The Final Affair

by David McDaniel

  Put the guard over by the door, maybe even with his body slumped against it; Harry about three feet away, the guard's automatic in his hand.

  Say Harry had been hiding in here and the guard heard him, or —

  There was a footstep outside and Napoleon's hand darted to the lamp switch plunging the room into darkness just as the latch clicked and the door opened.

  Light spilled in from the corridor, silhouetting a figure with a gun in her hand pointing steadily at him. He froze, squinting against the bright fluorescents. There almost seemed to be something familiar about the way she stood... Slowly she lowered the gun. "Napoleon?" said a soft, slightly hesitant voice. Something impossible started to stir in his memory as she spoke; on sudden impulse he snapped the desk lamp back on. She came a step towards him, tentatively.

  "Have I changed so much?" she asked,. "After eighteen years — don't you recognize me?"

  It was Joan.

  His wife.

  SECTION III

  "Cry 'Havoc!', And Let Slip The Dogs Of War."

  CHAPTER NINE

  "Where Have You Been All My Life?"

  The room spun about Napoleon, and a wave of dizziness blurred his vision for a moment. He leaned on the desk and tried to think. The question of a hoax never entered his mind.

  Joan.

  The only photograph he had of her was a yellowed snapshot in the bottom of a box somewhere — he hadn't seen it in years. But her image was still clear in that part of his mind where he lived alone; cool, intelligent eyes with a directness of gaze which had annoyed some of his classmates but had drawn him magnetically; a certain indefinable grace of posture and movement which even now identified her more surely to him even than her soft and husky voice.

  He stared at her, unable to voice the questions bursting unformed within him. She looked down at the floor. "Good," she said. "I thought you'd think of that." She knelt smoothly to inspect Harry's body, then rose again as effortlessly as a dancer. "Would you have noticed the guard's pistol hasn't been fired? Baldwin would." Napoleon became aware that his mouth was open, and closed it. Then he realized he'd been asked a question, and opened it again to answer. But he couldn't think of anything to say. "Joan?" he finally said tentatively.

  "I thought you might be a little surprised," she said. "I'll explain it all to you, but not right now. You want to get out of here, don't you?"

  "Uh — yes... Oh! The Luger!" He stood up and studied the scene again. And Harry. And Joan, who had been killed in a horrible accident back home while he was carrying an M-l through enemy snow with death crouched behind every hill. He'd hardly known her, his bride of a year, with whom he'd lived less than a month — and nearly twenty years later, half his lifetime removed, he scarcely thought about her except as a private dream that had no relation to the real world...

  While that part of his mind reeled in gibbering confusion, his trained intelligence took on the problem at hand. He worked the toggle and ejected one cartridge from the guard's Luger; Joan caught it and dropped it into her pocket. Then he fired one muffled round into the guard's body, directing the slug parallel to the angle of the first and fatal wound. This done, he fitted the Luger back into Harry's limp and cooling hand.

  He straightened from his task, and Joan handed him the gleaming coppery cartridge. "At least it's the right caliber," she pointed out.

  Napoleon scowled "But it's a wadcutter," he pointed out. "Mine are full-jacketed hollowpoints. Tough. We can't do an autopsy to find the other slug and replace it without more trouble than we can spare at the moment. We have a chance it won't be found, at least for a couple of days, and it may be bashed up beyond ballistic reconstruction. Or they may not care to work on it. It looks like an open and shut case from here."

  "Let's hope it does from upstairs. We'd better get out now, I think."

  The plural registered belatedly, and Napoleon reacted.

  Joan noticed and looked at him. "Do you want me to come with you?"

  He stared at her, and suddenly whole areas of memories untapped for years flashed before him. Joan?? Finally he said, "I've changed."

  She smiled. "So have I, Napoleon. Possibly more than you — or perhaps not. But I think you're the same in the important ways."

  "Do — you want to come? You know who I am and what I do..."

  "Of course. Everyone in Thrush does."

  "Thrush?"

  "Of course Thrush, you ninny! Where do you think you are? I was working for Thrush before you even heard of U.N.C.L.E. — from about the time they first heard of you."

  "Oh! Uh, maybe you'd better explain after we get outside. Yes, If you come with me, I —I'd be honored. But..."

  "Napoleon, before we go on I want to tell you one thing. I never pretended or lied about the way I felt about you. Everything else —"

  "Not now. I'm not really sure you're real, but I don't want anything to happen to you before I find out. It's— it's been a long eighteen years. And a lot has happened."

  Her smile warmed him again. "Yes, quite a lot. Where's your partner, Illya? I've wanted to meet him for years."

  "He's right upstairs... Oh ye gods! Illya!" He looked at his watch. It was nine minutes past four. "He's sitting in the middle of an ultrasonic field upstairs, and I'm ten minutes late to get him out. Come on!"

