She didn't look like a murderer. Candice Marke might have been a legal secretary, a businesswoman or a school teacher -- anything but the cold-blooded killer U.N.C.L.E. was convinced that she was.

Twenty-year-old neo-agent Brandon Treville, however, was not convinced. He'd found her far too genteel, too human for that. In the past month he had fulfilled his very first field mission by infiltrating her so-called cover firm, a cosmetics company. He had worked for her as a personal aide, and had come to know her... well, fairly well. And one thing he was certain she could not be was a murderer.

Looking at her now, handcuffed to the arm of the twin plane seat she shared with a watchful Illya Kuryakin, he still found himself incapable of believing that this woman, whom Interpol had code-named "the hawk," had murdered a major world leader. The government of Zhikistan was more than eager to get its hands on Marke and exact revenge for the crime. U.N.C.L.E., in the persons of Treville and Kuryakin, would be escorting her there. Brandon was sure this entire
mission was a serious error on U.N.C.L.E.'s part. They were wrong this time. They had to be.

"We will be departing London in eight minutes," said a feminine voice over the chartered plane's PA system. "Please fasten all seatbelts in preparation for takeoff."

Marke's dark green eyes never left Brandon as Kuryakin secured the seat belt for her. "You know they plan to stage my public execution," she said matter-of-factly to Brandon. "Not a terribly humane people, the Zhikistani."

"I don't wonder," Kuryakin told her. "Not many nations are when it comes to the assassination of their leaders."

"Have you convicted me without a trial as well, Mr. Kuryakin? I would have thought U.N.C.L.E. to be rather more fair-minded."

"I'm sorry, Illya," Brandon said timidly, "but I think the lady is right. What's more, this whole affair should never have been U.N.C.L.E.'s concern to begin with."

The plane began its runway taxiing and mere seconds later lifted effortlessly into the air. Kuryakin waited until they had climbed, leveled and disconnected their safety belts before he answered.

"For the record, Mr. Treville, the decision isn't ours to make. In theory as well as in practice, we don't question an assignment -- we just carry it out."

"'Ours but to do or die,' is that it?"

"Something like that, yes."

Brandon locked gazes with Candice Marke again, and silently wished he could somehow apologize for being a part of this thing.

There were many, after, all, who would say that Marke, if guilty, had done the world a favor. The man she stood accused of killing had been called a terrorist, a madman, a monster.

"U.N.C.L.E. takes no sides in the world political arena, he heard Kuryakin saying, part of what was apparently an ongoing lecture, "And whatever our personal feelings on a matter, we have no right to allow them to interfere with getting our job done. We follow orders. Is that clear?"

Embarrassed, Brandon nodded.

"Perhaps I also followed orders," Marke said quietly. "Tell me, Mr. Kuryakin, have your superiors never required you to kill a man? A man, say, who posed a threat to world security?"

If the question had discomforted Kuryakin at all, he didn't allow it to show. "Let's drop the games, shall we? I don't deal with equivocation too terribly well this early in the morning."

Marke smiled thinly, then sat back and said nothing more for well over an hour. While Kuryakin became immersed in a paperback copy of _The Dead Zone_, Brandon tried unsuccessfully to occupy himself with one of the in-flight magazines. He found his eyes wandering, more often than not, back to Marke, thinking again that she looked nothing like a hawk; nothing like a murderer. What if Zhikistan, Interpol and U.N.C.L.E. were all wrong about her? If they were, he would have helped to condemn an innocent woman to death, Not a pleasant thought.

The pilot routinely announced that they had just entered West German air space at 12,000 feet, and Brandon noticed Marke glance furtively out the small rectangular window. In the next moment she had tapped a bored Kuryakin on the arm and pointed aft toward the plane's single restroom. "Apologies, Mr. Kuryakin, but would you mind?"

Kuryakin reached into his coat, but what came out instead of a key was the silencer-muzzled U.N.C.L.E. Special. "I'll unlock the cuffs," he said, pointing the weapon into Marke's solar plexus, "as long as you're aware that I know all the tricks. Fair enough?"

"To be sure." Fear (real or feigned?) tinged Marke's voice. "No tricks. You have my word."

Kuryakin, choosing not to respond to that, unlocked the handcuffs and moved into the aisle to follow Marke aft, his Special still in his hand. "Just remember," he warned, "I'm going to be right outside the door -- with this."

