Текст книги "The Cross of Gold Affair"

Автор книги: Fredric Davies

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Текущая страница: 4 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

“Almost any of those levers will move the porthole view faster, slower, or at an angle,” said Arnold, “but none of them will open this spacelock door. We wouldn’t want you stepping into the vacuum of outer space without a special suit-and Mr. Porpoise wouldn’t want you leaving this room without his permission under any circumstances.”

Hands in the pockets of his rumpled suit, Napoleon looked over his prison. He turned to Arnold, indicating with raised eyebrows the other door to the room, which seemed to be a way out.

“Yes, that’s an exit. But we’re fairly certain you won’t try that way, because it goes through the Space Maze, the most confusing house of mirrors in Coney. Besides its normal difficulty, we have an added reason to believe you’ll sit right here until we free you.” He reached in his pocket and took out a Johnson quarter.

“When the power is on in this maze, it keeps the public amused with flashing lights, scurrying monsters and what we modestly call fourth-dimensional projections. When we turn on an additional power source, however, it becomes just the tiniest bit deadly.” He showed Napoleon a slit of teeth meant to be a smile, and flipped his quarter through the room into the adjoining chamber.

The quarter hit one wall, and bounced down. As it landed, before it really touched the floor, it crossed unseen lines of current. A tiny flash was followed by the splitting of the entire floor along a precise line. The two parts of the floor slipped back into the wall, and Napoleon looked down through the opening to follow the fall of the coin.

A shudder gripped his whole frame as he stared down into the ocean at the tips and edges of a forest of knives. He half sprang, half fell back from the doorway as the floor slammed back together. Napoleon crouched down to the floor of his wide-open prison, and stared at the floor in the next room, trying to count the blades in his memory of one brief glimpse into a hell specially designed for him. Each one seemed to be working its way into his flesh, and he sweated in the cold while the vision swept over his nervous system.

“You see,” said Arnold, “we just don’t want you to leave. You might dive across that floor at an angle to land in the next room, with some assurance that that floor wont split under you. But even though I designed this maze, it was long ago, and I wouldn’t guarantee that the next room isn’t highly charged with electricity, or that your slightest touch on a wall wouldn’t release deadly gas.” He sighed over the loss of his quarter, and turned to go. “Those knives have been lashed to this pier’s pilings for many years/’ he said in afterthought. “You could catch lockjaw if any of them cut you. I really wouldn’t advise you to try our maze at all.” He stepped away from the spacelock door, and it swung to a solid close.

Chapter 6

“You’re using real bullets!”

“Frontal attack,” Illya said to himself. “They can teach all the sneak and secret classes they want at U.N.C.L.E. refresher sessions, but sometimes a spy has to get right out in the daylight and scare the bejeebers out of the enemy.” The marble and whitestone facade of Gambols office building loomed up at him from across the street as he backed the U.N.C.L.E. sedan into the alley a second time and slid out. Pedestrian traffic had increased since he’d fled backwards down that alley ten minutes earlier, but he threw out the idea of mixing with the crowd. He dodged across the

busy streets like a salmon confused by the rush of traffic at spawning-time, and entered the building at speed.

His lockpick made it the work of a moment to jam both banks of elevators. The tiled floor led in two directions, and he picked the dimmer corridor almost without thinking about it. At the rear of the building he found and blocked the service elevator, leaving a large stool propped across the open door, with the out of service sign across it. With all routes but the stairs and the street door cut off, he felt a bit better about his chances of tackling the Gambol menagerie meaningfully.

Back up the dim cement and tile hall he turned and took the stairs three at a time. On the second floor things got dingier, but he hardly paused. With no one in sight, he kept on up the stairs, heading for Gambol’s fourth-floor office. The carpeting gave out, and metal runners did their best to trip him up as he moved on. On the next level, he saw a girl standing at the elevator bank, pushing the down button and tapping one foot.

“Frontal attack,” he muttered. One hand pushed his hair back reflexively as he sucked in a deep breath and stepped out toward her.

“Pardon me, Miss,” he said, “but are you with the local satrapy?”

