Prince Cecil: XV.

Chapter XV.

In the Jaws of the State

They were marched through two steel doors and led first of all into a small room on the right where they were searched for weapons. The SO officers confiscated Cecil’s pistol and he was glad that he had left his sword in Leiber’s shop where it was safe. Mikhailov, of course, had nothing and they seemed to think the worse of him for it, searching him over and over again until they were quite satisfied that he was unarmed.
When this welcoming ceremony was concluded, Cecil and Mikhailov were taken down the main hallway to an office. I should mention that they were guarded by the whole group of SO officers that had picked them up from the police station (there were six total). The office they were unceremoniously ushered into looked no different from any other ordinary office and the man who sat behind the desk looked very like an ordinary man. Cecil recognised him at once, though, as Zköllmann.
Cecil was able now to form a better idea of the SO chief’s appearance than he had been able to through the moth hole in the curtain in the little cathedral office. Zköllmann looked to be about thirty-four or thirty-five, had thin brown hair brushed straight back from his forehead, and wore the inescapable black uniform of the SO. There was nothing remarkable about his features and, seen on the street, he might have looked like a hundred other random people were it not for a manner he had of walking about with as much definite design and inflexible purpose as an incarnation of Fate.
He was almost handsome, and Cecil found himself wondering if this was really the man whom everyone was so afraid of—until Zköllmann laid aside the papers he had been examining and looked directly at him.
There was something sinister in those calculating, impersonal eyes. They might almost have been described as machine-like were it not for something deep in them far more terrifying than the mere automation of a machine. Cecil was suddenly reminded of the look of terror Miss Kaparthy had worn when those eyes were turned on her in the cathedral, and he understood it.
He was in his turn subjected to as thorough a scrutiny as he had taken of Zköllmann. The SO chief gazed at him with a look of mild interest and he seemed to be plumbing him through and through, though he gave not a glance to Mikhailov. Cecil felt as if everything about him were being learnt by that look and the tiny hope that they perhaps did not know who he was and which he had clutched at now disappeared. It was quite obvious that they knew.
‘Put them in detention until I have time to see to them,’ said Zköllmann to the head officer. ‘You can put that one through preliminary.’
This last he said with a slight gesture towards Mikhailov. They were marched out of the office and down the hallway again. The hallways in the building were made of concrete, the walls were unpainted and the floors were untiled, and the only lighting was from circular fixtures placed in the centre of the ceilings at measured intervals. The noise of their steps echoed endlessly down those long corridors, unshaken by any other sound.
The hallway they were led down ended in a T and here three of the guards turned to the left with Mikhailov, leaving the other two officers and Cecil to take the right. There was not time to say much. Cecil managed to catch hold of Mikhailov’s hand and give it a parting shake.
‘Sorry Mik,’ he muttered.
‘“Bullets in the front” is the old Guards’ watchword,’ said Mikhailov with a salute. Cecil thought he looked more excited than worried. The truth was that Mikhailov had led a boring life for so long that anything exciting happening at last appealed to him, no matter what the form.
One of the officers gave Mikhailov an unecessarily hard poke in the ribs with a luger and Cecil heard their footsteps echoing away down the hall. He could not see them, though, because he was being marched down the hall in the opposite direction.
He followed the officer in front of him down the seemingly-interminable labrynth of concrete corridors, the surroundings to Cecil looking strikingly similar to a very bad dream. As he went along he forced himself to concentrate. He knew well enough the reason he had been brought to the SO headquarters—they meant to interrogate him. Whatever happened, he must not allow a word to cross his lips that could give the game away. This would be difficult, he knew—perhaps impossible.
He was determined to be brave, but would he be able to outlast the SO? He pinched himself as hard as he could and tried to multiply the pain mentally a hundred times. If they hurt him as bad as that would he give in? He did not think so, but how could he be sure?
As he was thinking thus they stopped at a door in the wall and marched Cecil through it into another office. This was not for interrogation—they were taking another more thorough search of him. This time it was not for weapons but for anything that might give them information. Cecil was glad that Karotski had taken the precaution of making sure that Cecil carried nothing incriminating.
