The Deadly Dark Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  And he began to babble a stream of incoherent oaths whose venom was strengthened because the THRUSH agent realized that his life was slipping quickly away.

  “What experiment?” Solo closed his fingers around the man’s shoulder. “What experiment did you radio and ask them to stop?”

  Homburg made a strange, terrible arrgh of pain deep in his throat. His head hung down, cheeks traced with thin black lines of blood. For a moment he stared at Napoleon Solo with clarity and understanding.

  Then the dying agent turned his head just a little, peering off into the windswept distance where there was no longer a city of San Francisco, only darkness and a dreadful harmony of automobile horns bleating up the streets below like terrified metal voices.

  Homburg turned back to Solo and coughed, “Lights---out. For you---“

  More unspeakable cursing. Breath whistled between his teeth. He arched his back, driving the folded metal deeper into his bloody belly. “---your hard luck,” he whispered and died.

  Napoleon Solo scowled and straightened up. A whiff of smoke tinged with the rancid smell of oil drifted from the helicopter wreckage. The bay bridge to Oakland went dark. Then, on the Oakland side, street after street plunged behind the advancing wall of black.

  Not a single light showed anywhere in the entire city of San Francisco. The din of car horns was frightening, pounding on the eardrums. Far up, lined by the last dying beams of the western sun, another huge silver jetliner was arching down into a forced landing.

  Solo struggled to grasp the enormity of the threat contained in the envenomed dying words of the section chief. Evidently Homburg had been alerted to a pending experiment which would cancel every volt of electric power in the entire Bay area.

  This experiment, coincidentally, had come at the moment when the ‘copter needed power to carry its cargo to safety. The section chief had radioed for a delay, been refused. And the ‘copter pilot had shot at the U.N.C.L.E. agents, not knowing what his section chief knew and assuming that the men from U.N.C.L.E. had been responsible for the power failure.

  As Solo stared out over the darkened city in the wind, the specter of what had happened once when power went out in Manhattan rose to haunt him. The famous blackout had been a terrifying, potentially explosive time. Fortunately the accident had been remedied with reasonable dispatch.

  But this incredible domino march of darkness across hundreds of square miles was no accident.

  “Lights out,” Illya murmured. There was a strange, worried expression on his face. “He kept repeating it, Napoleon. Did you hear him?”

  If THRUSH were truly behind this, Solo thought, then all other THRUSH threats in the past were as nothing by comparison. “I heard him,” Solo said in a hollow voice, and watched the dark swallow the last of Oakland.

  ACT I

  SHOCKING DEVELOPMENTS AT SPOON FORKS

  And so,” said Mr. Alexander Waverly, ‘the blackout ended?”

  Illya Kuryakin nodded. Gray fatigue circles showed beneath his eyes.

  “That’s right, sir. Precisely thirty minutes after it began. The lights came back on everywhere at once, as far as I could see.”

  Mr. Waverly rose. He walked around the large motorized circular conference table which occupied the center of the planning room of U.N.C.L.E.’s Operations and Enforcement Section. Banked computers and message information boards blinked their tiny multicolored lights along the walls.

  On his way to the window, Mr. Waverly scanned all the random-colored displays, instantly reading in them an orderly, peaceful pattern. The lights, green, amber, muted purple, indicated that all up and down the Eastern seaboard, it was a quiet night.

  Yet Waverly’s puckered brow suggested anything but enjoyment of the luxury of relative calm.

  From one of the deep leather armchairs near the round table, Napoleon Solo regarded his chief with glassy-eyed interest. Solo and Illya hadn’t slept since the incident atop the Mark Montfair Hotel a little over twenty-four hours before.

  In the aftermath of the blackout, the authorities had been busy, to say the least. There had been minor outbreaks of looting during the darkness. And Solo and Illya were detained briefly until their credentials gave them leave to go.

  Because airline schedules had been disrupted, there were further delays at the airport. The agents landed at Kennedy International at the height of Manhattan’s twilight rush hour. They proceeded directly towards the East River and the East 44th Street brownstone which was one of the entrances to U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.

