Illya finished off his drink, replaced the glass. "May I present my proposition to you, Sam? It may prove to be worth your while. We are quite aware of your background—even to your effects being found in a plane crash fatal to forty passengers and crew. We did not know that you had gone underground to work for Thrush. We know all this now."

Sam met his gaze levelly. "For all you know, I may be Thrush."

"You may be. Or you may be an underling with delusions of grandeur—some more of your ancestor-oriented viewing the end results? We are prepared to offer you our protection in exchange for certain cooperation from you."

Sam Su Yan laughed.

His mismated oriental-Texan face worked uncertainly, pulling muscles into play that had almost atrophied from disuse. The sound burst out of him almost like a strange, off-key sob. But it was laughter.

"May Buddha look out from his celestial home to see the incredible arrogance of this puppy!" Sam laughed again, that tormented, unaccustomed sound. "Do you truly delude yourself that I permitted you to walk into this room so that you might offer me some ridiculous cops-and-robbers trade for turning stool pigeon?"

Illya shrugged. "I've found worse crimes in your dossier."

"You've found nothing in my record to match what you have permitted yourself to walk into."

Sam Su Yan's face was chilled, the unreconciled parts going hard and waxen. He dropped his glass on the carpeting and slapped his hands together.

The three men seemed to appear from the woodwork, as silent and as quick as termites.

Illya recognized one of them as the man who had attacked him with' the acid-loaded fountain pen in the Honolulu jail. He supposed the other two were his fellow assassins.

He shrugged his jacket up on his slender shoulders, but made no other move.

Sam said, "You'll forgive me if I've grown bored with this depressing exchange. When I heard you had escaped from the island, I entertained the notion that your wits might be stimulating in exchange and conflict. I know better now. You looked better from afar."

Sam shook his head and padded about the room in his Texan boots.

He seemed to forget that Illya was in the room. He went over to the baggage rack and rummaged for a moment inside it. But when he straightened, his hands were empty.

None of the three guards moved. They continued to poise, like a kill-trained canine corps, their soulless eyes fixed on Kuryakin as if waiting for the one-word signal that meant attack and slaughter.

Suddenly Sam Su Yan gave the command. He jerked his head toward Kuryakin. "Prepare him."

Kuryakin spun on his heel, thrusting his hand under his jacket, snagging at the butt of his U.N.C.L.E. Special. But he could not reach it in time.

Sam's assassins sprang upon him without speaking. A hand chopped him across the neck, a hand struck him at the base of his spine, a hand caught him in the groin. Expert hands caught his arms, tore away his jacket and shirt, tossed gun and holster upon the bed.

A straight chair was pushed in behind Illya. One of the thugs said, "Sit," and Illya was thrust down upon the chair.

Illya struggled, and ended with his wrists and ankles secured. They worked smoothly, efficiently, deftly, and then stepped back, standing unmoving, waiting for the next command.

Illya glanced at Sam. "Surely you have sense enough left to know you can't get away with killing me—not here in this hotel."

Sam walked toward him, his face an ugly mask, expressionless.

"I don't need you to remind me that your agents have harried me constantly since I arrived here, that they are aware you are in this hotel, in this hotel room. But I prefer that you permit me to make whatever decisions are necessary concerning you—because I assure you they were laid out in great detail long before you arrived here."

"You'll commit a serious blunder by not releasing me at once."

"Please!" Sam spoke sharply. "If your men call your room in this hotel, be assured that your voice will answer the telephone. Your voice will assure them that all is proceeding smoothly."

He walked back to the bag on the rack, drew from it a syringe and needle. He held it up to the light, forced a drop through the needle and then returned to where Illya sat watching him. "Will you sit quietly, or must you be held? This won't hurt you as I inject it. It is in fact a discovery of our chemists, and I wish I could assure you it had no side effects. But"—his mouth pulled into a faint smile of pride—"I can't do that. I must tell you, as a matter of fact, that it is a matter of quite unpleasant side-effects."

"Drugged," Illya said in contempt. "Carried out in the dark. What high-quality intellect devised this hoary scheme, Sam?"

"Unfortunately for you, I'm afraid you'll discover nothing hoary or old-hat in this. It's never been done quite this way—in fact this particular nerve-stimulant has never been tested on human beings, my young guinea pig. In the lab it has created some exciting results. I suggest you not be contemptuous until we learn who wins the war. Eh?" He lifted his eyes, spoke to the guards. "Subdue him."

Sam held the hypodermic needle in his hand, but he could not resist a final boast as the men held Illya's inner arm open to the injection.

"We are not unsubtle enough to kill you and leave your body here to draw local and international police, my friend. What we are accomplishing is much too important, and much too secret for such resulting publicity. I assure you, we have better and more long-range plans for you than this."

As he spoke, he injected the point of the needle into the collateral radial artery from the parent trunk of the profunda brachu, inside the elbow joint. "Slowly," Sam said. "This is accomplished slowly, Mr. Kuryakin. No thrust of needle and spurt of solution. This takes a little time. You will be patient, won't you, Mr. Kuryakin?"

III

The DC-7 droned soothingly at thirty-seven thousand feet, with churning thunderheads like a broken wall between plane and the California mountains where bandits and tireless padres had marched, above the dark and choppy bay where sea wolves once hoved in from plundering to shanghai a fresh crew from the hills of the town between the bay and the ocean.

Solo smiled wryly at the thought that San Francisco hadn't changed much; the violence and the excitement was still down there in the gaudy lights and the impenetrable, dark. He even remembered that during the war when his outfit had been awaiting transport to Korea, the men had been futilely warned against the gin mills of Mason Street, the friendly natives who'd insist on buying drinks. "Don't drink with your own brother if he's been in San Francisco longer than three years—and you haven't seen him in that time." And there was the theme song of embittered sailors: I left my wallet in San Francisco, high upon some dark and windy alley…

Solo put the thoughts of his past out of his mind. He-knew San Francisco as an exciting town where pulses quickened and life took a new edge. Paris of the new world. An old cliche, but with all the truth of the tritest platitude.

He buckled his seat belt as the plane put down through the thick smoking of the clouds, gliding upon the runway.

He came off the plane with the forty other travel-mussed passengers, trying to blend in with the crowd despite his purpled eye and the strong premonition of deadly danger ahead for him in this spirited town he loved.

He returned the stewardess' warm smile, and recalled his promise to call that number she'd printed for him on the inside of a match folder if he got five free minutes in town during the next three days.