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obscenities. The tall man came over and kicked me in the side.
    "Don't hurt him," I heard the girl say. "There is no need to hurt him." The voice seemed to come from the other end of a long tunnel or maybe from the other side of the world.
    The tall man swore loudly at the girl. The stocky man stumbled to his feet. The vertigo was getting worse and worse. I tried to get to my knees but fell back heavily onto my side. The thing that kept running through my mind was that they had come to kill me. This had been a plot to assassinate AXE's top agent, and it had succeeded. But neither of the men had guns out.
    "You think that what we're going to do to him won't hurt him?" The stocky Russian gave an ugly laugh. He kicked me hard in the ribs. I groaned and fell onto my back. I heard the girl named Ilse Hoffmann and Tanya Savitch deliver some well-chosen words to the stocky man. Then the voices faded away and became a dull buzzing in my ears.
    A minute later the blackness returned, and there was no pushing it away this time. I was suddenly falling, falling through a bottomless black space, my body turning slowly as I fell.

Four
    When I came to, I was lying on the floor of a bright, antiseptic-looking room, about ten feet square. The room was empty except for a white cot. The ceiling lights shot rockets of pain into my head when I looked at them. I struggled to sit up and immediately felt the pain in my side where the men had kicked me. I examined my ribs. There were some nasty bruises, but nothing was broken.
    I had no idea how they'd gotten me here. At first I couldn't even remember the events leading up to my blackout, but then slowly the scene with the girl came back. Damned clever of them to put a drug in her lipstick. But what was it she'd said about her immunity? And why did I remember, now, her soothing voice speaking to me in the overwhelming blackness, her sensual, irresistible, voice telling me to sleep undisturbed? The fact was, I'd gone out completely, so completely that I'd have felt refreshed now if it hadn't been for the throbbing pain in my side.
    With some difficulty I got up, and went over, to the cot, and sat down on the edge of it, rubbing my face with my hands, trying to clear my head. Whatever drug they'd used on me, its effect was temporary and apparently harmless. For some reason I couldn't figure out, they wanted me alive and unharmed. Maybe before it was all over I'd be wishing they'd put a slug in my brain back at the girl's apartment.
    I remembered Tanya's warm flesh under me on her sofa. The KGB was big on sex as a weapon, always had been. But that wouldn't have been enough to get me without the new cosmetic drug. There'd been rumors that the Russians were working on hundreds of drugs and that they were many years ahead of the West in that area. I may have been the first enemy agent they'd used the drug on. It wasn't a distinction I wanted to claim.
    Looking back on it, I didn't figure Tanya for an ordinary KGB agent. There had been that attempt to keep the men from beating me and that mention of… some kind of hypnosis.
Hypnotic immunity,
that was it. I'd never heard the term before. My mind raced through all sorts of possibilities and probabilities and ended up nowhere, and my head throbbed violently. I had just succeeded in thoroughly confusing myself when I heard a sound at the door.
    I tensed automatically. The door opened, and the two men who had appeared at Tanya's apartment came in. The fat, bald guy had the same ugly grin on his face. The tall one looked at me impassively.
    "Well," the tall one said, "I hope you had a good rest." It was definitely the voice of the man who'd attacked me in Washington.
    "It was you with the stocking over your face in Washington." I said.
    "Yes, it was I," he said patronizingly. "The man you killed was merely an American who worked for us. He was expendable."
    "And you've been keeping an eye on me in Caracas."
    "Of course. We did not want to lose contact before Dr.