The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 17

Waverly was caught with his mouth open, a lighted match halfway to the pipe he held in his other hand. Yet again he nodded.

"Right. Well, we believe we have the means of getting in touch with this network, of putting a man, a particular man, in contact with them—a task which has so far baffled every police chief in Europe, as you no doubt know."

"I'm listening," Waverly said.

"Let me give you three facts. One, there is in my country a convicted bank robber and murderer who has just escaped from a prison near Praha. He made for the capital, where he will be waiting with a large sum of ready money, wondering what to do—a natural client, don't you think, for our network?"

He paused for a moment. Waverly had uttered a sharp oath, dropping the match, which had singed his fingers, into an ashtray.

"Two," Hradec resumed, "this man is known to have gone to ground in the old city and to have laid his hands on the money he had cached away. He is also known to be seeking a way out of the country, for obvious reasons. And the third point is that he is dead..."

He paused for effect. Waverly was staring uncomprehendingly at him.

"We had in fact discovered his hideout," Hradec explained.

"As we moved in to flush him out, he broke cover and fled… and he was knocked down and killed instantly as he ran across a road in the early morning. The important thing about this is that nobody outside the secret police, not a soul, knows that he is dead. There were no witnesses to the accident, and as far as the underworld is concerned, he is still lying low in his hideaway."

"I'm afraid I cannot quite see—"

"There is one further fact you should know," the colonel went on, brushing aside Waverly's interruption. "It is a visual one, so I shall content myself with showing to you a photograph."

He took a pigskin wallet from his breast pocket, opened it, separated an envelope from a neat bundle of passport, papers and airline tickets, and took out a postcard-size portrait, which he handed to Waverly.

"That is Kurim Cernic—the murderer who is no longer amongst us," he said.

Waverly looked at the photograph and gasped.

For the features staring out at him from the glossy print could have been those of Illya Kuryakin!

Chapter 8

Illya Sweats It Out!

"YES, IT REALLY is quite remarkable!" Colonel Hradec said a few minutes later, looking from the photograph in his hands to the live face of Illya Kuryakin. "The features are the same and that is a help—but what is even more astonishing is that the hair grows the same way, and the height and build are identical. That is almost as important!"

Kuryakin himself, Russian-born, American naturalized, and as respected east of the Oder as he was west of it, had been hastily summoned to Waverly's office. Next to Solo, he was Section One's most trusted operative.

"I won't waste words, Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly had said after he had introduced the two men. "You probably know something of the case Mr. Solo is working on. In any case you can take away the file when we have finished speaking. For the moment I just want you to concentrate on this picture and on what Colonel Hradec tells you."

"This man was a robber and a murderer," the Czech said. "He had escaped from prison and was in hiding in the old part of Praha when he was killed. Nobody knows he was killed except the SNB—the state security police—and my own department. We also know the place he was using as a hide out, the places he got his food—everything. We even know where he keeps the proceeds of his robberies hidden, for we had been watching him for some time."

"And you want me to take his place?" Kuryakin said.

"Exactly. We could introduce you into the quarter secretly, at night; you could go up to the attic in which he was staying—and nobody would know he had ever been away from it. All you would have to do is darken your hair slightly and remember to limp on the left foot a little. That way even his closest colleagues would never know the difference."

"The suggestion is," Waverly put in, "that if you hide out where this character was and let it be known quietly that you want an—er—assisted passage out of town and that you have the loot to pay for it, then this escape gang is bound to contact you."

"After which?"

"After which you agree to pay them whatever they ask, let them take you along the route—and keep in touch with Mr. Solo on your transceiver, so that the two of you together can wind the whole thing up."

Beneath the tow-colored hair and the bulging brow, Kuryakin's pale eyes were amused. "And we also keep in touch with the SNB and the military intelligence gentlemen?" he asked. "Or do we deal it off the sleeve?"

"Play it off the cuff," Waverly corrected automatically. "If it's a question of dealing, it would be from the sleeve. But in any case that's what you do; Colonel Hradec feels that there would be too much risk attached to any system of liaison with him."

"Definitely," the colonel affirmed. "You're on your own as soon as we have given you Cernic's clothes. Just find out who works the system and how and then report back, eh?"

And so, a few hours later, his hair darkened with a chestnut rinse, his left shoe fitted with a protuberance inside that made it impossible not to limp, the Russian sat next to Hradec in an Illyushin jetliner, fastening his belt as they circled to land at a military airfield near the Czech capital. They were met far out on the perimeter track by an ancient Tatra staff car, which drove them recklessly through the rain to a command-post caravan parked in woods between the airfield and the city. Here Kuryakin was given local shoes, socks, and underwear, with a gray turtle-neck sweater and exceedingly wide flannel trousers with deep cuffs. Then they set off for Prague.

They crossed the Vltava by the Smetanov bridge, dodged a late tram at the Prikopy junction, and swung into the Vaclavske Namesti. The street glittered with light from the junction to the statue of Wenceslas on his iron horse, but there were very few people about. Soon the car turned and threaded its way back toward the river among the narrow, cobbled streets of the old town.

They stopped halfway down a twisting thoroughfare leading into a small square. Around them, the tall, narrow houses were shuttered and silent, but light from a single street lamp splashed lozenges of silver onto the ancient stones through the branches of a linden tree in the center of the square. There was more light streaming onto the cobbles from the open door of a kavarna on the far side of the open space. Over a chatter of voices, the sound of an accordion brayed softly.

Colonel Hradec leaned forward and opened the door of the Tatra. "Very well, my friend," he said quietly, "now it is up to you. You know where to go; you know what to do. Just remember that our murderer is known since he came to this quarter simply as 'Milo'—and that the real Cernic was very roughly spoken, bad-tempered, a surly fellow!... Good luck now!..."

As Kuryakin melted into the shadows, the door clicked shut, the staff car turned and whined away down an even narrower street, and the Russian was alone with his new identity.

Much of the flight from New York had been spent, with Hradec's help, in memorizing a detailed street map of the area and learning the position of the few stores Cernic patronized and the kind of things he bought there. There was therefore no difficulty in finding the right route, and Kuryakin—having waited a few minutes to let the car get away—emerged from the darkness and slouched down toward the square.