by Paul Kenyon
Then there was a pale shape on the path ahead of him, hands on hips. "Gute nacht," a soft voice said. Willi prodded him helpfully forward.
A face swam into view, pallid by starlight. It was Horst. Van Voort stopped, suddenly sober. He knew where he was now. This wasn't the motor pool.
"Willi," he said tremulously, "I have decided not to go to Queimadura. Please take me back to the house."
Willi was somewhere behind him. He started to turn his head, but Horst's hands came up, palms flat against van Voort's chest. Willi was on his hands and knees behind him, a childish prank. Horst pushed, hard. He laughed, a mischievous boy's laugh. "Guten Tod," he said. Van Voort tumbled over Willi's back into the water.
He thrashed around, then went under. The water became very busy around him. Standing at the edge of the lagoon, Horst and Willi saw a hand come up once. It wasn't van Voort's fat little hand at all. It was the chalky hand of a skeleton.
* * *
There was someone just outside her door, trying not to be heard. Penelope sat at the dressing table, buffing her nails, doing her best to act normal for the television camera hidden in the fake ceiling beam. But she took a deep breath, oxygenating her body in a Kung-Fu breathing exercise, and made all her muscles ready.
There was the faint whisper of a square of plastic being inserted between the lock and the door jamb, and the knob turned silently. The door opened and Tom Sumo slipped inside, putting a finger to his lips.
Penelope went on buffing her nails, watching Sumo in the mirror. He moved just outside the range of the television lens; he had helped her mark out its exact field of view the first night of their stay. The microphone pickup, fortunately, was in the far wall, in a blind spot behind the camera. He moved familiarly to the framed Heinrich Hoffman religious print on the wall and lifted it off its hook. The hook was a spike mike, very obvious. There weren't any others; Heidrig's surveillance techniques were hopelessly old-fashioned.
With an ease born of practice, Sumo neutralized the mike and immediately patched in the little tape recorder he had brought with him. The recorder was now feeding a carefully matched level of background into the mike. There was a three-second delay so that Penelope would have a chance to produce an appropriate noise-making action now and then to make it all look real.
"You can talk now," he said.
Penelope inspected her nails and blew on them. "What have you got, Tommy?" she said without moving her lips. The sound of a chair scraping came from the little recorder, and she moved the stool closer to the dressing table and examined her eyebrows in the mirror.
"Key sent the answer," he grinned. "Right over Radio Nacional do Brasilia, 1210 kilocycles. I'd like to shake the hand of the agent who figured out how to feed into their antenna. There was a beautiful burst of static right in the middle of a hit song by Elza Soares."
"Go on," she said.
"It fits what I found in Heidrig's safe, and what I was able to piece together from the information about diamonds I pried out of van Voort last night. Heidrig's found a way to turn a cut diamond into a new kind of laser element — generate a laser beam that's more powerful and more concentrated than has ever been possible before."
"How?" she said from behind still, parted lips. The tape recorder produced the sound of a drawer opening. She waited three seconds, then opened the drawer of the dressing table. She took out a pair of tweezers.
"You brilliant-cut the diamond as usual, then add an extra sixteen facets at mathematically precise angles. You silver all the facets except one, so they act as tiny mirrors. You shoot a beam of violet laser light into the unsilvered facet. The beam bounces around inside the diamond. When it makes the last bounce, it shoots out through the unsilvered facet. Only the laser beam is now incredibly intense."
"How intense?"
"Intense enough to heat a small volume of matter to a temperature of seven hundred million degrees."
"Very interesting." Penelope tweezed an eyebrow. "And if that particular volume of matter happens to contain heavy hydrogen, you've got a thermonuclear reaction. A hydrogen bomb."
"That's right. And that explains the lithium I found in Heidrig's quarters. Lithium combines chemically with any isotope of hydrogen, including heavy hydrogen. It's easy to handle. You don't have to refrigerate it. And you don't have to use an atom bomb as your thermonuclear trigger."
