Pulp Fiction | The Finger in the Sky Affair by Peter Leslie (10 page)

"
Look out
!" Solo shouted suddenly.

Moving with incredible speed, he leaned across Kuryakin and yanked the door shut. Then, in a single complex movement, he slumped back against his own door, opening it with his elbow, and subsided backwards onto the ground, dragging the Russian bodily after him.

"Napoleon! What the...? What are you..." Illya gasped as he landed in the grass beside the roadway. "What was that...?"

"Quick!" Solo hissed. "Into the bushes..."

The soft explosions of the silenced revolvers wielded by the men on the far side of the drive were hardly audible as they wriggled backwards into the shrubbery. Bullets thwacked heavily into the leaves above their heads.

"Did you see them?" Solo whispered. "Four, I think—two on each side of the guy with that tripod thing."

"Yes, I saw. Just an instant before you pulled the door shut. I'm afraid my reaction was very delayed....I wasn't expecting to be ambushed. But at least we know why the motor stopped."

"What d'you mean?"

"The thing on the tripod. I saw them testing one like it in East Germany some time ago. It's an electronic gadget—creates a field of force which will put any electrical machinery in its orbit out of commission. Too short range for general use—they've only been able to make them with an effective field of three or four yards so far—but perfect for a job like this!"

"So in effect it
was
ignition failure? The field stops the coil functioning properly, I suppose?"

"Yes—look out! I think they're going to rush us..."

The shooting had stopped. A hundred yards to their right, the lighted windows of the hospital stared impersonally down the drive. On their left, the glare of the city silhouetted the archway through which they had driven a few minutes before. Straight ahead, the dark bulk of the stationary car masked the adversaries whose stealthy movements they could just hear over the rumble of distant traffic.

"I guess they'll be fanning out," Solo murmured. "Cross the drive further up and come down through the shrubberies to take us on the flank..."

But for a long time nothing happened. The two men lay in the soft mold under the bushes, straining every nerve to see or hear a significant movement, their guns at the ready. Once Illya reached out for a fragment of tree branch lying on the ground and pitched it into a clump of oleanders some way to their left. At once the plopping of the silenced guns recommenced. Twigs and morsels of leaf shredded to the ground as the heavy slugs ripped through the bushes.

"They
have
spread out, Napoleon," the Russian whispered. "Those shots were coming from almost opposite the place that branch landed..."

He groped around in the mold and discovered a flat stone half buried in the loam. Prising it loose he spun it a dozen yards away in the opposite direction. The moment it landed among the leaves a similar fusillade started. After a few seconds, it stopped.

"You're right," Solo muttered. "Dead opposite again. They're strung out along the far side of the roadway. But I don't get it: they're at least five to two. Why don't they cross higher up and rush us?"

Illya shook his head. From their place of concealment, the two agents peered anxiously up the drive, strained back to look up into the branches above their heads, and craned under the immobilized Peugeot.

Nothing happened.

Solo fired two shots at random under the car. The double crack of the unsilenced automatic was thunderously loud in the darkness under the trees. But there was no answering fire from across the drive.

"I don't like it," he said quietly. "It's almost as though they were just keeping us pinned down. They only shoot if they think we're trying to move. If they wanted to kill us, they could easily —"

He broke off abruptly, his head cocked to one side, listening. From somewhere up by the hospital there was a clatter of feet. Voices shouted and a door slammed. Then a car engine burst into life and a moment later twin headlights blazed into view around a corner of the building and raced down the drive towards them. Fifty yards short of the Peugeot, the vehicle screeched to a halt. A wide door opened and two or three men ran from the bushes bordering the drive to pile inside. There was a grinding of gears, and the car lurched forward to stop again on the far side of their own.

"They're loading the tripod," Illya said, raising his gun arm as the driver engaged first gear and revved up the engine.

"Wait!" Solo laid a hand on his forearm and pressed it to the ground. "We might be sorry...Look."

