Текст книги "The Diving Dames Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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The time had come to end the interview. He wasn't sure at all that the girl was employed by the D.A.M.E.S. If she was, surely they would have liaised with Waverly. On the other hand, he couldn't believe she was a Thrush member. Even the most accomplished of actresses could hardly have feigned that bland incredulity when he'd mentioned the organization and its aims. In any event, the riddle of her allegiance must wait until another time: at the moment be was tired of being questioned himself.

"...essential that you tell me your principals," Cora he Simone was saying.

Once more, Illya searched for, caught and held her eyes. "But surely you must realize, my dear..." he began.

Tensing the muscles of calf, back and thigh, he raised himself minutely from the chair and sent it rocketing backwards with a powerful thrust of his fingers.

The girl's eyes tore themselves away from his as the chair skated across the floor with a rumble and a screech. Involuntarily, she followed its path with her glance. At the same time, like a trepak dancer from the Cossack country, Kuryakin kicked out one leg horizontally from his squatting position.

The toe of his shoe caught the underneath of the gun's butt as it nestled in her hand, sending the weapon spinning upwards. Before she had switched her gaze back from the errant chair, he had risen to his feet, stretched out a hand and snatched the Berretta from the air.

"Forgive the liberty," he said quietly. "I have to leave early in the morning and I really do need some sleep."

The girl, scarlet with anger, her eyes flashing, nursed her hand and watched as he broke the automatic, slid the clip out and shook the shells into the palm of one hand. He crossed the room to the bed, picked up the white shoulder-strap bag she had left there, and dropped them inside. Then he bowed, handed her the bag and the empty gun, and turned to open the door for her. He was smiling.

"Until the next time, Miss Simone," he said gently.

"If there is one," the girl said grimly. "I do not like people opening my handbag without my permission. It's rude. Also, I have a rooted objection to being followed. So if you'll forgive me…"

She reversed the gun in her hand and slashed the butt expertly down to the side of Illya's head while he was bent over the lock.

–

He still had a headache when the plane landed at Brasilia the following morning. The weather was humid, close and fiercely hot, the sky overcast by a lowering front.

In view of O'Rourke's information, he decided to go first of all to the auto rental companies. It wasn't until the fourth attempt that he found anyone who had heard of "Mr. Williams." But the boy behind the shabby counter in this one remembered at once.

"Why goodness me, yes!" he exclaimed, his dark face lighting up at the memory. "As a matter of fact he hired the car personally from me. Nice chap, really top-hole."

"He was going up to the San Felipe dam, was he?"

"Oh rather. Absolutely. Told me so himself, don't you know. In fact be asked me to help him work out the jolly old route. He was going to spend the night at Goiás, I believe."

"He didn't bring the car back himself?"

"Well, no. As a matter of fact a different bloke did. Just handed it in, paid out the cash and hooked it, you know."

"And you haven't seen Mr. Williams since?"

"Williams? No. Not a hide nor a jolly old hair. But..."

"You have seen the other man?"

"Not to say since, old bean. Before. I've seen him around. Cove by the name of Greerson. Hardly the type I'd expect your friend -"

"Does he live here?"

"Live here? Who does, old chap, who does? No, I fancy he's a backwoodsman. Tell you the truth, I rather thought he was a foreigner employed on the construction site or something of that sort."

"You've been very helpful," Illya said. "Here, take this – and I'd like to rent a car myself for a few days. Any chance at all of getting the same one Williams had?"

"Oh, I say, thanks awfully. Most decent of you… Not to say the same actual one. One just like it – another VW. But you can't very well have the actual one – the girl's already taken that."

"The girl?"

"Smashing bird, old boy. About an hour ago. Asked all the same questions you've asked – and off she drove."

Kuryakin gave an exclamation of annoyance. If the girl was Coralie Simone, it meant she had help in a big way. For she hadn't been on the first plane, he could have sworn – and that in turn meant she must have a private aircraft, for to have made Brasilia from Rio in any other way would have been impossible in the time.

"Don't you find that collar uncomfortable in this weather?" he asked sourly as they turned together to go out into the garage.

