Текст книги "[The Girl From UNCLE 01] - The Birds of a Feather Affair"

Автор книги: Michael Avallone

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Mr. Riddle's Frankenstein face still showed only the frozen leer but his voice said: "Miss Van Atta did the honors."

"Good girl," the Negro chortled. "You got class, lady."

He bent down, poking his big hands under Bora Singh's armpits. Arnolda Van Atta watched, no emotion visible on her cool face. Charleston hummed softly as he worked, adding some words as he swung the dead Hindu astride his broad shoulders. "Way down upon the Swami River...." Mr. Riddle laughed mirthlessly. Blood from Bora Singh's blasted skull dripped to the floor.

The laughter halted only because of a large, explosive rush of sound from somewhere outside the room. The walls rocked with thunder. Plaster cracked. Arnolda Van Atta uncrossed her shapely legs and sprang erect. Charleston paused in the doorway, Bora Singh's body draped over one muscular shoulder. His eyes popped with fright.

Mr. Riddle came from around he desk. He was very tall. Tall and cadaverous. A gaunt, skeletal sight with a Frankenstein face.

"It's them," Arnolda Van Atta said in a low voice. "That came from their room—those damn Uncle swine—what have they done now?"

The question hung unanswered as echoing bursts of sound raced around the room.

The room seemed to tremble with violence.

The Great Zorki

"My compliments, Mr. Zorki," Alexander Waverly said. "Your colleagues place the highest price on your services."

The man with the head of a bull glowered across the polished glass of Waverly's desk. His savage black brows met in a V of impatience.

"You mock me?"

Mr. Waverly shook his head, his professorial facade mild and good-natured.

"One does not mock an agent whom Thrush would go to such great lengths to return him to the field, my friend. No, I do not mock Alek Yakov Zorki. I would be a fool if I did. I am all too aware of your triumphs with Thursh."

Zorki's bestial face, framed in a skull that was a living portrait of the charging bull rampant, smiled. His massive shoulders, enhanced by the gray turtleneck sweater which accented the thickness of his neck, hunched forward. His teeth were grotesquely small and even in his big face.

"So, my dear Waverly. The bargaining has begun then?"

"Yes." Waverly indicated the yellow streamer of teletype on his desk. It lay on the blotter pad between the two men—the difference between life and death. It was an odd afternoon to think about morbid combats: sunlight flooded the picture window of the office, revealing the glass architecture of the buildings in the background. Countless windows, reflecting the sun, glistened like emeralds.

Zorki, staring past Waverly's lean shoulder, seemed mesmerized by the view, like an immigrant viewing the Statue of Liberty for the first time. But the head of U.N.C.L.E. was not deceived.

This was Zorki, a man who had been to America too many times to be mistaken for a guileless foreigner. The same Zorki who had sabotaged the waterfront situation, delaying countless cargoes of supplies crucial to the running of a democracy. God knew what else.

Alek Yakov Zorki. KKK on the books. Code name: Bomber.

The agent's eyes glittered. "Have you agreed to the terms?"

Waverly pursed his lips. "Not yet. We must talk first. A fair exchange is no bargain—I've heard that somewhere. Your people have one of my best men. Perhaps they now have two. A most unique young lady you may well remember. I prize these people very highly. But I fear I may prize you even more. Therefore, I must think a little longer on the matter."

Zorki snorted. "And how much time do you have to—think?"

"Midnight today. Your friends suggest I contact a locker in Grand Central Station."

"Ah, yes. Grand Central. I nearly blew that place up once. It would have been a glorious thing. Think of it. New York's vital traffic bogged down for weeks, months."

"Perhaps," Waverly murmured. "In any case, I didn't bring you in here to discuss your exploits for Thrush."

Zorki's bushy eyebrows rose.

"So? To specifics then. Are you going to agree to the terms?"

"No," Mr. Waverly said. "I am not." He stared down at the tips of his spatulate, leathery fingers, then searched the top of the desk for one of his pipes. But there were none there. Only the row of enamel buttons of all colors. Zorki followed his gaze, impatiently. "You see, my dear Zorki, I am fearful of your health. A man such as yourself must often catch colds. I have found that true of most large men of my acquaintance."

