by John Denis
C.W. bounced the shiny strip of alloy thoughtfully around his hand. ‘Why don’t I?’ he murmured. Then to Graham, ‘Let’s go — fella.’
Smith signalled to the truck drivers, and they restarted their engines. Graham manned the control panel, Pei monitored the computer alone. C.W. clipped the metal tag to his breast pocket, and walked the length of the yard to the screen of lead. He waited there, head bowed, until the light blinked fussily above his head.
His step never faltered, but his blood ran ice-cold as he saw Graham trip the Lap-Laser switches. C.W. walked closer, and closer, to the target area. He felt the hairs of his neck grow individually erect when the barrel of the laser-gun turned in his direction. The mouse-ears twitched, picked him up, and locked on to him.
Even above the noise, Sabrina, standing right by the Lap-Laser, heard a dull click as the gun’s firing mechanism operated. But there was no fierce glow at the mouth of the tube. No death ray leapt out to reduce the black man to ashes.
‘A malfunction?’ Smith suggested.
Mike grinned sardonically. He pressed another lever on the panel, and a target silhouette trundled out on the electric pulley until it was bearing down on the area swept by the Lap-Laser. C.W. stopped, looked back and watched.
The Lap-Laser tracked its new target, discovered no inhibition to firing, and carried out its allotted task. The tube-end glowed, the beam flashed once, and the silhouette disintegrated. The trucks were silenced. C.W. turned, and continued his steady march to the platform. He stopped beneath the laser-gun, and tossed the safety tag at Graham’s feet.
‘Don’t ever,’ he hissed, ‘don’t you ever put me on again, boy.’ He glared at Graham through slit eyes, and Graham looked contemptuously back. C.W.’s fists balled, and his eyes opened wide, flaring. He stepped aside and commanded, ‘You! Down here!’
Mike made to move, but Smith’s voice cut through their anger. ‘Stop! Now!’ There could be no argument; they backed off, glowering. ‘I have watched your childish exhibition with some interest, not because I particularly care what happens to either of you, but because it did serve the purpose of illustrating something else which it is just as well you should all know.
‘You have now had it amply proven that while the Lap-Laser will destroy indiscriminately what you wish it to destroy, it will miss any target protected by a safety device fed into the computer … in this case, a metal tag.’ He picked the tag up from the platform, and stowed it in his pocket.
‘I have a supply of these tags,’ Smith continued, ‘under lock and key. They will remain there. I have also mounted a Lap-Laser on the roof of this castle. The way I see it now is — no unauthorized person can get into the château. And by the same token, no one can leave. Good night to you.’
* * *
The following morning, trucks took the main team and a company of other ranks to a secluded area in the castle park. They lined up in military formation by a lily pond. Rising thirty feet above the pond was a tower constructed mostly of wooden scaffolding poles.
Claude blew a whistle, and the trainees swarmed like monkeys over the tower; on the bars, through them, inside and out, some acrobats clinging to the cross-beams by hands and feet, inching their way along like giant sloths. Others tight-rope walked on connected pipes, or moved hand over hand from one side to the other. It looked like a giant jungle-gymnasium for adults, which was precisely what it was.
Smith appeared, and motioned to C.W. and Graham. He held a stop-watch in his hand, and he thumbed it dramatically. At the top of the tower the beams were of metal, and Sabrina and Tote sat astride a cross-pole, welding mounts to the iron.
A rope snaked down to drop its end at C.W.’s feet. He shinned up it and joined Sabrina on the beam. Below, Graham fastened the end of the rope to a Lap-Laser. Tote and C.W. hoisted the gun up the tower, and mounted it on the cross-beam. Then they repeated the operation with a second Lap-Laser, which Graham followed until all four trainees were perched on the tower with the two guns. Smith pressed the stop-watch again.
He walked to the foot of the tower and shouted, ‘Bravo. The best yet. You’re improving. It must be the food.’
That night in the stable yard, Pei and two other recruits worked under floodlights at the thick bundles of cable. Pei and one of the men wore electricity linemen’s heavy duty gloves. The generators boomed out, and they worked with exaggerated care. Each of the cables bore a lightning bolt label, and the simple warning, ‘2000 volts’.
