Acute cynicism made Napoleon Solo want to retch. How could Elisabeth possibly fall for such verbal goo?
Elisabeth reached up to touch Beladrac’s hand on her shoulder. In Solo’s left leg, the internal spasm worsened. He was afraid his leg would start twitching any moment. Elisabeth said: “Lugo, as soon as I discharge my duties at the Conference, can---can we be married?”
“I want you to be sure, Elisabeth sweetest.”
Elisabeth looked far from sure. She looked glassy-eyed, uncertain, and, now that he studied her more closely, totally worn out. “I am sure, darling. I have been sure for many days now---“
It was just then that the little scene changed from a parody of romance to something tinged with horror.
Lugo Beladrac disengaged his left hand gently from Elisabeth’s stroking fingers. He touched her throat, caressing it. Elisabeth shuddered, slumped forward, enjoying the touch.
Beladrac bent toward her across her shoulder. The front of his jacket belled away to reveal bright red satin lining. And Napoleon Solo saw that Lugo Beladrac was going to kiss Elisabeth d’Angelo’s white throat---
The count’s right hand came up around her bare shoulder from the other side. Elisabeth did not see. In that right hand the Count carried some sort of hypodermic, its barrel full of fluid, its needle split into a pair of sharp tips, like fangs---
Vampire! Thought Solo, just as a shout burst into the room.
Elisabeth’s eyes flew open. Startled, Beladrac thrust the double tipped needle downward. His angle was off, the needle buried itself in her shoulder instead of her neck.
Elisabeth shrieked feebly and clawed at it. A door Solo couldn’t see crashed open. He recognized the voice of one of the guards, shouting in Italian about a tradesman who had not come out of the house.
Face wrenching with rage and frustration, Beladrac drove the hypodermic plunger all the way to the bottom of the barrel with his thumb. Solo was struggling to get his pistol up into firing position against the grille. Elisabeth shuddered, pitched forward over the table, knocking a wine goblet off.
In the sudden silence, the goblet shattered. A second later, the muscle spasm in Solo’s left leg tore loose. His knee banged against the metal wall of the duct, a huge reverberating sound.
Beladrac’s satanic eyebrows hooked up. With a guard behind him, Beladrac charged toward the grille. Solo struggled to get his gun hand properly lined up for a shot. Beladrac skidded to a stop. He whipped out his heavy gold filigree cigarette lighter and pointed it toward the grille. His thumb flicked against the side.
A high pressure stream of knockout gas ripped into the ventilator. Napoleon Solo coughed once. His head slumped. The pistol fell from his hands, hitting the metal of the duct with another clang that had all the odd finality of a funeral bell. Solo didn’t hear it.
ACT III
DING, DONG, BELL-
SOLO’S IN THE WELL
The Shelley-Python screamed around another curve.
Lying on his belly on the bonnet with his jaw sticking out over the car’s front end, Illya Kuryakin was hit in the face by a dazzle of light. Two immense headlamps filled the road ahead. The Shelley-Python didn’t slacken speed, shooting at the big motor lorry like a projectile.
Over the scream of the wind Illya heard a cry of fright from the driver in the lorry’s high, open cab. The unseen driver wrenched the wheel. The lorry careened into the ditch, spilling part of its load of cabbages. Two of them hit Illya on the back of the head like cannonballs as the automated sports car narrowly missed the lorry’s right rear wheels and shot on.
Jolting, punishing, the bonnet crashed against Illya’s belly again and again. He despaired of freeing himself from the racing death-machine, because if he parted the ropes by a sudden tug of strength---granting he could do it at all---he would be thrown off a vehicle hurtling along at well over one hundred miles an hour and he’d probably end up a gooey red paste on the roadside.
Still, the initial shock of being shot into the night on top of a mindless metal machine programmed to go out of control any moment had worn off a little. Illya found himself able to think a little more coherently. Must be a way off this infernal machine. Must be!
His view directly ahead was something akin to the sensations he’d once enjoyed on a roller-coaster at Coney Island. Enjoyed? He must have been out of his skull. There was nothing enjoyable in whizzing around hairpin curves, down short straight-aways, up suddenly steep hills, never knowing whether the cracking up was right around the next bend. The Shelley-Python had missed the lorry, but what if a less skillful driver showed up?
