MFU Whitman - The Affair of the Gentle Saboteur (3 page)

He enjoyed the noises of the birds in the trees. He whistled intermittently as he strolled southward. He would walk to Fifty-ninth and from there take a cab. He was going to pick up the gift he had already selected for his father—and what a gift. A gorgeous set of golf clubs! He had been saving all year and still didn't have enough money. He had had to borrow the balance from his mother. But what a gift! Expensive, yes; but foolhardy, no. His father would love the new clubs, and he himself would inherit the old clubs— in a sense a double gift. The man at Abercrombie's had wanted to arrange for delivery but Steve had said no. He wanted the joy of looking at them again, then waiting while they were packaged. He would bring them home himself, leave them with the superintendent, then slip them into the apartment when his father was out.

He whistled softly, happily, while he strolled. He loved Abercrombie and Fitch, loved all of America, four years now his adopted country, loved being a Winfield. It was exciting and wonderful to be the son, the only child, of Sir William Winfield. Sir William Winfield. What was the full title here in America? Sir William Winfield, Ambassador Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, Permanent Representative to the United Nations from the United Kingdom.

He stopped whistling, hearing his name called. He saw the long, sleek, gray Rolls Royce slide to the curb.

"Steve! Steve Winfield!"

He moved toward the car. The girl at the wheel was blond and pretty.

"You
are
Steve Winfield. I mean, I hope..."

"Yes," he said awkwardly.

"There!" she said. "I was certain. Don't you remember me? Pamela Hunter?"

"No, I don't think...

The voice, somehow, was familiar, but not actually familiar. He understood. It was clearly a British voice and any British accent, here in this country, would somehow ring familiarly. He did not know her. Perhaps he did. Through his parents he had met many persons, however fleetingly. She was very pretty.

"It's been a long time," she said. "London. It must be five years. You weren't quite as handsome then. Pamela Hunter. I'm a friend of your mother's."

"My mother's?" His mother was forty-seven. This girl was at most twenty-three.

Her laughter tinkled. "Well,
my
mother's
your
mother's friend; not I, really. Look, get in, or they'll be giving me a ticket for illegal parking." She reached back and opened the rear door.

He got in and closed the door. The car purred away from the curb. Sitting at an angle behind her, he could see her eyes in the rear-view mirror. They were large and blue and friendly, and the sweet smell of her perfume permeated the car.
Heck
, he thought,
this is better than a taxi.

"Out for a bit of exercise?" she asked.

"Not really. I'm going down to Abercrombie and Fitch."

"Rather a long walk," she said, and the tinkling laughter came again.

"I was going to take a taxi after a while."

"Oh? So?"

"You can drop me out if it's out of your way."

"Quite the contrary. I'm to pick up Mother outside of Bergdorf's. She'll be positively delighted to see you. Steve Winfield. New York—every thing happens. We've only been here a few weeks. Visiting. Shopping. Mother'll be ecstatic. Old friends. How's your father?"

"Fine."

"Your mother?"

"Fine, thank you."

She tapped out a cigarette and held the package back toward him.

"Cigarette?"

"I don't smoke, thank you."

She took out a gold lighter. "A gift from my mother. Isn't it exquisite?"

He leaned forward. The car stopped for a red light. She turned and showed him the lighter. She extended it close, right under his nose. He heard the click, heard a hiss, heard nothing more.

The gray Rolls parked on East 68th Street. The girl got out, propped up the sleeping boy in a corner of the car, slammed the door, and went to the tall, dark man lounging at a side of the many-windowed, modern apartment house. The tall man needed a shave and his eyes were red rimmed. His smile was brief and somewhat sullen. "All right?" he asked.

"I have him," the girl said. "Now what about the other one?"

"He'll come out."

"Are you sure?"

"Look, I've been loitering here since yesterday. I saw him go in, and he hasn't come out. He'll come out."

"And if anything goes wrong?"

"Then we'll use the other plan. As long as we've got the boy."

"Oh, we've got him."

"Nothing'll go wrong. He'll come out. He's due. Now you take over. You know what to do."

"Yes, Mr. Burrows."

"Good girl."

