23-The Finger in the Sky Affair

by Peter Leslie

  "What chance have you got of getting the others out?"

  "Haven't a hope in hell. This is an old building, mister. Wood beams, bricks, plaster. Not like one of your concrete places with steel frames—you got a chance there; the girders hold the rubble away from corners and intersections and such. But here..." He shrugged sadly. "The explosion hit the Sister's office in the middle of the ward, it seems, and up she went—then down she came with two stories and the roof and water tanks and all caved in on her." He shrugged again. "And then the fire...No, I guess the ones that weren't blown up were buried, crushed to death or suffocated. And the ones that didn't go that way would've been burned anyway...We're doin' what we can, but the main job's really to stop the fire spreading now. I've got the rest of the place evacuated on the lawns at the other side of the building."

  Solo watched firemen direct hoses to tamp down the flames barring the path of salvage workers trying to burrow under a tangle of bricks and boards. A group of them gathered around a tunnel in the wreckage and the interest of the watching crowd quickened. Voices died away. The crackle of flames sounded suddenly louder. There was a flurry of movement among the rescuers perched high on the rubble slope; they were extracting something or somebody. Then a steel-helmeted man in oilskins stepped down a few feet, looked over towards the Chief, and shook his head definitively. A sigh wavered across the crowd—and once more the hum of voices rose.

  "Could it have been sabotage?" Solo asked.

  "Sabotage?"

  "Dynamite, plastic, a time bomb—something like that."

  The Fire Chief stroked his chin with finger and thumb. "Could be," he said laconically.

  Solo shouldered his way back to the car and drove out along the road to the airport. On the first quiet stretch, he pulled to the side under a row of trees and cut the motor. Pulling the tiny transmitter from his breast pocket, he called up the U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York.

  "Tell Mr. Waverly," he said to the girl on duty, "that somebody got there before me, both at St. Mary's and in Cicero. He'll know what I mean. And Barbara—tell him I'm not even bothering to go to the third place. I'm going to hang on here while you make a call for me."

  "You want me to keep the channel open while I call?"

  "Yeah. Call the chief of the Homicide Squad at Wilmington, Delaware. Ask him have they any reports of a homicide at a place called Worsthorne Court, on State Street. If they have, it'll be a client by the name of Spaggia, Enrico Spaggia—an invalid...Got that?"

  "Worsthorne Court...Spaggia...Yes, Mr. Solo. And if there's no such report?"

  "If there's not, I'll be asking him to place a very special guard over that gentleman for his own protection. But somehow I don't think I'll be troubling him...Oh, and Barbara—while you're putting through the call, get one of the other girls to call the Chicago police, will you? There's a murdered man at 1362 Venice Avenue, in Cicero..."

  "You are getting around, aren't you, Mr. Solo!" the girl said. "Hold on: I'll give you a report on the Delaware call in a moment."

  Waiting for the girl's voice to emerge from the diminutive radio, the agent looked at his watch. It was a quarter after ten, and he hadn't eaten yet. Somehow, though, he felt that soon he would be heading for a restaurant—he couldn't believe that there would be any need for him to catch a plane to Wilmington...not if the agents of THRUSH were as efficient there as they had been in the Middle West."

  "Mr. Solo?"—the girl sounded astonished—"ten out of ten for perspicacity! Spaggia and his wife were both shot dead by an unknown assailant using a twelve-bore sporting gun, probably with a sawn-off barrel. The Wilmington police chief is most impressed. If you weren't so far away, he says, he'd book you for the killings yourself! The patrolman's report only came in ten minutes ago and the shooting itself took place in the last half hour. I'm about to ask you, Mr. Solo—and I quote—how in hell you knew about it!"

  The man from U.N.C.L.E. smiled wearily. "Tell him with my compliments," he replied, "that a little bird told me..."

  Chapter 6 — Some advice from the man on the top floor

  It was sunny and warm again on Fifth Avenue. The girl at the Information Desk on the ground floor of the T.C.A. Building had a warm and sunny smile too. It was, Napoleon Solo supposed, what she was paid for. "An appointment with the Chairman, Mr. Solo?" she said sweetly. "Of course. I'll have someone come down and fetch you. Er—it was Mr. Maximilian Plant you wanted, sir?"

