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

"Surely, in the circumstances..."

"And as a uniform he happened to have found and put on was a spare one intended for the Umpires in the exercise, he got away with it!"

"Even so," Kuryakin began, "I still do not see how you—"

"The annoying thing, though," Waverly said, not looking in the least annoyed, "was that through a misinterpretation of something Solo said while he was dressed as an Umpire, the Italian army thought they had lost an entire armored division in a surprise attack! And by the time the mistake was discovered, it was too late... "

"And that has upset the course of the—er—exercise?"

Waverly nodded. "That's the understatement of the year! But never mind. Here's the transcript of Solo's radio conversation with me. Read it, please, and then we can talk." He handed Kuryakin a sheaf of typescript, settled back in his chair, and pulled a cherrywood and a tobacco jar towards him across the huge desk.

By the time Illya had finished reading, he was actually smoking, puffing out dense clouds of smoke with what appeared to be genuine enjoyment. "Well?" he asked, "Does anything strike you?"

"Yes, of course. Turin."

Waverly nodded again. "Exactly. Turin. And Leonardo..."

The Russian's face was suddenly grave. "Poor Leonardo!"

"Your man in Turin. Leonardo was shot down yesterday in the street just outside a branch post office on the outskirts of Turin. Two days previously we receive here a mysterious photographic plate, apparently meaningless, in a package bearing a Turin postmark. And now there is Solo."

"Who is kidnapped in New York and flown secretly to a country house near... Turin."

"And what does that imply to you, Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Well, obviously, that the assignment on which Leonardo is... was... working, and the kidnapping of Napoleon, are connected."

"Just so. And if we bear in mind that Leonardo had obtained a priceless list of intended Thrush agents in Europe from the headquarters of their Supreme Council Member for the South... ?"

"It suggests that the house where Solo was imprisoned, the man called Carlsen... "

"Is either that Supreme Council Member himself, and the house is where Leonardo found the list, or else he is the head of a rival organisation who wants the list as badly as we do. And in either case, Solo was kidnapped because they wanted to pick his brains about communications. They chose him rather than anyone else simply because he was between assignments and was therefore, being unconditioned, an easier subject for interrogation."

"It certainly seems from what Solo reports," Kuryakin said, picking up the typescript again, "as though they were heading that way in the odd questions he was asked while he was there, doesn't it?"

"It does. The questions could have been directed, very cleverly, at finding out how our agents reported, what systems they used, and in particular had we received any special ones from Turin recently. The similar enquiries about Thrush could have been a blind... or, if they are not Thrush, they may not have known whether Leonardo was working for us or for Thrush."

"You are thinking of the photographic plate which arrived...?"

"Presumably from Leonardo, yes. And presumably containing in some concealed form the famous list. As Leonardo was murdered outside a post office, it seems reasonable to assume that he was about to send us the key to our mysterious photo."

"Or had just sent it?"

"That too, is possible. An ordinary airmail letter wouldn't have got here until today, anyway. But I suspect he was killed before he could let us know. In either case, it would be absolutely vital—either to Thrush or to a possible rival—to know whether we knew the contents of the list or not."

"What do the lab boys say about the photographic plate?"

Waverly looked at his watch. "I'm expecting their report at any minute. In the meantime, we can plan on general lines. Since it was your case, I want you to go to Turin tonight and start backtracking on Leonardo right away. Mr. Solo can help. And between you, I hope you will turn up something, some clue—"

He broke off as one of the telephones on his desk burred discreetly. He lifted the receiver to his ear. "Waverly," he said crisply.

He listened for a moment and then said: "I see. It's as I thought then? And there's no means of reading it, of deciphering it at all, unless we know what medium it was shot through?—actual piece, at the same angle?... I see. Thank you."

For a moment more, he listened, and then he added: "We shall do what we can. Mr. Solo is there now. I am arranging with the Italian S.I.D. to supply him with papers, money, and so on. And Mr. Kuryakin will fly out to join him there tonight. Until they report, we shall just have to backpedal, then.... All right, George. Thank you very much."

He lowered the receiver to its cradle, knocked out the cherrywood into a green glass ashtray, and turned to the Russian. "Do you know, Mr. Kuryakin," he asked, "what a Hologram is?"

CHAPTER EIGHT

How To Read A Hologram

"A hologram," Colonel Rinaldi said to Napoleon Solo, "is in effect a photograph in three dimensions obtained without the use of lenses. Its advantage—or disadvantage in your case—is that the finished plate is useless without the original means of producing it."

Solo cleared his throat. "I'm sorry. I'm afraid you'll have to be a little more specific, Colonel," he said. "I'm the one they send out when the assignment calls for action!"

Rinaldi laughed. "Very well. I shall start at the commencement," he said.

The two men were sitting on high stools at the side of an optical bench in a top secret laboratory hidden in an old hill fort on the high ground between Oulx and Sestriere. Solo, outfitted, gunned, supplied with papers, money and a magnificent meal by a dapper little man in the S.I.D., had driven out to see Rinaldi on the following morning. The laboratory, perched on a rocky spur near the famous winter sports resort, was one of the most closely guarded of all NATO research centers. And Rinaldi himself had been a Professor of Optics at Verona before he was made its Director-General. He was a short man, and compactly built, with immaculately waved hair and a face as brown and seamed and wrinkled as a walnut. He looked—Solo thought, trying hard to concentrate—so much like a character actor playing an Italian direttore that it was difficult to take him seriously.

"For holography," Rinaldi was saying now, "you have to have the laser. You are perhaps familiar with the laser, Signor Solo?"

The agent nodded. "You could almost say intimate," he said. "I was once almost melted by a laser*, less than two hundred kilometers from here!"

"Ecco! Then you will know that the laser is an exceptionally brilliant source of light, produced by the stimulation either of gases or of crystals, in which all the waves are, so to speak, 'in step'—what we call 'coherent light'."

"I'll have to make the best of this," Solo said. "But I do know that."

"So. Holography is a method of photography employing this light—only instead of using a lens to record a focused image on the sensitized plate, we record simply a pattern of interference between two beams of coherent light... as one might record the pattern produced when one dropped two stones into a pool and the widening circles of ripples mingled."