20

SECTION IV : "This Is A Way To Get Killed."

Somewhere in West Berlin, Sometime in November 1971

The door of the lighted office stood ajar; through ceiling windows high above the pool, a skeleton glow came from the outside arc lights and intercrossed the darkness of the cool interior. Kuryakin, having entered with catlike tread, meant to steal upon his prey in darkness, but he came to a standstill and went rigid in the shaft of light projected from the office door. Not much time to think things over. Only react. Instinctively, he wanted to react by lowering his body stance, bending his legs, touching the tiled floor with his fingertips, a panther crouching and on the brink of a fight. Instead he stood still, blinked in the hard light, blinked, too, as if in mental rejection of something as untrue.

Some ten paces ahead, Napoleon Solo, through the glass of a wire-mesh window, narrowed his eyes as if trying to bring them into focus on Kuryakin, who felt relief flood through his veins. There he was. A little less dapper for wear and tear, true enough, with several days of beard-growth, white shirt smeared with blood, hair greasy and fallen over his forehead. But alive.

There was one overhead light, a bare bulb, and it cast harsh shadows upon his old friend. Glints of gunmetal on the table, points of light in the eyes of two men who sat with Napoleon Solo between them: one was Grieves, the other a man Kuryakin did not know. Grieves had his hand on a gun lying before him on the table. So did the other man. Kuryakin knew the make: the Walther P-38, the weapon U.N.C.L.E. modified into the Specials and issued to its enforcement agents.

Grieves pushed back from the table and stood up, gun in hand, to give Kuryakin an inquiring once-over. He apparently found humor in what he saw. "Mr. Kuryakin, you look awful," he said, laughing. "Evidently, in the Ukraine, Eagle Scouts fail to instruct their young Communist recruits about the futility of running around in circles." Grieves continued to smile at his own joke.

With a yank that made the legs chatter and screech, he pulled out the only empty chair, placing it four feet from the table. He motioned with his Walther that this was where he wanted Kuryakin, and sat back down. Kuryakin obeyed, resuming the role of prisoner.

Sitting down next to Grieves, Kuryakin thought it incredible how normal these criminals often looked. Even in light that cast cliffs and chasms over his features, Grieves had a round mild face, and an easy disarming smile, like that of a bank loan officer who had not quite decided whether you were worthy of your credit history. But his eyes were large and cold, toad-like.

"Kuryakin," the other man piped up, with feigned interest. He had one of those gold-throated radio voices. "That's Slavic. Russian, is it not?"

Irritated, Kuryakin stared at the man. "It's a French name. It means woods and Blanche means white, so the two together mean white woods. Like an orchard in spring."

The man let out a surprised guffaw - a very American sound, Kuryakin

thought - and looked at Grieves, who only looked confused.

The tired agent clasped his hands in his lap and sat straight, easing his back and sifting through his memory for a name to put with the man's face. It was a handsome enough face, muscular, with a stubborn line to his thin mouth. Eyes brown and small. Irish, perhaps. Of indeterminate age - anywhere from 25 to 45, Cary Grant type, like Roger O. Thornhill in North by Northwest.

Somewhere not too far off, drops of liquid made mossy mutterings. Water, perhaps.

Bringing his thoughts back to assessing the situation, Kuryakin glanced sideways at his partner for a sign. They shared a subtle communication, under usual circumstances. But this time Kuryakin felt no connection, just a sickening feeling at the sight of the profuse sweat shining on his partner's face, the ashen hue replacing the signature tan. He could see Solo's pulse throbbing, swift and irregular. Kuryakin's mind went into a turmoil of anger, the eye of his personal hurricane centered on Grieves: fraud, cheat, a man willing and ruthless enough to kill for stupid greed, or blind power.

Kuryakin looked steadily at Grieves, slowly pushing down his anger. It was no good becoming emotionally outraged. Coolness was the only way to deal with Grieves. "Tell me what happened," Kuryakin said, forcing evenness into his tone. "I'm not a big believer in the science fiction about brainwashing, but I can't see any other explanation why I might pull the trigger on my partner."

Now Grieves tried out a sympathetic tone. "This has been nibbling away at the core of your self-esteem and sanity," Grieves said, looking serious. "I can tell."

"Thank you for being so kind. I need kindness now," Kuryakin muttered sarcastically, feeling defeated. He understood now that there was no alternative but to stay, face the test, and glean whatever details he could of the plot. On no occasion would there be any opportunity to reverse the situation, he decided. Primary rule: don't start a fight you can't finish. He was in rough shape, having run around more than twelve hours without getting anywhere, and exhaustion was taking its toll, making every muscle ache. Moreover, he was outnumbered; wrestling for one of the guns would turn the room into a deathtrap. And, one look at Solo, his eyes glazed and his skin gray, was enough to convince Kuryakin that his partner would be worthless - and only be in harm's way - if a fight broke out.

"Ill. Illya."

It was Solo.

"P-Plea. Please," Solo stammered, like a deranged patient finding out his mouth worked. "Illya, meet my, ... my ... friend," Solo whispered hoarsely, licking his chapped lips. "An old friend. Deck ... co ... corated. Kor ... Korean War."

The man Solo had called an old friend shifted uncomfortably. "Keep quiet, Napoleon, or the deal is off."

Only slightly raising an eyebrow, Kuryakin looked at his haggard partner. Deal? What was this about a deal? In the shadows, one side of Solo's face seemed to collapse, as if the effort to keep up appearances had finally failed and daylight optimism had abandoned him.

Grieves cleared his throat, as if preparing for great truths. "I realize this situation must generate an ethical paradox," Grieves said calmly. "Still, you must know that an exchange of resources is the only viable scenario."

This was ridiculous, Kuryakin thought. Introducing ethics in the middle of a Thrush satrap! It was like pondering the morality of fishing while riding on a shark boat.

"Please tell me you wish to cooperate, Mr. Kuryakin," Grieves said after some silence. "Otherwise, well, our lovely femme fatale might find herself - how does the saying go? - in over her head?" He said this in his low voice and surveyed the gloom of the empty pool, and now, in the cool half-darkness of the place, he did seem a bit like a toad.

Kuryakin had caught sight of the situation in the pool's deep end. And he knew they would still be there, the four Thrush hoods remaining like statues, their Brownings pointed directly toward the shadow that was April Dancer. It had struck Kuryakin that the poor woman seemed frozen in a clumsy position of obsequiousness, as though she were humbling herself to some ancient idol. Kuryakin could tell that the terrible position had cost her. Her long hair, fallen limply over her shoulders, was drenched with perspiration, her breath sketchy.

