The Man From Uncle 02 - The Doomsday Affair - Whittington Harry (книги хорошего качества txt) 📗

"whole attention riveted on the battle between the cars below them.

It seemed to prolong itself interminably, but it was quickly over. The cars swung back and forth like one car on the narrow, twisting roadway, skirting its rim. Suddenly the wheels of the outside car peeled away the rocks and shale at the brink of an angular turn. The wheels skidded off the road. The car suddenly dropped and then went leaping outward into the darkness. The headlights appeared turned straight up for a split second, and then they fell away and there was only darkness.

Illya heard the savagery in Violet's deep sigh, and after a moment she stepped hard on the gas.

The sun was metallic white when they lined up at the international border. Illya lay with his head on the seat rest, trying to force intelligible words from his mouth.

His attempts did not disturb Violet; in fact, they seemed to amuse her.

"My little bug just won't stop fighting, will he?" she said.

They rolled up into customs. The American officer tipped his cap and asked if they'd mind getting out of the car.

Violet smiled sadly across Illya at the young officer. "My brother can get out, sir, and he will if he must. But you'll have to help him in and out."

Illya struggled, his mouth stretching wide as he tried to speak one intelligible word. His mind was agonizingly clear, as bright as* the sunlight, but the sounds he made were those of low-grade idiocy.

"It was a birth defect," Violet told the customs man. "Brain damage, you know."

"Yes. That's too bad." He called another officer and between them they lifted Illya from the car and set him on a chair just outside the office.

Violet stood chatting with the officers while they opened his luggage and hers, and while they inspected the passports she had. Bitterly he wondered about the one they had prepared for him. Name. Age. Cause of idiocy.

He stared at them, at the people going both ways across the border. He cried out, but it was a cawing sound and they glanced at him in shame-faced pity. No one liked to look at the mentally defective.

Breathing raggedly, Illya forced his body to bend forward at the hips until he fell off the chair. He struggled then, trying to crawl away. Couldn't these people see now that something was wrong?

They came running.

"Poor guy! He fell right off the chair!"

"Don't squirm around like that, fellow; we'll get you up. Take it easy!"

"It's all right." Illya heard Violet's calm voice. "He does this all the time." She bent over him. "You're a naughty boy." She straightened. "That's why we're having to put him away finally—we don't want to do it."

They drove in silence northward up the rugged California coast. They stopped for the night in a sleek motel on Highway 101. By now, Illya saw they'd been joined by Edgar and company. He saw that the men were still shaken by the encounter with the U.N.C.L.E. men on the Mexican highway.

He watched Violet. She was completely unconcerned about the deaths. Death had no meaning for her. He gazed at her, thinking she would enjoy torturing and tormenting the helpless. She got a strange kick from seeing him squirm and his red-faced attempts to speak.

In the morning they loaded him in the convertible once more and Violet kept the Kharmann Ghia at top speed, going north again.

In the afternoon they left the coastal highway, climbing east into the mountain ranges. They sped through a small town of stucco buildings and palm-lined parkways. They continued to climb and a chill settled through the car.

At about four o'clock Violet brought the car to a halt before the tall iron-barred gate in a six-foot fieldstone fence.

Above the gate, in fussy wrought-iron, were the words:

BROADMOOR REST.

The name stirred something inside Illya's mind, troubling him, but he could not pin it down. He knew it to be a private sanitarium of some kind, created from the thousand acre estate and chateau built by a lumber and mining millionaire in the early twenties. But it was not just that it was a sanitarium. There was something more, something that had turned up with a puzzling regularity in U.N.C.L.E. briefings.

He struggled with the thought, but it eluded him. The gates parted and Violet drove through, going along the twisting lane toward the vine-matted walls of the old stone castle. He could see its turrets and gables and bay windows. He couldn't see the bars at those windows, but he knew they were there.

Three white-clad orderlies awaited them when Violet braked the car before the veranda. They stood on the steps that stretched thirty feet across, made of the same native stone as were the fence and the house.

The orderlies came off the wide steps and lined up beside the car. One of them glanced at Illya, then grinned at Violet. "Is this it?"

Violet laughed and nodded. "He's all yours."

One of the orderlies said, "What are you doing tonight, baby?"

Violet tossed her red-gold head. "You'll never know, simpleton. I can't tolerate men who work for a salary. It makes peasants of them."

She turned on her spike heels and tapped away, going up those stone steps and through the huge thick redwood door.

The orderlies reached for Illya. He struggled, fighting at them, but his arms only flailed wildly, and the noises he made were foolish, giggling sounds. He was in an agony of terror and outrage but he was unable to express anything except garbled idiocy.

VIII

Solo paused for a moment outside his room in the St. Francis Hotel. For no good reason, he felt the tightening inside that warned of danger. He shook the thought away and rapped three times, slowly. He listened for Barbry's voice beyond the door. There was silence and Solo tensed, taking his key from his pocket.

The door was unlocked and opened as he reached for it. Solo scowled, saying, "I thought I told you—"

He stopped speaking, staring into the blandly smiling face of Samuel Su Yan.

"Come in; we've been waiting for you," Su Yan said.

Solo's hand moved toward the holster beneath his jacket, but stopped when he noted the small .25 caliber Spanish-made Astra pistol that Su Yan held.

"An experimental model, Solo," Su Yan said, "but quite deadly."

Solo sighed and stepped inside the room. Everything looked as it had when he had walked out of it, except that now Barbry Coast sat upon the foot of his bed, staring straight ahead of her, her features rigid, her gaze transfixed; she looked like a mannequin.

"Are you all right, Barbry?" Solo walked toward her, trying to ignore the snubbed nose of the Astra that was fixed on his spine.

Barbry turned her head slowly and stared at him blankly. It was as though she had never seen him before.

"Of course she's all right," Su Yan said from behind Solo. "Aren't you all right, my dear?"

"I'm all right," Barbry said in a flat, lifeless tone.

Staring at her, Solo shivered involuntarily.

"We've been looking for Esther for a long time," Su Yan said in a conversational tone. "I must thank you and your organization for locating her for us—and for leading us to her."

"We have a pretty good organization for finding people who want to be lost," Solo said. "Even those who have themselves declared officially dead."

"Perhaps I no longer guarded my privacy so zealously," Su Yan said. "You have a rich organization, underwritten as it is by so many nations with built-in missile age jitters. But it is not infallible. I proved this before—and I shall prove it again."