The Doomsday Affair

I

An instant before, she had been alive.

One moment she was laughing, so darkly lovely that she’d ignite a faraway look in any man’s eyes. Simply being in the same room with her could be an unnerving experience, yet she’d been anxious to unburden herself, frightened, troubled, wanting to get down to the serious business of a confidential talk with Solo on the subject of a mutual enemy.

“Let me get out of this lei and into something more comfortable,” was what she’d said. And then abruptly she was dead.

Napoleon Solo stood immobile, staring at the bewitching corpse without a face. He swallowed hard, thinking she was the loveliest corpse between where she lay on the pink shag rug — and eternity.

For this moment checkmated by shock, he caught a glimpse of himself in the pink mirror. Deceptively slender, no more than of medium height, he had the smart appearance of a young intern, a Madison Avenue account exec, a youthful professional man swinging his way through the fabled gay pads of the globe. He looked like anything except what he was: a diamond-hard, exhaustively trained enforcement agent for perhaps the most important secret service in the world, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

His smile was easy, distilled of genuine warmth and an inner glow of a healthy, finely honed body. His jacket and slacks were impeccably tailored with a Brooks Brothers quality, but the disarming cut concealed a strapped-down Berns-Martin shoulder holster housing its hidden U.N.C.L.E. Special, thirty-seven ounces of deadly weapon, including silencer.

Solo shook his head, stunned, even while a substantial fragment of his precision-trained intellect warned him that he could join her in eternity in the seconds it was costing him to recover from the horror and outrage of her murder. He’d encountered sudden death often, in his work with U.N.C.L.E., but this girl was so young, so lovely — and so abruptly mutilated.

He glanced at the gold face of his Accutron watch, mechanically noting the time. Time no longer had meaning for Ursula, but he still operated for an agency where time was forever of the essence.

A faint breeze faltered in hesitant curiosity in the pink window drapes. The fabric bent inward gently and then expired against the full-length windows as if the breeze had darted in terror back out to the sandy beach which lay like stained carpeting between the pink hotel and the incredible blue of the sea.

Solo broke the spell at last, stepped forward and bent down beside the dead girl.

He scraped his fingers over the rug, attempting to assemble the atoms of flower and string that had recently been a lei of ginger flowers tossed over Ursula’s head in a laughing Aloha at the Honolulu International Airport less than an hour ago.

Solo shook his head again, refusing to accept it. Murder from a lei?

He scowled. Aloha meant both hello and goodbye. Hail and farewell. So long, Ursula. She’d reached up with those golden arms to remove the lei over her head and the mechanism concealed in the bright ginger flowers had blown her face away. There had not even been time for her to cry out, or for Solo to reach her from across the pink bed.

Solo straightened up, shaking off the horror of her sudden and brutal death. It was as if someone compounded of evil had searched diligently to find the most heartless manner of death for lovely Ursula Baynes-Neefirth. She was vain about that classic perfection of her delicately hewn face. Blow it away, then. They’ll seal her casket and sew her in a shroud.

He warned himself for the last time that emotionalism in his job was taboo because it softened him, strangled his thought processes, rendering him ineffective to his profession and to himself.

In the next instant, Solo began to move efficiently, as if unaware of the corpse on the pink carpeting.

From his attaché case he drew a small chrome, plastic and metal rectangle that fit snugly in his palm. From an upper edge he pulled two thread-like antennae that trembled reed-like in the scented breeze in from the banyan park.

He pressed a button on the sender set, blew into the golden netted speaker, waited a moment and then spoke slowly, enunciating clearly: “Bubba. This is Sonny. Acknowledge. Mayday. Acknowledge, please.”

He pressed a second button and stood staring, his eyes fixed on the beach without seeing it Waikiki was loud with laughter, bright with bikinis, busy with surfboards and children building castles in the sand. The sea lay milk-blue with the sun shimmering on it.

And in the midst of all this pleasure he was concerned with death.

Death and failure. Ursula’s death. His own failure. More than a lovely girl had blown up when that ginger lei had exploded.

From where does death always strike? From the most innocent-appearing sources of all. A lei of ginger flowers had erupted in violent murder and his chance to find Tixe Ylno had gone in that sudden flash of time.

He grimaced. You got in a place like this, a pink resort hotel in an unreal Pacific vacationland, and you relaxed. And death struck. And failure. It was over, and months of intensive preparation were fragmented like the petals of those ginger flowers.

“Sonny. This is Bubba. Acknowledging. Over.” It was Illya’s voice, and he felt a sense of relief.

The small sender-receiver in his hand crackled and then was still. Solo prowled the room, counting, and then he crossed to the corridor door, listened a moment and opened it.

Illya Kuryakin grinned at him from beneath a thatch of golden hair. A slender Slavic type, his enigmatic smiling hid all his emotions and thoughts. Congenitally a loner, he was clever and physically adept; Solo had learned that Illya was a good man to have at his side in a tight spot. It was easy to think that Illya was like a machine, computing danger and finding solutions for it, fashioned for this specific purpose. Sometimes nothing seemed to exist for him but the task assigned to him. Of Russian origin, Illya had worked behind the Iron Curtain — sometimes with the knowledge and consent of the authorities, and, when necessary, without it. He’d trained himself to move fast and never to look back because he’d learned the unpleasant way that the devil takes the man who is caught.

At the moment, Illya wore the smartly crisp uniform of a hotel bellhop, and for all the expression in his high-planed face he might well have had no interest in this world except the size of his anticipated tip.

He said, “You mentioned Mayday.

Solo spoke flatly: “She’s dead.”

Illya pushed by him, entering the room. He stood for a full second staring at the lovely body, the faceless corpse. He shook his head. “A lei,” Solo said.

“What?” Kuryakin spun on his heel.

“She was pulling it over her head. Some kind of mechanism. It blew to bits, along with everything else. It was like a Chinese firecracker, then there was this blast of air — the vacuum. It was all over before I could move.”

Illya straightened. “Who sold her the lei?”

Solo frowned, remembering. “No one sold it to her. It was thrown over her head. A lot of laughter from a well-wisher. I heard that much.”

“Who put it over her head?”

Solo removed a cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it so the fire flared.

He extended the lighter to Illya. “She’s on here, whoever it was. The moment I heard that well-wishing, no-charge bit, I lit a cigarette and snapped her picture. You might want to print them; you’re on the roll, in all your bellhop glory.”

Illya nodded, took three small black plastic cups from Solo’s attaché bag. He tore open foil sacks of powder developer and setting chemical, added water from the bathroom tap in the three cups.

He broke open the cigarette-lighter camera and inserted the protected film roll into the first cup. The protective skin over the film dissolved on contact with the liquid.

Working, Illya spoke over his shoulder, “What did you learn from her?”

Solo shook his head. “Nothing. She was scared.”

“We already knew that.”

“I tried to get her to relax.”

“Three months,” Illya said. “Shot.”

“Never mind beating me over the head with it.”

“I’m not blaming you.”

“Maybe I’m blaming myself.”

“She was a spy. She was trying to quit Thrush. She must have known better. Why should she think she could make it?”

“I promised her.”

“Nobody’s perfect.”

“Whoever planned to kill her had it arranged well in advance—”

“That’s for sure. No one knew she was meeting you here except the two of us, Waverly, and the man from the President’s staff.”

“Somebody knew it.”

Solo prowled the room, turning this over in his mind. Kuryakin continued working and none of what he must have been thinking showed in his flat, impassive face.

“Somebody knew where Ursula was going to be, and where, when and how to bypass her fears, her instinct for preservation, her caution — and mine!” Solo spread his hands. “It takes its own kind of intellect to come up with a scheme so simple, and so foolproof.”

Abruptly Solo stopped talking and strode across the room to the baggage rack where the single beige Samsonite weekender bag had rested since the bellhop placed it there when he came into this room with Ursula. The clatter of their relaxed voices still clamored in his brain.

