The Doomsday Affair

I

Napoleon Solo stepped from the taxi at the corner of Third Avenue in New York City’s East Forties.

He paused a moment on the curb, glancing at the large public parking garage, the row of aging brownstones siding a modern three-storied whitestone. Beyond them he could see the glass and glitter of the United Nations Building near the river. He exhaled heavily, saying to himself inwardly, “Welcome home, Solo.” He was thinking there were moments when he hadn’t been sure he would make it. But he did not smile in his small triumph because he still nursed a purpled eye and a welted, tender jaw, souvenirs from Oahu.

The street was quiet in the afternoon and Solo went along its walk, going down the steps from the street level and entering Del Floria’s cleaning and tailoring shop in the whitestone building.

The tailor, a mild, balding man in his fifties, glanced up from his work and returned Solo’s faint smile of greeting.

Entering a small cubicle at the rear of the tailoring shop, Solo found himself wondering about this agent of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The tailor operated certainly in a minor capacity, one of those who served mostly by only standing and waiting. He was a good tailor. Perhaps he’d once been a good field agent. Perhaps he knew nothing more than that behind his modest shop was a complex of steel, stone and bulletproof glass housing one of the strangest and most far-flung law agencies in existence. It was unlikely that the tailor knew all the workings of U.N.C.L.E. even if he’d once been a field agent, because only a few at the top knew all its bewildering secrets of communication, eradication and prevention.

Behind the eager young faces of the men and women who entered here were the alert minds of carefully selected and wholly dedicated people of almost every race, color and national origin.

A wall parted and Solo stepped through as it closed again silently behind him. He was in the first, outer cell of the complex; the receptionist behind the desk smiled at him as if she’d seen him only moments earlier, and placed his identification tag upon his lapel.

Solo winked at her and strode through the metallically lighted corridor, able to see his reflection in the deep-polished surface of the flooring.

Other agents, some in shirt sleeves, all intent, as if their minds were computers, passed him with brief glances or silent greetings. The silent corridors hummed with ceaseless activity.

Though one could not see them or hear them through the sound-proofed flooring, a set of underground channels churned with the speeding launches plying in secret from moorings to the East River.

On the roofing, what appeared to be a large neon-lighted advertising billboard concealed a high-powered short-wave antenna, elaborate receiving and sending gear, pulsing constantly, attuned to every change in the world around it, reaching out like prying eyes and searching feelers into every dark cranny of the world. The battle which U.N.C.L.E. fought wasn’t new; it was as old as man’s conscience. Only the weapons were different now — incorporating computers, spy planes, atomic weaponry and the finest brains money could hire.

Solo wasn’t a simple man, nor a naive one. He prided himself upon his urbanity, sophistication and clear-eyed recognition of the truth about worldly matters, rather than the hypocritical things one was expected to believe and swallow. But here in this air-conditioned maze of steel corridors and sound-proofed suites, one felt the strength and the moral principles that guided it.

A door slid into the wall as Solo approached it and he entered the private sanctum of Alexander Waverly. There had been no delay and Solo knew why — every movement in these corridors was continuously monitored on closed-circuit television, and electric brains scanned, rejected, or admitted one at all the knobless doors in this place.

Waverly looked up from behind his desk. The top of it was cluttered at the moment with small, luminous maps, code messages and directives. Waverly’s hair was toppled over his rutted forehead. His hair was black, and Solo suspected that Waverly’s barber dyed it with each trimming, because if Waverly had a vanity, it was the matter of his age. He admitted, like an aging prizefighter, to an obviously curtailed age — in his case he would tell you he was in his late fifties. No one ever disputed him, but he had a brilliant record in army intelligence that dated back almost that far. Solo supposed his superior was actually in his late sixties, but Alexander Waverly was walking proof that age was all a matter of the mind.

“Hello — uh, Solo,” Waverly said without smiling. He kept a hundred matters of utmost urgency in the forepart of his mind, but he had the poorest kind of memory for names or other trivia, even in the cases of his most highly rated operatives.

Waverly’s rhesus-monkey eyes under bushy brows seemed more vacant than ever, but Solo had long ago learned this meant the deepest sort of concentration. He respected Waverly as he did few men. It was easy to have ideals when these human heroes were at a distance, but when you worked closely with any man you got to know him well, in all his weaknesses and strengths. “One must conclude from your report, Mr. Solo, that your triumph in Oahu was less than breathtaking,” Waverly said.

Solo smiled. As Waverly understated his agency’s dangers and accomplishments, so he minimized its failures. But Solo knew how they hurt — the pain clawed at him. “I fell flat on my face, all right. And before we go any further, I want to make a statement that I hope you won’t construe as an alibi. It may well be the pattern in this case — if it turns out that there is a pattern, or even a case left after the recent setback.”

Waverly pressed a button. A wall panel slid back, revealing a small screen which instantly glowed with gray light.

“I assure you we do have a case left,” Waverly said. “A strong case. Perhaps we are in a better position than we have been at any time previously. We must negate any past failure by concentrating on the future. Learning the identity and the goal of our friend Tixe Ylno would have been easy if we could have kept the young woman alive. But perhaps that would have been too easy. I’m sure Thrush would feel this, and this must be our attitude. Now — what is your idea of a possible pattern in this affair?”

“Simplicity,” Solo said. “Utter simplicity. Everything so obvious that you overlook it because it’s so simple.”

Waverly nodded, smiling faintly, but impressed, Solo could see that. “Yes. Extremely clever — and sophisticated. Using simple attack in a world that has grown to look only for danger in the complex — yes. Very ingenious.”

Solo saw Waverly digesting this thought, putting it through the computer of his brain. He did not underestimate this power of his immediate superior, because Waverly was one of the five men at the peak of U.N.C.L.E.’s organizational structure. On Madison Avenue in the advertising world, it was a matter of having a key to one’s private bathroom. Here it was a little more than that — Waverly was one of the few men who knew every one of the secret entrances into this building.

And it was more than status with Waverly. One reached his place of trust and responsibility only through awesome sacrifice and dedication. If any men knew every detail of the U.N.C.L.E. operations, it would be Waverly and the four other men — each of a different nationality and background — at the pinnacle of the organizational structure. The organizational chart of U.N.C.L.E. broke down the personnel into six sections, each subdivided into two departments, one of which overlapped the functions of the department below it.

Waverly, with his four associates, headed up the Policy and Operations Department. In descending order of rank, the other departments were: Operations and Enforcement — and it was in Enforcement where Solo was listed as Chief Agent — Enforcement and Intelligence, Intelligence and Communications, Communications and Security, and Security and Personnel.

It was Intelligence and Communications whom Waverly alerted now with the buzzer that prepared the screen for briefing.

A woman’s soft voice rose from the waiting screen: “Yes, Mr. Waverly.”

“The pictures transmitted here by, uh, Kuryakin, Miss, uh—” He let that part go.

“Yes, Mr. Waverly.”

“Where is Illya?” Solo asked as they awaited the first briefing pictures.

“He had a bit of a sticky problem getting out of Hawaii. A matter of a murder charge.”

“Good lord.”

“Yes. You might say that.”

Solo sank into the leather covered chair, glaring at the white screen. He bit his lip as the first picture was flashed upon it. It was the picture he had taken of the little flower girl at the moment she had tossed the lei over Ursula’s head at the Honolulu International airport. It was magnified many times and showed people in the immediate background.

“This is the young woman Polly Jade Ing,” said the voice from the speakers. “Of Chinese ancestry, she is believed to have become involved with an agent for Thrush through a dealing in uncut heroin.”

Solo sighed. One got so near, and yet fell so far short. The picture changed and Solo sat forward. “This man in the background is a Chinese-American named Samuel Su Yan. He was born in Dallas, Texas, attended public and private schools in Texas. He was rejected by the U.S. Army for moral reasons. He attended a university in Shanghai. For some years he worked with the Peking government as an agent in Japan, Viet Nam and in South Korea. He was deported from the Philippine Islands. He was reported killed in a plane crash two years ago.”

“Obviously he has been very much alive, working underground so cleverly that no agent of ours spotted him in all these months,” Waverly said as the picture flashed off the screen, followed by a second, a close-up of Sam Su Yan in a pink hotel suite. “Illya Kuryakin took this picture,” Waverly said.

The woman’s voice said, “This is a closer picture of the subject, now definitely identified as Samuel Su Yan. At this moment he has been located by agents as a guest at the Acapulco International Hotel in Mexico.

“According to Agent Kuryakin, this man accosted Kuryakin as he left the suite of the slain Thrush agent, Ursula Baynes-Neefirth, forcing him to return to the room and to await the arrival of the police. Kuryakin reports that to his belief, Samuel Su Yan is a paid agent for Thrush. Thrush is a supra-nation, without boundaries, and an international conspiracy—”

“Come, come, Miss Uh—” Waverly said impatiently. “Get on with it. Believe me, we know what Thrush is.”

“Yes, Mr. Waverly.” The voice continued, unruffled, as unperturbed as a delayed recording. “Agent Kuryakin managed, by appearing to drug his own drink, to induce subject to intake ten milligrams of neuroquixonal. Neuroquixonal is a drug which causes a sweat-gland and epidermal reaction which—”

“All right! All right!” Waverly said. “You may have time for all of the basics, but we do not. If that’s all, thank you — and out.”

