Текст книги "The Thousand Coffin Affair "

Автор книги: Michael Avallone

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 9 страниц)

“KISS ME BEFORE YOU DIE”

THE PRIVATE interview began within ten minutes of their unscheduled landing. Solo was thankful for small favors. For some reason, Denise Fairmount seemed to be in charge here and she wanted to question him privately.

“You’re not looking eminently officerish, Denise. I rather like you in that uniform. Though I must say I much prefer silver lamé on lady agents.”

“Please spare me your sarcasms. We may be alone, but I’ve only to press a buzzer and you will be extremely incapable of escaping from this place alive. Also, as you see, I have a Luger.”

He remained seated in the hard-backed wooden chair. She had ushered him into this tiny cubicle in the stone building and was now ensconced behind a low metal desk, idly training a dark Luger at his heart. It would be useless to try anything sudden or ill-timed. She knew it and he knew it.

She had removed the visored hat and placed it to her left on the desk. Her dark hair was wound in a severe yet attractive bun behind her neck.

“You should have told me you were a Colonel back in Paris,” Solo said lightly. ‘We could have had all kinds of fun saluting and marching back and forth.”

She frowned at him, her eyes cautious.

“Yes, I am a Colonel. I have until now killed twenty-seven men. I will kill more. I will kill you when the time comes. I tell you all this so that we will not waste each other’s time with the sentimentalities of the Hotel Internationale. You were an assignment then, however pleasant. And you still are. But that is all you will ever mean to me, Napoleon Solo.”

“If you say so, Colonel.”

He had already measured distances and opportunities, and concluded with regret that nothing could be accomplished in this office. It was so small that the woman would have little to do but start blasting away. A lady with twenty-seven notches on her Luger would have no difficulty managing the twenty-eighth one.

“I am interested in what you have to say, Solo.”

He smiled. “It’s nice to know I have a ready audience, anyway. But what about the girl? There’s nothing she can tell you.”

“When she is revived, she will be brought here. One can find out many things when two prisoners are involved, don’t you think?”

He shrugged. “She doesn’t mean anything to me.”

Denise Fairmount laughed. “Perhaps not. But I’ve been instructed to take the chance. The unit you escaped from has lost their opportunity. When your escape was relayed here, we waited. I must confess I never thought I’d see you again.”

“You’re seeing me. Now what do we do?”

She showed her teeth in a smile, but her eyes were cold.

“You are to provide a list of names, I understand.”

“Is that all you want? I’ve got a million of them. Daniel Boone, George Washington, Dwight Eisenhower, my aunt Trudy—”

“Stop it!” she snapped, her military composure breaking; “Foolish talk will get you nowhere. Would you like to watch while the girl dies? It won’t be a pleasant death, I assure you.”

“I can think of several other things I’d prefer,” he admitted.

There was a black telephone on the desk. Solo could see that Denise Fairmount was expectant, waiting for it to ring. He gauged the distance between himself and the desk. Too far. He would have to find another way.

“What’s a nice girl like you doing in the spy business, Denise?”

Her dark eyebrows shifted in surprise.

“I believe in the future of what I am doing. The same, no doubt, as you do. That is reward enough. And when the day comes—” She paused, catching herself.

“Go on,” he urged. “You were going to say something about today Europe, tomorrow the world? The song never changes, does it? Only different people sing it from time to time.”

Her eyes flashed and the Luger jutted menacingly across the top of the desk.

“You are an idiot,” she said quietly. “I should kill you now and claim you attempted to escape.”

“Why don’t you, then? I can make it look good. I’ll reach across the desk and kiss you.”

She bit her lip, a flush rising in her face. Her eyes narrowed and she shook her head. “No, you will not trick me. In spite of what we shared at the Internationale. There are many men yet and I am still young.”

“You’ll get old in this business, lady. Take my word for it.”

“I only want your word on names, and places in the U.N.C.L.E. organization.”

“Sorry, I’m all out of names now.”

