The Unfair Fare Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 25

"Well, ask the lad how things are, for me," Van der Lee said, "for I've had no word from him for many a long month."

"Oh, come now! That's enough of your Celtic hyperbole!" Solo chided. "It can't be more than a week since you were in touch with him."

"What are you talkin' about?"

"Well, he must have been in contact to arrange about our meeting."

"Our meeting? I don't follow you at all." The Irishman was staring.

"You mean he didn't? You weren't tipped off I was coming?"

Van der Lee shook his head.

"You hadn't come to the Terminus especially to contact me? Our meeting was a coincidence? But that's fantastic! I never thought of asking…"

And a few minutes later, when Waverly's irascible voice was crackling over the ether, Solo asked, "How come you hadn't warned Tufik—Van der Lee, I should say—that I was coming? I mean, after I had received the tickets and room reservation you sent, I naturally expected to meet someone, either here or on the journey. But weren't you leaving it a bit vague if you—"

"Tickets?" Waverly's voice interrupted. "Reservation? Have you taken leave of your senses, Mr. Solo? I have made no communication with you since you left."

Solo whistled softly. If neither Waverly nor Van der Lee knew anything about that special-delivery letter with the tickets in it, then it meant he had deliberately been decoyed to the hotel! Which in turn meant that someone—the person who had tried to run him down in Paris, presumably—had changed his mind and decided to attend to him in Holland.

But why?

If they were going to shoot at him when he was on a balcony or knock him on the head and abduct him from a hotel room, why did this have to be done in The Hague? After all, there were plenty of balconies and plenty of hotel rooms, in Europe!

There could be only one answer—because the person of persons who had to do the shooting and abducting found it convenient. And in practice, surely, this must mean that they had to be in The Hague; they were unable to leave the city... and so, having failed in Paris, they arranged for Solo to come where they were.

The instigators of both decoy and attempted kidnapping, it seemed obvious, must be the men behind the escape network; they had somehow found out that somebody was asking too many questions and they had tried to remove him.

The realization didn't get Solo much further forward. He had asked a lot of questions in a lot of places. Many of the people he had questioned had themselves demanded information of others—who had in their turn probably talked. And the people who were after him could have found out from any of them; he had no means of knowing where the leak had occurred. His discovery that he had been duped therefore gave him no pointers from which he could deduce anything about the network or its operators.

It had, on the other hand, even if coincidentally, brought him into contact with Van der Lee. And it had made him realize that he might have misjudged the girl Annike, in thinking her a party to the kidnapping!

When he had spoken to Waverly the previous night, it had been mainly to hear about Illya Kuryakin's visit to Prague and the reason for it. He had said little about his own researches. He filled in the details of these now, and as soon as Waverly had signed off, he turned back to the fat man in the wheelchair and said, "There's the sum total of my investigations to date! About the only positive thing about them is that I know now that—at least mentally—I owe your little girl an apology."

"My little girl?"

"Annike. She is still with you, isn't she? I'm afraid I'd been thinking she was responsible for my being knocked on the head. I figured she'd engineered my return to the Terminus and suggested I needed a coat simply because she knew there was somebody up in my room waiting to sap me."

"Well now," Van der Lee said, "I don't know about that at all. But Annike herself is away for a couple of days, Mr. Solo. She had two owin' from the bank holiday period, and she asked could she take them now. She'll not be back until the day after tomorrow, I'm afraid. Can I give her a message?"

Solo shook his head. "I guess not. You don't know where she went, do you? I kind of like making apologies to blondes!"

"Ah, no. That I don't. Her time's her own when she's away out of this."

The agent sighed. "Okay then. I'll be on my way… unless you have any second thoughts about that information I wanted to buy from you?"

It was the fat man's turn to shake a massive head. His jowls quivered in negation as he said regretfully, "A rule's a rule, Mr. Solo. Even among friends. Anyway, I doubt if it would be much use to you if I could talk—a name, a description, a probability of whereabouts. Which you'll latch on to soon enough yourself if Mr. Kuryakin's lucky. You already know they were asking about you... and you've had proof of why! That's all, I guess."

Solo shook hands. "I'll get along then. And thanks anyway."

"A pleasure, Mr. Solo. Always a pleasure. And one thing. Wait'll I tell you: remember—it's not always the new ones that travel the best..."

"Not always the new ones...?" echoed Solo with a puzzled frown.

But the Moroccan-Irishman refused to elaborate his hint––if hint it was—and Napoleon Solo went his way with the riddle unsolved, leaving the man in the wheelchair smiling blandly as he pulled a huge pile of daily newspapers toward him and reached into his pocket for a fistful of different colored pens.

Solo had rented a Citroen DS21, a splendid car for covering a lot of ground quickly. Having skirted Antwerp and Brussels, he managed to make the gray, cobbled central place of Namur in time to buy beer and charcuterie and bread before the stores closed for lunch.

Then, taking advantage of the midday traffic lull, he drove rapidly across the ragged, untidy Belgian plain, with it dull and grimy little towns, until he reached the Ardennes. Shortly before two o'clock, he pulled off the road not far from Bastogne and prepared to eat. Around him, the undulating country fell away in a series of interlocking wooded curves. And over all these acres of trunk and branch and dead leaf, the sky—which had been becoming more and more overcast since early morning—stretched a sullen yellow canopy.

Wind moaned in the pines above Solo's head and stirred the needles around the boles of the trees further down the hill. It looked as though it was going to snow.

He sat for a while with the engine running and the heater on, waiting for Illya's call to come through on the transceiver.

They had had time only to exchange a few words on the ten o'clock transmission—Solo had been parked behind a highway cafe where he had stopped for coffee—before Kuryakin had been forced to hide the baton because his chauffeur was coming around to talk to him. From the fix Solo had been able to take from the small but sophisticated machine he carried in his valise, he judged the Russian to have been somewhere between Wels and Gmunden, in Austria.

When he came through again at one minute to two, he told Solo that they had made very little progress during the day. Apparently the network preferred to travel mainly at night. He had been in the back of an empty cattle truck, a hearse, and a trailer truck since they had abandoned the electrical delivery truck near Linz hours before. He had no idea where they were now.

Solo made it somewhere near the Alter See, a few miles from Salzburg.

He finished his lunch and drove on into Luxembourg. On the eastern slopes of the Ardennes, snow had already fallen. There was a thin coating beneath the trees, and occasionally, along the surface of the twisty road near Esch-sur-Sure, powdery white trails snaked toward him in the wind. Farther south in the Grand Duchy, the fall had been heavier. Snow lay thickly on branches and roofs, filling the furrows between iron-hard ridges of plowland.