Napoleon Solo

Illya Kuryakfn

PART ONE—Incident in Pink Hawaii

I

An instant before, she had been alive.

One moment she was laughing, so darkly lovely that she'd ignite a faraway look in any man's eyes. Simply being in the same room with her could be an unnerving experience, yet she'd been anxious to unburden herself, frightened, troubled, wanting to get down to the serious business of a confidential talk with Solo on the subject of a mutual enemy.

"Let me get out of this lei and into something more comfortable," was what she'd said. And then abruptly she was dead.

Napoleon Solo stood immobile, staring at the bewitching corpse without a face. He swallowed hard, thinking she was the loveliest corpse between where she lay on the pink shag rug—and eternity.

For this moment checkmated by shock, he caught a glimpse of himself in the pink mirror. Deceptively slender, no more than of medium height, he had the smart appearance of a young interne, a Madison Avenue account exec, a youthful professional man swinging his way through the fabled gay-pads of the globe. He looked like anything except what he was: a diamond-hard, exhaustively-trained enforcement agent for perhaps the most important secret service in the world, the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

His smile was easy, distilled of a genuine warmth and an inner glow of a healthy, fine-honed body. His jacket and slacks were impeccably tailored with a Brooks Brothers quality, but the disarming cut concealed a strapped-down Berns-Martin shoulder holster housing its hidden U.N.C.L.E. Special, thirty-seven ounces of deadly weapon, including silencer.

Solo shook his head, stunned, even while a substantial fragment of his precision-trained intellect warned him that he could join her in eternity in the seconds it was costing him to recover from the horror and outrage of her murder. He'd encountered sudden death often, in his work with U.N.C.L.E., but this girl was so young, so lovely—and so abruptly mutilated.

He glanced at the gold face of his Accutron watch, mechanically noting the time. Time no longer had meaning for Ursula, but he still operated for an agency where time was forever of the essence.

A faint breeze faltered in hesitant curiosity in the pink window drapes. The fabric bent inward gently and then expired against the full-length windows as if the breeze had darted in terror back out to the sandy beach which lay like stained carpeting between the pink hotel and the incredible blue of the sea.

Solo broke the spell at last, stepped forward and bent down beside the dead girl.

He scraped his fingers over the rug, attempting to assemble the atoms of flower and string that had recently been a lei of ginger flowers tossed over Ursula's head in a laughing Aloha at the Honolulu International Airport less than an hour ago.

Solo shook his head again, refusing to accept it. Murder from a lei?

He scowled. Aloha meant both hello and goodbye. Hail and farewell. So long, Ursula. She'd reached up with those golden arms to remove the lei over her head and the mechanism concealed in the bright ginger flowers had blown her face away. There had not even been time for her to cry out, or for Solo to reach her from across the pink bed.

Solo straightened up, shaking off the horror of her sudden and brutal death. It was as if someone compounded of evil had searched diligently to find the most heartless manner of death for lovely Ursula Baynes-Nee-firth. She was vain about that classic perfection of her delicately hewn face. Blow it away, then. They'll seal her casket and sew her in a shroud.

He warned himself for the last time that emotionalism in his job was taboo because it softened him, strangled his thought processes, rendering him ineffective to his profession and to himself.

In the next instant, Solo began to move efficiently, as if unaware of the corpse on the pink carpeting.

From his attache case he drew a small chrome, plastic and metal rectangle that fit snugly in his palm. From an upper edge he pulled two thread-like antennae that trembled reed-like in the scented breeze in from the banyan park.

He pressed a button on the sender-set, blew into the golden netted speaker, waited a moment and then spoke slowly, ennunciating clearly: "Bubba. This is Sonny. Acknowledge. Mayday. Acknowledge, please."

He pressed a second button and stood staring, his eyes fixed on the beach without seeing it. Waikiki was loud with laughter, bright with bikinis, busy with surfboards and children building castles in the sand. The sea lay milk-blue with the sun shimmering on it.

And in the midst of all this pleasure he was concerned with death.

Death and failure. Ursula's death. His own failure. More than a lovely girl had blown up when that ginger-lei had exploded.

From where does death always strike? From the most innocent-appearing sources of all. A lei of ginger flowers had erupted in violent murder and his chance to find Tixe Ylno had gone in that sudden flash of time.

He grimaced. You got in a place like this, a pink resort hotel in an unreal Pacific vacationland, and you relaxed. And death struck. And failure. It was over, and months of intensive preparation were fragmented like the petals of those ginger flowers.

"Sonny. This is Bubba. Acknowledging. Over." It was Illya's voice, and he felt a sense of relief.

The small sender-receiver in his hand crackled and then was still. Solo prowled the room, counting, and then he crossed to the corridor door, listened a moment and opened it.

Illya Kuryakin grinned at him from beneath a thatch of golden hair. A slender Slavic type, his enigmatic smiling hid all his emotions and thoughts. Congenitally a loner, he was clever and physically adept; Solo had learned that Illya was a good man to have at his side in a tight spot. It was easy to think that Illya was like a machine, computing danger and finding solutions for it, fashioned for this specific purpose. Sometimes nothing seemed to exist for him but the task assigned to him. Of Russian origin, Illya had worked behind the Iron Curtain—sometimes with the knowledge and consent of the authorities, and, when necessary, without it. He'd trained himself to move fast and never to look back because he'd learned the unpleasant way that the devil takes the man who is caught.

At the moment, Illya wore the smartly crisp uniform of a hotel bellhop, and for all the expression in his high-planed face he might well have had no interest in this world except the size of his anticipated tip.

He said, "You mentioned Mayday."

Solo spoke flatly: "She's dead."

Illya pushed by him, entering the room. He stood for a full second staring at the lovely body, the faceless corpse. He shook his head.

"A lei," Solo said.

"What?" Kuryakin spun on his heel.

"She was pulling it over her head. Some land of mechanism. It blew to bits, along with everything else. It was like a Chinese firecracker, then there was this blast of air—the vacuum. It was all over before I could move."

Illya straightened. "Who sold her the lei?^w

Solo frowned, remembering. "No one sold it to her. It was thrown over her head. A lot of laughter—from a well-wisher. I heard that much."

"Who put it over her head?"

Solo removed a cigarette lighter from his pocket, flicked it so the fire flared.

He extended the lighter to Illya. "She's on here, whoever it was. The moment I heard that well-wishing, no-charge bit, I lit a cigarette and snapped her picture. You might want to print them; you're on the roll, in all your bellhop glory."