Chapter 2
The team had a plan and were on their way to the mansion by 1 p.m., Illya driving as he had won the thumb fight. As he steered the car onto the road where the estate was, he said, "I am not thrilled with doing this without the cover of night."
Napoleon simply nodded his agreement and felt as if good fortune was abandoning them.
Illya parked well out of sight of the mansion and its guard house entrance. They cautiously approached the west perimeter, looking for booby traps or alarm tripwires. Their prudence was rewarded, as they discovered several such traps.
"I'm hoping this precaution is all due to the relative isolation and impressive acreage of this satrapy," said Napoleon, "and not to the high priority of this latest venture into world domination."
His partner nodded, sending damp strands of blond hair into his eyes. He brushed the errant locks to aside. "I suspect Julie may have activated one of these alarms unwittingly."
"Could be. Let's go a little farther before we head closer to the house. We'll approach after the next security patrol."
They hadn't considered the possibility that the "lords of the manor" had stepped up patrols and widened their scope after Bussiere's capture.
MFU
They were roughly halfway through traversing a ridge on the west perimeter, looking for a way in that would give them decent cover to approach the house when Kuryakin spotted two THRUSHes aiming rifles at them. Illya body-slammed his partner down the embankment. He reached into his jacket and squeezed the small dent in his communicator. The time he used for that stole any chance for him shooting the guards. His hand was on his gun's butt when he took both hits—one to his neck, the other to his leg—of THRUSH's version of sleeping-inducing darts. He narrowly missed following his partner down the hill.
The THRUSHes slung their rifles on their backs and walked swiftly to their unconscious victim. One of them pointed to the lax body in the ditch far below.
"I don't think he made it. Ain't that a hoot. Killed by his own partner."
The second man screwed up his face. "Naw, I think he's still breathin'. Anyway, too hard to haul him up. I say we leave 'im there. The docs only want one poor jerk at a time anyways."
"Okay by me. Should we tell the boss about that guy?"
"Nah. He'd just yell at us and make us go get 'im. Don't know about you, but totin' one limp body in this heat is enough. Let's go."
They dragged the senseless man by his arms to the moss-strung mansion.
MFU
The burly leader of the facility went through their prisoner's effects as the men handed him the garments they were stripping from him. He didn't care about anything but the identification he found, since the man would be dead in a couple hours, if not sooner.
"Hmm," he said out loud. He stared at the foreign name on the yellow card emblazoned with a skeletal globe and a man's silhouette on one side and UNCLE beneath it. He'd seen the name before, on a memo or something like that, not too long ago. He remembered it because it was weird and probably Russian. Those Russkies all had weird names.
"What's his name?" asked the lab-coated woman.
He showed her the ID card. "Another UNCLE agent." Her maleficent smile—if it could be called a smile at all—made him shiver.
And then he remembered the man was high up in Section II. He wondered how such a puny guy could be an enforcement agent. He shrugged, knowing he'd never have the answer and didn't care. He bundled the clothes and placed them, along with the gun and holster, on the shelf beneath the stretcher where the UNCLE agent was laid out like a slab of beef, waiting for a butcher.
"Dr. Lark," he said to the woman who was obviously eager to start the experiment, "you can go ahead. I just need to call this into the New Orleans office."
MFU
Illya moan-gasped upon his jarring arousal and the awareness of a needle being removed none too gently from the crook of his elbow. He opened his eyes and instantly regretted it. He shuttered them again against the intense photophobia he experienced. Soon after he realized his wrists and ankles were bound in metal and a leather band across his forehead secured his head. A deep breath filled his nostrils with the stomach-churning odor of partially digested fatty sausages and sauerkraut.
"Oh, dear, Mr., um, how do you pronounce it … Kurryakeen?" The lilting voice with a faint German accent belonged to a female, which explained the halitosis. "The reversal agent for our tranquilizer has a few little side effects. The lights should only bother you for a few more minutes. Also, you may notice that you are feeling quite warm. We've taken the liberty of removing most of your clothing so you'll be more comfortable. And the dizziness will pass soon as well."
He wondered why she hadn't mentioned the other side effects: an abysmally throbbing headache, a pounding, rapid heart rate, full-body muscle aches.
"Thank you for coming," she continued. "We didn't think we'd have a new test subject so soon after our last UNCLE 'volunteer.'" She made a peculiar sound in her throat that seemed, in Illya's opinion, a self-congratulatory sneer.
Not again, he thought. A white rat with proverbial fur only around his middle. Napoleon, you better get here soon. Of course, that was only a possibility if his push hadn't killed Napoleon or he had been significantly injured by the plunge down the hill. Or been captured as well.
"My colleagues and I will start the experiment as soon as the antidote has worn off. You understand, I hope, that we don't want anything in your system that might interfere with the new serum's action, don't you, Mr. Kurryakeen?"
Illya growled. "It's Kuryakin, you imbecile."
He wheezed from the unanticipated blow to his solar plexus.
"Mind your manners," the woman said. He could hear her swearing quietly and rubbing something. Her fist, I hope.
She took a deep breath. "I think I will give you smaller doses of the mildest chemical to start. That way, you will have the opportunity to inflict damage to yourself before you finish." She chortled and added, "Forever." She turned away to confer quietly with her colleagues.
Several minutes later, Illya felt the prick of a needle at the same time a pulsating yellowish light shone above him; closing his eyes did little to dim it. The injection, also tinted yellow, produced an icy-hot, bubbly sensation that quickly crawled up his arm. A few seconds later, he felt as if he was losing himself in thick, pungent smog. Hanging onto a bare minimum of self-awareness, he heard an extremely cacophonic mix of fear and pleasure banging about in his head. It rapidly became more than he could bear. He whimpered loudly, not hearing himself, and started groping about as best he could for something to harm himself with; it was the only thought existing in his mind, the only thing that could deaden the bizarre sounds in his head. In short order the handle of a scalpel was slapped into his right hand. With an odd sense of relief, he ran the instrument's edge along his shorts, cutting through them to his skin, not deeply, where he could within the limited range the restraint gave him. Thankfully, unbelievably, the noise in his head calmed.
The chemical wore off more quickly than he thought it would. He slowly returned to semi-normal functioning and the realization that he had wounded himself, that he now felt the pain of the cuts, that things would only get worse until he met the same end as Bussiere.