1

R

by

Gary Kuhlmann

R

He could feel the heat closing in, could feel them out there making their moves, threading their way through the city, buzzing over the special gadgets he discarded in a restroom stall at John F. Kennedy International Airport. He vaulted turnstiles, up two flights of concrete stairs off the Lex and onto a Lower East Side sidewalk. Guns and sirens pierced the night. He was sick, nauseated and sweating. His feet, hot and aching, screaming for a rest, were finished. His calves and thighs cried for an end to the running.

Where was he? Footsteps and the curses of men taunted the corners of the night. A fluid seemed to envelop him. The place was a fluid that enveloped him, that breathed in through his nostrils like cigarette smoke, some substrata swimming beneath a cityscape moon shining steady and opaque, smooth and fecundating.

Jumping from a fat dark sedan that had pulled to a stop curbside with a screech, a young, pretty and trim, redhead, tennis court beauty. Her figure fit for haute couture; not too long ago no doubt adorning herself with the latest mod clothes from England, miniskirts and go-go boots. He was evidently her idea of a suspicious type.

"Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin!"

Her hand slipped inside black leather. Rectangles of metal and glass slid by, cold, cruelly metallic traffic that emphasized the delicious delirium of her blouse against the alabaster flesh of her body. He could observe their reflection, ghosts reversed in a world of diffused light and fluorescent highlights.

Her hand slid back out of her leather coat, and she brought the black circle of a pistol barrel up even with a point between his eyes. She dismissed his bewilderment with a terse summary.

"Procedure," she advised him, matter-of-factly.

SECTION I : "Anything Else for the Good of the Cause to Which We Are All So Devoted?"

Somewhere in New York City, Nov. 3, 1971

Ringing. Inside a car. A loopy little siren. Like a European ambulance, only tiny.

No, not coming from the car. A pen. The woman holding the pen. The same woman who had forced him at gunpoint. Now she produced a pen from inside her black leather coat. The pen was chrome and rather expensive looking. She adjusted the clasp holder and it sprang ceilingward, forming a small antenna. The tiny siren stopped, and a man's crisp, English sounding voice filtered from the fountain pen. The woman listened, then handed the pen-like device to him.

"Your condition, Mr. Kuryakin?" came the voice from the pen.

He wanted to answer but he couldn't. He found himself overwhelmed.

"We received corroborating reports from several authorities," the voice continued. "CIA, Interpol, and most curiously, Thrush. I suspect this does not make much sense to you at the moment. I want you to come in. Rest. Once I receive your report, we will sort this all out."

He watched in amazement as she lowered the antenna. When they pulled up to a row of brownstone apartments, the woman brandished her pistol again, ordered him out of the car, shoved him down a short flight of steps and through the doors of little shop fuzzy with heat and smelling of steamed cotton, and pushed them both through the back wall of a fitting room.

She eventually left him standing in the middle of an office that contained enormous panels some 20 feet wide and full of electronics, buzzers, signals, and markers blazing like a field of fireflies or a tangle of Christmas tree lights. The room also held a large machine in the corner that ticked constantly and spewed a wide ribbon of paper that ended up in a large pile on the floor.

"Good to see you again, both of you," said an elderly gentleman who stood behind the consoles – the voice from the fountain pen. "We had become a bit concerned about you, too, Miss Dancer."

"He needs medical attention, Mr. Waverly," the woman said, deflecting the inquiry. "Diminished capacity, doesn't recognize his name."

"All appropriate sections have been advised of your report from the intercept point Miss Dancer," the old man said flatly, as if restating the obvious. The small but necessary details-a schedule of medical examinations, an official pronouncement of arrest, preparations for taking Mr. Kuryakin's statement-had all been handled while Mr. Kuryakin and Miss Dancer had been en route, the man explained.

"I'll stand by, then, sir," she said, and dropped back to the doorway.

"How are you, Mr. Kuryakin?" Mr. Waverly asked, turning his attention to his guest and speaking slowly, with special emphasis on the word Kuryakin.

The old man was rugged looking, and his face had lines so deep they looked like seams.

"Confused," he-the one these people called Mr. Kuryakin, evidently-managed to say. "Unharmed, I think. Fine."

