Man From U.N.C.L.E. 23 The Finger in the Sky Affair[UK]

by Peter Leslie

  The final climb up the sloping wall of the rampart was not too difficult and soon they were peering cautiously over the parapet. A raised concrete promenade ran about four feet beneath the lip. Below this was a narrow roadway, on the far side of which clustered the tall, shuttered houses of the village. Not a soul was to be seen, not a light showed: obviously the inhabitants were outside the walls on the far side of the town, watching the display.

  Quietly they dropped to the ground, unfastening the rope and stowing it together with the remainder of the climbing equipment behind a bollard. A line already fastened to this rose to the parapet and disappeared over the top: here undoubtedly was the other end of the rope from which hung the murdered survivor…

  Above the tumble of pantiled Provençal roofs surmounting the narrow houses on the far side of the street, a second rank of buildings rose higher into the sky. It was in the upper storey of one of these, looking across the lower roofs to the coast, that Helga Grossbreitner’s apartment was situated, Illya had discovered in the Mairie at Nice.

  ‘There’s no street between the two rows,’ he told Solo in a low voice. ‘The houses are all jumbled together and the entrance will be on the far side of the second row.’

  ‘Okay,’ Solo answered. ‘We’ll take it from two directions as we planned. You find your way to the entrance and get in on the ground floor; I’ll go in from the top and see you later. We’ve got – let’s see – twenty-seven minutes before the Trident is due. Keep in touch…’

  With a wave of his hand, Illya melted into the shadows and vanished through a narrow gothic archway between two houses. Solo catfooted across the cobbles, ran lightly up a stone staircase leading to a vine-covered balcony and swung effortlessly over the iron railings to grasp a stackpipe. He shinned up this to the guttering, hauled himself on to the roof, and advanced cautiously up the sloping tiles until he reached the wall of the row of houses behind.

  Helga Grossbreitner’s apartment was in a building twenty yards to his left. Now that he was closer, he could see through the picture window spanning the entire frontage a dim glow of red light. Faintly, from somewhere below, he felt the hum of a generator.

  Another stackpipe took him to the second row of roofs. As soon as he reached the ridgepole, he stood upright and surveyed the scene. Around him a forest of chimney stacks, each covered by its little shelter of curved tiles, dotted the roofs of St. Paul. Slopes of every conceivable pitch and angle, gashed here and there by the narrow canyons of streets, stretched away and up towards the square-towered church topping the hill in the middle of the village. Beyond this jagged skyline pulsed the fitful glare of Roman candles, catherine wheels and set-pieces raining coloured fire. Behind, the headlights of distant cars probed the dark countryside falling towards the coast.

  Two more roofs lay between him and his goal. With infinite care, he trod softly across the steep tiles, clambered down to the first roof, which was on a lower level, crossed it, pulled himself up on to the second, edged round a chimney stack, and dropped on to all fours as he approached the final slope. From what he could see, the antennae sprouting from Helga’s roof were a good deal more sophisticated than would be required for reception of France’s television services. Almost certainly, among the bizarre shapes of the ordinary domestic T.V. aerials which rose from the chimneys around him, was the evidence of a powerful transmitter and receiver on an international scale.

  He eased himself over the parapet separating the two houses and paused. Helga’s roof was of a shallower pitch – but to counteract this advantage, a broad modern chimney stack carrying six pots straddled half the width…and the remaining distance was obstructed by a sloping buttress leading down from the top to the gutter. Beyond the angle of stone, he could see the corner of a skylight set in the tiles. A faint light hazed the air above the glass.

  Solo looked at the luminous dial of his wrist watch. Some where down below, Illya should be preparing to crash the entrance to the house.

  He waited a minute and a half and then moved carefully to the edge of the roof. Now that he was nearer, he could see through the skylight into the attic below: part of a workbench, the edge of a chair, one side of a grey-steel console studded with switches and dials.

  Averting his eyes from the dizzy drop to the street, he leaned his back against the slanting buttress and swung first one leg and then the other over to the far side. Then, automatically dusting off his jacket with one hand, he moved thankfully back towards the centre of the roof. The skylight was only ten feet away.

