by Paul Kenyon
"The Russians aren't gentlemen," Defense snorted. "It's stupid to try to reach any sort of accord with them. They'll zap us first chance they get."
The President's man fixed him with a cold stare. "The President has staked his prestige on SALT. He's hopping mad. He wants an answer. And he wants it yesterday. And I don't mind telling you that if he doesn't get one, there'll be a new face or two at this table."
They all stirred uncomfortably. CIA went noticeably pale.
DIA broke the silence. "The satellites are still up there, at least physically, aren't they, Sam?" he said to the NSA director.
"That's right. We can bounce a radar signal off 'em. Their mass seems to be intact, according to orbital analysis. But all the telemetry's gone dead."
"What could cause that?"
"Hard radiation. Or heat."
"You mean something melted them up there?"
Defense hit the table with the flat of his hand. "I tell you, it's the Russians!"
"What about it, Sam?" said the President's man.
"Well… we know the Russians are experimenting with a 'killer' satellite."
"Refresh our memories."
"The first test model seems to have been their Cosmos 248. They sent it up when our radar was busy tracking Apollo 7 and Soyuz 3, so we're short on real data. It knocked out two of their own target satellites. Then there were Cosmos 249 and 252. They self-destructed after a test. And Cosmos 373 — it blew up two other Cosmos satellites."
"Maybe the tests are over. Maybe they've decided to put us out of the satellite business."
NSA shook his head. "I don't see how. Our radar showed nothing — absolutely nothing — within striking distance of our satellites before they went out of action."
"Could that be explained by electronic countermeasures? Could they make a killer satellite that was transparent to radar waves?"
"It's possible. Just barely," NSA said reluctantly.
"How would it disable one of our satellites?"
"Tag it with a thermite bomb. Flood it with hard radiation. Burn it out with a laser beam."
Defense said: "What about a laser beam fired from the ground?"
"Not possible. At least, not at the present state of the art. The ray would have to penetrate twenty miles of atmosphere. The heat would dissipate. There just isn't a laser powerful enough to be used from the ground. It's a different story in the airlessness of space."
"Can we get an inspector satellite up there to examine the wrecks?"
"Ask the Air Force. They're still playing with the project."
The President's man sighed. "Then we'll have to make our inspection on the ground."
Somebody drew a breath sharply.
CIA put his hands in his pockets. "You mean penetrate the Russian space facilities at Baikonour?"
"That's what I mean."
"Impossible. It's in the heart of Kazakhstan. The security perimeter is two hundred miles in diameter. We'd never get an agent within a hundred miles of the place."
"We've heard from CIA," the President's man said coldly. "What about your people, Sam?"
The NSA director looked him straight in the eye. "Coin can do it, if any agent can."
"Just a minute!" CIA protested. "This is a delicate mission. If the agent gets caught at Baikonour, the whole world situation could blow up in our faces. It would make the Francis Gary Powers U-2 flap look like a child's picnic. We can't trust a job like this to some spook who's not under our direct control! None of us in this room even knows who Coin is! Not even Sam!"
"Maybe that's why Coin's been so effective," the President's man said sardonically. "Sam, contact Key." He smiled. "You do know who Key is."
"He's the only one who does," someone grumbled.
NSA got to his feet, a tall handsome man who carried himself like the Air Force general he still was, by rank. "Sit tight, gentlemen. I'll be back in five minutes."
He rapped on the door, and the Marine guard outside unlocked it. He disappeared into the world's longest corridor — almost a fifth of a mile long. The door closed behind him.
He was back in less than three minutes, frowning.
"Gentlemen, there's a problem."
"What kind of problem?" CIA said solicitously.
"The same kind of problem our other agents have been having. The MESTAR VI satellite's been knocked out. Key is unable to contact Coin."
"We'll he'll just have to use some other channel of communication," the President's man said. "It may take a little longer, but…"
"You don't understand," NSA said. "It's a little more serious than that."
