Disclaimer: I do not own Man From U.N.C.L.E., and make no profit from this work.
In The Blink of an Eye
Chapter Six
It had been a routine mission. Simple and clean and easy – almost insultingly so, but then, they were nearing the end of their usefulness as field agents.
It was a mutual approach, really. For Napoleon, he was coming ever closer to being moved permanently into Section One. For Illya, a childhood of malnourishment and the first twenty years of his life being spent on sheer survival and nothing else was catching up at last.
It was, Napoleon learned much later, meant to be the last field assignment to take them out of the United States at all.
Unusually, it was an assassination job. The scientist in question had no intention whatsoever into defecting from the enemy, and every intention of using his chemical genius to manufacture bioweapons on a mass scale.
The U.N.C.L.E. were taking the hard line this time.
He had owned a private villa in Northern Spain, about ten miles from Oviedo, and it was poorly defended and easy for Napoleon and Illya, heading a small crack team from U.N.C.L.E. Santander, to take by sheer force, skill and numbers.
Perhaps it was Napoleon's new-found knowledge of the power-politics involved between Sector Heads that made the decision for him, but at the very end, he made a wrong turn.
He ordered that only himself and Illya were to enter the basement laboratory.
In the three years that followed, Napoleon would curse that single decision and blame it – and himself – for the result.
They had not expected the scientist – a Dr. David Mansfield – to be armed. And even if they had, they had not expected him to be any use with a weapon.
They were wrong on all counts.
The laboratory had been at the bottom of a long flight of stairs, down which Illya had led the way. The Spanish agents had gone, returning to the rest of the villa to scout the area for stray guards – and probably purloin the rioja while they were at it. An initial report of success was probably already being transmitted to Madrid.
Too soon.
The moment Illya had stepped into the doorless room, Dr. Mansfield had turned and fired.
And then things had become a terrible blur of motion for Napoleon. He remembered, very clearly, the sight of the Russian crumpling like a rag doll, his head snapping sideways as if he had been punched, and the horrific bloom of knowledge in his own chest about where that bullet had gone.
But training had taken over – Napoleon had dived for him, slamming the pair of them behind a steel lab bench thicker than a door. He had ignored Kuryakin's wound, returning fire and for a sickly seven or eight minutes, the laboratory rang with the sound of exchanged gunshots.
And even when he heard the sickly, dulled noise of a bullet piercing human flesh, Napoleon had to leave his partner to check that the scientist was dead and not merely wounded.
He had fired again into Dr. Mansfield's head at point blank range, out of pure anger rather than anything else, before dismissing him from his mind and returning to the Russian.
And that was when things got bad.
Really bad.
The blood was the first clue. There were copious amounts of it, pooling under Illya's head and gluing his clothing to the linoleum floor. It stuck to his hair, turning the blond a gut-wrenching crimson, and it made it difficult, for a moment, for Napoleon to see the wound.
The wound itself made his guts turn to water, even as he scrabbled for his communicator and barked frantic orders. Calls for a medic, calls for a helicopter to take them to the nearest hospital, instructions for blood transfusions, everything he could think of, before he cut it off sharply and bent to handle things as best he could.
First and foremost – miraculously – the Russian was still breathing. His pulse was flickering under Napoleon's fingers, and his breath was shallow, but he hadn't been killed yet.
But the wound itself was horrific. The bullet had not just clipped his skull, but had torn part of it away. The fragile meshing of bone above Illya's left ear had been destroyed, blasted apart by the impact, and between the blood leaking out of the hole like water from a tap, and the matted clumps of blond hair, Napoleon was faintly, disgustedly sure that he could see Illya's brain.
"Oh God," he remembered saying, but nothing after that, although the Spanish agents who had responded to the calls had later told him that he had been babbling.
He remembered needing to stop the bleeding, or Illya would bleed to death on the cold floor – or in the helicopter – before getting anywhere near a hospital. He remembered having to help move his partner's completely limp form onto a stretcher, hand and gauze clamped over that gaping hole. He remembered the lack of any kind of tension in Illya's limbs and the half-open eyes that had made him look so dead in the helicopter on the too-long ride to the hospital.
But he couldn't remember what he had been saying.
And when he had finally gotten the news that Illya had survived the surgery to mend his skull, had not died as a result of that scientist and that terribly botched mission...Napoleon had also had to bear the news that the Russian was no longer really alive, either.
And for three long years, he had carried that with him.
"Now can you possibly understand," Napoleon whispered, after his halting explanation was through, "why I am so unbelievably delighted that you've come back to us? To me?"
"It was hardly a decision," Illya replied.
How could it have been? He remembered being on the flight to Santander, and then walking along the track road in Russia. And that glimpse of his childhood in Russia could not have lasted three entire years, could it?
And even if it had, why had his dreams shown him the same road, and Stepan? And why had he dreamed in Russian – in consistent, fluid Russian? He had not dreamed entirely in Russian since he had finished his degree in Cambridge. The English had always invaded and, eventually, had taken over completely.
How could any of this possibly be right?
"You'll settle," Napoleon soothed, misreading the lines in Illya's face. "We'll get you home, and you'll get back into your old life. And eventually it will be like nothing has happened."
Illya had barely agreed, so it seemed, before he was dressed in slacks and a casual shirt, and bundled back into a wheelchair, and then was sat in the back of a cab, and then was suddenly at Napoleon's apartment. He must have slept in the cab, he surmised, because there was no way that the journey had been that short, and Napoleon looked faintly amused when helping him back into the wheelchair.
"My things..."
"Are all here," Napoleon reminded him. "I told you. I've kept it all."
And he had – the apartment was cluttered with their things, mixed in together as if Illya had been living here for those three years. Even his jazz records, slotted in beside Napoleon's more conservative tastes in music, and a framed photograph of the pair of them sat on the end table that was home to the telephone and some random odds and ends.
It looked like Illya lived here...so why did he feel so unsettled by it all?
Stepan was there again, waiting on the road when he dreamed, and although Illya accepted it as a dream, he could not escape the joy that swelled at seeing his old friend again, even though Stepan was serious, and all business, and cut to the chase, as Napoleon liked to say.
"Do you agree, yet? There's something off about it all. Something not right."
"What do you mean?" Illya asked, though he thought that he already knew.
"A bullet to the head and you're not severely brain damaged?" Stepan laughed. "I know you're a genius, Illya, you always were, but that...that's too much to hope for."
"They might have..."
"You and I have never dealt in might haves, so let us not start now when I'm not here to defend myself against them," Stepan joked, and Illya felt that pang of loss once again. Once, a long time ago, this man had meant to him as much as Napoleon did now, and his loss had been a terrible pain to carry. "Illya," Stepan said earnestly, shaking him a little by the shoulders. "You trusted me once, now trust me again. There is something wrong here."
"What?" Illya demanded. "If you know what it is, then tell me!"
"I'm not sure yet myself," Stepan said. "But there is. You have to keep your guard up. There's something wrong about all of this."
