Текст книги "The Unfair Fare Affair "

Автор книги: Peter Leslie

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First, though, the impostor had to be won back from them....

Bartoluzzi followed the army truck carrying Illya at a discreet distance. As soon as he could, he changed vehicles, just in case any of the soldiers recognized the van in which the Russian had been traveling. He ran the vehicle into a junkyard on the outskirts of Munich, paused to have a word with the night watchman, and left in an ex-American army jeep, hand-painted a bright orange and equipped with a civilian registration.

The hood of the jeep flapped dismally, the garish paint was flaking off all over it, and the tires seemed to be almost bald. But there was a highly tuned engine under the battered hood and it ran like the hammers of hell!

Even so, not until they were nearly at Nurnberg did he catch up with the truck again. It had been joined by four motorcycle outriders.

Bartoluzzi accelerated and drove past the convoy. He knew where they were going, and he could afford to press on ahead. Between Bayreuth and Hof, he turned sharp right off the highway and bounced along a narrow lane. Eventually he came to a graveyard of wrecked autos—a large field piled high with the telescoped and concertinaed remains of cars that had come to grief on the Autobahn whose embankment formed one boundary of the property. There were several gaps in the ragged hedge shielding the place from the lane. Bartoluzzi chose the smallest and least used and steered the jeep in among the mounds of scrap.

Toward the back of the yard, just under the embankment, he ran in close to a towering pile of metal and stopped the jeep canted over on an outsize hummock of grass.

From a distance, slanting drunkenly toward the mound of wreckage, it would be indistinguishable from the derelicts surrounding it.

He switched off the engine and jumped to the ground. The rain had ceased, and the clouds had momentarily withdrawn. In the light of the waning moon, he threaded his way through the scrap to an old Dodge three-tonner that was parked among the nettles near the hedge. It looked barely capable of remaining erect on its wheels, but the motor turned sweetly and, in a secret space behind the gaping glove compartment, were papers. These included bills of sale, insurance certificates, an agreement to buy the vehicle for scrap from an East German yard (which had been easy enough, since the yard was his own), and permission to take the truck into the People's Republic for that purpose.

Easing the old Dodge out into the lane, he drove as quickly as he could to the frontier. Kuryakin had been handed over to the East German police not long before; the motorcycles and the army truck were just turning to start their journey back when Bartoluzzi arrived. He presented his credentials, said he was driving the truck through as scrap, and shook hands with the corporal who stamped his permit. Then, taking the road for Dresden, he set off after the prisoner and escort as fast as he could.

Day was breaking and they were less than twenty miles from the rebuilt city when he caught up. Kuryakin was sitting with six militiamen on a bench running down the back of a mesh-covered Wartburg riot truck. It is doubtful if any of them noticed the ancient Dodge as it rattled abreast of them. In any case the nerve gas from the expertly lobbed grenade worked so fast that they would have had no time to make any comments on it.

All seven of them were out for the count before the Dodge pulled in again to the right-hand side of the road after passing the truck.

Three miles farther on, the road snaked through rising ground in the center of a belt of forest. As the Wartburg slowed for a sharp bend, four shots from a repeater rifle cracked apart the dawn calm and sent birds flapping up from the tree tops in widening circles of alarm.

Behind the starred windshield, the driver and the sergeant beside him leaned together in a crazy embrace and then slid to the floor of the cab.

After the corner, the road dropped away to the right. But the truck went straight on. It bumped over the shoulder, scraped one side on the trunk of a tree, lurched into a hollow and then, gathering speed now, slammed into a fallen trunk and fell over, quite slowly, on one side.

Bartoluzzi was running noiselessly toward it over the carpet of pine needles almost before the echoes of the crash had died away among the sighing of the branches.

He crawled into the space beneath the battered mesh covering and tried to haul Kuryakin into the open air. There was a bruise on the unconscious Russian's temple, but otherwise he seemed to be undamaged. He was handcuffed to the militiaman on each side of him, however, and the wiry little Corsican was unable to drag all three of them out together. He felt in the pockets of the soldiers and then examined those of the dead sergeant in the cab. There were no keys to be found.

