The Shot in the Park Affair: Chapter 6 alynwa
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Toni Angel, up and coming THRUSH satrapy leader, was furious and letting her cohorts know it. "I should have known better than to take a chance and trust you idiots with a mission this important to the Central Committee! To me!"
Slay and Belz appeared contrite. "I'm sorry, Toni, but we were just following The Snowman's orders!" Belz said.
Toni snorted her disgust as her gaze moved to the clown seated before her. "'Snowman' my butt! Arnold Havermeyer, your problem is you're so busy trying to be mysterious, you can't get anything done! I spent months building up a THRUSH presence in the Circus on Ice! I spent weeks building up a relationship with Parson Brown after Intel ID'd him as an UNCLE courier!" She snatched her coat off and threw it onto a couch against the wall. "All that work, all that preparation and for what? I wanted Brown CAPTURED! And you send Slay, an assassin, to intercept him!"
Arnold took a deep breath to control his own anger. He hated his name and hated Toni for insisting on using it. I'm The Snowman, dammit! he thought, but wisely, kept to himself. "Slay's orders were to capture him, but Brown fought him and he had to shoot."
"I'm supposed to believe that a civilian courier couldn't be brought to me alive, but two trained UNCLE agents could be? And not just any UNCLE agents, two of the best UNCLE agents!" She started pacing back and forth. Finding and handing over whatever Brown was carrying to the Central Committee would have caused me to become highly valuable to them! "And then to make it worse, what Slay brought us is useless! It doesn't contain a microdot, it's not encrypted, it's nothing! Every time I saw Brown playing in the train station, he had his sax' carrying case with him. If you had brought him to me, we could have found out where he kept it and searched it for the device."
The Snowman broke in to say, "We have the case now and there's nothing in it."
"No, there isn't. Is that because there never was anything in it or because Kuryakin and Solo found something and removed it?"
"I don't know."
"Exactly. The only thing I know is: They claim they don't have the device."
Arnold shrugged. "Maybe they're telling the truth."
"Or maybe, their acting skills are as good as ours. Plan A was bringing Brown to me which obviously failed. Plan B to get them to think I'm a victim in all this doesn't seem to be working. We need to think of a Plan C."
Napoleon silently counted to ten. When he no longer heard anything, he looked at his partner and said quietly, "Why don't you trust her?"
"She is trying way too hard, in my opinion, to get us to reveal the whereabouts of the device. I think if she were truly an Innocent, she would be trying to get the bad guys to believe what we are telling them in order to be freed." He was mildly shocked when the CEA smiled and chuckled. "Have I said something to amuse you, Napoleon?"
"I'm laughing at the irony of it all, Partner Mine. I think you're right, in fact, I'm sure of it. She's one of them. I'd bet my life on it." He looked around their cell again as much he could and spoke softly in Russian. "They already have it."
Illya's eyes widened. He replied in his native tongue, "What do you mean?"
"She told me she literally ran into Brown in Central Park. He put it in an inside pocket of her coat. I felt it, but I couldn't get it. When she gets back in here, we have to play along like we still think she's here against her will. First opportunity, we get the coat."
Meanwhile, Arnold stood up from his throne and walked up to Toni. "Instead of a Plan C, we should keep this one going a bit longer." He caught her with a left hook that caused her to land roughly on the couch.
She pulled a box cutter from her bra and brandished it at him. "What do you think you're doing and why shouldn't I kill you where you stand?!" she demanded as she got into a defensive stance and waved the razor threateningly.
"If we don't send you back in there, they will know you aren't who you presented yourself to be and if we return you unharmed, they definitely will be suspicious. You need to be worked over and it's got to be real."
Toni thought about what The Snowman said and knew he was right. "All right. Do it. But wait!" She went to the door and called Theo, her bodyguard from his post outside. "Arnold here is going to beat me up for the mission, but if he looks like he's enjoying himself, kill him. Understood?"
Theo nodded and pulled his .45. "I understand."
She looked at The Snowman. "Proceed."
Twenty minutes later, Illya and Napoleon heard a key enter the lock and when the door swung open, Toni's semi-conscious body was shoved into the cell where she collapsed on the floor.
