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

As Trevitt began to speak, Waverly moved round and dropped into a chair next to Illya. "All this... fuss... made me forget your own assignment," he murmured. "Is there anything to report?"

"Yes, indeed," Kuryakin replied. "Leonardo's come up with something far better than I had hoped for. He's got the list!"

"He made it! Splendid fellow!... Not a list detailing every Thrush satrap in Europe, I suppose? That would be too much to hope for."

"I'm afraid so, sir. No such list exists anyway, he tells me. One would have to be compiled specially from masses of other material, and he simply didn't have the time. What he did find was a complete list of every company and organization in Western Europe that was destined to become a Thrush satrap—a blueprint of their advance plans in that particular theatre of operations. With this information, we can alert managements and the security organizations of the various countries, blocking the Thrush infiltration and takeover technique before it starts. It'll put back their European expansion schedule by two or three years."

"But that's excellent, excellent!" Waverly enthused. "Leonardo is to be complimented... Er, you are sure the list is authentic?"

"Absolutely. He got it from the private safe of the Supreme Council member for Southern Europe."

"Do they know we have it?"

"Leonardo thought not. He cracked the safe, took out the list and photographed it, and put it all back again and locked up while the man was having dinner."

"Good. When do we get the photographs?"

"I'm not sure, sir. Leonardo's daily transmission was fading and he went off the air just as he was about to tell me. I'm waiting for his normal routine report this evening to find out."

"No doubt we shall receive them through the usual channels either tomorrow or the day after. Microdot, are they?"

"No, sir. He was using a new technique. He was..." Kuryakin's voice tailed off as Trevitt put the receiver back on its cradle. The policeman's face was white.

"You're right about them being ruthless," he said tightly. "That was my Captain. Our woman witness... she was sitting having a cup of coffee with the boys in the squad room. They got her—in there! Some guy on the roof of an apartment house right across the street. They think he must have had an express rifle. Drilled her through the head—a downward deflection of nearly forty degrees... and the slug had to pass through double-glazed windows with bars over them!" He shook his head in disbelief. "She died instantly."

There was a grim silence. Waverly scraped another match to life, tossed the empty book into the wastepaper basket, held the match in mid-air for a moment and then, finding that there was no pipe for it to ignite, dropped it into the ashtray. "One damned thing after another," he said. "So, since neither Del Florio nor his assistant can tell us anything, we're back where we started: without a single lead to follow."

"Not quite, sir. The car—or one just like it—has been traced. A pale grey Plymouth has been found abandoned on the perimeter of a private airfield just outside Johnstown, in upper New York state. The lab boys are still working on it, but they've already found a special compartment between the back seat and the trunk in which they think your man must have been hidden while he was ferried up there."

"We shall just have to wait and see what else they can tell us, then," Waverly said. "But at least we can be fairly certain of one thing."

"What's that?" Kuryakin and the policeman asked together.

Picking up the pipe from the desk, the lean, grey man with the tired face ticked off points against his fingers with the stem. "One, no ransom demand has arrived. Two, Mr. Solo appears to have been removed by aircraft, which presupposes both a big deal and a long-term one. Three, since he was not on assignment, it seems unlikely, as we have said, that he was—er—snatched either to prevent him completing something or to force information on a specific mission from him. Because, four, adversaries well enough informed to have planned the kidnap, and to have removed the witnesses in the way they did, would certainly know also where Mr. Solo had been and why... which is to say they must have known he was not on assignment."

Waverly paused and reversed the pipe, clicking the stem into place between his teeth. "It seems, in fact," he continued slowly, "as though Mr. Solo has been abducted at this particular time precisely because he is not engaged on a mission. And you can make of that what you like... Could either of you gentlemen oblige me with a light, please?"

CHAPTER FOUR

The Velvet Glove Approach

It was the only possible answer, Napoleon Solo thought. He must have been kidnapped on his way back from that dreary conference, in the way that he had been, precisely because he wasn't on assignment. But why? What were his captors hoping to get out of it? What was the point?... And what kind of captivity was this, anyway?

For the hundredth time, he shook his head in puzzlement. His reasoning had followed exactly the same line as Waverly's, and he had arrived at the same conclusion. Solo, however, had a lot more facts and impressions to go on—even though they didn't take him any nearer the solution of the mystery. He remembered clearly the stupefaction with which he had heard the unexpected hiss of escaping gas; he recalled the mortification he had felt when his drugged muscles refused to obey the commands of his brain, the widening highlight on somebody's shoe. But after that there was a timeless period of blankness broken only by sensations of movement, of being bounced about on a hard floor in a confined space, of being lifted, of the assault of pressure on the eardrums. Once, he had a confused idea that he had been woken from a deep sleep in an aeroplane in the middle of the night. There had been a roaring all around him and the sense of floating in a void. Then cold fingers had pulled up a fold of skin on his arm and there had been a stinging sensation before he fell asleep again. He could see the mark of the hypodermic now, just in the bend of the elbow, and the joint was still sore. After that, he remembered nothing at all until his awakening in this house, in this room, in this bed.

Since his initial return to consciousness, though, there was a host of impressions to sift in his mind. He had sat up in the unfamiliar room, hearing nothing but the slow pounding of blood through his own veins. He was wearing striped pajamas in green and brown and purple. There were silk sheets on the bed and the room was floored with parquet surrounded by walls covered in damask. On one of the petit-point chairs, his clothes were neatly laid out. It looked like the bridal suite of a very expensive Victorian hotel, or the guest room of an oil man's Park Avenue house.

Solo had swung his feet to the floor and attempted to stand up. Apart from an odd giddiness, there seemed to be nothing wrong with him.

Experimentally, he trod the Bokhara rugs to the window embrasure. A tug at the broad, tasselled cord hanging to one side had soundlessly drawn back the midnight-blue velvet drapes. Outside it had been daylight, with sunshine splashing the shadows of a row of poplars across a lawn down below. Solo had tried the bedroom door. Astonishingly, it had been unlocked. Outside was a wide, carpeted passage leading to a gallery encircling a huge hall.

Hastily drawing on his clothes, he had tiptoed out and down the shallow staircase to the floor below. Once he had walked a few paces, the giddiness had disappeared. Through double doors at the far end of the hall, he could see formal gardens stretching away towards a copse.