Текст книги "The Finger in the Sky Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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Chapter 5 – A surprise for Napoleon Solo

Even in mid-August, there was an edge to the inevitable wind slicing south across Lakeshore Drive and Solo pressed the button to raise the passenger window on the rented Chevrolet as he left the congestion of downtown Chicago and headed for the suburb of Cicero. Far above his head, the street lights roosted on their iron gantries, a double line of futuristic birds marking the waterfront in dwindling perspective.

It was just after dark and the traffic was light. The cool evening seemed to have kept most of the commuters indoors eating or watching television.

Venice Avenue was a long, looping street curving out—it seemed to Solo—practically to Alaska before he hit the thirteen hundred block. The middle-class respectability of its faded private homes and stained concrete apartment houses seemed a far cry from the rambunctious free-for-all of Prohibition, when Cicero had been something very like a personal domain for Capone.

"You come right on over, Mr. Solo," James Lester had said when the agent telephoned earlier. "I'm still covered with these pesky dressings and the burns give me trouble every time I move—but no darned bandage is going to stop J.H.V. Lester from bending his elbow! I got me a good story to tell, and until the doc allows me back into a saloon, the next best thing is to have a real good listener over at the apartment while I let a few fingers of rye slide down my craw!"

"You're sure it won't inconvenience you?" Solo had asked.

"Not on your life! My daughter lives in Winnipeg, my wife—rest her soul!—died ten years ago, and I'm all alone here. Until I can get back to work again, drinking in good company is my occupation. Care to help me in my job?"

With a mental grimace at the man's archaic slang and archly ingratiating manner, Solo pulled up outside a liquor store across the street from Lester's address. A few minutes later, grasping a wrapped fifth of Seagram's V.O., he was standing outside the survivor's door. Thirteen sixty-two was a crumbling old house divided into three apartments, to reach which visitors had to negotiate rusty iron gates, a weed-grown driveway and a communal hall smelling of dust. The agent pushed the illuminated button outside the second-floor plaque labeling the steward's home. A double chime sounded within.

As he waited for the door to be opened, Solo glanced idly at the cracked cream-colored paint of the landing walls. A gleam of brightness in the low-wattage light caught his attention on the far side of the door. Thumbing the button for the second time, he paced across.

Bent slightly outwards from the lintel, a telephone company's lead was reflecting the illumination via a bright core exposed by whoever had recently severed the wire.

With a muttered exclamation, Solo tried the door. It was securely locked. He leaned his ear against the top panel and rapped with his knuckles. No sound came from inside the apartment. Finally, he fished a small silver cylinder rather like a pocket torch from his breast pocket and unscrewed the top. From it he took a selection of thin, delicate but extremely strong instruments in stainless steel. Studying the keyhole for a moment, he chose one and inserted it. It wouldn't turn. Selecting another, he pushed that slowly into the aperture and twisted. He had to manoeuver it this way and that, but at last it clicked sharply and the tumblers dropped home. A gun had somehow appeared in Solo's hand. Pushing off the safety catch, he turned the handle, flung open the door and walked into the apartment.

It was a small place. A hallway with a bathroom off it, one large, untidy room with an unmade bed and dirty dishes on the table, a tiny kitchen—and that was all. A wheelback cottage chair lay overturned on the rumpled carpet.

Lester was in the bathroom. He had been brutally beaten about the head and body, the clothes torn half off his back, the dressings ripped from his burns and hurled to the ground. Afterwards—after he had been knocked insensible, Solo hoped—his murderers had filled the tub under the shower and held his head under water until he drowned. Judging from the expression on the dead man's face, and from the state of the half-healed wounds, his end had been an agonizing one.

Solo's face was very grim as he dragged the sodden body into the living room, lifted it onto the bed and pressed down the lids to close the frightened eyes. It would be pointless to search the place; there was nothing he could do—not even call the police, since the telephone wires were cut.

He ran down the stairs, climbed into the Chevrolet, executed a tight U-turn with screaming tires and headed back for Chicago as fast as he could.

St. Mary's Hospital was on the far side of town, beyond the stockyards. Solo heard the sirens while he was still a mile away. He flashed a very special pass at the uniformed State Trooper who was keeping the traffic moving and coasted to a halt behind the line of police cars, ambulances and fire equipment grouped around the gates. Over the heads of a dense crowd of sightseers flame licked sporadically at the underside of smoke bellying into the night sky.

