“You wide awake now, Terry?” he barked.
“Yes. Yes!”
“All right, then. Come on. And don’t look back. Just remember—it was Denise or us.”
Jerry Terry said nothing further. She lowered her head and staggered for the MIG. Solo was just behind her, imploring the silent gods to stay with them for just five minutes more until he got the damn MIG airborne once again.
But even as he made the unspoken plea, he could see a heavy motor lorry turn in from the roadway about five hundred yards down the field.
Grimly, he hurried Jerry Terry ahead of him, not bothering to mention the minor detail that their flight was not unobserved.
When the hounds were on the scent, it was downright amazing how they showed up at the most inopportune moments.
What was even worse, the pain had come back. Sharp, excruciating agony coursed through his body.
Partridge of the Paris Overseas Press Club was in the bar, finding new joy in the way Stanley mixed martinis, when he was summoned to the telephone. Shrugging heroically, he lifted his bulk from the leather stool and had a houseboy plug in a phone for him.
“Partridge here,” he said tiredly.
“Who gives the given signal?” a crisp voice asked.
He became alert immediately. “You do.”
“Who tells the untold millions?”
“I do.”
He knew it was Napoleon Solo’s voice at the other end, but one had to play the code out.
“Who had a second knife?’
“The same chap who had the first one.”
“Billy,” Solo said. “I need your help, and pronto.”
“Fire away, old sport.
“Fire one—I’m sitting at Landry’s airstrip. I owe him thousands of dollars for wrecking his plane. He won’t take a MIG in trade and the French Air Force is pretty mad at me for flying one in. Fire two—I’ve got a very sick girl friend on my hands. She could die if she doesn’t see a doctor soon. Fire three—the world is in sad shape. You’d better tell my uncle all about it. No doubt he’s dying to hear from me.”
“I see. Landry’s. Good show, old sport. Be there in two hours. I’ll call your uncle, of course. Think you can hold out until then?”
“I’ll try, Billy. And thanks.”
“Ever the faith endures,” Partridge chuckled. Anything else?”
“No, that ought to cover the preliminaries. The girl is my first concern right now.”
“Off I go.”
William Partridge hung up, drummed the phone for three taut seconds of preparation, downed his martini zestfully and left the bar like a shot.
Stanley, the bartender, had never seen him move so fast.
Illya Nickovetch Kuryakin was unhappy.
In his tiny West Side apartment in Manhattan, New York, he paced the rooms, looking for something to do. Working overtime at Headquarters had not improved his restlessness. There was just so much they had been able to discover about Stewart Fromes’ corpse. And that very, very special piece of dynamite his dead toes had revealed—the tiny capsule. If it was what the lab boys expected, then things indeed would get very bad around the world.
Kuryakin tried not to think about Napoleon Solo. Awkward business liking a fellow agent. When the going got rough, as it usually did, it was a terrible thing not to be on hand to assist with the difficulty. Kuryakin was level-headed enough to despise the Russian side of his nature which tended toward gloomy prophecy. Still, an agent of Napoleon’s capabilities should be able to take care of himself—
Memory of Stewart Fromes and his capabilities made Kuryakin’s brow cloud over again. Damn this infernal business of waiting, waiting, waiting. One had to be doing something at all times. It was a must.
SEND HIM TO THE CEMETERY
LONDON FOG settled like a blanket over the city. The “ruddy pea-soups” of legend and fact had closed lovingly over buildings, cobbled streets and historic landmarks. The Cumberland Hotel sat squarely in the center of the heaviest concentration of the vapors. The fog did not swirl or dance or filter. It hung curtain-like over London town.
Waverly, ensconced behind a glass-topped desk in a suite of rooms on the fourth floor, was holding court. He was dressed once more in his familiar tweeds, yet there was something jaunty about his manner. The red carnation adorning his lapel lent a touch of joviality seldom seen by his colleagues, to his appearance.
Seated at various points of the modernistically furnished room were Napoleon Solo, Jerry Terry and Illya Kuryakin. Solo wore a dark suit of conservative cut and a sober powder blue tie. His face was as unlined and freshly handsome as ever. Jerry Terry, her long copper hair neatly bound with a red headband, looked beautiful and invulnerable in a beige woolen sheath dress. The contrasting white sling in which her right arm was cradled somehow seemed an afterthought rather than a necessity.
Kuryakin’s attire was less unkempt than usual. He had managed to appear in a pressed, clean suit of indeterminate gray. The atmosphere was cordial and friendly. Smoke from Solo’s cigarette filled the air.
“So Partridge got you out, Solo,” Waverly concluded.
“Partridge got us out,” Solo amended, winding his account of the adventure into a neat summarization of the facts. Waverly had evinced keen interest when Golgotha had entered the narration. Even Kuryakin had never seen Waverly so drawn out before.
“Golgotha. We’ve been waiting for his hand in this. High time, too. Thrush had to enlist a man of his stripe sooner or later.”
“He’s a new one on me, sir,” Solo remarked, smiling at Jerry Terry. Memory of that flight in the MIG made him wince—wrestling with unfamiliar controls and fighting to stanch the flow of blood from her shoulder with his free hand to keep her from bleeding to death. It was all over—for the time being. They could breathe free for a bit. “I’ve never heard of Golgotha.”
“Kuryakin,” Waverly murmured.
The young Russian smiled at Solo and the girl.
“Napoleon, Golgotha is Fromes’ opposite number. An absolutely brilliant chemist. Security has had him on file for years, at least up until there was a fire-explosion in his laboratory in Budapest in ’54. He’s been out of sight since then. Everyone assumed he was alive but had somehow been disfigured in the blast. We’ve been waiting for him to show up with Thrush. He’s exactly the sort of man they would find use for—brilliant, embittered, and hungry for some sort of fame in his own field.”
“You think he’s come up with some super-drug that scored so heavily in Utangaville and Spayerwood?”
“It’s a safe guess at this writing, Napoleon. The man’s a wizard and our lab results check out to something frightening. In fact, if we don’t find the stockpile of this unknown element, the world is in for a jarring time.”
Solo frowned at Waverly. “Fromes’ pellet?”
“Yes, Solo,” his chief said heavily. “Our worst fears are realized now. Thrush has found a blood catalyst which causes a man to literally lose his mind and all sense of mental coordination. Lord knows what a sight those two towns must have been with the entire populace running amuck. And they’ve been improving their methods since then—decomposition of the body is now speeded up to less than twenty-four hours of full cyclic effect. Fromes is no more than a skeleton now.’
Solo restrained a visible shudder. “What was in the pellet?”
Kuryakin laughed harshly.
“What good would the chemical composition do you, Napoleon? It’s enough to say that it is a never-before-known agent. The lab is trying to break it down now. We only know what it can do. After Fromes’ odd case, I tried it on guinea pigs and white mice. They lasted only three hours. If Thrush has it, were in for it, as I said.”