He reached for the bag and withdrew his hands at the precise instant Illya spoke warningly from the bathroom door: “Watch it!”

They stared at each other and Solo gave Illya a somber caricature of a smile.

“You’re all systems go again,” Kuryakin assured him with a faint grin.

Solo strode to his attaché case, returned with a handheld explosive detector. He ran it across the case, along its sides. Gently he turned the weekender over and repeated the process without getting a reaction from the minute needle.

He tossed the detector to Illya, who returned it casually to the attaché case.

Solo released the catches and opened the case. He stared into it, not speaking. After a moment he was aware of Illya beside him, as speechless.

Inside the suitcase were two objects; otherwise it was bare. There was a letter addressed to Ursula Neefirth, King’s Hotel, Nassau, Bahamas. There was no return address, but the cancellation showed San Francisco, 2 P.M., July 12. Beside the letter, carefully coiled, was a silver whip that glittered when it caught the errant rays of the sun.

Solo opened the envelope, removed the single sheet of cheap typing paper. He unfolded it and held it so that both he and Illya could scan it.

“Meaningless,” Illya said.

“If it’s a code, it’s their own private make,” Solo said.

“The whip?” Illya said. “Does this register?”

Solo frowned, aware of the tail-end of a thought flashing through the deep crannies of his mind, darting, but landing nowhere. There was a meaning to the whip, something that had been revealed to them in the briefing on Ursula Baynes-Neefirth at the New York headquarters of U.N.C.L.E.

“It’ll come to me,” he said coldly. “It’s got to.”

Illya glanced at his watch. “Meantime, it’s been thirty minutes up here.”

“All right.”

Solo loosened his tie, unbuttoned his shirt and, in the same downward movement, unbuckled his belt, unzippered his trousers and stepped out of them.

At the same time, Illya was removing his bellhop’s uniform. They exchanged clothing with maximum speed and efficiency.

Illya checked his watch again. “When you’ve been out of here for five minutes, I’ll call the police and notify the desk — before I walk out…And don’t forget to use the service elevator, will you?”

Solo donned the bellhop uniform. With the trousers on, he crossed the room, returning from the bathroom with the strip of developed film. Drying it beneath the light for a moment, he held the strip under a magnifying glass, scanning along it.

“There she is,” he said. “Looks like a Chinese doll, doesn’t she? A real little death doll.”

II

Even in the flesh, the flower girl looked like a doll.

Solo found her in the terminal building at the Honolulu Airport.

He moved through the crowds, thinking how easy it had been. The only delay had been in changing from the bellhop uniform into jacket and slacks in the men’s room at Kapiolani Park. Carrying his attaché case, he had returned to his rented Chevy and crossed town, going directly out to the airfield.

The look of her was the sharpest image in his mind.

And suddenly he had seen her, exactly as if she had stepped from the snapshot.

He paused a moment, and then strode toward her. There were other girls around her, all colorfully dressed in muumuus or draped in holukus, brightly printed with flowers. But the Chinese girl stood out from them as if she were alone.

She wasn’t quite five feet tall but her figure and everything else about her was perfect: the delicate China skin, the black hair worn straight, starched and ironed almost to her shoulders. She looked as though if you turned a key in her back she’d say, “mama” or “daddy”.

He sidled through laughing groups, delightfully working his eyes back and forth over her, finding her more elegant than the gay strings of leis on her arm.

And then he remembered the lei she’d thrown over Ursula’s head, and some of the beauty of her faded.

The impact of his unwavering gaze somehow communicated itself to the Chinese doll.

Solo saw her head jerk up, her almond eyes, black and frightened suddenly, recognizing him. Fear seeped down from her eyes and her lips parted.

She shook her head.

Solo walked faster.

She turned, looking around like a small, trapped animal. Then she brought her gaze back to Solo’s face.

She looked ill. She reached out futilely toward the girl nearest her, then changed her mind and did not speak to her after all. Instead, she dropped the leis from her arm, pushed between the girls in front of her and ran toward the exits.

The girls turned, chattering like mynah birds, calling after her, some of them laughing.

Solo changed his course, tacking hard right toward the doors and the street.

“Look where you’re going, young man!”

A stout woman had caught his arm and was shaking it with vigorous disapproval.

Far ahead, he saw the girl’s darting run. She went racing past startled people. He tried to follow her with his eyes, but then he had to bring his attention back to the woman who was shaking him, and to the women around them. There were a dozen of them, none under sixty, all being shepherded by a uniformed island guide.

Solo apologized, trying to push his way through them. They all wore leis, carried straw plunder bags and wore comfortable shoes. Clearly they were on an all-expense tour straight from the Midwest.

“I beg your pardon,” Solo said, trying to look at the woman grasping his arm and yet not lose sight of the girl who flitted like a sparrow in the sun beyond the doors. “I’m sorry.”

“What’s your hurry, young man? Why don’t you look where you’re going?” the woman said.

“Make him stay after school, Esther!” one of the other women laughed.

Reminded that she was not in the corridors of her school, the large woman released Solo’s arm, flushing slightly. She said again, “You should look where you’re going.”

Solo nodded, trying to step through them and the confusion they created. They milled around him and the bronze-skinned guide like sheep, all bleating at once.

He managed to reach the brink of the flock and he backed away, still nodding, but headed toward the street exits again.

“Look out!”

The woman and her French poodle yelped at the same instant. Solo stopped cold, turning.

She was as tall as Solo in her spike heels. She was metallically sleek from her stockings to her hat, as if her beauty were something anodized upon some long-submerged framework.

He found himself startled because she was all in pink, and the carefully trimmed poodle was dyed a matching pink. The color brought back the room in the hotel at Waikiki, and the dead girl.

He stepped around the pink, yapping dog, aware that the herd of women was milling around, bleating toward him again.

He ran for the doors. He went through them, but the delay had given the China doll all the time she needed to elude him.

He stopped on the sun-bright walk, looking around. Cars were lined in the parking area. He brought his gaze back to the walk. The girl was gone. He had lost her.

Solo stood unmoving for a moment. The sharp pop of a starting motorcycle snagged his attention and he heeled around toward it.

The cycle missed, caught, and smoke flared. The cycle raced out from between two cars, coming directly toward Solo and the exit of the airport.

Solo stepped forward, seeing the bright muumuu of the China doll behind the cycle operator. The boy wore a gaudy purple and yellow shirt and skin tight pants. His thick black hair was cropped close to his skull. His ancestry was a wild mixture of Hawaiian, Chinese, Polynesian. He was stocky, keg-chested, shoulders bunched with muscles, a bull neck, thick lips, a flat wide nose, black eyes under thick brows, a narrow forehead.

The girl clung to the boy, both her arms locked around his stout midriff.

Solo moved out, trying to slow them down. He saw the boy lower his head, feeding gas to the machine. It popped loudly and raced past him.

Solo leaped back to the curb.

He wasted no time trying to figure their direction. The flower girl and her beach boy had only one idea, getting out of here.

Solo ran to the rented car and leaped into it.

He came out on the road and far ahead of him he saw the motorcycle swing out on Dillingham Boulevard without slowing down. The screech of brakes, the protesting clatter of horns struck at him.

He settled down to the business of driving and attempting to keep the reckless cyclist in sight. The small vehicle bounced along the inside lane, cut in between speeding cars. They passed the Oahu prison and sped across the Kapalama drainage canal into downtown Honolulu.

Brakes screeched as the cycle went left off Dillingham onto narrow Robello Street. Solo pulled over, slowed and made the turn. He was just in time to see the two make another left on busy King Street, again without stopping or slowing down.

He was forced to stop at the intersection of King. The cyclists went right on Banyan Street off King, going into the Palama Settlement. Solo followed as swiftly as he could.

