Spy Castle (1966)

  (Book 12 in the Killmaster series)

  Version 0.9

  Dedicated to The Men of the Secret Services of the United States of America

  Chapter 1

  WARNING SHOT

  Five o’clock Saturday morning, November 6, 1965.

  The missile left its pad somewhere in the bleak, fog-shrouded islands off northeastern Scotland. It rose steadily on a pillar of fire, a massive metal cigar loaded, in this instance, with something even more dreadful than the atomic warhead. It carried a carefully calculated payload of terror!

  The black volcanic rock of the island shuddered and melted as the blast lashed it, but most of the sound and fury was absorbed and covered by a November gale howling in from the northwest. The men who launched the rocket were counting on that!

  The missile vanished into the murky overcast. It arched and bent into a long parabola as the gyroscope took over.

  In a concrete blockhouse one of the men in white coats said, “It’s a simple enough shot, really. Like dropping a marble in a rain barrel.”

  Another white coat glanced at his wrist. “Well, we should know in about four minutes.”

  A third man, speaking in a nasal Yankee accent, said: “Talk about the shot heard ‘round the world! This is really it!”

  The missile attained full speed. It gained its apogee and tilted downward, every sensitive device functioning perfectly. It began to nose for its target, the North Pole, like a well-trained hunting dog after a bird …

  Far below the penthouse, the traffic of New York was a diminishing symphony of taxis and buses and newsies and Broadway sounds drifting up forty floors to where Nick Carter battled a recurrent nightmare. He moved restlessly in his sleep, his great sleek muscles contracting spasmodically. Tiny bullets of sweat greased his clean cut features and trickled amid the hair on the massive chest. A stray shaft of neon-tinted light, leaking through heavy velvet draperies, illuminated the hard planes of his face. It was a classically handsome face and just now, by some trick of the light and shadow, the eyeless face of some nameless God on an ancient Greek coin. Without the eyes, which could hold warmth and humor when they chose, the face of Nicholas Huntington Carter was cold and stern, with just a hint of cruelty. The features of a tense and danger-inured Apollo, marred by the suffering of Apollyon. The stray beam of light, benign now in this moment of sleep, did not show the razor-etched lines about the eyes and mouth …

  The missile was diving now, the force of gravity added to its own searing speed. The white desert glistened below, the ice-bound polar eye stared up at the terrible intruder about to blind it. The Arctic waste brooded and waited for the man-made flame that would free it, unlock it, transform it into watery steam …

  The nightmare conquered. Nick Carter started awake, gasping and sweating. He wiped away sweat and got up, his feet sliding into slippers. He shrugged into a robe and stood for a moment looking down at the sleeping girl. She was sleeping on her back, covered only to the waist, one slim arm flung across her perfect oval of a face. Her name was Melba O’Shaughnessy and she was from Dublin. Last night she had made her debut at the Metropolitan Opera, singing Musetta in La Boheme, and today all New York would be at her feet. She had taken twenty curtain calls. And Nick, an hour after meeting her at a party, had taken her! To his penthouse high atop one of the city’s swank hotels …

  The missile penetrated deep into ice and exploded. Fifty megatons of savage fury was unloaded on top of a world that did not yet realize it had been struck. It was a pin-point hit—actual impact not more than a mile from the Pole—and for a radius of forty miles the ice cap melted and boiled …

  On an ice floe ninety miles to the south a party of U.S. Navy and West German scientists stared with awe at the fireball in the sky. One of the Germans combed ice from his beard with trembling fingers. “Mein Gott! The swine! Mein Gott—Mein Gott they’ve finally started it!”

  A Navy scientist was faster thinking. He watched the now fading fireball as he squinted with narrowed eyes at a slide rule. “Let’s not jump to conclusions,” he warned his colleagues. He glanced at his slide rule again. “According to the gizmo here that was a direct hit on the Pole! How come? Why would they waste one on the Pole? It just doesn’t figure—unless it’s some kind of a warning. And they wouldn’t warn us! No—there’s something screwy in Denmark!” And he ran for the radio tent …

  Nick Carter, N3, holding rank of senior KELLMASTER in AXE, stood beside the bed and gazed down at the sleeping Meiba O’Shaughnessy. He was about to draw the covers over her nude torso, then hesitated to admire her beauty. The loveliness he had so recently kissed and caressed and made love to.

