Passing the prostrate Fleming, I smelled bittersweet chloroform and heard him shout, “For godsake, get those damned documents back!”
For a second, I flashed back to a time when I’d gone long during a USC football game, the lone receiver who had to make the play and win the game. Then I snapped back to the dark, wet rush of traffic outside the station where pelting rain struck my face and hunched back, causing me to jump back for fear that I’d been shot.
The only thing that dribbled down my head and chest was a cold Parisian drizzle on the Rue du Faubourg St. Denis. Could they make these street names any longer or more complex?
Outside the station and farther up the rue, I caught sight of a nun’s black garment flapping in the breeze past a green flashing cross outside what looked like a drug store. I hustled after it, along a high stone wall to my left that concealed the train yard from view. I reversed the knife and tucked it up my sleeve to likewise conceal it from the small amount of public that I passed in the evening’s downpour.
I moved up the street, past a butcher’s shop next to a glass-blower’s establishment. Two prostitutes and a mime stood huddled together smoking in the sheltered doorway. Apparently, Los Angeles wasn’t the only land of fruits and nuts.
A shrill train whistle called from the other side of the stone wall. Wisps of steam rose from metal grates in the sidewalk, into the chilled October air. Another church bell rang out in the distance, signaling the end of Sunday services.
Someone came galloping up fast from my rear. I turned, ready to defend myself or explain to the French police, but saw that it was Norman, walking quickly and pretty well, considering his weak leg.
He raised the cane in my face and shouted through the rain, “They got Molly. Get them!” and limped past me, as if I were a parking meter cemented in the pavement.
I charged ahead and caught up with him at the intersection with Rue du Terrage whatever that was. “Is she dead?”
“Just wounded,” he said, not waiting for the traffic light to change.
“Hey, stand down,” I yelled. “Let me handle it.” But he dashed between two oncoming cars and a splashing bus speeding from the other direction.
I put my head down and followed like an obedient pup.
We hurried in front of a Romanesque church with a huge clock mounted between two dripping towers. When we reached the other side of the street, I pulled him to me. “Stop. Go back.”
“Nothing doing.” There was fire in his eyes. He was like a new man--one I wasn’t sure I knew. “I’m sick of sitting by while everybody else gets involved. Don’t try and stop me, Mr. Wade.”
Before I could answer, I saw yet another person coming up from behind us. The flashing traffic and pouring rain obscured my view, but I hoped it was the local johndamns.
Norm pulled away from me and pointed in the opposite direction, up a shadowy street. “Look. They’re going down those steps.”
He was right. It didn’t matter who was behind us--the local cops or another player in the game. We couldn’t afford to lose the Russian agents.
Forging ahead through the shower, we came to an entrance of the Paris subway, blocked off by metal railings. An ornate sign identified it as the Chateau Landon metro station. A more modern sign seemed to explain why it was closed down. Ferme de Construction.
“Are you sure they went down there?” I asked, not happy about going underground again.
Norm didn’t answer. He was busy swinging his injured leg over the barrier and rotating his body to start down the stairs.
Water dribbled off my nose and lips. I did what I’d been doing reluctantly for over a week--I followed.
We descended a dozen wet steps and turned left along a tiled corridor. Our squishy footsteps echoed off the plastered walls of the enclosed tunnel. I stepped over bundles of two-by-fours and long rods of rebar. Stacks of red bricks and wooden crates lined the way as we pressed through a bank of turnstiles. Cables and tubing ran along the floor, ready to be installed near an open cavity that was draped with a brown canvas cover.
I listened and peered beneath the canvas. Nothing. Just darkness and the sound of dripping water.
Norm hobbled past a compact piece of digging machinery and hissed at me. “I hear them farther on.”
The lights were dim and far apart, held in wire cages strung along drooping extension cords.
Now I heard footsteps again, but I couldn’t get a bearing on whether they were in front of us or behind.