"So Heidrig has a suitcase bomb. One man with a suitcase can blow up a city."
"And worst of all, there's nothing radioactive in the package. No way to detect it when it crosses a border."
Penelope looked grim. "A madman like Heidrig has nothing to lose. He could use his fusion bombs to blackmail a country like Brazil. Maybe blow up the capital as a demonstration. There are right-wing elements in the Brazilian government that would be happy to ally with him. And a big, unassimilated German population, too. Whole German cities — like Blumenau, where three-quarters of the population is German, where Portuguese is hardly spoken. There are German schools for the children, operating with the connivance of the local authorities."
"Today Brazil, tomorrow the world. Is that it?"
"That's what he has in mind. The Fourth Reich. With Brazil as a staging area, he can start using his suitcase bombs to blackmail other countries. Absorb all of South America, turn it into one huge superpower. Then start nibbling away at the rest of the world."
"But Baroness…" He frowned. "How does Heidrig expect to get all those Germans to follow him? He needs a rallying point. A figure with charisma. Germany had Adolph Hitler. Where is the figurehead for Heidrig's Fourth Reich going to come from?"
The Baroness looked solemn. "I don't know, Tommy. But Heidrig is shrewd, even if he is a madman. He has something up his sleeve. Something specific."
"When do we move?"
Penelope reached a decision. "We've got everything we need. Can you steal that diamond out of Heidrig's safe when the time comes?"
"Sure, if he's out of commission."
"He'll be out of commission," she said grimly. "We're going to set up an operation. Wipe this hellhole out. Can you get a message to Dan and Skytop? Tell them to meet me later tonight, about a mile upriver from here where that little tributary branches out?"
He hesitated. "Sure, nothing easier. Eric laid down a line of triggered transceivers between here and Queimadura, eight of them with a range of five miles each. I can send a coded signal that'll hop from one to the other. But that's not the problem. How are you going to get out of here?"
She smiled at herself in the mirror. "With the Spyder."
"That's not what I mean." He gestured toward the hidden television camera. "You're being watched. Or at least checked every few hours. And suppose Heidrig decides to visit you tonight and finds you gone?"
She thought it over. "If anybody's watching me over that thing, it's Heidrig. I'm the Isolde to his Tristan. He isn't going to have a flunky see me in my underwear. I'm going to be on that monitor screen all night" She smiled wickedly. "And I'm going to put on enough of a flesh show to keep him in front of his screen instead of visiting me. Get Inga in here. Tell her to put on a black wig — there are two or three of them in the accessories trunk."
When Sumo understood, he broke into a happy smile. "She'll be here in ten minutes. Tell her to put a hand or something over her lower face whenever she presents more than a one-quarter profile to the lens." He sketched out a diagram in the air. "If she spends a lot of time in this sector, it'll cut off a view of her face whenever she wants to show a full front to the camera."
"A very full front, Tommy darling."
He looked embarrassed. "If I can make a suggestion on holding Heidrig's interest…"
"Please do, darling."
"Judging from what I found in Heidrig's bureau drawers, he's very interested in black lingerie — foundation garments, garter belts, that kind of thing."
She made a wry face. If anyone was watching the television monitor, it might have seemed that she was inspecting the corners of h
er eyes for crows' feet. "Inga will love that — on a tropical night like this. Thank you, Tommy."
He put a finger to his lips and disconnected the tape recorder. The spike mike behind the sentimentalized Hoffman portrait began once again to pick up every sound in the room. Sumo slipped quietly out of the room.
Inga appeared a few minutes later. She was wearing a black wig, and her eyebrows were darkened and shaped to resemble Penelope's. The limited resolution of the little TV camera wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Inga slipped off her robe. She was nude underneath it. She had darkened her nipples with make-up to match Penelope's, and the blond triangle of pubic hair was now black. Penelope nodded her approval. She helped Inga into a black long-line bra with lots of bones; it was the most old-fashioned thing she could think of. A black garter belt went underneath it, attached to nothing. She doubted that Heidrig would stop to puzzle it out. She took off the peignoir she had been wearing all evening and gave it to Inga. The blond girl put in on over the black lingerie: she would have to stretch the performance out for hours.
