by Paul Kenyon
She bunched the powerful muscles of her calves and did a quick backflip, then a forward cartwheel. She came to rest, hands on hips, her breasts quivering and her long black hair whipping her face. She nodded with satisfaction. The superb instrument that was her body was ready for action.
She dressed quickly: a seamless spandex bra that gave her freedom of action, a soft mohair turtleneck, wisp of bikini bottom, stretch pants, canvas shoes.
There was only one thing missing.
She felt naked without it.
She strode across the afterparty shambles of the apartment, wrinkling her nose at the odor of stale drinks and staler grass. She stopped in front of the huge painting that dominated the drawing room — a priceless Assumption of the Virgin by Tiepolo.
She reached into the narrow slot concealed in the bottom of the massive frame. No one ever looked at the frame; they were always overpowered by the Tiepolo.
It was still there, suspended from a powerful magnet. She drew it out and held it in the palm of her hand, a customized Bernadelli VB, the smallest automatic ever made.
It weighed only nine ounces, measured a bare four and one-eighth inches in length — smaller than a derringer. It was chambered for .25 caliber, not the derringer's .22. The magazine held five rounds.
She'd never needed more than one to kill a man.
Penelope tucked the stubby weapon into her waistband, under the turtleneck. Not much bigger than a cigarette lighter, it didn't even make a bulge.
There was a commotion at the door. Penelope whirled. Two enormous Russian wolfhounds bounded across the room, baying eagerly. Two hundred pounds of dogflesh hit her with a solid smack, sending her staggering.
"Igor! Stasya!" she said with genuine pleasure. She hugged each of them in turn, patted the narrow primitive heads. The two Borzois wagged their tails and smiled, showing their long, wolf-killing teeth.
"I couldn't hold them," Inga said from the doorway. She came across the room, a stunning, big-boned blonde in a white uniform, and unclipped the Borzois' dangling chains. "They could hardly wait to get back from their walk."
"They're excited," Penelope said, lowering her face so the big white dogs could lick it. "They always are, before an operation. They seem to sense something's going on."
"When will the others be here, Baroness?"
Penelope glanced at her watch. "Any minute. I told them to be here at seven."
The last guest had staggered out at five. Penelope had cat-napped for an hour, then showered and had Inga rub her down. She felt no trace of fatigue. The familiar excitement and zest of a new mission had brought her senses keenly alive.
The doorbell rang. The Borzois swung their long heads toward it and growled. Penelope grabbed a double handful of fur to restrain them.
"Get it," she told Inga.
Joe Skytop was the first to arrive. He clumped into the drawing room, a hulking, slab-muscled man with an enormous barrel of a chest. His Cherokee genes showed in the high wide cheekbones, the bent hook of a nose, the bony shelf of his brow. He wore faded jeans, a denim jacket, cowboy boots and carried a Hasselblad and light meter slung from his shoulder. Despite his rough appearance, he had the reputation of being one of the best fashion photographers in the business.
"What's up, Baroness?" he said. "What's this about Brazil?"
"Have a seat, Chief," she said. "Let's wait for the others."
He scowled. "Nobody calls me Chief!" The scowl disappeared and his big ugly face lit up in a smile. "Except the chief."
Penelope laughed. Skytop lowered himself into a fragile eighteenth century Venetian chair which looked as if it might collapse under his weight. He unslung the camera and put it on the floor beside him.
The bell rang again. Inga opened the door and screamed.
A man with a hand grenade crouched there — a slim elegant black with an evil grin on his ebony face. He was already in motion. Before anyone could move, he threw it. It landed in Skytop's lap.
The grenade made a tiny popping sound. A little American flag jumped out as its two halves fell apart.
"You're dead, man," he said to Skytop. "You moved too slow." He turned to Penelope. "You better give him a good workout, Baroness, make 'im cut down on the beer. He's getting soft and lazy."
Inga shook a finger at the black man. "Paul, you scared me half to death! Don't you do that again!"
Paul laughed. "I'm supposed to be the explosives expert, right? I got to keep in practice. Anyway, you can't stay mad at me. I brought Eric."