"Let her go," Kuryakin said flatly.

"Of course, Mr. Kuryakin." Grieves smiled. "Mr. Solo has used his powers of persuasion, let us say, to convince us of the sanctity of Mr. Waverly's little experiment in female espionage. We're ready to seal the deal, Mr. Kuryakin."

"Then he leaves now, with her," Kuryakin demanded. "Let her take Solo for medical treatment."

Grieves leaned back in his chair, glanced from Kuryakin to Solo and back at Kuryakin, then chuckled. "I do admire your stoic Russian tenacity, my pathetic Communist friend."

Kuryakin eyed Grieves coolly. "You are aware, of course, that U.N.C.L.E. would hardly ignore the murder of its top agent. If somebody from U.N.C.L.E. did not avenge the death, somebody else, somewhere, would. Napoleon Solo has many - "

"Yes, yes, yes," Grieves interrupted, disdainfully waving with his gun hand. "Your wonderful Napoleon Solo has many friends all over the world who would scour the planet to hunt down his killer, blah, blah."

Silently the agent logged the astonishing familiarity of his words for consideration.

"Agent Solo is worth more alive than dead," Grieves said, staring intently at Kuryakin's chest, as if a curious transition were taking place there. "I know, I know. You want to tell me that you and Napoleon are only two agents. That you are expendable. That Alexander Waverly would never let two of his agents, or any distrust between his agents, bring down the Command."

Kuryakin was silent. Seeing no light of welcome on his enemy's face, Grieves went on with the lecture a little louder, so it echoed inside the large and nearly empty pool area: "You see, everybody has his or her pressure point, Mr. Kuryakin. You just need to find the personal weakness and squeeze."

No good arguing. Besides, Kuryakin tried to direct his mind to the premise, but it was like trying to press the like poles of two magnets together. Kuryakin knew he could not have shot Solo. Whatever poison had subverted his mind and Kuryakin, an expert marksman, was convinced some small region of reason, some piece of sanity - whatever poison subverted his mind that terrible night in Berlin - had kept him from discharging a fatal shot, even as inexplicable impulses had compelled him to murder. Based on the location and pattern of the bloodstains on Solo's shirt, Kuryakin suspected that Solo's wound was serious, but, at least in and of itself, not lethal. Still, no gunshot wound was benign. Kuryakin knew the horrible outcomes of untended wounds. Fever, malaise, headache, anorexia. Seeding of the bloodstream that could lead to pneumonia, lung abscess, ostoemyelitis, septicemia, endocarditis, meningitis, or brain abscess.

He had a sinking sensation as he reexamined the bloody mess on Solo's shirt. "Let's get on with it, Grieves," Kuryakin said impatiently.

"Delivery vehicle's out back, BMW, sedan, four-door," Grieves said, then added sardonically, "An early model, I'm afraid, but what can you expect these days."

"Just what merchandise am I delivering for you, Grieves? No humanitarian consignment of medical supplies, I imagine."

"You think you deserve a summation of why you're doing this. I suppose it goes to motivation." Grieves smirked at Solo's mysterious old war friend, then turned a sober face to Kuryakin. "Look around. We're the men with the guns. I don't think you need more motivation than that, do you?"

"Fine," Kuryakin said bitterly. "I'm not happy to do your dirty work, but my options seem fairly limited."

"Wonderful. Payment on delivery." Greives nodded toward Solo.

"Why us, Grieves? Why two operatives for U.N.C.L.E. for your work?"

Grieves looked at Kuryakin with his cold eyes. "Allow me a certain sense of poetic justice. Another twist of the knife blade."

A quick grab for the gun, pull the trigger without even thinking, watch the big round eyes go wide with surprise. Kuryakin wanted nothing more right now than to see this man die. Instead, he breathed deeply, suppressing his anger. "Fine. Call off your jackals," Kuryakin said. "But, before we embark on our little trip, we could use some food, and some rest."

"Ah, Mr. Kuryakin, this is no time to be nodding off like a freckle-faced kid on a fishing raft. Time to make tracks for another part of the world."

Kuryakin paused for effect. "If your plans included me as your errand boy, why did you try to kill me last night?"

Grieves looked surprised. "Kill you?"

"Come on, Grieves. The car bomb in the bungalow garage? A good one, too. And then your men chased me, shot at me."

Grieves stiffened, then relaxed himself. But he could not hide the redness that swelled over his face as he eyeballed his collaborator, but the Roger Thornhill-lookalike shrugged indifferently. Then, with a trace of that easy smile resurfacing, Grieves faced Kuryakin again. "There have been some regrettable mishaps," Grieves said calmly. "But the disturbing developments of late will soon bear sweet fruit."

Reluctantly leaving behind a well-guarded Napoleon Solo, Dancer and Kuryakin were escorted to the washroom by two armed men, who locked them, one at a time, into the simple closet and stood outside the door, letting them out at a knock from the inside. Next, they were taken to a kitchen, where they were fed, on coffee and sandwiches, before being rousted out into the blinding midday sunlight of a steep little street behind the house. A big green glossy BMW had been driven up, and now the car stood there, shining in the winter daylight, its doors open like wings, its motor running.

"We've no luggage," Kuryakin said, squinting at Grieves and the other man. "Not even a toothbrush or razor. And we are completely unarmed."

Solo's friend from Korea laughed. "No American should leave home without a gun, right!"

Grieves laughed, too. "We Americans are a strange lot, aren't we?" Grieves said. "We travel to foreign countries and complain how hard it is to find a decent hamburger." He faced the two U.N.C.L.E. agents. "Are you ready otherwise?"

Dancer shrugged. "Suppose so. Have you any cigarettes?"

"No," Grieves said, "but you can get some on the road. Stop at any petrol station along the designated route. You'd better look through this," he added, and handed Kuryakin a small black leather folder. Kuryakin opened the folio and glanced through a car registration, a roadmap with their route traced zealously in red marker (the red line ran from Berlin through Poland and stopped at the Russian border), and two American passports. The passports were made out in their own names with their own photographs mounted on them, both embossed by a deep-press U.S. governmental seal running across the corner. They were neither old nor new; Kuryakin's described the Russian U.N.C.L.E. agent as a courier, and gave his status as single. The details impressed Kuryakin; he had to give them that much. But, holding the bundle of documents, Kuryakin felt slightly nauseated. It was like looking in the mirror one morning and seeing that overnight you were beginning to grow old; whatever was happening, you couldn't help it, and things would never be the same again.

"We are declaring ourselves Americans traveling in the usually prohibited Eastern bloc," Kuryakin stated blandly.