She had been out of sight of the television camera for less than twenty seconds. She stayed close to the wall, and Inga took her place at the dressing table. Inga picked up a hair brush and began to brush the black wig.
Penelope dressed for action: a no-nonsense bra that held her firmly in place, her hair in a tight chignon, black nylon tights and turtleneck, black gum-soled sneakers, sheer black gloves. A fine black net went over her head and face; it would eliminate reflection and shield her from the vicious night insects.
She nodded to Inga, and the blond girl opened the shutters, as if for a breath of night air. Penelope squeezed through at the far side of the window, just out of range of the camera.
There was no one below. She simply walked down the side of the building, the Spyder clicking out the thread-thin polymer line. When she reached bottom, Inga unhooked the end of the line from the window sill. Penelope thumbed the release on the Spyder's pistol grip. The polymer line flicked instantly into the mouth of the Spyder, like a frog's tongue.
She was in the formal garden. She skirted the pebble-lined fish pools and dove into the shrubbery. She waited and listened.
Someone was breathing stertorously nearby. After a while, a female voice sighed and said, "Johann!"
A male voice answered passionately, "Traude!"
Penelope waited until they were breathing again in quick time, then ran crouching past them. A pair of man's legs, the trousers down around the ankles, stuck out from behind a shrub, between two fat white woman's legs. The woman's feet were in furry bunny slippers. Neither of the two were in a condition to notice anything.
She headed for the west wall, passing lighted windows in the darkness: the guest houses and the servants' quarters. The barracks, thank goodness, were nestled against the east wall, protecting the laboratories. The blind spot Sumo had told her about was in the northwest corner of the estate, protected, Heidrig evidently believed, by the artificial lagoon and the extra wire fence that surrounded it.
She worked her way across the grounds, heading due west under cover of foliage, until she reached the bridle path. She couldn't go any further without alerting the guard dogs who patrolled the fenced run parallel with the concrete outer wall. They often set up a furious barking when they sensed the proximity of any large jungle animal — a jaguar or a tapir — and their barking was always investigated by the armed guards. She had to cross the wall at a point that would get her out of sight within a minute or two after the dogs began their commotion.
She flitted from tree to tree, bush to bush, a black shadow that made no noise. She was squeezed against the trunk of a palm, gathering herself for the next dash, when she heard a sound that made her stiffen.
Men's voices, singing.
There were at least a hundred of them, raised in a joyous chorus of the Treuelied, the SS hymn of loyalty. They were moving closer.
Penelope cursed. It had to be Schleicher, the ridiculous three-stripe Unterscharführer, who made his trainees pick up cartridges with their teeth if they were unfortunate enough to drop them while loading, or do pushups in the sun until they dropped if they were missing a uniform button. He was taking his men on a night march around the grounds.
If she waited here, they'd cut her off before she reached the crossing point Sumo had chosen for her. It had to be here, now.
Now meant now. That's what Wharton had taught her out of his Green Berets training. There was nothing to be gained by hesitation except losing precious seconds of your margin.
Penelope sucked oxygen into her lungs and dashed headlong for the dog run. The Spyder was in her hand before she reached it, her thumb already depressing the right accessory button. Still running, using all the momentum she could gain, she aimed stiff-armed at the top of the concrete wall beyond the dog run. The Spyder's line, pulled by the explosive piton that the button had fed into the firing chamber, hit the wall near its peak, with only an inch to spare. The piton went off with a little muffled crack. Without waiting to see how well it gripped, Penelope ran straight up the mesh of the inner fence, her body almost at right angles to it.
The dogs, big savage Alsatians, were barking, running from all around the perimeter of the estate to the sound of the piton. From the corner of her eye, Penelope caught sight of the big brindle brute of a dog hurling himself down the narrow corridor between the fence and the wall.
