“You know how to break a gal up, don’t you?”
“It’s the truth doing that, Barbry. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already told yourself these past months.”
After a moment she shook her head. “No. I guess not.”
“And then there’s the matter of this Chinese-American who approached you and Ursula in the first place. For all we know he may be Tixe Ylno. No matter who he is, he’s part of this immediate business they’re enmeshed in—and they don’t want people like you around spoiling it for them. He loves secrecy. He even had himself declared dead in a plane crash two years ago in order to make all this easier for him. You think he’s going to let a doll he was afraid to trust as a spy stay alive long enough to trip him up? I can tell you he won’t. The stakes are too high.”
She shuddered, covering her face with her hands. Her body shook. Solo saw that she was numbed with fear.
“We’ve got to stop him, Barbry. You understand? The only way we can do that is—”
The telephone rang, breaking across his words, stopping him cold. He glanced toward the instrument, frowning.
He reached out, lifted the receiver and placed it against his ear. “Solo speaking.”
The voice was that of a woman: the words were in the code of his department in the United Network Command. There was no doubting their authenticity or their meaning.
“Acknowledge,” he said.
“Do you understand clearly?” the voice inquired. “Yes. Thank you.” The phone went dead in his hand. He turned, finding Barbry Coast crouching on his bed, watching him, her eyes stark, wide.
“I must go out,” he said. “At once. Will you wait here for me?”
Her voice was flat. “You think they won’t find me here?”
“You’ll be safe here, as long as you follow my orders.”
“Safe when used as directed,” she said in a dulled tone that was devoid of hope.
“Just stay in here. Keep the door locked, the latch on. When I come back, I’ll knock three times. Before you unlock the door, ask my name. Don’t unlatch or unlock that door for any reason, unless you hear three knocks first and then hear my voice.”
She nodded and sank down on the bed. He glanced at her, seeing she had no hope. She wanted to trust him, but she knew too much about Thrush, and she no longer trusted anything.
VI
SOLO WALKED into Forbidden City just off Grant Avenue. The shops around it and the cafe itself seemed pervaded with oriental incense. One never escaped the startled little bite of shock at finding a place like this, even in a city like San Francisco. The patrons, the murals, the waitresses, the waiters, the tables and chairs seemed unreal, as if they did not even exist outside this world inside itself.
A man in Mandarin dress came forward and bowed. “Ah, Mr. Solo. Good evening, Mr. Solo.”
Solo bowed, giving him a faint smile because he knew neither of them had ever encountered the other before. “Will you be kind enough to come this way with me, Mr. Solo?”
Solo followed him through the tables toward the rear of the cafe. They went along a short, dimly lit corridor and the Chinaman rapped on the door facing.
Alexander Waverly looked up from the head of the table when Solo was ushered into the red-upholstered room. Waverly seemed entirely at ease, though Solo knew that less than five hours ago he’d been at headquarters on New York’s east side, or at home in bed. Nothing ever appeared to ruffle his exterior calm. Solo supposed a man got like this when he had been down all roads, seen everything at least twice.
“Come in, Mr., uh—”
“You must know who I am,” Solo said, smiling. “You sent for me.”
Waverly chuckled briefly and motioned him to a chair across the red-varnished table from the third man in the room. He said, “Solo, I’m sure you know Osgood—uh, Osgood DeVry. He’s a personal adviser to the president of the United States.”
Solo extended his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Mr. DeVry. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”
Osgood DeVry smiled. He was a thickset man of slightly more than medium height. There was the flushed pink, steak-fed look about him of a man who had grown accustomed to unaccustomed success and ease of life. He was in his early fifties, mildly overweight. He wore his graying brown hair parted on the side and brushed back dry from his scalp.
“Everyone who knows Osgood is proud of the work he’s doing down there in Washington,” Waverly said.
“Not everyone,” DeVry said, deprecatingly, though he smiled. “One does the best he can. Sometimes he’s rewarded. Sometimes he’s forced to turn the other cheek until he runs out of cheeks. I try not to think about it. I do what I think I must.”
“Yes.” Waverly cleared his throat. “And this leads us neatly into the reason for our nocturnal call on you, Solo. It’s so urgent that we had to interrupt your present mission, no matter how important, and even if it were blonde.” Waverly smiled, but there was an entire lack of sympathy in his voice.
“Perhaps I’d better fill you in on it,” Osgood DeVry said. He shifted his attaché case on the table before him. “Though it applies to the case, some of it is personal.”
“All of it is of vital concern to the safety of this nation, and perhaps of Russia too,” Waverly said. “And we are now certain that it concerns our friend of the code name, Tixe Ylno.”
DeVry filled a pipe with tobacco and tamped it down. He placed the curved mouthpiece between his teeth, but did not light it. Watching him, Solo saw a strong man who might have somehow weakened from the soft life in Washington. Obviously, he worked hard, but one saw that whatever he did for the president or for his country these days, it was all inestimably easier than the life he’d known in his early years.