Marke started to walk down the aisle, and it was in that moment that Brandon glanced aside, out at the patchwork of West Germany's farm lands. He'd failed to notice the hand that Marke carefully kept on Kuryakin's blind side until they'd arrived at the restroom door. When Kuryakin opened it, Marke's hand rose as though to take hold of it. Then, instead, her fingers depressed the end of a minute plastic tube that had slipped from the sleeve of her jacket. A small jet of white smoke shot upward into Kuryakin's face. He succumbed almost instantly to the gas, but when Marke had relieved him of his gun and turned around, it was to face Brandon Treville with his own U.N.C.L.E. Special in hand.

"Put it down," he demanded, aware that the tremor in his voice was audible, "and get back in that seat with the cuffs on."

"Oh come now." Marke, in her charming, ingratiating way, was taunting him, daring him to carry out the threat. "Shall we be honest? Because the truth is, you see, I have nothing to lose. And you, you have everything. Because when we reach our destination I will tell our Zhikistani friends that you helped me in the Hawk affair -- that you were a part of it all along."

"They won't believe you."

She took a tentative step toward him. "Pull the trigger then. We'll find out."

He knew she was lying; knew he should have fired the .38 caliber pistol and carried out his assignment to deliver Marke to Zhikistan. But his finger refused to tighten on the trigger. Smiling, Marke reached out and easily pulled t he weapon from his hand.

"You haven't many choices now, you know," she said smoothly. "Stay behind, and your superiors will 'court martial' you. Come with me, and you may find I'm not quite the monster the world press has painted me."

While he pondered just what she'd meant by that, she obligingly solved part of the mystery by throwing open one of the plane's emergency storage units and lifting a folded parachute from its interior. In a moment, the compact bundle had come sailing across the cabin at him. Brandon caught it, but deliberately dropped it again. "I'm not going anywhere."

"No? Then I regret I shall have to make the request a formal one." With no expression in her eyes at all, she leveled Kuryakin's gun at him. "Put the parachute on."

Furious with himself for having bungled all of this so badly, Brandon obeyed, watching as she donned one of the chutes herself and headed for the plane's rear escape hatch. She'd been right, he
reflected, about one thing. U.N.C.L.E. was likely, at the very least, to terminate his short-lived career over this. Or worse...

He knelt beside the restroom's still-open door to take Kuryakin's pulse, and jumped when the sound of the hatch coming open created a small wind storm in the plane's decompressing cabin.

"After you," Marke shouted over the roar.

He eyed the weapon in her hand, considered trying something foolishly heroic, then quickly thought better of it. _All right, Brandon,_ he told himself. Here's where two exhaustive years of U.N,C,L,E.'s training had better come in handy. You've jumped out of dozens of airplanes. What you'd never done was shoot at anything other than a man-shaped target. Not quite the same when the target is breathing, is it?_

He went out the hatch not far ahead of Marke, and together they hurtled earthward in the wind-roar and biting cold of free fall. He followed her signal as to when the ripcord should be pulled, finally allowing the billowing mushroom of the chute to open and guide him to a reasonably soft landing in the midst of some unsuspecting German farmer's bean crop.

Marke came down several hundred yards to the east of him, her chute tangling in the stand of scrawny trees that served as a feeble windbreak. The fleeting thought that he could duck and run while she struggled to unsnarl her parachute occurred to him and quickly died again. He had no idea where they were, and there was no adequate cover for literally miles. Nowhere to run.

Marke had left her chute dangling from one of the trees and walked triumphantly across the furrowed ground to meet him. "A very good jump," she said sincerely.

"Thank you. I've never been abducted by a more complimentary kidnapper. But next time see if you can scare up a helmet, will you? I'm going to have a headache for a week."

She laughed, whether with genuine amusement or derision he couldn't be sure. "Tell me," she asked. "Do you carry one of those marvellous little transceiver gadgets with you?"

She held out his hand expectantly, and Brandon, somewhat disgusted at his own complacence, handed over his pen communicator. "They never should have code-named you 'the hawk,"' he told her. "It doesn't fit you."

"I never thought so either," she admitted, and began dismantling the pen transceiver to carefully rewire its components. "But then, I never took to the word 'assassin' either. I much prefer the more generic term 'mercenary.'"

"But you did assassinate that Zhikistan official."

"Oh, you are new at all this, aren't you? I freed the world of a dangerous and unstable random element. You'll find there's oftentimes a fine line between murder and practicality."

"You make it sound positively noble. As though someone hadn't paid you for it."

Marke didn't answer. She snapped the communicator's casing back together and twisted the pen base until she was rewarded with the crackle of static. "Vier-neun-sieben zum Himmel," she
said into it, "Erick Himmel, antworten Sie bitte."

Several minutes passed before a voice responded, stating perfunctorily in German that their co-ordinates had been noted and a pick-up would be arranged. Marke calmly closed the frequency and pocketted the pen.

"A friend of yours?" Brandon asked.

She began walking slowly west toward the only visible road. "Not precisely. A mercenary has no friends."

They'd walked the narrow dirt road for nearly an hour before they were met by a rambling old flatbed truck, driven, Brandon had to presume, by the man Marke had called Erick Himmel. There was no exchange of pleasantries. Marke simply motioned him into the back and then joined him there for a long, bumpy ride that brought them, ultimately, into the suburbs of Munich.

When the old truck rattled past an alley on its way into central Munich, no one noticed the small white VW Rabbit sitting in the shadows. From behind its steering wheel, Napoleon Solo watched the truck go by before opening the frequency on his own pen transceiver. "Open channel D," he said.

After a moment, a tired voice answered. "Kuryakin here."

"Ah, Illya. How's the headache?"

"Pounding. You have a fix on Marke yet?"

"Affirmative. They just passed me, heading straight into Munich."

"Wonderful. If you'd like to keep track of them a while, I can rendezvous with you in about ten minutes."

"Check."

The homing unit mounted on the Rabbit's dashboard maintained a fix on Treville's altered communicator. Its flashing digital read-out stablized when the truck finally stopped moving.

Once Illya had joined him, Solo simply followed the signal into Munich, pulling up at last in front of a sprawling two-story brick mansion. The flatbed truck was nowhere in evidence, but the signal on the VW's dashboard continued to hum steadily.

"It insists this is the place," Solo said and killed the motor.

Illya looked up at the red brick face of the mansion as they both got out of the car. "Our friend the hawk has extravagant taste," he noted.

"Yes. Shall we just walk up to the door and knock? Or would you suggest a more subtle approach?"

"I rather had in mind the servants' entrance. Unannounced."

"Good thinking."

Neither of them saw, as they proceeded to the rear of the house, that at intervals near the roof, set deeply into the brick, were observation cameras that slowly turned to follow their every move.

In a room on the mansion's top floor, Candice Marke viewed the U.N.C.L,E. agents' progress on a bank of inset television monitors. Brandon, the only other occupant of the room, watched uncomfortably from just behind her.

"What are you going to do?"

"What I have to," she said flatly, and as she spoke the screen showed her that Solo and Illya had entered the mansion's kitchen through a rear door.

"I won't let you harm them."

"If you want to live, my young friend, sit down and be quiet."

At the touch of a control, she sealed the kitchen's doors and windows with electronically-controlled metal shields. The figures on the multiple screens pulled weapons from beneath their coats and began circling the secured room, searching for an exit.

"I knew they would come," Marke said, and touched another control. "The problem lay only in what to do with them once they were here. I believe I've solved that."

* * *

Napoleon Solo stopped searching for a way out of the sealed kitchen and shortly located the surveillance camera he knew would be concealed somewhere in the high ceiling. "Miss Marke
would appear to be expecting us," he said to Illya, and pointed to the camera with his automatic.

"So it would seem. Now is it my imagination, or is it suddenly becoming rather warm in here?"

It was getting rather warm. Too warm. Solo spotted a household thermometer over the burnished copper range and was surprised to see its bright red fluid climb from 74 to 79 degrees in less
than a minute. It kept climbing.

"Marke," Solo shouted at the camera. "Whatever you're doing, it isn't going to help. You think there aren't others coming after us? And more after that? You can't parboil all of them. Can you hear me, Marke?"

The walls offered no response, but the thermometer crept upward another five degrees.

Upstairs, Brandon watched his two fellow agents shed their coats against the onslaught of heat. He saw, in the same moment, that Marke had placed the .38 she had taken from him earlier on the counter in front of the monitors. Intent on the victims in her trap, she was not paying close attention to the gun, or to him.

Slowly, unobtrusively, Brandon began to inch toward the weapon...
 

Already gasping for air, Solo pulled open the collar of his shirt. The act of hunting for some way out of here seemed fruitless now, but there was little else they could do. The thermometer now read 104, and was continuing to climb.

"Shall we try a little target practice on the camera lens?" he suggested, half-serious. "At least we can deprive Marke of the pleasure of watching us roast."

Illya stopped a futile search of the sealed windows to turn and look briefly at the camera.. "I would much prefer simply finding a way out of here," he said. On an afterthought, he reached for the cold water tap over the sink, yanked his hand back when the metal proved too hot to touch, tried again with his handkerchief in hand and twisted the tap to "on." Nothing happened.

"Nice try," Solo allowed. "You have any other ideas?"

"One." Illya's hair and clothing clung to him in wet swaths as he extracted an explosive pellet from the heel of his shoe. "I have absolutely no intention of becoming someone's dinner entree."

Solo, following suit, removed another pellet from his own shoe. "Shall we try the door?"

"Let's."

They wedged two of the tiny charges into the sealed lock of the outer door and when Solo's pocket matches refused to ignite, lit the fuses with a long-handled match purloined from the kitchen cupboard and lighted via the stove top burners. Sparks flared from the burning fuses until a miniature explosion blackened the door and wall, wafting acrid smoke into the already-searing air.

Solo kicked with all his might at the door, but met only solid resistance. Illya's efforts proved equally useless.

The kitchen thermometer reached 110, surpassed it, and finally burst with a sharp pop of shattering glass.

Candice Marke broke into a confident smile, pleased at the sight of both Solo and Kuryakin at last succumbing to the heat of her trap. Her own temperature read-out told her that the kitchen was now 116 degrees warm.

Something moved beside her. Damn. She'd forgotten about Treville. And the gun...

"Turn it off."

Marke looked down the .38's short barrel and smiled. "Are we back to that again?"

"Don't play games with me, damn you. Turn that heating element off. Now!"

"Ninety seconds," Marke said, and consulted her watch for emphasis. "The temperature will reach 150 and it will all be over."

Brandon tried to close his finger on the .38's trigger and found to his horror that he still couldn't bring himself to fire.

Marke laughed, deliberately turning her back on him, and settled into her chair to watch the conclusion of her triumph. On the triple screens, her victims now lay motionless on the kitchen's
polished tile floor.

Furious both with Marke and himself, Brandon charged her and blindly attempted to knock her away from the control panel, throwing as many switches as he could in the brief seconds his surprise attack had allowed. Marke's surprisingly strong hands grabbed him, threw him aside and quickly moved to undo the 'damage' he had done to the controls, The temperature gauge soared to 128.

Blind rage obscuring his vision, Brandon retrieved the .38 from the floor where it had fallen, and once again, aimed it at Marke.

"Turn it off!" he shouted, "Now!!"

Marke got out of her chair to come at him with her hand outstretched. "You really should learn to be less of an annoying child," she said angrily, and reached to once again take the gun from him,

The red digital display on the panel behind her clicked to 135. The audio pick-up registered Solo's muffled groan. Marke's hand closed over the barrel of the .38, began to draw it away.

Brandon pulled the trigger.

* * *

Illya Kuryakin opened his eyes to the soft white glare of the kitchen ceiling's light panels, and gradually became aware of the fact that he was no longer dying of heat prostration. The electronic seals had vanished from the room's doors and windows. Slowly, unsteadily, he pulled himself to his feet and made it back to the sink, where the tap, still warm to the touch, finally delivered a stream of cold flowing water. When he had swallowed several handfulls, he soaked a dishtowel with it and went back to where Solo still lay unconscious on the floor.

"Time to wake up," he said, mopping Solo's flushed face with the towel. "It looks as though someone decided to alter the dinner menu."

Solo's eyes came narrowly open. "Gpfmpf," he mumbled, taking the towel from Illya. "The first course looked disgustingly unappetizing anyhow. Never did like Russian food."

They found the upstairs surveillance room after a brief search of the mansion that had turned up no other occupants. When they came through the door, it was to find Brandon Treville kneeling
beside a prone Candice Marke, a spreading pool of red slowly staining the carpet beneath her. He neither looked up at them nor responded when Solo called his name. His eyes remained fixed on the corpse in front of him, a gaze that was broken only when Solo took him gently by the shoulders and lifted him away to sit him in the same chair Marke had occupied mere minutes
before...

The click of Illya's communicator preceded its soft hiss of static. "Open channel H," he said to it quietly. "Overseas relay, New York. And scramble."

A moment later, Sir John's voice said, "Yes, Mr. Kuryakin. You have a report?"

"For what it's worth, sir, Candice Marke is no longer a threat to world security."

"She's dead then?"

Illya glanced at Solo. "An occupational hazard., of which I'm certain Ms. Marke was aware."

"And you've located agent Treville?"

"Yes sir. Safe and..." IIlya allowed the slightest pause to fall between the words. "...sound. We'll take the first available flight back to New York and report in. As soon as we've cleaned up here. Kuryakin out."

"It's all right," Solo said to Brandon as Illya put the communicator away. "I wish I could tell you it gets easier with time... only it doesn't." After a long moment, he added, "You did what you had to. Orders, Remember?"

Brandon permitted his tears to come, a welcome cleansing of the horror he had just lived. "I don't think," he said weakly, "that I'll ever be able to forget."

Solo helped him up and walking slowly alongside, urged him gently past the now-lifeless monitor screens and out of the room.

They didn't look back.
 
 

The End