"I believe it," Solo said. "I know where those plants came from."
"What's the point of growing tropical plants in this part of the world?"
"There's a point to it, all right. Those plants are growing even larger and greener and wilder than they did down in that damned rain forest."
Illya shook his head. "What's the exact distance and range reading?"
Solo checked the readings. "Four miles, due west."
"That could be a long walk."
"Yes. That four miles is as the scanner and the crow flies."
Illya Kuryakin pushed his feet back into his shoes. "Much as I don't want to, we've got to get closer. We've got to get in there."
Solo checked the flickering pictures reproduced on the tiny screen another few moments. Illya Kuryakin sank to the rock and tied his shoes.
They both heard the noise from the rocks behind them at the same instant.
They moved as one man. Illya came up from the rock and Solo spun around, .38 U.N.C.L.E. Special drawn.
They stared down the barrel of a waiting rifle.
Tense, they gazed at the girl holding that gun. The first thing they saw was that she was extraordinarily beautifully, unspeakably frightened.
She trembled, barely able to hold the rifle fixed on them. This made her triply dangerous because her finger on the trigger quavered, too.
Her voice shook. "Don't move, either one of you, or I'll kill you."
Solo gave the quivering girl his blandest smile. "I wasn't planning any move."
"Nor me," Illya said. "Matter of fact, we were just sitting here, waiting for you to come along."
"Go ahead. Laugh," the girl said on the verge of tears. "I hope you can laugh as easily with a bullet in you."
"That's the hard way, all right," Solo agreed.
THREE
"WHO ARE YOU?" Napoleon Solo kept his voice level, afraid any undue excitement might drive her into hysterical use of that gun. Her voice slashed at him, quavering, but the rage riding it. "Never mind that. I'll ask the questions."
Napoleon Solo watched the girl narrowly. "You don't act like a professional with that gun, but THRUSH has used more obvious gimmicks."
"THRUSH?" The girl scowled.
"That's right," Illya Kuryakin said. "Are you from THRUSH?"
"I don't know what you're talking about," the girl said, hysteria mounting behind her voice again.
"She thinks THRUSH is a bird," Illya said.
"Make your jokes," the girl said savagely, tilting the mouth of the rifle. Even with the gun in her hands there was a breathtaking loveliness about her. Not even the functional clothes she wore could truly detract from her eye-widening beauty.
Her hour-before-dawn black hair was brushed back carelessly from her face and toppled in lustrous waves almost to her shoulders. She wore Levis, denim shirt and scuffled boots as if they were the latest from the House of Dior. She looked to be somewhere between eighteen and twenty. "Death is no joke to me."
"You misunderstand," Illya said. "Would you want to see grown men cry?"
"My father cried," she said in that savage tone. "You people made him cry."
"Wait a minute! This is a case of mistaken identity," Illya began.
Her quavering voice rang out. "You stay where you are."
She jerked the gun up, her finger trembling on the trigger.
"Hang cool, miss," Solo advised. "You got a hate on, but we haven't earned it yet."
"That's right," Illya said. "If you shoot us for something that happened to your father, you've got the wrong men."
She stared at them, her lovely face gray. Her lips were perfectly formed, even without lip rouge. Her eyes were the color of violets, and her gaze wavered between them for a moment.
Suddenly she burst into tears, crying violently. She sobbed, standing shoulders round, the gun dangling at her side. Tears streaked across her cheeks, but she did not even lift her hand to her face.
It was as if she were too tired to raise her fingers.
Solo went slowly forward and gently removed the rifle from her arms.
She did not protest. It was as if she were relieved to be rid of it.
Solo started the fire in the gas cooker outside the girl's car, camped six miles down the west side of the mountain. The car was parked hidden in a copse of pine between a narrow trail and a mountain brook.
He put on the coffee and when it was ready, carried the girl a steaming cup. She took it, her hands trembling.
Illya and Solo sat near her, drinking coffee in the gathering dark.
The girl held the cup in both hands. She seemed depleted, finished.
Solo said gently, "Why don't you tell us about it? Who are you looking for?"
"That's it." Her chin tilted. "I don't know. I could have killed both of you—and been wrong. I know that now. I've been half out of my mind since my father disappeared."
"That's a good place to begin," Solo said. "Tell us about your father, how he disappeared."
"He disappeared last night," the girl said. "But that wasn't the beginning of it. I don't know where it began, really. Everything's been so strange for the past year... My father was an associate professor of biology at Northwestern—"
"Under Professor Ivey Nesbitt," Illya finished for her, as if thinking aloud.
She stared at them, caught between astonishment and suspicion. "How did you know that?"
Solo said, "We've been looking for Dr. Nesbitt. For a long time."
She frowned, staring at the steam rising from her coffee. "Well then, you know that Dr. Nesbitt simply disappeared from the school. No one heard anything from him."
"But your father came out here to Montana looking for Dr. Nesbitt," Solo prompted.
"Yes. He took a leave from the school this summer, I came along with him. I'm a secretary in a publishing office, but I gave up my job. I was worried about my father, and didn't want him traveling alone."
"Do you know why he came here to the Big Belt Mountains?"
"You're sure he never got any word from Dr. Nesbitt?"
"Of course I'm sure." Her voice rose slightly. "I would have known. He would have told me. No. It was a hunch he had. He said he and Dr. Nesbitt had done some biology experiments out in these ranges once years before. He had no other place to look, and so he came here, perhaps in desperation."
"Perhaps," Solo agreed. "Except that we're pretty sure that if Dr. Nesbitt is still alive he is some where in these mountains."
"Well, my father didn't know that, not for sure. He would have told me."
"Do you think he could have met Dr. Nesbitt somewhere and simply have gone away with him?"
"And left me? Why should he do that?"
"I don't know. Sometimes scientists do strange things."
"Not my father. The strange things were done to him."
"What strange things?" Illya prompted her.
She held her breath a moment. She stared upward, past the dark trees toward the star-silvered sky. They gazed at the perfection of her classic profile. She said, "The strangest of all was the summons to death that he got—"
"Summons to death?" Solo asked.
"Oh, I know it sounds incredible." She looked from Illya to Solo. "We were in the hotel at Big Belt. It was night. Father had been alone, riding through these mountains on horseback. He was tired. But he was troubled. Something was on his mind. Three or four times he looked as if he were going to tell me about it.