After the examination they went out again and turned down another passage where there were small doors along the walls at close intervals. They stopped before one of these, which one of the officers opened, and Cecil was thrust inside and the door was banged shut after him.
It was a very small space he was shut into. The walls were four feet by four feet and smooth straight up to the ceiling with no variation save for a small ventilator tube high up in one wall. The only light was from a bare bulb in the ceiling. The little space was as cold and cheerless as the inside of a safe or an icebox.
It was quite apparent that there was no possible way of escape, yet it always pays to make sure, so Cecil went round the walls three times, examining them and testing them for weak points. The space was so small that the task was soon completed and Cecil was far more convinced than he would have liked to be that his prison was a secure one.
Having satisfied himself on this point, he set to thinking about his next course of action. He was not the only one the SO would force to talk—Mikhailov would be questioned as well; he was probably being questioned already. But Mikhailov did not know anything.
‘Poor Mikhailov,’ he thought. ‘I hadn’t any right to get him mixed up in all this. If I get a chance to get clear I won’t leave this place without him—that’s a promise.’
This resolution set his mind at rest somewhat and he set again to thinking out a plan of escape. He had a fairly good idea of what would happen to him. They would come after a while and take him out of the cell to be interrogated. That would require them to take him down those corridors again. He would be guarded well and the guards would have their guns on him but at least there would be a better chance of escaping then. He did not know his way around the building and from what he had seen of it so far he knew it to be very large and confusing, but this was yet another obstacle he would have to overcome.
There was another possibility that he might be able to escape from the interrogation room. Probably it would not be so hard to get out of as his cell was and the door might not be locked. It was true that he would be watched the whole time, but men were not as impregnable as concrete walls and they could not watch every second.
There would be the yard to get across too, and the wire fence to get through. He had no idea how he would manage these, but he determined to concentrate on each step seperately. Whatever happened, he must make an attempt. An attempt was better than nothing.
As each new obstacle presented itself, a wave of fear rushed over him. It was all so hopeless. Of course there was no way of escape. Cecil knew this, but he also knew that funking was the one thing between possible success and certain failure. He remembered the awful terror that had gripped him in the vaults under the cathedral and knew that if he once let fear get a hold on him, he should not be able to conquer it.
And conquer it he must, for Mikhailov’s sake—for Miss Kaparthy’s—for Pyromania’s. They all depended on him now. Besides, he was determined that the SO should not triumph. He had come too far for that.
The bolt of his door shot back with a sharp clang and the door swung open. An officer stood in the corridor with two guards on either side of him. They had come to take him to the interrogation chamber.
Cecil stepped out and fell into step behind the officer. The two guards brought up the rear and though Cecil did not glance back he knew their pistols were trained on his back. As he went down the hall he made an effort to take bearings of his surroundings, but every door and corridor looked the same.
‘I would not suggest that you attempt to escape,’ said the officer, seeming to divine Cecil’s intentions. ‘Every door in this building has an electric alarm bell that will go off if the door is opened by anyone other than the administration. Furthermore, there are guards patrolling all corridors and on sentry duty at every exit. The yard is surrounded by high-voltage electric wire that kills on contact. The sentry towers are equipped with spotlights and machine guns. Allow me to inform you that no one has ever escaped from here.’
As he rattled on through this impressive list Cecil saw his chances of escape growing fewer and slimmer. Yet underneath it all there seemed something lurking—a sense, almost a certainty, of the existence of some sort of weakness in all these elaborate precautions. They seemed too perfect; they were specialized down to the smallest detail and therefore it seemed that something obvious had been over-looked. Cecil had no idea what this weakness could be, but the certainty that it existed grew stronger as he followed the officer down the corridor.
They soon arrived before a door which the officer opened and led the way through. Cecil followed and they entered a room with very little furniture and no sort of decoration on the walls, which were painted a dull grey. In the middle of the room was a chair and in it sat Mikhailov with his arms and legs strapped to the wood.
His eyes met Cecil’s and they both started slightly from the shock of the sudden meeting. Cecil stopped and opened his mouth to say something but the officer, without even looking back, said, ‘Speaking among prisoners is forbidden.’ Cecil felt the muzzles of the guards’ pistols pressed into his back and he shut his mouth and followed the officer, looking back over his shoulder at Mikhailov.