With a grimace of exasperation, he loped off through the trees to the place where he had hidden the Dodge. Five minutes later he was back by the crashed truck with a surgeon's saw in his hand.

Once his gruesome task was completed, he pulled Kuryakin clear and carried him—alone now but with an empty handcuff dangling from each wrist—back to his own vehicle. Dumping him in the back, he covered him with a pile of old sacks. The gas from the grenade would keep him quiet for at least another hour.

There was one more thing to do. Bartoluzzi did not know how much, if anything, the Russian had said to his guards. But he could not afford to take chances. It was possible that he had spilled the whole story in an attempt to establish his real identity. And even if they hadn't believed him, a fragment of the truth might stick.

The Corsican slid a clip of ammunition into an automatic pistol and went back to the scene of the crash.

Six more shots sent the birds wheeling.

Shortly afterward he was on a side road heading south into the forest with the briefcase full of money, which he had recovered from the Wartburg's cab, on the seat beside him.

Chapter 16

A Murder Is Planned

ILLYA KURYAKIN blinked his way awake. It took some time for his mind to clear, and the blurred images revolving slowly in front of his eyes meant nothing to him at first.

Then, portion by portion, the jigsaw assembled itself—the long wait in the Prague attic... the succession of decrepit vehicles in which he had been ferried half across Europe… the tramp through the snow and the crossing of frontiers... Bartoluzzi's face when the tell-tale streaks of dye told him that Illya wasn't Kurim Cernic... the journey with the soldiers and the sudden realization that the face of the truck driver whose ancient vehicle was passing them was the face of the Corsican...

And the recognition of the innocent-looking plastic grenade full of nerve gas the Corsican had tossed so neatly into the back of the riot truck as he passed.

Kuryakin jerked fully awake. Bartoluzzi was standing in front of him making circular movements with his hands before the Russian's eyes. "So," he said softly, "monsieur Impostor has recovered his senses. So much the better. Bartoluzzi will be able to find out the truth that much more quickly—and then he will be able to deal with the man who has dared to thwart his plans!"

His lips curled back from his teeth, and his eyes flashed venomously as he spat out the last words.

Kuryakin involuntarily flinched back from the fury in his voice. Or at least he tried to. But he found out as soon as he moved that he was far more of a prisoner than he had been in the truck. He was sitting in a stoutly built rustic oak chair. His wrists were wired to the arms, his knees and ankles were wired to the front legs, and there was a wide luggage strap passing across his chest and behind the chair back, which was buckled so tightly that he found it difficult to breathe freely.

Speaking of the truck... his eyes went once more to his own wrists. In front of the electric cord binding each to the arm of the chair, the metal hoop of a handcuff still encircled the flesh. But the companion cuff attached to each by a short length of chain was now empty; the guards were gone.

Yet the steel bracelets that had attached them to Illya remained closed and locked—and there were rust-colored stains splashed across the bright metal and over each of the sleeves of his jacket.

The Russian's eyes widened. "My God!" he cried involuntarily. "Those guards! How did you get the cuffs off them without unlocking them? You didn't...?"

"How do you think I got them off?" the little man snarled. "You think maybe I went for a locksmith or something?"

"You took off their... you... while they were unconscious... But that's monstrous! That's just what happened to the warder in Denmark. How could you do such a thing?"

"It won't make much difference to them now."

"You mean you killed them? You murdered unconscious men in cold blood?"

"It was the only way I could stop the bleeding," the Corsican said with a coarse laugh. "You might almost say I killed them in hot blood!"

"And you can joke about it? You're… you're nothing but barbarous."

"We shall see just how barbarous Bartoluzzi can be in a minute," the little man said. "I suppose it's useless asking you who you really are, why you have come snooping into my private affairs, or who sent you?"

"Quite useless."

"As I thought. I can tell a professional when I see one. It would save me a great deal of time—and you a great deal of pain—if you could do the same. For I mean to get that information, and I don't care how I do It. Also I am in a hurry, so that my methods must necessarily be somewhat– er—crude."

"And supposing I was to give you this information—what happens to me then?"

"I shall kill you," Bartoluzzi said simply. "You must pay the price of the knowledge you have gained by your spying. You know too much for the safety of my organization."

"If you are going to kill me anyway, why should I talk then?"