The vehicle emerged from behind the Peugeot and slowed down as it came opposite the oleanders into which Illya had thrown the branch. It was—they saw now that they were no longer blinded by its headlights—a Citroen ambulance, long and low. A final man swung aboard, and the ambulance gathered speed, rocketing down towards the archway, where it swung left into the street with a squeal of its low-pressure tires.

Solo was already on his feet, running towards the hospital. "Come on!" he shouted. "I'm afraid we'll be too late, but we have to see."

They pelted down the drive and burst in through the swinging doors. In the middle of the tiled foyer a uniformed porter lay on his back with outflung arms. A bullet hole in the center of his forehead stared upwards like an obscene third eye. A receptionist slumped across the inquiry desk, her starched cap resting in a pool of blood. On the graceful curve of the stairway sprawled two male nurses in short white jackets.

At the far end of the entrance hall a young nurse stood petrified by the open door of an elevator, her eyes wide with horror.

"Nurse!" Solo shouted. "Quick! The man from the air crash—the survivor...What ward's he in?"

"Number s-seventeen...F-f-first floor," the girl faltered. "What happened? I c-c-can't understand —"

But Solo and Illya were already half-way up the shallow flight of stairs. They dashed down the rubber-tiled corridor, paused at an intersection to consult an indicator board, and then hurried on to the far end of a passage.

The general wards appeared to be situated on the higher floors, for the doors were so close together that the rooms on the first floor must be quite small. Number 17 was the last on the left.

Solo pushed it open and strode inside.

The narrow iron bedstead was empty, sheets, pillows and blankets tumbled in a heap on the floor beside it. Bottles, glasses and jars on the bedside table appeared undisturbed, but the gray-curtained screen which had been around the patient was folded back and now leaned against a wall.

"God damn it!" Solo exclaimed bitterly in a rare moment of profanity. "Abducted under our eyes! Those THRUSH men in the drive
were
told just to keep us pinned down. We could have made a break for it and at least tried to stop them, if only we'd realized..." He broke off with an exasperated shrug.

Illya was touching his arm. There was a movement on the far side of the bed.

In two strides, Solo was across the room. A nurse lay face down on the floor. As he bent to grasp her shoulders, she groaned and shook her head.

"Easy, easy," he soothed in French as he hauled her to her feet. "Take it easy. It's all over now. Nobody's going to harm you...There. Sit down in this chair....Illya, give her a glass of water, will you?"

They propped the woman up and placed a pillow so she could lean her head against the wall. Congealed blood traced a network of lines from a dark contusion on her temple, but otherwise she seemed undamaged. Kuryakin soaked a wad of cotton in water and gently bathed the wound as she slowly recovered her senses. "It's all right; it's all right," he said quietly as recollection flamed in her eyes. "We have come to help you. Take your time...and tell us what happened..."

The nurse was a thin, gray-haired woman in her fifties, with a lined face. She made a visible effort to pull herself together, touched the ugly bruise with a trembling hand, and looked up at them dubiously.

"What...what...Who are you? What do you want?" she said at last in a weak voice.

"We were going to speak to your patient," Solo said, mastering his impatience. "But we were too late. He has been kidnapped, hasn't he? Please try to remember what happened."

"What happened?...The patient!" She remembered suddenly and caught her breath, looking wildly towards the empty bed. "Oh, those men! They hit him, they beat him so much...and then they..." She shuddered and began to cry, her spare body racked by great sobs.

Illya glanced again at the bed. There was blood on the undersheet, blood on the discarded pillows, splashes of blood on the tangle of blankets.

"Exactly what happened?" he repeated.

The woman pulled a handkerchief from her starched sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. "Forgive me," she said, sniffing. "It was such a—a shock...The patient had hardly been here a half hour..."

"Was he badly hurt?"

"Not—not when he came in. Profoundly shocked, of course. And very badly shaken. But apart from bruises and—and—and superficial burns...he did not appear too much damaged. He was to have an X-ray examination to see if there were any internal injuries...I was preparing him...That's why I thought it so odd that they should send an ambulance from...from..."

