Diamonds Are for Dying Read online

  "Not if your skin is unbroken," he said gratefully. He warmed to his subject. "Don't have any cuts or scrapes on your hand. For delivery, we've got this."

  He held out a long, very feminine-looking cigarette holder and a filter. "The filter's a little CO2 cartridge. The needle sits in a groove just under it. There's a fusable element up front that makes the cartridge fire."

  "So you can aim it, and leave a cigarette burning — a five-minute fuse. But what if you want to use it right away?"

  "Watch."

  Wharton unscrewed the holder, inserted the gas cartridge, screwed the holder together again. Holding the tube between two fingers, he pressed the end with his thumb. There was a sharp phhhht! and a tiny needle buried itself in the leather spine of a book in the shelves on the far wall.

  Wharton walked across the room and picked up the book. "History of the Borgias," he said, looking at the title. "Very appropriate."

  He worked the needle out of the binding. "This one is just a plastic dummy. The real ones cost the taxpayers about eight thousand dollars apiece. Don't shoot anyone, Baroness, unless they're worth eight thousand dollars dead."

  Chapter 4

  They'd been gone only a few minutes when Penelope's wristwatch stung her again. It was the Code R signal: two longs and three shorts. She looked at it in disbelief — this time to tell the time. It was only a little after noon, some twelve hours since she'd talked to John Farnsworth.

  Before she had time to think about it, the shocks came again, urgently.

  She was out the door before they stopped, her hand automatically patting her waistband to make sure the little Bernadelli .25 was there. Ninety seconds later, she was in the underground parking garage, running past the startled attendant. The little red Porsche she was driving this year was waiting in a stall next to the ramp. She vaulted into the front seat without bothering to open the door. The key was in the ignition in the same movement. The engine roared, and she backed and swung the wheel, with a smell of scorched rubber.

  The attendant jumped for his life as she roared up the ramp, honking the horn Italian style. A truck driver cursed and slammed on his brakes as the little red car pulled out into the street in front of him. Penelope cursed back in fluent Italian without bothering to turn her head. "Non ć è fretta!" he yelled in admiration.

  She whizzed through the crowded Roman streets at more than sixty. A priest on a bicycle ended up on the curb, crossing himself. A taxi filled with tourists swerved up over the sidewalk to avoid being hit by the Porsche. Penelope threw the driver an ironic kiss. She rounded the corner of the Via Gaeta on two wheels and screeched to a stop in front of the new glass building.

  "Park it!" she said, tossing the keys to the doorman. She pushed through the door, leaving him scrambling on the sidewalk for the keys.

  The reception room of the Rome office of International Models was crowded with people. Half a dozen models or hopefuls had arranged themselves on the chrome-and-leather couches, and there were a couple of dapper men who looked like agents. Carla, the receptionist, looked up when she entered, and said: "Baronessa! Che cosa… Signore Farnsworth…"

  "I know," Penelope said shortly. She walked past the indignant models and agents and into the inner offices.

  John Farnsworth was sitting behind the big desk in the office he used when he was in Rome. He looked crisp and commanding with his iron gray mustache and mahogany tan, in a pinstriped suit that didn't have a single wrinkle to show that he'd come five thousand miles in it.

  "Seven and one-half minutes," he said, glancing at his watch. "What took you so long, Penny?"

  "Twelve hours," she said, looking at her own timepiece. "What were you dawdling about?"

  He laughed and got up from behind the desk. They embraced, and Penelope kissed him on the lips.

  "All right, Penelope, give it here!" He held out his hand.

  "What are you talking about, John?" she said innocently.

  "That cannon I just felt digging into my middle-aged gut."

  Reluctantly she removed the Bernadelli VB from her waistband and handed it over. "It's just a little gun, John. I may need it."

  He examined the tiny gold-plated automatic. It was almost swallowed up in the palm of his hand. "What were you going to do, tape it to the inside of your thigh? Hide it in the lining of your handbag? Smuggling a gun past customs is risky. Agents don't take risks."

  "John, don't be mean."

  "All right," he relented. "I'll see what I can do." He put the gun into his pocket. "You'll get it somehow."

  "Is that a promise?"

  "It's a promise."

  She sat down, crossed her legs, lit a cigarette. "Why did you come all the way to Rome, John?" she said. "I got your instructions. Weren't they complete?"

  He tossed her a thick manila envelope. "There were a few odds and ends I couldn't trust to a transmission. Study those. It's a pile of technical data on hydrogen bombs. Everything you have to know. Have Sumo take a look at it, too. Then destroy it. It's highly classified. You'll also find a dossier on Heidrig, with some photos."

  Penelope looked him in the eye. "What else did you come five thousand miles to tell me, John?"

  "You received instructions to find out what happened to a couple of CIA boys named Carlos and Humberto inside Heidrig's estate. You also received instructions to find out what you could about Heidrig's political ambitions and this suitcase bomb he may be developing. Those instructions came from the highest authority. The President."

  Penelope waited.

  Farnsworth sighed. "There are some things the President doesn't want to know about. He's a nice man. A family man."

  "What do you want me to do, John?"

  "Kill Heidrig."

  "Whose idea is that?"

  Heavy lids dropped over eyes that had seen too much. "Let's say that the powers that be — the powers that really be — decided that there's no reason for Heidrig to be walking around after this caper. They don't want that particular piece on the board any more. And they don't see any need to bother the President about it."