Things looked rather bad for both of them, but Cecil felt cheered just the slightest bit by the encounter. At least he knew where Mikhailov was and that would make it easier to rescue him when the time came.
He was led through a door on the far side of the room into yet another office that looked exactly like the first except that the only pieces of furniture in it were a desk and a chair behind it. There were two other doors in this room. One looked as if it led out into the hallway while another smaller door in the back of the room looked as if it opened into an office. As he looked at these two doors Cecil felt with a sudden instinct that anything in this den of deceit and fraud could not be what it was made to appear to be. It was the feeling he had had in the corridor a minute before that there must be some weakness beneath this seeming impregnability and he felt with the same certainty that, if he were to escape from that room, it would be through the little door in the back.
As these thoughts raced through his mind the said door opened and Zköllmann came into the room. He shut the door behind him, paused for a moment, surveying Cecil, then took a seat behind the desk.
‘Cecil Montellescue,’ he said, gazing probingly at Cecil with his inscrutable eyes. ‘Aged twelve years; in the lower fourth form at Mapleton, boys’ college, Sudbury, England. Makes good marks in Latin; speaks German fluently; deft hand with a pistol; owns private wireless set. Collects stamps; fond of tether ball; won a prize in composition last month; dislikes brussels sprouts.’
He said all this as if reading it off of a piece of paper—only he was not reading, he kept his eyes fixed on Cecil the whole time and had got it all by memory.
‘You see, we know all about you,’ he went on. ‘We’ve been keeping an eye on you ever since you first fled Pyromania. Our agents are observant and there isn’t anything about you that we are not informed about. Very likely we know more about you than you know about yourself. For instance, if you turn the tail of your jacket over you will find the number 36478 stitched on it.’
Cecil did so and found that it was the truth.
‘Here is a brief overview of your movements so far,’ said Zköllmann, going from memory still. ‘You reentered Pyromania on the 4:11 express on Monday afternoon. You were arrested by a patrol in the Grohcohr region and liberated by British SIS agents. Thereafter you went to the British consul who gave you shelter and introduced you to the underground. You joined forces with the insurgents and helped to steal a truck full of dynamite with which you and your compatriots blew up the conference room of the palace in an attempt to wipe out Wakjavotski and his three top ministers.
‘Failing this, you fled through the sewers and you and you alone managed to crawl through a drain into the tank bunker. From there you got hold of an army truck and escaped with a convoy. You drove the truck into an alley and hid in the national cathedral. While there you came into contact with Csilla Kaparthy who assisted you to escape. You rejoined the underground and began a campaign to enlist recruits into your forces.
‘Quite a lot accomplished in just three and a half days, but you did not manage to conceal your movements from us. The number on your jacket was from the shop that cleaned it and by it we were able to trace you. The clothes were bought and taken away this morning by a member of your band, Leiffer.’
Cecil almost fell for it. He had already opened his mouth to correct Zköllmann when he suddenly snapped it shut again. This was the way the SO got information from their prisoners—one of the ways, at least. They gave the prisoner a detailed account of the truth, carefully edited for their own purposes, and drew inferences from his responses. They didn’t know for certain that Leiber was a member of the underground, but all it would have taken to prove it was for Cecil to have said his name and shown that he knew him.
Cecil now understood what Karotski had meant when he had said that Cecil would wish he had never heard their real names. It was a terribly dangerous thing to know and he, Cecil, had very nearly betrayed one of his best friends.
‘Disguised thus you went to speak to Csilla Kaparthy at the theatre this afternoon,’ went on Zköllmann with scarcely a pause. ‘Oh, we didn’t know about it at the time—we would have arrested you then if we had—we found out about it shortly afterwards and by that knowledge traced you this far. It appears that after the concert, you went to a low sort of public house, involved yourself in a brawl, and were thrown out in company with a low and desperate sort of character—that soldier in the other room.’
Cecil said nothing. He now knew how the SO worked and he realised that this was a mental battle between himself and Zköllmann. He must be on his toes all the time, never missing the slightest detail. He must guard his lips closely and be sure that nothing passed them that could endanger the others in any way.
