Текст книги "The Splintered Sunglasses Affair"

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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Текущая страница: 9 (всего у книги 10 страниц)

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Solo And Illya Take To the Air

There was a man with a sledgehammer inside Illya Kuryakin's skull, trying to beat his way out. The blows became stronger and stronger, reverberating agonizingly inside the steel walls, until at last the hammerhead burst its way through at a weak point and daylight came flooding in.

The Russian blinked his eyes. It wasn't daylight at all, he saw, but the illumination of an unshaded electric bulb hanging from a flex about ten feet above his head. He was in fact lying on his back on the floor and he was—he flexed muscles experimentally—scientifically bound, spread-eagled to four rings set in the concrete. If he twisted his head, he could see the iron circlets and the wire which bit into his flesh and attached him to them. He could also see to his surprise (he craned his neck to make sure) that he was completely naked. He could feel the cool, gritty texture of the cement floor against his calves, his haunches and his shoulder blades.

As far as he could, he looked around the room. It was more like a cellar, really, about fifteen feet square and completely empty except for an apparatus that looked rather like a hi-fi set, and another which seemed to comprise a tubular steel tripod with a T-shaped crosspiece and a length of rubber tubing leading to it.

There was one other thing, though, a few feet away from him, he could see the bare body of Napoleon Solo similarly spread-eagled between four iron rings set into the floor. Kuryakin tested the efficiency of his bonds with his wrists and fingers. The wire was of the variety used to make netting for chicken runs, and it had been fastened by a master. It was not knotted but twisted into place, and the tightening had been effected either by a packaging machine or by someone who was an artist with pliers. Even if he could have reached the joins, Illya could have done little to free himself. Nothing short of a pair of wire-cutters or a half hour session with another set of pliers would have any effect on them. Struggling would only chafe away the flesh from his wrists and ankles; and he was already uncomfortable enough, stretched out to the full extent of his spread legs and arms. And there was a draught cutting across the floor like a knife from somewhere behind. He decided to try and arouse Solo. "Napoleon!" he hissed in a piercing whisper. "Napoleon! Are you with me?"

There was a deep chuckle from the dead area behind his head. "I'm afraid Mr. Solo is still unconscious," a voice said. "But I am always pleased to talk... and we haven't had the pleasure of meeting before, Mr. Kuryakin. The name is Carlsen... Supreme Council Member for Southern Europe."

Illya twisted his head this way and that until eventually he was able to see the bulky figure of Solo's kidnapper seated comfortably on a chair behind and between the two of them. "We've used this line before, this week," he said; "but I'm afraid you have the advantage of me."

"And I intend to keep it," Carlsen said genially. "You—either you or Mr. Solo, that is—are going to tell me exactly what it was that the tiresome Leonardo used to make his hologram. And when you have told me, we shall destroy it. And then the hologram will remain forever useless, and I can carry on with the work your people have interrupted."

"Having destroyed us, too, no doubt?"

"That depends upon your cooperation. Certainly we shall take steps to ensure that you will both be—shall we say—forever useless too!... But first the matter of the hologram.

"I have no doubt that you have been subjected to the usual U.N.C.L.E. subliminal conditioning. Mr. Solo hasn't. And we expect, therefore, that he will crack first. Let me explain the method we'll use."

He rose and walked slowly around Solo to the two pieces of apparatus on the cellar floor. "Here we have," he said, touching the tripod, "an item of homely garden equipment. Doubtless you are familiar with it. Through the rubber tube, water flows under pressure into the crosspiece, revolving it about its central axis, which is balanced on delicate bearings. At the same time, as it swings round, water emerges from a multitude of tiny holes along its length in the form of a fine spray. Since the pressure of the water can be varied, both speed and direction of crosspiece—and thus the distance and the course traced by the spray—are in effect random. And a tripod properly set up can water a fair section of garden very thoroughly in quite a short time."

The big man moved across to the second piece of equipment and stood with one hand resting on it, looking quizzically down at Kuryakin.

"That is of course only of academic interest," he said. "But with this apparatus we come into the realm of practical applications. And all this is—when you come down to it—is a kind of electrical generator." He paused and added significantly: "And water is a perfect conductor..."

The draught behind the Russian increased. There was the sound of footsteps, and tall, white boots creaked into his field of vision.

