by Paul Kenyon
The toad-woman showed the colonel a transformer and generator with a pair of alligator slips attached. He nodded his approval. Penelope kept her face impassive. This was going to be bad.
"So, you like to make jokes about electrical tits," Ostrovsky said. "Let's see how funny they are."
He signaled, and the toad-woman snapped the alligator clips on Penelope's nipples. He wouldn't have touched her breasts himself; that was why a woman was present. The clips pinched: the woman gave them an unnecessary squeeze.
"If you make me keep this up too long," Ostrovsky said, "the electricity will burn your nipples right off. You know that, don't you?"
"You're wasting your time, Colonel."
The woman sat down and looked avidly at Penelope's face. Ostrovsky switched on the generator.
Her body lurched against the straps in a violent spasm. A scream was torn from her throat. A blinding pain shot through her breasts and flashed through her entire body.
"That was only three seconds at a relatively low voltage. Now I'm going to increase the dose," Ostrovsky said.
There was another jolt that seemed to lift her off the table and keep her straining against the straps for an eternity. The pain was excruciating. She screamed. The shock stiffened her whole body.
It was over again. She heard herself panting. Blood trickled from her Up where she'd bit it There was a dull ache in her breasts.
"Talk, damn you!" the colonel shouted.
"I didn't blow up your damned spaceship," Penelope said hoarsely.
He set the dial of the transformer to a new reading. "It will be worse this time," he said grimly. The toad-woman licked her lips.
The door opened. A young soldier came diffidently into the room and spoke to Ostrovsky, looking out of the corners of his eyes at the naked woman on the table.
"A call from Moscow," the colonel said. "I'll be back immediately. Watch her while I'm gone, Vera, but don't do anything."
The moment Ostrovsky was gone, the squat woman was scrabbling at the transformer. Her wide slit of a mouth opened in a horrid smile. Penelope vibrated with an unbelievable pain. It seemed to go on forever.
When Ostrovsky returned a minute or two later, the woman was back in position at the foot of the table. Penelope had stopped moaning.
"You're being shipped to Moscow immediately," Ostrovsky said savagely. He looked disappointed. "They'll question you there. But don't rejoice too soon. There is a special interrogator at Lubianka. He is a dwarf. They use him for stubborn cases. He likes to use his teeth. He is very ingenious. He can spread a man twenty feet across a cellar, with his intestines at one side and what's left of him at the other, and keep him alive for days."
The woman, Vera, removed the alligator clips. Penelope got a glimpse of her nipples. They felt raw and sore, but they looked all right.
"Moscow wants us to take the pictures and fingerprints for her zapiska before we ship her," Ostrovsky said. "We'll keep one set here and send the other to headquarters."
Vera scuttled across the room and came back wheeling a close-up camera arrangement. She tilted the table all the way up and positioned the lens five feet from Penelope's face.
Penelope probed with her tongue for the hollow tooth that held the capsule. She found the point of the false crown. She waited until the entire role of film had been exposed, then bit down hard.
There was an unpleasant metallic taste in her mouth. She pursed her lips and blew in the direction of the camera. She thought she saw a faint shimmering haze, but it was too insubstantial to be sure.
Vera had been looking in the other direction. She turned around, sniffing the air suspiciously.
"You look exactly like a toad," Penelope told her.
The wide mouth tightened. Penelope was glad Ostrovsky was still in the room. But the squat woman forgot about whatever she thought she'd smelled.
"Get her fingerprints, Vera," Ostrovsky said. "Can you manage her, or shall I get help?"
"Nyet, nyet, palkovnik Ostrovsky," the woman said. "She can walk."
She loosened the straps and helped Penelope from the table. Penelope made herself sag, leaning heavily on the woman as they crossed the room. She waited until the fingerprinting had been completed. She wanted to be sure that the false prints pasted to her fingertips got into the KGB files.
Then, with Vera still hanging onto her left wrist, she whirled and broke the woman's jaw.
"I don't like your busy little hands," Penelope said.
The squat woman was sprawled on the floor, ten feet away, making choking sounds. Her eyes were wide with shock. Her jaw gaped open at an unnatural angle. She tried to get up, but couldn't.
Ostrovsky was grabbing for the pistol in his holster.
"Don't worry, Colonel," the Baroness said sweetly. "I'm not going to hurt you. You can ship me to Moscow now."
* * *
She was under heavy guard all the way back to Moscow. They'd found the guard's body on the water tower. That and Vera's broken jaw had convinced them that she was dangerous. They dressed her in too-large gray prison clothes of some coarse fabric and chained her wrists to an iron band around her waist.
There was an armed escort waiting at the military airport near Moscow when the Hyushin-18 turboprop landed. They hustled her into an armored car and drove her, with a four-vehicle escort, to No. 2 Dzerzhinsky Street, the double building that joins KGB headquarters and Lubianka Prison.
They herded her down the peeling green corridors toward the basement. She wondered if that was where they kept the dwarf.
She counted three basement levels before they prodded her toward a massive steel door. There was an armed guard with a machine gun at either side, and an official sitting at a little wooden table in front of it. He wore the insignia of a KGB general.
