Death is a Ruby Light

by Paul Kenyon

  That was interesting. They knew who her houseguest was, too. They'd cased the villa well. The Baroness frowned. It was obviously a highly professional operation.

  Who could they be? She thought hard. The KGB? The boys from Peking's misnamed Social Affairs Department? Both the Russians and the Chinese had good reason to want to get rid of the agent known as Coin.

  Only nobody had called her Coin. Not yet, at least They'd called her Baroness.

  What did they want? It was obviously an intelligence operation. No simple burglars, these! The ampoule probably wouldn't kill her. They'd have shot her if they wanted her dead right away, or used the KGB's pet weapon, a metal tube that sprayed prussic-acid gas and made the victim look as if he'd had a heart attack. No, more likely the ampoule contained some sort of truth serum. They wanted her to blow her own team, give them leads, maybe take them to the man called Key.

  She began to hyperventilate, taking the surreptitious deep breaths that would feed strength and speed into her muscles. She couldn't do anything now; she'd be riddled with slugs before she could get off her elbows. But when he got close to her with the needle…

  With luck, she'd get one or two of them first. And make them kill her before she could talk.

  "All right," the leader said. "Get it over with."

  They moved with lightning speed. Two of the hooded men moved to the bed and imprisoned Lars's arms before he realized what was happening. There were still two guns pointing at the Baroness, spaced well away from one another. The man with the syringe slid the needle skillfully into the vein in Lars's neck. Lars gave a peculiar long sigh and went limp instantly.

  His face was slack, the tongue lolling. Penelope couldn't tell if he was dead or not.

  "Your turn, Baroness," the hooded man said.

  One of them whistled softly, some kind of signal.

  "Practicing birdcalls?" Penelope said dryly.

  "Shut up!" one of the men said nervously. He waved his gun at her.

  "You get special treatment, Baroness," the leader said. "The headman's going to take care of you himself."

  There were footsteps outside in the corridor, approaching the bedroom door.

  A chill traveled down Penelope's bare spine. There was something too familiar about those footsteps.

  The bedroom door opened.

  2

  The nuclear submarine disappeared silently beneath the waves, a fat, dangerous cigar shape with a bulbous nose. The rubber raft it had left behind bobbed like a cork in the lengthening swell.

  Jimmy Ching looked up at the brilliant stars, orienting himself. The coast was over that way, dark and sinister. He had a couple of hours' paddling to do.

  If his briefing had been correct, he'd land on a deserted stretch of rocky shore, just north of Lienyun. He'd have to make his way overland to Peking, trusting his forged identity papers to get him on trains and buses.

  The papers said he was an agricultural worker from Kweichow province. The Defense Intelligence Agency's language school had coached him minutely in the Kweichow dialect. There was a job waiting for him in the Peking restaurant favored by Liu Hung-Fu, the aging spymaster who ran the Social Affairs Department's foreign espionage network. In Jimmy's pockets were a supply of ultraminiaturized transmitters, embedded in honest-to-god soda mint tablets. Liu Hung-Fu was known to have an ulcer and to ask the restaurant for an after-lunch soda mint to offset the hot Szechuan food. Liu gulped the tablets whole.

  U.S. Intelligence was going to have a listening post inside the intestinal tract of China's top spy. The evidence would be flushed away each morning. Jimmy grinned at the thought.

  He checked the rest of his gear: the waterproof maps, the matchbox-size receiver and tape recorder, the integrated-circuit encoder that was no larger than a Mah-Jongg tile.

  Most important, there was his personal alarm system. Its tiny components were hidden in the big stainless-steel watch he wore. It picked up signals from NSA's orbiting communications satellites. If his cover was in danger of being blown, they'd warn him by a series of coded electric shocks.

  Jimmy grinned again. NSA was really looking after him. His mission must be considered important for them to have unbent enough to loan something as esoteric as the satellite transponder to a rival agency like DIA.