The beach boy whipped his cycle right on Vineyard and right again on River Street, going to Beretania.

Solo turned out onto Beretania, watching the cycle ahead through the traffic. He saw them slow down. He had figured they were attempting to shake him, but he felt now they had some destination in mind, a place where they could ditch the cycle and lose him at the same time.

The boy swung his cycle right on Aala, but was forced to straighten out, blocked by a Chinese dragon dance, loud with fireworks.

The cycle rolled uncertainly now, the boy jerking his head, looking both ways. The girl stared across her shoulder. They flicked between moving cars, forced back to King Street. Here the boy made a hard right turn into the intersection at Hotel Street and poured the gas to it. Solo kept after them, fighting through the afternoon traffic of downtown Honolulu until it ended at Thomas Square.

The boy turned to King Street and then left again to Kalakau Boulevard, going toward Diamond Head. He sped past Fort De Russy, now in the Waikiki beach area, passing the high rise hotels, the Royal Hawaiian, the Outrigger, going left at Kapiolani Park on Kapahulu Avenue, doubling back toward King Street.

Solo stayed in pursuit, realizing that since the beach boy and the flower girl had been forced out of Aala, they were now trying to lose him. Only the brightness of their garb and the flitting of the cycle through the cars kept him on their trail.

The boy went left again on King Street, racing toward downtown Honolulu. Solo stepped harder on the gas.

A traffic signal caught the cyclists at Ntiuanu Avenue. The boy sat a moment, bracing his leg on the pavement, both he and the girl staring across their shoulders. Suddenly the boy said something to the girl and then he whipped the cycle right against the light, pedestrians leaping to safety, yelling in shock and rage.

Solo followed, seeing the gaudy-hued pair far ahead. The cycle climbed, made a turn on Pacific Heights road. Solo was forced to slow down on the narrow, twisting street, but the beach boy saw the curves as a challenge. The road curved back to Nuuanu Avenue, and again the cycle whipped right, running scared and going inland. They went past Iolani School, the Royal museum, climbing past the Country Club golf course toward the high ranges and Nuuanu Pali Pass.

Solo glanced at his speedometer, seeing that he was doing sixty. Hillside homes and wide-spreading banyans whipped past him on the wind. On the outskirts of town he could gain on the cycle.

He stepped harder on the gas, pulling alongside the cycle. The boy and the girl stared at him for a moment, the boy’s dark face pulled in a wind-smashed grimace, the girl showing only fear.

“Talk!” Solo shouted across his car toward them. The car shivered on the road. “Only want to talk!”

The beach boy slowed the cycle. Exhaling, Solo took his foot off the accelerator, letting the car slow. When the car was down to thirty miles an hour, the boy suddenly spurted forward on the road, going faster than ever.

Swearing, Solo stepped down on the gas.

The narrow road seemed to whirl upward through the green ranges — hairpin turns, broken-back curves. Cars headed makai, south toward the ocean, swerved, their horns crying out in anguished protest.

Solo pulled the car close behind the cyclist, blowing his horn at them.

The girl turned, gazing at him across her shoulder, her face set, her hair wild in the wind.

Solo shook his head, motioning her to pull the cycle over. When the boy turned, Solo waved his arm toward the roadway shoulder. The boys face rutted into a savage laugh that refused. He shook his head, then jerked his gaze around.

It all happened at once. A car came down the road, around a curve. The boy had allowed the cycle to wander toward the middle line; now he wrenched it hard to the right as he negotiated a wide curve that brought them out on the narrow plateau of Nuuanu Pali Pass.

Solo caught his breath, seeing what had to happen, even before the cycle’s front wheels struck the shale, volcanic rock on the roadway shoulder.

The cycle quivered, going out of control. The boy fought it, and the rear wheel bounced far out off the pavement. The boy pulled the cycle around hard. The front tire struck a pothole. The cycle bounded upward, striking against the concrete wall and going over it. Tourists in the parking area turned, screaming.

Solo slammed on his brakes. There was no sound as the cycle wheeled and skidded, going over and over down the sheer embankment toward the serene volcanic valley over a thousand feet below.

Solo let the car roll until the gas-starved engine shook, gasping. Then he stepped hard on the gas, going around the curve and down the winding road toward the far side of the island.

III

Illya replaced the pink phone gently in its cradle, cutting off the incredulous voice of the desk clerk.

He stood one more moment then, looking about this room, but not allowing his gaze to touch the corpse of the lovely spy. A breeze riffled the curtains, touched at his face. He tilted his head, seeing the sun-struck beach, the incredibly blue water and the buffalo-bulk of Diamond Head up the coast.

He shrugged the jacket up on his shoulders then and strode across the room to the corridor door. He took a deep breath, opened it and stepped out into the hallway.

“I beg your pardon.” A man’s voice, cat-soft, Orientally accented, stopped Illya.

He turned slowly, scowling because the man seemed to have materialized from the walls. A moment earlier the pink-toned hallway had appeared deserted.

For a brief moment they exchanged stares and Illya saw the shocked puzzlement revealed in the other’s face — a look quickly replaced by a flat smile.

Kuryakin peered at the man’s bland smile in the saffron-tinged face. Tall, with the lean rangy body one associated with a Texan slimmed down from hard work and meager diet, pigeon-chested, knobby shouldered, the man’s narrow head had the mongrel features of a Eurasian. Thinning black hair, high forehead, bushy brows, large nose, thin-lipped mouth, his cheeks high-planed and his inscrutably black eyes tight-lidded, Oriental. He wore a brightly colored shirt, gray slacks, hand-woven sandals and he carried a heavy cane.

Kuryakin shook his head; this wasn’t an individual at all, but rather a casual assembly of mismatched parts. He turned and moved toward the elevator.

“I beg your pardon,” the man said again.

Kuryakin gestured. “Sorry. No speak English.”

“Quite all right,” said the cat-purr voice. “I speak six languages fluently, many dialects.”

Illya shook his head again. “Sorry. I don’t understand.”

The taut-skinned yellow face stopped smiling. “You understand death, don’t you?”

Kuryakin stared at the long, glittering blade suddenly ejected from the tapered end of the cane. The man brought it up quickly and rested its needle point lightly above Illya’s buckle.

Kuryakin bit his lip. “Death I understand.”

The blade remained where it was, unwavering in the bony hand. “I need to talk with you, sir.”

“I’m in something of a hurry.”

“Shall we talk there — in your room?”

“My room?” Illya glanced toward the closed door of the room where Ursula’s body lay awaiting the arrival of hotel management and the Honolulu police. “There’s some mistake. This isn’t my room.”

He saw that faint uncertainty in the man’s lean face, as if Illya was not the one he’d expected to find here.

The doubt was transient, quickly gone. The blade inched into the fabric of Illya’s shirt.

“Inside the room, sir.”

“I don’t even have the key.”

The man stared at him a moment, produced a key ring, shook one out. Still holding the blade fixed on Kuryakin, he inserted the key, unlocked the door and swung it open.

“After you, sir,” he said.

“If you must talk, couldn’t we go somewhere for a drink?” Illya asked.

“Inside the room,” the man said. He touched at him with the blade.

Illya bowed and preceded the tall man into the room. They did not speak, both of them gazing fixedly at the lovely corpse.

Illya, looking up, felt he glimpsed the faintest tug of satisfaction about the thin lips.

“Friend of yours?”

Illya shrugged. “She just came in to use the phone.”

“Surely not in that condition.”

“Who are you?”

“You may call me Sam for the little while we will be in contact.”

“What do you want?”

“Must I want anything?”

“Obviously you do, Sam.”

“Perhaps I already have what I want.”

Illya nodded. “Then you’ll excuse me if I leave, since I am in a hurry.”

