Chapter Text
Prologue
Illya looks up automatically as the office door swings open to his partner's return from his impromptu meeting. Though Napoleon can't have been away more than fifteen minutes, his eyes go directly to the clock on the opposite wall. One hardly has to be a spy of Illya's calibre to recognise the body language of a man in a hurry to be elsewhere.
"A little early for lunch, isn't it?" he asks.
"Not when duty calls," replies Napoleon, "I have a lunch date with Suzanne. She's leaving for Mombassa this evening. After all the help she was to us last month, it would be terribly bad form to miss the chance to see her off."
"The one who claims dentistry runs in her family, wasn't she?" Illya remembers Suzanne, of course, if less charitably than she perhaps deserves. "Was there anything in the meeting I should know about, before you go?"
"Always plenty of need for dentistry in Mombassa, so I hear," Napoleon says, good-naturedly. "And nothing urgent." At Illya's continuing stare, he amends this with, "Section One just wanted to raise a minor issue of our conduct relating to that recent Arabian Affair."
That Napoleon is trying to avoid the subject has Illya's instincts prickling. "Let me guess: they didn't appreciate your disobeying direct orders to come running to my assistance."
Napoleon stills for slightly too long to pass it off as natural. "Ah, no. As a matter of fact, it was your conduct they objected to."
"My conduct? In what-"
"There was a feeling that your interactions with that Arabian girl—Sophie, wasn't it?—may have reflected badly on our organisation..."
That Napoleon is obviously trying to break this to him gently does nothing for Illya's temper. "They were a band of wandering thieves and would-be slave traders, whom I convinced to storm a major THRUSH installation! What part of that reflects badly on us?"
"Well, specifically, they thought it represented something of, ah, a missed opportunity to contribute to your, ah, quota, you see..."
Illya's jaw drops. "Napoleon, she stabbed me in the leg! After that, I'm supposed to, what? Ask her to dinner?"
Napoleon shrugs, sheepish. "Their words, not mine. It's not an official reprimand, Illya, just a note."
Illya snorts. "How official could it be? They'd have to put that in writing."
"I suppose they have to find something to pull you up on once in a while." Napoleon shrugs, in what passes for conciliatory fashion. "How else are they going to keep us on our toes? But I wouldn't worry about it too much," he adds, with a twinkle in his eye, "After all, I'm out to even up our mutual public relations score as we speak."
Sometimes Illya wonders that any work gets done around this place. "Your dedication to the line of duty does you credit indeed," he observes, dryly.
Napoleon gives him a broad grin. "Aren't you lucky you have me around?" So saying, he vanishes out the door.
Illya leans back in his chair, pushes up his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. The worst of it is, he is lucky to have Napoleon around to cover for him, and he knows it. Which doesn't make any part of the situation less frustrating.
I.
In a world where the occasional well-placed enemy mole or major security breach is simply a matter of course, a handful of UNCLE's most sensitive operational directives have never been committed to paper at all. Knowledge of such protocols is passed on only by word of mouth to those UNCLE personnel granted the highest level security clearance, typically behind locked doors in rooms freshly rechecked for listening devices by at least two independent security teams. Compliance in the field (or lack thereof) is thereafter reported in writing only implicitly, and discussed aloud only by euphemism, if need arises for it to be addressed at all.
A new recruit at the New York office might find his-or-herself encountering any number of suggestive euphemisms of this sort (such as 'on administrative leave' or 'tripped over the office cat'). But few can match the mystery of the occasional oblique reference to 'the quota'—as in, for example, "I'm disappointed to note your team seems to have fallen rather behind quota this quarter, despite any number of suitable opportunities to be inferred from your mission reports," or, "Sounds like Solo's just about up for another commendation for his tireless dedication to exceeding his quota this year, the lucky bastard." Recognising that explicit denials generate only more curiosity, senior agents questioned on the subject by junior staff generally say one of three things: 1) if you don't know what the quota is, it doesn't apply to you, so be grateful, 2) that it's a reference to an obscure public relations measure as laid down by an outdated edition of the operating manual, now remembered primarily by office in-joke and otherwise functionally obsolete, or 3) that there isn't one. Most younger staff members probably assume it has something to do with institutional loyalty or case closure rates, which is both more or less the intention, and quite categorically wrong.
In reality, even the euphemism was coined firstly to mislead: the 'quota' has in practice always been strictly more of a guideline, and deliberately so, for both practical and psychological reasons. Practical, because with a moratorium on written records, anything more would be unenforceable; and psychological, because the upper echelons of Section I know perfectly that nothing keeps people on their toes like obligation to a standard that was never more than hazily defined to begin with.
Caught at the wrong moment, Illya Kuryakin might in fact tell the curious young agent all of the above, leaving them both suitably cowed, and effectively none the wiser. Not many people ask again.
All feelings on the quota aside, Illya is very good at his job.
Inarguably one of the more unlikely proposals ever to come out of the Aberdeen Proving Grounds in the mid 1950's, Project FY-104 was ultimately on the books for slightly less than two months before the wrong authority figure was made aware of its existence, and had the entire project not merely shut down, but wiped from all records overnight in a whirlwind of righteous indignation. That the proposal had ever been approved at all was little more than a lucky fluke, and had it not arrived discretely sandwiched between two rather more mundane proposed methods for the non-lethal incapacitation of hostile forces (specifically a sleep gas derived from synthetic LSD and a chemical agent engineered to induce chronic halitosis), it's doubtful it wouldn't have been laughed out of the room then and there. Doctor Spencer Newgate himself, the project's progenitor and sole proponent, was informed in no uncertain terms that the US defence budget did not exist to fund research into perverse and tasteless aphrodisiacs, and turned out on the street with some prejudice—thereafter to find himself suddenly and inexplicably unemployable anywhere in the United States, the apparent lack of a single surviving record of his most recent termination notwithstanding.
