23-The Finger in the Sky Affair Read online

  The woman in the beach robe pushed a strand of wet hair from her eyes. The ringing tone had stopped, the receiver at the other end had been lifted.

  "Hello?" she said. "Madame? Celeste here. Larsen has just telephoned an urgent report. Solo and the Russian are going to try again. They are flying to Orly this afternoon to catch the T.C.A. Trident coming in to Nice tonight. I am to emphasize that they'll be on the later flight: the one that lands at ten thirty-five."

  She paused and listened for a moment.

  "No, Madame. Larsen managed to tape a conference in the director's office, but apparently nothing was mentioned about the methods they were using...No, they said nothing about last night's flight...No. Nothing about that either. He didn't know if they knew an attempt had been made or not...Yes, ten thirty-five...Very good, Madame."

  She replaced the receiver, pushed through the hanging bead curtain and walked back, under a rattan awning that was flapping in the wind, to the crowded beach.

  * * *

  Solo and Illya, however, did not in fact fly to Orly airport.

  Under an aching blue sky scoured clean of clouds by the mistral, the twin-engined Cessna was crossing the gaunt limestone peaks between Brian�on and Gap when Solo leaned forward and tapped the pilot on the shoulder. "We've changed our plans," he said. "Will you please radio Grenoble and ask permission to land there?"

  The pilot looked over his shoulder, his eyebrows raised in astonishment.

  "Yes, I know it's not in accordance with the flight plan we filed," Solo said. "But I think you'll find it's okay. Just tell them to check back with Nice if there's any difficulty..." He sank back into his seat and grinned at Illya.

  "Do you think Mr. Waverly will have been able to arrange the helicopter in time, Napoleon?" Kuryakin asked.

  "I guess so. I had the cipher radioed to him at ten o'clock this morning. He'll be hopping mad at having to organize things in the middle of the night—God knows what time it was in New York then!—but the 'copter will be there all right."

  "Do you think THRUSH will have swallowed the bait?"

  "Let's hope so. I don't see why not. Our security was watertight on the details of last night's flight. Only a hand-picked team of Matheson's best men knew we had taken a duplicate Murchison-Spears box aboard. And the comparison tests were carried out in complete secrecy. I'm pretty sure our birdlike friends have no idea of the line we're following."

  "So they'll have no idea we were in the tail of the aircraft—or why their device failed to make it crash as usual?"

  "I guess not. I hope not. That's why I was so careful to have nothing mentioned about it at the conference this morning."

  "And why you kept broadcasting the fact that we were having a conference?"

  "Sure. I figured they were bound to have the room bugged when they knew it was on. And once they learn we're going to have another go, they're certain to make another attempt to bring the plane down. After all, so far as they know, we just sit in the cockpit holding a watching brief—and there's no reason why their device should fail a second time. Only this time we won't be on the plane at all: we'll try to steal up behind them and catch them in the act as the Trident comes in."

  "There's no chance they'll find out we haven't gone all the way through to Orly—and call the attempt off?"

  "No. Not a soul at Nice knew we intended to land at Grenoble. I asked Waverly to delay sending instructions about the altered flight plan until after we'd taken off. And once they'd seen us leave, THRUSH's agents would stop covering the airport—so even if there was a leak when Waverly came through, there'd be nobody around to hear and report it."

  "I see. That's why you insisted that the arrangements for the helicopter were made through New York instead of through Station M?"

  "Yeah, that's it."

  "Well," Illya said, leaning his forehead against the cabin window and squinting down at the jagged serrations of the mountains five thousand feet below them, "it only takes six hours to get to Grenoble from Nice by car. If they send us one of the new Sikorskys, we should be able to make St. Paul an hour and a half before the Trident's due and still have time for a leisurely dinner at the Relais des Alpes before we take off..."

  The pilot, who had for some time been talking into the radio microphone, replaced it on its hook under the instrument panel and half turned towards them with one arm extended in the thumbs-up signal.

  Banking steeply, the Cessna dropped six hundred feet in an air pocket over the summit of La Meije and then flattened out for the long glide down the valley of the Drac to Grenoble.

