Walter Fleming frowned.
That wasn't right. He suddenly realized that he had not heard an elevator hum or so much as a signal beep that he could remember these past few minutes. That shouldn't be. Not with the midnight shift arriving and setting up, taking over for the personnel they would be relieving. There was always some sort of sound. Fleming climbed out of his chair at the corridor's very end, where it forked in both directions toward the elevators and scanned the foyer briefly. For a moment, he was on his guard, all of his senses alert. Then he heard the elevator and the sound of footsteps walking casually, unconcernedly somewhere behind him. He turned.
Down the corridor, stepping through sliding doors just hissing shut, came a big, bear-shouldered man in gray turtleneck sweater and taut trousers. Walter Fleming started. Zorki! But no, it had to be James Wilder in the special trick makeup and costume that Mr. Waverly had prescribed for the assignment. Fleming knew about that. He did relax when he saw the U.N.C.L.E. odd-shaped badge card pinned to the breast of the sweater.
Still—
Walter Fleming trained the machine pistol on the bull-necked man marching toward him. This Zorki waved, smiling, showing small white teeth.
"Wouldn't shoot a pal, would you, Walter?"
Fleming chuckled, shaking his head. "Damme, Jimmy, but that's some disguise. Never realized you looked so much like Zorki. Even with the extra touches. Sure he isn't your brother?"
"My Big Brother," gloated James Wilder, for it was indeed he and not Alek Yakov Zorki. However, it did not make much difference, which was something Walter Fleming did not know.
"What's up, Jimmy?"
"Have to see Mr. Waverly. The Russky wants to talk to him about something. I don't know but what it might be important."
"Never hurts to try," Fleming assented.
As the dual Zorki brushed by him, Walter Fleming felt a sharp sting on the bare skin of his right hand. He emitted a sudden bleat of surprise and stepped back. When he saw the puncture mark on the hairy surface of his hand, he looked up quickly. When he saw the look in James Wilder's eyes, he tried to bring up his machine pistol. The bogus Zorki didn't make a move. It was not necessary.
Walter Fleming's eyeballs rolled and he collapsed in half, sliding to the smooth floor. He was dead before he could watch his murderer return by the way he had come to the sliding panels that bisected the corridor.
The panels hissed apart.
Alek Yakov Zorki barreled through, his big figure animated and agitated. Pinned to his facsimile sweater was another of the odd-shaped badge cards. His small eyes gleamed at the sight of the fallen agent.
James Wilder motioned to him, as he reset the hypodermic needle in the stem of his watch. THRUSH poisons worked with the speed of light.
"Come on," James Wilder whispered. "We've got just five minutes to make the roof. And that's all the time that those systems will stay out of order. I had to work fast."
"Da," Alek Yakov Zorki rumbled, sweat standing out on his bull face. "Kolya, it cannot be soon enough for me."
"Let's save the reunion for later."
"As you say."
They whipped around the fork in the corridor and headed for the stairway, James Wilder leading the way. Zorki lunged behind him. Two large men in a great hurry.
They were reflections of each other. Veritable twins. Two peas in a pod.
Only their mother could have told them apart.
And she had always had quite a time of it, in the very beginning, when they were two little boys growing up in Tatarstan, Russia.
Alek and Nicolai Zorki.
Alek had always called Nicolai "Kolya."
April Dancer, Mr. Waverly, Mark Slate and Joanna Paula Jones didn't need a diagram. The two cells that had held Alek Yakov Zorki and his impersonator, James Wilder, separated by some five feet of concrete bunker, were empty.
Slate, hastily summoned by a vocal chain of commands to the other agents scampering all over the complex and trying to locate the source of the malfunctioning systems, was properly attired now. His loud weskit, flaming red beneath a blue blazer, set him off like a playboy at a funeral parlor.
"Our birds have flown," Mr. Waverly said. "The question is where?"
"They can't get out of Headquarters without being seen," Slate said. "That's one sure thing."
"Not at all, Mr. Slate," Waverly demurred. "If we have a traitor in our midst, there is no guaranteeing anything, is there? He certainly is familiar with all our security measures and must have prepared himself in advance."
April bit her lip, breaking her long-standing resolution not to do so in company.
"It doesn't make sense, does it? Unless—"
She halted. Thinking out loud was a bad habit, too. Especially with Mr. Waverly in charge.
Slate frowned at her. "You were about to say?"
"It's probably a wild guess, Mark."
"The wilder the better," he laughed. "And that is a deliberate pun."
April stared at Mr. Waverly.
The head of U.N.C.L.E. smiled tolerantly. His cragged face was lined with apprehension. He nodded toward April, waiting for her to think her thought out. Slate made an impatient noise in his throat. But his superior, harried, perplexed and bewildered in the extreme, was in a mood to clutch at straws.
"Go on, Dancer. Say it outright. If you've thought of something, let's have it."
"Well, look," April continued. "Our man knows this building. All of it. He's fouled all the systems for a reason."
"To help Zorki escape, of course," Waverly murmured.
"That's just it. So what does he have? He's not going to walk out our front door. The alarm setups are out of commission but he'd run into fifty of our people going that way. He knows that, same as he knows it's midnight. And the new shift is coming in. True, this building is pretty soundproof, but I know what I'd do if I was a fink like James Wilder freeing a Russian bear."
Joanna Paula Jones was breathless with excitement. Her eyes swept from Mr. Waverly to April Dancer to Mark Slate, whom her girlish heart found thoroughly groovy.
"Come on, April," Mark snapped, his amused eyes suddenly very serious. "Out with it. The hunch, girl!"
"The roof," April said. "I'd head for the roof. We've only the radar screens and the burglar setups there. Nothing else. No sentries, no agents—no people with eyes to see."
Mr. Waverly paused, thinking about that. He pursed his lips.
"True enough but the roof would present a bigger problem. How could they hope to get off the roof? Unless—by the eternal! Of course!"
"Yes," April nodded. "The roof is the only place where they could be picked up."
Slate unlimbered his service pistol. It had an extra-large drum attachment, to the right of the firing chamber. His eyes twinkled. He'd been the deadest shot in the RAF and his firing range exploits were the talk of Headquarters.
"Charge, sir?"
"Charge," Waverly agreed, "sooner the better. We'll stop by the armorer's on our way up. This may be a bigger emergency than even I supposed."
"Come on, Joanna," April urged. "Or Paula, or whatever you like to be called. You stay behind me. And keep an eye open for low-flying airplanes."
Mr. Waverly flung her an astonished look before he set off toward the elevators once more. Amazing how Miss Dancer could always go to the heart of a matter in a flash. Woman's intuition, he supposed. Something intangible, that even technology couldn't ever cope with. After all, how did she deduce that THRUSH might be sending a plane to pick up their runaway agents? He'd only just thought of it himself, remembering the occasion when a similar stunt had been performed. The Arctic Affair, wasn't it? He was sure that was before Miss Dancer's time but he didn't pause to certify the thought.