The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter. Страница 9

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Nevertheless, it was towards the road to Leopoldina and San Felipe that he headed the Volkswagen as soon as he could decently leave.

The clouds had vanished and the startling blue of the sky was unbroken save for the shapes of vultures soaring over the gables of Goias. Napoleon Solo hung his jacket on a hanger from the loop behind the front seat, loosened his collar, rolled up his sleeves and prepared for a long difficult and intensely hot journey.

It was nearly ten o'clock at night when he returned. As soon as the dusty car turned the last bend and came in sight of the scattered lights of the town below, he pulled off the road and cut the motor. From the luggage space in the VW's front, he removed a pigskin case - and from the case he took a pair of silver backed brushes, a safety razor, a manicure set and a bottle of toilet water with an ornate stopper. Each of these articles could be dismantled, and from the interior of each came an assortment of precision parts which could be assembled into a miniature radio transceiver. It took the agent two and a quarter minutes to set up the gear, another thirty seconds to dismantle the car aerial and refit it in a special socket at one side of the set, and nine minutes of patient fiddling with dials and knobs and tuners before he heard an answer to his call-sign on the wavelength he was using.

He picked up the tiny microphone, thumbed the button on its side and spoke softly. "Hello, Recife?" he said. "Is that Da Costa at Recife?... Are you hearing me loud and clear?... Please acknowledge and advise. Over."

Releasing the button, he lifted a small earphone, flicked a diminutive switch and craned his head to one sale, listening to the tinny sounds within the can.

"Okay," he said at length, resuming the microphone and throwing the switch once more. "I'm not going to dictate you a message for passing on to Waverly. You know the procedure. It'll read oddly because you are to send it in clear - do you understand? It is to go in clear, for political reasons. Message begins: Following are certs and probables for Brazilian Hit Parade..."

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Half an hour later, he was running the Volkswagen in under the eaves of the huge barn which acted as garage for the inn. Hardly a light showed in the shuttered streets; there was more illumination from a sky prickled out with stars than was offered to the municipality of Goias as he stumbled across the yard and in at the back door of the hotel.

Once in his room, he checked methodically the half dozen tiny personal signposts that every agent leaves to tip him off in case of entry or search. Of the five cigarettes in the pack carelessly thrown on the table, three still had the brand names on the paper facing downwards. The corner of the folded map on the bureau still coincided with the angle of a letter V in the title of a book below it. Nothing had disturbed the irregularly shaped morsel of flint he had balanced on top of one of the drawers. He poured himself a glass of water from the carafe, pulled his sticky shirt over his head, and continued. The suitcase came next: carefully he eased open the catches. Balanced on a stud-box inside was a small pile of coins. The top one should be a 1936 Spanish peseta with the first numeral of the date pointing at the top left-hand corner of the case.

It was.

Solo sighed with relief. It looked as though the place was clean, all right. Not that he expected anything, but you could never relax. He would just check the last three pointers and then he could get to bed. First, though, he must have another drink and get the rest of his clothes off. It really was tremendously hot tonight.

He was staring straight at the ceiling then. He couldn't think why, for the moment, and then he realized that he was lying on his back on the floor. He had no recollection of having fallen, and no time seemed to have elapsed since he had formed the thought about the closeness of the night. It was very odd.

He got up, shaking his head, and reached for the glass of water. At least some of it was left - and he was exceedingly thirsty.

The floor spun away to his left and the bed moved in and hit him on the shoulder. He opened his mouth but no sound came out of it. The religious pictures on the wall advanced and receded in a blur of movement.

And then suddenly, in a blinding moment of c1arity, he had it: of course they hadn't bothered to search his things or turn over his luggage. Why bother when you can drug a man's drinking water on a hot night - and then search to your heart's content without arousing his… without arousing his what?... It was too dark to remember.

Desperately, Solo struggled to a sitting position. Idiot, idiot, idiot, a voice screamed into his dwindling consciousness. For a professional to be caught by such a trick...

He clawed at the bed but his fingers were swollen and woolly. The counterpane whirled away into the stars as the night burst through the wall. Dimly, he sensed the presence of people, of figures moving in a mist.

And then something exploded with a soft, almost caressing flare in his head, and he began to fall…

Chapter 4

A Matter of Interpretation

ICY RAIN lanced across the East River and rattled on the window of Alexander Waverly's office as a squall hurled itself on the city from the north. Outside the shabby block sheathing the electronic complexities of U.N.C.L.E. from a curious world, people turned up the collars of their raincoats and hurried to get in off the glistening street. A young man wrestled with an umbrella that had blown inside out on the sidewalk by Del Floria's tailor shop.

Waverly himself faced a woman across the immensity of his desk. Apart from the low humming of the air-conditioning, there was silence in the room. At length, the woman gave a short sigh of exasperation and shrugged her plump shoulders. "All right, Alexander, if you insist on being so conscientious, I suppose I'll have to accept it... but I think you're being unnecessarily obstructive. As Commandant of the D.A.M.E.S., surely I have a right to -"

"Barbara! Please!" Waverly interrupted. "There are no 'rights' at all in this matter. And I'm not being over-scrupulous at all."

I didn't say that. I said obstructive. And I think -"

"You meant that. But the point is simply this: we happen to have come across a case where, in another country, some women have been claiming to be members of your organization. The circumstances surrounding that case are of interest to us, so we are investigating it. Because the women are actually not members of your body, naturally you are interested too. You want to know why. But that does not give you the right to demand information about the case as a whole, or to be made party to the confidential reports of my operatives. Indeed, I'm very surprised that you should ask."

"Oh, Alexander, don't be so stuffy! You know perfectly well what I mean: I simply want to know, to put it in a nutshell, what it's all about. That's all."

"And to vulgarize my own position, Barbara, the answer is that I simply cannot tell you. I haven't the right to. All I can say, if it's any help, is that the fact they chose your organization as a cover is practically coincidental."

"I'm delighted. But what I want to know -"

"The case we're investigating, quite literally, has nothing whatever to do with you. Nothing."

"Since you have interrupted me three times in the past two minutes, I gather that's as much as you are prepared to say. But I warn you, Alexander - I'll take the matter further. We do have friends in the Pentagon."

Waverly rose to his feet. He was smiling good-naturedly. "By all means, Barbara, pull all the strings you can," he said equably. "And if you come across anything really succulent, let me know, won't you?"