"O'Donnell, Peter - Modesty Blaise 05 - The impossible virgin" - читать интересную книгу автора (O'Donnell Peter)

THE IMPOSSIBLE VIRGIN
Peter O'Donnell

CHAPTER ONE
Temptation came to Novikov as suddenly, as unexpectedly, as an assassin's bullet. In nearly thirty years of adult life he had never even toyed with the shattering idea that seized him on a quiet afternoon as he sat at his bench in one of the many small laboratories housed within the grey walls of the Satellite Reconnaissance Section, in Shabolovka Street.
Mischa Novikov was a quiet, dutiful man. His dossier described him as totally reliable and without political ambition. His reliability did not stem from meekness or fear, simply from an acceptance of things as they were and had always been within the bounds of his memory.
As a young man he had served in the Red Army, and at the end of the war had been posted to the KGB. Because he spoke German well, he had operated in the Berlin Section and taken a useful part in the bloody and confused underground war there, between the agents of East and West. In that time, and under the orders of Colonel Starov, he had played his part in many intrigues, bought and sold men and information, laid traps and avoided traps, and killed two men and one woman without either pleasure or regret.
His hobby was photography, and in this he developed an expertise which came to the notice of his superiors. He was posted to a training school for a year, and then given a position in the laboratories of the High Altitude Reconnaissance Section.
Within a few years the onrush of technology made his early work seem primitive. Once he had played with mosaics of black and white photography. Now he had an armoury of remote sensors to aid him. There were satellites in orbit carrying the new detectors which operated over the entire electromagnetic spectrum.
Mischa Novikov played with the results of light-waves and sound-waves, radio and radar, heat and X-rays, magnetism and laser beam. These were his eyes. They could penetrate cloud, water, forest and even the earth itself. He had never seen a sputnik launched, never travelled in a high altitude aircraft. Novikov was concerned only with the readings on film delivered to him in his laboratory. Sometimes the readings were transmitted from space by radio, sometimes film was exposed in space and returned to earth in a parachute capsule.
Novikov was one of the interpreters. From film taken by folded optics from a height of three hundred miles he could pinpoint an object no bigger than the desk at which he worked. From film taken by side-looking radar he could penetrate thick vegetation and the earth's skin, to learn the nature of the bedrock below. With infra-red photography he could pick out diseased trees or crops, foretell volcanic activity, locate forest fires.
He played with colour filters, optical combiners and all the gadgetry that the accelerating new technology provided; and he had believed himself to be quite content until that soul-shaking moment when temptation sprang from nowhere and consumed him. It was all over in less than ten seconds. He turned the projector back and held the single frame of film on the screen, staring.
There it was, the thin orange streak. It would have been meaningless to anyone but a handful of men in the world. Mischa Novikov was one of those men. To him it meant that he could be rich and free. Strangely, he had never before thought he lacked money or freedom. Now it was as if he had always known the fierce and bitter desire which suddenly stirred in him.
Caution touched Novikov. Could there be a tiny flaw in the film? That was easily checked by comparison with the film from the second camera carried by the experimental satellite. Methodically he set up the other film and ran it. There was no flaw. A fault in his instruments, then? In his technique? He spent two hours checking his work, and was satisfied. He had made no error.
Carefully he snipped out the vital frames from both films. They would not be missed. Part of his job was to discard useless material before passing on his results to Head of Section. It was lunchtime. He went out and sat in Gorky Recreation Park, smoking quietly, thinking.
To defect would be easy enough. His reputation was impeccable. He and his wife, Ilona, had been cleared for the holiday cruise on the Suvorov in eight weeks' time. Marseilles was one of the ports of call. That would do very well. The French would give asylum without making a great noise about the affair like the Americans or the British. He had once done a six-month tour as a security man at the Embassy in Paris, ostensibly as a chauffeur. He could handle the language adequately.
Would the KGB send agents to find and kill him? After careful reflection he decided that this was unlikely. The material he handled was classified, but only part of it was for Military Intelligence. This was mainly concerned with the plotting of missile sites in the West, and clearly he had nothing to tell the West they did not already know about that. The bulk of his work lay in providing new information for the various sciences, for the geologists, the hydrographers, the agronomists and meteorologists. It was resentfully accepted that the Americans were ahead in the field of remote sensors, so there would be little he could tell them. The KGB would be extremely angry, of course, but he did not think they would take extreme action. Mischa Novikov was not quite worth it.
