It was approaching ten o'clock in the evening when the group declared itself conditionally satisfied and went together to the commissary for coffee and conversation. Illya found himself seated next to Curley Burke, the crew chief. Curley, of course, was bald, and his features seemed to huddle together around his mouth as though lost in the vast pink expanse of his head, with only two low-set and lonely ears far away to either side. His chin was small, his nose was small, and his eyes were sparkling blue beads; only his mouth was large and mobile. It could allow an insult and a pint of beer to pass in opposite directions simultaneously, and still have room in one corner for a hand-rolled cigarette which smoldered constantly.
His hands were large and lumpy, with traces of ancient grease deep in the texture. Somehow he seemed to have twice as many knuckles as he should and his fingernails were cracked and ridged, but his large hands could move inside an engine with the skill and grace of a surgeon. He was as interested in Klaus as Klaus was in the petrophagic fungus.
"Klaus," he said, "how'd a waiter learn so much about engines?"
Illya's cover had not included this information; he took a fraction of a second to sort through it and improvised. "My first job at sea was as a stoker. I thought of working my way up to Chief Engineer, but I moved over to the White Gang after I learned what life was like a little more."
"Well, you've come to the right place. I've been fixin' trucks for the Park six years now––since they opened—and I wouldn't want to work anywhere else. I've got the best quarters, the best food and pretty good pay; and it's easy to save with no place to spend it."
Illya took a swallow of coffee and looked doubtful. "It's a long way from the rest of the world, all right. I was beginning to wonder if I could last until my vacation."
"What's to miss? The girls here are cute and there's no regulation against interdepartmental fraternization—we'd probably all go stir crazy if there was." He laughed roundly and upended a brown bottle over his foam-flecked glass. "There's plenty of society, all the television shows a week late, and no news from the outside to worry you."
He gestured around, indicating the unseen guests up in the Lodge or retiring to their cottages. "These rich guys have to pay through the nose for this place; I live here and they pay me! And they're always in such a hurry to leave. Never figure 'em out. Got the best of everything here." He shook his head.
Privately, Illya could understand both points of view. Publicly, Klaus had to establish in advance a valid reason for leaving Utopia after having been at the Park only a month and a half; his cover identity was too valuable to be broken easily. This nonexistent waiter had gotten some of their best agents into some of the best hotels in the world at times when security was getting very tight indeed.
It lacked twenty-five minutes of midnight when Illya returned to his room, tired and a little slowed down by a few sociable mugs of beer, but he had his other job to attend to. He plugged a complex unit about the size of a quart bottle into the wall socket above his writing table and keyed a set of frequencies. The small pilot light on top of the unit flickered yellow as the signal was sent, then shone red for two seconds as the high-speed squirt transmission was received, then green. Illya slipped the featherweight earphones behind his head, allowing the rubber tips to slide into his ears, and touched another button which allowed him to scan rapidly through the tape. Two seconds was short, even for the transmission speed the device used; Waverly didn't talk to himself and no guests had come to #35. Occasionally a clearing throat would activate the recording mechanism for a few seconds, or a door closing in the next room, but there was nothing worth listening to on the tape. Illya pushed a button for recycle, and then triggered the bug in Silverthorne's residence.
This transmission took ten seconds, and the tape took twenty minutes to scan for voices. Nearly to the end, but unspecified as to time, he heard one end of a conversation which brought him back to wakefulness.
It started with the telephone chime and Silverthorne's voice saying, "Yes, thank you... Hello, Sydney. I've got fifteen minutes. Using scrambler pattern three." There followed a few seconds of silence and sounds of plastic things clicking together, then, "Hello test, hello test... hello test, hello test... Ah. There you are. Now, what's the situation in Upolu?"
For a few minutes the tape contained only questions and commentary, most of it impossible to follow, with the long pauses clipped out by the voice-activating switch. Then Silverthorne went directly from a final comment into another subject.
"By the way, I hope you have a tape on this because I'm nearly out of time and won't be able to repeat. There's another guest here named Dodgson. Leon Dodgson." He spelled it. "I don't know what his line is, but he's got a tremendous capability for leadership, is quite widely educated and experienced in a number of fields. I think we could use a man like that, and I want a team of recruiters to meet him when he comes out. Here's his description..."
Illya's eyebrows rose slightly as he reached for the control that would allow him to replay that portion of the recording. He did so, and a wry smile crept across his face. Not likely that any other firm could woo Alexander Waverly from U.N.C.L.E., whatever they were willing to offer. But it would be interesting to see what happened when he was contacted, supposing that they could even find him.
There was no real evidence as to what Silverthorne's firm did—apparently they were large and wide-spread, occupied with import and export, sensitive to political situations all over the South Pacific area, and involved to some extent with scientific research of some kind touching on oceanography. It might be rewarding to look up Silverthorne when he got back to New York and see just what he did. Whatever it might be, the thought of Waverly being approached by representatives of a top executive search outfit was more than moderately amusing.
He filed that tape cartridge and plugged in another one, tapping his third bug in the Security Office. Nothing of interest there—he dozed off twice while routine matters flowed by, and as he disconnected the bug at last and fell into bed, he debated sleepily about removing the trick light bulb from Security. It might come in handy eventually, but there was conversation of some kind going on there every minute, and the time it took to audit the tape was worth more in sleep than anything he had learned from it. As he slipped down into slumber, his last thought was of Silverthorne.
"I think we could use a man like that," Illya quoted mentally, and smiled in the darkness.
Chapter 6
"Q ASSASSINATION."
THE MESSAGE was low priority and had been filed Saturday night, so it was Monday afternoon when the Sydney operator came to it in her stack of routine communications to Central. She signaled for access to Ident and tapped out the request.
1311670233 Z DE: SYDNEY TO: ULCOMP IDEREQ LEON DODGSON RESIDENT UTOPIA SOUTH AUSTRALIA. DESCOD 702-BBG-08-33692.