The voice was not natural. It came with an electronic timbre, a mechanized reconstruction. He opened his eyes. He was still blind. He shivered. Something cold and very rough grated against his backside and shoulders. He was lying on a stone floor. Very good. So far, so very good. He was here, where he wanted to be.
“Durell, are you hungry?”
He spoke. “No.” It was a ghastly croaking sound.
“Thirsty?”
“Are you Dr. MacLeod?” Durell asked.
“Are you cold?”
“Go to hell.”
His voice bounced back and forth in echoes off stone walls.
Someone laughed softly at him.
At one time or another—a long time passed, and he estimated it was many hours—someone came near him out of the darkness and pushed a needle into his arm before he could object. Then they threw what seemed to be clothes at him, and left. He heard the clang of an iron door and the slam of a heavy bolt, and footsteps walked away, heels thudding on a stone floor.
He yelled aloud.
“Hey!”
His voice echoed. There was no answer.
“Hey, Dr. MacLeod!”
For a long time, he simply listened to the slow, steady thud of his heart and the synchronized beat of surf against rocks. He felt something move in his veins, circulating through his body. Pain went away. He felt sleepy. He fought against the drowsiness, the feeling of well-being. He guessed they had given him some kind of tranquilizer, a powerful shot that threatened to suck him down into placid depths.
“Hey!” he yelled again.
“Yes?”
“I want to make a deal,” he said.
“For what?”
“Information. I can give you what you want to know.”
“Do you think us so naive, Mr. Durell?”
“Listen,” Durell said. He had trouble breathing. “Do you think I came here unwillingly? I flew to London alone, right? Nobody knows where I am now. I don’t even know where I am myself. I walked into Stone Circle deliberately. I’m glad you weren’t hasty. I’m glad you waited to talk to me, before killing me. We can make a deal, all right.”
“I doubt that. Go to sleep, Mr. Durell.”
There was a click, and then silence. Durell tried to stay awake. He grew panicky, because he could see nothing at all; the darkness was absolute; he opened his eyes, shut them, squeezed them, rubbed them. Nothing worked. Then, through a dreaminess and tranquility that slid over him, he began to make out a glimmer of gray. He could not understand it. He waited, looking upward. He put on the clothes-slacks and a heavy woolen shirt. Some of the shivering eased, but the stone floor was like a tomb. He told himself to be patient. Things were getting better.
Finally, the grayness became daylight, a small square of light high in one wall, and he knew he had not been blinded, that the cell in which he was a prisoner had simply been totally without light during the night. He felt a cold, wet wind pour through the square little window. He got to his hands and knees and crawled toward it. It took a great effort. He wanted only to sleep. His arms and legs felt rubbery, but his heart was beating with great, erratic poundings in his chest. Slowly, very painfully, he got to his knees and then to his feet. The little stone cell swayed, the floor heaved, he fell down. He climbed up again, reached for the stone ledge under the window. He could not reach it. It was too high up in the wall. He wondered why there was no direct sunlight. Then he guessed that the window faced west, and it was morning, and the sun was shining on the other side of the building, whatever it was, wherever it was.
The window was not the only thing beyond reach. High on the opposite corner was a small television camera. The thing must have been operated by heat sensors, or someone on duty at remote controls. Wherever he moved, the eye of the TV camera followed him, from one corner of the cell to another. Just next to the bracket that held the camera was another, which supported a small speaker and what looked like an infrared light. The voice that had spoken to him must have come from there, although someone had actually come into the cell to give him the shirt and pants and the injection in his arm.
All at once, Durell fell asleep.
When he awoke, he saw a slant of pale-yellow sunlight almost horizontally probing the cell. The tranquilizer, whatever it was, had kept him out for most of the day. The sun was setting now in the west. It looked quite weak. The cell was still cold, smelling of the sea, of moss. They had put a bucket of water in one corner of the cell, and he used it, and then saw that the rusty iron door to the cell had a smaller door set into it, at floor level, and they had shoved in a tray containing a bowl of oatmeal, a plastic jug of milk, another plastic bottle of water, some sugar in a cone of paper, a plastic spoon, and a slice of darkish bread. The oatmeal was cold, but he ate hungrily, ignoring the television eye that implacably swung to observe him.
He took the food as a hopeful sign. They didn’t intend to kill him just yet.
37
DURELL’s hours settled into a routine that alternated between light and darkness. Before the light faded for the first time, he tried to jump for the high window ledge. His fingers clawed the rough stone, came four or five inches short of his goal. He tried again and again, but each succeeding jump was weaker. He couldn’t make it. At last he settled down, exhausted, and studied the cell. He judged it to be about eight feet wide and about twelve feet long. There was no cot or pallet to sleep on, and he had to settle for the hard stone floor. The floors were old, worn smooth by countless feet in an area near the iron doorway. The door was hinged on the outside and presented only a smooth barrier to his inspection. He tried to peer through a chink where the lock was situated, but his eye was greeted only by darkness. Nothing to see. The stones of the floor and walls were very old, and moss grew around the base of the window wall.