As he spoke he began to move toward the door. The tall man took one long step and brought up the dagger-like blade, touching its glittering point at Illya’s Adam’s apple.

“I insist you stay.”

“You underline your invitations so tellingly.”

Illya stepped back toward the center of the room and the blade relaxed. Illya said, “You mind if I smoke? It’s permitted even before a firing squad.”

Sam shrugged. “‘Where do you get the impression that I am less than friendly toward you? Smoke, by all means.”

Illya shook out a cigarette, faced the tall man and flicked his lighter, wondering if he would ever get an opportunity to develop this film.

He glanced around, seeing the Scotch on a table.

“Would you like a drink?”

Sam seemed to be listening for something, but he nodded, his smile bland. “Please.”

Illya poured Scotch over ice cubes in two glasses. He saw Sam was watching him carefully, but when he returned his lighter to his jacket pocket, he brought out a small white pill between his fingers. He passed his hand over his own glass, lifting the other and extending it toward the watchful Sam.

Sam shook his head. “I’ll let you drink this one. I’ll take the other.”

Illya frowned. “But—”

“My dear young fellow. I don’t know whom you think you’re dealing with here. If you hope to outwit me, don’t do it so clumsily.”

“But—”

“Oh, I know. You snapped my picture with the Japanese-made camera-cigarette lighter. I would object, but I don’t think it matters — where you’re going.”

“Do you mind giving me some hint as to where this might be?”

“And then you attempt to confuse me by heavy-handed legerdemain. The hand is quicker than the eye, eh? We love it that Americans and Russians oppose us in league with each other — the stupid unsubtle Americans and the heavy-handed Russians. You drop something in this glass and then permit me to see you apparently doctor the glass from which you will drink. Not even very clever, my heavy-handed friend.”

“If you say so.”

The black eyes smiled now, in cold assurance. “You will drink down the glass you hold out now for me. Drink it down. How do you say in the States — chug-a-lug?”

“Cheers.”

Illya held the glass of Scotch to his lips, hesitated just that fraction of an instant that would be dramatic and yet not overdone. He drank the liquid off, holding his breath.

As Illya drank, Sam smilingly took up the other glass and held it to the sunlight. Satisfied that it was free of sediment or any other contamination, he sipped at it, watching Kuryakin with ill-concealed triumph.

A heavy knock on the door stiffened both of them to alert attention.

Sam finished off the Scotch, set the glass down on the table. “For your hospitality, thank you.”

“It was my pleasure.’

“You will wait until I am on the balcony and have closed the doors. You will then admit your guests.”

“We’re eight stories up—”

“Do as I say.”

Illya shrugged and waited until the tall man crossed the room, retracting the blade of the dagger into the cane as he went. He stepped out on the balcony as the knocking grew louder and more impatient. He closed the doors and Illya saw his lean shadow through the fragile pink curtains.

He said, “All right. I’m coming.”

The knocking was repeated, louder this time.

He opened the door, seeing across its threshold the troubled face of the hotel manager and the chilled face of two men he supposed to be Honolulu homicide detectives.

They entered the room and then the three of them paused, staring down at the dead girl on the pink shag rug.

“How did this happen?” The hotel manager whispered it, sick.

“I don’t know,” Illya said. “I was not in the room.”

“Who is she?”

“I do not know. I got in the room by mistake. The wrong room. I found her here.” He hesitated, glanced toward the balcony, and added, “There was a man with her. A tall, Oriental-looking fellow.”

One of the detectives, slender and mahogany dark, said, “And where is this man now?”

Illya inclined his head toward the balcony. “He went out there when he heard you knock.”

The detective jerked his head toward the balcony. His fellow, a stout man in his thirties, his temples flecked with gray, strode across the room. “He’s armed,” Illya said mildly.

The detective paused at the door, removed a snub-nosed .38 police revolver from his belt holster. He turned the knobs, threw open the doors.

The balcony was bare.

“Very amusing,” the detective said at Illya’s shoulder.

“I didn’t think he’d hang around out there,” Illya said.

“We are on the eighth floor,” the detective reminded him.

“That’s what I told him,” Illya said.

“Oh?”

“Yes. He didn’t seem unduly impressed.”

The detective did not smile. “Neither am I,” he said.

“I was afraid that would be your attitude.”

“I better warn you. Anything you say may be used a against you.”

Illya shrugged. “I have just one thing to say.”

“Yes?”

“Have you ever had those days when nothing seemed to go right?”

IV

Solo walked slowly in the mid-morning heat reflected from the red-brick streets around the train station, College Park. He felt as if he were moving through an unfiltered nightmare where nothing went right and even the buildings seemed to waver rubber-like when he looked at them.

He’d been prowling for a long time. It had taken much indirect questioning to learn the names of the two young people who’d blasted over the bluff at Pall Pass.

“Polly Jade Ing,” they told him. “She was the girl who sold leis. Kaina Tamashiro worked as beach boy at Waikiki. They planned to marry.”

Beyond this, there was little he could learn. It consumed two hours to learn that Polly Jade Ing’s parents had returned to China six months earlier. She had lived over a tailor shop near the carnival park, on River Street. Her room revealed nothing to him except that she was a casual housekeeper who wrote no letters and kept none if she received any. She had a weakness for flashily colored spiked-heel slippers, shifts, and seemed unable to find a satisfactory hair lacquer. A dozen different brands lined her cluttered dresser.

The Honolulu Star listed Kaina Tamashiro’s address as only Aala Street. Solo had asked at a dozen houses, but the dark eyed people stared at him and shook their heads. Most of them did not even speak.

Solo sighed, walking in the sun. He no longer believed that either Kaina Tamashiro or the pretty Polly Jade were any more than pawns in the deadly game that had caused Ursula’s death. But he had to keep pushing it now because they were the only link to whoever had hired Polly Jade to deliver the lethal lei at the airport. And Polly Jade had known there was something wrong with the deal; that was fear he had seen in her face, fear that had made her run, fear that had sent her to her death. Clearly she had been hired by a more devious employer than the Honolulu Chamber of Commerce. The lei had been deadly, and Polly Jade had known this when she had tossed it over Ursula’s head — obviously she’d even known that only the upward pull on the lei would detonate it.

What else Polly had known he’d never be able to learn. But perhaps the beach boy might be involved — he had run, too, and had seemed to know why he was running. Anyhow it was a lane he had to follow all the way because he had no leads except a silver whip — and a letter of meaningless jargon.

Solo was near the shabby depot of the small-gauge railway when he first noticed the young boy. The child was the color of beer in the sun, about nine. He wore a flowered shirt, brown shorts. He was barefooted. Each time Solo glanced over his shoulder, the boy was somewhere near him.

He glanced at the small train pulling out of the station, windows open. Across the street the military had posted “‘Off Limit” signs. There were small stores, paint-peeled houses and narrow alleys.

Solo felt someone tug at his shirt. “Mister.”

Solo was not too astonished to see it was the boy, staring up at him with round, black eyes.

“Mister, you looking for something?”

Solo nodded. “A beach boy who’s supposed to live around here.”

“I know most everyone who lives around Aala Street, Mister.”

Solo said, “You know Kaina Tamashiro?”

“Oh.”

“Why do you say that?”

“He is dead, mister.”

“I know that. He lived around here, didn’t he?”

“I know where he lived.”

Solo flipped the child a fifty cent piece, tossing it so it fell into the boy’s shirt pocket. The boy grinned admiringly.

“Can you take me where he lived?” Solo asked.

The boy removed the coin from his pocket, clutching it tightly in his fist. “All right.”

He motioned Solo to follow, and ran across the street. A car wailed at him.

The boy waited at the mouth of a debris littered alley until Solo crossed the street and stepped up on the walk, then he moved away into the narrow passageway.

Solo glanced both ways and followed.