  Chapter 13 — Outdoor fireworks

  St. Paul-de-Vence is one of the most typical of the medieval 'perching' villages which stud the hilltops just inland from the Côte d'Azur. It is also one of the most expensive: the slopes of the tree-clad collines surrounding it are terraced with high-income villas and building land brings from $45 to $300 a square yard. The village itself is built on a spur and lies entirely within ramparts rising steeply from the valleys on either side. There is only one entrance, through an ancient arch in the wall. Inside the cobbled streets separating concentric rings of old houses are too narrow for cars, and those rising to the two tiny squares in the center are stepped every few yards.

  Napoleon Solo peered down through the perspex blister of the Sikorsky as they flew across from the north. There was something wrong with the village—something unexpected which he could not quite place. Beyond, a distant chain of bright lights marked the motor road which ran beside the shore. But here...

  "It's a funny thing," he began, turning to Illya Kuryakin.

  "I know," the Russian cut in, looking over Solo's shoulder. "The place is in darkness. There's not a light in the whole village. Even the street lamps seem to be out."

  From below, a vivid red streak arrowed through the air towards them, accelerating fiercely as it approached. There was a bright flash a hundred feet beneath the helicopter, then a shower of stars subsided gently earthwards.

  The pilot from the Deuxi�me Bureau turned his head and laughed. "St. Paul is en f�te tonight, messieurs," he said.

  "Fireworks!" Solo exclaimed in relief. "For a moment you had me worried there: I thought THRUSH had dreamed up an anti-aircraft battery!"

  Three two-stage rockets fizzed upwards to their left, bursting into golden streamers which exploded again to release red, blue and green stars.

  "Every August the municipality puts on this giant display," the pilot said. "Some years it last an hour and a half, two hours. It is the most lavish spectacle in Europe. Truly it is fantastic!"

  "What is it for?" Illya asked.

  The pilot lifted his hands from the controls and spread his arms in a Gallic gesture. "For people to see, monsieur," he said. "To enjoy. Part of the season. They come from all over the south to watch—see, the roads for two kilometers around the village are choked with parked automobiles...There will be tens of thousands of people sitting on the terrace walls of the vineyards. The spectacle is free, after all. It is very good for the tourism."

  "But how can such a small village afford this huge display?"

  "St. Paul is not large, but the municipality is very rich. Many wealthy people live there. And what else can they do with all the tax they gather? The place is enclosed. There is electricity, water, drainage. There is no room for expensive improvements, wider roads and that sort of thing. So why not spend money on enjoyment?"

  "A very civilized attitude," Solo said. "I wish we had known of this before. Still—it should make our task easier. All the lighting is switched off during the display?"

  "Everything. Even the street lighting on the roads leading to St. Paul. For the finale, they reenact the sacking of the town by the Saracens, with smoke screens and red flares to simulate the burning. Then the lights come on and there is a fair outside the gates, in the place where the old men play pétanque under the plane trees. It is very gay."

  The Sikorsky was sinking slowly into the deep valley beyond the s
pur. It skimmed the top of a geometrically planted orange grove and settled gently down in a field. Beyond the dark bulk of the ramparts, the sky shimmered with silver rain.

  The pilot handed them climbing ropes, crampons, a pick. "Good luck, messieurs," he said. "If one may venture a question...?"

  "By all means."

  "You have to negotiate an extremely steep, rough hillside, scale a seventy meter cliff and then climb the stone ramparts to get in. At the other end of the village is an open gate with a road leading through. Why do you not use that?"

  Solo laughed. "There are many THRUSH agents here who we do not know by sight—but who may know us," he said. "Even in a crowd, we might be recognized. And the success of this operation depends on surprise. So we enter by the least expected route..."

  The pilot waved goodbye and slid shut the perspex canopy. Soon, the clatter of the helicopter's rotors was dying away in the sky towards Nice.

  Illya and Solo walked across the field, threaded their way through the rows of a small vineyard and began the stiff climb to the rockface. The going was rough, the ground uneven and tussocky—and the sporadic bursts of different colored light erupting in the sky were more of a hindrance to their progress than a help. By the time they reached the foot of the cliff, they were out of breath and drenched in perspiration.

