Текст книги "The Diving Dames Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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"But why didn't you say so? It would have saved so much -"

"How like a man! Why should I tell you? Who are you, anyway?"

"I work for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The man who is missing is a colleague of mine from the same Section."

"So you're from U.N.C.L.E.! Why didn't you tell me?"

"Because I didn't…" Illya sighed in exasperation. "Because nobody told me you would have a representative down here. I imagine they didn't know."

"No, they wouldn't," Coralie Simone said. "We didn't tell you."

"Why on Earth not?"

"Mrs. Stretford – the Commandant – said that since your Mr. Waverly couldn't be bothered to be cooperative, she didn't see why she should."

"So you wasted all that time checking on me, and I – Never mind! Since we are both trying to find out what's going on here, suppose we join forces for the time being, okay?" Illya smiled his rare and charming smile.

The girl hesitated. Then the smooth skin around her eyes crinkled delightfully, the wide mouth stretched in the lean face. There was a flash of teeth. "Agreed," she cried with a laugh. "It's a deal – for the time being!"

"Splendid. What now, then? I'm trying to find out what goes on in the grounds of that estancia back there."

"So am I. All the trucks seem to go there and not along the made-up road leading to the power station. I want to have a closer look. Do you think... if we kept on this side of the fence and circled the place from above..."

Kuryakin was shaking his head. "Not a chance," he said. Even if we could make it past the guards and the dogs, there's not a shadow of cover. Look!" His gesture encompassed the sweep of bare hillside above the trees masking the estancia, the slant of rocky slope beyond it, and the barren wall of cliff rising behind that. "Do you have a change of clothing in the car?"

"Yes," Coralie said. "Why?'

"Because I'm going to make a frontal foray. As long as you are not dressed like one of their spurious D.A.M.E.S, you can be my assistant when I ask for information about the Candomblé."

'Candomblé. I keep hearing that word. I've spoken to a lot of the local Negroes, and some Indians too. All of them seem afraid to talk about the dam – even if they've been forced to leave their homes by the scheme – because of the Candomblé. What is it, a secret society?"

"Not exactly. More like a religion. There are a number of different cults here in Brazil – all of them a mixture of African and Indian worship with Christianity and Spiritualism. The two most affecting simple Negro and Indian people are Candomblé and Umbanda. In both cases, their gods are a mixture of Christian and pagan ones; both believe that you can communicate with those gods or their representatives by means of mediums. But the initiates of Candomblé – so it is believed – can be visited by, or get in touch with, their gods personally, whereas the umbandistas' mediums have to have the gods' wishes interpreted through a guide, rather in the manner of a western séance."

"How fascinating," the girl said. "But why the difference?"

"I don't know too much about it," Kuryakin replied. "But the main reasons go back to the days of slavery. The most intelligent African slaves brought over to Brazil were the Yoruba. They had the most complex religions and gods – and the mixture of these with Catholicism produced Candomblé... the cult with the strongest African influence, radiating outwards from Bahia. The less developed Bantu from Angola, centered more on Rio, were that much more swayed by the great Spiritualist movement which swept Brazil in the last century, and their cult is the one called Umbanda today."

"But why should a religious cult bar local people from -"

"We'll ask," Illya said, interrupting, "when we get there."

–

But the tall, white haired Negro with the Harvard accent and the lined face who met them in the Candomblé tenda – a wooden building like a mission hut which stood among trees to one side of the estancia – was uncooperative. They had not been challenged at the gate and they had followed the drive, which skirted the building and then sloped downhill towards a thicket, until a signpost had directed them towards the hut. A Negro woman in a white robe had left them in a waiting room while she'd gone to call Pai Hernando.

"If – as you claim – you are an anthropology graduate from the University of Southern California," the priest said in his well-modulated voice, "I cannot understand why you and your assistant should have chosen to come all the way here to this very modest, uninspiring tenda when there are so many others more interesting else where." He sat at a simple desk. Through the uncurtained window behind him, they could see groups of men in the now familiar khaki and black uniforms moving in among the trees.