Tomorrow he would make a blow-up of the film and correlate it with a large-scale map. No problem there. It was part of his regular work. And there would be no problem with Ilona. Her political ideas had always been disturbingly bourgeois, though she had the wisdom never to voice them except to him. She would come with him gladly.
And then ...
Then would come the difficult part. A thin streak of orange on a map was one thing, but to turn it into riches was quite another. The commercial complexities would be huge. But there was Brunel. That name had sounded in his mind during those few seconds when, as he first looked at the film, the world had changed and he had made his decision. Nothing was too big for that little man Brunel, not even this. And Brunel was the obvious man for quite another reason, an amusing reason. He was the man on the spot. Very much so.
Novikov smiled to himself and threw away his cigarette. He would have to be very careful with Brunel, of course. He remembered finding the still-living ruins of a man in a cellar in West Berlin, one of the Gehlen Bureau agents, who had not been very careful with Brunel. In mercy Novikov had severed the thread by which the thing in the cellar was held to life, even though it had been an enemy.
Yes. He would have to arrange his dealings with Brunel in a way which left him fully protected. Any mistake was likely to have a result initially painful and finally fatal.

In the event it was not Novikov who made the mistake. It was Brunel. The result, for Mischa Novikov, was the same. Five thousand miles from Shabolovka Street, and eight months from the day he had sat in the park making his plans, Mischa Novikov crawled from the scrub and thorn which bordered a dirt road leading to the village of Kalimba, forty miles from the western shore of Lake Victoria.
He was almost naked. For four days he had used strips from his tattered clothes to bind about his raw feet. He had sight only in one eye. His right hand was mangled as if it might have been crunched in the jaws of a leopard, except that the damage was too regular and precise to be the haphazard work of any jungle beast. His body was a mass of cuts, abrasions and suppurating wounds. Only some of them had been gathered during his flight through the jungle and in the fall he had taken down a rocky slope as he reeled under the brutal sun through volcanic hills.
He was close to death, and his mind had collapsed. He no longer thought of Ilona waiting for news of him in the small Paris flat... Ilona of the big firm body, the dark hair, grey eyes and warm loving mouth. He no longer thought of Brunel, or the map, or the film with the orange streak. He no longer knew that he lived or that he was dying. Sometimes a few words rattled hoarsely from his cracked lips, always the same words. He was not conscious of speaking them, and no longer knew what they meant.
When he had crawled for a hundred yards along the dirt road he collapsed on his face for the last time. An hour passed before a battered Land Rover came juddering along. The Reverend John Mbarraha of the African Mission Society stopped the truck. He and his wife turned Novikov gently face-up. Angel Mbarraha felt for the pulse. Like her husband she was a Bantu, raised in a Mission School and later sent to England for further education.
She said, 'He is alive, John.'
'But very close to the end. We must pray for his soul.'
'Yes. But later. First we must take him to Dr Pennyfeather. Our Lord will be patient.'
They put him in the back of the truck and drove on to Kalimba, to the long prefabricated hut above the village. This was called the hospital, and here Dr Giles Pennyfeather fought in his own curious way against disease in general and, at this particular moment, against the results of a crowded diesel coach, the local weekly bus, toppling off the road into a shallow ravine.
Mischa Novikov died after twenty-four hours, his nationality and identity still unknown, and was buried in the graveyard behind the small wooden church.
It was two days later that a Piper Comanche, out from England and bound for Durban, made an emergency landing just east of the Mission School, on the long flat stretch of beaten earth where John and Angel Mbarraha struggled doggedly to instruct their charges in the mysterious ways of western team-sports. The sturdy, elegant little aircraft had been caught at seven thousand feet over the Sudan by a haboob, a sand-storm rising from the desert like a dust-devil to towering heights and spreading its myriad particles through the upper air. Sand had found its way through the vent holes of the tanks and eventually worked through to block the fuel filter and cause loss of power.
There were no passengers on the plane. Surprisingly, the pilot was a woman. Her name was Modesty Blaise.

