by Peter Leslie
In the circumstances, it was natural that he should take an abnormal interest in the bed. He knew by heart every chip and scratch and imperfection in the shiny surface of its headrail. He could have mapped with his eyes closed the graining of the leather handcuffs attaching his wrists to the frame. He was an authority on the disparate personalities of three flies and a daddy-longlegs in the cell whose existence was dedicated to avoiding the webs spun by a spider which lived in one corner of the grille.
Every now and then the door would swing silently open and in would come the doctor with his crisp, white women. The women varied but the doctor was always the same - a pudding-faced man, rather plump, with staring brown eyes behind thick spectacles.
One of the women would open a case and hand things to the doctor while the other put the heel of her hand under Solo's chin and forced his head back onto the mattress so that he couldn't raise himself. Then the doctor would pinch up a fold of skin from Solo's arm (so far as he could tell, he had been stripped to his underwear and socks) and inject whatever it was he injected. After that, Solo went to sleep.
This routine wasn't invariable, of course: there were different treatments too, involving tubes and clips and something like a dentist's gag. It was to do with food or feeding, Solo thought. Sometimes there was a clip biting into his arm with a tube attached to it, and some times something went into his throat. In either case, it left him rather sore - and in each case he usually went to sleep afterwards just the same.
The man and the two women always worked in complete silence, which Solo found rather unnerving at first, but his throat was always too dry and sore to ask questions or talk himself and he soon got used to it.
And yet there was talking, somewhere. Or there had been. And one of the voices, he could almost have sworn, was his own. Yet he could in no way remember talking, or think of anything to talk about. Perhaps he dreamed while he slept, but he had definite impressions of voices and movement, the words surging and receding like bees on a drowsy summer afternoon. Sometime or other, too, there had been someone shouting. Perhaps it had been him.
It was all very puzzling.
And then, suddenly, one day - one night? one morning? one afternoon? he could not tell - one day the doctor had come in with his two assistants and they had unbuckled the straps and taken them away. He was left alone in the cell, free to get up, sit down, move around, just as he liked.
Solo thought that was very kind. He was so grateful that he made no protest when they came back a little later to give him another injection.
It was funny about the injections. Really he felt quite giddy after them sometimes. Everything seemed to spin around and he could never tell if he really had been to sleep or whether perhaps he had actually just woken up from the time before. Sometimes he thought he had been in the cell for weeks, perhaps months; and sometimes he was convinced he had only been in there a few hours at the most and would soon begin to feel hungry.
On the whole, he was inclined to favor the former theory - mainly because one of the nurses, a pretty one he had noticed on several visits, seemed to have had different hairstyles on different occasions.
He remembered who he was - and what he was supposed to be doing - in a single blinding moment of awareness. The doctor and the nurses were just coming in, the cell door had opened... and there was a second's delay. Somebody outside had called a question to the doctor.
And in the instant that he replied, over the mumble of voices, somewhere down the passage outside a door slammed sharply.
As it shut, a door in Napoleon Solo's mind opened as suddenly. Every detail of his life up to the moment he had realized that the carafe in the hotel room at Goiás had been drugged was with him again. It was exactly as though the preceding period really had been a confused and disturbing dream from which now suddenly he was freshly awake.
"How long have I been held here under sedation and artificially induced amnesia?" he asked quietly as the doctor approached.
"Ah! The moment of breakthrough has come and gone, then" - the voice came not from the doctor but in a curiously disembodied way from the gri1le which extracted the breathed air in the cell – "and Mr. Solo knows once more just who he is!... Never mind: perhaps we have been fortunate to have had him for our guest... for so long."
"You haven't answered my question," the agent said, still facing the doctor.
"Doctor Gerhardi is not permitted to speak with you, Mr. Solo," the voice continued. "You may talk to me. After all, we are old friends."
"I'm afraid you have the advantage of me," Solo said, swinging around to face the grille and feeling rather foolish as he did so. "Or have we held – er - conversations while I have been drugged?"
A deep chuckle floated from the grating. '''Have the advantage' is good," the voice said. "You might almost call us intimates. Through the closed-circuit television camera mounted behind one of the four lighting panels in your ceiling, you have been under constant watch since the moment you arrived. And thanks to the doctor's persuasionary powers you have been most cooperative in the matter of conversations."
"You have been questioning me under the influence of Pentathol?"
"A refined version of a drug discovered centuries ago by the Matto Grosso Indians - a drug which makes Pentathol seem as mild and innocuous as an aspirin. So far as information goes, Mr. Solo, you have been sucked as dry as a lemon! Now it only remains to decide whether the rind shall be discarded or whether it might add zest to a cocktail by being shaved and twisted... There is no point in proceeding with the injection at this time, doctor: once the amnesiac condition has been broken through, one has to go right back to the beginning again."
"I trust you obtained the information you wanted," Solo said politely.
"Indeed, yes. Indeed. We know all we want to know, now, about the United Network Command for Law and Enforcement, and why Mr. Waverly sent you out here, and what Mr. Forster of the C.I.A. said, and so on."
