Текст книги "The Man From Uncle 02 - The Doomsday Affair"

Автор книги: Harry Whittington

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"Who is 'they'? The Chinese-American that originally approached you and Ursula?"

"Yes. Him. The rest of them. But him mostly. He'll find me if he wants to."

"Could you make it easy for him?"

"What?" She shook her head, her eyes dilating.

"I want you to let him find you. We need you to bring him out—so we can trap him."

She shook her head. She stared at him. Her face was milk white, and her eyes empty Her lips moved, but she did not speak. He leaped up, going around the table because she fainted suddenly, her face striking hard, straight down.

IV

Illya awoke and found himself lying curled upon a red and brown Mexican rug.

He shivered, opening his eyes. Remembering the injection given him by Sam Su Yan, he was astonished to find his mind was clear.

"Ah. He wakes up. Our guinea pig." He heard Sam's voice somewhere above him.

He turned his head, but the light pained his eyes, and suddenly his whole body twitched as he had seen spas-tics quiver.

He tried to speak, but the words were garbled, meaningless, and his tongue felt thick in his mouth.

He heard Sam's amused chuckle, mixed with something new—a woman's contemptuous laughter. He tried to turn again, but every time he tried to move at all, his body reacted in violent and disjointed spasms.

He stared up at Sam standing like a bony vulture above him.

"Yes." Sam was pleased. "We are getting about the same reactions from our human guinea pig that we elicited from our other animals in the lab. Your mind is quite clear, is it?" His smile was sour. "No sense your trying to say yes or no; it won't come out that way. The only sounds you can make are those mindless grunts of the idiot, the spastic, the victim of stroke or brain damage. Try to get up. Come on. Get up on your feet!"

Illya turned his body, aware of the tremors that went through him. When he ordered his arms to support him, his legs bent or straightened, or simply trembled while his arms flew in wild, useless motions.

Sam and the woman laughed again. She moved closer now, in lime green shift, high heels, her hair a golden red. Illya saw her as the kind of new discovery he wouldn't want to introduce to the boys.

Sam Su Yan noticed Illya's rapt staring at the woman. He laughed. "I'm afraid women will be of little use to you in your condition, my friend—unless you enjoy tormenting your mind by seeing what you cannot touch. This is Miss Violet Wild, Kuryakin. I'm sorry I cannot remain here any longer to enjoy the side-effects of my revenge upon you. More urgent matters demand my immediate attention. I'm sure you'll forgive me. Miss Wild will see you safely put away."

Illya struggled frantically on the floor, managing to get to his knees before he was attacked by a sudden fit of violent trembling and sprawled out face down upon the carpeting. He lay still there watching Su Yan and Violet Wild leave the room.

He stayed face down, panting against the carpeting, his body dissociated from the messages of his mind. It was as if the drug had scrambled his nerve centers. Every order from his mind only seemed to confuse and aggravate his nerves and muscular controls.

Lying there he felt the pressure of his shoulder holster, of his gun. They were so sure of themselves they had not even bothered to disarm him.

Painfully, and after many false starts, and falls and wild muscular spasms in his legs and arms, Illya fell over on his back.

Exhausted, he lay for a moment before he attempted any other moves. Then, his forehead sweat-beaded, he ordered his right arm to reach for the gun in his holster.

His left arm trembled and waved in a wild arc. But when it fell, it landed on the holster, although there seemed little sense of feeling in his fingers.

He could see his hand lying on the holster.

He bit his lip, sweated, afraid that his arm might suddenly fly away from the holster in another spasm. Closing his eyes tightly, he ordered his right hand to close on the holster, to cling tightly. His left hand closed on the holster, but his arm quivered all the way to his shoulder.

Afraid even to compliment himself upon this small success, Illya forced his hand to inch upward toward the gun butt.

His shirt was sweat-damp, his eyes burning with perspiration by the time he forced his quivering, fatigue-aching hand to close on the gun butt.

He said the words over and over in his mind. Draw. Draw the gun. Draw.

