[Magazine 1967-­10] - The Mind-­Sweeper Affair - Davis Robert Hart. Страница 1

THE MIND-SWEEPER AFFAIR

THE NEW COMPLETE "U.N.C.LE." NOVEL

It was a house of madness, peopled by men who knew Evil not wisely but too well. Somewhere inside there Solo and Illya must find and destroy a devil's monster that lay bare men's very souls—before it destroyed them!

by ROBERT HART DAVIS

ACT I—TO SLEEP, PERCHANCE TO DREAM

ANAGUA is the capital of Caragua. The war department building is in the center of the city. On a night in May, at about eight o'clock in the evening, a sergeant of the national army walked quietly along the corridors until he came to an office marked: Major General L. G. Dachado.

The sergeant stopped for a moment in front of the door, looked up and down the corridor, then leaned his ear against the closed door. Satisfied, he walked on to the next door, which was plain and unmarked. Again checking to see if he was alone, he produced a key, opened the unmarked door, and stepped inside, shutting the door quickly behind him.

The room the sergeant stood in was dark. Windowless, it had no lights on. The sergeant waited for a moment until his eyes were accustomed to the .dark. Then he stepped quickly across the room to a wall of shelves that held office supplies.

The sergeant removed a stack of paper, took a small contact microphone out of his pocket, and pressed it against the wall behind shelves.

The sergeant remained in that listening position for an hour. The telephone rang several times in the office of General Dachado. The sergeant listened, but showed no interest. As the first hour passed, he shifted his position a couple of times, lit another cigarette, and went on listening.

Ten more minutes passed, and the telephone rang again in the other office. The sergeant came alert, dropped his cigarette and stamped it out. The ringing of the telephone this time had a different sound, as if muffled. A drawer opened, and then the sergeant began to listen intently.

A moment later the sergeant put his microphone into his pocket, stepped away from the shelves, and moved silently to the door between the storeroom and the office of General Dachado. He took a strange looking pistol from his pocket, changed the clip in its hand grip for another clip he took from his pocket, and opened the door soundlessly. He peered through the opening.

A tall, skinny man with a long drooping mustache and a dark complexion was at the desk with his back to the storeroom door. The sergeant saw General Dachado talking on a telephone he had taken from the bottom drawer of his desk. Obviously a special telephone, since two other instruments stood on the top of the desk. And the general was not talking—he was listening.

As he listened, Dachado wrote on a pad of paper in front of him. The hidden sergeant watched the whole scene. There was no one else in the office. At last Dachado stopped writing, nodded to the telephone as if whoever he was talking to could see him, muttered something that was more than a grunt than a word, and hung up. The general looked at what he had written for a moment, then replaced the private telephone in the desk drawer, locked it, and stood up.

The sergeant opened the door of the storeroom, raised his odd pistol, and something seemed to spit in the room. The general clutched at his neck, half-turned, and collapsed to the floor.

The sergeant stepped quickly into the room. He bent over and took the piece of paper from the general's hand. It was the message Dachado had written down while listening to the telephone. The sergeant stood above the fallen man and read the paper. The only sound in the room was Dachado's labored and shallow breathing under the influence of the drugged pellet the sergeant had shot him with.

Nothing moved as the sergeant read the paper carefully. Then the outer door of Dachado's office burst open.

A masked man in civilian clothes jumped into the room. There was a pistol in his hand. The attacker shot the sergeant. There was no sound, just a short, guttural bark like a sharp cough.

The sergeant was knocked backwards.

The attacker jumped in toward the piece of paper that the sergeant had dropped. For an instant his silenced pistol was aimed away from the crumpled man.

With a burst of strength, the wounded sergeant threw himself on his attacker. The sergeant knocked his attacker down and staggered out the open door into the corridor.

On the floor of the office the attacker lay stunned for a moment. Then he jumped up and was about to go after the sergeant when he stopped, turned, and picked up the paper again. He read it quickly but carefully, dropped it again, and went out the open door.

The sergeant staggered on along the dim corridors of the silent building. Once he stopped, leaned against the wall, and looked back at the trail of blood. He shook his head. Then he took off his jacket and pressed it against the ugly wound in his chest. He held the jacket tight against the wound and staggered on.

He grew weaker as he went, but he no longer left a trail of blood. He reached, at last, a cross corridor at the far end of the building. He turned left and came to another unmarked door. He opened it. A small closet was behind the door. He went in, closed the door, and sat among brooms and mops in the dark.

The sergeant took a pencil from his pocket. His movements were slow, painful. At last he had the pencil in his hand, a tiny thread sticking up from the top of the pencil like the antenna of some insect. The sergeant bent his face close to the pencil.

"Control… local. Control... local... come in. This is Agent Forty-Four, come in... Agent Forty-Four…"

Another voice, soft and faint, was in the closet.

"Control local. Report Agent Forty-Four. This is control local."

"Agent... Forty-Four," the sergeant said, his breath coming in gasps. "June seventeenth. Repeat, June seventeenth. Dachado had a call... private telephone… full details of time and place… June seventeenth was the date of..."

The door of the closet burst open. The sergeant made a feeble effort to raise his pistol.

Framed in the open door the masked attacker shot twice.

The sergeant lay dead among the brooms and mops.

The masked attacker ground the pencil-radio beneath his foot and turned away without a glance at his victim.

The building became silent again.

TWO

IN THE COMPLEX of closely guarded rooms and corridors behind and above Del Floria's Tailoring Shop on the East Side of New York near the United Nations that was the headquarters of The United Network for Law and Enforcement, the female assistant to the Chief of Communications Section listened to the message coming in from far to the south.

She spun dials and the message, picked up by the concealed antenna in the billboard on top of the building, came quick and urgent.

When her radio finally went silent, she touched a button on the console. Moments later a door opened by itself and a pair of young men stepped into the room. They looked like college boys. They were neat, well-groomed and young. But the pistols in their hands indicated that they were not college boys.

"Urgent. To Mr. Waverly direct," the communications girl said.

The two men nodded. One took the message. The other stood to one side with his pistol ready. The message was in a sealed envelope. Neither of the young men even glanced at the envelope. They acted as if they were aware of being watched constantly. They were being watched—this was how young men who wanted to be U.N.C.L.E. agents started: carrying important data between departments inside U.N.C.L.E. head quarters. Messengers and the lowest level of internal security.

The two young men walked from the communications room and along a bright grey corridor that had no visible lights, no windows, and rows of doors without locks or knobs. They walked single file, even inside their own security, alert, pistols ready. It was this unceasing vigilance that, in the last analysis, accounted for the efficiency of U.N.CL.E. Never relax your guard or your brain, not even in your own headquarters. Anyone could be a spy, and the enemy was resourceful.