  There are four known entrances to the hidden complex of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters in New York. A maze of steel and bombproof concrete hides behind its innocent façade, which includes a tailor shop, the false offices of an international aid organization also called U.N.C.L.E., and a key-club called The Mask Club. The stronghold has no stairs, only elevators, and has been penetrated only once.

  To those who know, the headquarters can also be entered by water from the river through secret tunnels. The main entrance, however, used by all but the few who can never be seen coming in, is Del Floria’s tailor shop. An important man in Section-IV of U.N.C.L.E., De Floria is the keeper of the gate. He knows every U.N.C.L.E. member by sight, the only man below Section I who does. He knows their faces and no more.

  Getting an all clear signal from Del Floria, Solo and Illya entered the dressing room, closed the curtain. A wall opened, and they stepped through hurriedly as the wall closed fast. They were now in the reception room of U.N.C.L.E. The room was windowless, with no doors. Behind the modern reception desk, an attractive girl was operating controls on the desk top. No button was labeled. Only she knew each identification. Behind her back, in its holster was her U.N.C.L.E. special. The receptionist handed Solo and Illya their triangular identity badges.

  At this moment April Dancer and Mark Slate came into the room through a wall panel that suddenly opened. The four U.N.C.L.E. agents exchanged greetings, and Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin stepped through the same panel.

  Without their badges, alarms would be clanging, doors closing and sealing. The two men walked past doors which would never open to anyone without the proper signal. There were no windows anywhere. In a silent elevator they rode up two floors, entering into a steel corridor. After passing several doors, they came to a steel one at the end of the corridor which, like all the others, was unmarked. Inside was the heart of U.N.C.L.E. operations in New York, the office of the chief. He was one of only five men who formed Section I---Policy and Operations.

  The door opened. Alexander Waverly was deeply worried. Solo could see it. Their chief was at the window, tapping his cold pipe against the sill. Peering at the city lights in that almost cross-eyed way which denoted intense concentration, he murmured, “Strange how man depends on light for security.”

  “All things considered,” Solo said, stifling a yawn, “the people in San Francisco behaved very well indeed. It was similar to the situation that happened here in the Manhattan blackout.”

  Alexander Waverly nodded. “Yes, I was here when that occurred. Terrifying as it was, it was most heartening in another way.” A wry smile. “It almost led one to believe that the human race was beginning to discover its humanity at last. People were courteous, helpful---“ Now Waverly fixed Napoleon Solo with an intense stare. The latter had not fully concealed another gargantuan yawn behind his hand. “Perhaps we are keeping you up, Mr. Solo?”

  Solo looked chagrined. On occasion Waverly teased him. That last barb, however, carried no concealed humor. Waverly had simply had one of his infrequent lapses into temper. The lapse cast a new, grim light on the importance Waverly placed on the report which Solo and Illya had just given.

  Illya was busy completing a report form in duplicate. He glanced up, said “It’s just that we haven’t been to bed, sir. Or had a decent meal. And on the plane back here, Napoleon remembered that he had a tentative engagement with this spear carrier---“ Illya flushed and fiddled with his report.

 
“An engagement with whom, Mr. Solo?” Waverly inquired.

  “Not a spear carrier, sir. A fan carrier. A young lady.” And, ah, what a young lady, he thought, rather wistfully. “She’s a singer , sir. A lyric soprano with the Met. Actually she’s only been with the company since the start of the season. She’s in the chorus. All she gets to do is carry a fan in Aida. After the performance tonight, we were going to---“

  Mr. Waverly shook his head. “I am afraid your performance has been cancelled. We must concentrate on this new threat posed by the San Francisco blackout.”

  So much, thought Solo, for the cultural side of life. He hoped Babette would not hate him too much. “Yes, sir,” he said.

  Waverly ticked his pipe against the sill again. “Naturally I watched all the TV reports on the West Coast blackout today. The authorities still assume it was a failure similar to that here in New York.” He waved his pipe. “A massive breakdown.

  Illya Kuryakin rose, stretched. He looked wan, tense in the artificial light. “We didn’t hear any reports while we were traveling, of course. Has any specific source of power failure been discovered?”