–

San Felipe do Caiapo was a collection of shacks, some wood, some adobe-and-thatch, dispersed around a rutted open space that did service as central square, market, sports ground and local park. There was an inn, a mud walled church, a swaying bridge over the river, and a garage – an open shed flanked by a single rusty gasoline pump which was surrounded by an assortment of decrepit vehicles. Without exception, these were of pre-war vintage and looked as though they had just man aged to struggle as far as San Felipe when they were new, and had never been able to raise the necessary horsepower to leave again.

Most of the population were seated outside the front doors of their houses, leaning against the walls to get the maximum amount of shade from the projecting eaves, but there were several groups of men along a boardwalk linking the building on one side of the square rather in the manner of a Hollywood western.

Illya bumped the Volkswagen across the plaza, scattering chickens, dogs and mules, and edged the car cautiously over the bridge. There was only a trickle of water in the pebbly river bed below.

Beyond the town, the road twisted through a belt of forest, breasted a rise, and dropped down to the river again, where it joined a wider, paved highway running almost due north and south. Kuryakin took the northerly direction and beaded for Getuliana. Presently the valley widened, the hills at each side became lower, and the river looped away in a series of ox-bows across an alluvial plain.

In a few miles, he caught sight of the new city. Or, rather, the place where the new city was destined to be.

The road clung to higher ground at the side of the wide valley, and the excavations – a couple of miles away in the middle of the plain – were spread out before him like a map. Hundreds of acres had been cleared, bulldozed into squares and rectangles and crescents, segmented by radial boulevards converging on a central space, laterally divided by wide avenues. But apart from the temporary huts erected by contractors, there wasn't a building in sight. A cloud of dust above the yellowish earth marked the place where a single bulldozer was working near a pair of cranes in one corner of the vast site. But the only other activity Illya could see was a mile away to the north, where the antlike movements of a fleet of trucks and several dozen men centered on a pair of heavy transport aircraft drawn up at one end of a wide landing strip.

Soon the distant puttering of the bulldozer was submerged in a heavier, deeper rumble. For a moment, he sought the source of the noise. Then his eye caught a moving dust cloud to his right. A column of trucks was winding its way along a route leading from the site to the road be was on. In a few minutes, the convoy roared past, heading for San Felipe and the damn. All the trucks were covered – and each one seemed to have a man in some sort of uniform beside the driver.

It was unbearably hot parked in the sunlight at the edge of the road. Making up his mind suddenly, Kuryakin swung over the VW's wheel and set off the way he had come, following the convoy back towards the dam.

Three or four miles after the junction with the road to San Felipe village, the valley narrowed and the sides became steep and rocky. Soon he was driving along a serpentine defile above whose thickly wooded lower slopes great cliffs reared skywards.

Abruptly the gorge divided: the river in its stony bed burrowed beneath the road and was seen to be emerging from the canyon on the right, while the tributary valley on the left was marked only by a dried-up watercourse showing not even a trickle of moisture. The road forked too, though in a contrary sense – for while the highway to the south twisted away towards the pass at the head of the minor valley, the road following the main gorge was blocked a hundred yards further on by wire mesh gate on steel frames. And the smooth blacktop which had distinguished the highway ever since Getuliana swerved aside from the main road and continued beyond the gates to where, a half mile away, the great bulk of the dam itself was visible around a bend in the valley. Beyond a cracked and peeling sign pointing to AGUACALINDA – SANTA MARIA DA CONCEICAO – GOIÁS the trunk road relapsed at once into an unsurfaced dirt-track alternating chassis-breaking potholes with extrusions of naked bed rock. Clearly the pavement had been laid only to assist the contractors in moving materials from landing strip to dam, and the hell with local communications.

Illya had no means of knowing how wide the reservoir might be in the drowned valley behind the barrage, but the actual dam was one of the highest he had ever seen. From the curved lip spanning the gorge high up against the blue wedge of sky, the great curtain of concrete plunged downwards in three stages like a frozen wave. At each level, multiple arches housing the sluices linked blockhouses from which the giant-bore pipes dropped to the hydroelectric generating station below. And around the power station an ancillary web of transformer housings, masts, insulators and pylons had been neatly spun. Towering between the age-old rock faces of that desolate valley, the dam was a testament to the ingenuity of man, a beautiful piece of engineering.

