"I don't know yet where it will lead me," Solo said. "But I was able to contact the young woman who was a close confidante of Ursula Baynes."

"Good. Good," DeVry said.

"She's been in hiding from Thrush," Solo said. "We were able to get to her first this time, I believe."

"Yes. Miss Baynes told me that the young woman had completely disappeared. I was of the mind that Thrush had found her and destroyed her. I didn't say any of this to Miss Baynes, of course. I'm glad to hear the other young woman is alive and safe."

"She's alive," Solo said. "Whether she's safe or not is something else."

DeVry smiled. "Your record is satisfactory for me, Mr. Solo. I assure you that the president himself will be most pleased when I report to him that you people are at last in contact with someone who might lead us to Tixe Ylno. Just to learn whether Tixe Ylno is male or female will be a giant step forward, eh, gentlemen?"

VII

"Just don't be impatient, my dear little Illya," Violet Wild said in a crooning voice. She stood atjove him where he sprawled with the sheet of garbled writing before him. "Were you writing Violet a love letter, you dear helpless little bug? Don't you worry. Violet will see you safely put away."

She laughed down at him, her beauty making her heartless laughter more than cruel.

Illya raged at her, but the sounds he made were the mindless cries of a mewling child.

Violet jerked her head and a man stepped from the shadows. Illya recognized him as the man who'd first attacked him with that fluid-filled fountain pen in Honolulu.

"All right, Edgar," Violet said. "It is now two a.m. It is time our little Illya and I started our journey."

Edgar nodded, but did not speak. Illya struggled against them, but his agitated movements only amused them, and they lifted him easily. Another of the team brought the suitcases. They went out into the corridor, along it to the bronzed cage of the elevator.

The lobby was almost deserted. Laughter drifted in from the cocktail lounge. A night clerk watched them disinterestedly as they half carried Illya toward the front exit. Illya cried out, but his cawing sounds only frustrated him and got no reaction from the bystanders except a glance of amused pity. They thought he was drunk, a mental defective, or both.

Violet spoke soothingly to him as they walked—not for his sake, he was aware, but for any interested onlooker.

But Illya saw that there was none.

Even the doorman held open the Kharmann Ghia door while they half lifted Illya into the split seat of the convertible. "Has he been like this long?" he asked Violet in heavily accented English.

"All his life," Violet replied offhandedly. It was the sort of answer one would give who has lived with a tragic affliction so long that it has lost its pain.

She went around and got in under the wheel while their bags were stacked into the small car behind them. She tipped the doorman handsomely and smiled at him. She was calm, unhurried. She tied a pale green wisp of scarf about her bright red-gold hair, knotted it under her chin. She checked her classic loveliness in the rear-view mirror and only finally got around to starting the car, putting it in gear and pulling out of the hotel entrance.

Illya glared at the speedometer. She rolled through the sleeping town at less than twenty miles an hour.

He heard her humming to herself as she drove.

He saw the flicker of headlights in the windshield, reflected from behind them.

He realized that Violet saw them, too. She glanced into her rear-view mirror, increasing her speed only slightly as they went north out of the town limits.

Illya began to feel a little better. Violet did not seem perturbed, but at the same time, they both knew the car behind them was not friendly to her.

Illya sat tensely, waiting for the moment when Violet would tromp on the gas, attempting to lose the car tailing them.

He felt a sense of satisfaction. The Mexican country was desolate, open. Losing that car would be a difficult matter on this narrow, winding road through the mountains. He cut his eyes at her, willing to give her odds that she would not make it.

She drove now at an untroubled forty miles an hour.

Illya stirred in his bucket seat.

She glanced at him. "What's the matter, Little Illya? Does my little bug thin^ his friends will stop us?"

He forced his head around, though it jerked and trembled, seeing that the car was gaining on the Khar-mann Ghia convertible.

"Look well," Violet told him sardonically.

He saw at once what she meant. Another set of headlights flared behind the second car. He did not have to be told that this was Edgar and his friends. They had lain back only long enough to give the U.N.C.L.E. agents time to roll in behind Violet's small car.

"Now we shall see what we shall see," Violet said. She laughed, showing faultless white teeth. "Now!"

She cried out the word and shoved her slipper hard onto the accelerator.

The small car lunged ahead on the narrow dark road. Illya felt the sharp cut of the wind. The motor hummed and the tires screamed on the shoddy pavement. She slowed slightly when a sign warned of a sharp curve, but she was already speeding again as she rolled into it.

Her headlights raked across the grass and rock facade of the mountains. At times below them the tops of huge trees bent in the night wind. Climbing upward, they could see the racing headlights of the other two cars on turns beneath them in the unquiet dark.

Illya was tossed helplessly in the seat. He tried to cling to something but he could not force his hands to obey his orders.

The speedometer needle wavered at eighty. They struck potholes and the small car danced, almost turning around. Violet fought the wheel, bringing them skidding to the brink of deep chasms.

"What are you afraid of, my little bug?" Violet shouted. The wind caught her words, fragmenting them. "You want to go on living—the way you are—you call that living?"

Illya made no attempt to answer her.

He saw on a turn that Violet's car had far outdistanced the other two—perhaps for two reasons: the men in the other cars didn't take the insane chances Violet did on this unfamiliar mountain road, and the race for the moment was between those cars back there.

The third car was lunging and nipping at the one ahead of it, in a dogfight attempt to force it off the road at every hairpin curve.

"You wouldn't want them to get you away from us," Violet shouted at him, laughing. "Not really. Not the way you are. What do your people know of the injection you got—or even how to combat its effects?"

Illya had flopped against the side of the car, locking his chin over the door. He was able to watch the cars below them when they came out on plateaus or sharp turns.

He saw the four headlights blend until they were like one huge beam. He saw them waver and waltz crazily back and forth across the road. Once the inside pair seemed to climb a sheer mountain wall, and then fall back, leveling out only with painful slowness.

Then they came together down there again—the scream of metal was lost in the distance, but the spark and fire of metal friction was not. The cars seemed to lock, to sway back and forth from one side of the road to the other, hugged together, neither willing to back away. Each turn brought them closer to the brow of the cliff.

Violet slowed the car and he cut his eyes around, seeing a savage intentness in her face, a blood-lust in her eyes.

She seemed, with some kind of animal instinct, to sense the moment when it was going to happen. She allowed the convertible to slow almost to a crawl, her