"Diplomatic couriers. You should do all right," Grieves said.

"How about some cash?" Kuryakin asked. "It's a long trip."

"You won't need any," Grieves said. "This one's on the house."

They consumed the long kilometers in fatigued silence. Kuryakin, voluntarily the primary driver, led them along Eastern European roadway, bumpy and narrow, that jostled their noisome cargo, raising a clatter from the trunk like the sound of several dozen Mason jars jiggling around. Sullen proprietors dutifully dispensed free fuel, gratis cigarettes, and hot flavorless coffee in the standard Styrofoam cup. All night tall trucks studded with colored lights, like dreadful Christmas lights, loomed in the darkness and thundered their sedan. And, next day, the inside of the car would alternate, at the whim of a temperamental heater, between being a furnace and a meat locker. Kuryakin had seen what the uniquely intimate confines of a vehicle could do to a couple of operatives on a stakeout, how his and Napoleon Solo's personalities could stand in deep relief - cool, cranky, spacey, scary. But now the prison of metal threw into perspective the real need for regular personal hygiene - Kuryakin became acutely aware that it had been days since either had enjoyed the luxury of a hot bath.

"I don't think I want to marry you anymore," Kuryakin said, which elicited a jolt from his companion, and the barest of smiles. But the smile was the first sign that the young female agent might be okay after her long trial with Grieves. "You don't smell clean enough to bring in the house with my mother."

"You're one to talk, Blanche. You don't exactly smell like a springtime orchard, you know," Dancer rejoined, but her smile didn't last. Kuryakin knew what she was going through, the feelings of betrayal over the desertion of a wounded agent, the treasonable surrender to an enemy. Lesser hazards had done in the best agents. Her face turned away and she pressed her forehead against the side window.

But there was nothing more they could do now but get on with their task. With any luck, and if things went well, they might be able to risk a phone call, even on an unsecured line. Call Waverly, pinpoint the Satrapy for Mark Slate.

The traffic on the highway was light; nobody passed anybody; and nobody attempted to get in between their curious green car and its imperious black shadow - as if there were some spell cast on that interspace, a zone of evil mirth and magic, a zone whose very precision and stability had a glasslike virtue that was almost artistic. The driver behind them looked like a pale display dummy, and his sedan seemed to move only because an invisible rope of silent silk connected it with Kuryakin and Dancer's shabby vehicle. Kuryakin knew they were many times weaker than the mannequin's splendid, lacquered machine, so that he did not even attempt to outspeed him.

With bewildering ease, the Thrush shadow switched from one vehicle to another. The technique implied the existence of garages specializing in "stage-automotive" operations, and every time Kuryakin pulled into a petrol station, a few minutes later a dark sedan - once a black Mercedes, then a navy blue Saab, another time a blood-red BMW - would glide alongside next to the two agents, Kuryakin pumping gas and Dancer wiping down the windows. The mysterious driver, from inside the dark interior of his sleek car, would fix Kuryakin and Dancer with his stare. But he never needed to refuel, never stepped from his vehicle.

They climbed long grades and rolled down again, and heeded speed limits, and spared slow schoolchildren, and reproduced in sweeping terms the black marked on the roadmap from Grieves, and no matter how and where they drove, the enchanted interspace slid on intact, mathematical, mirage-like. A traffic policeman, deep in the nightmare of crisscrossing streets - at half-past-six in a factory town - was the hand of chance that interrupted the spell. He beckoned Kuryakin and Dancer on, then with the same hand, cut off their shadow. A score of cars were launched in between them, and Kuryakin sped on, and deftly turned onto a narrow lane.

When, after a lot of deliberate meandering, Kuryakin returned to the designated route, their shadow had disappeared. At the next petrol station, Dancer and Kuryakin walked briskly into the store. One man at the counter. No customers. Dancer took the lookout position at the door, and Kuryakin grabbed the phone on the counter and dialed furiously. The proprietor, a little man - balding but young, with a dark mustache - was shaking his head and nervously glancing toward the dark windows.

"Emergency," Kuryakin whispered to the man, before hearing on the other end of the line a velvety female voice replaced at once by an angry greeting from Alexander Waverly.

"Where the devil are you?" Waverly growled, his voice from several thousand miles away filtering through a wash of static. "Nobody seems to understand the meaning of urgency anymore. I expected to hear from you and Miss Dancer hours ago. When I send my best troubleshooters into the field, I expect expediency and I expect investigative intelligence delivered in a timely fashion to this office. Understood, Mr. Kuryakin?"

"Of course, sir." Kuryakin smiled. Hearing the speech of the old Englishman who had lived in many lands other than England, Kuryakin felt a bit homesick for the New York City headquarters, where it had all begun for him a little more than a decade ago. He could almost see Waverly, the old aristocratic-looking bloodhound, bushy eyebrows and all. A veteran of more than 50 years of service in British and American intelligence, Waverly was the man who, for Kuryakin, was U.N.C.L.E. The old fox was probably now pushing away from his table and the documents he had been studying to rise and cross to the windows that distinguished his office from all other rooms in New York City's headquarters building. He could see him, all tweedy and baggy kneed, but a man with a brain quick as a scorpion and just as dangerous, a composure that never ruffled, and the ability to command men. A man very alone. Kuryakin wondered briefly how many times these calls had come in to the old man who had devoted his life to the pursuit of securing the safety and dignity of mankind. How many false starts along the way had the old man faced? How many setbacks, defeats?

Kuryakin quickly pinpointed the location of the Berlin operation, relayed what he had learned from Grieves and about Solo's condition, and passed on their Russian terminus.

Dancer interrupted. "I see headlights," she hissed. "They're coming."

"It's imperative you proceed as Grieves has directed. I'll call in a favor with my Russian friends -"

And then the connection was cut off by a storm of static.

Kuryakin slammed down the receiver and shoved the phone across the counter, and then, executing a smooth about-face from the counter and drawing a deep breath, he followed Dancer out of the gas station store in a casual and unhurried stroll. Headlights swept across the asphalt lot from a hearse-like sedan nosing toward the station.

They pulled back onto the road, and the car followed as before, maintaining its distance.

Dancer adjusted her seat back and folded her arms, gazing at the roadside, and Kuryakin realized it would be all over in Berlin. Mark Slate would have honed his strike team to perfection. The planned raid would unfold with prescribed and unerring routine: Waverly's order arriving instantaneously by satellite communication; flak-jacketed men and women strapping on their assault weaponry; their human target, oblivious of the truckload of crackerjack sharpshooters hurtling through Berlin's bitter night, taking a last self-satisfied breath before all hell broke loose around him.