  Something hard jammed into the small of his back. ‘Okay, bud,’ a voice rasped behind his ear. ‘Raise those hands…quick. One move and you’re dead…’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  INDOOR FIREWORKS

  A ROCKET burst with a thunderous detonation and released a fleur-de-lys of coloured streamers as Illya Kuryakin located the door of the house. It was a massive affair peppered with iron studs and recessed deeply into a stone arch. Curiously, there were no windows on the ground floor of the building – nor could he see the row of name tags and bells which customarily flank the entrances to apartment houses.

  He had been going to ring the bell of the ground-floor flat if there had been one, with the intention of bluffing his way in on the pretext of having pressed the wrong button – and then improvising once he had got up the stairs. Now, however, he reconsidered: it looked as though any other apartments in the building might be a blind. Probably the whole place belonged to THRUSH. He examined the archway and the small porch behind it. Concealed among the ornamentations of the stonework was a diminutive circle of ground glass. A matching circle glinted dully on the opposite side of the opening. Presumably, once anyone crossed the threshold and broke the ‘magic eye’ beam which spanned the space between them, a photo-electric cell would actuate some kind of warning…perhaps a closed-circuit television camera – yes: the porch was roofed with tiles of bottle glass. One of them would be a hidden lens.

  Kuryakin looked up and down the narrow street. On both sides, the ancient houses lay dark and silent. He had not seen a soul since he entered the village. The roadway was only six feet wide. The house opposite the THRUSH headquarters seemed to be some kind of gallery: there were paintings displayed in a window. From beneath a balcony on the first floor projected a stout wooden beam supporting a rustic sign – and a few feet from the end of the beam was the wall of the house he was trying to enter. If he could tightwalk to the end of the beam without falling, there was a wide window ledge opposite, a little higher up…

  He crouched, flexed his muscles and sprang upwards. His outstretched finger tips brushed the wrought iron curlicues supporting the beam, but he was unable to grab hold of them. He tried a second time – and again his hands hit the iron without being high enough to curve around it.

  Breathing hard, Illya waited until some set-piece over the roofs brightened the sky and then, gathering himself, leaped once more. This time his fingers curled over a loop of the ironwork and held. There was a wrench tearing at his hands and shoulders as his full weight dropped earthwards – but he hung on. Swinging back and forth with gathering momentum, he finally managed to hook one foot into another curlicue and from there levered himself painfully to the balcony.

  After a pause to regain his breath, he stepped out on to the wooden beam. It was about two inches wide – and fortunately it was flat rather than rounded. Providing he could keep his balance…

  Bringing one foot up behind the other – for he dare not risk overbalancing by crossing them – he inched out from the balcony towards the other side of the street.

  In the occasional flickers of reflected light, the cobbles gleamed fifteen feet below. When he was about half way along, the beam creaked and shifted slightly. He swayed, sawing with outstretched arms on either side to preserve his balance. Another two feet only…but would the beam hold? For the further away from the balcony he got, the greater the leverage on the fixing points.

  Eighteen inches to go – and a
gain the beam creaked, more loudly this time. The sign hanging below it swung once to and fro, faintly squealing its iron hooks and eyes.

  Six inches…There was a rending sound, a splintery crack. As the beam sank beneath him, Illya launched himself forwards and outwards, his hands desperately groping for the wide sill under the window opposite. His forearms struck the stone shelf hard, and an instant later his knees and toes crashed numbingly into the wall below it. Panting, he tensed his biceps and held on. There was no clatter from the street: the beam and the ironwork below it had loosened but not fallen; the sign still hung crazily above the cobbles.

  The agent pulled himself up on to the sill and peered into the window. The room inside was in darkness.

  Alarm wires led from the casement to a junction box along the wall. He pulled a flat box like a cigarette case from his pocket. Inside, two neat rows of shining implements were ranked. For a tenth of a second the beam of his flashlight brightened the embrasure. Then he worked industriously in the dark for two minutes: insulation was scraped away from one wire, a clip carrying a short lead was fastened on. The other end was attached to a miniature steel pin. There were two brief metallic taps as he drove the pin into the second wire by the frame.

