The Magicians of Night - By Barbara Hambly Page 0,103

Paris to Warsaw. There was not a shred of wire, not a radio tube, not a soldering iron to be seen, even in the drawers and cabinets.

Saltwood smiled inwardly. What a collection! Old Marvello would swap his firstborn child for a crystal ball that size!

That means the real lab must be across the hall, or in one of the attics upstairs. But the lab itself was of only secondary importance.

He looked back at the thread of light under the door. Not strong enough for a working light...

A bedroom, then. And he’d seen von Rath and Twisselpeck, and the old geezer on the terrace that afternoon fit the description Mayfair had given him of the third member of this particular cell of the Occult Bureau, Jacobus Gall...

At a guess, this room would be Sligo’s.

Of the three new keys on the ring, he’d already eliminated one as belonging to the lab door; the first of the remaining two he tried fitted. He had a story ready that his uniform would have backed up; but when he stepped silently through the door, he found he didn’t need it. The man sitting perched on a laboratory stool at the table had his back to the door, and was far too absorbed in what he was doing to look around or even, evidently, notice that someone had entered. Even in the dim glow of a single candle, which was all the illumination the room could boast, Saltwood recognized him: Professor Rhion Sligo, self-styled wizard and pet mad scientist of the SS, a broad-shouldered bearded little man clothed in a hand-me-down Wehrmacht sweatshirt and patched fatigue pants, bent over a weird construction of braided metal wires, small glass spheres, and the biggest hunk of rock crystal Saltwood had ever seen.

Both Sligo’s chubby hands rested on the twisted wire base of the thing—crude and lumpy iron wound around with something that looked like gold but was probably brass. His head was bowed, his eyes shut and his breathing slow, as if in sleep or deep meditation, Saltwood took the garrote from his pocket and silently unwound it, wrapping the handles tight in his hands.

He really does believe it...

His face still turned away from Saltwood, the Professor straightened up a little on his backless stool and raised his head, but the candlelight showed his open eyes focused inward, devoid of any awareness of his surroundings. It seemed to Tom, standing behind him, that a faint secondary glow seemed to be coming from the crystalline gizmo on the table, shining faint bluish white, like distant stars, in the lenses of Sligo’s glasses.

Sligo stretched out one hand, keeping the other on the gizmo’s base.

It has to be a reflection. An optical illusion... But it seemed to Tom that in Sligo’s cupped hand a seed of blue-white light blossomed, cold St. Elmo’s Fire that threw a ghostly radiance on every line and ridge of his fingers without appearing to burn the flesh. But if it’s a reflection of the candle flame, shouldn’t it be orange?

Tom stepped nearer. Sligo stretched out his hand, and the ball of light drifted upward like an ascending balloon. He raised his head to follow it with his eyes. Fascinated as Saltwood was by the trick, the trained assassin in him said Now.

Tom stepped soundlessly forward and crossed his arms; Sligo never knew what hit him until the garrote pulled tight. With the dancer’s grace that an Italian thug had taught them all at Lochailort, Tom turned his body, hooked his shoulder under the taut wires and dragged the little man off his stool and up onto his back. He felt the futile twist of Sligo’s body, the slapping, desperate grope of his hands as he tried franticly to find something to grab or strike. But in this position there was nothing, no purchase possible, no way to make contact with anything but the strangler’s back and sides. Thirty, forty seconds at most...

But with a final convulsion, Professor Sligo hooked one foot in the stool on which he’d been sitting and kicked it as hard as he could against the wall. In the dead silence of the night it made a noise like the house falling down, and von Rath’s room, Saltwood knew, was immediately next door.

Cursing, he threw Sligo’s limp body to the floor and whipped out the dagger that was part of the SS uniform, jerked his victim’s head back by the hair, and slashed at the exposed throat. For one split second he found