“What’s wrong with electric power to operate the lift?” he asked. “They run all the other elevators.”
Su Yan pointed, with infinite Oriental patience, at the small ratchet turning with each click of the smallest wheel in the series. “The lift can be operated from here with the touch of a finger. Another flick of the smallest finger drops this ratchet into the cog wheels, instantly stopping the lift. We can know what’s happening down here, but not above. We had to prepare for every contingency — including attack, power failure, accident. The engineers must have warned you that this atomic device is jerry-built to say the least. We have tried to measure to the least decibel the amount of sound or movement that might activate it, but it is only an educated guess. We are handling it with every care until we get it loaded on your pilot’s plane. After that,” Su Yan shrugged. “Delivery is his problem.”
Colonel Baker laughed. “Load it up, Ace. I’ve delivered eggs through hurricanes without breaking a one of them.”
VI
Solo’s frantic mind ordered every muscle in his body to move — any movement at all. Watching Barbry rise from her chair with the knife gleaming in her taut fist, he felt his senses boil as adrenalin coursed into his bloodstream.
His order was not a complete failure. But the response he did elicit was worse than failing, more demoralizing. Wasn’t there faint movement, return of life to his toes? He stared at his fingers, seeing them flex, but nothing more than a tremor. It was slow, too slow, like the movement of that part of an iceberg below the surface of some frozen sea.
Operation Doomsday continued unchecked. The noises from below came like taunting sounds from the channels of the air ducts: the pulse of engines, the distant turn of metal wheels on iron tracks, the whirring rasps of winches and cables.
Across the room Illya stirred, straightening his head from his shoulder. He came awake painfully slowly. At first when Solo cried out his name, Illya didn’t respond, still too drugged with pain and dulled with his forced sleep.
“Illya! Listen to me!”
Across the room, Illya sat straighter, a flicker of light showing in his eyes. Solo called out again, urgently.
“Illya. Wake up, Illya!”
Illya stirred, his head came up and his eyes focused.
He saw Barbry, the gleaming knife, the direction of her intent gaze, and read in that instant the grave danger to Solo.
He tried to come up off the chair, but the bonds stopped him, yanking him back down. The chair scraped on the tile flooring, but not even this sudden sound penetrated Barbry’s consciousness. She did not even hear it.
“Barbry!” Illya called. “Barbry. Over here!”
It was no good. She did not hear his voice any more than she had heard the abrupt scraping of his chair. As far as Barbry knew in that moment, only she, Solo, the knife and her orders to kill existed.
Barbry walked toward Solo slowly, with the careful, wooden manner of a sleepwalker.
She raised the knife to shoulder-level and she kept it there as she walked.
She was looking fixedly at Solo. Solo told himself there was infinite sadness in those deep violet eyes. But common sense warned him this was illusion. Her gaze was intent upon him, but there was no emotion in it — the intense concentration was upon that vulnerable place where she’d strike with that knife between his shoulder blades.
“She can’t kill like this — even in hypnosis!” Illya said, working with the bonds securing his wrists.
“She’s not in hypnosis,” Solo said, wriggling his fingers, squirming his toes within his shoes, sweating because the return of his senses was slow, too slow. “It’s a nerve gas. She’s like a robot, programmed to kill, and that’s all she knows.”
“They haven’t missed a trick,” Illya said, struggling.
Solo stared at Illya on that chair. Like the weaponry in the cabinets, Illya was so near, yet impossibly far away.
He saw Illya interpret the question in his eyes. Could he break out of those fetters in time?
Illya made no effort to deceive him. He shook his head. Though his wrists bled, he could not work his hands free, not in time.
Time. Solo saw the next fateful step made by the feet shod in patent-leather pumps, high heels, the trim ankles.
He did not look higher; he was staring at Illya, at the cabinets of weaponry. Illya was not going to work free in time to stop Barbry. But perhaps this wasn’t as important as what he might accomplish when he was free.
Illya at least had a chance to alert U.N.C.L.E. in time to avert an international catastrophe. Even if he, Solo, died here, Illya still could make it.
Solo pitched his voice at an unemotional level, staring at Illya. “No matter what happens, to me and to Barbry, don’t let it slow you down. Right now, below us, they’re loading an atomic device that will be dropped on Washington, D.C. The destruction there will be tremendous — but it will only be the beginning, if it starts an atomic war.
“There are some things you must do, Illya. In order to accomplish them, find the camera eye of the closed-circuit television in this room. Smash it. Then arm yourself from that row of cabinets. Somehow you’ve got to get out of here, and somehow you’ve got to get word to Waverly. Time has run out, Illya. They’re loading the device right now.”
“I’ll do it,” Illya said. His voice shook with the savagery of his working to free himself.
Solo felt the toe of a sleek slipper strike his face. He stared at the shoe, and with the inconsistency occurs in moments of extreme danger, he realized that he could see his reflection in the slick surface of those slippers — his helpless body mirrored there.
It occurred to him that he could watch himself being killed.
He felt his pulses quicken, the increased beat of his heart, the adrenalin fed uselessly into his system. All his senses were keenly alert to this final danger. But he was unable to move.
She stood above him a moment, not moving because she had walked as far as she could.
The lights in the room dimmed, flickered. A new sound raged up through the air ducts. Solo recognized it because he had been listening for it. The large elevator, especially constructed for this one mission, was slowly grinding into motion, lifting the atomic device to ground level.
Solo shivered — not with fear, but rage at his helplessness.
That plane would soon be airborne, loaded with its deadly cargo. It didn’t seem to matter much now that a girl named Barbry Coast was bending over him, ready to drive a knife into his back. What mattered was that the entire world was in danger, and he could do nothing to stop it.
There was a new and terrible irony in it, too. Life now quivered tentatively more than halfway down his fingers. He could wriggle his feet, but he could not lift them. He could flex his fingers, but he could not move his hands.
Using all his will power, he managed to turn his neck, his head twisting so that he faced Barbry. There was nothing to see in her face except the pallid emptiness.
“Barbry!”
She did not respond. He saw that her eyes did not even blink. Nothing would reach her.
He sweated, seeing the knife lifting above her shoulder, her gaze fixed on his back, between his shoulder blades, precisely as Su Yan had commanded her.
Below them, the rumble of the slowly rising lift.
Nearer, the easy breathing as Barbry lifted the knife to plunge it — three times, Su Yan had told her. She was totally relaxed, dispassionate, her subconscious entirely divorced from this robot-action of her body.
The lifting elevator grumbled, the building quivering. The knife glittered, stopping at the crest of the arc. The blade, zeroing on Solo’s heart, quivered in her hand, ready to flash downward.