"But that's just it," Illya said. "All the way here. Since Candomblé is centered on Bahia state and the areas to the north and east of it, we find it intensely interesting, demographically, to find a tenda as far west as this. We had no idea the Yoruba had ever been transported this far."

"They probably migrated after abolition. And in any case the boundary between former slave peoples and the Indian aboriginals is hopelessly blurred now," Hernando said. He flicked a speck of dust from his pale gray suit and drummed his fingers on the top of the desk.

"As the priest in charge of this place," Coralie asked suddenly, "can you explain why the spirits should frown on the local people talking about this dam? We wondered how the forced moves had affected them, sociologically, but we couldn't get a soul to talk about it at all. They say the gods forbid."

"I am only Pai Hernando, the horse on which the spirits ride," the Negro said. "It is not for me to question the wisdom of the Orixás, the great ones. Indeed, I had no idea such messages had been transmitted through me. And now," he added pointedly, "if you could tell me how I can help you…"

"We should very much like to see some ceremonies – perhaps an ôrunkó – to compare with those performed in the Candomblés further east."

"I am afraid that is quite impossible. This is a simple country place. No such rituals take place here."

"But I thought…"

"Definitely not, sir. Apart from which, the local folk are – as you have seen – superstitious and suspicious. They would resent any outside participation, any hint of an audience, at their devotions."

Illya rose from his chair and paced up and down. "But surely," he cried agitatedly, running his hand through his pale hair, "there must be something in a cult which can impose so strong a taboo on the discussion -"

"I regret extremely," Pai Hernando said, rising to his feet also, "that I cannot help you at all. It is a pity that you should have traveled so far and so fruitlessly. Had you inquired first…"

"Are those soldiers out there?" Coralie asked innocently as he showed them to the door.

"Certainly not," the Negro said. "They are members of the construction company's security guard. There is valuable property in here."

"Your tenda is financed by the company, then?"

"By no means. They have been very generous, allowing us to operate on their land, granting us certain facilities."

"That aspect of paternalism in a foreign concern is interesting," Illya said. "Perhaps we could ask you a new -"

"Good day to you," Pai Hernando said firmly. He closed the door.

"Well, I've heard of visitors being discouraged," Coralie exclaimed as they walked out of the gates, "but this is ridiculous. Did you see those – security guards, did he say? I'm sure they'd have fired on us if we had turned right instead of left when we left that hut!"

"They probably would," the agent said soberly. "Obviously the entire Candomblé thing is a cheap device to blackmail the locals into silence about the whole project. The thing's a fake from beginning to end,"

"Why are you so sure?"

"Several reasons. In the first place Pai Hernando, Father Hernando, is a form of address used in Umbanda associations, not in Candomblé. If there is a priest at a Candomblé tenda – and it's usually a priestess, as it happens – he would be called a Babalorixá, a Father-of Saint. Caboclo, the term for an Indian guide, is from the Umbanda vocabulary too... Second, to say they hold no ceremonies such as an ôrunkó is absurd: the ôrunkó is the be-all and end-all of Candomblé – the ceremony at which the initiates are 'visited' by their particular deities. And finally, if it was a genuine tenda it would have been surrounded by miniature huts – the dwelling places for particular gods, which have to be sited at particular spots. Did you see any shrines, any offerings, any despachos there?"

"No," the girl said. "I didn't see those twelve trucks anywhere either. Did you?"

The Russian smiled. "There were no trucks to be seen," he said. "But when I started my pacing-up-and– down routine, I was able to catch sight of a space behind those trees at the bottom of the slope. There's a cliff which comes right down to ground level there – a fault or something in the rock, so that there's no gradual slope there. But there is something else; I could see it quite clearly. The drive runs right up to the cliff – an then straight into it."

"Do you mean there's a tunnel?" Coralie gasped.

"A tunnel leading into the mountain, or through it. With a double row of lights in the roof and a concrete blockhouse at the entrance. So the mystery of the appearing convoys is a mystery no more. They go on and through – and as soon as we have an opportunity to take them by surprise, that's what we have to do too."

