by Paul Kenyon
The last two digits kept changing as she watched, flashing the seconds. She counted under her breath.
"You're alive, darling," she said. "A little too alive. Your pulse is racing."
"Is it any wonder?" He ran his eyes down her naked body and reached for a breast. He ran the ball of his thumb across her nipple. It surged erect almost instantly. He squeezed the breast. The adhesive and gauze was rough against the tender flesh.
"Careful, darling. That's the bruised one."
He laughed. "We're a pair, aren't we?"
"We'll manage."
She finished up by spraying anesthetic on his torn and raw elbows, taping thick gauze pads over them.
He burst into laughter. "One of the male's most important accessory organs, the elbow."
She rolled him a joint from the little silver box by the bedside, and took a couple of long drags herself before passing it over. It was good stuff, and it didn't take very long. There was a nice floating sensation, and all her aches and pains were outside her body, where she could inspect them without feeling them.
Basil was feeling that way too. "A balm for the embalmed," he said, a smile wreathing his face.
"A balm for the bombed embalmed," she said, running an oily hand down his chest and belly, and grasping his tumid shaft.
"That's not anesthetic?" he said, alarmed.
"No, darling, it's antiseptic."
She rubbed some of the jellied stuff on his penis, making it slick. He reciprocated by thrusting a bandaged mitt between her legs. A blunt finger probed.
"We shan't need any lubrication, love," he said. "I see you're doing quite well on your own."
She groaned with a sudden rush of pleasure. He probed deeper, the taped knuckles scraping against her outer labia. She put a warning hand on his wrist.
He withdrew his hand and held it up to the light. He stared critically at his extended middle finger. "You need about a quart."
Unaccountably, she burst into tears. It was the pot, exaggerating the swing of her moods.
Basil put a clumsy hand around her shoulders. "I know what you must be thinking, Penny," he said. "When you pulled me out of those flames, I was remembering poor Reynaldo too. Wonderful chap! Superb driver!"
She turned to him fiercely. "I couldn't get there in time to save Reynaldo. Saving you paid off part of the debt. Winning would have paid off more. Now don't make me regret it. Don't be tedious."
She flung herself across his body, heedless of the twinges of pain she was causing them both, and fastened her lips on his. They kissed thirstily, and Penelope signaled his lips with her tongue. He opened them obediently and her tongue darted between them, exploring. His breath was harsh from the grass, his tongue hot and muscular. He had his mitt between her legs again, cradling her raised mons with the heel of his hand.
Basil was right. She was well lubricated already. Her loins had flowered, oozing anticipation, even before he'd touched her. She knew what had done it. It was the race. It had always been that way with Reynaldo: the hot excitement, the danger, the thrill of high speed, the hours of living crowded into split seconds, had brought them both to fever pitch on race days. And today, the crash; the brush with death that had told every cell of her body that life was more precious. She had a lot of adrenalin to use up.
She took his penis in her hand and felt him shudder all over. She caressed it lovingly, feeling the pulsing warmth in her fist. Her thumb pressed into the bulbous tip. There was a single sticky drop there, a jewel of intent. She ran the ball of her thumb around the acorn tip. He groaned.
His own thumb was on her clitoris, teasing it outward in a lazy, voluptuous stroke. Her legs vibrated. There was a tingling shock at the base of her spine. He dipped a finger inside her, then another. Thank goodness the doctor had left them unbandaged! The fingers explored the hot slippery cavern of her vagina with a circular motion. She felt something else. The fingers were spreading. He was making a V sign. The sensation was indescribably delectable. She shivered.
He twisted the fingers around a half circle. They slid easily within the oiled core of her.
His thumb grew busier. The knurl of her clitoris was distended to bursting. Her entire body felt flushed.
Panting, she raised herself on one elbow, still gripping his tool. Her breasts dangled in front of his face. He craned his neck and sampled them with his mouth. Her fingers tightened convulsively on his cock.
