London, 1967

To say that the returning agents looked a bit the worse for wear was putting it mildly, and the initial reports of the joint mission had been convoluted to the point of absurdity. For instance, they mentioned, merely as an aside, that both sets of agents in the joint task force—British and American—had apparently been trapped for some considerable period of time inside a malfunctioning security device of some sort. The fact that this was one of the more coherent, and comprehensible, sections of the reports said a great deal about what sort of mission it had seemingly been.

Stephens was rather looking forward to a more complete explanation of the so-called 'cone of silence.' As for the rest of the story, he was beginning to wonder if he really wanted to know.

Newkirk plunked himself down in the debriefing room with an irritated scowl. Kay dropped wearily into a chair beside him. She didn't quite have a thousand-yard stare, but it was definitely fifteen hundred feet at least.

Stephens looked, with some concern, at the pair. "I suppose I should start out with 'welcome back,' but frankly, all I can think to say is 'what on earth happened?'"

"Chaos," Kay snapped, in a tone balanced on the razor's edge between pomposity and hysteria, still staring intently into space. Her accent, normally all but unnoticeable, had thickened almost to incomprehensibility. She slapped a hand on the desk for emphasis, still without focusing her eyes. "This is chaos! Chaos is what happened! Chaos will always prevail! Next question!"

"…Very informative, Friemann. Thank you," said Stephens, dryly. Her naturally dark eyes had made it difficult to tell at first, but at close range, Stephens could see that her pupils were so fully dilated that practically none of the iris was visible. There was, he concluded, little or nothing to be gained from interrogating her in her current state. She was either concussed, hypnotized, or stoned out of her mind. He wondered which it was. As it happened, it was all three.

"Sorry, Stephens. The medicos swear that she'll be right as rain in a day or so." Newkirk sighed. "It was that kind of mission, I'll just put it that way."

"I'll repeat the question. What happened?"

"To Kay, or in general?"

"Start with her and go on from there," Stephens said.

"Well, I guess it really starts with the first time the bad 'uns captured her," Newkirk said meditatively.

"The… first time?" It was a good thing Stephens was already sitting down.

"I told you. It was that kind of mission," Newkirk said. "And, by the by, those Yanks you had us working with are madder than a box of frogs. Madder than a whole crate of frogs."

Stephens glanced at Kay. Her head was cocked to the side, but her gaze was still locked, laserlike, on whatever it was she thought she was seeing. "As she says herself, it's rather an occupational prerequisite. And if at least one of you doesn't start making sense sometime soon, I will go mad as well! What. Happened?"

"We liaised with the American agents in Washington, just as planned," Newkirk said. "Two of them; one man, one woman."

Stephens nodded. "Yes, I know something about them. Their record is quite impressive. Apparently they're the best team in their agency."

"No bleeding comment," said Newkirk sourly. "Anyhow, the four of us broke into the research facility and we retrieved the plans, no trouble, but on the way out, we were ambushed. Bit of a scuffle. In the end, we got the plans. They got Kay."

Stephens swallowed hard, and nodded. "I see. What did you do then?"

Newkirk smiled bleakly. "My job. We got the schematics back to their HQ. Once we'd gotten it safe, I went back for her."

"How did you know where to look?"

"Turns out that the Yanks had tangled with this crew before; they recognized one of the men we fought as being part of an outfit of international criminals called KAOS. Once we knew who had her, we were able to figure out where they'd probably have taken her." Newkirk glanced at his partner, then back at Stephens. "They came with me on the rescue. Insisted on it."

"We've faced Siegfried before. We know his tricks," said Agent 99. "And even if we didn't, you shouldn't go in without backup."

"I can't ask you to do that," Newkirk said. "Your superiors would never allow it, first of all. And even leaving international relations and career suicide out of the question, it's too risky. You'd be in danger every minute."

"And loving it," said 86, with a twisted smile. "We're coming with you. We'll get her back, one way or the other."

Newkirk nodded. "Thank you," he said simply.

"Yes, well," said 86. "…I know how I'd feel if it was 99."

Stephens let out a breath. "It would seem that the rescue was a success."

"It was," said Newkirk. "Up to a point. They'd doped her with some sort of… it was like a cross between truth serum and a hallucinogen. They were trying to brainwash her, essentially. I assume she was meant to be sent back here, programmed as a double agent."

Stephens nodded. "And she was in this state when you found her?"

