She had nothing with which to tackle those bars on the window.
Suddenly, she heard a sound—and froze, senses alert.
A vague, almost far-off whisper of noise. She cocked her head, listening. Now the noise grew louder. A scratching, pawing sort of sound.
It was coming from one of the metal lockers.
Mark? A feeling of jubilation surged through her. Was it possible Slate had dashed in here.... The sound abruptly materialized as a whimper. A human moan of despair. That wasn't Mark Slate. You couldn't have gotten a sound like that out of him if you nailed him to a barn door.
There was no mistaking now the sobbing murmur of a woman's voice.
She stepped rapidly to the locker cabinets, and waited. The sound came again. Muffled and indistinct, but a woman's moan all the same. It seemed to be coming from the third battered file on the line. April moved to the tinny door, jiggled the damaged handle and pulled it back.
Almost timed to the gesture, the woman crammed inside, her figure distorted from the narrow confines of her prison, fell forward. April caught her. She had a fleeting glimpse of untidy brown hair, cut in a boyish bob, a piquant face and a shapely arrangement of curves encased in a winding sheet of some kind. The sheet came apart, grey and molding, to reveal a torn, tattered blue dress of a wooly texture.
The woman, girl really, squirmed in her grasp, her arms fighting the folds of the sheet. She settled on the basement floor.
"You—you—" she gasped, breathing deeply.
"Me, me," April agreed. "Do you usually hide in closets? You don't look like an old maid."
She plucked the remainder of the crumbling sheet away from the girl so that she could sit up. She watched as the girl caught her breath. No matter how smudged and sooty the face, there was no hiding the gloriously creamy skin. Her eyes were dark and flashing, her mouth a fine cherry bud. The nose was retroussé. All in all, the last person April would expect to find in a battered tin locker in a damp old basement in the middle of nowhere.
The girl brushed at her cheek, nervously. "You can't be one of them. You wouldn't have let me out—"
"By them, you mean Thrush?"
The girl nodded, her eyes frowning at April's unusual garb of oversized male clothes. "Have they gone?"
"Yes. Leaving me here to wonder what surprise they have in store for me. Who are you, Alice-Hide-in-the-Closet?"
The girl shook her head, pushing to her feet.
"I'm just somebody they don't want on their hands anymore."
April studied her. "That means you are either from Internal Revenue, Discarded Lovers Incorporated or Enemy Agents, Unlimited. Which is it?"
The girl winced. "I can't tell you."
"All right. We'll discuss that later. Do you know anything about bombs?"
Her eyes opened fearfully. "They haven't—no, they wouldn't do that—this place was one of their best hideouts in the city. Oh, unless—they did pack all their supplies in that blue panel truck!"
"Ah." April smiled, as little as she felt like it. "Then perhaps you'll rack your newly air-conditioned brain and try to think where they might have left some explosive forget-me-not for both of us?"
"I can't," the girl wailed. "I just don't know. Oh, are you sure? If they do that it means the end of my assignment and—"
April shook her head.
"Honey, you haven't been listening. If there's a loud noise in here, we will both have no tomorrow."
The girl swayed, falling back against the sink for support. She saw the faucet and the tiny drip of a globule of water from the rusty tap. "I'm so thirsty," she whimpered. "I need some water—" She looked around for a glass, her eyes almost glazed. April could see that she still hadn't quite collected all her faculties. She might have been sealed in the locker for a long time.
But something the girl had said held her. It set off a bell in her brain, an alarum of warning that meant something. Something important.
"Water," April echoed. "Say that again."
"Water," the girl flared. "I want some water. What's so peculiar about that?"
April Dancer smiled. It had come to her. Yes, the only solution to the bomb she could not find.
"Yes, water. I want some too. Lots of it, honey. All the water in the world."
So saying, she turned on the tap full blast, making certain to employ the rotting rubber stopper to close off the drain. The girl watched in bewilderment as April clambered like a monkey toward the crisscrossing maze of pipes. April stood on her toes to crank one of the large round valve handles. Suddenly, from a broken section of piping, rust-colored water shot down to the cobbled basement floor, rushing like a cataract to meet the walls of the room. April came down from the pipes, raced to the locked door, whipping off the shirt she had wrested from the corpse and stuffing it effectively into the crevice where the wood met the stone floor. She looked around the basement like a wild woman, spied another valve and busied herself once again. The strange girl shrank back against the lockers, frightened by this maniacal behavior. But April persevered. She was moving like some galvanized mechanical toy, setting all the water outlets in the basement to full power.
THRUSH had left the water power on. She meant to put it to good use.
The girl shivered, moaned again, as the wet, rusty waves washed over her shoes, staining her silk stockings.
"What are you trying to do?" she whispered. "Drown us both?"
April was grinning from the center of the basement, admiring the slow but definite rise of the water level. Her long hair was quite wet and dangling now but the grim smile that played about her mouth was almost a happy one.
"Water, water, everywhere," she quoted, "nor any drop to drink."
The girl goggled at her. "That's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner"—what is your name?" She was whispering again, as if to ensure April that she was ready to trust her, no matter how erratically she was behaving.
"April Dancer here. Performing the Gunga Din ritual. I generally work for an organization known as Uncle."
The girl's eyes bulged.
"U.N.C.L.E.?" she spelled quickly. "Well, why didn't you say so?"
''You didn't ask me. But we girls have to stick together. Now, honey, you are—"
"Paula Jones," the girl said. "Joanna Paula Jones. But I prefer Paula so don't laugh, please. It's a name my father gave me because he was in the Navy for forty years. Oh, dear. What's the use! I'm with U.S. Naval Intelligence, Miss Dancer."
April couldn't resist a smirk. She gazed about them at the water building on all sides. The cast iron legs of the sink were slowly being submerged under the force of the rising tide.
"You're in your element, Miss Jones. And we do have the lockers, too. However, back to my request. It's very necessary that we stay as close together as possible. I expect some concussion, perhaps a tidal wave to tell the truth. We'll be better off like two peas in a pod. Topsy and Eva, you know."
"But where," Joanna Paula Jones blurted, "can we go?" It was as if she understood for the first time why April was banking everything on the water. "We still don't know where they put the thing—if there is a thing—"
"No," April said soberly, taking the girl's hand and leading her toward the lockers. "But let's play my hunch. To be on the safe side."
The Jones girl tried not to cry, following April dumbly, letting herself be led to the lockers once more. April knew the classic symptoms. First big assignment. First big scare when a girl realized she could actually get killed playing Spies. She urged the girl on quickly. Below all her own banter, a facade against terror, she was genuinely worried. A lot of valuable time had elapsed. Suppose the water didn't rise fast enough? What if the bomb were planted elsewhere, other than in the basement?