The Girl From U.N.C.L.E.: The Birds-Of-A-Feather Affair

by Michael Avallone

  THE MAKING OF AN

  U.N.C.L.E. GIRL

  "If you're going to kill a man with your bare hands, Miss Dancer, make certain you know where the beggar's feet are. It's a mistake you won't be able to make twice."

  —Mr. Waverly, Headquarters, N. Y.

  "Mais non, my dear April! Once you have made your thrust, recover immédiatement. You will not want to be covered with the blood of your victim, n'est-ce pas?"

  —Rene de Fresnay, Master Of The Sword, U.N.C.L.E. Academy

  "It's in the form of a harmless jelly compound, April. Light it and it just flares harmlessly. But if you contain it in some tube or cylinder, it would destroy this whole building."

  —Mark Slate, Laboratory, U.N.C.L.E.

  "Nitrogen narcosis, Dancer. If you stay down too long or too deep, you'll get silly in the head. Maybe hand your oxygen filter to a shark or go dancing with an octopus. So make certain you never go down to great depths without another experienced diver. Got me?"

  —Sam Wales, Scuba Expert, Tampa, Fla.

  "No, you won't fall in love, my girl. You're in love already—with U.N.C.L.E."

  —April Dancer, standing before a mirror

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  the girl from

  U.N.C.L.E.

  The Birds-of-a-Feather Affair

  by Michael Avallone

  A SIGNET BOOK

  Published by The New American Library

  Copyright © 1966 by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc.

  All rights reserved

  First Printing, September, 1966

  SIGNET TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND FOREIGN COUNTRIES

  REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA

  HECHO EN CHICAGO, U.S.A.

  SIGNET BOOKS are published by

  The New American Library, Inc.,

  1301 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10019

  printed in the united states of america

  This one is for my sister Grace,

  who taught me my first steps

  Table Of Operations

  1. WHAT THE GIRL IS

  2. SISTER AGENT

  3. DEATH IN THREE LANGUAGES

  4. OH, U.N.C.L.E., WHERE ART THOU?

  5. THE GREAT ZORKI

  6. DONT BLOW YOUR TOP

  7. DANCER WITH COLD FEET

  8. CLEAN SLATE

  9. AWAY ALL GIRLS

  10. AROUND-THE-CLOCK TERROR

  11. MR. WAVERLY CALLS THE TUNE

  12. I HAVE NOT YET BEGUN TO SPY

  13. THE TWO MAD BOMBERS

  14. MR. RIDDLE

  15. SEND ONE MORE COFFIN

  16. BYE, BYE, EGRET

  For The Uninitiated

  The letters U.N.C.L.E. stand for United Network Command of Law Enforcement. This is an organization of unusual quality and outstanding ability; its main function is to defeat the forces of global operations that seek to subjugate civilization as we know it beneath the hell and totalitarianism of tyranny.

  To combat all the deadly isms, there is U.N.C.L.E. No other arm of counter-intelligence and espionage exists in which the range of counter—ism endeavor is so nonparochial and far-flung. The personnel of U.N.C.L.E. is intentionally multinational and multilingual. All races, colors and creeds combine their efforts to block any world power or underground organization that attempts to unbalance the scheme of things by force.

  U.N.C.L.E. is subdivided into six sections:

  SECTION I: Policy and Operations

  SECTION II: Operations and Enforcement

  SECTION III: Enforcement and Intelligence

  SECTION IV: Intelligence and Communications

  SECTION V: Communications and Security

  SECTION VI: Security and Personnel

  There is a profitable overlap of one Section into another. Section II is perhaps the most vital of all the departments in that it is there that the all-important job of execution of the work of the other five sections truly solidifies into reality.

  For there is one country, one force, one power, whose entire raison d'être is world domination. Out of this country has come an organization of supra-people who seek to rule the universe and are known by the code name of THRUSH.

  U.N.C.L.E. is the only answer for THRUSH.

  No one has ever learned what the lettered name of a bird symbolizes.

  But it is not the dove of peace. It is the bird of war. All-out, deadly, no-holds-barred war.

  U.N.C.L.E. has the men to stop them.

  And the women.

  What the Girl Is

  She pinned herself against the stone wall of the building, her spiked heels anchored to the thin strip of ledge which ran like an ornamental belt about the nineteenth floor of the Hotel Taft. She waited for her reflexes to return, for the dull fear to leave the pit of her stomach. A swarm of monumental doubts, concerning the wisdom of fleeing out here to the ledge to run away from death, tormented her. But soon, all the bees died. Her rigid training took command.

  Briefly, keeping her mind clear, she surveyed her position. It was acutely disagreeable.

