“Why?”
“I came out here for a vacation. I was tired of the work. That’s all. You can’t make any more out of it. I don’t know the dead girl. Why don’t you try to find that man?”
“What man is that?”
“You could get on a person’s nerves. You know that, don’t you?”
“I never took this job to be popular.”
“I know. Only to be without a flaw.”
“I saw no man in that room with you. No trace. I found only an empty suitcase that may have belonged to the dead girl.”
“There was a man in that room. He forced me to stay there until you and the hotel manager arrived. I’m telling you the truth.”
“Perhaps you are.” The voice was low. “If you are, you then have nothing to fear.”
“I have to fear you. You won’t listen to me. You’re more interested in a perfect record of solved cases than you are in the truth. How many people have you forced to confess to crimes when they weren’t even guilty?”
Kuryakin had found Guerrero’s Achilles’ heel. The youthful detective sprang up, gripping the bars, his black eyes fixed on Illya’s impassive face.
“Don’t say such things to me! Don’t ever say such things to me!”
“Then why don’t you let me try to prove to you that man was in the room with me?”
Guerrero relaxed. He straightened, allowing himself a faint, superior smile. “I think we will keep you here. We will wait for the results of your fingerprints.”
He turned and walked away, going leisurely out of the cell-block.
Illya stood unmoving at the bars, staring at the man’s back. He shook his head, now deeply troubled because of what those fingerprints would reveal about him to Guerrero.
He prowled the cell. He ran his fingers through his wheat-colored hair. It flopped back across his forehead. He knew what the results of the fingerprints inquiry would be. The FBI would send word to the Honolulu police, showing not only that his name was Illya Kuryakin, but then it would have to be shown who he was and for whom he worked.
He shook his head. The assignment was already going too badly for him to involve U.N.C.L.E. in his presence in the islands. He and Napoleon Solo had been assigned by Alexander Waverly to find a person named Tixe Ylno who might be male or female, or who might not exist at all. No one in U.N.C.L.E. had ever seen Tixe Ylno—they knew only that code name which Thrush had given him. Spelled backwards Tixe Ylno was simply Exit Only—which, from the meager clues and information gathered by agents for U.N.C.L.E., was Tixe Ylno’s plan for humanity. A female spy, frightened and almost hysterical in her desire to come in from the cold, had managed to contact U.N.C.L.E. and make known her desire to defect from Thrush. Word came that the woman agent was one of the few people who actually had known, seen and talked with Tixe Ylno. She was anxious to trade her information for U.N.C.L.E.’s protection.
The frightened spy’s name of course was Ursula Baynes-Neefirth.
Even the suggestion that agents for U.N.C.L.E. were remotely involved in the murder of the fleeing spy would completely destroy all chance of continuing the pursuit of Tixe Ylno. There was no doubt about it. Tixe Ylno appeared to be the most dangerous foe yet encountered by the agents for U.N.C.L.E.
He worked from the deepest network of secrecy—as attested to by the fact that not even U.N.C.L.E. knew whether Tixe Ylno was a man or a woman, an individual, or a conspiracy.
Whoever or whatever Tixe Ylno was, the countermeasures had to be accomplished in a matching veil of secrecy.
Illya stared at the bars of his cell. One thought kept wheeling through his brain. He had to get out of here before there was any answer on his fingerprints which had already been flashed across ocean and continent to Washington, D.C.
He had to get out of here.
“You! George.”
When Illya, lost in savage concentration, did not reply to the unfamiliar name he had assumed as a hotel bellhop, the jailer scraped his nightstick along the cell bars.
“You. Yorkvitz. George!”
Illya turned from his contemplation of the barred window, staring at the jailer. “What do you want?”
“You got company,” the jailer said. “A friend of yours.”
Illya felt the breath exhale from him as if he had not been breathing for an incredible time. Solo must have somehow learned of his plight.
He strode across the cell. “Yes,” he said. “Take me to him.”
“Relax,” the jailer said. “We’ll bring him back here. He says he’s a bellhop from your hotel at Waikiki.”
Illya nodded, waiting expectantly. The jailer went along the corridor to the entrance of the cell-block. The door was opened and a man came through it. Illya stared, his heart sinking.
This was not Solo. It was no bellhop from the hotel. It was no one he had ever seen.
He shook his head. The man came toward him, smiling confidently. The jailer pointed out the cell, and leaned against the wall. “You got three minutes, fellow.” The man nodded and walked to the bars where Illya awaited him, puzzled and watchful.
“Hello, George.” The man was obviously Chinese, smartly dressed, his shoes shining and black. His mouth smiled, but there was no light in his eyes.
“I don’t know you,” Illya said.
The mouth went on smiling; the man peered at him. “Sure you know me, George.” His voice was louder than necessary. Illya saw he was speaking for the guard’s benefit. “We work together. Why, when I came in here, they frisked me, George: He laughed loudly. “How about that? Afraid I would bring you something to help you escape. How about that, George?”
“How about that,” Illya said. “I don’t know you, and I don’t know what you want. Get out of here.”
“Take it easy, George. Why, I went through a lot to get in here. They took everything from me, George. Everything except this fountain pen. How about that, George?” He took the fountain pen from his shirt pocket, extending it suddenly toward Illya.
Illya stared at it, lunged backward, crying out. In that same instant, the visitor pressed on the end of the pen and white liquid flushed out of it, striking Kuryakin in the face.
Illya tried to cry out, and could not. He tried to catch himself, but had lost all coordination. He was aware of nothing except the burn of the fluid on his skin, in his eyes and his nostrils.
He toppled back on the bed, for the moment suffocating and almost entirely paralyzed.
The man beyond the bars laughed again. “Well, all right, George, you don’t want to talk to me, I’ll clear out. We wanted to help you. You don’t want us to help you, that’s all right, too.”
He turned, thrust his fountain pen back into his shirt pocket and strode away, complaining loudly.
Sprawled on the cot, Illya stared after him, unable to move at all. He heard the cell-block door open and close distantly, and then there was silence in the cell.
He tried to turn and could not. He lay unmoving while the FBI investigated his fingerprints and flashed back word to the Honolulu police. Illya Kuryakin. Agent for the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.
Sure, he’d be freed then—but he might as well be dead.
He struggled, his nerve centers frantically ordering his numbed muscles to move, even to twitch, to show any sign of life at all.
He tried to cry out, and he could not even speak. Whoever had put him here meant to see he stayed here until he was framed for a crime he had not committed, or until his true identity was established and his usefulness destroyed.
He stared furiously, frustrated and enraged, at his hands, at his feet. And he was struck fiercely again with the simplicity of the attack. First, Ursula’s face was blown away by a mechanism concealed in a lei—flowers given a hundred times a day to visitors to Hawaii. Now, a visitor to the jail was carefully searched, and allowed to enter the cell-block with a lethal fountain pen—who even looked at a fountain pen in a man’s pocket?