The briefing screen darkened and for a moment the two men sat, mulling over what they had seen and heard.

Solo said, “Acapulco for me?”

Waverly’s head came up. “I thought your report stated you were returning here for additional information on the slain Miss — what’s her name, the Thrush spy.”

“Yes. That’s right. Illya and I found only a meaningless letter — and our code people confirm that it is no known code — and a silver whip. I recalled that Ursula had been part of a night club act with another young woman in which the silver whip was a part of the important props—”

“I saw the act,” Waverly said with a faint smile. “Well. Quite educational. Krafft-Ebbing and the Marquis de Sade could have learned.”

“I wanted to see those briefing pictures again,” Solo said. “Until Illya turned up this bit on Samuel Su Yan, the whip and the former partner seemed my only link with Ursula and what she became — as a spy for Thrush.”

Waverly pressed a button, gave an order, and in less than a minute, a picture obviously some years old was flashed on the screen. The woman’s voice said, “This is the last night-club act of Ursula Baynes and her partner Candy Kane — whose real name was Esther Kappmyer. Our notes show that Miss Baynes stated she hoped to refine this act, find a new partner and return to show business.”

A small muscle worked in Solo’s tautened jaw. He thought: this was Ursula’s dream, her hope for a future that was now forever denied to her. She’d brought along that whip, hoping that Solo and the United Network could somehow protect her from her former bosses at Thrush. She had been alive and lovely and filled with plans for a new beginning.

Solo said, “What I need, Miss McNab, is the name and present whereabouts of Ursula Baynes’ former partner Candy Kane, nee Esther Kappmyer. Do you have that?”

The unseen voice from the stereo speakers said, softly, “Of course we do, Mr. Solo.”

II

Illya Kuryakin lounged in the back seat of an Acapulco taxi, a vintage Dodge that limped asthmatically through the sun-struck streets, dodging the bicycles that were everywhere like fleas in the hairs of a dog. The driver batted continually at the horn, never paused at an intersection, and miraculously pulled into the curb before the Acapulco International Hotel.

He reached back and swung the door open. “We are arrive, señor.”

Illya smiled at him. “Remind me, next time, to walk.”

“A long walk, señor. Muy caliente. In the sun — very hot.”

The resort town lay prostrate in the sun before Illya, a matter of deep browns and Mexican reds, of stout Gringos in shorts and potbellied shirts and grass sandals. The American females on the prowl and the young Mexicans stalking the streets like unsubtle beasts of prey: they’d get together, and they would deserve each other.

Illya glanced toward the blue waters below him, fair and unreal, the palms rustling like whispering castanets. Except for the people, it was a lovely place, Illya decided as he entered the hotel lobby.

The clerk told him his room was waiting for him, reserved, and surely to his liking. “Overlooking the beach.” Illya could display no enthusiasm — he was becoming disenchanted with vacation places where death lurked on expense accounts submitted to Thrush, and yet paid in the end by the unsuspecting and the unwary.

He drew a three-by-five enlargement of the close-up he had made of Sam Su Yan in Honolulu. “I’m looking for this man — a friend of mine,” he told the clerk. “I was told he was registered here.”

“Ah, si, señor.” The clerk smiled. “Señor Samuel Causey—”

“If you say so.”

“—in room 421. Would you like me to ring him and announce you?”‘

“I’d like to astonish him,” Illya said, purposely using the imprecise word.

“Of course.”

Illya turned and walked toward the barred cage of the bronzed elevator. Some transient flicker in the clerk’s face suggested that he would call and announce him anyway. Obviously Sam paid well to avoid astonishments.

Sam awaited him at Room 421, standing in the doorway, a drink in his hand.

Sam gave him a brief nod and a false suggestion of a smile. “I could have killed you as you stepped off the elevator. I’d like you to remember this.”

“You would have killed me in Oahu, if your assassins could have worked it,” Illya replied with a matching tug of smile muscles about his mouth.

“One should never assign tasks,” Sam said with a slight shrug of knobby shoulders. He wore gray slacks, a checked shirt, hand-tooled boots, looking more like a Texan than ever — one with a sense of humor that dictated a Eurasian mask. “No matter how well-trained his minions.”

“If you want a thing done well; do it yourself,” Illya quoted. “That’s why I’m here. Would you care to compliment me on my tracking you across almost three thousand miles of ocean?”

Sam bowed, motioning Illya past him into the room, which was furnished in the Gringo decorator’s notion of authentic Aztec-Mexican. Sam closed the door and turned. “I find in you a certain native cleverness — as opposed to true intellect, of course.”

“Still, I am here, and so are you.”

“True. But I wanted you here.”

“You made this decision after your men failed to deter me in Honolulu?”

Sam nodded. “At that moment. I was defaming you at the time for the stupid trick you engineered with the Scotch.”

Illya almost smiled. “The neuroquixonal. Interesting, isn’t it? The way it works on the sweat glands and the epidermis so the subject leaves a clear trail of yellow stains behind him wherever he goes, whatever he touches with any part of his skin. It was developed by our chemists, and its lasting power remains up to a week — and, you’ll be pleased to hear, there are almost no side effects.”

“I was pleased to leave you a trail visible to your infrared lamps. I wanted you led to me when our hirelings were unable to stop you. I dislike having to say this so bluntly, but I mean to have you stopped. Permanently.”

“I’ve never suspected your intentions were any less from the moment we met.” Illya shrugged. “I only fail to see why you consider me worthy of so much of your attention.”

Sam nodded toward the portable bar. “Pour yourself a drink. From any bottle. I assure you, my plans for you do not include the use of some chemist’s trick with no side effects.”

Illya poured himself a drink. Sam strolled across the room, stood near the balcony watching him.

He said, “In my life there have been many things I have done that I viewed myself with displeasure. I have not always approved of every action circumstances have forced upon me. Oh, but this is not true here and now with you. I tell you. I feel invigorated and renewed at having you here like this. Your Russian smugness. Your smirk of triumph. You have outwitted three of my agents and the Honolulu police—”

“You’ll surely grant me that it was a bit more than child’s play — pinched between the forces of an ambitious police lieutenant and three assassins trained to kill on signal like canines? A helicopter picking me off the beach at Waikiki? Why shouldn’t I be permitted some faint satisfaction of accomplishment? What does it take to impress you, Sam?”

“My father’s people are old,” Sam Su Yan said. “They lived in starvation, in oppression, in famine, flood, in every disaster known to nature and man. They learned a great patience — quite alien to your Russian stolidity. We don’t look to the battles that are won, my young friend, but to the outcome of the war. Does this answer your question?”

Illya finished off his drink, replaced the glass. “May I present my proposition to you, Sam? It may prove to be worth your while. We are quite aware of your background — even to your effects being found in a plane crash fatal to forty passengers and crew. We did not know that you had gone underground to work for Thrush. We know all this now.”

Sam met his gaze levelly. “For all you know, I may be Thrush.”

“You may be. Or you may be an underling with delusions of grandeur — some more of your ancestor-oriented viewing the end results? We are prepared to offer you our protection in exchange for certain cooperation from you.”

Sam Su Yan laughed.

His mismated oriental-Texan face worked uncertainly, pulling muscles into play that had almost atrophied from disuse. The sound burst out of him almost like a strange, off-key sob. But it was laughter.

“May Buddha look out from his celestial home to see the incredible arrogance of this puppy!” Sam laughed again, that tormented, unaccustomed sound. “Do you truly delude yourself that I permitted you to walk into this room so that you might offer me some ridiculous cops-and-robbers trade for turning stool pigeon?”

Illya shrugged. “I’ve found worse crimes in your dossier.”

“You’ve found nothing in my record to match what you have permitted yourself to walk into.”

Sam Su Yan’s face was chilled, the unreconciled parts going hard and waxen. He dropped his glass on the carpeting and slapped his hands together.

The three men seemed to appear from the woodwork, as silent and as quick as termites.

Illya recognized one of them as the man who had attacked him with the acid-loaded fountain pen in the Honolulu jail. He supposed the other two were his fellow assassins.

He shrugged his jacket up on his slender shoulders, but made no other move.

Sam said, “You’ll forgive me if I’ve grown bored with this depressing exchange. When I heard you had escaped from the island, I entertained the notion that your wits might be stimulating in exchange and conflict. I know better now. You looked better from afar.”

Sam shook his head and padded about the room in his Texan boots.

He seemed to forget that Illya was in the room. He went over to the baggage rack and rummaged for a moment inside it. But when he straightened, his hands were empty.

None of the three guards moved. They continued to poise, like a kill-trained canine corps, their soulless eyes fixed on Kuryakin as if waiting for the one-word signal that meant attack and slaughter.

Suddenly Sam Su Yan gave the command. He jerked his head toward Kuryakin. “Prepare him.”

Kuryakin spun on his heel, thrusting his hand under his jacket, snagging at the butt of his U.N.C.L.E. Special. But he could not reach it in time.

Sam’s assassins sprang upon him without speaking. A hand chopped him across the neck, a hand struck him at the base of his spine, a hand caught him in the groin. Expert hands caught his arms, tore away his jacket and shirt, tossed gun and holster upon the bed.