  Seconds later there was a sharp snap and the window swung inwards.

  Illya swung his legs over the sill and dropped soundlessly to the floor inside. Apart from the humming of the generator, no sound broke the silence.

  Again the thin ray of the flashlight lanced the dark. There was nothing in the small room but three rows of filing cabinets. The door was immediately opposite the window. He tiptoed around the end of the middle row and reached out for the handle…then paused, his hand arrested in mid-air.

  From the matchbox-sized radio receiver in the breast pocket of his shirt, a call-sign was vibrating minutely against his chest. Solo was calling him…

  Each of them was wearing an ornate dress ring which in fact was a tiny transmitter. The vibration meant that Solo had pressed the miniscule control at the side of his ring to initiate transmission. Illya fished the receiver from his pocket and held it to his ear, listening. Faintly, he heard the tail end of a sentence in a harsh and unfamiliar voice:

  ‘…tell me what you’re doing here, bud, or it’ll be the worse for you. C’mon – what were you doing prowling about our roof?’

  Then the whisper of Solo’s voice, in a passable imitation of cockney: ‘All right, mister, I’ll come clean. I didn’t mean no harm. Honest – I was just hopin’ for a tickle. There’s plenty of nobs in these gaffs. I thought maybe I’d find an open skylight…you know: there might be a spot of tom or some pussy to lift. I wasn’t after your pad special, honest I wasn’t…’

  ‘Don’t give me that. I seen you before somewhere – Celeste: don’t we know this guy from some place?’

  ‘Could be’ – it was a woman’s voice speaking now – ‘The face seems kinda, well, familiar.’

  ‘That’s what I thought, but I can’t quite place it. Come on, you bastard: who sent you, and why are you here?’ There was the sound of a blow and a strangled exclamation from Solo – then the agent’s voice, panting:

  ‘Well done, little one. Go on. Do it again. It must be a nice change hitting a man bound to a chair – bit of a relief from the monotony of beating up elderly nurses and throwing hospital patients over cliffs.’

  ‘He does know something,’ the woman’s voice said. ‘Larsen – we’d better knock him off…’

  ‘Naw. We can’t do that without Number One’s permission – and she’s busy with the ray and can’t be disturbed. I’ll check with Fröhlich – and in the meantime, we can find out exactly what he knows. Let’s go get the dynamo and the clips. With a few hundred volts through you-know-where, he’ll soon talk. C’mon: he’s safe enough there…

  There was a pause, and then, faintly, Solo’s voice: ‘Illya? Are you with me? I’m probably very distant because my arms are bound to the arms of a chair and I can’t get the mike in the ring near my mouth.’

  Kuryakin lifted the ring on his own hand up to his mouth and pressed a tiny knob embedded in the scrollwork of the setting. ‘I hear you, Napoleon,’ he said softly. ‘What happened?’

  ‘I was sprung as I crossed the roof,’ the voice in the receiver whispered. ‘I would guess it was the same little dark villain you saw at the airport; the one who probably murdered Andrea Bergen and helped with the hospital job. The woman could be the one who knocked the magazines out of Sherry’s hand and distracted your attention while Shorty killed Andrea. They’ve gone now.’

  ‘I gathered that. Where are you?’

  ‘In an attic under the roof. I imagine the operations room is just below. Where are you?’

  ‘In a room on the first floor. You’ll be three storeys above me. Shall I come and get you out – or shall I deal with Helga first?’

  ‘What did you say? You’re very faint. My receiver’s in my breast pocket and I can hardly hear you.’

  ‘I said shall I deal with Helga or shall I come and get you?’

  ‘Try and get me first – we’ve got to stop them finding out who I am. If they do, they’ll call the whole thing off…and it’ll need two of us to deal with them: apart from these two, there’s Fröhlich, whoever he is, and possibly the two others involved in the hospital deal.’

  ‘I see what you mean. Whoever’s operating their weapon has got to continue thinking we’re both on that plane…I’ll be up.’

