With a grunt of satisfaction, the guard relaxed his grip enough to let Kuryakin slide down within his grasp. And immediately his elbows were free the agent coiled and uncoiled like a tempered spring. With bunched fists, he slammed a left and a right with piston-like precision to the man's unprotected belly. And then all at once the rest of him was free....

The purple face paled to a strange and livid green, the remainder of the breath wheezed from the lungs, and the guard careened over, leaned against the wall and slowly slid to the floor. Kuryakin stood over him and completed the treatment with a couple of quick rabbit punches to the neck. "Shall I tie him?" he asked the girl. She had been hovering on the fringe of the short struggle, unable to decide whether or hot to intervene.

She shook her head. "We haven't time. We'll be discovered anyway before he regains consciousness. Come on... every moment counts... "

Illya darted to the doors, glanced around outside to make sure that the coast was clear, and then they picked up Solo and waddled towards the car. They were within two yards of the nearside door when footsteps crunched on gravel just beyond the oleanders.

Like lightning, they dropped U.N.C.L.E.'s Chief Enforcement Officer to the ground behind a border of lavender, and crouched down themselves behind the screen of pink and red-flowered bushes.

Carlsen and Giovanna del Renzio came into sight beyond the car, walking fast and talking animatedly. They were heading for the cellar door.

"... can't understand what's come over her," the man was saying, "for I distinctly told her, when I allowed her to take the first shift, that I wanted the current switched on after five minutes and then left on for some considerable time—those were my exact words—on the initial session."

"Yes," the girl said. "And it's at least seven minutes since we heard so much as a groan. I can't imagine what all that whispering was about..."

The double doors opened and closed behind them.

Lala Eriksson was on her feet. Her face was white. "Blast!" she hissed. "They must have been listening to the tape, live, all the time. We've about thirty seconds before they raise the alarm. Let's go!"

Bundling Solo unceremoniously into the back, they piled into the Lancia and the girl twisted the starter key. The motor caught and they were away with a crisp snarl of exhaust and a shriek of tires on the shiny cobbles. As they swung wide into the driveway circling the house, Illya looked back over his shoulder and saw Carlsen, closely followed by the girl, burst out of the doors leading to the cellar.

There was something in the man's hand. A moment later smoke blossomed three times from the muzzle of an automatic and a slug hummed over the agent's head, close enough for him to feel the wind of its passing. As they screamed round the bend to the front of the house, the Thrush chief began running back towards the cellar doors.

"He'll be telephoning the gatehouse," the girl said. "Hold tight!"

They rocketed around the shrubbery, scattering gravel, and roared on to the main drive. For two hundred meters, Lala gave the Lancia its head, and then, as they entered the straight leading to the gates after swinging left, right and left again through the poplars, she braked the car down to a normal speed with repeated applications of the hand lever. "Can't afford to be seen in an obvious hurry," she panted. "They might get suspicious."

Beside her, holding a rug over Solo's unconscious body on the back seat, Kuryakin lived and died through every second of their 20 mph approach. There was a gunman lounging against the bole of a tree near the mesh gates, and he could see two others over on the far side of the lawns.

When she was fifty yards away, Lala gave a single sharp toot on the horn. Just before they got there, the iron frames began slowly to swing away. Illya could see through the window of the gatehouse the man who was twirling the wheel operating them—and he could see too, as in some nightmare pantomime, the operator's free hand reaching for a telephone which was presumably ringing....

The girl changed down with a burst of revs. The Lancia surged forward—and in the same instant, Kuryakin saw the astonished face of the operator, the frantic lunge he made for the wheel.

As they drew level, the gates halted their outwards swing and began rapidly to close again. The car was almost through when the right hand one slammed into the bodywork, scraped along the wing with a shower of sparks and screeched off the nearside rear quarter. The Lancia shuddered, seemed for a moment to stagger in its tracks, and then resumed its course as the girl's slim wrists expertly corrected the misalignment.

A moment later, they were bellowing through the archway piercing the gatehouse. Lala swung the car broadside on into the lane with a shrill scream of tires and they howled back along the route to Turin.

Machine-gun fire stammered a farewell before they were far down the road. The driving mirror vanished in a shower of splinters, a ricochet zinged off the chrome strip lining the wing, and there were several heavy thuds as the lid of the boot was holed. Then they were out of range.. and Kuryakin was able to look back over the Lancia's tail and see across the flat sweeps of meadow through which the road looped the strength of the pursuit.

There were two cars quite close behind them, the Cadillac and Solo's borrowed Fiat, with a third whose roof he could not identify several hundred yards further back.

In convoy like this they burned up the quiet afternoon countryside between Buronzo and Ivrea. Lala tried everything she knew; but no matter how perilously she cornered on the limit, no matter how much bhp she coaxed from the willing front-drive power unit on the straight, she was unable to shake off Carlsen's men.

Then, on a long stretch of road arrowing across the plain beneath the poplars without a corner in sight, the big American car crept inexorably up on them. There were men leaning from its open windows, and soon over the boom of exhausts the sharper note of pistol fire split the air.

"They must be mad—shooting on an open road in public!" Kuryakin gasped. "You'd think they'd wait until they had us cornered somewhere."

The girl shook her head as she weaved the convertible from side to side. "It doesn't matter to them," she said. "Don't you see? Carlsen will be in the clear. You can bet he's not in the lead car. The Cadillac crew are all torpedoes—kind of like a kamikaze unit. The only thing that's important is that they destroy us, and with us the hologram glass. They'll try to shoot, bomb, force a crash, anything, no matter who else they involve, no matter who sees them do it. They'll worry about that afterwards."

"Will they succeed?"

"Not on this road. It gets twisty again after this next corner. But it's the outskirts of Turin, with the traffic jams and the lights, that worry me."

The Russian glanced back at the pursuing cars again. "All right; we scrap Turin," he said. "Tell me: are those NATO maneuvers still going on in the Val d'Aosta? It's straight ahead from here, isn't it?"

"Yes they are and yes it is. But it's another fifty kilometers."

"Have you enough gas? And could you keep them off all the way?"

"If we keep to the secondary roads," the girl said. "And naturally I know the dispositions of the army units fairly well. What have you in mind?"

Kuryakin told her.

A little less than forty minutes later, they were bumping along a dirt road undulating across a countryside scored with tank tracks. Somewhere to their right there was a cannonading of artillery, and behind, the sporadic rattle of shots marked the progress of Carlsen's convoy along the track.