A straight chair was pushed in behind Illya. One of the thugs said, “Sit,” and Illya was thrust down upon the chair.

Illya struggled, and ended with his wrists and ankles secured. They worked smoothly, efficiently, deftly, and then stepped back, standing unmoving, waiting for the next command.

Illya glanced at Sam. “Surely you have sense enough left to know you can’t get away with killing me — not here in this hotel.”

Sam walked toward him, his face an ugly mask, expressionless.

“I don’t need you to remind me that your agents have harried me constantly since I arrived here, that they are aware you are in this hotel, in this hotel room. But I prefer that you permit me to make whatever decisions are necessary concerning you — because I assure you they were laid out great detail long before you arrived here.”

“You’ll commit a serious blunder by not releasing me at once.”

“Please!” Sam spoke sharply. “If your men call your room in this hotel, be assured that your voice will answer the telephone. Your voice will assure them that all is proceeding smoothly.”

He walked back to the bag on the rack, drew from it a syringe and needle. He held it up to the light, forced a drop through the needle and then returned to where Illya sat watching him. “Will you sit quietly, or must you be held? This won’t hurt you as I inject it. It is in fact a discovery of our chemists, and I wish I could assure you it had no side effects. But”—his mouth pulled into a faint smile of pride—“I can’t do that. I must tell you, as a matter of fact, that it is a matter of quite unpleasant side-effects.”

“Drugged,” Illya said in contempt. “Carried out in the dark. What high-quality intellect devised this hoary scheme, Sam?”

“Unfortunately for you, I’m afraid you’ll discover nothing hoary or old-hat in this. It’s never been done quite this way — in fact this particular nerve stimulant has never been tested on human beings, my young guinea pig. In the lab it has created some exciting results. I suggest you not be contemptuous until we learn who wins the war. Eh?” He lifted his eyes, spoke to the guards. “Subdue him.”

Sam held the hypodermic needle in his hand, but he could not resist a final boast as the men held Illya’s inner arm open to the injection.

“We are not unsubtle enough to kill you and leave your body here to draw local and international police, my friend. What we are accomplishing is much too important, and much too secret for such resulting publicity. I assure you, we have better and more long-range plans for you than this.”

As he spoke, he injected the point of the needle into the collateral radial artery from the parent trunk of the profunda brachii, inside the elbow joint. “Slowly,” Sam said. “This is accomplished slowly, Mr. Kuryakin. No thrust of needle and spurt of solution. This takes a little time. You will be patient, won’t you, Mr. Kuryakin?”

III

The DC-7 droned soothingly at thirty-seven thousand feet, with churning thunderheads like a broken wall between plane and the California mountains where bandits and tireless padres had marched, above the dark and choppy bay where sea wolves once hoved in from plundering to shanghai a fresh crew from the hills of the town between the bay and the ocean.

Solo smiled wryly at the thought that San Francisco hadn’t changed much; the violence and the excitement was still down there in the gaudy lights and the impenetrable dark. He even remembered that during the war when his outfit had been awaiting transport to Korea, the men had been futilely warned against the gin mills of Mason Street, the friendly natives who’d insist on buying drinks. “Don’t drink with your own brother if he’s been in San Francisco longer than three years — and you haven’t seen him in that time.” And there was the theme song of embittered sailors: I left my wallet in San Francisco, high upon some dark and windy alley…

Solo put the thoughts of his past out of his mind. He knew San Francisco as an exciting town where pulses quickened and life took a new edge. Paris of the new world. An old cliché, but with all the truth of the tritest platitude.

He buckled his seat belt as the plane put down through the thick smoking of the clouds, gliding upon the runway.

He came off the plane with the forty other travel-mussed passengers, trying to blend in with the crowd despite his purpled eye and the strong premonition of deadly danger ahead for him in this spirited town he loved.

He returned the stewardess’ warm smile, and recalled his promise to call that number she’d printed for him on the inside of a match folder if he got five free minutes in town during the next three days.

There was a scented perfection to her specifications, and he experienced a moment of regret because he knew in advance that he would not have five minutes he could call his own for a long time.

Solo glanced over his shoulder and she waved to him from the plane exit way, and he knew with a faint sadness that he’d never see her again.

He paused at the car-rental desk and collected the keys for the Chevrolet convertible that had been reserved in his name. He saw a slender man in a gray suit lower a newspaper when he spoke his name at the desk, and straighten as the girl repeated it. The man folded his newspaper deliberately and with an unhurried stride went to the row of public phone booths and entered one, closing it behind him. He watched Solo narrowly across the administration building to the parking area.

Solo drove at fifty miles an hour in the suburban traffic on roads that sang wetly from the recent rain. The air was bracing, the flow of traffic was a challenge that alerted tired senses, and the memory of the sudden rains that struck the Bay Area stirred more old memories.

He left his keys with the doorman at the St. Francis hotel, stood a moment listening to the luring call of the evening traffic, seeing the lights and the elegantly dressed women. He checked into the room that had been reserved for him. He prowled it a moment, anxious to be out of it and on his way as if he were a hunter with the scent of prey nagging at him.

In the street again, he rejected the idea of getting out the car. A man stalked these hills, hearing the rattle of the cable cars, seeing the streets forking out like spokes from a hub, drinking in the excitement of the strange race of inhabitants of this place. Night in San Francisco! Solo heaved a deep sigh and strode faster, going down Market Street toward the Embarcadero.

He paused on the walk, aware of people passing him on both sides, the clatter of sounds, the winking of the lights on the purple and orange neon: THE HUNGRY PUSSYCAT. Up Three Flights.

He walked up those three flights and entered the padded doors. The hysterical clatter of sound washed out around him.

He saw the bored faces of male and female lined like crows along the padded bar, the disenchanted bartenders moving behind it, the dark mirrors, the damp smell of liquor. Music was loud, with that muffled tone of poor acoustics. The small dance space was crowded, and here and there were military uniforms to remind one that the cold war was with him, and that this frantic city was still the port of the Pacific.

He ordered a Cutty Sark Scotch and ice at the bar and then turned with it in his hand toward the place where the largest crowd was knotted. He would have been more than mildly astonished to see that this was a goldfish pool if Heather McNab had not briefed him so thoroughly at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters less than nine hours ago…

“There she is, swimming down there. Looks like one of the goldfish, doesn’t she?”

“Except the goldfish are up here and she’s in a tank in the basement.”

“You’ve got to be joking.”

“You don’t really think she’s swimming around naked in there with those goldfish, do you?”

“So what’s with being naked? She’s no bigger than one of the goldfish,” a woman said.

“Honey, she looks better like that than a lot of us do!”

“How do they do that? Make it look like she’s swimming around with the goldfish?”

“Honey, it’s all done with mirrors.”

“You know that’s what’s wrong with life? Everything. Everything is done with mirrors.”

“Barbry Coast. That’s what she calls herself. Look at her! I wonder what her real name is?”

Solo turned away from the fish pond, wondering if there would be any glamor left if they knew as he did that the nude swimmer’s real name was Esther Kappmyer.

“Esther Kappmyer? Sure, that’s my name, but what does that prove?” She stared at Solo from the fluffy concealment of a terry-cloth robe.

“It proves you’re the one I’ve been looking for,” Solo said, leaning back in the only chair in her closet-sized dressing room in the building basement.

“What do you want with me?” She scrubbed at her dark, wave-rich hair with a bright red towel. He knew from his mirrored view of her that she was a thoughtfully designed young woman, and he saw that nothing improved her looks as much as being near her. And he saw something else. She was a frightened young female. Her dark violet eyes were haunted with something she never talked about, probably tried never to think about — the kind of fear that one never escaped, no matter how fast she ran or how often she changed her name.

“I never date customers, mister,” she said.

Solo gave her a smile that he hoped might reassure her. “I’m afraid my business with you is more serious than the pleasant prospect of a date with you. Do you know a girl named Ursula Baynes?”

Her eyes widened and her body tensed beneath the robe. She swallowed hard, tilted her chin. “What about her?”

“Ursula Baynes and Candy Kane. A dance act employing a silver whip. It played a lot of the larger clubs, and before it broke up it seemed to concentrate on the areas near sensitive military or missile centers.”

“We used to have an act together; what about it? And we used to use silver whips. It’s not what we want, mister, it’s what the public will buy.”

“I’m not here to censure you. I thought maybe you might be willing to talk to me about Ursula.”

She batted at her head with the heel of her hand, saying, “I’m water-logged.” She appeared to be busy getting her body dried and warm. But Solo had seen these signs before — she was attempting to cover up how upset she was, how nervous she had become since he’d mentioned Ursula.

He said, “She’s dead. You know that, don’t you?”

She nodded. “What do you want me to tell you, Mister — what’s your name? Solo? That’s about as believable as mine — Barbry Coast. That has a certain nothing, don’t you think?”

“How well did you know her?”

Barbry Coast tossed her head. “Look. I don’t want to talk about her. She’s dead. What can it help to talk about her now?”

“You’re not afraid that what happened to her — might happen to you?”

He saw her wince. He saw the way she shivered beneath that robe, but she forced a laugh. “Why should it?”

“I don’t know. Why should it have happened to her?”

