The Doomsday Affair Page 5

  Placing the binocular loupe in his left eye, he scanned the strip of developed film while the film from his own lighter-camera was being developed.

  He paused, staring at the film Solo had taken of Ursula’s receiving the welcoming lei from the China Doll flower girl at the airport.

  He caught his breath, pleased. He could never have seen it without the jeweler’s magnifying loupe, but with it he could distinguish the features of the man standing beyond the flower girl, intently watching the small ceremony.

  He was not too surprised to see that it was the Eurasian who called himself Sam.

  His next triumph was the excellent close-up likeness he had been able to get of Sam himself with his own lighter-camera.

  Smiling, pleased with himself, he did not hurry even when he heard the scream of police sirens approaching from downtown. He sighed. If Guerrero’s police were on his trail, could Sam’s commandos be far behind?

  He placed the pictures and the materials in his jacket pocket and crossed the room carrying the infrared flashlight.

  On the balcony, he played the light along the railing top. His impassive face lighted faintly at the clear yellow stains he found there—finger marks. He knew who had left those prints. Sam had been leaving yellow stain hand and finger marks ever since he had drunk down the Scotch and the neuroquixonal tablet, and he would continue to put them down wherever he went for some time to come.

  Illya stood there smiling, and he did not even stop smiling when he counted the four police cars racing into the drive eight floors below. He returned calmly inside the room and took up the receiver-sender, pressing its button and speaking into it, slowly, clearly, repeating himself to be certain he was understood.

  PART TWO

  Incident at the Hungry Pussy Cat

  I

  NAPOLEON SOLO STEPPED from the taxi at the corner of Third Avenue in New York City’s East Forties.

  He paused a moment on the curb, glancing at the large public parking garage, the row of aging brownstones siding a modern three-storied whitestone. Beyond them he could see the glass and glitter of the United Nations Building near the river. He exhaled heavily, saying to himself inwardly, “Welcome home, Solo.” He was thinking there were moments when he hadn’t been sure he would make it. But he did not smile in his small triumph because he still nursed a purpled eye and a welted, tender jaw, souvenirs from Oahu.

  The street was quiet in the afternoon and Solo went along its walk, going down the steps from the street level and entering Del Floria’s cleaning and tailoring shop in the whitestone building.

  The tailor, a mild, balding man in his fifties, glanced up from his work and returned Solo’s faint smile of greeting.

  Entering a small cubicle at the rear of the tailoring shop, Solo found himself wondering about this agent of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The tailor operated certainly in a minor capacity, one of those who served mostly by only standing and waiting. He was a good tailor. Perhaps he’d once been a good field agent. Perhaps he knew nothing more than that behind his modest shop was a complex of steel, stone and bulletproof glass housing one of the strangest and most far-flung law agencies in existence. It was unlikely that the tailor knew all the workings of U.N.C.L.E. even if he’d once been a field agent, because only a few at the top knew all its bewildering secrets of communication, eradication and prevention.

  Behind the eager young faces of the men and women who entered here were the alert minds of carefully selected and wholly dedicated people of almost every race, color and national origin.

  A wall parted and Solo stepped through as it closed again silently behind him. He was in the first, outer cell of the complex; the receptionist behind the desk smiled at him as if she’d seen him only moments earlier, and placed his identification tag upon his lapel.

  Solo winked at her and strode through the metallically lighted corridor, able to see his reflection in the deep-polished surface of the flooring.

  Other agents, some in shirt sleeves, all intent, as if their minds were computers, passed him with brief glances or silent greetings. The silent corridors hummed with ceaseless activity.

  Though one could not see them or hear them through the sound-proofed flooring, a set of underground channels churned with the speeding launches plying in secret from moorings to the East River.

  On the roofing, what appeared to be a large neon-lighted advertising billboard concealed a high-powered short-wave antenna, elaborate receiving and sending gear, pulsing constantly, attuned to every change in the world around it, reaching out like prying eyes and searching feelers into every dark cranny of the world. The battle which U.N.C.L.E. fought wasn’t new; it was as old as man’s conscience. Only the weapons were different now—incorporating computers, spy planes, atomic weaponry and the finest brains money could hire.