Eric walked in quietly through the open door, a tall, towheaded Viking with features that were almost too handsome, too perfect. He kissed Inga, then took a seat without a word.
Paul and Eric were the male models who appeared in Skytop's fashion sequences when men were required. They made an eye-catching contrast — black and white — that was the delight of editors. They also happened to be two of Penelope's most useful agents. Paul, besides being an explosives specialist and guerrilla warfare expert, knew just about everything there was to know about motors and transport. Eric, with his European manners and fluent command of eight languages, made an ideal front man, and provided Penelope with a plausible escort when an assignment called for one. He also happened to be a mathematical whiz — a flesh-and-blood computer for the Baroness' team.
Sumo and Wharton arrived together, another study in contrasts. Wharton, a big, rumpled, sandy-haired man who moved with the awkward strength of a grizzly bear, towered over the little, deceptively fragile Japanese.
Dan Wharton's rugged good looks concealed the mind of a first-rate chemist — a career that had been interrupted when he became a Green Beret. He happened to be in the Social Register — a fact that Penelope found extremely useful from time to time. He never swore, never raised his voice, but he'd been the toughest sergeant a lot of GIs had ever served under. His job was handling the logistics.
Tom Sumo was an electronics genius. Give him an old transistor radio to cannibalize and a screwdriver and he'd come up with anything from a pulse monitor to a jammer. He could de-bug a room in sixty seconds. Or bug it. Sumo's parents had come from Osaka. He'd been born in Oakland, California.
Next to ring the bell was a slim, limber black girl with a towering Afro and skin as rich and creamy as milk chocolate. She wore the white pleated skirt and navy jacket she'd been modeling in a fashion layout the day before.
"Sit down, Yvette," Penelope said. "We're almost ready."
Yvette flashed an ivory smile. "You mentioned Brazil, Baroness?" she said in a lilting accent that still had a trace of Port-au-Prince. "Just the right time of year. With Carnival coming up, it'll be groovy."
There was a loud crash. Everybody's head turned. Paul was flat on his back on the floor. Skytop was poised over him, a hand held stiffly over Paul's throat in an arrested karate chop that would have killed him if it had connected.
"You're dead, paleface," Skytop said. "You shouldn't have turned your head to look at Yvette."
"Who you calling paleface, Injun," Paul said indignantly. "You been blown in little pieces. Let me up."
"Not till you take back the bit about my being slow. You never saw me coming. Admit it." Skytop was proud of his expertise in unarmed combat — everything from judo to jukado. One of his jobs was giving instruction to other members of the Baroness' team.
"Let him up, Joe," Penelope said. Reluctantly, Skytop backed off, watching Paul warily in case he made any kind of move. Paul got up and brushed himself off disdainfully.
"Where's Fiona?" Penelope said, looking at her watch. "It's almost seven-thirty."
"That one never wakes up till noon," Inga said.
"Dan, give her a call, will you?" Penelope said. "Nothing will get Fiona out of bed except a male voice."
"And that gets her right back into bed," Eric laughed.
Wharton, his face turning pink, headed for the phone. Before he got there, the doorbell rang.
Fiona walked in, a vision out of Botticelli. She had start
ling red hair, milk-white skin, deep blue eyes. She looked languid and willowy in a clinging turquoise dress that showed small-boned wrists, slender legs. She wasn't as strong as Inga, but she was amazingly agile — a natural acrobat who could bend backward and touch her head to the floor.
"What an ungodly hour for a meeting," she said, stifling a yawn. "Is there any coffee?"
Penelope looked pointedly at her watch. "The hour is thirty minutes godlier than it's supposed to be, Fi. Now sit down and try to stay awake."
Eight pairs of eyes were on her. Penelope moved to the center of the Isfahan rug and sat cross-legged, facing them.
"We've had a call from Key, children," she said. "We're being wound up again. Diamonds and Nazis and Brazil and something that looks as if it might turn into a nuclear bomb."
Sumo looked interested. Wharton looked worried. Fiona looked bored. Penelope stared at her until she was sure she had her attention. Then, Farnsworth's taped words running through her head, she began telling them what they had to know.
