"Six this fall."
"It seems longer. And you've saved my life a few times, and I've saved your life several times…"
"More or less."
"And you trust me implicitly in odd situations."
"As a general rule. Are you leading -"
"All I ask is that you trust me just this one time and I'll try to explain later. Okay?"
"Okay…"
"Hold my hand."
"Hold your -?"
"Please," Napoleon whispered intently. "Trust me. Hold my hand for a few minutes. And smile when you look at me."
"Well…" Illya extended his hand across the table and Napoleon took it. He looked defiantly along the bar and eight or nine pairs of eyes reluctantly returned to the big mirror on the wall behind the spigots and racks of multicolored bottles.
"Napoleon, I will take it on faith that you know what you are doing. But I must say -"
"Whatever you say, keep smiling while you say it. Look. Nobody's watching us now. I promise I'll explain it to you – but not right at the moment. Maybe tomorrow."
"I trust your instincts, Napoleon – you've proven them often enough. But still, there are times when…"
"Hey -isn't that him?"
A thin, dark young man with an intense, hunted look in his eyes and nervous energy in his movements ducked around the partition at the door, nodded to the bartender, and walked unsteadily to the back booth on the far side.
Harry had been wandering aimlessly for some time, pausing now and then to check behind him, scanning anxiously over his shoulder, studying thinning throngs against the chiaroscuro of colored lights. He was somewhere in North Beach, and it was getting late. He didn't want to keep walking much longer, but he didn't know yet what to do.
He couldn't keep it – he didn't even want it anymore. He needed to sit down and think about it for a few minutes. Any place would do… He looked up and with a moment's shock saw an angel waiting for him, outlined in flickering blue neon. Another bar. It looked open – he went around the partition and saw it was only about a quarter full, with a line of private booths running back towards a rear door.
Casually and a little unsteadily, he walked in, nodded to the bartender who didn't notice, and made his way to the rear. A dyed blond young man in a tight sweater fetched his drink and left him alone.
Another minute or two passed, and another customer arrived, a young Falstaff in a flamboyant shirt and bushy red hair. He studied the room with a coolly appraising eye as he wandered along the bar towards the back, finally taking a stool some twenty feet from Harry's booth. He asked the bartender for something in a low tone and nodded at the answer before ordering a stein of beer. Napoleon and Illya, themselves unobserved, watched as he nursed it, his eyes on the hack booth either directly or in the mirror, for most of the next twelve minutes.
Nobody could see into the back booth, and Harry, oblivious to his surveillance, took the little case out again and opened it on the table before him. What could he possibly have been thinking of when he took this? It was a beautiful thing – still the most beautiful object he had ever seen – but hardly enough to risk his entire career and perhaps his life for. He had been incredibly foolish. And now what could he do?
It would be insane to try to return it – he would surely be detected. It would be dangerous even to take it back to his apartment. He had betrayed his trust for this worthless bit of metal, and he could think of nothing but to get rid of it. He ordered another drink, hiding it in his pocket until the waiter had come and gone.
He could throw it off the Bridge – but that was an awfully long way to go and it was late and cold, and besides, the Bridge was hard to get to on foot.
He could drop it in a trash can or down a sewer, but it seemed little less than blasphemous to treat this perfect, precious rod so badly.
For that matter, he didn't want to have to carry it another step. Could he just abandon it here?
Why not? He could tuck it out of sight somewhere, and it might not be found until the building was torn down. Certainly they didn't clean this place very thoroughly… He looked around. What would be a good place? There was no room under his cushion – the seat was a solid unit all the way to the floor; the table stood on a central pillar and was bracketed to the wall. But on his right there was a gap of half an inch or more between the end of the seat and the cracked plaster wall. Plenty of space for the rod if not the case.
But he couldn't just drop the rod down there in all that dirt – it would be awful to mar that virginal surface. In quick improvisation he wrapped the napkins from his two drinks around the gamma laser and tucked in the ends.
Looking quickly around to be sure no one could see into the booth, he pushed the paper wrapped package out of sight – and out of his thoughts.
He stared at the empty case, gaping in mute reminder of his guilt, and quickly closed it. He couldn't stay here any longer – he gulped the last of his drink, stuck the case in his pocket and left.
Napoleon and Illya saw Harry come out of the booth. He stood beside it a moment, pulling on his jacket, then walked unsteadily out of the bar. The young John Falstaff carried his remaining beer back to the booth Harry had just vacated, glanced in and was satisfied; he drained his stein and set it on the bar on his way out the door.
"So much for that," said Napoleon quietly. "We will have to go to plan B, whatever that is."
"I'll give you odds that was one of them," said Illya. "They get all the field work they can handle."
"Stim-heads? I thought so the minute I saw him. Let's pick up the baby and get out of here. Mr. Waverly will have something else imaginative to hit us with in the morning and I wouldn't mind getting some sleep. All that briefing for nothing."
"Well, we had a quiet evening out. We can report in, drop it off and check out for the night. But I wonder what is going on in Harry's head right now…"
A block away Harry chucked the plastic case down a storm drain. As it vanished forever into the darkness he felt a tremendous load lifted from him. Still, he didn't feel well he'd probably had a little more to drink than he should've. He'd had two at each place, after all – and he hadn't even noticed the name of the last place he'd stopped. Well, he hadn't felt good all day.
He should go home and get some sleep. He was glad that business with the gamma laser was over and he could forget about it; he'd been pretty silly, was lucky to have gotten away with as much as he had. Best to just forget about the whole thing…
He dozed off in the bus on the way home, and only just woke up in time for his stop. He had had too much to drink, he decided fuzzily, and wondered why he'd gone out in the first place. He seemed to remember he'd done something bad -he'd stolen something from the lab. Or had he dreamed that in the bus?
He couldn't really tell, as he stumbled up the steps to his flat. He didn't want to think about it, because it hurt. He undressed and fell into bed, to sleep the sleep of the damned.
CHAPTER FOUR
"You mean he's wired with a backup system?"
"Effectively. It would've been simpler if we'd been able to bring him in last night, but this is supposed to get the job done – and probably with a little less damage to Harry's fragile mental condition."
Napoleon and Illya sat over spread sheets of the Sunday Chronicle, their U.N.C.L.E. Specials disassembled and a pack of linen rags between them. The office air conditioner strove in vain to pump out the heavy pungent odor of gun oil and solvent as they passed an idle hour stripping and cleaning their personal weapons in a quiet conference room, unused at this late hour. Napoleon sighted into his muzzle, tipping the receiver to catch the light, squinting along the spiral grooves for any grains of foreign matter which had missed his energetic swabbing. "How does it work?" he asked. "A big black Cadillac with drawn curtains pulls up beside him on the street and whisks him away to an obscure fate?"