She didn’t blink an eye as she turned from the elevator to smile at him. “I’ve got to admit that’s a new one,” she said. Her micro-second smile didn’t have a lot of warmth in it. “But I’m not part of the satrapy, and I don’t want to join the neighborhood seraglio, either. This is a lousy neighborhood; a girl can’t even get an elevator.” She turned back to push the down button again, jabbing it with a great deal of force. Illya wondered how Napoleon would have fared with the same problem, and backed off, excusing himself.

“Really, I meant something else,” he said. She kept turned away from him. “By the way, some idiot has turned all the elevators off. I’m afraid you’ll have to walk down.” He turned to leave.

“I’ve got a better idea,” she said simply. Illya turned back and found a tiny gun pointed squarely at his midriff. With one hand she snapped her purse shut, and motioned him toward the stairs. “Why don’t we both walk up a flight, Mr. Man from U.N.C.L.E., and I can apologize for lying to you while some friends of mine tie you to a chair and question you. Or do you want to question my marksmanship at point-blank range?” Her eyebrows were wavering as she tried to look determined to shoot.

“My dear young lady, I wouldn’t dream of arguing with your abilities with the charming little pistol.” Even while he was talking, Illya moved half a pace sideways as if to turn to the stairs, and he watched her eyebrows shoot up when his left knee buckled under him. In the middle of a spastic fall his arm lashed out and he snatched the gun, nearly dislocating her trigger finger before she could move. He recovered from the collapse in a spry jig step, reversed the pistol and calmly removed its bullets. “The safety was on,” he said sorrowfully. “I wish I’d known that, because half the problem was turning it the second I took hold, to keep you from firing while my tummy was in the way.”

“Of course the safety was on!” she spat. “You didn’t have to be so rough. I only wanted to take you upstairs for questioning, and you nearly broke my hand. I wasn’t going to shoot you or anything!” She nursed her bruised finger, frowning at him.

“You still aren’t going to shoot me or anything.” He handed her back the cleared weapon, and turned to the stairs. “Point that at my back and herd me up there. Remember, if you tip off your friends that I’m not your prisoner, there’s liable to be a gunfight with you slam in the middle of it”

They went up to the fourth floor, and into Gambol’s office, side by side. The girl played her part well, keeping the empty automatic pointed fiercely at Illya. One of the toughs who had chased him down the alley met them at the door; the other two were across the room, and another man sat at Gambols desk. With more than he had counted on against him, Illya went back into the frontal attack mode.

The U.N.C.L.E. Special fell into his hand as he pushed the girl into the room past the startled Thrush. Karl, showing more in the way of guts than brains, tried to outdraw Illya from a foot away, and collected a steel-jacketed slug for his efforts. Frank, backing his partners play, caught two more bullets, one in the shoulder, and one to shatter the wrist that might have aimed his pistol. The third man froze, holding his hands well away from his sides. Illya spun the wounded Karl around and sent him sprawling into the room after the girl.

“You’re using real bullets!” she accused in a betrayed whine.

“You and your little friends here were using real bullets, weren’t you?” Illya asked as he frisked the third hood.

“That’s different, you’re not supposed to be using real bullets, everyone knows that U.N.C.L.E. agents use mercy bullets.”

“I prefer the real thing for close work, like this. The mercy bullets are all right, but they just don’t act fast enough sometimes. I’m really not in any sort of mood to have these three plug-uglies perforate me while I try to play nice. If this is a real life and death affair, you two may as well come out shooting, otherwise, I’d appreciate it if you would just kick those guns over here.”

The two wounded Thrush watched their blood flow for a minute, and then decided that Illya had position on them all the way. “Do we get the Geneva Convention?” asked one, unbuckling a shoulder holster.

“Last time I heard,” said Illya, “the Hierarchy was not among Geneva’s signatories. I can possibly guarantee not to use mustard gas, but we do want a bit more than your name, rank and serial number. Slide them out here so I can pick them up, and then we’ll snoop around for something to wrap you up comfortably.”

“We haven’t got anything; besides, Karl and Frank are bleeding.”

“Oh, you must have something useful for tying people up. After all, you promised to tie me up. I’m sure we can find something that will do; some adhesive tape perhaps, and we can make it double for first-aid. Sitting still in a good posture is excellent for flesh wounds, so we’ll tie Tweedledum and Tweedledee here firmly into those straight-back chairs.”

While the girl was working apathetically on bonds for her pals, Illya pulled out his communicator and called in to report to his headquarters. His progress ended with a request for Napoleon’s whereabouts.

