The Burning Air Affair

by Robert Hart Davis

  Mark was not unconscious long, but he had difficulty seeing. Everything in the room was a blur that would not focus. He was conscious of Royce speaking.

  "There is nothing you can do!" Mark knew that the words were carrying back to Mr. Waverly in U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. But he also knew that it would be impossible for anyone from U.N.C.L.E. to reach this place soon enough.

  "I will!" he heard April cry. She was still trying to buy time by persuading Royce that he had to make a deal with her. "This is your last chance! If you don't, I will kill myself before you can use that truth serum!"

  "How?" Royce asked, his voice heavy with contempt. "There is no way you can do anything except sit right where you are! Clermont brought the serum. I'll get it off his body. Then, Miss Dancer, I guarantee you will talk!"

  He walked across the room and through a small door. Mark was sprawled on the floor near her feet. She called softly to him. He raised his head.

  "I can't see a thing," Mark said feebly, his voice strained.

  "We've got to do something fast!” April said hurriedly. "If he gives me that truth serum, I can't keep anything back. It's not sodium pentothal. Our immunity won't protect me."

  "Don't worry," Mark replied.

  "The thing isn't in any potted plant at the Golden Cock. We searched. THRUSH searched. It isn't there."

  "I know," she said hurriedly.

  "And I think I know why. That's what frightens me, Mark. When Royce told me he searched there, I wondered why he didn't find it. I thought you got there first. Then when I found out you didn't have it, I wondered where it was. That was my mistake. The truth got in my mind. He'll find out what I thought when he questions me."

  "And what is that, April? Speak quickly. I've got my pen-communicator going. Mr. Waverly is listening to us."

  "It won't do any good," she said. "Royce knows you have it on and he didn't even bother to shut it off when he knocked you out. He has a pickup decoder. That's how he knew you were following Clermont."

  "Really? That's too bad for us, April. But we must talk fast now."

  "April, tell us where you think the trigger bomb is hidden," Waverly's voice came seemingly from Mark's pocket. "Perhaps we can beat Royce to it."

  "Yes, sir," April said hurriedly. "It is---"

  The rest of her words were drowned in a buzz of machine noise. The girl from U.N.C.L.E. jerked her head around and saw Royce standing in the doorway. His hand was still on the switch activating the machinery that drowned her report to Waverly.

  Royce, his lips tight, walked across the room and reached down to cut off the transmitter. As he did, Mark lunged.

  He struck Royce in the stomach with his head.

  The renegade scientist squalled and fell back. Mark tried to follow up his attack, but he couldn't move fast enough with his hands and feet secured as they were. Royce rolled back out of the way.

  April Dancer struggled to her feet when Mark launched his desperate attack. But like her co-agent, she couldn't move so fast as Royce.

  He scrambled back away from them. He was shaking, unnerved at how closely he had escaped Slate's attack.

  "I kept you alive because I thought you might know something if this woman died under the truth serum. But I see that I can't take a chance with you any longer."

  He raised the THRUSH gun and pointed it at Slate's chest.

  "Don't!" April cried. "If you kill him, I'll kill myself! You'll never learn where the trigger bomb is!"

  Royce asked April the same question he previously demanded when she threatened to forestall his questioning by killing herself.

  "How will you destroy yourself?" he asked with contempt.

  "This way!" April cried defiantly.

  The girl from U.N.C.L.E. took a deep breath and held it. Her face turned red and. then pale. Royce watched her uneasily. His face was a study in mixed emotions. He doubted that she would voluntarily suffocate herself, but what the scientist knew of the girl's stubborn determination made him wonder.

  Royce stood there gun still pointed at Mark's chest, waiting to see if April was bluffing. Mark was as dumfounded as Royce by April's grim determination to sacrifice herself.

  "April!" he began in an agonized voice. "Don't do it for me!"

  She ignored him. Her face was starting to turn blue for lack of oxygen.

  Royce's nerve broke. He was sweating badly. He could see his only chance to bend the world to his feet was crumbling under the stubborn will of the girl from U.N.C.L.E.

  "I'm willing to make a deal with you," he said lamely. His body was shaking as badly as his voice.

  April Dancer scarcely heard him through the roaring in her ears. Her lungs burned. Her throat felt raw. Stiff jabs of pain ripped through her body as she broke her self-induced suffocation and started to breathe again.

  A little color came back to her face. Royce leaned weakly against the desk. He was still shaking. He had the THRUSH gun in one hand and the vial of truth serum in the other.

  "You'll never use it on me!” April gasped out. "Are you convinced now that I can and will kill myself first?"

  "Yes!" Royce said.

  "But I promised to make a deal,''' April went on. Her voice was scarcely intelligible because of the way her chest heaved as her tortured lungs sucked hungrily for long delayed air. "I---I---"

  She broke off, unable to continue. His face twitching, Royce started toward her. Then he caught himself and stopped. His eyes narrowed. He glared at her suspiciously, suspecting a ruse to bring him into a position where she might jump him as Mark Slate had.

  "I'll agree to whatever you want," he said. "And I'll do whatever is necessary to---"

  "I---I feel an attack---" she gasped, her voice going weaker. "I must---I must have-one of the mints---in my purse ... "

  He picked up April's purse and took out the package of mints. Royce looked at it suspiciously. Watching him through half-closed eyes, April abandoned her idea of asking for a glass of water. It might feed his suspicions and ruin this last desperate chance.