"Aaah…" he gasped. He went rigid for a moment, then mastered himself with a helpful squeeze from Penelope.
He'd found the raised cone of a nipple now. His lips were around it, tight as a rubber ring. He moved it in and out of his mouth, the tip of his tongue caressing its peak. Penelope's vision blurred.
Her hand, trailing behind her, manipulated his swollen prong. She put it through four gears. His body vibrated like a racing car.
"This can't go on, love," he wheezed. "We're not even at the starting grid."
She was reluctant to abuse his burned back by getting on him with all her weight. "How are your elbows?" she gasped.
"Bloody sore."
She eased him to a half sitting position against the headboard, putting two of the Hôtel de Paris bolsters behind his neck and at the small of his back. She clambered on top of his thighs, her legs splayed out in a vee, resting on the headboard at either side of his hips. It was a little like sitting in a racing car. His long rod stuck up in front of her like a gearshift. She eased back a little and bent it forward so that its knob rested against her cleft. She moved it up and down against her clitoris, tears of ecstasy running down her face.
The crowd roared. The voices surged in through the big glass windows of Penelope's suite, from the terrace below where the quality was watching the race. More of the rich and the famous were leaning out their own windows, enlivening the façade of the Hôtel de Paris, taking pictures and placing bets with their friends.
Penelope leaned over and turned on the television set next to the bed.
Basil was making blind, automatic pelvic motions, trying to push his way all the way inside her. She held him steady.
"Elle est dans le fossé!" came the excited voice of the announcer.
"Not yet, darling," the Baroness said.
She lifted her bottom a little and dipped the end of his mast just inside her crevasse. She moved the spongy head around the edges, not letting it penetrate too far yet, rubbing it against her clitoris at each circuit.
Basil gave a hoarse bellow. His body strained. She continued to hold firmly onto his shaft.
"Tenez à droite! Tenez à droite!" the announcer shouted. Out of the corner of her eye, Penelope could see the bright little cars flashing across the screen.
"For pity's sake, darling!" Basil moaned. "I'm at the end of my tether!"
She pushed forward. He parted his legs enough to let her drop to a proper alignment, his hands on her hips to position her. His swollen baton slithered effortlessly inside her, all the way. At once she hooked her toes into the bars of the headboard for leverage and began riding his stick.
Basil gasped in rhythm to her movements. Penelope, breathing harshly, felt the taped hands on her hips, the long stem waggling inside her in reciprocating motion, like a piston.
"Matra au milieu," the announcer said. The little cars zoomed at the periphery of her vision.
She raised herself up and down, feeling the hot piston slide in and out, her eyes fixed on the instrument panel of his chest with its blind male paps like switches. He heaved in time to her thrusts, contributing an interesting sidewise wobble. His pubic ridge massaged her distended vestibule as he worked away inside. It was total ecstasy.
Outside, the crowd gasped. "Faites attention!" the announcer said.
A big warm wet sensation was starting to take shape inside her. She pumped away more quickly. With Basil bracing her hips, she leaned all the way backward, her long black hair trailing on his toes, her breasts splashed across her torso like eggs, quivering with her exertions. The p
osition brought his billy hard against the forward edge of her scabbard. She squirmed with delight.
He stretched his hands towards her and she took them. He pulled her forward again. Her breasts swung forward and bumped his bony chest. He put a brawny pair of arms around her and worked away some more, pushing at the base of her spine with a big gauze-padded hand. She bit his neck.
"Deuxiène vitesse ici," the announcer said. On the color screen, the little cars growled and buzzed.
It was coming closer now, a huge, intolerably delicious sensation. Penelope moved the piston of flesh in longer strokes inside her. A hot little bubble burst. She clamped down on the others that were struggling to rise through the thick fluid of her ecstasy, willing them to wait, to combine into that one enormous red bubble that would fill the universe of her senses. She gripped Basil's shoulders for dear life, feeling his body shuddering against her breasts and belly. A roaring filled her ears: the engine noises and the crowd and the vast rumbling of her nerves and brain. Basil thrust frantically into her, faster and faster, panting.