Suddenly his left arm moved, yanking the gun from its holster. Then it swung in wide arcs, gyrating, shaking, no matter how his mind screamed at it to lie still. The fingers loosed and he watched the gun sail halfway across the room and go sliding under the bed.

He sagged back on the carpeting, too tired to care. His left arm continued to tremble.

He managed to turn his head and saw that his luggage had been brought into this room and stood with two green lightweight lady's weekenders.

He remembered Su Yan's words: "Miss Wild will see you safely put away."

He breathed heavily, going over in his mind the implications of this mild statement. His mind remained clear, but he made the noises of a cretin idiot and his movements were those of one who suffered from epi-lepsy, or a crippling stroke, or brain damage at birth. He could not even control any of his movements.

Miss Wild will see you safely put away.

Put away where?

He managed to search the room by flailing about, lifting his head only to have it fall back hard upon the floor. He was alone. They were certain he wasn't going anywhere.

He managed to hurl his right arm upward and allow it to fall across his shirt pocket and the ball-point pen clipped upon it.

Minutes later he had it closed in his fist and his shaking thumb had pressed down, releasing its point.

Holding the pen as if his life depended upon it, he rolled across the room to the small desk. Quivering, his body jerking in strange and uncoordinated spasms, he pulled himself up to his knees. He reached out and pulled the small stack of hotel stationary toward him.

The papers fluttered out around him and he sprawled out, holding the pen in his fist.

He closed his eyes as tightly as he could after setting his shaking fist at the top left hand corner of the sheet of white paper. He gripped the pen with all his strength even though this caused the rest of his body to react in paroxysms.

He took his time. He knew he could not hope to do more than to print his given name and the word help. Even this pushed out of the balcony would be enough to alert the other U.N.C.L.E. agents in the immediate vicinity.

He exhaled at last, dropping his head upon his arm.

He cried out his success in wild laughter, recoiling from the unnatural sounds pouring across his mouth. He didn't care, it was laughter. It was triumph. It was mind over convulsive muscle.

He lifted his head, staring at the short distance to the double doors standing open to the balcony. He had only to grip the paper, roll over there and let the wind catch it. Miss Wild will see you safely put away.

Maybe she would, Sam.

He finally was able to force his fist to open and let the pen drop to the floor. Then he turned his attention to closing either of his hands on the paper on which he had written, Illya. Help.

He stared at the paper upon which he had written so agonizingly.

The sound that burst from his mouth was a sob of agony, and it sounded like one. He cried out violently, helplessly. The words his mind had struggled so long with were not words at all. There was nothing on the paper except the meaningless scribbling of a three-year-old child.

V

Solo moved the spirits of ammonia under Barbry's nose.

"No." She sat up protesting, pushing the small bottle away from her nostrils.

"You all right?"

A slight shudder coursed through her at the sound of Solo's voice. Obviously, it brought back abruptly the reason why she had fainted.

"How did I get here?" She opened her eyes, staring about her in alarm.

"There's nothing to be afraid of—"

"Let me decide that." Her voice quavered.

"You're all right, Barbry. You fainted in the restaurant. I didn't want to attract too much attention to us, so a waiter and I walked you out to a taxi, and I brought you here."

She met his gaze. "Yes. You brought me here. Where am I?"

"You're all right. You're in my room at the St. Francis Hotel."

"You're a sneaky worker, aren't you?"

Solo smiled wryly. "Under other circumstances I'd most definitely be using all my wiles on you, Barbry. But right now I'm trying to help you, whether you believe me or not."

"Right now I'm not so sure."

He grinned at her. "I had coffee sent up. You'll feel a lot better." He poured a cup from the glittering silver service.

She took the small china cup, sipping at it, relaxing slightly.

"Why did you bring me here, Solo?"

"What would you do with a woman who fainted in a public place?" He sipped at a cup of coffee. The steam rose between them. "I promised to protect you. I can do it better when you're where I can watch you."

"That's all off, Solo."

He set his cup down, watching her narrowly. "What are you talking about?"

"The agreement you and I made. I meant to keep it. But you've already broken your part of it."

He frowned. "Do you mind explaining that?"