When they pulled up to the shack at the Russian border crossing, a long train was standing in a station and the platform was empty. Winter. Night. The frozen sky was flooded with red. Only a woman's weeping could be heard. She was pleading for something from an officer in a stone coat. A black Mercedes, it, too, flooded with red from the setting sun, was parked in front of the shack. German Federation plates, government type. Engine running.

The passport and papers check went quickly. Then, the officer had Kuryakin park next to the Mercedes, into whose trunk Kuryakin, under close supervision, transferred the goods from his trunk. It was the first time he had lain eyes on their mysterious cargo, and the prize looked to be no more than a case of brown German beer bottles.

Flames of cold flickered across his skin. After he closed first the trunk lid of the Mercedes and then that of his own, he noticed a man climbing out of the Mercedes from the driver's side. The man walked over to Kuryakin as Dancer got out of their BMW, apparently having noticed the development.

"Welcome to Russia," the man said.

Kuryakin recognized the voice. The unidentified man, the third man at the table, Solo's so-called friend from the war. He wore a long dark overcoat, open slightly at the top, and beneath that, a fresh suit. Kuryakin looked but could not tell what kind his handgun was, whether he still had the Walther. The man had it holstered to the left, under the suit, judging from the hang of the overcoat fabric.

Two Russian officers huddled out of the wind on the platform in the shadow of the black train. They stamped their feet for warmth, and drew on their cigarettes. The cigarettes had no filter, and after the officers exhaled, they would have to pick off bits of tobacco that were stuck to their lips and tongue. Kuryakin watched them as they momentarily quit smoking and looked over at him. But then Loveless leaned back against the side of his car, and it seemed like nothing serious was going to happen, so the officers went back to work on their cigarettes.

"You've done your job, you're clear now," the man said. "You're to proceed to your safe house. In Siverski."

"Who the hell are you?" Kuryakin asked.

"Lancaster Loveless. Central Intelligence."

Loveless. Solo had mentioned the name over the years.

"Central Intelligence, huh? Tell me something, Mr. Loveless," Dancer said, her teeth chattering; it was bitterly cold. "Don't you remember a time when you could tell the good guys from the bad?"

Loveless laughed quietly and said, "Oh, my involvement with Thrush was merely a means to an end."

"Naturally, we would be remiss if we failed to press for some details about that, er, end," Kuryakin said.

"My dear Mr. Kuryakin, if you think I'm about to tell you everything, let me save us all some time," Loveless said with a grin. "I'm not." Loveless turned to go back to his car; the snow under his feet had a soda cracker crunch. "Remember this," he said, "all agents defect, and all resistors sell out. It's the sad truth."

Kuryakin strode up behind the man and grabbed him brusquely by the elbow, and Loveless whirled, an instinctive reaction.

"Ah, Mr. Kuryakin, careful. I've got the gun." Loveless nodded to the officers, who had just stiffened perceptibly. "You think a bullet wound would get much attention around these parts?" Kuryakin heard the Russian officers speaking on the platform. Then Loveless's face softened. "What fools we are, Illya, talking like this - as if I'd do that to you - or you to me." He shook loose of Kuryakin's hold on his elbow, climbed in behind the steering wheel. "Leave this alone. You will learn all you will need to know in short order. I'm very sure my superior will share the appropriate information with your old man."

"Which superior is that, Loveless?" Kuryain muttered. "The one from the CIA, or from the KGB? Or from Thrush?"

"I've stayed true to my school," Loveless said with an unctuous smile. "Besides, I'm not hurting anybody's freedom by what I do. Anyway, the dead are happier dead, don't you think? They certainly wouldn't miss much here, poor devils," he added with an odd touch of genuine pity, as the Russian officers lit another cigarette from the ones they were smoking, all stone coats and faces of the doomed-to-be-victims, tired pleasure-starved ghost faces, and peered over at the group of Americans. "I could cut you in, you know. It would be useful."

"What a work a man is... ."

"The Russian knows his Hamlet," Loveless said as he started to pull the car door shut. "Please, Mr. Kuryakin, I am not your pupil."

After Loveless's sedan finally backed up and pulled away into the night, Kuryakin looked helplessly at Dancer, started toward their car, then paused under the high light that guarded the near corner of the railway platform. What he saw at his feet puzzled him. On the whiteness that had already fallen small dark spots were swarming like gnats. They darted this way and that and then vanished. There seemed to be a center where they would vanish. The phenomenon seemed totally ghostly. Then the constriction of his heart eased as the rational explanation came to him. It had begun to snow, very lightly, and these were shadows of snowflakes cast by the light above him. His feet began to hurt from being cold and his thoughts turned sickly in his mind. As if leaving a cramped room he restored his mind to the breadth of the border station, where large traveling eddies of snow had begun to sway and stride from the sky with a sort of ultimate health.

He crawled into the cave of the car with Dancer and shoved his cold boots under a vent of heat. Hurriedly the U.N.C.L.E. agent backed out of the lot and headed up the drive toward the main road. On their way to Siverski, a few cars came from the other direction, and a few came up from behind and passed them. The snow let up after a while, and clouds of stars seemed to rise from the wilderness, lighting the treetops in a cool fire. They saw a castle nestled in distant hills, like a scene from a child's storybook. Slowly, the night closed in around them as light from farmhouses became less frequent and a small river crept up from around a nearby hill, and soon they entered the night's flowing, dark space.

The idyll ended just past a highway police station several kilometers from the next burg, when a car pulled in behind them abruptly enough that Kuryakin checked his speed to see if he wasn't violating the limit, but he wasn't. Then the car was very close, and the driver shifted his lights to a high beam so intense that Kuryakin could see their shadows on the dashboard, his knuckles on the steering wheel glaringly white. He was nearly blinded by his own mirrors, which he hastily adjusted.

He said, "What's with this guy?"

"See if he'll pass."

"If he's who we think he is, I don't think he will."

He softened his pressure on the gas pedal. For the usual motorist, easing the already modest speed would politely suggest that the driver might go by them. Kuryakin even hugged the shoulder, but the car remained glued to their bumper. There was something about this that reminded Kuryakin vaguely of his feeling of failure back in Berlin, with the shooting and later with the inability to reach headquarters, but he was unable to put his finger on it.

"Dammit," Dancer said. "Pull over."

Kuryakin moved off to the side of the road slowly and predictably, but although he had stopped, the incandescent globes persisted in their rearview mirror.

"This is not good," Dancer said.

"I would consider going back to speak to him, but this is not normal, not even for us."

