Whoever or whatever Gwen Dibley actually was, she was still clearly living on a civil servant's salary-- that was the only explanation, Diana thought uncomfortably, for the tiny car with the cramped boot.
As she was dragged from the office down a deserted flight of stairs, and out into the deserted underground car park-- trust Gwen Dibley to have those details right-Diana Steel took stock of her situation: helpless, bound, and gagged, her prospects for unaided escape weren't good. Once stashed in the boot, out from under her captors' watchful eyes, there might be some chance to shed her bonds… but, then, of course, that meant she'd be in the boot, which presented its own set of difficulties.
There was also the unsettling realization that, while her captors had bound and gagged her, they'd not seen fit to blindfold her... which strongly suggested that they didn't expect her to ever be in a position to identify them to anyone.
As she was hustled along, Diana had just about managed to find a posture that allowed her to move at her captors' pace, without having her hair yanked from her scalp, when they came to a halt behind a small grey sedan.
Oh, well... here we go...
Diana had barely begun the thought when Gwen Dibley flipped a button on her key fob, and the small boot lid popped open.
If the angle had been lower, she suspected that the Dibley woman would have relished throwning her in by the hair, but the smirking blonde was forced to relinquish her captive to her scar-faced companion, who hefted the bound and gagged Diana in his arms, and began to lower her.
Fitting even Diana's slender form into the tiny space was going to be no easy task. She felt Dibley's hands pressing on her shoulders, forcing her to look down at her own chest, while the man's hands pushed and prodded her trim legs and buttocks until she was wedged in place like a particularly troublesome jigsaw puzzle piece. If her position was marginally less confining than the barrel had been, breathing was even more difficult: the rag that had been tied in her mouth while she was held captive in the back of the pub had at least allowed air in around it, foul tasting though it was. This time, however, her mouth was well sealed with tape, forcing her to do all her breathing through a nose that was already starting to feel stifled. At the same time, the ball in her mouth was forcing her to swallow saliva at an accelerated rate, further distracting and discomfiting her.
Once her captors seemed to have her stashed to their satisfaction, the lid was slammed shut, and Diana began her dark, bumpy, claustrophobic journey.
She quickly realized that any prospect of slipping her bonds while in the boot had been predicated on being kept in a somewhat larger area of confinement. The room in which she had to maneuver could barely be measured in inches, and there simply wasn't enough clearance to allow her the leverage to work at her bindings. Too, she could feel the circulation to her limbs diminishing by the moment, and she knew that, even if she did free herself, she'd be effectively paralyzed by the time they took her out. A disgusted sigh bubbled the saliva at the corners of her gag, and she settled back as comfortably as she could manage.
Once they arrived, Diana discovered that she'd been exactly right: when the lid of the boot was thrown open above her, the scar-faced man had had to lift her out like a piece of luggage, because there was simply no way her arms or legs would respond. He threw her casually over a shoulder, and Diana's senses reeled dizzily as her head bounced against his back, her hair hanging down around her face.
From what she was able to see, her captors appeared to have brought her to some abandoned warehouse or plant, a shabby building that loomed up in the growing dusk.
How DO these criminals FIND so many of these places? she wondered to herself. Dibley undid a large padlock on the disused-looking gate, and swung it wide, to allow their captive to be borne inside to her fate.
Once through the gate, Diana was carried up the stairs of a large, musty-smelling building. By the time they reached the top, her circulation seemed to be returning, and she was experimentally flexing some muscles when they descended another staircase, and stopped on a platform overlooking a large room. The man lowered Diana from his shoulder, and pushed her up on still-unsteady feet against a metal rail at the edge of the platform.
The room was imposing and cavernous, with colored lights blinking here and there to some obscure purpose, and while it might possibly have once had some manufacturing or metallurgical purpose, Diana had the strong feeling that it was far more like a giant movie set, something out of the climax of a James Bond thriller.
From the platform, they stood overlooking what appeared to be bubbling vats of... something. Again, while she couldn't be certain, she had the feeling that the vats were supposed to contain something like molten steel. But what was it really? Wax? Oatmeal? Whatever the liquid was, though, there was no question that it was boiling, with steam rising off it in great clouds. Why it should be boiling, apart from providing B-movie atmosphere, she wasn't certain, but she had no doubt that falling into it would be most unpleasant… and, again, she could imagine no reason for the stuff to be there except for someone to fall into it, gloomy prospect though that was.