The old man extended his hand, took Kuryakin's hand in his hand, a hand like the pocket of an old baseball mit, and shook it firmly. The handshake with the old man called Mr. Waverly steadied Mr. Kuryakin a bit. Waverly leaned close, so close the pores on the old man's nose looked magnified, crater-like. The old man peered into Kuryakin's face as if to see the silent and helpless suffering in the brain squirming like a frog behind the eyes.

"Any new insights?"

"Insights… uh… Mr. … Waverly, is it?"

Waverly told him to sit down in a wood, straight-backed chair. So he did, and he sat there, back hard against the wood panels, every muscle aching, while Waverly pushed buttons and thumbed enamel buzzers on the consoles, issuing orders to unseen subordinates.

The man, who was obviously in charge, had ordered a cup of tea with sugar and a corned beef sandwich for Kuryakin. When the meal came, Waverly turned politely away and gazed out a large window that overlooked a river and a towering beauty of steel and glass. He tamped tobacco in his pipe, then discarded the pipe, stood, and strode to Dancer.

"I've seen this kind of thing before," Waverly advised the woman quietly. "We know that Kuryakin's Capsule B pill was inside his communicator pen when we found his discarded clothing in Kennedy International, so we should assume this is Thrush's doing. At this point, any line of questioning might do more harm than good."

Waverly dismissed the woman with the gun, but she volunteered to escort Kuryakin on his round of medical appointments and then through Security-and, she said, she would be more than happy to show their befuddled agent to his quarters.

It was impossible to open his eyes. When he pried the aching muscles behind them enough to form two slits, a buzzing light over his head forced the two slits shut. What's more, something had split his skull in two. It was as if he had received a terrible blow. He began to raise an arm but felt imprisoned beneath a heavy blanket, and after considerable effort, he brought his right arm from under the flannel cover and gingerly touched his temples and rubbed his forehead. No, he could feel no warm blood running, no obvious bumps swelling.

Illya Nicovetch Kuryakin had been sleeping. He understood that much. He did not know for how long, and he did not feel rested, only tired. Tired, and unreal: it was his ghost in a dream that roamed the New York City streets and past all those starved faces bathed in the neon of commerce and consumption. It was his dream-ghost, he decided, that had climbed from the dudgeon of a nightmare-filled sleep and squinted hard against the light that buzzed in the ceiling.

But closing his eyes made his stomach turn upside down and he thought he might vomit. His mind tumbled back through a dizzying mish-mash of nightmarish impressions that refused to congeal into a cohesive and sensible whole. So he concentrated instead on forcing his eyes open and getting used to the light a little at a time, in longer and longer intervals.

After he had adjusted reasonably to the bright light, he began an inventory of his environs. The walls were glistening steel. The light came from white fluorescent tubes in the ceiling. A small desk next to his cot held a typewriter, portable, and a sheath of papers. There was a door with a wire-mesh window. He was in custody, it dawned on him, and this cave of steel was his prison cell. And this prison cell-he was shaken by a sudden shock of recognition.

It seemed impossible, but it could not be otherwise: he was inside an U.N.C.L.E. detention cell.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent was thoroughly familiar with the New York City headquarters building, and the familiar was normally comfortable. But this time there was cold comfort under the bright fluorescence. This had to be a nightmare or somebody's cruel joke, he thought, as he looked around the austere room, glanced at the plate of burnt toast, inhaled the insipid smell of reheated coffee, eyed the dour-face sentry outside the door sporting U.N.C.L.E.'s distinctive triangular security badge.

Within moments, Kuryakin had cleared his head enough to understand one thing: for whatever reason, he had not returned stateside to a hero's welcome.

This was bad. But, bad as it was, the situation, he soon began to suspect, would only worsen. As he struggled to sit up on his hard cot, he saw on the desk a half-inch thick folder inside a black cover. He picked up the folder with exaggerated caution, as if the thing might explode, and gently turned back the cover.

It was a dossier, a compendium of police reports and other analyses. His heart raced as he ran through the pages hastily at first. He then went back to scan them more carefully, and he blinked in disbelief at what he read.

Details of an assignment in Berlin-his and Napoleon Solo's assignment-had been dissected and pored over many times, by experts from within U.N.C.L.E. and from without. The world of espionage and law enforcement, it seemed, was watching a bizarre drama unfold.