The tall man went to the car. He opened the rear door and looked at the boy. He put a cigarette between the boy's lips, and there it dangled. He closed the rear door, got in behind the wheel in front, and sat waiting. The girl would know whom to approach. She had seen his picture many times, studied the picture. She would know what to do. She was bright, intelligent, devoted to the cause, an idealist. He made a grunt in his throat, his mouth closed. Idealist. He did not trust idealists; he preferred mercenaries. Not his business. He was not the boss. Leslie Tudor was the boss. Tudor trusted the girl. No question the girl was perfectly suited to her role. But an idealist. A devotee of the cause. People like her were good workers, even great workers, fanatical but unpredictable. He sighed. He was—how did they put it in Americanese?—the second banana. Leslie Tudor was Number One. What suited Tudor had to suit, perforce, him. He grunted again, lit a cigarette, and sat watching, waiting.

In time, Illya Kuryakin came out. Quickly the girl approached him. "Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Hello?" A fellow tenant whom he had missed? Possible, not probable. A bachelor, somehow he did not miss the pretty ones. Maybe she had recently moved in. She was certainly pretty, blond and shapely in a yellow sleeveless summer dress.

"I was about to go in and ring," she said. "You are Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Yes, but how would you know?"

"I've seen pictures of you."

"Who showed you?"

"Sir William Winfield."

"Well! The good lord of the manor!" Sir William was a friend. A year ago there had been a private time of stress, and he had been assigned as a private bodyguard for the Winfield family and had so served for a period of three months.

"I'm a messenger from Sir William."

"He certainly picks them beautiful."

"Well, thank you, sir. It's his birthday today. I imagine you know."

"No, I don't know."

"It is."

"Good enough. So take a message, lovely messenger. My hearty congratulations to Sir William."

"No. There's to be a party for him tonight." She smiled at the good-looking, blond, young man, thinking to herself that if this emergency had fallen on another day Leslie Tudor would have coached her to mouth another reason as adequately appropriate. Aloud, she said, "A surprise party. Mrs. Winfield has not sent out invitations. We're personally inviting the guests."

"We?"

"Steven Winfield and myself. I'm Sir William's new secretary. Pamela Hunter."

"Pleasure to make your acquaintance. Where's Steve?"

"He's right there in the car."

She pointed and Illya looked. A new Rolls. He shook his head and grinned. What else for Sir William Winfield but a sleek, long Rolls?

"Please, Steve would like to talk to you," Pamela Hunter said.

"Sure."

He went with her to the car. The chauffeur smiled, nodded. The girl opened the door, and Illya bent over the seat toward Steve. A cigarette? He did not remember that the boy smoked.

"Steve," he said. "Hi."

The boy seemed to be dozing. The chauffeur leaned back, reached back with a hand holding a gold lighter, clicked it, and moved it swiftly to ward Illya. He heard the hiss, tried to fight away from it, and lost.

The girl settled herself between the two sleeping men, propping Illya's limp form up in the corner opposite the Winfield boy.

The chauffeur turned the ignition key and drove off with his new passengers.

4. The Gentle Saboteur

ALEXANDER WAVERLY entered his office at twenty minutes past twelve. His buzzer sounded and his secretary said, "Napoleon Solo."

The Old Man took up the phone. There was no sound. He said into the intercom, "I thought you said Solo."

"Yes, sir."

"Phone's dead."

"Not on the phone, sir. He's here."

"Here?" The Old Man frowned. "All right. Send him in. Thank you."

Almost at once Solo knocked. He came through the door smiling, obviously rested, natty in a freshly pressed mohair suit. "Good afternoon, Mr. Waverly."

The Old Man nodded, cocked his head, and grunted. "You look like the cat that swallowed the canary."

"In a manner of speaking, I am."

The Old Man leaned an elbow on the arm of his swivel chair. The seams on his face deepened as he squinted inquiringly.

"We took him," Solo said. "Albert Stanley. Yesterday."

The Old Man sat up. "Tell me."

Solo told him. The Old Man's face remained an inscrutable mask.

"Good work. Where's Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Sleeping, probably."

The squint was back on Waverly's face.

"We've had a rough vigil since Tuesday," Solo said. "And you weren't due back today until one. He'll be here by then, I assure you."

"Um, yes, of course, of course. Where's Stanley now?"

