Flicker of Doom

by Paul Kenyon

  She squeezed against a wall to let a donkey go by. It was loaded with an incredible mountain of wicker baskets, being poked along by an unveiled mountain woman in bright, cheap garb. Half turned, her back pressed against the wall, she got another glimpse of her pursuer. He'd closed the gap. He was less than fifty feet away.

  The streets were almost empty now. A crescent moon overhead cast the feeblest of light in these narrow corridors. She paused, as if confused, and walked uncertainly into an alley. It was blind; she could make out a shadowy wall at the end of it.

  The nail file in her hand, she waited in the shadows and prepared to mug him. Her moves were planned: the arm around his throat, the swift push that would send his chin back, the point of the nail file into the side of the neck, the quick twist that would gouge a hole in the carotid artery.

  She tightened her grip on the nail file.

  And then there was a hand thrown over her own neck from behind. Another hand snaked around just under her breasts, imprisoning her arms. A robed figure, dingy white in the moonlight, appeared in front of her and grabbed at her handbag.

  Of all the times to be mugged! With a snort of annoyance, she stomped on the instep of the man behind her. He howled in pain and danced back, still holding her. The man in front of her had a knife. It glittered in the moonshine, a dull icicle. She had less than three seconds to do everything.

  She was being held just above the elbows. She bent her arm, grasped the little finger of the man holding her and broke it.

  He made a sharp cry of pain and released her arms, still holding her around the neck. That was fine; she needed the leverage. She leaned back into him and kicked with a sidewise swing. The legs of the knife man went out from under him.

  With her free hand, she made a hitchhiking gesture over her shoulder, thumb rigidly out. It encountered something wet and sticky. His eye. He screamed and let go of her neck, staggering backward, hands up to his face, his broken finger out at a strange angle.

  She caught the wrist of the knife man before he hit the ground. She let him fall, but darted forward with his arm. He screamed, and she felt something give, and she knew she'd dislocated the arm at the shoulder. The knife clattered to the ground.

  There were pounding footsteps, and a light suit, looking headless in the dark, running into the alley. He got past the shadows, and she saw that it was the man who had been following her.

  The two muggers picked themselves up and ran awkwardly for the rear of the alley. The half-blinded man stumbled, and the man with the dislocated arm was off balance, but they helped one another over the fence at the rear.

  "Are you all right?"

  She brushed herself off. "Yes, I think you scared, them off."

  She wondered how much he'd seen. He made no attempt to run after the two thugs, or to call the police. Of course he wouldn't want to attract police attention himself.

  He bent over and picked something up. "You dropped your nail file."

  She took it from him. "Thanks."

  She looked him over. There was no hurry about killing him now. He was a darkly handsome young man, with sensuous lips and large, long-lashed eyes. He was medium-sized, about her height, with a lean, wiry frame. There was a sort of controlled alertness about him that suggested a high degree of physical competence.

  She decided to try the direct approach. Maybe she could startle him.

  "Why were you following me?" she said.

  He smiled. "I wasn't following you."

  "I saw you in the bazaar."

  "And why wouldn't I follow you? A beautiful woman." He showed no signs of being abashed.

  Now that she saw him close up, she knew he wasn't a PAFF guerrilla. He was the right age, and had the brooding look that you see in fanatics, but he didn't seem to fit the PAFF image. Possibly he belonged to Habash's Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine. Their members tended to be well educated, and dedicated social revolutionaries. Or maybe he was with Hawatmeh's PDF.

  If Don Alejandro was playing games with Arab terrorists, there was no telling where this intense young man fit in.

  "Do you have a name?" she said.

  "Ahmed," he said without hesitation. "Ahmed Hassein."

  "You can call me Penelope. I'm the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. But of course you know that, don't you?"

  He spread his hands. "How should I know that?"

  She had to admire his style.

  "Tell me, Ahmed Hassein, are you by any chance a Palestinian?"

  "Ah, you have a good ear. Yes, I'm a Palestinian."

  "What are you doing in Morocco?"

