Blade gave the masked man a cold smile. 'So I admit it. I am Richard Blade.'
The man nodded slightly. 'You are J's man? You work for MI6?'
They did not, then, know about MI6A.
Blade played along. No point in doing otherwise. They knew all about him and about J. Just as J, and Blade, knew all about them and about TWIN. All this was pointless preliminary, a mere skirmishing of pawns.
'What is the object of all this?' Blade said petulantly. 'You know all the answers. We are both professionals and you just happen to have won this round. So come off it, eh? I'm cold and I have to go to the bathroom. How about it?'
Blade thought he heard a chuckle from behind the mask. 'You will be allowed to go to the bathroom. Not just yet. First I want to put your mind at ease - we are going to drug you again, very shortly, and we have found that an absence of fear increases the potential of the drug. So let me reassure you now, Mr. Blade - you will not be harmed physically in any way. No torture or compulsion of any sort. We do not, er, operate on so crude a level.'
'That is nice to know,' said Blade. But not exactly surprising, he thought. They didn't want to harm him, rough him up. They intended to smuggle him out of England and ship him to Russia. There the real experts would take over and start working on him. Brainwash him. Milk him of everything he knew. Maybe even make a good Communist out of him. It had happened before.
The masked man's tone was nearly genial. 'Yes. I thought you would enjoy knowing that you have nothing to fear in the, er, physical line. I am not even going to question you without drugs. You would only lie to me.'
Blade nodded. 'You are so absolutely right.'
A nod. 'Yes. Whereas under the drug you will not be able to lie, no matter how desperately you try. Drugs are a marvelous thing - they make life so much easier for all concerned.
Blade stared at the oriel window. He counted acanthus leaves. The bastard was right, of course. They were probably going to use sodium pentathol on him, or some variant of it, and if they knew their technique he would soon be babbling like a babe in a crib. Yet there might be, must be, some technique by which he could fight back. But what?
He was deliberately vulgar. He said: 'You may be right, whoever you are, but right now I have to take a shit. Right now! Unless you do something fast I will have shat, past tense, and your people are going to have a mess to clean up.'
Blade did not really have to go to the toilet. In any case he was not ready to pass the deadly bomb he carried in his entrails - not until he saw a way out of the place. But he wanted to know where the bathroom was, and he wanted to start setting a pattern.
'I'm not kidding,' Blade said harshly. 'I ate breakfast a long time ago. I can't hold it much longer.'
'Very well,' said the man. 'I will send someone for you.'
He went to the door and rapped. There was a whispered conversation. In a few minutes the men who had given Blade his breakfast appeared. Both carried pistols. A third man stood near the door, cradling a Sten gun in his arms, as the two men loosed Blade and tossed him a rough blanket to drape over himself. They were still not talking. They pointed to the door.
As Blade walked stiffly past the Sten gunner - he was cramped and sore from the long hours on the table - he grinned and winked and said, 'You want to watch those old Stens, chum. They are very nasty things to blow up.'
He was ignored. They took him down a short hall, distempered in scabby green, and across an open cobbled court. They had made their first mistake, in not blindfolding him, and Blade hoped they wouldn't think of it. He stepped out briskly before them, three guns on his back, and using his eyes for all they were worth.
He was in an old stable. There was still a lingering odor of horse and leather in the dank air. There were stalls and tack pegs and an exercise post in the middle of the court. The open side of the court was hedged by a crumbling red brick fence with a rusty iron gate. Beyond the fence, along a road deep in mud and bordered by yews, Blade caught a glimpse of a Georgian manor house. It looked deserted.
A pistol jammed into his back. 'Get along with it, mate. No use to gawk about - you won't be coming back here.'
The toilet, filth encrusted, was in a narrow cubby. No door and no windows. There was a scant roll of paper and a thin piece of soap for the brown stained lavatory. The three men watched him from a safe distance.
Blade draped the blanket over a hook and squatted. He pretended to defecate, thinking that in his profession you had to do a lot of crazy things. Things that never got written up in the spy books or put on the telly.
Who would have believed, for instance, that if he wished to do so - which he didn't - he could here and now shit a bomb?
The men watched. Blade put on his act. Thinking hard. By the time the man with the Sten got impatient and told him to come off the throne, Blade had an idea how he was going to defeat the truth serum. How he was going to try to defeat it. Tell them the truth! A carefully edited, skillfully confused truth. They would never believe him. But could he manage it?
He washed his hands in a thin stream of rusty cold water, donned the blanket again and was hurried back to the long bare room. As they crossed the cobbled area he heard the church clock booming somewhere in the distance.
There were two masked men awaiting him now. The new arrival was short and round, not so well dressed as the taller man, and was pulling a pair of rubber gloves over broad spatulate fingers as Blade entered. A doctor, Blade thought. Near the table was an old tea cart with an array of bottles and trays and a box of cotton fluffs. A short piece of rubber cord and three glistening hypodermic needles. Ampoules of some dark fluid.
Blade firmed his mind for the ordeal.
Concentrate, Blade! Tell them the truth. Easter that way. But only part of the truth. Tell them what they cannot possibly believe. Confuse them, gain time, no real harm done if you kill them in the end.