Kuryakin read, over and over, the mass of words that he came to realize would remain with him for the rest of his life.

He felt dull witted, inarticulate. But it was his duty now to fill out his field report. When he began laboring over the small typewriter, tapping at the hard keys, wrestling with a way to put into words his account of the terrible events, the full impact sank in with each stroke of the keys. He became all too aware that his ordeal was a law enforcement embarrassment, the result of one snafu after another. The blown cover. A dangerous madman at large in Berlin. And, my God, the shooting, the shooting.

By the end of the day, the amnesiac effects had worn off, and his head was full of disturbing thoughts, not the least of them the unreality of having to fit a human tragedy into a five-page report.

It occurred to him as he walked with a guard through the brightly lit building that everyone knew. It was the way they looked, some shade of difference in their glance, their eyes. In this strange drama, he was the actor whose blunder flurried the other actors and put them off their lines.

When the guard left him standing in front of Alexander Waverly, Kuryakin was shaking like a drunken soldier, and disappointment was etched in the old man's face.

Kuryakin's superior carried the burden of maintaining international peace with a professorial aplomb. Waverly, he knew, always fumed privately. The people who worked for the head of U.N.C.L.E. never found him in the doldrums. But this time, the old man decided to remind Kuryakin of the dramatic possibilities of a world coming apart. Waverly brought his fist down hard on Kuryakin's field report, shaking three unlit pipes and a canister of tobacco, and unsettling any loose papers in the otherwise orderly pile.

Then Waverly walked around the desk and took Kuryakin brusquely by the right elbow. Escorting him beneath the fluorescence and along the metal hallways, the old man said, "Mr. Kuryakin, I have always admired your articulate command of the king's English, as it were, particularly considering you are no doubt far more comfortable with the native tongue of your beloved Dostoevsky. But this is one time in your career I urge you to choose your words with utmost care."

His voice was stern but calm, even confident.

"Perhaps better not to speak unless spoken to," Kuryakin offered diffidently.

The old man grunted. "Undoubtedly, Mr. Kuryakin. Undoubtedly."

They were due soon to meet some of the world's top spies. When someone said pay attention in the darkened classroom, Kuryakin had learned, you'd better hide your knuckles, and you'd better look smart. The overwhelmed agent had decided that, when the time came, he would stare back hard at the vultures gathered in the conference room and confess, simply and without embellishment, to shooting Napoleon Solo, the number one operative for U.N.C.L.E.

Kuryakin stumbled once, his knees slipping away like so much water, and Waverly propped him up. Kuryakin had seen Waverly send off agents who were never heard from again. He understood from having watched Waverly in action all these years that those people whose jobs involve great emotional stress often develop an amazing stoic power to defer emotion-a power that momentarily eluded Kuryakin. None had it more than the old man who was to meet with some of the world's preeminent espionage leaders.

"Hold it together, my good man," Waverly said, bracing an arm around Kuryakin's back. "At least for the show."

Kuryakin felt unsteady, jittery. He was suffering a side effect, from either the junk the Thrush gorilla had jabbed into his biceps or the brutal treatment he'd received at the hands of agents in Security and doctors in Medical.

He'd had a rough couple of days, to be sure. After a day on the lam in a tattered gray suit, he was glad for the warm familiarity of his old loose trousers and a clean black T-shirt, but he felt ill at ease for having to endure his house arrest sans shoulder holster and its customary accoutrements. His wrists still stung from the handcuffs Security agents had unlocked late last night.

It was April Dancer who had slapped the cuffs on him. He couldn't blame her for the little extra zeal she had introduced into his apprehension and detainment. She was, after all, a comrade in arms, their protégé, his and Solo's, in her early years with the United Network Command. Over the years, he and Solo had come to hold the young agent in affectionate regard. In particular, Solo had shared many of her baptisms by fire in the fields of destruction Thrush had tried to cultivate in the late 1960s.

It was a salve to Kuryakin's wounded professional pride that she had found him so easily last night on the streets of New York City. She was well trained.

Holed up inside a small conference room that was unadorned except by a stark chalkboard and a standard clock, Kuryakin recognized the men. Some of them looked like spies, dressed in frayed sports jackets, keeping up a light percussion of scratching and tapping with pens and pencils inside tiny black moleskin notebooks. Others looked like businessmen, dressed in ties and pants with knife-like creases, fabric rustling as legs crossed and uncrossed.