  "What does any Palestinian do in Morocco? Or Lebanon, or Syria, or Egypt, or any other Moslem country that is kind enough to take them in? We survive as best we can. Fortunately, Palestinians tend to be better educated than most of our poor Arab brothers. We are in great demand. We find it easy to get jobs."

  "And what kind of a job do you have?"

  "Alas, at the moment I am between jobs."

  "And what do you usually do?"

  He gave her a cool glance. "I'm a student."

  "A student of what?"

  He smiled obliquely. "You're a woman of many questions." He took her by the arm. "Tell me, have you eaten?"

  "I'm famished," she said dutifully. She was glad the suggestion had come from him. She hadn't quite decided how she was going to keep an eye on him until she had him safely pegged.

  Dinner was a pastilla, a fabulous pigeon pie in a miraculous flaky pastry, that must have taken Ahmed's last franc. He wouldn't have a drink, in a restaurant frequented by Moslems, but during the meal he helped himself surreptitiously to a couple of glasses of the excellent southern rose that he'd had the savoir-faire to recommend. Penelope studied him over the rim of her glass and decided that she liked him, Arab terrorist or no. He was the sum total of his life, as she was of hers. Perhaps if she'd been raised in a Palestinian refugee camp, rankling with the injustice of it all, she might not have turned away either when a glamorous recruiter for a guerrilla organization came along, spouting vague ideals. After a while it became your world, as the dark complexity of espionage had become her world. But on a more primitive, basic level, she and Ahmed were responding to one another as man and woman. There was a tingling wave length between them. He could feel it, too, she knew. They communicated it to one another through all the subtle clues of body language and conversational drift and glandular perfumes just below the threshold of awareness.

  It would be sad to have to kill him. Perhaps it wouldn't be necessary.

  After dinner, he insisted on taking her back to her hotel. "After all, Penelope," he said with a bland smile, "you don't want to go back alone after your experience. You have nothing to protect yourself with except a nail file."

  While Ahmed admired the view of the Mediterranean from her small terrace, she managed to send a signal to John Farnsworth. The components of the transmitter were scattered here and there throughout her suite, looking innocent, linked by spiderweb circuits or by microwave induction that needed no connections at all. The sending key was a Ronson table lighter left in plain sight on the coffee table. It really lit your cigarette if you pressed it all the way, but you could tap out a code just by pushing on it lightly.

  She asked Farnsworth to check on one Ahmed Hassein, a Palestinian of age thirty or thereabouts, now in Tangier. She gave his physical description in the terse code symbols that encoded all the parameters of human appearance in just a few dozen taps of the key. She added everything she'd been able to observe about his little habits and his patterns of speech.

  Then she fed the cigarette lighter his thumb print. She'd swiped it off her own wine glass after he'd sampled her rose. It was on a postage stamp-sized scrap of something that looked like glassine. She set it under the lighter's glass base. An optical scanning device picked up the main reference points of the print and encoded them digitally.

  The aerial strung outside through the frame of the beach umbrella in her
outdoor table squirted the signals into space. The MESTAR satellite that was servicing the western Mediterranean at the moment picked up the signals and stored them. In approximately an hour, after circling the globe, it would be hovering over the eastern United States to drop her question into John Farnsworth's antenna. He'd give it to the big computer at Fort Meade to chew on.

  Ahmed came in from the terrace. "Having trouble with the lighter?" he said. "Let me."

  He produced a lighter of his own and held it to her cigarette.

  "Thanks," she said. "These things never work."

  He picked it up and turned it over. He thumbed the lever. A little flame flickered.

  "That's funny," he said. "It works for me."

  She stood up and took the lighter from his hand, palming the scrap of glassine stuck to the bottom. She put her arms around his neck. "I work for you, too, darling," she said, kissing him.

  He drew back — a reaction she wasn't used to. Then she realized that he'd just been startled for a moment. It violated his Arab sense of machismo for the woman to be the aggressor.