"Quite a pretty pair!" Giovanna del Renzio said, staring up and down the trussed figures of the two agents. "But how droll they look, spread out on the floor like that..."

"They will look more droll still, when our little experiment begins," Carlsen replied suavely. "Perhaps, my dear, you would like to explain?"

"It's quite simple really," the girl said to Illya. "As you heard, water is a perfect conductor—so if we connect the out put of the generator to the spray, the water droplets, as they whirl round, will carry the charge... so long as there is continuous contact, drop by drop, back to the metal of the crosspiece. Anybody on whom the spray falls when such a contact exists will therefore receive a shock, of course—unless or until the particles of water separate, when the circuit is broken.

"Since the speed and direction of the spray is indeterminate, as is the frequency of electrical contact within it, the amount of time a person under the spray would in fact be receiving shocks is also totally random."

"The point of all this," Carlsen put in, "is that in most forms of—er—persuasion, the person to be persuaded can see the hot iron or the stroke of the whip or whatever it is on the way... and can therefore in some manner tense himself, prepare to tighten up in anticipation of the pain. But imagine—as I am sure somebody in your position, Mr. Kuryakin, easily could!—the victim in the dark awaiting the arbitrary movements of a spray such as this... knowing that, even when the water touches him, it may not carry a charge. And that the charge itself, and therefore the amount of pain it produces, is also infinitely variable. Infinitely, Mr. Kuryakin!"

"It may seem unduly bizarre or complex," the girl added, "but the system has been perfected to save time, really. The disintegration of self control actually does arrive much more quickly, I can assure you. It's rather like the old Chinese dripping tap torture, with uncertainty thrown in to add a... logical... element."

"Yes, yes," Carlsen said. "And in the line of labor saving, like all modern equipment. And in that connection, of course, I must not neglect to point out that, as the floor becomes covered with a thin layer of water itself, a charge carried by spray falling on it can be transmitted to the body even though the spray may not in fact touch it. If you think a little you will see that this is why we use iron rings and wire for the purpose of securing you. Both conduct admirably."

"If your people spent less time on the melodrama and more on planning, you might be a little more successful," Illya said.

"We shall see how successful we are in a little while. A very little while, I should think," Carlsen replied. "Your headquarters are mad to send you against us. How can your puny little efforts triumph against our computer? Mr. Solo is not yet with us, my dear; but I think we might venture a little trial run, eh?"

The girl nodded. Keeping her eyes on Illya, she walked over to a main riser culminating in a tap from which the rubber tube feeding the sprinkler ran. Slowly she turned the brass wheel opening the faucet.

For a moment nothing happened. And then, with a sudden hiss, the crosspiece jerked into motion like a watery firework. From each end, a fan of spray feathered out, describing a moving spiral of mist in the air. And as the apparatus revolved more and more rapidly, these two, plus the smaller issues along the length of the rotating bar, coalesced to form a single arc of droplets which scythed this way and that in the bright electric light beneath the cellar ceiling. Initially, Illya saw the figure-of-eight patterns the damp made on the dusty floor.

And then a trailing end of the douche fell once, twice and—after a slight delay—a third time coldly over the gooseflesh on his skin. By the time he had caught his breath, the whole floor was shining uniformly wet.

Giovanna del Renzio was attaching some piece of equipment to the tap. "This," Carlsen said, raising his voice slightly over the swishing of the sprinkler, "will vary the pressure of the water reaching the crosspiece automatically, so the pattern of its fall will start to vary also. We'll let you watch for a few minutes before we go out and turn off the light; but first let me show you the electrical side of the business!" He wheeled the generator closer to the sprinkler, drew on a pair of rubber gloves, and made a connection.

The water was falling across Kuryakin's flesh every now and then, sometimes in a fine veil, sometimes with a certain amount of force. And now, suddenly, one time, the unmistakable tingle of a mild shock whipped across his belly and up over his shoulder to his right arm.

Carlsen was turning a rheostat control on the generator.

Again water swept over the Russian. Once more it approached, wavered, went away, returned—and a violent spasm arched his body up from the iron rings as what felt like a red-hot whip scalded across his thigh. A hoarse cry of pain was torn from his lips. A few feet away, Napoleon Solo moaned slightly and shifted against his bonds.

