Solo stared through the bars a moment, then let himself drop within the dungeon.
"Something's fouled them up!" he said in triumph.
"Maybe it was this," Illya said in mock casualness. He touched at an inch-long cylinder pinned at his lapel.
Solo put his head back, laughing in pleasure.
"You've been broadcasting distress bleeps!"
Illya nodded. "As fast as my little transistors would work." He smiled faintly. "I don't like to sit around idle."
The thick dungeon door was hurled open. Its brass knob gouged into the stone wall.
Albert, Marie and three guards charged into the room like a task force.
Albert carried a small machine pistol.
"All right," Albert snapped the order. "You two. Solo, Kuryakin. Let's go!"
Yvonne cried out. "Don't leave me alone down here!"
Illya bounced to his feet without touching his hands to the floor. Gently, he touched at her cheek with the backs of his fingers. He smiled at her. "Don't worry. I've a feeling we'll be back. Soon."
Albert laughed. "Don't count on it."
Marie smiled, too. "This time your cleverness has carried you too far."
TWO
A GUARD OPENED the double doors of a room on the third floor of the chateau.
Solo and Illya stepped into a room of incredible elegance. It left them for the moment speechless.
The large, high-ceilinged room was part of a suite done in an early Eastern dynasty decor, featuring blood reds and ebony blacks.
In the center of this luxury reclined a man of Siamese ancestry. Before him was a low, bone white table.
He sat with his long legs crossed. He wore a silk suit of deep black, a white shirt and white cravat. His face was like ancient writing paper made of rice. It looked as if it would tear or crack if touched. His cheek bones stood prominently and his nose, hooked above a taut, small mouth. From deep sockets burned eyes black and fiery. He was almost bald, his forehead high and protruding.
Across from him a far wall was banked with large closed circuit television screens monitoring the chateau. Upon one tube Yvonne huddled against the dungeon wall, shoulders sagging, face pressed into her hands. Lights flickered gray when there was movement in any area.
The Siamese slapped his fragile hands. Albert and Marie withdrew reluctantly, but not daring to protest aloud. They were followed by the guards.
The man waved his slender fingers. Solo and Illya followed the direction of his gesture. They saw the dark mouths of guns trained on them from every wall.
They returned their gazes to the smile of the man at the bone-white table.
Illya glanced at Solo, found his fellow agent peering incredulously at the seated man.
For one long moment Solo's hazel eyes struck against the ebony black ones of the man before him. The room was charged with the static tension generated between them in the silence.
"Dr. Lee Maunchaun," Solo whispered at last.
"Ah, yes. I am the doctor you were anxious to meet."
"But—"
"I'm dead?" Dr. Maunchaun inquired, smiling enigmatically. "A violent death, wasn't it? The last time we met—"
"An atomic misfire," Solo whispered.
"Obviously I survived," Dr. Maunchaun said. "Without nurturing any deeper affection for your people and their goals."
"You always hated on a fantastic scale," Solo said, remembering.
"Perhaps you thought you knew me when I hated. But I had barely learned its nuances at that time, my old enemy." He stared through them at something in the middle distance. "I was born to hatred. I saw my sisters slain because there was not food for female children in my land. I saw starvation.
"I was the youngest of ten surviving children, subsisting on a plot of ground barely thirty square yards. People of my kind learn to live with hatred, or to die of despair. I lived. I persisted. I bought myself—at prices you would never understand—the wisdom of the ages, all the knowledge I would need to buy myself away from the land I hated."
"Only to find yourself meeting people you hated," Solo said it for him.
Dr. Maunchaun gazed at him unblinking. "Ah, yes, we've met before, Mr. Solo. But your partner, we've not met."
"Only in my nightmares," Illya said mildly.
"I'm sure you learned to hate Mr. Kuryakin without needing to know him," Solo said in irony.
Dr. Maunchaun waved his reed-like hand imperiously, dispensing with the preliminaries. He said, abruptly. "Which of you is doing it?"
They gazed at him blankly, as if they did not know he meant the bleep-broadcast signals.
The doctor's voice tautened. "I've been occupied this past hour or I would know unerringly which of you is the culprit. It does not matter. You will suffer equally for this crime."
They remained silent, watching
Dr. Maunchaun gazed at them a moment almost pityingly. Then he pressed a button on the table edge. A scientist in white smock appeared from a side room almost immediately. He carried an oblong sound-detector.
He walked close to where Illya and Solo stood. He passed the oblong before them, its thin antennae trembling.
He reached out, removed the cylinder from Illya's lapel. The expression on his face did not alter. He placed the small object on the table before the doctor.
Maunchaun looked at it but did not touch it. "No doubt made in Japan," he said in contempt.
"It upset your laundry cart," Illya said.
Maunchaun met his gaze for a moment, then shrugged his thin shoulders in his immaculate silk jacket. He pressed another button. "I remind you, there are guns trained on you from the walls."
Illya shrugged.
Maunchaun paused, then as if making a decision, he nodded toward the white-smocked scientist.
The man set the detector down.
From an inside pocket he with drew two small vials. Then he placed goggles and an oxygen mask over his face. He came slowly to Illya and Solo.
He broke the vials with the pres sure of his thumb and extended them toward the faces, of the two young agents.
There was no smoke, nothing they could see, a faint acrid odor, this was all. The scientist retreated. He removed his mask. He glanced toward Dr. Maunchaun and when he nodded, the scientist withdrew from the room.
Illya and Solo could not move, found they could not speak, though they remained conscious, aware of everything around them.
"No sense gambling with your foolhardy notions of courage," Dr. Maunchaun said.
He pressed another button be fore him. Almost at once, the corridor opened and Lester Caillou entered. Except that Illya saw this was not the real Caillou. This man, the ringer they'd substituted for the internationally known banker, paused, wincing slightly when he saw Illya.
"It's all right," Maunchaun said to the ringer. "Everything is all right. These are the agents who saved your life, some years ago in the Middle East. I'm sure you won't forget them again."
"No," said the false Caillou.
A knock at the door. Maunchaun pressed a button, the doors parted. A servant entered.
"Lieutenant David of the Paris Police, Doctor," he said.
The police lieutenant entered, paused, momentarily stunned at the opulence of the suite.