  She felt something hard against her belly. She pressed herself against it and rubbed back and forth. His teeth were clenched, and a light sheen of perspiration had broken out on his forehead. The hard object grew bigger. His body wasn't bothered by the rules his society had imprinted on his mind.

  Then the twentieth-century man in him took over, and he drew her to him. He was very strong — stronger than he looked. That wiry frame was all muscle and gristle. She ran her hands down his back and found it hard as wood. She also found the cross strap of a shoulder holster.

  His lips were on her, his breath spiced with cinnamon and almonds and ginger from the pastilla. She parted her lips and his tongue thrust itself between them. She sucked on it while her hand slid down to his buttocks to press him against her.

  He groaned and his hand was feeling the shape of a breast through her caftan. It was an impatient hand, squeezing the marshmallow softness, probing for the hard nub of the nipple that was pushing against the fabric of the bra and caftan. She drew a sharp breath at the sudden rush of heat she felt, and pulled him over to the couch.

  They tumbled to the cushions together, Ahmed on top. He reached out and turned off the lamp. The room turned to shimmering silver from the crescent moon shining through the glass doors. There were stars out there, and the black waters of the Mediterranean.

  He struggled out of his jacket and dropped it to the floor. There was a thunk: the shoulder holster had gone with it. He'd contrived to have the jacket cover the holstered weapon.

  She didn't give a damn about that now. He was helping her pull the caftan over her head, and now his fingers were fumbling at the bikini top. He found the catch and yanked it free. Her breasts spilled out into his waiting hands. She wriggled out of the pants and kicked them to the floor; then she was undoing the buttons of his shirt. His chest was hard and hairless, and his nipples, under her thumbs, were small stiff gumdrops. He moved impatiently; her fingers there meant nothing to him, and she moved her hands down to unbuckle his belt. He let go of her breasts long enough to remove his shoes, while she undid his zipper and pulled his trousers down. There was a huge tent pushing at his cotton shorts; she pulled the shorts off and the pole sprang free. It was a long, tapering organ that fit her hand comfortably, its heat contrasting with the cool silver sheen the moon was giving it.

  He gasped at her touch, and tried to crawl between her legs immediately. She pushed him back and showed him what she wanted him to do. He resisted at first, and then at her urging hand his head was between her thighs and his tongue, cleverer than she'd dared to hope, was probing her hidden knob of pleasure. She writhed in sweet agony. The rush of pleasure grew stronger and threatened to spill. Little splashes of gratification made her stiffen and shudder several times, but she made herself wait.

  Ahmed sensed how close she was, and the dark head came up. The huge black pools of the eyes were staring at her, and a hoarse voice said, "Now you, yes?"

  "Yes, darling," she whispered, and she bent to give him a treat. She ran her tongue around that distal chestnut that had been peeled for her by some mullah long ago, then fit its rubbery shape between her lips. He squirmed, making a prolonged moaning sound.

  "I think that's enough of that," she said, sitting up. A single drop of serum had oozed out of that blind eye at the end of his penis, and the long shaft quivered like a dog shaking itself off. He made a small, despairing sound, and scrambled to fit himself into her. She broke the syndrome with a quick, deft squeeze in the right place, and he was kneeling between her legs, in command of himself again, his long formidable instrument poised at the horizontal, a sardonic smile on his face.

  "You are talented," he said.

  "I want to bring out the best in you, darling," she said.

  He cradled her face between his hands and gave her an intense, soulful look. "You deserve the best," he said, "whatever may happen between us later."

  They kissed one another gently, while she held his balls in her hand. They rested against her palm, a warm, trusting shape that reminded her of a bird she'd once held while it recovered from a fight with a cat, until it had fluttered and flown away. His balls began to flutter and he looked at her questioningly. She nodded.

  "Now," she said, and turned to present her bottom to him.

  He put his hands on her hips and edged forward. Penelope raised her behind, her cheek resting against the sofa cushions. She spread her knees apart. There was something blunt and hard pushing at the tingly, swollen lips of her vulva, and then, with a swift, sure thrust he was deep inside her. She moaned and shuddered, and when she'd recovered from that first pleasurable shock she began to move her hips in an undulating rhythm.