"What's wrong, Sam?" the President's man said.
"The KGB is on to Coin. They're closing in. And there's not a damn thing in the world that Key can do to send a warning."
3
He came through the bedroom door quickly, side-on to present a narrower target, and stepped immediately out of the door frame. Penelope noted his movements with professional approval; they were the movements of a man who's stayed alive a long time by killing other people before they killed him.
He wore a black hood like the others. In his hand he held a Czech-made Skoda automatic pistol with a silencer. The pistol swung in Penelope's direction and stayed there.
"Out," he said to the five hired hands. His voice was muffled by the hood.
"Careful of this one," the syringe man said in an indeterminate middle-European accent. "She moves like a cat."
"Out."
"But…"
"No witnesses. That includes you. All of you. Move."
The five filed out silently. The man with the Skoda cocked his head, listening to their footsteps fade down the hall, down the big marble staircase. When he was satisfied, he turned his attention to the Baroness.
"Hello, Coin," he said.
He took off the hood and grinned evilly at her, the moonlight making bars across his face.
"Hello, John," she said, not moving from her knees-and-elbows position. "I didn't know you worked for the KGB. Or has the agency decided to eliminate me?"
The man who stood before her was John Farnsworth, her business manager. He ran the two-million-dollar-a-year organization called International Models, Inc., which she'd built up from scratch.
He was also the man called Key.
He was her only liaison with the National Security Agency, her nominal employer. Even General Phillips, NSA's head, didn't know who Coin was. It had been set up that way.
"Get up, Penny," he said, waving the gun. "Put on a robe."
She stood up and faced him, naked, her shoulders back and her arms by her sides.
"I don't think I'll put on a robe just yet, John. I'm going to make you as uncomfortable as you made me."
Farnsworth stood there, his well-bred, fiftyish face struggling not to show emotion. His iron-gray mustache twitched. John Farnsworth was tough, resourceful and uncompromising, and he had done his share of killing in the OSS and the Cold War that followed. But he was also an old-fashioned gentleman.
She enjoyed his discomfiture for a long moment, then, with a tinkling laugh, ran over and threw her arms around him.
He pried her loose. "The robe," he said firmly.
She brushed his mustache with a kiss, then walked deliberately to the enormous lacquered Venetian wardrobe across the room. She slipped into a white terry robe and belted it. Then, after satisfying herself that Lars Lindqvist was alive and breathing, she sat down on the bed.
"All right, John," she said. "Explain the reason for this extraordinary visit."
He tucked the Skoda automatic in his belt. "What've you heard from your wristwatch lately?"
She glanced at the timepiece involuntarily. "Why — nothing."
"I've been sending you signals for two days. The MESTAR satellites are out of commission. All of them."
She digested the information, then said, "All right, so I was out of communication. And you couldn't reach me with a coded message by phone, because I just opened up t
he villa and haven't had the phone put into service yet. Incidentally, John, when did you leave New York?"
"Three hours ago."
"How did you manage that?"
"I commandeered one of the SR-71 reconnaissance jets. The Blackbird, they call it. It flies at Mach 3. I made the 4,000 miles to Italy in under two hours."
"Who are your five friends?"
"Local talent. On NSA's Italian payroll."
"That leads to the big question, John. Why did you need them? Why didn't you just come to the gate and ring the bell?" She cocked her head and waited for an answer.
"Because I didn't know what I'd be walking into. I don't work for the KGB. But your friend Lindqvist does."
"Lars?"
He nodded grimly. "He's an agent in place. Has been for fifteen years."
"Am I blown, John?"
"Not yet. But you would have been by morning."
"But Lars knows I'm Coin?"
He shook his head. "He only suspects it. He's been prowling your villa, putting little things together. Seems he came across the gun you keep hidden in the frame of the painting by Tiepolo…"
"My God! And you say I'm not blown!"
