The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter (читать книги онлайн без сокращений .TXT) 📗

"I am most surprised to find you abusing our hospitality, Mr. Solo," the Negro said. "And disappointed. I had thought you were one of our more cooperative guests." The voice, Solo realized as soon as the man spoke, was the one he had been talking to over the intercom in his cell.

"Unfortunately," Wassermann said, "we were not attending to our monitor speakers in the control room, otherwise we'd have noticed earlier that clandestine messages were being transmitted. We have, however, heard enough to tell us that you were speaking in code - and that this story of you investigating some drug racket is false."

"Most interesting," the Negro said. "I'd be fascinated to learn the details of the treatment to which you were subjected. A system which permits deliberate lies to be told, mixed in with a judicious amount of truth, even under the deepest hypnosis and the most powerful drugs - that is something I really admire! Regrettably, though, I have to deny myself the pleasure of forcing you to tell me: our operation is ready to start. You have transgressed the laws of hospitality and now you have be come merely an embarrassment. You must be disposed of."

"Didn't they teach you not to end sentences with a preposition in the mail-order English course you took?" Solo said blandly.

The Negro smiled. "I am immune to insults, my friend," he said. "As I was saying, you must now die. You have until darkness tomorrow night… tonight, I should say, for it must be almost dawn now."

"Isn't that – ah - untraditional?" Solo said. "It's usually dawn."

"It is a question of method, Mr. Solo," Wassermann said. "We like to be tidy; we do not like to arouse the curiosity of our Brazilian hosts. So any deaths that are necessary are customarily arranged to look like accidents - a hit-and-run road accident, a heart attack, that sort of thing."

"What about the girls in the car?"

"One of the troubles about employing members of the underworld is that they will not obey rules," Wassermann said. "Despite our orders, individual members of our team persisted in driving all the way down to Rio to amuse themselves in their spare time. This particular pair drove carelessly, that is all. Then they had to be silenced to ward off your prying questions... In the case of your own death, as I was saying, this will be arranged to look like an accidental drowning. And it is better to stage that in darkness, simply to avoid possible witnesses."

"And how do you propose to stage it?"

"We don't really have to bother. The submarine pen attached to this building has double doors - so that the craft can enter underwater, wait until the water has been extracted, and then disgorge its crew in safety. With you, the process will be the reverse: you will be. left in the pen when it is air-filled, the inner doors will close, the outer doors will open and the water will come in. And then, sometime later, your body will float to the surface in the normal way and will no doubt be discovered at some time in the future by a worthy peasant. This way, too, we avoid any marks of violence on the body."

"Bodies - not body," the Negro put in. "We cannot tolerate disloyalty." He walked across the room to the girl. "You could have seriously jeopardized our plans by helping this man," he said with cold malice. "Now you will have to pay for your foolishness with your life." He raised his arm and slapped her repeatedly, forehanded and backhanded, across the face. The marks of his fingers stood out lividly against the girl's pallor as a thread of blood crawled slowly down her chin from one corner of her mouth.

"All right, Hernando, that's enough," Wassermann said. "No, Mr. Solo - I wouldn't. I really wouldn't... Greerson, you'd better calm Mr. Solo down before we take him back to his cell with his fellow conspirator to await, the night, eh?"

"Okay," the man called Greerson said. He handed his gun to Wassermann and shambled forwards across the room, his baggy suit flapping on his bony frame. "Only thing is," he said as he approached the agent, "my hands, are kinda delicate and I hate to bruise them. You know?"

Solo automatically raised his arms to defend himself as Greerson came near. But the thin man took him by surprise. Moving like lightning, his left hand reached out and grasped Solo's shoulder, spinning him deftly around so that he was facing the wall. Then, almost in the same movement, the gunman's other fist looped in and buried itself in Solo's kidney.

The agent's fingers scrabbled at the concrete wall as he sank to the ground, a strangled cry forcing itself from his lips. Dimly through waves of nausea he heard the girl cry out - though whether in pain or in horror at what was happening to him he did not know.

Behind him, Greerson measured his distance carefully, then drew back his foot...

Chapter 10

"Don't Call Us - We'll Call You!..."

AS GREERSON RAISED his foot in the fortress below the artificial lake, Illya Kuryakin turned the key to cut the motor of the Volkswagen fourteen hundred yards away on the other side of the rocky spur separating the reservoir from the adjoining valley.

Mist clung to the lower branches of the trees like streamers of chiffon, blanketed the hollows in the ground, and wreathed in frightening shapes across the road. The estancia was invisible in the before-dawn darkness as he coasted the car in under some overhanging evergreens opposite the gates. Beside him, the greyhound profile of Coralie Simone was pale and tense in the dim illumination of the single dashboard light.

"Somewhere in that mountain," Illya said, "there is a kind of fortress where all those trucks full of material go. It must lie at the end of the tunnel - though whether it is on this side of the lake or beyond it we can't tell. Since we couldn't possibly identify the place from above - even if the guards allowed us enough time on the shores of the lake to try - we'll just have to force our way in through the tunnel. Because somewhere in there, dead or alive, is Napoleon Solo... It'll be dawn in about a half hour: it seems to me that now is as good a time as any to try. Are you game?"

"So far as this phase of the operation is concerned," the girl said, "you are the boss. If you say go, we go."

"Fine. Well, the first thing to do is to spy out the land. Just hold on a moment while I fix the equipment, will you?"

Kuryakin hauled an attache case over from the car's back seat and took out what looked like a heavy flashlight with a hooded lens. He held the device out of the VW's window and pressed the switch. There was no result at all - until he and the girl looked through a pair of viewfinders resembling truncated field glasses. Then the darkened and misty topography sprang to life in a manner as quick as it was impressive. In the powerful infrared beam cast by the flashlight, the special lenses showed up trees, grasses, fences, gateposts and buildings as vividly and dramatically as though they had been the snow scene they resembled.

"Oh, it's beautiful," the girl cried. "It looks just like full moon - only much brighter!"

Illya's face remained impassive. "Seems quiet enough,' he said. "I guess we'd better get moving while it's still dark Out there. Unless we can penetrate the tunnel mouth before dawn, we might as well go home."

While the girl held the infrared lamp out of the passenger window, Kuryakin strapped the lenses over his eyes and got out of the car. He crossed the road and busied himself with the latch of the wire gates blocking the entry to the estancia. In the unearthly light visible to him through his glasses, it took him less than thirty seconds to pick the lock. There seemed to be no alarm system connected with it. The gate was used so much that they probably considered the alarms were best left further inside the Thrush enclave.