Why had THRUSH chosen to take Slate and leave her behind? It didn't make sense. There had to be some explanation for such a move. After all, hadn't they been keen to make a swap for Zorki? They were surely lessening their chances against Mr. Waverly's concern for his agents by kidnapping only one. Unless—
Grimly, April ran to the doorway leading from the basement. A door on the far side of the dank area. It wouldn't budge. Her eyes roamed to the grilled window, far above her head, where she could just make out the ancient, cracked sides of a stone building adjoining. The grilled window stood twenty feet above her head, inaccessible except to someone with a ladder or to Superman. Biting her lips, a nervous habit she gave in to only when she was alone like this, she reentered the darkened corridor. She roved with her hands and feet in the gloom. As she had expected, it was a blind alley. The wall ended against the door of the room that had served as their jailhouse. No, the only way out of the basement was the locked door. There was no telling just how much of an impossible barrier that was.
They had locked her in.
She had no outer clothes, no weapons, no tools. None of her fancy devices for extricating herself. The nail polish explosive X-757 had been the last arrow in her bow. That's all there was; there was no more.
They knew that.
So what could it mean—that they had chosen to leave her behind?
It was at just about this time that she began to realize that the basement and/or the building was expendable. They would probably never need to use it again. THRUSH had a "scorched earth" policy; they liked to burn their bridges behind them, once they had used them for a purpose. Burn them or blow them up.
The building had to be wired for an explosion. It was all too clear, now. A dead U.N.C.L.E. agent was much better than a live U.N.C.L.E. agent, no matter what yardstick THRUSH used.
April shivered in her panties and bra, responding now to the chill dampness and dankness of the corridor and basement.
Where was the bomb?
When would it go off?
The curious blue panel truck with the painted sides that bore the legend ROMEO'S LEAGUE OF NATIONS EXHIBIT, traveled smoothly in the heavy traffic throttling Grand Concourse. It turned off at 161st Street, roared past Yankee Stadium and bore rapidly toward the Harlem River Bridge.
The beautiful redhead at the wheel, a white ribbon pony-tailing her vivid tresses, stared straight ahead, mindful of the jammed lanes of cars going South. Beside her, the man with the Frankenstein child's mask sat with his arms folded serenely. Passing motorists and people on the pavements, glimpsing the offbeat couple, as the truck stopped for red lights, grinned and waved. The redhead and Frankenstein and the blue panel truck were a novelty in the prosaic Bronx afternoon.
"I'm not convinced it was clever leaving her back there," Mr. Riddle said, without any complaint in his voice.
"Slate is sufficient to arrange the trade," Arnolda Van Atta said. "Miss Dancer can't be much more than a female. I wasn't too impressed with her."
"But if Uncle learns of her death before—"
"They won't. There won't be enough left of that old dye factory to put in a stamp album. Her body could never be identified."
Mr. Riddle looked at the Timex watch strapped to his left wrist.
"Five minutes more," he said crisply. "I wonder if we'll hear the explosion from here?"
Arnolda Van Atta laughed harshly, spinning the wheel to bypass a slow-moving Cadillac.
"If the noise bothers you, I'll have Thrush send you some earplugs for future assignments."
Mr. Riddle said nothing. Only the gruesome mockery of his Frankenstein face seemed to smile in approval of the remark.
"What about the other woman?" Mr. Riddle asked unexpectedly.
Arnolda Van Atta shot him a look. "What about her?"
"If Miss Dancer should find her—"
His superior, for that is who Arnolda Van Atta clearly was, laughed again. It was an ugly guffaw that held more invective than a sentence full of oaths.
"If she does, so much the better for her. Perhaps, before they both get blown into infinity, they can tell each other all about the men in their lives."
The paneled truck roared on toward Manhattan, its brightly painted sides as gay as a carousel in the waning sunlight.
Mr. Riddle had only one thought.
He would hate to have been a woman who had raised a spark of envy or jealousy in the heart of a terrifying female like Arnolda Van Atta.
She was a tigress with long, jagged claws that needed, wanted blood.
Demanded it.
Dancer With Cold Feet
In the quiet of the basement, April dressed quickly. She didn't know what drove her to such modesty, except that you couldn't run around town in your underthings, could you? If there was to be a time when she would be out of this damnably cold basement.
She had scavenged the trousers, shoes and shirt of the giant assassin in the hallway. It was robbing the dead, of course. When she had dragged the supine man into the light of the basement, it had been quite obvious that she was toting a corpse.
The Karate blow at such short range had smashed the man's larynx and broken his neck in the bargain. She didn't like to kill but she couldn't think twice about it, either. It was that kind of a profession, being an U.N.C.L.E. agent. You or them. It was a much better arrangement when it was them.
She had entertained some hope that the victim possessed a weapon of some kind. But there was none, the man's pockets holding no more than the usual loose coins, keys and a wallet. These and identity cards in a plastic case indicated that in life, the corpse had been one Clyde C. Charleston, a New Jersey truck driver. Beyond that and his Negroid lineage, she knew nothing. Possibly some poor recruit whom THRUSH had inveigled for the use of his vehicle. The woman in her was fully glad that the wicked Mr. Charleston seemed to have been a bachelor, also.
The trousers and shirt were baggy, swimming on her slender, compact figure. Her feet were lost in the shoes too but they would serve. Time now for an examination of the basement. A true, thorough, painstaking search to discover the bomb mechanism she was certain had been left as a legacy to her. Wasn't the Great Zorki a specialist with explosives? These were his friends.
Soundlessly, swiftly, she checked the place. The rusting pipes were a maze of thick, crisscrossing snakes running at all angles about the room. The cracked porcelain sink, large as it was, revealed nothing. The cobblestones of the floor all seemed secure and undisturbed. The very walls, limned with grease and layers of grime, revealed the desolation of abandonment in the long, long ago. No, there had not been any life in this place until recently. Perhaps this very day.
There was a row of thin, dilapidated metal lockers, lined up like soldiers on the opposite wall. April debated with herself briefly. She could knock the lockers over, and pile one on top of the other, to form a height sufficient to reach the grilled window. Yet, she was as certain as she was of her shoe size that once she attained that giant step, she would be no better off. The barred window opened on an alleyway far from the sound of human ears. She was sure of it. Still, there wasn't enough time, to squander on guesswork. She could be mistaken about the bomb, of course—but she didn't think so.