"It's simple enough. I told you I was scared half out of my mind. You said that if I'd tell you what I knew of Ursula and the time she worked as a spy with Thrush, you'd try to help me stay alive."

"And I do promise that."

"No. You said talk. But the next thing you wanted was to use me as bait to lure a man into your trap. He's a man I'm more afraid of than I am of the devil. Talking about him is one thing. Putting myself where I know he can get at me—I don't want any part of that. I mean it, Solo. I'm dead afraid—and I'm not going to get involved."

"You are involved."

"Am I? Then I'm not going to get involved any deeper."

He stood up. He looked down at her. 1 don't blame you for being afraid. I wouldn't think much of you if you didn't have sense enough to be scared—"

"Oh, I've got a lot of sense! I'm scared to death. Sorry, Solo, flattery won't do it, either."

He smiled, "All right. But maybe the truth will, and the unvarnished truth is, Barbry, you are involved. I assure you that you are. If only because you were approached by Thrush—that means they know about you. Whatever it is they plan to do now, they may be afraid to trust you. You said for some reason they turned you down, but you didn't tell me what it was."

He saw a shadow flicker across her dark eyes. She drew a deep breath. "I don't want to talk about it—the reason."

"Why?"

"Because it doesn't have anything to do with this."

He shrugged. "That's up to you, Barbry. Everything you tell me to help me may aid in saving your life. But what you want to tell me, and don't want to tell me, that's up to you… But there are more reasons why you're in danger from Thrush. You wrote Ursula a letter—and even if it was in a hip jargon only the two of you would understand, it would be enough to make Thrush suspicious of you. And the very fact that you stayed with Ursula for some weeks after she started working for Thrush may mean that you—even unwittingly—met or heard from Ursula about a man that we know only by his code name—Tixe Ylno. You may have seen him, or you may know him well enough for your life to be forfeit because he'll be afraid to let you live at this critical time in his plans."

"You know how to break a gal up, don't you?"

"It's the truth doing that, Barbry. I'm not telling you anything you haven't already told yourself these past months."

After a moment she shook her head. "No. I guess not."

"And then there's the matter of this Chinese-Ameri-who approached you and Ursula in the first place. For all we know he may be Tixe Ylno. No matter who he is, he's part of this immediate business they're enmeshed in—and they don't want people like you around spoiling it for them. He loves secrecy. He even had himself declared dead in a plane crash two years ago in order to make all this easier for him. You think he's going to let a doll he was afraid to trust as a spy stay alive long enough to trip him up? I can tell you he won't. The stakes are too high."

She shuddered, covering her face with her hands. Her body shook. Solo saw that she was numbed with fear.

"We've got to stop him, Barbry. You understand? The only way we can do that is—"

The telephone rang, breaking across his words, stopping him cold. He glanced toward the instrument, frowning.

He reached out, lifted the receiver and placed it against his ear. "Solo speaking."

The voice was that of a woman: the words were in the code of his department in the United Network Command. There was no doubting their authenticity or their meaning.

"Acknowledge," he said.

"Do you understand clearly?" the voice inquired.

"Yes. Thank you." The phone went dead in his hand.

He turned, finding Barbry Coast crouching on his bed, watching him, her eyes stark, wide.

"I must go out," he said. "At once. Will you wait here for me?"

Her voice was flat. "You think they won't find me here?"

"You'll be safe here, as long as you follow my orders."

"Safe when used as directed," she said in a dulled tone that was devoid of hope.

"Just stay in here. Keep the door locked, the latch on. When I come back, I'll knock three times. Before you unlock the door, ask my name. Don't unlatch or unlock that door for any reason, unless you hear three knocks first and then hear my voice."

She nodded and sank down on the bed. He glanced at her, seeing she had no hope. She wanted to trust him, but she knew too much about Thrush, and she no longer trusted anything.

VI

Solo walked into Forbidden City just off Grant Avenue. The shops around it and the cafe itself seemed pervaded with oriental incense. One never escaped the Startled little bite of shock at finding a place like this, even in a city like San Francisco. The patrons, the murals, the waitresses, the waiters, the tables and chairs seemed unreal, as if they did not even exist outside this world inside itself.