  "Certainly. Mr. Maximilian Plant, the Chairman."

  "Very good, Mr. Solo. We have to ask. Sometimes visitors ask for him when all they want really is Mr. Benedict Plant, or Mr. Gaylord, or Mr. Iain."

  "How embarrassing."

  "Er—yes. Quite." The girl spoke softly into the operator's mouthpiece which sprouted like a mad ship's ventilator from between her remarkable breasts. In a few minutes the doors of the center elevator slid open and a raven-haired beauty with equally vital statistics appeared.

  "Mr. Solo?"

  "The same."

  "If you would be so kind as to follow me, please..."

  "To the ends of the earth," the agent said, becoming seized by a kind of madness as the doors closed them in the small cage. "Are you the Old Man's secretary?"

  "The Old..? Mr. Plant's secretary? Good Heavens no!" The girl was appalled by the idea of so much responsibility. "I'm just the Top Floor Hostess. I'm to take you to Miss Finnegan."

  Miss Finnegan was waiting for them on the 62nd and final floor. Her hair was auburn and the bones of her face were lean, rakish and feline. Beneath the cream and navy T.C.A. jacket a special line in voluptuousness—according to the arrowhead creases—lurked.

  "Mr.—er—Solo? If you would follow me, please, I'll take you through to Mr. Maximilian's office."

  "We don't have time to drop in on Iain, Gaylord or Benedict?"

  "I beg your pardon, Mr. Solo?"

  "Let it pass, let it pass...You wouldn't be the great man's secretary, would you? No—of course you wouldn't —"

  "Miss Bernstein acts as secretary to Mr. Plant."

  Three corridors and two qualities of wall-to-wall carpet later, Solo was in a position to evaluate Miss Bernstein—a nubile brunette with a sulky mouth and a great deal of make-up on her long eyelashes. "Good grief," he exclaimed, "do they get you all out of the same mold? Among you, you must keep the House of Maidenform on full production! Do you ever dream you went to T.C.A.?"

  The girl—she'd graduated from the uniformed branch and wore a figure-hugging little shift in black—stared at him haughtily. She rose and went to tall, slim double doors at the far end of the office. Opening the two handles together, she pushed the doors apart and announced:

  "Mr.—ah—Solo."

  The man from U.N.C.L.E. walked into a lofty room furnished with two deep leather armchairs and a flat-topped desk covered with telephones and dictagraphs. Behind the desk sat a spectacular blonde of about thirty.

  "Mr. Solo," she said, rising and holding out her hand. "Welcome to T.C.A. I'm Helga Grossbreitner."

  Solo was getting light-headed. "I thought for a moment you were Max Plant," he said. "Tell me: if Miss—ah—Bernstein is the great man's secretary, just who are you? If it's not a rude question, that is."

  Helga Grossbreitner smiled again. She was tall and slim-waisted, with willowy hips and a jutting bosom. She wore blinding white boots, a black-and-white houndstooth skirt and a black vest over her shirt. Her gold hair was drawn back in a loose chignon secured by a velvet bow. "Miss Bernstein is Mr. Plant's general secretary and stenographer," she said; "I am his confidential secretary and personal assistant."

  "I can see why they break a guy in gently with all the others, if you're the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow," Solo said foolishly. "May a mere mortal inquire what time you take luncheon—if, indeed, you eat at all?"

  For the third time, the blonde flashed her smile at him. "Mr. Plant is waiting for you," she reminded him.

  The inner sanctum from which Maximilian Plant directed the
affairs of Transcontinental Airways and associated companies was austere in the starkly luxurious way that only the very rich can afford. Solo sank into one of the vast Swedish hide armchairs and looked at the tubby little man with silver hair who sat on the far side of the teak desk. On top of the desk were a black telephone, a gold pencil and five buff folders.

  "One on each of the air crashes, young man," Plant said in his creaky voice, tapping the nearest file with his forefinger. "Pages and pages of it...Now—what do you want to know?"

