"As you wish. We are between Wurzburg and Bamberg. The East German frontier is only about an hour's drive away. You are an American—do you think they will let you cross?"

"I may be an American citizen, but I work for an organization that is supranational. I have papers to prove I work for U.N.C.L.E.—and we are welcomed in the East as much as in the West, fortunately."

"Your papers will get you through right away?"

"Not as quickly as if I had a special permit or a visa. They'll probably have to phone their headquarters to check that it's okay to let me through. But it shouldn't take too long, I guess."

"I, on the other hand, am well-known. I can pass straight through. Do you not think, as your friend may be in great danger, that it would be best if I went ahead as I suggested? Then, when I have seen how things are at Bart's place, I can come back to you and we will decide what to do."

"Yes, but you may find yourself in great danger yourself."

"Do not worry. I know the paths and tracks of that forest like the back of my hand. Also the place where he lives. I can move secretly there and listen, where it would be impossible for two. Nobody will see me, I promise."

Solo sighed, "Okay. Seems I have very little choice—and it's too true that every minute counts if we're to rescue Illya. But you don't have to come back to me, not physically. Remember the little baton radio we heard my friend on, outside the restaurant?"

"But yes. It was most convenient."

"I have another. If I show you how to use it, you can take it with you—and then you can simply call me when you have found out what is happening. After that, you can give me directions and I will come to you. We shall save time that way. And also we can keep tabs on your... on Bartoluzzi. If you don't mind staying there until I arrive, that is."

"For this purpose," Annike said grimly, "it will be a pleasure."

Illya Kuryakin was unconscious, slumped forward against the retaining strap with his blond head hanging, when the clatter of the helicopter's rotors broke the silence in the big room.

Bartoluzzi dropped the magneto on the table. Leaving the leads still clipped in position, he ran to the stairs leading to the open air.

From the outside, his retreat presented an even more surrealistic aspect. It had originally been built as a shooting lodge for a Dresden businessman—a kind of Gothic Folly, with turrets and battlements pretentiously hiding what was in fact quite a small house—and it had always looked curiously unreal set in its forest hollow. But surrounded by a turbulent sea of scrap iron as it was now, the place became immediately a creation of the wildest fantasy.

Over a groundswell of bedsteads, cooking utensils, iron railings, disused cookers and lengths of railway track, great crests of heavier stuff swept toward the building in a rusty and remorseless flood—a flood culminating in a tidal wave of smashed car bodies, dented boilers and the skeletons of traction engines that had once, in their day, hauled entire circuses.

Dwarfed by this metal deluge, Bartoluzzi stood waiting. The helicopter sank down from the sky over the mountains forming the border with Czechoslovakia, skimmed across the surf of green tree tops that washed against the foothills, and lowered itself neatly to the ground in an open space between one of the mounds of scrap and the outer wall of the Folly.

A Plexiglas door opened in the machine's nose, and a lithe figure clad in black dropped to the ground.

Black boots laced to the knee strode purposefully across to the porch in which Bartoluzzi was waiting; beneath a form fitting black leather flying suit, the curves of a supple body moved enticingly; on the smooth brow of a black helmet, goggles were pushed up by black-gloved hands.

And the face, thin-cheeked and pale below the oversized lenses, was the face of Marinka, the blonde from the kavarna in Prague.

The Corsican shook hands formally and took her up to the room in which Kuryakin was held prisoner. She glanced cursorily at the inert figure and asked, "Has he come up with anything yet?"

Bartoluzzi shook his head. "He may not be the real Cernic, but he's a tough one all the same," he growled. "I was just about to make a change in the method, when I heard your plane."

He picked up an electric soldering iron, rammed the plug into a socket set in the wall beside the door, and laid the tool down on the tiled floor of the cheminée to heat up.

"He's said nothing at all?" the girl demanded. "He hasn't talked one way or the other?"

"Oh, he talked all right. They all talk when the electricity's flowing! But he didn't say anything worthwhile, nothing we could use. Mostly, he was babbling what I took to be his name—it sounded Russian to me—and some nonsense about his uncle."

"His uncle?"

"That's what it sounded like. He even spelled it for me, but I—"

"Do you mean he said he was from U.N.C.L.E.?"

"I think that was it. What does that mean?"

"It's... kind of an international police organization."

"This is a flic, a policeman?" Bartoluzzi made an instinctive movement toward the soldering iron, which was beginning to smoke slightly.

"More than that—and you can leave your torture toys. They will do you no good if this is an U.N.C.L.E. agent."

"But I can make him talk, Marinka. I swear I can."

"Of course you can. But you'd be wasting your time. Before they go out on assignment, agents of this organization undergo a course of posthypnotic suggestion to make psychological implants in their minds. Without wearying you with detail, the result of this is that—under truth drugs or torture—they will tell you the truth up to a certain point. But that as soon as you start asking questions about their mission, a psychiatric censor, as it were, comes into operation, and their subconscious mind supplies answers that accord with the facts but are not the genuine truth. They have a built-in series of conditioned reflexes. And to break that down would take far more time than you have available. My principals want action. You'll have to get rid of this man."

"Yes, yes. Of course I will. If he didn't talk within the next half hour, I was going to kill him anyway. I have clients waiting in other parts of Europe, and I cannot afford to waste time here trying to discover why a madman should pass himself off as a murderer! I have to go."

"And the means?"

"Obviously his death must be arranged so that the authorities believe no other person was involved. I had worked out a plan whereby it would seem he had himself escaped from the militiamen and had then come to grief while getting away from the scene of the crash."

"Good," the girl said. "Good. You must tell me about it at once…"

"It's a pretty diabolical scheme," the voice coming from the transceiver in Solo's hand said. "Here's what they plan to do. It appears that there's an old railway viaduct crossing the head of a valley near here. It was built in the middle of the last century to carry some branch line toward the mountains, but the Germans closed it down and tore up the track in 1933. The bridge is still standing, however, and the old permanent way still exists as a kind of rough track. It's weed grown and bumpy, but you can apparently get a car down it—at least as far as the viaduct."

"Bully for me," Solo said. "And the point is..."

"The viaduct is in a bad state... about to fall down. Apparently the wind and frost have eaten away all the mortar, and it's practically resting on dry stone pillars now. It's closed even to foot traffic, and the track is blocked with barbed wire before you get there."