by Paul Kenyon
"What's going on?" Wharton hissed from his hiding place.
"Almost there, man. Just hold on."
The prow of the launch hit the spit with a jolt. Paul and Skytop vaulted over the side, splashing in the shallow water, and hauled on the thick manila hawser until the craft was beached.
"Better check to make sure your feet are still there," Paul said.
"What do you mean?"
Paul grinned wickedly, white teeth flashing in the dark. "There are supposed to be piranha fish in this river. That's why they call it Rio Das Mortes."
Skytop grunted. "There'll be plenty of fish food — German style — floating down this river after we finish blowing a hole in Heidrig's wall." He squinted at the stars, estimating the time. "The Baroness should have the layout of the grounds by now. After Eric lays down the string of transceivers, we can make contact."
At the end of the spit of sand was a tumbledown thatch hut on stilts. A holed canoe was half sunk in the water in front of it. The hut had obviously been abandoned for years.
"That's our base for tonight," Paul said. "After we offload the jeeps and equipment, we can set up camp deeper in the jungle. I don't like being this close to the river. Too much traffic."
They tied the hawser to the thick bole of a palm tree and started toward the launch. They had taken no more than a step or two when they were caught in a blinding circle of light.
"Para onde vai?" demanded a tough, official-sounding voice.
They turned around, shielding their eyes against the light. Footsteps approached them. Behind the light, as their eyes adjusted to it, they could see the blurred forms of two men with pistols.
"Damn, a police patrol," Paul whispered. His body went into a servile crouch, imitating the posture of a poor Brazilian Preto. An ingratiating smile appeared on his lips.
"Não percebo," he said. "I don't understand."
A meaty list flew out of the darkness and caught Paul on the side of the face. He staggered, fell to his knees.
"Answer me, scum!" the policeman said. "What are you doing here in the middle of the night?"
"Não percebo, não percebo!" Paul cringed, playing his part.
The flashlight was pointed at Paul now, and Skytop could make out the two policemen: burly men in dark uniforms, carrying long-barreled revolvers that looked like .38s.
"He doesn't understand," one of the policemen said sarcastically. "Perhaps he'll understand when we take him back to headquarters and attach the electrodes to his cock, eh?"
The other policeman laughed heartily. "And some broken glass up his ass." He turned to Paul. "That's what we do to terrorists. Admit it. The two of you belong to the Liberation Movement, don't you?"
"No, no!" Paul cried.
They turned their attention to Skytop. "What have you got in that boat? Explosives? Answer!"
Skytop stood mute. His Portuguese wasn't as fluent as Paul's. The minute he opened his mouth, he'd give himself away.
"Well?" the policeman demanded. "What are you hiding?"
"He's hiding me," a woman's voice said from the darkness.
The policemen whirled. The flashlight beam played over the launch. A tarpaulin stirred, and Yvette stood up, mother naked.
They stared at her, transfixed, for about three seconds.
Three seconds was all the time Skytop needed to slit their throats.
Chapter 11
Sumo perched on the ridge of the roof, his sneakered feet gripping the tiles on either side. Above him the fabric of night was threadbare with stars. If anybody happened to look up, there was a chance they might notice his black-clad form occluding the starshine. It was a chance he had to take. He couldn't afford to wait for a cloudy night. This was the one night that he could be sure Heidrig would be away.
He took a cautious look around to orient himself, crouching low along the peak. Stretching entirely around the estate was an enormous parallelogram of a concrete wall. There were guard towers and a high inner fence of metal mesh; the dogs roamed freely along the run between the inner and outer walls. There was a blind spot at the northwest corner of the parallelogram. Instead of a guard tower, there was a huge fenced area outside the wall, an artificial lagoon enclosed by it. Heidrig had probably figured that the water and the fence made an extra line of defense there.
One foot slipped on the tile and a pebble-sized fragment rolled noisily down the roof. Sumo held his breath and froze. A shuttered door opened below, spilling light into the formal garden. A woman's voice said uncertainly, "Johann?" Sumo recognized the voice. It belonged to a blond Brunhilde-sized woman named Traude, married to a bald, paunchy functionary who was addressed as Brigadeführer Blomberg. He had listened to Traude's chatter, a polite Japanese smile on his face, through a large formal dinner the night before.
