Giovanna del Renzio's bright plastic raincoat was shiny with water. Water dripped from the ceiling, washed across the floor and streamed down the cellar walls. Kuryakin could feel it clammy against his back. But there was no more water in the air. The girl had switched the apparatus off.
Carlsen, his suit dark with moisture, spoke from the far side of the room. "We're going to leave you now," he said. "Some time during the next hour the lights will go off. And at indeterminate times subsequently, the sprinkler will be turned on—and off—sometimes with current, sometimes without.
"You have already had a taste both of the mild and of the fairly severe current... although, of course, we can make it stronger still if we wish. We do not wish to keep on interrupting you with tedious requests as to whether or not you are ready to speak. So every sound you make will be taped, and at intervals we shall play the tapes back. When we judge from the noises that you are—er—desirous of further conversation, we shall return. But not before."
He was about to turn and go, shepherding the girl before him, when Lala Eriksson appeared in the doorway. She had changed out of her green suit and was wearing slacks and a turtle neck sweater in black. There was a slight smile on her face and her eyes were shining.
"Lala!" Carlsen sounded surprised. "I know we promised you the first trick, but I thought we'd agreed that a half hour to reflect—"
"I know, I know," the girl interrupted. "But the more I think of it, the more I'm inclined to the view that too much time in the light is a bad thing. It may give them the time to steel themselves, you know. And we simply cannot afford to let them do that."
"Very well then. At the beginning, anyway, you're the boss."
He turned back to Kuryakin with a sardonic smile. "For you, at any rate, the night starts now. Other plans will be carried out as outlined." He switched out the light, ushered the two girls into the passage, went out himself and closed the door.
In the sudden intense darkness, Illya lay spread-eagled on the wet floor and wondered desperately what he could do. There was nothing. His bonds were unburstable; since he was naked, there was nothing he could reach or hope to adapt from his clothes that might help; Napoleon Solo was still unconscious—and even if he could have talked, it would have been useless, as everything they said would have been taped. He imagined, from the scrap of conversation he had heard, that they were to take it in turns to actuate the combined water-electric torture. There were probably controls just outside the door, and Lala Eriksson would be at them now. How long, he wondered, would they be able to hold out against the combined onslaught of pain and uncertainty?
Not too long, probably. But whereas, as Carlsen had surmised, he was conditioned, Solo was not. And when he himself broke and wanted to talk, the things he said would be things implanted subconsciously in his mind by a New York psychiatrist attached to the Command. When Solo broke and they injected the drugs, he would simply tell them what they wanted to know.
It was the uncertainty and not the pain that would break them, though. Carlsen had been right, damn him! Stretched there as humiliatingly as a specimen on a slide, the flesh tensed for the cold caress of spray that might or might not come, the shock that might or might not come with it... it was hardly a situation that called for rejoicing!
Water hissed suddenly into action as the sprinkler jingled into movement. A wedge of light opened into the dark and then vanished as the door opened and closed. In the instant of illumination, he saw Lala Eriksson slip into the cellar. She had put on a black raincoat over her slacks and she was busy about the generator and the sprinkler.
Cold mist trailed over Kuryakin's legs, but there was no shock, mild or violent—that time.
A pencil of light from a pocket torch lanced the gloom. Footsteps splashed across the cellar floor and stopped somewhere just behind him. Again and again the spray washed across his body. But there was still no shock.
The girl was on one knee by the iron ring to which his right hand was attached. He heard the rustle of the raincoat as she moved. When he craned his head over his shoulder, he could see highlights sliding over the contours of the polished proof material sheathing her body.
An instant later, there was a sharp snick and his hand was free.
"What the devil... ?" Illya began.
"Shhhhhh!" The girl's whisper was urgent. "Don't forget the tape!... And you're supposed to be getting electric shocks, so if you could groan a bit it would help."
The Russian uttered a hoarse cry and then another. The light beam stabbed down towards his feet. Again the girl crouched, a strange figure shining wetly in the diffuse light as the spray twisted this way and that. And then he was completely free, sitting up damply on the cold floor, trying to massage life back into his limbs.
Another three minutes, and they were manhandling the unconscious body of Napoleon Solo out of the door and into a dimly lit passageway. Kuryakin gave a final realistic cry of pain and closed the cellar door.
"We'll be all right for ten or fifteen minutes," the girl whispered. "Even if they do listen to the tape so early, they'll just think I've left a gap in the 'treatment'; they'll be expecting that."
"I don't wish to seem ungrateful—but what the hell goes on?"
Lala Eriksson grinned, her face suddenly impish in the dim light. "Like Giovanna, I belong to the S.I.D.," she said. "But whereas she was using the S.I.D. as a cover for her membership of Thrush, I'm doing exactly the opposite—using my Thrush association to mask the fact that I'm with the S.I.D.! Giovanna doesn't know I belong, of course; but we've been watching her... and Mr. Carlsen's unsavory menage... for months!"
Kuryakin tried to laugh, but he was shivering so much with cold and with reaction that all he managed was a kind of steam-engine stutter.
"I'm so sorry!" The girl was all contrition. "You must be perished. Your clothes are here in this cupboard. Mr. Solo's too. I don't suppose he'll be coming round yet, will he?"
"I doubt it. He must have been knocked out a full hour after I was, and I've only been conscious quite a short while. Since Carlsen came in."
Lala bit her lip. "That's going to make it awkward. We've got very little time, you see. Any time after the next ten minutes, Carlsen or Giovanna may realize you're not in the cellar—and that tips them off that it's me that's responsible. If we could possibly get Solo unseen to a car, though, and I could bluff my way through the gates before we were spotted, we might..."
She broke off abruptly and, signalling the Russian to help, began feverishly to dress Solo in the clothes she took from the cupboard. Illya felt anxiously in the breast pocket as they eased the jacket over his shoulders. The sunglasses—the vital link in the chain that would strangle Thrush's plans for Europe—were still there! Hurriedly, he put on his own clothes. Together, they manhandled the unconscious man up a flight of stairs, through a doorway and along a short passage. At the double doors which blocked off its end, the girl held up her hand for silence. "My car is just outside here," she whispered. "If we can get him into it without being spotted, we might just make the gates and crash through before anyone realizes... "
Kuryakin eased back the catch and inched one of the doors open while Lala supported Solo's sagging figure. Gradually, the hairline of daylight widened until finally he could peer through into the open air.
The doors gave out on to a cobbled yard beside the garage at the back of the house. On the far side of the yard, a high wall sheltered the kitchen garden; behind it were the stables—underneath which, presumably, was the cellar in which they had been imprisoned—and at the front, the drive ran past the long, low elevation of the house itself. The Lancia convertible was parked about five yards from the doors, with a clump of oleanders masking it from windows in the house.