“We shall see—”

The phone rang. Deftly, she spun the receiver to her ear and listened. “Good. At once, then.” She replaced the receiver. He didn’t like the pleased smile on her face.

“You won’t change your mind, Solo?”

“It’s not my business to change my mind. I thought you knew that much about me, Denise.”

She stood up, brushing her jodhpurs with her left hand and tugging the Sam Browne belt which girdled her slim waist. The Luger centered on his chest. She also returned the officer’s cap to her head.

“Get up,” she commanded. “And walk through that door. We shall see how much agony your lovely friend will have to endure before you begin to tell us what we want to hear. Our doctor has patched up the lady so that she will be wide awake to enjoy her coming torment.’

“My, you are a bitch, aren’t you?”

“Move,” was all she said, motioning him toward the other door of the cubicle. Solo rose and sauntered toward the barrier, keeping his hands away from his body.

The door.

There was no telling what was behind the door.

It was as bad as he had expected. Worse, possibly. It was one thing to be in the soup himself, quite another to have to stand around while it was stirred with somebody he liked.

The door opened on a short corridor without illumination which led into the long, low hangar. Solo could smell the heavy odor of gasoline and grease. There was a stench like burning rubber in the air, too.

The hangar was empty of aircraft. The wide doors had been left open, hanging crookedly on their steel running bars to show the German landscape. The mountains stood poised in view beyond the tarmac.

There were just two uniformed soldiers and Jerry Terry in the building. They had formed a small semicircle in the center of the hangar. At first Solo had no notion of what they were doing until Denise Fairmount nudged him sharply with the muzzle of the Luger.

The soldiers had Jerry Terry suspended between them, each holding one of her arms. She was made to stand straddle-legged to support her own weight without slumping. Her face was ashen and drained of life. Despite the bandaged wound of her shoulder, she was standing up and taking notice. Notice had closed her mouth in terror.

There was a metal barrier of sorts on the concrete floor. It was alive with radiant heat of some kind, glowing like a sunburst. Solo could feel the suffocating warmth as they drew nearer. There was something hopelessly cruel about the white-hot poker resting in the heart of the brazier. An electric cord ran from the handle of the thing to a wall outlet nearby. The faces of the two soldiers were dull and expressionless. Like trained seals, Solo thought. They could stick knives in a lovely girl and not raise a sweat. Or brand her with a metal burning tool, the sort of instrument used to forge letters and numbers on steel parts.

Denise Fairmount halted him and stepped around to where she could keep him in her sights.

“Must I spell all this out for you, Solo? I could print the message across Miss Terry’s face.” She indicated the metal-burner and brazier.

“I get the idea. Roast lady spy if I don’t open my big mouth.”

Jerry Terry swallowed nervously, shaking her head, but her eyes had never left the white-hot tip of the burning poker.

“You don’t like me anyway, remember, Solo? Forget it.”

Denise Fairmount spun on her, viciously. “Quiet, you fool! He can save you a great deal of pain.”

As Denise Fairmount glared at the girl, Solo moved one step toward her. It was as far as he dared go with the guards watching, but it would have to be far enough. Denise was still well beyond arm’s length, but—

Solo cleared his throat. “All right then, Denise. Unaccustomed as I am to public squealing…

She turned back toward him, surprised that he was giving in so easily. It put her off her guard just enough—

Solo’s right leg shot upward and his body arched backwards in a perfectly executed Le Savate kick. The tip of his shoe caught the Luger directly under the barrel, sending it high into the air above their heads. It flipped twice neatly and he caught it before it hit the floor. He quickly turned it to the proper position, his finger on the trigger.

Denise Fairmount fell back with a shriek and the two men holding Jerry Terry released her and went for their guns. Unfortunately for them, their weapons were slung behind their shoulders in the required form for soldiers bearing rifles.

Yet they were foolhardy and wouldn’t stop. Released from their grip, Jerry Terry fell hard to the floor. Denise Fairmount, in her anxiety to regain control of the situation, went wildly for the white-hot poker in the brazier. There was no time to shout orders or commands to halt the carnage. The soldiers were bringing their rifles to bear and Denise Fairmount was already brandishing the glowing poker.