  She had magnificent breasts, had Melba. She was a deep-chested girl, fully developed as befitted an opera singer. It was not hard to see whence came the deep and pure tones about which the critics would rave in today’s papers.

  Nick fancied himself as something of a connoisseur of breasts. Melba’s were of the Celtic type—what else in a girl from Dublin?—half pear and half globe and hung low on the ribcage with nipples tilting high on the upper round of flesh. Velvety, satin-soft flesh, pink budded, with just a hint of blue vein tracery in marmoreal perfection. Soft-firm-hard-soft! Exquisite. They might have been carved from Carrara!

  Nick smiled faintly now as he remembered their lovemaking. Melba was extremely sensitive and responsive. She had whimpered and sobbed with pleasure. It had been fine. Marvelous. First times usually were. And it had all happened so fast! A few glasses of champagne at the party, then he had asked her to leave the hot and noisy throng and come with him.

  At first Melba had laughed at him, displaying stunning teeth in a moist red smile. “To the Casbah to see your etchings, no doubt? Sure and ‘tis a fast worker you are, Mr. Carter!” Her voice, beautifully modulated, yet had the crispness of Dublin.

  They both laughed at the weird dichotomy of old jokes. Nick said, “To my penthouse, m’cushla. Or, as I like to think of it, to my temporary playhouse.”

  Temporary it must be, of course. An agent for AXE, especially one bearing the rank of KILLMASTER, dared not live too long in one spot. It was an axiom in the service —to live at all you had to keep on the move, changing cloak for cloak, disguise for disguise, cover for new cover.

  Now he added, “And sure and it’s a fast world we live in these days. Tomorrow may never come.” How sadly true! He finished his champagne.

  The girl laughed. “Carpe diem?” There was a brightness of intelligence in her violet eyes. They sparkled at him like the champagne she was drinking.

  “Something like that,” Nick acknowledged. “But spare me the Latin, please. I never could pass it in school. I was always forgetting my pony. But if that means what I think it does then I’ll go along with it—and translate it into good English—gather your rosebuds while ye may! I’m all for that!”

  And you, sweetheart, he added to himself, are some rosebud!

  Melba laughed again, a sound like the ripple of an Irish brook, and put a pink-nailed hand on Nick’s sleeve. She was wearing a simple sheath of white and gold that revealed shoulders and upper breasts the color of fresh Dorsetshire cream.

  Melba put her head back and studied him with half-closed eyes. Nick sensed that he had made it, that assent was trembling on the red lips. She squeezed his muscular bicep. “Do you always rush your fences so—Nick?”

  Nick grinned. “I guess I do. Shall we go?”

  As they left he thought, not without grimness, that in his profession it was the hour you seized, not the day. It had been nearly a month now since the blue phone in the penthouse had rung and the dry voice of Delia Stokes—Hawk’s private secretary in Washington—had requested him to “scramble, please.”

  It would come! Sooner or later the blue phone would ring and he would scramble and Hawk’s cold voice would come over the wire. Sending him to God knows where. Oh, yes—the blue phone would ring! But not tonight— Nick hoped!

  He kissed Melba O’Shaughnessy in the taxi and she responded with utter abandon. The road lay clear ahead. After the first round of kisses, as they paused for breath, she whispered to him. “I feel like a tart, you know. I’m not, really. I’m quite inexperienced at this sort of thing, and I know I shouldn’t be so easy! But somehow, with you, it doesn’t seem to matter! Oh, Nick, there’s something about you that fair melts my heart!”

  Melba was still asleep, her arm over her face, breathing lightly in some deep dream of peace. As Nick drew the covers over her he saw that a tiny smile of content moved her lips.

