To their astonishment a confused sound burst from the tiny speaker, and a moment later—distorted but understandable—Illya Kuryakin's agitated voice: "... misfired …Bartoluzzi has spotted me, and I have been handed over to the authorities as Cernic... taken with military… East Germany... back to Prague..."
The line abruptly went dead.
"That's smart!" Solo said admiringly. "He must have denounced him as Cernic the moment he found out he wasn't Cernic! That way, he roped in soldiers to take the impostor out of his hair."
He paused and then added reflectively, "The only thing is, what do I do? Illya will be able to identify himself in time in Prague... but where has your boyfriend got to in the meantime?"
"Bart would never do that," the girl said decidedly. "Never."
"Never do what?"
"Let them take away a possible witness against him. I know Bart. And I know the way his mind works. If you ask me, he's just using the military to get the man across a frontier for which he hasn't any papers or something. As soon as it's convenient to him, he'll contrive to get your friend back again—and after that I wouldn't rate his chances very high."
"What do you mean?" Solo asked uneasily.
"He'll take him to that place of his and kill him. You'll see."
"Place? What place?"
"His headquarters. He has a fantastic place in a forest somewhere south of Dresden—a cross between the world's most comprehensive junkyard and a medieval castle!"
"And you think he'll hijack the prisoner and take him there?"
"I'm certain of it. The swine," the girl said vehemently. "The rotten swine... and the woman's years older than me!"
"Do you know the way to this place? Could you take me there?... You'd like to get your own back, wouldn't you? Do you know the way?"
The girl stopped and turned to face him. "Of course I know," she said.
"Crazy!" Solo cried, taking her elbow and turning her toward the row of parked cars. "We're on our way!"
Emilo Bartoluzzi was not a man to work himself if he could persuade others to do it for him. Having no forged papers suitable for a west-east crossing of the East German frontier with Illya, he had therefore decided to denounce the character he was impersonating and allow the authorities to convey the Russian there for him.
Once he was some way into the country, a rapid change of ownership would have to be effected—because Bartoluzzi had to get hold of the impostor for himself... fast.
There were three reasons for this. The first was to prevent others' hearing the man's story. It would not be long before he was able to gain at least some credence for his protestations that he wasn't really Cernic. Secondly, he had to have the fellow to himself so that he could employ the gentle arts of persuasion and find out who he was and for whom he was working. The tough little Corsican had not worked all this time just to see his carefully planned empire collapse at the first push of the first person to penetrate it.
And thirdly, the man bad to be silenced—for good. He knew far too much about the network to stay alive even in a Czech prison.
Stop him opening his mouth; find out who he was; shut his mouth. Those then were the objectives. And since none of them could conveniently be carried out in the middle of Austria, Switzerland or Western Germany, he had arranged for the military to kindly ferry the victim to a place of his own choosing; his own place.
First, though, the impostor had to be won back from them....
Bartoluzzi followed the army truck carrying Illya at a discreet distance. As soon as he could, he changed vehicles, just in case any of the soldiers recognized the van in which the Russian had been traveling. He ran the vehicle into a junkyard on the outskirts of Munich, paused to have a word with the night watchman, and left in an ex-American army jeep, hand-painted a bright orange and equipped with a civilian registration.
The hood of the jeep flapped dismally, the garish paint was flaking off all over it, and the tires seemed to be almost bald. But there was a highly tuned engine under the battered hood and it ran like the hammers of hell!
Even so, not until they were nearly at Nurnberg did he catch up with the truck again. It had been joined by four motorcycle outriders.
Bartoluzzi accelerated and drove past the convoy. He knew where they were going, and he could afford to press on ahead. Between Bayreuth and Hof, he turned sharp right off the highway and bounced along a narrow lane. Eventually he came to a graveyard of wrecked autos—a large field piled high with the telescoped and concertinaed remains of cars that had come to grief on the Autobahn whose embankment formed one boundary of the property. There were several gaps in the ragged hedge shielding the place from the lane. Bartoluzzi chose the smallest and least used and steered the jeep in among the mounds of scrap.
Toward the back of the yard, just under the embankment, he ran in close to a towering pile of metal and stopped the jeep canted over on an outsize hummock of grass.
From a distance, slanting drunkenly toward the mound of wreckage, it would be indistinguishable from the derelicts surrounding it.
He switched off the engine and jumped to the ground. The rain had ceased, and the clouds had momentarily withdrawn. In the light of the waning moon, he threaded his way through the scrap to an old Dodge three-tonner that was parked among the nettles near the hedge. It looked barely capable of remaining erect on its wheels, but the motor turned sweetly and, in a secret space behind the gaping glove compartment, were papers. These included bills of sale, insurance certificates, an agreement to buy the vehicle for scrap from an East German yard (which had been easy enough, since the yard was his own), and permission to take the truck into the People's Republic for that purpose.
Easing the old Dodge out into the lane, he drove as quickly as he could to the frontier. Kuryakin had been handed over to the East German police not long before; the motorcycles and the army truck were just turning to start their journey back when Bartoluzzi arrived. He presented his credentials, said he was driving the truck through as scrap, and shook hands with the corporal who stamped his permit. Then, taking the road for Dresden, he set off after the prisoner and escort as fast as he could.
Day was breaking and they were less than twenty miles from the rebuilt city when he caught up. Kuryakin was sitting with six militiamen on a bench running down the back of a mesh-covered Wartburg riot truck. It is doubtful if any of them noticed the ancient Dodge as it rattled abreast of them. In any case the nerve gas from the expertly lobbed grenade worked so fast that they would have had no time to make any comments on it.
All seven of them were out for the count before the Dodge pulled in again to the right-hand side of the road after passing the truck.
Three miles farther on, the road snaked through rising ground in the center of a belt of forest. As the Wartburg slowed for a sharp bend, four shots from a repeater rifle cracked apart the dawn calm and sent birds flapping up from the tree tops in widening circles of alarm.
Behind the starred windshield, the driver and the sergeant beside him leaned together in a crazy embrace and then slid to the floor of the cab.
After the corner, the road dropped away to the right. But the truck went straight on. It bumped over the shoulder, scraped one side on the trunk of a tree, lurched into a hollow and then, gathering speed now, slammed into a fallen trunk and fell over, quite slowly, on one side.
Bartoluzzi was running noiselessly toward it over the carpet of pine needles almost before the echoes of the crash had died away among the sighing of the branches.