The World's End Affair (3 page)

"That was the laboratory," he said, primarily for the benefit of the THRUSH agent. "We have concluded our initial tests of the components of the device discovered aboard your plane. While we waited for our laboratories to finish the preliminary phase we had a certain latitude in this interrogation. Now I'm afraid we must begin to put the parts together, and rather quickly. Will you talk?"

With composure the flight engineer regarded his hands folded in his lap.

"My name is Flight Officer Hiram Wei," he said. "I am so listed on the -"

Mr. Waverly sighed, a sigh befitting the heavy decisions which fell to a man so highly placed in U.N.C.L.E's policy and operations section.

"Obviously drastic measures are required."

Illya said, "I have a nice set of brass knuckles which I confiscated in Athens"

Solo grinned. "The knuckles, Mr. Waverly?"

"The drugs, Mr. Solo."

Three

Three hours later, Solo, Illya and Waverly waited in a short, aseptic corridor.

The corridor was situated one flight below the planning room. Dim, hooded little bulbs burned along the baseboards in either direction. At either end the corridor ended in double swing doors. It resembled a wing of a private hospital which, in fact, it was.

Solo pinched the bridge of his nose. He glanced at his watch. Illya stood across the hallway. In his right hand he held a drum of magnetic recording tape. Abruptly the swing doors to the right opened.

A long grotesque reflection was cast out ahead of a rubber-wheeled hospital cart. The attendants in white pushing the cart seemed to take forever to wheel it down to the door where Solo impatiently was jigging from one foot to the other.

"Are you having some sort of internal upset, Mr. Solo?" Waverly asked. He appeared exhausted. Pouches showed under his eyes.

"Well, sir," Solo said, "it is getting late. And there's this girl, sir. Her name is Bernice. A charming thing. She'll only be in Manhattan one more night. Since we've already heard the tape of what Chee said while he was under the drugs, I thought maybe we could wait until tomorrow to pursue this matter."

Mr. Waverly knocked his pipe against the wall. "No, Mr. Solo. We are going to proceed from here to the audio-visual conference room."

"Oh." Solo sighed as the cart squeaked up on its big wheels. "Bye-bye, Bernice," he said under his breath.

Waverly spoke to the physician attending the cart: "Dr. Bailey, how soon will Mr. Chee recover?"

The physician glanced down. Under crisp sheets, Alfred C. Chee, flight engineer, lay asleep. The doctor said, "He should be out from under most of the fog in an hour. Will you want him again?"

"In the audio-visual conference room, under maximum guard," Waverly nodded.

"I'm afraid the questioning didn't pull much out. Obviously he didn't know enough to be useful."

"On the contrary, on the contrary," Waverly said, dismissing the cart. It rolled into the gloom of the small, neatly-furnished recovery bedroom. Waverly enjoyed the looks of puzzlement on the faces of Solo and Illya. He said, "Come along, gentlemen. You may think the tape we made of Mr. Chee's babbling was worthless, but you are not in possession of all fragments of the mosaic. I have one more bit to add, in the audio-visual room. Until today, I confess I didn't know what to do with it."

Illya said, "About all this tape contains is the information that Alfred Chee was a THRUSH agent placed on station eighteen months ago in his cover post as a flight engineer. He was based in Hong Kong and told to wait. He received his first orders only one week ago Friday."

The elevator doors opened. Solo thought one last time of Bernice and followed the others inside. As the doors closed he said, "But Illya, that does reveal one other thing, sort of by implication."

Illya hooked up an eyebrow. Solo continued: "It indicates the priority THRUSH assigned to the testing of the weather control apparatus. Chee was to get into place, hold his cover and, apparently, let nothing else disturb it pending the test. Last week he finally received the components - the switch belt which Captain Loo, also of THRUSH, was to wear around his waist, and the black generator box we found stowed in Chee's luggage when the plane landed at Hong Kong."