“I can’t stay here and watch this lot all night ,” he said. “The girl has tied them so ineptly that I think I’ll have to do it all over again as soon as I tie her up. It would be an excellent idea for someone else to come out here and stand guard or search the place, while I take off after our decoy. He could be halfway around the world by now, strapped buck naked out on an anthill or tied to a railroad track.”

“An investigatory team will coordinate with you within the quarter hour, Mr. Kuryakin,” replied Waverly. “They will be prepared to handle your five captives and administer a measure of first-aid. The information we gathered from Mr. Solo’s search today has been quite illuminating, and it’s vital that we delve into the mysteries of Mr. Gambol’s business with all possible dispatch.”

“Yes, sir. But Napoleon can still be assumed active in the search, and I think I ought to start chasing his yellow blip.”

“Mr. Solo is secondary in importance now,” said Waverly. Illya looked at the fountain-pen communicator, considering things he could say to his chief about throwing a man into something and then not going in after him. He decided not saying them was a better idea. It was altogether too possible that Napoleon was cold meat now, anyway, and the job had to be done.

Waverly’s relayed voice kept its steady tone, businesslike and unflinching. “He could hardly have risen to his post with this organization if he had not shown a remarkable capacity for getting out of as well as getting into trouble. Without some link, proof of a connection between the numerous investors and someone in Thrush, we have no basis for acting in the matter of Breelen’s common stock; Mr. Solo knows this, and wherever he is he is probably working to help us establish that connection. We know many of the names of the investors after today’s analyses of broker records, but there’s nothing we can do yet; there is no law in this country against capitalism.”

“Understood, sir.”

“While you’re waiting for the crew to arrive, may I suggest you finish your crossword puzzle? You really should not have let Mr. Solo convince you that ‘A Petty Annoyance’ is ‘Crossword Puzzle.’ It’s ‘Minor Irritation,’ a rather more ordinary, if less amusing, solution.”

Illya settled down to wait, with one eye on the Thrushes and the other on his crossword puzzle. The solution Waverly gave him changed three he had incorrectly filled in, and the puzzle was nearly completed when a group of capable looking young men with attache cases and U.N.C.L.E. Specials arrived to take over for him.

The prisoners were bundled off by two of the young men, and the rest started to take the Gambol filing system and offices apart in a methodical way designed to process every bolt, fingerprint and dust-mote in the area. The Type Two search was generally considered the finest field analysis that could be brought to bear with equipment at the portable stage.

“Open Channel D, please,” Illya requested as he returned to the street. He was eager to start playing the Great White Hunter again.

“Yes, Mr. Kuryakin. We have Mr. Solo pinpointed for you. He’s apparently much closer than halfway around the globe; he seems to be at Coney Island. His tracker was taken there directly, and then it bounced around for a bit. But the latest report is-excuse me! My monitor shows that yours is the only tracer left active. Mr. Solo’s yellow blip has vanished. Perhaps you had better get out to Coney Island quickly; with today’s upsets the future of our operation re Breelen’s common may depend on it.”

“The future of Breelen’s?” Illya asked no one in particular. “What about Napoleon’s future?” He pulled out into snarled traffic and headed towards Brooklyn. He gave only a part of his attention to his bumper-to-bumper traffic negotiations with people going home late. Most of his mind was centered on the question, “Does Napoleon have a future?” He finally managed to break free in some one-way traffic; fighting the signals down Manhattan was a bigger problem at times than fighting Thrush.

The wait at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel wasn’t phenomenal, but he was losing the last of his patience as he crept forward. Beeping from his communicator came as a welcome break to purgatory on wheels.

“Mr. Kuryakin, our preliminary search of Gambol and Associates has failed to tie any of the names we have gathered to Thrush in any way. The only answers we are liable to get may be at Coney Island, whether Mr. Solo is still operating there or not. Proceed at all possible speed. Communications informs me your car is hardly moving.” Waverly actually sounded excited over the airwaves.

“Proceeding at all possible speed as ordered,” said Illya. “It’s just that, at the moment, possible and minimal are synonymous. You said earlier that a ‘large number’ of investors was involved, sir. Just how many makes up a ‘large number’? How many Thrushes am I out to find evidence against?”