"Traude?" a man whispered from the garden. It wasn't Blomberg's voice. Traude slipped out, closing the shutters behind her. The splash of light had dimmed Sumo's night vision, but he could see the woman, a large figure in a billowing nightgown and a single heavy braid hanging halfway down her back, as she jogged across the garden. Presently there was the unmistakable sound of rhythmic panting and little suppressed moans.
Sumo relaxed. There was no danger of being noticed by Traude or her industriously occupied Johann. He continued his survey of the layout.
The key to it all was in the northeast corner of the enclosure, between the kennels and the row of wooden barracks. It was a cluster of laboratories and workshops, concrete block construction and surrounded by its own barbed wire-topped fence.
Heidrig had taken Penelope inside for a tour, of course, showing her only what he wanted her to see. She was a precise observer, and she had described what she'd seen to Sumo. Computers, explained by Heidrig as handling the data processing for his diverse business enterprises. Metallurgical laboratories where they must be working the lithium that NSA had traced here. And outside, in the loading depot, a shipment of cryogenic containers that, Sumo was sure, held liquid hydrogen. There was an optical workshop, where solemn men lined at benches explained in boring detail to Penelope about lens grinding techniques. But no indication of what the lenses were used for. Heidrig had inferred he was going into the camera business.
And there had been a lapidary's workshop. Penelope recognized it right away; she knew more about gemstones than Sumo did. Working in it was a funny fat little man named van Voort, a Dutchman who lived in the big fazenda house instead of the scattered guest houses inside the walls. He was a diamond cutter, and Penelope had had a conversation about jewelry with him at one of Heidrig's formal dinners.
And dominating the whole complex, there was a forty-foot concrete dome that could only be a nuclear reactor.
How to put it all together? Sumo needed a key. If he couldn't get it in the laboratories, he was going to have to look for it in Heidrig's quarters.
He'd told Penelope he needed the chance, and she had worked on Heidrig for three days. Sumo chuckled at the memory. It had been a virtuoso display of petulance, such as only the Baroness was capable of:
"Wilhelm, I'm so bored! I've got to get out of this place or I'll go mad!"
"But my dear, we were going to go riding today."
"I've ridden around that silly bridle path until I know every turn. And it isn't very nice having those guard towers hovering over you! It's like riding inside a concentration camp."
"We'll go outside to ride. There's a trail along the river."
"And be eaten alive by mosquitoes? No thank you! Wilhelm, darling, why don't you take me to lunch in that town you told me about?"
"But Penelope, it's three hours by motor launch. We'd have to stay overnight. The accommodations there are very primitive. Besides, lunch would be disappointing. There's nothing to compare with the chef I have here."
He'd given in finally, of course. No man could have withstood the kind of performance Penelope was putting on.
Sumo tested the nylon line. It held firm, anchored to the bed in his own roo
m on the other side of the house. He couldn't use the Spyder this time: too many corners to go around.
With a last nervous look at the watchtowers in the distance, Sumo lowered himself down the line. He passed the lighted square of a garret window. Inside he caught a glimpse of a pigeon-plump housemaid, still wearing her starched cap and nothing else, sitting astride Hermann the butler. Both were shiny with sweat, but the action evidently had just finished. Sumo continued easing himself down the line, thinking, everybody in the fazenda must be doing that tonight except me.
Heidrig's window was shuttered and barred from the inside. It was at the end of the second-floor gallery, with a little balcony of its own.
Sumo rattled the shutters once to find the precise point of resistance that marked the latch. He was going to have to count on the fact that shutter construction and latch arrangement of all the second-floor bedrooms were identical; he had studied Penelope's in detail.