The agent pushed his way through the babble of voices...."They tried from the inside but there wasn't a chance"..."gotten two of them out through a window"..."First thing I knew, my screen door was in the parlor!"..."broken glass all over the sidewalk right down the eleven hundred block..." He went up to the Fire Chief and showed his pass again. "What happened?" he asked.

The big man pushed his scuttle-shaped helmet to the back of his head and mopped his scarlet brow with a handkerchief. "Search me, mister," he said. "I guess that's for the accident investigators to find out. All I'm trying to do is stop it getting worse." From behind two wings of the rambling, four-story building, an avalanche of rubble slanted to the ground. Over it, asbestos-suited men of the disaster squad picked their way between the flames to lever at half-buried beams. There was the familiar smell of brickdust, plaster and charred wood to catch at the throat.

"You misunderstand me, Chief," Solo said. "I wasn't looking for causes: I don't know what happened—at all."

The big man turned and looked at him, reflections from the fire chasing expressions across his craggy face. "Explosion," he said gruffly at last. "Could be a gas main, could be a crashing airplane, could be oxygen bottles—though I doubt it; the damage is too great."

"What part of the hospital did it affect?"

"Women's surgical ward. There were twenty-three of them in there—plus a Sister and five nurses. All we've got out so far are two nurses and half a patient, and they're all dead." He gestured towards three sheeted figures lying behind an ambulance, and then cupped his hands to shout at a section of firemen hauling a hose towards the rubble. "Franklyn, Harman—tell Two Section for Chrissake to take the table around to the other side of the wing; give these guys some cover from on top..."

"What chance have you got of getting the others out?"

"Haven't a hope in hell. This is an old building, mister. Wood beams, bricks, plaster. Not like one of your concrete places with steel frames—you got a chance there; the girders hold the rubble away from corners and intersections and such. But here..." He shrugged sadly. "The explosion hit the Sister's office in the middle of the ward, it seems, and up she went—then down she came with two stories and the roof and water tanks and all caved in on her." He shrugged again. "And then the fire...No, I guess the ones that weren't blown up were buried, crushed to death or suffocated. And the ones that didn't go that way would've been burned anyway...We're doin' what we can, but the main job's really to stop the fire spreading now. I've got the rest of the place evacuated on the lawns at the other side of the building."

Solo watched firemen direct hoses to tamp down the flames barring the path of salvage workers trying to burrow under a tangle of bricks and boards. A group of them gathered around a tunnel in the wreckage and the interest of the watching crowd quickened. Voices died away. The crackle of flames sounded suddenly louder. There was a flurry of movement among the rescuers perched high on the rubble slope; they were extracting something or somebody. Then a steel-helmeted man in oilskins stepped down a few feet, looked over towards the Chief, and shook his head definitively. A sigh wavered across the crowd—and once more the hum of voices rose.

"Could it have been sabotage?" Solo asked.

"Sabotage?"

"Dynamite, plastic, a time bomb—something like that."

The Fire Chief stroked his chin with finger and thumb. "Could be," he said laconically.

Solo shouldered his way back to the car and drove out along the road to the airport. On the first quiet stretch, he pulled to the side under a row of trees and cut the motor. Pulling the tiny transmitter from his breast pocket, he called up the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York.

"Tell Mr. Waverly," he said to the girl on duty, "that somebody got there before me, both at St. Mary's and in Cicero. He'll know what I mean. And Barbara—tell him I'm not even bothering to go to the third place. I'm going to hang on here while you make a call for me."

"You want me to keep the channel open while I call?"

"Yeah. Call the chief of the Homicide Squad at Wilmington, Delaware. Ask him have they any reports of a homicide at a place called Worsthorne Court, on State Street. If they have, it'll be a client by the name of Spaggia, Enrico Spaggia—an invalid...Got that?"

"Worsthorne Court...Spaggia...Yes, Mr. Solo. And if there's no such report?"

"If there's not, I'll be asking him to place a very special guard over that gentleman for his own protection. But somehow I don't think I'll be troubling him...Oh, and Barbara—while you're putting through the call, get one of the other girls to call the Chicago police, will you? There's a murdered man at 1362 Venice Avenue, in Cicero..."