The gloved trainee, under Pei’s watchful gaze, made a long cut in the insulation of the cable. He prised the incision apart with insulated shears, and exposed a section of gleaming copper wire. The second man, who had discarded his gloves, leaned in, and opened a huge clamp. It, too, had insulation over its handle and operating nut.
The trainee slid the clamp over the ruptured cable. He was trembling, and his face ran with sweat. Inevitably, his hand slipped, and touched the metal of the clamp, which dropped on the exposed cable. A violent blue arc of electricity streaked from the copper wire into the clamp and passed into the body of the unlucky ex-recruit. Pei watched impassively. Then he turned to the other man, and said, ‘Keep your gloves on. Switch off the current, and get rid of him. And in future, remember: when I say take care, I mean take care.’
When the corpse had been removed, and the stench of burning flesh had abated, Pei repeated the manoeuvre with the clamp — but he made no mistake. He lowered the tool until it barely rested on the copper strands. There was a tiny crackle of current. Nothing more.
So another week of training passed, an endless procession of exercises, weapons practice, written and oral examinations, foot-slogging, fighting; until, bone-weary, the team came to what they had been told would be the final day.
They gathered at the lily-pond tower. Graham alone, and again under the tyranny of the stopwatch, approached the scaffolding. Swiftly, he set lumps of plastique and detonators at all four corner supports. He ran back, and peered over Smith’s shoulder at the stop-watch. The hand moved to zero. The four small explosions flared up, and the tower collapsed, crashing to the ground in an unruly tangle of bent piping and broken wooden beams.
Smith was delighted, but didn’t explain why.
That night, after dinner in the Great Hall under a glowing crystal chandelier, and eating off silver plates, waited on like maharajahs, the five newest recruits in Mister Smith’s organization saw him rise to his feet and clap for silence.
‘You have done a fine job during your ten days here,’ he said, ‘and I am proud of you. You have mastered every technique necessary for our operation, and you are now at your peak. It would be pointlessly cruel to keep from you any longer the details of the project I wish you to undertake, and which I am confident you will discharge with every success.’
So Smith unveiled the master plan. Every detail of it; coldly, logically, and with great clarity. They listened in absolute silence as he opened his warped brain to them, and the appalling lunacies came tumbling out.
‘He is mad,’ C.W. whispered to Sabrina. ‘God Almighty, he really is.’
* * *
Mad, perhaps, but not stupid. When Sabrina tentatively peeped outside her bedroom door just after 1.30 a.m., she saw two armed guards seated in adjoining chairs midway along the stretch of corridor between her room and C.W.’s. With the secret plan now the common property of all five new recruits, Smith was clearly taking no chances that any of them might be foolish enough to consider passing on their knowledge to the outside.
‘Yet somehow,’ Sabrina murmured furiously, ‘I’ve got to get word to Philpott.’ She knew he would still be watching the château — that he would have seen the laser-guns and, knowing what he did of their enormous power, would have ruled out a frontal attack. He could not have spotted the Restaurant Larousse trucks, which had always been concealed. He could also know nothing of the target, or the timing of Smith’s scheme. Either she or C.W. must pass that information to him if there was to be any even remote chanc
e of stopping Smith.
She was sure the guards had not spotted her, but equally aware that she could not get past them undetected. So it would have to be the window. She switched off her bedroom light, leaving the bathroom illuminated so that from the outside it would appear she was taking a late shower. She pulled aside the thick drapes … as she expected, searchlights positioned on the crenellated roof coping swept the lawns, gardens and approach roads. The façade of the château itself was bathed in floodlighting. She could see commandos leashed to tracker dogs patrolling the grounds.
Sabrina sighed. It would be suicidal to risk flashing a message from her window: one of the patrolling commandos would be bound to see it, and she would be unmasked. She opened the window, and peered upwards. Thick, leafy creepers dropped from the eaves to fall down the château walls between the windows.
The searchlights at either end weaved continuously over the manicured lawns and landscaped parkland, but two beams of light from a central point on the roof stayed fixed, trained on the approach road to the château, converging at a distant spot. Sabrina calculated that if she could climb up to the roof unseen, and use one of the fixed lights for signalling, there was a fair chance she would not be spotted from the ground. From the air, though, the message flashed through the intermittently broken beam would be recorded on video-tape.
