The Thousand Coffin Affair - Avallone Michael. Страница 23

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!”