16 - The Splintered Sunglasses Affair Read online

  He broke off as one of the telephones on his desk burred discreetly. He lifted the receiver to his ear. "Waverly," he said crisply.

  He listened for a moment and then said: "I see. It's as I thought then? And there's no means of reading it, of deciphering it at all, unless we know what medium it was shot through?—actual piece, at the same angle?... I see. Thank you."

  For a moment more, he listened, and then he added: "We shall do what we can. Mr. Solo is there now. I am arranging with the Italian S.I.D. to supply him with papers, money, and so on. And Mr. Kuryakin will fly out to join him there tonight. Until they report, we shall just have to backpedal, then.... All right, George. Thank you very much."

  He lowered the receiver to its cradle, knocked out the cherrywood into a green glass ashtray, and turned to the Russian. "Do you know, Mr. Kuryakin," he asked, "what a Hologram is?"

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  How To Read A Hologram

  "A hologram," Colonel Rinaldi said to Napoleon Solo, "is in effect a photograph in three dimensions obtained without the use of lenses. Its advantage—or disadvantage in your case—is that the finished plate is useless without the original means of producing it."

  Solo cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid you'll have to be a little more specific, Colonel," he said. "I'm the one they send out when the assignment calls for action!"

  Rinaldi laughed. "Very well. I shall start at the commencement," he said.

  The two men were sitting on high stools at the side of an optical bench in a top secret laboratory hidden in an old hill fort on the high ground between Oulx and Sestriere. Solo, outfitted, gunned, supplied with papers, money and a magnificent meal by a dapper little man in the S.I.D., had driven out to see Rinaldi on the following morning. The laboratory, perched on a rocky spur near the famous winter sports resort, was one of the most closely guarded of all NATO research centers. And Rinaldi himself had been a Professor of Optics at Verona before he was made its Director-General. He was a short man, and compactly built, with immaculately waved hair and a face as brown and seamed and wrinkled as a walnut. He looked—Solo thought, trying hard to concentrate—so much like a character actor playing an Italian direttore that it was difficult to take him seriously.

  "For holography," Rinaldi was saying now, "you have to have the laser. You are perhaps familiar with the laser, Signor Solo?"

  The agent nodded. "You could almost say intimate," he said. "I was once almost melted by a laser*, less than two hundred kilometers from here!"

  "Ecco! Then you will know that the laser is an exceptionally brilliant source of light, produced by the stimulation either of gases or of crystals, in which all the waves are, so to speak, 'in step'—what we call 'coherent light'."

  "I'll have to make the best of this," Solo said. "But I do know that."

  "So. Holography is a method of photography employing this light—only instead of using a lens to record a focused image on the sensitized plate, we record simply a pattern of interference between two beams of coherent light... as one might record the pattern produced when one dropped two stones into a pool and the widening circles of ripples mingled."

  "Great! But I'm afraid that I can't quite see."

  "Patience, Signor Solo! Patience! To make this hologram, we set up the object to be photographed and shine our laser beam at it... but not directly! We shine it through some semi-translucent medium that both reflects and refracts... a piece of mirror that is only half silvered, for example; a fragment of frosted glass; even a sheet of plastic."

  "Plastic!"

  "Just so." Rinaldi was well into his stride now; Solo reckoned he was getting free half the third year optics course from Verona. "Now what happens? Half of the light penetrates the medium and goes on to illuminate the object. And the rest is reflected back towards the light source, where we allow it to fall on the photographic plate. Now the light beam which goes on through to illuminate the object also makes its way back eventually to the photographic plate. And it is the recording of the interference between these two halves of the original beam that makes the Hologram."

  "What's the effect, then? On the photographic plate, I mean."

  "When it is developed it makes what seems to be a meaningless blur. But wait!" Rinaldi raised a cautionary finger. "We shine the original laser beam at this blur... and, presto! we see the original object in three dimensions again!"