It was a dangerous game that must be played in the dark. Cecil did not know how much of the truth the SO knew or guessed, but still there were some things he could gather from what Zköllmann had told him. In the first instance, the SO did not know how many SIS agents had helped him to escape. This he was sure of because it was one of the few details that Zköllmann had neglected to include. The SO knew that there were at least two because the soldiers at the outpost had seen two, they could guess that there were probably more, but they could not be certain exactly how many. Therefore, the SIS agents had an advantage over the SO.
There was another thing that the SO did not know and that was what Aleph’s real name was. As long as that was a secret the underground could continue to operate. This Cecil was sure they would try to get out of him and he must be on his guard.
There was yet a third and last thing that Cecil knew and that Zköllmann didn’t—that was the secret paper he had found in Schumm’s office, and as he thought of it Cecil felt a sudden touch of pity for the SO chief. Zköllmann did not know about the threat hanging over him, and though he might have known everything else, it was not enough to save him.
Cecil knew a little about Zköllmann because Karotski had told him about him. The SO was Zköllmann’s own brain-child to which, though he had based it off of other secret police organisations such as the Gestapo or the KGB, he had given his own practical improvements. He had taken it from a mere idea to the most concise, organised, secretive, and deadly force in Pyromania. He was certainly a genius, but apart from that there was little that anyone knew about him. He had no friends, no family. He remained inscrutable—a black man against a black background.
And all his work—his life too, perhaps—was to come to an abrupt end as soon as Baden gave the word. Everyone comes up against Fate at one time or other—no one can take on the rest of the world without being bested at last by some part of it. For a moment Cecil almost felt that Zköllmann was only another person like himself and no one to be afraid of.
As he thought of all this, he had been looking absently at Zköllmann’s SO badge. He glanced up at Zköllmann’s face and suddenly saw those cold eyes fixed on him as they had been unwaveringly from the beginning and as he returned their gaze he saw something in them that he had not noticed before—a cold, passive hatred. This man had cut himself off from the rest of mankind and no human feeling or sentiment could reach him anymore across the unbridgeable gulf he himself had made. And as Cecil looked at those eyes he was afraid again.
Zköllmann had stopped talking. He was leaning back in his chair, regarding Cecil, possibly realising that Cecil had not been paying attention to what he had just been saying. Their eyes met like the clicking together of two magnetic poles but Cecil looked away again quickly. There was silence for a few moments—it seemed almost a puzzled silence because Zköllmann had seen the look of pity on Cecil’s face.
‘Have you ever tried reading minds?’ asked Zköllmann. His tone was suddenly conversational.
‘No,’ said Cecil in confusion.
‘It’s an interesting study, psychoanalysis—why people do what they do. Most people act on a set system from which mentally they are unable to deviate. A strong mind can identify these systems and predict exactly what such minds will do. You’d be surprised how narrow the groove is that the human brain runs in and how simple it is to crack—like a code.’
‘But you’ve missed half of it,’ said Cecil, surprising himself by this outburst for he had not intended to say anything. ‘People have feelings too—not just minds. Sometimes they do things that don’t make sense because…because they feel that they ought to.’
‘But you can predict even erratic behaviour,’ said Zköllmann. ‘It’s all because of how a person thinks.’
‘Not always,’ said Cecil. ‘You can’t tell how a person will feel about something unless you’ve felt the same way; and you haven’t. You’ve probably never had any feelings at all.’
Zköllmann didn’t say anything for a few minutes and chewed on the end of a pen.
‘Tell me if I’m right,’ he said, taking the pen out of his mouth suddenly. ‘You want to save Csilla Kaparthy’s brother, you know he is interned here, and you hope to find out exactly where.’
This was coming at him from a side-wind with a vengeance and Cecil was thrown mentally off-balance for a moment. It was quite true that that very idea had been lurking in the back of his mind and Zköllmann’s precision rather unnerved him. But he was not concerned with concealing the fact that he wanted to help Miss Kaparthy’s brother and at any rate, he was rather sure that Zköllmann was working mostly from guess work, as in the case of Leiber.
