by Paul Kenyon
It had to be the watch tower.
She'd seen the face of a soldier up there earlier, peering down at the wolves. He hadn't appeared for a while. She hoped he'd stay on the other side of the battlements for at least a minute or two. There was going to be some noise.
She drew the Spyder and aimed it at the top of the watch tower, the pistol-grip warm and comfortable in her hand. She thumbed a piton into the firing chamber. The piton's iris bore gripped the tip of the thread-fine plastic fine and secreted a single drop of instant-drying epoxy that sealed it with a breaking strain of over a thousand pounds.
She pulled the trigger, and the Spyder spat. Up above there was a faint pop as the explosive piton went off and gripped the wooden parapet with little steel claws.
Penelope gripped the Spyder with two hands and hit the clutch. The incredible little spring began winding in. plastic line, and Penelope was suddenly yanked out of her burrow and into the air.
She flew almost twenty feet straight upward before the Spyder got tired and swung her like a pendulum toward the watch tower. Her heels hit the tower walls with a thud. She didn't pause to worry whether or not she'd been heard. She'd find out soon enough if she had.
She walked straight up the outside of the tower, the Spyder's spring pulling her along. There was a slight overhang at the top. She rested a moment in its shelter, holding on to a strut while she worked the piton loose and holstered the Spyder.
The tower was outside the triple fence. It was a jump of more than thirty feet across. It would take a human flea to do it.
She smiled to herself. That was exactly what she was going to become.
She reached down and massaged the heels of her boots. She could feel them getting lumpy and uncomfortable against her feet. She kept up the massage until the boot heels had become as tight and hard as they could get.
It was one of the minor technological miracles produced by NSA's Special Effects Department. Synthetic resilin protein. The same stuff that enables a flea to jump more than a hundred times its own length.
She rapped her heels sharply against the tower wall, and the resilin snapped like some extraordinarily powerful rubber band. Penelope shot forward like a cannonball, tumbling over and over, clearing the triple fences by a comfortable three feet. She caught a blurred glimpse of the faces of the wolves, turned upward toward the strange phenomenon.
She hit the snow like a circus acrobat, easing the force of impact by letting her body collapse and roll over. A couple of wolves made a yipping sound. She lay motionless.
The searchlight swung over and examined the wolves. They were milling around restlessly. The yellow beam moved and began dutifully to examine the snow outside the fence. Penelope almost laughed.
The searchlight lost interest after a minute or two and resumed its probing of the distant landscape. The wolves lost interest too. Their noses told them there was nothing lying in the snow, no matter what their eyes had seen.
Moving her head by inches so as not to attract the attention of the wolves, Penelope took a long and careful survey of the complex of buildings inside the triple fence. They were spread out over at least ten acres, dominoes of concrete and glass and prefabricated aluminum panels.
Somewhere, inside one of them, was a metal capsule about the size of a fire extinguisher. The fire it could extinguish was the fire of life. All life on earth.
Where? Which building was it in?
There was no gadget on earth that could tell her.
Except one.
Her brain.
She studied the jumbled complex of buildings carefully, her mind emptied of all thought, her consciousness arranged in the deep reverie of Samadhi meditation. The Yoga exercises began to alter her perceptions. The alpha-wave rhythm of her brain slowed, and its amplitude increased. Trains of theta-wave activity — even slower than the alpha-rhythm — began to appear. The world became an illusion. And as such, she mastered it.
There! The moon virus was in that building! She saw it as plainly as if red paint had been splashed on the door.
Her mind snapped back to reality. She shook her head to clear it.
She studied the building again, this time with cool attention. What clues had her subconscious picked up during her Samadhi reverie?
It was a squat, ugly, two-story garage, exactly the same as the half-dozen other garages that stood nearby. But there were no fresh tracks going into it. Nothing more recent than a blurred set of monstrous, four-foot-wide treadrmarks that were at least two or three days old. Ergo, something big had gone into the garage two or three days ago, and nothing else had gone into it since.
There were other clues. Some sheet metal vents on the roof that looked newer than the blackened chimney stacks of the other garages. They could be part of a freshly installed air filtration system. And — she couldn't be sure at this distance — what might be fresh calking around the upstairs windows. And the big steel doors looked scorched, as if someone had played a flamethrower over them.
She grinned. She didn't need any reasons for knowing the moon capsule was in the building. She knew!
With imperceptible movements, she wormed her way on her belly toward the building, stopping whenever she thought she might be attracting the attention of the wolves in the enclosure behind her. A quarter-hour later, she'd put a safe distance between her and the animals. She found temporary shelter in a corrugated steel shed that held tools.
She peeked through the crack of the door at the building, a good two hundred yards away. How to get inside? There would be security — guards might see her approaching across that expanse of bare snow. And of course she'd never get through the door unchallenged.
There were people wandering about the grounds, hurrying along paths shoveled between buildings. The light, in this Arctic night, was dim. If she could become one of the strolling researchers! But the hotsuit was no longer good camouflage. Now it would make her conspicuous.
