23-The Finger in the Sky Affair Read online

  He had been going to ring the bell of the ground-floor apartment if there had been one, with the intention of bluffing his way in on the pretext of having pressed the wrong button—and then improvising once he had got up the stairs. Now, however, he reconsidered: it looked as though any other apartments in the building might be a blind. Probably the whole place belonged to THRUSH. He examined the archway and the small porch behind it. Concealed among the ornamentations of the stonework was a diminutive circle of ground glass. A matching circle glinted dully on the opposite side of the opening. Presumably, once anyone crossed the threshold and broke the 'magic eye' beam which spanned the space between them, a photo-electric cell would actuate some kind of warning...perhaps a closed-circuit television camera—yes: the porch was roofed with tiles of bottle glass. One of them would be a hidden lens.

  Kuryakin looked up and down the narrow street. On both sides, the ancient houses lay dark and silent. He had not seen a soul since he entered the village. The roadway was only six feet wide. The house opposite the THRUSH headquarters seemed to be some kind of gallery: there were paintings displayed in a window. From beneath a balcony on the first floor projected a stout wooden beam supporting a rustic sign—and a few feet from the end of the beam was the wall of the house he was trying to enter. If he could tightwalk to the end of the beam without falling, there was a wide window ledge opposite, a little higher up...

  He crouched, flexed his muscles and sprang upwards. His outstretched fingertips brushed the wrought-iron curlicues supporting the beam, but he was unable to grab hold of them. He tried a second time—and again his hands hit the iron without being high enough to curve around it.

  Breathing hard, Illya waited until fireworks over the roofs brightened the sky and then, gathering himself, leaped once more. This time his fingers curled over a loop of the ironwork and held. There was a wrench tearing at his hands and shoulders as his full weight dropped earthwards—but he hung on. Swinging back and forth with gathering momentum, he finally managed to hook one foot into another curlicue and from there levered himself painfully to the balcony.

  After a pause to regain his breath, he stepped out onto the wooden beam. It was about two inches wide—and fortunately it was flat rather than rounded. Providing he could keep his balance...

  Bringing one foot up behind the other—for he dared not risk overbalancing by crossing them—he inched out from the balcony towards the other side of the street.

  In the occasional flicker of reflected light, the cobblestones gleamed fifteen feet below. When he was about halfway along, the beam creaked and shifted slightly. He swayed, sawing with outstretched arms on either side to preserve his balance. Another two feet only...but would the beam hold? For the further away from the balcony he got, the greater the leverage on the fixing points.

  Eighteen inches to go—and again the beam creaked, more loudly this time. The sign hanging below it swung once to and fro, faintly squealing its iron hooks and eyes.

  Six inches...There was a rending sound, a splintery crack. As the beam sank beneath him, Illya launched himself forwards and outwards, his hands desperately groping for the wide sill under the window opposite. His forearms struck the wide shelf hard, and an instant later his knees and toes crashed numbingly into the wall below it. Panting, he tensed his biceps and held on. There was no clatter from the street; the beam and the ironwork below it had loosened but not fallen; the sign still hung crazily above the cobblestones.

  The agent pulled himself up onto the sill and peered into the window. The room inside was still in darkness.

  Alarm wires led from the casement to a junction box along the wall. He pulled a flat box like a cigarette case from his pocket. Inside were two neat rows of shining implements. For a tenth of a second the beam of his flashlight brightened the embrasure. Then he worked industriously in the dark for two minutes: insulation was scraped away from one wire, a clip carrying a short lead was fastened on. The other end was attached to a miniature steel pin. There were two brief metallic taps as he drove the pin into the second wire by the frame.

  Seconds later there was a sharp snap and the window swung inwards.

  Illya swung his legs over the sill and dropped soundlessly to the floor inside. Apart from the humming of the generator, no sound broke the silence.

  Again the thin ray of the flashlight lanced the dark. There was nothing in the small room but three rows of filing cabinets. The door was immediately opposite the window. He tiptoed around the end of the middle row and reached out for the handle...then paused, his hand arrested in mid-air.