A powwow of this kind was a rarity at U.N.C.L.E. headquarters. Normally, these men were rivals to one another, and often, to U.N.C.L.E. Normally, these men were out to beat each other. U.N.C.L.E. was usually the odd man, the one without the need to operate according to local political objectives. It was a rare occasion for the agencies to gather in one place to work with or for an U.N.C.L.E. goal or agenda. And expecting the many members of the intelligence community to agree on anything was like thinking everyone in your family could get along at Thanksgiving Day dinner, Waverly had said once.

Now Kuryakin's superior, the old man in the crisp blue shirt and navy tie, did his pipe trick for the world's spies. A couple of times, absently, he picked up his cold pipe and puffed at if for several seconds before realizing it was unlit, stared at it vaguely, lit another match, and watched the match burn. The spies picked up on the cue to light up.

"The unknown is always frightening," Waverly addressed the men, leaning back in his chair behind a small cloud of cherry-wood smoke. "Today, we are faced with many unknowns. As you know, the United Network Command is not a game run without rules."

He glanced around the table. Waverly might have been reading a radio broadcast, so avuncular and patient was his tone.

"Two days ago, shots rang out at Checkpoint Charlie in Berlin. Soon your governments learned that our top operative, Mr. Napoleon Solo, had been killed. Another of our top operatives, Mr. Illya Kuryakin, was placed under investigation for the killing of his fellow officer during a covert operation in Berlin."

Politzei reports were sketchy, Waverly explained: no body found, only a trail of smeared blood matching Solo's type. Reports to internal affairs indicated Kuryakin seemed headed for West Berlin headquarters to detail the tragic incident and his part in it. While headed to U.N.C.L.E., Thrush agents captured him so he could be injected with an amnesia-producing substance of an unknown variety. Nobody could determine whether Kuryakin escaped or was let go. Nobody could explain how Solo's body had disappeared in broad daylight.

The spies looked at Kuryakin. He steeled himself, refused to flinch.

The U.N.C.L.E. agent was proud not to be counted among these spies. The USSR, where the government was locking up poets and novelists and journalists, was represented in U.N.C.L.E., as well as many countries that infringed upon their citizens. His new country, his adopted nation, was struggling over the conflict over the war and the disillusionment of the 1960s assassinations and civil disorders. With detached bemusement, he had observed both countries telling their citizens the true concern was the other superpower.

The world of the Vietnam War years had moved ever further beyond the comparatively clear-cut choices of the Cold War into a moral morass. And, as it had, Kuryakin took increasing solace in the knowledge that he was no spy in the ordinary sense of that word – that he owed loyalty to no single government.

U.N.C.L.E. was a supranational organization sworn to somehow keep the world safe and, if possible, sane. Kuryakin had come to see any enemy of any peaceful and honest person in the world was the enemy of U.N.C.L.E.

It was hard work, dangerous work. He and Solo had shown daredevil nerve many times, but always with a single purpose in their lives — to enforce the law and keep the world safe from warped power-mad criminals. For that purpose, Kuryakin had studied, learned 15 languages, left the service of the country of his birth to work for what he truly considered the only sane group of people on earth — U.N.C.L.E. — the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement.

"There must be no outcry," Waverly told the group. "It's been kept out of the papers so far. If there's any chance that Mr. Solo is still alive, if there's any chance that this is all a horrible mistake, Mr. Solo's safety depends on absolute secrecy."

The CIA man cleared his throat, touched a corner of his round tortoise-shell horn-rimmed glasses.

"They'd be crazy to harm him," the man said, and he offered Kuryakin a reassuring smile.

Reports of the mishap had come from CIA witnesses. Kuryakin knew the key CIA witness was an old friend of Solo's, Lancaster Loveless, a peer from Solo's post-Korean War training years.

"They will have us all down their throats if they did," the CIA man said with a look of stern resolve.

Napoleon has many friends, Kuryakin thought. There was even word of a loose cannon within the MI 5 ranting about using his license to kill to exact revenge for Solo's death.

"Still, Thrush has done some crazy things in its time," the KGB man said.