  With a last quick look around, they checked all the elements of their tableau, switched off the light, and departed. In silence, Napoleon led the way back to the proper stairwell and up two flights. There was his sonic shield, just as he'd left it. He cracked the door, and extended the baton.

  In seconds, the circuitry was functioning, though only one pink light was on. Together within the invisible umbrella they moved slowly into the protected area. Napoleon was very aware of her presence, though she scarcely touched him.

  The green warning signal, which had stayed dark through his inbound journey, came to life shortly after they entered the sonic field; Joan followed his lead instantly and froze until his hand cued her to move again.

  The light gleamed once more just before they reached the corner, and he drew her closer to him with his free arm until the warning light went out. Her arm came around his waist, and thus embracing, they rounded the corner.

  And thus Illya first saw them. An expression compounded of relief, irritation, surprise and concern chased itself around his broad Slavic features as they approached.

  "Napoleon," he said softly, "that isn't Harry."

  "Joan, this is my partner, Illya Nicolaivitch Kuryakin. He sometimes overstates the obvious. Illya, I would like you to meet Joan, my wife. She's defecting from Thrush. Would you care to come along, now that you've been properly introduced?"

  It is to Illya's eternal credit that he remembered to lock the access panel.

  "So Mr. Stevens is no longer with us," said Alexander Waverly when Napoleon had finished his report.

  "Neither is he with Thrush, sir," Illya pointed out.

  "Hm. Yes. And neither are you, young lady. Which brings me to the question of how you fit into this. I was aware of you only as a brief entry in Mr. Solo's personal history file, closed before our first contact with him. You were dead, you know," he added chidingly. "How do you happen to spring up in such an unlikely place?"

  "I was interviewing Harry last night just before the sedative took him off. He wasn't very happy. His section super sent him in because he'd had an attack of the shakes and started to cry a little in the office. Nobody could figure out why, and they were sort of worried."

  "I can understand that."

  "He was going to get a good long sleep and a nourishing breakfast and go in for a hypnoprobe at 11:00. I was sent in to talk to him as he was drifting off to see if I could pick up some idea as to where his problem lay."

  "And did you?"

  "Not exactly. But he was moaning a little before he went deeply asleep, and he mentioned U.N.C.L.E. twice. And he mentioned Solo. Was Harry connected with you?"

  "You must have expected him to be r
escued; did you know Mr. Solo would be doing the rescuing?"

  "I thought it likely."

  "Why?"

  "Why did you send him?"

  Waverly coughed and fumbled for his pipe. "Mr. Solo — with the best of intentions, you could be forgiven a less than objective viewpoint — but are you satisfied as to her authenticity and sincerity? Her fingerprints are being compared at the moment, but they are not likely to match anything on record."

  Napoleon looked at her and held her eyes while a thousand thoughts flowed between them in a few seconds. "Yes sir," he said "I am. And I'd stake my life on her sincerity."

  "You already did," Illya pointed out.

  "I did not report what I heard from Harry," Joan said. "I filed only that he moaned and muttered before he went to sleep but that no recognizable words were formed. He didn't respond to me at all; he was already half under when I came into his room. Whatever they gave him hit faster than usual."

  Mr. Waverly tamped his pipe reflectively with a nicotine-stained thumb and fumbled for a large wooden match. He waited for the sulphurous flare to die down before drawing clean flame into the tobacco-packed bowl. At length it was properly ignited and he dropped the remaining quarter-inch of white wood into a convenient ashtray.

  He exhaled a cloud of fragrant blue smoke that rose about his head and drifted toward the air-conditioner vent. "Mrs. Solo," he said as if considering the name, "You understand that your appearance here at this time is, frankly, unexpected. We have no pressing business for the next few hours — would you care to tell us the story of your life?"

  "Well, the first sixteen years were ordinary enough. But then I was contacted by Thrush, and they offered me a lot of things I really wanted. I volunteered for something exciting, and they gave me a full battery of tests. Now I guess this was about the time you were starting to be interested in Napoleon. As I recall, you picked him out of the personality profiles sent to you for consideration by that student testing organization — what's their name..."

  "I didn't know anything about U.N.C.L.E. before I got out of the service," said Napoleon.

  "But they knew about you. Didn't they, Mr. Waverly?"

  Waverly cleared his throat. "Ah — please continue."

  "Certainly. That was in 1949. The following year — "

  "I was a senior in high school in 1950," said Napoleon.

  "You were still a junior in the spring semester. Thrush noticed you too about that time, and it didn't take them long to learn that U.N.C.L.E. was already interested in you. They ran your profile through the Ultimate Computer and it matched mine to you."

  "And that fall you came to Hudson High as a senior, even though you were a year younger."

  "And it took you three months to notice me."

  They laughed together, then stopped and studied each other searchingly, as though neither one was sure what they were looking for.

  "And just a few months after that we graduated. I was just starting to find out what kind of man you really were when you went into the army."