* * *
Pieter van Voort was a small round man with a comfortable belly approximately the size and shape of a beach ball. The belly had been put there by several decades of good Dutch beer, gin, ripe kaas, heaping plates of runder-lappen and gekookte aardappelen and other good things to eat and drink. A heavy meal or a glass too many of ninety-proof gin gave his face a tendency to grow red.
His face was getting red now. But not because of food or beer or gin. It was getting red because he was being chewed out.
"The work was not satisfactory," Wilhelm Heidrig was saying, in the icy tone one uses to reprimand a small child, an animal or an idiot. "The instruments showed that photon amplification would have been insufficient if it had been more than a test. Either you bungled the cutting of the stone or you bungled the polishing."
Heidrig, a whipcord-lean man in his sixties, tapped a riding crop against his leg as he spoke. The skin was drawn parchment tight over the bones of his face. The Brazilian sun had given him a fine tan. Standing there in open-necked shirt and immaculately pressed twill slacks, he looked altogether hard and fit and competent. He made van Voort feel older and softer and fatter.
"But Herr Heidrig," van Voort protested. He held a dazzling brilliant-cut diamond up to catch the sunlight. "It was a successful cutting and polishing by any standard. You can see the fire in this gem. It would fetch a small fortune in any jewelry shop."
"Betrunken fool!" Heidrig shouted. "We are not in the business of selling jewelry! You are being paid a small fortune to do a job which so far you have not done."
Van Voort wiped his sweating face with a large handkerchief. "But Herr Heidrig. The difficulties are immense. No one has ever done what you are asking me to do. To brilliandeer a diamond and then cut sixteen additional facets at precise angles dictated by a computer simulation. With an error of not more than a thousandth of a degree. And all this with an ordinary dop and skeif. We have been very close on the last few attempts. You must be patient."
"Patient!" Heidrig exploded. "I am not in the mood to be patient! Time is running out! Listen well, fat pig! If you can do no better, you are of no use to me! I might as well turn you over to Horst, so that he may amuse himself with you!"
Van Voort's red face grew suddenly gray. He felt faint. He groped for a garden chair and sat down in it. By the time he had recovered sufficiently to look up, Heidrig was a hundred feet away, striding erectly toward the riding stables across the compound.
Van Voort had never seen Horst's work. He didn't know whether or not to believe some of the whispered rumors he had heard from servants or from some of the older Germans. But he saw how they all deferred to him. And he had seen Horst's eyes and mouth and the strange expression that sometimes came over his face. That was not a normal man. Not a man to be given to as a plaything.
Sitting in the hot Brazilian sunlight, van Voort shivered.
* * *
Eric, Paul and the three girls had gone. Penelope sat in the study with Skytop, Sumo and Wharton, pondering the contents of the two attaché cases that were open on the desk before them.
"You know, we can't afford to be caught smuggling anything into Brazil these days," she said. "The General's government is very strict."
"Yeah, f hear they torture people and do other discourteous things to them," Skytop said. "You're liable to get your orelhas sliced off if they don't like you."
"I didn't know you knew any Portuguese," Dan Wharton said seriously.
Penelope cut through the banter gently but firmly. "Tom," she said to Sumo, "what have you got?"
The young Japanese reached into one of the attaché cases and took out what looked like a plastic sandal strap. He flexed it back and forth a few times to show that it was normally pliable.
"This was in the last consignment from Fort Meade," he said. "It's a spinoff from the space program. We're the only operational group that's getting it. They want to keep it secret for a while."
"What do you do with it?" Skytop snorted. "Spank the opposition with it till they cry for mercy?"
"It's a co-polymer," Sumo said. "The lab boys aren't saying what that other molecule is. Watch."
He lit a match under the sandal strap, holding it by the buckle end. For a moment nothing happened. Then the strap sprang rigid, like a striking snake. It seemed a little wider, more pointed, where the edges had spread out.
"Feel that point," he said.
Skytop tested it with a fingertip. "Man could get stuck with this," he said.
"How many do you have, Tom?" Penelope said.