“I told you I don’t want to talk about it. Maybe Ursula got mixed up in something that was bad news. In her way she was a kook. I don’t know what it is you want to hear from me. I don’t even want to know, because what happened to Ursula could happen to me.”

“Is that what you’re afraid of, Barbry?”

She tried to laugh. “Who’s afraid? I always shake like this. That water’s cold.”

“If you’ll trust me — if you’ll answer some questions the best you know, I’ll protect you.”

She shivered, her violet eyes fixed on his. Her chin tilted slightly. “You know what? Those are probably the exact words you said to Ursula.”

Solo didn’t speak. After a moment, Barbry said, “I’ll tell you this much. If the man who ordered Ursula’s death decided to kill me, no one could protect me.”

Solo stood up. He crossed the narrow space to where the girl stood, looking small and helpless wrapped in the thick robe.

“You do know the man, don’t you?”

“I don’t know anything.”

“Is that why you’re scared to breathe?”

“It’s nothing to you.”

“That’s where you’re wrong, Barbry. This is a serious business. Deadly. We don’t even know yet how bad it is, only that the plot is urgent enough to have involved a personal adviser to the president of this country.”

“What’s that got to do with me? I’m just trying to make a buck — and stay alive.”

“A lot of other people want to stay alive, too, Barbry. Their lives may depend on what you can tell me — if you will.”

“Why do you think I know anything at all?” Her voice rose and she shook her head wildly. He saw the shadows of hysteria swirling in the depths of her violet eyes. “You know the man who killed Ursula — who ordered her death.”

“No! I don’t!”

“You know him. And you know why he wanted Ursula killed. And you’ve lived in terror since the moment you heard she was dead—”

“Let me alone!” Her voice lifted, shaking.

Solo caught her arms, gripping her gently and yet firmly. Her lips quivering, the hysteria building in her, she tried to break free. She could not.

She burst into tears, crying suddenly in hurting sobs. “Oh, please let me alone.”

“I’m sorry, I can’t do that. And I don’t believe you want me to.”

“You’re crazy!” She screamed it at him. I never saw you before you walked in here. I never heard of you. That’s the way I want it.”

“No. You don’t know me. But you know — inside — that I’m trying to fight whoever it was who killed Ursula. And you know that whatever chance you have of staying alive depends on your working with me, helping me. Maybe the odds against you are bad. I tried to help Ursula. I couldn’t do it. But I’ll try to help you — and you know that your chances are better with me than without me.”

She shook her head, her mouth trembling, her body shaking. “No. I’m afraid. I only want to stay alive, that’s all I want. I haven’t seen Ursula not for years. That’s the truth. What could I know? Don’t drag me into it. Please don’t.”

“Am I dragging you into it, Barbry? You knew Ursula was frightened — and I believe you know why. Ursula’s death was decided a long time before she arranged to meet me in Hawaii.”

The girl sobbed openly now, almost lost in mindless hysteria. She repeated over and over, “I’m so afraid. I’m so afraid.”

“Why, Barbry, why?”

“No. I don’t know. Let me alone.”

Solo sighed and dropped his hands to his side. “What if I do let you alone, Barbry, what then?”

“I’ll be all right.” But she pressed her trembling hands over her face.

“No. When you walked in here and saw me in that chair, you almost fainted. Why? Because you were afraid I had come — from whom, Barbry? From the man who had killed Ursula?”

“No. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You know something else, too, Barbry. If you even suspect the identity of the man who sentenced Ursula to death, you must realize that you, too, are in the same danger that she was. You’ve got to have help to stay alive. I can walk out — or I can stay. That’s up to you. Either way, you’ve got to face it. Alone. Or with whatever help I’m able to give you. There’s a big organization behind me, Barbry, and I can offer you whatever power they possess to help you.”

“I’m so alone. I’m so afraid.”

“You’ve been alone and you’ve been afraid ever since Ursula died. It doesn’t have to be that way any more.”

Barbry straightened slightly. “What can I do?”

Solo sighed. “I want whatever information you have on Ursula. You won’t be adding anything by telling me that she worked as a spy for Thrush. We know that. We know she was trying to break away. That’s why she was killed. What we need are the people she worked with in the immediate past inside Thrush. Anything you know about them, any of them. Maybe you even know the reason why she wanted to quit the conspiracy. Whatever you tell me I promise to keep in strictest confidence. But it might be the key that will open up this whole affair.”

Barbry Coast stood immobile and stared up at him for some seconds. He saw that she was looking at him for the first time. She had been until this moment so wrapped up in the ball of fear that her life had become that she’d been incapable of turning her attention outside her own confused, terrorized mind.

Her face was rigid, pallid. She walked away from him, moving woodenly, her thoughts spinning. She appeared hardly aware of what she was doing. She went behind a screen, dropped the robe and dressed in that same abstracted way.

At last she said, “I don’t know why I trust you. Maybe like you say I’ve got no choice. I’ve got you or nobody…Ursula trusted you, and she died…but maybe at least she wasn’t alone when it happened. Maybe the way things are with me right now that’s all that matters.”

Barbry Coast sat across the white-linen covered table in a restaurant booth. She turned the daiquiri slowly in her fingers. “You’re right. I am scared. I’ve been out of my mind. Since Ursula was killed, it’s as though I’ve been sitting around waiting for them to come for me. I knew they’d find me sometime. I changed my name, my act, everything about me — and all the time I knew it wasn’t any good.”

“I got to you first. You’re going to be all right.”

She drew little comfort from his reassurance. She’d lived too long with her desperate terror to have it easily allayed. “It’s not much of a life being a goldfish in a San Francisco night-joint, but it’s all the action they gave me, and I’m stuck with it — and I’m honest enough to tell you I’m scared to die.”

“Do you know how Ursula got mixed up with Thrush in the first place?”

She was silent for some seconds. At last she looked up. “We were doing this act. We were free — and dating a lot. We didn’t even realize that most of our dates were with military men. They were alone, had money and were looking for fun. We just got together. Then this man came along — he was a Chinese-American, a truly ugly man, though I’ve met a lot of ugly men who were nicer than the handsome ones. But not him. He told us what a high percent of our dates were with men involved in top-secret military and missile matters. He said he could get us booked only into fine clubs near these missile and military centers and that we could make more money than we’d ever dreamed of making simply by repeating to his men anything that our dates said to us. I didn’t want to do it, and I told him those men never talked about secret matters. But Ursula laughed at me, and he knew better anyhow. He said all men boasted when they drank too much, especially with women.

“Ursula went for it, right from the first. She warned me that I might get in trouble unless I agreed. When this man came back for our answer, we both said we’d agree to his deal. But he said he only wanted to hire Ursula at that time. The reason — well, he said he could contact me later.

“I got ill then, seeing that Ursula had joined this man’s organization. Suddenly we got a complete new set of bookings. But I was too nervous. I was getting ulcers worrying about Ursula and what was going to happen to us. We broke up the act. She went on working for them, and I tried to change my name and lose them. I was afraid — even then.

“Once Ursula and I met, accidentally, for a little while. She was thin, pale, nervous, tense, scared. She wanted out, but didn’t know how to get free — and stay alive.

“We had a silly code made up of hip words, and I wrote to Ursula in our secret code begging her to make a break, to get away and to turn herself in to the C.I.A., the government, anyone who could help her.”

Solo handed her the letter he had found along with the silver whip in Ursula’s suitcase. “Is this the letter?”

Barbry smiled wanly. “Yes. That’s it. It’s just a jumble of zero-cool words. The only way you can understand it is to know what the other person is talking about. Ursula knew. I never heard from her again. After I wrote her, I got frightened again. I dyed my hair again, I left Chicago suddenly, and turned up out here with my new act and my new name. But I know they’ll find me. They can find anybody they want to find.”

“Who is ‘they’? The Chinese-American that originally approached you and Ursula?”

“Yes. Him. The rest of them. But him mostly. He’ll find me if he wants to.”

“Could you make it easy for him?”

“What?” She shook her head, her eyes dilating.

“I want you to let him find you. We need you to bring him out — so we can trap him.”

She shook her head. She stared at him. Her face was milk white, and her eyes empty Her lips moved, but she did not speak. He leaped up, going around the table because she fainted suddenly, her face striking hard, straight down.

IV

Illya awoke and found himself lying curled upon a red and brown Mexican rug.

He shivered, opening his eyes. Remembering the injection given him by Sam Su Yan, he was astonished to find his mind was clear.

“Ah. He wakes up. Our guinea pig.” He heard Sam’s voice somewhere above him.

He turned his head, but the light pained his eyes, and suddenly his whole body twitched as he had seen spastics quiver.

He tried to speak, but the words were garbled, meaningless, and his tongue felt thick in his mouth.

He heard Sam’s amused chuckle, mixed with something new — a woman’s contemptuous laughter. He tried to turn again, but every time he tried to move at all, his body reacted in violent and disjointed spasms.

He stared up at Sam standing like a bony vulture above him.

“Yes.” Sam was pleased. “We are getting about the same reactions from our human guinea pig that we elicited from our other animals in the lab. Your mind is quite clear, is it?” His smile was sour. “No sense your trying to say yes or no; it won’t come out that way. The only sounds you can make are those mindless grunts of the idiot, the spastic, the victim of stroke or brain damage. Try to get up. Come on. Get up on your feet!”