He smiled icily. "Lindqvist is an amateur. He started working for the Russians years ago because he had vague political ideas about the brotherhood of man. They fed his ego — even told him he'd been made a major general in Soviet intelligence. Same way they flimflammed the Swede, Wennerstrom, a while back. You remember the case?"
She nodded. "Wennerstrom was doing chores for the CIA at the same time he was passing information to the Russians. The Russians fed him spurious data and laughed themselves silly." She grimaced. "The poor fool!"
"Don't feel sorry for Lindqvist, Penny. The poor fool was going to finger you for a KGB murder squad. That's why I thought I'd better bring some muscle."
"Why isn't the squad here, John? Coin must be high on the Ninth Section's priority list."
"I told you Lindqvist was an amateur. He was playing ego games with his KGB caseworker. Told him he had a lead to Coin, but wasn't sure. Said he'd have Coin's identity for him tomorrow. I thought I'd better get here right away."
"You were listening, of course."
He nodded. "Our man in Oslo has a laser tap on the Soviet caseworker's windowpane." He chuckled. "You should have heard the poor KGB man pleading with Lindqvist over the phone to give him the name of his Coin suspect. But Lindqvist was enjoying himself too much. He wanted to stretch it out. Amateurs!"
"What was in that injection you gave Lars? It didn't kill him."
"Puromycin."
"But that's an antibiotic."
"It also interferes with the chemical activity of RNA in the brain. It erases the short-term memory before it has a chance to become long-term. So far it's just been used in learning experiments with rats. I think your friend Lindqvist qualifies as a rat."
"You gave Lars a case of amnesia!"
"That's right. He'll forget everything that's happened in the last two or three days. Including his suspicions about Coin."
"I see," she said slowly. "All right, John, I'll fill him full of liquor before he wakes up. Get some barbiturates in him to make him feel bloody awful. I'll work on him all day — convince him that he's been on the world's biggest binge for the last three days, and that he's had a giant blackout."
"That'll do fine. But a day is all I can give you. You've got something more important to do now."
"An assignment?"
"More like a suicide mission."
A prickly sensation ran across the Baroness' scalp. It wasn't just the promise of excitement, welcome as that was. Something had triggered the alarms in the animal level of her consciousness.
"Tell me about it, John," she said.
He obliged, spouting a lot of vague hints. The Skoda automatic had appeared as if by magic in his hand again.
She prowled silently, on bare feet, to the door. Her hand was on the knob and her body went into a crouch.
She jerked the door open.
A man was kneeling there. One of the hooded five — she couldn't tell which.
Her knee came up in a short vicious swing before he could move. It caught him under the chin and flung him, tumbling, backwards. A gun went spinning from his hand.
She dove on top of him. He was a thickset man, as hard as a block of wood. A chunky forearm came up at her throat in a karate chop. She got inside the arm, burying her face in his chest. Her knee went between his legs. He screamed.
She heaved herself off the blocky torso and swung the edge of her hand like a machete. She felt his throat crush. All of a sudden, he was as limp as a sack of grain.
"You might have kept him alive for questioning," Farnsworth said, coming up with the gun in his hand. He thrust it back inside his trouser waistband.
"He heard you call me Coin."
"Quite right, Penny. Safer not to have anyone walking around knowing that, even if he's your prisoner." He stooped over and lifted the hood. "It's Antonelli. I never would have suspected him."
"A double agent?"
"We'll have to assume he was. And if he was just curious — well he should have known better. Help me roll him into that rug, will you?"
The rug was a small Isfahan, worth about $7,000. Penelope wrapped the body into it without comment. It was probably the most expensive set of threads Antonelli had ever worn. It made a fine shroud.
"I'll stuff this in the boot of my car when I leave," Farnsworth said. "No point in calling in a cleanup squad. The fewer people who know about it, the better. I'll dump him out over the Atlantic on the flight back."
"What about the others, John?"