The elevator doors opened again. The men moved down a long corridor walled in stainless steel. Recessed ceiling lights blinked blue, amber, red, in signal patterns. Through an open doorway a teletype chattered. A girl spoke into a microphone.

"But actually, the sum of our information is that THRUSH has perfected a dreadful weapon," Illya commented" as they entered a large room off the corridor.

Shutting the door, Mr. Waverly said, "Well. Mr. Kuryakin, thank you for grasping that point. Perhaps it will lessen Mr. Solo's concern about his cancelled amours."

Waverly swung round beside a highly polished board room table. "I believe it is quite apparent from the report which Rolfe brought to us, just before we followed Chee into the operating theater, that an enormous peril is posed by this new discovery of THRUSH research. Control of the weather is a weapon ruthless men have dreamed about for centuries."

"I understand the danger," Solo said. "Under the cover of a man-made storm like the one produced from the jet, a cadre of THRUSH people could move in and take over virtually any city in the world. There'd be no defenses. People would be too busy finding cover, caring for their dead and wounded, trying to prevent looting -" Solo's voice trailed off. Pictures of the possible carnage flicked in his mind like images thrown by a slide projector. None was pleasant.

"We must discover the source of this THRUSH breakthrough," Waverly said. "How far along is the development of the device? Does the mission of Chee and Loo - which was to be a suicide mission if necessary, as Chee revealed under the drugs - represent an early test? What will be the next test? An entire city? Is every THRUSH satrapy now equipped with such a generator? Or if we locate and wipe out the research unit, will we have cut off the rooted tree before it grows to full size?"

Waverly cleared his throat. "We must operate on the assumption that the generator is a research project only. We will prove the truth or falsity of our theory only by locating the research center responsible for the machine."

Waverly turned to a console. He pressed one of many colored studs. A rheostat began to reduce the light level. Soundlessly, an ultra-wide screen descended from the ceiling on the far wall. Illya slouched in a deep leather chair, smoking. Solo paced.

"About that damned generator itself, sir -" he began.

"You heard Rolfe's report."

"Yes. They're sure downstairs that the generator will produce violent weather on command, but they're not sure how yet."

Waverly nodded. "Rolfe is wary of using destructive testing to analyze the components, the belt and the black generating box found in Chee's luggage. Since those are the only samples we have, tearing them apart must be done with utmost caution."

"That also means it will be some time before the laboratory people discover a way to counteract the ion reversal which Rolfe thinks is at the heart of the process," Illya said.

"Um." From the underside of the gleaming table, Waverly took small microphone from a carrier receptacle. He pressed a button beneath the tiny mike grid. A red light on the wall glowed. "Stand by to let me have the aerial photos, will you, Jacques?"

There was a disembodied, "Right, sir," from a concealed loudspeaker.

"I have brought you two here," Waverly explained, "to offer you the one additional piece of the mosaic which is in U.N.C.L.E.'s hands. It came through while you were returning from Bangkok. We routinely receive unusual aerial reconnaissance material from the various governments banded together lo support U.N.C.L.E. What you are about to see was culled from a batch I received while you were on the other side of the World.

The photos were taken by an aircraft similar to the American U-2. It was flying a routine patrol mission. Normally the weather in the region photographed prohibits clear photography, which is why views like these have never shown up before. Now the only other facts Mr. Chee revealed on that tape which Mr. Kuryakin is holding were what again?"

Solo frowned. "He didn't know the man who brought the weather equipment and the sealed orders to Hong Kong."

"But the man was a THRUSH agent, " Illya said. "He knew the code."

"He was Oriental," Solo said. "This may tie in later."

Silence. Mr. Waverly sucked on his pipe stem.

Illya said, "Isn't that all?"

"Is it?" said Waverly.

Furrows formed on Solo's forehead. Then he remembered. "Chee's contact mentioned a rough flight. And something about Nepal, I think."

"Nepal," murmured Waverly. Into the mike again: "The photos, Jacques, please."