  As soon as she got it going, Ahmed leaned forward and rested his cheek between her shoulder blades. It felt very comforting there. His hands cradled her billowing breasts, giving them welcome support. Her nipples were hard and swollen, rubbing against his palms, sending little lightning flashes through her breasts.

  He was pushing back and forth in a slow, easy motion. The long rod slid within her, slippery as soap. The walls of the dark tunnel within her writhed in expectation. Inside her was the sun, bathing her channels and recesses in its glorious warmth.

  She moved in and out faster. His hands clutched her breasts with a convulsive movement. A low moan came from him, exciting her further. She pressed her face against the cushions and worked harder.

  He was bumping against her rear with the violence of his thrusts. Her buttocks slammed into his belly over and over again. He slipped all the way out of her once, and they both went wild for a moment until he sheathed himself again. The sun inside her was beating against her flesh. She went into a frenzied corkscrew motion. He cried aloud. He was trying to stuff himself inside, further and further. The wiry hair of his pubes were scraping against the lips of her swollen crevasse, an unendurable bliss. Her clitoris was a pulsing ball of fire.

  And then the sun spilled over. There was a blinding warmth that pulsed and radiated, dissolving her in blessed relief. She pushed against his lap with all her might, shuddering in one tremendous paroxysm after another. She heard her own little mindless cries, and Ahmed's great hoarse roar. The sweet convulsions subsided, little by little, and she was making small whimpering sounds of gratification.

  She stretched herself face down, exhausted, and his long harpoon pulled free with a little moist sound. She felt something warm and sticky drip down on the backs of her thighs.

  Ahmed was panting, out of breath. "Never," he said. "Never has it been so good."

  She rolled over and looked at his swollen face. "That's because we're made for each other, darling."

  Her eyes dropped to the dark triangle between his legs. The long pole still stood out there, straight and rigid, glistening wetly in the moonlight. It showed no signs of drooping.

  "You're full of surprises," she said.

  He followed her glance and
laughed. "I can't get enough of you," he said.

  "There's no such thing as enough," she said.

  She grasped it by the shaft and lay back among the cushions. With her eyes closed and her teeth bared in ecstasy, she plunged it deep inside her like a dagger.

  * * *

  Dr. Funke turned up the volume.

  "You're full of surprises," the voice of the Baroness said.

  Don Alejandro turned to Dr. Funke, one eyebrow raised ironically. "Isn't he?" he said.

  The loudspeaker crackled. "I can't get enough of you," it said in Ahmed's voice.

  "An unreliable young man," Dr. Funke growled. "He can't keep his mind on business."

  "But my dear Funke," Don Alejandro said. "The Baroness is his business."

  They both turned toward the receiver as the Baroness said, "There's no such thing as enough." They listened for a while to the mingled moans and cries and hard breathing, until Don Alejandro noticed that Dr. Funke was sweating. The little man had a glazed look. The child-sized trousers bulged at the crotch with something that definitely wasn't child size.

  Don Alejandro turned down the volume.

  "My dear Dr. Funke," he said with mock sympathy.

  "You mustn't distress yourself. We'll have the Baroness all to ourselves, very soon now."

  * * *

  After Ahmed had gone, some time around dawn, the Baroness searched her suite for bugs. The kind of chemistry that she and Ahmed had enjoyed was all very well, but it was no excuse for neglecting proper security procedures.

  She found the bug in the lamp. It was an obvious place. He'd put it there when he turned out the light.

  It was a little microphone-transmitter combination embedded in a plastic casing the size and shape of a jelly bean. The Japanese made them. Every amateur you bumped into these days used them. Militant groups in California and Colorado and Ohio used them to eavesdrop on other militants, the police and even the local FBI. The police in backwater places bought them cheaply, and used them to eavesdrop on the local hippies. Evidently they were selling well in the Mideast now. The Arabs had learned their use, along with the automatic rifles and the plastic explosives and the shoulder-fired surface-to-air missiles. The world was a technological supermarket these days.