18 - The Unfair Fare Affair (17 page)

Napoleon Solo was worried. Having failed to find anyone to talk to in the office of the junkyard, he had traversed the chalet-and-pine-tree fringe of the Vosges, cut through the bare slopes on which in summer the magnificent vines of Alsace grew, and sped down the long, shallow Rhine valley between Strasbourg and Mulhouse. He was now approaching the outskirts of Basle... and he didn't know what to do.

He had waited until eleven o'clock for Illya's call, and nothing had happened. He had, on the other hand, been a few minutes late coming in himself; he hadn't turned the tiny indicator to RECEIVE until ten or eleven minutes after the hour, and it was possible that Kuryakin had transmitted during those few particular minutes.

But unless he was certain that the Russian had in fact reached Zurich, it would not be worth going through the customs and immigration formalities and entering Switzerland via Basle; any other rendezvous would be quicker to make driving around the back of the mountains. Since he had no idea where such a rendezvous would be, however, there was no point actually starting in that direction. Nor was it worth heading for Zurich if he was going to have to waste time coming back again.

The only thing to do, he decided finally, was to wait where he was until Illya came through again. He would lose three hours, but if he pressed on and then discovered it had been in the wrong direction, he might find he had lost even more.

Catching sight of the blue and red neon surrounding the entrance to a roadside restaurant, Solo suddenly realized he was hungry. He had not eaten since his picnic lunch in the Ardennes almost ten hours ago.

He swung the DS off the road and crunched onto the graveled parking lot at one side of the building.

An illuminated sign over a glassed-in portion announced that the place was open from 8 A.M. until 2 A.M., and there was a board at one side on which the bill of fare was displayed in two-inch lettering. Judging from the number of cars still in the lot, business was good.

Solo walked past cars registered in Germany, Switzerland and several departments of France. He was negotiating a group of puddles left by the evening's rain, when he came to a dead stop. His eye, ranging across colored reflections of neon in the pools of moisture, was arrested by the inverted image of a car's license plate. He looked up. The letters
NL
on an oval white plaque surmounted the letters and figures of a Dutch registration.

And the car bearing them was a Fiat 850 coupe in a flamboyant shade of mustard.

The girl was sitting alone at the back of the restaurant. Solo didn't see her at first; he was momentarily swamped by the tide of warmth that submerged him as soon as he pushed through the door. The place had lost the hectic air of early evening—there was just the murmur of voices and the discreet tinkle of cutlery to complement savory aromas spiced with garlic and the background tang of coffee and dark cigarettes. The tables, clothed in red checks, were set in waist-high wooden booths arranged around a vast central
cheminée
bright with copper pans. The agent gave his coat to a waiter in a white linen jacket and looked around for a table.

Only when he glanced past the flames leaping on the great hearth did he see Annike, her blonde head gleaming below the oak beams.

He crossed the room and slid into the vacant seat on the other side of the table.

Her elbows were planted on either side of her coffee cup and her chin was resting on crossed hands. "The
truite aux amandes
is quite good," she said without looking up, "and they have Gewürztraminer in
pichons
, which is a must."

"Sold to the gentleman with the hungry eyes," Solo said. "Though I shall take leave to have a steak after that trout and an avocado with huge prawns before. What are you doing here—if the question is not indiscreet?"

"Waiting for a gentleman to buy me an armagnac."

"No sooner asked than granted. Waiter!"

"Thank you, kind sir. Now, I'll answer your question if you'll answer mine first—what are you doing here, Mr. Solo?" the girl said brightly. Her uptilted nose was slightly red at the tip. She looked as though she had been crying.

"You know what I'm doing here. I'm trying to catch a man who runs an escape service for criminals."

Annike caught her breath. A tear welled from her left eye and rolled slowly down her cheek. She smiled.

"It's him, isn't it?" Solo said with a flash of inspiration. "He's let you down."

"How do you know?"