"Downstairs in Section Five. Detention. They've fed him, shaved him, bathed him, given him fresh linens. A gentle little man. Monsters come in all guises."

"Who talked to him?"

"Nobody. He's being saved for you, as you instructed."

"And that portable radio? That infernal machine?"

"Upstairs in the lab. The technicians are having a ball with it."

"And
that
report?"

"Being held for you, as you instructed."

"Um, yes." Waverly dialed the telephone.

"McNabb?... Waverly here. You can go into that room now... Stanley's. But be careful. Keep Johnson in the corridor as the lookout. I don't want you seen going in or coming out. What's that?... Yes, that's right. I want you to bring out whatever's important. I want all that stuff down here. Use the freight elevator… Yes... Yes, that's right. Then I want Johnson, O'Keefe, and Gaines staked out inside the room. Any visitors are to be taken in... Yes. Very good. See you soon. 'Bye." He hung up.

Solo said, "May I?" and sat down in a deep leather chair.

The Old Man pressed a button on the console

The overhead loudspeaker said, "Laboratory. Phil Bankhead."

"Waverly."

"Yes, Chief?"

"On that Stanley business. I want the report."

"Written or verbal?"

"Both."

"Yes, Chief."

"Now."

"At once, Mr. Waverly."

Phil Bankhead was fat, bald, and brilliant, a scientist of the highest rank. Solo winked at him when he came in, but Bankhead did not return the wink. That put Solo forward on the edge of his seat. Bankhead was usually a jovial soul. Today he appeared anything but that. He was pale, his jowls hung loose, and his dark, bulging eyes smoldered. He acknowledged Solo with a curt nod, went to Waverly, laid a sheaf of papers on the desk. Bankhead's controlled consternation was not lost upon the Old Man. Quite mildly, obviously in an effort to calm Bankhead, he said lightly, smiling, "And what earthshaking information do you bring us, Mr. Bankhead?"

"In one word," Bankhead said, "exitron."

"Exitron," the Old Man said. He clung to his smile but now, as Solo could plainly see, with effort. It hung on his face grotesquely, like a badly adjusted mask, but he kept smiling. He was, after all, the Old Man. "Do tell us about exitron," he said calmly and turned on the tape recorder.

"We thought it was all ours," Bankhead said. "Top-level, top-secret. We thought we were at least six or seven years ahead of them. Seems we're not."

"Tell us about exitron," the Old Man repeated.

"A nuclear explosive, small but clean, no fallout. Small. What is small? A comparative term. This particular atomic concentration hasn't yet been developed for massive warheads, for city-leveling bombs, for the rockets that overnight would change the power structures of the world. Small, the exitron concentrate, but indescribably destructive, and Stanley's device was powered with exitron. The tiny bomb contained in that confounded radio had the explosive equivalent of five thousand tons of TNT."

"And if exploded? What effect on Liberty Island, the Statue, the soldiers of Fort Wood, the civilian personnel, the many sightseers?"

Bankhead's expression said more than a thousand words.

"First things first," the Old Man said. "Please sit down, Mr. Bankhead."

Bankhead sat limply in a chair near Solo. Waverly put through a call to the Pentagon and transmitted his information. It took time. When he hung up he said, "We've exploded our own little bomb in
their
laps. And now, if you please..."

The buzzer rasped. Waverly flicked a key.

"Mr. McNabb," his secretary said through the intercom.

McNabb carried in two large valises. One contained, carefully wrapped in heavy cloth, four portable radios similar to the one confiscated at Liberty Island. Bankhead examined them. "Exitron—all of them," he said.

"Dangerous, Mr. Bankhead?" the Old Man asked.

Bankhead pointed. "Not unless this switch key is on. Then this timing device is adjusted. Then the electric current from the batteries triggers the detonator. Beautiful job, really. Most ingenious."

"I'd appreciate it if you'd get those deadly little things out of here," the Old Man said.

"Yes, sir." Bankhead repacked them in the suitcase. "One was good. Four more are better. My people will enjoy working them over."

"Enjoy away," the Old Man said.

The other suitcase contained maps, photographs, and booklets of minute detail relevant to five famous sites on the eastern seaboard—including the Statue of Liberty.