"And now…" the scar-faced man addressed his captive for the first time, "it is time for us to have a conversation, my lovely one." With that, he carefully began to peel the tape away from her face. He went slowly, a strip at a time, and Diana couldn't tell if he thought he was being gentle, or if he genuinely knew just how much it hurt to have the sticky stuff removed in such a prolonged fashion. Whichever it might be, when the final strip came away, and he had plucked the spit-slick ball from her mouth, Diana licked her lips, half to reassure herself they were still there, and tried not to croak as she said "Thank you."
"Oh, you needn't thank me-- I've removed your gag for my benefit more than your own." He set the rubber ball down on the shelf, with a look that suggested that it would no longer be welcome in his pocket.
"And what's next for me?" Diana gave him her most imperturbable look. Diana's voice felt rusty from disuse, and sounded strange to her own ears.
The man chuckled, and nodded his head in the direction of the bubbling vats. "Surely you don't need to ask... after all, you have seen the little 'scenarios' that my associates and I have prepared for the other young ladies. Yours, though, I fear, will differ from theirs in one key respect--"
"No last-minute rescue," Diana finished wryly. She desperately tried to think of other questions to keep the man talking; if she were to have any chance at an escape, she'd have to get some circulation back into her arms, and that was taking longer than had been the case with her legs.
The scar-faced man threw a switch on the control panel before him, and from above the vats, a hook began to lower, with a set of chains depending from it. The scar-faced man handed his gun to Dibley, and addressed their captive.
"And now, my dear-- time for your final performance as a 'damsel in distress'!"
Diana's useless, still-buzzing arms were unbound, then drawn around in front of her, her wrist bonds being replaced with handcuffs. The handcuffs were fastened to a link of the chain, which hung heavily now on her arms.
"You know, it's a pity that your Mr. Tweed turned out to be an imposter: I really think that all this--" and he cast a hand in the direction of the bubbling vats and blinking lights-- "would have been our master presentation." By now, the man had pulled another of the rubber balls from his pocket, and was squeezing it.
"And this is all in aid of precisely what?"
"Ah, Mrs. Steel," the voice was measured and rhythmic, in time with the squeezing of the ball. "A plan of simple perfection! Utilizing the latest research in hypnosis and pharmaceutical behavior modification... well, you've seen the results. Our 'targets' are caught in scandalous behavior-- but always behavior that stops just short of the worst." He smiled. "Murder, you see, gets investigated... but the preposterous goings-on that we have staged for these gentlemen are the sort of thing that governments prefer to sweep under the rug. The men are quietly put away, the poor girls given new jobs far away from the source of their unpleasant memories... and when the fresh new faces come to occupy the offices, the estimable Miss Dibley has one of her highly-trained girls in place."
"Providing you high-class espionage, no doubt."
The man shook his head, almost sadly. "Mrs. Steel-- can it be that you really do not appreciate the beauty of this scheme?" He leaned closer, and Diana tried not to flinch as he stroked her cheek with a finger. "Anyone can spy... but how many understand the way that bureaucracy works? What minister, or under-cabinet officer, has the time or inclination to read all that he should, to keep up? That's what they have secretaries for." Diana didn't respond, but it was beginning to make sense. "The secretary controls what information reaches the minister, who he sees, and how his words are interpreted. And with the right training--"
"They wind up being your puppets," Diana interrupted with a wry smile. "With your blond she-cat pulling the strings." She endured a slap across the cheek from the seething Dibley for that, but the scar-faced man only laughed.
"Precisely. Soon the entire apparatus of the British government will dance to the tune that my superiors call."
The man now produced a small pocket recorder.
"Now, Mrs. Steel, if you'd like your demise to be quick and painless, all you need to do is record a little message for your telephone answering machine, assuring your callers that all is well... that you and Mr. Tweed have simply decided to take an extended vacation, thus delaying their search for the two of you until we are safely away."
"Has Tweed made one for his machine, then?" Diana spoke as lightly as she could, dreading the answer, but having to know. "It would be a welcome change from his Churchill impression."
A crooked smile. "Why not let me worry about that, eh? So... will you be a good girl and make the recording? We had actually planned a rather elaborate cover story to mask your abduction, but this seems far the simpler answer."