Nice gleamed in a blurred pattern of lights visible now and then through breaks between the hills. Illya writhed uncomfortably. The bonnet was heating up.
A cherry glow at the corner of his eye caught his attention. He strained his head around. The wind battered at his right cheek like a ram. He saw that the exhaust pipes projecting from the left side of the bonnet were shining redly, super-heated by the continuous high-speed performance of the engine.
For one wild moment Illya stared at these red-hot exhaust pipes and tugged at the ropes which bound his left arm to his side. Could he do it? Did he dare even try?
A certain fatalistic professionalism well implanted in all U.N.C.L.E. agents took over, blanking out most of the intrinsic horror of his situation. Illya experimented with shifting his weight.
Although his bonds did not give greatly, he found he could move himself a short distance to the left, so that he lay precariously on the shoulder-slope of the bonnet. This placed his left wrist within a couple of inches of the rear-most of the three glowing exhaust pipes.
Breathing in great whooping gulps, Illya thrust his weight hard against his bonds. He felt himself slide ever so slightly down the bonnet’s slope. The heat from the exhausts grew intense on his wrists. He wondered whether he’d be able to stand it.
Nonsense! Of course he must stand it. Napoleon Solo, his good friend and comrade, was probably dead back in the morgue in Rome. Therefore it behooved him to get off this devil’s engine if possible, and go back to Beladrac’s villa and take necessary steps to sabotage THRUSH’s current plan. From the start he’d hated Beladrac’s ugly, supercilious face. Fixing that face in his mind helped give him the strength he needed.
Illya could almost feel the adrenalin pumping, giving him the little extra impetus required to shift his weight so that his wrist-bonds jammed down against the hot exhaust.
A stink of rope fibers and flesh blew up briefly into his face. Then the wind whipped them away. Heat rose around his lower arm. Beginning to bring intense pain---
Illya shoved harder, pushing his roped wrist down on the pipe. The smell worsened. The pain was awful. He pressed harder---
Suddenly the rope sizzled through. Illya’s downward pressure sent his hand hurtling free by the exhaust pipe. Wildly he dragged his arm back, just an instant before it touched the pavement whistling past underneath.
Illya hugged the hurting hand to his side, feeling it tremble and shake with the force of the exertion. If he’d so much as touched the road at this high speed, his hand would have been snapped off.
One hand free. How much time before the automatic controls failed? And he certainly couldn’t free himself and just hop off the vehicle. He’d be jellied when he hit. That meant he had to find some means of hoisting himself back into the cockpit to where the brakes were located. Quite a challenge, with his legs lashed up and over the windscreen.
The Shelley-Python hit another grueling curve, went skidding through it. The road hugged the edge of a precipice on the left. The cliff dropped away sheer to darkness far below. The lights of Nice, its hotels and harbors, had receded a long way since he’d last glimpsed them. He was high up. The dizzying effect of the chasm on the left only intensified the intense precariousness of the situation.
Swallowing hard, Illya shifted his weight again so that his right wrist rested against a hot pipe on that side. More pain. Then those bonds
frayed too. Now his whole torso was free.
The sports car seemed to be traveling along a relatively level stretch. Illya took he chance, starting to twist himself violently over on to his back.
Only a single rope lashed him back there, running from his ankles down over the windscreen into the cockpit. The rope twisted. He flopped onto his back and immediately began to slide off the bonnet. His hands went out instinctively, seized the nearest holds to keep himself from falling---
Screaming without thinking, Illya gripped the two exhaust pipes just long enough to give himself a violent push. He used all his strength to drive himself back to the sitting position. He caught the top edge of the windscreen, kicked hard so that the rope slid down to where it ran around the right side of the screen.
Illya stuck his legs around that way, felt his feet drop past the cockpit’s edge into the cockpit proper. He got a firmer hold on the windscreen, even though the palms of his hands were raw, blistered. He said a little wordless prayer and gave a pull.
