A shadow shifted down by the burning building on the shore. Solo flung the rifle to his shoulder.
Illya started throwing switches on the big shortwave. A dial lit. Another. He called exultantly to Solo but Solo didn’t hear. He was too busy pumping shots at the first of the painted men who came howling across the concrete ‘copter pad in the red dusk.
ACT I
THREE’S A CROWD---OF VICTIMS
“And there was one clip left for Illya’s rifle,” said Napoleon Solo, “and a lot more of them than us still howling and jabbering down by the burning hut on the river. That’s when the squad that came cross country from the Isle showed up.”
Remembering, Illya Kuryakin looked grave. “Lady Luck not only smiled, she positively ginned from ear to ear. If Plympton’s radio hadn’t been working---“ He shrugged rather casually.
A bitter wind whined at the window panes. Too chill, too sharp for this early in the year. Solo sat in one of the largest, most comfortable chairs in the room, one leg hooked over the arm. His $75 hand-lasted English shoe swung back and forth. He stared moodily out the window at the towers of Manhattan gilded by the thin sunset light falling out of the western murk of New Jersey.
Fatigue-shadows stained his eye sockets, marring his dashing, sophisticated good looks. His dark eyes seemed to brood. His impeccable white shirt showed half inch of expensive linen at the cuffs of his smartly cut dark hopsack suit. His clothes did a neat job of concealing the fact the he and Illya had arrived back in the U.S. less than twelve hours earlier.
They came in on an U.N.C.L.E. relay jet that shuttled back and forth to Sao Paulo. Aboard was the third member of their party. This third, quite dead U.N.C.L.E. agent was now down in the laboratory-morgue.
Solo’s mind kept returning to him. Again and again he saw that crawling, livid, horror of a blotched face.
“Ah, Plympton,” murmured Mr. Waverly. “A brave man. Outstanding record.”
Illya strode back and forth. He turned at Waverly’s last word. He looked his usual bookish, introverted self. His blond hair fell nearly to his blue eyes. He wore charcoal slacks, a madras jacket and soft white shirt, but the civilized clothing only accented the burned, peeling rawness of his skin.
“You’ve seen him , sir?” Illya asked.
“Of course,” replied Alexander Waverly. “The moment you contacted me two days ago from down there to say that Edmonds had escaped---“
Abruptly Solo sat up. “Sir, all the rest of the night on the river we didn’t have a chance to report. It wasn’t until we reached Sao Paulo next morning by ‘copter that I used Channel D. Do you mean to say word of Edmonds escaping hadn’t reached you until then?”
Waverly nodded. He was a middle-aged, unkempt man with a long, sad face. His hair was the neatest thing about him, combed down on one side from a precise part. He wore now, as always, exquisitely baggy Harris tweeds. He played with the stem of his perpetually cold pipe as he faced the pair of agents.
As chief of Section I, Policy and Operations, Mr. Waverly always looked something like an anachronism. He would have fitted the role of aging, benevolent schoolmaster. But his outward appearance and manner hid a man both incredibly tough and tough minded, as demonstrated by the way he spoke now. Quietly, about a subject which would have given lesser men a slight case of nervous hysteria.
“Naturally, Mr. Solo, the Isle de Mal flashed instant word of Edmonds’ escape. But that was late on a Friday evening. My wife and I hadn’t enjoyed a short holiday---oh, in two years, I suppose. We drove into Connecticut on Friday. It wasn’t until Saturday morning that the one courier who knew my whereabouts located us. And even he did not know the nature of the emergency. Consequently, it was your astonishing calm voice which informed me when I reached headquarters that Edmonds had broken free. There’s already been a security shakeup at the Isle. That doesn’t alter the fact that one of the vilest, most diabolical clever assassins who ever worked for THRUSH is now at liberty. Dantez Edmonds---“
Turning, Waverly walked to the window. He looked out over the buildings melting into the twilight. He shook his head.
“I go away a short time and he has to be the one to turn up. Dreadful irony. A man out of the past. I thought we’d finished with him.”
“Have any of the other operatives in the network picked up word of him?” Illya asked.
“No. He’s vanished.” There was an odd, almost unpleasantly humorous light in Waverly’s eyes which Solo didn’t like. Nor did he understand it. What kind of macabre secret joke was Waverly keeping from them?
“Has the lab had any luck with Plympton’s remains?” Illya wanted to know.
“Not so far,” was Waverly’s answer. “Sufficient to say that he was the victim of a rather new and virulent strain much like those responsible for the dread plagues during the Middle Ages. Only this tropical strain was---“
“---carried by the monkey Edmonds had with him,” Solo put in.
Waverly tick-ticked his pipe against the sill. “Not precisely what I was going to say.”
“Oh. I’m sorry, sir.”
“Correct, in any case,” Waverly added. “If I seem to be holding something from you two, I am.”
“You have some information about this plague strain?”
“I do, Mr. Solo. But in the interests of not repeating myself, I shall wait until our two guests come round. They’re conferring with Dr. Bruno of data processing. I had them flown in the moment I learned of Edmonds’ escape.”
A curious air of tension descended over the room. Both Solo and Illya knew that two high-level U.N.C.L.E. executives were in New York. These men held a rank equal to Mr. Waverly’s, occupying posts similar to his in other parts of the world. One was Mr. Mohandus Bal, from the populous Asian state of Purjipur. The other, Sir Blightstone Jurrgens, operated out of U.N.C.L.E.’s European branch. Napoleon Solo had met Bal once at a reception. He had only seen photos of Jurrgens.
But he knew quite well that Waverly, Bal and Jurrgens, operating as a team, had personally captured Dantez Edmonds in the sub-cellar of a winery near Munich, Germany, some years ago.
Solo had once heard Waverly tell the story of how six men had been required to subdue Edmonds. He had been carried, shrieking and writhing, out to a steel-lined automobile. This maximum security car drove him to the seacoast. From there a plane relayed him to London, and a jet with fourteen guards aboard watched over him on the flight to South America and the Isle de Mal.
In his day Dantez Edmonds had been that feared, respected. A monster of a man, weren’t those the words Waverly had used?
The tension tightened up a notch in the room where lights winked and shadows gathered.
A staff girl entered. She handed Illya a blue flimsy. Solo skewered his neck around, admiring the girl’s neat shape and trim legs. Illya handed him the sheet. He scanned it without really seeing it. He thought half-heartedly about asking the girl’s name. He was temporarily at liberty, had a few days of holiday coming. Perhaps---
Illya coughed, tapped the flimsy.
“Oh. Oh yes, just getting to it,” Solo said.
He read rapidly. At least their South American mission had paid off. The flimsy said an U.N.C.L.E. strike force had attacked and eradicated the secret THRUSH training center. The photos he and Illya had taken had blueprinted the most feasible entry routes, and only one man had been wounded in the takeover.
Solo laid the flimsy aside. “Good news.” The words fell, sepulchral, into the silent room.
The room was Mr. Waverly’s private office and command center. It was equipped with computers, built-in monitors and a large, circular, motorized conference table which revolved at the touch of a button. Few outsiders had ever seen the room. Fewer still of the eight million plus people in New York were even aware that it existed.
This headquarters room was the strategic center of the entire Manhattan complex of U.N.C.L.E. which was hidden away behind the facades of a row of buildings a few blocks from the United Nations e
nclave in the city’s East Fifties. The buildings consisted of an out-sized public parking garage, four dilapidated brownstones and a modern three-story whitestone.
The first two floors of the whitestone were occupied by an exclusive key-club restaurant, The Mask. On the third floor were sedate offices. These, a front, belonged to U.N.C.L.E. They inter-connected with the maze of steel corridors and suites behind the decaying fronts of the brownstones.
There were four known entrances to the three-story U.N.C.L.E. complex. One was through the third floor offices in the whitestone, another through a carefully contrived dressing room in Del Florio’s Tailor Shop on the level just below the street.
Within U.N.C.L.E. headquarters proper, four elevators handled all vertical traffic. And inside the steel-walled rooms where signal lights of amber, purple, green, red, royal blue, and orange blinked constantly in coded sequences worked a crack cadre of alert young men and women of many races, creeds, colors and national origins.
