[The Girl From UNCLE 01] - The Birds of a Feather Affair - Avallone Michael. Страница 12

"I'm not convinced it was clever leaving her back there," Mr. Riddle said, without any complaint in his voice.

"Slate is sufficient to arrange the trade," Arnolda Van Atta said. "Miss Dancer can't be much more than a female. I wasn't too impressed with her."

"But if Uncle learns of her death before—"

"They won't. There won't be enough left of that old dye factory to put in a stamp album. Her body could never be identified."

Mr. Riddle looked at the Timex watch strapped to his left wrist.

"Five minutes more," he said crisply. "I wonder if we'll hear the explosion from here?"

Arnolda Van Atta laughed harshly, spinning the wheel to bypass a slow-moving Cadillac.

"If the noise bothers you, I'll have Thrush send you some earplugs for future assignments."

Mr. Riddle said nothing. Only the gruesome mockery of his Frankenstein face seemed to smile in approval of the remark.

"What about the other woman?" Mr. Riddle asked unexpectedly.

Arnolda Van Atta shot him a look. "What about her?"

"If Miss Dancer should find her—"

His superior, for that is who Arnolda Van Atta clearly was, laughed again. It was an ugly guffaw that held more invective than a sentence full of oaths.

"If she does, so much the better for her. Perhaps, before they both get blown into infinity, they can tell each other all about the men in their lives."

The paneled truck roared on toward Manhattan, its brightly painted sides as gay as a carousel in the waning sunlight.

Mr. Riddle had only one thought.

He would hate to have been a woman who had raised a spark of envy or jealousy in the heart of a terrifying female like Arnolda Van Atta.

She was a tigress with long, jagged claws that needed, wanted blood.

Demanded it.

Dancer With Cold Feet

In the quiet of the basement, April dressed quickly. She didn't know what drove her to such modesty, except that you couldn't run around town in your underthings, could you? If there was to be a time when she would be out of this damnably cold basement.

She had scavenged the trousers, shoes and shirt of the giant assassin in the hallway. It was robbing the dead, of course. When she had dragged the supine man into the light of the basement, it had been quite obvious that she was toting a corpse.

The Karate blow at such short range had smashed the man's larynx and broken his neck in the bargain. She didn't like to kill but she couldn't think twice about it, either. It was that kind of a profession, being an U.N.C.L.E. agent. You or them. It was a much better arrangement when it was them.

She had entertained some hope that the victim possessed a weapon of some kind. But there was none, the man's pockets holding no more than the usual loose coins, keys and a wallet. These and identity cards in a plastic case indicated that in life, the corpse had been one Clyde C. Charleston, a New Jersey truck driver. Beyond that and his Negroid lineage, she knew nothing. Possibly some poor recruit whom THRUSH had inveigled for the use of his vehicle. The woman in her was fully glad that the wicked Mr. Charleston seemed to have been a bachelor, also.

The trousers and shirt were baggy, swimming on her slender, compact figure. Her feet were lost in the shoes too but they would serve. Time now for an examination of the basement. A true, thorough, painstaking search to discover the bomb mechanism she was certain had been left as a legacy to her. Wasn't the Great Zorki a specialist with explosives? These were his friends.

Soundlessly, swiftly, she checked the place. The rusting pipes were a maze of thick, crisscrossing snakes running at all angles about the room. The cracked porcelain sink, large as it was, revealed nothing. The cobblestones of the floor all seemed secure and undisturbed. The very walls, limned with grease and layers of grime, revealed the desolation of abandonment in the long, long ago. No, there had not been any life in this place until recently. Perhaps this very day.

There was a row of thin, dilapidated metal lockers, lined up like soldiers on the opposite wall. April debated with herself briefly. She could knock the lockers over, and pile one on top of the other, to form a height sufficient to reach the grilled window. Yet, she was as certain as she was of her shoe size that once she attained that giant step, she would be no better off. The barred window opened on an alleyway far from the sound of human ears. She was sure of it. Still, there wasn't enough time, to squander on guesswork. She could be mistaken about the bomb, of course—but she didn't think so.

She had nothing with which to tackle those bars on the window.

Suddenly, she heard a sound—and froze, senses alert.

A vague, almost far-off whisper of noise. She cocked her head, listening. Now the noise grew louder. A scratching, pawing sort of sound.

It was coming from one of the metal lockers.

Mark? A feeling of jubilation surged through her. Was it possible Slate had dashed in here.... The sound abruptly materialized as a whimper. A human moan of despair. That wasn't Mark Slate. You couldn't have gotten a sound like that out of him if you nailed him to a barn door.

There was no mistaking now the sobbing murmur of a woman's voice.

She stepped rapidly to the locker cabinets, and waited. The sound came again. Muffled and indistinct, but a woman's moan all the same. It seemed to be coming from the third battered file on the line. April moved to the tinny door, jiggled the damaged handle and pulled it back.

Almost timed to the gesture, the woman crammed inside, her figure distorted from the narrow confines of her prison, fell forward. April caught her. She had a fleeting glimpse of untidy brown hair, cut in a boyish bob, a piquant face and a shapely arrangement of curves encased in a winding sheet of some kind. The sheet came apart, grey and molding, to reveal a torn, tattered blue dress of a wooly texture.

The woman, girl really, squirmed in her grasp, her arms fighting the folds of the sheet. She settled on the basement floor.

"You—you—" she gasped, breathing deeply.

"Me, me," April agreed. "Do you usually hide in closets? You don't look like an old maid."

She plucked the remainder of the crumbling sheet away from the girl so that she could sit up. She watched as the girl caught her breath. No matter how smudged and sooty the face, there was no hiding the gloriously creamy skin. Her eyes were dark and flashing, her mouth a fine cherry bud. The nose was retrousse. All in all, the last person April would expect to find in a battered tin locker in a damp old basement in the middle of nowhere.

The girl brushed at her cheek, nervously. "You can't be one of them. You wouldn't have let me out—"

"By them, you mean Thrush?"

The girl nodded, her eyes frowning at April's unusual garb of oversized male clothes. "Have they gone?"

"Yes. Leaving me here to wonder what surprise they have in store for me. Who are you, Alice-Hide-in-the-Closet?"

The girl shook her head, pushing to her feet.

"I'm just somebody they don't want on their hands anymore."

April studied her. "That means you are either from Internal Revenue, Discarded Lovers Incorporated or Enemy Agents, Unlimited. Which is it?"

The girl winced. "I can't tell you."

"All right. We'll discuss that later. Do you know anything about bombs?"

Her eyes opened fearfully. "They haven't—no, they wouldn't do that—this place was one of their best hideouts in the city. Oh, unless—they did pack all their supplies in that blue panel truck!"