  Two hours later he wasn't grinning anymore. He was dog tired from all the paddling he'd done through a choppy sea. He beached the rubber boat next to a concealing outcropping of rock and deflated it. Quickly he scooped a hole in the sand. The boat went into it, and the oilskins he wore over the baggy cotton jacket and pants.

  When he finished burying the boat and oilskins, he straightened up and looked at the sky. The first flush of dawn was in the east. He brushed the sand off his cotton trousers and headed for the treeline.

  He got halfway there before they intercepted him.

  All of a sudden there was a blinding light in his face and a harsh voice that shouted, "Chien tieh t'ing!"

  He stopped in his tracks, stupefied by his bad luck. They'd been waiting for him. They'd called him "spy."

  He was suddenly surrounded by soldiers in the olive uniforms of the People's Liberation Army, red stars on their caps and PLA Mao badges on their tunics. They all carried AK-47 machine guns. They handled him roughly, holding him until the officer came up.

  "Right on time, James Ching," the officer said in English. "We captured your contact at the restaurant yesterday. He confessed everything."

  Jimmy was stunned. If they'd captured Yuan-chiu, the CIA's Peking man would have known within hours. He'd have transmitted the information immediately. From Fort Meade, Maryland, NSA would have bounced a warning signal to him off the satellite that hung over the East China Sea.

  Why hadn't the transducer in his watch gone off?

  "Take him in," the officer ordered. "The Social Affairs Department has some questions to ask him."

  The soldiers dragged him toward a waiting truck. Tears of bitterness flowed in Jimmy's eyes. There was only one thing left to do.

  He used his tongue to dislodge the cyanide capsule in the hollow tooth. He bit down on it hard, quickly, before he could change his mind.

  * * *

  Gurevitch lit another cigarette, his sixth in an hour, took a few deep puffs, then stubbed it out savagely in the littered ashtray on his desk. All this waiting was getting him down.

  A rumpled bear of a man with broad Ukrainian features, he crossed impatiently to the window and looked out at the London fog. The American, the one who called himself Smith, was late. Could something have gone wrong?

  He smiled wryly. Nerves, Victor Petrovitch, nerves, he reprimanded himself. Nothing can go wrong. The Americans have seen to that.

  He returned to his untidy desk, piled high with correspondence from Ukrainski exiles all over the world. He flipped the yellow legal tablet to a fresh page and, moistening a pencil in his mouth, began once again to compose his editorial.

  The mimeograph machine in the next room stopped its noise, and he heard footsteps approaching. He looked up and Nina was standing there, buttoning her coat, a worried expression on her small pretty face.

  "Will you be all right, Victor Petrovitch?" the girl said. "I don't like to leave you alone at this hour."

  "Go home, Nina. It's past midnight. You've worked long enough today."

  "But…"

  "And stop worrying," he said firmly. "This is England. Nothing can happen to me here. The KGB wouldn't dare."

  "They killed Rebet," she said bluntly.

  "That was a long time ago. And it happened in Munich."

  He remembered Lev Rebet with a pang. They'd been good friends in the Ukraine, before their resistance activities had forced them to flee. Rebet had been organizing émigré revolutionaries too, and editing a Ukrainski newspaper in exile, when the KGB had decided to eliminate him. It was supposed to look like a heart attack; they'd used an ingenious device that shot prussic-acid vapor, leaving no trace. But the KGB executioner, a young man named Sta
shynsky, had lost his nerve and confessed to the German police. There had been an international scandal.

  Nina stood her ground stubbornly. "I don't like it. You should have gone underground a month ago, when your identity was exposed."

  "Nina, listen to me." He took her hands in his. "That's exactly why it's important for me to go on publishing Ukrainski Novasti as long as I'm able. I've become a rallying point for dissent back home."

  "And that's just why they can't afford to let you go on walking around."

  "Every issue of the paper counts. When I'm in real danger, I'll quit and go underground again."

  "How will you know when they're after you?"

  For a moment, he was tempted to tell her. Then he decided that the less she knew, the better. The CIA man, Smith, had cautioned him not to mention the device to anyone. It was reserved for very special agents.