"It's a fair deduction. Somebody had been asking questions about me in your office. You knew who I was, and you engineered it so I should go back to my hotel. Nice girls like you don't usually arrange for total strangers to be knocked on the head... unless a man they're in love with asks them to. Ergo, you are in love with someone from the organization. And now, since I know it's a one-man show, obviously you were in love with the one man. You went to see him on your off days—and evidently, something has gone wrong."

"The bastard!" the girl said venomously. "Oh, the
salaud
! After all he promised me... and it's only with some thin-faced cow from Czechoslovakia. I could kill him!"

A waiter was standing at Solo's side. "Would you care to order, sir?"

"Yes, please. Bring a double armagnac for the lady. I'll take the avocado with prawns, the trout with almonds, and a porterhouse steak, medium to rare, with salad."

"Very good, sir. And to drink?"

"I'll take a
pichon
of the Gewürztraminer."

After the man had tucked the carbon copy of the order under their tablecloth and gone away, Solo asked, "Tell me, Annike—how did you get me out of the hotel?"

She rubbed her thumb against her fingers in the universal gesture to indicate money changing hands. "They have very large laundry baskets," she said, "that go down in the service elevator and then get dumped in the yard."

Solo finished his meal, and they went out to the parking lot. Annike was wearing blue slacks and a ribbed sweater that clung to the supple outlines of her figure like a second skin. She looked young, desirable, and very vulnerable. "Where's your boyfriend now?" the agent asked as they reached her car.

"I've no idea. He had some job—taking someone from Praha to Zurich, I believe. If that wasn't just a stall to hide the fact that he's with that woman."

"That was no stall. The someone is a friend of mine," Solo said, taking the baton from his pocket and showing it to her. "I'm expecting to hear from him later on this little gadget. Then we'll really know where he is." Absently be thumbed the button.

To their astonishment a confused sound burst from the tiny speaker, and a moment later—distorted but understandable—Illya Kuryakin's agitated voice: "
... misfired …Bartoluzzi has spotted me, and I have been handed over to the authorities as Cernic... taken with military… East Germany... back to Prague...
"

The line abruptly went dead.

"That's smart!" Solo said admiringly. "He must have denounced him as Cernic the moment he found out he wasn't Cernic! That way, he roped in soldiers to take the impostor out of his hair."

He paused and then added reflectively, "The only thing is, what do I do? Illya will be able to identify himself in time in Prague... but where has your boyfriend got to in the meantime?"

"Bart would never do that," the girl said decidedly. "Never."

"Never do what?"

"Let them take away a possible witness against him. I know Bart. And I know the way his mind works. If you ask me, he's just using the military to get the man across a frontier for which he hasn't any papers or something. As soon as it's convenient to him, he'll contrive to get your friend back again—and after that I wouldn't rate his chances very high."

"What do you mean?" Solo asked uneasily.

"He'll take him to that place of his and kill him. You'll see."

"Place? What place?"

"His headquarters. He has a fantastic place in a forest somewhere south of Dresden—a cross between the world's most comprehensive junkyard and a medieval castle!"

"And you think he'll hijack the prisoner and take him there?"

"I'm certain of it. The swine," the girl said vehemently. "The rotten swine... and the woman's years older than me!"

"Do you know the way to this place? Could you take me there?... You'd like to get your own back, wouldn't you? Do you know the way?"

The girl stopped and turned to face him. "Of course I know," she said.

"Crazy!" Solo cried, taking her elbow and turning her toward the row of parked cars. "We're on our way!"

Emilo Bartoluzzi was not a man to work himself if he could persuade others to do it for him. Having no forged papers suitable for a west-east crossing of the East German frontier with Illya, he had therefore decided to denounce the character he was impersonating and allow the authorities to convey the Russian there for him.

Once he was some way into the country, a rapid change of ownership would have to be effected—because Bartoluzzi had to get hold of the impostor for himself... fast.

There were three reasons for this. The first was to prevent others' hearing the man's story. It would not be long before he was able to gain at least some credence for his protestations that he wasn't really Cernic. Secondly, he had to have the fellow to himself so that he could employ the gentle arts of persuasion and find out who he was and for whom he was working. The tough little Corsican had not worked all this time just to see his carefully planned empire collapse at the first push of the first person to penetrate it.