The agent drove slowly up to the wire gates blocking the road to the power station. On either side as far as he could see, ten-foot wire fencing behind a deep ditch guarded the boundaries of the property. A man came out of a small concrete building just inside the gates. He was dressed in the same khaki and black uniform worn by the guards Illya had seen in the convoy. And he was carrying a machine pistol.

"What do you want?" he called over the top of the gates. His voice was not friendly.

"This is the San Felipe dam, isn't it?" Illya called, putting his head out of the car window. "The Moraes-Wassermann project?"

The guard continued staring at him, saying nothing.

"I am a construction engineer… in Brazil on a short visit to survey progress in hydroelectric works, bridging, and so on. They tell me the barrage here, is particularly interesting and I wondered -"

"This is private property," the man said. "On your way.

"Most dams are on private property, but that does not mean that a courteously worded request -"

"I said beat it," the guard snapped, his sullen face scowling. "We don't like snoopers around here. Like I said, it's private, see. Now get out."

"But how can I get to see the artificial lake…"

"You can't. You can either go back to San Felipe or go on to Aguacalinda or Goiás – if you like driving over bare rock. And you won't see the lake from either road, because it's not overlooked by any goddamn road. It's too high up and the rocks are too steep around it… There's a third choice: you stay here one minute more, I'll call out the site police and have you towed off our property. And they're not gentle."

"Well, really… I'm not on your property anyway. I'm outside the gates."

"You're on private property the moment you leave that fork. Now are you getting the hell out of here, Or…"

Hoping that he had displayed the correct amount of outraged resentment to pass for a visitor consumed merely with idle curiosity, Illya turned the Volkswagen and drove on towards Aguacalinda. Although the surface was very bad, the road appeared – judging from the multiplicity of tire marks in the dust – to carry fairly heavy traffic.

Such few houses that he saw, however – mainly peasant huts or the dwellings of subsistence farmers who scratched a living from the stony soil – were strung out along the hillside far from the road without even a track wide enough for a vehicle leading to them. So the traffic must either be heading all the way south to Goiás and the next state (which seemed unlikely) or to some other place further up the valley. Yet the maps he had, admittedly imprecise, showed no sign of any large habitation before Aguacalinda... which was some distance on the other side of the pass and was in any case smaller than San Felipe itself.

If the maps were in any way correct, the valley which had been drowned by the reservoir curved around and ran almost parallel with the one he was in right up to the watershed. Between the trees to his right every now and then he could see the high wire fence enclosing the property – which seemed to confirm the geographers in their mapping.

When he was two or three miles from the gates and, the guard house, he stopped the car under a grove of trees and climbed the steep side of the valley on the opposite side of the road from the fence.

The trees were dense and for the first half hour it was tough going. Then he came out onto a stretch of rocky ground where it was easier to pick his way. And finally he stopped where the rough slope met the vertical cliffs lining the gorge.

But the guard had been right. Even from here he could see nothing of the artificial lake beyond the far side of the defile. Behind the opposite rock face the barren ground rose again and cut off his view before it dropped to the next valley. At his feet, the road and the dried up river bed snaked through the trees.

He scrambled back down the mountainside and crossed the road to examine the wire fence.

As he had expected, there were alarm wires threaded along its length – although these were surprisingly not electric, but the simple mechanical kind which actuated buzzers or bells. Every few yards there were notices saying: DANGER! THIS IS PRIVATE PROPERTY. KEEP OFF! WARNING IS GIVEN TO TRESPASSERS THAT THE GROUND BEYOND THIS FENCE IS PATROLLED BY ARMED GUARDS AND BY DOGS.

He returned to the car and drove on. After another mile and a half, the fence curved away up the steepening hillside to pass around a sizable property bordering the road. There was a long, low, two-storied house with wooden balconies, a group of outbuildings, and palm trees behind a high hedge of some shrub. An estancia, would it be? A hacienda?... No, that was Spanish, surely. But anyway it was a demesne very different in style from the poor cabins scattered along the other side of the valley.

It was when he had gone about ten minutes' drive past the place, and the road was beginning to zigzag up wards, obviously on its way to the saddle across the watershed, that he realized the evidence of heavy traffic was no longer visible. The dusty spaces between the pot holes were bare of tire marks.

