23-The Finger in the Sky Affair Read online

  "They have spread out, Napoleon," the Russian whispered. "Those shots were coming from almost opposite the place that branch landed..."

  He groped around in the mold and discovered a flat stone half buried in the loam. Prising it loose he spun it a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. The moment it landed among the leaves a similar fusillade started. After a few seconds, it stopped.

  "You're right," Solo muttered. "Dead opposite again. They're strung out along the far side of the roadway. But I don't get it: they're at least five to two. Why don't they cross higher up and rush us?"

  Illya shook his head. From their place of concealment, the two agents peered anxiously up the drive, strained back to look up into the branches above their heads, and craned under the immobilized Peugeot.

  Nothing happened.

  Solo fired two shots at random under the car. The double crack of the unsilenced automatic was thunderously loud in the darkness under the trees. But there was no answering fire from across the drive.

  "I don't like it," he said quietly. "It's almost as though they were just keeping us pinned down. They only shoot if they think we're trying to move. If they wanted to kill us, they could easily —"

  He broke off abruptly, his head cocked to one side, listening. From somewhere up by the hospital there was a clatter of feet. Voices shouted and a door slammed. Then a car engine burst into life and a moment later twin headlights blazed into view around a corner of the building and raced down the drive towards them. Fifty yards short of the Peugeot, the vehicle screeched to a halt. A wide door opened and two or three men ran from the bushes bordering the drive to pile inside. There was a grinding of gears, and the car lurched forward to stop again on the far side of their own.

  "They're loading the tripod," Illya said, raising his gun arm as the driver engaged first gear and revved up the engine.

  "Wait!" Solo laid a hand on his forearm and pressed it to the ground. "We might be sorry...Look."

  The vehicle emerged from behind the Peugeot and slowed down as it came opposite the oleanders into which Illya had thrown the branch. It was—they saw now that they were no longer blinded by its headlights—a Citroen ambulance, long and low. A final man swung aboard, and the ambulance gathered speed, rocketing down towards the archway, where it swung left into the street with a squeal of its low-pressure tires.

  Solo was already on his feet, running towards the hospital. "Come on!" he shouted. "I'm afraid we'll be too late, but we have to see."

  They pelted down the drive and burst in through the swinging doors. In the middle of the tiled foyer a uniformed porter lay on his back with outflung arms. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead stared upwards like an obscene third eye. A receptionist slumped across the inquiry desk, her starched cap resting in a pool of blood. On the graceful curve of the stairway sprawled two male nurses in short white jackets.

  At the far end of the entrance hall a young nurse stood petrified by the open door of an elevator, her eyes wide with horror.

  "Nurse!" Solo shouted. "Quick! The man from the air crash—the survivor...What ward's he in?"

  "Number s-seventeen...F-f-first floor," the girl faltered. "What happened? I c-c-can't understand —"

  But Solo and Illya were already half-way up the shallow flight of stairs. They dashed down the rubber-tiled corridor, paused at an intersection to consult an indicator board, and then hurried on to the far end of a passage.

  The general wards appeared to be situated on the higher floors, for the doors were so close together that the rooms on the first floor must be quite small. Number 17 was the last on the left.

  Solo pushed it open and strode inside.

  The narrow iron bedstead was empty, sheets, pillows and blankets tumbled in a heap on the floor beside it. Bottles, glasses and jars on the bedside table appeared undisturbed, but the gray-curtained screen which had been around the patient was folded back and now leaned against a wall.

  "God damn it!" Solo exclaimed bitterly in a rare moment of profanity. "Abducted under our eyes! Those THRUSH men in the drive were told just to keep us pinned down. We could have made a break for it and at least tried to stop them, if only we'd realized..." He broke off with an exasperated shrug.

  Illya was touching his arm. There was a movement on the far side of the bed.

  In two strides, Solo was across the room. A nurse lay face down on the floor. As he bent to grasp her shoulders, she groaned and shook her head.

  "Easy, easy," he soothed in French as he hauled her to her feet. "Take it easy. It's all over now. Nobody's going to harm you...There. Sit down in this chair....Illya, give her a glass of water, will you?"

  They propped the woman up and placed a pillow so she could lean her head against the wall. Congealed blood traced a network of lines from a dark contusion on her temple, but otherwise she seemed undamaged. Kuryakin soaked a wad of cotton in water and gently bathed the wound as she slowly recovered her senses. "It's all right; it's all right," he said quietly as recollection flamed in her eyes. "We have come to help you. Take your time...and tell us what happened..."

  The nurse was a thin, gray-haired woman in her fifties, with a lined face. She made a visible effort to pull herself together, touched the ugly bruise with a trembling hand, and looked up at them dubiously.

  "What...what...Who are you? What do you want?" she said at last in a weak voice.

  "We were going to speak to your patient," Solo said, mastering his impatience. "But we were too late. He has been kidnapped, hasn't he? Please try to remember what happened."

  "What happened?...The patient!" She remembered suddenly and caught her breath, looking wildly towards the empty bed. "Oh, those men! They hit him, they beat him so much...and then they..." She shuddered and began to cry, her spare body racked by great sobs.

