Goodbye California - Alistair [34]
‘Lord only knows. One thing for sure, he’s no defector.’
Schmidt said: ‘He could be an involuntary defector?’
Burnett said: ‘It’s been known to happen. But it’s one thing to take a horse to water.’
‘I’ve never met him,’ Schmidt said. ‘He’s the best, isn’t he? From all I hear and all I read, that is.’
Burnett smiled at Healey and Bramwell then said to Schmidt: ‘We physicists are a jealous and self-opinionated lot who yield second place to no one. But well, yes, he’s the best.’
‘I assume that it’s because I’ve been naturalized only six months and that he works in a super-sensitive area that I’ve been kept away from him. What’s he like? I don’t mean his work. His fame is international.’
‘Last seen at that symposium in Washington ten weeks ago. The three of us were there. Cheerful, happy-go-lucky type. Frizzled head of hair like the blackest gollywog you ever saw. Tall as I am, and heavily built – about two-hundred-and-ten pounds, I’d say. And stubborn as they come – the idea of the Russians or anybody making him work for them just isn’t conceivable.’
Unknown to Professor Burnett, unknown to any other person who had ever known Willi Aachen in his prime, Burnett was wrong on every count. Professor Aachen’s face was drawn, haggard and etched with a hundred lines, none of which had existed three months previously. The mane of frizzled hair he still had but it had turned the colour of snow. He was no longer tall because he had developed a severe stoop akin to that of an advanced sufferer from kypho-scoliosis. His clothes hung on a shrunken frame of 150 pounds. And Aachen would work for anybody, especially Lopez. If Lopez had asked him to step off the Golden Gate Bridge Aachen would have done it unhesitatingly.
Lopez was the man who had worked this change on the seemingly indestructible, seemingly impregnable Aachen. Lopez – nobody knew his surname and his given name was probably fictitious anyway – had been a lieutenant in the Argentinian army, where he had worked as an interrogator in the security forces. Iranians and Chileans are widely championed as being the most efficient torturers in the world, but the army of the Argentine, who are reluctant to talk about such matters, make all others specializing in the field of extracting information appear to be fumbling adolescents. It said a great deal for Lopez’s unholy expertise that he had sickened his ruthless commanders to the extent that they had felt compelled to get rid of him.
Lopez was vastly amused at stories of World War heroes gallantly defying torture for weeks, even months, on end. It was Lopez’s claim – no boast, for his claim had been substantiated a hundred times over – that he could have the toughest and most fanatical of terrorists screaming in unspeakable agony within five minutes and, within twenty minutes, have the name of every member of his cell.
It had taken him forty minutes to break Aachen and he had to repeat the process several times in the following three weeks. For the past month Aachen had given no trouble. It was a tribute and testimony to Lopez’s evil skill that, although Aachen was a physically shattered man with the last vestiges of pride, will and independence gone for ever, his mind and memory remained unimpaired.
Aachen gripped the bars of his cell and gazed through them, with lack-lustre eyes veined with blood, at the immaculate laboratory-cum-workshop that had been his home and his hell for the previous seven weeks. He stared unblinkingly, interminably, as if in a hypnotic trance, at the rack against the opposite wall. It held twelve cylinders. Each had a lifting ring welded to the top. Eleven of those were about twelve feet high, and in diameter no more than the barrel of a 4.5-inch naval gun, to which they bore a strong resemblance. The twelfth was of the same diameter but less than half the height.
The workshop, hewn out of solid rock, lay forty feet beneath the banqueting hall of the Adlerheim.