  From the matchbox-sized radio receiver in the breast pocket of his shirt, a call-sign was vibrating minutely against his chest. Solo was calling him...

  Each of them was wearing an ornate dress ring which in fact was a tiny transmitter. The vibration meant that Solo had pressed the minuscule control at the side of his ring to initiate transmission. Illya fished the receiver from his pocket and held it to his ear, listening. Faintly, he heard the tail end of a sentence in a harsh and unfamiliar voice:

  "... tell me what you're doing here, bud, or it'll be the worse for you. C'mon—what were you doing prowling about our roof?"

  Then the whisper of Solos voice, in a passable imitation of cockney: "All right, mister, I'll come clean. I didn't mean no harm. Honest—I was just hopin' for a tickle. There's plenty of nobs in these gaffs. I thought maybe I'd find an open skylight...you know. I wasn't after your pad special, honest I wasn't..."

  "Don't give me that. I seen you before somewhere—Celeste: don't we know this guy from someplace?"

  "Could be"—it was a woman's voice speaking now—"the face seems kinda, well, familiar."

  "That's what I thought, but I can't quite place it. Come on, you bastard: who sent you, and why are you here?" There was the sound of a blow and a strangled exclamation from Solo—then the agent's voice, panting:

  "Well done, little one. Go on. Do it again. It must be a nice change hitting a man bound to a chair—bit of a relief from the monotony of beating up elderly nurses and throwing hospital patients over cliffs."

  "He does know something," the woman's voice said. "Larsen—we'd better knock him off..."

  "Naw. We can't do that without Number One's permission—and she's busy with the ray and can't be disturbed. I'll check with Fr�hlich—and in the meantime, we can find out exactly what he knows. Let's go get the dynamo and the clips. With a few hundred volts through you-know-where, he'll soon talk. C'mon: he's safe enough there..."

  There was a pause, and then, faintly, Solo's voice: "Illya? Are you with me? I'm probably very distant because my arms are bound to the arms of a chair and I can't get the mike in my ring near my mouth."

  Kuryakin lifted the ring on his own hand up to his mouth and pressed a tiny knob imbedded in the scrollwork of the setting. "I hear you, Napoleon," he said softly. "What happened?"

  "I was stopped as I crossed the roof," the voice in the receiver whispered. "I would guess it was the same little dark villain you saw at the airport; the one who probably murdered Andrea Bergen and helped with the hospital job. The woman could be the one who knocked the magazines out of Sherry's hand and distracted your attention while Shorty killed Andrea. They've gone now."

  "I gathered that. Where are you?"

  "In an attic under the roof. I imagine the operations room is just below. Where are you?"

  "In a room on the first floor. You'll be three stories above me. Shall I come and get you out—or shall I deal with Helga first?"

  "What did you say? You're very faint. My receiver's in my breast pocket and I can hardly hear you."

  "I said shall I deal with Helga or shall I come and get you?"

  "Try to get me first—we've got to stop them finding out who I am. If they do, they'll call the whole thing off...and it'll need two of us to deal with them: apart from these two, there's Fr�hlich, whoever he is, and possibly the two others involved in the hospital deal."

  "I see what you mean.
Whoever's operating their weapon has got to continue thinking we're both on that plane...I'll be up."

  "Okay. But hurry, Illya. The plane's due in nine minutes..."

  The Russian took an automatic from his hip pocket, fitted a long silencer over the barrel and pushed a clip of ammunition into the butt. Then, cautiously opening the door, he slid out onto the dark landing. Now that he was outside the room, he could hear the low murmur of voices from somewhere above.

  Before venturing upstairs, though, he had to make sure of his line of retreat. Waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, he finally made out an oblong of less intense darkness to his left. It was the entrance to a stone staircase leading down between arched plaster walls. Keeping to the outside of the tiled steps, he trod softly down.