  Solo wasn’t a simple man, nor a naive one. He prided himself upon his urbanity, sophistication and clear-eyed recognition of the truth about worldly matters, rather than the hypocritical things one was expected to believe and swallow. But here in this air-conditioned maze of steel corridors and sound-proofed suites, one felt the strength and the moral principles that guided it.

  A door slid into the wall as Solo approached it and he entered the private sanctum of Alexander Waverly. There had been no delay and Solo knew why—every movement in these corridors was continuously monitored on closed-circuit television, and electric brains scanned, rejected, or admitted one at all the knobless doors in this place.

  Waverly looked up from behind his desk. The top of it was cluttered at the moment with small, luminous maps, code messages and directives. Waverly’s hair was toppled over his rutted forehead. His hair was black, and Solo suspected that Waverly’s barber dyed it with each trimming, because if Waverly had a vanity, it was the matter of his age. He admitted, like an aging prizefighter, to an obviously curtailed age—in his case he would tell you he was in his late fifties. No one ever disputed him, but he had a brilliant record in army intelligence that dated back almost that far. Solo supposed his superior was actually in his late sixties, but Alexander Waverly was walking proof that age was all a matter of the mind.

  “Hello—uh, Solo,” Waverly said without smiling. He kept a hundred matters of utmost urgency in the forepart of his mind, but he had the poorest kind of memory for names or other trivia, even in the cases of his most highly rated operatives.

  Waverly’s rhesus-monkey eyes under bushy brows seemed more vacant than ever, but Solo had long ago learned this meant the deepest sort of concentration. He respected Waverly as he did few men. It was easy to have ideals when these human heroes were at a distance, but when you worked closely with any man you got to know him well, in all his weaknesses and strengths. “One must conclude from your report, Mr. Solo, that your triumph in Oahu was less than breathtaking,” Waverly said.

  Solo smiled. As Waverly understated his agency’s dangers and accomplishments, so he minimized its failures. But Solo knew how they hurt—the pain clawed at him. “I fell flat on my face, all right. And before we go any further, I want to make a statement that I hope you won’t construe as an alibi. It may well be the pattern in this case—if it turns out that there is a pattern, or even a case left after the recent setback.”

  Waverly pressed a button. A wall panel slid back, revealing a small screen which instantly glowed with gray light.

  “I assure you we do have a case left,” Waverly said. “A strong case. Perhaps we are in a better position than we have been at any time previously. We must negate any past failure by concentrating on the future. Learning the identity and the goal of our friend Tixe Ylno would have been easy if we could have kept the young woman alive. But perhaps that would have been too easy. I’m sure Thrush would feel this, and this must be our attitude. Now—what is your idea of a possible pattern in this affair?”

  “Simplicity,” Solo said. “Utter simplicity. Everything so obvious that you overlook it because it’s so simple.”

&
nbsp; Waverly nodded, smiling faintly, but impressed, Solo could see that. “Yes. Extremely clever—and sophisticated. Using simple attack in a world that has grown to look only for danger in the complex—yes. Very ingenious.”

  Solo saw Waverly digesting this thought, putting it through the computer of his brain. He did not underestimate this power of his immediate superior, because Waverly was one of the five men at the peak of U.N.C.L.E.’s organizational structure. On Madison Avenue in the advertising world, it was a matter of having a key to one’s private bathroom. Here it was a little more than that—Waverly was one of the few men who knew every one of the secret entrances into this building.

  And it was more than status with Waverly. One reached his place of trust and responsibility only through awesome sacrifice and dedication. If any men knew every detail of the U.N.C.L.E. operations, it would be Waverly and the four other men—each of a different nationality and background—at the pinnacle of the organizational structure. The organizational chart of U.N.C.L.E. broke down the personnel into six sections, each subdivided into two departments, one of which overlapped the functions of the department below it.

  Waverly, with his four associates, headed up the Policy and Operations Department. In descending order of rank, the other departments were: Operations and Enforcement—and it was in Enforcement where Solo was listed as Chief Agent—Enforcement and Intelligence, Intelligence and Communications, Communications and Security, and Security and Personnel.

