"You will talk?" Fraser asked again, his voice suddenly suave and beseeching. "For those who talk there are—rewards."
"Let down the ladder," said Foulet, in a quiet, conversational tone. "It will be easier to discuss this—"
Fraser's eyes narrowed to gleaming slits. He smiled craftily. "The ladder will be let down—when you talk."
"And if," suggested Foulet, "we don't wish to talk?"
Fraser's lips stretched in a wider grin. His white teeth gleamed. His shiny black eyes glittered. In that warm, rosy light he looked like a demon from hell. He held out his hand. In it shone a long, slender instrument.
"This knife," he said softly, "Will cut the steel cables that connect you to this platform—as if they were cheese! You will talk?" Beside me I heard Foulet gasp. Swiftly my imagination conjured up the picture of our fate. Our determined refusal to divulge the secrets of our respective countries; the severing, one by one, of the four cables holding us to the platform; the listing of our swinging cell; the tipping, the last, terrible plunge two thousand feet. But it would be swift. The power of the magnetic ray would give us no time to think—to suffer. It would be a merciful end....
"Let us up," bargained Foulet. "We will talk." Fraser laughed.
"None of that," he said slyly. "You talk from there and if your information doesn't dove-tail with what I already know—" he flourished the steel knife suggestively.
We were caught! No amount of bluff would save us now. Fraser demanded that truth, facts, actual information—and he wouldn't be fooled by anything spurious. Foulet's shoulder touched mine as we peered up through the roof of our cell at our mad captor. We spoke together: