The Thousand Coffin Affair - Avallone Michael - Страница 1

It started with two beautiful girls.

Napoleon Solo met Denise Fairmount in Paris, and that night in his hotel suite they were attacked by an eerie barrage of killing sound…

He met copper-haired Jerry Terry in a plane going to Germany, and before long they were shot down…

Then he met the twisted genius Golgotha, whose face was a skull-like travesty of hideously scarred tissue, and he learned of the endless variety of horror.

DEDICATION:

For my brother Pat—

who never lost his smile.

THE U.N.C.L.E. ORGANIZATION

(United Network Command for Law and Enforcement)

THERE IS A ROW of buildings in New York City, a few blocks from the United Nations Building. At the south end of the row is a three-storied whitestone which appears fairly new in comparison to the brownstone buildings which make up the rest of the street. At the north end is a public garage. The brownstones are occupied by a few lower-income families living above the decrepit shops and businesses which rent the space on the street level. Del Floria’s tailor shop occupies the street level space in a brownstone near the middle of the block. The first and second floors of the whitestone are taken up by an exclusive key-club restaurant known as The Masked Club.

On the third floor of the whitestone is a sedate suite of offices the entrance to which bears the engraved letters “U.N.C.L.E.” In this suite of offices, a rather ordinary group of people handle mail, meet and do business with visitors, and in general seem to be a normal organization engaged in some special charity project or a Fund Foundation operation.

All these buildings are owned by the organization known as U.N.C.L.E.

If it were possible to peel away the outer, decaying brownstone skin of the four old buildings, a surprising edifice would be found. For behind the walls is one large building consisting of a complex modern office setup of three floors: a steel maze of corridors and suites containing brisk, alert young personnel of many races, creeds and backgrounds…as well as complex masses of modern machinery and equipment, all of a highly technological nature.

There are no staircases in the building. Four elevators handle vertical traffic.

Below the basement level an underground channel has been cut through from the East River, leading out to sea. On the roof of the building is a large neon-lighted advertising billboard whose supporting pillars contain a high-powered short-wave antenna as well as elaborate receiving and sending gear.

This is the heart, brain and body of the organization named U.N.C.L.E.

The personnel of the organization is peculiarly multinational. And their line of work tends to cross national boundaries with such nonchalance that a daily shortwave message from the remote Himalayas fails to flutter any eyebrows—this even though there is no recorded wireless in this Himalayan area according to the printed international codebooks.

An Organization Chart for U.N.C.L.E. would read as follows:

SECTION I: Policy and Operations

SECTION II: Operations and Enforcement

SECTION III: Enforcement and Communications

SECTION IV: Communications and Security

SECTION V: Security and Personnel

Napoleon Solo is the Chief Enforcement Agent for U.N.C.L.E.

THE THOUSAND COFFINS AFFAIR

WHAT HAPPENED TO STEWART FROMES?

A CORPSE is always interesting.

Rich man, poor man, beggar man or king, who a man is and how he died is of far greater interest to mortal man than, say, the price of eggs in Istanbul. The corpse that comes into being for strange and exotic reasons, of course, is of paramount interest to the police and law enforcement agencies of the world. And while all of us are touched in some phantom way because another human being has been singled out by the Grim Reaper, the death of a special agent is naturally a vital matter to the body of men of which the corpse was a member.

Stewart Fromes was just such a man. Just such a corpse.

Fromes died in Oberteisendorf, Germany at approximately five-fifteen (German Central Time). He was 37, in excellent physical condition, a master field chemist for the organization known as U.N.C.L.E. In Korea, he had won a Silver Star for staying seven days on Heartbreak Ridge before a hand grenade put him out of action. In Oberteisendorf, there were no battles and no medals. There was only the long, unending far-into-the-night research which had brought him to the little town below the Bavarian Alps in the first place,.

On the day he was to die, he did three interesting things.

At five o’clock that last afternoon, Stewart Fromes was taking a bath in the wooden tub placed at the rear of the tiny laboratory he had set up in Frau Morganstern’s home. He was thoughtfully soaping his lean, angular body when he experienced the odd dizziness which had become particularly chronic this past week.

Fromes waited no longer. He stepped naked from the tub, heedless of the soap and the chill of the drafty house. His bare feet sloshed across the wooden floor to the rear of the laboratory. There, a rickety wooden cage revealed a carrier pigeon nestling quietly. With quick, deliberate movements, Fromes affixed a tiny banded scroll to the pigeon’s right claw and set it free. He hardly waited to see it spring for the Eastern sky, its wings fluttering rapidly.

The second interesting thing that Stewart Fromes did was to suddenly fall flat on his face in the center of the room, kicking over a low table on which he had set his clothes. He began to thrash about violently, his arms and legs twitching uncontrollably. Had anyone been present, he would have been amazed and terribly frightened to hear Stewart Fromes, third in the ’47 Class of Cornell, begin to babble incoherently. The walls of the laboratory echoed with a string of moaning, gibbering sounds. The dampness of his naked body left small patches of moisture wherever his vibrating body touched.

And then Stewart Fromes did the third interesting thing before he died.

Through the haze of pain and the complete seizure of his limbs and muscles, he reached blindly for the clothing scattered on the floor—his coat, trousers and shirt, which had toppled from the low table.

Stewart Fromes was dying. Slowly. Terribly.

Yet even as he rolled around on the floor like a frenzied mad dog, he began to dress.

Alexander Waverly, fingering one of his many unsmoked pipes in the quiet office of the U.N.C.L.E. building in New York, was unhappy. As head of Policy and Operations, he was no alarmist. Yet the transatlantic message from Paris Headquarters had been upsetting. Stewart Fromes had been on to something; that had been most apparent from his reports of the last few hectic weeks. Now, suddenly, he was dead.

Five men, of various nationalities, guided the Policy operations of U.N.C.L.E. Waverly was one of that very select five. Yet a casual observer would be forgiven if he thought this elderly-looking man to be a gentle old college professor who tended toward crabbiness.