"Yes, I see," the girl said thoughtfully. "That's what the guard meant, of course. 'Either you go through the mountain or you stay in the estancia' – that's what he said, isn't it?"

Kuiyakin nodded. "They seem especially determine that nobody shall so much as glimpse the surface of this marvelous lake," he mused. "It seems to me, therefore, that before we try the tunnel I really ought to have a look for myself..."

–

There was a moist breeze laden with hints of thyme, rosemary and wet earth as Illya Kuryakin stood on the broad shelf of concrete lipping the dam later that evening. In the darkness to one side, he could hear the rustling of dry grasses where the barrage met the hill side. Behind him, the wind which plucked at his shirt and trouser legs stirred the water into small waves which slapped at the dam. And in front the blackness trembled as the outlets from the invisible sluices roared down the sloping face of the barrage in their gigantic pipes.

He was surprised to find that there appeared to be no patrolling guards on the wall of the dam itself. It had taken him three hours to work his way through whole squadrons of them deployed between the boundary fence and the shore of the lake. The hillside slopes, the ridge, the steep faces dropping to the surface of the water on the far side – all of these were stiff with armed men on the lookout. Yet here, where one might expect the concentration to be strongest, there was nobody. Nor could he hear any evidence of activity around their power station far below. It followed, therefore, that the guardians of the mysterious lake were more concerned to keep people away from the reservoir itself than from the dam forming it.

With a puzzled frown, the agent lowered himself from the lip to a small observation platform, swung from the guard rail of this to a buttress, slid down fifteen feet of rough concrete in the dark, and finally found with his feet the curved surface of the huge-bore pipe down which he intended to work his way to the power station hundreds of feet below.

Forty-five minutes later, half deafened by the tumult of falling water which had battered his ears from the other side of the conduit, he thankfully unstraddled the great iron tube, wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans, and stepped onto the balcony which circled the modernistic cube of the power station building.

There appeared to be no personnel guarding it. No lights gleamed through the slits of the shuttered windows or pierced the louvers on the doors. There was no watchman's cubicle beside the main entrance. The place seemed as deserted as the blank surface of the lake above which he had scanned so fruitlessly for so long. The nearest sign of life was the floodlight above the guardhouse, shining palely through the complexities of transformer and pylon from the main gates a quarter of a mile down the valley.

He edged his way around the balcony and found a door on the far side of the building from the gates. Crouching down, he drew from his hip pocket a square metal device about five inches square. He moistened the four rubber suction cups attached to its corners and clamped it firmly to the door above the lock. Then, straining every nerve in concentration, he placed one ear to the box and began with infinite care to oscillate a flat knob set flush with its surface. Presently he gave a satisfied grunt and rose to his feet. The door swung silently inwards at his touch and he vanished into the dark interior.

Something was wrong inside. At first he couldn't place it – then, over the muted, more muffled roar of the water, his trained senses gave him the answer. It was nothing positive; it was an absence that he noticed. There should have been a humming of generators, a whine from the giant turbines, a whiff of ozone in the air. But there wasn't.

Believing now firmly that the power station was totally uninhabited, Illya risked switching on a miniature but powerful flashlight. As soon as the thin beam lanced the dark, he saw why.

For whatever purpose the dam had been constructed, it wasn't that of supplying electricity to Getuliana. For apart from ducts leading the seething water direct from the pipes out to the river which wound down to the gates and the bridge, the vast building was completely empty. There were no turbines, no generators, no insulators, no railed catwalks or gauge-and-dial consoles. Like the metalled but trafficless road leading to it, the place was nothing but a blind, a colossal sham...

Chapter 9

The Message That Had To Get Through

ALTHOUGH THE WALLS were damp to the touch, there seemed to be a current of dry air blowing through the cell.

Napoleon Solo had no idea how long he had been there. There was always a bright light burning and the only means he had of marking the passage of time was the doctor's visit – if indeed he was a doctor. At least he wore a white coat and he was always attended by two women in nurse's uniform. On the other hand, the visits might be sporadic and not regular at all. Certainly it seemed to Solo that there was more time now between the hypodermic injections than there had been before when he had still be strapped to the bed.

