"I think...Wait a minute, Napoleon! Suppose he was using the existing line—the black line of the graph—to represent the ground..."
"Yeah?"
"...then surely the two rectangles might be a simple way of indicating the airport buildings with the control tower above them?"
"They might at that," Solo admitted. "But then so what? We have a picture of a plane landing. It doesn't tell us anything about the landing—or about the wreck."
"Oh, but it could, Napoleon. Don't forget these smudges. I don't think they are random. They are very faint, but they are in a definite line...coming downwards from the plan—Look!—and reaching the red line below the black one. There are none above the plane and none below the red line."
"Kind of a dotted line, it seems."
"Exactly. And what's implied by a dotted line—in comic strips, for example?"
Solo considered. "As far as I'm concerned," he said slowly, "a dotted line between two objects implies some kind of relationship between them—nothing more, in the absence of other data."
"But that's just it! A relationship between the plane—the red plane—and the red line..."
"I still don't quite see —"
"Look at the red line," Illya said excitedly. "Everything else has been scrawled roughly, daubed in great haste. But the red line has been done very carefully, laboriously, even. In the desperate hurry he was in to get the message across before he was discovered, he took time to get this bit exactly right."
"How do you mean—exactly right?"
"It repeats the black line very precisely; same slope, same slight differences where the blobs occur, same length—see, it ends on the very same line of the graph paper."
"But if the black line represents the ground, as we think..."
"Then the red one also represents the ground."
"But that's crazy, Illya! One plane, one set of buildings, but two landing grounds—No! Wait a minute!...It's not so crazy, is it?...One plane, one set of buildings, and two landing grounds, only one of which is related to the plane. Is that it?"
"That's it. And the 'ground' related to the plane by the dotted line is lower than the real one, the one with the airport buildings on it. I'm sure that's it."
"You mean he's trying to tell us, via this dotted line, that—so far as the plane was concerned—the ground appeared to be lower than it really was?"
"Yes—and if the pilot, or in this case the Murchison-Spears equipment, is informed the ground is lower than it really is —"
"The aircraft will obviously level off too late; it'll fly straight in. Just as though, in an old-fashioned crate, the altimeter was reading incorrectly."
"Exactly."
Solo picked up the chart, scrutinized it, and laid it down on Matheson's desk. "Okay, wonder boy," he said with a grin. "Sold to the gentleman with the rich uncle! And if the survivor was tipping us off that the crash was due to faulty evaluation of height by the Murchison-Spears box, that ties in with what we already know, doesn't it?"
"It does. Witnesses all say the aircraft 'flew into the ground'; the survivor from the last crash was babbling something about 'it' being too high; Matheson advised us to look for a fault in that particular stage of the gear. It all ties in. I suppose the survivor meant that the ground, as it were, was too high: it rose up and hit them."
The door opened and Helga Grossbreitner came into the room. She hurried across to a filing cabinet, pushing a strand of golden hair that had worked loose out of her eyes.
"Sorry to interrupt you, boys," she said absently, flicking through a stack of folders. "Oh dear—those poor people. I'm trying to deal with inquiries from relatives and friends. It really is most distressing..."
"It's a tough job, honey," Solo sympathized. "But don't worry: I think we may be on our way."
"You mean you've found out who's causing these terrible crashes?"
"Not the actual individuals—though we know it must be THRUSH members. But we do have a line on how it's being done...and once we've established that definitely, it should be easy enough to pin down the culprits."
"But that's good. What have you found out?"
Solo gave her a brief resumé of the conclusions they had arrived at and the evidence which had led to them, adding: "And I'm real sorry, Helga—I guess I have to stand you up on that date tomorrow night...tonight, I mean: it's already past one A.M."
She flashed him her golden smile. "That's okay, lover boy. It'll keep—and me with it. What's the big deal, then?"
"We have to check our deductions, honey. No good acting on them unless we can prove they're right. Illya and I will go to Paris and fly into Nice tomorrow on the T.C.A. Trident—the same flight as the one that crashed here this evening—and keep watch in the pilot's cabin to see what we can see. They seem to be stepping up the disaster rate and there's a chance that we may find something out."
"Yes, I guess that seems sensible—but, darling, you will be careful, won't you? I can't have another date broken!"
Solo patted her rounded shoulder. "I'll take an ejector seat and a 'chute," he promised with a grin. "Expect me to drop in any time after nine...:
After the girl had found the file she wanted and returned to the outer office, Kuryakin looked up from some notes he had been consulting. "You know, Napoleon, there's one angle of this case that we haven't taken into account at all," he said seriously.
"What's that?"
"T.C.A.'s franchise to carry the fissionable material from here to the U.S. We haven't looked into that end of it at all. Do you think we should?"
Solo shook his head. "I guess that wouldn't figure in the case until after THRUSH had gained control of the airline," he said. "From their point of view, the number one priority is to discredit the company to the extent that they can take it over. Until they've achieved that, they can afford to ignore the radioactive bit. It only goes on one flight a month anyway—and there's a squad of men with automatic rifles guarding the armored car that brings it to the airport...Besides there's no question of the crashes being in any way connected with an attempt to grab the stuff."
"You are sure, Napoleon?"
"Sure I'm sure. All the crashes are incoming planes, and the fissionable material is flown out."
"Yes, of course. I just thought I'd mention it."
"Quite right, my boy! Quite right...And now let's go grab some sleep. We have to be back here on the first available flight to Paris tomorrow morning."
"You really meant what you told Helga?"
"Certainly. We'll sit right up in the front of that Trident with our slide rules and our compasses, watching every move," Solo said with a curious emphasis. He opened the door and ushered the Russian out of the office.
A shutter fell noiselessly over the concealed lens of the videotape camera which had been recording their conversation from its hiding place behind a relief map of Europe which hung on the wall.
Chapter 11 — Solo and Illya take a back seat
A fringe of waves laced the edge of the blue-green Mediterranean as the Trident turned in a shallow bank and headed east along the coast towards Nice, gradually losing height. There had been stray banks of cumulus building up over the Basses Alpes and their passage over the Rhône delta had been quite bumpy. Once they passed Toulon, however, the sky cleared and the air was calm and still as the giant plane sank into the dusk which was beginning to shroud the fishing villages south of the Massif des Maures. The creased, iridescent surface of the sea dulled to a somber violet, reflecting the pinpoints of light beginning to twinkle among the craft massed in the harbors of Lavandou and St. Tropez.