"To save yourself great suffering before you die."

"I have nothing to tell you."

"Very well. We shall see." Bartoluzzi sighed heavily and went out.

Left alone, Illya looked desperately around the room. It was a strange place. There were another chair like the one to which he was bound, a huge refectory table slanted across one corner, a roll-top desk littered with paper—and that was all. The rest of the dusty boards, from the hooded cheminée to the gothic embrasure on the far side of the room, were bare. Through the mullioned window, he could see the façade of another wing of the building—a turreted, spired, and battlemented expanse of hewn stone that looked like a castle in a fairy story.

Except that, unlike the fairytale mountains that humped themselves up above flower-strewn fields in story books, the peaks and spurs and bluffs beyond this stronghold were composed of towering heaps of scrap iron that raised rusty fingers at the winter sky. And the horizon all around was formed by the forbidding skyline of the forest.

The Russian looked closer at hand. The tying of his bonds had been an expert job—he could neither reach them with his fingers nor detect the least sign of resilience when he flexed his muscles against them. And there was nothing nearby that could be of any help. At one end of the table, the empty briefcase lay beside two piles of money—one that he had given to Bartoluzzi when he got out of the furniture van, the other that he had been keeping until he got to Zurich... and that had been sent back to the Czech authorities by the German police.

At the other end of the table the remains of a delicatessen-type meal lay in cartons and squares of greaseproof paper. But there was nothing, not a knife or a fork or any thing that could be used as a tool, within sight.

Footsteps echoed in a flagged passageway somewhere out side the door. The Corsican was coming back.

A moment later he was in the room, carrying a small piece of machinery in a cast iron housing, two lengths of high-tension cable, a six inch crank handle, and half a dozen bulldog clips.

"A magneto," he said proudly, laying the housing on the table with a heavy thump. "A twenty-four volt Bosch from an old dump truck out there. The paras in North Africa used to say there was nothing like them for making people volunteer information!... And it's nice that we can provide it from stock, as it were. I always knew this junkyard would come in useful one day!"

He laid the rest of his equipment down by the magneto and walked across to Kuryakin's chair. "And now, friend, we will see how sweetly Bartoluzzi can make you sing," he said softly.

Reaching forward, he seized the Russian's shirt and ripped it open from neck to waist in a single powerful gesture.

Napoleon Solo pulled the DS into a parking area in response to a signal from the slender arm projecting from the window of the mustard-colored Fiat in front.

The girl was standing by his door before the Citroën had stopped. "I think we'd better have a little council of war here," she said. "It's getting light, and we may not have the opportunity later on. Also, I think it might be better if I went on alone. You could wait for me in some secluded place."

"I should love to wait for you in some secluded place," Solo said. "But in this case, it's just out of the question. This is my show. It may be dangerous. I couldn't possibly allow you to do anything alone. Now that your ex-boyfriend has tumbled to the fact that my friend's not what he says he is, he'll be on his guard and doubly dangerous."

The girl laughed bitterly. "You don't realize what that man has done to me," she said. "He has made me break the law, risk prison many times. And he is not just my ex-boyfriend. We were going to get married... I heard so many times about the piece of land under the olive tree, the sound of the sea, the hot Mediterranean sun... and… and now... "

For a moment her voice faltered, and then she went on. "I do what I do because I want to. Because I must for my own self-respect. So you see, Mr. Solo, it's not a case of whether or not you permit me to take part. I'm going on to his place anyway; it's just a question of whether you come with me or wait here!"

Solo grinned. "If it's like that, we'd better go together."

"As you wish. We are between Wurzburg and Bamberg. The East German frontier is only about an hour's drive away. You are an American—do you think they will let you cross?"

"I may be an American citizen, but I work for an organization that is supranational. I have papers to prove I work for U.N.C.L.E.—and we are welcomed in the East as much as in the West, fortunately."

"Your papers will get you through right away?"

"Not as quickly as if I had a special permit or a visa. They'll probably have to phone their headquarters to check that it's okay to let me through. But it shouldn't take too long, I guess."

"I, on the other hand, am well-known. I can pass straight through. Do you not think, as your friend may be in great danger, that it would be best if I went ahead as I suggested? Then, when I have seen how things are at Bart's place, I can come back to you and we will decide what to do."

