And in the instant that he replied, over the mumble of voices, somewhere down the passage outside a door slammed sharply.
As it shut, a door in Napoleon Solo's mind opened as suddenly. Every detail of his life up to the moment he had realized that the carafe in the hotel room at Goiás had been drugged was with him again. It was exactly as though the preceding period really had been a confused and disturbing dream from which now suddenly he was freshly awake.
"How long have I been held here under sedation and artificially induced amnesia?" he asked quietly as the doctor approached.
"Ah! The moment of breakthrough has come and gone, then" - the voice came not from the doctor but in a curiously disembodied way from the gri1le which extracted the breathed air in the cell – "and Mr. Solo knows once more just who he is!... Never mind: perhaps we have been fortunate to have had him for our guest... for so long."
"You haven't answered my question," the agent said, still facing the doctor.
"Doctor Gerhardi is not permitted to speak with you, Mr. Solo," the voice continued. "You may talk to me. After all, we are old friends."
"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," Solo said, swinging around to face the grille and feeling rather foolish as he did so. "Or have we held – er - conversations while I have been drugged?"
A deep chuckle floated from the grating. '''Have the advantage' is good," the voice said. "You might almost call us intimates. Through the closed-circuit television camera mounted behind one of the four lighting panels in your ceiling, you have been under constant watch since the moment you arrived. And thanks to the doctor's persuasionary powers you have been most cooperative in the matter of conversations."
"You have been questioning me under the influence of Pentathol?"
"A refined version of a drug discovered centuries ago by the Matto Grosso Indians - a drug which makes Pentathol seem as mild and innocuous as an aspirin. So far as information goes, Mr. Solo, you have been sucked as dry as a lemon! Now it only remains to decide whether the rind shall be discarded or whether it might add zest to a cocktail by being shaved and twisted... There is no point in proceeding with the injection at this time, doctor: once the amnesiac condition has been broken through, one has to go right back to the beginning again."
"I trust you obtained the information you wanted," Solo said politely.
"Indeed, yes. Indeed. We know all we want to know, now, about the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and why Mr. Waverly sent you out here, and what Mr. Forster of the C.I.A. said, and so on."
"Nonsense. I don't believe it!" Solo said.
All Enforcement Agents from U.N.C.L.E. were periodically "brainwashed" by a system of subliminal suggestions which was supposed to plant in their minds a series of conditioned answers to any questions they might be asked when under the influence either of drugs or of torture. The theory was that it was best to give as much as possible of the truth, particularly as regards the agent's affiliation with the Command and so on: after all, any adversaries might already know this, and any untruths there would automatically invalidate further revelations. On the other hand, if a victim first confirmed what the questioners knew, they would be all the more likely to believe what he said subsequently. A mental "censor" was supposed to operate on the agent's mind as soon as the questions genuinely impinged on the task in hand - and from that point the prepared lies were supposed to operate subconsciously, even under the deepest hypnosis. It was therefore essential for Solo to know whether this system had worked - and the only way he could find out was to discover from his captors what they had been told while he was under their drugs.
"What do you mean, you don't believe it?" the voice was asking.
"I told you," Solo said. "You can't have got any information from me when I was drugged. We are conditioned. You could have found out I belonged to the Command, and about Waverly, from many sources."
"We could have, perhaps. But we didn't. You told us everything. Absolutely everything."
"Ridiculous!" Solo said contemptuously. "I simply do not believe you."
"I tell you, you came across with the whole works." There was a definite edge to the voice now. "You're not imbecilic, Mr. Solo. There is no need to bandy words. You can believe me when I tell you -"
"And I tell you I don't believe you. It's just a trick - and a very old and shabby trick, too, like telling a man his confederate has confessed all - to make him talk."
"You have talked, Solo. Plenty. So much so that there's no point - no need, for God's sake! - to ask you any thing more. We have it."
"Rubbish," Solo said shortly. He turned away from the grille and sat down on the bed. The pretty nurse flashed him a knowing smile as she went out with the doctor and her colleague.
"Do you want me to prove it to you, for Heaven's sake?" the voice cried.
"Prove it? You couldn't. Not in a million years," Solo gibed.
"No?... Not if I told you we knew you came to Brazil because of the fingerprints of those D.A.M.E.S. women in the car crash? Not if I told you everything about your conversations with Garcia, your visit to the hospital and the discovery of the old man Oliveira? Not if I detailed the things the boy at the rental company said - the one with the old-fashioned slang?... Not even if I listed your findings so far in the hunt to discover the places where these false D.A.M.E.S. are distributing the cocaine and heroin?" There was a hint of laughter in the voice.
Napoleon Solo mentally heaved a sigh of relief. The built-in censor had worked. Under the drugs, he had told them every mechanical step he had taken in the investigation - but the subliminal suggestions had taken over when it had come to the reasons for the inquiry.
He had said that U.N.C.L.E. thought the girls we connected with some drug ring. His captors would believe that; the Command did interest itself in illegal drug traffic and the facts as known to Solo could believably be interpreted as leading to that erroneous conclusion.
The man who had been interrogating him would be laughing at the thought of Solo's gullibility, thinking he had wrested from the agent all he knew - which would leave him free to go on wondering exactly what was afoot.
And about this, Solo reflected ruefully, he knew very little.
"You look crestfallen, my friend," the voice was saying jubilantly. "I told you I could prove it!... Oh well, never mind. There has to be a loser in every game doesn't there?... For the moment, until we decide what is to be done with you, you can take a little rest – on our laurels!" There was a dry chuckle and the sound a switch snapping off.
The agent threw himself on the bed and gazed moodily at the ceiling. After a while, he turned over lay face downwards, with his chin pillowed on crossed arms. If they were really leaving him alone for a while, there was a chance the television camera above him might be switched off as well as the two-way speak grille. Especially if he appeared as despondent as possible.