by Paul Kenyon
The serving boy was screaming and screaming. His eyes were gone. In their place were two bloody sockets, the flesh around them badly torn by the falcon's claws.
"Bakh, bakh, Hakim," the Emir crooned soothingly, putting the hood back on the falcon's head.
Le Sourd yawned and stood up. "Very amusing, your Highness. But I must get back to work."
The Emir pouted. "Must you?"
"You know very well, your Highness, that we're behind schedule. You're a hard taskmaster. Your poor servants must work day and night to meet your timetable."
The Emir nodded. "Go," he said. "You are doing the work of Allah."
* * *
Joe Skytop was the first to arrive. The big Cherokee, with a face like rough-hewn hickory and a torso like a rain barrel, lumbered into the drawing room and handed his coat and camera case to Inga. He lifted a bulging arm toward the Baroness in greeting and opened his mouth to say something, and then the dogs were all over him.
"Down, fellows, hey, down!" he said in a bass rumble, bracing himself against the onslaught of the two enormous Russian wolfhounds. "Hey, cut that out!"
The big white dogs yelped joyfully, wagging their tails and bouncing up and down. On their hind legs, they were as tall as Skytop. Igor was pulling at the sleeve of Skytop's sweatshirt with his wicked-looking teeth, and Stasya had his paws on the Indian's shoulders, licking his face.
"Igor, Stasya, come here," the Baroness said.
Obediently, the two borzois trotted over to her and extended their long, saurian heads to be patted. The Baroness was reclining on a baroque velvet divan, dressed for comfort in black stretch pants and sneakers, and a wispy tank top that clung to her bosom like cobwebs. She lifted her perfect ivory face and gave Skytop a cool, amused look out of her huge green eyes.
"Hello, Joseph," she said. "Did you finish up those Paris fashion shots for me?"
"Everything but the bra pictures," he said with a leer. "They're not wearing boobytraps this season." Skytop was rude, crude and loud, but behind a camera he had the sensitive eye of a poet. It had made him one of the most sought-after photographers on the fashion scene. He was an artist at killing and disabling people with his bare hands, too. He had the sure instincts of a master in every form of unarmed combat, from karate to kendo.
He sat down gingerly in a Louis XIV chair. It creaked in protest.
"Joe Skytop," Inga said severely. "You be careful of that chair! The Baroness paid four thousand dollars for it at an auction at Bellini's!"
She held out a tray with a silver coffee service to him. Inga was a big-framed blond girl with clear, blue eyes set in the flawless face of a china doll. She fairly glowed with health. She was dressed now in a white uniform that showed off a trim waist and a pair of high, nicely spaced breasts that were held sternly in place under a starched front.
Skytop took the coffee from her gratefully. "No breakfast on the flight from Paris," he said. "I couldn't face it after last night. That French booze is poison." He took a battered flask out of the pocket of his jeans and poured a couple of ounces of bourbon into his cup.
The dogs started barking again. Inga went to the door. This time it was Paul and Yvette. They were an elegant black couple, much in demand by the clients of International Models, Inc. for evening and beach wear photos. Yvette had been a beauty queen in Port-au-Prince until she'd been caught in a plot to overthrow the Duvalier dictatorship. John Farnsworth, recognizing superb agent material in her, had smuggled her out of Haiti and given her a new identity and the deadly training she needed to become a member of the Baroness' team. Paul had learned everything there was to know about street fighting and guns and explosives as a member of a black activist group. The CIA would have had kittens if it had known he'd been given security clearance to join the Baroness' group. But they didn't know he was an agent. They didn't know the Baroness was one either.
Paul laughed, and scratched the borzois' ears. The dogs whimpered with pleasure. Paul pushed them away and slumped in an antique loveseat, picking white hairs from his form-fitting Cardin suit.
"What's this I hear about Arabia?" he said. "Our Ayrab brothers acting up?"
"You're going to be an archaeologist, Paul darling," the Baroness said from the divan.
"Any excuse to get a pick and shovel back in our hands, right?" he said.
"Paul!" Yvette scolded. "Now you stop that right now, you hear?"
The Baroness laughed. "Lincoln freed the slaves," she said. "King Faisal still hasn't."