  "I think I should understand more easily if I could see—"

  "I show you! I show you!" The Colonel bounded over to his desk and opened a wide, shallow drawer. He took out what looked like an ordinary photographic plate measuring around six inches by four inches and handed it to the agent. Solo glanced at it. The ground-glass surface looked like a close-up of a piece of granite or a pattern formed by a non-regular kaleidoscope: a completely random assembly of differently colored flecks.

  "That is the hologram," Rinaldi said, bustling about between the bench and a series of work tables ranged along one wall. "Now we bring it back to life for you!"

  He dragged over a heavy, box-like structure bearing two dials and a row of switches, plugged a coaxial cable into the mains supply, and then attached a lead which projected from between the ventilation louvres on the steel side of the box to a complicated framework screwed to the bench. In the framework he fixed a hooded metal cylinder about twenty inches long and five inches in diameter, from one end of which projected what looked like a camera lens. "This is a ruby laser," he explained. "Only a small one—thirty joules—since it is for demonstration. But you can see what it will do..."

  He arranged a somewhat shabby-looking mirror three feet away from the output aperture of the laser, took back the hologram and slotted it into a groove prepared in the bench, and walked across to draw black curtains over the opaque, reeded glass of the windows. Then he handed Solo a pair of dark glasses, flicked over a master switch beside the laser, and turned out the lights.

  After a moment there was a brilliant blue-green flash from the bench followed by a deep, low humming noise. Almost at once Solo discerned a curious rose-colored fluorescence surrounding the laser cylinder; and then a painfully intense pencil of vivid crimson light pulsed from the aperture and lanced down the length of the bench. He looked further down the polished surface and gasped.

  Where there had been an empty space of wood, there was now a silver tray of coffee and liqueurs laid out. Solo could see the shine on the bone china, the dark luster of coffee, the jewelled highlight lurking in the drink. He reached out his hand ... and touched nothing.

  Behind him in the dark, Rinaldi chuckled. "That is what you see in our meaningless blur when the right kind of light illuminates it!" he said.

  "But that's uncanny! exclaimed.

  "It is impressive, no? But wait... I show you more..."

  Rinaldi switched on the lights, fetched a large gilded picture frame from a corner and suspended it from the ceiling hook a few feet in front of Solo. The area circumscribed by the frame resembled the smaller hologram the agent had examined before: a wilderness of colored fragments. But as soon as the Italian reset some switches and altered the angle of the laser, the gilt framed a perfect three-dimensional color photo—a street scene in a small town, with gaily striped awnings over market stalls and a couple of cars parked by the entry to a side road.

  "Remarkable! The 3-D effect is astonishing," Solo said.

  "It is, yes. But perhaps more so than you realize, Signor Solo. Walk out to the side there... so... and look down that side street."

  The agent whistled in amazement. As he moved out wide of the picture, craning to see "down" the narrow thoroughfare in the photo, he found that in reality he was doing just that. The back of a third car, which had not been visible before, had come into sight down the side street.

  Rinaldi laughed. "Yes, you really do 'see around corners' with coherent light," he said. "It's because the hologram, as it were, freezes all the existing light waves in the original scene. They are all there, waiting to be released�
�or melted, if you like—when the right kind of light illuminates them. And when it does, all the original beams, not just some as in ordinary systems of stereoscopy, come back. If a thing was there to see in the original, you will be able to find it in a hologram!"

  "It's fantastic. Unbelievable."

  "If I had time, I could show you more. We have a holographic television demonstration. There is an actress standing in front of her dressing table, so as to hide something on the shelf behind her. You can step to one side and peer around her to see what it is!.... There is a huge Hologram transparency which works in ordinary light. If you hang it in front of a window, you see a life-size portrait of a man, apparently standing solidly in space!"

  "Most interesting," Solo said. "But how exactly does it...?"

  "How does it affect the problems of your Mr. Waverly? Simply enough. If an operative made a hologram of a blueprint, for example, and sent it to his headquarters, it could only be deciphered if the decoders knew how it had been made. Suppose he had made it through a sheet of frosted glass. It can only be turned back into a blueprint by shining the same light at it through the same piece of glass, held in exactly the same position."