"Nonsense. I don't believe it!" Solo said.
All Enforcement Agents from U.N.C.L.E. were periodically "brainwashed" by a system of subliminal suggestions which was supposed to plant in their minds a series of conditioned answers to any questions they might be asked when under the influence either of drugs or of torture. The theory was that it was best to give as much as possible of the truth, particularly as regards the agent's affiliation with the Command and so on: after all, any adversaries might already know this, and any untruths there would automatically invalidate further revelations. On the other hand, if a victim first confirmed what the questioners knew, they would be all the more likely to believe what he said subsequently. A mental "censor" was supposed to operate on the agent's mind as soon as the questions genuinely impinged on the task in hand - and from that point the prepared lies were supposed to operate subconsciously, even under the deepest hypnosis. It was therefore essential for Solo to know whether this system had worked - and the only way he could find out was to discover from his captors what they had been told while he was under their drugs.
"What do you mean, you don't believe it?" the voice was asking.
"I told you," Solo said. "You can't have got any information from me when I was drugged. We are conditioned. You could have found out I belonged to the Command, and about Waverly, from many sources."
"We could have, perhaps. But we didn't. You told us everything. Absolutely everything."
"Ridiculous!" Solo said contemptuously. "I simply do not believe you."
"I tell you, you came across with the whole works." There was a definite edge to the voice now. "You're not imbecilic, Mr. Solo. There is no need to bandy words. You can believe me when I tell you -"
"And I tell you I don't believe you. It's just a trick - and a very old and shabby trick, too, like telling a man his confederate has confessed all - to make him talk."
"You have talked, Solo. Plenty. So much so that there's no point - no need, for God's sake! - to ask you any thing more. We have it."
"Rubbish," Solo said shortly. He turned away from the grille and sat down on the bed. The pretty nurse flashed him a knowing smile as she went out with the doctor and her colleague.
"Do you want me to prove it to you, for Heaven's sake?" the voice cried.
"Prove it? You couldn't. Not in a million years," Solo gibed.
"No?... Not if I told you we knew you came to Brazil because of the fingerprints of those D.A.M.E.S. women in the car crash? Not if I told you everything about your conversations with Garcia, your visit to the hospital and the discovery of the old man Oliveira? Not if I detailed the things the boy at the rental company said - the one with the old-fashioned slang?... Not even if I listed your findings so far in the hunt to discover the places where these false D.A.M.E.S. are distributing the cocaine and heroin?" There was a hint of laughter in the voice.
Napoleon Solo mentally heaved a sigh of relief. The built-in censor had worked. Under the drugs, he had told them every mechanical step he had taken in the investigation - but the subliminal suggestions had taken over when it had come to the reasons for the inquiry.
He had said that U.N.C.L.E. thought the girls we connected with some drug ring. His captors would believe that; the Command did interest itself in illegal drug traffic and the facts as known to Solo could believably be interpreted as leading to that erroneous conclusion.
The man who had been interrogating him would be laughing at the thought of Solo's gullibility, thinking he had wrested from the agent all he knew - which would leave him free to go on wondering exactly what was afoot.
And about this, Solo reflected ruefully, he knew very little.
"You look crestfallen, my friend," the voice was saying jubilantly. "I told you I could prove it!... Oh well, never mind. There has to be a loser in every game doesn't there?... For the moment, until we decide what is to be done with you, you can take a little rest – on our laurels!" There was a dry chuckle and the sound a switch snapping off.
The agent threw himself on the bed and gazed moodily at the ceiling. After a while, he turned over lay face downwards, with his chin pillowed on crossed arms. If they were really leaving him alone for a while, there was a chance the television camera above him might be switched off as well as the two-way speak grille. Especially if he appeared as despondent as possible.
It was while he was lying perfectly still like that hoping his negative mime might have some positive effect, that he felt something under the tightly drawn mattress covering that had certainly not been there before… a foreign body that was irregular in shape, sharp at the edges, and extremely hard.
And suddenly he remembered that last glance the prettier of the nurses had thrown him. Hadn't she been swiveling her eyes in a meaningful sort of way at this corner of the room? And, now that he came to think of it, hadn't that parting gaze been the last of several? Had she not been continually staring over at the bed today?
Carefully, slowly, in case he was still being watched by the camera, he slid one hand beneath the cover. In a few moments, he had it back under his chin with some thing small and metal grasped in it. There were several separate objects under the cover - and not until he had withdrawn all of them did he drop his eyes and look at what lay beneath the protective wall of his cupped palm.
Four small stainless steel instruments lay on the bed: a nail file, a scalpel, an implement like a crochet hook with a sharp point, and a thin, flexible spatula.
Solo stared at them unbelievingly. Why had the girl left them there?
With a combination of two of them, he could probably pick the lock of the cell door. If the spatula was strong enough and flexible enough, he might even be able to slip the tongues without picking it.
