Lowiewski's face twitched. For an instant, he tried vainly to break
loose from the men who held him. Then he slumped into a chair. Heym
ben-Hillel gasped in shocked surprise. Suzanne Maillard gave a short,
felinelike cry. Sir Neville Lawton looked at the capsule curiously and
said: "Well, my sainted Aunt Agatha!"
"That's the capsule I gave him, at noon," Farida Khouroglu exclaimed,
picking it up. She opened it and pulled out a roll of colloidex
projection film. There was also a bit of cigarette paper in the capsule,
upon which a notation had been made in Kyrilic characters.
Rudolf von Heldenfeld could read Russian. "'Data on new development of
photon-neutrino-electron interchange. 22 July, '65. Vladmir.' Vladmir, I
suppose, is this _schweinhund's_ code name," he added.
The film and the paper passed from hand to hand. The other members of
the Team sat down; there was a tendency to move away from the chair
occupied by Adam Lowiewski. He noticed this and sneered.
"Afraid of contamination from the moral leper?" he asked. "You were glad
enough to have me correct your stupid mathematical errors."
Kato Sugihara picked up the capsule, took a final glance at the
cigarette pack, and said to MacLeod: "I'll be back as soon as this is
done." With that, he left the room, followed by Bertie Wooster and the
Greek.
* * * * *
Heym ben-Hillel turned to the others: his eyes had the hurt and puzzled
look of a dog that has been kicked for no reason. "But why did he do
this?" he asked.
"He just told you," MacLeod replied. "He's the great Adam Lowiewski.
Checking math for a physics-research team is beneath his dignity. I
suppose the Komintern offered him a professorship at Stalin University."
He was watching Lowiewski's face keenly. "No," he continued. "It was
probably the mathematics chair of the Soviet Academy of Sciences."
"But who was this person who could smuggle microfilm out of the
reservation?" Suzanne Maillard wanted to know. "Somebody has invented
teleportation, then?"
MacLeod shook his head. "It was General Nayland's chauffeur. It had to
be. General Nayland's car is the only thing that gets out of here
without being searched. The car itself is serviced at Army vehicles
pool; nobody could hide anything in it for a confederate to pick up
outside. Nayland is a stuffed shirt of the first stuffing, and a tinpot
Hitler to boot, but he is fanatically and incorruptibly patriotic. That
leaves the chauffeur. When Nayland's in the car, nobody even sees him;
he might as well be a robot steering-device. Old case of Father Brown's
Invisible Man. So, since he had to be the courier, all I did was have
Ahmed Abd-el-Rahman shadow him, and at the same time tap our phones.
When he contacted Lowiewski, I knew Lowiewski was our traitor."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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