"Bah," roared Zorki. "What are two agents compared to the Great Zorki? A mere man and a woman—"

"The man," said Mr. Waverly, "is impulsive, a bit of a nonconformist but he is highly skilled and intelligent enough to be a candidate for this very desk one day. As for Miss Dancer, apart from being dedicated to good work, she has poured every molecule of her being into the fight against cosmic evils like Thrush. She's a bit penurious—her Maine background—but I find that refreshing when it comes to turning in expense accounts. Miss Dancer actually is worth five of you to me, Mr. Zorki. But we were talking about your health, were we not?"

Zorki leaned out of his chair, his arms resting on the lip of the desk. His small eyes were angry. "What is this nonsense about my health?"

Waverly's eyes met his, a slight smile tugging his mouth.

"Don't you notice anything peculiar in the air? A bit of a chill—?"

Zorki frowned, his nostrils curling. Suddenly, a look of dawning wonder flooded his bull face. He gazed about wildly, then he tried to rise. Too late, he sensed the subtle, cool fragrance about his chair. It was then and only then that he managed to push up from the chair. He cursed, clawed at his throat briefly and fell over backwards, missing the chair. His heavy body thudded to the soft carpet of Mr. Waverly's office.

Waverly hardly gave him a glance. He thumbed the yellow button on his desk. A female voice, issuing from seemingly nowhere again, abruptly crackled with sound.

"Section Six, Mr. Waverly."

"Send Mr. Wilder in, please."

"Yes, Mr. Waverly."

He pressed another button on his desk. The green one. This activated an air current that issued from the edge of his desk and kept the gas that had knocked out Zorki from reaching him. Waverly steepled his fingers, sat back in his chair, and waited.

A door on his left, cleverly merged with the pale umber color of the wall, opened with a slide of panel, and a man stepped into the office.

Mr. Waverly spun about in his chair and scrutinized the newcomer carefully. As if by prearranged signal, the entrant to the office stood at attention and said nothing.

Yes, Wilder would most certainly do. Only Zorki's mother could have told them apart.

Security and Enforcement Agent James Wilder was the spitting image of Alek Yakov Zorki. It was more than the similar costume of rough tweed suit, gray turtleneck sweater and plain, scuffed shoes. The bull head, massive shoulders and the artfully made-up face, would definitely serve to fool anyone coming as close as five feet. The Lab had once more performed one of their highly specialized tricks.

James Wilder turned around for Mr. Waverly's benefit, walked a few paces and then paused, cocking his head. As his chief studied him for defects, he too scarcely paid any attention to the man on the floor.

"Good, Mr. Wilder. You'll do. Concentrate a bit on that flinging of the head. Our dear Zorki's bullishness is one impression he leaves with the most casual acquaintance."

"Right, sir."

"Now I suggest that you find our sleeping friend a cell to sleep it off in. Continue to study him until eleven tonight. All details, all physical mannerisms. Using a glass mirror, of course. By that time, we will have formulated our plans for the midnight rendezvous with our other friends from Thrush."

Wilder came further into the room and bent over Zorki. He rolled the heavy agent over on his back. Zorki made not a sound. Wilder's smile was bleak.

"Sleeping like a baby."

"Yes," Waverly nodded. "The depression of the cushion on that chair he sat in is rather unique, I think. Harmless enough but most effective in releasing the gas. Took a bit longer to work this time. Have the Lab check out the formula for possible flaws. It took nearly five minutes to incapacitate Mr. Zorki."

"Right, sir." Wilder paused, as he slung Zorki to his shoulder. "Any word on Slate and Dancer?"

"No. That will be all, Mr. Wilder."

Mr. Waverly turned to look out the picture window. The panorama of the East River and the shore beyond was always a pleasing sight. It had a soothing effect on whatever strain he experienced in his duties for the organization known as U.N.C.L.E.

He was upset now, though his headmaster's manner indicated no such thing to observers like James Wilder, who was already removing Zorki's bulk from the office. It was one thing to dupe the enemy and prepare a fine plan to rescue two valuable agents, but he was all too aware of the duplicity of THRUSH.

