Текст книги "The Splintered Sunglasses Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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Solo had completely regained his usual alert wakefulness now. He dropped one hand on the girl's shoulder as she reloaded. "Okay, this is it," he said. "Thank you, bless you—and good luck..."

Kuryakin flashed her one of his rare smiles. "Thank goodness I remembered they were testing these things, and that you knew exactly where they were," he said. "It's a sick wind that doesn't blow somebody well."

Lala Eriksson laughed. "An ill wind, Illya! Look! For Heaven's sake, go while I still have some ammunition. I'll be all right. Really."

Together the two agents plunged through the bushes, swerving wildly to avoid the Thrush fire, and dashed down an incline to a row of Nissen huts behind which a line of half a dozen strange machines were drawn up. Each one had a seat with safety straps, a control panel, some kind of motor, and four vertical tubes about a foot in diameter at the corners. Above them, rotor blades projected from a short shaft rising from the motor housing.

Solo drew the splintered sunglasses from his breast pocket and put them on, "What on earth?" he began. "They look like miniature tractors under umbrellas that have been blown inside out!"

"One man helicopters, partly conventional, partly jet," Illya explained briefly. "They're trying them out for extra-short-range communication. If we can evade the bullets, they'll get us to Caselle in time for the evening plane... "

Feverishly, they zigzagged across the clearing and began strapping themselves in. Then, as the Russian called instructions, men in olive green battledress ran from the huts, shouting, and there was a burst of rifle fire from the top of the slope they had just run down.

With a sudden roar of power, the motors caught. The unwieldy machines bounced on the ground, hovered, and then rose astonishingly, straight up and over the trees. "Just in time," Illya shouted. "Look! Lala's still firing from the Lancia, and the men from the Cadillac are pinning her down. But the Fiat crew beyond—the ones shooting at us!—are in for a surprise!" He pointed down.

As they soared two hundred feet above the ground, the scene below lay revealed as clearly and as simply as the models in an army sand-table exercise... the scarred convertible shielding the girl with her rifle; the professional gunmen deployed around the Cadillac, now pockmarked with bullet holes; the four killers from the Fiat, kneeling, firing up at the helicopters; the army platoon from the Nissen huts advancing warily up the scrub-covered slope to see what was going on.

Two ridges away, the ground was alive with men moving between the pines as the genuine maneuvers continued, unaware of the drama being played out in their midst. The third car in the Thrush cavalcade, the one carrying Carlsen, had turned round and was heading back towards Buronzo. By the remaining quartet of helicopters, a fat sergeant in uniform was standing with his mouth open, shaking his fists at the sky. And on the far side of the slope on which the Thrush men were staked out, hidden from the gunmen but clearly visible from the viewpoint of the airborne agents, six police cars had halted on a parallel track as their crews fanned out to take the gangsters from above and behind,

"There you are, you see!" Kuryakin yelled again above the clatter of the rotors. "The Commendatore made it, after all!" But from Solo's helicopter there was no reply. One of the men in the Fiat must have been an uncommonly good marksman, or unusually lucky, for a stray shot had creased the agent's temple, leaving a scarlet furrow across the skin and plunging him into unconsciousness for the second time in two hours.

And that was not all. The slug that had knocked out Solo had scored a second and more valuable bull.

In its trajectory, it had passed clean through an eyepiece of the sunglasses and shattered forever the remaining lens of the damaged pair...

CHAPTER FIFTEEN 

Glass– Handle With Care

"There are two things I do not entirely understand from your report," Alexander Waverly said to Solo and Kuryakin. "In the first place, why did you decide to secrete a homing device in your car when, so far as you knew, you were driving straight to the airport to catch a plane for New York? Had you in fact reason to suspect the young woman at that time?"

"Oh, yes," Solo replied. "Look: my car was sabotaged when I left Rinaldi's laboratory. That had to be somebody connected with the S.I.D., or somebody who had access to S.I.D. information: nobody at Carlsen's house could possibly have known I was going there. Then we met the del Renzio girl just after we had nearly been run down in the street. She could have fingered us there. Again, it was she who suggested we ate at Angelo's—and the gangster in the next booth was the man who fixed the lift at Leonardo's apartment. Only Giovanna knew that we were on our way there. She must either have tipped him off or made sure that he overheard the crucial part of our conversation."