She changed into tight black jeans and a black sweater, and coated her face and hands with mud from the guttering above her dormer window. She glanced to her left: the wall of enveloping creepers was about six feet away. She eased her body over the window-sill, stood upright, pressing her face to the rough, hard stone of the wall, and crab-walked the ledge until she reached the shelter of the ivy and Virginia creeper.
She burrowed into the dusty, spider-webbed area behind the impenetrable waterfall of green and red leaves, and used the cover to climb up to the battlemented roof coping. She scaled the wall linking the two turrets, and lay panting in the fork between the battlements and the sloping roof. To either side of her, the big end-mounted searchlights kept up their sweeping pattern. The two smaller, fixed lights were on the apex of the roof between nests of chimneys, a little to her right.
Sabrina marvelled at the fantastic towers and turrets strewn across the roof and battlements, darker than the house below them but still sufficiently lit to throw grotesque shadows on the tiles. She squirmed along to a patch of deeper shadow and, inch by inch, started the long crawl up the roof.
Small, twin campaniles stood at either end of the roof, and from the open spaces above the bell mountings, eight bright and beady eyes looked out between the slim stone pillars and monitored her progress …
Sabrina froze as she felt the beating of wings on the air, terrifyingly close to her face. The pair of shaheen peregrine falcons, one an eyas, trained from the nest, the other haggard, caught wild, had taken to the air fractionally before the matched pair of Greenland gerfalcons from the opposite bell-tower. They were both eyasses, and, like the peregrines, females. The female hunting hawk is a third larger than the tiercel, or male, and the gerfalcon is the biggest of the game-taking hawks.
The peregrines soared high above the château, and the eyas made the first dive, dropping almost perpendicularly, then flattening out in a swooping dive that took her unsheathed claws to within eighteen inches of Sabrina’s disbelieving eyes. The haggard peregrine followed her, legs and claws extended, beak open in an eldritch screech, her whole body aimed like a deadly live projectile. Sabrina choked back a scream as the hawk’s mottled belly flashed before her face, and one of the tufted wing-tips brushed her hair.
She jerked up her head and saw, with relief, the two hunting birds climbing away in a high arc above her. Then a second throaty squawk assailed her from the right, and the first of the monstrous, white-plumed gerfalcons bore down on her from the night sky. She rolled over, and the gerfalcon’s claws scraped the tiles where her face had been.
Terror overwhelmed her mind, and she slipped and bumped her way down the eight feet of roof she had climbed to lay hunched in the angle of the battlements. Even so, she was not quick enough for the second gerfalcon, which altered course at the last moment and, as Sabrina upended herself in her tumbling flight, took a quarter-inch strip of flesh away from her left ankle.
She could see all four hawks now, circling overhead to dive for what she suspected would be a concerted attack. Worse, shouts from below told her that Smith’s airborne guard-dogs had been spotted by a patrol.
Sabrina guessed she had one chance left: if the attention of the armed commandos was fixed on the hawks, she might be able to squeeze unobserved between the fortified battlements and drop to the creepers.
A third grating screech was all the warning she needed. As the haggard peregrine started its dive, Sabrina slithered over the eaves and dropped head first into the nest of creepers.
Her clutching hands found thick bundles of liana, and she broke her fall, twisted round, and prayed that the creepers would support her weight. Dust flew, wall-roots tore apart and the spiders danced unaccustomed nocturnal capers — but the creepers held. Sabrina got her breath back, and hauled herself up to the ledge.
She looked out between the leaves, and saw with a sinking heart that she was still far away from her own window, which she had left unobtrusively ajar. Then the window nearest her squeaked open, and C.W. hissed, ‘Swing over here, you silly cow!’
Sabrina grasped a bunch of ivy and wooded liana and launched herself into space. She landed in C.W.’s arms feet first, and he grabbed her body and hauled her into his darkened bathroom. He slammed the window shut, and said to her brusquely, ‘Strip.’
Meekly, Sabrina did as she was told …
* * *
Ten minutes later, bathed and coiffured, Sabrina sat demurely on a chaise-longue in the Louis Seize suite. C.W. answered the peremptory knock at the door.