  "You mean that it would remain indecipherable unless you had that exact piece of glass and knew how it had been held...?"

  "Precisely. Your spy could feel quite safe if he had sent the Hologram by one route and the glass, with the instructions how to use it, by another. Even if the hologram fell into enemy hands it would be useless without the glass."

  "Suppose the glass was lost—or broken, for that matter?"

  "Then it would be impossible to recover the image of the original blueprint. Without the right piece of glass it would remain as a meaningless blur!"

  "That's our problem, then," Solo said. "As I understand it, Waverly has received a hologram—but he doesn't know what the man used to make it. And now the man has been killed and I have to try and find out what it was. If only Leonardo had written or cabled at the same time."

  "Leonardo? Are you talking of Signor Leonardo? Is this the man who has sent the hologram to Mr. Waverly?"

  "Yes, that's right. Colonel. Leonardo."

  "But... but he was here!" Rinaldi was astonished. "A week ago. He has come to see me and ask if he can borrow the ruby laser for a half hour!"

  "Here!" Solo breathed. "Then if he came here to borrow your laser, he probably made the hologram here. Right in this lab!"

  "Undoubtedly."

  "But then you'd know... you might have seen ... Were you there while he worked the thing? In the room with him?"

  The Italian shook his head. "Unfortunately, no. I have work elsewhere. I leave him in the lab and when I come back, he is gone. But at least you will know what wavelength is the light you must use—when you find your glass."

  Solo sighed. "Yes... if we find the glass. Or whatever else he used."

  Rinaldi clapped him on the shoulder. "It is a small problem compared with some of those we deal with here."

  The agent remembered his manners. "Of course, it must be, Colonel. Are you allowed to talk about your work. It must be absorbing!"

  "To you, yes. In principle at least. We are working on a system of holography which would 'translate' human books, papers, articles or instructions extremely fast into computer 'language'; and save all that terrible business of coding everything on to punched cards when it was necessary to reprogram."

  "So that's what Carlsen and the girl were on about!" Solo murmured.

  "There are also implications in molecular biology," Rinaldi continued; "and we think we have found a method of using it to follow in three dimensions the movements of particles in a vapor. Calabri, over at Milano, is working for the aviation ministry, studying the shock waves surrounding missiles or aircraft shapes by this means."

  "Colonel Rinaldi," Solo said, shaking hands, "you have been more than kind. Thank you very much for your invaluable help—now, if you will forgive me, I must hurry, because I have to meet a colleague who is arriving by plane this afternoon."

  "It is nothing," the Italian said, looking at his watch. "It was a pleasure, Signor Solo. From here to Caselle, the airport for Torino, should take you not more than... let me see... yes, about one hour and a half. Not more."

  Solo thanked him again and left.

  He threaded the little Giulietta lent to him by the S.I.D. through the succession of guarded arches which pierced the walls of the 14th-century fortress concealing the research centre, showed his papers to the sentry at the outer gate, and began winding down the mountainside towards the main road linking Sestriere and Susa.

  He was approaching a hairpin about a mile below the lab when the brakes failed.

  He had already changed down from top to fourth and was intending a quick double tab at the pedal before dropping down one further to third. But although he pumped madly at the pedal, the Alfa Romeo continued at the same 70 kph. He hauled on the lever between the front seats Again, nothing!

  And that meant that it was the operating mechanism rather than the hydraulic system that was at fault. Which in practice meant sabotage.

  Solo blipped twice, three times on the throttle pedal, double declutched, and slammed the short lever into third. The engine screamed in protest as the needle on the rev-counter spun round into the red quadrant. But the braking effect of the engine slowed the little sports car enough for him to wrestle it around the first hairpin, the open body canting over sickeningly, the tires screeching.

