Текст книги "The Cross of Gold Affair"

Автор книги: Fredric Davies

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THE CROSS OF GOLD AFFAIR

Fredric Davies

The clown leered at the slender puppet-girl. His caperings rang silvered bells, and he spoke.

“My sorrow, my love, is that the world understands me, and what the world understands, it despises.” Her eyes followed his expectantly, waiting for release. He laughed at her, deciding to leave her in her doll’s posture. He capered away, tinkling, jingling with every gesture.

“And now, my friends,” he departed from the play, “do gather round, for ‘tis time to broach the wine.” He mimed a long drink. “The price, pray good sirs, do not mind the cost, for at twenty-two and ten I’ll buy all day.” He glanced again at the girl and laughed at the anger showing in her eyes.

“But perhaps you are right to think of price, for wine may come dear. At twenty-two and ten I’ll buy all right, but at twenty-two and twelve-I’d rather sell than buy, good sirs. Aye, twenty-two and twelve is much too high, for this Medoc white. So send it back. Aye, sell the lot and refuse to buy. And why?-why, because a birdie told me so. Aye, a birdie, and who but a fool or two would refuse such sound advice?”

The clown prepared to continue, his facile mind forming new monologue. Suddenly the puppet came to life. Acting as if she had received a cue, the girl pirouetted across the stage, paused to remark, “Poor fool!” and exited.

Alain, the actor-clown, was enraged. How dare she? How dare she? he silently stormed as his capering and prancing won back the audience’s attention.

A tall, tanned young man chose that moment to leave. The quiet exit from his orchestra seat went unnoticed by all but Alain.

They can’t do that. They know they’re not to leave until the final curtain. His rage grew to encompass both of his enemies.

Somehow he finished out the scene. Even without the doll-girl as a foil he managed to retrieve the thread of the play. The final curtain came down to more applause than the play, or the players, deserved. Alain stepped back into the wings, bowing, smiling, and looking for the girl who played the dancing puppet. He would flay her flesh.

He found them together, outside the dressing rooms, the puppet-girl and the tanned young man. Some inner cunning warned him not to push too soon. Instead of wrath he turned a clownish smile on them both.

“Introduce us, Jenny luv,” he addressed the girl. Somewhat coldly she replied.

“Kim, this is the Great Alain.” Her accenting of “Great” was almost sarcasm. “And this, Alain, is Charles Kimberly-Phelps.” Then, with more warmth: “If you’ll excuse me, Kim, I’ll change and be right back.”

“And what do you think of my play, Mr.-er, Phillips was it?” asked Alain as he stepped into his own dressing room.

“Phelps,” he was corrected with a smile. “Kimberly-Phelps. I was puzzled by it rather.” Kim paused to take in the collection of photos clustered around the mirror. All of Alain, all markedly posed. The odor of old clothes and greasepaint filled the room.

The clown moved to his dressing table, and peeled off one eyebrow. “Puzzled?” he said to the reflection in the mirror. “My dear chap, is that why you left so early?”

Alain was ready to start his flaying. Reaching for the cleansing cream, he caught the reflection of Kimberly-Phelps leaning forward. The young man’s jacket had fallen open, and nestled at his shoulder was a luger-like U.N.C.L.E. Special. Alain felt a stab of fear.

“Not really, but now that you’ve mentioned it, what was that nonsense about the Medoc white? You couldn’t have been serious, and yet, Lord knows, no one seemed to be laughing.” Kimberly-Phelps continued to explore the dressing room.

“Nothing at all, just lines in the play.”

“Jenny told me you were ad-libbing, though. Was it a rib, or what?”

Alain’s clever fingers removed the rubber nose. As he wiped away half of his face of red and white, he spun to reveal the blue steel of a weapon hidden till then. Two bullets ripped into the U.N.C.L.E. agent’s stomach.

Conditioned response put his U.N.C.L.E. Special into Kim’s hand. A mercy bullet tore open Alain’s cheek as the agent slumped to the cluttered floor. The clown’s half-real, half-fantasy face tried to show both pathos and amazement at once. The mercy bullet took effect and he slumped, unconscious, into the paints and creams before the mirror.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent pulled out his communicator, thumbed it urgently, and whispered with dwindling strength, “Open Channel L, please. Emergency, open Channel L. I’ve been gut-shot.”

