The Dagger Affair - McDaniel David (хороший книги онлайн бесплатно txt) 📗

They hurried down the long rugged tunnel carved out of natural rock to the little softly-lit room which afforded a view of the penstock tunnel. It was empty. The tunnel beneath the room ran off into darkness in both directions, and the huge pipes within it lay like the pulsing veins of an unimaginably huge animal. A red and yellow shirt would have stood out even in the dim light of the tunnel. And as Illya looked carefully down, it did.

The shirt was draped over a stanchion a fair distance below them. It was no longer occupied. Their man had ducked in here, removed the shirt that had personified him to everyone, and stuffed it through the little access hatch at the side. But for the opportune intervention of the structural member, it would have fluttered to the bottom of the tunnel and remained undiscovered for years. Now...well, now all they had to do was look for a man who wasn't wearing a bright shirt.

They headed out the rockwalled tunnel again.

Guards were running about, and tourists were standing in nervous groups like sheep whose herd-dogs had suddenly taken to strange behavior. Napoleon took command.

"Attention, please! Will all the tourist groups please line up along that wall. Guards come over here."

They did. While Napoleon told the guards what they had found, Illya quickly scanned the faces of almost a hundred tourists — groups that had piled up since the elevator was stopped. Their man was not among them.

Garnet came running up at last. "Napoleon — I think he might be over on the north side. I saw somebody in a white tee-shirt coming out of a little tunnel door."

Leaving most of the guards with orders to send the tourists out by elevator and continue searching the Arizona side of the dam, Illya and Napoleon took four men and headed for the Nevada border, a hundred feet away. Garnet showed them the door.

"Yeah, he could've," said a guard. "That goes down and under the whole front of the dam. Dunno how he'd know about it, though. I guess he's no regular tourist."

"You can say that again," said Napoleon. "And that was no regular bomb he planted either, so don't worry about it exploding. What he planted not only won't explode, it'll prevent anything else from exploding too."

The guards stared at him strangely. "Don't worry about it," Napoleon repeated. "We've got to find that man."

"Mr. Solo," Garnet said, "hadn't we better concentrate on finding the E/D? Even if we catch the man, he probably won't know how to turn it off, and I'm sure he wouldn't tell us where it is."

Solo looked at her. "Garnet," he said, "you have a gift for going right to the heart of things." He turned to the guards. "Look," he said, "catching the man won't do us as much good as finding that thing before it goes off. I want you all to spread out and cover every tunnel, every room, every trash basket, every corner big enough to leave a wad of paper in. What you're looking for is probably a brown gadget bag, about so by so by so." He gestured with his hands. "And if you find it in time, we may still be able to save Southern California — and all your jobs."

They went.

Chapter 6: "But He Left His Glass Slipper."

Napoleon, Illya and Garnet retired to the office of the head of the maintenance department. Here they found maps showing the entire honeycomb of tunnels that filled the mountain of concrete that was Boulder Dam. The phone rang every few moments, as guards called in to say they had just finished searching some particular area. Illya would mark it off with a red line on their map, and Napoleon would direct the guard to another area.

Half an hour passed. The tourists had all been cleared out of the dam and the area around had been evacuated. The searchers had found neither the camera case nor any sign of the man who had left it. They could have vanished together into thin air. Then the phone rang. Napoleon answered it.

"Solo — Good! Where? Don?t move it. We'll be right there." He hung up and turned to the map. "There we are," he said. "Come on. We may be able to disarm that thing yet."

* * *

The case lay behind some boxes in a small cul-de-sac about the center of the dam, near the bottom. Since the tour went nowhere near there, the man must have planted it somewhere, probably the penstock-viewing room, and then picked it up and moved it to this safer place while on the run. And he might have re-set the timer to give himself more time, or to go off sooner. They had no way of knowing but had to expect the worst.

"I've looked it over carefully, Napoleon, and I think it should be reasonably safe to move it. Handle it carefully; there might be a sensitive trigger inside."

Since Illya's eyes had not recovered from the blast of tear gas, Napoleon now was the only one to carry the device out of the area and away to safety.

The north elevator sat at the bottom of the shaft, door open. Napoleon got in, the camera case hanging from its strap beside him, and pushed the top button. He waved to Illya between the closing doors.

The elevator started its long trip upward.

It was some seven hundred feet up the elevator shaft, and it took the elevator about a minute to make the climb under ordinary circumstances. But to Napoleon Solo it was seven miles, and took an hour.

He was aware of the silent menace in the leather case, of the immense mass of concrete around him, of the shaft extending up and down from his little steel cage. And he felt very much alone.

There were access doors every couple hundred feet along the shaft, and if the E/D went off in the elevator, the automatic mechanical brakes would still function to hold him where he was. Then a rope could be let down from the next door up, so he wasn't in any real danger....

If was still a long, long way to the top. The wall crawled endlessly past him, and the closed doors slipped from the top to the bottom of the frame and disappeared every now and then. The only sound was the hum of the air-conditioner and the sighing of displaced air in the shaft. Napoleon glanced at the light and realized that the climb on the rope ladder (should the thing go off before he reached the top) would have to be managed in total darkness.

How long had he been in the elevator, now? It seemed like forever since Illya had disappeared between the doors as they'd slid closed at the bottom of the dam....

And then another door slid into his field of vision, moved down, slowed, matched with his own, and stopped. The door slid open. Hot, blue desert daylight flooded into the little anteroom outside the elevator and made him squint.

He stepped out through the doors and picked up the telephone. He dialed the extension at the bottom. Illya answered in the middle of the first ring.

"Yes?"

"Made it. I'll get this thing to the car, and you come on up with Garnet."

"We'll be right up."

Napoleon hoisted the bag to his shoulder and sauntered out into the sunlight.

* * *

Ten minutes later he was at the wheel of their car with Garnet beside him, climbing through the tangled hills toward the road back to Las Vegas. Illya sat in the back seat, holding the camera bag on his lap. There was a dour Russian look of triumph in his bloodshot eyes. Garnet had suggested looking inside to be sure it really was the Energy Damper, but Illya had vetoed it.

"It would have been easy to wire a small explosive charge to go off in the hands of anyone trying to open the case. Or to close the circuit of the Energy Damper. Besides, our superior officer, Mr. Waverly, likes things handled neatly and would be most upset if we tampered with the object in any way under these circumstances."