He turned and drove back towards the property, pulling the VW off the road a quarter of a mile short of it and running the car behind a thicket to hide it from the road.

Once again he forced his way up the hillside to the rock face and scanned the valley below through field glasses.

The estancia was clearly visible beyond a stretch of woods. Behind the dense hedges, there seemed to be quite a number of people busied about various tasks, among them a number of women in the distinctive green tweed uniforms of the D.A.M.E.S. They must be sweltering in those clothes at this temperature! Illya thought.

There were several station wagons and a few private cars parked between the house and the barns. As he watched, some large American convertible carrying three men and three girls prowled around the edge of the building and cruised down towards the gate. One of the girls got out to open the gate and then the car sped away northwards towards Getuliana in a cloud of dust. Judging from their movements, all six of the occupants appeared to be somewhat drunk.

Illya's binoculars had remained trained on the gateway, though. The powerful Zeiss lenses clearly showed up the beaten earth of the entrance – and the myriad marks of heavy wheels passing over it. The mystery of where all the traffic on the road had gone was solved: obviously all of it turned in here!

But where did the heavy trucks go when they had made the turn? There were none visible there now – and although the estancia was large enough, there was certainly no accommodation for convoys as big as the one he had seen leaving the airstrip earlier. There had still been trucks loading material from the transport planes when he had left to follow the first convoy, however; even if he had lost the first one, there should be a second coming along some time soon. Then he could find out.

He would have to find a different viewpoint, nevertheless. Various belts of trees intercepted his vision where he was now. He began working his way back down to wards the car.

When he was about halfway there, he emerged from a screen of bushes to find a poorly dressed Indian standing with his back to him on a piece of level ground, staring flint-faced across the valley at the estancia.

"Nice place?" Kuryakin said, lacking a suitable opening.

The Indian swung slowly around and stared at him impassively.

"I mean, it's a bit of a surprise, finding a big place like that out here," Illya went on. "All the others are so small, you know."

"Nice place, sure, if you have money," the Indian said bitterly.

"It belongs to rich people, then? From the city?

"Surprise, too, to all the people live here. All the people have houses and farms that are take away and put under lake," said the man – who appeared to make a practice of answering always the question before the one that had just been asked.

The agent looked suitably encouraging and said nothing.

"I had a farm – small place, but I like – over there," the Indian continued, waving an arm towards the opposite side of the valley. "Now it is take away and I am given small, poor house here with stony ground and some money. But money cannot give me back thirty years work on that farm – and my father before. Now I am not even allowed to walk past and look into water!"

"But I thought the ladies down there dressed in green had helped to iron out – or – to – to make easy all the problems with those who had to move for the dam."

"Ladies!" the man burst out. "Ladies? Our women are not allowed to behave like that in private – and certainly not in public. It is disgrace… drunken and singing and shouts and unseemly acts."

"Really? You surprise me. But this is an American -"

"Why should these foreign women be permitted to mock our customs in this way? It is disgrace."

"Understood. This is not the first time I have heard such complaints. Do all the women connected with the dam behave like that?"

But the Indian suddenly bit his lower lip, an expression of guarded watchfulness closing up his face. "I say too much," he muttered. "It is not permitted. It is forbidden to speak of these matters."

"By whom?"

"The gods will be angry and spoil our crops."

"Who says so? Who says you mustn't speak?"

"The caboclo. It is instruction."

"Caboclo?"

"The old one, the mouthpiece of the spirits. Pai Hernando told me so. Through the caboclo he speaks with the spirits."

"What name did you say?" Illya almost shouted.

"Pai Hernando. The father-of-saint at the Candomblé down there."

"That place is a Candomblé headquarters?"

"Not whole place. There is a Candomblé tenda behind."

"And the name of the – father-of-saint? – his name is Hernando and he speaks with the spirits through a guide, a caboclo?"

"Pai Hernando, yes."

Illya was whistling to himself as he ran down the remainder of the slope to the Volkswagen. He had felt all along that he was on the right scent. Now, surely, this must be the "Hernando's Hideaway" which had so puzzled them in Napoleon Solo's telegram.

–

He put his key in the Volkswagen's lock and twisted.

