The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 23

For a long time it had been Solo's world. Although he was not particularly uncomfortable with his wrists and ankles buckled into the leather bracelets at the four corners of the bed and his middle restrained by a broad strap passing under its frame, it nevertheless afforded him only a limited horizon. The walls of the cell were of smooth green cement; the ceiling, with its four powerful bulbs behind armored glass, was stone colored; and what little he could see of the floor looked like slate. The door was a single slab of steel without even a judas-window. And that was all - there was no furniture of any kind, no decoration to break the monotony, only a single small grille through which he imagined the warm, dry air was extracted.

In the circumstances, it was natural that he should take an abnormal interest in the bed. He knew by heart every chip and scratch and imperfection in the shiny surface of its headrail. He could have mapped with his eyes closed the graining of the leather handcuffs attaching his wrists to the frame. He was an authority on the disparate personalities of three flies and a daddy-longlegs in the cell whose existence was dedicated to avoiding the webs spun by a spider which lived in one corner of the grille.

Every now and then the door would swing silently open and in would come the doctor with his crisp, white women. The women varied but the doctor was always the same - a pudding-faced man, rather plump, with staring brown eyes behind thick spectacles.

One of the women would open a case and hand things to the doctor while the other put the heel of her hand under Solo's chin and forced his head back onto the mattress so that he couldn't raise himself. Then the doctor would pinch up a fold of skin from Solo's arm (so far as he could tell, he had been stripped to his underwear and socks) and inject whatever it was he injected. After that, Solo went to sleep.

This routine wasn't invariable, of course: there were different treatments too, involving tubes and clips and something like a dentist's gag. It was to do with food or feeding, Solo thought. Sometimes there was a clip biting into his arm with a tube attached to it, and some times something went into his throat. In either case, it left him rather sore - and in each case he usually went to sleep afterwards just the same.

The man and the two women always worked in complete silence, which Solo found rather unnerving at first, but his throat was always too dry and sore to ask questions or talk himself and he soon got used to it.

And yet there was talking, somewhere. Or there had been. And one of the voices, he could almost have sworn, was his own. Yet he could in no way remember talking, or think of anything to talk about. Perhaps he dreamed while he slept, but he had definite impressions of voices and movement, the words surging and receding like bees on a drowsy summer afternoon. Sometime or other, too, there had been someone shouting. Perhaps it had been him.

It was all very puzzling.

And then, suddenly, one day - one night? one morning? one afternoon? he could not tell - one day the doctor had come in with his two assistants and they had unbuckled the straps and taken them away. He was left alone in the cell, free to get up, sit down, move around, just as he liked.

Solo thought that was very kind. He was so grateful that he made no protest when they came back a little later to give him another injection.

It was funny about the injections. Really he felt quite giddy after them sometimes. Everything seemed to spin around and he could never tell if he really had been to sleep or whether perhaps he had actually just woken up from the time before. Sometimes he thought he had been in the cell for weeks, perhaps months; and sometimes he was convinced he had only been in there a few hours at the most and would soon begin to feel hungry.

On the whole, he was inclined to favor the former theory - mainly because one of the nurses, a pretty one he had noticed on several visits, seemed to have had different hairstyles on different occasions.

He remembered who he was - and what he was supposed to be doing - in a single blinding moment of awareness. The doctor and the nurses were just coming in, the cell door had opened... and there was a second's delay. Somebody outside had called a question to the doctor.

And in the instant that he replied, over the mumble of voices, somewhere down the passage outside a door slammed sharply.

As it shut, a door in Napoleon Solo's mind opened as suddenly. Every detail of his life up to the moment he had realized that the carafe in the hotel room at Goias had been drugged was with him again. It was exactly as though the preceding period really had been a confused and disturbing dream from which now suddenly he was freshly awake.

"How long have I been held here under sedation and artificially induced amnesia?" he asked quietly as the doctor approached.

"Ah! The moment of breakthrough has come and gone, then" - the voice came not from the doctor but in a curiously disembodied way from the gri1le which extracted the breathed air in the cell – "and Mr. Solo knows once more just who he is!... Never mind: perhaps we have been fortunate to have had him for our guest... for so long."

"You haven't answered my question," the agent said, still facing the doctor.

"Doctor Gerhardi is not permitted to speak with you, Mr. Solo," the voice continued. "You may talk to me. After all, we are old friends."

"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," Solo said, swinging around to face the grille and feeling rather foolish as he did so. "Or have we held – er - conversations while I have been drugged?"

A deep chuckle floated from the grating. '''Have the advantage' is good," the voice said. "You might almost call us intimates. Through the closed-circuit television camera mounted behind one of the four lighting panels in your ceiling, you have been under constant watch since the moment you arrived. And thanks to the doctor's persuasionary powers you have been most cooperative in the matter of conversations."

"You have been questioning me under the influence of Pentathol?"

"A refined version of a drug discovered centuries ago by the Matto Grosso Indians - a drug which makes Pentathol seem as mild and innocuous as an aspirin. So far as information goes, Mr. Solo, you have been sucked as dry as a lemon! Now it only remains to decide whether the rind shall be discarded or whether it might add zest to a cocktail by being shaved and twisted... There is no point in proceeding with the injection at this time, doctor: once the amnesiac condition has been broken through, one has to go right back to the beginning again."

"I trust you obtained the information you wanted," Solo said politely.

"Indeed, yes. Indeed. We know all we want to know, now, about the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and why Mr. Waverly sent you out here, and what Mr. Forster of the C.I.A. said, and so on."

"Nonsense. I don't believe it!" Solo said.

All Enforcement Agents from U.N.C.L.E. were periodically "brainwashed" by a system of subliminal suggestions which was supposed to plant in their minds a series of conditioned answers to any questions they might be asked when under the influence either of drugs or of torture. The theory was that it was best to give as much as possible of the truth, particularly as regards the agent's affiliation with the Command and so on: after all, any adversaries might already know this, and any untruths there would automatically invalidate further revelations. On the other hand, if a victim first confirmed what the questioners knew, they would be all the more likely to believe what he said subsequently. A mental "censor" was supposed to operate on the agent's mind as soon as the questions genuinely impinged on the task in hand - and from that point the prepared lies were supposed to operate subconsciously, even under the deepest hypnosis. It was therefore essential for Solo to know whether this system had worked - and the only way he could find out was to discover from his captors what they had been told while he was under their drugs.