The bed was made of iron and enameled black. It was high and narrow, with a thin, hard mattress and no bedclothes, and its legs were cemented into the floor of the cell.

For a long time it had been Solo's world. Although he was not particularly uncomfortable with his wrists and ankles buckled into the leather bracelets at the four corners of the bed and his middle restrained by a broad strap passing under its frame, it nevertheless afforded him only a limited horizon. The walls of the cell were of smooth green cement; the ceiling, with its four powerful bulbs behind armored glass, was stone colored; and what little he could see of the floor looked like slate. The door was a single slab of steel without even a judas-window. And that was all – there was no furniture of any kind, no decoration to break the monotony, only a single small grille through which he imagined the warm, dry air was extracted.

In the circumstances, it was natural that he should take an abnormal interest in the bed. He knew by heart every chip and scratch and imperfection in the shiny surface of its headrail. He could have mapped with his eyes closed the graining of the leather handcuffs attaching his wrists to the frame. He was an authority on the disparate personalities of three flies and a daddy-longlegs in the cell whose existence was dedicated to avoiding the webs spun by a spider which lived in one corner of the grille.

Every now and then the door would swing silently open and in would come the doctor with his crisp, white women. The women varied but the doctor was always the same – a pudding-faced man, rather plump, with staring brown eyes behind thick spectacles.

One of the women would open a case and hand things to the doctor while the other put the heel of her hand under Solo's chin and forced his head back onto the mattress so that he couldn't raise himself. Then the doctor would pinch up a fold of skin from Solo's arm (so far as he could tell, he had been stripped to his underwear and socks) and inject whatever it was he injected. After that, Solo went to sleep.

This routine wasn't invariable, of course: there were different treatments too, involving tubes and clips and something like a dentist's gag. It was to do with food or feeding, Solo thought. Sometimes there was a clip biting into his arm with a tube attached to it, and some times something went into his throat. In either case, it left him rather sore – and in each case he usually went to sleep afterwards just the same.

The man and the two women always worked in complete silence, which Solo found rather unnerving at first, but his throat was always too dry and sore to ask questions or talk himself and he soon got used to it.

And yet there was talking, somewhere. Or there had been. And one of the voices, he could almost have sworn, was his own. Yet he could in no way remember talking, or think of anything to talk about. Perhaps he dreamed while he slept, but he had definite impressions of voices and movement, the words surging and receding like bees on a drowsy summer afternoon. Sometime or other, too, there had been someone shouting. Perhaps it had been him.

It was all very puzzling.

And then, suddenly, one day – one night? one morning? one afternoon? he could not tell – one day the doctor had come in with his two assistants and they had unbuckled the straps and taken them away. He was left alone in the cell, free to get up, sit down, move around, just as he liked.

Solo thought that was very kind. He was so grateful that he made no protest when they came back a little later to give him another injection.

It was funny about the injections. Really he felt quite giddy after them sometimes. Everything seemed to spin around and he could never tell if he really had been to sleep or whether perhaps he had actually just woken up from the time before. Sometimes he thought he had been in the cell for weeks, perhaps months; and sometimes he was convinced he had only been in there a few hours at the most and would soon begin to feel hungry.

On the whole, he was inclined to favor the former theory – mainly because one of the nurses, a pretty one he had noticed on several visits, seemed to have had different hairstyles on different occasions.

He remembered who he was – and what he was supposed to be doing – in a single blinding moment of awareness. The doctor and the nurses were just coming in, the cell door had opened... and there was a second's delay. Somebody outside had called a question to the doctor.

And in the instant that he replied, over the mumble of voices, somewhere down the passage outside a door slammed sharply.

As it shut, a door in Napoleon Solo's mind opened as suddenly. Every detail of his life up to the moment he had realized that the carafe in the hotel room at Goiás had been drugged was with him again. It was exactly as though the preceding period really had been a confused and disturbing dream from which now suddenly he was freshly awake.

"How long have I been held here under sedation and artificially induced amnesia?" he asked quietly as the doctor approached.

