Diamonds Are for Dying Read online

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  Swings Into Action.

  Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, the swingingest international playgirl of them all, is off for Brazil on a gay Carnival lark — and a top-secret espionage mission vital to America's survival. For unbeknownst to the handsome Rio cariocas whose beds she's shared, this voluptuous beauty is a cunning, deadly superspy out to smash an astounding neo-Nazi plot for world domination!

  * * *

  Paul Kenyon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  * * *

  Paul Kenyon

  Diamonds Are for Dying

  OCR Mysuli: [email protected]

  Chapter 1

  When the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini threw a party, it swung.

  The rock group that she had imported from London writhed under the flashing strobes, filling the big drawing room with an earsplitting din. The priceless Isfahan rug was pushed carelessly back for the dancers. Among them was the Contessa Paoli, who had removed her gown's halter top to treat the guests to the sight of her pushy young breasts quivering in time to the beat. A famous American playwright was having a shouting match with an equally famous Italian film director. The Action Sculptor of the moment, a hairy Frenchman in jeans and net shirt, had his hand up Lady Darlington's skirt while she chattered brightly, a champagne glass in her hand. The air was heavy with hash and pot and spilled drinks and the exhalations of one hundred and fifty bodies.

  The Baroness stood at the center of it all, a martini in one hand and a joint in the other. The exquisite, chiseled face that had decorated the covers of Vogue and Elle and Harper's Bazaar showed a lively satisfaction. They'd said it was impossible, putting together a decent blast in Rome in February, but she'd done it.

  The Baroness was a long-legged beauty in her thirties, with the supple grace of the professional model. She had wide shoulders, flaring hips, narrow waist, splendid torso. She had big startling green eyes, high explicit cheekbones, a rich, black mane of hair. She had dressed for her party in a filmy claret jumpsuit whose front was slashed to the navel in a huge V.

  Helena Pontarelli, the opera star, swept by on the arm of her current lover, a Texas millionaire named Clem Ferguson. "A marvelous party, Baroness!" she chirped. "Molto ben riuscita!"

  The Baroness smiled automatically, ignoring Helena. Her attention was elsewhere. A spectacular male whom she did not recognize had just entered the drawing room. He was tall, broad-shouldered, with a handsome weathered face that was as well bred and expensive as the English-cut flannel blazer he wore.

  "You can't have him," Helena whispered. "He's taken."

  "If he's taken, he shouldn't have come to my party," the Baroness said. She spoke in perfect Italian, with just the trace of an American accent.

  "That's Sir Hugh Greystone. He just resigned from the Cabinet because of that scandal with Christina Poole. He's mad about her. He's just come here to take her home."

  Sir Hugh searched the crowd, looking for someone. His face lit in a dazzling smile and he started across the room. Penelope moved to intercept him.

  "You haven't a chance," she heard Helena say behind her.

  An hour later, Penelope poked a long finger into Sir Hugh's bare, hairy chest and said, "You haven't a chance. I'm not going to let you out of here until you've made love to me at least twice more."

  With his clothes off. Sir Hugh looked exactly as Penelope had imagined he would. He sprawled in the middle of her oversize bed, big, rangy and walnut brown, with huge ropy muscles that were oak hard from all the swimming and golf and tennis and polo.

  He smiled and poked a finger of his own at her, circling one pink nipple. "My dear lady, I'll be glad to oblige. But aren't you neglecting your guests?"

  From beyond the locked door they could hear the heavy beat of the rock group, the background roar of one hundred and fifty voices. Several times while they'd been making love, someone or other had rattled the knob, then given up and gone away.

  "They've forgotten about me by now," she said. "They're stoned, or into a rap session, or dancing, or in the sack with someone in one of the other bedrooms. I like this party better."

  She reached between his legs to encourage him. His tool grew in her hand until it was a rigid club, hot and heavy to the touch. It was darker than the rest of him, with a livid network of purple veins and a thin white line down its length. She traced the scar with her thumb.

  "Manhood rite among the Australian aborigines," he explained. "I lived among the abos for a year when I was on loan to the High Commissioner. Only way to gain their confidence." He laughed. "It does tend to make a chap worry a bit till it heals."

  "It's all right now, isn't it?" she whispered.

  "Quite," he said. "I'll show you again if you like."

  "I like," she said.

  She squeezed the pulsing shaft and he gasped with sudden pleasure. "That's the way, old girl," he whispered. He pressed his body against hers, hip to hip, and circled her with one strong arm, his hand grasping for her breast. Penelope felt a thrill of sensation flash through her body as he began skillfully to manipulate the smooth yielding flesh. He grasped the hard nub of her nipple between thumb and forefinger. She could feel a wetness between her thighs.

  The doorknob rattled. Hugh cocked his head, his fingers pausing. "Pay no attention," Penelope hissed fiercely. She wondered if it were Christina out there, and gave a throaty laugh. Hugh's fingers grew busy again.

  Penelope put her free hand behind his head and pulled his face down to hers. Her lips fastened on his mouth. She flicked her tongue along his closed lips until he opened them. She pushed her tongue thirstily inside. His tongue was hot and slippery against hers. She heard a groan and realized it was her own voice.