Solo’s first shot caught one soldier high in the chest and spun him around. His second found a nesting place directly in the forehead of the other man. Both of them were dead before they hit the stone floor of the hangar.

And then there was Denise Fairmount.

If she had stopped—if she had for a moment considered she was going up against a marksman at close quarters—he might have stayed his hand. He didn’t want to shoot the woman; she could be valuable later on. But Denise Fairmount had lost all power to think coherently or to evaluate consequences. All of her headlong charge, with the poker held like a flaming rapier, was spearheaded for the body of Napoleon Solo. Unluckily for her, he didn’t have the time for a fancy or well-chosen shot. The time had arrived at that split second when all lives are changed by the next bullet.

Solo triggered the Luger once more. A single, telling shot.

He stood and watched as Denise Fairmount’s face came apart with surprise and pain, as if she had never believed he would actually shoot her. The poker described a smoking eddy as it clanged to the stone, shooting off sparks. Denise Fairmount crumpled, her hands holding her Sam Browne belt as if that alone could hold her up and keep her from dying.

Wordlessly, Solo stepped over her body and lifted Jerry Terry to her feet. He kept an eye on the hangar entrance. Once again, the race would be to the swift.

Despite the obvious pain and confusion she was undergoing, Jerry couldn’t take her eyes off Denise Fairmount’s prone figure, curled up in death. “Solo—you killed her—”

“You can lecture me later,” he said impatiently. “Right now, I’m for that MIG and getting out of here, and nothing else.”

Her eyes were dazed.

“Come on—we have to move quickly. Can you walk?” She nodded dumbly, allowing him to half-push, half-drag her to the tarmac. Solo Hung a sweeping search over the field. The MIG was where he had parked it, even facing toward takeoff. There was no sign of the two patrol planes. It seemed as if there were no one else on the field. Everybody had been accounted for.

“You wide awake now, Terry?” he barked.

“Yes. Yes!”

“All right, then. Come on. And don’t look back. Just remember—it was Denise or us.”

Jerry Terry said nothing further. She lowered her head and staggered for the MIG. Solo was just behind her, imploring the silent gods to stay with them for just five minutes more until he got the damn MIG airborne once again.

But even as he made the unspoken plea, he could see a heavy motor lorry turn in from the roadway about five hundred yards down the field.

Grimly, he hurried Jerry Terry ahead of him, not bothering to mention the minor detail that their flight was not unobserved.

When the hounds were on the scent, it was downright amazing how they showed up at the most inopportune moments.

What was even worse, the pain had come back. Sharp, excruciating agony coursed through his body.

Partridge of the Paris Overseas Press Club was in the bar, finding new joy in the way Stanley mixed martinis, when he was summoned to the telephone. Shrugging heroically, he lifted his bulk from the leather stool and had a houseboy plug in a phone for him.

“Partridge here,” he said tiredly.

“Who gives the given signal?” a crisp voice asked.

He became alert immediately. “You do.”

“Who tells the untold millions?”

“I do.”

He knew it was Napoleon Solo’s voice at the other end, but one had to play the code out.

“Who had a second knife?’

“The same chap who had the first one.”

“Billy,” Solo said. “I need your help, and pronto.”

“Fire away, old sport.

“Fire one—I’m sitting at Landry’s airstrip. I owe him thousands of dollars for wrecking his plane. He won’t take a MIG in trade and the French Air Force is pretty mad at me for flying one in. Fire two—I’ve got a very sick girl friend on my hands. She could die if she doesn’t see a doctor soon. Fire three—the world is in sad shape. You’d better tell my uncle all about it. No doubt he’s dying to hear from me.”

“I see. Landry’s. Good show, old sport. Be there in two hours. I’ll call your uncle, of course. Think you can hold out until then?”

“I’ll try, Billy. And thanks.”

“Ever the faith endures,” Partridge chuckled. Anything else?”