The bubbles grew and combined. The urgency was too much to bear. She pushed him into her as far as she could and held him there, her teeth clenched. On the screen the cars were crossing the finish line. The big red bubble grew distended and burst. It flooded her insides with a hot blessedness. She gave a great shuddering cry. The sweet convulsion seemed to go on forever. It was a big one, one of the biggest. She came down slowly from it, in diminishing tremors. Her entire body was flushed and covered with moisture. She gave a little wriggle, and there was a whole little string of new explosions.
She arched her spine and stretched, Basil's cock still hard inside her. He was lying back like a dead man, his mouth hanging open, gasping for air. His face was the color of brick. Gradually it subsided toward normal.
"C'est fini," the announcer was saying. "Le vainqueur…"
"What in heaven's name did you do to me, Baroness?" Basil said.
"I gave you a race, darling."
"Who won?"
"I think we crossed the finish line together."
She lifted herself off his stem, cupping a hand under herself to catch his spilled juices. On the television, the announcer was reviewing the day's events, talking about the accident that had taken Basil Quarles and the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini out of the race.
She strode naked to the big windows and looked out through the curtains. People were spilling out onto the roadway now, crowding around the spent little cars. There was activity in the reviewing box; she could see a cluster of officials around Grace's powder-blue suit and Rainier's correctly dark one. The band was playing again.
She turned to Basil. "How do you feel?"
"Bit sore, that's all."
"Sorry about the accident?"
"Best thing that ever happened to me. Baroness…"
"Yes?"
"Think we might try for a second round?"
She was about to say yes when the answer came for her.
There was a tingling sensation in her wrist, and she knew that, somewhere in space, floating hundreds of miles above Europe, MESTAR had hurled an electronic thunderbolt at her.
She sighed. They picked the most inconvenient moments.
"What about it?" Basil said.
She pressed the stem of her watch. A luminous tracing appeared on the tiny blank screen.
It was a picture.
A picture of a human skull.
Penelope stared at it, startled. There never had been anything like that before. The most urgent code was Code Sigma: a crooked M lying on its side. And that one was reserved for impending nuclear war or similar disasters involving possible death to millions.
And then she remembered. The skull signal had been programmed into MESTAR's electronic brain as an expression of the ultimate disaster. The unthinkable. The passing of all life on earth. They'd briefed her on it once, long ago, just in passing. And they'd been apologetic. It was silly, of course, they'd said, but just in case of the theoretical possibility…
And here it was. Not theoretical any longer.
"Well?" Basil said.
She pressed the stem to wipe the little screen. Planes of polarization rotated. MESTAR's electronic trigger scattered light across the face of her wristwatch. Letters and numbers appeared.
DD49
DC5
M
Doomsday was only 49 hours away. She was required in Washington in five hours. In masquerade. Not with a cover story. With an uncrackable disguise. That meant that Coin was going to be exposed to view.
Washington was over 4000 miles away. She had to get there in five hours. It was going to take a bit of doing.
"Sorry, darling," she told Basil. "I've got an appointment."
* * *
Ten minutes later, she was driving like a demon toward the airport at Nice. Her private Learjet 25C was hangared there; she'd flown it from Rome for the race. Not that it would do her any good. With a cruising speed of 507 mph, it would take her almost eight hours to get to Washington, even if there were time to install the special fuel tanks for extra range.
No, she couldn't use the Learjet.
She had to go supersonic.
There was a Concorde 02 at Nice. She'd seen it on the runway the previous day. She made a few telephone calls from the drawing room while Basil snored away.
"C'est impossible!" the Minister had sputtered.
But nothing was impossible for the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. She'd made a few more calls. When she was finished, the Concorde was hers. She was probably going to have to sleep with two French cabinet ministers and an official of Aerospatiale. But for the time being, she had her wings.