"They sent over a half dozen this shipment," Sumo told her. "That's all that exist so far."
"Find some matching vinyl and have a pair of sandals made up for me. And wristwatch straps for yourself, Joe and Dan. What else have you got?"
Sumo fished a leather belt out of the attaché case. "This is the same 'memory plastic' in the large economy size."
"Turns into a sword, does it?" Skytop said.
"Better than that. It becomes a bow with a thirty-pound pull. The bowstring is a long-chain polymer that looks like a nylon thread. I'm having several sewn into a selection of brassieres in your size."
Penelope laughed. "Fantastic, Tommy. I'll feel like Queen of the Amazons when I shoot it Can't you just see the spectacle I'll make of myself?"
Wharton blushed, his face pink with his Puritan blood. Sumo said seriously, "You do not have to remove the brassiere. The end of the thread will protrude just under the left armpit. Just pull on it to draw it out."
"What about arrows?"
Sumo smiled triumphantly. He produced what looked like a lipstick. In a quick gesture he pulled a nest of tubular sections into a short, stubby arrow. Little metal fins sprang out at the base. Sumo locked the tubular sections of the arrow into place by giving each of them a quick half-twist.
There was more in the kit: a string of pearls that included a perfectly matched nacre-coated bead with a cyanide pellet inside; a scrambler in the form of a transistor radio with extra circuits; a selection of buttons which actually were the elements of an ultraminiaturized radio transmitter. There was a dim little corner of the NSA where a group of specialists thought up and made such things. Sumo produced a couple of familiar items: a magnetic lock-picking device; a pair of sneakers that could not be worn because their thick gum soles were an explosive composition.
"This is the new generation of gadgets," Sumo said. "Things that look like other things, and don't have to be buried in jars of cold cream or hidden under the deodorant. The amateur traffic in drugs has made customs officers much too poky in most countries."
"What about the Spyder, Tom?" said Penelope. "We're going to need that. There's a twelve-foot wall around Heidrig's estate."
Sumo shook his head. "Looks too much like a gun. We can't afford to risk smuggling it through Brazilian customs. If Key can't smuggle it in for us with the other weapons, we'll have to do without it."
The Spyder was an ingenious gadget
the NSA's specialists had made for the agent they knew as Coin. It was a pistol-winch that fired a plastic line that was thread thin — the same long-chain polymer used for Sumo's bowstrings — yet having a tensile strength of over a thousand pounds. A powerful spring made of an alloy developed by NSA turned the handle into a free ride of over twenty feet for the person strong enough to hold onto it — enough to scale the tallest walls. For longer, downhill rides, there was a tough, tiny block and tackle in the handle. Penelope had once coasted dizzyingly down the Spyder's thread from a sheer cliff in Yugoslavia to a tree trunk seventy feet below, while the men who were attempting to kill her were trying to figure out a way to get down.
Wharton brought out his contribution. "Black widow spider venom," he said, uncovering a little metal box that contained a dozen tiny splinters of a translucent amber material. "Synthetic, of course. You'd have to milk hundreds of spiders to get the poison in this little collection of needles. One of these little babies has enough concentrated poison to stop a man as fast as a slug from a .45. Massive insult to the nervous system, and all that. Shock him senseless in three-fifths of a second, kill him a couple of ticks later. The needle is a gel that dissolves at body temperatures. The corpse retains enough heat to make it disappear completely in a couple of minutes."
"There's nothing like that at Fort Meade," Penelope said.
"I haven't told NSA. This is for you, Baroness. It's an exclusive."
Wharton's ruggedly handsome face looked at her beseechingly. Penelope knew what this was all about. Wharton had just given her a valentine. He was in love with her. But much as she liked him, it would have been out of the question for her to sleep with any of the agents on her team — Wharton, Skytop, Sumo, Eric, Paul. That kind of involvement could be fatal when your survival depended upon impersonal, efficient interaction. It was hopeless. Wharton knew it was hopeless.
Penelope patted his hand. "Dan, darling, you're a wizard," she said gently. "But how do you deliver it? Isn't it dangerous to handle?"