Kuryakin had learned from the Security reports, that the East German Stasi had immediately informed the KGB, whose officers fired off an angry communiqué to Waverly, demanding the whole story.

"Definitely," Waverly said. "They want to take over the world by destroying the world. Most of you in attendance represent governments which have containment and deterrence as the mandate for world peace."

Two or three of the men fidgeted in their seats. The old fox was at work.

"It's not a stretch to think Thrush has found some inspiration in your particular brand of madness," he went on.

"We must save the world from the politicians, as well," the man from MI 5 said with a robust laugh.

"Yes, well, you are well aware how much I deplore simplistic doctrine of single governments," Waverly said, turning to the Englishman. "Doctrines purport to define one's behavior in future situations where it may or may not be suitable. That said, knowing that Thrush believes in a doctrine of greed and world domination, we do have a very real enemy."

"Tell us something we didn't know," the CIA man jumped in.

"Very well," Waverly said, unruffled. "There seems reason to imagine a possibility even more unthinkable than the murder of a fellow agent. Mr. Kuryakin and Mr. Solo have reported that Thrush has cultivated a new threat to our world."

"What kind?" the KGB man asked.

"Biological, likely a virus. They recently attempted to move samples into East Berlin. Unfortunately, this mishap with Mr. Solo occurred while tracing the samples move into East Berlin."

"I must only guess that East Berlin is the first step," the KGB man said nervously. "Thrush is at our front door."

"Exactly," Waverly said. "And that puts Thrush at the front door of the whole world. Would Thrush use the weapon to destroy millions of people? Not likely. They want their minions alive and well, after all. No, the more likely threat is the use of the virus for leverage, influence, to blackmail governments. Possibly, to pit our governments against one another, so that we collapse or annihilate one another over a series of misunderstandings."

"Leaving Thrush to come in and pick up the pieces," said the man from MI 5.

"Possibly."

"And so, you are asking for our cooperation," the man from the CIA said.

"If by cooperation, you mean stay out of the way, then that is exactly what I'm telling you to do," Waverly said, frowning. "This case crosses a line into Cold War espionage, what with the Berlin incident. But keep your agents out of our way, give us your support when we call upon you, and we will resolve this case with our usual efficiency."

"Er, who exactly are you sending to take care of this," the MI 5 man asked.

Waverly paused, pursed his lips.

"Gentlemen, we are continuing our mission as it was planned," he said. "I'm sending Mr. Kuryakin back to Berlin. Our Number Three, April Dancer, will go with him."

"I beg your pardon, Alexander," the man from the CIA said. "You've placed your agent under arrest, for review by internal investigation, and you're sending him back into the field?"

"No need to beg my pardon. You know I am not one prone to apologies," Waverly said, quietly, patiently, and a wave of mild laughter passed among the men. "This might be odd in your organizations. However, Mr. Kuryakin knows the case and will have resources at his disposal. I must also consider that once he returns to the scene of the crime, it will also be solved."

"I still do not understand all the circumstances," the man from the KGB asked.

His big face reminded Kuryakin of Jack Ruby, hat tilted forward, glasses folded in his vest.

"And neither do we," Waverly said. "Neither, for that matter, does Mr. Kuryakin, who has suffered from a bout of amnesia.

Waverly relaxed a bit in the leather-cushioned chair and picked up his pipe again. "A simple accident? Unlikely. A rogue ploy?"

He raised his bushy eyebrows as he glanced at Kuryakin. "Again, unlikely, as our boys stay on the straight and narrow. The strongest possibility, gentlemen — a Thrush plan.

"But I don't have enough details of the crime to make that determination. Regardless, we are on the clock, and U.N.C.L.E. must move fast, with your cooperation."

Waverly looked around the table.

"Well, gentlemen," he said. "Anything else for the good of the cause to which we are all so devoted?"

There was more clearing of throats and shifting in chairs, but nobody said anything.

Waverly let the silence hang in the air like the cherry-scented smoke from his pipe. Then, after a moment, he cleared his throat, a symbolic clearing of the deck.

After muttering his farewell to his guests as they rose from their chairs to leave, Waverly looked over at his operative, canted his eyebrows, and released a long blue cloud of smoke that climbed in a slow spiral toward a ceiling of nondescript institutional-white tiles.