CHAPTER THREE
"Have I gone mad?"
"I'm afraid so, but let me tell you something, the best people usually are."
Illya had come to his senses to find himself in a padded cell and wearing a restraining jacket.
There were no windows and the walls, floor, and ceiling were covered in large squares of a dingy beige quilted material. There were no personal amenities, either, not even a mattress to lie down on or a toilet.
Embedded in the 15-foot-ceiling overhead were spotlights that glared relentlessly down at him , making it impossible for Illya to have any idea what time it was or if it was day or night for the rest of the world outside of those padded walls.
He had been lying on his right side on the floor and he felt cramped, as if he'd been in the same position for a while. Yet when he tried to sit up, the room began to dip and spin so badly it made him nauseated and he was forced to lie down again (this time on his left side) until the vertigo eased enough for him to get his bearings regarding his stark surroundings.
He felt light-headed and woozy, as if he were heavily drugged—and then realized that is exactly what he was.
To his foggy brain the room seemed oddly-shaped, shorter and narrower on the end where he lay and higher and wider on the opposite side. As that made no sense, he decided it must be an optical illusion due to whatever drugs or opiate he'd been given.
Having no way to shield his eyes from the blinding lights coming from overhead, Illya was doubly glad his long bangs afforded him some slight shading so he could make out the outline of a door at the far end of the cell. Near its top was a narrow rectangle which he assumed was a viewing window for whoever might be on the other side; but at the moment it appeared to be closed or shuttered.
Curled on his side again, he looked down at himself, seeing the straight jacket binding his upper torso, while his lower limbs were clad in dark blue pajama bottoms. Not surprisingly, his ankles were manacled together and his feet were bare.
He rolled over a little and squinted up and about the room again, then tried to shout with a voice that sounded pitifully weak to his ears: "Hello?! Is anyone there who can hear me? Why am I in here? Can I at least have some water, please?"
But there was no response to his request, and the Russian had no choice but to lie there trying to fathom how he'd gotten into this situation—but he found to his alarm that he had no memory of anything prior to waking up in here, which made no sense.
Since he had no way to measure time passing, he also could not tell how long he'd been lying awake when the door finally opened and a dark-haired man walked into the room, accompanied by an armed guard wearing the Red Star cap and uniform of the Soviet army, which at first Illya did not register.
Even through the haze of the drugs in his system, the captive U.N.C.L.E. agent recognized the dark-haired men.
"Napoleon?!" he exclaimed in a dry croak. "Thank god you've come!" The youthful Russian struggled back into a sitting position again, trying to ignore the rising vertigo and nausea. However, he only succeeded in toppling over onto his other side with a low groan as a sharp pain shot through his head and his vision darkened momentarily.
"Illya!" Solo said, and started to move toward him, but the guard with him shook his head and motioned him back.
The senior agent gave his helpless and disoriented partner a sorrowing look. "I'm sorry, Illya. There's nothing I can do about this right now. It was only because of Waverly's intercession with the Soviet authorities that I was allowed to see you for a few moments."
Trying to clear his vision, Illya blinked at him, dumbfounded. "What did you say? Am I somewhere in the U.S.S.R.?" he asked in disbelief.
Solo nodded. "Within the Kremlin."
"But why? How did…I get here?" the blond agent slurred, trying to make sense out of what made no sense.
"Illya, don't' you remember that Waverly sent you hear on a low-profile mission, and instead you went renegade and tried to kill your father, Nikolai Kuryakin. You never speak of him, so I had no idea he was a highly-placed government minister here. "
"What are you…talking about, Napoleon? You say …that my…my father…." Illya began, but rather than continue, some inner warning told him to stop speaking.
Solo continued: "Well, in any case, you attempted to assassinate him but failed. However, rather than have you arrested, your father used his influence and had you put in here. He told me when I interviewed him earlier that he hasn't seen you in years. He also told me that you and he had had a violent argument in which you threatened you'd come back someday and kill him. Apparently you used your mission here to try and do that, Illya."
The younger agent looked bewildered. "Napoleon, it is true that my father and I had a falling out…but I…I would never try to kill him, no matter how much I despised him. You know me, the man that I am! There…there must be some mistake!" He paused, swallowing hard. "And…why don't I have any memory of any of this?"
" Ваш визит с заключенными! Вы должны оставить сейчас," ("Your visit with the prisoner is over! You must leave now") the guard brusquely said in Russian to the dark-haired agent.
Solo nodded at him then looked back at Kuryakin.
"I'm sorry, Illya, there's nothing I or U.N.C.L.E. can do. We have no real influence here, as you know. Waverly had to pull a lot of strings to get the Kremlin to allow this visit. But I can tell you that the Soviet authorities do not plan to execute you…at least not while you are being held for psychiatric evaluation and observation."
And with that, Napoleon Solo turned and left the cell, leaving a despairing Illya Kuryakin alone in desolate isolation.
Lewis smiled over at the dark-haired man sitting near Illya's bedside in her lab.
"You did well. The young man believed you were his partner, Napoleon Solo."
The other removed the electrodes attached to his own temples and brow and laid them alongside the unconscious U.N.C.L.E. agent, who was still connected to the memory retrieval machine.
"A brilliant invention you have here, Doctor," he replied. In person his physical resemblance to Napoleon Solo was similar enough to ensure that the drugged and disoriented Kuryakin would think it was his partner he'd been talking to, but in fact the THRUSH operative was a good decade older than Solo and not quite as handsome.
She smiled again and looked back at the monitor, where in Illya's drugged mind he was alone in the padded cell after the Solo impersonator had told him he'd tried to murder his father and that he was in Russia.
"Thank you, Erik. Yes, I am very pleased for the most part with its capabilities in combination with the new hallucinogenic I'm now giving him." She motioned toward Illya. "His generation often refers to this category of psychoactive drug as *acid*, but in this case the subject does not experience a sense of euphoria or well-being, but instead feels doubt, anxiety, persecution, even paranoia. At the moment I have only been giving Kuryakin minuscule intravenous doses in order to manipulate his current reality. By creating that false memory in the padded cell for our young friend and having you appear as Solo in a projected form along with Jackson here as the guard," and she glanced over at the limo chauffeur who was also removing sets of electrodes he'd been wearing, "I am beginning to crack Kuryakin's mental defenses by undermining his own sense of self along with his perceptual sense qualia. Soon THRUSH will have that formula and anything else they wish to know about U.N.C.L.E. that Kuryakin can tell them."