Free MFU Whitman - The Affair of the Gentle Saboteur by Brandon Keith Page A

what her penalty. Free!
    She hurled the cigarette into an ashtray and fled down the stairs to the basement. Breathlessly she tugged at the bolts of the iron door—three wide slide-bolts, top, middle, and bottom—and pulled with all her strength at the heavy door. It opened, creaking.
    Mr. Kuryakin and the boy stood in the middle of the room, looking at her. They needed shaves. The clothes provided them fitted badly. Pale, untidy, unkempt, they looked rough, dangerous, like tramps, this man from UNCLE and this son of the British Ambassador to the United Nations. Wanting to cry, blinking, biting back hysteria, she laughed—and stopped it, feeling her teeth against her suddenly stiff lips.
    "Come!" she whispered, realizing there was no need to whisper, for they were alone in the house.
    Kuryakin frowned, standing still, holding back, studying her.
    Softly but quite distinctly he said, "What is it?"
    "Come! Please! Quickly!"
    Still he stood his ground, persisting. "Why?"
    "They—they want to—they want to kill you." It was as though his study was completed. His grin was boyish, his blue eyes crinkling at the corners. He slapped an open palm at the boy's rear, like a coach sending in a football replacement. "They want to kill us, the lady says, the beautiful lady." He slapped again quite casually, cheerfully, but his voice was tense. "Get a move on, Stevie boy. Don't let's keep our lady waiting."
    She led them up and out through a side door, and they were in the hot sunshine under the blue cloudless sky.
    "This way." Still she was whispering. She could not help herself.
    They hurried, a little group, a long way through shady, sweet-smelling orchards and then in the blazing sun along the tended grass of wide lawns and then in the coolness of shady trees again. She led them a long way westerly, until they came, by a narrow path, to a little side-gate in the high, iron picket fence. The lock was a combination lock, and she twisted and turned the circular indicator, whispering the numbers, left, right, right again, left, right, right and right, left, and right.
    She pulled down and there was a click and the lock opened and then the gate opened and she led them under the hot burning sun a long way along narrow roads. Then they were on a big road and cars passed and they waved at the cars and the cars passed.
    "Look," Kuryakin said. "Steve and I better get out of the way. We look like a couple of hoods, delinquents. I don't blame them for not stopping." And he grinned. "But for you, Miss... Hunter, did you say?"
    "That is correct."
    "Anybody doesn't stop for you, Miss Hunter— that would be a pretty sick fella."
    They went off the road and squatted behind a hedge of weeds and were out of sight of the whiz zing cars. The girl stood alone, a blond girl in a green-and-white striped dress, and waved at the whizzing cars. A truck stopped, and she talked to the driver. Then she turned and waved to them, and they came out of the shelter of the weeds and went up into the truck, and they all sat huddled together in the steamy cab of the truck thunderously rumbling on the hot road.
    "I'm not allowed no riders," the driver said, a round-faced man in a visored cap, "but the little lady says emergency, and emergency, naturally that's different. But I am dropping you off at the first town, which ain't far, which is the deal I made with the little lady, which is all I can do for you. I'm not allowed no riders."
    "Thank you," Kuryakin said.
    "Ain't much of a town. Three blocks of town and then no more town. All the rest all around is suburbs for rich people."
    They rode rumbling in the sun for a few miles, and then the truck stopped at the edge of a paved street.
    "This is it," the driver said. "All I can do. I can get into trouble. I'm not allowed no riders."
    "Thank you," Kuryakin said.
    "Welcome. Watch your step, little lady."
    The truck was gone, leaving a smell of gasoline in the motionless air. They walked and came to a diner, built in the