It was not a long job to take out the filter, wash it in petrol and replace it. She could have been on her way again the next day, but she stayed in Kalimba for twelve days, at first simply to give a pint of blood that Dr Giles Pennyfeather needed urgently, and then because he needed help even more urgently than blood.
She did not stay from any selfless urge to succour the weak and ailing, but because there was nobody else competent to help Dr Pennyfeather cope with an almost overwhelming situation, and to turn her back was impossible.
The Mbarrahas gave her a room in their small house. With Angel Mbarraha she washed filthy bandages, swept and scrubbed the floor of the hospital hut, took temperatures, carried bedpans, and helped when the onset of gangrene forced Dr Pennyfeather to amputate a limb in the little cubicle which served as a primitive operating theatre, or when some other emergency called for the use of the knife.
She had run through a whole range of emotions towards Dr Giles Pennyfeather. He was thirty but looked younger, a gangling man, all hands and feet, incredibly clumsy. She felt that in an academic sense he was probably an appalling doctor. Yet he healed his patients. Healed was the word, rather than cured. She had come to the conclusion that this was more of a psychic feat than a medical one, and that he had an extraordinary gift which stemmed perhaps from something inborn.
At first she had thought him a fool, and perhaps by worldly standards he was, but if so then he was the best kind of fool, totally without guile, optimistic, having a boundless liking for people. He was not in any way saintly. He did not exude love towards his patients. He was simply very determined to make them well and had great confidence in his ability to do so. Whatever he did was done with a kind of schoolboy cheerfulness. If he was a dedicated man he was completely unaware of it. He simply pressed on with whatever problem was thrust upon him, tackling it with clumsy optimism.
He was operating now, not on one of the bus casualties but on a woman from the village who had conceived in one of the fallopian tubes. His operating robe was a faded blue shirt and khaki shorts, well-laundered. His rather spiky fair hair rose like a great thistle-head above the sweatband round his brow, making him look like something out of a farce.
Modesty stood at the operating table, her hair capped in a silk headscarf. In the oppressive heat she would have preferred to be stripped to pants and bra, but to avoid shocking the Mbarrahas she wore an overall that Angel had contrived from a cotton housecoat.
The woman was under ether and seemed to be sustaining the operation well so far. Giles Pennyfeather had already knocked the tray of instruments on the floor, and was waiting now, unperturbed, while Modesty sterilized them anew. He hummed to himself behind his mask and peered dubiously into the abdominal cavity, held open by retractors, from which a cluster of clamps protruded.
'First time I've done this one,' he said. 'I mean the fallopian tube. All looks very confusing in there to me. Let's have another squint at that diagram, old girl.'
Modesty tried without success to think of anyone else in the world she would have allowed to call her old girl, then wondered why she did not mind it too much from Giles Pennyfeather. She used a spare scalpel to flick over the stained and dog-eared pages of the big medical book. 'I think this is it.'
Giles Pennyfeather moved to peer at the diagram, and she quickly shifted the tray of instruments to safety from under his elbow as he bent forward with gloved hands in the air, gazing at the page.
'It all looks clear enough here,' he said at last, 'but when you look in poor old Yina's tum there's just a grotty old mish-mash of bits and pieces.' He paused, reading the caption. 'Ah, trumpet-shaped. Yes, I remember now. How's young Bomutu's leg, Modesty?'
'It seems to have set pretty well. Look, is she all right for blood-pressure and respiration, Giles? I can't tell.'
"Neither can I. Black skin makes it a bit tricky to judge colour, doesn't it? Breathing sounds a bit groggy though.' He bent suddenly over the unconscious woman and said firmly, 'Now look here Yina, old girl, you just stop messing about. Keep breathing nice and easy, like a good girl, or I'll wallop your wobbly old behind when you wake up. Savvy?'
He remained bent over her, glaring at her in mock severity for several seconds, then straightened up. Modesty told herself that if Yina's breathing seemed easier it could only be her imagination. But she had heard Pennyfeather talking to his patients before, conscious and unconscious. The fact that they rarely understood a word of English did not trouble him. She had known him sit up all night holding the hand of a dying boy, talking to him in a rambling monologue. The boy had lived and was growing strong again. There was no air of mysticism about it all, and certainly Pennyfeather himself had no sense of possessing any healing power. He simply did or said whatever came into his head.