One sneakered sole touched the top strand of barbed wire, and her body whipped to the vertical, pulled by the Spyder's rewind spring and her own momentum. With perfect timing, she pushed with her heels and jumped for the top of the wall, a good twelve feet away, and four feet higher than the top of the barbed wire.
Without the Spyder's rewind mechanism, she would have swung downward to the base of the wall, and have to climb straight up, with the dogs already down there, snapping and leaping. But the powerful spring and the forward motion of her jump gave her six feet of grace. Her feet slammed into the wall at the height of a man's head, and she at once began scrambling up the concrete. The big brindle dog leaped into the air, the teeth snapping on empty air a bare quarter-inch from her flesh. The next dog's leap was a foot short, and then she was balanced on the top of the wall, her feet nestled uncomfortably between the shards of broken bottles embedded in the concrete. She bent, and with a quick, hard pull-push, worked the piton out of the concrete. The dogs were going wild down below. She had to get off the top of the wall before the men arrived.
She backed to the edge, her hands finding a spot where she could grip the wall without getting cut, and dropped. Her shoulders were wrenched painfully, and she was dangling at arms' length. She let go and dropped the rest of the way, rolling with the impact when she landed.
She was inside the wire enclosure, the still black water of the artificial lagoon stretching out in front of her. She had crossed the concrete wall too far to the south.
She could hear men's voices on the other side of the wall, milling about. Unterscharführer Schleicher's voice cut through them shrilly, giving orders. A whistle blew.
She knew what was going to happen next. The guards in the north gatehouse would be pounding along the outer perimeter to see what was happening around the corner. And the tower at the southwest corner would switch on its searchlight and begin playing a beam along the stretch of wall she had just crossed. She had two minutes to get across the enclosure and over the final wire fence, and hide herself in the jungle beyond.
There wasn't time to go all the way around the lagoon on that neat gravel path and climb over the wire. She looked at the black water. She'd better swim across.
It was less than fifty feet across the lagoon. An easy swim. She'd just have to get wet, she decided. It wouldn't hurt her.
A night breeze rippled the surface of the water. Penelope balanced on the edge and braced herself for a clean dive that would take her as far toward the center as possible. She inhaled and held her breath.
Then a big
yellow circle of light appeared on the wall and began moving toward her. Penelope teetered on the edge, and just barely managed to keep from going over into the lagoon. The searchlight was playing back and forth as it moved, and if it caught any disturbance on the water's surface, it would circle the lagoon until it caught her. She ran pell-mell, scattering gravel, just ahead of the moving light.
Unexpectedly there was cover. She almost ran into it, a scaffoldlike construction that resembled a gallows. She hit the gravel hard with a shoulder and rolled over and over until she was under it. The searchlight passed over the heavy timbers and rough planks, stray fingers of light reaching down for her. Then it was gone. Penelope risked a peek. The cone of yellow light was moving methodically back and forth in a search grid in front of the concrete wall. The mind that was aiming it was rigid and predictable. She had a couple of minutes before it would be back this way.
She clambered up a diagonal timber, unholstering the Spyder as she went. She was just another night shadow in her black garb, making no noise. She thumbed another piton into the chamber, where its iris bore would catch the end of the line and release a drop of instant-drying epoxy that was capable of supporting an elephant. She fired high, at a branch of a cinchona tree outside the enclosure, and with the Spyder's powerful clutch gaining inches for her, swung in an easy arch over the top strand of wire.
A sharp tug failed to dislodge the piton from the cinchona tree. Penelope cut the thread with the little snicker blade, sacrificing twenty feet of line. There were a couple of hundred more feet on the reel. But she couldn't leave it dangling there; someone might find it in the morning and follow it up to the piton. She held the flame of her cigarette lighter to it, concealing it with her hand. A spark, no more noticeable than a firefly, climbed up the treated line and turned it into ash.