THE UNSPEAKABLE AFFAIR

by ROBERT HART DAVIS

Mute, powerless to speak or write, they gasped and were no more—the gallant men who had unmasked Thrush's most diabolical plot—and who now must carry their incredibly grim secret to the grave!

ACT 1

IN THE BEGINNING WAS SILENCE

THE MAN was tall and slender. He staggered as he walked, half ran, down the East Side street toward the river. His head turned every few yards to look behind him.

There was no fear in his eyes, only concern, worry, an anxiety that made him break into a full run as he neared the first street corner.

The street he ran on was in the East Fifties of New York. A dark night, with a wind; the street lamps cast only feeble circles of light.

For all his haste and anxiety, the man was clearly trained to danger. When he looked behind, it was not under the street lights but between them, in the darker areas, where he could have seen anyone following him as the follower was revealed by the light.

There was no one behind the running man, and he turned into a street of small brownstones that stood silent and innocent between a three-story whitestone building and a public garage. He passed the three-story white building, a faint smile on his face. His goal in sight, his guard down for an instant, he did not glance at the three men in full evening dress who came out of the whitestone building as he ran past.

The three men swayed as if drunk, laughing, their voices slurred in the night. The running man barely glanced at them, and ran on. The instant he was past them, the three men in full dress ceased to sway. Their laughter vanished; their voices spoke to each other sharp and crisp.

"Now!" the tallest one cried.

The sharp hiss of his voice was matched the next instant by three piercing spitting sounds. Three, and no more. One short, harsh puh-puh-puh from each gun that had appeared in the hand of each dress-suited man.

Puh-puh-puh!

The running man seemed to leap forward, his feet off the ground, hurtling. His head jerked back, his arms flung out, and he sailed through the air of the dark street like some horrible, grotesque bird.

He seemed to hang there in the cold air for a long minute, flung up and forward, suspended on air. Then he sprawled face down on the hard concrete.

He did not move for a moment. Then, slowly, impossibly, he began to crawl. Three holes in his back, blood drenching the silent street, the man crawled. Slowly, painfully, like some crushed insect that still weakly moved its legs.

The three men in dress suits watched. Their pistols were still in their hands, the long, ugly silencers pointed at the crawling man. One spoke.

"Stubborn, these U.N.C.L.E. fools," the tallest man said. "They can't even die simply. Dimitri!"

The heaviest of the three nodded, stepped forward to where the man was still trying to crawl toward the steps down to a small shop with the sign, Del Floria's Cleaners & Tailors. He walked slowly, letting the wounded man crawl. He raised his pistol again.

The shot never came.

From a doorway at the top of the brownstone stoop above Del Floria's another man materialized. This man, too, held a pistol, a strange-looking weapon.

He was a slender man of medium height with neat, dark brown hair. He looked like a young executive, a rising young doctor, perhaps an athletic playboy still young enough to be in good condition. He wore a conservative business suit, and looked like a thousand bright young men of business in the great city. He was none of these things.

His name was Napoleon Solo, and he shot the heavy man in the dress suit.

Puh!

A single spitting sound even fainter than the three shots earlier from the silenced pistols.

The heavy man was not knocked down; there was no blood. The dress-suited killer merely looked once at Solo, tried to raise his gun, and slid to the concrete.

Solo moved down the steps and out into the street with catlike speed. Incongruously, an easy smile played across his almost handsome face.

"Your guns, gentlemen, if you please," Solo said, smiling at the two remaining men in dress suits.

The two men raised their guns, fired wildly. Solo dove for cover. His pistol was up and aimed. The two men turned to run.

Directly in front of them, in the middle of the dark city street, there was now still another man. This man was small, slender, his Slavic face crowned by an unruly thatch of blond hair cut like the round-bowl haircut of some ancient knight-errant. His bright eyes were shrewd beneath a habitually lowered brow as he watched the three men in the dress suits.

He seemed to have risen from the concrete itself, come up out of the earth. He watched the surprised killers with a quizzical expression.

"I think you should do as the man said," Illya Kuryakin said. "It's polite, you know."

The two men recovered from their shock, raised their pistols, and the blond man, Illya, shot them both.

Puh. . . puh!

They slid to the ground.

Illya did not look at them again. The small blond agent of U.N.C.L.E. walked quickly over them to where Napoleon Solo was already bending over the man they had shot. This man had stopped crawling. Solo had turned him over, and he lay now on his back with his eyes closed. Illya looked down at the shot man.

"He's alive," Solo said. "But he won't be."

"Diaz," Illya said, speaking down to the man. "Diaz, can you talk? Why—"

The wounded man, Fernando Diaz, agent for U.N.C.L.E. Section II, New York, opened his eyes. He stared up, dying, at the face of his Chief Enforcement Agent, Napoleon Solo. His lips moved, his tongue moved.

But no sound came.

"Diaz?" Solo said softly. "Speak slowly."

The man opened his mouth again. Strained, eyes bulging, the cords on his neck thick with effort.

There was no sound from his open mouth.

Not a groan, not a word, not a whisper...

Diaz fell back, breathed irregularly. Then his hand began to move. Illya reached into his pocket. The blond agent took out a small notebook and a pencil. He handed them to Diaz. The fallen agent barely nodded, took the pencil and notebook.

The pencil drew lines on the paper, circles. Diaz blinked, looked up. Solo showed him the paper with the meaningless scrawls. Diaz tried again. On the paper there was nothing but lines and small circles.

Diaz dropped the pencil, dropped the notebook. He choked, blood welling up in his throat. His eyes dilated, showed for one instant a small fear. Then he raised his hand. Finger extended, he pointed at the sky. His hand moved in the dark air, fluttered like a bird. He smiled and died.

Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin stood there for some minutes, looking down at the dead man. Then they holstered their guns and bent to pick him up. They carried him into Del Floria's cleaning shop, into a rear dressing room, and through the wall into the clean, hospital-like corridors of the headquarters of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

Behind them other men had appeared to carry in the three fallen killers.

TWO

THE ALARMS had stopped now in the bright, windowless corridors of U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters. Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, Chief and Number 2 man in U.N.C.L.E. Section II—Operations and Enforcement in New York, hurried in grim silence along the vaultlike corridors, past the closed and silent doors.

In its silence and anonymous efficiency, the complex of U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters, as impregnable as a fortress, could have been anywhere on earth or a thousand miles underground. Here there was no evidence of the city outside, or of the innocent seeming brownstones on the street. There was no evidence from inside of the four known entrances, nor of the tunnels out to the East River, one of which Illya Kuryakin had used to make his seemingly miraculous appearance in the street through an ordinary manhole.