And thirdly, the man bad to be silenced—for good. He knew far too much about the network to stay alive even in a Czech prison.

Stop him opening his mouth; find out who he was; shut his mouth. Those then were the objectives. And since none of them could conveniently be carried out in the middle of Austria, Switzerland or Western Germany, he had arranged for the military to kindly ferry the victim to a place of his own choosing; his own place.

First, though, the impostor had to be won back from them....

Bartoluzzi followed the army truck carrying Illya at a discreet distance. As soon as he could, he changed vehicles, just in case any of the soldiers recognized the van in which the Russian had been traveling. He ran the vehicle into a junkyard on the outskirts of Munich, paused to have a word with the night watchman, and left in an ex-American army jeep, hand-painted a bright orange and equipped with a civilian registration.

The hood of the jeep flapped dismally, the garish paint was flaking off all over it, and the tires seemed to be almost bald. But there was a highly tuned engine under the battered hood and it ran like the hammers of hell!

Even so, not until they were nearly at Nurnberg did he catch up with the truck again. It had been joined by four motorcycle outriders.

Bartoluzzi accelerated and drove past the convoy. He knew where they were going, and he could afford to press on ahead. Between Bayreuth and Hof, he turned sharp right off the highway and bounced along a narrow lane. Eventually he came to a graveyard of wrecked autos—a large field piled high with the telescoped and concertinaed remains of cars that had come to grief on the Autobahn whose embankment formed one boundary of the property. There were several gaps in the ragged hedge shielding the place from the lane. Bartoluzzi chose the smallest and least used and steered the jeep in among the mounds of scrap.

Toward the back of the yard, just under the embankment, he ran in close to a towering pile of metal and stopped the jeep canted over on an outsize hummock of grass.

From a distance, slanting drunkenly toward the mound of wreckage, it would be indistinguishable from the derelicts surrounding it.

He switched off the engine and jumped to the ground. The rain had ceased, and the clouds had momentarily withdrawn. In the light of the waning moon, he threaded his way through the scrap to an old Dodge three-tonner that was parked among the nettles near the hedge. It looked barely capable of remaining erect on its wheels, but the motor turned sweetly and, in a secret space behind the gaping glove compartment, were papers. These included bills of sale, insurance certificates, an agreement to buy the vehicle for scrap from an East German yard (which had been easy enough, since the yard was his own), and permission to take the truck into the People's Republic for that purpose.

Easing the old Dodge out into the lane, he drove as quickly as he could to the frontier. Kuryakin had been handed over to the East German police not long before; the motorcycles and the army truck were just turning to start their journey back when Bartoluzzi arrived. He presented his credentials, said he was driving the truck through as scrap, and shook hands with the corporal who stamped his permit. Then, taking the road for Dresden, he set off after the prisoner and escort as fast as he could.

Day was breaking and they were less than twenty miles from the rebuilt city when he caught up. Kuryakin was sitting with six militiamen on a bench running down the back of a mesh-covered Wartburg riot truck. It is doubtful if any of them noticed the ancient Dodge as it rattled abreast of them. In any case the nerve gas from the expertly lobbed grenade worked so fast that they would have had no time to make any comments on it.

All seven of them were out for the count before the Dodge pulled in again to the right-hand side of the road after passing the truck.

Three miles farther on, the road snaked through rising ground in the center of a belt of forest. As the Wartburg slowed for a sharp bend, four shots from a repeater rifle cracked apart the dawn calm and sent birds flapping up from the tree tops in widening circles of alarm.

Behind the starred windshield, the driver and the sergeant beside him leaned together in a crazy embrace and then slid to the floor of the cab.

After the corner, the road dropped away to the right. But the truck went straight on. It bumped over the shoulder, scraped one side on the trunk of a tree, lurched into a hollow and then, gathering speed now, slammed into a fallen trunk and fell over, quite slowly, on one side.