The Last Frontier (7 page)

'I do.'
'Then from what in the world -- ?'
'From fear, Mr. Reynolds,' Jansci interrupted. 'From an almost terror-stricken fear that has no parallel among governments of modern times.
'They are afraid because the ground lost in leadership is almost irrecoverable: Malenkov's concessions of 1953, Kruschev's famous de-Stalinisation speech of 1956 and his forced decentralisation of all industry were contrary to all the cherished ideas of Communist infallibility and centralised control, but they had to be done, in the interest of efficiency and production -- and the people have smelled Freedom. And they are afraid because their Secret Police has slipped and slipped badly: Beria is dead, the NKVD in Russia are not nearly so feared as the AVO in this country, so the belief in the power of authority, of the inevitability of punishment, has slipped also.
'These fears are of their own people. But these fears are nothing compared to their fears of the outside world. Just before he died, Stalin said, "What will happen without me? You are blind, as young kittens are blind, and Russia will be destroyed because you do not know how to recognise her enemies". Even Stalin couldn't have known how true his words would prove to be. They cannot recognise enemies, and they can only be safe, only feel safe, if all the peoples of the outside world are regarded as enemies. Especially the west. They fear the west and, from their own point of view, they fear with every reason.
'They are afraid of a western world that, they think, is unfriendly and hostile and just waiting its chance. How terrified would you be, Mr. Reynolds if you were ringed, as Russia is ringed, with nuclear bomb bases in England and Europe and North Africa and the Middle East and Japan? How much more terrified would you be if, every time the world tensions increase, fleets of foreign bombers appear mysteriously on the far edge of your long-distance radar screens, if you know, beyond any reasonable doubt, that whenever such tensions arise there are, at • any given moment of the day or night anywhere between 500 and 1,000 bombers of the American Strategic Air Command each with its hydrogen bomb, cruising high in the stratosphere, just waiting the signal to converge on Russia and destroy it. You have to have an awful lot of missiles, Mr. Reynolds, and an almost supernatural confidence in them to forget those thousand hydrogen bombers already airborne -- and it only requires five per cent of them to get through, as they inevitably would. Or how would you, in Britain, feel if Russia were pouring arms into Southern Ireland, or the Americans if a Russian aircraft carrier fleet armed with hydrogen bombs cruised indefinitely in the Gulf of Mexico? Try to imagine all that, Mr. Reynolds, and you can perhaps begin to imagine -- only begin, for the imagination can be only a shadow of the reality -- how the Russians feel.
'Nor does their fear stop there. They are afraid of people who try to interpret everything in the limited light of their own particular culture, who believe that all people, the world over, are basically the same. A common assumption, and a stupid and dangerous one. The cleavage between western and Slavonic minds and ways of thinking, the differences between their culture patterns are immense, and alas, unrealised.
'Finally, but perhaps above all, they are afraid of the penetration of western ideas into their own country. And that is why the satellite countries are so invaluable to them as a cordon sanitaire, an insulation against dangerous capitalist influences. And that's why revolt in one of their satellites, as in this country two years last October, brings out all that is worst in the Russian leaders. They reacted with such incredible violence because they saw in this Budapest rising the culmination, the fulfilment at one and the same time of their three nightmare fears -- that their entire satellite empire might go up in smoke and the cordon sanitaire vanish for ever, that even a degree of success could have touched off a similar revolt in Russia and, most terrible of all, that a large-scale conflagration from the Baltic to the Black Sea would have given the Americans all the excuse or reason they ever needed to give the green light to the Strategic Air Command and the carriers of the Sixth Fleet. I know, you know, that idea's fantastic, but we are not dealing with facts, only with what the Russian leaders believe to be facts.'
Jansci drained his glass and looked quizzically at Reynolds. 'You begin to see now, I hope, why I was neither advocate of nor participant in the October rising. You begin to see, perhaps, why the revolt just had to be crushed, and the bigger and more serious the revolt the more terrible would have to be the repression, to preserve the cordon, to discourage other satellites or any of their own people who might be having similar ideas. You begin to see the hopelessness -- the foredoomed hopelessness -- of it, the disastrously ill-judged futility of it all. The only effect it had was to strengthen Russia's position among the other satellites, kill and maim countless thousands of Hungarians, destroy and damage over 20,000 houses, bring inflation, a serious shortage of food and an almost mortal blow to the country's economy. It should never have happened. Only, as I say, the anger of despair is always blind: noble anger can be a magnificent thing, but annihilation has its -- ah -- drawbacks.'