"We know you're Coin," he said, looking up.
She said nothing.
"It's out of my hands," he went on. "The man in charge is in there." He licked his lips nervously and turned to one of the soldiers. "Send her in and close the door behind her."
The sentry gave her a shove through the door. It was dim. The walls were damp, cracked blocks of dressed stone.
A man was sitting at a desk over at the far walk. He was bent over some papers, his back to her.
He got up at the sound of the closing door and came toward her. Dim as it was, there was no mistaking him. The man in charge, the KGB general had said. She stared at him, her pulses pounding with the surprise and shock of it.
"Hello, Coin," he said.
It was John Farnsworth.
9
"Am I supposed to know you?" she said coldly.
It was John Farnsworth, all right. There was no mistaking that handsome, distinguished face, with the clipped gray mustache and the hard penetrating eyes. He looked out of place in this dank sub-basement with its moldy walls. In his impeccably tailored pin-striped suit, he looked as if he ought to be presiding over a board meeting of a blue-chip corporation.
"You can stop playing games," he said in an amused tone. "My colleagues know that I'm Key and you're Coin."
"Colleagues? Are you running the KGB now?"
He smiled thinly. "Just one small department" He produced a key from his pocket. "I'll unlock those shackles if you promise to behave yourself. I hear you broke the jaw of the last person who tried to talk to you."
"I just gave tat for tit"
"Colonel Ostrovsky wasn't too rough on you?"
"I'm all right now. A little sore. Was it you who called from Moscow?"
"That was the general. I was there when he made the call."
He was unlocking her chains now. The circulation surged painfully back into her wrists. Farnsworth took both her hands in his and looked into her eyes.
"The general's a little miffed," he went on. "You see, I'm taking a rather important operation out of his hands."
He was squeezing her hands. A series of quick little squeezes. It was Morse code.
THEY KNOW YOU COIN. BUT
DON'T KNOW YOUR IDENTITY. DID YOU FIX PICTURES?
She squeezed back: YES.
So Farnsworth had told the Russians she was Coin. But he hadn't told them who Coin was. That was reassuring.
"Am I a part of this… operation?" she said.
"Yes. The Russians have had a file on Coin for some time. They're a little awed by you. And they're very impressed at the way you penetrated the Baikonour Cosmodrome. They didn't think such a thing was possible. There'll be some shake-ups at the KGB." He looked up at some hidden bug. "Sorry about that, General."
"Key, darling, are you ready to tell me what this is all about?"
"Sit down. You're about to get a briefing. You're about to go to work for the GRU."
"Soviet military intelligence? I'm not sure I care for the idea."
"It's all been fixed. At the highest levels. Washington and Moscow are calling a temporary truce over this thing. The President and the Premier have been on the hot line all day."
"Then Washington knows that it's not the Russians who've been disabling our satellites?"
"Yes. I transmitted the report of your backup team while you were out of touch. And more to the point, the Russians know that it's not the Americans who've been knocking out their satellites. It was obvious as soon as their technical experts finished analyzing the data from the Vrach disaster. We think we know the answer. The Chinese are doing it to both of us."
"But how?"
"An earth-based high-energy source. Most likely a laser beam."
"But I thought such a thing was technically impossible."
He smacked a fist in the palm of his hand. "It is impossible! But they're doing it! We've got to find out how!"
"Why are Washington and Moscow cooperating? I'd think either of them would give their souls to get their hands on a new superweapon."
"Neither of us can do it alone. The crossover has to be made from Soviet territory. But we've got the exact coordinates of the laser source."
She raised a quizzical eyebrow.
He explained: "It seems to be coming from a point in the Khingan Mountains in northeastern China. The most barren part of Manchuria, just across the Russian border. We've run a computer analysis, based on the precise points in their orbits that our own satellites went out of commission. The Russians have a rough fix, but their computer analysis isn't as sophisticated as ours. And the Khingan Mountains are a big place."
"So it's a joint mission? An American team and a Russian team. Who's in charge?"
"You are. Nominally, anyway. You'll have the coordinates. You don't share them till you're well out of Soviet territory, into China. And you're in charge of communications. The Russians don't like it, but they know that's the only way we'll play."
"Who's in charge of the Russian team?"
"Their top agent. He's got the same reputation in the GRU that you have on our side. A fellow named Alexey Krylov."
* * *
Alexey dove out the window and hit the fire escape with his shoulders. He grabbed at the icy iron rails to keep himself from going over, then turned to crouch facing the window looking in on the hotel corridor.
He'd heard the footsteps just in time.
It was the same big American he'd seen a few minutes before, just before he'd forced the window. The American had beefy shoulders, a beefy face. He wore a blue serge suit with a suspicious bulge under one arm.
It was three o'clock in the morning. The American wasn't prowling the corridor, fully dressed, just to visit the lavatory at the far end. He didn't look like a man with a weak bladder. He was some kind of security guard, probably CIA, there to guard the American technical experts assigned to the Helsinki round of the SALT talks.