Kuryakin put the car in gear again and pulled back onto the highway. The last reasonable thought he had was that he would proceed to the next town as though nothing were going on, and once they were back in civilization their tormentor's behavior would be visible to all, and they could, if necessary, simply drive to the police station with the offender in tow.

Their blinding, syncopated journey continued another kilometer before they reached a sweeping northward bend, closely guarded by hillside walls. They started passing scenic pulloffs, and Kuryakin estimated that the next curve was acute enough for a small lead to put him out of sight. As they entered a narrower roadway, Kuryakin pinned the accelerator, and they shot into the dark. Dancer grabbed the front edges of her seat and stared at the road twisting in front of them. She emitted something like a moan. Halfway around the curve, their tormentor vanished behind them, and although their car seemed only marginally under control, the absence of blinding light was a relief as they fled into darkness.

When they emerged and the road straightened, Kuryakin turned off his lights. He was going so fast he felt rattlebrained, but the road was visible under the stars, and he was able to brake hard and drop down into a scenic turnoff. Seconds later, their new friend shot past, lights blazing into nowhere. He was clearly determined to catch them: his progress up the road was rapid and increasingly erratic. They watched in fascination until the lights suddenly jerked sideways, shining in white cones across the river, turned downward, then disappeared.

Kuryakin heard Dancer say, in a tone of reasonable observation, "He went in."

Kuryakin had a strange feeling that took a long time to put into words, a mixture of relief, guilt, and cynicism. "Did I do that?"

Dancer shook her head, and Kuryakin pulled out onto the highway, his own headlights on once more. He drove in an odd, measured way, as if bound for an undesired destination, pulled along by something outside himself, thinking: betrayal, mistrust. They could see where the guy had gone through the guardrail. They pulled over and got out. Any hope they might have had for the driver was gone the minute they looked down from the riverbank. The car had broken through the ice and was submerged, its lights still burning freakishly, illuminating a bulge of crystalline water, a boulder in the exuberance of an ancient glacial watershed. Presently, the lights sank into blackness, and only the silver sheen of river in starlight remained. They had no choice but to climb back up to the roadway. At the next stop for gas, they switched seats, and Dancer drove off quietly.

An hour later, huge snowflakes, like confused moths, headed into the beams of their headlights and veered up at the last moment. The falling snow reminded Kuryakin of the street in Berlin with the Christmas shops and their mosaic-like ornaments of stained glass, the desolate street musician hoping for the drumming of a few cold coins in the blue case. Kuryakin soon fell into a slumber, and from slumber he settled into a deep and long sleep.

Dipping into his rather wild imagination, his sleep-starved brain concocted a rampageous dream that featured an outlandish Thrush scheme. The scheme involved snow globes; the glass orbs, about six or so inches in circumference, usually contain polyurethane-resin figures in idyllic scenes and, when shaken, fill up with plastic snowflakes and, when you wind a little crank on their base, out comes a tinkly rendition of "White Christmas." But the snow globe's in Kuryakin's dream were no ordinary snow globes. These snow globes were U.N.C.L.E. weapons and fiendish Thrush devices, snowy crystal balls delivered to the doorstep of Del Floria's tailor shop, rolled down the stairs of a brownstone apartment house, or discovered on the blizzard swept side of a Himalayan peak.

When Kuryakin found himself trapped inside one of the orbs, it took him a minute or two to discern that the snow was not falling around him but rather outside the thin skin of glass and that the glass was really the windshield separating a winter storm from the rank interior of a miserable sedan. In the seat next to his, the woman driving was unruffled. The little clock in the dashboard said it was 2:07.

The snow thickened around them. As it dashed into their headlights it flared like a spatter of sparks, swooped upward, vanished, and was replaced by another spatter of sparks. The onrush was continuously abundant. They met few other cars on the road now. The lights of farmhouses were blurred in the blizzard. The heater came on and served to emphasize their isolation. The arc of the windshield wipers narrowed with every swipe, until they stared into the storm through two mottled slits of cleared glass. The purr of the motor was drawing them forward into a closing trap.

Going down a hill past a cemetery, they skidded. Dancer fought the

wheel as the chassis slithered. They slipped safely to the bottom. A big truck like a fleeing house poured down past them and on toward Siverski, the rapidfire clunk of its chains panicked.

Dancer straightened the wheel, pressed on the gas, revving the engine, and pulled out. They began up the next hill. The car plowed upward some dozens of yards; when the wheels start spinning again Dancer shifted desperately down into third. The motor stalled. Dancer yanked out the emergency brake to hold them there on the hill. They were more than halfway up. The storm sank sighing into the silence of the motor. The motor restarted but the rear tires could not grip the snow; rather, the weighty old BMW slipped backwards toward the low cable fence that guarded the edge of the highway embankment. In the end there was nothing for Dancer to do but to open her door and, leaning out, using the pink glow of her taillights as her only guide, to back all the way down. Yet, though the momentum gathered this way carried them briskly into the lower part of the hill, they spun to a halt a little short of the straightaway at the bottom. Their previous tracks were dark ruts in their headlights.

Suddenly their heads cast shadows forward. A car behind them was coming down the hill. Its lights dilated, blazed like a shout, and away outward around them. Its chains slogging, it continued past them, took the steepest part of the hill, and gathering speed, vanished over the crest. Their own stalled headlights picked out the stamp of the crosslinks in its tracks. The sparkling of the snow was steady.

"We'll have to put on chains like that guy," Kuryakin told his partner.

"Did you notice the way that bastard didn't offer to give us a push?"

"How could you expect him to? He almost didn't make it himself. Besides, I'm not so sure I want anybody stopping for us."

A second time, Dancer opened her door and leaned out and guided the car backwards down the hill, the snow dyed rose by her taillights. A few flakes swirl in through the open door and pricked Kuryakin on the face and hands. He thrust his hands into the pockets of his parka.

Back at the bottom of the hill, they both got out. They opened the trunk and tried to jack up the car. They had no flashlight and nothing was easy. The snow at the side of the road was six inches deep and in trying to lift their tires clear of it they jacked the rear too high and the car toppled sideways and threw the jack upright, with shocking velocity, into the center of the road.

"Jesus," Dancer said, "this is a way to get killed."

She made no motion to retrieve the upright, and Kuryakin went to get it. Holding the notched bar in one hand, he looked along the side of the road for a rock to block the front tires but the snow concealed all such details of earth.

His partner stood staring up at the tops of pines that hovered like dark angels above them in the storm. Dancer's thought seemed to her partner to be describing wide circles, like a scouting buzzard, in the opaque mauve heaven above them. Now her thought returned to the problem underfoot and she addressed Kuryakin: "No chains. Pointless to do this. Let's try to drive out of this again."