  From directly below, the bluff and the ramparts surmounting it looked enormous: a giant's castle bulked against a fairy-story sky. Solo unhitched the rope from his shoulder and knotted one end around his waist. "We could do with a handful of those magic beans right now," he observed with a wry grin. "However—let's get on with it..."

  Apart from the mutter and snap of fireworks from the other side of town, the night was quiet—and the mistral which had been blowing when they left for Grenoble had died down as suddenly as it had started. The cliff was not quite perpendicular but it was a difficult enough climb in the fitful light. The first fifty feet were the easiest, the rock being seamed and fissured with pockets of soil and vegetation to afford them footholds. After that the face became steeper, the weathered slabs larger and smoother. Having forced their way up a narrow chimney with shoulders and feet, they came to a halt on a ledge.

  "It's no good, Napoleon," Illya gasped. "We'll have to use the crampons from now on."

  Tapping the steel spikes into the rock seemed to them to raise echoes loud enough to waken the dead. But no heads appeared silhouetted against the ramparts far above; no searchlight beam split the night to discover them spread like flies against the wall. Laboriously, painfully, with screaming muscles, they forged upwards. Once the rock crumbled when Solo put his weight on a crampon, and the spike fell out and down, to tinkle from boulder to boulder in the darkness beneath. Solo grabbed wildly at the cliff face, his fingers tearing on the eroded stone. For a moment he arrested his fall, then the rock crumbled again and with a strangled cry of warning to Kuryakin, who was in the lead, he plunged downwards to the full length of the rope. Fortunately the Russian had one arm around a crag, preparing to knock in another crampon. As Solo called, he flung the other arm around the projecting rock and tensed himself for the shock as the agent's full weight jerked appallingly on the rope circling his waist.

  Gritting his teeth, the Russian hung on, his lips drawn back with effort and his forehead beaded with sweat. For a giddy moment, Solo swung like a pendulum in space. Then his threshing feet found interstices in the rock face and he was able to slowly fight his way back to his former position. A few minutes later, they reached the top of the cliff. Across a stretch of grass, only the stone rampart, leaning away from them into the night, separated them from St. Paul.

  "Thanks, Illya," Solo panted. "I'd have been a goner if you hadn't held on."

  "I cannot say it was a pleasure," Kuryakin replied. "But I certainly wasn't prepared to complete this mission alone!...Let's move along this way a bit before we climb the wall: the crevices look wider over there."

  Facing the rough-hewn blocks side by side, they edged along the foot of the rampart. Suddenly the Russian froze, his hand outstretched in astonishment.

  "What's up?" Solo whispered. "Why did you stop?"

  Wordlessly, Kuryakin gestured to his right. Solo looked over his shoulder and gave a low whistle of amazement.

  On a level with their heads, a pair of naked feet dangled against the wall. The ankles were bound together with wire. Above the legs was a body. And from behind the lolling head, a rope stretched tautly up into the dark to disappear over the parapet on top of the rampart.

  Illya produced a small flashlight from his breast pocket and switched it on. In the pencil beam they saw the body was that of a man in pajamas, the striped material splotched brown with old bloodstains. The dead face was lacerated and swollen, with bulging eyes and protruding tongue. Cuts and bruises scarred the bare chest. The man's hands had been tied behind his back.

  "It must be the survivor they abducted from the hospital," Solo whispered. "Poor devil. They must have tortured him to find out what he knew—and then tied him up, put the rope around his neck and thrown him over to strangle slowly in the dark..."

  Illya shuddered. "It is horrible," he said. "This nest of evil must be smoked out, Napoleon. We can do nothing for the poor man now. Let's go."

  The final climb up the sloping wall of the rampart was not too difficult and soon they were peering cautiously over the parapet. A raised concrete promenade ran about four feet below the lip. Below this was a narrow roadway, on the far side of which clustered the tall, shuttered houses of the village. Not a soul was to be seen, not a light showed: obviously the inhabitants were outside the walls on the far side of the town, watching the display.