The key refused to turn.

Puzzled, he tried again. Again he could make no impression. He stood back and stared at the vehicle... and realized suddenly that it wasn't his own. It was the same color, the same model, the same year. But the registration number was one integer different – and inside, tossed carelessly onto the back seat, was the cockaded hat of a member of the D.A.M.E.S.

It must be the car hired by the girl, Coralie Simone – indeed, now that he had oriented himself, he could see the top of his own gleaming through the thicket a little way to the north.

And if this was Coralie Simone's car – and if the boy at the car rental company had told the truth – then this was the actual one Solo had been driving in this very area a few days ago. And Solo himself, alive or dead, must be somewhere on the other side of the wire fence beyond the place he had called Hernando's Hideaway...

Chapter 8

A Break-In – And A Surprise!

ILLYA CAME upon the girl quite unexpectedly. He had decided to leave the car where it was and approach the estancia on foot, reasoning that the people in charge were less likely to notice a strange vehicle if it was further on up the valley, beyond their gates. He had been forced to cross the road to the side where the wire fence ran, because the river bed was immediately along side the entrance road and there was no cover on the opposite side. And he had plunged deeper into the bushes between road and fence, first to avoid being seen by two tough-looking men and two overpainted girls in a red Jaguar which had roared past in the direction of the pass, and secondly when he had heard the second convoy arriving.

It was while he was watching the twelve two-tonners turn in at the gate of the estancia that he heard the girl's gasp of pain.

The sound seemed to come from only a few feet away, just on the far side of a clump of oleanders lining the ditch. Cautiously, he parted the branches with their scarlet flowers and peered through.

The fence was immediately beyond the ditch – and just behind it was the girl, her arm bent up behind her back by one of the uniformed men who obviously patrolled the whole perimeter around the dam. She was dressed in D.A.M.E.S. uniform now. Against the pallor of her cheeks, her hair shone richly in the sun.

"Come on, sweetheart," the guard was saying in English. "You know as well as I do that you're not allowed on this side of the fence. Now how'd you get over, and what are you doin', huh?"

"You're hurting my arm," the girl said. "Oh… I – I walked around from the gates. Down by the power house."

"Don't give me that," the man rasped. "The gates are five miles from here and your shoes are still polished – there's not even a scratch on 'em!"

"I can't help that... Will you let go of my arm -"

"You come across from the estancia that's what, ain't it? Now you know you birds got no business this side of the wire… that's why Macdonald would never let you through at the gates. Either you go through the mountain or you stay outside at the estancia, right?... Now I'm gonna take you right back to the guardroom and we'll see what…"

And suddenly he was on the ground. Illya could not see exactly how it was done – an ankle was placed to one side, a trim hip was thrust out and something expert took place with the arm that had been held up be hind the girl's back – but the result was that the guard, momentarily inattentive as his thoughts ran ahead, found himself flying through the air over Coralie Simone' shoulder.

He landed flat on his back among the grasses. There were lumps of limestone bidden by the tussocks an the force of the impact would have knocked out many men. But this one was tough. He was on his feet almost at once, lips snarled back from discolored teeth, approaching the girl like a wrestler, with outstretched hands.

His mistake was to go on thinking, after the initial surprise, that he could handle the thing himself. Had he blown the whistle that hung around his neck on a chain, that would have been that: a patrol of men would have been down on them within minutes and the girl would have been taken prisoner. But with the arrogance of the true bully, the guard was confident that he could overpower a mere woman.

From behind his screen of oleanders, Kuryakin watched the man and the girl circling each other over the rough ground. He wasn't sure what to do. There was an overhanging branch from a big tree some way down the fence; he could probably swing himself across without disturbing the alarm wire there. Yet there was a risk that the guard might see or hear him on the way to it. And they had to avoid at all costs any attempt to summon help.

In the event, the decision was taken from the Russian's hands. Having had three attempts at grappling with his adversary frustrated by well timed judo grips, the guard began to lose his temper. He leaped at the girl with flailing fists.

