When they were alone in the long conference room, both Solo and Waverly sat some moments without moving.
At last Waverly got up and paced the floor, face rutted with thought. "So Sheik Zud—whose goodness lights the desert and whose treachery turns my stomach—wants me to send you to fetch the effects and remains of Illya Kuryakin."
"I'll be pleased to go, Alexander."
"Oh, I'm sure you would. This is one little trip I'd like to take with you." Looking at Waverly, Solo was reminded of a bulldog with the ruff standing at its shoulders. ''But we've got to be dispassionate about this. If we act in haste, or in rage, we may be walking into just the mistakes Sheik Zud might be hoping we'll make."
"I would be most alert," Solo said with some savagery.
"I'm positive of this, too. But I've made my decision. Where is Wanda Mae Kim?"
Solo's mouth sagged open. "On assignment. Why?"
The faintest smile tugged at Waverly's mouth. "Oh, I understand your consternation. No, I'm not senile. No more than usual, any how. I realize as well as you, Solo, that Wanda worked in our outer offices, and is the newest of your recruits—"
"On the least urgent of all assignments," Solo reminded him.
Waverly straightened. "I've made my decision, Solo. Zabir and Sheik Zud will anticipate my sending you to collect Illya's belongings. Since, as you say, Wanda handles only the most petty assignments, surely she won't be missed on whatever occupies her. Bring her in to me at once."
Solo gazed at Waverly incredulously, then he straightened and nodded. He had his orders.
* * *
THE UNITED Command helicopter hovered for a moment above the west-side tenement building. On the seat beside the pilot, Solo gazed down at the grime-crusted buildings, the crowded early-afternoon streets.
He said, "Can you put her down on this roof?"
The pilot nodded. He was a dark-haired man in his twenties, with a devil-may-care smile for any peril. "I can put her down anywhere. That's why you hired me. Remember?"
"Knew there must have been some reason," Solo said. He spoke over his shoulder to the three agents in the dome cabin. "Hang on. Sunday Driver is going to chop his way in through the clotheslines."
Sunday Driver grinned, settled the chopper easily to the black roofing. Pigeons fluttered up in panic and a cloud of dust and debris smoked upward.
Solo opened the plastic door and swung down. He checked his vest- pocket sender for channel and efficiency.
"Sit tight," he told his agents. "I won't be a minute."
"If there's any glory in it, or a chance for a raise, call me, will you?" one of the agents called after Napoleon Solo, grinning.
"Don't forget we're double- parked," the pilot called.
Solo didn't glance back. He went through the stairway door, down to the fifteenth floor without hesitation, aware that doors were cracked open, his progress followed.
On the fifteenth floor, he strode directly to a door at the end of the shabby corridor.
He removed a small, conelike device from his pocket, placed it against the door facing. Sounds came through subdued, but as clearly as if he were on the inner side of the wall.
Moving smoothly, but without undue haste, he took a cylinder much like a hair-spray refill tube from his jacket. Placing it at the edge of the door, he sprayed around it in a continuous movement from floor upward and across the top, down the other side.
The fluid ate away the wood like concentrated acid on metal. The door quivered. Solo touched it with the tip of his finger, and it fell away into the room.
Solo's first view, of that interior was less than reassuring.
His gaze was drawn to Wanda Mae Kim.
Wanda Mae was outlandishly decorative under any conditions, and she managed to be eye-catching even in the trying circumstances in which she had managed to become involved.
She was not only involved, she was entangled. Her trim ankles were secured by leather leashes to almost opposite poles of the room. Her China-gold arms were stretched by other leashes high above her head.
She lay like the black-haired, ruby-mouthed adornment of the center of a particularly unappetizing bargain-basement carpeting. Her eyes, like dark opals, were wide with terror.
Her form-clinging skirt had been ripped up the side; her dragon- embroidered blouse was torn, smudged with dirt. A streak of dirt was like a scar across the glaze of her ceramic-smooth cheeks.
Even so, she was bewitching.
This could not be said for the other occupants of the room.
They were grouped about her, each with his own sadistic weapon of torture. There were four of them, one wearing the blue uniform of the New York City police force.
He was as intent upon torture as his three comrades. He knelt beside Wanda, holding the bright tip of a cigarette within inches of her eyes. Her beauty left him unmoved. His florid face sweated with concentration.
This was true of all of them. They had little in common except the evil in their faces, the tools of torment in their fists—and the common bond of their vile racket.
A slender, sunken-chested man brandished a thin, narrow whip, cracking it within inches of Wanda's bared golden legs. A stout, balding man in plaid jacket and ankle-length slacks held a dripping hypodermic and needle. The youngest, swarthy, greasy-haired, black bangs eye-length, waited with a switch-blade knife for his turn.
So intent upon their prisoner were the four thugs that the door tell, air whipping across them, before they reacted.
They lunged around, and the cop leaped to his feet, going for the gun at his holster.
Wanda saw Solo first. Her straight, shoulder-length black hair waved as she rolled her head back and forth in anguish, crying out, "I didn't tell them anything! I didn't!"
Solo spared her only a brief glance that warned he'd deal with her later for her fearful breach of direct orders.
Since the cop had reacted first, Napoleon Solo gave him his immediate attention.
He did not draw the U.N.C.L.E. Special from its shoulder holster.
Instead he drew from his inner jacket pocket what appeared to be a wallet. But when he pressed its safety catch; a barrel the length of the wallet plunged outward. He fired it by pressing the same catch, so his movement was fluid, and no time was wasted.
There was a sharp sound like "thid!"
A pellet erupted from the barrel and struck the cop squarely in the neck.
It was as if the big man had been stung by a wasp in flight. He threw his right hand up, slapping at the place he'd been struck. His hand closed on his neck—and he found himself unable to withdraw it. In those brief seconds the pellet's fluid had stunned him, and he stood immobile, his hand grasping at his neck. He tried to move and he could not.
The long-haired boy was next, because his reactions were fastest. The boy wheeled around, stared for a moment at Solo. In that instant, his reactions named Solo enemy, and he lowered his hand to his side to hurl the knife in a fierce underhanded pitch directly at Solo's buckle. It would have seemed impossible for him to miss at this close range.
Perhaps it would have been, except that the second pellet from Solo's nerve-gun caught the boy in the center of his bangs. It struck at the moment he'd started his upswing and the knife floated harmlessly past Solo's head.