The world started to disappear, just as the beautiful puppet-girl ran into the room. She saw her courtier fade as the small radio replied, “Channel L is open.” The girl took in the two still forms, the blood, and the repeated words, “Channel L is open; come in, please. Channel L is open.” As she bent over the communicator, she did everything she could to stifle a scream of terror.

Chapter 1

“An Arctic Oil Source.”

Napoleon Solo swept his rented Corvette Sting-Ray off the West Side Elevated into the mismated streets of Greenwich Village. The tall brunette sitting beside him looked bored.

“We aren’t going slumming, are we, Napoleon?” she asked with a touch of the uptown sophistication that had first attracted him. “I’ve had several craws full of Village deli food and ethnic African wildebeest. One hopes your clothes and car are signs of better taste than that.”

Solo’s eyes took in her gown, jewelry and fur, and crinkled in quiet amusement. He said nothing, but his expression told Beth Gottsendt, “You’ve let me choose dinner, and I promise you we’ll have the best meal you’ll ever eat on this island.”

Two quick turns of the powerful car, and a surprise bonus presented itself: a parking place-unheard of!-just off MacDougal Alley. His dark eyebrows raised to salute whichever Fate had blessed him, and a moment later he was escorting his lady into the quietest of the many dining areas in The Jumble Shop.

“It’s a remake of an historic old house,” he explained as they were seated at a table already served with two glasses of Dry Sack. “There’s a rumor that no one knows just how many dining alcoves they have here, and Edgar

Allan Poe is said to have gotten drunk many a night by betting he could take a different drink in each room, and never repeat.”

But she was not to be so lightly awed. “Yes, this is where they have the original Wanamaker Stable.” She beamed at him and looked about in a proprietary way, sipping her sherry. “I’ve heard the food is superb, especially anything from the charcoal broiler.”

“Uhmmm,” said Solo, covering his squashed pride with sudden interest in a painting of Washington Square. “Yes, the broiler. Something wonderful.” He grinned boyishly all at once, and added, “And the fudge here is terrific.” He toasted her with a click of meeting glasses, and they laughed together.

The evening continued most adequately, amid the low noise-level of a congenial restaurant, with fine Italian wine and the couple’s chatter over dishes heaping with beef and accessories. The Solo brow wrinkled in satisfaction as the courses progressed and this delightfully feminine creature repeatedly delighted him with her beauty and ready conversation.

Coffee and tortoni were just being finished when the maitre d’ came to their table escorting a blond sweatered man with a newspaper folded under one arm.

“Illya!” exclaimed Napolean, rising to perform introductions while their waiter brought a chair. Napoleon wondered how his partner planned to explain this meeting, but his heart sank a bit over the reasons he suspected.

Illya Kuryakin, blandly not noticing the gentlemen who wore ties to The Jumble Shop, made himself comfortable and seemed to become part of the group at once. His open, fair smile made it hard not to like him; he had the looks and manner of a gentle intellectual.

“Mr. Waverly told me you planned to be here,” he said, refusing Napoleon’s offer to be third on a match. As he lit his own Gauloise Blue he continued, “I mentioned I’d be in the Village tonight, and he asked me to deliver a message; then he reconsidered, and decided he had a number of things to say. He’d like you to call him at your earliest convenience.”

“I plan to see him first thing in the morning,” said Napoleon, suspicions confirmed. Pleading with his eyes to be let off, he continued, “I, uh, don’t think I can call him just now” Reaching inside his coat, Napoleon tried to indicate to his partner that he had left behind his U.N.C.L.E. communicator, to avoid the embarrassment of beeping in the middle of his date.

“Oh, certainly you can call him,” smiled Illya, speaking with sufficient firmness to make it an order relayed. “There’s a telephone booth just by the entrance to this room. Oh, and here’s the pen you left behind, in case you need to make notes.” Without a sign that he was forcing Solo’s hand, the Russian casually passed over his own two-way U.N.C.L.E. communicator.

Excusing himself, Napoleon found the booth and stepped inside to cover his call. Thumbing the catch on Illya’s communicator, he said quietly, “Open Channel D, please.”

“Yes, Mr. Solo,” replied Waverly’s dry voice. “I see I estimated Mr. Kuryakin’s timing correctly; it was only a moment ago I had your channel put through to my office. Would you be so good as to come here tonight?”

Napoleon was rapidly thinking of excuses he could offer his chief.

“And, Mr. Solo, please contact agents Langley and Ellik. You will have to pass on to them your current projects; what I have for you this evening promises to be a full time project.” Napoleon dismissed the excuses.

