“Understood, sir.”
“While you’re waiting for the crew to arrive, may I suggest you finish your crossword puzzle? You really should not have let Mr. Solo convince you that ‘A Petty Annoyance’ is ‘Crossword Puzzle.’ It’s ‘Minor Irritation,’ a rather more ordinary, if less amusing, solution.”
Illya settled down to wait, with one eye on the Thrushes and the other on his crossword puzzle. The solution Waverly gave him changed three he had incorrectly filled in, and the puzzle was nearly completed when a group of capable looking young men with attache cases and U.N.C.L.E. Specials arrived to take over for him.
The prisoners were bundled off by two of the young men, and the rest started to take the Gambol filing system and offices apart in a methodical way designed to process every bolt, fingerprint and dust-mote in the area. The Type Two search was generally considered the finest field analysis that could be brought to bear with equipment at the portable stage.
“Open Channel D, please,” Illya requested as he returned to the street. He was eager to start playing the Great White Hunter again.
“Yes, Mr. Kuryakin. We have Mr. Solo pinpointed for you. He’s apparently much closer than halfway around the globe; he seems to be at Coney Island. His tracker was taken there directly, and then it bounced around for a bit. But the latest report is-excuse me! My monitor shows that yours is the only tracer left active. Mr. Solo’s yellow blip has vanished. Perhaps you had better get out to Coney Island quickly; with today’s upsets the future of our operation re Breelen’s common may depend on it.”
“The future of Breelen’s?” Illya asked no one in particular. “What about Napoleon’s future?” He pulled out into snarled traffic and headed towards Brooklyn. He gave only a part of his attention to his bumper-to-bumper traffic negotiations with people going home late. Most of his mind was centered on the question, “Does Napoleon have a future?” He finally managed to break free in some one-way traffic; fighting the signals down Manhattan was a bigger problem at times than fighting Thrush.
The wait at the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel wasn’t phenomenal, but he was losing the last of his patience as he crept forward. Beeping from his communicator came as a welcome break to purgatory on wheels.
“Mr. Kuryakin, our preliminary search of Gambol and Associates has failed to tie any of the names we have gathered to Thrush in any way. The only answers we are liable to get may be at Coney Island, whether Mr. Solo is still operating there or not. Proceed at all possible speed. Communications informs me your car is hardly moving.” Waverly actually sounded excited over the airwaves.
“Proceeding at all possible speed as ordered,” said Illya. “It’s just that, at the moment, possible and minimal are synonymous. You said earlier that a ‘large number’ of investors was involved, sir. Just how many makes up a ‘large number’? How many Thrushes am I out to find evidence against?”
“It seems to be slightly short of five thousand. We have collected the names of almost five thousand investors who will carry off a huge profit for Thrush unless you and Mr. Solo manage to come up with something at Coney Island. Naturally, we can discount some small number as legitimate investors who simply took a ride on the Reading, as it were. But individual briefs, prepared in the case of each one of these several thousands suspected of criminal activity, will keep us busy for many months.” Waverly’s matter-of-fact recounting of numbers, skipping lightly over the matter of Napoleon, rankled Illya as he crept forward in the Tunnel traffic pattern.
“About a third of this group, and their cohorts in London, forced Breelen’s up to nearly sixty-three,” continued Waverly, “and then they sold. Not only sold-they sold short. When the price reached sixty-two and seven-eighths, the orders poured in so fast that I’m told the tape was running over an hour behind.”
“The tape was what? What tape?”
“The securities ticker-tape. It was running an hour behind the actual transactions on the floor of the Exchange, simply because Breelen’s was being traded in thousands of small odd-lot sales. Our man in Finance was very impressed.”
An opening appeared in the traffic ahead, and Illya put the U.N.C.L.E. sedan through it. A squeal of brakes at his rear told him some less fortunate driver had just missed the same hole. Then the nickel dropped.
“Mr. Waverly!”
“Yes,” his chief answered.
“That price. You said sixty-two and seven-eighths. If you found a seven letter word for ‘Arctic Oil Source’ with the middle letters ‘RWH,’ could you fill in the block of words surrounding 62 across in that puzzle?”
“I finished that some time ago, Mr. Kuryakin. ‘An Arctic Oil Source’ is ‘Narwhal,’ and . .
“Exactly. And with that, I can solve 62 across. A five letter word completing ‘The Magnificent-‘ is ‘Seven.’ And 62 down is ‘Cake or Stop.’ The answer to that has to be ‘Short.’ The puzzle tells you to sell short at sixty-two and seven-eighths!”
Anything further Illya might have said was lost as his message was cut off by the solid walls of the Battery Tunnel; he had finally made it in, and his chief was left with a dead communicator.
Waverly sat back in the straight chair he preferred at his desk. One hand flicked open a line to U.N.C.L.E. Cryptoanalysis; the other searched through the mound of files and papers in front of him for a copy of the puzzle. Both hands got results simultaneously-the blank puzzle form and a voice from his desk communicator that said, “Crypto here, sir.”
“One of our agents has just suggested that we correlate the Thrush activity on the Stock Exchange with the morning paper’s crossword puzzle ” he said.
“What?” The voice from Cryptoanalysis was guarded. A request for solutions to the Kaiser’s intimate code, and improvements on the code itself, would be answered in minutes, but every now and then Crypto thought the old man had taken leave of his grip on reality.
“Get on it right away, will you? Go back a few months, and see if the puzzle could be used to transmit information.” Waverly signed off and turned back to the myriad papers before him. Two floors below, a tall bony Negro turned his desk communicator carefully to off, and stared blankly at the wall while he tried to remember if this was the wildest pipe-dream he’d ever been assigned to track down, and if Waverly was the wackiest boss he’s ever worked for.
Two pretty girls giggling behind him broke off his muttering. He turned and faced them, trying to look severe. “You heard the man. Get your behinds in gear, sisters, and let’s crack the Crossword Puzzle Caper and save the world.”
The girls stopped giggling. The pixie-faced blonde spun a rotary file open to crossword, cf., and followed the references to the morning daily. The redhead fed the visual unit at her side a magna-chip each time one was handed to her from the records.
Each chip was read and the thousands of bits of data thereon were flashed to the huge U.N.C.L.E. computer on the floor below. A run-code notified the computer that a Code Four priority situation existed, and a rat’s-nest of integrated circuits reached out electronically to queue up the autocorrelation program for immediate time-sharing. The Central Processing Unit blithely kept working on six other jobs while the data came in, making no great effort at solving the problem until several month’s puzzles were stored on drum.
The girl at the rotary file had keyed in instructions to set the correlation in motion, leading it to each day’s puzzle. By the time six months of newspapers had been scanned the computer was over two-thirds committed to the problem with interim solutions stacked up on drums awaiting a later pass.