A man in Mandarin dress came forward and bowed. "Ah, Mr. Solo. Good evening, Mr. Solo."

Solo bowed, giving him a faint smile because he knew neither of them had ever encountered the other before.

"Will you be kind enough to come this way with me, Mr. Solo?"

Solo followed him through the tables toward the rear of the cafe. They went along a short, dimly lit corridor and the Chinaman rapped on the door facing.

Alexander Waverly looked up from the head of the table when Solo was ushered into the red-upholstered room. Waverly seemed entirely at ease, though Solo knew that less than five hours ago he'd been at headquarters on New York's east side, or at home in bed. Nothing ever appeared to ruffle his exterior calm. Solo supposed a man got like this when he had been down all roads, seen everything at least twice.

"Come in, Mr., uh—"

"You must know who I am," Solo said, smiling. "You sent for me."

Waverly chuckled briefly and motioned him to a chair across the red-varnished table from the third man in the room. He said, "Solo, I'm sure you know Osgood—uh, Osgood DeVry. He's a personal adviser to the president of the United States."

Solo extended his hand. "I'm glad to know you, Mr. DeVry. I've heard a great deal about you."

Osgood DeVry smiled. He was a thick-set man of slightly more than medium height. There was the flushed pink, steak-fed look about him of a man who had grown accustomed to unaccustomed success and ease of life. He was in his early fifties, mildly overweight. He wore his graying brown hair parted on the side and brushed back dry from his scalp.

"Everyone who knows Osgood is proud of the work he's doing down there in Washington," Waverly said.

"Not everyone," DeVry said, deprecatingly, though he smiled. "One does the best he can. Sometimes he's rewarded. Sometimes he's forced to turn the other cheek until he runs out of cheeks. I try not to think about it. I do what I think I must."

"Yes." Waverly cleared his throat. "And this leads us neatly into the reason for our nocturnal call on you, Solo. It's so urgent that we had to interrupt your present mission, no matter how important, and even if it were blonde." Waverly smiled, but there was an entire lack of sympathy in his voice.

"Perhaps I'd better fill you in on it," Osgood DeVry said. He shifted his attache case on the table before him. "Though it applies to the case, some of it is personal."

"All of it is of vital concern to the safety of this nation, and perhaps of Russia too," Waverly said. "And we are now certain that it concerns our friend of the code name, Tixe Ylno."

DeVry filled a pipe with tobacco and tamped it down. He placed the curved mouthpiece between his teeth, but did not light it. Watching him, Solo saw a strong man who might have somehow weakened from the soft life in Washington. Obviously, he worked hard, but one saw that whatever he did for the president or for his country these days, it was all inestimably easier than the life he'd known in his early years.

DeVry said, "I'm a kid who sold newspapers in Dallas streets, Mr. Solo. My folks deserted me. I grew up in foster homes. I made my own decisions—they weren't always right, of course, but I learned to stand up whether they were right or wrong. In my present position of course, I can't do anything that is contrary to the wishes of the president—nor would I want to."

Waverly said, "We understand."

Solo nodded, settling back in the red, leather-covered chair. The lights from the red chimneys cast a reflected glow upon the faces of the men across from him.

"It's the matter of the decision that's important here. When I was younger—younger than you, Mr. Solo—I was a line officer in the army. I made decisions then when I couldn't get back to headquarters or there wasn't time. I can tell you, I stood or fell on them, then." He shook his head as if brushing away a bitterly unpleasant memory. "Well. Now what I am about to tell you, I have discussed with the president—and with Alexander

Waverly here—but no one else. The president agrees with me that I must make the decision—and he has tacitly allowed me to understand that he will not be able publicly to defend me or my decision. My public life depends on success or failure—"

"We're not here to fail, Osgood," Waverly said.