Illya turned his body, aware of the tremors that went through him. When he ordered his arms to support him, his legs bent or straightened, or simply trembled while his arms flew in wild, useless motions.

Sam and the woman laughed again. She moved closer now, in lime green shift, high heels, her hair a golden red. Illya saw her as the kind of new discovery he wouldn’t want to introduce to the boys.

Sam Su Yan noticed Illya’s rapt staring at the woman. He laughed. “I’m afraid women will be of little use to you in your condition, my friend — unless you enjoy tormenting your mind by seeing what you cannot touch. This is Miss Violet Wild, Kuryakin. I’m sorry I cannot remain here any longer to enjoy the side-effects of my revenge upon you. More urgent matters demand my immediate attention. I’m sure you’ll forgive me. Miss Wild will see you safely put away.”

Illya struggled frantically on the floor, managing to get to his knees before he was attacked by a sudden fit of violent trembling and sprawled out face down upon the carpeting. He lay still there watching Su Yan and Violet Wild leave the room.

He stayed face down, panting against the carpeting, his body dissociated from the messages of his mind. It was as if the drug had scrambled his nerve centers. Every order from his mind only seemed to confuse and aggravate his nerves and muscular controls.

Lying there he felt the pressure of his shoulder holster, of his gun. They were so sure of themselves they had not even bothered to disarm him.

Painfully, and after many false starts, and falls and wild muscular spasms in his legs and arms, Illya fell over on his back.

Exhausted, he lay for a moment before he attempted any other moves. Then, his forehead sweat-beaded, he ordered his right arm to reach for the gun in his holster.

His left arm trembled and waved in a wild arc. But when it fell, it landed on the holster, although there seemed little sense of feeling in his fingers.

He could see his hand lying on the holster.

He bit his lip, sweated, afraid that his arm might suddenly fly away from the holster in another spasm. Closing his eyes tightly, he ordered his right hand to close on the holster, to cling tightly. His left hand closed on the holster, but his arm quivered all the way to his shoulder.

Afraid even to compliment himself upon this small success, Illya forced his hand to inch upward toward the gun butt.

His shirt was sweat-damp, his eyes burning with perspiration by the time he forced his quivering, fatigue-aching hand to close on the gun butt.

He said the words over and over in his mind. Draw. Draw the gun. Draw.

Suddenly his left arm moved, yanking the gun from its holster. Then it swung in wide arcs, gyrating, shaking, no matter how his mind screamed at it to lie still. The fingers loosed and he watched the gun sail halfway across the room and go sliding under the bed.

He sagged back on the carpeting, too tired to care. His left arm continued to tremble.

He managed to turn his head and saw that his luggage had been brought into this room and stood with two green lightweight lady’s weekenders.

He remembered Su Yan’s words: “Miss Wild will see you safely put away.”

He breathed heavily, going over in his mind the implications of this mild statement. His mind remained clear, but he made the noises of a cretin idiot and his movements were those of one who suffered from epilepsy, or a crippling stroke, or brain damage at birth. He could not even control any of his movements.

Miss Wild will see you safely put away.

Put away where?

He managed to search the room by flailing about, lifting his head only to have it fall back hard upon the floor. He was alone. They were certain he wasn’t going anywhere.

He managed to hurl his right arm upward and allow it to fall across his shirt pocket and the ball-point pen clipped upon it.

Minutes later he had it closed in his fist and his shaking thumb had pressed down, releasing its point.

Holding the pen as if his life depended upon it, he rolled across the room to the small desk. Quivering, his body jerking in strange and uncoordinated spasms, he pulled himself up to his knees. He reached out and pulled the small stack of hotel stationary toward him.

The papers fluttered out around him and he sprawled out, holding the pen in his fist.

He closed his eyes as tightly as he could after setting his shaking fist at the top left hand corner of the sheet of white paper. He gripped the pen with all his strength even though this caused the rest of his body to react in paroxysms.

He took his time. He knew he could not hope to do more than to print his given name and the word help. Even this pushed out of the balcony would be enough to alert the other U.N.C.L.E. agents in the immediate vicinity.

He exhaled at last, dropping his head upon his arm. He cried out his success in wild laughter, recoiling from the unnatural sounds pouring across his mouth. He didn’t care, it was laughter. It was triumph. It was mind over convulsive muscle.

He lifted his head, staring at the short distance to the double doors standing open to the balcony. He had only to grip the paper, roll over there and let the wind catch it. Miss Wild will see you safely put away.

Maybe she would, Sam.

He finally was able to force his fist to open and let the pen drop to the floor. Then he turned his attention to closing either of his hands on the paper on which he had written, Illya. Help.

He stared at the paper upon which he had written so agonizingly.

The sound that burst from his mouth was a sob of agony, and it sounded like one. He cried out violently, helplessly. The words his mind had struggled so long with were not words at all. There was nothing on the paper except the meaningless scribbling of a three-year-old child.

V

Solo moved the spirits of ammonia under Barbry’s nose.

“No.” She sat up protesting, pushing the small bottle away from her nostrils.

“You all right?”

A slight shudder coursed through her at the sound of Solo’s voice. Obviously, it brought back abruptly the reason why she had fainted.

“How did I get here?” She opened her eyes, staring about her in alarm.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of—”

“Let me decide that.” Her voice quavered.

“You’re all right, Barbry. You fainted in the restaurant. I didn’t want to attract too much attention to us, so a waiter and I walked you out to a taxi, and I brought you here.”

She met his gaze. “Yes. You brought me here. Where am I?”

“You’re all right. You’re in my room at the St. Francis Hotel.”

“You’re a sneaky worker, aren’t you?”

Solo smiled wryly. “Under other circumstances I’d most definitely be using all my wiles on you, Barbry. But right now I’m trying to help you, whether you believe me or not.”

“Right now I’m not so sure.”

He grinned at her. “I had coffee sent up. You’ll feel a lot better.” He poured a cup from the glittering silver service.

She took the small china cup, sipping at it, relaxing slightly.

“Why did you bring me here, Solo?”

“What would you do with a woman who fainted in a public place?” He sipped at a cup of coffee. The steam rose between them. “I promised to protect you. I can do it better when you’re where I can watch you.”

“That’s all off, Solo.”

He set his cup down, watching her narrowly. “What are you talking about?”

“The agreement you and I made. I meant to keep it. But you’ve already broken your part of it.”

He frowned. “Do you mind explaining that?”

“It’s simple enough. I told you I was scared half out of my mind. You said that if I’d tell you what I knew of Ursula and the time she worked as a spy with Thrush, you’d try to help me stay alive.”

“And I do promise that.”

“No. You said talk. But the next thing you wanted was to use me as bait to lure a man into your trap. He’s a man I’m more afraid of than I am of the devil. Talking about him is one thing. Putting myself where I know he can get at me — I don’t want any part of that. I mean it, Solo. I’m dead afraid — and I’m not going to get involved.”

“You are involved.”

“Am I? Then I’m not going to get involved any deeper.”

He stood up. He looked down at her. “I don’t blame you for being afraid. I wouldn’t think much of you if you didn’t have sense enough to be scared—”

“Oh, I’ve got a lot of sense! I’m scared to death. Sorry, Solo, flattery won’t do it, either.”

He smiled, “All right. But maybe the truth will, and the unvarnished truth is, Barbry, you are involved. I assure you that you are. If only because you were approached by Thrush — that means they know about you. Whatever it is they plan to do now, they may be afraid to trust you. You said for some reason they turned you down, but you didn’t tell me what it was.”

He saw a shadow flicker across her dark eyes. She drew a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about it — the reason.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

He shrugged. “That’s up to you, Barbry. Everything you tell me to help me may aid in saving your life. But what you want to tell me, and don’t want to tell me, that’s up to you…But there are more reasons why you’re in danger from Thrush. You wrote Ursula a letter — and even if it was in a hip jargon only the two of you would understand, it would be enough to make Thrush suspicious of you. And the very fact that you stayed with Ursula for some weeks after she started working for Thrush may mean that you — even unwittingly — met or heard from Ursula about a man that we know only by his code name — Tixe Ylno. You may have seen him, or you may know him well enough for your life to be forfeit because he’ll be afraid to let you live at this critical time in his plans.”

“You know how to break a gal up, don’t you?”

“It’s the truth doing that, Barbry. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already told yourself these past months.”

After a moment she shook her head. “No. I guess not.”

“And then there’s the matter of this Chinese-American who approached you and Ursula in the first place. For all we know he may be Tixe Ylno. No matter who he is, he’s part of this immediate business they’re enmeshed in — and they don’t want people like you around spoiling it for them. He loves secrecy. He even had himself declared dead in a plane crash two years ago in order to make all this easier for him. You think he’s going to let a doll he was afraid to trust as a spy stay alive long enough to trip him up? I can tell you he won’t. The stakes are too high.”

She shuddered, covering her face with her hands. Her body shook. Solo saw that she was numbed with fear.

“We’ve got to stop him, Barbry. You understand? The only way we can do that is—”

The telephone rang, breaking across his words, stopping him cold. He glanced toward the instrument, frowning.

