Eye of the Needle - Ken Follett [70]
If he were spotted in the open country, he would not be captured immediately; country policemen had bicycles, not cars. But a policeman would telephone his headquarters, and cars would be after Faber within minutes. If he saw a policeman, he decided, he would have to ditch this car, steal another, and divert from his planned route. However, in the sparsely populated Scottish lowlands there was a good chance he would get all the way to Aberdeen without passing a country policeman. The towns would be different. There the danger of being chased by a police car was very great. He would be unlikely to escape; his car was old and relatively slow, and the police were generally good drivers. His best chance would be to get out of the vehicle and hope to lose himself in crowds or back streets. He contemplated ditching the car and stealing another each time he was forced to enter a major town. The problem there was that he would be leaving a trail a mile wide for MI5 to follow. Perhaps the best solution was a compromise; he would drive into the towns but try to use only the back streets. He looked at his watch. He would reach Glasgow around dusk, and thereafter he would benefit from the darkness.
Well, it wasn’t very satisfactory, but the only way to be totally safe was not to be a spy.
As he topped the thousand-foot-high Beattock Summit, it began to rain. Faber stopped the car and got out to raise the canvas roof. The air was oppressively warm. Faber looked up. The sky had clouded over very quickly. Thunder and lightning were promised.
As he drove on he discovered some of the little car’s short-comings. Wind and rain leaked in through several tears in the canvas roof, and the small wiper sweeping the top half of the horizontally divided windshield provided only a tunnellike view of the road ahead. As the terrain became progressively more hilly the engine note began to sound faintly ragged. It was hardly surprising: the twenty-year-old car was being pushed hard.
The shower ended. The threatened storm had not arrived, but the sky remained dark and the atmosphere foreboding.
Faber passed through Crawford, nestling in green hills; Abington, a church and a post office on the west bank of the River Clyde; and Lesmahagow, on the edge of a heathery moor.
Half an hour later he reached the outskirts of Glasgow. As soon as he entered the built-up area he turned north off the main road, hoping to circumvent the city. He followed a succession of minor roads, crossing the major arteries into the city’s east side, until he reached Cumbernauld Road where he turned east again and sped out of the city.
It had been quicker than he expected. His luck was holding.
He was on the A80 road, passing factories, mines and farms. More Scots place-names drifted in and out of his consciousness: Millerston, Stepps, Muirhead, Mollinburn, Condorrat.
His luck ran out between Cumbernauld and Stirling.
He was accelerating along a straight stretch of road, slightly downhill, with open fields on either side. As the speedometer needle touched forty-five there was a sudden very loud noise from the engine; a heavy rattle, like the sound of a large chain pulling over a cog. He slowed to thirty, but the noise did not get perceptibly quieter. Clearly some large and important piece of the mechanism had failed. Faber listened carefully. It was either a cracked ball-bearing in the transmission or a hole in a big end. Certainly it was nothing so simple as a blocked carburetor or a dirty spark plug; nothing that could be repaired outside a workshop.
He pulled up and looked under the hood. There seemed to be a good deal of oil everywhere, but otherwise he could see no clues. He got back behind the wheel and drove off. There was a definite loss of power, but at least the car would still go.
Three miles farther on steam began