The Doomsday Affair Page 9

  Illya had flopped against the side of the car, locking his chin over the door. He was able to watch the cars below them when they came out on plateaus or sharp turns.

  He saw the four headlights blend until they were like one huge beam. He saw them waver and waltz crazily back and forth across the road. Once the inside pair seemed to climb a sheer mountain wall, and then fall back, leveling out only with painful slowness.

  Then they came together down there again—the scream of metal was lost in the distance, but the spark and fire of metal friction was not. The cars seemed to lock, to sway back and forth from one side of the road to the other, hugged together, neither willing to back away. Each turn brought them closer to the brow of the cliff.

  Violet slowed the car and he cut his eyes around, seeing a savage intentness in her face, a blood-lust in her eyes.

  She seemed, with some kind of animal instinct, to sense the moment when it was going to happen. She allowed the convertible to slow almost to a crawl, her whole attention riveted on the battle between the cars below them.

  It seemed to prolong itself interminably, but it was quickly over. The cars swung back and forth like one car on the narrow, twisting roadway, skirting its rim. Suddenly the wheels of the outside car peeled away the rocks and shale at the brink of an angular turn. The wheels skidded off the road. The car suddenly dropped and then went leaping outward into the darkness. The headlights appeared turned straight up for a split second, and then they fell away and there was only darkness.

  Illya heard the savagery in Violet’s deep sigh, and after a moment she stepped hard on the gas.

  The sun was metallic white when they lined up at the international border. Illya lay with his head on the seat rest, trying to force intelligible words from his mouth.

  His attempts did not disturb Violet; in fact, they seemed to amuse her.

  “My little bug just won’t stop fighting, will he?” she said.

  They rolled up into customs. The American officer tipped his cap and asked if they’d mind getting out of the car.

  Violet smiled sadly across Illya at the young officer.

  “My brother can get out, sir, and he will if he must. But you’ll have to help him in and out.”

  Illya struggled, his mouth stretching wide as he tried to speak one intelligible word. His mind was agonizingly clear, as bright as the sunlight, but the sounds he made were those of low-grade idiocy.

  “It was a birth defect,” Violet told the customs man. “Brain damage, you know.”

  “Yes. That’s too bad.” He called another officer and between them they lifted Illya from the car and set him on a chair just outside the office.

  Violet stood chatting with the officers while they opened his luggage and hers, and while they inspected the passports she had. Bitterly he wondered about the one they had prepared for him. Name. Age. Cause of idiocy.

  He stared at them, at the people going both ways across the border. He cried out, but it was a cawing sound and they glanced at him in shame-faced pity. No one liked to look at the mentally defective.

  Breathing raggedly, Illya forced his body to bend forward at the hips until he fell off the chair. He struggled then, trying to crawl away. Couldn’t these people see now that something was wrong?

  They came running.

  “Poor guy! He fell right off the chair!”

  “Don’t squirm around like that, fellow; we’ll get you up. Take it easy!”

  “It’s all right.” Illya heard Violet’s calm voice. “He does this all the time.” She bent over him. “You’re a naughty boy.” She straightened. “That’s why we’re having to put him away finally—we don’t want to do it.”

  They drove in silence northward up the rugged California coast. They stopped for the night in a sleek motel on Highway 101. By now, Illya saw they’d been joined by Edgar and company. He saw that the men were still shaken by the encounter with the U.N.C.L.E. men on the Mexican highway.

  He watched Violet. She was completely unconcerned about the deaths. Death had no meaning for her. He gazed at her, thinking she would enjoy torturing and tormenting the helpless. She got a strange kick from seeing him squirm and his red-faced attempts to speak.

  In the morning they loaded him in the convertible once more and Violet kept the Kharmann Ghia at top speed, going north again.

  In the afternoon they left the coastal highway, climbing east into the mountain ranges. They sped through a small town of stucco buildings and palm-lined parkways. They continued to climb and a chill settled through the car.

  At about four o’clock Violet brought the car to a halt before the tall iron-barred gate in a six-foot fieldstone fence.

  Above the gate, in fussy wrought-iron, were the words: BROADMOOR REST.