His whole middle body swung out into space over the side of the racing car. For one wild moment, he thought that he wouldn’t be able to hang onto the windscreen, that he’d fall backwards and hit his head like a ball on the racing pavement and have his brains dashed out---
But somehow he held fast, jerked his feet. And got his lower body down into the cramped cockpit. He crouched awkwardly there. He used his pain-laced finger to pry and tug and twist at the rope on his ankles. Dimly in the starlight he saw the spider-webbing of auto-control wires which Beladrac’s mechanics had rigged. Illya was afraid to disturb them. Already he thought he heard a peculiar buzzing up where the wires disappeared in the dark beside the brake pedal.
Blood leaked down onto his fingers from his palms. It made working with the ropes difficult. At last he got the main knot unfastened. In a second he unlooped the rest of the strand, worked it down off his ankles.
The buzzing grew more pronounced. The Shelley-Python was still barreling along the straightaway beside the precipice. With difficulty Illya unbent his left leg. He stretched it forward into the leg space and felt for pedals. He found one, pressured it. But there was no response.
Must be the accelerator, probably over-ridden by the programmed controls. He shifted his foot to the left. Wind beat against his face over the windscreen. He contacted another pedal, touched it, felt the sensitive car respond. He sighted along the road ahead.
The straightaway continued along the precipice for at least another mile. He couldn’t risk waiting. The buzzing increased. He hit the brake and gave the steering wheel a savage twist to the right. The Shelley-Python’s tires smoked and howled. As the engine was forced into deceleration, the gearbox protested with a spit and grind. The car shot toward an embankment rising on the right side of the road.
How fast was he going? Fifty now? Forty? Illya couldn’t tell. The bonnet reached the hill-slope, tilted up. Illya flew backwards, grabbing at air. He kicked free of the cockpit, went spinning. He came down with a massive, bone-wrecking thud that knocked him half unconscious. His single salvation had been landing on the hill’s heavy turf.
Suddenly from under the bonnet of the car came a skyrocketing of greenish sparks. The Shelley-Python caromed off the side of the hill and bounced back toward the roadway. The motor noise stopped suddenly.
Silently, eerily, the racing car hit the pavement and lifted off, its tires leaving smoke-trails behind. It shot over the edge of the precipice like a missile, arching out and out silently until it lost velocity and began to fall.
The thick grass against Illya’s palms hurt unmercifully. Abruptly, like the mutter of a thunderstorm, the car struck somewhere down at the bottom of the cliff. A geyser of light, molten-red, climbed into the sky and recede.
Illya’s whole body felt crushed, battered. He rolled over onto his stomach so that his palms would not touch the ground.
Beladrac, he thought. Beladrac’s villa.
Must get up. Go back there.
Assignment.
Job to do. Got to get back there and see what---
The stars pulsed bright, then dimmed. If he was going back to Beladrac’s villa, it would have to be later. Illya knew he was going to black out.
In a second more, it happened.
TWO
Darkness. Thick. Stifling. Tinged with dampness. Napoleon Solo woke in it, terrified.
Every instinct recoiled and rebelled against the unclean, subterranean odor of that dark. He thrust his hands out in front of him, wiggling his fingers, hoping to touch something that would give him a sense of orientation. A strangled shout worked up into his throat---
All at once, like a relay switch being thrown, reason took over. Solo remembered what had happened. He drew his hands back to his sides, embarrassed at the way his sudden wakening in the muffling dark had started his heart hammering and his mind careening on a panic course.
Find out where you are.
The ancient, primitive fear of the dark receded a little. Solo realized he was sitting on a rough, hard floor, propped up against a similar type of wall. He felt on both sides of his legs. His fingertips found the indentations of worn mortar between bricks. Then they brushed across the faintly wet surfaces of the bricks themselves.
Reaching behind his head, he discovered that the wall he leaned against was likewise made of brick. Solo scrambled to his feet. His shoes made an odd, hollow clacking sound, raising faint echoes. This further confirmed his suspicions that he was imprisoned somewhere underground.
Where? In Beladrac’s villa? Probably. But there was no way of telling for certain.
Cautiously Solo worked his way around the curve of the wall. After he had continued this for a minute or so, he stopped. He turned, faced the center of his cell, started walking in that direction.
