18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (19 page)

He picked up an electric soldering iron, rammed the plug into a socket set in the wall beside the door, and laid the tool down on the tiled floor of the cheminée to heat up.

"He's said nothing at all?" the girl demanded. "He hasn't talked one way or the other?"

"Oh, he talked all right. They all talk when the electricity's flowing! But he didn't say anything worthwhile, nothing we could use. Mostly, he was babbling what I took to be his name—it sounded Russian to me—and some nonsense about his uncle."

"His uncle?"

"That's what it sounded like. He even spelled it for me, but I—"

"Do you mean he said he was from U.N.C.L.E.?"

"I think that was it. What does that mean?"

"It's... kind of an international police organization."

"This is a flic, a policeman?" Bartoluzzi made an instinctive movement toward the soldering iron, which was beginning to smoke slightly.

"More than that—and you can leave your torture toys. They will do you no good if this is an U.N.C.L.E. agent."

"But I can make him talk, Marinka. I swear I can."

"Of course you can. But you'd be wasting your time. Before they go out on assignment, agents of this organization undergo a course of posthypnotic suggestion to make psychological implants in their minds. Without wearying you with detail, the result of this is that—under truth drugs or torture—they will tell you the truth up to a certain point. But that as soon as you start asking questions about their mission, a psychiatric censor, as it were, comes into operation, and their subconscious mind supplies answers that accord with the facts but are not the genuine truth. They have a built-in series of conditioned reflexes. And to break that down would take far more time than you have available. My principals want action. You'll have to get rid of this man."

"Yes, yes. Of course I will. If he didn't talk within the next half hour, I was going to kill him anyway. I have clients waiting in other parts of Europe, and I cannot afford to waste time here trying to discover why a madman should pass himself off as a murderer! I have to go."

"And the means?"

"Obviously his death must be arranged so that the authorities believe no other person was involved. I had worked out a plan whereby it would seem he had himself escaped from the militiamen and had then come to grief while getting away from the scene of the crash."

"Good," the girl said. "Good. You must tell me about it at once…"

"It's a pretty diabolical scheme," the voice coming from the transceiver in Solo's hand said. "Here's what they plan to do. It appears that there's an old railway viaduct crossing the head of a valley near here. It was built in the middle of the last century to carry some branch line toward the mountains, but the Germans closed it down and tore up the track in 1933. The bridge is still standing, however, and the old permanent way still exists as a kind of rough track. It's weed grown and bumpy, but you can apparently get a car down it—at least as far as the viaduct."

"Bully for me," Solo said. "And the point is..."

"The viaduct is in a bad state... about to fall down. Apparently the wind and frost have eaten away all the mortar, and it's practically resting on dry stone pillars now. It's closed even to foot traffic, and the track is blocked with barbed wire before you get there."

"You're beginning to make me feel uneasy."

"What they're going to do—they plan to put your friend in the cab of an old truck. He'll be lightly drugged so that he doesn't know what's happening, but he won't be bound or anything. And then they'll push the truck out onto the viaduct and…"

"Down will come vehicle, Illya and all?"

"That's it. The bridge is so shaky that a bicycle might start it crumbling away. A heavy truck will just make it fall down. It won't bear that much weight."

"Okay," Solo said crisply. "Now just how are they going to do this? You say they are going to push the truck out onto the viaduct?"

"Not literally. The barbed wire barriers can easily be displaced. And the track approaching the bridge is on a downhill slope which continues at a slight incline across the viaduct itself. They are going to tie a rope to the back of the truck, give it a push down the slope, and then winch it out gradually as it rolls across the bridge. When it falls, they'll cut the rope and then hurry down to the bottom of the valley to remove the other end from the wreckage. The truck is the one that was used this morning to hijack your friend from the military. This way, the authorities will think he killed himself making his getaway..."

"It's up to us to stop them, then, isn't it? The important things to know are, when is this murder due to take place, how far am I from the viaduct, and exactly how do I get there?"