"You are getting around, aren't you, Mr. Solo!" the girl said. "Hold on: I'll give you a report on the Delaware call in a moment."

Waiting for the girl's voice to emerge from the diminutive radio, the agent looked at his watch. It was a quarter after ten, and he hadn't eaten yet. Somehow, though, he felt that soon he would be heading for a restaurant—he couldn't believe that there would be any need for him to catch a plane to Wilmington...not if the agents of THRUSH were as efficient there as they had been in the Middle West."

"Mr. Solo?"—the girl sounded astonished—"ten out of ten for perspicacity! Spaggia and his wife were both shot dead by an unknown assailant using a twelve-bore sporting gun, probably with a sawn-off barrel. The Wilmington police chief is most impressed. If you weren't so far away, he says, he'd book you for the killings yourself! The patrolman's report only came in ten minutes ago and the shooting itself took place in the last half hour. I'm about to ask you, Mr. Solo—and I quote—how in hell you knew about it!"

The man from U.N.C.L.E. smiled wearily. "Tell him with my compliments," he replied, "that a little bird told me..."

Chapter 6 – Some advice from the man on the top floor

It was sunny and warm again on Fifth Avenue. The girl at the Information Desk on the ground floor of the T.C.A. Building had a warm and sunny smile too. It was, Napoleon Solo supposed, what she was paid for. "An appointment with the Chairman, Mr. Solo?" she said sweetly. "Of course. I'll have someone come down and fetch you. Er—it was Mr. Maximilian Plant you wanted, sir?"

"Certainly. Mr. Maximilian Plant, the Chairman."

"Very good, Mr. Solo. We have to ask. Sometimes visitors ask for him when all they want really is Mr. Benedict Plant, or Mr. Gaylord, or Mr. Iain."

"How embarrassing."

"Er—yes. Quite." The girl spoke softly into the operator's mouthpiece which sprouted like a mad ship's ventilator from between her remarkable breasts. In a few minutes the doors of the center elevator slid open and a raven-haired beauty with equally vital statistics appeared.

"Mr. Solo?"

"The same."

"If you would be so kind as to follow me, please..."

"To the ends of the earth," the agent said, becoming seized by a kind of madness as the doors closed them in the small cage. "Are you the Old Man's secretary?"

"The Old..? Mr. Plant's secretary? Good Heavens no!" The girl was appalled by the idea of so much responsibility. "I'm just the Top Floor Hostess. I'm to take you to Miss Finnegan."

Miss Finnegan was waiting for them on the 62nd and final floor. Her hair was auburn and the bones of her face were lean, rakish and feline. Beneath the cream and navy T.C.A. jacket a special line in voluptuousness—according to the arrowhead creases—lurked.

"Mr.—er—Solo? If you would follow me, please, I'll take you through to Mr. Maximilian's office."

"We don't have time to drop in on Iain, Gaylord or Benedict?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Solo?"

"Let it pass, let it pass...You wouldn't be the great man's secretary, would you? No—of course you wouldn't —"

"Miss Bernstein acts as secretary to Mr. Plant."

Three corridors and two qualities of wall-to-wall carpet later, Solo was in a position to evaluate Miss Bernstein—a nubile brunette with a sulky mouth and a great deal of make-up on her long eyelashes. "Good grief," he exclaimed, "do they get you all out of the same mold? Among you, you must keep the House of Maidenform on full production! Do you ever dream you went to T.C.A.?"

The girl—she'd graduated from the uniformed branch and wore a figure-hugging little shift in black—stared at him haughtily. She rose and went to tall, slim double doors at the far end of the office. Opening the two handles together, she pushed the doors apart and announced:

"Mr.—ah—Solo."

The man from U.N.C.L.E. walked into a lofty room furnished with two deep leather armchairs and a flat-topped desk covered with telephones and dictagraphs. Behind the desk sat a spectacular blonde of about thirty.

"Mr. Solo," she said, rising and holding out her hand. "Welcome to T.C.A. I'm Helga Grossbreitner."

Solo was getting light-headed. "I thought for a moment you were Max Plant," he said. "Tell me: if Miss—ah—Bernstein is the great man's secretary, just who are you? If it's not a rude question, that is."