Dan Wharton met her at the gate. "Paul and Sumo are in the plane, checking it out," he said. "It was already fueled, waiting for takeoff. They had to cancel out a VIP charter flight of a hundred passengers. They're milling around, making phone calls to their governments. There's going to be a few diplomatic incidents." He looked at her with his gray eyes. "How in hell did you do it?"
Wharton was a big, rugged man with sandy hair and a broken nose. He had a face like a granite outcropping and a body like a bear. His hands became gentle only when he was stripping an automatic weapon or setting a plastic explosive charge. He was the Baroness' armorer, among other things. He also happened to be a member of the Social Register. They hadn't disowned him yet.
"Get in," she said.
He clambered into the Triumph Spitfire's passenger seat, and she drove it down the runway.
The Concorde was waiting for her, a big bird with a bent beak — the swing-down nose section they'd designed into it. The illusion of a giant hawk was uncanny. She shivered. She was going to have to fly that thing.
There was a knot of officials from Aerospatiale and British Aircraft Corporation clustered under the wing, looking worried. One of them stepped forward: a Britisher with a ruddy mustache.
"Baroness?" he said.
"I'm in a hurry," she said. "Am I cleared for takeoff?"
He frowned. "This is absolutely unprecedented," he said. "This aircraft is one of the first production models. It hasn't been flown commercially yet. The consortium…"
"Yes, yes," she said impatiently. "I've already been through all that."
He frowned again. "You're qualified for jets, I'm told."
"You're not going to ask to see my pilot's license, darling?"
The consortium man flushed. "Supersonic flight is quite another thing."
"I've flown the SR-71, darling," she said sweetly. "That's the one the United States calls the Blackbird. One of the privileges one has when one has friends in Washington. It flies at above Mach Three. I understand that your sweet little bird flies at about Mach Two point Two."
A little sweating Frenchman stepped forward. "Le bang sonique…" he began.
"Darling, I know all about le bang sonique" she said, pushing past the clustered officials, Wharton at her heels.
Another offi
cial stepped in front of her. "Baroness," he said unctuously, "we have managed to provide you with a flight crew at short notice — co-pilot, navigator, flight engineer…"
"I've my own crew, thank you."
His lip trembled. "Madame, that is a fifty-million-dollar aircraft!"
She patted his cheek. "If anything happens, I'll write you a check."
She gave them a wave and a dazzling smile before she closed the door in their faces. They scrambled in panic when she cut in the afterburners. Some maintenance man had the wit to wheel the steps away, and she slapped the throttles all the way up.
When they were in the air, wheeling over the blue Mediterranean, Sumo lowered his headphones and turned to her.
"The Concorde's banned from National Airport in Washington, you know," he said. "No supersonic flights."
"Call John Farnsworth through the scrambler, Tommy. You can bounce a signal off MESTAR IV." She looked at her watch, telling time again. "Tell John he has three and a half hours to get us landing permission."
Sumo nodded happily and started to unpack the special electronic equipment he'd brought abroad with him.
The Baroness turned to Wharton. "Why don't you go back to the cabin and see what you can find us for lunch, Dan?"
He poked his head back in a few minutes later. "One hundred and twelve servings of blanquette de veau, still warming up, from Le Grand Véfour in Paris."
She laughed. "Fetch four of them, will you, darling? And some chilled wine."
Sumo was tapping out his signal. "John's going to have fits," he said. "And so is the FAA."
"Tell him we'll come in subsonic," she said. "If there's any trouble, a call to the FAA from the White House ought to do it."
She eased the throttles forward. The big airliner shuddered for a moment as it approached Mach One. Through the windscreen she could see the Concorde's beak, no longer bent, but thrust forward for supersonic flight.
They were over Gibraltar. The gray Atlantic stretched endlessly ahead of her. With a shiver of joy, the Baroness crashed through the sound barrier.
Chapter 4