What if April Dancer and Mark Slate were already dead?

For one tiny second, he wistfully wished that Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin were not thousands of miles away in Rangoon on that infernal ray affair.

He tried not to think about that as he watched the sun's rays dance off the numberless windows on the opposite side of the river.

April Dancer and Mark Slate were a team, too. As such, they would have to play the game. The game that can be lost just once.

The deadly game of Spy, U.N.C.L.E., Spy.

Don't Blow Your Top

The corridor was empty.

Behind them, the fused, crumpled door, a twisted testimonial to the effectiveness of X-757, now revealed the glowing chamber, their recent cell. The hallway stretched ahead, long, dark and unknown. No light gleamed. In the shadowy gloom, April Dancer could see the pale blur of Mark Slate's half-naked body. The woman in her made her grin wryly, despite the situation. There was something indecent about having to operate without a full set of fig leaves.

Silken panties and bra were not exactly the standard uniform for U.N.C.L.E. assignments, either.

"Where to now?" Mark Slate whispered.

"Let's wait till we hear a noise. No sense in playing blindman's buff."

It was a good idea. No hue and cry had been raised since the muffled explosion of the door. A cemetery silence filled the corridor. A silence more discomforting for the noisy blast that had preceded it.

A darkened corridor was ideal for the onslaught of sudden attacks. Especially when one had not the faintest notion which way led to freedom.

They didn't have a weapon between them. THRUSH had seen to that. Good old reliable Mark, who seemed to think of everything sometimes, had had the good sense to secrete a tiny blasting cap in the hollow of his armpit. It was that and that alone which had triggered the wadded clump of X-757 in the door jamb. But what now?

"Mark—"

"Yes?"

"Listen—"

From somewhere at one end of the corridor came a click of noise. April tensed, clutching Mark Slate's forearm in warning. They both froze where they stood. No door had been opened that they could see; no telltale light lit up the darkness. Yet they both knew from long experience that someone was in the corridor with them. Perhaps, more than one—

April felt the barest influx of air playing over her flesh. It had to come from an opening of some kind. Then it was gone. The trickle of wind came from the gloom just ahead of them, no more than fifteen feet away. April flattened against the wall, straining to listen. She pushed her long dark hair back, away from her ears. She kept herself from trembling, concentrating on the source of the sound. This was a typical THRUSH maneuver, this baiting-in-the-dark. She remembered ruefully the way they had bottled up poor Donegan in Granada. The abandoned air shaft of an old apartment house. Donegan hadn't had a chance, either.

She was dimly aware of the sound of Mark's breathing. Or was it the enemy's? Too hard to tell. She couldn't risk a whisper now. She had almost lost sight of the pale blur of his body. Where exactly was Mark?

Had someone decided to traverse the width and length of the corridor with scathing bursts of machine-gun fire, they wouldn't have had a chance in a million. Either of them. Therefore, that could only mean one thing. The enemy was in the corridor with them. And they were wanted alive. That was worth knowing, but—

Far too late, she sensed the rush of bodies. She tried to scuttle back in the darkness. And then a hard knee rocketed from nowhere, ramming into her stomach. The air shot from her lungs. Tears sprang to her eyes; a fierce stab of agony filled her middle. She staggered, only to feel herself vised by a pair of arms which should have belonged to a gorilla. She shook herself violently, trying to dissolve the waves of shock. But it was too soon. She allowed herself to fall forward against her assailant, smelling the sweaty nearness of an enormous, muscular body. From somewhere, she heard Mark Slate's clipped voice blurt something. Then there was a savage series of smacking, thudding noises, suggesting a terrible fight at close quarters.

Someone else cried out in pain and terror. A blue shaft of gunfire lit up the darkness, briefly, as a streak of lightning ignites an overcast sky. And then April was too occupied with her own troubles to think of anything else. The dry, acidic taste left her mouth and her senses cleared.