They climbed back into the car, started the motor, and drove forward. But in the half-hour since they came onto this road another inch of snow had fallen and the packing action of traffic had utterly ceased. The rear tires kept slithering. The slits of vision in their windshield went furry and closed. Three times the BMW sloughed forward up the shallow slant to have its motion smothered. The third time, Dancer ground her foot into the accelerator and the crying tires swung the rear of the car into the untouched snow at the side of the road. There was a small depression just off the shoulder. Dancer shifted down to first gear and tried to lift out, but the snow held them fast in its phantom grip. They were hopelessly stuck. She switched off the motor.

"We'll have to walk," Kuryakin said. "We'll be okay. We'll make it. It's about three kilometers more; can you make it?"

"I'll have to," she said.

They walked in their own ruts up the hill. Kuryakin found it difficult to put one foot directly ahead of the other, as the Native Americans were said to have done. The wind kept tipping him. There was a screen of pines and though the wind was not powerful it yet had an insistence that penetrated the hair on his head and fingered the bone beneath. On the slope past the cemetery the pines faded away and the wind blew as if minded to pierce his body through and through. He became transparent: a skeleton of thoughts. Detached, amused, he watched his feet like blinded cattle slog dutifully through the drifted snow; the disparity between the length of their strides and the immense distance to Siverski was so great that a kind of infinity seemed posited in which he enjoyed enormous leisure. He employed this leisure to meditate upon the phenomenon of extreme physical discomfort. There was an excising simplicity in it. First, all thoughts of past and future are eliminated and then any extension via the senses of yourself into the created world. Then, as further conservation, the extremities of the body are disposed of - the feet, the legs, the fingers. If the discomfort persists, if a nagging memory of some more desirable condition lingers, then the tip of the nose, the chin, and the scalp itself are removed from consideration, not entirely anesthetized but deported, as it were, to a foreign realm to the very limited concerns of the irreducible locus, remarkably compact and aloof, which alone remains of the once farflung and ambitious kingdoms of the self. The sensations seemed to arrive from a great distance outside himself when his partner, now stumbling beside him and using Kuryakin's body as a shield against the wind, tugged like a lead weight at his sleeve and ducked her face into his shoulder and let out a long and low, almost inaudible, moan.

The room was radiant. Beyond the white mullions and the curtains of dotted Swiss pinned back with metal flowers painted white, the sky was undiluted blue. He had sunk into the center of the bed. He looked for a clock; there was none. He closed his eyes to listen for voices, heard cups clinking at some distance, and slipped back into sleep.

When he awoke again the strangeness of it all - the house, the day so fair and sane in the wake of madness, the silence, inside and out (why had he not been wakened? what had happened to Dancer? what about Waverly and Solo and the Thrush stronghold in Berlin? Loveless?) - held him from falling back, and he arose and dressed as much as he could. His shoes and socks, set to dry on a radiator in the room, were still damp. The strange walls and hallways, demanding thought and courage at every turn, seemed to suck strength from his limbs. He located the washroom and splashed water on his face and ran a wet finger back and forth across his teeth. In bare feet he went down the stairs. They were carpeted with a fresh-napped beige strip held to place by a brass rod at the base of each riser.

A middle-aged woman came in from the front room wearing a pinned-up bandana and a plain blue dress. She had a white cup in her hand and, grinning so her gums flashed, hailed him with, "Dobraya utra, gospodeen Kuryakin." Her pronouncing his name behind the Russian made him completely welcome. She led him into the kitchen and in walking behind her he felt himself, to his surprise, her height, or even an inch taller. He sat at the little linoleum-topped kitchen table and she served him like a wife. She set before him a thick tumbler of orange juice whose translucence cast on the linoleum in sunlight an orange shadow like a thin slice of the anticipated taste. It was delicious for him to sit and sip and feel the warmth of the little house. The kitchen reminded him of the cramped and improvised space where his mother had made their meals.

"Gdye zhe devushka?" he asked.

"Nye znayoo vot tak," she said. "Shto vy khotite zhe-Wheaties? Nyet, Rice Krispies? Yelnya, mozhet byit?"

"Rice Krispies." A plain electric clock beneath the battered cabinets said 1:10. He asked, "Shto otkhodil a devushka? April Dancer?"

"They took her."

"They?" Panic fluttered in his chest.

"They, cheloveki," she said, looking at him soberly. Then, smiling a little: "She say tell you not to worry and how her uncle come and take her with them. She is all right. She is smiling when they come." She paused. "Have you looked outdoors?" she asked, gazing toward the window above the sink.

"Sort of. It's stopped?"

"Twenty-six centimeters, the radio said. All the schools in the area have cancelled. Even the army does not practice today."

"I wonder if they're going to have swimming practice tonight."

She looked at him unsmilingly.

"In America, you see, they announce on television and radio the closings..."

"I'm not sure," she said, staring at him. She was really quite lovely, he thought, and so sad. "You must be dying to get to your home."

"I suppose so. It seems forever since I was home." He stopped, realized he had lost track. "Please, what day is it?"

"27. November. You were sleeping some days."

"Some days?"

"Your gospasha Dancer, she must love you very much. She tell me you went through too much. She was very worried about you. She looked after you two days, then doctor came, your fever go."

The room was brilliant in the aftermath of the storm. He started to remember dreams, bent extensions backwards in time, like that of sticks thrust into water, of the last waking events - the final kilometer staggering through the unwinding storm; Dancer's beating at the door of the dark house, knocking and yelling and rubbing her hands together in desperation. His own blind numbness. Then this gracious woman, sad and alone, yawning and blinking in the bleaching glare of her kitchen, her unbound hair fanning over the shoulders of her brown bathrobe, her hands tucked in the sleeves, her arms hugging herself as she yawned. She put them in two tiny rooms in the back of the house, in small beds that smelled of feathers and starch, and for a while he kept tense. Then the wind outside the room sighed mightily, and this thrust of sound and motion beyond him seemed to explain everything, and he relaxed.

"Do you drink coffee?" she asked.

"I try to every morning but there's never any time. I'm being an awful lot of trouble." There were always innocent people. Ordinary angels swept up into these affairs. He wondered what danger they had put this poor woman in by their arrival at her house. Would Thrush be at her doorstep after he left, or KGB? Central Intelligence?

"Hush. It is no trouble."

He made bold to ask, "Did anybody act suspicious?"

"Suspicious?"

"Yes. Did anybody ask a lot of questions? Or look dangerous?"

"I do not know."