‘You don’t know why I want to save him,’ he said. ‘You think it’s all nonsense.’
‘It’s because you have a disproportionate set of ideals.’
‘I told you so!’ said Cecil. ‘If that’s true, then I can’t succeed.’
‘You won’t,’ said Zköllmann.
‘Watch me!’
‘You’re a prisoner yourself. You can’t get away from here.’
‘You’re a prisoner too—you don’t trust anybody; you’re afraid to go out alone. You don’t believe in anything. I’d rather be shut up in a box than be the kind of prisoner you are!’
Zköllmann remained impassive.
‘Pretty soon,’ he said; ‘you and that soldier in the other room will be feeling very unhappy. Then we will get what we need to know from you both. After that you will be shot.’
‘Thank you,’ said Cecil. ‘Now I shall not be in suspense about what is going to happen to me.’
Zköllmann said nothing and looked at him with an uninterpretable face. What he thought would have been impossible to say, but at that moment Cecil looked and sounded more like a prince than he ever had before.
‘Put him in cell 407,’ said Zköllmann with the end of the pen in his mouth again.
The officer and the two guards, who had been standing by the door all that time saying nothing, came forward and marched Cecil out through the room in which Mikhailov was going through ‘preliminary’ to the hallway again. This time they took Cecil to a different corridor full of narrow cell doors.
The officer paused before one of the doors and looked around.
‘Did he say 407 or 411?’ he asked one of the guards.
The guard could not remember, so the officer went down several doors to check cell 411. The guards watched the officer with bored expressions. Cecil realised that this was his chance…

Mikhailov had seen Cecil enter and depart with a great deal of apprehension. What were they doing to Cecil? What would they do to him? As for Mikhailov, so far he had only been asked his name, occupation, and address. The simple questions had been asked over and over again until Mikhailov began to wonder if they expected him to tell them something different each time.
‘What is your age?’ asked the SO officer who had the office of interrogator.
This was a new question, at any rate.
‘I’m twenty-nine,’ said Mikhailov glibly.
‘Where do you live?’
‘I already told you.’
‘Answer the question.’
Mikhailov suppressed a sigh and repeated the information with ill-concealed impatience.
‘What did you do after you left the army?’
‘I worked in a factory.’
‘You said before that you worked for a newspaper.’
‘I did that too.’
‘What is your—’
‘Eugensz Mikhailov,’ he interrupted.
‘That’s not the question.’
‘Oh, sorry.’
‘The question is, what is your occupation now?’
‘Nothing.’
‘Nothing?’
‘Would you like me to swear to it before the court?’ asked Mikhailov sarcastically.
‘What is your age?’
‘Eighty-seven!’ cried Mikhailov.
The officer turned away and wrote something down on a piece of paper. There was another officer and three guards in the room as well; the guards were standing watchfully by the doors and the second officer was leaning up against the wall scrutinising Mikhailov in the hopes of making him nervous. They all looked up as the door to the further room opened and Zköllmann came in. Mikhailov had not been paying attention but he snapped his head up as he heard the click of Zköllmann’s boots coming towards him.
‘Hullo,’ he thought; ‘here’s the old head buzzard himself. Now I’m in for it!’
Zköllmann strode up and the officer handed him a paper. He looked at what the officer had written, looked at Mikhailov, and handed back the paper.
‘Put him through the next phase,’ he said.
And without another word he left the room.
The officer went to a desk in the corner and opened a drawer. The other officer came forward and turned on a light that hung directly over Mikhailov’s head and that shed an unpleasantly brilliant light over him. At the same time one of the guards turned out the other lights in the room so that Mikhailov was left in a little island of lemon-yellow radiance. He could scarcely see the interrogating officer and the probing voice seemed to come to him from some disembodied being.
‘What is your name?’
He answered, haltingly.
‘Where do you live?’
Again he replied, but his mind seemed strangely confused and he scarcely realised what he said.
‘What is your occupation?’
No answer came to his lips. His many different occupations floated before his mind, interspersed with many that he had never had. He shut his eyes and tried fiercely to concentrate.
The voice went on without waiting for him to answer.