"They don't know anything about it. They were brought in to deal with a dangerous KGB agent — which Lindqvist is. The Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini is just an innocent bystander." He smiled. "I'm supposed to have stayed behind to appeal to your patriotism. If you don't agree to keep quiet, I'm supposed to kill you and make it look like natural causes. They'll be relieved to find out you're still alive tomorrow. The name Coin never came into it."
She belted her robe and brushed back her hair. "Why don't you go downstairs and fix yourself a drink, John. I'm going to take a shower. Then you can tell me about the assignment."
* * *
"It doesn't sound like much, John," the Baroness said. "Let me see if I've got it straight. All you want me to do is get into Russia, penetrate about 1,500 miles inside to the heart of the Kazakh province without being caught, get past a few thousand troops and security guards into the missile base at Baikonour, get the information on a highly guarded secret weapon that we're not sure exists and get out again without anyone suspecting it."
Farnsworth laughed. "That's about it."
They sat facing one another in the Venetian-silk embroidered chairs in the vast downstairs drawing room, filled with Orsini family heirlooms. The walls were hung with priceless Florentine paintings: Donatello and Brunelleschi and Giotto. The carpet was an extravagant thirty-foot Kashmir, laid over a marble floor. The first light of dawn was filtering through the glass doors that overlooked the formal garden, sending a pink glow over the Renaissance antiques.
The Baroness was relaxed and refreshed after a stinging shower. She wore a soft charcoal-colored cashmere turtleneck, stretch jeans and sneakers. Her thick black hair was swept up casually and held in place with a few pins.
"It ought to be a little easier than that to get the information." She looked at him shrewdly over the rim of her bloody mary. "Don't you have a man in Baikonour?"
"We do. How'd you guess? His name is Vassily Glukhov. He's one of their top rocket scientists. He's been on our payroll since 1968. But we haven't heard from him for months. Can't get in touch with him. The Russians have Baikonour buttoned up tight."
She took a sip of the bloody mary. "So, seeing that they've buttoned up the security because of this killer satellite, or whatever it is, you figured it would be a good time for me to go in there?"
"All right, John." She tossed her head. "How am I getting into Kazakhstan? Over the Afghanistan border?"
"No, they've buttoned that up tight, too. Too risky right now."
"How, then?"
"You're going to Moscow. Legally. You're covering the seasonal showing at the All Union Fashion House, as an accredited correspondent. Women's Wear Daily will be there. So will Vogue and Harper's. You're using your Italian passport, correspondent for Il Viaggiatore. It's all fixed with the editors."
"That sounds dandy. Then all I have to do is travel a thousand miles east, without letting the Russians know I've left Moscow."
"That's about the size of it. But I've got it fixed for you to take your team in with you. You're going to be fashion consultant for the U.S. pavilion at the trade fair that's going on in Moscow this month. That means you'll be able to get some equipment past customs. You'll have crates of stuff with you."
The Baroness regarded her drink reflectively. "John, what if it isn't the Russians? Could it be the Chinese?"
He snorted. "Not likely. The Chinese have exactly three satellites in orbit at the present moment. One of them's nothing but a damn music box playing 'The East Is Red.' They simply don't have the capability."
"All right. I'll start making arrangements. I hope the special effects department has some new gadgets for me. For one thing, I'll need something that will fog photographic film."
He looked at her sharply. "What do you need…? Oh. Of course. I'll check with the cookie factory. I'll have a few things in Sumo's hands by tomorrow."
The Baroness got to her feet and walked to the big Tiepolo that dominated the far end of the room. She reached into the slot on the underside of the frame and released the little Bernardelli VB automatic from its magnetic catch. She weighed its nine ounces in the palm of her hand. It looked like a toy — a little gold-plated pistol that was only four inches long and as slim as a cigarette case. But it packed five rounds, and was chambered for .25 caliber rather than .22. It not only killed; it had stopping power as well.