“No, that ought to cover the preliminaries. The girl is my first concern right now.”

“Off I go.”

William Partridge hung up, drummed the phone for three taut seconds of preparation, downed his martini zestfully and left the bar like a shot.

Stanley, the bartender, had never seen him move so fast.

Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin was unhappy.

In his tiny West Side apartment in Manhattan, New York, he paced the rooms, looking for something to do. Working overtime at Headquarters had not improved his restlessness. There was just so much they had been able to discover about Stewart Fromes’ corpse. And that very, very special piece of dynamite his dead toes had revealed—the tiny capsule. If it was what the lab boys expected, then things indeed would get very bad around the world.

Kuryakin tried not to think about Napoleon Solo. Awkward business liking a fellow agent. When the going got rough, as it usually did, it was a terrible thing not to be on hand to assist with the difficulty. Kuryakin was level-headed enough to despise the Russian side of his nature which tended toward gloomy prophecy. Still, an agent of Napoleon’s capabilities should be able to take care of himself—

Memory of Stewart Fromes and his capabilities made Kuryakin’s brow cloud over again. Damn this infernal business of waiting, waiting, waiting. One had to be doing something at all times. It was a must.

SEND HIM TO THE CEMETERY

LONDON FOG settled like a blanket over the city. The “ruddy pea-soups” of legend and fact had closed lovingly over buildings, cobbled streets and historic landmarks. The Cumberland Hotel sat squarely in the center of the heaviest concentration of the vapors. The fog did not swirl or dance or filter. It hung curtain-like over London town.

Waverly, ensconced behind a glass-topped desk in a suite of rooms on the fourth floor, was holding court. He was dressed once more in his familiar tweeds, yet there was something jaunty about his manner. The red carnation adorning his lapel lent a touch of joviality seldom seen by his colleagues, to his appearance.

Seated at various points of the modernistically furnished room were Napoleon Solo, Jerry Terry and Illya Kuryakin. Solo wore a dark suit of conservative cut and a sober powder blue tie. His face was as unlined and freshly handsome as ever. Jerry Terry, her long copper hair neatly bound with a red headband, looked beautiful and invulnerable in a beige woolen sheath dress. The contrasting white sling in which her right arm was cradled somehow seemed an afterthought rather than a necessity.

Kuryakin’s attire was less unkempt than usual. He had managed to appear in a pressed, clean suit of indeterminate gray. The atmosphere was cordial and friendly. Smoke from Solo’s cigarette filled the air.

“So Partridge got you out, Solo,” Waverly concluded.

“Partridge got us out,” Solo amended, winding his account of the adventure into a neat summarization of the facts. Waverly had evinced keen interest when Golgotha had entered the narration. Even Kuryakin had never seen Waverly so drawn out before.

“Golgotha. We’ve been waiting for his hand in this. High time, too. Thrush had to enlist a man of his stripe sooner or later.”

“He’s a new one on me, sir,” Solo remarked, smiling at Jerry Terry. Memory of that flight in the MIG made him wince—wrestling with unfamiliar controls and fighting to stanch the flow of blood from her shoulder with his free hand to keep her from bleeding to death. It was all over—for the time being. They could breathe free for a bit. “I’ve never heard of Golgotha.”

“Kuryakin,” Waverly murmured.

The young Russian smiled at Solo and the girl.

“Napoleon, Golgotha is Fromes’ opposite number. An absolutely brilliant chemist. Security has had him on file for years, at least up until there was a fire-explosion in his laboratory in Budapest in ’54. He’s been out of sight since then. Everyone assumed he was alive but had somehow been disfigured in the blast. We’ve been waiting for him to show up with Thrush. He’s exactly the sort of man they would find use for—brilliant, embittered, and hungry for some sort of fame in his own field.”

“You think he’s come up with some super-drug that scored so heavily in Utangaville and Spayerwood?”

“It’s a safe guess at this writing, Napoleon. The man’s a wizard and our lab results check out to something frightening. In fact, if we don’t find the stockpile of this unknown element, the world is in for a jarring time.”

