Man From U.N.C.L.E. 01 - The Thousand Coffins Affair

by Michael Avallone

  “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. Th
ey 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.”