  Illya glanced again at the bed. There was blood on the undersheet, blood on the discarded pillows, splashes of blood on the tangle of blankets.

  "Exactly what happened?" he repeated.

  The woman pulled a handkerchief from her starched sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. "Forgive me," she said, sniffing. "It was such a—a shock...The patient had hardly been here a half hour..."

  "Was he badly hurt?"

  "Not—not when he came in. Profoundly shocked, of course. And very badly shaken. But apart from bruises and—and—and superficial burns...he did not appear too much damaged. He was to have an X-ray examination to see if there were any internal injuries...I was preparing him...That's why I thought it so odd that they should send an ambulance from...from..."

  "From where?" Solo prompted gently.

  "They said they were from the Anglo-American hospital at Villefranche, Monsieur. As the man was an American, and he kept on talking, talking all the time in American—well, at first I thought maybe they had decided to transfer him to a hospital where they would understand what he said."

  "And later?"

  "They appeared at the door with a stretcher, and they told me they had orders to transfer him. They had all the necessary pieces of paper, so I...well, I began to help them move him onto the stretcher. Then the patient himself seemed to question what they were doing..."

  "He began to protest?"

  "I could not understand what he said—I do not speak English—but I think so. They tried to pacify him...and so did I, as far as I was able. Then he attempted to get off the stretcher and they...they...Oh, it was horrible!...They hit him..."

  "I understand. Do not distress yourself, Mademoiselle. They beat him unconscious, is that it?"

  The woman nodded, tears coursing down her cheeks. "I had begun to wonder, just before. For I know most of the orderlies at Villefranche, and I realized that I had never seen any of these men before. And although they spoke French well enough, there was, well, something about them..."

  Solo nodded. "And then you questioned their authority yourself?"

  "As soon as the first blow fell, of course. It was so rapid.. so vicious—the poor man was unconscious alm
ost before he had time to cry out. There were four of them, you see..."

  "What did you do?"

  "Naturally I tried to stop them, Monsieur. But two of them held me—one with his hand over my mouth—while the others...finished their vile work with the patient. And then...and then—while they still held me—one of the others...a little dark fellow, he was...came over and hit me with a —"

  The nurse stopped talking suddenly and pressed her clenched hands against her mouth.

  "And you have no idea at all, what the patient was talking about before they came in? You didn't catch anything he said—even a single word—before he was beaten insensible?"

  The woman shook her head dumbly.

  "He wasn't entirely unconscious, Napoleon," Illya said. "Look."

  He had picked up from the floor the wooden board to which the patient's temperature chart was clipped. Wordlessly, he held it out for Solo to see.

  Below the thick black line which had begun to move out from the left hand margin, a wider, more vivid line in red wavered across the squared paper. And above it, two hastily daubed symbols stood out against the white in the same sticky medium.

  "He must have used his finger to write us a message," Illya said soberly. "using his own blood as ink..."

  Chapter 10 — An eye in the wall

  "The guy must have been lying apparently unconscious on the floor," Solo said. "And while THRUSH's thugs were beating up the nurse, he opened his eyes and saw the chart where it had been knocked to the ground in the struggle."

  "Yes," Illya said. "And he'd only have a moment before they picked him up to put him on the stretcher, so he'd have to work very fast. The thing is—how would his mind have worked and what was he trying to tell us with these daubs?"

  They were back in the T.C.A. building at the airport. Matheson, the Technical Director, had lent them his office while he supervised the crash inquiry team working in the wreckage out on the floodlit runway, and they had decided to have a council of war before deciding on their next move.

  Solo picked up the temperature chart with its gruesome symbols. "This guy's a steward," he said, "so whatever information he has will at least be given with a semi-technical mind...Let's analyze this thing properly."

  The survivor's temperature had been logged five times—once when he was first put in the ambulance, again just before they reached the hospital, and three times, at quarter-hour intervals, in Room 17. The graph joining the five blobs was almost flat: a heavy black line sloping faintly downwards towards the right-hand side of thte sheet with a uniform inclination. Standing on the line at its left-hand end was a long thin rectangle drawn in blood, with a smaller, tall rectangle on top of it. Higher up, on the far side of the paper, a crudely executed dart shape with a crossed tail dipped its nose towards the rectangles. There was a facsimile of the black line laboriously traced in red about an inch lower down the sheet. And apart from a few smudges below the dart shape, that was all.

  "Well, one thing seems clear," Solo said at last. "Whatever the message is, it's not in any way an attempt at actual writing: there's nothing here remotely like lettering. So what we have to solve is a picture puzzle."

  "I agree. And I should think it fairly certain that this sort of thin arrow with a stroke across its tail is meant to represent the aircraft, wouldn't you?" Illya asked. "It's not at all unlike a Trident."

  "Yeah. Landing, I guess, since the nose points down....So okay: he's painting us a picture of the plane coming in to land. So what's the significance of the two box-like shapes on top of one another? How do you figure them?"

  "I think...Wait a minute, Napoleon! Suppose he was using the existing line—the black line of the graph—to represent the ground..."

  "Yeah?"

  "...then surely the two rectangles might be a simple way of indicating the airport buildings with the control tower above them?"

