“Now, something I just thought of,” Simon said. “Won’t these garage doors be wired into the alarm system?”
“Yes, but there’s a switch you can throw by pushing one of the bricks down here next to the ground.” Amity knelt down and felt the lower bricks beside the articulated metal door. “Yes. Here. This one moved when I pressed it. It gives me the most uncanny feeling. He’s thought of everything.”
“Including the extra ignition switch, I hope! Now, the guard may hear the door going again, so get ready for some fast action. I’ll see what I can do with this lock.”
“Maybe it’s not locked,” suggested Amity.
“It must be.”
But when Simon tried turning the handle his hand met no resistance. He and Amity each took one of the doors and swung them quietly outwards. In the deeper darkness of the garage’s interior glinted the black limousine, its nose towards the door.
“Too easy,” Simon whispered as they ran to either side of the big car. “Don’t tell me Mr. Warlock was good enough to leave the car open too.”
The limousine’s windows were up, but the doors were not locked.
“Don’t look gift horses in the mouth,” Amity said.
“Where’s that ignition switch?”
Their hands groped beneath the steering wheel. Suddenly light flared through the front window of the car.
“It’s the guard!” Amity cried, no longer bothering to hold her voice to a whisper. “He’s coming this way!”
Simon’s fingers found the small metal button beneath the steering column. The engine rumbled. Simon engaged the automatic shift and jammed the gas pedal to the floor. The wheels whined on the cement floor of the garage, propelling the giant limousine out along the drive like a shell from a cannon. The guard with the light was in the centre of the pavement. He dived for the grass. One of the patrol dogs came racing towards the car, barking wildly, its handler running behind it with a shotgun.
Those were Simon’s last impressions in the seconds it took the car to cover the ground between the garage and the wire mesh gate. He had already reached a speed of fifty miles an hour. He would have liked more, but the gate seemed to expand directly ahead of him in the car lights. The shotgun roared at almost point blank range, and the full charge spat harmlessly against the window just six inches from Amity’s cheek.
“Good glass,” Simon had time to say. “Hang on.”
The front of the car ripped into the wire fence, creating an explosion of sparks as the deadly electric current was shorted in a hundred places. Next came the crunching sound of splintering wood as the limousine hurtled through the second gate immediately beyond the first. It was free then, roaring out of the volcanic incandescence of its escape into a straight stretch of dark country road.
“Are we out?” Amity asked in a quavering voice.
She had thrown herself to the floor and covered her head with her hands.
“We’re out,” Simon said. “You can come up now.”
He slowed the limousine to a reasonable speed as Amity sat beside him. She pointed to the spider web of cracks and pockmarks made by the shotgun blast.
“Look.”
Her voice was weak.
“This thing is like a tank,” Simon said, patting the door affectionately. “Congratulations on furnishing it with bullet-proof glass.”
“Thanks, but I don’t even want to think about those books again, much less write any.” She turned to look out the back window. “There’s nobody after us yet.”
“I wonder where we are. Watch for road signs.”
Amity turned and sat back in the seat with a deep sigh. She lowered her window halfway so that she could see beyond the cracked glass.
“We’ve made it,” she said. “We’ve done the impossible, do you realize that? We’ve escaped from S.W.O.R.D.!”
Simon glanced into the dark rectangle of the rearview mirror.
“Maybe,” he said.
“Maybe?” whimpered Amity.
“I’d feel a lot better if the impossible had been a little more difficult.”
“Well, for heaven’s sake don’t worry about it! We’re out now. What can they do about it?”
Almost simultaneously with her last word, several things happened at once. The window she had lowered shot up with the force of a guillotine. The car engine died completely without so much as a splutter. There was a rapid series of clicks as the door locks automatically popped into closed positions.
“I wish you hadn’t asked that question,” Simon said to Amity.
The car was rolling to a standstill on the unlighted road as its own lights were extinguished by whatever force had shut off the engine. Simon pumped the accelerator without result. Working the auxiliary ignition button which had originally started the car produced not even a click.
“What happened?” Amity gasped.
“You tell me,” said Simon. “You wrote the script.”
Amity, frowning, shook her head.
“There was never anything like this. Let’s get out of here. It looks like a crossroads up ahead...”
“I’m afraid you’ll find that impossible,” Simon said. “My door is sealed shut.”
“Oh, no! So is mine.”
Suddenly a red light began to glow in the centre of the instrument panel and a voice issued from the radio grille.
“This is Warlock speaking. This recording of my voice was activated by the same device which automatically trapped you and cut off the electrical system of the car. Your location will be easily traced by a tracking device which picks up a continuous signal broadcast from the car you have so foolishly stolen. I suggest that you make yourself comfortable. There is no way to escape, and very shortly several persons will arrive to take you in custody.”
“So Warlock isn’t completely unoriginal,” the Saint said when the recording fell silent.
“Oh, dear,” Amity said sheepishly.
“Oh, dear, what?” Simon asked.
“In a short story I wrote — before the first book — there was something... like this.”
“My compliments to your memory. What’s the trick for getting out?”
“No trick. It wasn’t important. It didn’t happen to important characters.”
“Well, we’re important characters, and I’ve no intention of sitting around here like a chicken in a box waiting for the butcher. Get your head out of the way, please. Maybe that shotgun weakened the glass.”
Simon swung his legs above the girl’s lap, braced his hands behind him, and gave the damaged window a double-footed kick which would have taken most car doors completely off their hinges. The thick window was completely unchanged.
“As I said, good glass,” he remarked ruefully. “I’ll try the back way.”
He climbed quickly over into the back seat and proceeded, in effect, to pull it apart.
“What are you doing?” Amity asked.
“Trying to get these cushions loose so we can get back into the boot.”
“Isn’t there anything between the seat and the boot?”
“Generally just some cloth, at least in places.”
“I didn’t know that,” Amity said.
“Good. If you had you’d have figured a way to keep us from getting out.”
Simon had pulled loose the back cushion, revealing a strip of black leatherette material. He ripped it aside. There was nothing else between him and the boot.
“Your lighter, please,” he said.
Amity leaned over from the front seat to hand it to him.
“Don’t blow us up.”
“That might be the fastest way out.”
He put his head and shoulders through the hole he had created and flicked on the lighter to illuminate the stark interior of the boot.