A series of full-color aerial shots slid one after another across the screen. There was an oval area in the center of each photo. The area glowed darkly green. It was surrounded by sharp, brown-and-slate topography, splotched here and there with white.

"A valley," Illya said, "And a very fertile one, from the looks of it."

"Surrounded by - that can't be!" Solo said. "Those are mountains with snow on them. No valley so green could exist at such an altitude, so close to such big peaks." Solo turned toward Waverly. "There must be some distortion, sir. The valley must be far below those mountain tops."

"On the contrary," Waverly said. "Photo analysis confirms that the peaks and the bottom of the valley are less than a quarter mile apart."

Illya snorted. "A fertile valley at the snow line? Where on earth -"

"In Tibet," said Alexander Waverly.

Solo jumped up so hastily he dropped his burning cigarette on the carpet. He snatched it up, talking all the time: "These photographs were taken over Tibet, Mr. Waverly?"

"To be specific, Mr. Solo, over the Himalayan mountain range, the highest mountains in the world. Cold, frozen mountains. Of course no fertile valley could exist at that altitude, Mr. Solo. Unless, of course, one could control the climate."

Mr. Waverly thanked Jacques on the microphone, re-hooked it beneath the table and tented his fingers. The rheostat brought the room light up to normal again. "I expect the significance has dawned on both of you by now."

"The THRUSH contact's reference to Nepal -" Illya said. "Nepal adjoins Tibet."

"But Tibet is in the hands of the Red Chinese!" Solo said.

"Quite right," Waverly agreed. "Do you suppose that would make any difference to THRUSH? They have sold out the worst as well as the best in their insane determination to build a supra-nation. Why not operate in Tibet if it suits their purpose'? Perhaps they have recruited some Chinese assistance. Why is that so unrealistic? The fanaticism of the Chinese would fit perfectly into their scheme of things.

"In fact, I can think of few worse adversaries than a Communist Chinese who has renounced his old masters and joined the intellectual monsters who control THRUSH. Most civilized people consider the Red China the most destructive and imperialistic nation in the world today. THRUSH makes the Chinese look like kindergarten toddlers by comparison."

Solo swallowed. "'What's our move?"

"To try to send agents along the route from Hong Kong to Nepal, and thence into Tibet."

A chill descended. Solo's backbone crawled. Penetrate Chinese-dominated territory and discover a THRUSH outpost? The peril would be exactly doubled. Before he could comment, Waverly went on:

"That's my purpose in having this man Chee brought back here as soon as he recovers. We will place him under the control of our hypnotic compounds, so that he will be amenable to whatever we suggest. We will buy him a plane ticket to Hong Kong. You two gentlemen will be on the next plane. We will let Mr. Chee be seen in his usual haunts in the Crown Colony. Before very long, I imagine, there will be THRUSH agents sniffing after him, to find out what went wrong with the aircraft test.

"After all, THRUSH cannot have gotten a very authoritative report. They cannot know fully how the flight turned out, since we managed to neatly quash any reference to the storm in the Hong Kong newspapers. They should be most anxious to contact Alfred Chee when he reappears. When that happens, you two gentlemen will follow those who contact him."

Napoleon Solo was about to say something sardonic. High up on the ceiling, a bank of square, previously dark inlaid panels flared red and began to blink in sequence.

Illya jerked his head up, staring at the blood-hued lights.

A hidden loudspeaker barked, "Immediate red alert! Immediate red alert!" A siren began to warble. Waverly snatched up the mike.

"Give me the Central Board." A pause. "This is Waverly. Where's the trouble?"

"The medical wing," came a voice. "Unexplained explosion. All primary communications systems have been knocked out. We're trying - hold on, here come the backups."

"Plug me in with the wing," Waverly ordered.

Solo and Illya tensed by the door, checking over their long-barreled pistols. There was another rattle of noise. As the back-up communications systems cut in, the audio-visual room filled with an amplified confusion of voices crying out in pain. Solo heard fire crackling, sirens warbling, walls collapsing. Waverly shouted for Dr. Bailey. Finally he answered: