Volta’s fright-wig of red hair was even more disarrayed than usual. His pin-striped suit was rumpled. In his blue-marble eyes, fanaticism and desperation glared.
“I---I need both hands,” Martin said in a choked voice.
A technician tugged at Volta’s sleeve, whispered. Dr. Volta’s cheeks mottled. He released Martin’s arm and instantly gave him a vicious slap in the side of the head.
“You’re message cost us Plowshare! The plane is turning back. You have one final chance to save yourself and the ones you love. Black out the city of Toronto and do it now!”
Pale, Martin Bell rubbed his wrists. He looked defeated, lost, as though he were thinking of Beth Andrews, his parents. Finally he said, “All right.”
“Stand away,” Volta ordered.
The other THRUSH technicians backed off. Dr. Volta reached into his coat. He drew out a small pistol. “Martin,” he said, “at the first sign of treachery I will shoot you in the back of the head. Then I will order your loved ones killed. Now turn on the equipment. Give me full, all-directional power, and at once.”
Martin’s hands stood out white in the gloom as he reached forward and began turning controls to bring down the darkness.
FOUR
At an intersection in the distance an automobile had been overturned. A small mob of looters had set it afire. The flames licked upward, the only light in the otherwise impenetrable darkness of the warehouse district along the lakefront.
Several moments earlier Napoleon Solo had been chased by another band of looters. He had eluded them only after a wild dash down back alleys. Among the voices in the mob he’d heard one with a distinctly Continental accent. The voice exhorted the others to violence, to murder. Solo was sure now that THRUSH had sent infiltrators into Toronto to create panic and disorder an hour and a half ago when the blackout began.
Gunfire crackled from the direction of the business district. Panting and footsore, Solo drove himself forward along the sidewalk under the loom of a windowless brick wall.
He had gotten to within three miles of the Bloor Brothers warehouse in a car commandeered at the airfield. Then the blackout had caught him. The car’s engine conked out. He had come the rest of the way on foot, eluding mobs and racing toward the source of the devastation.
A phone call to Canadian Air Defense just before all communications systems failed revealed that Martin Bell had given his whereabouts in his desperate broadcast for help. Hugging the wall of the building, Solo now could see his goal on the opposite side of the street a block down. The huge Bloor Brothers---Movers and Transporters, Ltd. gleamed in the starlight.
The darkness of the city made his spine crawl. So did the noises of riot and alarm which the night wind carried. He heard windows smashing, people baying blindly in terror, guns exploding. The Canadian Army had been mobilized to join the municipal police and units of the R.C.M.P. in an attempt to maintain order and spread word that the cause of the blackouts was known and the source would soon be put out of action.
That, thought Napoleon Solo, as he slipped along in the shadows, was optimism he did not share.
Never had he seen THRUSH devastate a city so completely without actually taking a single destructive action. He knew that if he failed now, chaos would reign. Knowing it was all that kept him moving along the pitch black street. His strength was nearly spent.
In his right hand he clutched the long-muzzled pistol. He stopped, crouched down. The cowls of two unpainted vans were discernible in the main loading bay of the establishment. Solo stole forward again, angling across the street in a staggering run. He’d seen no guards posted near those big trucks---
The guards had been hiding. They reared up when he was right in the middle of the street. “Stand right there or---It’s our old friend Solo!”
Shadow shapes had risen beyond the cowl of the first truck. Starlight gleamed on machine-pistol muzzles. And the voice that had called out belonged to Felix Corrigan.
Suddenly Corrigan darted around to the front of the nearest van. He leveled his machine pistol and blasted a smoking barrage of orange streaks at the point where Solo stood. The bullets chewed up asphalt as Solo flung himself down and to one side. He hit hard, banging his head. Lights danced behind his eyes.
Corrigan’s bulk loomed as the big man stepped out into the street to get a clearer shot at his target. Frantically Solo flung out his right arm, squeezed the trigger. The pistol popped. Corrigan shrieked, slammed back against the truck’s dark headlights. As he died his finger convulsed on the firing mechanism. Orange fire-bursts ate up the night again. Solo started rolling but one of the bullets ripped through his right shoulder; a pyrotechnic of pain.