“It seems to be slightly short of five thousand. We have collected the names of almost five thousand investors who will carry off a huge profit for Thrush unless you and Mr. Solo manage to come up with something at Coney Island. Naturally, we can discount some small number as legitimate investors who simply took a ride on the Reading, as it were. But individual briefs, prepared in the case of each one of these several thousands suspected of criminal activity, will keep us busy for many months.” Waverly’s matter-of-fact recounting of numbers, skipping lightly over the matter of Napoleon, rankled Illya as he crept forward in the Tunnel traffic pattern.

“About a third of this group, and their cohorts in London, forced Breelen’s up to nearly sixty-three,” continued Waverly, “and then they sold. Not only sold-they sold short. When the price reached sixty-two and seven-eighths, the orders poured in so fast that I’m told the tape was running over an hour behind.”

“The tape was what? What tape?”

“The securities ticker-tape. It was running an hour behind the actual transactions on the floor of the Exchange, simply because Breelen’s was being traded in thousands of small odd-lot sales. Our man in Finance was very impressed.”

An opening appeared in the traffic ahead, and Illya put the U.N.C.L.E. sedan through it. A squeal of brakes at his rear told him some less fortunate driver had just missed the same hole. Then the nickel dropped.

“Mr. Waverly!”

“Yes,” his chief answered.

“That price. You said sixty-two and seven-eighths. If you found a seven letter word for ‘Arctic Oil Source’ with the middle letters ‘RWH,’ could you fill in the block of words surrounding 62 across in that puzzle?”

“I finished that some time ago, Mr. Kuryakin. ‘An Arctic Oil Source’ is ‘Narwhal,’ and . .

“Exactly. And with that, I can solve 62 across. A five letter word completing ‘The Magnificent-‘ is ‘Seven.’ And 62 down is ‘Cake or Stop.’ The answer to that has to be ‘Short.’ The puzzle tells you to sell short at sixty-two and seven-eighths!”

Anything further Illya might have said was lost as his message was cut off by the solid walls of the Battery Tunnel; he had finally made it in, and his chief was left with a dead communicator.

Waverly sat back in the straight chair he preferred at his desk. One hand flicked open a line to U.N.C.L.E. Cryptoanalysis; the other searched through the mound of files and papers in front of him for a copy of the puzzle. Both hands got results simultaneously-the blank puzzle form and a voice from his desk communicator that said, “Crypto here, sir.”

“One of our agents has just suggested that we correlate the Thrush activity on the Stock Exchange with the morning paper’s crossword puzzle ” he said.

“What?” The voice from Cryptoanalysis was guarded. A request for solutions to the Kaiser’s intimate code, and improvements on the code itself, would be answered in minutes, but every now and then Crypto thought the old man had taken leave of his grip on reality.

“Get on it right away, will you? Go back a few months, and see if the puzzle could be used to transmit information.” Waverly signed off and turned back to the myriad papers before him. Two floors below, a tall bony Negro turned his desk communicator carefully to off, and stared blankly at the wall while he tried to remember if this was the wildest pipe-dream he’d ever been assigned to track down, and if Waverly was the wackiest boss he’s ever worked for.

Two pretty girls giggling behind him broke off his muttering. He turned and faced them, trying to look severe. “You heard the man. Get your behinds in gear, sisters, and let’s crack the Crossword Puzzle Caper and save the world.”

The girls stopped giggling. The pixie-faced blonde spun a rotary file open to crossword, cf., and followed the references to the morning daily. The redhead fed the visual unit at her side a magna-chip each time one was handed to her from the records.

Each chip was read and the thousands of bits of data thereon were flashed to the huge U.N.C.L.E. computer on the floor below. A run-code notified the computer that a Code Four priority situation existed, and a rat’s-nest of integrated circuits reached out electronically to queue up the autocorrelation program for immediate time-sharing. The Central Processing Unit blithely kept working on six other jobs while the data came in, making no great effort at solving the problem until several month’s puzzles were stored on drum.

The girl at the rotary file had keyed in instructions to set the correlation in motion, leading it to each day’s puzzle. By the time six months of newspapers had been scanned the computer was over two-thirds committed to the problem with interim solutions stacked up on drums awaiting a later pass.

The Negro section chief stopped his girls there. “Just that much,” he said. “You know what Data Processing is going to say about tying up this much machine time. Wait’ll they find out what it’s for.” Suddenly a light seemed to explode over his head, and inspiration spread in an expression of shock on his face.