And Alexey had to get past him. Preferably without hurting him. If the Americans got the notion that somebody had been having a look inside the briefcases of the scientists attached to the arms limitation conference, there'd be a hellish flap. The Finns would protest the invasion of their neutrality, the Americans would stiffen their bargaining position. And the GRU would disown him. Fatally.
He clung, shivering, to the fire escape and thought it over. Alexey was a long, lean man in his thirties, with frank blue eyes and wheat-colored hair. He had a handsome, rather aquiline face with high cheekbones and a broad, humorous mouth. He was dressed for this expedition in black turtleneck and slacks, crepe-soled shoes and a woolen knit cap. A nylon bag was slung over his shoulder. In a pinch he might have passed for a Norwegian sailor on shore leave.
He checked the luminous dial of his watch. The blue-suited American made his rounds in under five minutes. He was out of sight around the bend for about two and one-half minutes on each circuit.
It wasn't much time, but it would have to do.
The moment the American turned the corner again, Alexey flowed silently, like some boneless night creature, over the sill. His tools were already in his hand by the time he reached the door of the room. The locks in the Finnish hotel were old, probably dating from the last century. He slipped inside and closed the door quietly behind him.
In the bed across the room someone stirred and moaned in his sleep. Alexey froze. When the breathing grew regular again, he moved in a low crouch to the bedside.
He risked a quick blink of the red-shielded flashlight, memorizing the position of the scientist's body. It was Higgins, all right; he'd recognized the man's features in the brief flash. Thank God he was in the right room!
He grabbed Higgins' arm and plunged the needle into his bicep. The man thrashed weakly, then subsided. He began to snore. He'd be out for hours and, hopefully, never remember that instant pinprick in the darkness.
Alexey stuffed some loose bedding around the door to keep light from shining through the cracks, then used his flashlight on high beam. Higgins' briefcase was leaning against the wall. It was locked.
He opened it carefully, so that no scratches would show on the lock. He spread the papers on the floor and scanned them quickly. When he saw what he'd stumbled onto, he almost whistled in appreciation.
The top document was the most important. It was an outline of American strategy for this SALT session, complete with fall-back positions and an estimate of Soviet bargaining strengths. He grinned. That would give the Russian experts something to go by.
There were also technical descriptions of the new generation of American spy satellites, giving such details as focal lengths of the high-resolution cameras and wavelengths in millimeters of the radiation that the systems could detect.
He set up the little stand on the floor, with the special battery-operated lamp and, lying on his stomach, began to take pictures. He exposed three of the seventy-two-frame Minox rolls before he was finished. Then he put the papers back in the briefcase and packed up his kit. He took a last look around the room to make sure he'd left everything just as he'd found it. Higgins was still snoring peacefully.
He was about to open the door a crack, when the knob rattled. A key turned in the lock.
Alexey flattened himself against the wall and fitted the lead sap in his hand. He didn't dare use his gun. There's no doubt about the cause of death, when the corpse has bullets in it.
The door opened six inches and a hand with a flashlight poked inside. "Professor Higgins?" a voice whispered. The flashlight beam picked out Higgins' sleeping form, then the briefcase by the wall. Apparently satisfied, the man with the flashlight switched it off.
Alexey waited, relief starting to flood him. Perhaps he wasn't going to have to kill the CIA man after all.
But then the door opened all the way and the beefy face was peering around the corner. Alexey swung the sap. It caught the CIA man on the temple, making a dull crunching sound. He caught the man before he hit the floor.
He looked at the body ruefully. The man's ragged breathing indicated a serious concussion. Perhaps he wouldn't remember anything. But Alexey couldn't take the chance. Maybe the mission wasn't botched. Maybe he could still salvage it.
He got his shoulders under
the CIA man's body and carried him in a fireman's lift toward the window. He propped him on the fire escape, his head and torso hanging downward over the edge. There was a long nylon cord in his kit. He looped it around the man, holding one end and letting the rest of the cord slide freely through his fist.
After a quick glance at the alley below, he began descending the fire escape, playing out the cord as he went. There was just enough.
He tugged at the two ends of the cord. The body up above toppled off the fire escape. Alexey stepped back quickly, reeling in the cord. The body hit the bottom of the alley, head first. A quarter-minute later, Alexey was out of the alley, the cord wound up in his pocket, whistling his way down the street.
When they found the body, they'd assume the CIA man fell while checking the fire escape. Perhaps there had been a prowler, perhaps not. In any case, it was better than a body with a bullet in it. No one could ever prove that an intruder had actually been inside Higgins' room, or the rooms of any of the other American technical experts. Most likely, it wouldn't even occur to them.
An hour later he was in a stolen fishing boat, putt-putting his way across the Gulf of Finland. Tallinn was only fifty kilometers away. By morning he'd be in Leningrad.
10
The admiral didn't like it.
"It's just plain crazy!" he said. "Letting Soviet aircraft land on a U.S. carrier. We don't want them anywhere near us. Ordinarily we scramble our jets and intercept at a hundred-mile radius."
"You can relax, Admiral," the Baroness said. She continued packing the cold-weather gear that was spread out on the bunk. "The Russians aren't going to bomb your carrier."