He was almost to the gangway now, and no one anywhere in sight. The last straggle of passengers had vanished into the dark doorway up there. He swept one last glance around, wishing his nerves would ease off a little. It was hard to be easy and nonchalant when every instinct he had was screaming a warning. He mounted the tread and ran lightly up the slope, pausing at the top to turn and wave to the watchers he couldn't see but knew were there. It was done. He had made it. He turned to step inside.
A slim, very erect figure moved out of a side door and stood facing him, obstructing the way. A man all in black, even to the jet-black hair and Mephistophelean beard. Only the blazing blue eyes and chill grin remained to give him away. Solo stopped as if he had walked into a concrete post. Ice touched his nerves.
"You!" he gasped, and in that second an infernal buzzing started up in his skull, making him cringe, blurring his vision. "You!" he croaked. "But—I shot you, didn't I? In Paris?"
"So you did, Napoleon." The familiar voice came cold and firm over the hellish racket in his skull. "So you did. And now it's my turn!"
Solo snatched for his weapon, but it was also his turn to be too late. The pistol in Kuryakin's fist spat once, and Solo felt the pang, right in the middle of his forehead. It spat again, but he never felt that one at all. He sagged slowly forward, unseeing and uncaring. Kuryakin caught him gently, settled him over one sturdy shoulder, turned and went, heavy-footed, to where the aircraft's emergency escape hatch stood gaping open ready. It was on the far side of the cabin from the watchers. To the pop-eyed passengers he offered a genial grin.
"It's quite all right, folks. This is only a film sequence for a TV show. Won't keep you more than a minute. Fun, isn't it?"
Beyond the open hatch, down there on the concrete, stood a pickup wagon, all ready. A couple of husky agents stood on its roof. They reached up for the Russian's limp burden, lowered it gently down and inside, then made room for him to jump down himself. Seconds later the wagon rolled away, swiftly and silently, to a far corner of the airfield. There a charter plane stood, propellers clicking over. Ten minutes more, and the plane was airborne over Hialeah and heading north.
CHAPTER NINE
PART of the aircraft cabin had been set aside as an emergency operating room. Solo lay inert on the narrow bed as Susan Harvey checked his pulse and respiration and announced herself satisfied. Waverly and Kuryakin were standing anxiously by.
"It's going to be all right," she said. "You planted the anaesthetic darts just right, Illya. He'll be ready in a moment or two."
"You'll be able to locate the exact spot of the insertion?"
"No trouble to that, Mr. Waverly. Here, you can see for yourself." She lifted the unconscious man's head and showed where a small flap of skin and hair could be lifted up easily. "Plastic plug in place. I doubt if I'd have to use instruments, other than a small pair of forceps. Still, I'll scrub up and do it thoroughly."
"All right." Kuryakin sighed and relaxed a shade. "I'll go and get this comic opera makeup off." He ran fingers through the caked dye on his hair and made a face.
"I rather like it dark," she said. "It suits you!"
He glared at her, but the words which came to his tongue were hardly suitable for saying aloud, so he swallowed them and went limping away to the aircraft's tiny washroom. Waverly lingered, but his thoughts had gone far beyond the operation.
"You anticipate no difficulty in removing this gadget from Mr. Solo's brain, but can you give any estimate as to whether it might have produced any permanent effect?"
"That's something I won't be able to say until we've had a full-scale check-up. Not until we get back to a proper laboratory. The possibilities are immense, and I've nothing at all to go on. Most obvious, of course, is the risk of infection, but I imagine the Countess would be too good a surgeon to make that kind of mistake. There may, also, be localized brain damage. Most probable, I would say, is some kind of mental disturbance, and that is quite outside my field."
"I see. Thank you for being candid, Miss Harvey. I'll leave you now to do what you must. Keep him under sedation until we can lay on a proper checkup."
Waverly went away to his cabin, there to activate a radio link which disturbed a quiet, urbane-looking man who was at that moment leaning back in a seat in the very aircraft Solo had been booked to fly in. At the faint bleat of his communicator he stood up and made his way briskly to the washroom, there to pull out his instrument and answer,
"Crawford White here."
"Everything went as planned, Mr. White. You know what to do now. When you change planes in Rome you will be bothered by the Rome police, you will make a break, escape from them, and then go to ground. It has all been prepared. You will be Mr. Solo until you receive a further order from
"I have all that, Mr. Waverly."
"Good. You may now remove the lead from your module and go ahead as planned. No more communication with us by this channel. Be alert for signals from Corfu, and reply accordingly. Out!"
Whereupon Crawford White carefully deactivated his communicator so that it would not sound again, then, with equal care, set about peeling off a protective layer of lead foil from the module that was securely fastened to his jaw bone by adhesive tape. It was no coincidence that he looked very like Napoleon Solo in appearance, nor that his voice was very similar in tone. He had been selected with those very characteristics in mind. He was about to become Solo in everything but the fact. It was highly important that Countess Louise did not discover that her tame dog had shed his leash. It was all part of a plan that Waverly had concocted, one that required Solo to put his head back into the mouth of the tigress once again, just as soon as it could be established that he was sound in mind and body.
There were minor details to clear up. The stolen modules had been recovered and were even now being inspected by a team of experts under Cronshaw. The jamming interference was off, but could be restored at the least sign of consciousness in Solo. And Crawford White's module was an exact harmonic match for the one in Solo's head. Waverly scanned through a long list of such lesser items, ticking them off. A lot of work had gone into this operation. Harmless copies of the modules were already made and standing by for the next step. Waverly chewed on his pipe and reviewed his plans over and over, striving to find some weakness in them. It was the only thing to do, now, until Solo had been checked out. On him rested the final action.
Chores done, his musings turned to a slightly different theme. There seemed to be a fairly firm and unbroken chain of effect from the theft of the radio-modules, then to Countess Louise, and to this devilish device for controlling a person like a puppet. But how did this concern Thrush? If there was a logical tie up, Waverly couldn't see it. The Countess was definitely involved with Thrush, of that he was certain, although he didn't know just how she functioned within that vast, faceless and sinister organization.
But how on earth could the ability to implant a radio control unit inside a person's skull have any great attraction for the evil men whose one aim was to dominate the civilized world? It was tempting to think they had some wild idea of surgical implantation for large numbers of people, but that just was not feasible. In the first place there weren't all that many modules available. Even the nonprofit resources of military research couldn't make them in very great quantity. And in the second place there was the surgery to think of, and the complex of control equipment. The idea just would not work.