Eight long strides brought him up against the curved wall on the opposite side. He was inside some lightless underground prison-cell in the shape of a cylinder.
Once more he began a circuit of the wall, feeling carefully, feeling high and low. When enough time had elapsed so that he was certain he’d gone at least once around the circumference, he gave up. He leaned back, letting a little sibilant breath of exasperation slip out.
As far as he could tell, there were no doors anywhere in the brick. Quickly he searched through his clothing. Beladrac had removed everything, including his pocket communicator. So no help was to be had in that direction. And his special shoes with the tiny compartments that held various powerful gas and explosive capsules had been taken too.
Now a new kind of terror began to gnaw at Napoleon Solo’s mind. Not formless terror; clearly defined. He knew the limits of his prison. He didn’t like them one bit. How high was the ceiling?
By way of experiment, he tried climbing the part of the wall nearest him. The grooves in which the mortar lay were not deep enough to provide finger-holds. He fell once, twice, three times before giving up.
Solo wished he had a cigarette. He wondered what had become of Elisabeth. Was she alive, having taken that nasty pronged needle in her neck? Had Beladrac gone? Elisabeth too? Unfortunately the period from the gas attack in the air shaft until he wakened here was a total loss.
He didn’t feel too badly, all things considered. A slight touch of nausea, a mild headache. Nothing at all to worry about---if he had a fighting chance of getting out of this peculiar circular dungeon.
Pondering the problem, he was startled by a sudden rasp of sound overhead. Light washed down into the cylinder. A huge stone cap that topped the cylinder had been removed; Solo saw two of Beladrac’s Thrushmen laboring to shift it all the way to one side.
The round opening was a good twenty feet above Solo’s head. There seemed to be additional space above that, as though the mouth of the cylinder was part of a floor; higher than the mouth itself, Solo glimpsed a ceiling, a dim light bulb burning.
All at once Count Lugo Beladrac’s ugly face popped over the lip of the top. His hand appeared, carrying a huge ele
ctric torch which he snapped on. Wincing from the light, Solo recoiled against the wall. Beladrac crouched beside the mouth of the brick cylinder-cell, moving the light so that Solo was finally caught in the middle of it.
“Now, now, Solo,” Beladrac called, his voice bouncing and echoing around the circular brick wall. “Mustn’t be reticent. After all, there’s no place to hide in my little oubliette.”
Oubliette. That was the word for which Solo had been searching. An oubliette was a special type of underground dungeon, usually secret. Many old homes throughout Europe had them, dating to the time when political prisoners were kept penned up until they conveniently died.
Solo had never seen an oubliette before, though he decided now that he could have skipped the novelty altogether. “How long have I been down here?” He had a tendency to shout until he discovered that the oubliette acted as a kind of sound-chamber, carrying his speech upward quite clearly when he spoke in a normal tone.
“The better part of three hours,” said the count.
“Is this supposed to soften me up?”
“Not particularly,” answered the count with a shrug. “No doubt it will, though.”
“And I doubt that very much,” Solo said, with much more bravado than he actually felt.
Count Beladrac clucked his tongue and flashed his huge white smile that distorted his ugly face into a grotesque mask. “Mr. Solo, I believe you are laboring under a false assumption. I seem to detect a conviction that I have put you down there for psychological reasons. A little preparation for torture, let’s say? Nothing could be further from the truth. I have no intention of seeing you again after this stone cap is rolled back into place.
“I do wish I had time to subject you to some slightly more creative and painful mode of death. Unfortunately I have an important mission to carry out. I can’t let personal whims stand in its way, even though I could think of nothing more delightful than watching you die second by second and bit by bit.”
Again the continental shrug. “Ah, well. My loss of pleasure is minor, especially now that THRUSH is on the threshold of final victory. It will begin with war in the Middle East, and will end with the globe in chaos, nation against nation. The free world’s so-called defenders, the U.N.C.L.E., will be torn by strife and treason from within. You see, Mr. Solo, we now have the means to bring members of you organization under our direct control. Our goal is to take over five hundred agents in five months.
The Ugly Man Affair Page 7