  The weather was uniformly bad over Great Britain and the Continent. Rain, mixed with snow and sleet, and borne on a screaming nor’wester, plagued the capitals. Nevertheless the mail service, in London, Paris, Rome, and Bonn, was efficient and on time. In each city, at precisely eight o’clock, a registered letter was handed in to each Ministry. The letters were addressed personally to the Prime Minister, President, or Chancellor in question, and on the upper left-hand corner of each envelope was rubber-stamped the notation: TOP SECRET—UTMOST URGENT—CONTAINS MATERIAL RELATIVE TO POLAR ATOMIC EXPLOSION.

  The letters, as well as the explosion, had been well and cunningly timed. It was the old Hitlerian technique—institute and disclose a daring move over the weekend, when the machinery of government is slowed nearly to a halt, and key personnel are dispersed. By the time high officials can be recalled from fishing or hunting, from drinking sprees, or weekends with grandchildren, or some old fashioned lovemaking, and parliaments
can be assembled in the democratic manner, it is too late! They are faced with a fait accompli!

  Hitler used this technique with great success. Now another terrible and cunning mind was using it—a mind that had only contempt for Hitler because he had failed! This mind, this brain which esteemed itself far superior to any other mortal, signed itself with a single word. A flourishing sounding word. A word bearing the panache of centuries of Celtic history. The signature at the bottom of every letter, in great round script done in red ink, was—PENDRAGON!

  By the time the letters were received the Ministries of the West, as well as the Kremlin, were in a state of near nervous collapse. The day was murky and dour, and lights burned long in the White House, the Kremlin, and in 10 Downing Street and Paris and Rome and Bonn. Everywhere there was feverish activity. Phones and teletypes were red hot.

  The President of the United States, over the hot line, assured the acting Premier of the Soviet Union: the U.S. had not dropped the bomb on the Pole. The Premier was equally convincing in his assertions that the Soviet Union was not to blame. Who then?

  The British? French? Italians? West Germans? Preposterous! Unthinkable that any of them could be guilty. The French were barely started on an atomic buildup. Italy and West Germany didn’t even have a bomb, much less a missile capable of delivering it to the Pole!

  But who then? What in hell was going on this dull gray November morn?

  The President and the Premier spoke in tones of desperate urgency, each trying to convince the other, each knowing that the world was hovering on the brink of total atomic war! Both men, though perhaps for different reasons, were desperate for peace. At last a tenative agreement was reached—wait and see what developed.

  It was about this time that the fateful letters were delivered. No letter was sent either to the United States or Russia!

  Immediately upon reading his letter the Prime Minister of Great Britain got through to the President of the United States. After a frantic and hurried exchange, during which the line to Moscow was kept open, a party line setup was put into action and Paris, Rome, and Bonn came on the line. Luckily all participants in the fateful conversation spoke English, so there was no delay for interpreters.

  Ten minutes later matters were a great deal clearer. The chiefs of the six most important nations in the world breathed a little easier. It was not, as they had feared, the midnight of civilization. It was only a quarter of midnight! They had a little time!

  Very little. The letters were most explicit. They had exactly one week to comply with the demands put forth in the letters. Pendragon had spoken!

  There is always a leak to the Press, and this time was no exception. Newspapers around the world emblazoned the bare fact of a mysterious atomic explosion at the North Pole. That was all they knew, all they could print, and there they left millions of readers hanging. By common consent the iron curtain of censorship clamped down. Even in England and the United States the censorship was total. After the flaring headlines—nothing. The rest was silence!

  A hundred agencies, trained and equipped to handle just such disasters, went to work. Thousands of men and women the world over were alerted and drawn into the fight!

  Pendragon sat in the midst of his web and fingered the trump he held and smiled and smiled …

  Nick Carter mixed himself a very light scotch and took it out on the dark terrace. Melba was still sleeping, still with the enigmatic little smile on her lovely face. Nick lit one of his very special long cigarettes—king-king size, of Lata-kia, perique, and Virginia—with a gold embossed NC on them. It was one of his few ostentations and he enjoyed smoking them when he was at home. He never took them with him on a mission—they would be a dead giveaway. Now he drew deeply at the fragrant tobacco, closed the French doors behind him, and pulled the robe about his throat against the chill. A light rain was falling, greasing the mosaic floor of the little terrace, and first light was still an hour or so away. Unmindful of the rain, Nick went to a stone baluster and stood peering down forty floors at the glistening black canyon of 46th Street.