  “None,” Waverly answered.

  Unsuccessfully, Solo had tried to forget the dying THRUSH section chief, hanging head down in the ‘copter’s twisted hatch, bleeding to death and furious with his masters. He had been identified as one Herman Graybar.

  “From what Graybar muttered, all THRUSH agents on section chief level and above, had been alerted that this San Francisco experiment was coming.”

  “We must be quite certain of one thing,” Waverly said. “The dying man did use the word experiment?”

  Illya lost no time in affirming it. “Experiment, sir, yes. Conducted, from all we could gather, by some of the higher-level scientific THRUSH personnel. High enough, anyway, so that Graybar’s wish to escape from us was of no concern to them”

  Waverly mused, “Of no concern for a good reason. If THRUSH has developed the capability of damping down all electric power in a given area at will---“ He paused. “---then gentlemen, you can see the tremendous advantage THRUSH would enjoy. In an accidental blackout, as proved in New York, and in San Francisco with the exception of those few looting incidents, people tended to behave rather well. But imagine a THRUSH planned blackout---“

  Waverly spun, waved at the splendor of Manhattan burning in the night outside the window. “Imagine a blackout deliberately engineered to envelop this city on signal. Or the entire East from Boston down to Washington. And then imagine that into this blackout infiltrated trained teams of THRUSH whose specific task it was to set fires. To kill. To create conditions of havoc and panic.

  “Not many operatives would be needed. A dozen. THRUSH has ten times that many at its disposal. Given such conditions, the veneer of calm would, I fear, crack and crumble. There would be terror. And with it, violence. Were THRUSH able to mount such a psychological attack upon any nation’s large metro areas, I expect it would not be long before THRUSH had that particular country on its knees, crying for mercy.

  Illya said, “Apparently THRUSH now has that capability, sir”

  “But on how large a scale?” Waverly asked rhetorically. “Is it limited to an area of a single city? Can it be expanded at will? We must locate the source of this THRUSH research project, put it out of action at once.”

  Waverly crossed rapidly to a console. Quickly his fingers tapped a series of colored buttons. As he punched in the combination, he said over his shoulder, ”You did deliver the attaché case with the courier list to Mr. Narzoomian?”

  Illya nodded. Narzoomian was an Operations and Enforcement man whose section specialized in THRUSH narcotics traffic. Waverly muttered, “Good, good; he’ll take it from there.” A grid on the console lit up.

  “Yes, Mr. Waverly?” said a throaty female voice from the grid.

  “Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin are no longer on the Pacific Coast assignment.”

  Waverly punched another of the studs, faced around. “The fact that you two are on personal assignment to me is, as you well know, a euphemism. It means we have no specific clues, no place to search for the nerve center of this newest THRUSH scheme. In fact, I am at a loss to suggest how we can even begin to investigate its scope and seriousness.” Waverly pondered. Then

  “Well, perhaps for starters, we might consult with Dr. Ruthven and Dr. Kepinsky from the lab. I’ll have them run up. They are both specialists in electrical---“

  Waverly went white and rigid

  Solo shot out of his chair. “Are you ill, sir?”

  “No. No.” Waverly looked as though a shock of recognition had struck him. He rushed toward his desk, thrust aside a sheaf of sealed documents labeled A.W., Policy & Operations, Eyes Only. “No, by heaven, but I have just made a mental connection with something which might---“

  His words trailed off as he lifted a thin, plain manila folder and dumped its contents on the conference table. Solo recognized, among other things, a short clipping in the headline and text typeface of The New York Times.

  “Please wait a moment, gentlemen,” Waverly urged, picking up a hand mike. He pressed a button on the mike’s underside. “Waverly here, Mr. Jacques. Will you please obtain from Security and Personnel the last regular identification on Harold Bell? That’s correct, B, e, double l. No, I do not have his employee number.”

  Illya Kuryakin and Napoleon Solo exchanged puzzled glances as Waverly continued, “Put a rush on it, please. By the way, Bell is no longer with us. He retired as senior technologist here some two and a half years ago. The tape should still be on file, though. I want it run as quickly as you can. Thanks very much, Mr. Jacques.”

  Waverly slammed down the mike, rubbing his hands together almost excitedly. “I don’t want to be over-confident, gentlemen. The lead may disintegrate completely. And yet---“

  He snatched up the Times clipping, re-read it. His eyes were lighted by enthusiasm that showed he was on to something. He mused aloud:

  “My father started me very early on the habit of reading newspapers. I now read half a dozen to a dozen a day. At time like this, I thank my father, gentlemen. Back then, I hated the idea. I would have preferred to run outside and play cricket.”

  Still mystified, Solo said nothing. Waverly’s remarkable speed-reading faculty was well known in the U.N.C.L.E. organization, as was his omnivorous attention to details of the newspapers sent to his desk daily from all parts of the country and abroad. Before Solo could ask a single question about what was up, a rheostat controlled in an adjacent chamber took the lights down.

  A large acetate map of North and South America slid aside. A screen double the size of the normal TV receiver lit up from black to gray. A title flashed on, the usual code lettering and identification tape.

  Every U.N.C.L.E. staff member had his image recorder on such tape, for security reasons. The tapes were re-done every two years.

  Against a stark white background, brilliantly lit and lined with height grids, stood a slight, gray-haired man in a dark suit. The man faced the camera. Then he faced left. Then the other way, holding the profile a few seconds each time. Next he faced to the rear. Then front again.

  He walked forward toward the camera, his face assuming huge proportions. Solo wondered why all the hoorah. The technologist---what was his name? Bell?---looked thoughtful, harmless, typical of many high-level scientific specialists employed by U.N.C.L.E.

  “That’s enough, Mr. Jacques, thank you,” Waverly called.

  The tape blurred to a freeze-frame halt.

  The acetate map closed over the screen. The lights brightened.

  “That’s Harold,” Waverly explained. “I wanted you to see him for purposes of identification. He was quite a good friend of mine. A brilliant man and an excellent snooker player who---but never mind that. As I mentioned, Harold reached retirement age a couple of years ago. He and his wife Maude retired to Maude’s part of the country, a little town down in Arkansas with a peculiar name. “What was it? Wa
verly consulted the Times clip. “Spoons Forks.”

  Illya almost guffawed. “You must be joking, sir.”

  “The American talent for fascinating peculiar names on towns is limitless, Mr. Kuryakin. I assure you such a town exists. Harold and Maude Bell---she’s considerably younger than Harold---have a son. Martin Bell. Just a couple of months ago, Harold brought Maude back here to Manhattan for a little vacation. We had a chance to spend some time together. I had forgotten about Martin, I confess. Harold brought me up to date.”

  Solo still didn’t grasp the significance. Trying to look interested and afraid he was looking dense, he leaned forward as Waverly continued, emphasizing each word, “Harold told me Martin had just entered Bay State Institute of Technology as a first-year student.”

  “I have respect for him,” Illya murmured. “Bay State is a sort of think-factory school which accepts only near-geniuses, if I remember.”

  “Quite so, Mr. Kuryakin. I was reminded that Martin was indeed a youthful prodigy, and possessor on an I.Q. which some professionals tested out to be very near to two hundred. Harold told me then that Martin’s specialty at school was to be electrical field theory. The boy showed an uncanny ability in an area of scientific endeavor which, as I understand, is so highly sophisticated and abstruse as to be practically incomprehensible to the layman.”

  “Now that in itself, gentlemen, would indicate very little. Except for this.”

  Waverly took out the clipping again.

  “This is an item which I was fortunate enough to note in the Times. It is bylined Little Rock. It states that Martin Bell, son of famed technologist Harold Bell of Spoon Forks, disappeared while home from school visiting his parents. Disappeared. Vanished. That article appeared four days ago. A tenuous connection---“

  Illya’s eyes flickered brightly now. “But one worth following up, sir?”

  Waverly picked up a handset. “Precisely. Hello? This is Section One. I want a direct wire to the home of Mr. Harold Bell in Spoon Forks, Arkansas. And scramble, please.”