  Far below the tips of her I. Miller pumps, like harbor lights in the night, Manhattan traffic moved quickly, smoothly. The circus lighting of Times Square became a blinding glare of nudity against the massed blackness of the buildings—canyon walls rising starkly high. A star-bright night shone overhead.

  Enough light to die by.

  She was nineteen floors above the street, her lithe figure straining against the dizzy environs of space. The silver lamé of her gown, clinging to every feminine line of her body, was now a laughable luxury. She was like some displaced Cinderella lost in transit. The danger was all too apparent. The next window was a good twenty feet away.

  The black attaché briefcase, which she could afford to lose as little as life, totally hampered her slow and torturously hazardous progress. The spiked heels didn't help at all. She might have been walking on stilts.

  She held the briefcase behind her curved back, one slender arm extended for balance, flattening herself against the cold stone sides of the building. Her ivory cheek was pressed to the facade.

  She took a deep breath. Her body trembled.

  At least, she was away from the killing ground. They had sought to bottle her up i
n the corridor. Now, there was only the proposition of getting off the ledge without breaking her neck—and getting the briefcase and its valuable contents back to Headquarters. The odds weren't too good.

  Slowly, she edged along the narrow concrete strip, inch by inch, supremely conscious of the shaky purchase of the spiked heels. There had been no time to remove her shoes and now it was too late. Life was sweet but she would not endanger the casual passersby below with the outlandish hazard of falling spiked pumps. That too was laughable, somehow.

  The night wind built up a soft yet disturbing breeze. The billowing of her dark hair, worn long for this assignment, unsettled her. She pushed it out of her mind and concentrated on her feathery ballet across eternity.

  The assignment was ending badly; she had had success in her hand, the briefcase, and now, it might cost her her neck. They had got on to her somehow.

  Ten feet of the tricky passage lay behind her, now. The safety of the next window drew comfortably nearer. She had to fight against a tendency to speed her steps. She kept her eyes glued on her goal. The briefcase snagged once on a jagged scale of stone and she paused, heart beating. She teetered precariously for an instant. Then she righted herself and moved on.

  The briefcase seemed to weigh a ton though it contained only thirty five pages of highly specific top secret data. And clothes.

  Nine feet, eight feet, seven, six, five, four, three——

  She heard the window ride upward before she saw the man. A fast, rising, grating sound of doom.

  She froze on the ledge, trapped like a bug on a specimen board.

  Just before her, a gargoyle face, jutted into view, poised against the glare of neon from below. The head was fixed on awesome shoulders. Now giant hands reached for her. The face was a grinning mask of intermingled rage and amusement.

  "So!" The man snarled in the same thickly accented voice she had heard in the cocktail lounge (he had sought then to make a continental pickup). "You will not escape, as you think. My friends are down below to claim the briefcase from your corpse if—"

  The hands shot toward her. To push, to jar, to kill. To seize the briefcase.

  She bent backwards, hugging the wall. Her right hand moved with the blur of a comet, unhooking a cameo brooch fastened to the throat of her gown. An oblong of brilliant onyx and jade twinkled. She flung her hand toward the man. With the gesture, a thick spray of inky fluid, released with the pressure of a forefinger on a concealed lever, saturated the assassin's eyes. [His face darkened rapidly.]

  He roared in surprise and pain. The viscous, irritating concoction, product of the highly advanced Headquarters Research Laboratory, had never worked more devastatingly.

  The man forgot where he was, nineteen floors above the sidewalk. He threshed forward in dark agony, clawing vigorously at his eyes. He lowered his bull's head, moaning, as he doubled over the sill. The back of his neck lay exposed. She helped him the rest of the way.

  She chopped down savagely with her right hand, clubbing the man over the parapet of the window. The stiffened palm of a Karate blow fell like the stroke of an ax. The assassin's weight, coupled with his own sudden unconsciousness, sagged over the sill. His body, topheavy with torso, sprawled outward. Gravity did the rest.

  She did not watch.

  Mercifully, the senseless carcass plummeted into the lights below. It was as if some some dark mass of masonry had broken loose from the hotel itself. The hollow, breaking sound came up from the ground below as faintly as the distant thump of a toppled garbage can. The noise was lost in the tootling of traffic sounds, the clamor of New York after dark.

  And then a woman screamed. A thin, piercing wail of terror and disbelief. Talk about flying spiked pumps.

  She stepped quickly into the black refuge of the hotel room. She was too grateful to pause for investigation. Her left hand was sticky with the pressure of her palm on the laminated handle of the attaché case. A fine sheen of moisture dampened her body. The silver lamé dress clung to her like a shroud.

  The room was empty.