  "Mainly, what your experts have found out about them, sir."

  "I see. Well, to generalize—You do know about the Murchison-Spears complication, I guess? Good—to generalize, we can divide the five disasters into two groups." He moved two of the folders meticulously to one side. "The three crashes in Nice fall into one category; the two in the U.S. into another."

  "What's the difference between them?"

  "Well, granted that the aim of the operation is to discredit T.C.A. in general and the Murchison-Spears equipment in particular, we find the two categories align neatly with those propositions."

  "Meaning?"

  "That the three crashes at Nice, France, were due to some kind of tampering with the Murchison-Spears gear—and that the two accidents in the U.S.A. were due to a—er—less sophisticated kind of sabotage, shall we say?"

  "But it was sabotage? In fact they were not accidents?"

  "Right. The plane which blew up in mid-air was a pressurized 707. It disintegrated at 33,000 feet. My investigators—and the Federal accident people agree with them—believe the ship collapsed when a baggage compartment porthole was forced open. At that height, of course, a pressurized plane pops like a toy balloon if the higher pressure inside is allowed to get out."

  "You said 'forced open...'"

  "I did. From a painstaking examination of thousands of fragments gathered over half the state, the investigators concluded that the port was forced open by some kind of time-actuated mechanism—a small hydraulic ram, perhaps, set off by a clockwork alarm. Something of that sort."

  "But surely, Mr. Plant, that suggests an accomplice on the staff of T.C.A.? No outside person would be able to get to a plane for long enough to arrange a device like that, would they?"

  "They would not, Mr. Solo. It suggests precisely that."

  "I see. And the other one?"

  "The other one implies even greater complicity on the part either of T.C.A. personnel or the airport staff—I genuinely believe it to be the latter...You know what we call a five- five in T.C.A.?"

  "A run that's half passengers and half freight?"

  "That's it. Well, this flight was a five-five. We had a rush of passengers at the last moment, and the freight compartment was full—up to the maximum permitted load. Up to, but never over, understand...Right. Now the plane's flying with an absolute maximum payload and the freight includes a number of large, but empty, crates."

  "Empty?"

  "Yes. There's a firm that makes shockproof containers—insulated crates and padded boxes for carrying delicate machinery, radar components, nose cones for small rockets, and that sort of thing. Very specialized stuff. Well, we were shipping some of these to an electronics firm in New Jersey—they were going to use them for transporting computer parts or some such, but on our plane they were empty. Are you with me?"

  "Yes I am."

  "Right. Now the plane had been loaded and checked—all weights including passengers and baggage calculated and allowed for. But somehow, after the check, these empty crates had been removed and others—looking exactly the same, but filled with solid ice—had secretly replaced them."

  "My God! But surely —"

  "Exactly. The unsuspected extra weight was enough to alter the ship's trim and cause it to stall on take-off...and then of course the ice melted in the fire after the crash, leaving no trace."

  "Just a minute! If the ice melted and left no trace, how in hell did your investigators —"

  "Aha! A clever piece of deduction, young man! That's how they found out. Mind you, it is deduction only—there's no proof. But it sure satisfied me."

  "How did they work it out, then?"

  "Two things, Mr. Solo. Either one of them might not have been conclusive. But the two together..." Maximilian Plant shrugged eloquently. "Among the cargo were several small loads of consumer goods," he continued. "Stuff for drugstores and wholesale houses, replacements of stock, that kind of jazz. And among them were the two things that tipped our men off—a hundred gross of bottles of indigestion tablets, and a small consignment of barometric lambs..."

  The little man placed the palms of both hands on the desk and leaned back with a broad smile, obviously relishing at second hand the deductive triumphs of his employees.

  "I may be dumb, but I'm afraid I don't quite..."

  "The water, don't you see, Mr. Solo. The dampness. There were hundreds of broken bottles, thousands of these tablets, and when they tested them—just as a matter of routine, you understand, at first—they discovered that every single one of them had been hydrated; there's a chemical change when you drop these indigestion tablets in water, and in this case the change had already taken place!"