He pulled out a listing of the autocorrelator and replaced his girls at the remote console. With one hand he keyed in a crash Halt instruction that stopped his program while with the other hand he riffed through the listing until he found what he wanted. In thirty seconds he had keyed in half a dozen instructions and restarted the giant computer system, but not before his desk communicator had come alive.

“Dean, you clumsy feather-merchant-” bleated the radio. The head of Crypto put his hand on the send only switch and talked soothingly into it.

“Your little erector-set will be all right, Johnny. I only clobbered the processor for the time it took to enter a couple instructions.”

“Brother, you don’t demand Conversational mode from a system like this with no warning! Don’t you know enough to let the job terminate, and then make a re-run? Taking a free hand like that is going to cost everybody, you games-playing idiot.”

“Now, that’s talk unbecoming a department head,” said Dean. “I’ve got the priority from Mister Man himself, and I think even you’ll agree it was worth the interruption to keep the computer from solving crossword puzzles.”

“Solving what? To keep the computer from what?”

“I put in an autocor to-so help me-find out if the daily crossword is mixed up in a Thrush gambit. Just as the program got its teeth into the first pass at my data, I realized that any correlation worth its salt would solve the puzzles too. You can’t find out if there’s secrets in ‘em unless you know the answers. Before that tied us up for hours or maybe days, I tore into the program and told it to find the solution in the next day’s paper.”

The communicator buzzed, and clicked off with no comment. Below, the computer continued its complicated path through the data.

Five correlations were noted on the program’s first pass. One, every puzzle of any interest was signed “Avery D. Porpoise” as originator. Two, all these puzzles were cast in roughly the same format. 3, 4, and 5 were definitions common to many puzzles: A third of the puzzles asked the question “Who was Peer Gynt’s mother?” and a third each included the definitions “A Legume” and “A Celebes Ox.” The system suspended operations on the newspaper files and worked on other programs while the Crypto team prepared a magna-chip of instructions to follow up all but item number two.

“Everybody knows that crosswords come in pretty much the same pattern ,” said the blonde. “It’s a lot harder to make them up if your pattern is wandering all over the place.”

“Computers don’t ordinarily waste time solving crosswords,” Dean answered. “It’s fine for you to know that this Porpoise is only playing the game by all the rules of puzzle-makers, but that machine downstairs can’t tell the difference in importance between that correlation and the one that tells us that Porpoise is our man “

The second run found another two correlations in the selected puzzles: There was a number or a figure in the solutions of every puzzle signed Avery Porpoise, and the words “Buy,”

“Sell” or “Short” were also constants; every puzzle contained one of the three words.

Output was selected, and ten pages of data rattled off the remote line printer like machine gun fire. The printout was sealed in a flat case, and the redhead carried it personally upstairs to the office where a dozen people were working on the information Napoleon and Illya had gathered during the day. When the dates and numbers were added to the information, a wave of relief passed through the room.

The list of names compiled from buying and selling records broke into three groups, their purchases matching the dates of the puzzles tightly. Quick glances at the prices checked out the clue that had put Illya on the track: when a Porpoise puzzle appeared, at least one third of the investors found their key definition in it, and solved the puzzle. Their instructions were there, and the actual point of transaction was spelled out as a number from zero to seven in a block whose number was the dollars part of each deal. 1 By the time Illya pulled out of the Tunnel, Waverly could tell him his hunch had paid off.

Chapter 7

“This hairbreadth stuff has got to stop.”

Napoleon watched the spacelock close until Arnold and his sick smile were completely shut from sight. Sadists like that make me wish I could transfer to a job with a friendly atmosphere, like cab-driving. He sure gets a kick out of locking people up and flexing his death-traps. Never inclined to take the enemy’s advice, Napoleon decided to see for himself, despite the knives, just how deadly the Space Maze could be.

He started from the spacelock-door in a crouch and made a running leap, clearing the next room and its sliding trapdoor completely. The next alcove was walled with glass and steel, mirrors reflecting mirrors with a hundred Napoleon Solo forms poised on all sides of him, hair disarrayed and every muscle ready to bounce when the next trap was sprung.