"No. They hadn't gotten too far with her yet. She was fighting tooth and nail, of course, but who knows how much longer she could have held out. It was closer than I like to think about. Missed her by that much, really," said Newkirk, measuring out an infinitesimal distance between thumb and forefinger. He glanced at her again before returning to his story. "The truth serum part of it made her a bit more honest than was entirely good for anyone concerned, but no worse than a couple of beers too many would do. And in any case, the boys in their lab were able to give her something to counteract it in time. Turns out 86 had some sort of communications device hidden in the heel of his shoe; he told them ahead of time what to expect. She was fine."

"Glad to hear it," Stephens said. "And then…?"

"And then we found out that the scientist had left out the most important step. The secret to the whole process existed in his head and nowhere else. Which meant we had to go back to the original facility we'd broken into and get him to explain it."

"Gaining entry will be much easier this time," said 99. "We shouldn't have any trouble at all."

"Why is that?" asked Newkirk.

The Americans exchanged a proud little grin. "Would you believe, we've got a man on the inside now," he said. "Agent 44. One of our best."

"Already?" Newkirk said. "That's fast."

"Well, the Chief gave him a choice between continuing with his previous assignment or taking this new one," said 86. "He couldn't jump ship fast enough."

"Was his last job really as bad as all that?" Kay asked.

"No. He just gets seasick easily," 86 explained.

"And, so help me, Stephens, there was an agent hiding in one of those mainframe computers. Literally. He was crammed right inside the computer."

Stephens had to think about that for a minute. He knew he probably didn't want the answer to the next logical question, but he couldn't help himself. "…Why?"

"Remember what I said earlier about the box of frogs?" Newkirk said. "Anyhow, he did get us into the facility, God knows how. But we were too late. The professor had already been kidnapped."

Stephens nodded.

Back at CONTROL, the mood was grim.

"There's no other choice. We have to get back into their headquarters," said 86. "And quickly, before they get him to talk."

"I know, but after what happened yesterday, they'll be on high alert," said 99. "I don't think we'll be able to slip in there twice."

"Letting this formula fall into enemy hands is not an option," said the Chief. "At all costs, we have to prevent that."

There was a pregnant pause, which gave birth to several baby pauses while everyone digested that.

"So it's a frontal assault, then, is it, Chief?" asked 86.

Newkirk frowned. "No. There has to be another way. That's a suicide mission,' he said.

"I'm afraid so," said the Chief.

"Well, you picked the right man for the job," said 86, with a fatalistic gleam in his eye.

"Not… necessarily," said Kay, thinking hard.

86 shot her an ironic glance. "Ah… Not necessarily a suicide mission, or not necessarily the right man for the job?"

She smiled at him. "Both. I think that this time, the best man for the job is a woman. Me."

"Kay, have you gone crackers, or did those drugs just not wear off yet?" Newkirk asked.

"My point exactly," she said. "So far as they know, I still think I'm a double agent. What could be more natural than my going back to my new colleagues?"

Stephens winced. "Please tell me that you didn't really send her right back to the people who'd been trying to brainwash her."

"We did," Newkirk admitted.

"I asked you not to tell me that," said Stephens, with a groan. "What were you thinking?"

"I'd be lying if I said that any of us liked that plan too much, or at all, really, but we didn't have a better," Newkirk said. "She volunteered. And it was still better odds than trying to get in by force."

Stephens gave him an old-fashioned look; Newkirk shrugged, almost casually enough to disguise how gut-wrenching a decision it had been. Stephens subsided.

"Oh, and the bad guys? Their leader's a Kraut," Newkirk said, his voice going cold. "Not just a Kraut, either; a filthy goosestepper. She wanted another crack at that Nazi bastard almost as much as she wanted to rescue the scientist."

"I see," said Stephens. That at least made some sense. "I still disapprove, but I see. So she went back to this fine upstanding group of international criminals, pretending to have been completely won over. I assume they gave her a second dose for good measure?"

"Yes, we'd expected as much. We'd given her a few extra rounds of the antagonist, so we thought she'd be all right, at least long enough to locate the target and escape."

"If she was drugged, how did you expect her to be able to administer her own antidote?"

"We didn't. As a show of good faith, she pretended to have captured Agent 86, and brought him to KAOS with her. You know; the old 'double-crossing-double-agent with a fake-prisoner' trick. He was going to handle that part of it."

Stephens, beyond words, groaned out loud. This had officially gotten beyond ridiculous.