"It's going to be a real pleasure to do him in, then."
A voice came from the door. "It's the Emir of Ghazal we're going to do in, as I understand it. Is that right, Baroness?"
The man who stood there was tall and blond, with pale Viking eyes and chiseled features that were handsome to the point of overperfection. Eric was the top male model in the Baroness' stable. But behind the pretty face was a tough, intelligent brain that was fluent in eight languages and passable in a dozen more. His body was just as tough as his mind. Like the Norwegian sailor his father had been, he was an accomplished barroom brawler who used fists, feet, elbows or anything within reach.
"Perhaps," Penelope told him. "But first you're going to have to teach yourself all about the archaeology of the ancient Persian Gulf civilizations. You've got to become an expert in two or three days. The Tyler Foundation is expecting some concrete results from your dig. And the sheik is an expert amateur archaeologist himself. He's taken a friendly interest in this 'expedition.' You're going to have to satisfy him, too."
"I've already started," he said. He tapped the pile of books under his arm. "I picked these up on the way."
Sumo and Wharton arrived a few minutes later, looking neat and sober in business suits. Each of them carried an attaché case.
"Sorry we're late, Baroness," Wharton said. "We've been assembling a kit for you."
Wharton was a ruggedly handsome man with sandy hair, broad shoulders and large hands that were always stained by the chemicals he worked with. It would have surprised the men who had served under him in Vietnam to learn that he was in the Social Register. He'd been the toughest sergeant any of them had ever served under, despite the fact that he never raised his voice or used a four-letter word.
The Baroness sat up, looking interested. "What have you got, Dan?"
He walked over and opened his attaché case on the marble coffee table. He reached inside and pulled out a plastic device that looked like a miniature shower head with a bulb attached.
He grinned triumphantly. "From those marvelous people who gave you the Spyder — the Spinneret!"
The Spyder was a pistol-winch that shot a gossamer-fine thread from its blunt snout. The thread was a long-chain polymer that could support a weight of a thousand pounds. A miniaturized set of gears and clutch in the handle of the Spyder made it a handy tool for climbing walls, swinging across chasms or lowering yourself in a hurry from a window.
"Spinneret?" Inga interposed. "Isn't that the name for a spider's silk glands?"
Wharton nodded. "That's essentially what we have here. The bulb is filled with a liquid polymer. It hardens instantly when it comes in contact with the air. You force it out through all these pinholes in the nozzle. Watch."
With a swift motion of his arm, he raised the Spinneret, squeezing the bulb. A fine milky spray shot out of the shower nozzle. Somehow, in midair, the spray wasn't a liquid any more. A silvery net, light as a spider's web, hung magically in the air.
The web floated down over Skytop's head and torso, enclosing him and his chair in its silken threads. He thrashed about, trying to break loose. The chair fell over. Skytop continued to struggle. The Baroness had seen him pull apart an iron chain with his bare hands. But he couldn't seem to break the almost invisible filaments of the net.
"Joe Skytop!" Inga screamed. "Be careful!"
She was too late. There was a sound of splintering wood. The antique chair came apart. Skytop continued to thrash around inside the net, along w
ith the chair's assorted arms and legs.
Wharton shot an apologetic glance at the Baroness. He sprayed the struggling Indian with what looked like a tiny perfume atomizer. The net seemed to dissolve. Skytop stood up, his head and shoulders festooned with sticky, silvery strings.
"I'm sorry, Baroness," Wharton said. "That was stupid of me."
"That's all right, Dan darling," the Baroness said dryly. "The chair only cost four thousand dollars."
Wharton looked stricken. He had a secret: a secret that all the other members of the team knew about. He was in love with the Baroness. He knew it was stupid of him. If he let it affect his judgment, his efficiency, it could kill him some day. Worse yet, it could kill her. He tried his best to suppress his feelings. But he dreaded the thought of displeasing her worse than he dreaded torture. And he had learned a lot about torture as a prisoner-of-war.
"All right, hell!" Skytop rumbled dangerously. "That's a hell of a thing to do to a buddy with a hangover!" He straightened, and a chair leg clattered to the floor.
"That's enough," the Baroness said sharply. "Tommy, what have you got there?"
