CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE: A SOLO SNATCH
CHAPTER TWO: A WELL-PLANNED AFFAIR
CHAPTER THREE: BACK TO SQUARE ONE
CHAPTER FOUR: THE VELVET GLOVE APPROACH
CHAPTER FIVE: EXIT BY MOONLIGHT
CHAPTER SIX: SOLO STEALS A RIDE
CHAPTER SEVEN: WAVERLY REASONS WHY!
CHAPTER EIGHT: HOW TO READ A HOLOGRAM
CHAPTER NINE: TWO FRIENDS AND AN ENEMY
CHAPTER TEN: FINDING OUT THE FACTS
CHAPTER ELEVEN: A RARE STAKE!
CHAPTER TWELVE: QUESTIONS AND ANSWERS
CHAPTER THIRTEEN: THE TABLES ARE TURNED
CHAPTER FOURTEEN: SOLO AND ILLYA TAKE TO THE AIR
CHAPTER FIFTEEN: GLASS-HANDLE WITH CARE
THE SPLINTERED SUNGLASSES AFFAIR
CHAPTER ONE
A Solo Snatch
It was the slickest kidnapping they had seen in New York for ten years. At eleven twenty five, Napoleon Solo, Chief Enforcement Officer of the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, turned a handle and walked through a doorway leading to his own headquarters. At eleven twenty six, he was lying unconscious on the floor of a car heading upstate for Johnstown.
The morning was sunny, with high white clouds moving lazily across a clear sky. Earlier, it had been raining. But by the time Solo paid off his cab at the corner and walked the length of the seedy brownstone block which masked the Command's nerve center, the sidewalks had steamed themselves dry and the tires of the traffic in the street no longer hissed greasily over the patched macadam. For the middle of April, it was really quite warm.
The agent had been on a routine visit to Geneva. An all-nations conference on the drug menace had been held in one of the white hotels above the lake, and Interpol had asked U.N.C.L.E. to send a top operative who could act as observer and at the same time answer questions on some of the more advanced techniques the Command had evolved to deal with international trafficking. Alexander Waverly, the grey and lined Policy and Operations chief to whom Solo and his colleagues were responsible, had decided as a compliment to the Europeans to send his No. 1 operative. The conference being over, Solo was on his way back to base to report. Essentially a man of action, he loathed paperwork—and it was with some distaste that he rehearsed in his mind the opening paragraphs of the statement that he would shortly begin dictating to one of the personable secretaries available to his Section.
A nondescript Plymouth was maneuvering into a gap in the line of parked vehicles at the side of the roadway as he drew abreast of the misted windows of Del Florio's tailor shop.
The old man must be doing a lot of pressing this morning, Solo thought, turning towards the doorway. For a moment, as his fingers touched the smooth, worn wood of the latch, he caught sight of his own reflection—crisp, dark hair, humorous eyes below level brows, a cleft chin, the whole face still frowning a little at the thought of the report he had to make.
Then the image, and with it the section of sunny street over his shoulder, with the moving car, a wedge of blue sky above the opposite roofs, the kaleidoscope of magazines outside Sol Zimmermann's newsstand across the street, all slanted away and swung inwards as the door opened at the touch of his hand. Behind him, an unkempt man with a butt drooping from his unshaven lip put a hand on the arm of a passing businessman in an unspoken request for a light. The miniature electric bulbs of the ribbon clock above the newsstand flashed off from 11:24 and came on again to read 11:25.
Napoleon Solo walked into the shop.
The two padded halves of the pressing machine were open, although there were no garments actually on it. Behind it was a girl Solo hadn't seen before, fussing with the controls. There was a lot of steam in the air.
The old man himself was in his shirtsleeves, the inevitable tape measure around his neck, crouched down over a desk at the back of the shop.
"What's this, Del?" Solo called, grinning at the girl. "Been injecting a bit of new blood into the business while I've been away, have you?"
Above the starched white collar of her overall, the girl gave a lopsided smile and put up a hand to touch the roll of blonde hair at her neck. The old man grunted something unintelligible and hunched himself still further down over his papers. Thinking he was in one of his irascible moods, Solo shrugged affectionately, cocked an approving eye at the curves beneath the girl's overall, and walked into a fitting booth at the back of the shop. He shut the flimsy door and turned to face the wall.
Like everything else about the brownstone block of which it was the centre, the tailor shop was both more and less than what it seemed.
Behind the shabby fronts, buttressed by the public garage which completed one end of the block and the key club which was at the other, was hidden the ultra-modern complex of steel and glass and concrete housing the headquarters of U.N.C.L.E. Below the concealed masts on its roof, the world's most sophisticated communications centre kept in constant touch with a network of agents all over the earth. And through its four entrances, day and night, streamed the cosmopolitan crowd of men and women who made up its supra-national staff. Streamed, that is, in a somewhat devious manner—for the centre is highly secret and part of the job of the run-down tenants of the brownstones (who, like the garage and club staffs, are themselves on the U.N.C.L.E. payroll) is to see that it remains so. Thus, while communications and office personnel make their way in through the washrooms of the garage, visitors enter via the key club. Certain extra-secret arrivals and departures are made by means of an underground channel leading to the East River. And Solo's men, the elite of the organization who carry out its dangerous and exacting field work, come and go through Del Florio's shop.
The middle coat hook on the back wall of the fitting booth which Napoleon Solo had entered was in fact the handle of a secret door. When it was pulled down in a certain way the wall swung inwards to reveal a short passage leading to the Command's central reception area, where a girl sat behind a desk watching miniature closed circuit TV screens which monitored the four entrances.
Solo reached up now and hauled down on the hook.
Ordinarily, conditioned by his long training and experience, his catlike alertness never relaxed. Even at home. Even when he was not on assignment.
Today, however, a little bored perhaps after a week of routine, he was a little ragged after the long transatlantic flight, and preoccupied with the problem of his report. His concentration must therefore have been slightly lower than usual. Though even the most experienced operative can be pardoned for letting up, just a little, in the entrance to his own headquarters...
Which is why between one and a half and two seconds elapsed before Solo realized that—for this one time—the hook-handle was not operating the secret door. And that a persistent hissing above his head was connected with a curious smell in the air.
Abruptly, the agent's reflexes snapped back into top gear. In a flash, he took in the narrow, deep cuts in the woodwork which must have severed the actuating mechanism of the door; he remembered that he had not seen Del Florio operate the overriding safety catch which controlled it and saw the tiny cylinder of gas hidden in the dead area just below the lens of the closed circuit TV camera. At the same time he saw the neat arrangement of wires through which, by pulling down on the hook, he had himself triggered off the release of the cylinder's contents.
Desperately, he stretched out towards the container and its deadly gas. But his arms seemed abnormally heavy, his fingers thick and soft. There was a loud noise in his ears and his chest was on fire. Whirling round, he yanked furiously at the door through which he had entered.