Coralie Simone sprang agilely away towards the fence – but as she went, one heel caught in a projection of rock concealed among the grasses and she stumbled backwards. With a growl of triumph, the guard was on her, pinning her arms to her sides in a bear hug and forcing her to the ground. The girl brought one sharp knee up into his stomach as she tried desperately to free her arms. She twisted her head and sank her teeth into the rough material of his sleeve, attempting to bite through the cloth to the muscles of the biceps beneath. She jerked her forehead back and forth trying to butt him in the face.

The man chuckled and spun her around as easily as if her body had been a bale of cotton. As she lay face downwards in the tall grass, he kneeled on the backs of her thighs and seized the collar of her jacket in both hands. The green stuff ripped up the back seam as be yanked with all his strength and the garment came away from her in two pieces.

As he grunted in triumph and in amusement, his eyes looked through the wire strands of the fence and met the glittering stare of Kuryakin concealed among the leaves on the other side.

Before the round O of his mouth could utter the cry of astonishment it was framing, the agent's forefinger had tightened on the trigger of the miniature automatic in his hand. The weapon – it looked no more dangerous than a gadget cigarette lighter – emitted a staccato chock and the guard keeled over backwards. As he crashed down among the grasses, the girl got shakily to her feet.

"You!" she said, seeing Kuryakin. "What are you doing here?... I suppose I ought to thank you, though I could have bandied him perfectly well myself. Even so…" She looked dubiously down at the fallen guard.

"Do not worry," Illya said. "I dislike violence and I never kill unnecessarily. It was just what we call a sleep dart; he will be hors de combat for an hour, that's all. So far as thanks go, I think I deserve them.. considering that I still have a headache from our last meeting."

Coralie Simone blushed. "I'm sorry about that," she said, "but I wanted to make sure you didn't follow me here."

"You could have saved yourself the trouble, as you see. Why not?"

"Because I have an investigation to carry out and don't like snoopers. You wouldn't say who you were."

"So have I and neither would you. But before we start quarreling again let us deal with this man – otherwise both our investigations will fail." He rose to his feet, made his way to the tree with the overhanging brand and worked his way along it until he could drop safely to the ground on the far side of the fence.

"The sleep dart will take care of this specimen for an hour," he said as he came up to the girl and the recumbent guard. "But I need him to be out of the way for at least two – so that he cannot possibly raise an alarm until I'm well away. If only I knew how often he is supposed -"

"He patrols a five hundred yard sector of the fence," the girl said crisply. "I've been checking. He doesn't have to make contact – or not necessarily – with the men on either side. There is no overlapping. And he isn't due for relief for another three hours."

"So he's just possibly not going to be missed?"

"Exactly. We are more than a hundred and fifty yards from the nearest adjoining sector."

The agent was rolling the unconscious guard over onto his face. "Okay," he said. "So if we take off his belt… so… and strap his arms to his sides… like this... and lash his wrists together with his tie… we should be able to prolong his period of forced inactivity beyond the hour given to us by the dart. Now what about his knees, his ankles, and some sort of gag?"

"You could use this," the girl said doubtfully. "It's of no further use to me now." She was holding up the two torn halves of her jacket.

Kuryakin took the green tatters from her. He ripped a back panel into three sections, binding the guard's ankles with one, his knees with another, and using the third to tie into place a wadded handkerchief which he rammed into the man's open mouth. "That should keep him out of the way until they start to look for him when he doesn't report at the end of his shift," he murmured as they dragged the bound and gagged man into the shelter of a thorn bush. "Now what about you, young. Aha!"

"What is it, Sherlock Holmes?"

The agent was looking at the remaining half of the D.A.M.E.S. jacket which he held in his hands. Below the torn collar a name tape, shiny with continued use, slightly soiled from contact with other clothes, was neatly sewn. On the pale ribbon, red letters spelled out C. SIMONE.

"Unless your principals specialize in detail work more perfect than any used by the world's intelligence services," Illya said slowly, "this is an old jacket that's been worn a lot. It really is your own garment – not a cover disguise. You really do work for the D.A.M.E.S."

"Of course I do," the girl said impatiently. "I work for the Special Investigation section. Lots of our girls come from very particular families and we have to take special care about conditions and so on when we send teams abroad. We're always having to make inquiries about one thing or another – and of course when we find people pretending to be D.A.M.E.S. when they're not, then naturally the Committee wants to find out why."