The Final Affair - McDaniel David (серии книг читать онлайн бесплатно полностью TXT) 📗

“Forget Ward Baldwin,” said Illya. “As I said earlier, this job will be a creampuff.”

“Yeah. I didn’t believe it then, and I don’t believe it now.” He stood and picked up his manila envelope. “But I guess that doesn’t matter. Let’s go.”

CHAPTER TWO

“Little Sirrocco, How Do You Do?”

All nightclubs look alike during the day. Chairlegs bristled from tabletops and the garish decor seemed tawdry in the merciless glare of a couple of thousand-watt lamps in standing birdcages in opposite corners.

The faint chemical smell of cedar sweeping compound mingled with stale smoke and sweat left from the night before, and there was a tang of ammonia in the cool air somewhere. FM jazz was piped into the sound system, like a ghostly combo on the empty stage.

Napoleon and Illya looked around the place, having found the front door open, the checkstand deserted and the cashier’s desk unguarded with the cash drawer gaping empty. Behind a partition to the left they heard a telephone ring and a voice answer it; following the clue they found an office and a balding man saying, “— and the last show starts at 1:15. Thank you.”

He hung up the phone and looked up at Napoleon and Illya. “One of these days I’ll get a gadget to answer that. What can I do for you gentlemen?”

“Is little Sirrocco here?”

“What for? You don’t look like fuzz.”

“We’re family friends,” said Napoleon. “You can tell her we work for her Uncle.”

“Tell her yourself. She’s back in the dressing room, unless she left without me hearing her —cleaning up after rehearsal. I can buzz her.”

“Tell her we’re coming. Where’s her dressing room?”

“Around behind the stage on your left. Green door with a gold star on it. Not the one with the gold crescent —some wiseacre put that on the men’s john.” He reached for a box with buttons on it as they left.

The corridor curved around behind the stage, and a door was open ahead of them. Inside, a girl sat at a dressing table doing things with her long blonde hair. She saw Solo in the mirror as he looked cautiously around the doorframe.

“Come on in and close the door,” she said. “This place is safe to talk. —I can fill you in on the situation as it’s developed.” Her voice was soft and husky, but her speech was crisp and precise.

Illya closed the door behind them as Napoleon pulled a couple of folding chairs from a corner and sat down straddling one with his arms folded across its back.. “Okay. Mr. Waverly said you could bring us up to date on Harry Stevens and his current project.”

“Good,” she said. “That proves who you are. I was pretty sure. See, something came up, and we’ve got a pickup for you to make in the next couple of days. You are Solo and Kuryakin, by the way?”

“None genuine without this signature,” said Napoleon, gracefully flipping out his gold identification card. Illya’s appeared beside it -Sirrocco looked at each a moment and then returned to her mirror and her comb.

“Okay. How much did Mr. Waverly tell you about Harry’s condition?”

“The fundamentals. He’s running on a constant posthypnotic and you see him once a week.”

“Yeah. And when he reports in we can set him onto a specific track -which can get pretty complicated. You Know all about the KEG?”

“As much as anyone outside of Thrush.”

“Somebody named Simpson back in New York was asking about anything that fired along with the fireball, like for sighting or ranging, and Harry found out there was such a thing. It’s like a laser, but not in the visible spectrum, and Harry said it ionizes a path in the air and the plasmoid runs down it. This came up day before yesterday when he came over to my place to report. So we set him to get one of those things and bring it to us. You’ll pick it up.”

“pick it up? Why doesn’t he bring it to you next week?”

“New York didn’t want to wait. Harry can drop it off at a bar in North Beach. It’s all been arranged.”

“Just a minute,” said Illya. “I thought Harry didn’t know he was working for anyone but Thrush. You just gave me the impression that Harry was going to steal this —whatever it is —and drop it off at a place in North Beach for us to pick up.”

“That’s right. But he won’t know you’ll be there, and he won’t know why he’s doing it, and he’ll forget he did it afterwards. So it’s all okay.

Didn’t they explain it to you?”

Napoleon stared at her reflection in the mirror, and his eyebrows rose.

“I don’t know exactly how it works. myself.” she admitted. “Dr. Grayson can tell you. But when Harry gets this thing. he’ll signal me at my place around six-thirty or seven, before I leave for work. I’II let you know when I hear, and you’ll plan to be at this place in North Beach. He’ll leave it in his booth and you’ll pick it up.”

“How big is it?” asked Illya.

“About three inches long and maybe as big around as a pencil.”

“And what does it do?”

“Well, it’s some kind of a laser crystal. But instead of light it lases gamma radiation. Not a whole lot —I think they said it’d just give you a quarter-inch-wide sunburn —but enough to ionize the air it goes through so the plasmoid, being electrically charged, follows the track. That’s as close as I remember. Does it seem reasonable?”

“Completely,” said Illya. “And Mr. Simpson wants the real thing so he can study its atomic crystalline structure, shoot some neutrons through it and see what it’s made of. I wonder what they use to drive it.”

“Anyway, after Harry leaves, you go to the booth. pick up the thing and come home. And that’s it. Nobody should be tailing him. and you can just stay out of sight if they are.”

“Tailing him? I thought he was above suspicion.”

“In this Satrapy. nobody’s above suspicion. I think Baldwin watches himself. Harry’s been followed a couple of times. even though they have absolutely nothing on him. He tests clean. He loves Thrush like a mother.”

“He must, if they let him get at something this important.”

“Well, he doesn’t have much rank, but he’s in the copying section. He’s cleared for just about everything, and his clearance gets him into places.

See —there’s only one KBG, and that’s at their test site down near Gilroy.

But there are replacement parts for everything, even parts nothing can go wrong with, like the laser crystal. And Harry can wander into Top Secret Storage and pick one up and it won’t be missed for months.”

“And all this time he’s loyal to Thrush,” said Napoleon.

“Uh-huh. That’s what makes things a little touchy. You don’t dare do anything that might disturb him while he’s around. See —he doesn’t really Know what he’s doing. But he can do everything right as long as he doesn’t stop to think about it, and he won’t as long as nobody calls his attention to it.”

“It doesn’t sound healthy,” said Napoleon.

“It isn’t,” said Illya. “But you’d be surprised how many people 90

around like that most of the time.”

“No, I wouldn’t. On the other hand, natural conditions are usually stabler than artificial ones.”

“That’s right,” said Sirrocco. “He’d freak out. And we don’t want that to happen. Dr. Grayson might be able to put him back together again, but some cracks might show. See, all I’m trained to do is cue him into a trance, debrief him into a recorder, play a tape of Dr. Grayson telling him what we want him to notice and reiterating his basic programming, wake him up, pat him on the back and send him home happy. Since I’m the only field contact he has, it’s part of my job to keep an eye on his emotional balance.

They say he has a chance of coming out of all this with his head in one piece, if nothing jiggers him badly.”

“That’s slightly reassuring,” said Solo. “I hope he doesn’t have a family.”

“No,” said Sirrocco. “Just me. And I’m not supposed to get involved. This is purely professional.”