Solo frowned at Waverly. “Fromes’ pellet?”

“Yes, Solo,” his chief said heavily. “Our worst fears are realized now. Thrush has found a blood catalyst which causes a man to literally lose his mind and all sense of mental coordination. Lord knows what a sight those two towns must have been with the entire populace running amuck. And they’ve been improving their methods since then—decomposition of the body is now speeded up to less than twenty-four hours of full cyclic effect. Fromes is no more than a skeleton now.’

Solo restrained a visible shudder. “What was in the pellet?”

Kuryakin laughed harshly.

“What good would the chemical composition do you, Napoleon? It’s enough to say that it is a never-before-known agent. The lab is trying to break it down now. We only know what it can do. After Fromes’ odd case, I tried it on guinea pigs and white mice. They lasted only three hours. If Thrush has it, were in for it, as I said.”

“Stockpile, you said,” Solo mused.

“Yes,” Waverly agreed. “It’s their pattern. Build up enough of a supply to cover the universe. I would say so.”

“That makes a lot of sense to me,” Jerry Terry said. “There’d be no end of places to hide something that small. So innocuous looking too.”

Waverly pyramided his lean fingers, his eyes sweeping over the three of them. He looked almost kindly for a change. They would never know how much he appreciated all three of them, at that precise moment. It was a comfort to talk with one’s own kind. The experience of the jet bomber was still too fresh in Waverly’s mind.

“That cemetery, Mr. Waverly,” Solo suggested. “They were awfully determined about our not taking a look.”

“True enough, Solo. But that cemetery checks out. Orangeberg. Built in 1922. Spared by the Allies in World War Two. If it were a blind of some kind, we’d have to have proofs. You don’t go poking about cemeteries, Solo. It just isn’t done. The Queen Mother herself couldn’t order such a thing.”

“Queen?” There was a startled expression on Napoleon Solo’s face. Waverly leaned forward, catching the odd look. He half-smiled.

“I was only being amusing, Solo. Or did you think of something—?”

“I’m not sure.”

“Napoleon, what is it?” Kuryakin prodded, knowing the makeup of the man who was his fellow agent. Jerry Terry sat enthralled. The rapport between the three men was suddenly electrifying.

Mr. Waverly said gently, “You’ve thought of something.”

“Yes, yes, wait. The word Queen did it. Queen, Queen, Queen. By Judas, that’s got to be it!” Solo sprang to his feet. “Mysteries. Stew was a mystery fan. Read them by the car-load, and now I remember—his favorite was Ellery Queen!”

“Go on, Solo, go on.”

The hotel suite was silent save for Solo’s energetic pacing back and forth. “Wait—I haven’t got it all yet. But hear me out. It helps the wheels to turn. What did we have? Stew’s body with the clothes on backwards, right? They let him stay that way for us to find, right? So it had to be okay with them; otherwise they would have guessed he was trying to leave some kind of message after death. By God, it all falls neatly into place. They let him stay with his clothes reversed because they thought it was one of the after-effects of their damned mind-killing drug. Yes, yes. That’s got to be it or they would have switched his clothing back to normal as sure as God made rotten little agents. Don’t you see? Stewart must have been naked, maybe in the tub or something when the effects of the stuff hit him. They had to know that. And he dressed backwards and all the time they thought he wasn’t coordinating—yet actually he was thinking more clearly than any man I’ve ever known!”

His enthusiasm and logic were contagious. His three listeners dared not interrupt lest they break the chain of his magic.

“Now, Stew knew that I knew he was a fanatical mystery fan. Above all an Ellery Queen fan. So he did the one thing to point the finger at what he had discovered. He had found the drug, stuck a pellet between his toes, but in case that was discovered, he had told us as surely as if he had written it in black letters a foot high exactly where to look. It was a long shot, a long, long shot but I feel sure it’s paid off.”

Waverly coughed. Napoleon Solo smiled.