He reached out, lifted the receiver and placed it against his ear. “Solo speaking.”

The voice was that of a woman: the words were in the code of his department in the United Network Command. There was no doubting their authenticity or their meaning.

“Acknowledge,” he said.

“Do you understand clearly?” the voice inquired. “Yes. Thank you.” The phone went dead in his hand. He turned, finding Barbry Coast crouching on his bed, watching him, her eyes stark, wide.

“I must go out,” he said. “At once. Will you wait here for me?”

Her voice was flat. “You think they won’t find me here?”

“You’ll be safe here, as long as you follow my orders.”

“Safe when used as directed,” she said in a dulled tone that was devoid of hope.

“Just stay in here. Keep the door locked, the latch on. When I come back, I’ll knock three times. Before you unlock the door, ask my name. Don’t unlatch or unlock that door for any reason, unless you hear three knocks first and then hear my voice.”

She nodded and sank down on the bed. He glanced at her, seeing she had no hope. She wanted to trust him, but she knew too much about Thrush, and she no longer trusted anything.

VI

Solo walked into Forbidden City just off Grant Avenue. The shops around it and the cafe itself seemed pervaded with oriental incense. One never escaped the startled little bite of shock at finding a place like this, even in a city like San Francisco. The patrons, the murals, the waitresses, the waiters, the tables and chairs seemed unreal, as if they did not even exist outside this world inside itself.

A man in Mandarin dress came forward and bowed. “Ah, Mr. Solo. Good evening, Mr. Solo.”

Solo bowed, giving him a faint smile because he knew neither of them had ever encountered the other before. “Will you be kind enough to come this way with me, Mr. Solo?”

Solo followed him through the tables toward the rear of the cafe. They went along a short, dimly lit corridor and the Chinaman rapped on the door facing.

Alexander Waverly looked up from the head of the table when Solo was ushered into the red-upholstered room. Waverly seemed entirely at ease, though Solo knew that less than five hours ago he’d been at headquarters on New York’s east side, or at home in bed. Nothing ever appeared to ruffle his exterior calm. Solo supposed a man got like this when he had been down all roads, seen everything at least twice.

“Come in, Mr., uh—”

“You must know who I am,” Solo said, smiling. “You sent for me.”

Waverly chuckled briefly and motioned him to a chair across the red-varnished table from the third man in the room. He said, “Solo, I’m sure you know Osgood — uh, Osgood DeVry. He’s a personal adviser to the president of the United States.”

Solo extended his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Mr. DeVry. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

Osgood DeVry smiled. He was a thickset man of slightly more than medium height. There was the flushed pink, steak-fed look about him of a man who had grown accustomed to unaccustomed success and ease of life. He was in his early fifties, mildly overweight. He wore his graying brown hair parted on the side and brushed back dry from his scalp.

“Everyone who knows Osgood is proud of the work he’s doing down there in Washington,” Waverly said.

“Not everyone,” DeVry said, deprecatingly, though he smiled. “One does the best he can. Sometimes he’s rewarded. Sometimes he’s forced to turn the other cheek until he runs out of cheeks. I try not to think about it. I do what I think I must.”

“Yes.” Waverly cleared his throat. “And this leads us neatly into the reason for our nocturnal call on you, Solo. It’s so urgent that we had to interrupt your present mission, no matter how important, and even if it were blonde.” Waverly smiled, but there was an entire lack of sympathy in his voice.

“Perhaps I’d better fill you in on it,” Osgood DeVry said. He shifted his attaché case on the table before him. “Though it applies to the case, some of it is personal.”

“All of it is of vital concern to the safety of this nation, and perhaps of Russia too,” Waverly said. “And we are now certain that it concerns our friend of the code name, Tixe Ylno.”

DeVry filled a pipe with tobacco and tamped it down. He placed the curved mouthpiece between his teeth, but did not light it. Watching him, Solo saw a strong man who might have somehow weakened from the soft life in Washington. Obviously, he worked hard, but one saw that whatever he did for the president or for his country these days, it was all inestimably easier than the life he’d known in his early years.

DeVry said, “I’m a kid who sold newspapers in Dallas streets, Mr. Solo. My folks deserted me. I grew up in foster homes. I made my own decisions — they weren’t always right, of course, but I learned to stand up whether they were right or wrong. In my present position of course, I can’t do anything that is contrary to the wishes of the president — nor would I want to.”

Waverly said, “We understand.”

Solo nodded, settling back in the red, leather-covered chair. The lights from the red chimneys cast a reflected glow upon the faces of the men across from him. “It’s the matter of the decision that’s important here. When I was younger — younger than you, Mr. Solo—! was a line officer in the army. I made decisions then when I couldn’t get back to headquarters or there wasn’t time. I can tell you, I stood or fell on them, then.” He shook his head as if brushing away a bitterly unpleasant memory. “Well. Now what I am about to tell you, I have discussed with the president — and with Alexander Waverly here — but no one else. The president agrees with me that I must make the decision — and he has tacitly allowed me to understand that he will not be able publicly to defend me or my decision. My public life depends on success or failure—”

“We’re not here to fail, Osgood,” Waverly said.

Osgood DeVry laughed, almost a desperate sound. “No. We certainly are not. Briefly, Mr. Solo, we have come across some information that perhaps should be turned over to the joint Chiefs, Central Intelligence, the Pentagon — but it is of such a nature that even if only a whisper leaked, the entire country might panic. My decision is to deal quietly with the matter as long as we can. My decision is to let you people at U.N.C.L.E. handle it — as long as you can. Now, it’s my decision, and the president concurs — as long as he can, and off the record. Failure will mean that my head will roll, that I will have failed the president, who’s been a close friend of mine for many years — but more than that, I will have failed the people I’ve tried to serve all my life, whether they always appreciated it or not.”

“Failure could well mean the destruction of the civilized world,” Waverly said.

Solo straightened, staring at his chief incredulously. Waverly smiled. “Don’t be upset, Solo. No one can hear us. This is a sound-proofed room. We could fire a cannon in here and we’d never be heard. That’s why we chose this place.”

Solo sighed and relaxed. “Then an atomic bomb is involved?”

DeVry said, “At least, an atomic device is rumored to be entangled in the affair. Yes. Here’s what happened. One of your people, in Tokyo on a tangential matter, came across a spy for Thrush. The man was badly wounded, his stomach laid open with knife wounds. He would have no reason to lie, and your man says he was conscious and not delirious, which is what I suspected when I first heard what he’d revealed. The plan is to attack a city inside the continental United States with an atomic device — and, according to the spy, that device and the operation is almost ready. Time is running out.”

“All of this certainly reconciles with every bit of the information we gathered which put us onto this Tixe Ylno matter in the first place,” Waverly said.

“I may as well tell you, I remain somewhat skeptical,” DeVry said. “I cannot help but doubt the plausibility of this information, even though we naturally must run it down. We can’t ignore it.”

“Not in the light of all our other facts about the activities of this Tixe Ylno,” Waverly said.

“The point that makes me most doubtful,” DeVry said, “is the matter of an outsider striking at the United States with an atomic device. Not with our early warning system. It just isn’t practical.”

“It’s just nightmarish enough to be possible,” Solo said

Waverly nodded. “The one important matter that evolves from what we have to this moment — whether such a plot actually is in the works or not, and whether a strike could be successfully delivered against us from without or not, whether it is fact or hoax — is that we must get to this person Tixe Ylno. Whoever he is, whatever he is, he must be quickly captured, exposed, disarmed.”

DeVry exhaled. “For all the reasons I’ve given you, I’ve reached my decision to let you people handle this quietly, and, I pray, quickly.”

“I believe you have made a wise decision,” Waverly said. “We have reports in our office of Thrush agents, and of apparent outsiders, inquiring of the governments of Red China, Russia, France — even the United States — for atomic components. There is afoot this secret plot to hatch some kind of atomic device that is functional. Beyond that, we have the young woman Baynes-Neefuth, who arranged through you, Osgood, for our protection. Obviously, you know that she had been in the employ of Thrush for almost a year, gathering classified information from men in sensitive roles at missile sites. Don’t doubt that there is such a plot. Thrush allowed that young woman to stay alive only long enough to get to us.”

“I failed you then, Mr. DeVry,” Solo said quietly. “I’ll try not to fail you again.”

“You didn’t fail, Mr. Solo.” DeVry smiled. “Thrush had decreed that girl’s death long before she came to me. Her death was one factor that convinced me there might be something to this plot of attack with an atomic device. If these people can build one, then perhaps they have the capability for a strike.”

“I don’t know yet where it will lead me,” Solo said. “But I was able to contact the young woman who was a close confidante of Ursula Baynes.”

“Good. Good,” DeVry said.

“She’s been in hiding from Thrush,” Solo said. “We were able to get to her first this time, I believe.”

“Yes. Miss Baynes told me that the young woman had completely disappeared. I was of the mind that Thrush had found her and destroyed her. I didn’t say any of this to Miss Baynes, of course. I’m glad to hear the other young woman is alive and safe.”

“She’s alive,” Solo said. “Whether she’s safe or not is something else.”

