Reynolds, lurching and staggering down the wildly swaying length of a coach corridor, shared none of the engine driver’s obvious confidence, not in the safety of the train, which was the least of Reynolds’ worries, but in his own capacity to carry out the task that lay ahead of him. When he had broached the plan first of all to the others, it had been with the memory in his mind of a soft starlit summer’s night and a train puffing gently along between the wooded hills of the Vosges: now, just ten minutes after he and Jansci had bought their tickets and boarded the train at Szekszard without let or hindrance, what he had to do, What he must do, assumed the proportions of a nightmare impossibility.
What he had to do was simply enough stated. He had to free the professor, and to free the professor he had to separate the convict coach from the rest of the train, and this could only be done by stopping the train and easing the tension on the coupling securing the convict’s coach to the guard’s van. One way or another he had to reach the locomotive, which, at the moment, seemed impossibility enough, and then prevail upon the footplate crew to bring their engine to a halt when and where he told them. ‘Prevail’ was right, Reynolds thought grimly. Perhaps he could persuade them, if they were half-way friendly. Perhaps he could frighten them, but what was certain enough was that he couldn’t force them. All they would have to do was to refuse to obey, and he would have been helpless. The control cabin of a locomotive was a complete mystery to him, and not even for the professor could he shoot or knock out engineer and fireman and place hundreds of innocent passengers in danger of death or disfigurement. Even as he thought of these things, Reynolds could almost feel the physical sensation of cold, dull despair flooding into his mind, and he thrust these thoughts ruthlessly aside. One evil at a time. First of all, he had to get there.
He was rounding the corner of the coach, supported only by the one hand that clung to the window-bar — his other was deep in his coat pocket supporting the weight of, and concealing, the suspicious bulge by the heavy hammer and torch there — when he bumped into Jansci. The older man muttered an apology, glanced at him briefly and without recognition, stepped forward till he could see the entire length of the corridor from which Reynolds had just emerged, stepped back, opened the door of the adjacent toilet to check that it was empty, then spoke softly.
‘Well?’
‘Not so well. They’re on to me already.*
‘They?’
‘Two men. Civilian clothes, belted trench-coats, no hats. They followed me up front and back again. Discreetly. If I hadn’t been looking for it, I wouldn’t have noticed it.’
‘Stand out in the corridor. Let me know — ‘
‘They’re coming now,’ Reynolds murmured.
He glanced briefly at the two men lurching towards him as Jansci slid quietly inside the toilet pulling the door till only a tiny crack was left. The man in the lead, a tall man with a dead-white face and black eyes, looked at Reynolds incuriously as he passed, but the other ignored him completely.
‘They’re on to you, all right.’ Jansci had waited till they were out of sight. ‘Worse still, they know you’re on to them. We should have remembered that every train in and out of Budapest is being watched for the duration of this conference.’
‘Know them?’
‘I’m afraid so. That man with the pale face is AVO — one of Hidas’ hatchet-men. As dangerous as a snake. I don’t know the other.’
‘But it’s an obvious assumption that he’s AVO also. Surely the Szarhaza — ‘
‘They don’t know about that yet. They can’t. But your description has been out for a couple of days to every AVO man in Hungary.’
That’s it.’ Reynolds nodded slowly. ‘Of course. . . . How are things with you?’
‘Three soldiers in the guard’s van — there’ll be no one in the wagon behind — they never travel in the same wagons as the prisoners. They’re sitting with the guard round a red-hot wood stove, and there’s a wine bottle circulating.’
‘Will you manage?’
‘I think so. But how — ‘
‘Get back!* Reynolds hissed.
He was leaning against the window, both hands in his pockets, and gazing down at the ground when the same two men returned. He glanced up indifferently, raised an eyebrow fractionally as he saw who it was, glanced down again and then sideways as he watched them stagger up the length of the corridor and then out of sight.
‘Psychological warfare,’ Jansci murmured. ‘A problem.’
‘And not the only one. I can’t get into the first three coaches.’
Jansci glanced sharply at him, but said nothing.
‘The military,’ Reynolds explained. ‘The third carriage from the front is a mid-aisle coach, and full of troops. An officer turned me back. Anyway, it’s no good: I tried an outside door handle when I turned my back to him, and it was locked.’
‘From the outside,’ Jansci nodded. ‘Conscripts, and the army is trying to discourage a premature return to civilian life. Any hope at all, Meechail? Communication cords?’
‘Not one in the whole length of the train. I’ll manage — I’ve damn well got to. You have a seat?’
‘Second last carriage.’
‘I’ll give you the tip off ten minutes beforehand. I’d better go. They’ll be back any second.’
‘Right. Bataszek in five minutes. Remember, if the train stops there it means that Hidas has guessed and got through to them. Jump out of the blind side and run for it.’
‘They’re coming,’ Reynolds murmured. He levered himself off the window and walked forward, passing the two men. This time both men looked at him with expressionless eyes and Reynolds wondered how much more time they would allow to elapse before making their pounce. He lurched forward the length of another two coaches, went into the toilet at the end of the fourth coach, hid his hammer and torch in the tiny triangular cupboard that supported the cracked tin washbasin, transferred his gun to his right pocket and closed his hand round it before moving out to the corridor. It wasn’t his own Belgian pistol, which had been taken from him, it was the Count’s, it had no silencer on it and it was the last thing he wanted to use. But, to live, he might be compelled to use it: it all depended on the two men who were shadowing his every movement.
They were running through the outskirts of Bataszek now and Reynolds realised, all at once, that their speed had slackened perceptibly, and even as the realisation came he had to brace himself from sliding forwards as the air brakes came on. He could feel the curious tingling in the finger-tips of the hand that held the gun. He left the toilet, moved into the middle of the passage between the two opposite doors — -he had no idea on Which side the station platform was going to be — made sure that the safety-catch was off his gun, and waited tensely, his heart hammering heavily, slowly in his chest. They were still slowing down, he had to steady himself as the train battered violently across a set of points, then, so suddenly that the change of motion caught him off balance, the air brakes hissed off, the locomotive’s whistle shrilled once, briefly, as the train started to accelerate again, and Bataszek station was only a confused memory of a flickering row of palely-blurred lights lost in the moment of seeing in this greyish-white curtain of driving snow.
Reynolds’ grip on ‘his gun eased. Despite the bitter cold of that coach corridor, he could feel the neck-band of his collar wet with sweat. So, too, he realised, was his gun-hand, and as he moved across to the left-hand door he withdrew it and wiped it up and down the outside of his coat.
He pulled the door window down a few inches, jammed it up a second later and stepped back, gasping, to clear his eyes of the whistling blizzard that had lashed whiplike across his forehead and blinded him just in an instant of time. He leant back against the wood behind him, lit a cigarette and his hands were unsteady.
It was hopeless, he told himself, worse than hopeless. With a steadily increasing wind gusting up to forty, perhaps even fifty miles per hour and the train doing the same speed diagonally into it, the combined total strength of that now howling wind outside was that of a whole gale, maybe a little more — and a whole gale that was no gale at all, just a screaming white wall of almost horizontally driving snow and ice. Even a split second of it on a tiny part of his body while standing in the relative warmth and security of the train had been too much. God only knew what it would be like outside for minutes on end, with his whole life depending just . . .