"Yes, but you may find yourself in great danger yourself."

"Do not worry. I know the paths and tracks of that forest like the back of my hand. Also the place where he lives. I can move secretly there and listen, where it would be impossible for two. Nobody will see me, I promise."

Solo sighed, "Okay. Seems I have very little choice—and it's too true that every minute counts if we're to rescue Illya. But you don't have to come back to me, not physically. Remember the little baton radio we heard my friend on, outside the restaurant?"

"But yes. It was most convenient."

"I have another. If I show you how to use it, you can take it with you—and then you can simply call me when you have found out what is happening. After that, you can give me directions and I will come to you. We shall save time that way. And also we can keep tabs on your... on Bartoluzzi. If you don't mind staying there until I arrive, that is."

"For this purpose," Annike said grimly, "it will be a pleasure."

Illya Kuryakin was unconscious, slumped forward against the retaining strap with his blond head hanging, when the clatter of the helicopter's rotors broke the silence in the big room.

Bartoluzzi dropped the magneto on the table. Leaving the leads still clipped in position, he ran to the stairs leading to the open air.

From the outside, his retreat presented an even more surrealistic aspect. It had originally been built as a shooting lodge for a Dresden businessman—a kind of Gothic Folly, with turrets and battlements pretentiously hiding what was in fact quite a small house—and it had always looked curiously unreal set in its forest hollow. But surrounded by a turbulent sea of scrap iron as it was now, the place became immediately a creation of the wildest fantasy.

Over a groundswell of bedsteads, cooking utensils, iron railings, disused cookers and lengths of railway track, great crests of heavier stuff swept toward the building in a rusty and remorseless flood—a flood culminating in a tidal wave of smashed car bodies, dented boilers and the skeletons of traction engines that had once, in their day, hauled entire circuses.

Dwarfed by this metal deluge, Bartoluzzi stood waiting. The helicopter sank down from the sky over the mountains forming the border with Czechoslovakia, skimmed across the surf of green tree tops that washed against the foothills, and lowered itself neatly to the ground in an open space between one of the mounds of scrap and the outer wall of the Folly.

A Plexiglas door opened in the machine's nose, and a lithe figure clad in black dropped to the ground.

Black boots laced to the knee strode purposefully across to the porch in which Bartoluzzi was waiting; beneath a form fitting black leather flying suit, the curves of a supple body moved enticingly; on the smooth brow of a black helmet, goggles were pushed up by black-gloved hands.

And the face, thin-cheeked and pale below the oversized lenses, was the face of Marinka, the blonde from the kavarna in Prague.

The Corsican shook hands formally and took her up to the room in which Kuryakin was held prisoner. She glanced cursorily at the inert figure and asked, "Has he come up with anything yet?"

Bartoluzzi shook his head. "He may not be the real Cernic, but he's a tough one all the same," he growled. "I was just about to make a change in the method, when I heard your plane."

He picked up an electric soldering iron, rammed the plug into a socket set in the wall beside the door, and laid the tool down on the tiled floor of the cheminée to heat up.

"He's said nothing at all?" the girl demanded. "He hasn't talked one way or the other?"

"Oh, he talked all right. They all talk when the electricity's flowing! But he didn't say anything worthwhile, nothing we could use. Mostly, he was babbling what I took to be his name—it sounded Russian to me—and some nonsense about his uncle."

"His uncle?"

"That's what it sounded like. He even spelled it for me, but I—"

"Do you mean he said he was from U.N.C.L.E.?"

"I think that was it. What does that mean?"

"It's... kind of an international police organization."

"This is a flic, a policeman?" Bartoluzzi made an instinctive movement toward the soldering iron, which was beginning to smoke slightly.

"More than that—and you can leave your torture toys. They will do you no good if this is an U.N.C.L.E. agent."

"But I can make him talk, Marinka. I swear I can."

"Of course you can. But you'd be wasting your time. Before they go out on assignment, agents of this organization undergo a course of posthypnotic suggestion to make psychological implants in their minds. Without wearying you with detail, the result of this is that—under truth drugs or torture—they will tell you the truth up to a certain point. But that as soon as you start asking questions about their mission, a psychiatric censor, as it were, comes into operation, and their subconscious mind supplies answers that accord with the facts but are not the genuine truth. They have a built-in series of conditioned reflexes. And to break that down would take far more time than you have available. My principals want action. You'll have to get rid of this man."

"Yes, yes. Of course I will. If he didn't talk within the next half hour, I was going to kill him anyway. I have clients waiting in other parts of Europe, and I cannot afford to waste time here trying to discover why a madman should pass himself off as a murderer! I have to go."

"And the means?"

"Obviously his death must be arranged so that the authorities believe no other person was involved. I had worked out a plan whereby it would seem he had himself escaped from the militiamen and had then come to grief while getting away from the scene of the crash."

"Good," the girl said. "Good. You must tell me about it at once…"

"It's a pretty diabolical scheme," the voice coming from the transceiver in Solo's hand said. "Here's what they plan to do. It appears that there's an old railway viaduct crossing the head of a valley near here. It was built in the middle of the last century to carry some branch line toward the mountains, but the Germans closed it down and tore up the track in 1933. The bridge is still standing, however, and the old permanent way still exists as a kind of rough track. It's weed grown and bumpy, but you can apparently get a car down it—at least as far as the viaduct."

"Bully for me," Solo said. "And the point is..."

"The viaduct is in a bad state... about to fall down. Apparently the wind and frost have eaten away all the mortar, and it's practically resting on dry stone pillars now. It's closed even to foot traffic, and the track is blocked with barbed wire before you get there."

"You're beginning to make me feel uneasy."

"What they're going to do—they plan to put your friend in the cab of an old truck. He'll be lightly drugged so that he doesn't know what's happening, but he won't be bound or anything. And then they'll push the truck out onto the viaduct and…"

"Down will come vehicle, Illya and all?"

"That's it. The bridge is so shaky that a bicycle might start it crumbling away. A heavy truck will just make it fall down. It won't bear that much weight."

"Okay," Solo said crisply. "Now just how are they going to do this? You say they are going to push the truck out onto the viaduct?"

"Not literally. The barbed wire barriers can easily be displaced. And the track approaching the bridge is on a downhill slope which continues at a slight incline across the viaduct itself. They are going to tie a rope to the back of the truck, give it a push down the slope, and then winch it out gradually as it rolls across the bridge. When it falls, they'll cut the rope and then hurry down to the bottom of the valley to remove the other end from the wreckage. The truck is the one that was used this morning to hijack your friend from the military. This way, the authorities will think he killed himself making his getaway..."

"It's up to us to stop them, then, isn't it? The important things to know are, when is this murder due to take place, how far am I from the viaduct, and exactly how do I get there?"

"Where are you now?"

"I'm on the Autobahn about fifteen kilometers southwest of Chemnitz—or Karl Marx-stadt, as they call it now. I crossed the border about an hour ago. It's funny how quickly those crazy little vineyards in Franconia, with the stone walls that zigzag from one terrace to another, get swallowed up in all this Gothic forest as soon as one's over that frontier!"

"I'm sure it is. You should be able to get to the valley—you do want to go straight there, I suppose?—in a little less than an hour. That'll be running it a bit fine, but they do have preparations to make, after all. As far as directions go, it's about twenty minutes' drive from Tharandt, to the south and west of Dresden. But detailed directions would be difficult. Would it help if I gave you a six-figure map coordinate?"

"That would be perfect," Solo said. "But before you do, there's one thing that's puzzling me. You keep on saying 'they'—yet I thought Bartoluzzi was a lone wolf. Where does the hired help come from?"

"It's anything but that! It's the girl I told you about from Prague. My successor. But she seems to be mistress in more senses than one; she's the one that's giving the orders, making the decisions, working everything out. And she keeps on talking about 'my principals' and asking questions as though she were worried about the credit rating of Bart's network. You'd almost think she was trying to buy her way into it!"

"Maybe she is. Does she say who these principals are?"

"Not directly. But she has several times used the name Thrush—Thrush would not permit this, Thrush would expect that," the girl said in a puzzled tone. "Isn't that a funny thing to say!"