Cats slithered between cans and barrels of refuse. Rear windows opened on the alley and voices came from those windows, along with the smells of cooking, of rancid foods.

Solo watched the boy run cat-like ahead of him. As he walked deeper into the alley a strange quietness seemed to envelop him, and to move along with him. There was tension in the silence, watchful and waiting.

A cat screeched behind him and Solo glanced over his shoulder. Two men had entered the alley behind him. One of them had stepped on a cat’s tail. Solo saw that they looked young, about the age of the dead Kaina Tamashiro. They even resembled him in flesh color and body size, as well as the casual and gaudy garb affected by the surfers and the beach boys.

He would not have been certain they were following him except that they tried to hide when he turned.

Solo exhaled heavily, looking again for the child ahead of him. The boy waited impatiently where the alley intersected with another, even less prepossessing.

“How much further, boy?’

Something in his tone diluted the last ounce of the boy’s courage. The child gazed at Solo for one moment, then heeled and ran along the side alley.

Two more brightly garbed beach boys stepped from the alleyways, blocking Solo’s path.

Behind him, Solo heard the other two running toward him.

Solo moved to the wall and put his back to it. His face set, he watched the four youthful men advance upon him.

They began to talk to him, their voices flat and cold, not waiting for him to answer, not wanting him to.

“What you doing down here?”

“You looking for Kaina, huh?”

“Kaina’s not down here.”

“Not any more. Kaina’s dead.”

“You know he’s dead?”

“You know Polly’s dead?”

“You some kind of cop?”

“He’s a cop.”

“He’s down here looking for Kaina. But he knows he won’t find Kaina, huh? You know that? You know he’s dead, huh?”

“He knows they’re dead.”

“You killed Kaina, didn’t you?”

“You killed him.”

They had crowded in upon him now. The two immediately in front were the only ones able to get directly at him. The others were hampered by the refuse barrels on each side of him.

It happened quickly. The two boys before him pulled out switch-blade knives, flicked out the blades.

Solo was forced to give them his entire attention. The gun in his holster seemed to press against his ribs, reminding him it was there to equalize the odds. But he did not touch it for the moment. Polly and Kaina had been mixed up in something evil, but these boys were Kaina’s friends, saddened and enraged by his death, and they were boys. There had been killing enough if he could escape without it. The odds didn’t make it seem likely.

One boy on each side of Solo grabbed a refuse barrel and upset it in the alley, rolling it toward him as the two knife wielders sprang at him.

Solo saw the glint of knife blades, the gleam of teeth bared in rage, black eyes wild with hatred.

As the barrels reached him, he lunged upward, going to his left over one and using its forward motion to propel himself hard against the first armed thug.

He heard the boy cry out and try to straighten. Solo chopped down, feeling the side of his hand contact across the boy’s neck. The boy sprawled face down across the rolling barrel and Solo was free beyond him. The three remaining attackers were for the moment caught in a confusion of their own making.

As the nearest knife-carrier whipped around and sprang at Solo, Solo shook free of his jacket, snagging it by the collar as it crumpled almost to the ground.

He brought it upward, feeling the tug as the knife was thrust into it. Solo jerked the coat past him, carrying the boy with it. With his free hand Solo clipped the falling boy in the throat and at the same instant released his jacket. The boy fell gasping and writhing three feet beyond him in the alley.

The last two boys hesitated one moment, glancing at each other, their dark faces troubled. The second knifer jerked his head forward and they leaped upon Solo at the same time, the unarmed youth striking high and the other crouching to rip upward with his switchblade. Solo felt the fierce impact of the two stocky boys and he gave with it, going against the wall again. Another barrel was overturned; another cat howled. Otherwise the alley silence remained unbroken.

The unarmed boy tackled Solo about the shoulders, trying to pin his arms to his side. Solo could hear his heavy breathing.

Solo let the boy clutch him with both arms, still retreating. As he toppled back, he caught the youth with his fingers thrust deeply into his nostrils. He thrust upward, hard, and the boy screamed, releasing his grip.

Still holding him helpless with his fingers in his nostrils, Solo caught his collar and slammed him down on the crouching knifer. Both of them went down, but the knifer was still scrambling forward, and Solo felt the slicing of the knife along his trousers.

From behind him, the other boy had gotten to his feet, still gagging and unable to catch a full breath. He swung wildly with his knife and Solo snagged his wrist, jerking him forward off his feet. He chopped him across the neck, letting him fall into the tangle of bodies and arms and legs and alley refuse.

Solo retreated again, but the second knifer had leaped free, tackling Solo at the ankles. Solo saw the alley springing upward toward him. As he struck, the other two boys turned and leaped upon him. Beat across the face, Solo sagged against the wall, momentarily stunned.

They swarmed over him, taking advantage of this momentary edge. Solo saw the bright gleam of switchblades, silver in the alley light. Silver. The silver whip. Why would he be thinking about a thing like that in a moment like this? A knife sliced at his shirt, scratching at his flesh. He used his knee to checkmate that knifer and saw him fall away, heard the clatter of the knife on the ground. His extended fingers sank into the solar plexus of the next boy, pressing him downward, relieved him of his weight, and he locked the fingers of both hands, catching them under the chin of the last one, knowing that in his rage he might decapitate him as he hurled him backwards. But he was not really thinking about the four boys, or this alley, or their knives. He was thinking about that silver whip he’d seen in Ursula’s suitcase, and even as the knife point made another swipe at him, he was grinning coldly because suddenly he remembered where he had seen that silver whip before…

V

Illya Kuryakin prowled the cell in the Honolulu jail. Outside his cell, the detective lieutenant who had arrested him sat relaxed in a cane-bottomed straight chair.

“You will make it easier on all of us to talk,” he said.

Illya sighed. “I have told you for three hours straight, I have nothing to say.”

“You will beg to talk before I am through with you.”

“Perhaps I will. But I am not begging yet.”

“Listen.” The slender man leaned forward, speaking in a conciliatory and confidential tone. “I am Lieutenant Yakato Guerrero. Perhaps you have heard of me.”

“I am afraid not.”

“If you had been long in Honolulu, you would have heard of me. My record as a police detective is without flaw. I did not get my promotion through any influence, only because of my record. I have no blemishes. Each case I have been assigned to, I have completed most successfully.”

“Very commendable.”

“Yes. It is. On this island, people know Lieutenant Yakato Guerrero. The law-abiding feel safer because of me. The criminal hopes I will not set myself on his trail, because I end my cases in only one way—”

“I know. Most successfully. Perhaps you will succeed with the death of that girl, but not by sitting there harassing me. You’re barking up the wrong red herring. I told you. I know nothing of her death.”

“You will talk to me of it before I am through. I am a patient man and I do not anticipate you to spoil my record that has no blemish.”

“Consider me as a nothing, as an innocent bystander caught in this situation. Let me be neither a triumph nor loss to you.”

Guerrero pushed back in his chair and did not speak. For some time there was silence between them, and Illya began to see that Guerrero had not lied. The police lieutenant was a patient man, with an Oriental patience in which time hung suspended, without meaning.

Illya drew his hand across his mouth, knowing that time was not suspended for him. Sam — the mismatched, ugly Eurasian — was incontestably a link in the Tixe Ylno matter, the affair that had seemed blown apart with the death of the beautiful defecting spy.

Finally, as if he had been continuing an unbroken dialogue, the police lieutenant said, “Who are you?”

“I told you. I am George Yorkvitz, a bellhop at the hotel.”

“Who are you really?”

“Oh, come on now, Guerrero. You must have more to do than this! The hotel manager recognized me. I didn’t even ask him. He looked at me, and told you himself that I was employed at the hotel.”

“But he could not tell us what you were doing up there. Only you can tell us this. And this is what you will tell me.”

“I told you. I was called up there.”