  After a slight hesitation, Royce took a single mint from the package. He did not approach her too closely, but tossed it in her lap.

  "I can't pick it up," April gasped. "My hands are behind my back.'" Still Royce refused to come near her. He said, tossing another on the couch beside her, "Pick it up with your mouth. For all I know this might be another of those cute U.N.C.L.E. chemical tricks. It could be a bomb you want to throw in my face!"

  April realized then it would be useless to ask for a glass of water. She would never pull off the trick she used on Rottermund in the THRUSH laboratory in New York.

  But continuing the subterfuge and keeping the smoke mint handy if a chance did present itself, April bent over. She tossed her head as she bent so that her shoulder-length hair hid her face. She pushed the mint under a wrinkle in the couch, using her chin.

  When she straightened up, April said in a stronger voice, "I'm feeling better already. These mints work fast."

  From the floor, Mark said, "I feel like hell too. Give me one."

  “You'll get one," Royce said through clinched teeth. "You'll get a bullet!"

  "You're shaking worse than April," Mark said quietly. "You had better swallow one of them yourself."

  He ignored Mark's suggestion, but its tremendous significance caught April's imagination.

  She nodded toward the package of mints still in his hand. "Take one," she said.

  "Look what it did for me," April went on. "I'm feeling better already. Remember, the men from U.N.C.L.E. are on their way. You're still trembling. You need something to steady your nerves."

  He hesitated, looking now at her steady hands fastened behind her back with the handcuffs.

  "Hurry!" she said. "We've got to get out of here. I'm serious when I say I want to go with you. I meant what I said about wanting to be the Queen."

  He half closed his eyes. He reached over and picked up the vial of truth serum.

  "There is another secret way out,
" he said unsteadily. "I'll take you with me. If you lead me to the bomb, I'll make you Queen of England."

  But the way his hand gripped the truth serum gave away his intention of using it on her just as soon as he had allayed her suspicions.

  "Then take a mint," April said urgently. "And give me another."

  He made a visible effort to control his shaking, but was not successful. He had been too unnerved by how closely he came to losing his last lead to the bomb when April tried to suffocate herself.

  He tore back the paper on the mint tube. Mark watched in fascination. It was all April could do to control her surging feeling and to appear unconcerned.

  Royce tossed one of the mints in his mouth. All he tasted was the disguising sugar coating. He swallowed.

  He took a deep breath as it went down.

  "Feel better?" April asked. Royce nodded, apparently aided by suggestion. Then suddenly he half doubled up. A look of shocked surprise twisted his face. He tried to raise the gun and shoot April but he toppled. Smoke, activated by his stomach juices, boiled from his mouth and nose.

  "Come on!" April cried to Mark. Together they crawled from the room as the smoke, caught in the narrow confines without adequate ventilation, jammed every corner.

  Slowly inching along, they made their way up the tunnel and into the night. As they waited for help to come, Mark asked. April: "Where did that thing go?"

  She said, "If you remember, there was a fight between two drunks there in the lounge that afternoon.”

  "Yes but it was broken up after one knocked the other down."

  "I remember that he broke one of the fronds when he fell against the potted plant," April said. "I think all we have to do is find the florist who leases the plants. He probably replaced it and has the injured one at his nursery."

  "Why didn't the searchers find that out?" he asked.

  "You were one of them. Why didn't you?" April asked. "Because no one wanted to arouse any suspicion. No one went to the management. Each conducted a secret investigation and search. An official police search would have involved going to a judge and getting a search warrant. No one knew the plant was substituted because nobody asked."

  And that is the way it was.

  When the trigger bomb was recovered, a careful analysis by U.N.C.L.E. scientists verified that it would indeed have turned the earth's air into one giant blaze of nuclear fire.

  While April and Mark made a verbal report directly to Waverly, they were still required to make a written report for the record.

  As they finished it at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters after a four-hour jet flight back to New York, Mark said to April, "I'm a little sorry Royce didn't give you some of that super truth serum. Then maybe I could have asked you what you really think of me behind that businesslike exterior of yours!"

  April Dancer gave him a roguish look and then dropped her eyes demurely. "Well, I did absorb a lot of rays from that truth-forcing interrogation machine of Rottermund's," she said. "Maybe enough residue collected to force me to tell the truth for a while."

  "Great!" Mark Slate said with a grin. "What do you think of me---personally, that is?"

  April smiled cryptically at him. Then assuming a dream-like drugged manner, she said, "I think you are the most wonderful person in the world---to have around when there is a fight!"

  Mark grimaced. "Yeah, but what about between fights?"

  April got up. Her hair was now restored to its normal brunette. Sleep on the plane had erased the fatigue in her eyes. They sparkled with her usual joy of life. The girl from U.N.C.L.E. had changed into a tailored suit that displayed her physical charms to devastating perfection.

  "Between fights?" April Dancer repeated, smiling at Mark Slate. "Why then I'm so busy looking for another fight that I just don't have time to think about you at all!"

  Mark grimaced again and April said, "Hurry up and finish that thing. And then let's go look for another fight!"