  Neon signs splotched the shiny pavement with varicolored iridescence, like oil stains spreading on ebony water. The usual early morning traffic flowed like a skimpy, disjointed metal snake. Trucks and night hawk taxis predominated, their sound muted by rain and mist. A tug growled hoarsely somewhere on the East River. Nick reflected idly that in New York there was always traffic, always noise. To his right a few lights glowed fuzzily high in the U.N. Building and he wondered. Surely it was a little late for cleaning people?

  A chill breeze whipped at his ankles and rain damped his flesh. He sipped at the scotch and took a drag from the long cigarette. There would be no more sleep for him. Once he was as wide awake as this—well, he knew what he could do! What he intended to do. Waste not the shining hour!

  He went back into the bedroom and rolled in beside Melba and kissed those parted red lips.

  She came awake slowly, dragged from the depths of sleep to the slow, perhaps reluctant, renewal of life. To the realization of who and what she was, and where she was. For a moment she was frightened and strained away from him

  Nick held her close and kissed her ear. “Don’t be afraid, honey! It’s only Nick.” He chuckled. “Don’t you remember me?”

  For another moment she struggled against his strong embrace, fluttering like a trapped bird, then she understood and all her softness melded into his lean, tough fleshed body. Her lips sought his as she gave a little murmur of recognition and assent. Her pink tongue flicked a good morning kiss, her breath sweet and clean. She strained hard against him, her arms creeping about his neck, her firm pale breasts mashed against the concrete barrel of his chest.

  Nick let his fingers trickle down the smooth column of her spine. Melba wriggled and gasped, “Nick! Oh, Nick, what a lovely way to wake up!”

  They kissed again. A long kiss. Finally Melba came up for air, still clinging to him. “Nick! Darling! I was dreaming about you—about how—how lovely you were to me last night! I’ll never forget it. Never! Or you!”

  He kissed her again and their tongues renewed old acquaintance and finally Nick whispered, “It’s a bit early to think of forgetting, Melba. Or not forgetting! We’ve only just begun!”

  She pulled her head back to stare at him with half narrowed eyes that were more green than violet in the dim morning light. “Have we now? Indeed? I would like to believe that, Nickie, darling, but somehow I can’t. I just can’t! You’re a strange man, Nick. Very dear, but strange! And I’ve the terrible feeling we’ll not see much more of each other after today.”

  “You’ve got the failing of the Irish,” said Nick as he pulled her back to him. “You talk too much!”

  But as he began the sweet, soft preliminaries of love making he knew she was right. Nick increased the tempo of his love making. Subtly at first, then with demand, even a little roughly without ever being brutal. He demanded and he took! Love before killing, he thought sardonically. How sweet it is! Seize the day? Indeed—seize the hour. Seize the minute. Seize the second. Seize the micro-second!

  The big bed was a battlefield now as he and Melba struggled in tender fury. She gave as good as she got and her gaspings and pantings were muted little battle cries of anguished joy.

  That goddamned blue phone, that blue damned phone, was going to ring! It would! As sure as his boss, Hawk, had eyes like two cold and dry martinis and chewed crackling dry and stale unlit cigars that goddamned blue phone was going to ring! But not yet! Not now! Not yet!

  Melba O’Shaughnessy, in frenzy now, had thrown her arching white limbs over Nick and was attacking with zeal, fervent in the headlong pursuit of her pleasure and his, gasping and crying and sliding long moist red kisses across his face. Her face was contorted with pleasure as she gazed down at him, her facial muscles gone lax, her mouth open in a round scarlet O of ecstasy and her firm breasts now soft and melting with desire. They thrilled and convulsed at the same instant of timeless time! Melba shattered and broke and fell away from Nick like a glass doll smashed to shards. He lay panting, mindless, his body made of cotton wool without weight or substance.

  In another room a phone rang.