“I’m escorting an outsider, sir,” he said simply. Waverly would know that upsetting the normal requirements of a date could strain the effectiveness of his mundane cover.

“That has been taken into consideration, Mr. Solo,” answered Waverly’s quiet voice. “I have matters to discuss with you, but the whole world will not be plunged into chaos while you escort the-ah, outsider-home. Please do not tarry, however, as I would like you to join Mr. Kuryakin and me in less than an hour.” Napoleon winced, and then had an unreasoning twinge of fear that somehow Waverly could see his expression over the communicator. But there it was: nothing for it but to drive full-bore to Goodrich in the Bronx and back again. He signed off and returned to the table, mentally preparing his excuses for Beth.

Wishing Illya had not make the evening a threesome, he was astonished to find the Russian and Beth with their heads close together, bent over the newspaper Illya had brought. They were working the crossword puzzle.

As he sat down, the pair finally noticed his return. “Oh, Napoleon,” said the girl, “I’m glad you’re back. What’s a five-letter word for surrender?”

“U.N.C.L.E.” he said glumly.

While Illya penciled in the solution, and several others it led to, Napoleon signaled for and paid the check.

“I suppose you two have to be getting on, now,” Illya said. “I’ll see you later, Napoleon. It has been a pleasure meeting you, Miss Gottsendt.” He crammed the paper into his pocket and strolled off toward the exit, leaving Beth a bit frustrated as to how the puzzle would come out.

Napoleon took Beth to her home, presenting her with an amusing if rather fanciful excuse for cutting their evening short. She was almost angry and very intrigued as they said their goodnights in the shadows of an entranceway.

Searching for a key, she looked up at him from under dark eyelashes. “Are you certain you can’t come up for just one drink? It’s been ever so long since I’ve entertained a dark, mysterious stranger.” The perfume of her hair seconded the invitation.

Napoleon found himself drifting forward. He briefly considered dropping his U.N.C.L.E. identification into a mail box with a note saying, “I quit!”

But then he sighed. Still looking deeply into her eyes, he said, “I can’t; I have to return to town now.” Teetering on the thin edge of his sense of duty, he leaned down and took a kiss that warmly repeated her invitation.

“A rain check, please,” he said finally, unhappily, and turned abruptly to hurry back to his car.

He made the drive back to midtown Manhattan in less than twenty minutes. Lesser cars were left in his wake as he weaved the Sting-Ray through late night traffic. He thumbed the borrowed communicator alive, and spoke as he drove, with economy and precision. Before the twenty minutes had passed, substitute U.N.C.L.E. agents had complete details on the smuggling operation Napoleon had been about to close out.

Flipping the keys to a parking attendant, he entered the ancient brownstone housing U.N.C.L.E. headquarters through the Masked Club. Del Floria’s, the usual agent’s entrance, had long since closed for the night. Napoleon was led to a dark alcove, where he closed one set of curtains and then turned to another. The maitre d’ adjusted a fixture on the wall, and Napoleon was rotated, alcove and all, into the stone and steel reception room of U.N.C.L.E.

Two cold seagulls perched atop a plywood space antenna over a large building on the wildest of the several amusement piers just off the deserted Coney Island beach. Below the gulls a peeling sign brassily announced, “the hilarious, ROLLICKING, UNPARALLELED SPACE HOUSE.” A Second plywood aerial, painted silver once as was the first, waved in the wind above the Space House’s main entrance, where in fairer weather barkers would stand hawking the many attractions of the place.

Inside, all was quiet. The Alien Room was empty except for the papier mache Bug Eyed Monsters. The Space Maze was deserted, and all its portholes, glass “teleport” bridges and mirrors were smartly polished since the last customers had left; the floor was clean of tobacco and gum, and no handprints marred the see-through obstacles.

Beyond the Space Maze, deep in a part of the funhouse the public never saw, men in black uniforms and berets tiptoed from place to place, standing or sitting silently, smoking with a minimum of conversation when they had no need to move about. In the room deepest into the Space House, far from the seagulls’ cries, a fat man slept.

The bed of the fat sleeper was a violet chair without legs, floating motionless in the center of a blue tiled pool. Overhead, a plastene ceiling kept out the winds and knifelike chill of November. Electric heating lamps made the swimming area into a twenty-four hour, year-round summertime, while delicately modulated fans circulated air through the expansive, aquatic bedroom.

Next to the sleeper a pink styrofoam shark and a purple penguin bobbed in unison as he breathed. His head floated just above the water between them, taking color from both in the semi-tropical artificial lighting.

A bell-like chime rang once across the room, carrying softly over the water to waken him. His first deep breath caused small wavelets to break at the pool’s edge as he peered about from eyes buried deeply in fat.

“Did you have a nice nap, Sylvester?” he asked the shark. “And you, Pierette?” he said to the penguin. He sat straighter in his floating chair, and the pudgy fingers on his left hand turned a small rudder as his right activated a sea-screw at the rear of the chair. Literally breasting the waves, underwater but for his head and shoulders, he guided himself to the pool stairs.

Step by step, the once balloonlike body rose slowly from the pool. Rolls of fat jiggled and bounced as he mounted the stairs in slow, careful motion. The backwash from his progress sent the shark leaping at the penguin.

He dripped his way across the colorful carpet, revealing that his nude body was completely hairless, eyebrows and scalp hair were totally gone, making his head a grotesquerie of white flesh and whiter scar tracings. Heavy pendants of flesh dropped and creased all about his body. His fat fingers reached out to depress a delicate figurine, which emitted an even more delicate click, and the wall slid open.

Beyond was a nightmare collection of electronics gadgetry. A small man in tight black trousers, sweater and beret entered the radio room from another door. The swimmer picked up a many-hued beach towel and carefully patted every part of himself dry.

He hummed quietly as he blotted the stomach rolling out over his pelvis, and lovingly rubbed each hand absolutely dry. Covering his shocking hairlessness with a psychedelic terrycloth robe, he sat before the warm console and flicked twin amplifiers to life.

He tuned two Collins KW 26T receivers to a South African weather station, deftly adjusting first one, then the other. A seagull let out a squawk of indignation as his perch slewed suddenly to the south, and the metal core hidden in the plywood antenna reached out to the ether.

The small black-clad man set two Crown tape decks into motion as the other finished delicate adjustments by ear. Both short wave receivers were producing varying tones oddly complementing each other. The tones became richer, fell off, and then became richer still.

Finally the fat man stood up, beaming. He had tuned both sidebands of the AM broadcast to peak reception. The wavering tones rose and fell for a moment, then were simultaneously disrupted by a beep of sound. The small man stopped and rewound the tape recorders while his coworker almost gleefully flipped off the switch and toggle in the power-down procedure.

With the two tapes playing forward at one/one hundredth of their recording speed, the little man set the tone control and kept one spidery hand on the volume knob. A garble of sound came from one speaker, then from the other. Patiently, he started them over again, and again, until he found synchronization. Both spoke simultaneously.

“Short at 63 and seven-eighths.”

The fat man clapped his soft hands together and stared abstractedly at the wall while the tapes were rewound to be erased. “What do you think of ‘An Arctic Oil Source’ Arnold?” he asked.

Arnold looked up. “Artic oil source?” he asked. “Oh, that’s just fine, Mr. Porpoise. That’ll knock ‘em dead tomorrow.” He continued what he’d been doing.

Porpoise waddled from the room, idly dropping the robe of many colors in water he had dripped earlier. He slipped back into the warm swimming pool and re-mounted his violet lounging chair. Once more enthroned, he breathed deeply, relieved to let the water take his weight. After a short rest he triggered a simple mechanism to inflate the chair, and he was raised into the air. His upper body and the chair’s armrests were held up out of the water.

Another use of the chair appeared as he opened one arm support to reveal a waterproof secretaire from which he took slate and soapstone stick. In a gridded pattern on the big slate he pondered combinations of letters.

“This,” he crooned, “and thus, and our oil source.” He filled in the pattern, and finally with a great sigh of satisfaction he replaced the soapstone and submerged his chair.

Before he started snoring anew, one hand pushed away the slate. His eyes closed and he was asleep as the slate bobbed to the pool’s edge. The small man from the radio room retrieved it and carried it quietly from the room. Once again the shark and the penguin subsided from their mock battle into a serio-comic bobbing, seeming to mimic the sleeper’s breathing.

Outside in the night a black motorcycle roared to life. The sound faded into distance as the Yamaha, Arnold, and the slate headed off toward Manhattan.

Chapter 2

“But that isn’t illegal!”

Illya stared at the unfinished puzzle before him, lines of heavy concentration crossing his Slavic brow. One small portion of the puzzle eluded him still.

