Shaw shrugged and turned. He had no choice; he could only hope that he wouldn’t crack under the kind of methods these people would probably use.
They took him to the lobby by the elevator-well and they went through their whole repertoire, which was an extensive one and bang up to date. After a couple of hours of pain, alternated with respite on that hard chair — respite during which the rapid-fire questions were shot at him — Shaw’s body ached all over and he was bruised from his neck down, bruised and cut with the rubber coshes and the flick-knife, which Willoughby had used to give him agonizing nicks that caused bleeding but didn’t do any lasting damage.
But he didn’t talk.
Willoughby and Cassidy didn’t give anything away either. Not a thing. After more than two hours in the place, Shaw still hadn’t a clue as to what the objectives were or what organization these hoodlums belonged to. Another sixty minutes, followed by a sit-down and a half-hour’s soft pedalling and gentle persuasion, and he still didn’t talk. That was when Willoughby played his whole hand, his ace. He had lost patience now and he snapped, ‘Okay, then — so you won’t talk. So this is where it really hits you hard. Come on. Up!’
Shaw got to his feet and stood groggily in the middle of the lobby. Cassidy moved in behind him. With one hand the American rammed his gun into Shaw’s back, with the other he put on a lock and Shaw was marched back along the corridor and then out of it again through the food store at the end until they were in a long, low room, again with a concrete floor but this time with a ceiling that seemed to be made of metal — a ceiling in which there were set square recessions that looked like sliding trapdoors. At one end of this room was a deep, square hole in the concrete — seven or eight feet deep, by the look of it, and about two feet square at the top. By each corner, steel ring-bolts had been set into the floor, Shaw was halted on the brink of this pit and Willoughby said, ‘One last chance, Commander. Do you talk, or do you get in?’
Shaw felt icy cold. ‘What happens if I go in?’ he asked.
There was a harsh laugh from Cassidy, and Willoughby said, ‘Plenty! You’ll see. Know what this place is, this whole room, I mean?’
‘You tell me. I’m not clairvoyant.’
Willoughby grinned. ‘Well, I reckon you soon will be, that’s if there’s an after life. This here’s our graveyard, you might say.’ He waved a hand towards the rest of the floor, where the concrete had a slightly disjointed, though smoothed-down, look about it as though it had been laid at different periods. ‘There’s bodies standing up all under the surface here… guys who we wanted and then couldn’t let go of again. For obvious reasons, I guess.’ The voice now was cold like the steel of a gun-butt. ‘Well — you going to talk?’
Shaw took a deep breath, feeling dizzy and unbelieving. He said, ‘No. I’m not talking. You do what you like, but I’m not talking…’
He saw Willoughby draw his right arm back. There came a cruel, staggering blow across the back of his neck and he saw a kaleidoscope of light flickering before his eyes and then he stumbled and fell across the top of that narrow hole. After that, everything went black.
Willoughby nodded across at the other man. ‘Right, Cass,’ he said. ‘Go up and open the trap. Make sure the stuff runs easy. Mix up some more if you have to, and set the pusher for slow.’ He glanced at his watch. ‘Fleck wants the place shut down and cleared by midnight except for the dame, so we’ve got some time yet.’
Chapter Twelve
Shaw had been lowered down that tomb-like hole in the concrete and when he came round he found himself standing groggily up in it, supporting himself against one of its walls. It felt cold and horrible down there… when he looked up his range of vision was restricted to one comparatively small square of ceiling, which embraced one of those trapdoors — and Willoughby’s face, sneering down at him. He could hear vague sounds from above, scraping noises and thumps and heavy footsteps on the metal ceiling.
He swayed, put out his hands against the opposite wall to steady himself.
Willoughby’s voice came down to him as from another world. ‘Okay, Shaw, now just listen and listen hard. Cass has gone up top to mix some nice, wet cement. When he opens a trap in the ceiling, that cement, it’ll be concrete as a matter of fact, starts dropping through. Get me? It comes through slow, so you’ll have time to think again whether or not you’re going to start singing. The moment you do that, the trap shuts. If you don’t sing, it stays open — and you get buried alive.’ He jerked his head sideways towards the other concrete graves, the entombed corpses. ‘Those guys didn’t talk. That’s why they’re there. And not a soul on this earth knows what the heck ever happened to them, Commander, and never will. There’s a Government courier there who was thought to have been shot up by hoodlums and dumped out at sea… only he wasn’t. He’s right there, not six feet from you. There’s a guy, an F.B.I man, who’s supposed to have done a disappearing act behind the Iron Curtain… only he didn’t. They’re both there, Commander — them and a few others. Standing up till the Day of Judgement. See… they didn’t talk. I watched ’em die, Commander. It was horrible.’ The voice was soft now, silky-smooth. ‘So slow, so kind of inevitable… I guess that’s the word, h’m? And to think they could’ve saved themselves, those guys, just by opening their mouths a little way…’
Shaw’s head throbbed. He said with difficulty, feeling stifled already, ‘What difference does it make if anyone talks? Don’t you kill them just the same? You can’t let them go.’
‘Maybe,’ Willoughby said, ‘but only maybe, and you don’t have to die this way anyhow. There’s easier ways, if we have to rub you out.’ He paused. ‘No, you don’t have to die, not if you co-operate. A guy like you could be real useful to us. Don’t imagine Fleck doesn’t have that in mind, because he does.’
‘What’s happen to me if I talk?’
‘Well… remains to be seen, of course. Fleck’ll let us know — after you’ve done the talking. But you’d better make up your mind quick, Commander. This whole place, the whole set-up, is being shut down and dismantled tonight… once that pit’s filled in and levelled off, we’re through. We don’t need it any more, not just for now anyway. Things’ve been moving fast, and moving our way at that.’ The voice took on a sharper, harder note. ‘Well?’
‘The answer’s no,’ Shaw said flatly. ‘No talking.’
‘Okay. But you may change your mind. So if you do — just yell. This place is bugged, get me? You yell, I’ll hear it on the intercom, amplified. I’ll be busy shutting down and I’ll be around till soon after midnight — but don’t leave it too late. You still got your watch — so use it.’ He added, ‘And now this is where we fix you so you don’t climb out.’
He turned away from the pit’s edge and Shaw heard him moving across the concrete. A moment later he was back with a frame, which he placed over the top of the pit, a frame with two steel bars which would effectively stop Shaw heaving himself over the lip of the hole, even supposing he could reach it. Arms extending from this frame slotted into the heavy metal ring-bolts set into the concrete floor. As the arms slid into the bolts Willoughby pushed a padlock through a hole in each arm and snapped it shut. When he had done all four, he took a deep breath, stood up, and yelled loudly, ‘Hey, Cass? All okay now. Let it run.’
There was a brief pause and then a sound from above. One of the square traps was moved back in the ceiling, immediately above the pit in which Shaw was imprisoned. Then there came a faint whirr of electrical machinery, something seemed to slide very, very slowly across the top side of the ceiling, and then liquid concrete surged through the hole, came down on the bars of the metal frame, and fell through. It slopped wetly over Shaw, dropped down his body to the bottom of the hole. As the stuff began to pile up around his feet, and he felt the cold wetness of it through his shoes, the beginnings of panic erupted like a firework in his head. He felt stifled, claustrophobic, as though his head must burst… to be buried alive, by slow degrees, to wait in this awful pit until the concrete, setting around his body to clamp him in, pressing close, squeezing, rose to his mouth, his nostrils, his eyes, closed over his head… until he became a motionless living semi-corpse for the few moments — all eternity — that would be left to him until he died… never to be heard of again, sealed in this unsuspected tomb.