  With nothing else to deter her, she found the back stairway of the hotel. As she walked slowly down the dimly lit staircase, she swiftly and smoothly divested herself of the lamé gown. Before she had descended five flights, her appearance had changed radically. The briefcase, apart from its valuable papers, had yielded a tweed, two-piece outfit, sensible flats and a pair of rimless glasses. Her long dark hair had disappeared beneath the cramped brim of a soft, velour man's fedora.

  It was midnight, and Cinderella was leaving the ball, after all. No fairy godmother had arranged the miracle.

  She managed to leave the hotel, skirting the official uproar of the strange accident in front of the Hotel Taft. Wherever the assassin's friends were, they did not spot her. She walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, ignoring all cabs and passersby. A friendly drunk giggled at her wolfishly as she came by, but she dodged him nimbly. Within minutes, she had found the subway she wanted. She took a ride of three stops to her East Side hotel.

  Once she was safely esconced in her third-floor room, she opened the briefcase, removing a small, square metal case that for all the world resembled a cigarette case. She thumbed it and a low, beeping sound was audible. She held the square case several inches from her mouth. She had a lovely mouth. One would have been hard put to believe she had just killed a man.

  An electronically relayed voice bridged the tiny space between her lips and the case.

  "Yes, Miss Dancer?"

  "Mission completed," she replied, in a voice that might have sent thrills of anticipation down the spine of the most jaded male. "The briefcase will be turned over to the UN in the morning."

  "Good." The voice was dry, patient and eminently English. "Any complications?"

  "Yes."

  "Go on."

  "I had to scratch one Comrade X. Just as well. He was the only one who could have identified me, Mr. Waverly."

  "Then you had no other alternative. Anything else?"

  "Yes. Please tell the Lab to work on something for high heels. They should be made detachable so they can be jettisoned easily. They could trip a girl up sometimes."

  "I see. Yes, you have a point. Not very desirable for walking along ledges, are they?"

  She restrained a smile. She might have known. The Taft business was old news already at Headquarters. It figured that Mr. Waverly, head of Section II, Operations And Enforcements, would have had her covered somehow.

  "Report here tomorrow at ten o'clock," Mr. Waverly said. "A good night's work, Miss Dancer. Get some sleep."

  "Yes, sir."

  The beeping sound vanished. She closed her eyes for a long, delicious moment of relaxation. So the UN would get their precious papers back—all the notes and recorded data on the Space Program which the enemy had wanted so badly. But it would all have come to nothing if Comrade X had shoved her into eternity.

  She thought of the cold and hard concrete sidewalk in front of the Taft and shivered.

  Nerves were an occupational hazard. Though it was best to have them when all the shooting and the tumult was over. But, after all, she was a woman.

  In the morning, she'd check out of the hotel, having no further need of her cover as Agnes Malloy, dress buyer from Chicago, Illinois, in town for the Annual Dressmaker's Convention which had gathered at the Hotel Taft. By morning, she could return to her own little apartment downtown and resume her identity as Miss April Dancer. The UN Papers Affair was over.

  April Dancer.

  The girl from U.N.C.L.E.

  The United Network Command of Law and Enforcement needed women agents, too. After all, for all of the superb abilities of agents like Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, there was one specialty of April Dancer's that they didn't and couldn't perform.

  If a female enemy agent walked into the powder room, April Dancer could follow her.

  Not even her working partner Mark Slate could do that.

  Sister Agent

  Mr. Alexander Wav
erly was worried.

  As executive head of all the sections that comprised the unique organization known as U.N.C.L.E., one through six inclusive, he was not a scared white rabbit. In the extraordinary complex of steel walls, corridors, elevators and offices, there were thousands of buttons at his disposal. Any one of them could institute all sorts of activity, research, security measures—and attacks. Including panic.

  An orderly row of ten enamel buzzers were immediately available in Waverly's private office. Every color of the spectrum, every purpose in the universe. At his very fingertips lay the power to send an agent winging to far-off Ghana, or to order a cup of iced tea from the commissary. Only Waverly himself could tell which color button could perform which magic.

  Mr. Waverly felt like pushing a button now. He clucked aloud to himself, as though chiding his judgment. When he was alone in his Headquarters office, he often did. Now, behind his contour chair, Manhattan, sunlit and golden on this Fall day, glistened, together with the Queens shoreline. In the foreground, the tall monolithic glass structure of the United Nations Building towered above the East River.

  With sudden impatience, Waverly revolved forward in his leather swivel chair and thumbed one of the ten buttons on his desk. The blue one.

  A smooth, unhurried female voice sounded from no apparent position in the vicinity of his desk.

  "Section Two. Yes, Mr. Waverly?"

  "Has Miss Dancer reported in yet?"