“I’ll keep you waiting no longer. In case you don’t know, the most famous Ellery Queen mystery of them all begins with the corpse of a man found—on which all the clothing has been reversed. The killer did this to conceal the fact that the man had been a priest. Therefore the absence of the tie was not immediately apparent as it normally would have been—”

“Solo,” Waverly demurred. “Priest, tie—I fail to see—”

“Let me finish. As I say, that book is Ellery Queen’s most famous. Been reprinted a thousand times and people all over the world who go in for mysteries remember it. That’s the important point that Stew didn’t want me to miss. The title of that very famous book.”

Jerry Terry suddenly said in a very clear voice, “Well, I’ll be damned. The Chinese Orange Mystery.”

“Exactly. The Chinese Orange Mystery. Pointing to one stockpile that has to be destroyed at all costs.” There was a new silence in the room.

“Orange,” Kuryakin said, almost ruefully. “What a gamble.”

“Orangeberg Cemetery,” Waverly said with grim finality.

Oberteisendorf.

Darkness in the village. A few scattered lights. The livestock lowing in the sheds. A rural solitude dominated the hamlet at five o’clock in the morning. The sky was moody black, pierced only by an occasional star.

There was a light gleaming in Herr Burgomeister’s house—a lone bulb shining steadily through the drab, linen curtains. Herr Muller was busy with a visitor: the awesome, terrifying man he knew only as Herr.

“Bitte, what you want of me now?”

“A friend of mine has passed away,” Golgotha said. “He must be buried immediately.”

Herr Muller’s face in the harsh light of the bulb, reflected fear.

“Ach. Another?”

“Yes. The poor fellow died of a tumor. Brain tumor. There was no chance. It is better this way.”

“Ja, ja.” Herr Muller sipped his glass of Rhine wine. He did not like these conferences with this strange, cloaked man. The money was fine, one hundred thousand of the new marks, but Gott in Himmel!—was it worth it to have to talk with this man from hell each time?

“The coffin will be at your friend’s mortuary in the morning. You will see to it that all the arrangements are satisfactory. You must arrive at Orangeberg Cemetery no later than twelve o’clock noon. It has been agreed on that way.”

“Ja, I do. Same as ever.”

Golgotha chuckled dryly.

“You are sweating, Herr Muller. Are you warm?”

“Ein bischen,” muttered the Burgomeister. “A little. I feel—tired. Makes me sweat.”

“Certainly.”

“You must not misunderstand, mein Herr,” the scrawny mayor cried. “My devotion is—strong.”

“It had best remain so.”

The unspoken threat lingered in the. closeness of the room.

“I do the job.”

“You must. We have other coffins. Many, many coffins. Sometimes we actually do use them as they were intended to be used. Remember that, Herr Muller.”

The Burgomeister paled. “Ja, I remember.”

Golgotha stood up, a towering, dark shadow which cast a ghostly silhouette across the floor. He seemed all of seven feet high and as palpable as a nightmare.

“Oberteisendorf will become famous, Herr Muller. People will point to it one day and say ‘There. There is the place and there is where it happened.’ Greatness will come to Oberteisendorf, Herr Muller. And fame. And exalted memory. Remember that.”

“I will remember,” Herr Muller whispered, wishing his frightening visitor would go as silently as he always came. The man completely destroyed whatever soul he had left.

“Good. Twelve o’clock then. One coffin. Orangeberg. Gute Nacht, Herr Muller.”

“Gute Nacht, mein Herr.”

With his cloak wrapped about him like a shroud Golgotha left. Herr Muller crossed himself again, as he always did, and then reached once more for the bottle of Rhine wine.

The ghastly business would begin all over again on the morrow and there was not a thing he could do to stop it.

Verdammt! What in God’s name were they burying in that lovely cemetery just beyond the rimrock?

Herr Muller did not know. He was only certain of one thing. The coffins he had delivered for the Herr had never contained dead bodies. He did not care what the Death Certificate claimed nor how many headstones they put up with all the lying inscriptions.

Orangeberg was not a place where dead men slept.