  Not that he was a CIA agent, he told himself hastily. He worked for the Ukraine, not America. But CIA funds had made it possible for him to keep publishing the newspaper. And it was CIA money and equipment that made possible the weapons drops to the resistance cells within the Ukraine.

  "A little bird will tell me," he laughed. He reached in his pocket. "Here's cab fare. No, no, don't argue. I don't want you riding the underground at this hour."

  When she had gone, Gurevitch slumped behind his desk again, the editorial temporarily forgotten. Nina was right. The KGB couldn't afford to let him go on walking around. It was just a question of time.

  But he was going to squeeze every last moment out of that time, thanks to the Americans.

  He got the "little bird" out of his desk drawer. It was no larger than a transistor radio. Smith had told him it could pick up a signal from an orbiting satellite three hundred miles in space.

  The Americans had a man planted in the KGB's infamous Ninth Section — the political assassination branch that had once been known as SMERSH, but now was called Voyennaya Kontr Razvedka: The Organization for Counter-Infiltration. Why they'd trusted him with this information, Gurevitch couldn't fathom. But it made him feel better about being in the open like this.

  When word went out to assassinate Gurevitch, the American agent would transmit an ultra-high-speed signal — one that couldn't be intercepted. Halfway across the world, in America, another signal would be sent into outer space. The satellite would release a special signal when it orbited over London, on a combination of frequencies meant for Gurevitch alone. The transistor device would combine them.

  And the "bird" would sing.

  When that happened, Gurevitch would leave immediately for a CIA safe house, without stopping even for a toothbrush. He'd be taken far away and provided with a new identity.

  Gurevitch looked at the little signaling device. It had remained silent the entire month he'd had it. The KGB hadn't gotten around to him yet.

  He was still holding the "bird" when he heard the door in the outer office open. He put the device back in his drawer. It must be Smith.

  "I'm in here," he called.

  The man who entered wasn't Smith. He was a square, stocky man, needing a shave, wearing a black raincoat. He was holding a shiny metal tube that looked like an oversize fountain pen.

  Too late, Gurevitch tried to get up. He opened his mouth to speak just as the man lifted the tube and pointed it straight at his face. There was a tiny snapping noise, like a child's cap gun going off. A cloud of vapor enveloped Gurevitch's face. There was a bitter taste and a burning sensation, and the room turned dark around the edges. The universe seemed to flow into a black drain. The rest of Gurevitch's consciousness rushed after it.

  Immediately, the man in the black raincoat held a square of gauze to his own face. He crushed the glass ampoule that was sewn into it and took a deep whiff of the amyl-nitrate antidote.

  He inspected Gurevitch's body briefly, without touching it, to make sure that the death appeared natural. The editor was half-sprawled over the desk, as if he'd had a heart attack.

  Across the Atlantic, at Fort Meade, Maryland, a slender metal mast extruded itself from a rooftop. It sent an intense burst of high-frequency radio noise to a precise location three hundred miles out in space. The NSA satellite that hung there was programmed to translate the burst into separate transmissions on separate wavelengths, all beamed at a small device in the possession of a man named Gurevitch in London.

  It was the fifth time in two days that the high-gain antenna in Fort Meade had sent its warning.

  And for the fifth time, the warning died in space. The satellite swung mutely on its polar orbit, its complex electronic brain melted into a useless lump of slag.

  * * *

  The young NCO stared at his television monitor, fascinated as always by the incredible clarity of what he saw there. It was, he liked to think, like having the eyes of an eagle.

  He appeared to be floating only a few hundred feet from the ground, looking straight down at a construction site somewhere in the heart of Russia. He could see the bulldozers and dump trucks, bright toys in the rubble, and the ant-like figures of workmen swarming around them.

  Actually, he knew, his view came from one hundred miles out in space, through a lens with a focal length of more than eight feet. He twisted the knobs on his console, and telemetry adjusted the resolution. The captain had told him to stick with this one when it rolled round on the monitor again. He could hold it, he calculated, at least a minute and a half before the earth's rotation took it away from him.