  Beyond, the roadway dropped like a lift: a short, tremendously steep section ending in another hairpin so acute, and with so extreme an inverse camber, that even with brakes most drivers would have needed two bites at it.

  Despite the engine compression, the weight of the car pushed the speed up to 65 kph again. Double declutching, Solo attempted to force the lever across and down into second. There was a hideous noise. He blipped and tried again. It still refused to go in. And the hairpin was almost on him. With a curse, he banged it back into third and hauled on the wheel as hard as he could.

  Lurching, the Giulietta ran out of the road. The tail swung out and slammed into the bank: the tires howled broadside across the carriageway; the car burst through the stone parapet backwards, rose into the air, and somersaulted down the slope in a shower of stones. It hit the bare earth of the mountainside, bounced on to another loop of road below, crashed through a second stone wall and finally crunched to a halt upside down among the rocks.

  Solo had been thrown clear with the first impact. Bruised, shaken, but otherwise unhurt, he crouched behind a boulder, gripping the Berretta which had been given to him by the man in S.I.D. There was nobody to be seen. Above and behind him, the scorched slopes rose up to the fortress on its crag. In the valley far below, the milky green waters of the Dora Riparia frothed and tumbled on their way to the Po. And through a great fault gashing the mountain opposite he could see, blue with distance, the plain surrounding Turin.

  Ten kilometers away, a car winked in the sunlight as it rounded a spur above the river. Across the valley, tumbled roofs of undressed slate showed among the branches of conifers encircling a hill farm. But in all that expanse, there was no other sign of human activity.

  This was no cleverly timed ambush. Whoever it was that had sabotaged the car had been equally content whether Solo was killed, injured or merely delayed.

  And unless he could beg, borrow, hire or conjure up from the mountain air another car very soon, lllya Kuryakin was going to have a long wait at the airport....

  * See The Finger in the Sky Affair.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Two Friends And An Enemy

  Caselle Airport at Turin is what the French call mignon. If it was not so functional, it would run the risk of being termed cute. It lies a few miles to the northeast of the city on the right of a fast, curving blacktop heading for Ivrea. There is a large, empty car park surrounded by palms and oleanders and divided by beautifully painted white lines. Beyond this, at the side of the wh
ite concrete terminal building, there is a gravelled terrace set with tables and umbrellas from which travellers' friends and members of the public can gaze through a high wire fence at the apron and at the aircraft. The terminal itself houses a freight department, a square section combining customs hall, passport control and weighing-in desks for various airlines, and a lofty cafe-bar full of airport personnel and smelling of espresso coffee. Above its flat roof, the duty controller stares through the green glass windows of the tower at the planes which infrequently sink into view over the Alpine foothills which form its western horizon.

  Whether there are clouds or not, it always seems to be hot at Caselle. When Ilya Kuryakin arrived on the afternoon Alitalia flight from Paris, the tar on the roadway by the taxi stand was melting and the flowers banked behind the car park trembled in the heat rising from the parked vehicles. Above the mountains, the sky had dissolved in a sulphurous haze.

  Finding no Solo among the small crowd of bronzed men and women waiting at the customs exit, Kuryakin made his way to the bar.

  It was cooler in there, and the shutters and blinds which denied entry to the sun formed a kind of artificial dusk which gave the illusion of freshness. There were red-faced tourists from the coast, laden with striped beach balls and straw hats, waiting for the BEA flight to London; there were blue-overalled workmen and taxi drivers in shirtsleeves; there were several groups of businessmen drinking Campari-sodas and two patrician families lost in admiration of each other's children. But there was nobody there remotely resembling Napoleon Solo.

  The Russian went to the airline desks one after the other to see if there had been a message left for him. There had not. Puzzled, he picked up his overnight case, slung his unwanted raincoat over one shoulder, and left the terminal building for the sun. It was like a furnace outside. The red, white and green flag hung limply from the mast. The crimson oleander flowers drooped. The weight of the raincoat immediately stuck Kuryakin's shirt to his shoulder.