Two openings seemed to lead from the little room when he screwed up his vision to eliminate false doors in the reflections. He reached a hand towards one, carefully feeling his way. His fingers brushed glass where there should have been air, and he jerked back in pain. The glass was like fire.

The whole room was heating up, he realized. Not the muggy, drowning heat of the swimming-pool room where Porpoise lolled in ugly luxury, but a dry, baking heat that was less obvious. His skin prickled, and the fine hairs in his ears and nostrils seemed to vibrate. At the edges of his hearing he sensed a roar, a whining buzz, sounds that he couldn’t focus on or really be certain he even heard. He began to sweat. The heat in the center of the room was becoming unbearable, but near the walls there was nearly as much of it, a great physical thing that ground sweat and salt out of him.

Great globes of liquid formed on his hands and arms and brow, and as the heat increased they drew into smaller globes, finally drying on him even as his system pumped more water out. Under his clothes he felt like a walking swamp.

Fire coursed down his leg and sprinkled jingling across the, floor. The coins Apis had left him had literally burned a hole in his pocket and rolled away. Several rolled through the other opening he had been about to follow, bouncing from mirror to mirror. The entire next room suddenly disappeared in a shower of exploding glass as one of the coins rolled against a wall. Tiny fragments of the stuff passed Napoleon, others cut small gashes in his clothing. By some quirk, none actually cut his flesh.

“Those teeth are pulled,” he murmured, staring in awe at the debacle just next door. If he’d gotten into that room before his pocket change had, he might have brushed the exploding mirror as lightly as he’d touched one in the sweat-bath room.

He reached for one of his coins, thinking to use an advance scout again, but fumbled it as his fingers were seared. “Oh well. I didn’t really want to get through here the easy way anyhow,” he whispered as he sucked the injured fingers. He was very careful not to touch anything as he peered carefully through the door to the next room, and found himself looking down a glowing walkway in darkness. There were planets and stars reflected from floor, walls and ceiling.

Napoleon carefully placed a foot on the walkway, and-shock! Current shot up through his leg to arc from his fingers and hair in a pyrotechnical display of high voltage. Against his will one hand clutched the doorway, and a path opened for the current-up his right leg, through the trunk, down his left arm and out the hand. Somehow he kept his head clear, but he knew that a very few moments of this would burst his heart.

He put his whole soul into the only muscles he had that could save him. Writhing out of control in two-thirds of his body, he still had control over his left leg. Quickly, he made the left knee unlock and collapse, until his weight brought him down on the right. He kicked out, swinging his body off balance, and fell backwards onto the field of glass shards. He lay there twitching in reaction to the electricity, and forced new air into his screamed-dry lungs.

Somewhat shakily, he got up from the broken glass and faced the dark pathway again. He squatted into a set of kneebends to bring back coordination in the electrocuted muscles, breathed deeply, and brushed himself clean of glass.

“You’ll have to go back and start it over again, Solo,” said Arnold’s voice from above. A steel door slammed down, cutting off all access to the deadly walkway. Napoleon sat down to stare at it, to wait for Arnold to raise it again or to try to figure out a way through or around it. There was nothing visible forward, but he knew what faced him back in the Space Ship Room if he didn’t give this maze his all.

“Didn’t you understand me?” asked his unseen jailor. “You are to go back to your starting place now. Here’s something to convince you.” The persuader was a set of openings in the ceiling that boiled out a fine brownish mist. It almost had to be chlorine, and that wasn’t something he wanted to stay and find out about for sure. He stepped back into the furnace room, hoping it had cooked a bit since he had last been through.

The heat fooled him at first as he moved to the center of the room. The air was only mildly warm, and he wondered if the beams had turned off. Just a half-pause in the center cured him of that idea-as he became the focus for the ultrasonic blasts, he was forced against the still scorching walls, finding the mirrors hotter than they had been before. He sidled around the room, his only chance to remain uncooked being a hasty retreat to the Space Ship Room. The heat was draining him of strength and body fluid as sweat dried all over him, continually being sucked from his system.

He threw himself into a leap that carried him back over the dreaded knives, rolling safely into the futuristic room. The chill of outdoors hit him again but it soothed him after the soundless oven he’d crossed. His strength returned, and he faced back to the trapdoor room, staring bitterly into the inferno beyond. He heard the steel shutter open, tauntingly, tempting him to try again.