Her heavy assailant mashed her in a crushing embrace. She allowed herself to sag further. Now, her attacker, well aware of the softness and pliancy of the curved figure in his hands, roved with his brutal fingers, mixing pleasure with business. April gritted her teeth, shifting her weight into a dead, unstruggling mass. The attacker made himself more comfortable, lessening his fierce hold slightly. April tightened like a bowstring, flipped quickly and her legs levered like scissors. There was a startled curse and the heavy body, anchored at the waist by suddenly lithe and superbly conditioned legs, crashed into the wall.

April broke free and regained her feet.

The gorilla had been deposited somewhere behind her. She braced herself for a return onslaught. It came. A second animal-like charge. She sidestepped but the corridor was too narrow. A wedge of a shoulder clipped her and the man collided with her. April hugged him, in order to avoid a killing kick in the groin.

A hoarse, angry laugh echoed close to her ear. Hot breath washed over her face. There was a rough, tweedy feel to the man's clothing as it chafed against her exposed flesh. She shot a hand into where she knew the face to be, fingers pronged. Another howl as she found the target. She lowered her head and butted. The distance wasn't great for maximal effect but it served. The gorilla's grip loosened as his head snapped back. But he grunted and hung on.

April pushed fear out of her mind. She had run up against a man who had at least ninety pounds on her. Ninety pounds and years of experience as a back-alley fighter. This was obvious from the gouging, corkscrewing motions of the man's hands as they ground cruelly at her flesh.

It was impossible to use her legs now. She was cramped like a pretzel beneath a mammoth opponent. Desperately, she kept her arms high to protect her face and throat. The gorilla added pressure.

"I'll make you say Uncle, baby," his low, gutty voice chortled near her ear.

The sound was all April needed. It measured the distance for her. Swiftly, she reared her head, butting again. There was another howl, followed by a curse. For one precious second, the tight hold about her loosened. She heaved and followed through, slashing savagely with a stiffened palm, driving her right arm out from the shoulder like a pile driver, exactly the way a Karate expert drives through the thick slab of a wooden door.

A hideous gurgle of sound, ending in a tingling, snapping sensation at the very socket of her armpit, told her how successful she had been. The gorilla's body swept from her like a chaff of wheat in the wind. A crash signaled the fall of his heavy body to the floor of the corridor.

April sagged against the wall, her right arm limp and useless. She strove to clear her head of its blurred agony. Her heaving breasts strained at the bra. Her heart was tom-tomming.

The corridor had remained dark. Only now was she conscious of the sudden, terrible silence. Mark—

No, the silence was not healthy. She had to find her way out. She needed light to see by. She staggered down the dark corridor, toward the direction from which the gorilla and his friends had come. There had to be an entranceway somewhere.

She came up hard against a barrier of some kind. She pushed out with her hands. A door fell inward, exposing a bare, drab, basement of sorts. There were low-running water pipes, damp cobbles from another era of New York living and a cracked porcelain sink filled to overflowing with cobwebs and the soot and grime of years of disuse. The light that illuminated the interior of the basement was daylight. Pale, dirty daylight, streaming through a high window that was grilled.

April moved warily into the basement, breathing hard, her body on fire with fatigue and pain. Her eyes roved rapidly. She sniffed the air, experimentally. She waited for some sound, anything, that might alert her faculties. But there was none. All of her training in the U.N.C.L.E. Academy, where she had graduated with honors, plus her actual experiences on assignments, had taught her how to read the atmosphere of a room, a building—a place.

There was no mistaking the aura that hovered over the basement.

The birds from THRUSH had flown. It was quite obvious that they had taken Mark Slate with them, once again. She moistened her lips, reflecting. How could they have? True, she had been occupied in the corridor with Tom Too-Many Thumbs, but she had seen and heard nothing to indicate Mark Slate's mysterious disappearance. How could they have gotten him out of that corridor without her hearing something? There had to be another exit then—it was all too confusing. April, fighting the agony of her bruised shoulder, found it hard to assemble her thoughts.