The equipment installed for their use was the most sophisticated modern technology could devise. It included high-powered shortwave antennas and elaborate receiving and sending gear hidden away behind a large neon advertising billboard on the roof. These resources, utilized by the organization’s top agents in Operations and Enforcement---men like Solo and Kuryakin---stood between the world and the collapse of a delicate balance of terror. Should the balance tip, THRUSH would soon step in to claim the spoils.
And it seemed to Napoleon Solo as he brooded in the gathering twilight that with the return of Dantez Edmonds, the balance had tipped ever so little in favor of the other side.
“Ah,” said Waverly. “Our associates are arriving.”
A lighted display panel above a doorway flashed scarlet, then cleared to white. The heavily fortified and padded steel door slammed aside with a soft thud. Two men came into the room. They paused on the other side of the circular conference table. Mr. Waverly cleared his throat, adjusted a rheostat. The light level came up sufficiently to compensate for the deepening of darkness outside.
“Sir Blightstone, Mohandus---all finished, are you?” Waverly asked. “Quite.”
The Asian, a small, bright-eyed brown man in a turban of sparkling white silk, spoke first. He had a wry little face, almost bird-like in its forward-thrusting curiosity. But his eyes were shrewd. Solo and Illya stood up. Solo judged Mohandus Bal to be nearing his mid-fifties. Except for the graying of the eyebrows, he would have passed for a man much younger.
Bal wore a western suit obviously cut by a fine British tailor. His turban was his only concession to his country of origin. He gave a swift, darting look of instant recognition. Then he turned back to Waverly.
“Dr. Bruno was most cooperative. We expedited discussion of the problem and arrived at what we both feel is a workable solution.”
“Bruno’s preparing a report,” Sir Blightstone Jurrgens rumbled. “You’ll be receiving a copy, naturally. I think we’ll all find that this new programming technique Bruno has worked out will speed the transmission of the kind of information we all need.”
“I’m delighted the timing of your visit allowed us to iron out that little inefficiency,” Waverly said. Tick-tock went his pipe against the table’s rim. On the faces of the computers set into the walls, lights flashed in eerie silence. “Of course we are all aware that the conference just concluded was but an incidental detail. We are met for a more serious purpose. One which can only be said to be unpleasant. By the way, permit me to introduce Mr. Solo and Mr. Kuryakin. I am sure you know them by reputation, if not personally.”
Handshakes were exchanged. Sir Blightstone was an immense-chested bull of a man well over six feet. He brushed at his guardsman’s mustache and rumbled in his throat about the good work Solo and Illya had done in a recent European affair involving a notorious THRUSH killer named Count Beladrac. Bal responded politely when Solo reminded them of their reception meeting a few years ago. Sir Blightstone thumped the table at the conclusion of the formalities:
“Damned right this is unpleasant. The day-to-day battle with THRUSH is time consuming enough. Takes all our resources. Top men. Stretched thin, too. Now this---“
Again Blightstone harrumphed. He had a tendency to interrupt his speech with this deep-throated gargle, as if he were constantly reacting to a series of minor irritations. Solo might have raised a cynical eyebrow, but he knew better. No fool, no Colonel Blimp, no British caricature-man could ever have risen to Jurrgen’s position in U.N.C.L.E. Once you looked past the stout man’s façade you saw tiny, keen blue eyes pinning you, evaluating you, thinking every moment.
Jurrgens rumbled on, “It’s not as if I care a fig for the personal danger. Doubt it even exists, really. But with THRUSH pressing on so many fronts, to be burdened with what at first blush appears to be a personal vendetta---annoying!”
“Nor I,” answered Waverly. “We all remember Edmonds, I’m sure.”
“Too well,” Bal murmured. “Psychopathic. But clever. Ah, almost too much so.”
“His intense dedication to THRUSH,” Waverly said, “coupled with years of confinement and his personal animosity toward the three of us---“ A gesture to the other two executives. “They pose a peril of considerable magnitude. I do not enjoy employing two of my best agents as bodyguards---“ Here a slow, significant look at Illya and Solo. The latter was mystified by the references to personal danger.
Waverly continued: “--- and I hope I do so not out of any private desire to shield myself. But facts are facts. The three of us from Section I in this room represent three-fifths of the executive branch of U.N.C.L.E. Let us say, Mr. Solo, Mr. Kuryakin, that in accepting your new assignment, you are not serving us so much as you are the offices we hold.”
