"More than that—and you can leave your torture toys. They will do you no good if this is an U.N.C.L.E. agent."
"But I can make him talk, Marinka. I swear I can."
"Of course you can. But you'd be wasting your time. Before they go out on assignment, agents of this organization undergo a course of posthypnotic suggestion to make psychological implants in their minds. Without wearying you with detail, the result of this is that—under truth drugs or torture—they will tell you the truth up to a certain point. But that as soon as you start asking questions about their mission, a psychiatric censor, as it were, comes into operation, and their subconscious mind supplies answers that accord with the facts but are not the genuine truth. They have a built-in series of conditioned reflexes. And to break that down would take far more time than you have available. My principals want action. You'll have to get rid of this man."
"Yes, yes. Of course I will. If he didn't talk within the next half hour, I was going to kill him anyway. I have clients waiting in other parts of Europe, and I cannot afford to waste time here trying to discover why a madman should pass himself off as a murderer! I have to go."
"And the means?"
"Obviously his death must be arranged so that the authorities believe no other person was involved. I had worked out a plan whereby it would seem he had himself escaped from the militiamen and had then come to grief while getting away from the scene of the crash."
"Good," the girl said. "Good. You must tell me about it at once…"
"It's a pretty diabolical scheme," the voice coming from the transceiver in Solo's hand said. "Here's what they plan to do. It appears that there's an old railway viaduct crossing the head of a valley near here. It was built in the middle of the last century to carry some branch line toward the mountains, but the Germans closed it down and tore up the track in 1933. The bridge is still standing, however, and the old permanent way still exists as a kind of rough track. It's weed grown and bumpy, but you can apparently get a car down it—at least as far as the viaduct."
"Bully for me," Solo said. "And the point is..."
"The viaduct is in a bad state... about to fall down. Apparently the wind and frost have eaten away all the mortar, and it's practically resting on dry stone pillars now. It's closed even to foot traffic, and the track is blocked with barbed wire before you get there."
"You're beginning to make me feel uneasy."
"What they're going to do—they plan to put your friend in the cab of an old truck. He'll be lightly drugged so that he doesn't know what's happening, but he won't be bound or anything. And then they'll push the truck out onto the viaduct and…"
"Down will come vehicle, Illya and all?"
"That's it. The bridge is so shaky that a bicycle might start it crumbling away. A heavy truck will just make it fall down. It won't bear that much weight."
"Okay," Solo said crisply. "Now just how are they going to do this? You say they are going to push the truck out onto the viaduct?"
"Not literally. The barbed wire barriers can easily be displaced. And the track approaching the bridge is on a downhill slope which continues at a slight incline across the viaduct itself. They are going to tie a rope to the back of the truck, give it a push down the slope, and then winch it out gradually as it rolls across the bridge. When it falls, they'll cut the rope and then hurry down to the bottom of the valley to remove the other end from the wreckage. The truck is the one that was used this morning to hijack your friend from the military. This way, the authorities will think he killed himself making his getaway..."
"It's up to us to stop them, then, isn't it? The important things to know are, when is this murder due to take place, how far am I from the viaduct, and exactly how do I get there?"
"Where are you now?"
"I'm on the Autobahn about fifteen kilometers southwest of Chemnitz—or Karl Marx-stadt, as they call it now. I crossed the border about an hour ago. It's funny how quickly those crazy little vineyards in Franconia, with the stone walls that zigzag from one terrace to another, get swallowed up in all this Gothic forest as soon as one's over that frontier!"
"I'm sure it is. You should be able to get to the valley—you do want to go straight there, I suppose?—in a little less than an hour. That'll be running it a bit fine, but they do have preparations to make, after all. As far as directions go, it's about twenty minutes' drive from Tharandt, to the south and west of Dresden. But detailed directions would be difficult. Would it help if I gave you a six-figure map coordinate?"
"That would be perfect," Solo said. "But before you do, there's one thing that's puzzling me. You keep on saying 'they'—yet I thought Bartoluzzi was a lone wolf. Where does the hired help come from?"
"It's anything but that! It's the girl I told you about from Prague. My successor. But she seems to be mistress in more senses than one; she's the one that's giving the orders, making the decisions, working everything out. And she keeps on talking about 'my principals' and asking questions as though she were worried about the credit rating of Bart's network. You'd almost think she was trying to buy her way into it!"
"Maybe she is. Does she say who these principals are?"
"Not directly. But she has several times used the name Thrush—Thrush would not permit this, Thrush would expect that," the girl said in a puzzled tone. "Isn't that a funny thing to say!"
Chapter 17
Drama At The Bridge
BY THE TIME Solo reached the lower end of the valley a wind had risen and rain was sweeping down toward him between the trees.
Ten minutes later, he stopped the Citroën at the roadside and took out his field glasses. The viaduct was in full view, spanning a steep, wooded cleft between two belts of forest
—seven tall, narrow arches with a revetment at each end and six slender pillars in between. Even from this distance (it was still six or seven miles away) the agent could see clearly that the small blocks of yellow sandstone composing it had been fatally damaged by erosion.
There were two small observation platforms built out over the third and fifth arches—probably to act as refuges for linesmen when trains passed—but otherwise the single-track road was guarded only by a solitary iron rail above the shallow parapet.
It was no wonder, Solo thought, eyeing the flimsy structure through the binoculars, that they had been forced to bar the approaches!
He drove on—and found to his disgust that he must have made an error in reading the large-scale map of the area. For instead of climbing up to the rim of the valley as he had expected, the road plunged suddenly down and began following its floor. There was a network of lanes and byroads crisscrossing the forest just here, and he had obviously confused two of them in his haste. And so now—although he would arrive at the precise coordinate on the map that the girl had specified—he would be below the viaduct instead of above it.
Agitatedly he traced his path back on the map until he had found the point where he had left the correct route. To regain it, he would have to go back four or five miles… but could be afford the time?
Again he focused the glasses on the bridge. At the higher end he could see signs of activity—the cab of an old-fashioned truck above a clump of bushes, the roof of a car, figures moving.
No, the macabre stage for murder was already set. There was not a moment to lose; he would have to go on…