But there was a time to fight and a time to run for cover. Hadn't Napoleon Solo told her that more than once? She had to choose an alternative course of action. For one wild second, a sense of doom dominated her. Damn Mark Slate, damn THRUSH—

Why had THRUSH chosen to take Slate and leave her behind? It didn't make sense. There had to be some explanation for such a move. After all, hadn't they been keen to make a swap for Zorki? They were surely lessening their chances against Mr. Waverly's concern for his agents by kidnapping only one. Unless—

Grimly, April ran to the doorway leading from the basement. A door on the far side of the dank area. It wouldn't budge. Her eyes roamed to the grilled window, far above her head, where she could just make out the ancient, cracked sides of a stone building adjoining. The grilled window stood twenty feet above her head, inaccessible except to someone with a ladder or to Superman. Biting her lips, a nervous habit she gave in to only when she was alone like this, she reentered the darkened corridor. She roved with her hands and feet in the gloom. As she had expected, it was a blind alley. The wall ended against the door of the room that had served as their jailhouse. No, the only way out of the basement was the locked door. There was no telling just how much of an impossible barrier that was.

They had locked her in.

She had no outer clothes, no weapons, no tools. None of her fancy devices for extricating herself. The nail polish explosive X-757 had been the last arrow in her bow. That's all there was; there was no more.

They knew that.

So what could it mean—that they had chosen to leave her behind?

It was at just about this time that she began to realize that the basement and/or the building was expendable. They would probably never need to use it again. THRUSH had a "scorched earth" policy; they liked to burn their bridges behind them, once they had used them for a purpose. Burn them or blow them up.

The building had to be wired for an explosion. It was all too clear, now. A dead U.N.C.L.E. agent was much better than a live U.N.C.L.E. agent, no matter what yardstick THRUSH used.

April shivered in her panties and bra, responding now to the chill dampness and dankness of the corridor and basement.

Where was the bomb?

When would it go off?

The curious blue panel truck with the painted sides that bore the legend ROMEO'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS EXHIBIT, traveled smoothly in the heavy traffic throttling Grand Concourse. It turned off at 161st Street, roared past Yankee Stadium and bore rapidly toward the Harlem River Bridge.

The beautiful redhead at the wheel, a white ribbon pony-tailing her vivid tresses, stared straight ahead, mindful of the jammed lanes of cars going South. Beside her, the man with the Frankenstein child's mask sat with his arms folded serenely. Passing motorists and people on the pavements, glimpsing the offbeat couple, as the truck stopped for red lights, grinned and waved. The redhead and Frankenstein and the blue panel truck were a novelty in the prosaic Bronx afternoon.

"I'm not convinced it was clever leaving her back there," Mr. Riddle said, without any complaint in his voice.

"Slate is sufficient to arrange the trade," Arnolda Van Atta said. "Miss Dancer can't be much more than a female. I wasn't too impressed with her."

"But if Uncle learns of her death before—"

"They won't. There won't be enough left of that old dye factory to put in a stamp album. Her body could never be identified."

Mr. Riddle looked at the Timex watch strapped to his left wrist.

"Five minutes more," he said crisply. "I wonder if we'll hear the explosion from here?"

Arnolda Van Atta laughed harshly, spinning the wheel to bypass a slow-moving Cadillac.

"If the noise bothers you, I'll have Thrush send you some earplugs for future assignments."

Mr. Riddle said nothing. Only the gruesome mockery of his Frankenstein face seemed to smile in approval of the remark.

"What about the other woman?" Mr. Riddle asked unexpectedly.

Arnolda Van Atta shot him a look. "What about her?"

"If Miss Dancer should find her—"

His superior, for that is who Arnolda Van Atta clearly was, laughed again. It was an ugly guffaw that held more invective than a sentence full of oaths.

"If she does, so much the better for her. Perhaps, before they both get blown into infinity, they can tell each other all about the men in their lives."

The paneled truck roared on toward Manhattan, its brightly painted sides as gay as a carousel in the waning sunlight.

Mr. Riddle had only one thought.

He would hate to have been a woman who had raised a spark of envy or jealousy in the heart of a terrifying female like Arnolda Van Atta.

She was a tigress with long, jagged claws that needed, wanted blood.

Demanded it.