Chapter 17

Drama At The Bridge

BY THE TIME Solo reached the lower end of the valley a wind had risen and rain was sweeping down toward him between the trees.

Ten minutes later, he stopped the Citroën at the roadside and took out his field glasses. The viaduct was in full view, spanning a steep, wooded cleft between two belts of forest

–seven tall, narrow arches with a revetment at each end and six slender pillars in between. Even from this distance (it was still six or seven miles away) the agent could see clearly that the small blocks of yellow sandstone composing it had been fatally damaged by erosion.

There were two small observation platforms built out over the third and fifth arches—probably to act as refuges for linesmen when trains passed—but otherwise the single-track road was guarded only by a solitary iron rail above the shallow parapet.

It was no wonder, Solo thought, eyeing the flimsy structure through the binoculars, that they had been forced to bar the approaches!

He drove on—and found to his disgust that he must have made an error in reading the large-scale map of the area. For instead of climbing up to the rim of the valley as he had expected, the road plunged suddenly down and began following its floor. There was a network of lanes and byroads crisscrossing the forest just here, and he had obviously confused two of them in his haste. And so now—although he would arrive at the precise coordinate on the map that the girl had specified—he would be below the viaduct instead of above it.

Agitatedly he traced his path back on the map until he had found the point where he had left the correct route. To regain it, he would have to go back four or five miles… but could be afford the time?

Again he focused the glasses on the bridge. At the higher end he could see signs of activity—the cab of an old-fashioned truck above a clump of bushes, the roof of a car, figures moving.

No, the macabre stage for murder was already set. There was not a moment to lose; he would have to go on…

The valley road he was following seemed to be fairly well screened by trees. There was nobody actually on the viaduct or its approaches yet. It was just possible that he could run the car up to the arches without being spotted. In any case he would have to try. As quietly as he could, he urged the DS onward.

Overhanging trees and the steepness of the banks prevented him from seeing the ground beyond the lip of the valley—and presumably prevented those up there from seeing him—until he was almost below the bridge. But the slope on which the great piles were built was much gentler, and the trees had all been cut down. For a short distance on each side of the viaduct the road and all traffic on it would be visible to anyone above, if they happened to be watching.

Solo hoped they weren't watching as he coasted the Citroën to a halt under the third archway. It was over the fourth—through which ran the stream that had carved out the valley—that the section of old permanent way was most dangerous, according to Annike. Solo got carefully out of the car and gazed upward.

The viaduct seemed to be immensely high—a multiple façade soaring toward the sky on slender feet that tapered gently toward the top. Solo estimated its height at around a hundred and fifty-feet… and now that he was actually beneath it, he could see how precariously the pillars supported the old track far above. The stonework was cracked and fissured in dozens of places, and there were great gaps at the apex of the central arch where chunks of masonry had fallen away from the part immediately below the road.

He peered around the edge of the pillar and looked up the bank. He could just see the top of the truck's cab, but the steepness of the slope hid the rest of the vehicle and the people working on it. At any minute now, though, the cab might start moving over the bridge... and that would mean Illya Kuryakin would be moving too, moving to a certain death when the roadway collapsed.

Solo scanned the exposed slope bordering the revetment of the viaduct. The arch was wide enough at the bottom to conceal the DS parked behind it. But if he waded in to the rescue up that bank, he would rise into view as soon as he had scrambled up the first few yards, and for Bartoluzzi and his helper, he would be as easy a target as a duck in a shooting gallery.

Somewhere up there, Annike would be waiting to help him. He had told her to hide along the approach road and contact him when he appeared. But time was running out; he had no time to find her now. He had to get up there and stop that truck from reaching the unsafe part of the bridge.

And from where he was, deep in the valley, there was only one way to do it—he would have to scale the weathered face of the pillar itself!

It was an idea born of desperation. But there was a slim chance it might work. First, he could begin the climb by the car, on the inner side of the pillar, where he would be hidden from the truck. And when he reached the beginning of the curvature of the arch and had to move around to the outside, he could at least profit from the fact that the pile tapered and would thus be leaning very slightly away from him. Instead of forcing himself up a perpendicular face, he would only have to cope with a slope one or two degrees off the vertical!