Giovanna del Renzio's bright plastic raincoat was shiny with water. Water dripped from the ceiling, washed across the floor and streamed down the cellar walls. Kuryakin could feel it clammy against his back. But there was no more water in the air. The girl had switched the apparatus off.

Carlsen, his suit dark with moisture, spoke from the far side of the room. "We're going to leave you now," he said. "Some time during the next hour the lights will go off. And at indeterminate times subsequently, the sprinkler will be turned on—and off—sometimes with current, sometimes without.

"You have already had a taste both of the mild and of the fairly severe current... although, of course, we can make it stronger still if we wish. We do not wish to keep on interrupting you with tedious requests as to whether or not you are ready to speak. So every sound you make will be taped, and at intervals we shall play the tapes back. When we judge from the noises that you are—er—desirous of further conversation, we shall return. But not before."

He was about to turn and go, shepherding the girl before him, when Lala Eriksson appeared in the doorway. She had changed out of her green suit and was wearing slacks and a turtle neck sweater in black. There was a slight smile on her face and her eyes were shining.

"Lala!" Carlsen sounded surprised. "I know we promised you the first trick, but I thought we'd agreed that a half hour to reflect—"

"I know, I know," the girl interrupted. "But the more I think of it, the more I'm inclined to the view that too much time in the light is a bad thing. It may give them the time to steel themselves, you know. And we simply cannot afford to let them do that."

"Very well then. At the beginning, anyway, you're the boss."

He turned back to Kuryakin with a sardonic smile. "For you, at any rate, the night starts now. Other plans will be carried out as outlined." He switched out the light, ushered the two girls into the passage, went out himself and closed the door.

In the sudden intense darkness, Illya lay spread-eagled on the wet floor and wondered desperately what he could do. There was nothing. His bonds were unburstable; since he was naked, there was nothing he could reach or hope to adapt from his clothes that might help; Napoleon Solo was still unconscious—and even if he could have talked, it would have been useless, as everything they said would have been taped. He imagined, from the scrap of conversation he had heard, that they were to take it in turns to actuate the combined water-electric torture. There were probably controls just outside the door, and Lala Eriksson would be at them now. How long, he wondered, would they be able to hold out against the combined onslaught of pain and uncertainty?

Not too long, probably. But whereas, as Carlsen had surmised, he was conditioned, Solo was not. And when he himself broke and wanted to talk, the things he said would be things implanted subconsciously in his mind by a New York psychiatrist attached to the Command. When Solo broke and they injected the drugs, he would simply tell them what they wanted to know.

It was the uncertainty and not the pain that would break them, though. Carlsen had been right, damn him! Stretched there as humiliatingly as a specimen on a slide, the flesh tensed for the cold caress of spray that might or might not come, the shock that might or might not come with it... it was hardly a situation that called for rejoicing!

Water hissed suddenly into action as the sprinkler jingled into movement. A wedge of light opened into the dark and then vanished as the door opened and closed. In the instant of illumination, he saw Lala Eriksson slip into the cellar. She had put on a black raincoat over her slacks and she was busy about the generator and the sprinkler.

Cold mist trailed over Kuryakin's legs, but there was no shock, mild or violent—that time.

A pencil of light from a pocket torch lanced the gloom. Footsteps splashed across the cellar floor and stopped somewhere just behind him. Again and again the spray washed across his body. But there was still no shock.

The girl was on one knee by the iron ring to which his right hand was attached. He heard the rustle of the raincoat as she moved. When he craned his head over his shoulder, he could see highlights sliding over the contours of the polished proof material sheathing her body.

An instant later, there was a sharp snick and his hand was free.

"What the devil... ?" Illya began.

"Shhhhhh!" The girl's whisper was urgent. "Don't forget the tape!... And you're supposed to be getting electric shocks, so if you could groan a bit it would help."

The Russian uttered a hoarse cry and then another. The light beam stabbed down towards his feet. Again the girl crouched, a strange figure shining wetly in the diffuse light as the spray twisted this way and that. And then he was completely free, sitting up damply on the cold floor, trying to massage life back into his limbs.

Another three minutes, and they were manhandling the unconscious body of Napoleon Solo out of the door and into a dimly lit passageway. Kuryakin gave a final realistic cry of pain and closed the cellar door.

