Before venturing upstairs, though, he had to make sure of his line of retreat. Waiting for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, he finally made out an oblong of less intense darkness to his left. It was the entrance to a stone staircase leading down between arched plaster walls. Keeping to the outside of the tiled steps, he trod softly down.
As he rounded a bend in the stairway, he saw the origin of the faint illumination. A man sat with his back to the entrance in a small concierge's cubicle, poring over a magazine in the dim light of a low-wattage red bulb. Although paying lip service to the edict that all houses in St. Paul should show no lights during the display, the THRUSH headquarters was maintaining a basic supply with its own generator.
To one side of the concierge's desk was a fourteen-inch TV monitor screen flanked by a platen carrying warning lights and switches. The man, at second hand, was obviously the guardian of the front door.
Illya stole across the hall and paused in the doorway of the cubicle. The man had not moved. Engrossed in what he was reading, he was apparently mouthing to himself the words on the printed page as he laboriously followed the lines.
Illya raised his right arm, the hand held flat with the fingers extended. Abruptly, he swept the flat of the hand across and down to the nape of the man's neck in a karate chop.
The doorkeeper grunted once and slumped forward over the desk.
Thumbing back his eyelid to make sure he would take no part in the evening's festivities for the next hour or so, Kuryakin raced back to the first floor and groped along the wall for the stairs leading up. He found them at the far end of the landing and climbed cautiously to the next story. There were four doors, his exploring fingers discovered—two on each side of the passageway. Crouching, he peered through the keyhole of each in turn. Three of the rooms were in darkness. Through the fourth keyhole, a brighter light shone—and from behind the door he could hear voices raised in argument, among them those of the man and woman he had heard questioning Solo.
The third floor of the house boasted only three doors. Two of them, on the side of the building nearest the street, stood open—to reveal in the intermittent reflection of fireworks admitted through the uncurtained windows a bathroom and what looked like a miniature laboratory. Behind the third, which was closed, lay the room with the picture window, the operations room from which four T.C.A. Tridents had been sent crashing to their doom...
From this landing—Illya saw in the light of a blue-green flare—only a ladder led upwards to the attics. Gun at the ready, he swarmed aloft and disappeared through the open trapdoor in the ceiling.
The crude Proven�al armchair to which Solo was bound had its back to the door, and the first he knew of the Russian's presence was the hand that fell warningly on his shoulder.
"How long have we got?" Solo whispered urgently as Illya sawed through the electric flex clamping his wrists, elbows, knees and ankles to the wooden arms and legs.
Kuryakin glanced at his watch. "The plane is due to land in five and a quarter minutes, Napoleon," he said.
Solo rose to his feet, massaging the life back into his cramped limbs. "God, we have to move fast," he said. "And we can't afford to go into that operations room before we've accounted for the others. How many are there left, do you know?"
"The man and woman who were here with you, Fr�hlich—and probably one other. I've already—er—looked after one guard on the front door."
"Good. But the trouble is, we'll have to do it all in complete silence—the slightest sign of a struggle would tip Helga off..."
Together, they turned towards the door.
Larsen stood there with a Luger, the big gun steady in his dirty hand.
"Okay, you guys," he snarled. "So now it's a confederate, is it? Back up there—now. We'll see just who the hell you are..."
Balletically, Illya kicked straight-legged almost in reflex. The tip of his toe caught the barrel, and the heavy pistol went spinning across the room. As the small, dark man's mouth opened wide in dismay, the Russian chopped flat-handed at his throat, catching him viciously across the Adam's apple as the shout was forming. Solo made a dive to his left and caught the Luger before it could crash to the floor.
Larsen lurched forward, retching for breath, as Illya slammed a left to the pit of his stomach. The dark man doubled up. As his head sank down, Kuryakin grasped hold of the ears and brought his knee sharply up to connect sickeningly with Larsen's face.
The THRUSH man sagged, the two agents catching his inert body and easing it into a chair before it could hit the floor.
"A pity," Kuryakin said as they lowered themselves down the ladder. "I dislike violence..."
Outside the door where the rest of the gang were talking on the floor below, they waited to listen. The Trident was due in four minutes.
"Our timing had better be good on this," Solo whispered. "We've got to give the stuff time to work—and still be in there ready to catch them before they fall!" He produced from a shoulder holster a gun with a long, thin barrel no thicker than a pencil and poked it carefully through the keyhole. Flipping open a cover on the single chamber, he slid in a fragile glass capsule about half the length of a cigarette, closed the cover and pulled the trigger.
There was a faint snap as the powerful spring propelled the capsule into the room on the other side of the door. Illya looked at the luminous face of his watch, waiting while twenty-five seconds ticked away. The intonation of the voices in the room altered, becoming slurred and thick.
"Now!" the Russian called, twisting the handle and throwing open the door.
Holding their breath, the two agents moved quietly and quickly into the room. The shattered fragments of the capsule lay on the tile floor just below a table spread with cards. Two large men were on their feet, swaying drunkenly from side to side. Solo caught one just as he was about to crash face down across the table; Illya seized the other in the act of hauling out a gun from his hip pocket, and waited the few seconds needed before the nerve gas completed its action. Then, together, they lowered the unconscious men to the floor and hurried back to the landing.
"Forty seconds," Kuryakin gasped, dragging the air gratefully back into his lungs. "Anyone that says he can hold his breath for two minutes must be crazy!"
"You can say that again," Solo panted. "But what about the woman: she wasn't there."
The Russian laid a hand on his arm. From two stories below came the sound of a cistern emptying. A door closed and footsteps sounded on the stairs.
Solo and Illya melted back to the floor above and slipped through the open door of the bathroom. The footsteps traversed the landing they had just left and climbed the stairs towards them. In a moment, the woman Celeste appeared, walked along the passageway, opened the door of the operations room opposite, and went in.
A moment later, with Illya close behind him, Solo reopened the door and stepped quietly into the room.
It was a strange sight that met their eyes. Workbenches packed with electronic equipment ran the length of the two side walls. Indicator lights, dials and control knobs studded a panel fronting a complex of valves and intricate wiring; from a curved tube of glass spiraling around a metal core, heavy-insulation leads coiled in every direction. On one side, lights gleamed from the complications of a powerful transmitter.