Smith stood there, flanked by armed guards. His eyes took in the nonchalant black, clearly naked under the terry-robe; they shifted to Sabrina who, equally clearly, was wearing only a bath towel.
‘My guards tell me,’ Smith began, ‘that the hawks have been active. They believe someone came into a room on this floor, possibly from the roof. Could it have been either of you?’ He let the question hang dangerously in the air.
‘It could have been,’ C.W. shrugged; then adding, seemingly as an afterthought. ‘Sir.’
‘In fact, it was,’ Sabrina put in. Smith raised his eyebrows in her direction.
She went on calmly, ‘Since you chose, for reasons of your own, Mister Smith, to make us prisoners, I took it as a challenge, a point of honour almost, to sneak along the ledge outside my room and see my friend C.W.’
‘For what purpose, may I ask?’ Smith enquired.
Sabrina simpered. ‘When I’m dressed like this?’ she said, letting the towel slip further down her shoulders. ‘Really, Mister Smith, you either have very little imagination or you lead an abnormally sheltered life here.’
Smith looked steadily at her, weighing the evidence. ‘My guards didn’t see you,’ he pointed out.
‘The wall was completely lit up,’ Sabrina countered, ‘bathed, you could say, in white light.’
‘So?’
‘So I was naked. Camouflage — n’est-ce-pas?’
Smith’s stony face relaxed into a grin. ‘Now that’s the kind of audacity I admire. Well, assuming you have finished what you came here to do, Sabrina —’ she nodded, and C.W. winked. ‘Good,’ Smith went on, ‘in that case, let me escort you back to your own room by a route considerably less arduous and dangerous than the one you selected for the outward trip.’
She rose to her feet, and let the towel drop to the floor. ‘Thanks C.W. — for everything,’ she said.
Smith’s eyes combed her naked body. ‘I trust my little falcons didn’t treat you too badly, Sabrina,’ he said.
She showed him her blood-spotted ankle. ‘Hardly anything,’ she replied.
Smith tutted solicitously. ‘Dea
r, dear,’ he murmured, ‘I hope they don’t get a taste for human flesh.’
SEVEN
Sonya Kolchinsky rose early and walked from the most celebrated and luxurious hotel in Paris, into the most harmonious square in that city of beautiful proportions, Place Vendôme. She strolled through the markets, and then embarked on a determined window-shopping spree, from the Rue du Faubourg St-Honoré through Rue Castiglione, crossing to Boulevard Haussmann, and on through Boulevard Batignolles and Boulevard Courcelles to the Arc de Triomphe.
She took the bus down Avenue Kleber to the Palais de Chaillot, and trekked back across the river, past the Eiffel Tower, to the Boulevard Garibaldi. She checked her watch: it was still only eight-fifteen.
Sonya found the side street at the rear of the École Militaire, and saw the unsalubrious little workmen’s café. It was three-quarters full. The atmosphere was compounded about equally of coffee, croissants, Disque Bleue and Caporal. Two sweat-shirted labourers sat at the corner table, and it was there that she headed.
Sonya approached the table uncertainly. One workman was eyeing his cognac with practised relish; the other had his face plunged into a newspaper. She peered over the top of the paper. This man also had a cognac in front of him. He wore a greasy cap, and printed on his T-shirt was the legend, ‘APRÈS MOI LE DÉLUGE’. ‘Sit down, then,’ Philpott said. She lowered herself into the spare seat, and was made embarrassingly aware that she was dressed a shade formally for ‘La Chatte qui siffle’ on a busy September midweek morning.
‘Cats,’ she said tartly to Philpott, ‘do not whistle.’ Without looking up from his newspaper, Philpott drawled, ‘In here, baby, they do as they’re told.’ Their neighbour got up to leave, and wished them ‘bon appétit’ with a knowing leer. Sonya tossed her well-groomed head and ordered coffee and croissants. They were, as she suspected, delicious.
Philpott laid down the paper. ‘To business,’ he said. ‘I didn’t wake you last night, but I had a call at about 2 a.m. They’re on the move. Or, at least, the chopper and half a dozen trucks left in the small hours. And that is a Lap-Laser on the roof of the château, or rather, was. It’s gone now. The game, as Holmes probably never said, is afoot.’
