To have escaped the awful prospect which had faced them only two hours ago, to have survived a street battle uninjured, to have thrown their pursuers off the track, and now to be menaced again with all the horrors that the word ‘Moscow’ had conjured up for him since that afternoon, seemed an unbelievably brutal twist of fate. That this new threat to their liberty, sanity and lives should have arisen solely owing to the avarice of the miserable little old man who had it in his power to betray them made it infinitely worse. More shattering still was the thought of all that hung on the retention of their freedom. Fedora’s refusal to accept the waiter’s offer to go out and get the money made Nicholas suppose that her telephoning had been unsuccessful; for had she located friends who could hide them for the night, it seemed that she could have gone to them now and that, somehow, they would have managed to raise the ransom demanded. But, if she had failed, there remained Jirka at the airport.
