The Diving Dames Affair - Leslie Peter - Страница 22

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"Good day to you," Pai Hernando said firmly. He closed the door.

"Well, I've heard of visitors being discouraged," Coralie exclaimed as they walked out of the gates, "but this is ridiculous. Did you see those - security guards, did he say? I'm sure they'd have fired on us if we had turned right instead of left when we left that hut!"

"They probably would," the agent said soberly. "Obviously the entire Candomble thing is a cheap device to blackmail the locals into silence about the whole project. The thing's a fake from beginning to end,"

"Why are you so sure?"

"Several reasons. In the first place Pai Hernando, Father Hernando, is a form of address used in Umbanda associations, not in Candomble. If there is a priest at a Candomble tenda - and it's usually a priestess, as it happens - he would be called a Babalorixa, a Father-of Saint. Caboclo, the term for an Indian guide, is from the Umbanda vocabulary too... Second, to say they hold no ceremonies such as an orunko is absurd: the orunko is the be-all and end-all of Candomble - the ceremony at which the initiates are 'visited' by their particular deities. And finally, if it was a genuine tenda it would have been surrounded by miniature huts - the dwelling places for particular gods, which have to be sited at particular spots. Did you see any shrines, any offerings, any despachos there?"

"No," the girl said. "I didn't see those twelve trucks anywhere either. Did you?"

The Russian smiled. "There were no trucks to be seen," he said. "But when I started my pacing-up-and- down routine, I was able to catch sight of a space behind those trees at the bottom of the slope. There's a cliff which comes right down to ground level there - a fault or something in the rock, so that there's no gradual slope there. But there is something else; I could see it quite clearly. The drive runs right up to the cliff - an then straight into it."

"Do you mean there's a tunnel?" Coralie gasped.

"A tunnel leading into the mountain, or through it. With a double row of lights in the roof and a concrete blockhouse at the entrance. So the mystery of the appearing convoys is a mystery no more. They go on and through - and as soon as we have an opportunity to take them by surprise, that's what we have to do too."

"Yes, I see," the girl said thoughtfully. "That's what the guard meant, of course. 'Either you go through the mountain or you stay in the estancia' - that's what he said, isn't it?"

Kuiyakin nodded. "They seem especially determine that nobody shall so much as glimpse the surface of this marvelous lake," he mused. "It seems to me, therefore, that before we try the tunnel I really ought to have a look for myself..."

---

There was a moist breeze laden with hints of thyme, rosemary and wet earth as Illya Kuryakin stood on the broad shelf of concrete lipping the dam later that evening. In the darkness to one side, he could hear the rustling of dry grasses where the barrage met the hill side. Behind him, the wind which plucked at his shirt and trouser legs stirred the water into small waves which slapped at the dam. And in front the blackness trembled as the outlets from the invisible sluices roared down the sloping face of the barrage in their gigantic pipes.

He was surprised to find that there appeared to be no patrolling guards on the wall of the dam itself. It had taken him three hours to work his way through whole squadrons of them deployed between the boundary fence and the shore of the lake. The hillside slopes, the ridge, the steep faces dropping to the surface of the water on the far side - all of these were stiff with armed men on the lookout. Yet here, where one might expect the concentration to be strongest, there was nobody. Nor could he hear any evidence of activity around their power station far below. It followed, therefore, that the guardians of the mysterious lake were more concerned to keep people away from the reservoir itself than from the dam forming it.

With a puzzled frown, the agent lowered himself from the lip to a small observation platform, swung from the guard rail of this to a buttress, slid down fifteen feet of rough concrete in the dark, and finally found with his feet the curved surface of the huge-bore pipe down which he intended to work his way to the power station hundreds of feet below.

Forty-five minutes later, half deafened by the tumult of falling water which had battered his ears from the other side of the conduit, he thankfully unstraddled the great iron tube, wiped the palms of his hands on his jeans, and stepped onto the balcony which circled the modernistic cube of the power station building.

There appeared to be no personnel guarding it. No lights gleamed through the slits of the shuttered windows or pierced the louvers on the doors. There was no watchman's cubicle beside the main entrance. The place seemed as deserted as the blank surface of the lake above which he had scanned so fruitlessly for so long. The nearest sign of life was the floodlight above the guardhouse, shining palely through the complexities of transformer and pylon from the main gates a quarter of a mile down the valley.

He edged his way around the balcony and found a door on the far side of the building from the gates. Crouching down, he drew from his hip pocket a square metal device about five inches square. He moistened the four rubber suction cups attached to its corners and clamped it firmly to the door above the lock. Then, straining every nerve in concentration, he placed one ear to the box and began with infinite care to oscillate a flat knob set flush with its surface. Presently he gave a satisfied grunt and rose to his feet. The door swung silently inwards at his touch and he vanished into the dark interior.

Something was wrong inside. At first he couldn't place it - then, over the muted, more muffled roar of the water, his trained senses gave him the answer. It was nothing positive; it was an absence that he noticed. There should have been a humming of generators, a whine from the giant turbines, a whiff of ozone in the air. But there wasn't.

Believing now firmly that the power station was totally uninhabited, Illya risked switching on a miniature but powerful flashlight. As soon as the thin beam lanced the dark, he saw why.

For whatever purpose the dam had been constructed, it wasn't that of supplying electricity to Getuliana. For apart from ducts leading the seething water direct from the pipes out to the river which wound down to the gates and the bridge, the vast building was completely empty. There were no turbines, no generators, no insulators, no railed catwalks or gauge-and-dial consoles. Like the metalled but trafficless road leading to it, the place was nothing but a blind, a colossal sham...

Chapter 9

The Message That Had To Get Through

ALTHOUGH THE WALLS were damp to the touch, there seemed to be a current of dry air blowing through the cell.

Napoleon Solo had no idea how long he had been there. There was always a bright light burning and the only means he had of marking the passage of time was the doctor's visit - if indeed he was a doctor. At least he wore a white coat and he was always attended by two women in nurse's uniform. On the other hand, the visits might be sporadic and not regular at all. Certainly it seemed to Solo that there was more time now between the hypodermic injections than there had been before when he had still be strapped to the bed.

The bed was made of iron and enameled black. It was high and narrow, with a thin, hard mattress and no bedclothes, and its legs were cemented into the floor of the cell.

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