The dark face twisted into a pained smile. “By the dead girl, I suppose?”

“No. I never talked to her. Someone called me. A man. Why would I call the police and report her death?”

“If you are the one who did—”

“The hotel manager himself told you that I reported the death to the desk. As an employee of the hotel, I had a right to be up there.”

The lieutenant shook his head. “In civilian clothes?”

“I was getting ready to quit my job. I changed my clothes on the way up there.”

“Why?”

“I told you. I was getting ready to quit my job.”

“Why?”

“I came out here for a vacation. I was tired of the work. That’s all. You can’t make any more out of it. I don’t know the dead girl. Why don’t you try to find that man?”

“What man is that?”

“You could get on a person’s nerves. You know that, don’t you?”

“I never took this job to be popular.”

“I know. Only to be without a flaw.”

“I saw no man in that room with you. No trace. I found only an empty suitcase that may have belonged to the dead girl.”

“There was a man in that room. He forced me to stay there until you and the hotel manager arrived. I’m telling you the truth.”

“Perhaps you are.” The voice was low. “If you are, you then have nothing to fear.”

“I have to fear you. You won’t listen to me. You’re more interested in a perfect record of solved cases than you are in the truth. How many people have you forced to confess to crimes when they weren’t even guilty?”

Kuryakin had found Guerrero’s Achilles’ heel. The youthful detective sprang up, gripping the bars, his black eyes fixed on Illya’s impassive face.

“Don’t say such things to me! Don’t ever say such things to me!”

“Then why don’t you let me try to prove to you that man was in the room with me?”

Guerrero relaxed. He straightened, allowing himself a faint, superior smile. “I think we will keep you here. We will wait for the results of your fingerprints.”

He turned and walked away, going leisurely out of the cell-block.

Illya stood unmoving at the bars, staring at the man’s back. He shook his head, now deeply troubled because of what those fingerprints would reveal about him to Guerrero.

He prowled the cell. He ran his fingers through his wheat-colored hair. It flopped back across his forehead. He knew what the results of the fingerprints inquiry would be. The FBI would send word to the Honolulu police, showing not only that his name was Illya Kuryakin, but then it would have to be shown who he was and for whom he worked.

He shook his head. The assignment was already going too badly for him to involve U.N.C.L.E. in his presence in the islands. He and Napoleon Solo had been assigned by Alexander Waverly to find a person named Tixe Ylno who might be male or female, or who might not exist at all. No one in U.N.C.L.E. had ever seen Tixe Ylno — they knew only that code name which Thrush had given him. Spelled backwards Tixe Ylno was simply Exit Only — which, from the meager clues and information gathered by agents for U.N.C.L.E., was Tixe Ylno’s plan for humanity. A female spy, frightened and almost hysterical in her desire to come in from the cold, had managed to contact U.N.C.L.E. and make known her desire to defect from Thrush. Word came that the woman agent was one of the few people who actually had known, seen and talked with Tixe Ylno. She was anxious to trade her information for U.N.C.L.E.’s protection.

The frightened spy’s name of course was Ursula Baynes-Neefirth.

Even the suggestion that agents for U.N.C.L.E. were remotely involved in the murder of the fleeing spy would completely destroy all chance of continuing the pursuit of Tixe Ylno. There was no doubt about it. Tixe Ylno appeared to be the most dangerous foe yet encountered by the agents for U.N.C.L.E.

He worked from the deepest network of secrecy — as attested to by the fact that not even U.N.C.L.E. knew whether Tixe Ylno was a man or a woman, an individual, or a conspiracy.

Whoever or whatever Tixe Ylno was, the countermeasures had to be accomplished in a matching veil of secrecy.

Illya stared at the bars of his cell. One thought kept wheeling through his brain. He had to get out of here before there was any answer on his fingerprints which had already been flashed across ocean and continent to Washington, D.C.

He had to get out of here.

“You! George.”

When Illya, lost in savage concentration, did not reply to the unfamiliar name he had assumed as a hotel bellhop, the jailer scraped his nightstick along the cell bars.

“You. Yorkvitz. George!”

Illya turned from his contemplation of the barred window, staring at the jailer. “What do you want?”

“You got company,” the jailer said. “A friend of yours.”

Illya felt the breath exhale from him as if he had not been breathing for an incredible time. Solo must have somehow learned of his plight.

He strode across the cell. “Yes,” he said. “Take me to him.”

“Relax,” the jailer said. “We’ll bring him back here. He says he’s a bellhop from your hotel at Waikiki.”

Illya nodded, waiting expectantly. The jailer went along the corridor to the entrance of the cell-block. The door was opened and a man came through it. Illya stared, his heart sinking.

This was not Solo. It was no bellhop from the hotel. It was no one he had ever seen.

He shook his head. The man came toward him, smiling confidently. The jailer pointed out the cell, and leaned against the wall. “You got three minutes, fellow.” The man nodded and walked to the bars where Illya awaited him, puzzled and watchful.

“Hello, George.” The man was obviously Chinese, smartly dressed, his shoes shining and black. His mouth smiled, but there was no light in his eyes.

“I don’t know you,” Illya said.

The mouth went on smiling; the man peered at him. “Sure you know me, George.” His voice was louder than necessary. Illya saw he was speaking for the guard’s benefit. “We work together. Why, when I came in here, they frisked me, George: He laughed loudly. “How about that? Afraid I would bring you something to help you escape. How about that, George?”

“How about that,” Illya said. “I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you want. Get out of here.”

“Take it easy, George. Why, I went through a lot to get in here. They took everything from me, George. Everything except this fountain pen. How about that, George?” He took the fountain pen from his shirt pocket, extending it suddenly toward Illya.

Illya stared at it, lunged backward, crying out. In that same instant, the visitor pressed on the end of the pen and white liquid flushed out of it, striking Kuryakin in the face.

Illya tried to cry out, and could not. He tried to catch himself, but had lost all coordination. He was aware of nothing except the burn of the fluid on his skin, in his eyes and his nostrils.

He toppled back on the bed, for the moment suffocating and almost entirely paralyzed.

The man beyond the bars laughed again. “Well, all right, George, you don’t want to talk to me, I’ll clear out. We wanted to help you. You don’t want us to help you, that’s all right, too.”

He turned, thrust his fountain pen back into his shirt pocket and strode away, complaining loudly.

Sprawled on the cot, Illya stared after him, unable to move at all. He heard the cell-block door open and close distantly, and then there was silence in the cell.

He tried to turn and could not. He lay unmoving while the FBI investigated his fingerprints and flashed back word to the Honolulu police. Illya Kuryakin. Agent for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

Sure, he’d be freed then — but he might as well be dead.

He struggled, his nerve centers frantically ordering his numbed muscles to move, even to twitch, to show any sign of life at all.

He tried to cry out, and he could not even speak. Whoever had put him here meant to see he stayed here until he was framed for a crime he had not committed, or until his true identity was established and his usefulness destroyed.

He stared furiously, frustrated and enraged, at his hands, at his feet. And he was struck fiercely again with the simplicity of the attack. First, Ursula’s face was blown away by a mechanism concealed in a lei — flowers given a hundred times a day to visitors to Hawaii. Now, a visitor to the jail was carefully searched, and allowed to enter the cell-block with a lethal fountain pen — who even looked at a fountain pen in a man’s pocket?

VI

Solo straightened up in the littered alley and put his back against the wall. Around him, the refuse barrels were overturned, a stocky beach boy folded neatly over one of them, the other three lying face down in the scattered garbage.

Solo felt a stab of pain going through him and he touched gingerly at the fire in his side. He tried to keep his face expressionless, disliking the thought of giving in to the sharp burn of abrasion and contusion marring his face. His eye was swelling, purpling, and he tasted blood in the corner of his mouth.