Two of the strollers were coming toward the shed. They were holding hands. A man and a woman, both looking sexless in their bulky winter clothing.
The Baroness moved further inside, away from the door. It looked as if the path of the couple would take them past the shed. Could she drag them both inside, without one of them making a noise before being silenced, without anybody noticing?
She didn't have to. Their footsteps crunched closer through the snow. She could hear them talking.
"But your wife, Mikhail…" came a woman's breathless voice.
"The hell with my wife!"
The door opened. The pair of them groped their way into the dark interior.
Penelope struck with ruthless precision. First she clamped a hand over the woman's mouth, stuffing her fingers inside to stifle the scream. Holding the startled woman by the jaw, like a gaffed fish, she slammed her against the man's chest and held her there with all her strength.
That gave her purchase on both bodies for a few seconds. It would have to be enough. Her other hand came up and expertly found the man's carotid artery under the thick fur collar. Her thumb dug in.
He began to thrash about. He tried to raise his arms to tear away her hand, but he was made clumsy by his woman friend's body pressed against him. The two were fighting one another, getting in one another's way. By the time he got hold of Penelope's wrist, his blood-starved brain had made his movements feeble. Relentlessly she continued her pressure on the artery until she was sure he was unconscious.
The woman was wriggling away, making gagging sounds. Penelope let the man's body drop and found the Bernardelli automatic in its sleeve pocket. The little gun weighed only nine ounces, but she swung it with all her might against the side of the woman's head. The woman slumped to the ground, senseless.
She stood panting over the two bodies, listening for sounds from outside. There was nothing. She'd gotten away with the gamble. It would have been so much easier and safer simply to have killed the two of them. But she wasn't supposed to harm any of the Russian scientists. Tha
t was the word from Washington. Detente was a fragile tiling. They didn't want an international incident if she got caught.
She made a little grimace of satisfaction. They hadn't seen her. Nobody would know that America was responsible. Or at least they wouldn't be able to prove it.
She lit a match and thumbed their eyeballs. She gave both of them an additional tap on the head for safety's sake, ensuring they'd be out for at least an hour or two.
She bent over the Russian woman and stripped off her outer clothing — a fur-trimmed parka, boots and a white lab uniform. The sleeves were too short, but otherwise it made a loose fit over her hotsuit.
She looked dubiously at the snoring woman sprawled on the floor. The woman had been left with nothing on except her long underwear. She was wearing her lingerie — pink knee-length bloomers and a formidable satin brassiere — over the long Johns rather than under them; probably to give her lover a treat. She'd freeze to death in that rig, in the unheated shed.
Penelope sighed. It was going to be a handicap, this taking care not to harm the Russian technical staff. But it had to be done. She found kindling and split logs in a woodbox and made a fire in the potbellied iron stove. It would keep the two of them alive until they were found.
Nobody was in the immediate vicinity. Wearing the parka and boots, Penelope walked confidently out of the shed and proceeded, with short sturdy strides, along the path toward the converted garage. Body language was everything; she looked as if she belonged there. Her posture was a correct imitation of a short, chubby, middle-aged Russian woman scientist. It would do, from a distance.
She passed a trio of technicians heading in the opposite direction and nodded brusquely at them. They barely looked up, continuing a conversation about potency titrations for bubonic plague germs. Penelope shuddered; it was a reminder of where she was and what she was here for.
She walked past the guards in front of the building, ignoring them. They were mere soldiers, beneath the notice of a woman scientist from Moscow. They stared resentfully at her back as she continued down the path. It wasn't their business to challenge anyone unless they actually tried to enter the building. Even then, some of these high-and-mighty scientists became difficult about showing their identification. You had to treat them with kid gloves!
She turned the corner of the building and continued down the shoveled path. The snowbank at her left was shoulder-high. There was another pair of sentries at a side door. She walked past them, her chin held high. Behind her, she heard one of them mutter and spit in the snow.
Without breaking stride, she crouched below the level of the snowbank as soon as she turned the next corner. It was a magician's trick. She was out of sight of the guard who'd spat. And from the point of view of anyone who might have been looking across the snow, she'd disappeared after a change of direction. Unless some observer had seriously been following her progress, her failure to re-emerge wouldn't be noticed.
She hoped!
There were no guards at the back side of the huge garage. There were no doors that would have made it necessary.
She shucked off the heavy coat, rolled it into a ball and shoved it into the snowbank. The color of the technician's uniform was a fair match for the snow and the concrete wall. She'd have to depend on speed and luck.
There were no lights showing along one stretch of second-floor windows. She fired the Spyder into the caves above them. Agile as a monkey, she swarmed up the silken cord, the powerful spring and clutch of the pistol-winch reeling her in as she went. She was at the window in less than five seconds.
Her body plastered against the wall, she spent another second getting the suction cup out of her belt kit and attaching it to the window pane. The tiny ultrasonic generator was next. It was the size of a pair of fountain pens, hinged together at one end. She spread it into a vee, and ran the twin points around the edge of the pane. The two beams of high-intensity sound focused just below the surface of the glass and made a hairline path of molecular discontinuity. A square of glass came free. She held onto the suction cup to keep it from falling.
