The Last Frontier Read Online Free PDF

floor. He reached down to get it, but the chain brought his hands up with a sharp jerk inches from the floor. He swore softly to himself.

Szendro laughed, and Reynolds, straightening, looked at him. There was no malice in the colonel's face, just a mixture of amusement and admiration, the admiration predominating.

'Very, very clever, Mr. Buhl. I said you were a dangerous man, and now I'm surer than ever.' He drew deeply on his cigarette. 'We are now presented with a choice of three possible lines of action, are we not? None of them, I may say, has any marked appeal for me,'

'I don't know what you are talking about.'

'Magnificent again!' Szendro was smiling broadly. 'The puzzlement in your voice couldn't be improved upon. Three courses are open, I say. First, I could courteously bend over and down to retrieve it, whereupon you would do your best to crush in the back of my head with your handcuffs. You would certainly knock me senseless -- and you observed very keenly, without in any way appearing to do so, exactly where I put the key to these handcuffs.' Reynolds looked at him uncomprehendingly, but already he could taste defeat in his mouth.

'Secondly I could toss you a box of matches. You would strike one, ignite the heads of all the other matches in the box, throw it in my face, crash the car and who knows what might happen then? Or you could just hope that I'd give you a light, either from the lighter or cigarette; then the finger judo lock, a couple of broken fingers, a transfer to a wrist lock and then the key at your leisure. Mr. Buhl, you will bear watching.'

'You're talking nonsense,' Reynolds said roughly.

'Perhaps, perhaps. I have a suspicious mind, but I survive.' He tossed something on to the lap of Reynolds' coat. 'Herewith one single match. You can light it on the metal hinge of the glove box.'

Reynolds sat and smoked in silence. He couldn't give up, he wouldn't give up, although he knew in his heart that the man at the wheel knew all the answers -- and the answers to many questions which he, Reynolds, probably didn't know ever existed. Half a dozen separate plans occurred to him, each one more fantastic and with less chance of success than the previous one, and he was just coming to the end of his second cigarette -- he had lit it off the butt end of the first -- when the colonel changed down into third gear, peered at the near side of the road, braked suddenly and swung off into a small lane. Half a minute later, on a stretch of the lane parallel to and barely twenty yards from the highway, but almost entirely screened from it by thick, snow-covered bushes, Szendro stopped the car and switched off the ignition. Then he turned off his head and side lights, wound his window right down in spite of the bitter cold and turned to face Reynolds. The roof light above the windscreen still burned in the darkness.

Here it comes, Reynolds thought bleakly. Thirty miles yet to Budapest, but Szendro just can't bear to wait any longer. Reynolds had no illusions, no hope. He had had access to secret files concerning the activities of the Hungarian Political Police in the year that had elapsed since the bloody October rising of 1956, and they had made ghastly reading: it was difficult to think of the AVO -- the AVH, as they were more lately known -- as people belonging to the human race. Wherever they went they carried with them terror and destruction, a living death and death itself, the slow death of the aged in deportee camps and the young in the slave labour camps, the quick death of the summary executions and the ghastly, insane screaming deaths of those who succumbed to the most abominable tortures ever conceived of the evil that lay buried deep in the hearts of the satanic perverts who find their way into the political police of dictatorships the world over. And no secret police in modern times excelled or even matched Hungary's AVO in the nameless barbarities, the inhuman cruelties and all-pervading terror with