"Ah! The moment of breakthrough has come and gone, then" – the voice came not from the doctor but in a curiously disembodied way from the gri1le which extracted the breathed air in the cell – "and Mr. Solo knows once more just who he is!... Never mind: perhaps we have been fortunate to have had him for our guest... for so long."

"You haven't answered my question," the agent said, still facing the doctor.

"Doctor Gerhardi is not permitted to speak with you, Mr. Solo," the voice continued. "You may talk to me. After all, we are old friends."

"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," Solo said, swinging around to face the grille and feeling rather foolish as he did so. "Or have we held – er – conversations while I have been drugged?"

A deep chuckle floated from the grating. '''Have the advantage' is good," the voice said. "You might almost call us intimates. Through the closed-circuit television camera mounted behind one of the four lighting panels in your ceiling, you have been under constant watch since the moment you arrived. And thanks to the doctor's persuasionary powers you have been most cooperative in the matter of conversations."

"You have been questioning me under the influence of Pentathol?"

"A refined version of a drug discovered centuries ago by the Matto Grosso Indians – a drug which makes Pentathol seem as mild and innocuous as an aspirin. So far as information goes, Mr. Solo, you have been sucked as dry as a lemon! Now it only remains to decide whether the rind shall be discarded or whether it might add zest to a cocktail by being shaved and twisted... There is no point in proceeding with the injection at this time, doctor: once the amnesiac condition has been broken through, one has to go right back to the beginning again."

"I trust you obtained the information you wanted," Solo said politely.

"Indeed, yes. Indeed. We know all we want to know, now, about the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and why Mr. Waverly sent you out here, and what Mr. Forster of the C.I.A. said, and so on."

"Nonsense. I don't believe it!" Solo said.

All Enforcement Agents from U.N.C.L.E. were periodically "brainwashed" by a system of subliminal suggestions which was supposed to plant in their minds a series of conditioned answers to any questions they might be asked when under the influence either of drugs or of torture. The theory was that it was best to give as much as possible of the truth, particularly as regards the agent's affiliation with the Command and so on: after all, any adversaries might already know this, and any untruths there would automatically invalidate further revelations. On the other hand, if a victim first confirmed what the questioners knew, they would be all the more likely to believe what he said subsequently. A mental "censor" was supposed to operate on the agent's mind as soon as the questions genuinely impinged on the task in hand – and from that point the prepared lies were supposed to operate subconsciously, even under the deepest hypnosis. It was therefore essential for Solo to know whether this system had worked – and the only way he could find out was to discover from his captors what they had been told while he was under their drugs.

"What do you mean, you don't believe it?" the voice was asking.

"I told you," Solo said. "You can't have got any information from me when I was drugged. We are conditioned. You could have found out I belonged to the Command, and about Waverly, from many sources."

"We could have, perhaps. But we didn't. You told us everything. Absolutely everything."

"Ridiculous!" Solo said contemptuously. "I simply do not believe you."

"I tell you, you came across with the whole works." There was a definite edge to the voice now. "You're not imbecilic, Mr. Solo. There is no need to bandy words. You can believe me when I tell you -"

"And I tell you I don't believe you. It's just a trick – and a very old and shabby trick, too, like telling a man his confederate has confessed all – to make him talk."

"You have talked, Solo. Plenty. So much so that there's no point – no need, for God's sake! – to ask you any thing more. We have it."

"Rubbish," Solo said shortly. He turned away from the grille and sat down on the bed. The pretty nurse flashed him a knowing smile as she went out with the doctor and her colleague.

"Do you want me to prove it to you, for Heaven's sake?" the voice cried.

"Prove it? You couldn't. Not in a million years," Solo gibed.

"No?... Not if I told you we knew you came to Brazil because of the fingerprints of those D.A.M.E.S. women in the car crash? Not if I told you everything about your conversations with Garcia, your visit to the hospital and the discovery of the old man Oliveira? Not if I detailed the things the boy at the rental company said – the one with the old-fashioned slang?... Not even if I listed your findings so far in the hunt to discover the places where these false D.A.M.E.S. are distributing the cocaine and heroin?" There was a hint of laughter in the voice.