"Oh." He felt sorrow for bringing it up, but she seemed unruffled by the line of inquiry as she brought him a steaming cup of fragrant dark coffee. "Well, I wonder how our poor car is. We abandoned it last night at the bottom of that hill."

"The doctor said. He also said about a bad accident up the road. It is rumored another American go off the road and into the lake. He is under the ice now."

"These Rice Krispies are awfully good."

She looked up over her own cup of coffee in surprise and smiled. "They're just the ones that come out of the box." The sedan that drove him back into East Germany and then West Germany and West Berlin lapped up the kilometers - endlessly. There was snow everywhere. He always marveled when he was overwhelmed by the weather. The scientist in Kuryakin beheld the complexity of it all, the delicate net of interdependency. Another persona in Kuryakin loved winter, this beautiful and mysterious season, when heavy snow simplified many of the fascinating details seen during warmer seasons while yielding masterpieces of monumental sculptural forms in frozen landscapes. He remembered his appreciation as a boy growing up in Russia for the long-term responses and sacrifices each tree and bush had been obliged to make in order to survive. Paradoxically, and ultimately, however, he sensed in snowbound winters an abiding peace and tranquility suggesting that this was exactly how it was meant to be.

"I hope Mr. Waverly allows you a little more time in New York to recuperate," came April Dancer's voice through the phone at the Berlin airport. "Take some time for yourself, take in some jazz clubs, read those books you love so much."

She was quiet and confiding, but her voice took on a taunting edge when turning to the subject of the thugs who almost engulfed them both. "So Grieves wins," she said.

"Just this time."

"Grieves is on the loose. Maybe marketing his poison to so-called world leaders, people I wouldn't trust to lead me to a park bench, and Thrush is reaping the prize money."

"Has Central Intelligence told us anything about their man Loveless? About this poison, our cargo? Or the accident?"

"Mr. Waverly has a report on the substance. The CIA reports he arrived safely in D.C. yesterday. They say he infiltrated Thrush to retrieve the substance. Mr. Waverly has more details; basically, some U.S. Army experiment went sour in the early 1960s and Thrush stumbled on some leftovers."

"These damned governments," Kuryakin said, in half-jest.

"Another thing. Seems you've been officially exonerated."

"What do you mean?"

"You didn't shoot Napoleon. It was Loveless. Some ploy to preserve his cover with Grieves, according to the CIA."

"Has anybody told Napoleon about this?"

"You haven't heard," she said softly.

The phone felt cold in his hand. "What? I thought you said he was okay, recovering in a Berlin hospital."

"Yes, doing remarkably well, as I understand. Should be home in a week or so, they say."

"Well, what is it, then?"

"Suspended from active duty. Indefinitely."

"This has to be a joke. What the devil for?"

"The official line is that Napoleon sold out to Grieves."

Kuryakin held the phone in silence. He could not bring his mind to touch the issue squarely; it shied into distraction and confusion.

"This man, Loveless," Kuryakin said. "What did he do in the army?"

"Munitions expert."

"Of course," Kuryakin said, remembering the neatly prepared car bomb. "So, he gets away with shooting Napoleon and with almost killing me."

Kuryakin wanted to gut that sleaze, Loveless.

"Illya, Napoleon's out of the Command."

Waverly! What was that pedantic fool doing? He couldn't afford to lose his top enforcement agent. Not over this.

"He paid for your life, is what you're telling me," Kuryakin said.

"Yes. Loveless brokered some deal between Solo and Grieves. Grieves wanted me dead, wanted me tortured to death, as I understand."

"And the payment?"

"Napoleon authorized a transfer of his entire savings to an account in Switzerland under the name of Christopher Sly."

"A Grieves alias."

"We checked, and as of an hour after you and I arrived at the Russian border, the money was gone. $365,000. All of it."

"My God," Kuryakin muttered, bringing his hand up and pulling his bangs back severely from his clammy forehead. "So Mr. Waverly thinks he has a dirty cop on his hands."

"Well, the bad guy is out there running around with a lot of cold hard cash."

"But Napoleon saved your life."

Dancer spoke more calmly but with clear anger. "I'm tired of it all, Illya. If it's not Grieves, it's some other lunatic incarnation," she said. "They capture one of our agents, we kill two of theirs. We blow up one of their strongholds, and they find one of our labs. We've been fighting them for years and years, and it doesn't seem to make any difference. They're still plotting and planning, and we're still trying to stop them. What's the point?"

He heavily sat in the dark of the Pan-Am jumbo jet airliner and read from the little plastic seat rack Reader's Digests one after another. He read until he felt sick from reading. He eagerly discovered and consumed two articles side by side in the table of contents: "Are We Ready to Disarm?" and "Ten Proofs that There is a God." He read them and was disappointed, more than disappointed, overwhelmed. He found a tattered copy of Joseph Heller's beleaguered Catch-22, that crazy novel that so many school librarians in the early 1960s had been afraid of, and he felt sorry all over again for poor Yossarian, the bombadier stuck on that little part of Italy in the closing days of World War Two with all those people who wanted him dead.

The flight attendants fed him and put pillows under his head and took a blanket from a passenger ahead of him so he could be warm. His teeth had begun to chatter and he made no attempt to repress this odd skeletal vibration, which both released swarms of chill spirits with him and brought down from the lovely women helpless fluttery gusts of concern.

"Poor guy, he looks exhausted," one said.

"Keep an eye on him," another said.

To the tune of their retreating voices he fell asleep. His dreams did not embody them or April Dancer or Napoleon Solo or Mr. Waverly or Cornwell Grieves or Lancaster Loveless but seemed to take place in a sluggish whirling world that preceded them all and where only his mother's face, flashing by on the periphery with the startled fearful expression with which she used to call him down from a tree he was climbing, kept him company in the shifting rootless flux of unidentifiable things. His own voice throughout seemed to be raised in protest and when he awoke, with an urgent need to urinate, the attendants' voices seemed a grappling extension of his own. Sunlight the tone of lemon filled the frame of the small airplane window. He remembered that in the middle of his slumber he had almost surfaced from his exit-less nightmare at the touch of hands on his face and the sound of a woman's voice above his seat saying, "Poor sweet guy. I wish I could give him something to feel better."

Kuryakin looked out the Pan-Am jet window. In time New York City would appear in the frame, buildings like skeletal frames illuminated from within by yellow incandescence and from without by persistent and garish rainbows of neon. He knew what the scene would look like - a patch of the world he knew in 1971, the noisy life of New York City, frenetic pace of assignments for U.N.C.L.E. - and yet he did not know, was in his softly fevered state mindlessly soaked in a rectangle of dull shadow. Painters burned to paint such things these days, black squares on black squares, black lines slashing hard canvases. Then, he went weary and closed his eyes and nearly dozed, so that when the beautiful young flight attendant brought by his orange juice and cereal he ate with an unready mouth.