Kay glared at thin air. Still in that heavy Germanic accent, she bellowed, "This is KAOS! We don't whimper here! You sissy!"

Stephens looked pained; Newkirk rolled his eyes. "Yep. All the way home from the States I was listening to this," he said. "A few more days, the boys in the lab said."

"Ah. Charming. I take it that 86 was not able to deliver the counteragent in time."

"No. Credit where it's due; he did. He slipped her the antidote, she slipped him a lockpick; piece of cake. So that was her second round of those drugs. She just pretended the stuff was working, 86 was thrown into a cell, escaped, and went looking for the scientist, 99 and I were just outside, as backup, and everything was going smoothly."

"But?"

"But the scientist had been doped with the same brainwashing drug as Kay. He didn't want to be rescued, and he raised hell proving as much. Kay dropped the act and went to help 86. So did 99 and I."

Stephens raised a hand to his throbbing temple. "And then?"

"And then it turned out that KAOS had a supply of darts tipped with the drug. She knocked the dart gun out of the Kraut's hand, but not before she'd taken five or six more doses. 86 only had enough of the antidote left for one person, and he didn't know who else might be armed with those dart guns, so it was a choice. He could give it to our target, hoping he might be a little more cooperative about being rescued. Or he could give it to Kay, and hope that she hadn't already taken in so much of the drug that the counteragent wouldn't even be effective. Or neither, and hold it in reserve in case he was shot himself."

"What did he decide?"

"The hostage," Newkirk said. "He said he figured that even if he went down, the scientist, once returned to his right mind, might have half a chance to get to where 99 and I could get him to safety if he was able to remember that he even wanted to go."

"Logical," Stephens said. "And brave. What about Kay?"

"She'd had far too much; she was already ranting about how KAOS was going to take over the world. 86 didn't have any choice but to knock her out with the butt of his gun, pick her up, and run for it. 99 and I found them, and all five of us escaped."

"And then what happened?" asked Stephens, dully certain that there would turn out to be more to the story.

"Not much. Went to CONTROL headquarters for debriefing, got trapped inside the cone of silence for a few hours, the lab boys started the process of bringing Kay back down to earth, the scientist coughed up the missing parts of the information we'd been after in the first place, and we hopped the first plane that was willing to take us home."

Stephens took a deep breath. Then another. He found that he no longer had even the slightest desire to ask about the 'cone of silence,' although he now understood why it had been relegated to an aside. "My dear fellow… that has to be the second craziest story I've ever heard," he finally said.

Newkirk snorted. "What's the craziest?"

Stephens quirked an eyebrow at him. "Oh, I don't know. There were several. Although setting up a sabotage operation under a POW camp does rather spring to mind," he said. "Get some sleep. Both of you. In fact, use the beds in the infirmary; I want both of you monitored until I'm certain that neither of you have any residual effects from that drug."

"I didn't take any," Newkirk protested.

"Which is exactly what you'd say if you had been chemically programmed to be a double agent. Go. We'll discuss this tomorrow. Preferably after I've had a stiff drink."

Newkirk stifled a yawn, and visibly used the table to push himself upright. "Sounds good to me," he said. "Come on, Kay. Off we go."

Like a sleepwalker, she got obediently to her feet, and began moving unsteadily towards the door. She stumbled over Stephens' foot on the way. "Oh. Sorry about that, Chief," she said, not even slowing down. Newkirk hurried after her, presumably to make sure she didn't walk into any walls on the way.

Stephens put his head in his hands, exhausted just from hearing the story. He thought, with some understandable dismay, of the formal request currently sitting on his desk. The one from the head of CONTROL, the one he would be hard-pressed to refuse; he had apparently been quite impressed by the British agents, so much so as to request their assistance on an upcoming mission…

*.*.*.*.*.*.*

Author's note: Somehow, the recap party this week wove its way around to the idea of a Hogan's Heroes/Get Smart crossover. Only problem is the time difference; after all, Get Smart focuses on a group of spies operating in the late '60s, not WWII. As luck would have it, though, I just so happened to be writing a bunch of spies who operated in the '60s, and, well… this just happened.

Kay and Stephens are OCs from my ongoing work 'As I Shall Laugh,' a post-war storyline where Newkirk makes a career of intelligence work.

I worked in most of Get Smart's most famous catchphrases, and a few of the sillier details, including Agent 44, who spends his entire career hiding inside of random things... complaining bitterly about it all the while. I loved this show when I was a kid, and a lot of the humor still holds up, I think.