Helga Grossbreitner smiled again. She was tall and slim-waisted, with willowy hips and a jutting bosom. She wore blinding white boots, a black-and-white houndstooth skirt and a black vest over her shirt. Her gold hair was drawn back in a loose chignon secured by a velvet bow. "Miss Bernstein is Mr. Plant's general secretary and stenographer," she said; "I am his confidential secretary and personal assistant."

"I can see why they break a guy in gently with all the others, if you're the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Solo said foolishly. "May a mere mortal inquire what time you take luncheon—if, indeed, you eat at all?"

For the third time, the blonde flashed her smile at him. "Mr. Plant is waiting for you," she reminded him.

The inner sanctum from which Maximilian Plant directed the affairs of Transcontinental Airways and associated companies was austere in the starkly luxurious way that only the very rich can afford. Solo sank into one of the vast Swedish hide armchairs and looked at the tubby little man with silver hair who sat on the far side of the teak desk. On top of the desk were a black telephone, a gold pencil and five buff folders.

"One on each of the air crashes, young man," Plant said in his creaky voice, tapping the nearest file with his forefinger. "Pages and pages of it...Now—what do you want to know?"

"Mainly, what your experts have found out about them, sir."

"I see. Well, to generalize—You do know about the Murchison-Spears complication, I guess? Good—to generalize, we can divide the five disasters into two groups." He moved two of the folders meticulously to one side. "The three crashes in Nice fall into one category; the two in the U.S. into another."

"What's the difference between them?"

"Well, granted that the aim of the operation is to discredit T.C.A. in general and the Murchison-Spears equipment in particular, we find the two categories align neatly with those propositions."

"Meaning?"

"That the three crashes at Nice, France, were due to some kind of tampering with the Murchison-Spears gear—and that the two accidents in the U.S.A. were due to a—er—less sophisticated kind of sabotage, shall we say?"

"But it was sabotage? In fact they were not accidents?"

"Right. The plane which blew up in mid-air was a pressurized 707. It disintegrated at 33,000 feet. My investigators—and the Federal accident people agree with them—believe the ship collapsed when a baggage compartment porthole was forced open. At that height, of course, a pressurized plane pops like a toy balloon if the higher pressure inside is allowed to get out."

"You said 'forced open...'"

"I did. From a painstaking examination of thousands of fragments gathered over half the state, the investigators concluded that the port was forced open by some kind of time-actuated mechanism—a small hydraulic ram, perhaps, set off by a clockwork alarm. Something of that sort."

"But surely, Mr. Plant, that suggests an accomplice on the staff of T.C.A.? No outside person would be able to get to a plane for long enough to arrange a device like that, would they?"

"They would not, Mr. Solo. It suggests precisely that."

"I see. And the other one?"

"The other one implies even greater complicity on the part either of T.C.A. personnel or the airport staff—I genuinely believe it to be the latter...You know what we call a five– five in T.C.A.?"

"A run that's half passengers and half freight?"

"That's it. Well, this flight was a five-five. We had a rush of passengers at the last moment, and the freight compartment was full—up to the maximum permitted load. Up to, but never over, understand...Right. Now the plane's flying with an absolute maximum payload and the freight includes a number of large, but empty, crates."

"Empty?"

"Yes. There's a firm that makes shockproof containers—insulated crates and padded boxes for carrying delicate machinery, radar components, nose cones for small rockets, and that sort of thing. Very specialized stuff. Well, we were shipping some of these to an electronics firm in New Jersey—they were going to use them for transporting computer parts or some such, but on our plane they were empty. Are you with me?"

"Yes I am."

"Right. Now the plane had been loaded and checked—all weights including passengers and baggage calculated and allowed for. But somehow, after the check, these empty crates had been removed and others—looking exactly the same, but filled with solid ice—had secretly replaced them."

"My God! But surely —"

"Exactly. The unsuspected extra weight was enough to alter the ship's trim and cause it to stall on take-off...and then of course the ice melted in the fire after the crash, leaving no trace."

"Just a minute! If the ice melted and left no trace, how in hell did your investigators —"

"Aha! A clever piece of deduction, young man! That's how they found out. Mind you, it is deduction only—there's no proof. But it sure satisfied me."