The window was triple-paned against the Arctic cold. Penelope dangled the first square of glass from a cord attached to the suction cup, and pressed another suction cup against the next pane. She cut out another square of glass and repeated the process on the inner pane. This time she pushed the glass all the way inside and lowered it carefully to the floor.
She swung herself into the opening on the Spyder's line. She was out of sight of any outside watchers. The whole thing had taken less than fifteen seconds. Meticulously, she fit each of the triple panes back into place and fastened them at the corners and sides with squares of transparent sticky tape from her burglary kit. The window would pass casual inspection, from inside or out.
She was in a small cubicle containing a lab bench and a lot of glassware. There was a binocular microscope and a long row of glass bottles lying on their sides in a cradle of rollers that turned them slowly, like frankfurters on a motorized grill, spreading a film of trypsinized embryo cells in a culture medium evenly over the glass.
Penelope swore under her breath. The bloody fools! The Russians were actually making preparations to grow the moon virus. They didn't realize that it needed no help in multiplying.
There were footsteps outside in the darkened corridor. The door opened and the light went on. A big jowly man in a white lab coat stared at her in surprise.
She looked up at him, an annoyed expression on her face. That bought her a few seconds, while his mind struggled with the problem of why this woman in white technician's garb should be irritated at him entering his own laboratory.
She crossed the room swiftly, still looking annoyed, saying in fluent Russian: "Where the devil have you been? I've been looking all over for you!"
He opened his mouth to defend himself. It was still open when she hit him behind the ear with a piece of pipe she'd snatched from the bench.
She dragged his limp form over to the binocular microscope and propped him up behind it. He'd keep for an hour or so, she decided.
She gathered up a thick file folder to give herself a reason for wandering through the corridors, then stepped outside. She walked past rows of glass cubicles, some darkened, some occupied by late-working biologists.
There was no problem about finding the room she was looking for. It was at the end of the corridor, plastered with signs that read DANGER and CAUTION and NO ADMITTANCE. She could see the triple airlock, and the gaskets, and the jury-rigged air pumps that maintained negative pressure inside.
Through the glass she could see two men standing in the center of the chamber, having an argument over a report. One of them had his respiratory mask dangling down carelessly over his chest.
If he could live inside there, so could she.
She squared her shoulders and opened the outer lock. It made a slight pop. She closed it behind her and went through the next two doors.
The two scientists broke off their argument and looked up at her. She walked over to the one without the mask and kissed him on the lips, her hands lovingly cradling his face.
The other scientist raised his eyebrows. "This is not the place for such goings-on!" he said severely.
By that time, she had her thumbs pressed firmly into that convenient spot under the jaws where the carotids and jugulars cross bone. His hands came up instinctively. It looked as if he were affectionately gripping her wrists. His eyes glazed over. She kept him upright, her lips still fastened on his, her strong hands holding him by the neck.
"Here, here!" the other biologist clucked disapprovingly.
When Penelope was quite sure that her man was unconscious, she let him drop and, swiveling on the ball of one foot, delivered a roundhouse blow to the point of the other scientist's jaw. He crumpled to the floor.
She dragged the two of them behind a workbench, out of sight of the glass ports.
There was a sealed isolation unit against the far wall, the size and shape o
f a wine cask. A pair of rubber gloves for manipulating things inside the unit was mounted in the transparent end.
Penelope peered through the glass, a crawling sensation going down her spine. She'd never been afraid of anything in her life. But she was afraid of what she saw inside.
It was a dusty metal cylinder, not much bigger than a fire extinguisher. The resemblance was furthered by the wheel at one end that screwed the airtight lid down firmly over its gasket.
She thrust her hands into the rubber gloves and turned the capsule over, studying every square inch of its surface for cracks or dents. It was heavy — probably forty or fifty pounds. It seemed to be intact.
One of the unconscious biologists groaned. Penelope jumped.
There was no point in delaying. The thing looked all right. It was either the end of the world now, or in a day or two when the Russians got around to opening the isolation unit.
She undogged the hatch and opened the isolation unit. There was a hiss of air as pressure equalized.
She reached inside with her bare hands and dragged out the metal cylinder. She remembered the films from Houston. If she was going to die, she'd know it in less than an hour.
There was a soiled smock hanging on a peg. She wrapped the thing in it and carried it out into the corridor, closing the airlock behind her. She had to strain to carry the capsule's forty-plus pounds as if it were nothing heavier than a bundle of laundry. In one of the cubicles she passed, a round-faced young man looked up at her without interest, then bent over his work again. Sweating, she made it back to the room she'd started from. The man she'd knocked out was still lying on the floor.
She unreeled a few feet of plastic line from the Spyder and improvised a harness for the capsule. Slinging it crosswise over her back, she stepped to the window and looked out. There was nothing down below.
She peeled the transparent tape off the two inner window panes and set them carefully on the floor. She left the tape in place along the top edge of the outer pane, hinging it to swing outwards and fall back into place after she was outside. There would be a draft, but not one bad enough to raise an alarm.