"We'll be all right for ten or fifteen minutes," the girl whispered. "Even if they do listen to the tape so early, they'll just think I've left a gap in the 'treatment'; they'll be expecting that."

"I don't wish to seem ungrateful—but what the hell goes on?"

Lala Eriksson grinned, her face suddenly impish in the dim light. "Like Giovanna, I belong to the S.I.D.," she said. "But whereas she was using the S.I.D. as a cover for her membership of Thrush, I'm doing exactly the opposite—using my Thrush association to mask the fact that I'm with the S.I.D.! Giovanna doesn't know I belong, of course; but we've been watching her... and Mr. Carlsen's unsavory menage... for months!"

Kuryakin tried to laugh, but he was shivering so much with cold and with reaction that all he managed was a kind of steam-engine stutter.

"I'm so sorry!" The girl was all contrition. "You must be perished. Your clothes are here in this cupboard. Mr. Solo's too. I don't suppose he'll be coming round yet, will he?"

"I doubt it. He must have been knocked out a full hour after I was, and I've only been conscious quite a short while. Since Carlsen came in."

Lala bit her lip. "That's going to make it awkward. We've got very little time, you see. Any time after the next ten minutes, Carlsen or Giovanna may realize you're not in the cellar—and that tips them off that it's me that's responsible. If we could possibly get Solo unseen to a car, though, and I could bluff my way through the gates before we were spotted, we might..."

She broke off abruptly and, signalling the Russian to help, began feverishly to dress Solo in the clothes she took from the cupboard. Illya felt anxiously in the breast pocket as they eased the jacket over his shoulders. The sunglasses—the vital link in the chain that would strangle Thrush's plans for Europe—were still there! Hurriedly, he put on his own clothes. Together, they manhandled the unconscious man up a flight of stairs, through a doorway and along a short passage. At the double doors which blocked off its end, the girl held up her hand for silence. "My car is just outside here," she whispered. "If we can get him into it without being spotted, we might just make the gates and crash through before anyone realizes... "

Kuryakin eased back the catch and inched one of the doors open while Lala supported Solo's sagging figure. Gradually, the hairline of daylight widened until finally he could peer through into the open air.

The doors gave out on to a cobbled yard beside the garage at the back of the house. On the far side of the yard, a high wall sheltered the kitchen garden; behind it were the stables—underneath which, presumably, was the cellar in which they had been imprisoned—and at the front, the drive ran past the long, low elevation of the house itself. The Lancia convertible was parked about five yards from the doors, with a clump of oleanders masking it from windows in the house.

But between them and the car loomed the broad shoulders of one of the guards. He was standing with his back to them, his machine pistol at the ready, staring along the drive.

The Russian motioned the girl to come and look. Gently, she lowered Solo to the floor and joined him at the door. She gave one comprehensive glance at the scene outside, sketched a brief pantomime with one hand, and then jerked the door noisily open, "Brockman!" she called. "Here!"

The guard turned slowly round. His brutish face creased into a frown. "Was ist?" he demanded suspiciously, approaching the door.

"One of the prisoners below," Lala said agitatedly. "He's... come and look. Quick!"

The big man snicked back the safety catch on his weapon, bent his head and strode through the doorway. Lala was already at the head of the stair beckoning.

Kuryakin had obediently cached himself in the deep shadows behind the open door. Now, as soon as the guard had passed through, he stole up behind the man, poised on one foot, and slammed his other heel down as hard as he could on the butt of the F.N. where it protruded between the torpedo's arm and body.

The big pistol clattered to the ground as the gunman whirled round with a snarl of astonished rage.

Before he could voice his alarm, Kuryakin had danced in close, his forearm held across his chest, his fingers extended. Like a cobra striking, the flat of the hand darted out once, twice, in a deadly karate chop to the guard's throat. The man staggered. He uttered a strangled grunt—and he would certainly not be able to cry for help for some minutes!—but he was tough. He did not fall. Choking, he rushed at the slender Russian with outstretched arms and seized him in a bear hug. Illya tried every dirty fighting trick he knew. He butted the man's nose with his forehead, he stamped on his toe, he hacked his shin, he brought up one knee. But the torpedo was unbudgeable. Purple in the face, wheezing, he merely increased the pressure.