  He punched the signal button, and the captain was standing at his shoulder.

  "Is that the one, Avery?" the captain said. "The missile site north of Omsk?"

  "Yessir," the NCO said. "Only I can't tell for sure whether it is a missile site."

  The captain snorted. "I'll bet my ass that those are launching silos they're digging. You can't trust those goddam Russkies. If they're putting ICBM emplacements near Omsk, it's in clear violation of the SALT agreements."

  "It could be they're only pouring concrete pilings for a skyscraper," Avery suggested.

  "Pilings, my ass!"

  "Well, we'll know in a minute, sir. They're coming up now those black holes you were suspicious of. Just a second, while I see if I can get a better focus."

  The spaced round holes in the ground swam closer. There was something lying next to one of them that might have been a reinforced concrete lid.

  "There!" the captain snapped. "Isn't that something pointed sticking up out of the third hole from the right? It's casting a shadow. It looks… it just could be… one of the new Soviet 'Scrag' missiles!"

  Avery strained his eyes. Just a few seconds now, and he'd be able to verify the sighting. The angle of observation improved as the Big Bird satellite swung closer to the vertical.

  And then the screen went blank.

  "What happened?" the captain shouted.

  "I don't know, sir," Avery said, his hands swarming over his board.

  "Get your backup monitor working, man!" the captain sputtered, his voice frantic. "By the time Big Bird makes its next pass, the Russians will have those lids in place! We won't have a goddam shred of evidence!"

  The backup screen flickered. No image formed on it.

  "It's not the receiver, sir," Avery said, sweating. "We're okay here. Whatever happened, it happened up there. In Big Bird. A hundred miles out in space."

  * * *

  The President's man was grimmer than the other members of the special group had ever seen him. He glared down the length of the big polished conference table, then rummaged in his briefcase and threw down a thick sheaf of reports like a challenge.

  "We're blind, gentlemen," he said in his slight German accent. "Blind, deaf and dumb!"

  He had called the emergency meeting only an hour earlier. The heads of CIA, DIA, NSA and the men from Defense and State had been told to drop whatever they were doing and meet him at the "cookie factory" — the huge windowless building at Fort Meade that was NSA headquarters.

  "Let's no
t panic," CIA said placatingly. "Sure, we've had a few communications blackouts. But I'd like to point out that they've affected less than one percent of our message traffic."

  "One percent," the President's man said in the understated tone that passed for sarcasm with him. "Of course it just happens to be the most sensitive one percent."

  "But…"

  "For example," the President's man went on relentlessly, "there was the matter of the Ukrainian." He riffled through the reports and selected one. He scrutinized it myopically. "Let me see, his name was Gurevitch. A probable hit by the KGB. He was supposed to have been warned two days earlier."

  "We sent the message," NSA agreed.

  "And then there was the man the Defense Intelligence Agency was smuggling into China. He never got warned that they were waiting for him,"

  "We sent the message," CIA said defensively. "Our man in Peking got it off in plenty of time. It was NSA's job to transmit it back to the DIA man."

  The President's man shuffled the reports. "We've had hundreds of little disasters like those in the last two weeks. We're losing agents by the score. There are at least a dozen vital areas of the world where we simply don't know what's going on anymore."

  "Damn right!" said Defense. "And it isn't just a question of losing agents."

  The President's man peered owlishly over his horn-rimmed glasses. "Ah, yes, the four surveillance satellites that seem to have stopped functioning."

  "One, I'll buy," said Defense. "Could be battery failure, equipment malfunction. Two, the odds go up. But four? Something — somebody — has to be deliberately knocking them out."

  "The Russians?" State put in. "Is that what you think?

  "They have the most to gain. We're in a very delicate balance, gentlemen. We watch them, they watch us. We know how many missiles they have, they know how many we have. It's the only way to keep a Third World War from erupting. We have a gentlemen's agreement with them. Article Twelve of the SALT agreement specifically allows us to use satellites to spy on one another."