  ‘Okay. But hurry, Illya. The plane’s due in nine minutes…’

  The Russian took an automatic from his hip pocket, fitted a long silencer over the barrel and pushed a clip of ammunition into the butt. Then, cautiously opening the door, he slid out on to the dark landing. Now that he was outside the room, he could hear the low murmur of voices from somewhere above.

  Before venturing upstairs, though, he had to make sure of his line of retreat. Waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, he finally made out an oblong of less intense darkness to his left. It was the entrance to a stone staircase leading down between arched plaster walls. Keeping to the outside of the tiled treads, he trod softly down.

  As he rounded a bend in the stairway, he saw the origin of the faint illumination. A man sat with his back to the entrance in a small concierge’s cubicle, poring over a magazine in the dim light of a low-wattage red bulb. Although paying lip service to the edict that all houses in St. Paul should show no lights during the display, the THRUSH headquarters was maintaining a basic supply with its own generator.

  To one side of the concierge’s desk was a fourteen-inch T.V. monitor screen flanked by a platen carrying warning lights and switches. The man, at second hand, was obviously the guardian of the front door.

  Illya stole across the hall and paused in the doorway of the cubicle. The man had not moved. Engrossed in what he was reading, he was apparently mouthing to himself the words on the printed page as he laboriously followed the lines.

  Illya raised his right arm, the hand held flat with the fingers extended. Abruptly, he swept the flat of the hand across and down to the nape of the man’s neck in a karate chop.

  The doorkeeper grunted once and slumped forwards over the desk.

  Thumbing back his eyelid to make sure that he would take no part in the evening’s festivities for the next hour or so, Kuryakin raced back to the first floor and groped along the wall for the stairs leading up. He found them at the far end of the landing and climbed cautiously to the next storey. There were four doors, his exploring fingers discovered – two on each side of the passageway. Crouching, he peered through the keyhole of each in turn. Three of the rooms were in darkness. Through the fourth keyhole, a brighter light shone – and from behind the door he could hear voices raised in argument, among them those of the man and woman he had heard questioning Solo.

  On the floor above, according to Solo himself, should be the operations room. He tiptoed up another flight of stairs.

  The third floor of the house boa
sted only three doors. Two of them, on the side of the building nearest the street, stood open – to reveal in the intermittent reflection of fireworks admitted through the uncurtained windows a bathroom and what looked like a miniature laboratory. Behind the third, which was closed, lay the room with the picture window, the operations room from which four T.C.A. Tridents had been sent crashing to their doom…

  From this landing – Illya saw in the light of a blue-green flare – only a ladder led upwards to the attics. Gun at the ready, he swarmed aloft and disappeared through the open trapdoor in the ceiling.

  The crude Provençal armchair to which Solo was bound had its back to the door, and the first he knew of the Russian’s presence was the hand that fell warningly on his shoulder.

  ‘How long have we got?’ Solo whispered urgently as Illya sawed through the electric flex clamping his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles to the wooden arms and legs.

  Kuryakin glanced at his watch. ‘The plane is due to land in five and a quarter minutes, Napoleon,’ he said.

  Solo rose to his feet, massaging the life back into his cramped limbs. ‘God, we’ll have to move fast,’ he said. ‘And we can’t afford to go into that operations room before we’ve accounted for the others. How many are there left, do you know?’

  ‘The man and woman who were here with you. Fröhlich – and probably one other. I’ve already – er – looked after one guard on the front door.’

  ‘Good. But the trouble is, we’ll have to do it all in complete silence – the slightest sign of a struggle would tip Helga off…’

  Together, they turned towards the door.

  Larsen stood there with a Luger, the big gun steady in his dirty hand.

  ‘Okay, you guys,’ he snarled. ‘So now it’s a confederate, is it? Back up there – now. We’ll see just who the hell you are…’

  Balletically, Illya kicked straight-legged almost in reflex. The tip of his toe caught the barrel, and the heavy pistol went spinning across the room. As the small, dark man’s mouth opened wide in dismay, the Russian chopped flathanded at his throat, catching him viciously across the Adam’s apple as the shout was forming. Solo made a dive to his left and caught the Luger before it could crash to the floor.