I caught up to Norman as we entered the cavernous underground station with its long line of double tracks set low in a wide deep trench. The ceramic ceiling curved up and over our heads, stretching across the tracks which vanished into the darkness in both directions.
Norm looked winded. I had to give him high marks for courage, but he was risking too much. If he folded on me now, we could both wind up dead.
‘In the rain, far from home,’ the Noir Man added.
“I’m the one in charge now,” someone said in a muffled voice that resounded off the walls in front of us.
I attempted to adjust my eyes in the partial darkness.
Nikkita and Yuri were at the other end of the half-repaired Metro platform, on our side of the tracks. They had the documents we wanted and were arguing. Probably due to the fact that they’d trapped themselves in this hole and would have to come back this way to escape.
All we needed to do was to wait them out, but Norm didn’t look like he’d make it without a nice long rest, and soon.
“Stay here, pal,” I ordered, settling him into a crevice between a stack of plastic pipe and spools of copper wire and rubber tubing. “Keep down and let me handle this.”
I picked up one of the thin pipes as a weapon and hefted the knife in my other hand. The pipe felt too light-weight, not sturdy enough for good defense. The knife felt tiny, compared to their guns. I found a short shovel instead, and slid the knife into the back of my belt, starting to move out, hoping to get help, just as Yuri said, “They’ll never believe you.”
I froze, until I realized he was addressing Nikkita.
She held the papers in one hand and a gun in the other. The gun was mine and it was pointed at Kaminski’s chest. “And they’ll never forgive you,” she said. “The target needs to be Paris and London.”
“I’ve had all I can stand of your back-stabbing ambition,” Yuri replied. “You are holding me back and you know it. It ends now.”
There was a blaring shout from behind us all, way back at the tunnel’s entrance. It was enough to distract the woman, who suddenly saw me standing there, shovel raised and at the ready.
I flinched down, just as Yuri brought up his own gun and fired directly into Nikkita’s dark cloaked figure, below her left knee. She went up in a sudden ball of fire and debris that jolted my ears and eyes, kicking me back into a pile of ceramic tiles and plastic pails.
Explosives, I thought, in the compartment of her false leg. She’d been blown to hell in bite-sized pieces, and I could have sworn I heard Max’s voice calmly confirm it. “Exactly.”
Again, I’d been driven against something so solid that it knocked me nearly senseless. The room started to spin like a grand carousel, picking up speed. I wanted to get off. Nauseous and half blind, I felt something oozing from the back of my battered head.
Then, through a cloud of dust, smoke, and tears, Yuri came stalking in my direction. His face was streaked with dirt and blood, hopefully his own. But his gun hand was steady and pointed between my eyes.
I tried to raise the arm that still held the knife, but it wouldn’t budge from the floor. I couldn’t look away from Yuri’s wicked smile and the vein pulsing in the middle of his forehead. I’ll bet he hadn’t smiled like that since the invasion of Poland.
His tobacco-stained teeth were enormous, ragged, and ready to suck the blood from my neck. I giggled, knowing that I was slipping out of reality from too many hits to the head.
The ringing in my head was like a million l
ocusts. Otherwise, it was another silent movie, as I watched Yuri mouth something that looked like, “You always wanted to have Paris...”
Part of me fought back. “You know, I hate these rainy days,” I said, half gasping and unsure that he could even hear me. “Brings out all the worms.”
His eyes flared and an alien keening must have begun to slip from his lips.
My vision blurred, but I saw a bright metal nail sink into the left side of the killer’s neck. The soft flesh under Kaminski’s jaw absorbed the thin spike and let it protrude there like a short metallic arrow.
At first, he was stunned, unsure of what had happened. Then his smile returned, wider now and more ghastly than before. It was just a slight wound--nothing fatal. No serious harm or pain, considering the circumstances.
But it was enough to draw both his and my attention over to the stacks of building materials where I’d left Norman.
My pal stood upright, holding a makeshift weapon he’d constructed. He had strapped a plastic pipe to the length of Karloff’s cane. There were rubber tubes dangling from the tip of the walking stick, like those of a spent speargun, where the metal spike had been pointed and launched at Yuri’s neck.
The modified zip gun had halted Kaminski’s intention to shoot me, but it wasn’t enough to completely stop him. The mad Russian still had the upper hand.
I tried again to lift the knife and searched for the shovel, but failed. I struggled to get up, to speak, to kick out, to cry.
Yuri barked a laugh, knowing he would kill us both in the next seconds.
Then Norm threw something shiny out and over to land in the dark pit of the subway tunnel. A ball of reddish metal bounced and rolled along the track, uncoiling a thin length of wire that lead back to the spike in Yuri’s neck.
The copper ball hit the subway’s electrified rail, and Yuri instantly shuddered, silently screamed, and began to steam as he clutched the spike, yanking it from his neck. But his muscles seized and he couldn’t let it go. He danced and smoldered to the steady, deadly flow of direct current. His legs buckled as he went rigid, and the gun in his hand fired impotently into the concrete walkway.
I felt, rather than heard, the bullets thud. The Yuri’s body shook, sparked, and must have sizzled like a sixty-cent steak. The air was heavy with the tang of gunpowder, urine, and electricity. And then the copper wire melted through and the fallen body lay at rest.
I glanced back over to Norman and saw another person standing with him. The accumulated impacts to my head finally took their toll. I was slipping into insanity. My past and present blended into one swirling image and I knew I was leaving reality behind. The man next to Norman was my old boss, Mr. P.
CHAPTER 25
I was still weak, but could get out a complete sentence. “What are you doing here?” I asked.
Mr. P mouthed, “Groucho sent me.” There was a fifty-percent chance that he wasn’t kidding.
My brain drifted for a second and I latched onto the fact that he was all wet. Literally.
Norman came over and leaned into the Old Man.
“Nice zip-gun,” I told Norm. “Plenty of zap in that arrow, too.”
He smiled at my compliment, and I thought I heard him say. “I’m going to call it The Tingler.” It didn’t seem to bother him that he’d just killed a man, but he’d saved me. “I did it for Uncle Leo,” his faint voice declared. “Does that make us full partners now?”
“Yeah,” I said, still groggy. “Wade and Archer. Defenders of Justice.”
Mr. P started to help me up, and I began to fully understand what he was saying. “Seriously, Stan, Walt called me. When he told me about Poole, I knew I had to be involved.”
“Oh?” The back of my head was still wet and sticky.
“I flew over a few days ago, but missed all of you in London. I’ve been following ever since.”
“Welcome to the club,” I said, trying and failing to dust off my arms and legs.
“You guys get around,” the Old Man remarked.
“So it was you that Norm saw at the Nancy train station with Nikkita?”
“Yes, I got the upper hand and ushered her off the train before she could harm your party, but her number-two man caught us there. They managed to get away from me before I could alert the local authorities.”
I wondered aloud how he’d managed to stay on the trail.
“Ask Walt,” he said. “I caught a car and followed them, racing here to find you running down the street in the rain.”
So the bad guys had almost caught us twice and we’d slipped away each time by the skin of our bicuspids. We’d been living on the edge the whole time, traveling through French countryside.
“You came all this way? From Hawaii? Out of retirement? Why?”
“I couldn’t sit this one out, if I could lend a hand and maybe save the day.” He’d put on weight, age, and wrinkles around his eyes and mouth. “Looks like it didn’t turn out that way, but I owed it to you and Poole, to at least try.”
I digested this, suspicious again that I wasn’t getting the full story. Perhaps I never would. “Who is she?”
But before he could answer, the Paris police arrived and took us firmly into custody, separating and questioning us for over twenty-four hours. That’s the price you paid for almost blowing up their damn subway.