Napoleon Solo mentally heaved a sigh of relief. The built-in censor had worked. Under the drugs, he had told them every mechanical step he had taken in the investigation – but the subliminal suggestions had taken over when it had come to the reasons for the inquiry.

He had said that U.N.C.L.E. thought the girls we connected with some drug ring. His captors would believe that; the Command did interest itself in illegal drug traffic and the facts as known to Solo could believably be interpreted as leading to that erroneous conclusion.

The man who had been interrogating him would be laughing at the thought of Solo's gullibility, thinking he had wrested from the agent all he knew – which would leave him free to go on wondering exactly what was afoot.

And about this, Solo reflected ruefully, he knew very little.

"You look crestfallen, my friend," the voice was saying jubilantly. "I told you I could prove it!... Oh well, never mind. There has to be a loser in every game doesn't there?... For the moment, until we decide what is to be done with you, you can take a little rest – on our laurels!" There was a dry chuckle and the sound a switch snapping off.

The agent threw himself on the bed and gazed moodily at the ceiling. After a while, he turned over lay face downwards, with his chin pillowed on crossed arms. If they were really leaving him alone for a while, there was a chance the television camera above him might be switched off as well as the two-way speak grille. Especially if he appeared as despondent as possible.

It was while he was lying perfectly still like that hoping his negative mime might have some positive effect, that he felt something under the tightly drawn mattress covering that had certainly not been there before… a foreign body that was irregular in shape, sharp at the edges, and extremely hard.

And suddenly he remembered that last glance the prettier of the nurses had thrown him. Hadn't she been swiveling her eyes in a meaningful sort of way at this corner of the room? And, now that he came to think of it, hadn't that parting gaze been the last of several? Had she not been continually staring over at the bed today?

Carefully, slowly, in case he was still being watched by the camera, he slid one hand beneath the cover. In a few moments, he had it back under his chin with some thing small and metal grasped in it. There were several separate objects under the cover – and not until he had withdrawn all of them did he drop his eyes and look at what lay beneath the protective wall of his cupped palm.

Four small stainless steel instruments lay on the bed: a nail file, a scalpel, an implement like a crochet hook with a sharp point, and a thin, flexible spatula.

Solo stared at them unbelievingly. Why had the girl left them there?

With a combination of two of them, he could probably pick the lock of the cell door. If the spatula was strong enough and flexible enough, he might even be able to slip the tongues without picking it.

Could the girl possibly have known this?

If not, what a curious coincidence that she should leave just the particular tools that could be used successfully to master this particular lock. On the other hand, even if she had known it, why leave him the means to escape from the cell?

He would puzzle it out later, he thought: the thing now was to find out if he was still watched – and therefore whether or not he could safely make use of this gift from Heaven. After a few moments, he decided that the best thing was simply to sit up on the bed holding the tools in full view of the camera. If it was switched on, someone would come through the door soon enough to take them away from him; if it was off, nothing would happen and he could get to work on the lock. In either case, he lost nothing – for he could never use the implements if the TV circuit was still on...

After sitting for some time with the shining steel things in his hand, he decided that at last his luck had changed. No sound came through the grille; no footsteps clattered in the passage outside; nobody burst into the cell.

In three strides, he was at the steel door, his fingers busy twisting, probing, manipulating. He slid the spatula between the edge of the door and the jamb, testing the tongues and the resilience of their springs. It couldn't be opened with the spatula alone, that was for sure – perhaps the slender point of the scalpel, aided with a little extra leverage from the file here… Ah! There was the slight rolling movement of a tumbler beginning to fall.

He paused with the two instruments inserted, one supporting the other, into the keyhole. No matter how he turned, the wretched thing would not quite overcome its nul-point and drop.

But of course – that was what the crochet hook was for! He fed the shaft in, questing delicately with the curved point. It was extremely tricky feeling about blind with this while keeping up the complementary pressure on the other two instruments with his left hand. But eventually he sensed the satisfying chuck! of the wards falling home. The door should now be unlocked and ready to open.

He pulled with his fingertips at the edge. The door would not move.