  It was Intelligence and Communications whom Waverly alerted now with the buzzer that prepared the screen for briefing.

  A woman’s soft voice rose from the waiting screen: “Yes, Mr. Waverly.”

  “The pictures transmitted here by, uh, Kuryakin, Miss, uh—” He let that part go.

  “Yes, Mr. Waverly.”

  “Where is Illya?” Solo asked as they awaited the first briefing pictures.

  “He had a bit of a sticky problem getting out of Hawaii. A matter of a murder charge.”

  “Good lord.”

  “Yes. You might say that.”

  Solo sank into the leather covered chair, glaring at the white screen. He bit his lip as the first picture was flashed upon it. It was the picture he had taken of the little flower girl at the moment she had tossed the lei over Ursula’s head at the Honolulu International airport. It was magnified many times and showed people in the immediate background.

  “This is the young woman Polly Jade Ing,” said the voice from the speakers. “Of Chinese ancestry, she is believed to have become involved with an agent for Thrush through a dealing in uncut heroin.”

  Solo sighed. One got so near, and yet fell so far short. The picture changed and Solo sat forward. “This man in the background is a Chinese-American named Samuel Su Yan. He was born in Dallas, Texas, attended public and private schools in Texas. He was rejected by the U.S. Army for moral reasons. He attended a university in Shanghai. For some years he worked with the Peking government as an agent in Japan, Viet Nam and in South Korea. He was deported from the Philippine Islands. He was reported killed in a plane crash two years ago.”

  “Obviously he has been very much alive, working underground so cleverly that no agent of ours spotted him in all these months,” Waverly said as the picture flashed off the screen, followed by a second, a close-up of Sam Su Yan in a pink hotel suite. “Illya Kuryakin took this picture,” Waverly said.

  The woman’s voice said, “This is a closer picture of the subject, now definitely identified as Samuel Su Yan. At this moment he has been located by agents as a guest at the Acapulco International Hotel in Mexico.

  “According to Agent Kuryakin, this man accosted Kuryakin as he left the suite of the slain Thrush agent, Ursula Baynes-Neefirth, forcing him to return to the room and to await the arrival of the police. Kuryakin reports that to his belief, Samuel Su Yan is a paid agent for Thrush. Thrush is a supra-nation, without boundaries, and an international conspiracy—”

  “Come, come, Miss Uh—” Waverly said impatiently. “Get on with it. Believe me, we know what Thrush is.”

  “Yes, Mr. Waverly.” The voice continued, unruffled, as unperturbed as a delayed recording. “Agent Kuryakin managed, by appearing to drug his own drink, to induce subject to intake ten milligrams of neuroquixonal. Neuroquixonal is a drug which causes a sweat-gland and epidermal reaction which—”

  “All right! All right!” Waverly said. “You may have time for all of the basics, but we do not. If that’s all, thank you—and out.”

  The briefing screen darkened and for a moment the two men sat, mulling over what they had seen and heard.

  Solo said, “Acapulco for me?”

  Waverly’s head came up. “I thought your report stated you were returning here for additional information on the slain Miss—what’s her name, the Thrush spy.”

  “Yes. That’s right. Illya and I found only a meaningless letter—and our code people confirm that it is no known code—and a silver whip. I recalled that Ursula had been part of a night club act with another young woman in which the silver whip was a part of the important props—”

  “I saw the act,” Waverly said with a faint smile. “Well. Quite educational. Krafft-Ebbing and the Marquis de Sade could have learned.”

  “I wanted to see those briefing pictures again,” Solo said. “Until Illya turned up this bit on Samuel Su Yan, the whip and the former partner seemed my only link with Ursula and what she became—as a spy for Thrush.”

  Waverly pressed a button, gave an order, and in less than a minute, a picture obviously some years old was flashed on the screen. The woman’s voice said, “This is the last night-club act of Ursula Baynes and her partner Candy Kane—whose real name was Esther Kappmyer. Our notes show that Miss Baynes stated she hoped to refine this act, find a new partner and return to show business.”

