[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 7

"Yes, sir."

"Right... First, please cable Mr. Vrookluyt van Meerengen in Macao. Tell him that he is on no account to reveal himself to the authorities. On no account. He's strictly on a fact-finding trip and the less the Command gets mixed up in the thing the better."

"Very good, Mr. Waverly."

"Secondly, telephone General Hartz at the Pentagon and tell him the golf game is on. I'll send a chopper — er, a helicopter — to fetch him tomorrow morning at ten. Thirdly, cable Mr. Illya Kuryakin at the Hotel Ambassador in Vienna and tell him request for 48 hours special leave is granted — but that I shall expect him to report back to Section Two here on Monday morning. Fourthly..." He hesitated.

"Yes, sir?"

"Fourthly, please ask Miss April Dancer to come in to see me right away."

The girl shown in by Waverly's Chinese secretary a few minutes later was dark-haired and dark-eyed. Below the soft bang, her face with its full-lipped, generous mouth was warm yet alert. Her golden suede suit, whose fringed "pioneer" motif was repeated at the tops of her high-heeled boots, was richly moulded to the curves of her body.

Despite her glamorous appearance, however, April Dancer was as courageous and resolute as any of the operational elite who formed the Command's Section Two. A New England college graduate, she was fluent in a dozen languages, a first-class sportswoman and the holder of a pilot's licence, besides being one of the half dozen general assignment agents whom Waverly privately rated as the best of his hand-picked bunch.

She was also rumoured to be so dedicated to her job that she had steeled herself against anything more than the mildest flirtation with the personable young men who engaged, from time to time, her normal and healthy interest. Indeed, Section One's Head of Policy had once described her as having "a high I.Q., absolute emotional stability, and a scintillating animal vitality." Perhaps fortunately, Miss Dancer herself was unaware of this fact.

As she sat down now on the opposite side of his vast desk, Waverly again observed with pleasure the lithe grace with which she leaned back and crossed her legs as she waited for him to speak. She placed a large black crocodile handbag on the floor by her chair and crossed gloved hands patiently in her lap.

Waverly cleared his throat. "As I understand from Mr. Solo that you are — er — unoccupied for the moment, Miss Dancer," he began, "I should like you to go to England tonight and take over a little investigation from Mr. Slate. The affair has a complicated enough background, so — at the risk of boring you — I propose to spend a few minutes filling you in as the British say."

Setting his glasses on his nose, he crouched forward over the cablegram he was still holding in one hand and added:

"What do you know of Cornwall county, in the southwest of England?"

"Moors, china clay and abandoned tin mines inland," the girl replied; "crabs, lobsters, cliffs and picture postcard fishing villages living off tourists on the coast." Her voice was firm, melodic and fairly deep.

"Yes, that's all right as far as it goes," Waverly persisted, "but I was really talking — ah — professionally. In particular of the southern tip of the county, around the Lizard Point."

"Oh. You must mean the big radar base near Helston... Goonhilly Downs, I think it's called."

"Pronounced G'nilly, I believe. But although the British do have a fairly extensive top-secret tracking station there, it was really another name I was after. A few miles nearer Falmouth, just behind one of your picture postcard villages called Porthallow, is Trewinnock Tor."

April Dancer expelled her breath in a sigh of mild irritation. "Of course!" she said. "The big new NATO installation. I should have known at once. I saw something about it in the Stop List on classified locales yesterday."

"Exactly. Behind the rocky moors leading to the Tor itself lie the masts and towers and dugouts of what the Americans call E.C.10 — the lynch-pin of NATO'S chain of DEWS stations… probably the most sophisticated, and most experimental, of all the bases in Europe. Now while we are in no way responsible for the security of the Western Powers' Distant Early Warning System, being affiliated as you know neither to East nor West, we are interested in the maintenance of the balance of power between them — and one of our main tasks is to see that nothing untoward disrupts this to the advantage of one or the other."

The girl was leaning forward in her chair now, her eyes fixed on his face, drinking in every word of the briefing.

"I therefore thought it... expedient... when rumours and reports of espionage and/or attempted sabotage at Trewinnock Tor came to our ears," Waverly continued, "to do a little investigating. We had an agent, a part-time agent, working out of London. Her name was Sheila Duncan and in the London Headquarters listing she was identified as G.7."

"Was identified?" the girl queried.

Waverly nodded. "Miss Duncan's cover was running a sideshow at a travelling circus — the kind that's known here as a carnival. In this way she was able to keep thoroughly mobile and at the same time patrol fairly regularly the country areas where military establishments tend to be. Until recently, her assignment was just to keep her eyes and ears open and report to us anything unusual."

"And recently?"

"Recently, since the circus winters at Porthallow, I instructed her to make certain specific investigations relating to Trewinnock Tor."

"You still haven't explained that past tense, Mr. Waverly."

Waverly smiled bleakly. "Sheila Duncan was found dead in a circus sideshow the day before yesterday," he said. "She had been murdered in a somewhat bizarre fashion."

"In the course of duty? Had she reported back before she was killed?"

"Oh, yes. Several times. For reasons which I need not pursue now, she had become convinced that neither European, Middle Eastern nor Far Eastern powers were at the moment interesting themselves in the Tor. Yet the rumours did appear to be well-founded... which left us with the possibility that the espionage, and any projected sabotage, might be the work of THRUSH, who could certainly use the secrets of E.C.10 directly for their own underground armies as well as profiting indirectly from the mutual suspicion between the great powers if anything — er — happened to the station."

"She'd neither checked out nor disproved this theory before she died?" April Dancer asked.

"No. Which is why I sent Mark Slate down to Porthallow the moment I was informed of the murder. Slate's briefing was, simply, to check whether the girl's death was a murder unconnected with her work for us, or an assassination arising directly from it. In other words, had she found out too much? If it was the latter, naturally he was to take up the trail where she left off."

"Is such a murder — however bizarre — likely to be unconnected with an agent's work?" the girl queried.

"It is a possibility that has to be taken into account. Especially with part-time operatives, the screening on personal life cannot possibly be as rigorous or continuous as that under which you labour here." Waverly smiled. "There's always a chance. We never really know the full truth about how such agents pass their time off-duty, you know."

"I suppose not. What has Mark turned up, anyway?"

"Considering the background, he's not done too badly. You know the Cornish are originally an Iberian people, like the Welsh, the Western Scots, some of the Irish and the Bretons?"