The Splintered Sunglasses Affair - Leslie Peter (электронные книги без регистрации txt) 📗

The man took the card, swung round into his glassed-in booth, struck a punch with the flat of his hand, and handed the card back to Solo all in a single motion. He gestured the car on and pressed a switch to change the light in front of it to green.

Solo was through. But he hadn't a moment to waste... one of the men at the pay station had been gesticulating at a telephone. They could be after him at any time.

The drowsing fields tufted with poplars, the long lines of farm buildings in mellow brick, had given way to the graceless clutter which despoils the outskirts of so many modern cities. As the Lancia was sucked into the vortex of traffic swirling towards the centre. Solo saw thin chimneys belching flame at the sky, vacant lots pockmarked with shanties of corrugated iron, scrap yards high with wrecked and rusty cars, and everywhere behind hoardings was the stuttering of excavators and bulldozers. Across the flat horizon, the city was battlemented with the great slabs of modern apartment blocks.

The traffic stream was moving too fast—and the road system was too complicated—for him to choose a special route. For a while, he stuck with the main flow, following the small signs pointing either to Centra or to Francia.

But then he found himself in the wrong lane at a big police-controlled junction. And while the great bulk of the traffic swung away unexpectedly to the left, he was forced to go straight ahead into a maze of narrow streets leading uphill towards the old town. To have attempted to cut across the line would have invited attention from the men on point duty, which was the last thing he wanted. Mentally, Solo shrugged and pressed on.

As he drove, he looked constantly for some sign that would bring him back to a through route. But all the likely streets seemed to be one-way... the wrong way! Willy-nilly, he was boring deeper and deeper into the warren of thoroughfares surrounding the cathedral.

He threaded the Lancia past a street market bright with fruit and vegetables, inadvertently drove through a procession of small boys in white surplices, and eventually found himself in a street so full of pedestrians that he had to stop. There were no sidewalks. Square, smooth setts of granite joined one tall, grey, shuttered row of houses to the other.

And outside every door big-bosomed women in black sat chattering to their neighbors while children gambolled from one side of the roadway to the other. In ten minutes, he had made no more than thirty yards through the throng.

He began to worry. The car was attracting attention. And yet he could scarcely leave it in the middle of the street. With no curbs, there was no logical place to park; and the few side-streets he passed were choked with vehicles blocking every single space.

At last in desperation he edged the Lancia towards an entry and turned into a courtyard at the far end of which was a palazzo in crumbling yellow stucco. He braked it to a stop beside a colonnade of Roman arches supported on slender pillars and got out. From the far side of the court a voice called out: "Hey! You! What do you think you're doing ... ?"

Solo turned round. A policeman in a flat cap with a white cover was striding towards him, scowling. The agent whirled around and fled.

He ran back into the street with no sidewalks, darted across, and sped down a long cloister piercing a huge stone building on a corner. Behind him, footsteps clattered on the smooth-worn stones, voices were raised in protest, in interrogation, in laughter. A whistle shrilled over the babble of the crowd.

At the far end of the cloister, he found himself in a kind of paved foyer full of quiet elderly men in flowing black gowns. On the far side, glass doors led to a flight of steps above a street bright with sunlight.

Solo dashed past the academics, burst out of the doors and scrambled down the steps. A moment later, he was dodging through a press of students thronging a pavement cafe. Two more turns brought him to a wide main street just as the last of a long convoy of army trucks rumbled past the intersection. Without a second thought, he stepped into the roadway, swung himself up over the tailboard, and dropped into the dark space under the canvas canopy.

He could have gone to the American consul in Turin. But, even if his story had been believed, he was unwilling to involve his country in a personal dilemma which revolved entirely around his employment by a supra-national agency. And in any case, the convoy had given him an idea. It was a long shot, but if it came off it might mean a short-cut to Waverly in New York!

Forty minutes after he had swung aboard, he peered out of the back of the truck. The convoy had stopped in a compound to one side of a military encampment. And, judging from the conversation he had heard, the crews had marched off to the canteen for lunch.

Solo hitched the camouflaged overalls he had found among the stores in the truck higher on his shoulders and dropped to the ground.

From what he had been able to see as they lurched out of the city, the convoy had stopped about 35 kilometers north of Turin, somewhere between Cuorgne and Ivrea. And it looked very much as though it was part of a supply train for the big NATO exercise that Solo knew was taking place that week south of the Val d'Aosta. If he was right, his problems might be at an end....

Plucking a steel helmet covered in netting from the cab of the truck and putting it on his head, he walked nonchalantly along the back of the convoy, studying the vehicles comprising it.

There were twenty two covered three-tonners similar to the one in which he had travelled; a dozen half-tracks; two high, square ambulances with huge red crosses painted on their steel sides. And a command truck.

This was outwardly like the ambulances. But there was a complex of antennae on top of its squat roof. And in the boxlike tonneau, Solo knew, there would be a highly sophisticated and extremely powerful short-wave radio installation. Pretending to an air of casualness that he was far from feeling, he climbed up into the cab. Behind him, the sliding door blanking off the mass of switches and tuners and transistors and rheostats of the installation was half open. He stared out through the windscreen. There were soldiers busy about a khaki marquee tent about a hundred yards away, but nobody was looking in his direction.

Taking a deep breath, he pressed the starter button and, for the second time that day, steered a stolen vehicle out of a parking space towards the road....

CHAPTER SEVEN

Waverly Reasons Why !

The head of U.N.C.L.E.'s Policy and Operations Department, Section One, laughed aloud. It was not a noise customarily heard in the Command's headquarters and Illya Kuryakin treated it with respect. He waited. He listened. And by and by it was repeated. Waverly laughed again.

"Spectacular!" he barked. "And efficacious, I suppose, since it did get him in touch with me! But Heaven knows what I'm going to say to the Pentagon. Ha!"

The Russian frowned in puzzlement. "I'm sorry, Mr. Waverly... I'm afraid I do not quite..."

"Solo, Mr. Kuryakin! You knew he'd been taken to Italy by his captors and that he had escaped and contacted me. But you are probably ignorant of the precise methods he used to effect this."

"Er... yes."

"He climbed down a drainpipe, floored a gunman, leaped an electrified fence, drugged two killer dogs and escaped a third, before scaling a wall and stealing a car. Then he found himself in Turin and stowed away aboard a convoy of army lorries bound for maneuvers in the Val d'Aosta."

The Russian smiled affectionately. "That sounds like Napoleon!"

"Yes, but the serious thing is that he made off with a command post truck and used it to communicate with me on the radio."