  The name stirred something inside Illya’s mind, troubling him, but he could not pin it down. He knew it to be a private sanitarium of some kind, created from the thousand-acre estate and chateau built by a lumber and mining millionaire in the early twenties. But it was not just that it was a sanitarium. There was something more, something that had turned up with a puzzling regularity in U.N.C.L.E. briefings.

  He struggled with the thought, but it eluded him. The gates parted and Violet drove through, going along the twisting lane toward the vine-matted walls of the old stone castle. He could see its turrets and gables and bay windows. He couldn’t see the bars at those windows, but he knew they were there.

  Three white-clad orderlies awaited them when Violet braked the car before the veranda. They stood on the steps that stretched thirty feet across, made of the same native stone as were the fence and the house.

  The orderlies came off the wide steps and lined up beside the car. One of them glanced at Illya, then grinned at Violet. “Is this it?”

  Violet laughed and nodded. “He’s all yours.

  One of the orderlies said, “What are you doing tonight, baby?”

  Violet tossed her red-gold head. “You’ll never know, simpleton. I can’t tolerate men who work for a salary. It makes peasants of them.”

  She turned on her spike heels and tapped away, going up those stone steps and through the huge thick redwood door.

  The orderlies reached for Illya. He struggled, fighting at them, but his arms only flailed wildly, and the noises he made were foolish, giggling sounds. He was in an agony of terror and outrage but he was unable to express anything except garbled idiocy.

  VIII

  SOLO PAUSED for a moment outside his room in the St. Francis Hotel. For no good reason, he felt the tightening inside that warned of danger. He shook the thought away and rapped three times, slowly. He listened for Barbry’s voice beyond the door. There was silence and Solo tensed, taking his key from his pocket.

  The door was unlocked and opened as he reached for it. Solo scowled, saying, “I thought I told you—“

  He stopped speaking, staring into the blandly smiling face of Samuel Su Yan.

  “Come in; we’ve been waiting for you,” Su Yan said.

  Solo’s hand moved toward the holster beneath his jacket, but stopped when he noted the small .25 caliber Spanish-made Astra pistol that Su Yan held.

  “An experimental model, Solo,” Su Yan said, “but quite deadly.”

  Solo sighed and stepped inside the room. Everything looked as it had when he had walked out of it, except that now Barbry Coast sat upon the foot of his bed, staring straight ahead of her, her features rigid, her gaze transfixed; she looked like a mannequin.

  “Are you all right, Barbry?” Solo walked toward her, trying to ignore the snubbed nose of the Astra that was fixed on his spine.

  Barbry turned her head slowly and stared at him blankly. It was as though she had never seen him before.

  “Of course she’s all right,” Su Yan said from behind Solo. “Aren’t you all right, my dear?”

  “I’m all right,” Barbry said in a flat, lifeless tone. Staring at her, Solo shivered involuntarily.

  “We’ve been looking for Esther for a l
ong time,” Su Yan said in a conversational tone. “I must thank you and your organization for locating her for us—and for leading us to her.”

  “We have a pretty good organization for finding people who want to be lost,” Solo said. “Even those who have themselves declared officially dead.”

  “Perhaps I no longer guarded my privacy so zealously,” Su Yan said. “You have a rich organization, underwritten as it is by so many nations with built-in missile age jitters. But it is not infallible. I proved this before—and I shall prove it again.”

  “No. They’re on to you, Su Yan. They’ve got files on you, and pictures. You’re part of a regular briefing. I mention this only in case you think you can get away with murdering this girl—or both of us—and getting away with it. They have pictures tying you in with Ursula Baynes-Neefirth’s death in Honolulu. One more death will bring them down on you.”

  Su Yan smiled mildly. “You fail to intimidate me, Solo. Your people know me. But my agents know you now, and your young associate Kuryakin. Perhaps the death in Honolulu attracted too much attention, just as a death here might—even one in no way involving me or my people. Besides, perhaps there is an angle you fail to consider. Perhaps we don’t need your death at the moment so much as we need you stopped. Our moment is at hand, Solo. Surely you must perceive this: I no longer remain among the ‘dead,’ all our operations are accelerated, we are making moves more openly, tucking in neatly all loose ends, such as this young woman. She’s not really important, merely a minor nuisance we’d rather not have running loose at this time. But in case you take some hope from this, let me tell you that your deaths—after our operation has been completed successfully—will in no way trouble us.”