Tom Sumo smiled diffidently, a smile that had a lot of gold in it. The gold was the ultraminiaturized components of the radio transceiver he had built into his mouth, hiding in phony fillings and braces. His own saliva acted as an electrolite, reacting with the alloys of the metal mouthful to power the radio. Sumo was an electronics genius, but he sometimes got carried away by his work.
"That's a big palace," he said, "and you're going to need a lot of listening posts. And if the Emir is as suspicious as you said he is, you're going to need the capacity to neutralize a lot of his listening devices. So I've got a suitcase full of bugs and counter-bugs."
"Let's see them."
He opened the attaché case. Inside was a magpie's collection of buttons, pins, jewels, buckles, bows, zippers, spools of thread, fabric swatches. He held up a small, flat, ordinary-looking mother-of-pearl button.
"This one's a microphone. Others are FM or VHF transmitters with a quarter-mile range, or little cesium batteries for power. You hook them together with the thread — there's a metallic conductor spun into the cotton fibers. Inga can start sewing them into your wardrobe."
"So I can tell if anybody's searching my quarters? Or I can 'forget' a sweater or jacket, and leave it behind as a listening post."
Sumo nodded vigorously. "Right."
"What about the pickup?"
He produced a limp, ropelike object less than six inches long. "Like one of Dali's watches. Only the parts still work, even if you bend it into a circle. There's a tape recorder that records eight hours at a time — sound-activated, so you don't waste tape. And a built-in radio receiver, about the size of a sugar cube. Whole thing weighs less than two ounces. You can sew it into the hem of a gown, or plant it in your host's drapes."
The Baroness leaned forward over the coffee table. Her tank top ballooned outward, proving that she hadn't bothered with a bra. "But Tommy, somebody as security-conscious as the Emir is bound to pick up stray FM signals inside the walls of his palace."
Sumo gave her a golden grin. "See this?"
He held up a swatch of fabric. He pulled it in two or three directions to show that it was a stretch fabric.
"You're kidding," she said.
Sumo looked pleased with himself. "You guessed it. It's a computer."
The Baroness took the swatch from him. "The world's first stretch computer."
Sumo explained in a rush. "There are millions of microscopic specks scattered all through it. Each one is a MOSFET device — a metal-oxide semiconductor field-effect transistor. Basically I've taken them off the silicon chip they're usually implanted in, and embedded them in fabric. Together they form a lattice. It doesn't matter how you bend it or stretch it — the parts of the lattice are always in the same relationship to one another."
"All right, Tommy," Skytop boomed. "Let me in on it."
"It's a high-speed encoder. The stretch computer…" he grinned at the Baroness "…is programmed to make the high-speed bursts ride tandem with any ambient FM signal that happens to come along. There ought to be plenty of them in the Emir's palace. He can't detect yours, not ever."
Skytop shook his head. "That's a new one, Baroness. You're going to wear a computer."
The Baroness had turned to Wharton. "I'll risk the Bernardelli, but I don't want to take in anything else that looks like a gun," she said.
He nodded. "I figured. I've got the Spyder built into a portable hair dryer. Nobody's going to dismantle it, because the screws are cross-threaded. But you can open it up like a clamshell, by pressing two places simultaneously. And by the way, the hair dryer really works."
"You just made up for the chair, Dan darling."
He went on in a businesslike tone: "And your usual arsenal — the cigarette holder that shoots poison darts… I've crystallized a fresh supply of black widow spider venom for you. And the bra that stretches into a slingshot. A plastic garrote with a button at either end that you can sew into your clothing — if Tom's left any room. The belt that becomes a bow and the sandal strap that becomes a knife when you heat it — and one more device made out of the same 'memory plastic.' "
"Something new?"
He handed over something that looked like a leather shoe heel. "A ten-foot pole. For things you wouldn't touch otherwise. Pointed at one end. Makes a pretty good spear."
"And why is it more useful than a bow, or a throwing knife?"
"You don't need a fire around to throw it into. There's a built-in incendiary core. Magnesium. Just pull out this nail. Poof! Your shoe heel grows like Pinocchio's nose!"