  Quietly they dropped to the ground, unfastening the rope and stowing it together with the remainder of the climbing equipment behind a bollard. A line already fastened to this rose to the parapet and disappeared over the top: here undoubtedly was the other end of the rope from which hung the murdered survivor...

  Above the tumble of pantiled Proven�al roofs surmounting the narrow houses on the far side of the street, a second row of buildings rose higher into the sky. It was in the upper story of one of these, looking across the lower roofs to the coast, that Helga Grossbreitner's apartment was situated, Illya had discovered in the Mairie at Nice.

  "There's no street between the two rows," he told Solo in a low voice. "The houses are all jumbled together and the entrance will be on the far side of the second row."

  "Okay," Solo answered. "We'll take it from two directions as we planned. You find your way to the entrance and get in on the ground floor; I'll go in from the top and see you later. We've got—let's see—twenty-seven minutes before the Trident is due. Keep in touch..."

  With a wave of his hand, Illya melted into the shadows and vanished through a narrow Gothic archway between two houses. Solo catfooted across the cobblestones, ran lightly up a stone staircase leading to a vine-covered balcony and swung effortlessly over the iron railings to grasp a stackpipe. He shinned up this to the guttering, hauled himself onto the roof, and advanced cautiously up the sloping tiles until he reached the wall of the row of houses behind.

  Helga Grossbreitner's apartment was in a building twenty yards to his left. Now that he was closer, he could see through the picture window spanning the entire frontage a dim glow of red light. Faintly, from somewhere below, he felt the hum of a generator.

  Another stackpipe took him to the second row of roofs. As soon as he reached the ridgepole, he stood upright and surveyed the scene. Around him a forest of chimney stacks, each covered by its little shelter of curved tiles, dotted the roofs of St. Paul. Slopes of every conceivable pitch and angle, gashed here and there by the narrow canyons of streets, stretched away and up towards the square-towered church topping the hill in the middle of the village. Beyond this jagged skylight pulsed the fitful glare of Roman candles, catherine wheels and set-pieces raining colored fire. Behind, the headlights of distant cars probed the dark countryside falling towards the co
ast.

  Two more roofs lay between him and his goal. With infinite care, he trod softly across the steep tiles, clambered down to the first roof, which was on a lower level, crossed it, pulled himself up onto the second, edged around a chimney stack, and dropped on all fours as he approached the final slope. From what he could see, the antennas sprouting from Helga's roof were a good deal more sophisticated than would be required for the reception of France's television signals. Almost certainly, among the bizarre shapes of the ordinary domestic TV aerials which rose from the chimneys around him, was the evidence of a powerful transmitter and receiver on an international scale.

  He eased himself over the parapet separating the two houses and paused. Helga's roof was of a shallow pitch—but to counteract this advantage, a broad modern chimney stack carrying six pots straddled half the width...and the remaining distance was obstructed by a sloping buttress leading down from the top to the gutter. Beyond the angle of stone, he could see the corner of a skylight set in the tiles. A faint light hazed the air above the glass.

  Solo looked at the luminous dial of his wristwatch. Somewhere down below, Illya should be preparing to crash the entrance to the house.

  He waited a minute and a half and then moved carefully to the edge of the roof. Now that he was nearer, he could see through the skylight into the attic below: part of a workbench, the edge of a chair, one side of a gray steel console studded with switches and dials.

  Averting his eyes from the dizzy drop to the street, he leaned his back against the slanting buttress and swung first one leg and then the other over to the far side. Then, automatically dusting off his jacket with one hand, he moved thankfully back towards the center of the roof. The skylight was only ten feet away.

  Something hard jammed into the small of his back. "Okay, bud," a voice rasped into his ear. "Raise those hands...quick. One move and you're dead..."

  Chapter 14 — Indoor fireworks

  A rocket burst with a thunderous detonation and released a fleur-de-lys of colored streamers as Illya Kuryakin located the door of the house. It was a massive affair, peppered with iron studs and recessed deeply into a stone arch. Curiously, there were no windows on the ground floor of the building—nor could he see the row of name tags and bells which customarily flank the entrances to apartment houses.