Текст книги "The Doomsday Affair"

Автор книги: Harry Whittington

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He lifted his head, staring at the short distance to the double doors standing open to the balcony. He had only to grip the paper, roll over there and let the wind catch it. Miss Wild will see you safely put away.

Maybe she would, Sam.

He finally was able to force his fist to open and let the pen drop to the floor. Then he turned his attention to closing either of his hands on the paper on which he had written, Illya. Help.

He stared at the paper upon which he had written so agonizingly.

The sound that burst from his mouth was a sob of agony, and it sounded like one. He cried out violently, helplessly. The words his mind had struggled so long with were not words at all. There was nothing on the paper except the meaningless scribbling of a three-year-old child.

V

SOLO MOVED the spirits of ammonia under Barbry’s nose.

“No.” She sat up protesting, pushing the small bottle away from her nostrils.

“You all right?”

A slight shudder coursed through her at the sound of Solo’s voice. Obviously, it brought back abruptly the reason why she had fainted.

“How did I get here?” She opened her eyes, staring about her in alarm.

“There’s nothing to be afraid of—”

“Let me decide that.” Her voice quavered.

“You’re all right, Barbry. You fainted in the restaurant. I didn’t want to attract too much attention to us, so a waiter and I walked you out to a taxi, and I brought you here.”

She met his gaze. “Yes. You brought me here. Where am I?”

“You’re all right. You’re in my room at the St. Francis Hotel.”

“You’re a sneaky worker, aren’t you?”

Solo smiled wryly. “Under other circumstances I’d most definitely be using all my wiles on you, Barbry. But right now I’m trying to help you, whether you believe me or not.”

“Right now I’m not so sure.”

He grinned at her. “I had coffee sent up. You’ll feel a lot better.” He poured a cup from the glittering silver service.

She took the small china cup, sipping at it, relaxing slightly.

“Why did you bring me here, Solo?”

“What would you do with a woman who fainted in a public place?” He sipped at a cup of coffee. The steam rose between them. “I promised to protect you. I can do it better when you’re where I can watch you.”

“That’s all off, Solo.”

He set his cup down, watching her narrowly. “What are you talking about?”

“The agreement you and I made. I meant to keep it. But you’ve already broken your part of it.”

He frowned. “Do you mind explaining that?”

“It’s simple enough. I told you I was scared half out of my mind. You said that if I’d tell you what I knew of Ursula and the time she worked as a spy with Thrush, you’d try to help me stay alive.”

“And I do promise that.”

“No. You said talk. But the next thing you wanted was to use me as bait to lure a man into your trap. He’s a man I’m more afraid of than I am of the devil. Talking about him is one thing. Putting myself where I know he can get at me—I don’t want any part of that. I mean it, Solo. I’m dead afraid—and I’m not going to get involved.”

“You are involved.”

“Am I? Then I’m not going to get involved any deeper.”

He stood up. He looked down at her. “I don’t blame you for being afraid. I wouldn’t think much of you if you didn’t have sense enough to be scared—”

“Oh, I’ve got a lot of sense! I’m scared to death. Sorry, Solo, flattery won’t do it, either.”

He smiled, “All right. But maybe the truth will, and the unvarnished truth is, Barbry, you are involved. I assure you that you are. If only because you were approached by Thrush—that means they know about you. Whatever it is they plan to do now, they may be afraid to trust you. You said for some reason they turned you down, but you didn’t tell me what it was.”

He saw a shadow flicker across her dark eyes. She drew a deep breath. “I don’t want to talk about it—the reason.”

“Why?”

“Because it doesn’t have anything to do with this.”

He shrugged. “That’s up to you, Barbry. Everything you tell me to help me may aid in saving your life. But what you want to tell me, and don’t want to tell me, that’s up to you…But there are more reasons why you’re in danger from Thrush. You wrote Ursula a letter—and even if it was in a hip jargon only the two of you would understand, it would be enough to make Thrush suspicious of you. And the very fact that you stayed with Ursula for some weeks after she started working for Thrush may mean that you—even unwittingly—met or heard from Ursula about a man that we know only by his code name—Tixe Ylno. You may have seen him, or you may know him well enough for your life to be forfeit because he’ll be afraid to let you live at this critical time in his plans.”

“You know how to break a gal up, don’t you?”

“It’s the truth doing that, Barbry. I’m not telling you anything you haven’t already told yourself these past months.”

After a moment she shook her head. “No. I guess not.”

“And then there’s the matter of this Chinese-American who approached you and Ursula in the first place. For all we know he may be Tixe Ylno. No matter who he is, he’s part of this immediate business they’re enmeshed in—and they don’t want people like you around spoiling it for them. He loves secrecy. He even had himself declared dead in a plane crash two years ago in order to make all this easier for him. You think he’s going to let a doll he was afraid to trust as a spy stay alive long enough to trip him up? I can tell you he won’t. The stakes are too high.”

She shuddered, covering her face with her hands. Her body shook. Solo saw that she was numbed with fear.

“We’ve got to stop him, Barbry. You understand? The only way we can do that is—”

The telephone rang, breaking across his words, stopping him cold. He glanced toward the instrument, frowning.

He reached out, lifted the receiver and placed it against his ear. “Solo speaking.”

The voice was that of a woman: the words were in the code of his department in the United Network Command. There was no doubting their authenticity or their meaning.

“Acknowledge,” he said.

“Do you understand clearly?” the voice inquired. “Yes. Thank you.” The phone went dead in his hand. He turned, finding Barbry Coast crouching on his bed, watching him, her eyes stark, wide.

“I must go out,” he said. “At once. Will you wait here for me?”

Her voice was flat. “You think they won’t find me here?”

“You’ll be safe here, as long as you follow my orders.”

“Safe when used as directed,” she said in a dulled tone that was devoid of hope.

“Just stay in here. Keep the door locked, the latch on. When I come back, I’ll knock three times. Before you unlock the door, ask my name. Don’t unlatch or unlock that door for any reason, unless you hear three knocks first and then hear my voice.”

She nodded and sank down on the bed. He glanced at her, seeing she had no hope. She wanted to trust him, but she knew too much about Thrush, and she no longer trusted anything.

VI

SOLO WALKED into Forbidden City just off Grant Avenue. The shops around it and the cafe itself seemed pervaded with oriental incense. One never escaped the startled little bite of shock at finding a place like this, even in a city like San Francisco. The patrons, the murals, the waitresses, the waiters, the tables and chairs seemed unreal, as if they did not even exist outside this world inside itself.

A man in Mandarin dress came forward and bowed. “Ah, Mr. Solo. Good evening, Mr. Solo.”

Solo bowed, giving him a faint smile because he knew neither of them had ever encountered the other before. “Will you be kind enough to come this way with me, Mr. Solo?”

Solo followed him through the tables toward the rear of the cafe. They went along a short, dimly lit corridor and the Chinaman rapped on the door facing.

Alexander Waverly looked up from the head of the table when Solo was ushered into the red-upholstered room. Waverly seemed entirely at ease, though Solo knew that less than five hours ago he’d been at headquarters on New York’s east side, or at home in bed. Nothing ever appeared to ruffle his exterior calm. Solo supposed a man got like this when he had been down all roads, seen everything at least twice.

“Come in, Mr., uh—”

“You must know who I am,” Solo said, smiling. “You sent for me.”

Waverly chuckled briefly and motioned him to a chair across the red-varnished table from the third man in the room. He said, “Solo, I’m sure you know Osgood—uh, Osgood DeVry. He’s a personal adviser to the president of the United States.”

Solo extended his hand. “I’m glad to know you, Mr. DeVry. I’ve heard a great deal about you.”

Osgood DeVry smiled. He was a thickset man of slightly more than medium height. There was the flushed pink, steak-fed look about him of a man who had grown accustomed to unaccustomed success and ease of life. He was in his early fifties, mildly overweight. He wore his graying brown hair parted on the side and brushed back dry from his scalp.

“Everyone who knows Osgood is proud of the work he’s doing down there in Washington,” Waverly said.

“Not everyone,” DeVry said, deprecatingly, though he smiled. “One does the best he can. Sometimes he’s rewarded. Sometimes he’s forced to turn the other cheek until he runs out of cheeks. I try not to think about it. I do what I think I must.”

“Yes.” Waverly cleared his throat. “And this leads us neatly into the reason for our nocturnal call on you, Solo. It’s so urgent that we had to interrupt your present mission, no matter how important, and even if it were blonde.” Waverly smiled, but there was an entire lack of sympathy in his voice.

“Perhaps I’d better fill you in on it,” Osgood DeVry said. He shifted his attaché case on the table before him. “Though it applies to the case, some of it is personal.”

“All of it is of vital concern to the safety of this nation, and perhaps of Russia too,” Waverly said. “And we are now certain that it concerns our friend of the code name, Tixe Ylno.”

DeVry filled a pipe with tobacco and tamped it down. He placed the curved mouthpiece between his teeth, but did not light it. Watching him, Solo saw a strong man who might have somehow weakened from the soft life in Washington. Obviously, he worked hard, but one saw that whatever he did for the president or for his country these days, it was all inestimably easier than the life he’d known in his early years.

DeVry said, “I’m a kid who sold newspapers in Dallas streets, Mr. Solo. My folks deserted me. I grew up in foster homes. I made my own decisions—they weren’t always right, of course, but I learned to stand up whether they were right or wrong. In my present position of course, I can’t do anything that is contrary to the wishes of the president—nor would I want to.”

Waverly said, “We understand.”

Solo nodded, settling back in the red, leather-covered chair. The lights from the red chimneys cast a reflected glow upon the faces of the men across from him. “It’s the matter of the decision that’s important here. When I was younger—younger than you, Mr. Solo—! was a line officer in the army. I made decisions then when I couldn’t get back to headquarters or there wasn’t time. I can tell you, I stood or fell on them, then.” He shook his head as if brushing away a bitterly unpleasant memory. “Well. Now what I am about to tell you, I have discussed with the president—and with Alexander Waverly here—but no one else. The president agrees with me that I must make the decision—and he has tacitly allowed me to understand that he will not be able publicly to defend me or my decision. My public life depends on success or failure—”

“We’re not here to fail, Osgood,” Waverly said.

Osgood DeVry laughed, almost a desperate sound. “No. We certainly are not. Briefly, Mr. Solo, we have come across some information that perhaps should be turned over to the joint Chiefs, Central Intelligence, the Pentagon—but it is of such a nature that even if only a whisper leaked, the entire country might panic. My decision is to deal quietly with the matter as long as we can. My decision is to let you people at U.N.C.L.E. handle it—as long as you can. Now, it’s my decision, and the president concurs—as long as he can, and off the record. Failure will mean that my head will roll, that I will have failed the president, who’s been a close friend of mine for many years—but more than that, I will have failed the people I’ve tried to serve all my life, whether they always appreciated it or not.”

“Failure could well mean the destruction of the civilized world,” Waverly said.

Solo straightened, staring at his chief incredulously. Waverly smiled. “Don’t be upset, Solo. No one can hear us. This is a sound-proofed room. We could fire a cannon in here and we’d never be heard. That’s why we chose this place.”

Solo sighed and relaxed. “Then an atomic bomb is involved?”

DeVry said, “At least, an atomic device is rumored to be entangled in the affair. Yes. Here’s what happened. One of your people, in Tokyo on a tangential matter, came across a spy for Thrush. The man was badly wounded, his stomach laid open with knife wounds. He would have no reason to lie, and your man says he was conscious and not delirious, which is what I suspected when I first heard what he’d revealed. The plan is to attack a city inside the continental United States with an atomic device—and, according to the spy, that device and the operation is almost ready. Time is running out.”

“All of this certainly reconciles with every bit of the information we gathered which put us onto this Tixe Ylno matter in the first place,” Waverly said.

“I may as well tell you, I remain somewhat skeptical,” DeVry said. “I cannot help but doubt the plausibility of this information, even though we naturally must run it down. We can’t ignore it.”

“Not in the light of all our other facts about the activities of this Tixe Ylno,” Waverly said.

“The point that makes me most doubtful,” DeVry said, “is the matter of an outsider striking at the United States with an atomic device. Not with our early warning system. It just isn’t practical.”

“It’s just nightmarish enough to be possible,” Solo said

Waverly nodded. “The one important matter that evolves from what we have to this moment—whether such a plot actually is in the works or not, and whether a strike could be successfully delivered against us from without or not, whether it is fact or hoax—is that we must get to this person Tixe Ylno. Whoever he is, whatever he is, he must be quickly captured, exposed, disarmed.”

DeVry exhaled. “For all the reasons I’ve given you, I’ve reached my decision to let you people handle this quietly, and, I pray, quickly.”

“I believe you have made a wise decision,” Waverly said. “We have reports in our office of Thrush agents, and of apparent outsiders, inquiring of the governments of Red China, Russia, France—even the United States—for atomic components. There is afoot this secret plot to hatch some kind of atomic device that is functional. Beyond that, we have the young woman Baynes-Neefuth, who arranged through you, Osgood, for our protection. Obviously, you know that she had been in the employ of Thrush for almost a year, gathering classified information from men in sensitive roles at missile sites. Don’t doubt that there is such a plot. Thrush allowed that young woman to stay alive only long enough to get to us.”

“I failed you then, Mr. DeVry,” Solo said quietly. “I’ll try not to fail you again.”

“You didn’t fail, Mr. Solo.” DeVry smiled. “Thrush had decreed that girl’s death long before she came to me. Her death was one factor that convinced me there might be something to this plot of attack with an atomic device. If these people can build one, then perhaps they have the capability for a strike.”

“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 above 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 2 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 rearview 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 think his friends will stop us?”

He forced his head around, though it jerked and trembled, seeing that the car was gaining on the Kharmann 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 laid 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 façade 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 whole attention riveted on the battle between the cars below them.

It seemed to prolong itself interminably, but it was quickly over. The cars swung back and forth like one car on the narrow, twisting roadway, skirting its rim. Suddenly the wheels of the outside car peeled away the rocks and shale at the brink of an angular turn. The wheels skidded off the road. The car suddenly dropped and then went leaping outward into the darkness. The headlights appeared turned straight up for a split second, and then they fell away and there was only darkness.

Illya heard the savagery in Violet’s deep sigh, and after a moment she stepped hard on the gas.

The sun was metallic white when they lined up at the international border. Illya lay with his head on the seat rest, trying to force intelligible words from his mouth.

His attempts did not disturb Violet; in fact, they seemed to amuse her.

“My little bug just won’t stop fighting, will he?” she said.

They rolled up into customs. The American officer tipped his cap and asked if they’d mind getting out of the car.

Violet smiled sadly across Illya at the young officer.

“My brother can get out, sir, and he will if he must. But you’ll have to help him in and out.”

Illya struggled, his mouth stretching wide as he tried to speak one intelligible word. His mind was agonizingly clear, as bright as the sunlight, but the sounds he made were those of low-grade idiocy.

“It was a birth defect,” Violet told the customs man. “Brain damage, you know.”

“Yes. That’s too bad.” He called another officer and between them they lifted Illya from the car and set him on a chair just outside the office.

Violet stood chatting with the officers while they opened his luggage and hers, and while they inspected the passports she had. Bitterly he wondered about the one they had prepared for him. Name. Age. Cause of idiocy.

He stared at them, at the people going both ways across the border. He cried out, but it was a cawing sound and they glanced at him in shame-faced pity. No one liked to look at the mentally defective.

Breathing raggedly, Illya forced his body to bend forward at the hips until he fell off the chair. He struggled then, trying to crawl away. Couldn’t these people see now that something was wrong?

They came running.

“Poor guy! He fell right off the chair!”

“Don’t squirm around like that, fellow; we’ll get you up. Take it easy!”

“It’s all right.” Illya heard Violet’s calm voice. “He does this all the time.” She bent over him. “You’re a naughty boy.” She straightened. “That’s why we’re having to put him away finally—we don’t want to do it.”

They drove in silence northward up the rugged California coast. They stopped for the night in a sleek motel on Highway 101. By now, Illya saw they’d been joined by Edgar and company. He saw that the men were still shaken by the encounter with the U.N.C.L.E. men on the Mexican highway.

He watched Violet. She was completely unconcerned about the deaths. Death had no meaning for her. He gazed at her, thinking she would enjoy torturing and tormenting the helpless. She got a strange kick from seeing him squirm and his red-faced attempts to speak.

In the morning they loaded him in the convertible once more and Violet kept the Kharmann Ghia at top speed, going north again.

In the afternoon they left the coastal highway, climbing east into the mountain ranges. They sped through a small town of stucco buildings and palm-lined parkways. They continued to climb and a chill settled through the car.

At about four o’clock Violet brought the car to a halt before the tall iron-barred gate in a six-foot fieldstone fence.

Above the gate, in fussy wrought-iron, were the words: BROADMOOR REST.

The name stirred something inside Illya’s mind, troubling him, but he could not pin it down. He knew it to be a private sanitarium of some kind, created from the thousand-acre estate and chateau built by a lumber and mining millionaire in the early twenties. But it was not just that it was a sanitarium. There was something more, something that had turned up with a puzzling regularity in U.N.C.L.E. briefings.

He struggled with the thought, but it eluded him. The gates parted and Violet drove through, going along the twisting lane toward the vine-matted walls of the old stone castle. He could see its turrets and gables and bay windows. He couldn’t see the bars at those windows, but he knew they were there.

Three white-clad orderlies awaited them when Violet braked the car before the veranda. They stood on the steps that stretched thirty feet across, made of the same native stone as were the fence and the house.

The orderlies came off the wide steps and lined up beside the car. One of them glanced at Illya, then grinned at Violet. “Is this it?”

Violet laughed and nodded. “He’s all yours.

One of the orderlies said, “What are you doing tonight, baby?”

Violet tossed her red-gold head. “You’ll never know, simpleton. I can’t tolerate men who work for a salary. It makes peasants of them.”

She turned on her spike heels and tapped away, going up those stone steps and through the huge thick redwood door.

The orderlies reached for Illya. He struggled, fighting at them, but his arms only flailed wildly, and the noises he made were foolish, giggling sounds. He was in an agony of terror and outrage but he was unable to express anything except garbled idiocy.

VIII

SOLO PAUSED for a moment outside his room in the St. Francis Hotel. For no good reason, he felt the tightening inside that warned of danger. He shook the thought away and rapped three times, slowly. He listened for Barbry’s voice beyond the door. There was silence and Solo tensed, taking his key from his pocket.

The door was unlocked and opened as he reached for it. Solo scowled, saying, “I thought I told you—“

He stopped speaking, staring into the blandly smiling face of Samuel Su Yan.

“Come in; we’ve been waiting for you,” Su Yan said.

Solo’s hand moved toward the holster beneath his jacket, but stopped when he noted the small .25 caliber Spanish-made Astra pistol that Su Yan held.

“An experimental model, Solo,” Su Yan said, “but quite deadly.”

Solo sighed and stepped inside the room. Everything looked as it had when he had walked out of it, except that now Barbry Coast sat upon the foot of his bed, staring straight ahead of her, her features rigid, her gaze transfixed; she looked like a mannequin.

“Are you all right, Barbry?” Solo walked toward her, trying to ignore the snubbed nose of the Astra that was fixed on his spine.

Barbry turned her head slowly and stared at him blankly. It was as though she had never seen him before.

“Of course she’s all right,” Su Yan said from behind Solo. “Aren’t you all right, my dear?”

“I’m all right,” Barbry said in a flat, lifeless tone. Staring at her, Solo shivered involuntarily.

“We’ve been looking for Esther for a long time,” Su Yan said in a conversational tone. “I must thank you and your organization for locating her for us—and for leading us to her.”