The Final Affair - McDaniel David (серии книг читать онлайн бесплатно полностью TXT) 📗

Through a gathering haze of shock and dull agony, Napoleon saw Joan stumbling through the dimness toward him. He tried to move and something grated in his leg.

Then Joan was beside him, dragging an overstuffed chair as a shield behind her. “Okay,” she said, “you picked it. This is where we make our last stand. Can you see to shoot?”

He tried to twist to a sitting position, but part of his leg wouldn’t work at all. It hadnJt started to hurt yet, but there was that aching numbness of shock…

“Where were you when I needed you?”

“Twenty feet away, and I never got a shot. It was allover in ten seconds. He’s dead, you know.”

“I hope so. Help me up. Mind the leg —”

Eight rifles tracked them, and only two pistols could reply. Slugs smashed into the wall above them and plunked cotton batting from the chair, but Napoleon managed to get off a few shots before his eyes began to mist over.

“Joan —” he said. “I don’t think I can hold this thing steady anymore.

There’s five rounds in my left pocket…”

Four Guards charged the hasty barricade as running footsteps and a blast of gunfire outside preceded the slam of a grenade at the front door.

Joan stood, her own unadorned Special in her left hand and Napoleon’s fully assembled one in her right. shooting from the hip, altennately one and then the other, firing into the shadows where other Guards crouched, spraying lead at the outer door where dozens of running black-clad figures were bursting in amid smoke and thunder. The four Guards crumpled before Joan’s deadly fire, and she shouted over the confusion, “U.N.C.L.E.! This way!

This way!”

Three men ran ,out of the smoke, guns pointed at Joan, who was waving the assembled Special over her head like a flag. “Solo’s here,” she said urgently. “He’s wounded. Kuryakin’s in the basement,” safe but also wounded. How’s the battle going?”

“1 think we’re getting it together,” said Mr. Mills.

“What’s going on up there?” said Napoleon, dragging himself up on the arm of the chair to hang hal f over it. “Did we win?”

“There’s a lot of underground area to be cleaned out, sir, but this Big House was the last major organised resistance. There’s a whole lot of underground shops, by the way. <i>Big</i> stuff.”

A grenade went off down the hall and Mr. Short looked around. “There’s a few things to take care of here yet, too,” he observed.

“And d’you remember the nerve gas that was dumped in the Atlantic about a week ago? It’s here. They were unloading it from a submarine down in one of the pens. They’ve got facilities for a dozen full-sized subs down there!”

“We also caught two sub-loads of technical personnel just outside the lagoon —they’ve surrendered. Apparently nobody got away.”

“you mean we’ve won.”

“I’d say so. We’ll get a field surgeon to you right away. Jackson, go for a medic, would you?”

“What’s that light out’there beyond the lagoon?”

“It’s dawn. sir.”

“Already? How time flies when you’re having fun!”

..One other thing, Mr. Solo… said Short. “You’ll want to report back to headquarters as soon as possible. We’ll give you a full report on the situation, but there are a lot of things they want to know and you are the man to tell them what to do.”

“Me?”

“Mr. Solo —you are now active Section One, Number One. Mr. Waverly’s command sub was blown to pieces bya counter-attack from the island about half an hour ago. There could not have been any survivors —one of the support subs a quarter-mile away was damaged by the blast. I’m sorry, sir…”

Napoleon’s face was deathly grey in the eerie half-light, and he turned blindly to Joan before sagging forward over the chair and slipping limply to the floor, unconscious.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

“Sometime Again, Napoleon.”

On an afternoon late in the year, Ward Baldwin sat in the study of the tall old house on Alamo Square, and contemplated a high-sided wooden tray. It was divided into dozens of compartments, each as wide and half as high as the packs of tall cards which stood in them. Four knitting needles rested in a groove along one side of the box, and a representation of a card was painted on the front surrounded by arrows and numbers.

Each of the fifteen hundred or so cards represented a professional criminal who had worked in London just before the turn of the century. It showed his name, his contact, his specialty and his price, along with his police record, physical measurements and notes on his talents, trainin~ and limitations. All key infonmation was repeated in the coded notches alon~ the top and both sid~s of each card. A regular pattern of holes ed~ed every card —holes large enough to pass a knittin~ needle. If a card represented a safecracker, the first, third and fourth holes on the right side were clipped out to leave open notches. Passing three needles through the appropriate aligned holes in the full pack would lift out every card except those of all safecrackers, whatever else they might be. A murderer was represented by another notch code; a fence, an arsonist, a forger, all could be sorted out of the hundreds of professional criminals here catalogued in seconds.

This primitive box of Hollerith cards had grown in the founding office of the Technological Hierarchy for the Removal of Undesirables and the Subjugation of Humanity during the first few years of their pioneering operation. Buildin~

from an earlier, individually run or9anisation, they had aprlied the most advanced methods of their time to the problem of undisciplined crime and the establishment of a central information service which maintained certain control and direction over the activities of its clients. In twenty years —with the help of the first outbreak of the Great European War —the Hierarchy had become truly international. The acronymic nickname was coined in 1919, and the first warbird symbol appeared in 1923 on a blazer badge in Chicago.

During the first and fourth decades of the Twentieth Century they reorganised internally, broadening their base of power. Then when the simmering pot of The War returned to a boil, and the world erupted a second time, the Hierarchy was ready to profit from both sides.

The War had brou!‘Jht him Irene, he reflected, and set in motion events that had brought him all else he wanted from life: San Francisco, a comfortable income and freedom to pursue his own researches. He didn’t expect to change his way of life just because the Hierarchy had fallen —though the data banks of Thrush Central had been seized legally after all, with a special warrant signed by the hovernor, the n’ame of Ward Baldwin was entered there only for royalty payments on several dozens of his patents, and only those texts could be subpoenaed. His lawyer would appear in court to explain just why.

Months had passed, and nothina had been heard from Central. If the Island were still in operation, no word had come to any of his friends on five continents. Could it be possible that after three-quarters of a century the Hierarchy was no more? He had been born in the same month that five men met in London to fonm the First Council, he mused. So much had happened since then.

But the Hierarchy was more than men and machines —it was more than the reels of magnetic tape and files of paper. Like this tray of cards, the value in the Hierarchy was information. Tape can be erased, and parer can be burnt, but data can be endlessly duplicated or be carried in the untappable mind or generated ahew. Patterns erased from the tape or burned with the paper have a ghostly life of their own, and can never be destroyed, only lost for a while.

There came a tap at the door as he sat musing. and Irene entered at his invitation. She held an envelope and a card in her hand.

“Ward, this note just arrived in the mail. I tnOught you should see it —it’s from Mr. Kuryakin. -He says Alexander Waverly is dead:.