  As he rounded a bend in the stairway, he saw the origin of the faint illumination. A man sat with his back to the entrance in a small concierge's cubicle, poring over a magazine in the dim light of a low-wattage red bulb. Although paying lip service to the edict that all houses in St. Paul should show no lights during the display, the THRUSH headquarters was maintaining a basic supply with its own generator.

  To one side of the concierge's desk was a fourteen-inch TV monitor screen flanked by a platen carrying warning lights and switches. The man, at second hand, was obviously the guardian of the front door.

  Illya stole across the hall and paused in the doorway of the cubicle. The man had not moved. Engrossed in what he was reading, he was apparently mouthing to himself the words on the printed page as he laboriously followed the lines.

  Illya raised his right arm, the hand held flat with the fingers extended. Abruptly, he swept the flat of the hand across and down to the nape of the man's neck in a karate chop.

  The doorkeeper grunted once and slumped forward over the desk.

  Thumbing back his eyelid to make sure he would take no part in the evening's festivities for the next hour or so, Kuryakin raced back to the first floor and groped along the wall for the stairs leading up. He found them at the far end of the landing and climbed cautiously to the next story. There were four doors, his exploring fingers discovered—two on each side of the passageway. Crouching, he peered through the keyhole of each in turn. Three of the rooms were in darkness. Through the fourth keyhole, a brighter light shone—and from behind the door he could hear voices raised in argument, among them those of the man and woman he had heard questioning Solo.

  The third floor of the house boasted only three doors. Two of them, on the side of the building nearest the street, stood open—to reveal in the intermittent reflection of fireworks admitted through the uncurtained windows a bathroom and what looked like a miniature laboratory. Behind the third, which was closed, lay the room with the picture window, the operations room from which four T.C.A. Tridents had been sent crashing to their doom...

  From this landing—Illya saw in the light of a blue-green flare—only a ladder led upwards to the attics. Gun at the ready, he swarmed aloft and disappeared through the open trapdoor in the ceiling.

  The crude Proven�al armchair to which Solo was bound had its back to the door, and the first he knew of the Russian's presence was the hand that fell warningly on his shoulder.

  "How long have we got?" Solo whispered urgently as Illya sawed through the electric flex clamping his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles to the wooden arms and legs.

  Kuryakin glanced at his watch. "The plane is due to land in five and a quarter minutes, Napoleon," he said.

  Solo rose to his feet, massaging the life back into his cramped limbs. "God, we have to move fast," he said. "And we can't afford to go into that operations room before we've accounted for the others. How many are there left, do you know?"

  "The man and woman who were here with you, Fr�hlich—and probably one other. I've already—er—looked after one guard on the front door."

  "Good. But the trouble is, we'll have to do it all in complete silence—the slightest sign of a struggle would tip Helga off..."

  Together, they turned towards the door.

  Larsen stood there with a Luger, the big gun steady in his dirty hand.

  "Okay, you guys," he snarled. "So now it's a confederate, is it? Back up there—now. We'll see just who the hell you are..."

  Balletically, Illya kicked straight-legged almost in reflex. The tip of his toe caught the barrel, and the heavy pistol went spinning across the room. As the small, dark man's mouth opened wide in dismay, the Russian chopped flat-handed at his throat, catching him viciously across the Adam's apple as the shout was forming. Solo made a dive to his left and caught the Luger before it could crash to the floor.

  Larsen lurched forward, retching for breath, as Illya slammed a left to the pit of his stomach. The dark man doubled up. As his head sank down, Kuryakin grasped hold of the ears and brought his knee sharply up to connect sickeningly with Larsen's face.

  The THRUSH man sagged, the two agents catching his inert body and easing it into a chair before it could hit the floor.

  "A pity," Kuryakin said as they lowered themselves down the ladder. "I dislike violence..."

  Outside the door where the rest of the gang were talking on the floor below, they waited to listen. The Trident was due in four minutes.