With Corrigan sliding dead down over the truck bumper, the other THRUSH guards leaped forward to fire. Solo lay dazed, fingers within inches of the pistol that had fallen from his nerveless right hand.
He rolled over. He got his left hand on the butt. He swung the gun up, twisted the cylindrical baffle on the muzzle end until he heard it click. He waited until the new loads had dropped into the chamber. Then, as the THRUSH guards opened up, Solo shot back, this time a hissing stream of pellets that exploded acrid smoke inside the loading bay. Within seconds the THRUSH outpost was decimated. Every last man lay sprawled out sleeping as the last whiff of the tranquilizing smoke drifted away.
Blood soaked Solo’s sleeve, dribbled off his wrist. He lurched across the street into the bay, dragged himself up rickety stairs to a large service elevator.
The elevator had no door. Rather, it was closed off by an accordion-fold steel wicket. Solo pushed this aside---it felt as though it weighed three tons---and slid into the cage.
He thumbed the button. The motors whined, growled. The lift began to rise. Solo leaned against the cage’s solid left wall, gulping air. The lift reached the next floor above, jerked to a stop.
Darkness.
Nothing but darkness and the smell of old wood and mold out there.
Solo punched the button. The cage started upward again, creaking discordantly.
Too noisy, Solo thought. Like an alarm.
But there was no choice now. His strength was almost gone. He had to gamble while he could. When the cage started up for the top-most floor Solo saw faint gleams of light and heard voices. They knew he was coming.
The moment the top of the front grating cleared the floor of the loft, THRUSH men, vague phantoms in pale coats, thrust gun muzzles down at him. Solo hugged the front of the cage, emptying his pistol upward.
The tranquilizing pellets popped and bloomed. The Thrushmen dropped, thudding. Some of the gas drifted back to Solo’s nostrils, making his feeble condition even worse. By the time the cage ground to a halt he was hanging on the front grating.
It took him a moment to realize that his pistol did not respond because he had discharged the last of the gas charges. He fought to clear his own vision. Just as the loft sharpened into focus, a pistol crashed twice.
Solo dropped to the floor of the cage as the bullets tore huge holes in the elevator’s rear wall. Through a film of dizziness, Solo saw a bank of glowing machines far down the loft floor in pools of light cast by small spotlights on stanchions.
Dr. Leonidas Volta was there, blue eyes standing out like small shining plates.
Dr. Volta’s head peeped over Martin Bell’s shoulder. Volta had his left arm hooked around Martin’s neck, his other thrust forward under Martin’s right arm. And that right hand held a pistol that barked and snapped at Solo again.
The shots ripped more wall from the cage. Solo’s fingers felt numb. He tried to snap the cylindrical baffle back around on the muzzle so that it would fire the last regular bullets in the chamber.
His sweat-slicked fingers finally slipped off.
Dr. Volta was backing against the machinery, still using Martin for a shield. Volta screamed, “I see you, Solo! You’re supposed to be dead. It’s dark. We’ve brought back the dark and you should be dead. Why have you come back to torment me?�
��
The high, keening wail of Volta’s voice was the sound of a man who had suddenly stared into the face of failure, who had been unable to accept it, and who had gone mad.
Desperately Solo clamped his fingers around the baffle, twisted. The effort brought pain. He lay hugging the floor of the elevator cage while Volta howled, “If you come for me, Solo, I will shoot Martin. I promise I will.”
“Mr. Solo?” Martin called. “I know your name. You’re---“
“U.N.C.L.E.,” Solo called back.
“Stand still!” Volta shrieked, jerking his prisoner hard around the neck. “You’re supposed to be dead, Solo. Dead on the St. Lawrence bridge. Our planes---“
Solo panted out a bluff: “Turn off the apparatus, Volta. The building is surrounded.”
“Liar! You’re alone! You’re all alone there---“
Abruptly, while Volta was mouthing obscene curses at the top of his lungs, Martin bell doubled his right arm and jammed it into Volta’s midsection. Volta yelped.
Martin gave one terrific lunge and pulled away. The force of his lunge made him stumble. He sprawled on to the board floor.
