It was windy for August and the bright sunshine was not too warm. He walked the half block to his car with the breeze whipping his pale, forward-brushed hair off his forehead, collected his ticket from under the windshield wiper, and drove away from the fire hydrant where he had parked earlier in the morning. It took him twelve minutes to get to the shabby block hiding the headquarters of U.N.C.L.E.
He swung the car into the garage at the end of the row of brownstones, left it with the attendant, and walked out into the street again. Like every building on the block, including the seedy shops and the apartments above them, the garage was a front. U.N.C.L.E.'s basic personnel gained admission to the steel-shelled headquarters through the men's and women's locker rooms in the garage itself; such few official visitors as the organization had were show to a door above the club in the whitestone at the far end of the block. But the Enforcement Agents on their rare visits to base used the third entrance inside Del Floria's tailor shop.
There were two other entrances: an underwater channel leading from the basement to the East River; and a fifth way in that was only known to Mr. Waverly and his four colleagues of Section One.
Illya walked halfway down the brownstone frontage and went in Del Floria's door. The dimly lit front room was damp with steam from the pressing machine and at first the old man did not see him. Then he looked up and caught sight of the Russian standing over against the rail of suits basted ready for fittings. He opened the two white, padded halves of the big machine and hurried over with a smile, the orange tape measure draped around his neck swinging as he went.
"Mr. Kuryakin!" he beamed. "Some days it is since I see you. I am hoping you do well. Everything, she is fine, yes?"
"Hello, Del," Illya said easily. "Yes, I'm fine, thanks. How are you?...There is some kind of a panic on up there, so I am afraid that I have to hurry. See you later, maybe?"
He took off his jacket and handed it to the tailor as though he wanted it to be pressed, passing through to the fitting booths in the back of the shop. Del Floria slung the garment over one arm and pressed a button set into the side of the pressing machine. In the third cubicle, Illya drew across the curtain and twisted an ordinary-looking brass hook on the back wall.
The wall swung silently inwards, and he walked through into the Admissions foyer of U.N.C.L.E. headquarters.
The girl at the reception desk was a redhead. She had watched the agent's approach through the tailor's shop on her T.V. monitor screen and now she looked up with a five-star smile shining through her freckles. "Morning, Illya," she said cheerfully. "You're a minute early, you know: the old man'll be pleased!"
Kuryakin nodded seriously. The fact that he found his job of more importance than human relationships did not make his boyish charm any the less compelling on the personable young women with whom U.N.C.L.E. was liberally staffed.
"Good morning, Miss Merrell," he said. "I was fortunate with the lights today in the crosstown traffic. Do you have a badge for me?"
"Do I!" the girl said. "I have a whole chestful, if you must know. But I'd be out on my ear if I mentioned it!" She reached into a drawer of her desk and brought out a small white badge which she pinned carefully to his shirtfront, just below the shoulder. "Usually it's lapels, of course," she told him. "I wonder if you'd even notice if I'd stuck you with it?"
Illya smiled, an exercise that lit up his entire face. "Probably not," he said politely. "I should most likely have been too busy admiring the contours of the scenery to notice such pinpricks..."
"Gee," the red-headed girl breathed as she watched him cross the foyer to the elevators, "maybe one day he'll get around to call me Barbara..."
But the agent, absent-mindedly fingering the white badge in the elevator taking him to the third floor, was wondering what could have been the reason for the unexpected call on what should have been a free day. His taste, as it happened, inclined more towards brunettes.
(The white badge was more important than it looked. Each individual entering the headquarters—staff, out-posted personnel or visitor—was equipped with a badge every time he or she came in. And badges of different colors admitted to different levels of the organization. Thus a red badge restricted its wearer to the entrance floor, where only routine operations were carried out; a yellow badge permitted entry to this floor and also the communications and electronics centers on the floor above; and the Policy and Operations Sections on the top floor were reserved for white badges. The small shields themselves were activated by a chemical on the tips of the receptionist's fingers—and any badge thus treated which strayed into the wrong part of the building would immediately trip an alarm setting off winking red danger lights on every desk in the headquarters, while steel doors slid shut to divide the place into compartments in which capture of the interloper would be that much easier. Napoleon Solo had been there once when a too-curious columnist had strayed from the course marked out for him and caused the whole system to swing into operation. "It was hell," he told Illya afterwards. "Just like being in a torpedoed ship, with the watertight doors closing and bells ringing their heads off all over...")
The blonde in the black skirt took Kuryakin into Waverly's office at once. Solo was still there, and the blonde appeared to have some difficulty in deciding which man to look at as she returned to the outer office.
"What we're faced with here, Mr. Kuryakin," Waverly said, after Solo had put Illya in the picture, "is, as usual, a matter of time—time in which to discover how these air crashes occurred; time to see all the persons involved; time to work out some way of preventing a repetition of the disasters. And of course time is what we do not have. If it is indeed THRUSH behind the whole thing, then it must be effectively countered at once. At once—before public confidence drops further."
"It seems to me," Solo said, "assuming the planes are being sabotaged, that is—it seems to me we have to find out first of all how this is being done."
"I agree, Napoleon," Illya said. "From what Mr. Waverly has told us, I assume there is no evidence of any tampering with the planes. Is there likely to be any in the near future?"
"I wouldn't count on it," Waverly said morosely. "I've told you the results of the preliminary inquiry. The full investigation—where they gather together every fragment of the wrecked plane and marry it up with its neighbor to try to see what went wrong where—that'll take weeks. And it's not a job that you can rush, by its very nature. If you lean too heavily on the man doing the reconstruction, he may in his haste destroy the very fragment holding the clue to the whole thing!"
"I see. Then it seems our only lead is the survivors. Are there many?"
Waverly sighed. His lined face looked suddenly tired and old in the harsh light streaming through the window from Queens. "From the five crashes," he said, abstracting a sheet of paper from the folder which still lay on his desk, "there are precisely five survivors."
"How do they relate?" Solo asked.
"A stewardess from the second Nice disaster—there were no survivors from the first. This burned fellow from the third crash there. And a steward and two passengers from one of the American crashes."
"Which one, sir?"
"The aircraft that stalled on take-off. A DC-6, it was. At Chicago."