Inexorably, the arms tightened around Kuryakin like steel bands. His spine felt as though it was about to snap. His own arms, pinioned to his sides in that vice-like embrace, were seized with cramp.

It was when his senses had begun to reel that he resorted to the oldest of all tricks and went abruptly limp.

With a grunt of satisfaction, the guard relaxed his grip enough to let Kuryakin slide down within his grasp. And immediately his elbows were free the agent coiled and uncoiled like a tempered spring. With bunched fists, he slammed a left and a right with piston-like precision to the man's unprotected belly. And then all at once the rest of him was free....

The purple face paled to a strange and livid green, the remainder of the breath wheezed from the lungs, and the guard careened over, leaned against the wall and slowly slid to the floor. Kuryakin stood over him and completed the treatment with a couple of quick rabbit punches to the neck. "Shall I tie him?" he asked the girl. She had been hovering on the fringe of the short struggle, unable to decide whether or hot to intervene.

She shook her head. "We haven't time. We'll be discovered anyway before he regains consciousness. Come on... every moment counts... "

Illya darted to the doors, glanced around outside to make sure that the coast was clear, and then they picked up Solo and waddled towards the car. They were within two yards of the nearside door when footsteps crunched on gravel just beyond the oleanders.

Like lightning, they dropped U.N.C.L.E.'s Chief Enforcement Officer to the ground behind a border of lavender, and crouched down themselves behind the screen of pink and red-flowered bushes.

Carlsen and Giovanna del Renzio came into sight beyond the car, walking fast and talking animatedly. They were heading for the cellar door.

"... can't understand what's come over her," the man was saying, "for I distinctly told her, when I allowed her to take the first shift, that I wanted the current switched on after five minutes and then left on for some considerable time—those were my exact words—on the initial session."

"Yes," the girl said. "And it's at least seven minutes since we heard so much as a groan. I can't imagine what all that whispering was about..."

The double doors opened and closed behind them.

Lala Eriksson was on her feet. Her face was white. "Blast!" she hissed. "They must have been listening to the tape, live, all the time. We've about thirty seconds before they raise the alarm. Let's go!"

Bundling Solo unceremoniously into the back, they piled into the Lancia and the girl twisted the starter key. The motor caught and they were away with a crisp snarl of exhaust and a shriek of tires on the shiny cobbles. As they swung wide into the driveway circling the house, Illya looked back over his shoulder and saw Carlsen, closely followed by the girl, burst out of the doors leading to the cellar.

There was something in the man's hand. A moment later smoke blossomed three times from the muzzle of an automatic and a slug hummed over the agent's head, close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. As they screamed round the bend to the front of the house, the Thrush chief began running back towards the cellar doors.

"He'll be telephoning the gatehouse," the girl said. "Hold tight!"

They rocketed around the shrubbery, scattering gravel, and roared on to the main drive. For two hundred meters, Lala gave the Lancia its head, and then, as they entered the straight leading to the gates after swinging left, right and left again through the poplars, she braked the car down to a normal speed with repeated applications of the hand lever. "Can't afford to be seen in an obvious hurry," she panted. "They might get suspicious."

Beside her, holding a rug over Solo's unconscious body on the back seat, Kuryakin lived and died through every second of their 20 mph approach. There was a gunman lounging against the bole of a tree near the mesh gates, and he could see two others over on the far side of the lawns.

When she was fifty yards away, Lala gave a single sharp toot on the horn. Just before they got there, the iron frames began slowly to swing away. Illya could see through the window of the gatehouse the man who was twirling the wheel operating them—and he could see too, as in some nightmare pantomime, the operator's free hand reaching for a telephone which was presumably ringing....

The girl changed down with a burst of revs. The Lancia surged forward—and in the same instant, Kuryakin saw the astonished face of the operator, the frantic lunge he made for the wheel.

As they drew level, the gates halted their outwards swing and began rapidly to close again. The car was almost through when the right hand one slammed into the bodywork, scraped along the wing with a shower of sparks and screeched off the nearside rear quarter. The Lancia shuddered, seemed for a moment to stagger in its tracks, and then resumed its course as the girl's slim wrists expertly corrected the misalignment.