This last measure may have been a mistake. If there's anything THRUSH loves more than highly unethical proposals for psychoactive aerosols, that something might well be disgraced former government researchers—especially if they come with a borderline-psychotic belief in their own maverick genius and an axe to grind against the establishment. Doctor Newgate came with all of the above. THRUSH may not ultimately have bothered to read through his proposal any more thoroughly than had the Aberdeen high command—the details were all but irrelevant.
Doctor Newgate's tenure at THRUSH Laboratories lasted a respectable three years and change before that relationship, too, turned sour. Between the Doctor's studious disinterest in developing the antidote required to unlock his new drug's full potential as a blackmail aid, and the discovery during an internal review that the primary output of three long years of funding was a truly obscene number of hours of footage of copulating research monkeys, someone in THRUSH's upper command made the decision to pull the plug. In what may have been the last great stroke of luck of his career, Doctor Newgate himself caught wind of his upcoming termination with just enough time to scarper, and, by one report, was sighted working as a gogo dancer in San Francisco some time later, having apparently rediscovered his calling in life. Denied the chance to make a proper example of his failure, THRUSH were left in the possession of several tanks of colourless, odourless, experimental gaseous agent, which no-one still in their employ was sure what to do with.
In the early months of '62, an otherwise routine bust of a minor THRUSH satrapy on the outskirts of Brooklyn took an alarming turn with the discovery of a set of stolen blueprints detailing the precise location of an accessible intake vent in the air conditioning system of UNCLE's New York office. That those same documents came attached to a detailed plan to flood the entire air conditioning system with an experimental chemical agent would, in and of itself, have constituted a serious wake-up call for the entire security department at UNCLE NY. That the discovery was made only three days after the date on which said plan had been scheduled for execution—that was an international security scandal in the making. Word of precisely what the good men and women of UNCLE NY may have already been unknowingly gassed with was so completely outrageous that, were it not for The Incident, it might never have been believed at all.
The trouble with missives requiring all documentation to be destroyed is that mankind has set upon the habit of writing things down for a reason: facts, left to their own devices, are known to go soft and spongy around the edges. Some of the more salient facts about The Incident—say, the identities of the two male UNCLE agents caught performing invasive (and decidedly unsanctioned) cavity searches upon one another in an unlocked storage room—were perhaps best lost to the mists of time. Whether those two—or possibly three—unfortunate men had been caught in that storage room a day or two before or a day or two after the bust on that THRUSH satrapy would later vary by individual memory, even among agents who were present at the time. The question of whether any of those two (or perhaps as many as four) parties involved had any prior form for that sort of behaviour might never be settled at all.
What mattered, of course, was never the particulars of The Incident. What mattered was that UNCLE now had not only documented evidence that its entire staff had been gassed with a pheromone engineered to produce unrestrained homosexual desire in male subjects, they had observational evidence to back it up. Structured and appropriate institutional panicking procedures could now commence, and did.
Very little could have more greatly horrified the intelligence community than the suggestion that some of its best agents might be secretly homosexual—and therefore, by the conventional wisdom of the day, most likely also communists, enemies of the establishment, double agents and prime targets for blackmail, who might at any moment develop habits like mincing, lisping, or wearing women's clothes in wholly inappropriate circumstances. About the only things that might have scared the community more were major security breaches and novel new chemical weapons falling into the hands of enemy forces, and the work of the long-vanished Dr. Newgate once again checked every box. If word of this got out, it wouldn't be just the New York office at stake—the entirety of UNCLE could be brought down by association. THRUSH wouldn't even need real stockpiles of agent FY-104—the threat alone could bring the world to its knees. The future of all western civilisation might well depend on what UNCLE did next.
Long before the medical staff had even begun to assess the scale of the disaster, one contingency measure was already clear: no-one could ever be allowed to know. Not THRUSH, not UNCLE's own foreign allies, and absolutely not the general public. The world must be assured that UNCLE remained a competent, respectable, and above all, heterosexual body of men (and some women), at all costs. And to ensure the world was left in no doubt on this score, it was now the solemn duty of every able-bodied man still employed under their auspices to take full advantage of every opportunity to demonstrate that this was so.
For Illya Kuryakin—then only lately transferred from Europe, and more or less immune by nature to any great anxiety that he could have left the office post-exposure very much less heterosexual than he'd ever been to begin with—the whole fiasco was privately, outrageously funny. At worst, a development like this could hardly make it any harder for him to blend in at his new office. It ceased to be quite as funny once it had become apparent that damage control measures were unlikely to be rescinded even a year or more after the fact, and lost all remaining amusement value around the point when not one but both of UNCLE's first two attempts to assign him a regular partner ended within a month, with the other man asking to be reassigned, solely on the basis that he found Illya, quote, 'too distracting' to work with effectively.
The upside of this rapid shuffling of assignments was that it eventually led to his being assigned to work with Napoleon Solo—a man willing and eager to cover for all his partner's shortcomings, and perhaps even fill the entire department quota single-handedly if necessary.
The downside was that it led Illya to being assigned to work with Napoleon Solo, a man apparently willing and eager to fill the entire department quota single-handedly.
And there, for Illya Kuryakin, the real troubles began.