"There you are, you see!" Kuryakin yelled again above the clatter of the rotors. "The Commendatore made it, after all!" But from Solo's helicopter there was no reply. One of the men in the Fiat must have been an uncommonly good marksman, or unusually lucky, for a stray shot had creased the agent's temple, leaving a scarlet furrow across the skin and plunging him into unconsciousness for the second time in two hours.
And that was not all. The slug that had knocked out Solo had scored a second and more valuable bull.
In its trajectory, it had passed clean through an eyepiece of the sunglasses and shattered forever the remaining lens of the damaged pair...
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Glass— Handle With Care
"There are two things I do not entirely understand from your report," Alexander Waverly said to Solo and Kuryakin. "In the first place, why did you decide to secrete a homing device in your car when, so far as you knew, you were driving straight to the airport to catch a plane for New York? Had you in fact reason to suspect the young woman at that time?"
"Oh, yes," Solo replied. "Look: my car was sabotaged when I left Rinaldi's laboratory. That had to be somebody connected with the S.I.D., or somebody who had access to S.I.D. information: nobody at Carlsen's house could possibly have known I was going there. Then we met the del Renzio girl just after we had nearly been run down in the street. She could have fingered us there. Again, it was she who suggested we ate at Angelo's—and the gangster in the next booth was the man who fixed the lift at Leonardo's apartment. Only Giovanna knew that we were on our way there. She must either have tipped him off or made sure that he overheard the crucial part of our conversation."
"Also," Illya added, "when I overheard Carlsen talking to that same gangster, he made a great point of the fact that we were 'very well covered'—so well that it was unnecessary to try and kill us any more! We had just met Giovanna: if she was doing the covering, they would certainly not need to have outside help, for she was in on all our plans... the men we saw in the street were not Carabinieri or S.I.D agents at all, but covering agents from Thrush."
"Exactly. It had to be her," Solo said. "I borrowed a car and someone fixed a bomb in it. She knew the number of the borrowed car. We were attacked in an arcade on our way to a meeting with her. Only she would have known where we were coming from, and therefore the route we would take."
"I see. That answers my second question, then," Waverly said. "I was going to ask why you happened to have concealed from her the fact that the sunglasses were the medium Leonardo had used for his hologram. Obviously, if you suspected her, that would be the last thing you'd reveal... Miss Eriksson, though—she, I imagine, was a surprise to you?"
"A most agreeable one!" the two agents said together.
Waverly smiled. "Fortunately she is quite all right. I spoke to the Commendatore by radio-telephone this morning. His men moved in and cleaned up the gunmen just after you took off. Carlsen himself and the girl were in the third car and they got away... but the rest are safely under lock and key."
They were standing in a corner of one of the second-floor laboratories in the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York. At the other end of the room, white-coated assistants were helping the Chief Technician to set up apparatus on a long bench. Lieutenant Trevitt, who had been listening to this exchange without speaking, now grinned at Illya. "Seems like our little escape on the street here was only an appetizer for what you were going to go through!" he said. "What I want to know though—how in hell did you manage to persuade a one-man chopper to fly to that airport when the pilot was unconscious? Telepathy?"
It was Solo's turn to smile. He tapped the sticking plaster on his forehead. "It's pretty rugged in there!" he said. "We're a hard-headed family, you know. There was no mystery: the helicopter just continued on its course until I regained consciousness. Illya was flying alongside, yelling... but I woke up before he'd plucked up the nerve to change planes in mid-air!"
"There is a Russian proverb I could quote..." Kuryakin began with mock wrath, when the Chief Technician called that everything was ready. The four men moved across to the bench.
Solo saw a ruby laser similar to the one he had watched at Rinaldi's laboratory, a hologram plate in a movable clamp—and, between them in a complicated cradle of adjustable jaws, the battered sunglasses to get which they had gone through so much. "It's a million to one chance, I should say," he mused, staring at the chipped side-piece, the one empty frame and the splintered lozenge of tinted glass in the other. "Surely a lens that's cracked and starred like that cannot pass light through it in the same way as an undamaged one?" "You're worrying needlessly, Mr. Solo," the Chief Technician said. "We carried out a few experiments before you came down. Look..." He turned a switch and plunged the room into darkness.
A pink glow suffused the bench as the laser hummed into life. Rose-colored fingers manipulated the clamps, turning the sunglasses this way and that... and suddenly, as absurdly as a conjurer producing huge flags from an empty glass, the meaningless blobs of the hologram plate vanished and they saw floating in three dimensions before them a piece of foolscap paper covered from margin to margin in single-spaced red and black typing.
The list of Thrush members-designate in Europe had been decoded at last!
"It was the starred lens he had used all the time, you see!" the Chief Technician said. "I guess it was the nearest he could get, optically, to frosted glass in the time at his disposal... the plain one was nothing to do with it!"
Waverly was at the phone. "For God's sake send a photographer up to the optics lab at once," he said excitedly. "Holography may be the latest in scientific discoveries—but sunglasses can get broken and I shan't be happy until I have that list on an old fashioned photographic plate!"
Illya smiled affectionately. "And when the flash has flashed," he said, "I guess Napoleon and I can get out for a well-earned rest!"
The Head of Policy and Operations stared at him. He jammed a pipe upside down into his mouth. "Rest!" he snapped, "What do you mean—rest! Carlsen and Giovanna del Renzio are still at large. The four people who kidnapped Mr. Solo have yet to be brought to justice. Lieutenant Trevitt has a line on the man whose car was used in the snatch—and through him on the owner of the private plane which flew Solo from Johnstown to Italy. The man and woman who impersonated Del Florio and his assistant have to be tracked down, and so does the rifleman who murdered the witness in the precinct house." He took the pipe from his mouth and glared at his two most trusted agents. "Why, gentlemen," he said, "this case has only just started!"
Table of Contents
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN