[The Girl From UNCLE 01] - The Birds of a Feather Affair - Avallone Michael. Страница 2

No one has ever learned what the lettered name of a bird symbolizes.

But it is not the dove of peace. It is the bird of war. All-out, deadly, no-holds-barred war.

U.N.C.L.E. has the men to stop them.

And the women.

What the Girl Is

She pinned herself against the stone wall of the building, her spiked heels anchored to the thin strip of ledge which ran like an ornamental belt about the nineteenth floor of the Hotel Taft. She waited for her reflexes to return, for the dull fear to leave the pit of her stomach. A swarm of monumental doubts, concerning the wisdom of fleeing out here to the ledge to run away from death, tormented her. But soon, all the bees died. Her rigid training took command.

Briefly, keeping her mind clear, she surveyed her position. It was acutely disagreeable.

Far below the tips of her I. Miller pumps, like harbor lights in the night, Manhattan traffic moved quickly, smoothly. The circus lighting of Times Square became a blinding glare of nudity against the massed blackness of the buildings—canyon walls rising starkly high. A star-bright night shone overhead.

Enough light to die by.

She was nineteen floors above the street, her lithe figure straining against the dizzy environs of space. The silver lame of her gown, clinging to every feminine line of her body, was now a laughable luxury. She was like some displaced Cinderella lost in transit. The danger was all too apparent. The next window was a good twenty feet away.

The black attache briefcase, which she could afford to lose as little as life, totally hampered her slow and torturously hazardous progress. The spiked heels didn't help at all. She might have been walking on stilts.

She held the briefcase behind her curved back, one slender arm extended for balance, flattening herself against the cold stone sides of the building. Her ivory cheek was pressed to the facade.

She took a deep breath. Her body trembled.

At least, she was away from the killing ground. They had sought to bottle her up in the corridor. Now, there was only the proposition of getting off the ledge without breaking her neck—and getting the briefcase and its valuable contents back to Headquarters. The odds weren't too good.

Slowly, she edged along the narrow concrete strip, inch by inch, supremely conscious of the shaky purchase of the spiked heels. There had been no time to remove her shoes and now it was too late. Life was sweet but she would not endanger the casual passersby below with the outlandish hazard of falling spiked pumps. That too was laughable, somehow.

The night wind built up a soft yet disturbing breeze. The billowing of her dark hair, worn long for this assignment, unsettled her. She pushed it out of her mind and concentrated on her feathery ballet across eternity.

The assignment was ending badly; she had had success in her hand, the briefcase, and now, it might cost her her neck. They had got on to her somehow.

Ten feet of the tricky passage lay behind her, now. The safety of the next window drew comfortably nearer. She had to fight against a tendency to speed her steps. She kept her eyes glued on her goal. The briefcase snagged once on a jagged scale of stone and she paused, heart beating. She teetered precariously for an instant. Then she righted herself and moved on.

The briefcase seemed to weigh a ton though it contained only thirty five pages of highly specific top secret data. And clothes.

Nine feet, eight feet, seven, six, five, four, three——

She heard the window ride upward before she saw the man. A fast, rising, grating sound of doom.

She froze on the ledge, trapped like a bug on a specimen board.

Just before her, a gargoyle face, jutted into view, poised against the glare of neon from below. The head was fixed on awesome shoulders. Now giant hands reached for her. The face was a grinning mask of intermingled rage and amusement.

"So!" The man snarled in the same thickly accented voice she had heard in the cocktail lounge (he had sought then to make a continental pickup). "You will not escape, as you think. My friends are down below to claim the briefcase from your corpse if—"

The hands shot toward her. To push, to jar, to kill. To seize the briefcase.

She bent backwards, hugging the wall. Her right hand moved with the blur of a comet, unhooking a cameo brooch fastened to the throat of her gown. An oblong of brilliant onyx and jade twinkled. She flung her hand toward the man. With the gesture, a thick spray of inky fluid, released with the pressure of a forefinger on a concealed lever, saturated the assassin's eyes. [His face darkened rapidly.]

He roared in surprise and pain. The viscous, irritating concoction, product of the highly advanced Headquarters Research Laboratory, had never worked more devastatingly.

The man forgot where he was, nineteen floors above the sidewalk. He threshed forward in dark agony, clawing vigorously at his eyes. He lowered his bull's head, moaning, as he doubled over the sill. The back of his neck lay exposed. She helped him the rest of the way.

She chopped down savagely with her right hand, clubbing the man over the parapet of the window. The stiffened palm of a Karate blow fell like the stroke of an ax. The assassin's weight, coupled with his own sudden unconsciousness, sagged over the sill. His body, topheavy with torso, sprawled outward. Gravity did the rest.

She did not watch.

Mercifully, the senseless carcass plummeted into the lights below. It was as if some some dark mass of masonry had broken loose from the hotel itself. The hollow, breaking sound came up from the ground below as faintly as the distant thump of a toppled garbage can. The noise was lost in the tootling of traffic sounds, the clamor of New York after dark.

And then a woman screamed. A thin, piercing wail of terror and disbelief. Talk about flying spiked pumps.

She stepped quickly into the black refuge of the hotel room. She was too grateful to pause for investigation. Her left hand was sticky with the pressure of her palm on the laminated handle of the attache case. A fine sheen of moisture dampened her body. The silver lame dress clung to her like a shroud.

The room was empty.

With nothing else to deter her, she found the back stairway of the hotel. As she walked slowly down the dimly lit staircase, she swiftly and smoothly divested herself of the lame gown. Before she had descended five flights, her appearance had changed radically. The briefcase, apart from its valuable papers, had yielded a tweed, two-piece outfit, sensible flats and a pair of rimless glasses. Her long dark hair had disappeared beneath the cramped brim of a soft, velour man's fedora.

It was midnight, and Cinderella was leaving the ball, after all. No fairy godmother had arranged the miracle.

She managed to leave the hotel, skirting the official uproar of the strange accident in front of the Hotel Taft. Wherever the assassin's friends were, they did not spot her. She walked quickly toward Fifth Avenue, ignoring all cabs and passersby. A friendly drunk giggled at her wolfishly as she came by, but she dodged him nimbly. Within minutes, she had found the subway she wanted. She took a ride of three stops to her East Side hotel.

Once she was safely esconced in her third-floor room, she opened the briefcase, removing a small, square metal case that for all the world resembled a cigarette case. She thumbed it and a low, beeping sound was audible. She held the square case several inches from her mouth. She had a lovely mouth. One would have been hard put to believe she had just killed a man.

An electronically relayed voice bridged the tiny space between her lips and the case.

"Yes, Miss Dancer?"

"Mission completed," she replied, in a voice that might have sent thrills of anticipation down the spine of the most jaded male. "The briefcase will be turned over to the UN in the morning."