A moment later, they were bellowing through the archway piercing the gatehouse. Lala swung the car broadside on into the lane with a shrill scream of tires and they howled back along the route to Turin.

Machine-gun fire stammered a farewell before they were far down the road. The driving mirror vanished in a shower of splinters, a ricochet zinged off the chrome strip lining the wing, and there were several heavy thuds as the lid of the boot was holed. Then they were out of range.. and Kuryakin was able to look back over the Lancia's tail and see across the flat sweeps of meadow through which the road looped the strength of the pursuit.

There were two cars quite close behind them, the Cadillac and Solo's borrowed Fiat, with a third whose roof he could not identify several hundred yards further back.

In convoy like this they burned up the quiet afternoon countryside between Buronzo and Ivrea. Lala tried everything she knew; but no matter how perilously she cornered on the limit, no matter how much bhp she coaxed from the willing front-drive power unit on the straight, she was unable to shake off Carlsen's men.

Then, on a long stretch of road arrowing across the plain beneath the poplars without a corner in sight, the big American car crept inexorably up on them. There were men leaning from its open windows, and soon over the boom of exhausts the sharper note of pistol fire split the air.

"They must be mad—shooting on an open road in public!" Kuryakin gasped. "You'd think they'd wait until they had us cornered somewhere."

The girl shook her head as she weaved the convertible from side to side. "It doesn't matter to them," she said. "Don't you see? Carlsen will be in the clear. You can bet he's not in the lead car. The Cadillac crew are all torpedoes—kind of like a kamikaze unit. The only thing that's important is that they destroy us, and with us the hologram glass. They'll try to shoot, bomb, force a crash, anything, no matter who else they involve, no matter who sees them do it. They'll worry about that afterwards."

"Will they succeed?"

"Not on this road. It gets twisty again after this next corner. But it's the outskirts of Turin, with the traffic jams and the lights, that worry me."

The Russian glanced back at the pursuing cars again. "All right; we scrap Turin," he said. "Tell me: are those NATO maneuvers still going on in the Val d'Aosta? It's straight ahead from here, isn't it?"

"Yes they are and yes it is. But it's another fifty kilometers."

"Have you enough gas? And could you keep them off all the way?"

"If we keep to the secondary roads," the girl said. "And naturally I know the dispositions of the army units fairly well. What have you in mind?"

Kuryakin told her.

A little less than forty minutes later, they were bumping along a dirt road undulating across a countryside scored with tank tracks. Somewhere to their right there was a cannonading of artillery, and behind, the sporadic rattle of shots marked the progress of Carlsen's convoy along the track.

Solo had regained consciousness. Owlishly, he stared out over the Lancia's tail, loosing off an occasional shot at the Cadillac from the Berretta, which had unaccountably still been in his jacket pocket.

Lala drove boldly past notices proclaiming in red lettering on white boards that the way was prohibited, that it was mined, that it was dangerous, and that it was army property subject to artillery fire. She skirted a hutted camp, drove past two astonished sentries in boxes, and sent a group of officers leaping for the hedgerow as she careered past a staff car drawn up by the roadside. Eventually, after looking anxiously around, she steered the convertible into a space below a clump of pine trees and stopped. The Cadillac was laboring up a hill two hundred yards behind them, and the other cars were not yet in sight.

"Quick!" she cried. "Over there, beyond the Nissens! I'll hold them off from here while you run!"

"I only hope the equipment in the Commendatore's car is as good as that in ours. In theirs, rather!" said Solo. "Equipment?"

"I left a homing device in the Fiat," Solo grinned. "I rang the old man before we left Turin and told him the wavelength. He promised to keep a few kilometers away as long as it was transmitting. He shouldn't be far off."

"I hope not," Lala Eriksson said."Now run! Quick!" She opened the boot of the Lancia, took out a Mannlicher rifle, loaded it, and settled down behind the car's bonnet to fire at the Cadillac. At the first shot, the big sedan stopped and men disgorged on either side to seek shelter behind bushes.

A moment later, bullets were zipping through the leaves above their heads as the girl's fire was returned with interest. The Fiat pulled up behind the American car and its driver and passengers fanned out through the underbrush in an obvious attempt to outflank her. The third vehicle had stopped some way down the track.