The Don't Blow Me to Kingdom Come Affair
cast
Napoleon Solo: dashing and debonair secret agent (cheers from the audience)
Illya Kuryakin: dashing and almost as debonair as Napoleon (more cheers, loudest from young female viewers)
Connie Shaw: beautiful innocent (loud cheers from the male viewers)
Dane Shaw: her handsome husband (murmurs of discontent from the male viewers, murmurs of appreciation from the female viewers)
Anneke Hendrickson: pretty blonde possessor of the Kingdom Come formula (subdued murmurs from the male viewers, most are still glued to Connie)
Baron Jurn: requisite bad guy (boos, catcalls and whistles from the audience)
Mahn Montan: Baron Jurn's enormous right hand man (gasps from the audience)
Various Thrush and Jurn henchmen: cannon fodder (more boos)
Sir John Raleigh: makes a brief but telling contribution (more cheers from the female viewers)
Chapter 1
Napoleon looked at the painting in front of him. An improbably cupid looking child was holding a white kitten in her lap. He looked down at his handbook and read the unimaginative title of 'Child with Kitten' and made a wry face. He was standing in a corridor of the Stockholm Art Museum looking at paintings by contemporary artists. The corridor stretched to his left with paintings hanging on both walls. A little to his right the corridor made a right angle turn and disappeared from his view. He looked without seeming to at the pretty young blonde woman standing about ten feet from him looking at paintings hanging on the opposite wall. He was to meet a blonde in front of the middle still life painting in a set of three just behind him and a little to his left at 11:30 A.M. He didn't know who it was but they would identify themselves with code phrases. He glanced surreptitiously at his watch, 11:25.
He glanced down the long corridor. Besides the blonde, there was a little old grey-haired lady with one of the largest handbags he had ever seen and four men looking at the artwork. Two of the men, both blonde-haired, were standing together making low voiced comments about the painting they were looking at. The other two men, both brown-haired, were not together but were several feet apart. Just then a janitor came around the far corner pushing a garbage can on wheels. Napoleon's attention sharpened, 'you could hide a cannon in that thing,' he thought to himself. He glanced at his watch again, 11:26.
He moved to the next painting, an abstract with black, green and red lines emanating from the center. He winced at the wildness of it and glanced at his guidebook. 'Anxiety' was the title and he made a grimace. 'It certainly gives me an anxiety attack', he thought to himself. He checked out the blonde again. She was certainly very attractive, maybe when this meeting was over he could invite her to lunch. Then someone came around the corner. Napoleon looked once and then took a second look, just like all the other men in the corridor. It was another blue-eyed blonde, but not just another pretty blonde. In a country filled with good looking blondes this one was extraordinarily beautiful. A classically beautiful face, blonde hair falling in waves to below her shoulders, a dress of pale yellow with large blue flowers loving covered an outstanding figure. She glanced at her guidebook and walked straight to the nearest still life.
Napoleon felt the tightness of impending action. He glanced at his watch, 11:27, and the part of his brain that was all business kicked into high gear. He turned and moved towards the center painting, noticing the merely pretty blonde glance at her watch and then stand staring at the painting in front of her, and also noticing one of the blonde men eating a candy bar. It seemed to him the others were all drawing closer and he became very wary, but he had no choice but to continue on.
He stepped to the side of the painting, allowing room for the woman to come close to it. He shot her a side glance; she looked to be in her late 20's or early 30's, very early 30's at the most, he corrected himself, and at this range he could not see anything that could possibly be improved on in her looks. At precisely 11:30 she stepped over to the middle painting and gazed fascinatedly at it.
He cleared his throat and said, "I think the artist did a fine job with the fruit, but the background is a trifle weak, don't you think?" He waited for her response to his code phrase. Then he got a second shock.
"Oh yes, the color of the orange is well done, but just look at the coloring on the apple, the delicate shades merging into each other," she gushed in a surprising American accent. "It looks like you could just reach out and take a bite out of it." She turned a brilliant smile on him and gave the coded response, "My mother paints still lifes." She turned back to the painting, "And the balance is so well, the grapes over here and how they counterpoint the pear on this side."
Napoleon blinked at the rush of information that poured out of mouth about the objects in the painting. All he wanted, besides a lunch date, was what he had come for. "Excuse me," he interrupted the flow, "but what about the formula," he asked in a lowered voice.
She stopped and blinked at him. "Formula?" she asked in a too loud of voice.
Napoleon glanced around and saw the blonde man threw his candy wrapper into the janitor's can. 'A signal?' Napoleon thought to himself, and turned to the blonde. "Yes," he said in a low voice," do you have the formula?" Something was going down, he was too experienced an agent not to recognize or ignore the feeling of danger he was feeling. He went to take her arm, "I think we had better leave," he murmured to her.
She moved her arm away with a glacial look coming into her eyes, "Leave? I'm not leaving with you!" Out of the corner of his eye he saw the janitor pull a Thrush rifle out of the garbage can, which didn't surprise him, but what gave him his third shock of the morning was when he jerked to the side to pull his own UNCLE special out, a bullet hole appeared in the painting, ruining the picture-perfect apple, and he twisted to see the little old lady with a huge smoking hand gun clenched in both her fists pointing towards him. It appeared to not only surprise him but all five of the other men, who were all pulling guns out and staring at each other. They started shooting at each other while at the same time searching for nonexistent hiding places.