The television eye followed his every move.
He was awakened in the morning by the rattle of bolts and bars, and moved back from the doorway to his cell. He felt stiff and cold; he ached all over from sleeping on the hard floor.
Two men in gray jumpsuits came in. They wore unicorn medallions. One was armed with an automatic rifle; the other carried out his bucket and came back with a fresh one. Then he went out again and returned with
another tray of oatmeal, sugar, the plastic jug of milk.
Exactly what he had been fed the evening b
efore.
“Listen,” he said to the man with the gun, “how long am I supposed to stay here?”
There was no answer.
“Why don’t you tell Dr. MacLeod that I came here to see him?”
“He sees you,” the guard grunted.
“I want to talk to him.”
“Well, you can‘t.”
Durell moved toward the man. “Look, I’d like some shoes. I’d like a bed to sleep on. And you can tell me where we are, can’t you?”
“Stand back in the corner,” the guard said.
Durell looked at the gun and the man’s strangely blank face and did as he was told.
During the day, he tried jumping for the window again. This time he came perhaps an inch higher and closer to the ledge. The sea sounds were monotonous, a crashing on rocks below. There was no sunlight this time; the day was obviously cloudy. And it was colder. He did not receive shoes or a cot. By evening, he felt somewhat disoriented.
He was fed oatmeal again.
When he tried for the window once more, his fingertips just barely reached the top of the ledge. He almost was able to hang on. He jumped four more times, until he lost his balance and fell rather heavily on his side, turning his ankle. While he lay on the hard, cold floor, panting, the guards came in, and while the one with the gun covered him, the other gave him an injection.
“What’s that for?” Durell yelled at the TV camera.
“It is a simple sedative,” came from the loudspeaker.
“Are you Dr. MacLeod?” he asked.
“You will sleep easier with the injection. How do you feel, Mr. Durell?”
“Awful.”
“Did you expect anything better?”
“I expected to be able to talk to someone of reasonable intelligence,” Durell said. He pulled himself back into a corner, facing the TV eye high in the opposite corner. “You ought to know by now that I’m here of my own choice, really. I went to Sanderson’s place at Stone Circle deliberately, hoping to contact you. Otherwise, why should I have gone there alone? I could have come with a small army of police and taken your Mr. Sanderson then and there. Think about that, Dr. MacLeod. Haven’t you checked back on my movements since I flew to London?”
“Yes. You are very clever, Mr. Durell.”
“So let‘s talk about it,” Durell said.
“Are you claiming to be a detector? From K Section?”
“I want to make a deal.”
“At the moment,” the voice said from the speaker, “you have nothing to offer.”
Oatmeal, darkness, sunlight, oatmeal.
By the fourth day, Durell was no longer sure how long he had been here. He knew all about the techniques of disorientation. It was a common enough procedure with the KGB in Russia and was often used as an interrogative technique. But even though he knew what was happening, he also knew it was working. It seemed to him that the hours of daylight were excessively short, the nights excessively long. He had to assume he was somewhere in high northern latitudes, since Dr. Alexander MacLeod had been presumed to be in Scotland somewhere. He remembered vaguely the sensation of being in a plane, shortly after he had been taken at Stone Circle near Tower Rising. Yes, they had flown him north. It explained the cold, the shortness of the daylight hours at this time of the year.
He turned to the small square window again, backed far off to the opposite end of the stone cell, ran forward, and jumped. This time his reaching hands caught the high ledge, clung there, shot upward and caught one of the rusted bars. He drew himself upward, inch by inch. His body shook and trembled. With a grip on the bars, he was able to raise his legs, flex his knees, press his toes against the cold stone. His head came above the ledge.
He glimpsed gray sky, a sheet of gray ocean, a low-lying island or point of land with a small stone tower on it. His shoulders began to scream in pain from the effort of clinging there. He could not get up high enough to see directly down. To the right was an inlet, and high combers crashed against a ragged beach. Sea birds nested and clustered there. Duck, and gray geese, whooper swans and small waders. He thought he saw a single skua slanting on the wind against the ominous sky. Inland from the shore was a series of stone fences bordering fields, a few shaggy cattle. No houses. Far on the horizon, a steamer that looked rather like a ferry made its way from right to left. Heading south.
His muscles screamed. He fell back to the floor, exhausted, drenched in sudden sweat. His heart pounded. He drew up his knees and rested his forehead on them.
“Very good, Mr. Durell,” came the speaker’s voice.