‘Why did you go to the cinema to-night?’
‘I didn’t,’ he said, growing more bewildered. ‘It was the theatre…’
‘What time did the program end?’
‘I don’t know…It was over when we got there…’
‘Who unlocked the door?’
‘There was no key…we couldn’t open it…’
‘What was in the back room?’
‘Ho!’ cried Mikhailov so suddenly that he heard the officer drop his pen. ‘Do you mean you don’t know?’
‘Answer the question,’ came the reply.
‘Then you didn’t go inside the back room?’ asked Mikhailov.
‘Answer the question.’
‘You answer mine. You keep asking me questions that you already know the answer to; well, now I’ve found one that you don’t know and I’m not going to tell you.’
The truth was that Mikhailov didn’t know any more than the SO what was in the back room of the theatre, simply because he hadn’t been able to see anything when he was inside it. The SO, he thought, wanted to know what he and Cecil had been doing at the theatre. That he had been there they knew—they had gotten that much out of him with their backwards questions—but they could not fathom what business Cecil had had there and they wanted very much to know. Well, let them ask him: he would let them think there was something particularly important in that back room.
‘Answer the following questions yes or no,’ came the voice of the interrogator. ‘Did you take the prince to your flat?’
‘What prince?’
‘Answer yes or no.’
‘What flat?’
‘Did you or didn’t you?’
‘Did I what?’
The officer stepped up to where Mikhailov could see his boots at the edge of the circle of light on the floor.
‘So, you choose to be troublesome? Perhaps you’ll prefer the next phase.’
‘Maybe,’ said Mikhailov.
‘Shut up! Holben,’ said the first officer to the one leaning up against the wall; ‘is the next phase ready?’
‘Oh yes,’ came the officer’s voice unconcernedly. ‘It’s been ready for a good while.’
‘Do you hear?’ said the interrogating officer, turning again to Mikhailov. ‘Maybe you’d like to hear how the next phase works.’
‘No,’ said Mikhailov.
‘Ha! Here’s how: we will turn off the light; we will even let you out of this chair. You will be taken to another room and there something very unpleasant will happen to you. Have you ever wondered what it is like to go mad? Well, it is quite possible that you will have your curiosity satisfied on that point. Some people have gone into that room quite sane and come out quite otherwise…’

Cecil dashed down the passage, paused, and pressed himself up against a door. His lungs gasped for breath but he struggled to put them off with a few slow gulps of air. His ears strained for the sound of his pursuers’ footsteps.
They were coming: he could hear them just a few corridors down. They were not running, but were stalking at a steady, inexorable pace. They were in no hurry, for they knew they had him and that there was no way of escape for him. Weren’t there alarms on every door?
The footsteps were coming closer. They were in the next hallway but one now. Cecil could rest no longer. He darted out of the doorway and hurried on down the corridor, glancing at each door as he passed it in a desperate attempt to find a hiding place.
He turned the corner and found himself in a dead end. The corridor ran only a few feet and ended with a blank wall. There was not so much as a window. He glanced back. It was too late to go back down the corridor the way he had come. There was one door in the wall on his right, but it was of heavy steel and looked as if it would be locked. Then Cecil looked again. The door had not been shut properly. There was the slimmest crack between the door and the jam and he could see that the latch had not caught.
On the door hung a sign with a picture of a skull and crossbones and beneath it the words:

WARNING!
Risk of electric shock! Serious injury or death could occur. No one allowed to enter except for an experienced electrician.

Cecil opened the door and went in.

‘So, you think you’d prefer a change?’ asked the SO officer as the guards unstrapped Mikhailov’s arms from the chair. ‘You don’t like this room, eh?’
‘Oh, there’s nothing the matter with the room,’ said Mikhailov. ‘It’s the company I object to.’
‘We shall not be the ones putting you through the next phase,’ said the officer. ‘That is reserved for the professionals. We’ll be interested in hearing how you do, however.’
‘Remind me to tell you,’ said Mikhailov.
He was not feeling as pert as he sounded. ‘Still,’ he thought; ‘as long as they’re pitching into me maybe they’ll be too busy to do much to the prince.’