  "They might at that," Solo admitted. "But then so what? We have a picture of a plane landing. It doesn't tell us anything about the landing—or about the wreck."

  "Oh, but it could, Napoleon. Don't forget these smudges. I don't think they are random. They are very faint, but they are in a definite line...coming downwards from the plan—Look!—and reaching the red line below the black one. There are none above the plane and none below the red line."

  "Kind of a dotted line, it seems."

  "Exactly. And what's implied by a dotted line—in comic strips, for example?"

  Solo considered. "As far as I'm concerned," he said slowly, "a dotted line between two objects implies some kind of relationship between them—nothing more, in the absence of other data."

  "But that's just it! A relationship between the plane—the red plane—and the red line..."

  "I still don't quite see —"

  "Look at the red line," Illya said excitedly. "Everything else has been scrawled roughly, daubed in great haste. But the red line has been done very carefully, laboriously, even. In the desperate hurry he was in to get the message across before he was discovered, he took time to get this bit exactly right."

  "How do you mean—exactly right?"

  "It repeats the black line very precisely; same slope, same slight differences where the blobs occur, same length—see, it ends on the very same line of the graph paper."

  "But if the black line represents the ground, as we think..."

  "Then the red one also represents the ground."

  "But that's crazy, Illya! One plane, one set of buildings, but two landing grounds—No! Wait a minute!...It's not so crazy, is it?...One plane, one set of buildings, and two landing grounds, only one of which is related to the plane. Is that it?"

  "That's it. And the 'ground' related to the plane by the dotted line is lower than the real one, the one with the airport buildings on it. I'm sure that's it."

  "You mean he's trying to tell us, via this dotted line, that—so far as the plane was concerned—the ground appeared to be lower than it really was?"

  "Yes—and if the pilot, or in this case the Murchison-Spears equipment, is informed the ground is lower than it really is —"

  "The aircraft will obviously level off too late; it'll fly straight in. Just as though, in an old-fashioned crate, the altimeter was reading incorrectly."

  "Exactly."

  Solo picked up the chart, scrutinized it, and laid it down on Matheson's desk. "Okay, wonder boy," he said with a grin. "Sold to the gentleman with the rich uncle! And if the survivor was tipping us off that the crash was due to faulty evaluation of height by the Murchison-Spears box, that ties in with what we already know, doesn't it?"

  "It does. Witnesses all say the aircraft 'flew into the ground'; the survivor from the last crash was babbling something about 'it' being too high; Matheson advised us to look for a fault in that particular stage of the gear. It all ties in. I suppose the survivor meant that the ground, as it were, was too high: it rose up and hit them."

  The door opened and Helga Grossbreitner came into the room. She hurried across to a filing cabinet, pushing a strand of golden hair that had worked loose out of her eyes.

  "Sorry to interrupt you, boys," she said absently, flicking through a stack of folders. "Oh dear—those poor people. I'm trying to deal with inquiries from relatives and friends. It really is most distressing..."

  "It's a tough job, honey," Solo sympathized. "But don't worry: I think we may be on our way."

  "You mean you've found out who's causing these terrible crashes?"

  "Not the actual individuals—though we know it must be THRUSH members. But we do have a line on how it's being done...and once we've established that definitely, it should be easy enough to pin down the culprits."

  "But that's good. What have you found out?"

  Solo gave her a brief resumé of the conclusions they had arrived at and the evidence which had led to them, adding: "And I'm real sorry, Helga—I guess I have to stand you up on that date tomorrow night...tonight, I mean: it's already past one A.M."

  She flashed
him her golden smile. "That's okay, lover boy. It'll keep—and me with it. What's the big deal, then?"

  "We have to check our deductions, honey. No good acting on them unless we can prove they're right. Illya and I will go to Paris and fly into Nice tomorrow on the T.C.A. Trident—the same flight as the one that crashed here this evening—and keep watch in the pilot's cabin to see what we can see. They seem to be stepping up the disaster rate and there's a chance that we may find something out."

  "Yes, I guess that seems sensible—but, darling, you will be careful, won't you? I can't have another date broken!"

  Solo patted her rounded shoulder. "I'll take an ejector seat and a 'chute," he promised with a grin. "Expect me to drop in any time after nine...:

  After the girl had found the file she wanted and returned to the outer office, Kuryakin looked up from some notes he had been consulting. "You know, Napoleon, there's one angle of this case that we haven't taken into account at all," he said seriously.

  "What's that?"

  "T.C.A.'s franchise to carry the fissionable material from here to the U.S. We haven't looked into that end of it at all. Do you think we should?"

  Solo shook his head. "I guess that wouldn't figure in the case until after THRUSH had gained control of the airline," he said. "From their point of view, the number one priority is to discredit the company to the extent that they can take it over. Until they've achieved that, they can afford to ignore the radioactive bit. It only goes on one flight a month anyway—and there's a squad of men with automatic rifles guarding the armored car that brings it to the airport...Besides there's no question of the crashes being in any way connected with an attempt to grab the stuff."

  "You are sure, Napoleon?"

  "Sure I'm sure. All the crashes are incoming planes, and the fissionable material is flown out."