He no longer counted the days. He ate his oatmeal, used the bucket, exercised by walking back and forth in the cell, did yoga, deep breathing. He did not mind sleeping on the cold stone floor now. A light snow tell one day. He sat cross-legged and meditated. Now and then he leaped for the window ledge and clung there, looking out at the sky, the sea, the tiny strip of coast across the inlet of water. It was easy to reach the window now. He could hold on for a long time, as long as he cared to, and his muscles no longer quaked and screamed in agony.
Nothing changed much in the scene outside. Once he spotted a small fishing boat leaving the inlet and turning north, and another time he thought he saw a man and a woman walking in the dry, sere fields across the water, along one of the stone fences.
“Mr. Durell," the voice said.
Waking, he thought there was a deep satisfaction in the way he was addressed. It was just dawn, and very cold in the cell. Ice rimmed the stone walls.
“Mr. Durell?” the voice asked again. The camera swung, seeking him out. It was growing dark in the cell. “Are you ready to have dinner with me?”
“If it isn’t oatmeal,” Durell said.
“Here is your invitation.”
The slot in the door opened and closed before he was aware of it. Something rolled slowly over the floor, glinting, paused, wobbled, and settled down on the stone with a pleasant ringing sound. The camera watched him. He lifted on his haunches and picked it up.
It was a gold coin. A unicorn. Not the facsimile he had seen around the necks of the unicorn assassins. It was the real thing, very old, worn, its diameter irregular, but heavy, smooth under his fingers. He rubbed his thumb over the faint tracing of a unicorn rampant over a shield, turned it over, and saw a star on the reverse side.
“Recognize it?” asked the speaker.
“Yes,” said Durell. “Is Mr. Sanderson here?”
“Mr. Sanderson was useful to us only to make the identification copies our people wear. Mr. Sanderson of Tower Rising has been packed off happily to the Continent for a long holiday. You may ignore him henceforth. He has served our purpose and yours, too, we suspect.”
“Is that an editorial or royal ‘we’?” Durell asked.
“Or is there more than one of you?”
The silence was held just a fraction of a moment too long. Durell thought he ought to cover it, and suddenly yelled, “You son of a bitch, you’ve kept me here maybe a week, maybe longer, I don’t know or care anymore, but I’m tired of it, you hear? I came in good faith, to offer my services, and you’ve kept me in this cell like a pig, watching every move I make. I’m sick of it, understand? I won’t be toyed with any more for your remote amusement. You think I care about your goddam coins?” He seized the gold unicorn and suddenly swung his arm and hurled it at the high, barred window over his head. It sailed through and out and was gone in the gray sky beyond, twinkling for a moment before it vanished. Then, on his feet, he swept up the slop bucket and hurled it at the TV camera positioned in the opposite corner of the cell. His aim was accurate. The bucket and its contents smashed satisfactorily against the camera on its bracket, spilling, cracking metal, ripping the adjacent speaker and light from the ceiling. The camera was knocked askew. The speaker wires sparked for a moment, then went dead. Everything dripped.
Durell stared at the mess and laughed.
38
THE PATH led up across the barren crest of a
hill. There was a rime of ice and a thin dusting of snow on the rough ground. There were no trees anywhere in sight. Across the low dip was another tower, this one round and obviously a prehistoric structure. Durell recognized it as a broch, dating back to beyond the first invasions of Harold Fairhair. Then the guards turned him to the left, not gently, onto another path, leading around the hill. The sea was abruptly cut off from sight. A small lake reflected the last glimmer of steely light from the sky. Near the lake, on this side of it, was a long stone house, squatting close to the ground, with a thatched roof. Other farm buildings were scattered nearby. They all seemed to have been recently reconditioned.
“Inside,” the guard grunted.
Durell stumbled across the threshold, knocked his head on the low door frame, blinked at the light.
“Sit down,” someone said.
Dr. Alexander MacLeod was the man he had seen in the shooting jacket—a round, jolly-looking man, bald as an onion, with a hearty paunch covered by a red-checked waistcoat that may or may not have been in a clan tartan. He sat at one end of a long plank table in the light of electric sconces fastened to the white-plastered wall. He had already finished a dinner of duck and trout, to judge from the plates, but at the other end of the table, well away from him, was a place set for Durell.
The inevitable oatmeal.
“If you don’t mind,” MacLeod said, “please sit at some distance from me. Your term in the cell has made you—ah—rather uncleanly and—ah—odorous.”
“Do I have to eat more oatmeal?”
“Yes, you do.”
“I detest porridge,” Durell said.
“So do I. I was brought up on it. Do sit down, please. Incidentally, the camera you destroyed cost well over three thousand pounds. If we come to any arrangement, the amount will be deducted from whatever figure we arrive at."
“Spoken like a true Scot,” Durell said.
“Every ickle makes a mickle,” MacLeod said. “Will you sit down, or must you be forced to do so?”
Durell sat. The two men in jumpsuits who had escorted him from the abbey tower stood against the wall, one on either side of him.
Assignment Unicorn Page 14