***
I seemed to drift in and out of awareness in a Parisian hospital where accordion music played outside my window. What was with these people? I had to admit that the food was good, though.
There was a bandage on the back of my noggin and a blazing headache in the front that no amount of aspirin would dampen, so the doctors hooked me up to a sedative drip and told me to keep quiet. Poole was in another room down the hall, receiving treatment for her poisoning. Molly O’Dee was also in a room nearby, recovering from her shoulder wound.
Walt had contacted Interpol, who’d arranged for our release from the local police, due to the important nature of the Project Goldenharz information. The incriminating papers had been destroyed in the explosion, but Ian had examined them thoroughly enough during the train ride that he could advise his government, and they could begin diplomatic action.
“The Reds will pull back the nukes,” Fleming candidly advised our little group. “If not, your country’s U-2 flights will provide everything needed to close down the operation, as well as the site.”
“I have a special relationship with the world press,” Walt conceded. “The Russians are bound to pull back and nothing will be said publically for perhaps fifty years. By then, it’ll all be just a footnote in history. Otherwise, word of the threat will spread like wildfire and, well, let’s just say that it’s a small world, after all.”
The next day, I had my head examined, yet again. But it didn’t stop me from trying to get a full explanation from Walt about Mr. P.
“When we anticipated sending you to rescue Penny Poole,” he said, “we decided to lay in some backup in case it didn’t work out. That’s part of the reason I called in your mentor from Hawaii.”
“You could have told me,” I groused, struggling to sit up straight in the slanting bed. For a second, I saw two Walts. I’d been hooked up to one of these dripping drug bags before, years ago after a case involving Dick Powell, and I hadn’t felt as dopey then as I did now.
‘You’re getting old,’ the Noir Man said.
I fought to keep my eyes from crossing.
Walt lit another cigarette and plucked a piece of tobacco from his lower lip. “As frustrating as it was for you, it was more frustrating for the Soviets. Nikkita Reed was killed by her own second-in-command.”
“Who would have expected it?” I said. “They seemed as close as wallpaper.”
Walt thought about it for a second. “She forgot that there’s a Russian instinct to overthrow authority. In the end, I think Yuri pretty much cracked up from frustrated ambition.”
Ian appeared from nowhere and agreed. “He saw his opportunity for ad
vancement and took it. Ruthlessly. He wanted to become a sort of Soviet god.”
Walt snickered. “If he’s a god, I’m Mickey Mouse.”
That one almost made my ears pop.
“When you’re done with that brain,” I said, “sell it to me, will you?”
Sometimes I get carried away. Probably comes from watching too many old movies, but I was beginning to succumb to the dull, oppressive effects of accumulated exhaustion, both physical and mental. My adventure in cloak-and-dagger world was nearing an end. And they could have it. No more Stan Wade, private spy.
Feeling beat in more ways than one, I was still compelled to ask, “How are the women? Are they going to be okay?” Blame it again on my misspent youth, watching movie heroes care more about others than themselves.
“Poole is making a full and rapid recovery,” Walt answered. “And I told Molly that I had both good and bad news.”
“Yeah?”
“The bad news was that she’d been shot in the shoulder, but she already knew that.”
“And the good news?”
He took a long drag on his smoke. “The good news is that it’s not contagious.” Then he offered, “I’ve got something else important that you need to know, but it has to come from her, not me.”
Her, I thought, drifting off to sleep. Her has got to be Suzi, my girl of the golden west.
***
Turns out, I was wrong. Her was Agent Poole.
She was recovering nicely. I was off the drip bag now, so I wandered down to her room. We had a brief chat beside her bed where high windows let late autumn sunlight stream across the polished floor.
The bandage at the back of my neck itched. I tried not to scratch while she explained about her stuntman cover during the making of Ben Hur. It was something I could relate to, since I’d once trained as a stuntman myself. Before I left her room, I patted her hand. “You’ve done a great service for your country.”
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