  "I think I still have your letters — and that picture of you I..." his voice caught slightly, "...I took on our honeymoon."

  "I never even had that much." She took his hand, and they stared at each other wordlessly for several seconds. Mr. Waverly and Illya stared at each other too, with rather different expressions.

  "Twitterpated," said the U.N;C.L.E. chief, and cleared his throat. "I believe Mr. Solo had just left for military service. "

  "We wrote a lot back and forth, sir," Napoleon explained. "I proposed to her when I finished my basic, conditional on my survival, and she accepted."

  "Now you were working for Thrush all this time?"

  "Yes. My original assignment was to assess Napoleon for subversion to Thrush before U.N.C.L.E. actually got around to making their first contact with him."

  "Did your assignment include marrying him?" Illya asked.

  "No. But — well, I had to talk my nest leader into vouching for my report that convinced them to allow me to marry him. I wanted to marry him." She smiled. "The. Ultimate Computer did a good job of match making."

  "Then what happened?"

  "We were married. I was home on leave for a few weeks, in the summer of '52, and we were married on August third."

  "And you shipped out again on the eighteenth, and I never saw you again until tonight. Or is it this morning?"

  "I'm afraid the sun's up already. Mr. Waverly, we can quarter here under the circumstances, I should think."

  "I would like to hear the rest of her story, if she feels up to it?"

  "Of course. That's really most of it. Central wasn't very happy about my marrying my subject, and they were, well, very difficult during those few months. And I finally had to tell them that you were very stubborn and single-minded, and would never work out as a double agent. They had already pretty well decided that from studying your charts, so they declared my assignment cancelled and pulled me out."

  "They staged the accident?"

  She nodded. "I don't know where they got the body, but I'm told there wasn't much left of it. I was in Paterson, New Jersey, at the time, and I've never been closer than that since, except for once about six years ago when I flew past a hundred miles away. It was too overcast to see anything, but I- thought about you for the next week."

  Napoleon took over the narration. "I was in the middle of Kanghwa when I got the message. It was supposed to have stopped at the armored base but I got it about fifteen minutes before the attack. I didn't really think about it much — and I don't remember any of the battle very clearly, but that was when I won my silver star. Anyway, she was buried a month before I came home.

  And a few weeks later, Captain Kowalski got in touch with me — he'd been my superior in Korea — and talked for about two hours about what I wanted to do with my life. At that point, I didn't know. I'd known pretty well what I'd wanted to do, but it all included Joan. And then she wasn't there anymore. Captain Kowalski told me a little bit about U.N.C.L.E. and said they'd asked him to come to me as a friend, and present their offer. They gave a wide choice of college curricula for which they would pay and offered me, in addition to a full scholarship with a little spare cash on the side, a guarantee of at least a year's trial employment at a good starting salary when I graduated. And an opportunity to do something really constructive with my life, which somehow seemed to matter a lot to me right then.

  "Was there any more?" Mr. Waverly asked Joan.

  "Not really. I spent about six weeks being debriefed of everything I knew about Napoleon, and then they gave me a three month vacation all over South America. It didn't really help much. They didn't let me keep anything that would remind me of you, naturally. But they didn't have the memory blocks then, and I never let anyone know that I remembered everything about you — that I could never forget you.

  "I didn't exactly pine away. I stayed busy one place and another." She hesitated. "I. married another Thrush in 1957 — he was a chemical engineer. We were reasonably happy together, though of course there's no such thing as a quiet home life when you work for Thrush. We weren't in one place more than two years the whole time. He died almost three years ago — in an industrial accident. About six months ago, I was starting to go out of my mind in a routine job as a lab secretary in the psychogenic section, so I reapplied for active field status. My record looked good, I passed the physical, and training was a snap. I always kept in shape." She flexed herself and Napoleon grinned.

  "I've been in San Francisco for more than a year. Baldwin knows all about my connection with you, and he knows you were supposed to mean nothing to me. But he told me when I started to work there that if you ever came west of the Rocky Mountains again he would ship me to Madagascar until you were gone.

  He's suspicious of the Computer, but he trusts its accuracy. And sometimes I think he can read minds. Because I've known for — well, at least two years that if I had the chance I'd come over to your side to be with you — if y
ou'd have me."

  "Ah —I — well, I can't tell yet. I mean, we've both changed a lot in eighteen years. I've been through a lot, and I don't know how much I'll be like what you remember."

  "Are you willing to try for a few weeks and see? After all, we're like old friends reunited. We'll have to find out if the old spark is still there."

  "It may be awhile before anything can be done about that," Napoleon said. We're sort of in the middle of something very important, and I don't know whether you can do much more than sit in a room and occasionally be guided to the commissary for meals. You'll have a tv and books and whatever else you want, but I don't think you'll be allowed to move around much."

  "If you'll come and see me once a day, I'll be happy."