  Solo felt the tension all through his body, but he kept his voice unemotional. “We all die sometime. Perhaps Barbry and I feel some reassurance in the fact that we’re to be spared at all. Live one day at a time, eh, Barbry?” The girl continued staring straight ahead of her. She did not react when Solo spoke to her. Su Yan said, “I’m afraid if you want to speak to Esther, you’ll have to do it through me. She reacts only to my voice. Speaks only when I speak to her. Does only what I tell her.”

  “Very neat hypnosis. But no better than I’ve seen done on night-club floors—and I don’t believe you worked it through that closed, locked door.”

  Su Yan shrugged. “What you believe or disbelieve doesn’t interest me, Mr. Solo. I’m sure you’ve heard of post-hypnotic suggestion, and the fact that a subject once hypnotized can be easily put under a second, third or hundredth time—always with greater ease, if one makes maximum use of that post-hypnotic suggestion. Sometimes a word—one word.”

  Solo glanced at the waxen-like face of the girl and exhaled heavily. “You simply told her to unlock the door to you, and she did it, just like that?”

  “That’s correct, Solo. Just like that. As I told you. Everything is going my way now. Just like that. This girl won’t look at you, or react when you speak to her; she will do anything I tell her. She would shoot you, Solo, right now, if I told her to do it.”

  Solo did not bother arguing that one with him.

  “Would you like me to prove that she always obeys me?” He nodded toward the Scotch and bucket of ice on the dresser. “Esther. Mr. Solo and I are thirsty. The three of us have a long journey ahead of us tonight. Prepare the three of us Scotch on ice.”

  “Yes.”

  Barbry stood up slowly and walked woodenly to the dresser.

  Su Yan’s voice clawed after her in its cat-like, tormenting way. “And by the way, Esther, when you speak to me, I’d like a little more respectful tone.”

  “Yes, sir,” Barbry said.

  Solo straightened and Su Yan heeled around, his instincts sharp, his reaction time extraordinary. Solo relaxed. He said, “This proves you’ve known Barbry for a long time.”

  “Yes. I knew Esther for awhile even before Ursula started to work for my organization, didn’t I, Esther?”

  Barbry paused, mixing drinks at the dresser. She tilted her head, facing them in the mirror, her violet eyes empty. “Yes, sir,” she said.

  She returned to mixing the drinks. Su Yan smiled, pleased. He backed a couple of steps and sat down in a chair under a reading lamp. He reached up and snapped off its light.

  Barbry turned from the dresser, carrying the iced drinks in hotel drinking glasses. She extended one to Solo, gazing at him but not even seeing him.

  He took the drink from her and she turned mechanically, going to where Sam Su Yan reclined with the small gun resting on his lap.

  Barbry then walked away from him and leaned against the dresser as if waiting for a new command from Su Yan.

  Su Yan sipped at the Scotch, staring coldly at Barbry over the top of his glass. He said, “I saw you last at Cocoa Beach, didn’t I, Esther?’

  “Yes, sir.” She trembled, reacting, even in her semiconscious state. Fear melted and ran through her body. She nodded.

  “What did I tell you then, Esther?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “Not to try to run away again.”

  “But you did it, didn’t you? First to Chicago, and then to San Francisco. Didn’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.” Her voice was like that of a terrorized child. Solo stared at her, so fascinated by the extreme cruelty being practiced upon her by Su Yan that he sipped at his drink, hardly aware of its taste or the chill of the glass in his hand. Barbry had not lied: she did fear this man more than she did the devil. Her whole body was quivering with fear.

  “I warned you what I’d do if you ran away, didn’t I, Esther?” Su Yan persisted.

  “Yes, sir.” She could barely speak. Her face was the white of chalk dust.

