The trade and staff entrance to the hotel lay through a deep archway in the middle of the wall, wide enough and high enough to take a big delivery truck. Through the archway Reynolds caught a glimpse of the snow-covered courtyard beyond — the hotel was built in the form of a hollow square — an entrance door at the far side, opposite the main doors, and one or two parked cars. Above the entrance door to the main block, a hooded electric lantern burned brightly and light shone from several of the ground and first-floor windows. The total illumination was not much, but enough to let him see the angular shapes of three fire-escapes zig-zagging upwards before being lost in the snow and the darkness.
Reynolds walked to the corner, glanced quickly round him, crossed the street at a fast walk and made his way back towards the entrance, hugging the hotel wall as closely as he could. • Approaching the opening of the archway, he slowed down, stopped, pulled the brim of his hat farther over his eyes, and peered cautiously round the corner.
For the first moment he could see nothing, for his eyes, so long accustomed and adjusted to the darkness, were momentarily dazzled, blinded by the beam from a powerful torch, and in that sickening instant he was certain he had been discovered. His hand was just coming out of his pocket, the butt of the automatic cradled in his hand, when the beam left him and went round the inside of the courtyard.
The pupils of his eyes slowly widening again, Reynolds could see now what had happened. A man, a soldier armed with a shoulder-slung carbine, was making his rounds of the perimeter of the courtyard, and the carelessly swinging torch light had illuminated Reynolds’ face for an instant, but the guard, his eyes obviously not following the beam, had missed it.
Reynolds turned into the archway, took three silent paces forward and stopped again. The guard was going away from him now, approaching the main block, and Reynolds could clearly see what he was doing. He was making a round of the fire-escapes shining his light on the bottom, snow-covered flight of steps of each. Reynolds wondered ironically whether he was guarding against the possibility of outsiders going in — or insiders going out. Probably the latter — from what the Count had told him, he knew that quite a few of the guests at this forthcoming conference would willingly have passed it up in exchange for an exit visa to the west. A rather stupid precaution, Reynolds thought, especially when it was made so obvious: any reasonably fit person, forewarned by the probing torch, could go up or down the first flight of a fire-escape without his feet making any telltale tracks on the steps.
Now, Reynolds decided, now’s my chance. The guard, passing under the electric storm lantern at the far entrance, was at his maximum distance, and there was no point in waiting until he had made another circuit. Soundlessly, a shadowy ghost in the white gloom of the night, Reynolds flitted across the cobble stones of the archway, barely checked an exclamation, halted abruptly in mid-step and shrank into the wall beside him, legs, body, arms and widespread, stiff-fingered hands pressing hard against the cold, clammy stone of the wall behind, the brim of his hat crushed flat between the side of his head and the archway. His heart was thumping slowly, painfully in his chest.
You fool, Reynolds, he told himself savagely, you bloody kindergarten idiot. You almost fell for it, but for the grace of God and the red arc of that carelessly flung cigarette now sizzling to extinction in the snow not two feet from where you stood, rock-still, not even daring to breath, you would have fallen for it. He should have known, he should have done the intelligence of the AVO the elementary courtesy of guessing that they wouldn’t make things so childishly simple for anyone hoping to break in or out.
The sentry-box just inside the courtyard stood only a few inches back from the archway, and the sentry himself, half in, half out of the box, his shoulders leaning against the corners both of the box and the archway, was less than thirty inches from where Reynolds stood. Reynolds could hear him breathing, slowly, distinctly and the occasional shuffling of his feet on the wooden floor of the box was almost thunderous in his ears.
He had barely seconds left, Reynolds knew, half a dozen at the most. The sentry had only to stir, to turn his head a couple of lazy inches to the left and he was lost. Even if he didn’t so stir, his companion, now only yards away, would be bound to catch him in the sweep of his torch as he came by the entrance. Three courses, Reynolds’ racing mind calculated, three courses only lay open to him. He could turn and run, and stood a good chance of escape in the snow and the darkness, but the guard would be then so strengthened that his last chance of seeing old Jennings would have gone for ever. He could kill both men — he never questioned his own ability to do this, and would have destroyed them ruthlessly if the necessity were there — but the problem of the disposal of the bodies would be insuperable, and if the hue and cry over their discovery were raised while he was still inside the Three Crowns he knew he would never come out alive. There was only the third way that offered any chance .of success, and there was time neither for further thought nor delay.
The automatic was out now, the butt firmly clasped in both hands, the back of his right wrist pressed hard against the archway wall for maximum steadiness. The bulk of the silencer made sighting difficult, the swirling snow made it doubly so, but the chance had to be taken. The soldier with the torch was perhaps ten feet away, the guard in the box clearing his throat to make some remark to his companion When Reynolds slowly squeezed the trigger.
The soft ‘plop’ of the silencer muffling the escaping gases was lost in the sudden crash as the storm lantern above the entrance door shattered into a hundred pieces, the broken fragments tinkling against the wall behind before falling into the cushioning silence of the snow. To the ears of the man at the sentry-box, the dull report of the silencer must have come a fraction of a second before the smashing of the glass, but the human ear is incapable of making such fine distinctions in time and only the vastly louder sound could have registered. Already he was pounding across the courtyard towards the far entrance, the man with the torch close by his side, Reynolds wasn’t far behind them. He passed the sentry-box, turned sharply right, ran lightly along the track the circling sentry had beaten in the virgin snow, passed the first fire-escape, turned, launched himself sideways and upwards and caught the stanchion supporting the hand-rail on the first platform at the full extent of his arms. For one bad moment he felt his fingers slipping on the cold, smooth steel, tightened his grip desperately, held, then overhanded himself upwards till he caught the rail. A moment later he was standing securely on the first platform, and neither the snow round the three outer edges of the platform nor that on any of the steps leading up to it showed any signs of having been disturbed.
Five seconds later, taking two steps at a time with his feet, each time, placed sideways in the middle of each step so as to leave no visible trace from below, he had reached the second platform, on a level now with the first floor. Here he crouched, kneeling so as to reduce his bulk to the smallest dimensions possible, for the two soldiers were returning to the archway, in no great hurry, talking to one another. They were convinced, Reynolds could hear, that the hot glass had shattered because of the extreme cold, and not disposed to worry unduly about it. Reynolds felt no surprise: the spent bullet deflected by these granite-hard walls would leave scarcely a mark, and it might lie undisturbed, undiscovered for days under the thick carpet of snow. In their position, he would probably have come to the same conclusion himself. For form’s sake, the two men walked round the parked cars and shone their torches over the lower flights of the fire-escapes, and by the time their cursory inspection was over, Reynolds was on the platform level with the second floor, standing outside a set of double glass doors.
He tried them, cautiously, firmly. They were locked. He had expected nothing else. Slowly, with the utmost care — for his hands were now almost numbed with the cold and the slightest fumble could be his undoing — he had brought out his knife, eased the blade open without a click, slid it into the crack between the doors and pressed upwards. Seconds later he was inside looking the glass doors behind him.