The Splintered Sunglasses Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 33

"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