  His other hand slid to the fork of her legs, his forearm crossing hers. He pushed a thick finger into her body, grunting approvingly at the slippery ease of penetration. Involuntarily Penelope's buttocks lifted off the sheets as she pressed her pelvis against his hand. He slipped a second finger inside her, while he massaged her clitoris with a meaty thumb.

  Her fingernails raked the back of his neck, drawing blood. Working by touch, her vision filled with a blurry close-up of his leathery face, she pulled back his foreskin and began gently to rub the turgid knob at the end of his shaft. It was almost too much for him. He groaned and attempted to roll over on top of her.

  She pushed him back with all her considerable strength. "The missionary position?" she said mockingly. "You did it that way the first time. You've been too long with the aborigines."

  Frantic with passion as he was, he laughed. He hauled himself further up the bed, a pillow under his back, and raised himself on his elbows.

  "Will this do?"

  "It'll do fine," she said.

  She straddled him, facing his feet. She inched backward into position, his hands on her hips, guiding her. She reached behind her back and grasped his throbbing club. She lowered herself onto it and felt it push deep inside her body. "Ah," he breathed, and thrust upward.

  Penelope lifted herself off him, and he went wild, trying to penetrate her again. She sheathed him within her again, and let him make two or three piston thrusts before she raised her buttocks again. He got the idea at once, and began to work in concert with her, pushing all the way into her, then all the way out, over and over again. There
was a little electric shock of ecstasy each time the fleshy head of his glans parted the lubricated lips of her vulva. Penelope's senses began to swim.

  Finally it was too much to bear. She fitted him deep into the burning length of her vagina, and they went to work in earnest. They were good together. They found their natural rhythm immediately, and began to move in and out in a smooth elliptical motion. His hands braced her hips, steadying her. Once Penelope leaned forward and took his big toe in her mouth, sucking on it. He grunted in surprise, and she gave him a sharp little bite before straightening again. He was heaving up against her bottom in great powerful arcs now, breathing harshly with effort. Penelope contributed a sideways wiggle, and the reciprocal motion drove them both into a frenzy. Faster and faster they moved, the bed shaking beneath them. Penelope was panting uncontrollably, a deep warm glow growing within her. It was like a pulsating light, growing brighter and brighter, bigger and bigger, till there was a tremendous flash of joy. Ecstasy burst within her. Hugh's fingers were digging into her hips and he was wracked with a great shuddering spasm, and she knew it had happened for him too at the same instant.

  His long stem still stiff inside her, she reversed position and leaned over him, her hands on his shoulders. She wriggled back and forth, teasing the last fluttering convulsions out of herself, and when they were done and faded at last, she leaned forward and kissed him on the lips.

  It was at that moment that the little Movado watch on her wrist gave her a tingling electric shock.

  The Baroness finished the kiss. Her manner betrayed nothing. She pulled herself off Sir Hugh's glistening tool, cupping a hand under her vagina to catch the warm syrupy semen as it dripped out.

  The watch shocked her again, three short tingles in a coded signal. Involuntarily she glanced at it.

  Sir Hugh raised himself on one elbow. "You're not one of those girls who times a chap, are you?" he said in an amused tone.

  Penelope laughed. "Your performance was more than satisfactory, darling. But perhaps we'd better get back to the party."

  He swung his feet over the edge of the bed. "But Penelope, you said you wanted to have a go at it twice more. Just give me a few minutes to catch my breath and…"

  She gave him a brilliant smile. "Let's save it for later, darling, shall we? Right now I wouldn't wonder if Christina is looking for you. I wouldn't want a scene."

  The doorknob rattled just then, as if to punctuate her words. A guilty flush spread over Sir Hugh's face.

  "There's a little sink through there," Penelope said, pointing. "Do wash up quickly and get dressed. I'll rejoin the party in another fifteen or twenty minutes. I don't want us to reappear together."

  When Sir Hugh had dressed and gone, Penelope, still nude, locked the bedroom door behind him. She placed a trans-Atlantic call to New York and waited impatiently while it was put through.

  Finally, after the necessary exchanges between the Rome operator, the New York operator and the switchboard at International Models, Inc., she heard John Farnsworth's secretary say: "I have Mr. Farnsworth for you now."

  And at that moment, the electric shocks from her wristwatch stopped.

  * * *

  The man who had shocked her had sent the signal from more than five thousand miles away. He'd done it with the help of two computers and an orbiting satellite.

  It had all begun less than an hour earlier. John Farnsworth, the Baroness's business manager and the man who ran International Models, Inc., had pressed the button that told his secretary that he didn't want to be disturbed.

  For good measure, he pressed another concealed button on the underside of his desk that activated a special trip lock mechanism in his office door. The mechanism would make the door stick for three or four seconds — long enough for him to cover up what he was doing if someone should try to barge in without knocking.

  Farnsworth leaned back in his swivel chair for a moment, a distinguished-looking man in his fifties, with a clipped gray mustache and an impeccable blue pinstriped suit made for him by one of the best tailors in New York. His face was tanned the color of fine mahogany, and beneath his expensive grooming was the suggestion of hickory hard muscle. He moved like a man used to outdoor activity.