He experienced some small satisfaction when he looked at the four young thugs sprawled unconscious around him. The hell with them. He had not bowed to them, though his jacket was knife-ripped and stained with rancid refuse. His shirt was torn.

But he had another lead — the silver whip — despite the deaths of Ursula and the flower girl and her beach boy. He tried to smile. He had walked into a wall — and he looked it. Solo raised the back of his hand and drew it across his mouth.

After a long time, when he was sure his legs would support him, he straightened from the wall and gave his opponents a sardonic bow, but carefully and not very deeply. Even so, the sky and the littered pavement changed places for a second.

He turned to walk away, but a movement caught his attention and he stopped.

The stocky boy folded across the barrel was coming around. Solo turned to him, almost sadly, caught him by the collar and forcibly lifted him to his feet, bracing him against the wall.

Solo shook him, both hands holding his bright shirt.

“Who hired you to do this?” He kept asking the question until he saw those dark eyes focus, and comprehension return to them.

The boy shook his head. Solo saw fear and admiration in the youth’s face where there had once been only cold contempt. “No. No, sir. Nobody. You see, Kaina was our friend…”

“Who did he work for?”

“With us, sir. At the beach.”

“Who else? Answer me! Who else?”

The boy shook his head, frightened. “No. No, sir. No one.”

Solo stared at him, seeing that the boy was not lying. He was too frightened to dissemble.

Solo was calm. He held the youth’s shirt, forcing him to meet his gaze.

“And this girl? Polly Jade Ing? What about her? What do you know of her?”

“I have known her many years. She and Kaina. They were to marry.”

“Did you know who she worked for?”

“Only with the Chamber — that’s all. I swear it, sir! Are you a cop? Some kind of a cop?”

Solo sighed, deciding that the attack on him was a matter of vengeance, the need to cleanse Kaina’s honor, and nothing more — unless you counted the need for violence that had spurred them.

He tightened his grip on the boy’s shirt. “I’m going to give you a chance to get out of here, away from these others. If not, I’ll put you right back to sleep with them—”

“Oh, no, sir. No. That won’t be needed. I should be at work already. I am much late already. There’s no need.”

“Then get out of here. Move and keep moving.”

“Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.”

When the boy was gone, running through the littered alley, Solo remained where he was for another moment From the pocket of his jacket, he removed the sender-receiver he had used in the hotel room to summon Kuryakin. Now, after checking the alley and finding it empty and silent, he pulled out the antennae and said into the speaker:

“Bubba. Acknowledge. Acknowledge.”

He frowned, waiting. The call should have carried at least five miles. He glanced around him, thinking he wanted to clear out of here. A man could get hurt in this island paradise. Further, he wanted to communicate to Illya his need to pursue the clues offered by that silver whip.

“Bubba. Acknowledge, please.,

He spoke calmly and clearly, but without emotion. He touched at the darkening spot beside his mouth.

He pressed the button, listening.

He made one last effort. “Bubba. Come in please. Acknowledge.”

There was no answer and he stopped listening. He reset the antennae, replaced the set in his jacket pocket and walked toward the train station in the distance, carrying the soiled, slashed coat across his shoulder.

He decided that Illya had gone off alert, because it was basic computing inside the machinery of Kuryakin’s unemotional mind that if he did not hear from Solo, it was no signal to hit the panic switch. If anything he became calmer than ever, certain he was on a DC-7 winging stateside.

VII

Sprawled on the cot in his darkening cell at the Honolulu jail, Illya looked through the bars at the lighted corridor, at the guards and trustys moving around out there in the onion yellow light.

He struggled violently, in a way he had never struggled before. It had nothing to do with actual movement, action of any kind. His body was stilled as if in a catatonic trance. His eyes were still tear-clouded, burning from the fluid sprayed into them. The struggling was all inside his mind.

He began to be filled with a distracting terror that this paralysis might be permanent. Suddenly this cell was like a tiny box, a cheap coffin. He wondered if this were what it all finally added up to: lying helpless in an alien cell, among strangers. It had never occurred to him that he would not have to pay for having served U.N.C.L.E., the things he had done for the united command, and the misdoings in the years before he had joined them. He had not looked for a reward — no more than a few hours off once in a while to enjoy his collection of jazz. But it was bad to know one was so alone, and helpless.

Lying there, he watched the cell-block door open and then close. Trustys were carrying tin plates of food to the inmates. He wondered how long it would be before they came and found him like this. He struggled again, ordering his hands to move. He didn’t want to be found here like this.

He heard the distant ring of a telephone. It was silenced and he sweated, concentrating on moving his hands.

Inside his skull he laughed when his fingers twitched, and then bent, and then straightened. Now he concentrated fiercely upon his feet and his legs, forcing his conscious mind to ignore the bite of acid in his eyes and nostrils.

His feet moved. His legs moved. He did not know how long it was but finally he was able to sit up on the edge of the cot. His clothing was sweat damp, and he was wide-eyed and tense.

He reached out his arms, found support and pulled himself to his feet. He attempted to take a forward step, but lost his balance and sprawled outward. He caught himself on the lavatory, and then dragged his legs after him, straightening.

He turned the tap water on full. Slowly he lowered his face into the rush of water. He let it run for a long time.

The burn lessened in his eyes, and the sting ceased in his nostrils. He kept bathing his face with the water. He realized that feeling had returned to his legs, and his hands and forearms ached with the returning strength. He bent slowly forward and immersed his face in the water.

He stayed as long as he could hold his breath like that. He heard the trusty shout at him from the bars, telling him his food was there. He managed to turn his head and nod.

He straightened up at last, massaging his face with his hands, and rubbing them briskly along his arms, trying to escape the last traces of the drug as quickly as he could.

He walked to the bars, took up the tin tray of food. He ate slowly, holding the tray, then he replaced it on the floor where it could be collected.

He went back to his bunk then and sat down on the side of it. He glanced through the bars at the corridor, then bent over and removed his right shoe.

Holding the shoe, he turned the heel and shook out a heat-bomb pellet, thinking about the force concentrated inside it. From his tray he got a spoon and scooped out a small hole under the bars. He set the pellet inside it, checking the corridor across his shoulder. He pushed a half-dozen cigarettes around the pellet, securing it. He flicked light from his cigarette lighter, setting fire to the paper.

He stepped down from the bunk then, and walked leisurely across the cell. He dropped the spoon back on the tray and leaned against the bars, trying not to watch the fire flickering in the paper around the heat-bomb pellet.

He made a mental countdown, watching the corridor. The sound the pellet would make would not be huge, but it would be enough to be heard all over the cell block.

As he waited, he tried to compute the time he would have, running across the cell, lunging upward against those bars that would be ripped free along the bottom, but perhaps only loosened on the sides. He would have to go out that window in whatever space was blown loose by the heat-bomb. He knew it was going to be small.

At the instant the heat bomb exploded, the wall quivering with the mild concussion, Illya heard the shouts along the cell block, the pound of shoes as men ran in the corridors.

He did not waste time to look over his shoulder. He sprang up on the bunk, shoving with his hands, finding the bars still friction-heated. He thrust outward with all his strength, twisting as he pushed.

He breathed a small prayer of thanksgiving because three courses of bricks beneath the window had been blown loose and his weight against them sent them falling outside the jail. Holding his breath, he pushed upward on the bars, worming his head into the opening.

Illya’s head and shoulders were outside the window. Behind him he heard the shouting of men, the ring of keys, the clang of metal. It occurred to him that surely Lieutenant Guerrero would have a special torture and inquisition set-up for captured escapees. Guerrero would never stop tormenting him if he were caught and returned now. What better admission of guilt than an escape attempt?

Illya pressed downward on the bricks of the outside of the jail, thinking that he was like a woman trying to get into her girdle, only what he hoped to accomplish was to work his body through an opening too small to accommodate it.