  "And the—er—barometric lambs, did you say?"

  "You must have seen them. All the souvenir shops stock them. Little plaster models of Bambi covered in some rough substance—when it's going to rain (that is, when the humidity is high) the lamb turns pink; if it's going to be fine, the lamb's blue. And if it's variable the thing stays a kind of mauve color."

  "And the lambs in the crash were all pink?"

  "As a baby's bottom! Someone noticed they'd been blue when they were loaded—and the conclusive point was that there was a drought where the plane crashed: hadn't been a drop of rain for seven weeks!"

  "So neither the pink lambs nor the hydrated tummy tablets could have gotten that way at all unless there had been a lot of water around in the crash itself?"

  "That's exactly it, Mr. Solo."

  "It seems a fair deduction from the facts, then. You were saying earlier...about the three crashes at Nice..."

  "Oh, yes. Since these were all at the airport itself, it was possible to get a one hundred per cent tally of the pieces of wreckage—and the boys were thus able to get the most complete picture possible as a basis for their deductions."

  "A complete picture of the crash, you mean?"

  "Yes. And the minutes leading up to it. Don't forget we have the black-box tape recordings, which preserve the dialogue between the pilot and control."

  "Sure."

  "Well—as you know—in each case they could find nothing, nothing whatever, wrong with anything. And since the controls were working okay, it followed that the mistakes that caused the crashes must have been made by whoever worked the controls."

  "But the controls were in fact being worked by the Murchison-Spears equipment in each case?"

  "That's it. Therefore the fault lay with the gear—but as you know, the gear was working perfectly, too. After the smash."

  "So what we're looking for is someone or something that puts the equipment all haywire—yet leaves it okay after a crash?"

  "That's what they tell me."

  "Sounds crazy to me. The gear works on signals received from the ground, doesn't it—like a sort of radar? Then it adjusts the plane's controls in accordance with this information?...Right. Well, how in hell could anybody tamper with the machine so that it falsified signals from the ground—and yet, when it was tested after the crash, gave perfectly correct readings?"

  "That," Maximilian Plant said with a broad smile, "is what I figured you were going to find out for us, Mr. Solo!"

  Solo grinned back at him. He ran four fingers down one side of his jaw. "I don't know," he said, shaking his head; "I could understand it if the gear was just screwed up to give wrong readings and therefore fly the plane into the ground—but not when it works okay again after the crash!"

  "Yes. It looks as though we're looking f
or something that causes some kind of temporary maladjustment, doesn't it?"

  "Do you know of any technique that could do this? Does your staff? Can you think of any line of scientific inquiry that would help track down such a device—if one exists?"

  Plant smiled again. "No," he said frankly. "None whatever."

  "Then it looks," Solo said, "as though I'll have to take a plane to Nice to join my colleague there—the kind of sabotage your two American planes suffered can be done at any time; but the three jobs at Nice seem dependent on it being Nice. So my guess is that if we dig deep enough there, we may just come up with something."

  "I hope so, young man. This government—and the British government, for that matter—would hate for there to be any more crashes like the others. And we, of course, wish our company to stay solvent!"

  "Naturally, Mr. Plant. Could you give me the names of a few of your key personnel at Nice? I'll want to investigate everything concerning T.C.A. that goes on there, and of course I'll need help to steer me through the technical details when we try to work out what could have happened to these planes."

  "I can do better than that. I was planning to send my confidential secretary, Miss Grossbreitner, over to Nice to see what went on there. A unit that suffers accidents is usually a unit that has something wrong with it, and I like to keep a finger on the pulse—even if it's only a distant one. Why don't you team up with her and she can show you around? She used to be with our maintenance section at Nice—that's why I'm sending her, because she knows the place so well."

  "It would be a pleasure," Solo said—with feeling.

  And later, in the cloistered calm of the outer office, he stopped by Helga Grossbreitner's desk and said: "Seems I'm going to have my opportunity to buy you that lunch after all! How about tomorrow at the Ciel d'Azur—on the second floor of the terminal building at Nice airport? It's got four crossed knives and forks in the Guide Michelin, so it should be good."