Diana shrugged as best as her bondage would permit, and glanced at Gwen Dibley. "This alternative must be her idea, then. Cheap and easy."
The blonde snarled, "I think we've had just about enough of your smart mouth." With that, she yanked Diana's head back by the hair, plucked up the rubber ball from the table, and popped it back into her mouth. She snatched up one of the used strips of tape, and slapped it crookedly over Diana's mouth.
"Hmmmff!" Diana managed a startled exclamation as she was gagged once more; then, before the man could interfere, Dibley stabbed a finger at a button on the console, and the chain attached to Diana's cuffs began to slowly rise toward the ceiling.
Me and my big mouth. Diana turned her face to the scarred man, as if to remind him that she'd not yet done the recording, but he just shrugged.
"Very well, Gwen darling. Back to Plan 'A'" He reached out and toyed with a lock of Diana's hair. "Goodbye, my dear." At that point, the chain had elevated Diana's wrists past her shoulders, with no sign of stopping. Trying hard to keep her composure, the bound and gagged beauty looked up, seeing that there was plenty of room for the winch to keep winding the chain upwards... which it did. Her hands were even with her chin... then her ears... then the top of her head... and then there was slow straining pain in her shoulders as her arms went to full extension, and she felt her feet start to leave the floor.
"Uuuuuugghh!" Diana grunted involuntarily as her arms and shoulders and ribcage were forced to bear her weight as she was lifted off the floor by her cuffed wrists. She tensed her muscles, trying to match the force of gravity with her own exertion; only the lightness of her figure kept that from being a wholly hopeless enterprise. Even at that, she knew that she couldn't take much more of it… although the alternative directly below her didn't seem much better.
The winch was on a traveling rail, and Diana was slowly moved out over the center of the assortment of hot vats of bubbling liquid, still dangling by her aching wrists.
As she desperately cast her eyes about the room for some way out, she saw that Dibley had disappeared. A moment later, she returned, accompanied by the strangest figure Diana had seen in some time: a tall man, dressed in a flowing robe of red silk shot through with gold, an elaborate applique of a dragon occupying the whole of its back. What made the sight so incongruous was that this would-be Mandarin was not Chinese, or even Oriental-looking. He was a white man, with a ludicrous set of long fingernails badly glued to his fingers, and a drooping black mustache fastened crookedly above his lip. She was still shaking hair and sweat out of her eyes, to try and clear her vision, when the apparition spoke.
"So, my round-eyed beauty, you continue to defy me;" the elegantly BBC'd accent was the topper. Gag or no gag, Diana would have been speechless. Inside that ridiculous getup, and gazing into space as though he didn't recognize her, was Rafe Tweed!
Diana shifted her eyes to see Gwen Dibley, chortling at Diana's astonishment, and incidentally running her hands along Tweed's back and shoulders, and down the side of his leg.
"Tweed!" Against all logic, Diana squealed his name from behind her gag. The sound her efforts produced was pathetic.
"What's the matter, dear?" Gwen Dibley continued her fondling of Tweed, which, in his stupor, he scarcely seemed to notice, and grinned at the painfully-suspended Diana. "Jealous? Don't be." She caressed his cheek, and planted a kiss that almost dislodged the mustache altogether. "I know I can't keep him. Mr. Tweed will provide me with a bit of amusement... but I fear that afterwards... well, let's just say that, in this case, this is one archvillain who is going to meet the same demise as his poor unfortunate victim!"
No!!! Diana shook her head wildly, perspiration stinging her eyes and sharpening the pain at her bound wrists. She twisted, as though to try and swing herself off to the side, away from the bubbling vats, but the physics of the situation would clearly not permit it, and she succeeded only in eliciting more laughs from Dibley, who stared with undisguised glee at Diana's sweat-streaked face.
Dibley then brought the dazed, unresisting Tweed to stand before the controls of the winch. Seeming unaware of anything but the commands being whispered in his ear, Tweed worked the controls, sending the nearly-frantic Diana swinging and swaying back and forth over the bubbling vats, as though deciding which of them to deposit her into.
Can't take much more of this, old girl, she thought. Got to chance something. And there was one long chance.