Nervously Illya brushed at the clipped bangs hanging down over his forehead. “Forgive me, sir, but I don’t understand.”
“We’ve received threats,” said Bal. His face was a model of Oriental repose. His fingers were tented. But his small, dark eyes carried worry in them.
“Personal threats,” Sir Blightstone said.
“We each received them shortly after you reported the escape, Mr. Solo,” said Waverly. He reached into the pocket of his tweeds and pulled out a folded yellow sheet of paper. “These messages were transmitted simultaneously. Mine came from Bonn, Germany. Sir Blightstone’s came from Tokyo. Mr. Bal’s came from Capetown.
“Naturally it was useless to try to trace them. Edmonds was clearly using the THRUSH apparatus to serve his ends. By the time the messages were sent, he’d probably gone to ground somewhere. They all came in as straightforward cables.”
The paper rattled faintly as Waverly extended it. “Same message to each of us.”
A little sliver of fear dug into the back of Napoleon Solo’s neck as he took the paper and turned it so that shimmering green lights from the face of nearby computer illuminated the narrow message strips pasted on the yellow sheet. A teleprinter had typed out the words in block letters:
TO THE THREE WHO IMPRISONED ME---I HAVE A LONG MEMORY. AND HAVE LIVED FOR THIS MOMENT. THE GREAT DUMAS HAS SET THE PATTERN SO YOU UNDERSTAND WHAT YOU ARE TO EXPECT. ONE BY ONE. DEATH. ONE BY ONE. BUT YOU WILL NOT KNOW WHEN OR HOW UNTIL THE MOMENT. IT IS MY DEDICATION. ONE BY ONE.
The last three words were repeated several more times. They had a kind of silent drumbeat finality in Solo’s inner ear as he read them. He glanced finally at the simple signature.
A block capital D.
Looking over Solo’s shoulder Illya sniffed. “Rather theatrical, ringing in Dumas.”
“Edmonds always did have a touch of the histrionic about him,” said Bal.
“Which one has to overlook,” Sir Blightstone said, “Else one tended to regard him as a mountebank, a fool. According to his dossier, his father and mother were traveling players in the provinces of France.”
“Exactly how was he captured?” Illya asked.
To the younger agents, Mohandus Bal explained, “We were in your sectio
n then. Operations and Enforcement. We three were all assigned to Madrid. The informer’s tip came and we rushed---ah, but that is documented in U.N.C.L.E. files. Read it at your leisure. Alexander here was actually the one who got the line on the informant. We were good friends, and we wanted the prize for ourselves, so we closed in as a group. We called up reinforcements only at the last moment, Edmonds was so hysterically averse to being captured alive that only massive forces of men could keep him from killing himself. Rather ironic, isn’t it? Years in our maximum security prison on the Isle de Mal have instilled in Dantez Edmonds, as the saying goes, a rage to live?”
“And kill,” said Illya into the silence.
Darkness had fallen in Manhattan. The skyscrapers gleamed, lonely and lost. A whole normal, conventional world out there, Solo thought. Separated from us only by a few panes of glass.
But a lot more separated the rest of the world from U.N.C.L.E., including the dedication to a fight that never stopped, no matter how tired the fighters, or how bloodied or how hopeless they felt.
Solo tried to throw off the sense of impending disaster by watching Mr. Waverly click his pipestem against his teeth and smiled.
“It would be typical of Edmonds to strike the grand pose and characterize himself after the hero of the Dumas novel.”
“There is, however,” said Illya “A subtle difference. The Count of Monte Cristo was wronged by three evil men. He came back from the past to revenge himself. In this case the count is also the wrong-doer.”
Solo found himself speaking with an edge of annoyance that betrayed his tension: “Literary allusions are all very nice, gentlemen. Let’s get down to practicalities. Edmonds had sworn to kill all three of you. So you need protection. But unless you all plan to stay here in Manhattan, together, under guard---“
“Impossible,” said Jurrgens. “I’m flying home tomorrow.”
“The state of Purjipur faces an internal crisis,” said Bal. “THRUSH is behind it, I believe. It requires my presence.”
“Then we need fifty men, not two!” Solo exclaimed.
The Man from Yesterday Affair Page 2