[The Girl From UNCLE 04] - The Cornish Pixie Affair - Leslie Peter (электронная книга .txt) 📗

Now they had to get out through the passageways above: their only avenue of retreat had gone!

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: MISS DANCER DOES THE TRICK!

ERNIE Bosustow stopped and mopped his brow. He was panting with exertion. "I think... we'll stop here... few minutes… get my... bearings," he gasped, flopping to the ground. The torchlight showed them a widening in the tunnel almost extensive enough to be called a cave. On the far side, it branched off in three different directions — and it was floored, unbelievably, with sand.

April lowered herself beside him. Since they had watched the whaler sink, they had climbed an interminable number of stairs, negotiated a slippery platform set at a dizzying height above the underground pool, and hurried along what seemed to her to be miles of corridors carved into the rock. They had originally been made, centuries before, as exploratory workings for a projected tin mine, the boy told her, "before they found there wasn't any, this side of the Penwith peninsula!" And the smugglers of a later day had merely made use of what was already there.

"The thing is," Ernie said, levering himself to his feet again, "I can't remember all the ramifications by heart — 'tis too complicated. But there should ought to be like a map here somewhere. We used to copy her down each time we come, so's we didn't get lost, see."

For a few moments he flashed the torch around — and then, with a grunt of satisfaction, he loped across to the corner of one of the tunnels. Carved into the glistening rock, the striations filled in with some yellowish-white cement, there was a complicated diagram which looked something like an underground railway map of London. Clamping his tongue between his teeth, the boy produced a pencil and a scrap of paper and began to copy down part of the map.

While she was waiting, the girl took from her bag what looked like a flesh-coloured ear plug. She pressed a minute button on the end and then inserted it into her right ear. There was about her wrist a gold charm bracelet hung with many miniatures wrought into the shapes of elephants, cameras, tennis racquets, veteran cars and bicycles — a common enough piece of costume jewellery... except that in April's case every charm was a tiny transistorized microphone, a "bug", and the "ear plug" was the complementary receiver on which she could hear anything the bug transmitted. Before succumbing to her drugged sherry in Wright's sitting room, she had managed unseen to detach one of the charms and secrete it among the foliage of a pot of azalea. She might as well — since she felt exactly like Alice down here anyway! — improve the shining hour and listen in.

As soon as she had pressed home the plug, she sat bolt up right with an exclamation of delight. The receiver had a client! A transmission was coming in loud and clear!

Wright was talking to his wife. They appeared to be in the middle of an argument.

"... understand why you had to go and kill the wretched girl anyway," she said, "especially in so theatrical a way. What was the point?"

"Tidiness, in answer to the first question. Once I discovered she was working part-time for Waverly, was in fact a double agent, I had no alternative. You don't split allegiances with THRUSH."

"Couldn't you have kept her on, made sure she got nothing valuable from us, and milked her to gain more of their secrets?"

"They don't give 'secrets' to part-timers. But you miss the whole point, Diana: as I've said before, the fact that she knew we were THRUSH was enough to sign her death warrant. Surely that's obvious!"

"I suppose so. And the man, Bosustow?"

"A wretched, rash, intruding fool, to quote the Bard. So it had to be — to quote him again — farewell. You know the little rat made his money out of a particularly slimy line in black mail?"

"I know he had pictures of you with your doxy and tried to cash in on them, thinking an upright pillar of local society like yourself would pay anything rather than have his wife know about the affair!" There was a hint of mocking laughter in the clipped, strangulated voice.

"He didn't understand sophisticated people." Wright dismissed the point impatiently. "The point is — once he realised I didn't mind... that you knew already and you didn't mind –– then he was too much of a danger to live. Those very facts made us 'different'... and once local people know you are different, they start to poke and pry... We couldn't afford that."

"Even so, Gerry, I don't —"

"Look. What do they say in the latest Council Directive — the one with the computer analogy? When you have an input channel with one component weaker than the others — rip out the whole circuit and rewire from scratch."

"You haven't explained, still, the coconut-shy and the drowning —"

"Oh, heavens!" Wright interrupted. "I should have thought that was clear enough: to throw suspicion on that tomfool yokel the girl was supposed to be engaged to, in the first place; again for tidiness in the second. Mason lured him aboard our cutter by saying he'd discovered a love nest in a cove just beyond Coverack where half the V.I.P.s for the West Country took their secretaries for weekends! Of course the little worm reached for his camera and his flashgun and came running! So far as the coconut-shy goes, I'd hit the girl with my binoculars and I had to mask the wound in case they could have been traced from it."

There was a confused noise in the tiny receiver, ending in the clink of glass on glass. April realised that the table on which the bowl of azalea was resting had been moved and that someone was now pouring out drinks on it.

Wright was saying something, but his words were lost in the glugging of liquid, monstrously distorted by the proximity of the glass to the microphone. Then came the voice of the chauffeur, Mason: "Boat's ready on the slip, sir, and the sub will be standing off at eleven sharp to receive us."

"Right, Mason," the self-satisfied voice drawled. "And what about our impetuous young friend? Is he a little more subdued now?"

The chauffeur gave a vicious chuckle. "You could say that, sir. Jacko gave him a bit of a going over... We had to — Hah! — wipe the Slate clean afterwards, if you know what I mean! "Again he uttered the short, sharp bark of laughter.

April stiffened. Her worst fears were realised. They had got Mark — although at least it sounded as though he was still alive. But Jacko must be the giant she had injected with the knock out drops that afternoon: she shuddered to think what a "going over" from him might imply.

"He's secure, is he, Mason?" the woman was asking.

"Yes, madam. As secure as it's humanly possible to be."

"Really?" She sounded mildly amused. "And how secure is that?"

"Well, the chair he's sitting on is cemented to the rock floor, for one thing. That'll be dry now, and I'll defy anyone to move that!"

"You could saw through the legs above the cement."

"Not this one: it's wrought iron!"

"Oh. Oh, that was thoughtful of you, I must say. And how is he attached to it?"

"By wire, madam."

"Wire?"

"Yes, madam. Not the thin fuse-wire type. A determined man can snap that if he's strong enough and courageous enough to stand the pain. No — this is the thicker kind, the sort they use to bind fencing to its posts, or to tie up shrubs and small trees, and to do up crates. With that —"

"But surely it's not bendy enough to tie knots in?"

"No, it isn't. You don't tie knots: you twist it. You get a man tied to something with that wire looped around his ankles and knees and wrists, and the ends of each loop twisted automatically by a packager — just tight enough to sink into the skin — nothing on earth will free that man except by slowly and patiently untwisting the wire! With a crate, you can slip a screwdriver or a wrench between the wire and the wood — and she'll snap. But you can't do that with flesh: it's not hard enough. No more can you get a pair of wire-cutters between the bonds and the skin, if it bites in enough."