The miserable heat from the vats…she would make that heat her ally. As she writhed and squirmed, and contorted, the clouds of steam coming up from below, and the rivulets of sweat that ran down her face, began to slowly loosen the strip of tape that Gwen had hastily slapped across her lips. She twisted and scrunched her face, widening her eyes and stretching her cheeks in the hopes that her captors would mistake her exertions for the effects of fear. In the meantime, Tweed continued muttering catch phrases from the works of Sax Rohmer in his cultured, if slightly slurred, voice.
Closer… closer… Diana could feel the adhesive loosening as her lips twisted and distorted themselves. Her body ached miserably, and she knew that pain would soon give way to disability. She worked her jaw, pulled her cheeks out and in, grateful that Dibley seemed to be focusing her attention on the dazed Tweed… faster… faster…she might look up here and figure it out any minute…There!!! Got it!!!
One corner of the tape had peeled away, and Dibley's hurried application of the gag meant that the tape hadn't sealed her lips, and as it peeled away, Diana found herself finally able to open her mouth.
As she felt the tape come loose, Diana pursed her lips as best as she could manage, got her tongue behind the ball, took careful aim, and spit it as hard and as far as she could… smacking Tweed in the right eye! The ball bounced off, leaving a wet spot on his cheek, falling to the ground where the startled Gwen Dibley took one step towards Diana, slipped on the wet rubber ball, and thudded backwards to the floor.
"Tweed!" Diana's voice was hoarse, and she called his name a second time. "Tweed!"
She saw a fluttering of his eyelids, and she took in all the air her compressed lungs could handle as she shouted "Always keep your bowler on in times of stress…!"
As Dibley started to scramble back to her feet, Tweed flinched, blinked and raised his eyes, finally seeming to focus them on his bound partner.
"…;and watch out for diabolical masterminds!" Diana completed the sentence, and almost cheered to see the light of recognition in his eyes.
It's working! Tweed had given her the phrase months ago, as a supposed remedy for any hypnotic programming they might one day be subjected to, but she'd never had the chance to actually try it!
"Mrs. Steel-what ever are you doing up there?" Then, for the first time, he seemed to notice the enormous sleeves of the robe hanging off his arms. "For that matter, what am I…?"
"Look out!" Diana shouted as Gwen Dibley got to her feet again, scrambling to pull her gun from her waist. Tweed spun, artificial nails breaking off, grabbed hold of one sleeve of the long robe, pulled it off, and flung it at the blonde, engulfing her in its silken folds. He watched the gun fly from her hand and fall into one of the vats below, then delivered a swift kick to the blonde's silk-encumbered rump, sending her flying to the floor in a cloud of bright Oriental colors.
"Damn you!" The scar-faced man bellowed in Diana's direction, then reached to his coat pocket, pulled a knife, and advanced on the unarmed Tweed.
With his senses now mostly recovered, the resourceful secret agent dropped into a wary crouch- the scar-faced man was blocking his only means of exit, which meant that, weapon or no, he'd have to face down the wickedly glittering knife. He tried to turn back to the controls to release Diana, but the knife slashed at him, barely missing his stomach, slicing through his jacket.
Silently cursing the fact that Tweed hadn't had time to release her, Diana knew she had to help her partner somehow. She used the toe of her right foot to scrape at the heel of her left boot, working and loosening it until it hung off the edge of her toe.
"Tweed!" she called out, and kicked her leg sharply, sending the boot sailing into the air. As the scar-faced man made another deadly lunge, Tweed, in a single movement, plucked the boot from the air, sidestepped, and delivered a sharp "crack" with the boot's heel across the back of his foe's head.
The scar-faced man gave a grunt as he began to lose his balance; for a moment, he teetered on the edge of the platform, his senses seeming to return just as his balance gave way.
"Nooooooo…!" The scream died with an awful plopping sound as the man disappeared into the steam, and landed in some sort of goo that Diana had finally decided must be paraffin… and she still had no idea why it was bubbling away in these wretched vats.
Tweed rushed back to the control panel, throwing a series of switches that seemed to shut off whatever was heating the liquid, though it was evidently too late for the scar-faced man. He began twiddling with the knobs, and Diana found herself jerking left and right once more, first one way, then the other.
"Tweed," she gasped. "I'm sure this is all very amusing to you, but I'm finding it hard to breathe like this."
"Just working out how to… ah!" And with a flourish of the wrist, he sent her slowly moving to her left, while at the same time causing the chain to lower; in a moment, she was standing comfortably at the lip of one of the now-cooling vats, with several yards of slack chain drooping from her still-cuffed wrists.
