Remembering Caillou, Solo swung around toward the banker and his private jet.
Turning, Solo reacted to a sharp twinge in his side, pain akin to muscular spasms—or a knife biting at him:
It was a knife.
Solo cut-short his turning. A knife blade making itself felt through top coat, jacket and shirt could inflict irreparable damage if one swung around into it.
"Ah, this is wise."
"The wish to stay alive makes wise men of us all," Solo quoted.
He stared into the face of a man hewn from Moorish stone. Flat eyes shallowly reflected light, the way a dog's might. Several inches taller than Solo, broader, in London-tailored fabric tortured into the latest Mod fashion, his goatee was trimmed to a black point and his hair fitted like a cap close upon his scalp.
Solo glanced down at the razor-honed blade nibbling at his side. The big man held it in oddly bulky kid-skin gloves.
Solo said, "To what do I owe the pleasure of this encounter?"
"We wish to talk quietly with you, Monsieur," the Moor said in French.
"Moi non parle Francais," Solo said. He shifted his gaze to the Arab woman close against his other side.
About her sharp-featured face there was an extreme of loveliness and a worldly arrogance, as if she were not only a girl that knew the score, but had invented the game. Her beauty was eye-arresting, but its packaging was tarnished by her long-brushes with sin.
"He says he does not speak French," she told the knife-wielding Moor in disgust
"He'd better learn, if he means to keep butting in like this," the Moor said in English.
He prodded the knife less than a sixteenth of an inch, yet Solo had to bite his lip to suppress an agonized yell.
"Come," the Moor said. "We will talk in my office."
They marched him toward the terminal building, walking close beside him.
Solo scowled. Unless these two were connected with Caillou's attacker, their accosting him didn't make pretty good sense.
The Moor jerked his head to ward an alleyway.
"My office," he said with a cold grin.
Solo shrugged. "Where else?'
The Arab woman led the way Into the darkness. They marched Solo to a partitioned maintenance area.
Solo put his back to a wall. He said, "Well, what shall we talk about? Lovely weather, isn't it?"
The Moor stared at him unblinkingly. In a deft movement he transferred the switch-blade to the woman.
"I don't have a lot to say, ma chere ami." The Moor worked the bulky gloves off his fingers. "But what I do tell you, you will recall for a long time."
He smiled ruefully. He shook the gloves, lowering them in one hand toward his side.
Watching the big man closely, Solo reacted too slowly.
The Moor brought the gloves up, backhanded. They caught Solo in the temple.
Solo's legs melted to oleo. Before the Moor struck him in the other temple, Solo was already crumbling to his knees on the ground.
He felt the battering of those lead-lined gloves. His last conscious thought was that he understood why the Moor had removed them. If he'd hit him with those gloves on, he might have bruised his hands, or even fractured a metacarpus bone.
TWO
SOLO SAGGED into the window seat of the Trans-World jet, cruising at thirty-five thousand feet above the Atlantic.
He felt uncomfortably warm in the pressurized cabin.
A compassionate stewardess leaned toward him.
She was built cafeteria style: you wanted to help yourself. Even from the depths of his pain, Solo saw she'd be habit forming.
She winced at his facial abrasions and contusions. She said, "You poor man. You must be in total pain."
Solo attempted to smile.
"No. My left eyeball hurts hardly at all."
She extended an international copy of the New York Times. "Do you feel like reading?"
Solo did not answer.
His gaze froze on the headline:
WORLD BANK DEVALUES DOLLAR AND POUND IN INTERNATIONAL TRADE.
He stared at the newspaper. What he had witnessed tonight tied in with that headline, even if he didn't know how.
He saw Lester Caillou, a World Bank director, running frightened toward a plane, attacked from the darkness.
Many hours later, Solo carried that disturbing mental image as he left a taxi at Third Avenue and walked in the east Forties toward the United Nations Complex.
He walked down a flight of steps, entered Del Floria's Cleaning and Tailoring shop, in the basement of an inconspicuous whitestone building.
The tailor gave him a glance, but registered no reaction to Solo's battered face. It had been weeks since Solo had entered the place, but to Del Floria it might have been last night.
At the rear of the shop, Solo stepped between curtains into a dressing booth. He pressed a wall button.
There was a pause of three breaths, but in this time much happened in the complex sensory nerves of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement beyond an unmarked door in the wall.
Unseen eyes scanned him; complex memory tapes in computers whirred, finding him acceptable; inner mechanisms flicked into action and he was admitted into the chrome and steel interior of the home base of the world's most far-flung crime-fighting organization.
Despite its unpretentious appearance, the whitestone building housed cells of bustling activity— from its roof where a huge, innocent-appearing sign concealed antennae and sending apparatus to a maze of water-ways connecting it with the East River and the furthest cranny of the earth, to its main offices where everything and every one worked ceaselessly to contain, control, eradicate crime on an international scale.
The receptionist pinned an identification tag to Solo's lapel. She smelled of violets, but her curves pressured against the primness of her uniform, and her smile promised that she played to win. She smiled at his bruises.
"Someday you're going to learn to take no for an answer, Mr. Solo."
His grin matched hers. "That'll be the day."
Illya Kuryakin fell into step be side him inside the brightly lit corridors. A persistent muffled hum emanating even from the walls showed that all systems throbbed steadily from the foundation itself and out across the universe, wherever man carried evil.
Illya was slenderly made, but his leanness was deceptive. Solo had been trained to kill by every known method devised in the mind of man. Yet he was continually thankful that Illya was on his side.
Illya's smile was hesitant, crooked. His eyes were blue, and a lock of pale blond hair toppled over his forehead, and it grew shabbily on his collar. He didn't look like what he was, a Russian-born agent, incredibly trained in every aspect of global espionage.
Illya spoke casually. "Sorry to hear about Mace's death. Hope it was quick."
"And from the back," Solo said in remembered rage.
Illya ignored the contusions swelling Solo's cheeks, discoloring his eyes. "What sort of trip home?"
Solo shook his head, spoke casually. "The in-flight movie was lousy. All about spies and people getting slugged. Completely unbelievable."
ALEXANDER WAVERLY peered at Illya and Solo across his desk in the Command Room. Cited by almost every nation for bravery and distinguished service, Waverly might well have been past the age of enforced retirement, but if he were, it was a fact that not even U.N.C.L.E.'s computer dared bring before him.