Reynolds said nothing: for the moment he could think of nothing to say. A long silence fell on the room, long but not. cold any more: the only sound was the scuffling of Reynolds' shoes as he tied his laces -- he had been dressing as Jansci talked. Finally Jansci rose, switched out the light, drew back the curtain of the solitary window, peered out, then switched on the light again. It meant nothing, Reynolds could see, it was purely an automatic gesture, the routine precaution of a man who had lived as long as he had by never neglecting the slightest precaution. Reynolds replaced his papers in his wallet and the gun in its shoulder holster.
A tap came on the door, and Julia came in. Her face was flushed from the warmth of a stove, and she carried a tray holding a bowl of soup, a steaming plate of diced meat and diced vegetables and a bottle of wine. She laid this on the desk.
'Here you are, Mr. Reynolds. Two of our national dishes -- Gulyds soup and tokdny. I'm afraid there may be too much paprika in the soup and garlic in the tokdny for your taste, but that's how we like it.' She smiled apologetically. 'Leftovers -- all I could produce in a hurry at this time of night.'
'Smells wonderful,' Reynolds assured her. 'I'm only sorry to be such a bother to you in the middle of the night.'
'I'm used to it,' she said dryly. 'Usually there's half a dozen to be fed, generally about four o'clock in the morning. Father's guests keep irregular hours.'
'They do indeed,' Jansci smiled. 'Now off to bed with you, my dear: it's very late.'
'I'd like to stay a little, Jansci.'
'I don't doubt it.' Jansci's faded grey eyes twinkled. 'Compared to our average guest, Mr. Reynolds is positively handsome. With a wash, brush-up and shave he might be almost presentable.'
'You know that's not fair, Father.' She stood her ground well, Reynolds thought, but the colour had deepened in her cheeks. 'You shouldn't say that.'
'It's not fair, and I shouldn't,' Jansci said. He looked at Reynolds. 'Julia's dream world lies west of the Austrian frontier, and she'd listen for hours to anyone talking about it. But there are some things she must not know, things that it would be dangerous for her even to guess about. Off you go, my dear.'
'Very well.' She rose obediently, if reluctantly, kissed Jansci on the cheek, smiled at Reynolds and left. Reynolds looked over at Jansci as the older man reached for the second bottle of wine and broke open the seal.
'Aren't you worried to death about her all the time?'
'God knows it,' Jansci said simply. 'This is no life for her, or for any girl, and if I get caught she goes too, almost for a certainty.'
'Can't you get her away?'
'You want to try it! I could get her across the frontier tomorrow without the slightest difficulty or danger -- you know that that is my speciality -- but she won't go. An obedient, respectful daughter as you have seen -- but only up to a self-drawn line. After that, she is as stubborn as a mule. She knows the risks, but she stays. She says she'll never leave till we find her mother and they go together. But even then -- '
He broke off suddenly as the door opened and a stranger walked in. Reynolds, twisting round and out of his seat like a cat, had his automatic out and lined up on the man before he had taken a step into the room, the snick of the safety catch plain above the scraping of the chair legs on the linoleum. He stared at the man unwinkingly, taking in every detail of the face, the smooth, dark hair brushed straight back, the lean eagle face, with the thin pinched nostrils and high forehead of a type he knew well -- the unmistakable Polish aristocrat. Then he started as Jansci reached out gently and pressed down the barrel of the automatic.
'Szendro was right about you,' he murmured thoughtfully. 'Dangerous, very dangerous -- you move like a snake when it strikes. But this man is a friend, a good friend. Mr. Reynolds, meet the Count.'
Reynolds put the gun away, crossed the room and extended his hand. 'Delighted,' he murmured. 'Count who?'
'Just the Count,' the newcomer said, and Reynolds stared at him again. The voice was unmistakable. 'Colonel Szendro!'
'No other,' the Count admitted, and with these words his voice had changed as subtly, but as completely, as his appearance. 'I say modestly, but with truth, I have few equals in the matter of disguise and mimicry. What you now see before you, Mr. Reynolds, is me -- more or less. Then a scar here, a scar there, and that is how the AVO see me. You will understand, perhaps, why I was not unduly worried about being recognised Tonight?'
