Desperately, he stretched out towards the container and its deadly gas. But his arms seemed abnormally heavy, his fingers thick and soft. There was a loud noise in his ears and his chest was on fire. Whirling round, he yanked furiously at the door through which he had entered.
At least, that is what his brain commanded his muscles to do, but all he achieved was a kind of shambling half turn as he lurched against the wall
It seemed quite a long time later before he identified the strange gritty feeling against his right cheek as being caused by the carpet of the booth. He must have fallen over, he thought. How odd... And how did those two pairs of shoes creep up so close to his eyes without his having noticed them? There was a high-heeled pair with pointed toes. Brown. And a bigger, black pair with blunt toecaps pricked out in a pattern of perforations.
The nearest toecap had a highlight on it. Presently the bright spot on the leather expanded. It grew bigger and bigger, swelling until it had filled the whole booth. And finally it slid in beneath Solo's eyelids and spread out inside his head, brighter and brighter, whiter and whiter, wider and wider...
The man who had been at Del Florio's desk nodded to the girl in the overall. Together they dragged Solo back into the shop, hauling him by the legs as though these were the handles of a barrow. Before they reached the street door, it opened and two men came in, moving fast and silently—a businessman in a dark suit and a Homburg hat and a rough-looking fellow with an unshaven chin. The four picked up the unconscious agent and stood just inside the open door in a compact group, holding his body between them, gazing across the sidewalk.
The Plymouth had stopped maneuvering and from the front seat somebody signalled. The nearside rear door opened.
Rapidly, the quartet carried their burden across the pavement and fed it in through the open door feet first. The girl leaned into the tonneau and pulled. The seat back hinged forward to reveal a dark cavity behind.
There was a concerted heave, and Solo disappeared from view. As the seat swung up into position again, the girl and the man from the shop climbed into the car and closed the door. The businessman and the roughneck unhurriedly crossed the road and mingled with the few pedestrians on the other side.
Equally unhurriedly, the Plymouth nosed out into the traffic stream and drew away.
The clock above Zimmermann's stand moved on to 11:26. From the moment when Napoleon Solo twisted the handle of the street door and entered Del Florio's shop to the time when the driver of the car pulled away from the curb, the snatch had taken exactly forty seven seconds.
The few passers-by who had noticed three men and a girl carrying an unconscious man across the sidewalk to a car were still staring as the Plymouth reached the intersection and caught the lights on the green. The cop coming forward to hand the driver a ticket for parking by a fire plug was still half a block away.
And by the time the girl watching the monitors in Reception had come to her senses and plunged her finger down on the alarm button, the getaway car had disappeared in the swirl of mid-morning traffic.
CHAPTER TWO
A Well-planned Affair
Irritably, Alexander Waverly tossed his pipe on to the pile of reports in the middle of his huge desk. "Why?" he exploded, spreading his arms wide in exasperation. "Why? Why? And again... why? What good is it going to do anyone in this day and age to kidnap Napoleon Solo? What's the point?"
The briar teetered on the edge of a thick folder, overbalanced, and clattered to the surface of the desk. A twist of tobacco spilled out on to the polished wood and came to rest precisely opposite its reflection.
By the only window in the big room, Illya Kuryakin, Russian-born, naturalized American, respected equally in Moscow and Washington, stood gazing out across the river at the glittering glass column of the United Nations building. Below his high brow, the blue eyes were troubled.
"You say he was not on assignment?" he queried, swinging round to stare across the desk at his chief.
"Absolutely not. He'd been in Geneva for a week, acting as observer at a routine conference called by Interpol. I sent him there as the next best thing to a vacation." He stared bleakly at the Russian. Waverly's ideas on the uses of leisure were not always shared by his staff.
"You don't think he could have... stumbled... something else while he was there?" Kuryakin asked hesitantly.
"I'm certain he didn't. Damn it, he called me from the airport this morning"—Waverly dragged a gold watch from his waistcoat pocket and consulted the ornate dial—"less than two hours ago."
"Then all we can do is collect every conceivable fact we have on the kidnapping itself, and work, as it were, outwards from there."
"Yes, I suppose it is," Waverly growled. "Would you like to get on with it, Mr. Kuryakin? You can have as many men as you want. Number One priority, of course, and any help you need from the FBI, the CIA, Interpol, or the New York police department." Fumbling in the pocket of his shapeless jacket, he produced another pipe and began absentmindedly to fill it from a stone jar which was resting on a shelf beside the door. A green light set high in the panelling above began to flash on and off.
Waverly pressed one of a row of buttons set in a platen on the desk. "Yes, Miss Riefenstahl?" he called. "What is it, please?"
The girl's voice was deep and musical, with just a trace of accent. It came from a concealed speaker behind a bookcase. "Excuse me to interrupt, but you did say to tell you... Lieutenant Trevitt of the local precinct house is here."
"Have him come in, please."
"Right away, sir."
U.N.C.L.E.'s Head of Policy and Operations looked up and caught Illya Kuryakin's eye. "It's ridiculous!" he burst out, stabbing the stem of the half-filled pipe forward like an accusing finger. "Our own Chief Enforcement Officer, our star operative, snatched from under our very noses, practically inside our own HQ. It's... it's... almost indecent. I cannot think how Mr. Solo could have fallen for such a... It's most embarrassing. Most."
"You haven't actually given me the details of the kidnapping" the Russian reminded him gently.
"Eh? What's that? Oh... well, it was simple enough, in all conscience. Somebody tricked Del Florio's assistant into going to an uptown apartment block to collect some stuff for pressing. Of course it was a decoy calclass="underline" there was nobody there to collect from. While he was away, they came to the shop, knocked out the old man and stowed him below the counter, and then put in a ringer."
"A... ringer?"
"Somebody to impersonate him. Someone sufficiently like him to pass muster in the shadows at the far end of the shop, with his back to the door. There was a girl, too. A blonde in a white overall."
"Is Mr. Del Florio all right?"
"Yes—apart from a sore head. But he can't help us much. Apparently he was at the back of the shop, and they slugged him from behind. Can't remember a thing after his assistant left on that phony call."
"None of our people coming in and out noticed anything of all this?"
"According to the reports, it was exceedingly well timed." Waverly picked out a paper from the top folder. "Let's see ... Goldstein went out at 11:03. Del Florio and his assistant were both there then, definitely. He talked with them. Pasquali came in at 11:19—and he's fairly sure the old man was there, though he didn't notice the assistant. But in any case the door from the booth to Reception must have been working properly, because he used it. Yet by the time Solo arrived six minutes later, at 11:25, the substitution had taken place and the trap had been set. They must have moved in the moment Pasquali was through."