He turned and twisted, feeling his hips sliding through, feeling the cut of the bars, the scraping of the broken wall, and feeling the pain, too. The worst pain was the fear of being caught by the legs from behind, of being dragged back into that jail, squirming like a fish.

He pushed harder, feeling more bricks give, feeling his hips twist through the hole. A hard hand clutched at his ankle. Panic gave him forward thrust. He lunged outward, his hips freed. He lost his balance and went tumbling down toward the paved alleyway.

He struggled, trying to turn his body, attempting to land on his feet like a cat. He didn’t make it. He struck hard, and flat, the breath blasted out of him.

Breathing painfully, Illya sat up and looked around. From above him, he heard the warning shouts of the jailers, the crack of a gun. He scrambled on all fours to the shelter of the wall, trying to buy enough time to recover his breath.

He stared down at his feet, realizing for the first time that whoever had caught at his ankle had jerked off one of his shoes.

For a moment he slumped, feeling the chill of defeat. How far could he get in one shoe? He couldn’t lose himself in a crowd; he’d have eye witnesses to every move he made.

A gun fired above him and the bullet splatted in the pavement near him, galvanizing him into action, and shifting a gear in his brain. This was a vacation spot, wasn’t it, a land of gaudy shirts, shorts, bikinis — and bare feet?

Trying to control his desire for frantic haste, Illya pulled off his remaining shoe and his socks and tossed them away. He rolled up his slacks above his ankles, leaped to his feet and ran along the street.

Behind him sirens whistled and alarms flared. Armed men ran from the police station into the street.

Illya pulled his shirt from his trousers, and forced himself to saunter through the gathering crowd gaping at the curbs.

A taxi driver stood beside his hack, watching the uniformed men spilling from the police headquarters.

“Cab,” Illya said, opening the rear door and stepping inside the taxi.

The driver pulled himself reluctantly from the excitement. Behind the wheel, he grinned over his shoulder. “Where to? And you ain’t the guy they’re looking for, are you?”

Illya shrugged. “What do you think?”

The driver started the car, flipped down the meter flag and pulled away from the curb. He made it only to the center of the street when he was halted by two patrolmen armed with rifles. “Where you headed?” one of them wanted to know.

The driver shrugged, jerking his head toward the rear. “I don’t know. Got a fare here.”

Illya was lying back casually, his bare feet up on the seat. He grinned vacantly at the cops, hoping they had not seen him inside the jail. “Waikiki, driver. Let’s get away from here; I can’t stand violence.”

The cops pulled their heads back from the car and waved the cab on. Illya sat up, turning, giving them a wide grin and a bye-bye wave. At the same time he was saying to the driver, “Is this as fast as you can go?”

The driver, suddenly alerted, stiffened and stepped on the gas. He said, “You armed, mister?”

Illya turned, his face blank. “They so seldom arm the inmates, Charley. Just drive.”

He watched the driver’s knuckles whiten on the steering wheel. When the cabbie made a sudden move to turn a corner, it was as though Illya could read the slow process of his thoughts — around the corner and back to the police.

Illya leaned forward and laid the side of his hand against the cabbies Adams apple with only the slightest pressure. “I think this is far enough. You stop when you make this corner.”

“Okay. Okay. I got nothing against you, buddy. I just want to keep my license.”

“I have my little ambitions, too,” Illya told him.

He stepped out of the cab while it was still rolling, and strolled through the crowd. A bus was pulling in to the curb at the far corner. He ran across the street and boarded it.

When he heard police sirens behind the bus, he touched the cord, alighted and walked swiftly down the side street. He had gone less than half a block when a Volkswagen swung around a corner ahead of him and cruised toward him. He paused, watching it, vaguely troubled without knowing why he should be. There were three men crowded into the small car — and then he recognized the driver. It was the man with the lethal fountain pen.

There was an arcade at his left; Illya stepped into it and strode along it, going past the shops that lined it toward a walled court lighted with afternoon sun. He winced, seeing the cul-de-sac, and knowing there was no chance his friends in the Volkswagen hadn’t spotted him, just as they must have been watching the jail. Sam and company meant to see that he was framed for Ursula’s murder, and kept incarcerated.

Near the rear of the arcade Illya paused and looked over his shoulder. The Volkswagen pulled into the curb and the three men unwound themselves from it, spreading out to search for him.

He stepped into the alcove of a curio shop. From this shadowed concealment he watched his friend of the deadly fountain pen stride toward him, his dark eyes searching the stores, watchful and alert.

Illya waited until the man passed, then he stepped from the alcove. “Were you looking for me, friend?”

He heard the man gasp, turning. He didn’t let him get all the way around because he was too immersed in the memory and rage of what had happened to him in that jail cell. The man threw up his arm to shield himself and Illya drove his extended fingers into the unprotected armpit, and then clipped him across the neck with the side of his hand.

He didn’t wait to see him fall. He moved through the astonished bystanders, ran across the curb and leaped into the unattended Volkswagen.

He burned away from the curb with the accelerator pressed to the floor. The two men ran after him, shouting, guns drawn. Over and above the wail of horns and the shouting, he heard the scream of approaching police sirens.

He roared out on King Street and kept the small car on the upper level of the speed limit, heading toward Diamond Head. When he reached Waikiki, he swung into the drive outside the pink hotel where he had posed as bellhop, where Ursula had been slain.

A beach boy sunned himself, waiting for a bus. Illya called him over. “I promised to send this car into Vic’s Garage over near Aala Street. You know the place? If you’ll drive it there, you got yourself a free ride downtown.”

The boy grinned, his teeth gleaming. “Mister, you got yourself a deal.”

Illya did not even wait to see the Volkswagen driven out of the hotel parking area. He tried to move nonchalantly around to the service entrance, but inwardly he admitted he was running, even if he did manage to keep his pace to a sedate-looking stroll.

Five minutes later he came out of his room in the service quarters of the hotel wearing fresh slacks and jacket. He glanced longingly toward the cabs that would get him away from here before the police or the men from Sam overtook the Volkswagen and learned from the beach boy where he had gotten the little car.

Telling himself that nothing was ever easy, Illya went up in the service elevator to the eighth floor, where he found Ursula’s room sealed by the law, with appropriate notice on the door.

He entered with a passkey, and once inside he relaxed slightly. He laid out the developers and the small plastic cups, his receiver-sender, a binocular-loupe, a small infrared light, and the film he’d developed earlier for Solo.

Placing the binocular loupe in his left eye, he scanned the strip of developed film while the film from his own lighter-camera was being developed.

He paused, staring at the film Solo had taken of Ursula’s receiving the welcoming lei from the China Doll flower girl at the airport.

He caught his breath, pleased. He could never have seen it without the jeweler’s magnifying loupe, but with it he could distinguish the features of the man standing beyond the flower girl, intently watching the small ceremony.

He was not too surprised to see that it was the Eurasian who called himself Sam.

His next triumph was the excellent close-up likeness he had been able to get of Sam himself with his own lighter-camera.

Smiling, pleased with himself, he did not hurry even when he heard the scream of police sirens approaching from downtown. He sighed. If Guerrero’s police were on his trail, could Sam’s commandos be far behind?

He placed the pictures and the materials in his jacket pocket and crossed the room carrying the infrared flashlight.

On the balcony, he played the light along the railing top. His impassive face lighted faintly at the clear yellow stains he found there — finger marks. He knew who had left those prints. Sam had been leaving yellow stain hand and finger marks ever since he had drunk down the Scotch and the neuroquixonal tablet, and he would continue to put them down wherever he went for some time to come.

Illya stood there smiling, and he did not even stop smiling when he counted the four police cars racing into the drive eight floors below. He returned calmly inside the room and took up the receiver-sender, pressing its button and speaking into it, slowly, clearly, repeating himself to be certain he was understood.