"How did they work it out, then?"

"Two things, Mr. Solo. Either one of them might not have been conclusive. But the two together..." Maximilian Plant shrugged eloquently. "Among the cargo were several small loads of consumer goods," he continued. "Stuff for drugstores and wholesale houses, replacements of stock, that kind of jazz. And among them were the two things that tipped our men off—a hundred gross of bottles of indigestion tablets, and a small consignment of barometric lambs..."

The little man placed the palms of both hands on the desk and leaned back with a broad smile, obviously relishing at second hand the deductive triumphs of his employees.

"I may be dumb, but I'm afraid I don't quite..."

"The water, don't you see, Mr. Solo. The dampness. There were hundreds of broken bottles, thousands of these tablets, and when they tested them—just as a matter of routine, you understand, at first—they discovered that every single one of them had been hydrated; there's a chemical change when you drop these indigestion tablets in water, and in this case the change had already taken place!"

"And the—er—barometric lambs, did you say?"

"You must have seen them. All the souvenir shops stock them. Little plaster models of Bambi covered in some rough substance—when it's going to rain (that is, when the humidity is high) the lamb turns pink; if it's going to be fine, the lamb's blue. And if it's variable the thing stays a kind of mauve color."

"And the lambs in the crash were all pink?"

"As a baby's bottom! Someone noticed they'd been blue when they were loaded—and the conclusive point was that there was a drought where the plane crashed: hadn't been a drop of rain for seven weeks!"

"So neither the pink lambs nor the hydrated tummy tablets could have gotten that way at all unless there had been a lot of water around in the crash itself?"

"That's exactly it, Mr. Solo."

"It seems a fair deduction from the facts, then. You were saying earlier...about the three crashes at Nice..."

"Oh, yes. Since these were all at the airport itself, it was possible to get a one hundred per cent tally of the pieces of wreckage—and the boys were thus able to get the most complete picture possible as a basis for their deductions."

"A complete picture of the crash, you mean?"

"Yes. And the minutes leading up to it. Don't forget we have the black-box tape recordings, which preserve the dialogue between the pilot and control."

"Sure."

"Well—as you know—in each case they could find nothing, nothing whatever, wrong with anything. And since the controls were working okay, it followed that the mistakes that caused the crashes must have been made by whoever worked the controls."

"But the controls were in fact being worked by the Murchison-Spears equipment in each case?"

"That's it. Therefore the fault lay with the gear—but as you know, the gear was working perfectly, too. After the smash."

"So what we're looking for is someone or something that puts the equipment all haywire—yet leaves it okay after a crash?"

"That's what they tell me."

"Sounds crazy to me. The gear works on signals received from the ground, doesn't it—like a sort of radar? Then it adjusts the plane's controls in accordance with this information?...Right. Well, how in hell could anybody tamper with the machine so that it falsified signals from the ground—and yet, when it was tested after the crash, gave perfectly correct readings?"

"That," Maximilian Plant said with a broad smile, "is what I figured you were going to find out for us, Mr. Solo!"

Solo grinned back at him. He ran four fingers down one side of his jaw. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head; "I could understand it if the gear was just screwed up to give wrong readings and therefore fly the plane into the ground—but not when it works okay again after the crash!"

"Yes. It looks as though we're looking for something that causes some kind of temporary maladjustment, doesn't it?"

"Do you know of any technique that could do this? Does your staff? Can you think of any line of scientific inquiry that would help track down such a device—if one exists?"

Plant smiled again. "No," he said frankly. "None whatever."

"Then it looks," Solo said, "as though I'll have to take a plane to Nice to join my colleague there—the kind of sabotage your two American planes suffered can be done at any time; but the three jobs at Nice seem dependent on it being Nice. So my guess is that if we dig deep enough there, we may just come up with something."

"I hope so, young man. This government—and the British government, for that matter—would hate for there to be any more crashes like the others. And we, of course, wish our company to stay solvent!"

"Naturally, Mr. Plant. Could you give me the names of a few of your key personnel at Nice? I'll want to investigate everything concerning T.C.A. that goes on there, and of course I'll need help to steer me through the technical details when we try to work out what could have happened to these planes."

