The rest of the day passed like a slow nightmare for Illya and Marion. Marion wasn't able to do anything but pace back and forth, wringing her hands and sobbing. Illya just watched her, his eyes full of torment. Never in his life had he imagined that anything could be this painful.

The hours ticked by with no news. Napoleon visited and offered his support.

"You do not know how I feel," Illya told him coldly. "You have never had a child."

Napoleon had to concede that he was right.

"I remember the day I took him to the emergency room," Marion suddenly recalled. "As we were leaving, the door to the lab was open, and there was this tall, skinny guy just staring at us. It really gave me the creeps."

"Besides the fact that he was tall and skinny, what did he look like?"

"He had short brown hair and acne. He was very young, too. No older than twenty-five."

"I will mention that fact to the police," said Illya. "They can ask to check the hospital employee records to see whether anyone working in the lab matches that description."

He called the police right away, and they promised to look into it. "I am glad that you remembered that fact," he told Marion afterwards. "It may well increase the chances of Elijah's being found quickly."

"I want my baby!" Marion wailed for the umpteenth time that day. Illya put his arms around her and comforted her the best he could, his own heart aching almost more than he could bear.

"But that's not possible!" Dr. Dwight Majors, Troy Holden's physician, exclaimed. "A compatible donor couldn't possibly have been found this quickly!"

"And yet it has," the laboratory employee told him. "When you get here, you can see for yourself. All the tissue components match up perfectly. This transplant is guaranteed to be a success. There's no reason for the operation to be delayed any further."

"I'll believe it when I see it," Dwight mumbled, heading for his car. As long as he'd been searching for a kidney for the Holden child, he simply couldn't believe that one could have been found this quickly. Yet, he couldn't run the risk of missing this opportunity, just in case it should prove to be true, after all.

The physician was about halfway to the hospital when he heard the grating of steel against asphalt and realized that, to his chagrin, one of his car's tires had blown.

Troy Holden and Elijah Kuryakin waited in side-by-side cribs in the pre-surgical area. They'd both been prepped and were ready to be taken back just as soon as the surgeon arrived.

Elsa Holden had been left alone with her son and the other child while her husband had gone outside to pace nervously and smoke cigarettes. She looked at little Elijah playing contentedly in his crib and knew that in a half hour or so, he'd be lying unconscious on an operating table with a scalpel slicing into his tender flesh. And it was all because her husband had been unwilling to wait for a voluntary donor and had taken matters into his own hands.

Suddenly Elsa couldn't take it anymore. She loved her son dearly and desperately wanted him to live, but there had to be a better way than stealing an organ from another child, a child who was every bit as helpless and innocent as Troy himself was.

Her mind made up, Elsa left the pre-surgical area and went in search of the hospital's administration department.

Illya's heart beat like a drum as he raced to the hospital as quickly as he could. The police had called and told him that the hospital had no record of his son having ever been treated there at all. Yet Illya specifically remembered Marion telling him that she'd had Elijah treated for an ear infection there. He knew that Marion wouldn't have lied about that. Why would she have? The only explanation was that the hospital records had been stolen, presumably by a hospital employee.

Convinced that the answer to his son's current whereabouts lay at the hospital, Illya couldn't get there quickly enough. He was nearing the entrance when he saw a familiar face. Kurt Holden had been an ever present nemesis during Illya's years as an UNCLE agent. Upon his resignation, he'd assumed he'd never see the man again, yet here he was, pacing madly back and forth and smoking cigarettes.

He grabbed the front of the man's shirt and roughly pulled him toward himself. "What have you done with my son?" he snarled.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Kurt huffed. "Now let me go before I send you flying."

"Not until you tell me what you've done with my son!" Illya growled.

"I don't even know who you are!" Kurt lied.

Just then a hospital security guard appeared. "What's going on here?" he demanded.