‘I’d like to get the hell out,’ said Cayle.
Dempster nodded and stood up. ‘Well, I don’t think there’s any reason to detain you.’
‘Except that I’m out here in the flaming boondocks! I haven’t even got my bloody anorak, or my boots.’
‘You’ve got your passport and money,’ Dempster said, turning to the door. ‘You’ll make it.’ He went out and the door closed.
Like hell I’ll make it, thought Cayle. He lay back and stared at the naked bulb. For the first time he realized how warm it was in the room; his neck and armpits were damp with sweat. He began to regret that he hadn’t taken Dempster up on his offer of a glass of water.
It was very quiet, except for the stove. He kicked off the blanket and carefully stood up. His body seemed very heavy, and he felt slightly drunk. He walked across the room in his stockinged feet and tried the door. It opened. Beyond was a pine-wood passage with a door on either side, and at the end a third larger door with black iron hinges and a Yale-type lock.
He moved softly on the balls of his feet until he was level with the two side-doors, and listened. Nothing. He tried the one on the left, but it was locked; so was the door on the right, except that it had a lock with a sliding catch. He put his thumb under it and pressed, very gently. It slid back with a well-oiled click. The only light came from the room he’d just left, and what he could see ahead looked like a passage leading into darkness. The walls seemed to be made of some coarse rendering, with no doors. He came to a corner, turned, and started down another length of empty corridor. His hands were trembling; he took a slow, deep breath. At the end was a pair of steel doors with folding bars clamped across them, like an emergency exit in a cinema. He grabbed both bars and leaned his whole weight against them. There was a clang and a rush of icy air that left him breathless.
The door had ploughed back at least six inches of fresh snow. Beyond was a broad street with dark windows opposite rising eight floors high. It was still dark, except for pricks of streetlighting stretching at long intervals into the distance. The wide troughs from the snowploughs had been covered with a recent fall, and along the snow-packed pavements was the occasional hump of a half-buried car.
He looked at the nearest car, and thought: Find if it’s unlocked, open the bonnet, cross the wires. He’d learnt the trick as a kid back in Blue Water. It was a cinch, even in ninety degrees in the shade — all you had to worry about was the sweat getting in your eyes.
His face was numb, his feet were like great sacks dragging through the snow. He reached some steps and a heavy door, locked, with no bell. Opposite were two cars. He stumbled sideways and leaned against the first one, his naked hand fumbling under the snow for the door-handle. He found it, but it didn’t move. He tried the next car, and sank on to his knees. The snow had a thick feathery feeling; it wasn’t wet or even cold. He reached up and his fingers tightened round a bar of burning metal. He heard a humming sound growing into the steady beat of snow-tyres. Then a hush: the mutter of an engine, a door slamming, the shuffle of boots and steaming white breath. A hand shaking his shoulder, another pulling him to his feet. He was held by leather gloves and there were faces framed in ear-flaps, and voices, quiet and unhurried, as his feet left the ground and his back and buttocks bumped against something hard. Doors slammed again, it was warm, and the ground began to move.
He put his hands down to steady himself and felt nothing. A draught of hot air touched him, lulled him, his head sliding sideways and resting on metal. The metal drummed against his head with a painless rhythm. There was a jolt, a shout, a crash of doors, and he was half dragged, half carried, down steps and across a strip of concrete, through swing-doors into an aching light. His legs were stretched out, his socks peeled off his bloodless feet. A woman in a white coat felt his wrist; someone else loosened his belt, pulled down his trousers, wrapped his legs in a blanket, and he was lifted on to a trolley covered with a rubber sheet. He felt a sharp ache above the elbow, and saw the woman in the white coat pressing down the plunger of the hypodermic, as his mouth filled with a thick bitter-sweet taste.
Drugs, he thought: the new science of torture. He yelled and yanked his arm free, feeling the needle snap off in the muscle. The woman spoke angrily, and hands grabbed his shoulders and forced his head back on to the rubber sheet.
A man’s voice began speaking his name, spelling the letters out in Russian, as the needle went in again and he listened to the words, ‘Passport’, ‘Aeroflot’, ‘Londra’, fading as the trolley began to move and a warm fuzziness crept up from his toes. He was walking on the ceiling, trying to step over the strip-lighting and the green-painted girders. But the effort was too much; his head lolled sideways and rolled away into emptiness.
CHAPTER 15
Cayle heard a short scream, a splash, a series of thumps, then silence.
He was lying in a narrow white-tiled cell with a spy-hole in the green metal door.