"I can do better than that. I was planning to send my confidential secretary, Miss Grossbreitner, over to Nice to see what went on there. A unit that suffers accidents is usually a unit that has something wrong with it, and I like to keep a finger on the pulse—even if it's only a distant one. Why don't you team up with her and she can show you around? She used to be with our maintenance section at Nice—that's why I'm sending her, because she knows the place so well."

"It would be a pleasure," Solo said—with feeling.

And later, in the cloistered calm of the outer office, he stopped by Helga Grossbreitner's desk and said: "Seems I'm going to have my opportunity to buy you that lunch after all! How about tomorrow at the Ciel d'Azur—on the second floor of the terminal building at Nice airport? It's got four crossed knives and forks in the Guide Michelin, so it should be good."

The girl lifted a hand to tuck a few stray hairs in place beneath the golden curve of her chignon. "It's kind of you, Mr. Solo," she said huskily, "but I'm afraid it would be impossible."

Solo tried hard to keep his eyes off the taut hemisphere profiled so agreeably by the raised arm. "I don't see why," he said.

She looked him full in the eye and smiled slowly. "Our own flight arriving at midday is booked solid," she said. "I've had to take seats on Air France Flight A.F./022—and it doesn't arrive there until ten to seven in the evening."

"Dinner then? We'll be just in time."

Helga Grossbreitner dropped her arm. She shifted slightly on her haunches. "Yes," she said. "I think I should like that..."

The agent was still grinning to himself out on Fifth Avenue. The Mustang had jolted up onto the wide sidewalk, lined itself up and begun to roar towards him before the scattering of passersby; the expressions of frozen astonishment and a single girl's scream percolated through into his conscious mind. He looked up to see the high-fronted, wide sports car bearing down upon him at what seemed a fantastic speed. His mind, suddenly in top gear, worked like lightning: there was ten yards or more to each side before he could reach the shelter of shop front, parked car, newsstand or tree. A flick of the wrist, a swerve from that high-geared steering, and he wouldn't have a chance.

He took three tremendously quick steps towards the roadway and sprang desperately upwards, his out-stretched hands reaching for an ornamental arm projecting from a light standard. As his fingers closed over the green-painted ironwork, he let the impetus of his jump carry his legs on and up, drawing his knees towards his chin like a trapezist.

Missing him by fractions of inches, the Mustang snarled past below with a scream from its highly tuned engine. Fifty yards down the sidewalk, its brake lights blazed momentarily red as it spewed, rocked into a left turn with a screech of tires, and shot through the line of parked cars by a fire-plug. It slewed sideways as it hit the main road, was expertly corrected, and accelerated away towards the river with a bellow of its twin exhausts.

Solo breathed out. He relaxed his fingers and dropped to the ground, brushing his suit with automatic hand as the lunchtime strollers reemerged to exclaim and complain.

"... kind of a madman was that, for God's sake?"..."missed this guy here by inches—inches, I tell you!—Sure you're okay, bud?"..."and I always said there should be a special license for guys with..." "... I mean! Cars roaring down the pavement on Fifth Avenue..." "If you hadn't done a Tarzan up there, boy..."

The man from U.N.C.L.E. brushed aside the kindly-intentioned inquiries and rushed to the curb to flag down a cab. The Mustang had jumped the lights at the next intersection and gone. It was a black car with, he thought, a Philadelphia registration—but what the hell! The plates would have been switched within a half hour. And there were plenty of Mustangs in New York. He had not seen the driver's face, but he had the impression that there were at least two men in the front seat. So...

The cab driver was amused by the long and penetrating scrutiny Solo gave him.

"You lookin' for a long-lost brother, bud?" he asked. "You give me one good reason to do it—like a legacy from a distant aunt or sump'n—and I'll be your brother all day long."

"My cousin drives a cab," Solo told him with a grin. "We quarrel. He's a Republican, you see. So I prefer to—er—avoid..."

"Yeah, yeah, sure. Jump in, mister. Where you wanna go?"

"Just take me somewhere near the U.N. building, will you?"

"As near as you like, bub. Watch out, though. Everybody's your cousin there! Brothers they got for all the world at that place..."

"I'll bear it in mind."

"You do that," the cabby said, slamming the door. "Too many brothers—that can be a suffocatin' thing..."