  “I told you that I would take you back to that place you hate if you disobeyed me again, didn’t I?”

  The girl cried out, a guttural protesting sound. She was incoherent with fear, unable to speak even in her trance.

  Enraged, Solo forgot that gun lying waiting in Su Yan’s lap. Blood throbbed at his temples. His head ached, and the pressure behind his eyes was fierce. He had not known he could hate anyone as he hated this man tormenting that helpless girl—or that his emotions could make his head feel as if it were bursting. Even the objects about the room appeared wavering and insubstantial.

  “What are you? Who are you, tormenting her like this?” Solo demanded.

  Su Yan flicked a casual glance toward him, not bothering to tilt the gun. His thick brows lifted as if he were surprised. “I thought you had my complete file, Solo. Your rich, far-reaching organization. I thought you knew. Do you begin to be afraid of me, Solo? Do you begin to think that perhaps I’m in another of your files? That maybe I’m Tixe Ylno?”

  Solo’s head throbbed. He was aware of the pounding of his pulses, the frantic beat of his heart. He shook his head, forgetting caution or reason. He lunged toward the man in the chair. “No. I don’t think you’re Tixe Ylno. I think you’re a—”

  He stopped speaking and stopped striding forward. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but he could not. He reached out wildly for support, but there was none. He saw Su Yan make a serpentine, graceful movement up from the chair, standing beside it, watching him.

  He fought to keep his balance, but the room and the world were suddenly black dark. How? The question burned in his mind, and as everything else blanked out for him, the answer came bright and clear. Under previous orders from Su Yan, Barbry had dropped a knockout pellet into his Scotch—and Su Yan had kept him distracted while he drank it down. But in this warm darkness where he was, not even this answer mattered.

  PART THREE

  Interlude in Bedlam

  I

  SOLO CLIMBED the long, dark, free-swinging staircase upward from the stygian darkness of the pit. He was tired. He did not know how long he had been climbing or how far he had yet to go. Moonlight filtered through a small opening incredibly far above him, and it glittered faintly on the metal steps, and the only thou
ght his aching brain could contain was that he must keep climbing until he somehow reached that lighted escape hatch.

  He released the bamboo railing long enough to paw at the sweat on his face, at the pressure behind his eyeballs. He almost fell. He clutched out wildly, grabbing the rickety railing, clinging to it, while the round hole of light bounced like the white ball in a beer commercial.

  He jerked open his collar and loosened his tie, feeling suffocated and as if he were enclosed in a debilitating heat compartment. He didn’t know where he was, and he tried to think how he had got here.

  He stumbled. The attempt to think only started the wild little man with his sledge hammer again banging at the backs of his eyeballs. He gave up trying to think, and concentrated on climbing. It was so far upward to that lighted round hole, and yet somehow he had to make it before he strangled in the heat, or suffocated from lack of oxygen.

  He breathed through his mouth, gasping, his head tilted back and his gaze fixed on that ragged opening with the wan moonlight beyond it. It looked wonderfully cool up there in the open, if he could only make it before he fell again or drowned in his own sweat.

  Solo gave an agonizing yawn, stunned with fatigue. He didn’t see how he could take one more step upward, and yet the alternative was to tumble back into the bottomless dark. He shuddered, clinging to the railing that swayed precariously. Suddenly he heard something that made his heart miss a beat. He stiffened, listening.

  There was a faint whispering laugh from the light above him. A man’s voice said, “Welcome back to life, Mr. Solo. And welcome, also, to Broadmoor Rest.”

  II

  SOLO’S EYES jerked open. The movement almost took off his skull.

  Solo turned his head, and the pain washed down through him. He saw that he was on a round, kingsized bed in a beige-tinted room with doors opening off into other rooms of a suite, uniformly decorated and painted.

  There was movement behind him. He jerked his head around, instinctively tensing his body. His instincts brought him only searing pain, and a red haze that danced before his eyes like fireflies. The haze faded, cleared, and behind it he saw Samuel Su Yan. The Chinese-American, smiling faintly with that mismatched face that looked as if it had been designed by a committee, sat casually on a chair next to the bed. He had a small brown box in his lap.