EPILOG: "Go, Bid the Soldiers Shoot."

Somewhere in New York City, U.N.C.L.E. Headquarters, the Middle of January 1972

There were deep secrets being kept that disrupted the harmony and balance of his daily existence, making his life feel much more tenuous and complicated than it seemed on the surface. If the outcome of the mission in Russia had been anticlimactic and indeterminate, the debriefing portion was bloodless. He had spent the first week of December on mandatory leave, listening to jazz and having late and unhurried dinners in the Village; the rest of the month and into January he had spent working 18-hour days at headquarters in cold offices and conference rooms where he learned nothing.

And the moral of this story is...? he heard himself thinking. Solo, kicked out of the command. But, at least alive and well. Hibernating in his New York City apartment, nursing his wounded professional pride. Dancer was in England on a new assignment. But nobody seemed to know anything much about the creeps who had almost done them all in. Kuryakin kept remembering Dancer's anger over the phone in Berlin. What was the point, indeed?

There was a description of the cargo he and Dancer had transported for Grieves to the Russian border. The report came from U.N.C.L.E. analysts but even this was only historical background: Few people know that, early in the 1960s, U.S. Army scientists stumbled upon a deadly biological weapon that certain figures in the U.S. government believed would help make wars more humane. Predicated on the malaria virus, the material possesses a nauseating and penetrating odor and is so poisonous that exposure to it put many of the Army's best scientists in the hospital for a few days. If a man goes to a hospital suffering from a biological or chemical gas, he is as useless as if he were dead - and to care for him several other persons must be kept out of the battle lines. The chances are that the victim will recover. When the U.S. Army determined the substance was too dangerous to handle, they dumped their supply into the Atlantic Ocean off the coast of Germany. The whole matter was nicknamed The Geranium Experiment when it was discovered that the substance blossomed into bright and beautiful flower-like shapes when it hit the water.

Kuryakin had imagined briefly the back of the Mercedes trunk filling up with giant frozen geraniums of purple and green and blue.

Kuryakin found relative solace in the underground range and armory. Unused weapons of all makes, types, and sizes filled the amazing treasure trove of a store, and he produced for himself one of the old Mausers, still in its original box, thick with grease and wrapped in orange wax paper. No mean feat, as this particular gun had long since been removed from U.N.C.L.E.'s regular issue. A 1934 7.65-mm German Mauser. An original model with a wooden grip on the extended barrel. A conversion design similar to a Stoner 63 system the U.S. Marines had tested in the Far East.

Unlike the Walther P-38-style U.N.C.L.E. Special that could be fired all day without heating up, this gun could get hot after a few rounds and it also tended to jam. But to Kuryakin there was kind of poetic reward in reaching back into history with the old piece.

Alone he fired away at the black silhouettes. He thought about Grieves, or more precisely what he had seen the other day. A round head, from the back, unmistakably that of Grieves. Bouncing away from him in a sea of faces. Kuryakin had given chase. His vision jiggled as he pushed past shoppers and businessmen. Then a little old woman screamed as he ran past, almost knocking her down, and Grieves was gone.

He fired away with a mixture of ferocity and concentration that left him exhausted but not at peace. Kuryakin was not pleased at the prospect of pursing the loose ends of this case through the freezing streets and into the unspeakable hideaways of New York City. Under a causeway while a cold, dark rain falls. Not pleased. Could he pull himself together or not? As an agent, he longed for a time when he could relax, shed the paranoia, and yet it was true that his life had no meaning without dangerous work.

He heard himself speaking about all of this to Napoleon Solo with the exaggerated calm of a man trying to survive at the eye of a storm. Solo, armored with a thick beard and the suggestion of a heavy new gut, drank his beer quietly.

"Relax. On the balance I'd say things turned out okay," Solo said with a wry smile. "Everybody came out alive. And I hear you've been exonerated."

"Yes, well, I can't quite get over this new feeling of being a solid citizen again," Kuryakin said.

"If it helps any, I'll always think of you as disreputable."

The place was full and they sat in a dark corner. When Kuryakin looked at their images reversed in the big plate window, he wondered about these two men, two aging agents who might be just barely holding on to sanity and to the tender altruistic feelings that they thought redeemed their violence.

"You'll lose your disguise, I trust," Kuryakin said, smiling weakly as he turned his attention back to Solo.

"Of course. I got a call. I've been activated."

"Waverly?"

"Will wonders never cease?"

"So, the dirty cop gets thrown off the force but is brought back to solve a mysterious case."

Solo smiled, almost serenely. "Something like that."

"This has not been an easy one."

"On the contrary. I'd say it's been more of the same. Another blood-soaked, hellish experience. A midnight special for lovers of violent causes."

"I thought I saw him yesterday."

"Loveless?"

"No. Grieves."

"Here?"

"Yes. Not far from headquarters. Waverly's got eyes out all over the place for him."

"We have to get my money back, if nothing else. Save, Illya. Save for a warm place to die. I've always said that. Don't touch it for anybody. Not anybody."

"Not even if it means saving the life of a friend?"

There was a silence between the two men as they ate and drank. Then Kuryakin said quietly, "We need to get Loveless, too. If he's not already dead. I swear to heaven, Napoleon, I want to gut the man. Him and Grieves both." Solo said nothing and took another sip of his beer, gazed steadily over the rim of his glass into Kuryakin's face. Kuryakin continued, "How could Loveless be so...?"

Solo paused above the beer, waiting, then supplied the word: "Ruthless?"

Kuryakin grinned a bit sheepishly. "Ruthless Loveless. Yes, well, I did ask for that one."

But Solo wasn't smiling. "I honestly don't know. He was a friend. Obviously he's one of those who believes in the mission above all else."

"There has to be more."

Solo finished the beer. "Don't worry. We'll tie things up. I don't think this is over."

They finished in silence and then left.

The afternoon was clear and cold and the sun above the westward section of town made their shadows long before them.

"None of this is ever over, is it?" Kuryakin said weakly.

Solo hailed a cab from down the street. But for a minute longer the two agents stood together at the curb, finding a measure of repose in familiar company, and some ambiguous warmth in the sense of having failed each other without blaming each other. So two steeds in the same pen huddle through a storm. With a yank that made the door screech, Solo pulled open the back door of the cab and held it for the friend who would join him for the ride to a tailor shop on a block of humble brownstones. It was a maze, behind that little shop.

The End