The Baroness turned to Inga. "Inga, go shopping this afternoon. Get me a pair of shoes with matching leather, and substitute these heels."
Inga nodded.
"And where the hell is Fiona?"
"Here I am," a lazy voice came from the foyer. "The flight from New York was late."
The girl who walked into the drawing room might have posed for the Botticelli Venus, if Venus had been wearing a slinky green sheath that was tight enough to serve as an anatomy lesson. She had fiery red hair falling to her shoulders, and big startling eyes in a complexion as white and transparent as skimmed milk. Her legs might have been called skinny and her wrists fragile-boned, but her slender fashion-model frame managed to support a surprisingly generous bosom that pushed with explicit boldness at the front of her dress. Skytop planted his eyes on her torso and kept them there as she crossed the room and flung herself into an armchair. She wiggled a little for his benefit. The attention of men was what she lived for. She was lazy, bitchy, difficult. But she'd never let the Baroness down yet, either as a model or an agent. It made up for a lot.
"All right, Fi," the Baroness said. "Now please pay attention. And pull down your skirt. I don't want Joseph to miss any of this briefing either." She pulled a large map case over to her and started to open it. "Your expedition leaves from Rome in three days. Key's arranged…"
She stopped as the telephone rang. Inga got up to answer it.
"Baroness," Inga said, holding her hand over the mouthpiece. "It's for you. The Rome agent of the Emir of Ghazal."
The Baroness took the phone. Her body, in its skintight black costume, had all the tense, controlled alertness of a jungle cat. But her voice, as she answered the phone, suddenly became vapid, superficial: exactly what you'd expect of a woman whose chief concerns were grooming a beautiful body and spending the fortunes that two husbands had left her.
"Ah, yes, Mr. Shirazi," she drawled, "how kind of the Emir to invite me. And you say he'll show me the royal stables?… Yes, I quite understand that you can't promise that he'll sell me a stallion." She gave a tinkling laugh. "But perhaps I can manage to change the Emir's mind."
She was pensive for a long moment after she hung up. Her hand strayed absently to the hard outline of the little gold-plated automatic against her ribs. Then she suddenly became brisk again.
/>
She turned to face the eight people whose lives were going to depend on her. And on whom she was going to depend in return.
"Key's done it, children," she said. "It's all arranged."
5
The Baroness knew they must be getting close to Ghazal when the stewardess put on a veil. All during the flight from Rome, the girl had been as bright and open as any Western airline stewardess, if you overlooked the long trousers she wore under her green uniform skirt.
Sure enough, a moment later the old Boeing 707 jet wheeled dizzyingly for its landing approach. A scratchy version of the Ghazali national anthem came over the loudspeaker and the fasten seatbelts sign came on in curved Arabic script. The other two signs had been taped over. She wondered what languages the tape covered.
She looked out the window and there was the sparkling blue water of the Persian Gulf coming up at her, fast. There were some stubby sailing vessels — Arab dhows — and the flat wide expanse of a giant oil tanker tied up at a jetty.
"We seem to have arrived," she said.
Inga leaned across her to peer out the window. "Look! she said, "a skyscraper!"
The Baroness followed Inga's gaze. A tall glass box sparkled in the Arabian sun, rising out of a geometric jumble of crumbling ancient buildings and dusty green date groves.
"That's Ghazal," she said tartly. "A capital with one skyscraper, an airline with one jet. The oil money goes to the Emir's palace."
She tightened her seatbelt and braced herself for the landing of Ghazali Airlines' only plane. They dropped like a stone, and now she could see the vast balls of the oil storage tanks and, beyond them, the rising towers of the new refinery, arrogant reminders of the wealth of this bleak land. There was a jolt, and they were skidding down the runway, past the parked row of Phantom F-4 jet fighters provided by the United States.
She unbuckled her belt and stood up. Around her in the cabin, other passengers were doing the same. There were only a handful of them; most of the airliner's one hundred and forty-nine seats were empty. She could see a few Arab men in business suits, and an arrogant elderly man in the flowing robes of a sheik, and a few tired-looking Europeans come to Ghazal to try to sell something. As the veiled stewardess walked down the aisle, the sheik leaned out toward her. "Whore!" he spat.