The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric. Страница 3

Beyond was a nightmare collection of electronics gadgetry. A small man in tight black trousers, sweater and beret entered the radio room from another door. The swimmer picked up a many-hued beach towel and carefully patted every part of himself dry.

He hummed quietly as he blotted the stomach rolling out over his pelvis, and lovingly rubbed each hand absolutely dry. Covering his shocking hairlessness with a psychedelic terrycloth robe, he sat before the warm console and flicked twin amplifiers to life.

He tuned two Collins KW 26T receivers to a South African weather station, deftly adjusting first one, then the other. A seagull let out a squawk of indignation as his perch slewed suddenly to the south, and the metal core hidden in the plywood antenna reached out to the ether.

The small black-clad man set two Crown tape decks into motion as the other finished delicate adjustments by ear. Both short wave receivers were producing varying tones oddly complementing each other. The tones became richer, fell off, and then became richer still.

Finally the fat man stood up, beaming. He had tuned both sidebands of the AM broadcast to peak reception. The wavering tones rose and fell for a moment, then were simultaneously disrupted by a beep of sound. The small man stopped and rewound the tape recorders while his coworker almost gleefully flipped off the switch and toggle in the power-down procedure.

With the two tapes playing forward at one/one hundredth of their recording speed, the little man set the tone control and kept one spidery hand on the volume knob. A garble of sound came from one speaker, then from the other. Patiently, he started them over again, and again, until he found synchronization. Both spoke simultaneously.

“Short at 63 and seven-eighths.”

The fat man clapped his soft hands together and stared abstractedly at the wall while the tapes were rewound to be erased. “What do you think of ‘An Arctic Oil Source’ Arnold?” he asked.

Arnold looked up. “Artic oil source?” he asked. “Oh, that’s just fine, Mr. Porpoise. That’ll knock ‘em dead tomorrow.” He continued what he’d been doing.

Porpoise waddled from the room, idly dropping the robe of many colors in water he had dripped earlier. He slipped back into the warm swimming pool and re-mounted his violet lounging chair. Once more enthroned, he breathed deeply, relieved to let the water take his weight. After a short rest he triggered a simple mechanism to inflate the chair, and he was raised into the air. His upper body and the chair’s armrests were held up out of the water.

Another use of the chair appeared as he opened one arm support to reveal a waterproof secretaire from which he took slate and soapstone stick. In a gridded pattern on the big slate he pondered combinations of letters.

“This,” he crooned, “and thus, and our oil source.” He filled in the pattern, and finally with a great sigh of satisfaction he replaced the soapstone and submerged his chair.

Before he started snoring anew, one hand pushed away the slate. His eyes closed and he was asleep as the slate bobbed to the pool’s edge. The small man from the radio room retrieved it and carried it quietly from the room. Once again the shark and the penguin subsided from their mock battle into a serio-comic bobbing, seeming to mimic the sleeper’s breathing.

Outside in the night a black motorcycle roared to life. The sound faded into distance as the Yamaha, Arnold, and the slate headed off toward Manhattan.

Chapter 2

“But that isn’t illegal!”

Illya stared at the unfinished puzzle before him, lines of heavy concentration crossing his Slavic brow. One small portion of the puzzle eluded him still.

“Perhaps if you took another look at fifteen down, Mr. Kuryakin. As a law enforcement officer, surely you can come up with something better than ‘know* for ‘apprehend/ ” Waverly dropped his glance back to the paper before him and continued to sort out some of the many pieces of information that daily crossed his desk.

Illya looked up, startled. “How could you see the definition from there, sir?” he asked, as he changed ‘know’ to ‘take’ and rapidly filled in the rest of the elusive comer.

“I didn’t see it from here, Mr. Kuryakin. I worked that puzzle myself just this morning. Our press study department releases the paper to me just prior to lunch, after sifting it for possibly sensitive information, and I use the puzzle to fill in odd moments.”

Illya crossed the room to look at his chiefs solution to the puzzle just as Reception notified them that Napoleon was in the building. Waverly handed Illya the open paper with a curious smile and put through a signal to London to start the recorded questioning of Alain.

Napoleon entered the room, glanced from his chief to Illya, and took a seat at the huge round table. Waverly looked up from his communication console and smiled with only his eyes. “Ah, Mr. Solo,” he said in token welcome. “You are just in time to join us in monitoring a recorded interrogation of a Thrush messenger.”

Solo knew from the smile and the voice that Waverly was running short on sleep, from which he deduced that this was no simple interrogation. Seated opposite Illya, he watched part of one wall dissolve into a realistic color picture showing two men moving like Keystone Cops in quick-step in a small room. A third man sat limply in a chair.

It was the seated man who caught Solo’s attention. He took in the man’s hollow, dark eyes and striking face. Except for the slack expression, that face could have been a poet’s, a painter’s, or a king’s.

In one corner of the televideo screen an inset showed a luminous clock face with rapidly moving hands. The time read off was 12:31 with the letters “AM GMT” beneath. Checking his own watch, Napoleon had the eerie feeling he was seeing into the future. The radium dial at his wrist showed over half an hour before midnight. Then he relaxed, subtracting the five hours time difference from Greenwich Mean Time. He realized that he was seeing the early end of an interrogation that must still be going on.

The interrogation proceeded along lines typical of U.N.C.L.E. operations anywhere in the world. The two white-clad agents administered drugs in small doses, the amounts and compositions registering briefly, typewritten across the bottom of the picture. They always reminded Napoleon of titles in a foreign movie. Neither operative addressed the other, since both knew their job of old. The senior of the pair put frequent questions to Alain, who mumbled slowly in reply, losing his inner war with the drugs.

The figures moved rapidly between their instrument table and the chair. They adjusted the lights and microphones. Their voices came across like chipmunk squeaks on the audio as they continued the questioning. For several minutes the Thrush kept up his defense, while the sweep second hand of the inset clock spun in double time. Waverly spoke as one drug finally cracked the barrier. “Would you restart the sequence in real time, please?” he asked the unseen projectionist. The figures in white continued their scurry.

Thirty-nine seconds later the film halted and skipped backward as an affirmative to the order. Napoleon felt a shiver slide along his spine, and grinned. By now he should be cosmopolitan enough not to be surprised that the projectionist was sending from a booth in London, relaying the broadcast to New York via a communications satellite.

Alexander Waverly spoke. “You will notice,” he said, in precise syllables, “that there seems to be no last-ditch attempt at either suicide or escape. We surmise that this man, Alain, is a moderately low level Thrush, commissioned with very little real information.” Solo turned to look at his chief questioningly.

“Yes, Mr. Solo, I quite anticipate your question. If he is unimportant, you are wondering, why are we concentrating so seriously on him and ruining your evening?” With a gesture to the screen, Mr. Waverly indicated that the question would answer itself.