"From where?" Solo prompted gently.

"They
said
they were from the Anglo-American hospital at Villefranche, Monsieur. As the man was an American, and he kept on talking, talking all the time in American—well, at first I thought maybe they had decided to transfer him to a hospital where they would understand what he said."

"And later?"

"They appeared at the door with a stretcher, and they told me they had orders to transfer him. They had all the necessary pieces of paper, so I...well, I began to help them move him onto the stretcher. Then the patient himself seemed to question what they were doing..."

"He began to protest?"

"I could not understand what he said—I do not speak English—but I think so. They tried to pacify him...and so did I, as far as I was able. Then he attempted to get off the stretcher and they...they...Oh, it was horrible!...They hit him..."

"I understand. Do not distress yourself, Mademoiselle. They beat him unconscious, is that it?"

The woman nodded, tears coursing down her cheeks. "I had begun to wonder, just before. For I know most of the orderlies at Villefranche, and I realized that I had never seen any of these men before. And although they spoke French well enough, there was, well, something about them..."

Solo nodded. "And then you questioned their authority yourself?"

"As soon as the first blow fell, of course. It was so rapid.. so
vicious
—the poor man was unconscious almost before he had time to cry out. There were four of them, you see..."

"What did you do?"

"Naturally I tried to stop them, Monsieur. But two of them held me—one with his hand over my mouth—while the others...finished their vile work with the patient. And then...and then—while they still held me—one of the others...a little dark fellow, he was...came over and hit me with a —"

The nurse stopped talking suddenly and pressed her clenched hands against her mouth.

"And you have no idea at all, what the patient was talking about before they came in? You didn't catch anything he said—even a single word—before he was beaten insensible?"

The woman shook her head dumbly.

"He wasn't entirely unconscious, Napoleon," Illya said. "Look."

He had picked up from the floor the wooden board to which the patient's temperature chart was clipped. Wordlessly, he held it out for Solo to see.

Below the thick black line which had begun to move out from the left hand margin, a wider, more vivid line in red wavered across the squared paper. And above it, two hastily daubed symbols stood out against the white in the same sticky medium.

"He must have used his finger to write us a message," Illya said soberly. "using his own blood as ink..."

"The guy must have been lying apparently unconscious on the floor," Solo said. "And while THRUSH's thugs were beating up the nurse, he opened his eyes and saw the chart where it had been knocked to the ground in the struggle."

"Yes," Illya said. "And he'd only have a moment before they picked him up to put him on the stretcher, so he'd have to work very fast. The thing is—how would his mind have worked and what was he trying to tell us with these daubs?"

They were back in the T.C.A. building at the airport. Matheson, the Technical Director, had lent them his office while he supervised the crash inquiry team working in the wreckage out on the floodlit runway, and they had decided to have a council of war before deciding on their next move.

Solo picked up the temperature chart with its gruesome symbols. "This guy's a steward," he said, "so whatever information he has will at least be given with a semi-technical mind...Let's analyze this thing properly."

The survivor's temperature had been logged five times—once when he was first put in the ambulance, again just before they reached the hospital, and three times, at quarter-hour intervals, in Room 17. The graph joining the five blobs was almost flat: a heavy black line sloping faintly downwards towards the right-hand side of thte sheet with a uniform inclination. Standing on the line at its left-hand end was a long thin rectangle drawn in blood, with a smaller, tall rectangle on top of it. Higher up, on the far side of the paper, a crudely executed dart shape with a crossed tail dipped its nose towards the rectangles. There was a facsimile of the black line laboriously traced in red about an inch lower down the sheet. And apart from a few smudges below the dart shape, that was all.

"Well, one thing seems clear," Solo said at last. "Whatever the message is, it's not in any way an attempt at actual writing: there's nothing here remotely like lettering. So what we have to solve is a picture puzzle."

"I agree. And I should think it fairly certain that this sort of thin arrow with a stroke across its tail is meant to represent the aircraft, wouldn't you?" Illya asked. "It's not at all unlike a Trident."