A beach boy sunned himself, waiting for a bus. Illya called him over. “I promised to send this car into Vic’s Garage over near Aala Street. You know the place? If you’ll drive it there, you got yourself a free ride downtown.”
The boy grinned, his teeth gleaming. “Mister, you got yourself a deal.”
Illya did not even wait to see the Volkswagen driven out of the hotel parking area. He tried to move nonchalantly around to the service entrance, but inwardly he admitted he was running, even if he did manage to keep his pace to a sedate-looking stroll.
Five minutes later he came out of his room in the service quarters of the hotel wearing fresh slacks and jacket. He glanced longingly toward the cabs that would get him away from here before the police or the men from Sam overtook the Volkswagen and learned from the beach boy where he had gotten the little car.
Telling himself that nothing was ever easy, Illya went up in the service elevator to the eighth floor, where he found Ursula’s room sealed by the law, with appropriate notice on the door.
He entered with a passkey, and once inside he relaxed slightly. He laid out the developers and the small plastic cups, his receiver-sender, a binocular-loupe, a small infrared light, and the film he’d developed earlier for Solo.
Placing the binocular loupe in his left eye, he scanned the strip of developed film while the film from his own lighter-camera was being developed.
He paused, staring at the film Solo had taken of Ursula’s receiving the welcoming lei from the China Doll flower girl at the airport.
He caught his breath, pleased. He could never have seen it without the jeweler’s magnifying loupe, but with it he could distinguish the features of the man standing beyond the flower girl, intently watching the small ceremony.
He was not too surprised to see that it was the Eurasian who called himself Sam.
His next triumph was the excellent close-up likeness he had been able to get of Sam himself with his own lighter-camera.
Smiling, pleased with himself, he did not hurry even when he heard the scream of police sirens approaching from downtown. He sighed. If Guerrero’s police were on his trail, could Sam’s commandos be far behind?
He placed the pictures and the materials in his jacket pocket and crossed the room carrying the infrared flashlight.
On the balcony, he played the light along the railing top. His impassive face lighted faintly at the clear yellow stains he found there—finger marks. He knew who had left those prints. Sam had been leaving yellow stain hand and finger marks ever since he had drunk down the Scotch and the neuroquixonal tablet, and he would continue to put them down wherever he went for some time to come.
Illya stood there smiling, and he did not even stop smiling when he counted the four police cars racing into the drive eight floors below. He returned calmly inside the room and took up the receiver-sender, pressing its button and speaking into it, slowly, clearly, repeating himself to be certain he was understood.
PART TWO
Incident at the Hungry Pussy Cat
I
NAPOLEON SOLO STEPPED from the taxi at the corner of Third Avenue in New York City’s East Forties.
He paused a moment on the curb, glancing at the large public parking garage, the row of aging brownstones siding a modern three-storied whitestone. Beyond them he could see the glass and glitter of the United Nations Building near the river. He exhaled heavily, saying to himself inwardly, “Welcome home, Solo.” He was thinking there were moments when he hadn’t been sure he would make it. But he did not smile in his small triumph because he still nursed a purpled eye and a welted, tender jaw, souvenirs from Oahu.
The street was quiet in the afternoon and Solo went along its walk, going down the steps from the street level and entering Del Floria’s cleaning and tailoring shop in the whitestone building.
The tailor, a mild, balding man in his fifties, glanced up from his work and returned Solo’s faint smile of greeting.
Entering a small cubicle at the rear of the tailoring shop, Solo found himself wondering about this agent of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. The tailor operated certainly in a minor capacity, one of those who served mostly by only standing and waiting. He was a good tailor. Perhaps he’d once been a good field agent. Perhaps he knew nothing more than that behind his modest shop was a complex of steel, stone and bulletproof glass housing one of the strangest and most far-flung law agencies in existence. It was unlikely that the tailor knew all the workings of U.N.C.L.E. even if he’d once been a field agent, because only a few at the top knew all its bewildering secrets of communication, eradication and prevention.
Behind the eager young faces of the men and women who entered here were the alert minds of carefully selected and wholly dedicated people of almost every race, color and national origin.
A wall parted and Solo stepped through as it closed again silently behind him. He was in the first, outer cell of the complex; the receptionist behind the desk smiled at him as if she’d seen him only moments earlier, and placed his identification tag upon his lapel.
Solo winked at her and strode through the metallically lighted corridor, able to see his reflection in the deep-polished surface of the flooring.
Other agents, some in shirt sleeves, all intent, as if their minds were computers, passed him with brief glances or silent greetings. The silent corridors hummed with ceaseless activity.
Though one could not see them or hear them through the sound-proofed flooring, a set of underground channels churned with the speeding launches plying in secret from moorings to the East River.
On the roofing, what appeared to be a large neon-lighted advertising billboard concealed a high-powered short-wave antenna, elaborate receiving and sending gear, pulsing constantly, attuned to every change in the world around it, reaching out like prying eyes and searching feelers into every dark cranny of the world. The battle which U.N.C.L.E. fought wasn’t new; it was as old as man’s conscience. Only the weapons were different now—incorporating computers, spy planes, atomic weaponry and the finest brains money could hire.
Solo wasn’t a simple man, nor a naive one. He prided himself upon his urbanity, sophistication and clear-eyed recognition of the truth about worldly matters, rather than the hypocritical things one was expected to believe and swallow. But here in this air-conditioned maze of steel corridors and sound-proofed suites, one felt the strength and the moral principles that guided it.
A door slid into the wall as Solo approached it and he entered the private sanctum of Alexander Waverly. There had been no delay and Solo knew why—every movement in these corridors was continuously monitored on closed-circuit television, and electric brains scanned, rejected, or admitted one at all the knobless doors in this place.
Waverly looked up from behind his desk. The top of it was cluttered at the moment with small, luminous maps, code messages and directives. Waverly’s hair was toppled over his rutted forehead. His hair was black, and Solo suspected that Waverly’s barber dyed it with each trimming, because if Waverly had a vanity, it was the matter of his age. He admitted, like an aging prizefighter, to an obviously curtailed age—in his case he would tell you he was in his late fifties. No one ever disputed him, but he had a brilliant record in army intelligence that dated back almost that far. Solo supposed his superior was actually in his late sixties, but Alexander Waverly was walking proof that age was all a matter of the mind.
“Hello—uh, Solo,” Waverly said without smiling. He kept a hundred matters of utmost urgency in the forepart of his mind, but he had the poorest kind of memory for names or other trivia, even in the cases of his most highly rated operatives.