‘You will soon learn how to behave to your superiors,’ said the officer. ‘Before you’re done, you’ll be grovelling to us.’
‘How much do you wager?’ asked Mikhailov.
‘I’ll give you fifty to one,’ the officer replied sarcastically, gritting his teeth.
‘Here’s the one!’ said Mikhailov and fetched him a straight left to the jaw.
It was the neat sort of stroke that had felled Cecil, although to do Mikhailov justice, he had not hit Cecil half so hard or enjoyed it half so much. The officer spread out on the floor, stunned for a moment. A guard darted forward and raised his tommy gun.
‘Put that down!’ said the officer who had not been hit. ‘You know we need him still.’
But the officer on the floor took out a pistol and, before the others could stop him, fired straight at Mikhailov’s head. Fortunately he was still dizzy and his aim was off. One of the other guards tried to stop him before he fired a second shot. There was a momentary struggle; then suddenly the room was plunged into darkness.
It was a darkness so thick and complete that not a thing could be seen.
‘You idiot!’ said the officer who had not fired the pistol. ‘You’ve hit the light!’
The guards who were pinning Mikhailov’s hands behind his back felt him suddenly break away.
‘He’s escaping! Stop him! Don’t let him get past!’ they cried.
The door of the room opened but oddly enough the corridor was just as impenetrably dark as the room they were in and they only knew the door had opened by the sound it made.
‘He’s making a break for it! Get him, quick!’
There was a rumble of booted feet through the doorway and down the corridor. Then silence crept back into the room.
‘Well, that’s got rid of them,’ said a voice in the darkness and that voice was Mikhailov’s.
A second voice emerged from the gloom.
‘Are you in there, Mik?’
‘Cecil! Where are you?’
‘Here I am. I cut the main breaker and put out the power. We’ve got to get out of here quick before they bring torches. Follow me.’
Mikhailov shuffled toward the sound of Cecil’s shoes somewhere at the other end of the room.
‘I say,’ said Mikhailov sharply; ‘this isn’t the right door.’
‘I know,’ said Cecil. ‘If we go down the corridor they’ll find us. We’ve got to try to get out this way.’
‘Are you sure we can?’
‘We’ll find out,’ said Cecil.
‘I say, you should have seen the row a minute ago,’ said Mikhailov as they made their way into the next room.
It was the room where Cecil had spoken to Zköllmann.
‘Here’s the desk,’ said Cecil, bumping up against it. ‘The door’s behind it—here it is.’
‘Where does it lead?’ asked Mikhailov.
‘We’ll see,’ said Cecil.
The door was not locked. The space it led into did not seem to be an office or a corridor.
‘Snug in here,’ remarked Mikhailov. ‘Who’s been stuffing their coats in here?’
‘It seems to be some sort of a closet,’ said Cecil. ‘I wish I had my electric torch!’
But he didn’t have it, nor even a match. The SO had taken all his possessions away.
‘Here’s another door,’ said Cecil.
‘Let’s hope it leads somewhere airier; I’m stifling.’
‘Snakes!’ said Cecil.
He had opened the door (which was not locked) and the two prisoners had been greeted with a gust of fresh air. They were outside the building. The queer little door had been a back door of sorts for the SO headquarters. I will here tell you something that Cecil did not find out until later. This outer door was usually locked but the lock was electric and worked automatically. By cutting off the power Cecil had rendered every lock in the building useless. None of the alarms were working either.
It was a very dark night they emerged into, but the darkness was not so black as inside the building. The searchlights were of course all out of order and so the yard Cecil and Mikhailov were in was lit only by the stars. Their light twinkled faintly off the electric fence twenty meters away.
Parties of dark figures traversed the yard with electric torches but the light from these could only illumine small spaces at a time and Cecil and Mikhailov found them easy to dodge. They had reached the wire without incident and Cecil had already put his leg through when Mikhailov suddenly hesitated.
‘What if they get the electricity back on just when we’re half-way through?’ he asked.
‘Don’t worry,’ said Cecil. ‘They won’t get it on too soon. I took care of that.’They clambered through the taut wires and slipped out onto the street, the first two prisoners to ever escape from that gloomy citadel.