DeVry smiled. “Your record is satisfactory for me, Mr. Solo. I assure you that the president himself will be most pleased when I report to him that you people are at last in contact with someone who might lead us to Tixe Ylno. Just to learn whether Tixe Ylno is male or female will be a giant step forward, eh, gentlemen?”

VII

“Just don’t be impatient, my dear little Illya,” Violet Wild said in a crooning voice. She stood above him where he sprawled with the sheet of garbled writing before him. “Were you writing Violet a love letter, you dear helpless little bug? Don’t you worry. Violet will see you safely put away.”

She laughed down at him, her beauty making her heartless laughter more than cruel.

Illya raged at her, but the sounds he made were the mindless cries of a mewling child.

Violet jerked her head and a man stepped from the shadows. Illya recognized him as the man who’d first attacked him with that fluid-filled fountain pen in Honolulu.

“All right, Edgar,” Violet said. “It is now 2 A.M. It is time our little Illya and I started our journey.”

Edgar nodded, but did not speak. Illya struggled against them, but his agitated movements only amused them, and they lifted him easily. Another of the team brought the suitcases. They went out into the corridor, along it to the bronzed cage of the elevator.

The lobby was almost deserted. Laughter drifted in from the cocktail lounge. A night clerk watched them disinterestedly as they half carried Illya toward the front exit. Illya cried out, but his cawing sounds only frustrated him and got no reaction from the bystanders except a glance of amused pity. They thought he was drunk, a mental defective, or both.

Violet spoke soothingly to him as they walked — not for his sake, he was aware, but for any interested onlooker.

But Illya saw that there was none.

Even the doorman held open the Kharmann Ghia door while they half lifted Illya into the split seat of the convertible. “Has he been like this long?” he asked Violet in heavily accented English.

“All his life,” Violet replied offhandedly. It was the sort of answer one would give who has lived with a tragic affliction so long that it has lost its pain.

She went around and got in under the wheel while their bags were stacked into the small car behind them. She tipped the doorman handsomely and smiled at him. She was calm, unhurried. She tied a pale green wisp of scarf about her bright red-gold hair, knotted it under her chin. She checked her classic loveliness in the rearview mirror and only finally got around to starting the car, putting it in gear and pulling out of the hotel entrance.

Illya glared at the speedometer. She rolled through the sleeping town at less than twenty miles an hour. He heard her humming to herself as she drove.

He saw the flicker of headlights in the windshield, reflected from behind them.

He realized that Violet saw them, too. She glanced into her rear-view mirror, increasing her speed only slightly as they went north out of the town limits.

Illya began to feel a little better. Violet did not seem perturbed, but at the same time, they both knew the car behind them was not friendly to her.

Illya sat tensely, waiting for the moment when Violet would tromp on the gas, attempting to lose the car tailing them.

He felt a sense of satisfaction. The Mexican country was desolate, open. Losing that car would be a difficult matter on this narrow, winding road through the mountains. He cut his eyes at her, willing to give her odds that she would not make it.

She drove now at an untroubled forty miles an hour.

Illya stirred in his bucket seat.

She glanced at him. “What’s the matter, Little Illya? Does my little bug think his friends will stop us?”

He forced his head around, though it jerked and trembled, seeing that the car was gaining on the Kharmann Ghia convertible.

“Look well,” Violet told him sardonically.

He saw at once what she meant. Another set of headlights flared behind the second car. He did not have to be told that this was Edgar and his friends. They had laid back only long enough to give the U.N.C.L.E. agents time to roll in behind Violet’s small car.

“Now we shall see what we shall see,” Violet said. She laughed, showing faultless white teeth. “Now!”

She cried out the word and shoved her slipper hard onto the accelerator.

The small car lunged ahead on the narrow dark road. Illya felt the sharp cut of the wind. The motor hummed and the tires screamed on the shoddy pavement. She slowed slightly when a sign warned of a sharp curve, but she was already speeding again as she rolled into it.

Her headlights raked across the grass and rock façade of the mountains. At times below them the tops of huge trees bent in the night wind. Climbing upward, they could see the racing headlights of the other two cars on turns beneath them in the unquiet dark.

Illya was tossed helplessly in the seat. He tried to cling to something but he could not force his hands to obey his orders.

The speedometer needle wavered at eighty. They struck potholes and the small car danced, almost turning around. Violet fought the wheel, bringing them skidding to the brink of deep chasms.

“What are you afraid of, my little bug?” Violet shouted.

The wind caught her words, fragmenting them. “You want to go on living — the way you are — you call that living?”

Illya made no attempt to answer her.

He saw on a turn that Violet’s car had far outdistanced the other two — perhaps for two reasons: the men in the other cars didn’t take the insane chances Violet did on this unfamiliar mountain road, and the race for the moment was between those cars back there.

The third car was lunging and nipping at the one ahead of it, in a dogfight attempt to force it off the road at every hairpin curve.

“You wouldn’t want them to get you away from us,” Violet shouted at him, laughing. “Not really. Not the way you are. What do your people know of the injection you got — or even how to combat its effects?”

Illya had flopped against the side of the car, locking his chin over the door. He was able to watch the cars below them when they came out on plateaus or sharp turns.

He saw the four headlights blend until they were like one huge beam. He saw them waver and waltz crazily back and forth across the road. Once the inside pair seemed to climb a sheer mountain wall, and then fall back, leveling out only with painful slowness.

Then they came together down there again — the scream of metal was lost in the distance, but the spark and fire of metal friction was not. The cars seemed to lock, to sway back and forth from one side of the road to the other, hugged together, neither willing to back away. Each turn brought them closer to the brow of the cliff.

Violet slowed the car and he cut his eyes around, seeing a savage intentness in her face, a blood-lust in her eyes.

She seemed, with some kind of animal instinct, to sense the moment when it was going to happen. She allowed the convertible to slow almost to a crawl, her whole attention riveted on the battle between the cars below them.

It seemed to prolong itself interminably, but it was quickly over. The cars swung back and forth like one car on the narrow, twisting roadway, skirting its rim. Suddenly the wheels of the outside car peeled away the rocks and shale at the brink of an angular turn. The wheels skidded off the road. The car suddenly dropped and then went leaping outward into the darkness. The headlights appeared turned straight up for a split second, and then they fell away and there was only darkness.

Illya heard the savagery in Violet’s deep sigh, and after a moment she stepped hard on the gas.

The sun was metallic white when they lined up at the international border. Illya lay with his head on the seat rest, trying to force intelligible words from his mouth.

His attempts did not disturb Violet; in fact, they seemed to amuse her.

“My little bug just won’t stop fighting, will he?” she said.

They rolled up into customs. The American officer tipped his cap and asked if they’d mind getting out of the car.

Violet smiled sadly across Illya at the young officer.

“My brother can get out, sir, and he will if he must. But you’ll have to help him in and out.”

Illya struggled, his mouth stretching wide as he tried to speak one intelligible word. His mind was agonizingly clear, as bright as the sunlight, but the sounds he made were those of low-grade idiocy.

“It was a birth defect,” Violet told the customs man. “Brain damage, you know.”

“Yes. That’s too bad.” He called another officer and between them they lifted Illya from the car and set him on a chair just outside the office.

Violet stood chatting with the officers while they opened his luggage and hers, and while they inspected the passports she had. Bitterly he wondered about the one they had prepared for him. Name. Age. Cause of idiocy.

He stared at them, at the people going both ways across the border. He cried out, but it was a cawing sound and they glanced at him in shame-faced pity. No one liked to look at the mentally defective.

Breathing raggedly, Illya forced his body to bend forward at the hips until he fell off the chair. He struggled then, trying to crawl away. Couldn’t these people see now that something was wrong?

They came running.

“Poor guy! He fell right off the chair!”

“Don’t squirm around like that, fellow; we’ll get you up. Take it easy!”

“It’s all right.” Illya heard Violet’s calm voice. “He does this all the time.” She bent over him. “You’re a naughty boy.” She straightened. “That’s why we’re having to put him away finally — we don’t want to do it.”

They drove in silence northward up the rugged California coast. They stopped for the night in a sleek motel on Highway 101. By now, Illya saw they’d been joined by Edgar and company. He saw that the men were still shaken by the encounter with the U.N.C.L.E. men on the Mexican highway.

He watched Violet. She was completely unconcerned about the deaths. Death had no meaning for her. He gazed at her, thinking she would enjoy torturing and tormenting the helpless. She got a strange kick from seeing him squirm and his red-faced attempts to speak.

In the morning they loaded him in the convertible once more and Violet kept the Kharmann Ghia at top speed, going north again.

In the afternoon they left the coastal highway, climbing east into the mountain ranges. They sped through a small town of stucco buildings and palm-lined parkways. They continued to climb and a chill settled through the car.

At about four o’clock Violet brought the car to a halt before the tall iron-barred gate in a six-foot fieldstone fence.

Above the gate, in fussy wrought-iron, were the words: BROADMOOR REST.

The name stirred something inside Illya’s mind, troubling him, but he could not pin it down. He knew it to be a private sanitarium of some kind, created from the thousand-acre estate and chateau built by a lumber and mining millionaire in the early twenties. But it was not just that it was a sanitarium. There was something more, something that had turned up with a puzzling regularity in U.N.C.L.E. briefings.