"Also," Illya added, "when I overheard Carlsen talking to that same gangster, he made a great point of the fact that we were 'very well covered'—so well that it was unnecessary to try and kill us any more! We had just met Giovanna: if she was doing the covering, they would certainly not need to have outside help, for she was in on all our plans... the men we saw in the street were not Carabinieri or S.I.D agents at all, but covering agents from Thrush."

"Exactly. It had to be her," Solo said. "I borrowed a car and someone fixed a bomb in it. She knew the number of the borrowed car. We were attacked in an arcade on our way to a meeting with her. Only she would have known where we were coming from, and therefore the route we would take."

"I see. That answers my second question, then," Waverly said. "I was going to ask why you happened to have concealed from her the fact that the sunglasses were the medium Leonardo had used for his hologram. Obviously, if you suspected her, that would be the last thing you'd reveal... Miss Eriksson, though—she, I imagine, was a surprise to you?"

"A most agreeable one!" the two agents said together.

Waverly smiled. "Fortunately she is quite all right. I spoke to the Commendatore by radio-telephone this morning. His men moved in and cleaned up the gunmen just after you took off. Carlsen himself and the girl were in the third car and they got away... but the rest are safely under lock and key."

They were standing in a corner of one of the second-floor laboratories in the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York. At the other end of the room, white-coated assistants were helping the Chief Technician to set up apparatus on a long bench. Lieutenant Trevitt, who had been listening to this exchange without speaking, now grinned at Illya. "Seems like our little escape on the street here was only an appetizer for what you were going to go through!" he said. "What I want to know though—how in hell did you manage to persuade a one-man chopper to fly to that airport when the pilot was unconscious? Telepathy?"

It was Solo's turn to smile. He tapped the sticking plaster on his forehead. "It's pretty rugged in there!" he said. "We're a hard-headed family, you know. There was no mystery: the helicopter just continued on its course until I regained consciousness. Illya was flying alongside, yelling... but I woke up before he'd plucked up the nerve to change planes in mid-air!"

"There is a Russian proverb I could quote..." Kuryakin began with mock wrath, when the Chief Technician called that everything was ready. The four men moved across to the bench.

Solo saw a ruby laser similar to the one he had watched at Rinaldi's laboratory, a hologram plate in a movable clamp—and, between them in a complicated cradle of adjustable jaws, the battered sunglasses to get which they had gone through so much. "It's a million to one chance, I should say," he mused, staring at the chipped side-piece, the one empty frame and the splintered lozenge of tinted glass in the other. "Surely a lens that's cracked and starred like that cannot pass light through it in the same way as an undamaged one?" "You're worrying needlessly, Mr. Solo," the Chief Technician said. "We carried out a few experiments before you came down. Look..." He turned a switch and plunged the room into darkness.

A pink glow suffused the bench as the laser hummed into life. Rose-colored fingers manipulated the clamps, turning the sunglasses this way and that... and suddenly, as absurdly as a conjurer producing huge flags from an empty glass, the meaningless blobs of the hologram plate vanished and they saw floating in three dimensions before them a piece of foolscap paper covered from margin to margin in single-spaced red and black typing.

The list of Thrush members-designate in Europe had been decoded at last!

"It was the starred lens he had used all the time, you see!" the Chief Technician said. "I guess it was the nearest he could get, optically, to frosted glass in the time at his disposal... the plain one was nothing to do with it!"

Waverly was at the phone. "For God's sake send a photographer up to the optics lab at once," he said excitedly. "Holography may be the latest in scientific discoveries—but sunglasses can get broken and I shan't be happy until I have that list on an old fashioned photographic plate!"

Illya smiled affectionately. "And when the flash has flashed," he said, "I guess Napoleon and I can get out for a well-earned rest!"

The Head of Policy and Operations stared at him. He jammed a pipe upside down into his mouth. "Rest!" he snapped, "What do you mean—rest! Carlsen and Giovanna del Renzio are still at large. The four people who kidnapped Mr. Solo have yet to be brought to justice. Lieutenant Trevitt has a line on the man whose car was used in the snatch—and through him on the owner of the private plane which flew Solo from Johnstown to Italy. The man and woman who impersonated Del Florio and his assistant have to be tracked down, and so does the rifleman who murdered the witness in the precinct house." He took the pipe from his mouth and glared at his two most trusted agents. "Why, gentlemen," he said, "this case has only just started!"

Table of Contents

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

CHAPTER FIFTEEN