He took the little powerful magnet out of his pocket. It was part of NSA's standard lockpicking kit, and capable of lifting five pounds of ferrous metal. It almost jumped out of his hand when he brought it to the point he had located on the wooden shutter. Carefully he pushed it up the frame of the shutter. Resistance ended too soon. The latch was still in place. Sumo frowned. There must be a metal lip in the latch. Praying that it didn't protrude too much, and that its edge was rounded by age and use, he tried again. At the point where he judged the lip to be, he worked the magnet back and forth, then straight up. This time it worked. Sumo opened the shutter a crack, reached around for the bar, and put the magnet back in his pocket.
The inner window was locked, too. Sumo reached into the case strapped to his side and took a sheet of adhesive paper out of it. He peeled the protective layer off, slapped it against the little pane in front of the lock and smashed the glass inward. The square of paper with the glass fragments stuck to it fell inside the room. He'd have to search for stray fragments before he left. Then he'd have to replace the pane with the pane he'd filched from his own window, wrapped between two pieces of cardboard in the case at his side; he'd be suffering from mosquitoes tonight. Then he'd have to age the putty with the little paint kit he also carried.
Heidrig's bedroom was big and gloomy. Sumo flicked his penlight around the room and saw a Teutonic clutter that included stagshorns, Black Forest woodcarvings, artificial flowers — when real ones grew in such profusion outside, twin busts of Beethoven and Wagner, a sausage-tight armchair with an antimacassar, a medieval tapestry that already was showing signs of jungle mildew. And mirrors: a big heavy-framed one over the walnut dresser, a three-paneled one near the closet, a huge one in the ceiling, whose angle could be strategically changed by hauling on braided pulls.
Sumo made only a cursory search of the bedroom itself. Penelope had been here in the daytime, under Heidrig's watchful eye.
Heidrig had not yet approached her as a woman, other than a little kissing and fondling: "cheap feels," Penelope had called it. He was evidently proceeding on some kind of a rigid Teutonic timetable of his own. He would take her to bed after the prescribed number of glasses of champagne, the prescribed number of quotations from Schiller, the prescribed amount of foggy philosophizing.
It was as he thought. The drawers of the dresser and the big dark chifforobe contained nothing more interesting than Heidrig's wardrobe and some assorted articles of sexual fetishism.
Sumo was more interested in what was hidden in the adjoining room at the rear of Heidrig's quarters. The door was always locked, Penelope had told him. And testing Heidrig's reactions with the sophisticated tricks of body language they'd taught her at NSA, she'd noticed that he became tense whenever she passed too closely to the door; actually flinched once when she'd casually rested a hand on the knob.
The door was triple locked, and there was an alarm system. Sumo rummaged in his kit. It took him thirty seconds to pick the first lock, a minute and a half to pick the second and no time at all to slip the third with a square of plastic. The alarm system would have been a good one in the 1940s, but Sumo put it to sleep with a domino-sized induction device that set up a feedback current; there would be no sign that the system ever had been tampered with.
He pushed the door open and stepped inside.
It was a shrine.
On the far wall, draped on either side by red Nazi flags, was a life-size oil portrait of Adolph Hitler. It was the centerpiece of a kitsch display that included swastika pennants, an SS officer's dagger and jeweled scabbard, an assortment of death's head badges, an SS standard bearer's gorget complete with eagle, swastika and the double lightning bolt.
Sumo flashed his light around. There was more. Glass cases and pedestals displaying memorabilia. A Jingling Johnny used by SS military bands, with little dangling metal swastikas between the bells, and an emblem that read "Danzig." There were helmets and peaked caps and buttons and armbands and musty uniforms on wire racks. A side wall was completely covered with framed photographs. One of them showed Hitler flanked by SS bodyguards and aides. Sumo moved his flashlight over the faded faces. One of them was a youthful Heidrig; he couldn't have been more than twenty-five years old. All of the figures had signed their names and written an inscription to Heidrig, including Hitler.
Sumo smothered his despair. Had he taken this risk to find out that Heidrig kept a locked room full of Nazi souvenirs?
There was a desk to one side with a gooseneck lamp and stacks of papers weighted down by lumps of metal. So Heidrig came here to work sometimes? Probably found his inspiration surrounded by these relics of his past. Sumo moved, quiet as a cat, over to the desk to take a look.
His light moved over a page at the top of the pile. "Unsere Ehre heisst Treue…" it began in Heidrig's spiky script. He was writing his memoirs. Noting carefully exactly where the silvery paperweight lay, Sumo lifted it to get a look at the second page.
And promptly forgot all about Heidrig's memoirs.
The metal was unexpectedly light. And it was soft, cheesy. It had to be lithium.
Sumo carefully replaced it, smoothing out the marks his fingers had made. So Heidrig was concerned with the future as well as the past in this room! The lithium was some kind of symbol to him — a promise to the dead Führer whose picture hung on the wall. There had to be more.
He found it behind the picture itself — a round wall safe of ancient vintage that took him less than five minutes to open. Inside was a tube-shaped device, about the size of his forearm, that he immediately recognized as a laser assembly. Evidently it was so important to Heidrig that he kept it locked up in his living quarters instead of the laboratory. Sumo dug his Minox out of his trouser pocket and began snapping pictures of it, using the gooseneck lamp as a light source. He stripped it down as much as he dared and took the more important measurements with a micrometer.
There was something puzzling about the laser tube: a mysterious mounting within the tube itself, Sumo decided. It was a three-pronged affair, and the element it was meant to hold was obviously missing. There were three reduction gears — fine tuning controls — that positioned the missing element precisely in all three dimensions.
Just how precisely was indicated by the tiny terminal, about the diameter of a cigarette end, wired into the mounting. It was meant for a shoebox-size computer that had one program wired into it: tell the man who's turning the reduction gears when he'd got it right.
Sumo shrugged. It was beyond him. The facts wouldn't go together. He'd have to give them to the theoretical physicists and let them try. They were only a few thousand miles away, beyond the barbed wire and the twelve-foot wall and the Brazilian jungle.
He put the reassembled laser tube back into the safe. Something else caught his eye. It was a velvet jewel case. Sumo drew it out and opened it. It contained a single diamond — a huge blue-white stone that should have been breathtaking, except that it didn't sparkle the way cut diamonds are supposed to.
Sumo was running out of time, but he was curious enough
to try to figure out why. The diamond had started out in the traditional brilliant-cut shape. But then some fool had cut in a lot of extra facets. Sumo counted them — sixteen facets that shouldn't be there. Sumo shrugged and put the jewel case back in the safe. He'd tell Penelope about it. She knew more about diamonds than he did; she'd bought enough of them.
Sumo worked his way backwards out of Heidrig's quarters, going through the checklist he'd automatically imprinted on his brain coming in. Everything he'd touched back in its exact position. Alarm system reactivated. Three locks locked, with no telltale scratches on them. Stray fragments of glass swept up and put in his case for disposal later. New pane puttied into the window, and the putty colored to match the other panes. He paused before going out the window. There was someone down below smoking a cigarette. The smoker finally was driven back inside by the mosquitoes. Sumo swung out the window and latched the shutter from outside with his little magnet. There was nothing he could do about the inside lock except to set it to within a hair of the locked position and hope that Heidrig wouldn't notice. He scrambled up the nylon line, looped it around a projection on the roof, slid down the doubled line into his own window and pulled the line back in after him.
* * *
Penelope smiled brilliantly at Heidrig. "I'm having a marvelous time, Wilhelm," she said. He beamed at her. She was being charming, even affectionate, quite unlike her bitchy self of the past three days. It was his reward for taking her on the expedition to Queimadura. It kept him from being restless, from cutting the expedition short.
She was quite bare in a halter-top white muslin dress whose upper architecture seemed nothing more than a couple of crisscrossed bandannas. That was part of his reward, too.
Heidrig sweated beside her in a white silk suit and straw hat. The dusty streets of Queimadura had noticeably darkened his trouser cuffs.
He stopped with good-humored stubbornness. Ten feet behind them, his two servants stopped, too. They were laden with the packages Penelope had acquired during the morning's shopping.