DeVry said, “I’m a kid who sold newspapers in Dallas streets, Mr. Solo. My folks deserted me. I grew up in foster homes. I made my own decisions—they weren’t always right, of course, but I learned to stand up whether they were right or wrong. In my present position of course, I can’t do anything that is contrary to the wishes of the president—nor would I want to.”
Waverly said, “We understand.”
Solo nodded, settling back in the red, leather-covered chair. The lights from the red chimneys cast a reflected glow upon the faces of the men across from him. “It’s the matter of the decision that’s important here. When I was younger—younger than you, Mr. Solo—! was a line officer in the army. I made decisions then when I couldn’t get back to headquarters or there wasn’t time. I can tell you, I stood or fell on them, then.” He shook his head as if brushing away a bitterly unpleasant memory. “Well. Now what I am about to tell you, I have discussed with the president—and with Alexander Waverly here—but no one else. The president agrees with me that I must make the decision—and he has tacitly allowed me to understand that he will not be able publicly to defend me or my decision. My public life depends on success or failure—”
“We’re not here to fail, Osgood,” Waverly said.
Osgood DeVry laughed, almost a desperate sound. “No. We certainly are not. Briefly, Mr. Solo, we have come across some information that perhaps should be turned over to the joint Chiefs, Central Intelligence, the Pentagon—but it is of such a nature that even if only a whisper leaked, the entire country might panic. My decision is to deal quietly with the matter as long as we can. My decision is to let you people at U.N.C.L.E. handle it—as long as you can. Now, it’s my decision, and the president concurs—as long as he can, and off the record. Failure will mean that my head will roll, that I will have failed the president, who’s been a close friend of mine for many years—but more than that, I will have failed the people I’ve tried to serve all my life, whether they always appreciated it or not.”
“Failure could well mean the destruction of the civilized world,” Waverly said.
Solo straightened, staring at his chief incredulously. Waverly smiled. “Don’t be upset, Solo. No one can hear us. This is a sound-proofed room. We could fire a
cannon in here and we’d never be heard. That’s why we chose this place.”
Solo sighed and relaxed. “Then an atomic bomb is involved?”
DeVry said, “At least, an atomic device is rumored to be entangled in the affair. Yes. Here’s what happened. One of your people, in Tokyo on a tangential matter, came across a spy for Thrush. The man was badly wounded, his stomach laid open with knife wounds. He would have no reason to lie, and your man says he was conscious and not delirious, which is what I suspected when I first heard what he’d revealed. The plan is to attack a city inside the continental United States with an atomic device—and, according to the spy, that device and the operation is almost ready. Time is running out.”
“All of this certainly reconciles with every bit of the information we gathered which put us onto this Tixe Ylno matter in the first place,” Waverly said.
“I may as well tell you, I remain somewhat skeptical,” DeVry said. “I cannot help but doubt the plausibility of this information, even though we naturally must run it down. We can’t ignore it.”
“Not in the light of all our other facts about the activities of this Tixe Ylno,” Waverly said.
“The point that makes me most doubtful,” DeVry said, “is the matter of an outsider striking at the United States with an atomic device. Not with our early warning system. It just isn’t practical.”
“It’s just nightmarish enough to be possible,” Solo said
Waverly nodded. “The one important matter that evolves from what we have to this moment—whether such a plot actually is in the works or not, and whether a strike could be successfully delivered against us from without or not, whether it is fact or hoax—is that we must get to this person Tixe Ylno. Whoever he is, whatever he is, he must be quickly captured, exposed, disarmed.”
DeVry exhaled. “For all the reasons I’ve given you, I’ve reached my decision to let you people handle this quietly, and, I pray, quickly.”
“I believe you have made a wise decision,” Waverly said. “We have reports in our office of Thrush agents, and of apparent outsiders, inquiring of the governments of Red China, Russia, France—even the United States—for atomic components. There is afoot this secret plot to hatch some kind of atomic device that is functional. Beyond that, we have the young woman Baynes-Neefuth, who arranged through you, Osgood, for our protection. Obviously, you know that she had been in the employ of Thrush for almost a year, gathering classified information from men in sensitive roles at missile sites. Don’t doubt that there is such a plot. Thrush allowed that young woman to stay alive only long enough to get to us.”
“I failed you then, Mr. DeVry,” Solo said quietly. “I’ll try not to fail you again.”
“You didn’t fail, Mr. Solo.” DeVry smiled. “Thrush had decreed that girl’s death long before she came to me. Her death was one factor that convinced me there might be something to this plot of attack with an atomic device. If these people can build one, then perhaps they have the capability for a strike.”
“I don’t know yet where it will lead me,” Solo said. “But I was able to contact the young woman who was a close confidante of Ursula Baynes.”
“Good. Good,” DeVry said.
“She’s been in hiding from Thrush,” Solo said. “We were able to get to her first this time, I believe.”
“Yes. Miss Baynes told me that the young woman had completely disappeared. I was of the mind that Thrush had found her and destroyed her. I didn’t say any of this to Miss Baynes, of course. I’m glad to hear the other young woman is alive and safe.”
“She’s alive,” Solo said. “Whether she’s safe or not is something else.”