“Perhaps if you took another look at fifteen down, Mr. Kuryakin. As a law enforcement officer, surely you can come up with something better than ‘know* for ‘apprehend/ ” Waverly dropped his glance back to the paper before him and continued to sort out some of the many pieces of information that daily crossed his desk.

Illya looked up, startled. “How could you see the definition from there, sir?” he asked, as he changed ‘know’ to ‘take’ and rapidly filled in the rest of the elusive comer.

“I didn’t see it from here, Mr. Kuryakin. I worked that puzzle myself just this morning. Our press study department releases the paper to me just prior to lunch, after sifting it for possibly sensitive information, and I use the puzzle to fill in odd moments.”

Illya crossed the room to look at his chiefs solution to the puzzle just as Reception notified them that Napoleon was in the building. Waverly handed Illya the open paper with a curious smile and put through a signal to London to start the recorded questioning of Alain.

Napoleon entered the room, glanced from his chief to Illya, and took a seat at the huge round table. Waverly looked up from his communication console and smiled with only his eyes. “Ah, Mr. Solo,” he said in token welcome. “You are just in time to join us in monitoring a recorded interrogation of a Thrush messenger.”

Solo knew from the smile and the voice that Waverly was running short on sleep, from which he deduced that this was no simple interrogation. Seated opposite Illya, he watched part of one wall dissolve into a realistic color picture showing two men moving like Keystone Cops in quick-step in a small room. A third man sat limply in a chair.

It was the seated man who caught Solo’s attention. He took in the man’s hollow, dark eyes and striking face. Except for the slack expression, that face could have been a poet’s, a painter’s, or a king’s.

In one corner of the televideo screen an inset showed a luminous clock face with rapidly moving hands. The time read off was 12:31 with the letters “AM GMT” beneath. Checking his own watch, Napoleon had the eerie feeling he was seeing into the future. The radium dial at his wrist showed over half an hour before midnight. Then he relaxed, subtracting the five hours time difference from Greenwich Mean Time. He realized that he was seeing the early end of an interrogation that must still be going on.

The interrogation proceeded along lines typical of U.N.C.L.E. operations anywhere in the world. The two white-clad agents administered drugs in small doses, the amounts and compositions registering briefly, typewritten across the bottom of the picture. They always reminded Napoleon of titles in a foreign movie. Neither operative addressed the other, since both knew their job of old. The senior of the pair put frequent questions to Alain, who mumbled slowly in reply, losing his inner war with the drugs.

The figures moved rapidly between their instrument table and the chair. They adjusted the lights and microphones. Their voices came across like chipmunk squeaks on the audio as they continued the questioning. For several minutes the Thrush kept up his defense, while the sweep second hand of the inset clock spun in double time. Waverly spoke as one drug finally cracked the barrier. “Would you restart the sequence in real time, please?” he asked the unseen projectionist. The figures in white continued their scurry.

Thirty-nine seconds later the film halted and skipped backward as an affirmative to the order. Napoleon felt a shiver slide along his spine, and grinned. By now he should be cosmopolitan enough not to be surprised that the projectionist was sending from a booth in London, relaying the broadcast to New York via a communications satellite.

Alexander Waverly spoke. “You will notice,” he said, in precise syllables, “that there seems to be no last-ditch attempt at either suicide or escape. We surmise that this man, Alain, is a moderately low level Thrush, commissioned with very little real information.” Solo turned to look at his chief questioningly.

“Yes, Mr. Solo, I quite anticipate your question. If he is unimportant, you are wondering, why are we concentrating so seriously on him and ruining your evening?” With a gesture to the screen, Mr. Waverly indicated that the question would answer itself.

The chipmunk squeaks became human speech and the clock ran at a normal pace in the London drama. One of the men in white hammered out a question.

“I don’t know about the States,” answered the prisoner in a blurred monotone, rocking his head from side to side as if under physical torture. The question was rephrased and repeated in a softer tone.

“I don’t know about the States,” the prisoner again assured his questioners. “I only know the numbers, just before some shows. All I do is slip them in, and make sure they know Thrush said so.”

More questions, digging deeper as resistance slipped to nil, revealed he was an actor from the London West End, using only his single name, Alain, professionally. He had been running errands for Thrush for years, attempting all the while to become a recognized artiste in the theater on his own. Throughout the questioning, he kept repeating the phrase his interviewers never sought: “I don’t know about the States.”

“We don’t know about the States, either, Mr. Solo,” interjected Waverly with some dryness, after asking the London projectionist to skip the interrogation forward to the next breakdown of Alain.