"Where are you now?"

"I'm on the Autobahn about fifteen kilometers southwest of Chemnitz—or Karl Marx-stadt, as they call it now. I crossed the border about an hour ago. It's funny how quickly those crazy little vineyards in Franconia, with the stone walls that zigzag from one terrace to another, get swallowed up in all this Gothic forest as soon as one's over that frontier!"

"I'm sure it is. You should be able to get to the valley—you do want to go straight there, I suppose?—in a little less than an hour. That'll be running it a bit fine, but they do have preparations to make, after all. As far as directions go, it's about twenty minutes' drive from Tharandt, to the south and west of Dresden. But detailed directions would be difficult. Would it help if I gave you a six-figure map coordinate?"

"That would be perfect," Solo said. "But before you do, there's one thing that's puzzling me. You keep on saying 'they'—yet I thought Bartoluzzi was a lone wolf. Where does the hired help come from?"

"It's anything but that! It's the girl I told you about from Prague. My successor. But she seems to be mistress in more senses than one; she's the one that's giving the orders, making the decisions, working everything out. And she keeps on talking about 'my principals' and asking questions as though she were worried about the credit rating of Bart's network. You'd almost think she was trying to buy her way into it!"

"Maybe she is. Does she say who these principals are?"

"Not directly. But she has several times used the name Thrush—Thrush would not permit this, Thrush would expect that," the girl said in a puzzled tone. "Isn't that a funny thing to say!"

Chapter 17

Drama At The Bridge

BY THE TIME Solo reached the lower end of the valley a wind had risen and rain was sweeping down toward him between the trees.

Ten minutes later, he stopped the Citroën at the roadside and took out his field glasses. The viaduct was in full view, spanning a steep, wooded cleft between two belts of forest

—seven tall, narrow arches with a revetment at each end and six slender pillars in between. Even from this distance (it was still six or seven miles away) the agent could see clearly that the small blocks of yellow sandstone composing it had been fatally damaged by erosion.

There were two small observation platforms built out over the third and fifth arches—probably to act as refuges for linesmen when trains passed—but otherwise the single-track road was guarded only by a solitary iron rail above the shallow parapet.

It was no wonder, Solo thought, eyeing the flimsy structure through the binoculars, that they had been forced to bar the approaches!

He drove on—and found to his disgust that he must have made an error in reading the large-scale map of the area. For instead of climbing up to the rim of the valley as he had expected, the road plunged suddenly down and began following its floor. There was a network of lanes and byroads crisscrossing the forest just here, and he had obviously confused two of them in his haste. And so now—although he would arrive at the precise coordinate on the map that the girl had specified—he would be below the viaduct instead of above it.

Agitatedly he traced his path back on the map until he had found the point where he had left the correct route. To regain it, he would have to go back four or five miles… but could be afford the time?

Again he focused the glasses on the bridge. At the higher end he could see signs of activity—the cab of an old-fashioned truck above a clump of bushes, the roof of a car, figures moving.

No, the macabre stage for murder was already set. There was not a moment to lose; he would have to go on…

The valley road he was following seemed to be fairly well screened by trees. There was nobody actually on the viaduct or its approaches yet. It was just possible that he could run the car up to the arches without being spotted. In any case he would have to try. As quietly as he could, he urged the DS onward.

Overhanging trees and the steepness of the banks prevented him from seeing the ground beyond the lip of the valley—and presumably prevented those up there from seeing him—until he was almost below the bridge. But the slope on which the great piles were built was much gentler, and the trees had all been cut down. For a short distance on each side of the viaduct the road and all traffic on it would be visible to anyone above, if they happened to be watching.

Solo hoped they weren't watching as he coasted the Citroën to a halt under the third archway. It was over the fourth—through which ran the stream that had carved out the valley—that the section of old permanent way was most dangerous, according to Annike. Solo got carefully out of the car and gazed upward.