DeVry smiled. “Your record is satisfactory for me, Mr. Solo. I assure you that the president himself will be most pleased when I report to him that you people are at last in contact with someone who might lead us to Tixe Ylno. Just to learn whether Tixe Ylno is male or female will be a giant step forward, eh, gentlemen?”
VII
“Just don’t be impatient, my dear little Illya,” Violet Wild said in a crooning voice. She stood above him where he sprawled with the sheet of garbled writing before him. “Were you writing Violet a love letter, you dear helpless little bug? Don’t you worry. Violet will see you safely put away.”
She laughed down at him, her beauty making her heartless laughter more than cruel.
Illya raged at her, but the sounds he made were the mindless cries of a mewling child.
Violet jerked her head and a man stepped from the shadows. Illya recognized him as the man who’d first attacked him with that fluid-filled fountain pen in Honolulu.
“All right, Edgar,” Violet said. “It is now 2 A.M. It is time our little Illya and I started our journey.”
Edgar nodded, but did not speak. Illya struggled against them, but his agitated movements only amused them, and they lifted him easily. Another of the team brought the suitcases. They went out into the corridor, along it to the bronzed cage of the elevator.
The lobby was almost deserted. Laughter drifted in from the cocktail lounge. A night clerk watched them disinterestedly as they half carried Illya toward the front exit. Illya cried out, but his cawing sounds only frustrated him and got no reaction from the bystanders except a glance of amused pity. They thought he was drunk, a mental defective, or both.
Violet spoke soothingly to him as they walked—not for his sake, he was aware, but for any interested onlooker.
But Illya saw that there was none.
Even the doorman held open the Kharmann Ghia door while they half lifted Illya into the split seat of the convertible. “Has he been like this long?” he asked Violet in heavily accented English.
“All his life,” Violet replied offhandedly. It was the sort of answer one would give who has lived with a tragic affliction so long that it has lost its pain.
She went around and got in under the wheel while their bags were stacked into the small car behind them. She tipped the doorman handsomely and smiled at him. She was calm, unhurried. She tied a pale green wisp of scarf about her bright red-gold hair, knotted it under her chin. She checked her classic loveliness in the rearview mirror and only finally got around to starting the car, putting it in gear and pulling out of the hotel entrance.
Illya glared at the speedometer. She rolled through the sleeping town at less than twenty miles an hour. He heard her humming to herself as she drove.
He saw the flicker of headlights in the windshield, reflected from behind them.
He realized that Violet saw them, too. She glanced into her rear-view mirror, increasing her speed only slightly as they went north out of the town limits.
Illya began to feel a little better. Violet did not seem perturbed, but at the same time, they both knew the car behind them was not friendly to her.
Illya sat tensely, waiting for the moment when Violet would tromp on the gas, attempting to lose the car tailing them.
He felt a sense of satisfaction. The Mexican country was desolate, open. Losing that car would be a difficult matter on this narrow, winding road through the mountains. He cut his eyes at her, willing to give her odds that she would not make it.
She drove now at an untroubled forty miles an hour.
Illya stirred in his bucket seat.
She glanced at him. “What’s the matter, Little Illya? Does my little bug think his friends will stop us?”
He forced his head around, though it jerked and trembled, seeing that the car was gaining on the Kharmann Ghia convertible.
“Look well,” Violet told him sardonically.
He saw at once what she meant. Another set of headlights flared behind the second car. He did not have to be told that this was Edgar and his friends. They had laid back only long enough to give the U.N.C.L.E. agents time to roll in behind Violet’s small car.
“Now we shall see what we shall see,” Violet said. She laughed, showing faultless white teeth. “Now!”
She cried out the word and shoved her slipper hard on
to the accelerator.
The small car lunged ahead on the narrow dark road. Illya felt the sharp cut of the wind. The motor hummed and the tires screamed on the shoddy pavement. She slowed slightly when a sign warned of a sharp curve, but she was already speeding again as she rolled into it.
Her headlights raked across the grass and rock façade of the mountains. At times below them the tops of huge trees bent in the night wind. Climbing upward, they could see the racing headlights of the other two cars on turns beneath them in the unquiet dark.
Illya was tossed helplessly in the seat. He tried to cling to something but he could not force his hands to obey his orders.
The speedometer needle wavered at eighty. They struck potholes and the small car danced, almost turning around. Violet fought the wheel, bringing them skidding to the brink of deep chasms.
“What are you afraid of, my little bug?” Violet shouted.
The wind caught her words, fragmenting them. “You want to go on living—the way you are—you call that living?”
Illya made no attempt to answer her.
He saw on a turn that Violet’s car had far outdistanced the other two—perhaps for two reasons: the men in the other cars didn’t take the insane chances Violet did on this unfamiliar mountain road, and the race for the moment was between those cars back there.
The third car was lunging and nipping at the one ahead of it, in a dogfight attempt to force it off the road at every hairpin curve.
“You wouldn’t want them to get you away from us,” Violet shouted at him, laughing. “Not really. Not the way you are. What do your people know of the injection you got—or even how to combat its effects?”
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