The men in white began to skip around again. Their voices rose in pitch. Alain, slumped deeply into the chair supporting him, seemed the only normal part of the scene. After some minutes, the two agents again slowed to normal speed. Napoleon noted that the interrogation had lasted for nearly three hours.

Alain, under a deep hypnotic sleep, was repeating back a long sequence of numbers to his questioners. The numbers all referred to money, possibly the price of some commodity. Alain didn’t know what it was he was passing along, or to whom, for certain. He admitted that on the nights he had numbers to pass on, the audience of the play he had written and was producing swelled enormously.

The questioners brought him back to consciousness. Napoleon watched them bait the poor actor with the bits and pieces of information they had gleaned from his unconscious mind. Alain sat, dumbly ignoring them, until one insulted his abilities as an improvisor. He had a professional’s pride in his ad libs, and caught fire when the other remarked that the whole job was badly bungled.

“Bungled!” he bellowed around his drug-thickened tongue. His head snapped back, and his huge eyes chilled Napoleon even across three thousand miles. “One filthy spy, accidently suspecting my code, is not a bungle. With the same task, sir, you would stammer like a schoolboy caught stealing biscuits. I am Alain, and to everyone else the art of interpolation is thickest mystery.”

All of his strength was spent in that outburst; he fell back and lapsed into a burbling, uneasy doze. The two men in white tried to rouse him again, but the questioning had come to an end. The projectionist speeded the film once again, and abruptly Waverly closed a switch which turned the wall into dead plaster.

Lights came up to full and Alexander Waverly reached for one of the several pipes lying on his desk. “That, gentlemen, is the lot. This actor, Alain, was taken about five hours ago by one of our agents who quite literally stumbled across him.” His fingers idly tamped the pipe as he continued. “Alain was passing along one of his ‘numbers’ to a theater audience this evening and our man …” Waverly put down the pipe to reach for one of the many reports on his desk. ” … Ah, yes, our man Kimberly-Phelps happened to be present. He was apparently curious enough about Alain’s ad lib to speak to him about it, whereupon this loyal subject of the Crown pulled a gun and pumped two rounds into what he supposed was a coppers’ nark.”

Illya darted a glance at Napoleon, who asked sotto voce, “What sort of a snark?”

Ignoring the non sequitur, Waverly consulted the report and continued, “Our agent was shot twice in the lower abdomen, but was, luckily, able to answer with a mercy bullet. The show’s leading lady, attracted by the shots no doubt, ran in from an adjoining dressing room to find both Kimberly-Phelps and the actor unconscious. Our man had tried to communicate with London Headquarters and the girl figured out how to answer them on his communicator. Her quick thinking is the only thing that saved his life.”

“A fine thing,” said Napoleon, “when our white knights have to be rescued by fair maidens.”

“Ironically enough, our, ah, white knight seems to have been there only through his interest in the fair maiden. Alain was not suspect, and if he had not gone off the deep end it is doubtful we would have ever discovered this particular Thrush plot.” He emptied the unlit pipe and proceeded to fill it with fresh tobacco.

“Gentlemen, it is apparent from this fellow’s answers that some part of the plot includes Thrush activities in this country. We must take immediate appraisal of that fact.” Reaching for another file, he continued. “Alain has revealed that he was distributing information to a large group of Thrush investors. Our research department in London has concluded that the investments are in gold.”

Both Enforcement agents sat up with refreshed interest. “Gold,” said Illya reflectively. “Gold stocks have fluctuated unusually for several months now,” he recited, remembering the current-affairs briefings they audited whenever stationed at headquarters.

Solo looked from one to the other in question. “But anyone can give tips on the market, even in code. We seem to have this clown cold on a charge of assault with a deadly weapon, and were throwing in a charge of being a gold-stock tout. But that isn’t illegal.”

“Mr. Solo,” replied his implacable section chief, “the emphasis here is placed on the constant reference to the States. Alain’s relay of information may be part of an international conspiracy to manipulate securities in two countries. That is illegal. Many stocks are traded in both London and New York. Thrush could easily work havoc with any one of them, by forcing the price up or down in London, and using the five hour time difference to buy or sell to their advantage here.”

Reference to another file gave Napoleon and Illya time to light fresh cigarettes before the gray-haired U.N.C.L.E. executive continued. “As Alain has given us no leads to his-hmm-clients, we can only work backwards from fluctuations in the price of gold stocks.” He spun the table top, placing the file directly before Napoleon.