  The view from his office window was midtown Manhattan, a splendid vista of towering stone and aluminum and steel, glittering with the glass of millions of windows. One of those windows might have a man with a telescope behind it. Farnsworth had no reason to think so, but he was a cautious man; he had once been such a man with a telescope himself. He pressed another button, and the slats of his Venetian blinds swiveled from the horizontal to block him off from prying telescopic eyes.

  Then he got to work. He slid open the deep drawer at the left of his desk, revealing something that looked like a dictation-playback unit. He fitted a pair of earphones on his head. A stack of cassettes waited at his elbow. Farnsworth sighed. It looked like at least half a day's work.

  The first cassette was a routine transmission from Fort Meade. A flat, midwestern voice came through the earphones.

  "…and PROD says to tell you that Casimir won't be able to blow bubbles in Warsaw after the twenty-seventh, whatever that means," the midwestern voice said plaintively. "Hey, Key, are you still awake?"

  Farnsworth laughed. The midwestern voice had been needling him for the last couple of months. He couldn't blame the man. It must be galling to spend your days doing petty chores you didn't understand for a man whose identity you weren't allowed to know.

  Farnsworth picked up a fresh cassette and prepared to insert it. Before he could do so, his wristwatch gave him an electric shock.

  Involuntarily, the tape cassette dropped from his hand. He let it lie on the floor while he inserted a blank cassette into the dictation unit. The wristwatch continued to give him a mild shock every few seconds.

  "Damn naggers!" Farnsworth cursed. There was no way to turn off the shocks until he completed the special high-priority transmission cycle the signal was ordering him to initiate. They were being triggered by an FM carrier wave from NSA's local transmitter.

  He punched a digital code into the minicomputer built into his desk file, and two things happened. An integrated circuit module began to tune into a predetermined cycle of more than a dozen different UHF frequencies, so that no other receiver accidentally homing in on a particular frequency could intercept more than a small fraction of the message — a fraction that would make no sense whatever. And the "dictation unit" in his desk flipped to ultra-highspeed mode.

  There was a humming sound that lasted for no more than four seconds. The mild shocks from his wristwatch mercifully stopped.

  It took him thirty minutes to hear it through at normal speed. The half-hour's worth of sound had been imprinted magnetically in just four seconds, much as duplicate cassettes are prepared commercially. When he had finished, he put the cassette in his pocket; he'd need it again before erasing it.

  Farnsworth picked up his phone and dialed a number. As expected, he got a busy signal. But he knew the line was open and receiving. Still holding the receiver off the hook, he dialed ten digits, all of them either «1» or «0» — a digital code.

  Somewhere in New York — Farnsworth did not know where — the temporary Memory Buffer Register of an NSA computer received his digital code. The computer spoke to another computer plugged into NSA's local transmitter, and promptly «forgot» the message. No printout could ever show the message now. The second computer stored the message until a subprogram in its core memory unit told it that the orbit of an NSA MESTAR (Message Storage and Relay) satellite had carried it within transmitting range. A burst of high speed impulses traveled from a New York skyscraper to MESTAR's artificial memory, and the message was simultaneously erased from NSA's computer below. Key's message, nestled among the thousands of other encoded messages that form NSA's daily communications traffic, waited for the moment of electronic orgasm that would discharge it. It would happen in about twenty minutes. At 17,500 miles per
hour, that was how long it would take for MESTAR's orbit to put it on top of Rome.

  Farnsworth's voice spoke in her ear, surprisingly clear. "Penny! What a surprise! How nice to hear from you! What's the weather like there in Rome?"

  "Dreary and dreadful, John darling. How is it in New York?"

  "Polluted, my dear. Which unfortunately I won't be until I go to lunch with the new editor of Female. A four-martini man unless I miss my guess. How did the shooting for Vogue go today?"

  "Oh, John, I didn't call you up to talk business!"

  "Why not? I'm your business manager, Penny."

  "Don't scold me, John."

  His voice grew kind, courtly. "Of course not, my dear. Why did you call me?"

  "I'm feeling lonely, darling. Cheer me up. Play me some American music."

  He spluttered convincingly. "Play you some music? Penny, have you any idea what this call is costing?"

  "I can afford it, darling. Come on. Pamper me."

  There was a chuckle at the other end. "Penny, you must be the most spoiled girl in the Social Register. All right. Hold on. I think I have some new cassettes here that a talent agent left. New singer he's plugging. A demo. But you won't like it. An outmoded arrangement, if my middle-aged ear doesn't deceive me. Not 'with it' at all." There was a noticeable set of quotation marks around "with it."

  Penelope laughed. "John, you old fuddy-duddy! The words 'with it' aren't with it any longer. Never mind! Play me the music. I won't care if it's Victor Herbert, just as long as it's American."

  "All right, my dear, here we go."

  A female voice came over the wire, singing something about, "There's a Wide, Wide World Waiting Inside You." Penelope held a small microphone against the telephone receiver. A burst of static interrupted the music. There was a simultaneous whirring sound from her cassette player. There were several more bursts of static. All together, they couldn't have added up to more than four seconds' worth of noise.