Osgood DeVry laughed, almost a desperate sound. "No. We certainly are not. Briefly, Mr. Solo, we have come across some information that perhaps should be turned over to the joint Chiefs, Central Intelligence, the Pentagon—but it is of such a nature that even if only a whisper leaked, the entire country might panic. My decision is to deal quietly with the matter as long as we can. My decision is to let you people at U.N.C.L.E. handle it—as long as you can. Now, it's my decision, and the president concurs—as long as he can, and off the record. Failure will mean that my head will roll, that I will have failed the president, who's been a close friend of mine for many years—but more than that, I will have failed the people I've tried to serve all my life, whether they always appreciated it or not."

"Failure could well mean the destruction of the civilized world," Waverly said.

Solo straightened, staring at his chief incredulously.

Waverly smiled. "Don't be upset, Solo. No one can hear us. This is a sound-proofed room. We could fire a cannon in here and we'd never be heard. That's why we chose this place."

Solo sighed and relaxed. "Then an atomic bomb is involved?"

DeVry said, "At least, an atomic device is rumored to be entangled in the affair. Yes. Here's what happened. One of your people, in Tokyo on a tangential matter, came across a spy for Thrush. The man was badly wounded, his stomach laid open with knife wounds. He would have no reason to lie, and your man says he was conscious and not delirious, which is what I suspected when I first heard what he'd revealed. The plan is to attack a city inside the continental United States with an atomic device—and, according to the spy, that device and the operation is almost ready. Time is running out."

"All of this certainly reconciles with every bit of the information we gathered which put us onto this Tixe Ylno matter in the first place," Waverly said.

"I may as well tell you, I remain somewhat skeptical," DeVry said. "I cannot help but doubt the plausibility of this information, even though we naturally must run it down. We can't ignore it."

"Not in the light of all our other facts about the activities of this Tixe Ylno," Waverly said.

"The point that makes me most doubtful," DeVry said, "is the matter of an outsider striking at the United States with an atomic device. Not with our early warning system. It just isn't practical."

"It's just nightmarish enough to be possible," Solo said.

Waverly nodded. "The one important matter that evolves from what we have to this moment—whether such a plot actually is in the works or not, and whether a strike could be successfully delivered against us from without or not, whether it is fact or hoax—is that we must get to this person Tixe Ylno. Whoever he is, whatever he is, he must be quickly captured, exposed, disarmed."

DeVry exhaled. "For all the reasons I've given you, I've reached my decision to let you people handle this—quietly, and, I pray, quickly."

"I believe you have made a wise decision," Waverly said. "We have reports in our office of Thrush agents, and of apparent outsiders, inquiring of the governments of Red China, Russia, France—even the United States—for atomic components. There is afoot this secret plot to hatch some kind of atomic device that is functional. Beyond that, we have the young woman Baynes-Nee-firth, who arranged through you, Osgood, for our protection. Obviously, you know that she had been in the employ of Thrush for almost a year, gathering classified information from men in sensitive roles at missile sites. Don't doubt that there is such a plot. Thrush allowed that young woman to stay alive only long enough to get to us."

"I failed you then, Mr. DeVry," Solo said quietly. "I'll try not to fail you again."

"You didn't fail, Mr. Solo." DeVry smiled. "Thrush had decreed that girl's death long before she came to me. Her death was one factor that convinced me there might be something to this plot of attack with an atomic device. If these people can build one, then perhaps they have the capability for a strike."

"I don't know yet where it will lead me," Solo said. "But I was able to contact the young woman who was a close confidante of Ursula Baynes."

"Good. Good," DeVry said.

"She's been in hiding from Thrush," Solo said. "We were able to get to her first this time, I believe."

"Yes. Miss Baynes told me that the young woman had completely disappeared. I was of the mind that Thrush had found her and destroyed her. I didn't say any of this to Miss Baynes, of course. I'm glad to hear the other young woman is alive and safe."

"She's alive," Solo said. "Whether she's safe or not is something else."

DeVry smiled. "Your record is satisfactory for me, Mr. Solo. I assure you that the president himself will be most pleased when I report to him that you people are at last in contact with someone who might lead us to Tixe Ylno. Just to learn whether Tixe Ylno is male or female will be a giant step forward, eh, gentlemen?"