The Tears of Autumn - Charles McCarry [93]
Webster had arranged for the young officers who guarded the place to be sent away on Christmas leave. The old-fashioned German microphones implanted in the plaster had been replaced with voice-activated transmitters, and Christopher did not for a moment believe that he had been told where all the bugs were located. He took Glavanis and Eycken outside to explain what he wanted from them.
Glavanis asked only one question: “Is this man a Communist?”
“He works for them,” Christopher said.
Glavanis, standing at the bar, grinned and drank from a glass of ouzo, taking in a noisy breath as he swallowed.
Eycken, who had the face of a suspicious shopkeeper, raised immediate objections. Christopher listened, knowing that it was Glavanis who would set a price on the services of his friend.
“The time element is very short,” Eycken said. “We have to drive all the way to Calabria, take this man out of a guarded house, drive all the way back to Rome. And break him. All in three days or less. What if he doesn’t break?”
“He’ll break,” Christopher said.
He motioned for Glavanis and Eycken to follow him. Glavanis refilled his glass from the bottle of ouzo he had carried into the garden. The three men strolled around the villa, gravel crunching beneath their shoes. In a thick grove of cypresses, a hundred yards behind the villa, Christopher knelt and pulled a lever hidden in a concrete chamber at the base of a tree.
A spring-loaded steel manhole cover opened at their feet. Christopher shone his flashlight into the hole. Twelve feet below, the round beam of the electric torch moved over a damp stone floor.
“Eycken, get in,” Christopher said.
Eycken gave him a hard look and stepped back from the edge. He didn’t move his hands, but Christopher felt his tension.
“It’s all right,” Christopher said. “It’s just an experiment.”
Glavanis nodded; Eycken held out his hand for the flashlight. Christopher gave it to him, and he put it in his pocket and swung athletically into the hole, hanging for a moment by his fingertips before he dropped into the darkness.
“I’m going to close the hatch,” Christopher said. “You’ll see us again in five minutes.”
He turned Glavanis around and showed him that it was impossible to see the villa from where they stood. The house stood in open countryside, and there was no noise and no light.
They went back into the villa. Christopher led Glavanis down the cellar stairs, and then into a long concrete tunnel with strong light bulbs screwed into the ceiling. At the end of the tunnel, Christopher stopped before a rusted steel door.
“Eycken has been in there alone for five minutes, with a flashlight,” Christopher said. “Look at his face, and use your imagination.”
He threw a light switch and pulled open the door. Eycken was standing against the far wall of a bare round concrete room ten feet in diameter. The walls sloped inward like the sides of an inverted funnel. Eycken shielded his eyes from the blinding reflection of high-intensity lights. The walls were painted with white reflective paint.
Eycken held a heavy revolver in his hand. Glavanis stepped between him and Christopher. “It was a joke, Jan,” he said.
Eycken swore, a long elaborate Arab curse, and moved around to the door before he put his gun away.
Christopher explained that the Germans had built the room. During the war they would bring a man through the dark fields, strip him, and drop him through the trapdoor. He would be left naked in the dark room, sometimes with a dozen rats, sometimes with music or recorded human screams playing at high volume through the loudspeakers in the wall. The door was faced with concrete and cleverly concealed; it was impossible to tell that it was there by sense of touch. When, after two or three days, the wall opened and the lights went on, and the prisoner—already half-crazed by thirst and the rats