Red hair flying, pin-stripe suit a shambles, Dr. Leonidas Volta whipped up his pistol, pointing it straight at Martin Bell’s head.
With both hands fastened on the butt of his gun to steady it, Napoleon Solo fired.
Dr. Volta’s arms jerked up. His shot plowed into the black-box which was humming quietly among the other machinery as it sent out the impulses to darken the city. The moment the bullet struck the box gave off a low, sharp roar. Yellow-green sparks began to hiss and spurt from the junctions where the three thick red cables joined it.
The sparks lit up Dr. Volta’s fright-wig head. The THRUSH scientist’s mouth dropped open. He stared down at the bloodstain forming in the center of his shirt bosom.
Dying on his feet, Dr. Volta still managed to give one forlorn, protective wail.
He dropped his pistol, turned and seized the black-box apparatus as though he must shield---
Martin Bell yelled a warning. Dr. Volta’s hands clapped onto the black-box apparatus. A gigantic burst of hissing, shooting sparks erupted from the machine.
Volta stiffened. His limbs, his chest, his head glowed eerily green. Hundreds of thousands of volts of electricity poured through his body as he fell.
A reek of burned insulation filled the loft. Groggily Martin bell picked himself up. One by one all the dials and indicators on the machinery were going dark. Smoke drifted.
Young Martin Bell picked up the black-box, looked down at the dead man. Solo had seldom seen such utter loathing on a human face.
“The swine!” the boy panted. “The utter swine! He told me what he would do to Beth and Mother. He said he would---“
“Easy, son,” Solo said. “He’s dead. He was crazy, you know. He can’t hurt you now. Actually, you know---“
He was beginning to feel funny. Blood-soaked and lying on his belly on the floor of the elevator, Napoleon Solo mumbled, “I always did like fireworks.” Then he passed out.
Five
Alexander Waverly said, “What a truly heartwarming night. And one which we rather take for granted. Or did.”
Outside the window of the headquarters conference room, Manhattan’s lights twinkled. From Napoleon Solo (arm in a sling) and Illya Kuryakin (wheelchair, with a mammoth plaster cast on his left leg) Waverly’s remark drew small, wordless murmurs of agreement.
Of the lot of them, only Martin Bell looked reasonably healthy. He had on a neat new suit.
“Mr. Waverly,” Martin said, “I can’t say it too many times. If your men hadn’t acted so quickly and parachuted into that mountain place the way they did, Beth and my folks might not be alive tonight.”
“Tut tut, my boy,” said Waverly. “Merely our job. Be thankful that Mr. Solo managed to knock out your apparatus and stop the blackout before things really got out of hand. But speaking of your parents, Martin, aren’t they due here momentarily? With your young lady?”
Martin smiled. “Yes, sir. We’re going out to dinner and then to the theater. To celebrate.”
“We all have much to celebrate,” Waverly agreed. “How about you, Mr. Solo? A little festivity planned for the evening?”
Solo grinned. “My fan-carrying soprano comes off stage at eleven-thirty.”
Mr. Waverly glanced at Illya’s mammoth foot cast.
“Poor Mr. Kuryakin. He alone is left incapacitated, unable to toast our signal victory over the forces of THRUSH. Perhaps, Mr. Kuryakin, you would prefer that I keep you company? We might find a taxi driver willing to help us load your wheelchair. Steak and brandy. How does that sound? It’s certainly the least U.N.C.L.E. can do to reward you for yeoman service.”
“Thank you anyway, sir,” Illya replied, “but Dr. Whitcombe is coming in shortly to check my cast and change my other bandages.”
Waverly looked vague. “Ah, yes. One of ours?”
Napoleon Solo coughed discreetly. “Yes, sir, from the Dispensary, sir. Dr. Arlene Whitcombe, and if her bedside manner is anything to match her figure, well---“ Napoleon Solo gave a wicked grin.
“Oh” Mr. Waverly blinked. “Oh yes, I see. Well, then---“ He picked up his hat.
“Have a good time, all,” Illya Kuryakin called as the rest trooped out. He wiggled his toes down inside the plaster cast and, with a puckish grin, said to no one in particular, “I certainly intend to.”
The Deadly Dark Affair Page 11