Reynolds nodded slowly. 'I do indeed. And -- and you live here -- with Jansci? Isn't that rather dangerous?'
'I live in the second best hotel in all Budapest,' the Count assured him. 'As befits a man of my rank, naturally. But as a bachelor, I must, of course, have my -- ah -- diversions, shall we say. My occasional absences call for no comment...
'Not at all,' Jansci assured him. 'Mr. Reynolds and I have had the most interesting discussion.'
'About the Russians, inevitably?'
'Inevitably.'
'And Mr. Reynolds was all for conversion by annihilation?'
'More or less." Jansci smiled. 'It's not so long since you felt the same way yourself.'
'Age comes to us all.' The Count crossed to a wall-cabinet, drew out a dark bottle, poured himself a half-tumblerful of liquid and looked at Reynolds. 'Barack -- apricot brandy, you would call it. Deadly. Avoid it like the plague. Home-made.' As Reynolds watched in astonishment, he drank the contents without stopping, then refilled the glass. 'You have not yet come to the business of the day?'
'I'm coming to it now.' Reynolds pushed back his plate, drank some more wine. 'You gentlemen have heard, perhaps, of Dr. Harold Jennings?'
Jansci's eyes narrowed. 'We have indeed. Who hasn't?.
'Exactly. Then you know what he's like -- an elderly dodderer well over seventy, short-sighted, amiable, a typically absent-minded professor in every respect but one. He has a brain like an electronic computer and is the world's greatest expert and authority on the higher mathematics of ballistics and ballistic missiles.'
'Which was why he was induced to defect to the Russians,' the Count murmured.
'He didn't,' Reynolds said flatly. 'The world thinks he did, but the world is wrong.'
'You are sure of this?' Jansci was leaning far forward in his seat.
'Certainly. Listen. At the time of the defection of other British scientists, old Jennings spoke out strongly, if unwisely, in their defence. He bitterly condemned what he called outworn nationalism, and said that any man had the right to act according to the dictates of his mind, conscience and ideals. Almost immediately, as we expected, he was contacted by the Russians. He rebuffed them, told them to get the hell back to Moscow and said he fancied their brand of nationalism a damn' sight less than his own: he had only been talking generally, he said.'
'How can you be sure of this?'
'We are sure -- we had a tape recording of the entire conversation -- we had the whole house wired. But we never made public the recording, and, after he had gone over to the Russians, it would have been too late -- nobody would have believed us.'
'Obviously,' Jansci murmured. 'And then, also obviously, you called off the watchdogs?'
'We did,' Reynolds admitted. 'It would have made no difference anyway -- we were watching the wrong party. Less than two months after the old boy's interview with the Russian agents, Mrs. Jennings and her sixteen-year-old schoolboy son, Brian -- the professor married late in life -- went to Switzerland for a holiday. Jennings was to have gone with them, but was held up by some important business at the last minute, so he let them go on alone, intending to rejoin them in two or three days in their Zurich hotel. He found his wife and son gone.'
'Abducted, of course,' Jansci said slowly. 'And the Swiss-Austrian frontier is no barrier to determined men; but more likely, perhaps, by boat, at night.'
'That's what we thought," Reynolds nodded. 'Lake Constance. Anyway, What's certain is that Jennings was contacted within minutes of arriving at the hotel, told what had happened, and left in no doubt as to what lay in store for his wife and son if he didn't immediately follow them behind the iron curtain. Jennings may be an old dodderer, but he's not an old fool: he knew these people weren't kidding, so he went at once.'
'And now, of course, you want him bade?'
'We want him back. That's why I'm here.'
Jansci smiled faintly. 'It will be interesting to learn just how you propose to rescue him, Mr. Reynolds, and, of course, his wife and son, for without them you achieve nothing. Three people, Mr. Reynolds, an old man, a woman and a boy, a thousand miles to Moscow, and the snow lies deep upon the steppes.'
'Not three people, Jansci: just one -- the professor. And I don't have to go to Moscow for him. He's not two miles from where we're sitting now, right here in Budapest.'
Jansci made no effort to conceal his astonishment.
"Here? You're sure of that, Mr. Reynolds?'
'Colonel Mackintosh was.'
'Then Jennings must be here, he must be.' Jansci twisted in his seat and looked at the Count. 'Had you heard of this?'
'Not a word. Nobody in our office knows of it, 111 swear to that.'