The Cross of Gold Affair - Davies Fredric. Страница 26

Apis scooped Illya up in one hand, and lifted the kicking Malista up by the back of her jeans. Illya hiccuped again, dribbling water, and for a moment all was deathly quiet in the room. Mai looked from Andy to Chuck, and then swung around to look at Porpoise. “It must be twenty of or twenty after!” For no reason in the world this took all three of them into a fit of laughter, and the combination of a meaningless joke and Porpoise’s aversion to noise raised their voices to a roar. Apis and his men quickly ushered them out, and Porpoise jiggled his way across the room to the hidden entrance to the radio room.

Coincident with the sounding of the chime, an electric wristwatch set off a small alarm on the wrist of a tall, lean blond individual. He glanced at the watch, reset the alarm, and reached into a pocket for a small gold case. Four men watched as he opened the case, shook it gently, and then snapped it shut. Two small red pills remained resting in a large-boned, muscular hand. The tall man excused himself and left the room, pills in hand. Once out of sight of the others, he replaced the pills in the gold case and lifted the handset of a telephone.

“Quoth the Raven. Code, O.N.E., repeat one. Plans proceeding exactly on schedule. Tell Mr. Porpoise that Breelen’s is on its last legs,” he whispered into the phone. Without waiting for an answer he replaced the handset and returned to the group in the adjoining room, where the Board of

Directors of Breelen’s was meeting to decide the probable fate of their company. ,

“Gentlemen, we must hold out for a few days more. If we can swing the loan with Bristol we can crush those who would have crushed us,” the tall man said upon his return. “I will deal with the Bristol people personally, and I assure you, there isn’t a man in this room who is more aware of the outcome of this struggle if I fail.” He smiled for an instant, and then five grim men exited.

Three hundred miles away, a government radio operator was keying up two non-government sideband transmitters to pass on the message, “Code ONE, all is well.”

Chapter 11

“Where have all the Thrushes gone?”

“HEY, YOU GONNA sack out all night?”

Illya hiccuped into Malista’s frowning face, as she bent over him and forced him to open one eye. She let the eyelid drop, and he sank back into the drug Apis had injected. After an almost sleepless night before and a day of uninspiring flatfoot work capped by Porpoise’s water games, he was easily able to rationalize six to eight hours of peaceful, noble slumber.

The girl didn’t see it the same way. For one thing, she didn’t like the way he lay crookedly on the Spaceship Rooms wooden floor, one arm beneath him so that he’d wake with no circulation in it; for another, she wanted to know what was going on, and Illya looked like her only source of answers. “Wake up,” she said, prodding him and shaking his shoulder. “Wake up, fella. You’re uncomfortable.” That struck his funny bone, and called him up out of the velvet black pit where he’d been trying to nestle down. He belched, spewing a feeble half-mouthful of water on the floor, and twisted into a half-sitting position. “You’re opposed to the pursuits of night,” he muttered at Mai.

She leaned back on her haunches and laughed lightly. “No way” she said. “No way, Mr. Man. I am the most night-pursuit thing that ever happened to Long Island. I just didn’t like the idea of amputating your arm in the morning, when you finally rolled off it yourself.”

“Well, IT1 consider you the savior of my good right arm. If Thrush doesn’t take it off for me anyway; if they do we’ll have to call the whole thing off, right?”

“Thrush? What kind of a Thrush is gonna take off an arm?”

“Thrush stands for the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity.” Illya looked around at the three youngsters and the room they were trapped in. “From the looks of things, the four of us are Undesirables, and the last time I heard, Thrush had some very efficient methods of Removal. They don’t just call up the D.S.C. and send folks off to the Hudson.”

“Come on, Mai. This kook is some kind of a nut,” Andy said, rising. “Let’s split before someone comes back. Imagine trying to hold us prisoner in this dumb maze-you’d think we hadn’t memorized it or somethin’.” He started for the open alcove.

Illya grabbed an ankle and brought the boy down. “Hold it, speed kills, what’s the hurry? This room is only wired for sound, but the rest of the place is wired for death. Take it easy.”

Andy sat up, rubbing his bruised pride, and gave Illya a very strange look. “You serious? About Thrush and Removal, and wired for death and all?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “I guess Fatso is one of them, because I never saw anybody with more gadgets around to puff himself up in my life; looks pretty sick to me, but he never really bugged us before tonight. He messed Napoleon up good, though.”

“You know Napoleon?” Illya sat all the way up. “Where is he?”

“We found him on the beach, soaking wet and tom up one side and down the other. Messed up like that, he didn’t say word one about how he got that way,” Mai answered.

no

“Charlie here, Andy and I, we took him out past the boardwalk and caught him a cab. You a friend of his?”

Tm Illya Kuryakin; we sort of work together.”

Andy spoke up again. “You sure-god aren’t Good Humor Men, to get these Thrush buggers mad at you.” All three sat patiently, letting the implied question hang in the air. Illya leaned his head to one side, then the other, hitting himself to empty the water from his ears, before answering.

“We work for a kindly old gentleman who sends us out to get chopped to pieces, drowned, or shot up, for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.”

“U.N.C.L.E.,” said Charlie, and Mai laughed at the acronym.

“Well,” said Illya, “that is what we call ourselves. Napoleon and I are Enforcement Agents; we get sent out to clean up the sort of messes local police can’t handle.”

“Super fuzz,” said Charlie.

All three were looking at him in awe, and Illya began to feel uncomfortably the center of attention. Finally Malista spoke, breathing her words throatily.

“You’re a spy,” she said lovingly.

“Hey,” said Andy, “you got a fistful of superkill gizmos, like little bombs and wire dinghies?”

“I had, until Porpoise had me frisked. They took away all my weapons, radios, lockpicks, everything.”

“Napoleon is a spy, too,” said Mai, “and he didn’t even tell us.”

“It’s not the sort of thing you talk about, not if you plan to go on being a spy,” Illya explained. “The only reason I mentioned it is that we’re all prisoners together. You’ve got a right to know why Thrush is going to kill you.”

“Kill us,” spat Charlie, “is gonna take more than Arnold and Big Fats. I’d take on any three of that bunch. Any way. Fists, knives, bottles, chairs, or a long-range spitball contest.”

Andy chorused in, “No bunch of tweety-birds bugs us. We woulda laid them out on the beach, if they didn’t take us by surprise. At that, Charlie almost creamed the punk who jumped him, and you shoulda seen Mai hanging from Arnold’s nose by her teeth.”

Mai raised both hands, palms outward, and the boys quieted down. She talked to herself for a minute, smiling, her eyes focusing miles away, and then she chanted to the tune of Where Have All the Flowers Gone?:

“Where have all the Thrushes gone?

Long time passing.

Where have all the Thrushes gone? 1

Long time ago.

Where have all the Thrushes gone?”

Plucked by U.N.C.L.E. every one.

When will they ever learn?

When will they ever learn?”’

The two boys applauded, and Illya smiled at her, then looked down at the floor. “It certainly must be a wonderful thing,” he said, “to expect to take on these plug-uglies with bare hands. They aren’t even going to give us that chance. Most likely, Porpoise will tell Arnold to shoot us through a hole in the wall, and then float our bodies out over the billowing waters. He’s scared right now, finding that you three knew about Napoleon, but any minute he’ll realize the smart move is to get rid of us.”