Could the girl possibly have known this?
If not, what a curious coincidence that she should leave just the particular tools that could be used successfully to master this particular lock. On the other hand, even if she had known it, why leave him the means to escape from the cell?
He would puzzle it out later, he thought: the thing now was to find out if he was still watched - and therefore whether or not he could safely make use of this gift from Heaven. After a few moments, he decided that the best thing was simply to sit up on the bed holding the tools in full view of the camera. If it was switched on, someone would come through the door soon enough to take them away from him; if it was off, nothing would happen and he could get to work on the lock. In either case, he lost nothing - for he could never use the implements if the TV circuit was still on...
After sitting for some time with the shining steel things in his hand, he decided that at last his luck had changed. No sound came through the grille; no footsteps clattered in the passage outside; nobody burst into the cell.
In three strides, he was at the steel door, his fingers busy twisting, probing, manipulating. He slid the spatula between the edge of the door and the jamb, testing the tongues and the resilience of their springs. It couldn't be opened with the spatula alone, that was for sure - perhaps the slender point of the scalpel, aided with a little extra leverage from the file here… Ah! There was the slight rolling movement of a tumbler beginning to fall.
He paused with the two instruments inserted, one supporting the other, into the keyhole. No matter how he turned, the wretched thing would not quite overcome its nul-point and drop.
But of course - that was what the crochet hook was for! He fed the shaft in, questing delicately with the curved point. It was extremely tricky feeling about blind with this while keeping up the complementary pressure on the other two instruments with his left hand. But eventually he sensed the satisfying chuck! of the wards falling home. The door should now be unlocked and ready to open.
He pulled with his fingertips at the edge. The door would not move.
Puzzled, he squinted into the crack by the lock... Of course! This was the Mark III. He had moved back the retaining bars, but the tongues were still groove into their steel nests in the jamb. It needed a gentle pressure to push them aside - and that, naturally, was what the spatula was for!
He cased the flat blade into the crack and worked at it with his wrist. One after the other, the greased metal bars slid silently back into the body of the lock. The door swung slowly open.
Outside, a dimly lit passage stretched away in each direction. There were closed doors like the one he had just opened on either side, and flush fitting lamps in the ceiling every few yards. From somewhere beyond the right-hand branch of the corridor, machinery hummed quietly. Feeling faintly ridiculous in singlet and under pants, Solo tiptoed on stockinged feet towards the sound.
Around the bend in the passage the girl was waiting. His breath hissed in with surprise as he saw her - but then he realized she had a welcoming smile on her face and he breathed out in a long, slow sigh of relief. She had taken off the white nurse's uniform and now she was dressed in the D.A.M.E.S. green. Her lips were parted in a smile but her eyes, shadowed by a bang of blonde hair, were troubled.
"I thought you were never coming," she whispered. "What happened? I thought you were supposed to be a top agent!"
"I had to wait to make sure the TV was off before I started on the lock," Solo whispered back. "But I don't get it. What gives? Why would you help me escape?"
"I hated my foster parents," the girl murmured. "They used to keep birds in cages. When I was eight I set most of them free. The old man half killed me - and ever since then I've always hated to see anything in captivity. Setting things free is my way of getting even, I guess. I suppose that's why I married Danny."
"Danny?"
"Danny Lerina. Greatest safe man on the Coast. There wasn't a lock made that he couldn't master."
"Wasn't?"
"He was killed on some government job in Korea - but not before he'd taught me most of what he knew. Come to think of it, you're a little like him, you know. Maybe that's why I kind of took a shine to you when I saw you in there."
"Well, thanks," Solo said softly. "But tell me - just what's going on
in here? Where is this place? What's happening?... Forgive my interrupting - we can continue the mutual admiration society afterwards, and I think you're pretty, too - but first I'd like to know where I am!"
"Gee, I'm sorry. Of course. Here, put these on." She produced a rolled up dungaree suit from under her arm. "It's not much but it was all I could get in the time. I'll talk while you dress."
"Shouldn't we go somewhere – ah - quieter?"
"What for? We're on C Level down here - just the cells, the stores, some of the minor offices, and the reactor."
"Did you say reactor?"
"Sure. It's only a little one, of course - but since the power station outside the dam's a blind, we have to get power from somewhere, don't we?"
"I – ah - I guess so, yes. What about the offices, though - isn't somebody likely to be in and out of them?"
"At three-thirty in the morning?"
"Oh... I'm sorry. I'd no idea. I thought it was just after lunch time!"
The girl laughed. "No, I suppose you could hardly know, down here," she said. Not that it's much different on B and A, for that matter."
"And what does one find on B and A?"
"Well, living quarters on B, of course. And catering. And the important offices and the Council Chamber. And the radio room and the armory. The barracks and so on. A Level is mainly the pen, of course -"
"The pen?"
"Yes, the pen. For the ship. It has to go somewhere, doesn't it?"
"There's a ship connected with this place - and the ship docks on the top story? Presumably A Level is the upper one?"
