The Finger in the Sky Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги без TXT) 📗

Miss Finnegan was waiting for them on the 62nd and final floor. Her hair was auburn and the bones of her face were lean, rakish and feline. Beneath the cream and navy T.C.A. jacket a special line in voluptuousness—according to the arrowhead creases—lurked.

"Mr.—er—Solo? If you would follow me, please, I'll take you through to Mr. Maximilian's office."

"We don't have time to drop in on Iain, Gaylord or Benedict?"

"I beg your pardon, Mr. Solo?"

"Let it pass, let it pass...You wouldn't be the great man's secretary, would you? No—of course you wouldn't —"

"Miss Bernstein acts as secretary to Mr. Plant."

Three corridors and two qualities of wall-to-wall carpet later, Solo was in a position to evaluate Miss Bernstein—a nubile brunette with a sulky mouth and a great deal of make-up on her long eyelashes. "Good grief," he exclaimed, "do they get you all out of the same mold? Among you, you must keep the House of Maidenform on full production! Do you ever dream you went to T.C.A.?"

The girl—she'd graduated from the uniformed branch and wore a figure-hugging little shift in black—stared at him haughtily. She rose and went to tall, slim double doors at the far end of the office. Opening the two handles together, she pushed the doors apart and announced:

"Mr.—ah—Solo."

The man from U.N.C.L.E. walked into a lofty room furnished with two deep leather armchairs and a flat-topped desk covered with telephones and dictagraphs. Behind the desk sat a spectacular blonde of about thirty.

"Mr. Solo," she said, rising and holding out her hand. "Welcome to T.C.A. I'm Helga Grossbreitner."

Solo was getting light-headed. "I thought for a moment you were Max Plant," he said. "Tell me: if Miss—ah—Bernstein is the great man's secretary, just who are you? If it's not a rude question, that is."

Helga Grossbreitner smiled again. She was tall and slim-waisted, with willowy hips and a jutting bosom. She wore blinding white boots, a black-and-white houndstooth skirt and a black vest over her shirt. Her gold hair was drawn back in a loose chignon secured by a velvet bow. "Miss Bernstein is Mr. Plant's general secretary and stenographer," she said; "I am his confidential secretary and personal assistant."

"I can see why they break a guy in gently with all the others, if you're the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Solo said foolishly. "May a mere mortal inquire what time you take luncheon—if, indeed, you eat at all?"

For the third time, the blonde flashed her smile at him. "Mr. Plant is waiting for you," she reminded him.

The inner sanctum from which Maximilian Plant directed the affairs of Transcontinental Airways and associated companies was austere in the starkly luxurious way that only the very rich can afford. Solo sank into one of the vast Swedish hide armchairs and looked at the tubby little man with silver hair who sat on the far side of the teak desk. On top of the desk were a black telephone, a gold pencil and five buff folders.

"One on each of the air crashes, young man," Plant said in his creaky voice, tapping the nearest file with his forefinger. "Pages and pages of it...Now—what do you want to know?"

"Mainly, what your experts have found out about them, sir."

"I see. Well, to generalize—You do know about the Murchison-Spears complication, I guess? Good—to generalize, we can divide the five disasters into two groups." He moved two of the folders meticulously to one side. "The three crashes in Nice fall into one category; the two in the U.S. into another."

"What's the difference between them?"

"Well, granted that the aim of the operation is to discredit T.C.A. in general and the Murchison-Spears equipment in particular, we find the two categories align neatly with those propositions."

"Meaning?"

"That the three crashes at Nice, France, were due to some kind of tampering with the Murchison-Spears gear—and that the two accidents in the U.S.A. were due to a—er—less sophisticated kind of sabotage, shall we say?"

"But it was sabotage? In fact they were not accidents?"

"Right. The plane which blew up in mid-air was a pressurized 707. It disintegrated at 33,000 feet. My investigators—and the Federal accident people agree with them—believe the ship collapsed when a baggage compartment porthole was forced open. At that height, of course, a pressurized plane pops like a toy balloon if the higher pressure inside is allowed to get out."

"You said 'forced open...'"

"I did. From a painstaking examination of thousands of fragments gathered over half the state, the investigators concluded that the port was forced open by some kind of time-actuated mechanism—a small hydraulic ram, perhaps, set off by a clockwork alarm. Something of that sort."

"But surely, Mr. Plant, that suggests an accomplice on the staff of T.C.A.? No outside person would be able to get to a plane for long enough to arrange a device like that, would they?"

"They would not, Mr. Solo. It suggests precisely that."

"I see. And the other one?"

"The other one implies even greater complicity on the part either of T.C.A. personnel or the airport staff—I genuinely believe it to be the latter...You know what we call a five- five in T.C.A.?"

"A run that's half passengers and half freight?"

"That's it. Well, this flight was a five-five. We had a rush of passengers at the last moment, and the freight compartment was full—up to the maximum permitted load. Up to, but never over, understand...Right. Now the plane's flying with an absolute maximum payload and the freight includes a number of large, but empty, crates."

"Empty?"

"Yes. There's a firm that makes shockproof containers—insulated crates and padded boxes for carrying delicate machinery, radar components, nose cones for small rockets, and that sort of thing. Very specialized stuff. Well, we were shipping some of these to an electronics firm in New Jersey—they were going to use them for transporting computer parts or some such, but on our plane they were empty. Are you with me?"

"Yes I am."

"Right. Now the plane had been loaded and checked—all weights including passengers and baggage calculated and allowed for. But somehow, after the check, these empty crates had been removed and others—looking exactly the same, but filled with solid ice—had secretly replaced them."

"My God! But surely —"

"Exactly. The unsuspected extra weight was enough to alter the ship's trim and cause it to stall on take-off...and then of course the ice melted in the fire after the crash, leaving no trace."

"Just a minute! If the ice melted and left no trace, how in hell did your investigators —"

"Aha! A clever piece of deduction, young man! That's how they found out. Mind you, it is deduction only—there's no proof. But it sure satisfied me."

"How did they work it out, then?"

"Two things, Mr. Solo. Either one of them might not have been conclusive. But the two together..." Maximilian Plant shrugged eloquently. "Among the cargo were several small loads of consumer goods," he continued. "Stuff for drugstores and wholesale houses, replacements of stock, that kind of jazz. And among them were the two things that tipped our men off—a hundred gross of bottles of indigestion tablets, and a small consignment of barometric lambs..."

The little man placed the palms of both hands on the desk and leaned back with a broad smile, obviously relishing at second hand the deductive triumphs of his employees.