He struggled with the thought, but it eluded him. The gates parted and Violet drove through, going along the twisting lane toward the vine-matted walls of the old stone castle. He could see its turrets and gables and bay windows. He couldn’t see the bars at those windows, but he knew they were there.

Three white-clad orderlies awaited them when Violet braked the car before the veranda. They stood on the steps that stretched thirty feet across, made of the same native stone as were the fence and the house.

The orderlies came off the wide steps and lined up beside the car. One of them glanced at Illya, then grinned at Violet. “Is this it?”

Violet laughed and nodded. “He’s all yours.

One of the orderlies said, “What are you doing tonight, baby?”

Violet tossed her red-gold head. “You’ll never know, simpleton. I can’t tolerate men who work for a salary. It makes peasants of them.”

She turned on her spike heels and tapped away, going up those stone steps and through the huge thick redwood door.

The orderlies reached for Illya. He struggled, fighting at them, but his arms only flailed wildly, and the noises he made were foolish, giggling sounds. He was in an agony of terror and outrage but he was unable to express anything except garbled idiocy.

VIII

Solo paused for a moment outside his room in the St. Francis Hotel. For no good reason, he felt the tightening inside that warned of danger. He shook the thought away and rapped three times, slowly. He listened for Barbry’s voice beyond the door. There was silence and Solo tensed, taking his key from his pocket.

The door was unlocked and opened as he reached for it. Solo scowled, saying, “I thought I told you—“

He stopped speaking, staring into the blandly smiling face of Samuel Su Yan.

“Come in; we’ve been waiting for you,” Su Yan said.

Solo’s hand moved toward the holster beneath his jacket, but stopped when he noted the small .25 caliber Spanish-made Astra pistol that Su Yan held.

“An experimental model, Solo,” Su Yan said, “but quite deadly.”

Solo sighed and stepped inside the room. Everything looked as it had when he had walked out of it, except that now Barbry Coast sat upon the foot of his bed, staring straight ahead of her, her features rigid, her gaze transfixed; she looked like a mannequin.

“Are you all right, Barbry?” Solo walked toward her, trying to ignore the snubbed nose of the Astra that was fixed on his spine.

Barbry turned her head slowly and stared at him blankly. It was as though she had never seen him before.

“Of course she’s all right,” Su Yan said from behind Solo. “Aren’t you all right, my dear?”

“I’m all right,” Barbry said in a flat, lifeless tone. Staring at her, Solo shivered involuntarily.

“We’ve been looking for Esther for a long time,” Su Yan said in a conversational tone. “I must thank you and your organization for locating her for us — and for leading us to her.”

“We have a pretty good organization for finding people who want to be lost,” Solo said. “Even those who have themselves declared officially dead.”

“Perhaps I no longer guarded my privacy so zealously,” Su Yan said. “You have a rich organization, underwritten as it is by so many nations with built-in missile age jitters. But it is not infallible. I proved this before — and I shall prove it again.”

“No. They’re on to you, Su Yan. They’ve got files on you, and pictures. You’re part of a regular briefing. I mention this only in case you think you can get away with murdering this girl — or both of us — and getting away with it. They have pictures tying you in with Ursula Baynes-Neefirth’s death in Honolulu. One more death will bring them down on you.”

Su Yan smiled mildly. “You fail to intimidate me, Solo. Your people know me. But my agents know you now, and your young associate Kuryakin. Perhaps the death in Honolulu attracted too much attention, just as a death here might — even one in no way involving me or my people. Besides, perhaps there is an angle you fail to consider. Perhaps we don’t need your death at the moment so much as we need you stopped. Our moment is at hand, Solo. Surely you must perceive this: I no longer remain among the ‘dead,’ all our operations are accelerated, we are making moves more openly, tucking in neatly all loose ends, such as this young woman. She’s not really important, merely a minor nuisance we’d rather not have running loose at this time. But in case you take some hope from this, let me tell you that your deaths — after our operation has been completed successfully — will in no way trouble us.”

Solo felt the tension all through his body, but he kept his voice unemotional. “We all die sometime. Perhaps Barbry and I feel some reassurance in the fact that we’re to be spared at all. Live one day at a time, eh, Barbry?” The girl continued staring straight ahead of her. She did not react when Solo spoke to her. Su Yan said, “I’m afraid if you want to speak to Esther, you’ll have to do it through me. She reacts only to my voice. Speaks only when I speak to her. Does only what I tell her.”

“Very neat hypnosis. But no better than I’ve seen done on night-club floors — and I don’t believe you worked it through that closed, locked door.”

Su Yan shrugged. “What you believe or disbelieve doesn’t interest me, Mr. Solo. I’m sure you’ve heard of post-hypnotic suggestion, and the fact that a subject once hypnotized can be easily put under a second, third or hundredth time — always with greater ease, if one makes maximum use of that post-hypnotic suggestion. Sometimes a word — one word.”

Solo glanced at the waxen-like face of the girl and exhaled heavily. “You simply told her to unlock the door to you, and she did it, just like that?”

“That’s correct, Solo. Just like that. As I told you. Everything is going my way now. Just like that. This girl won’t look at you, or react when you speak to her; she will do anything I tell her. She would shoot you, Solo, right now, if I told her to do it.”

Solo did not bother arguing that one with him.

“Would you like me to prove that she always obeys me?” He nodded toward the Scotch and bucket of ice on the dresser. “Esther. Mr. Solo and I are thirsty. The three of us have a long journey ahead of us tonight. Prepare the three of us Scotch on ice.”

“Yes.”

Barbry stood up slowly and walked woodenly to the dresser.

Su Yan’s voice clawed after her in its cat-like, tormenting way. “And by the way, Esther, when you speak to me, I’d like a little more respectful tone.”

“Yes, sir,” Barbry said.

Solo straightened and Su Yan heeled around, his instincts sharp, his reaction time extraordinary. Solo relaxed. He said, “This proves you’ve known Barbry for a long time.”

“Yes. I knew Esther for awhile even before Ursula started to work for my organization, didn’t I, Esther?”

Barbry paused, mixing drinks at the dresser. She tilted her head, facing them in the mirror, her violet eyes empty. “Yes, sir,” she said.

She returned to mixing the drinks. Su Yan smiled, pleased. He backed a couple of steps and sat down in a chair under a reading lamp. He reached up and snapped off its light.

Barbry turned from the dresser, carrying the iced drinks in hotel drinking glasses. She extended one to Solo, gazing at him but not even seeing him.

He took the drink from her and she turned mechanically, going to where Sam Su Yan reclined with the small gun resting on his lap.

Barbry then walked away from him and leaned against the dresser as if waiting for a new command from Su Yan.

Su Yan sipped at the Scotch, staring coldly at Barbry over the top of his glass. He said, “I saw you last at Cocoa Beach, didn’t I, Esther?’

“Yes, sir.” She trembled, reacting, even in her semiconscious state. Fear melted and ran through her body. She nodded.

“What did I tell you then, Esther?”

She didn’t speak for a moment. Then she said, “Not to try to run away again.”

“But you did it, didn’t you? First to Chicago, and then to San Francisco. Didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir.” Her voice was like that of a terrorized child. Solo stared at her, so fascinated by the extreme cruelty being practiced upon her by Su Yan that he sipped at his drink, hardly aware of its taste or the chill of the glass in his hand. Barbry had not lied: she did fear this man more than she did the devil. Her whole body was quivering with fear.

“I warned you what I’d do if you ran away, didn’t I, Esther?” Su Yan persisted.

“Yes, sir.” She could barely speak. Her face was the white of chalk dust.

“I told you that I would take you back to that place you hate if you disobeyed me again, didn’t I?”

The girl cried out, a guttural protesting sound. She was incoherent with fear, unable to speak even in her trance.

Enraged, Solo forgot that gun lying waiting in Su Yan’s lap. Blood throbbed at his temples. His head ached, and the pressure behind his eyes was fierce. He had not known he could hate anyone as he hated this man tormenting that helpless girl — or that his emotions could make his head feel as if it were bursting. Even the objects about the room appeared wavering and insubstantial.

“What are you? Who are you, tormenting her like this?” Solo demanded.

Su Yan flicked a casual glance toward him, not bothering to tilt the gun. His thick brows lifted as if he were surprised. “I thought you had my complete file, Solo. Your rich, far-reaching organization. I thought you knew. Do you begin to be afraid of me, Solo? Do you begin to think that perhaps I’m in another of your files? That maybe I’m Tixe Ylno?”

Solo’s head throbbed. He was aware of the pounding of his pulses, the frantic beat of his heart. He shook his head, forgetting caution or reason. He lunged toward the man in the chair. “No. I don’t think you’re Tixe Ylno. I think you’re a—”

He stopped speaking and stopped striding forward. He shook his head, trying to clear it, but he could not. He reached out wildly for support, but there was none. He saw Su Yan make a serpentine, graceful movement up from the chair, standing beside it, watching him.

He fought to keep his balance, but the room and the world were suddenly black dark. How? The question burned in his mind, and as everything else blanked out for him, the answer came bright and clear. Under previous orders from Su Yan, Barbry had dropped a knockout pellet into his Scotch — and Su Yan had kept him distracted while he drank it down. But in this warm darkness where he was, not even this answer mattered.