The viaduct seemed to be immensely high—a multiple façade soaring toward the sky on slender feet that tapered gently toward the top. Solo estimated its height at around a hundred and fifty-feet… and now that he was actually beneath it, he could see how precariously the pillars supported the old track far above. The stonework was cracked and fissured in dozens of places, and there were great gaps at the apex of the central arch where chunks of masonry had fallen away from the part immediately below the road.

He peered around the edge of the pillar and looked up the bank. He could just see the top of the truck's cab, but the steepness of the slope hid the rest of the vehicle and the people working on it. At any minute now, though, the cab might start moving over the bridge... and that would mean Illya Kuryakin would be moving too, moving to a certain death when the roadway collapsed.

Solo scanned the exposed slope bordering the revetment of the viaduct. The arch was wide enough at the bottom to conceal the DS parked behind it. But if he waded in to the rescue up that bank, he would rise into view as soon as he had scrambled up the first few yards, and for Bartoluzzi and his helper, he would be as easy a target as a duck in a shooting gallery.

Somewhere up there, Annike would be waiting to help him. He had told her to hide along the approach road and contact him when he appeared. But time was running out; he had no time to find her now. He had to get up there and stop that truck from reaching the unsafe part of the bridge.

And from where he was, deep in the valley, there was only one way to do it—he would have to scale the weathered face of the pillar itself!

It was an idea born of desperation. But there was a slim chance it might work. First, he could begin the climb by the car, on the inner side of the pillar, where he would be hidden from the truck. And when he reached the beginning of the curvature of the arch and had to move around to the outside, he could at least profit from the fact that the pile tapered and would thus be leaning very slightly away from him. Instead of forcing himself up a perpendicular face, he would only have to cope with a slope one or two degrees off the vertical!

On the other hand, of course, there was the rain.... Solo shrugged. There was no point in hanging around. He took a half dozen steel climber's pitons from the interior of the car and stuffed them into his jacket pocket with a small, heavy-headed hammer, slid a streamlined Walther model PP automatic into his waistband, and approached the face of the pillar.

Napoleon Solo had done a great many dangerous things in his life, and a good many mad ones too. But the maddest and most dangerous of all was that wild climb in the rain up the crumbling façade of the viaduct near Tharandt.

For the first twenty or thirty feet the sandstone blocks were fairly large and the interstices between them correspondingly wide; climbing was simply a matter of wedging in the toes, reaching up and finding a handhold, taking the weight of the body on the fingers as the foot scrabbled for a higher toehold—and then starting the process over again.

But, as soon as the blocks got smaller and the cracks narrower, the trouble began. Rain was gusting across the valley now in great clouds, plastering Solo's hair to his face, weighing down his clothing, and rendering slippery the polished surfaces of the stone. It was also turning the crumbs of old mortar and eroded flakes of sandstone in the gaps into a greasy paste in which fingers and toes skidded more easily than grasped. Under such circumstances climbing without a rope up an almost vertical face was a nightmare.

Every foot became a test of willpower, coaxing the screaming muscles and overtaxed sinews to hang on for just that second longer while the questing foot found a temporary resting-place that would take the strain, the groping fingers a crevice that wouldn't flake away the moment any weight was put on it.

When Solo was seventy-five or eighty feet from the ground, the face he was climbing began to curve outward over his head. He had reached the curvature of the arch. Now he would have to move around to the outside of the pillar.

Gritting his teeth, he started to edge around the corner. For a moment he was splayed out, like a butterfly on a pin, with his right hand and foot on the inner face of the pillar and his left on the outer. The problem now was to swing the right hand and foot outward and around the edge without losing purchase with the left while doing it!

Solo knew better than to look down. Behind him was an eighty foot drop to certain death, a dizzying perspective of wet stone dropping away to the road and the stream far below. But he did look up. He had to.