"Now, how to get you back over here…?" he mused.
"Tweed, she's getting away!" He turned too late to see that Gwen Dibley had finally crawled out from under the robe, and was starting to scramble for the exit.
"Not so fast…" Diana leapt off the side of the vat, flinging herself at the wall. She grasped the chain above her wrists, bent her legs, and propelled off the side of the wall, swinging out, the slack in the chain allowing her to sail all the way to the opposite wall. The timing of her swing allowed her to encircle the fleeing Gwen Dibley with her legs; wrapping them around the woman's torso, then swinging pendulum-style back the other way, Gwen anchored in her grasp by means of Diana's legs about her waist, her prominent chest preventing her from slipping from Diana's grasp. At the apex of her swing, Diana opened her legs, releasing the blonde to crash against the wall, and slump to the floor, unconscious.
Before Diana's momentum could carry her back out over the vats again, Tweed was there, his big hands gently encircling her waist. He supported her as he walked back to the platform and used the controls there to finally lower her all the way back down to her feet. As she stood on shaky legs, and held up her cuffed wrists, Tweed began patting his pockets. "Now, let's see… where did I put…?"
"Tweed…" Diana twisted her lips in wry exasperation.
"Ah, here it is." He pulled out a silver cigarette case. Since Diana had never seen him smoke, she wasn't surprised when it proved to contain an assortment of wire lockpicks. He selected one, and in a moment, the cuffs were off, still hooked to the chain, and she was rubbing feeling back into her wrists.
Tweed glanced down to where the scar-faced man had disappeared.
"Tweed… who on earth was he?"
"Boris Stegoff. Generally regarded as one of the Other Side's true Master Minds. Met him once at an embassy function. Probably a good thing I didn't drink with him that night; heaven only knows what he'd have put in it." Tweed leaned over the bubbling vat, shook his head, and straightened back up. "Brilliant scheme, though."
"Yes," Diana mused. "Control the decision makers by controlling the information they receive."
"He'd have made a great political campaign manager."
Diana walked over to where Gwen Dibley was moaning her way back to consciousness. Before the blonde could do more than moan, Diana took the handcuffs and snapped them closed about the woman's ankles, then reached over the platform, and pressed a button.
"What-- ? No!!"
Tweed and Diana shared a chuckle as the two of them watched Dibley elevated into the air by her ankles. Though she was tempted to give the woman a taste of her own medicine, Diana stopped the elevation while the woman could still rest her weight on her shoulders, leaning up against the wall, sputtering furiously.
"Oh, that's quite enough of that noise." Diana strolled over to the cursing blonde and picked up the belt from the Mandarin robe. She twirled the upside-down Dibley around a few times, then bound the dizzy woman's wrists tightly together behind her back with the fabric belt. Picking up the remaining strips of tape from the table, she slapped them over her captive's lips, reducing her outraged shouts to an annoyed humming. She turned back to her partner.
"Call to the Ministry, followed by the police?"
Tweed looked down at the rent in his jacket where the knife had nearly gutted him. "And let's not forget my tailor."
***
"So it was the tea, then?"
Tweed nodded his head as he maneuvered the Bentley. "I'm afraid that was one invitation I really ought to have refused. You know, I honestly can't remember a thing that happened between the time she poured the tea, and when you called my name after smacking me in the eye with that ball."
Diana laughed. "Sorry for that, but desperate measures were called for."
He nodded. "Just think of what might have happened if you hadn't snapped me out of it."
"I'd have been seriously elongated before being par-boiled."
"To say nothing of the creation of a government full of ill-informed bureaucrats bent to the whims of the enemies of personal liberty."
"Oh, definitely-- let's say nothing about that," Diana answered dryly. She thought for a moment.
"Tweed…"
"My dear?"
"The Dibley woman… she exerted quite a powerful influence, didn't she?"
"She and her cocktail of drugs and hypnosis."
"Yes, those, of course…" Diana paused. "But apart from the drugs and hypnosis…" her voice trailed off. For a few moments, the only sound in the car was the humming of the vintage engine. Then, Tweed spoke softly.
"Mrs. Steel… shall we agree that I was in no way influenced by Miss Dibley except under hypnosis… and that you are in no way jealous in either case?"
Diana smiled. Both equally true, I suppose.
"Agreed."
The End
Tweed and Mrs. Steel will return.