He was briefly taken aback by the apparent irrelevance but soon forgot about it. She conducted their mutual arousal with her usual (though never repetitive) skill and once he had entered her, commanded him to keep still. He obeyed, astonished at his own control, and she kept talking to him softly, unmoving herself. How long they stayed thus, he could not tell; locked in a motionless intimacy, tension mounting to an unbelievable pitch and then still higher, a mystical rapture in which body and mind and spirit were indistinguishable, a trance of almost intolerable brilliance which could not continue yet must not be broken…
Karen whispered: 'Picture him. Picture the Prime Minister. Hold his image in your mind…Now, command him to be silent. For a night and a day he cannot speak. We command him. Hold the image and the command, right through the orgasm. Are you ready?'
'Yes.'
'Now!' – and in that instant her pelvis began thrusting. They cried out together in a tornado of release, but somehow, he managed to hold on to the image and the command. He felt exhausted of every atom of his strength and it was minutes before he could even summon up enough strength to dismount her.
'How long did that take?' he wondered at last. ‘I haven't the remotest idea.'
She glanced at her watch, relaxedly matter-of-fact. 'Just under an hour.'
'It was incredible… Will it work?'
'Of course it will.'
She spoke with complete confidence but Harley still found himself nervous, next morning, about calling on the Prime Minister. He found the doctor.with him, puzzled by a complete loss of voice which nevertheless had none of the other symptoms of acute laryngitis. The patient's voice came back suddenly, and equally completely, at half past ten that evening. The doctor bluffed an explanation, not daring to mention the word 'hysteria'.
Harley never doubted Karen again.
It was during her May visit that he asked her help in questioning Colonel Davidson. The colonel had been caught red-handed, in treasonable conference with one of his captains, a lieutenant and a signal corps sergeant. The lieutenant had been the weak link in the plot, some unguarded words of his arousing the suspicions of a lance-corporal who was in fact one of Intelligence Section's 'ears' in the Army. The Section had planted a bug in the colonel's quarters and had pounced on the conspirators next time they met, as soon as they had said enough to condemn themselves. In their enthusiasm the section had incurred Harley's wrath, for as he pointed out, they had pounced too soon. 'For God's sake – if you'd given them a bit more rope they'd have hanged others as well as themselves. They're only the ringleaders and I want everybody. You'd better get names out of them and fast.'
The Section had got to work. After twenty-four hours Davidson had still said nothing except to rail at Harley as 'a witch-ridden megalomaniac'. The implications of a leak about his relations with Savernake Forest had alarmed Harley and he had ordered the interrogators to be less squeamish in their methods. This proved unfortunate, for the lieutenant died under questioning, and the captain and the sergeant, who had been brought in to watch what to expect when their turn came, somehow managed to commit suicide in their cells.
Left only with Davidson, who seemed impossible to crack, Harley did some rapid thinking.
Colonel Davidson, bruised and aching though he was, knew better than to be surprised when he was cleaned up, brought a fresh uniform, given a good meal, and taken under escort to Harley's private quarters where the escort handcuffed him to a chair and left. Here comes the softening-up bit, the sweet reasonableness, the proffered deal, he told himself. God damn Harley, that won't get him anywhere, either.
Harley came into the room, a young woman with long black hair at his side. So that's the Black Mamba, Davidson thought, deliberately ignoring her. The colonel's own spies had been efficient.
'I'm sorry about the handcuffs,' Harley said pleasantly. ‘I’d have done without them but my watchdogs won't let me. They insist on you being physically harmless before they'll leave you alone with me.'
'How right they are,' the colonel told him.
'Come now, Colonel, the time's past for dramatic gestures. So pointless. Your conspiracy has lost its leaders and hasn't a chance of succeeding. You may disapprove of me but I'm sure you'll agree that with your chance gone, even my regime is preferable to anarchy. So why not be sensible and cooperate?'
'With you – and that!' He jerked his head towards the woman.
The woman laughed.
Apparently unruffled, Harley went on and on, calm, reasonable, placatory. The colonel was puzzled. He sensed that it was all meaningless, that Harley knew perfectly well it would not succeed but that he was continuing the interview for some hidden purpose.
The woman just sat there, unspeaking, a faint smile on her face. In spite of himself, the colonel found himself glancing again and again in her direction, drawn by that face, drawn by those eyes. They were an unusual shape; the colonel, who knew his Far East, was certain there was no oriental blood in her but could understand why people thought there might be. And the size of them… the depth…
He was back in his cell, sitting bolt upright with a start.
When they had dressed him for the interview, they had given him back his watch. It was still on his wrist and he looked at it incredulously. He had lost at least an hour and a half, between succumbing to those great eyes and receiving the mental order to wake up. He knew it had been a mental order; he could still feel the impact of it, the quality of mocking triumph, even the femaleness of its sender.
What had he said before he was led back to the cell? In that hour and a half, what names had he given, what plans explained, what good men and women betrayed? Had black sorcery achieved what torture could not?
Colonel Davidson could only feel, with an awful certainty, that the pockets of his mind had been picked, emptied, rifled. For the first time in years he lowered his face on to his hands and wept.
General Mullard, anxious about morale, wanted the executions to be carried out secretly. But Harley decided otherwise. Seven officers, twenty-three other ranks and nine civilians were marched, handcuffed, for half a kilometre along frequented corridors to a large empty store-room, where they were led in and dealt with four at a time. The firing squad had been picked by Harley personally from the Hub Defence Battalion which was known colloquially as 'the Big Chief's Own'. Thirty-nine prisoners, four at a time, meant ten volleys, which echoed down the Beehive corridors for quite a distance. Six of the thirty-nine had been women.
At the same hour, five were executed in the Cardiff Beehive and two at the Norwich one, the only places outside London where Davidson had managed to plant supporters.
There were no more conspiracies and informing on even flippant critics of Harley's regime became a normal self-defensive reaction. General Milliard, a little grudgingly, admitted to Harley that he had been right.
Brenda, no longer in Harley's confidence, had known nothing of the would-be putsch until the mass arrests had included one of her own library assistants. Within an hour, news of the swoop had been all round Beehive and it had been a nerve-racking hour for Brenda, quite apart from her distress over the assistant whom she had liked and known for years. She was frightened both for herself and for Gareth. She expected to be picked up and questioned because of her closeness to the arrested assistant and she had feared that Gareth might be involved in the conspiracy. She did not think he was but knowing his secret views she had to face the possibility of it and of his having hidden the fact from her for her own safety. But no questioning occurred, then or afterwards, and Gareth rang up her up with a routine library query the obvious purpose of which was to let her know that he was not in trouble.
He came to her room that evening and, signalling to her to be careful, began a meticulous search for any newly installed microphone. Brenda understood and kept up a harmless conversation till he had finished.