  A small muscle worked in Solo’s tautened jaw. He thought: this was Ursula’s dream, her hope for a future that was now forever denied to her. She’d brought along that whip, hoping that Solo and the United Network could somehow protect her from her former bosses at Thrush. She had been alive and lovely and filled with plans for a new beginning.

  Solo said, “What I need, Miss McNab, is the name and present whereabouts of Ursula Baynes’ former partner Candy Kane, nee Esther Kappmyer. Do you have that?”

  The unseen voice from the stereo speakers said, softly, “Of course we do, Mr. Solo.”

  II

  ILLYA KURYAKIN LOUNGED in the back seat of an Acapulco taxi, a vintage Dodge that limped asthmatically through the sun-struck streets, dodging the bicycles that were everywhere like fleas in the hairs of a dog. The driver batted continually at the horn, never paused at an intersection, and miraculously pulled into the curb before the Acapulco International Hotel.

  He reached back and swung the door open. “We are arrive, señor.”

  Illya smiled at him. “Remind me, next time, to walk.”

  “A long walk, señor. Muy caliente. In the sun—very hot.”

  The resort town lay prostrate in the sun before Illya, a matter of deep browns and Mexican reds, of stout Gringos in shorts and potbellied shirts and grass sandals. The American females on the prowl and the young Mexicans stalking the streets like unsubtle beasts of prey: they’d get together, and they would deserve each other.

  Illya glanced toward the blue waters below him, fair and unreal, the palms rustling like whispering castanets. Except for the people, it was a lovely place, Illya decided as he entered the hotel lobby.

  The clerk told him his room was waiting for him, reserved, and surely to his liking. “Overlooking the beach.” Illya could display no enthusiasm—he was becoming disenchanted with vacation places where death lurked on expense accounts submitted to Thrush, and yet paid in the end by the unsuspecting and the unwary.

  He drew a three-by-five enlargement of the close-up he had made of Sam Su Yan in Honolulu. “I’m looking for this man—a friend of mine,” he told the clerk. “I was told he was registered he
re.”

  “Ah, si, señor.” The clerk smiled. “Señor Samuel Causey—”

  “If you say so.”

  “—in room 421. Would you like me to ring him and announce you?”‘

  “I’d like to astonish him,” Illya said, purposely using the imprecise word.

  “Of course.”

  Illya turned and walked toward the barred cage of the bronzed elevator. Some transient flicker in the clerk’s face suggested that he would call and announce him anyway. Obviously Sam paid well to avoid astonishments.

  Sam awaited him at Room 421, standing in the doorway, a drink in his hand.

  Sam gave him a brief nod and a false suggestion of a smile. “I could have killed you as you stepped off the elevator. I’d like you to remember this.”

  “You would have killed me in Oahu, if your assassins could have worked it,” Illya replied with a matching tug of smile muscles about his mouth.

  “One should never assign tasks,” Sam said with a slight shrug of knobby shoulders. He wore gray slacks, a checked shirt, hand-tooled boots, looking more like a Texan than ever—one with a sense of humor that dictated a Eurasian mask. “No matter how well-trained his minions.”

  “If you want a thing done well; do it yourself,” Illya quoted. “That’s why I’m here. Would you care to compliment me on my tracking you across almost three thousand miles of ocean?”

  Sam bowed, motioning Illya past him into the room, which was furnished in the Gringo decorator’s notion of authentic Aztec-Mexican. Sam closed the door and turned. “I find in you a certain native cleverness—as opposed to true intellect, of course.”

  “Still, I am here, and so are you.”

  “True. But I wanted you here.”

  “You made this decision after your men failed to deter me in Honolulu?”

  Sam nodded. “At that moment. I was defaming you at the time for the stupid trick you engineered with the Scotch.”

  Illya almost smiled. “The neuroquixonal. Interesting, isn’t it? The way it works on the sweat glands and the epidermis so the subject leaves a clear trail of yellow stains behind him wherever he goes, whatever he touches with any part of his skin. It was developed by our chemists, and its lasting power remains up to a week—and, you’ll be pleased to hear, there are almost no side effects.”