[Magazine 1968-012] - The Million Monsters Affair - Davis Robert Hart (серия книг .txt) 📗

“The office is empty,” the report said. “We found that the telephone wire had been tapped and an extension run to a transmission box hidden in the wall. When the box is activated, all calls to the phone are automatically switched by radio communication. There is no way to trace where the call goes, since anyone who knew the wave-length could listen in.”

“Very well,” Illya said. “Pass this information on to Waverly in New York.”

“There is something else of utmost importance,” the reporter from the Paris office said.

“I’m late,” Kuryakin said impatiently. “Can you give it to me after I come back.”

“This is so important it may have a bearing on your actions,” the voice said. “There was a body in the film exchange office. It was jammed into a closet in the back storage room where the film reels are kept.”

“Go on!” Illya said in a dull voice, knowing without asking whom the corpse would prove to be.

“It was the body of Maurice Leroux.”

“Do the police know yet?” Illya asked.

“No, but we must notify them at once.”

“Hold off for fifteen more minutes,” Illya said. “And then try and get the police to withhold a public announcement for another hour.”

Kuryakin left the hotel in a run. Ten minutes later he was across the street from the address the girl had given him. Suspecting a trap, he did not go to the second floor apartment himself. He hailed a passing cab and gave the driver a large franc note to go get the girl.

Kuryakin went across the street to a sidewalk cafe. He stood with his back against a wall and his hand only inches from the shoulder holstered U.N.C.L.E. special.

A light rain was starting to fall, but he did not take cover. He kept watching the front of the building for any evidence that someone was following the cab driver.

Certain now that if there was a trap, it was upstairs, Illya rapidly crossed the street. He entered the small foyer and looked cautiously back before climbing the narrow flight of stairs. He was halfway up when the cab driver came racing down. In the dim light he could see the frightened twist of the man’s face. He brushed against Illya as he went down the steps, but apparently was too scared to recognize his fare.

Kuryakin went up the stairs in a dead run, his U.N.C.L.E. special in his hand. The door to the first apartment was open. He could see a mass of blonde hair on the rug. It was blood-stained!

He stepped to the door, looking cautiously about. The dead girl’s legs were drawn up as if she died in acute agony. Her face was frozen by death in a mask of terror.

Illya could see the hilt of a knife protruding from her left side. It was curiously carved.

After a quick glance at the corpse, Illya looked about the room. It was typically middle class with slightly shabby furniture.

A bedroom led off the sitting room. Illya assured himself that no one was hiding there. He looked down at the girl.

“Crazy mixed up kid,” he said. “She was going to take care of a trap for me, but walked into one herself.”

He stared down at the dead girl, feeling a distinct uneasiness. Somehow the girl’s death was a jarring note. It was obvious from what he heard through his amplifier that this dead woman had been a member of THRUSH.

“Then who killed her?” Kuryakin asked himself, “and why? It just doesn’t fit.”

He picked up the phone and called the police. The homicide inspector who arrived quickly was exactly opposite the picture one gets of the French police after reading Maigret. Inspector Gabin had the build of an Abraham Lincoln and the face of a hanging judge.

He gave a noncommittal grunt when Illya showed his U.N.C.L.E. credentials. After that he ignored Kuryakin until after he made a careful turn about the room. Then he stood for a long moment looking down at the dead woman’s face.

Suddenly he cut a sharp glance over at Illya Kuryakin.

“Who is she?” he asked.

“She claimed to be a receptionist for International Film.”

The inspector’s sour face turned more morose. “Mr. Kuryakin! I wish to cooperate with U.N.C.L.E., but I also demand that U.N.C.L.E. cooperate with me! Before you continue your evasive lies, let me say that I recognize this woman. She is a professional undercover agent who has lately been working for your U.N.C.L.E. associates here in Paris!”

“I just arrived,” Illya said. “I didn’t know. I mistook her for the woman I came here to meet. Apparently this agent was also on the woman’s trail. She got too warm and was killed.”

He gave the Frenchman a quick sketch of the case he was working on.

Before the inspector could comment, the medical examiner bustled into the room. As he bent over the girl to begin his examination, her body exploded!

Illya threw himself flat on the floor. A twisted piece of shrapnel cut the shoulder of his jacket. The inspector was knocked down, bleeding from a wound in his throat. The doctor was killed instantly. There was a large gaping hole in the corpse where the booby trap exploded.

Two members of the police team who had been inspecting the bedroom rushed in.

“Be careful!” Illya warned them. “There may be another booby trap implanted in the corpse.”

Waving the two policemen back into the bedroom, he followed them. There he grabbed a pillow from the bed and threw it at the dead woman.

There was a flash of fire and the feathers exploded outwardly to fill the room like a snowstorm.

“It looks like there was a photoelectric cell set with the bomb to explode it when the direct level of light was cut off,” Illya said.

“What a devilish trap!” one of the policemen gasped.

“And it was meant for me!” Illya thought.

TWO

BACK IN HOLLYWOOD, after Napoleon Solo dropped Kuryakin at the airport, he drove to the back of the public parking lot. He waited impatiently for the effect of the knockout drops to wear off his prisoner. Then he inoculated the THRUSH man with truth serum from the tiny reservoir in his U.N.C.L.E. finger ring.

While he waited for the drug to take effect, Solo opened his pen communicator circuit with Waverly in New York so the U.N.C.L.E. chief could listen to the interrogation.

In work so hazardous as this, anything might happen to him and he wanted Waverly to have the information so his replacement would not be handicapped if he was killed.

Solo’s first question verified his theory of the case. Subliminal hypnosis was being accomplished by the Mallon Million Monsters film. Control, the prisoner revealed, was done by radio suggestion.

“Is it possible to give individual commands?” Napoleon Solo asked.

“No,” the prisoner replied in a dreamy voice. “They can only give mass suggestion.”

“Like, say, ‘destroy everything in sight?’”

“Yes,” the prisoner said.

“What is THRUSH’s objective?’

“The subliminal effects are only effective on people up to about the age of twenty-four. From twenty-four to thirty it may or may not work. After thirty the brain cells are sufficiently set that no impression is possible. THRUSH intends to use the twenty-four and under age group to destroy every living person over thirty.”

“Then the rest will be enslaved by THRUSH?” Napoleon asked.

“Yes,” his prisoner said.

“What happens when these mind slaves grow older?” he asked. “Will their minds lose the subliminally induced hypnosis?”

“Yes.”

“What will THRUSH do about that?”

“They will be destroyed between the ages of twenty-four and thirty.”

“Did you hear that, Mr. Waverly?” Napoleon asked.

“Yes,” Alexander Waverly answered back. “This is the most monstrous scheme THRUSH has ever devised! It condemns every person on earth to death or slavery. And even the slaves will be cut down in the best years of their lives!”

“The present riots are just tests, aren’t they?” Solo asked.

“Yes,” his prisoner replied.