  "Our timing had better be good on this," Solo whispered. "We've got to give the stuff time to work—and still be in there ready to catch them before they fall!" He produced from a shoulder holster a gun with a long, thin barrel no thicker than a pencil and poked it carefully through the keyhole. Flipping open a cover on the single chamber, he slid in a fragile glass capsule about half the length of a cigarette, closed the cover and pulled the trigger.

  There was a faint snap as the powerful spring propelled the capsule into the room on the other side of the door. Illya looked at the luminous face of his watch, waiting while twenty-five seconds ticked away. The intonation of the voices in the room altered, becoming slurred and thick.

  "Now!" the Russian called, twisting the handle and throwing open the door.

  Holding their breath, the two agents moved quietly and quickly into the room. The shattered fragments of the capsule lay on the tile floor just below a table spread with cards. Two large men were on their feet, swaying drunkenly from side to side. Solo caught one just as he was about to crash face down across the table; Illya seized the other in the act of hauling out a gun from his hip pocket, and waited the few seconds needed before the nerve gas completed its action. Then, together, they lowered the unconscious men to the floor and hurried back to the landing.

  "Forty seconds," Kuryakin gasped, dragging the air gratefully back into his lungs. "Anyone that says he can hold his breath for two minutes must be crazy!"

  "You can say that again," Solo panted. "But what about the woman: she wasn't there."

  The Russian laid a hand on his arm. From two stories below came the sound of a cistern emptying. A door closed and footsteps sounded on the stairs.

  Solo and Illya melted back to the floor above and slipped through the open door of the bathroom. The footsteps traversed the landing they had just left and climbed the stairs towards them. In a moment, the woman Celeste appeared, walked along the passageway, opened the door of the operations room opposite, and went in.

  A moment later, with Illya close behind him, Solo reopened the door and stepped quietly into the room.

  It was a strange sight that met their eyes. Workbenches packed with electronic equipment ran the length of the two side walls. Indicator lights, dials and control knobs studded a panel fronting a complex of valves and intricate wiring; from a curved tube of glass spiraling around a metal core, heavy-insulation leads coiled in every direction. On one side, lights gleamed from the complications of a powerful transmitter.

  At the far end of the room, the picture window stood wide to the warm night. In the center of it, the tawny gold of Helga Grossbreitner's hair was burnished by the light from a red bulb overhead. She sat behind a battery of equipment mounted on a heavy trip
od and pointing out of the window towards the sea. Basically, this consisted of a four-foot long center section resembling a triple gun barrel, with a square box covered in switches and leads at the operating end and an attachment rather like a magnified camera lens with a long hood at the far end. Immediately above this device was a smaller three-barreled affair—the three tubes like a trio of telescopes of unequal length. Into the slimmest of these, obviously some kind of aiming sight, the girl was squinting as she turned a wheel, aligning the two sets of equipment. At one side, the greenish luminescence of a radar screen showed a moving blip representing the plane whose actual landing lights they could see through the window as it flew low over the sea towards the airport.

  Celeste stood behind, gazing out across the dark countryside.

  There was a muttered word of satisfaction from Helga. A hairline on the radar screen was coinciding with the nose of the moving blip. Her left hand threw a heavy master switch on the control box. A deep humming mingled with electric cackles filled the room. One of the barrels glowed red.

  Solo stepped swiftly forwards, reached over her shoulder, and twirled the wheel, canting the six barrels skywards.

  "A three-way laser with a ruby rod range-finder allied to conventional radar—very ingenious, Helga," he said softly.

  The girl spun around in her chair, her eyes flashing fire. "Solo!" she exclaimed furiously. "You! But you were supposed to be —"

  "On the plane you were about to bring down. I know—but we thought we'd let this be the one that got away. Too many people have died already, my dear. You've had a long enough run as it is."

  As the blonde sprang to her feet, her beautiful face a mask of rage, the silenced gun in Illya's hand spat flame. Before the cork-like pop of the explosion had died away, Celeste pitched forward and clattered to the floor, one hand still grasping the butt of the tiny automatic she had been trying to pull from the top of her stocking.