The Man from U.N.C.L.E.

The Protégé Affair

PROLOGUE

Somewhere in New York City, Early February 1972

Pigeons could not find a foothold on the sleek monolith of the United Nations building, and neither could the snow that clung adhesively to everything else, the branches of small trees and the edges of awnings, the tops of trucks and taxis that cut one another off in the streets far below the office of Alexander Waverly.

The Old Man, one of five regional heads of the multinational organization known as the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, continued to stare at the sheath of typed papers on his desk. He had not yet looked up at his two agents, Napoleon Solo and Illya Kuryakin, his top operatives in the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement. They had been standing in front of their boss for five minutes.

For the first time, Waverly looked up from the papers. He stared stonily at his agents.

"She had it, dammit," Waverly exclaimed mildly, and then turned his gaze to the view of the U.N. building in the picture window. "She had the information. And now it's gone."

Solo stiffened. "With all due respect, sir, she—"

"Damn you, if you don't think I know it, Mr. Solo!" The muscles in the Old Man's face were uncharacteristically strained.

Silence fell over the three men. The immense window rimmed in rounded dark metal sealed the taxi tops and bouncing heads of Forty-Third Street into an aquarium hush, and in the other direction one could look over a definite number of rooftops at the windows of the caramel-colored Dakota apartment building where, by some reports, Rosemary's Baby had been filmed and John Lennon and Yoko Ono, among others equally rich and famous, now lived. The old-fashioned idea of Kuryakin's that order should body forth the idyllic found confirmation in many corners of the city on such winter days. The headquarters building itself could form a soothing shelter from the streets outside, which were overtrafficked and clamorous. Almost twenty years ago Kuryakin had started living in New York City, though as a child he had dreamed of spending his life here. His protégé for many years, a young woman, a girl really, from Connecticut, had established residence in the Village in the middle 1960s, and on one of her first visits around the city Kuryakin had taken her to the Museum of Modern Art, and later claimed that he had never seen anyone so interested in the place. She was around twenty-four years old at the time.

Somewhere in Paris, late January 1972

The facades of buildings darkened in tint, the lights within windows seemed not merely to burn but to blaze, and abruptly the rain was upon Kuryakin. In the instant before it fell, the midnight air felt full of soft circular motion and a silent cry of "Hurry!" Night people hustled for shelter. Pelted, the U.N.C.L.E. agent in command black field jacket and cargo pants gained the cave of a café. The next instant he was staring at the headlights of a BMW screeching down the otherwise complacent street, careening unsteadily in the downpour.

Kuryakin felt the adrenaline surge. He yanked the Special from under his jacket, locked his arms in firing position, and spun to meet the hurtling vehicle. The sedan rocketed up to the curb in front of him. The laser sight from the Special picked out the dark passenger side window. His finger tightened on the trigger, the door burst open, and then thin red beam from the pistol had landed like a wicked wasp on the right temple of Napoleon Solo's drenched forehead.

"Get in!"

Solo was at the wheel, his face smeared with mud, his dark suit jacket torn at the shoulder where blood oozed.

"Get in!" Solo yelled again, eyebrows squinting, eyes glittering with paranoia as he glanced toward the rear window. "The mission has been compromised! They're on to us!"

The rain seemed to intensify yet one more notch as Kuryakin dashed and folded himself into the shelter of the car. In the same moment, more tires squealed a block away, and as Solo compressed the gas pedal, the back window cracked and crumbled and small objects unmistakably the size of bullets slammed into the arm rest next to Kuryakin, then into the dashboard, then the chrome of the Blaupunkt tape player and FM radio.

He heard a groan from the back seat. He looked back. April Dancer. Not in good shape. Full head of hair covering her face, her head bobbing like a snapped puppet.

"What happened?" Kuryakin gasped.

"Took her prisoner," Solo snapped back, fighting for control of the vehicle on the rain slicked street. Their shadow was closing. "I freed her using some explosives on the cell door, but I'm afraid she's hit. Shrapnel. Looks bad."

Kuryakin looked back and confirmed the assessment. He could make out a deeper shade of black on Dancer's black turtleneck, directly over the heart.

"Hang on!" Solo yelled.

Kuryakin braced with a hand on the dash and the other on the door. A bullet whizzed past his ear, shattered the windshield in front of him. Solo twisted the wheel, and Kuryakin felt himself go slightly weightless as buildings and lights blurred in front of him. There was the sound of tires desperately braking behind them, then a tremendous crash, and Kuryakin regained his orientation enough to witness a large black breaking through a wrought-iron fence and breaking the glittering surface of the peaceful and colorful Seine River.

Solo was breaking softly, then merging into traffic, glancing around at the faces of startled café people.

"I'm so...so damned c-c-cold," Dancer whispered from behind them. "Cold. Cold."

Her teeth were chattering. Kuryakin whisked off his jacket and threw it over her, tucking it in as best he could around her rib cage, and stopped, horrified at the fear he saw taking over her eyes. That faraway look. No. Dammit, no!

"April!" Kuryakin shouted. "April! Stay with me, April! April, look at me! Look at me!"

"It's very cold now, Illya," she stuttered, and there seemed nothing she could do about the odd skeletal vibrations that possessed her.

Somewhere in New York City, February 1972

Waverly said the article in Le Monde was concise to the point of poetry: An American espionage agent, possibly CIA, machine-gunned windows of a coutre boutique in Fresnes to the east of the French capital before rushing inside.

The dark-suited agent blew open doors to a basement room, then left with a young woman together by car. Two men were found dead inside, petty thieves wanted for drugstore robberies around Paris. Television pictures showed a hole blown in a door to the shop and burned out cars lining streets nearby.

Illya Kuryakin kept repeating the accounting of events and he and Napoleon Solo stood with legs apart and braced, arms locked, hands held in a vice grip on the handles of their respective UNCLE Special automatics. The two UNCLE agents pointed the black pistols at a wall lined with insubstantial silhouettes, the anonymous shapes of cardboard men who passively accepted every searing slug the two agents could pump out. Through his headphones Kuryakin could hear, muffled, their modified Walther P-38s coughing repeatedly, methodically, mathematically, and he felt a strange happiness to feel the heft of the weapon in his hand. The gun, after all, could survive anything — mud, water, sand, any meteorological extreme, the blinding snow of a Russian night, say, or the icy rain that cut across New York City streets and through his hair to pelt his scalp with an unforgiving and wicked insistence.