  "Okay, John." She gave a short laugh. "One piece to be removed from the board. When you get back to the States, tell them not to worry."

  On the way back to the apartment, Penelope drove at a more leisurely pace, enjoying the breeze that whipped through her hair. She attracted the usual quota of stares and whistles whenever she stopped for a light. At one intersection a fair-haired young man, bolder than the rest, leaned over the door and said, "Qual è il suo numero del telefono?"

  Penelope gave him an amused smile. "Andatevene," she said, putting the Porsche in gear. As she pulled away, she could see him in the rearview mirror, struggling to keep his balance.

  The mirror showed her own face, too. She squinted at the image, trying to see it as the young man had seen it — as the world saw it. It was startlingly beautiful, an ivory cameo with a vivid red slash of lips, sensuous, exquisitely formed. It was the face of a classic beauty, a woman made for love and leisure and the expensive things of life.

  How had she ended up in a world of tape cassettes that gave cruel mysterious orders, and ugly little pistols hidden in the frames of paintings by Tiepolo, and well-groomed, distinguished-looking men who came across oceans to tell her casually that she was expected to cross another ocean and kill a man she had never seen?

  How?

  She'd started out like any other moneyed young daughter of a proper family on Philadelphia's Main Line. She was a Worthington, daughter of one of Philadelphia's most solid investment bankers. Her mother, the former Adelaide Appleton, was one of Philadelphia's ranking hostesses, despite the fact that her grandparents had been relative newcomers from Boston and Bar Harbor. Perhaps her connections with the Peabodys and Appletons and Lowells helped.

  She'd spent her growing years learning all the proper pursuits of a young girl of her class: tennis, swimming, dancing, archery, riding her horse Major and learning to groom and care for him herself.

  Then
fate dealt her a card called John Stanton Marlowe.

  She was fresh out of Miss Frothingham's Finishing School when she married him. Her parents breathed a sigh of relief. John was one of the Philadelphia Marlowes, a scion of Eastern society, with connections in Boston, Atlanta and Wilmington. He was wealthy beyond counting. To the considerable fortune that had come to him from his family, he had added a second fortune by the time he was thirty. It was whispered in the best clubs that Marlowe actually operated some of the companies he bought, that he handled his own investments. Not quite a gentleman — but then, there was the Marlowe name. And fortune.

  Marlowe forfeited more of his gentility when he joined the Kennedy Administration. They put him in State, in the Agency for International Development. The Johnson Administration begged him to stay on, and he did. That was what killed him. They moved him from State to Defense, in what was euphemistically called Research and Engineering. It happened to be one of the civilian departments performing a watchdog function over NSA, but that was never very clear to Penelope.

  What was very clear was that John had begun to look tired, had actually been snappish on occasion. And he was away a lot, and sometimes his explanations were vague. Penelope might have suspected another woman, but John — her John — wouldn't do that to her. Besides, the sex was still good. It was John who had first awakened her to the possibilities in that supple, strong body of hers. There had been a few others before him — a local boy when she was at college, an instructor who had taken her to a motel and fumbled it, a boy from a family in her Main Line circle. But they had been boys. John Marlowe was a man. A tough-bodied, strong-willed man with a healthy appetite for the pleasures of the bed. Now, after almost two years of marriage, they were still coupling with joy, with verve, with inventiveness.

  He was off on one of his mysterious errands when it happened. John had put his investments in trust when he joined the government, but he had kept his two-engined executive jet, a three-million-dollar Grumman Gulfstream II. "No, no, they can't take that away from me," he had laughed at the Senate hearing that confirmed him. "Besides, it'll save the government some tax dollars." He flew it himself, with a co-pilot, unless business or politics kept him in the passenger compartment with his guests. On this flight there were no guests, and his co-pilot was a hard-faced, tight-lipped Air Force colonel. That morning he had kissed her and said, "I'll be back in time for cocktails." She was making the first pitcher of martinis, half-listening to the seven o'clock news on television, when David Brinkley's voice told her that her John was dead. The telephone call from the Defense Department came ten minutes later.

  The first few months were dreamlike, groping through a world of cobwebs and muted voices. The days were anesthetized. The nights were crawling horrors; thrashing around in bed unable to sleep, and when she did manage to close her eyes, the nightmares, the groping for a John Marlowe who would never he in bed beside her again.

  But there were always men around, drawn like bees to honey by her beauty, her aura of sleeping sensuality, the temptation of her widowhood. She took one or two of them as lovers, never for long, but her powerful appetite for life was rekindled. So when she was offered a spot modeling job by a publisher who had known her as a Washington hostess, she shrugged "why not" and took it. It was a fun thing, a one-shot assignment. But her cool, flawless beauty in an ad on the back cover of Holiday caused a ripple on Madison Avenue. Art directors made inquiries and began to call. She turned down many assignments, accepted a few. The demand grew, and she acquired an agent to screen the calls. Then, suddenly, it wasn't a sometime diversion, but a way of life. She became the model of the moment. When the Countess Christina Paolozzi created an international sensation by posing for Harper's Bazaar in the nude, Penelope upstaged her by appearing in Vogue, swathed in yards of fabric but somehow generating more excitement.

  It was while on a modeling assignment in Italy that she met the Baron Reynaldo St. John-Orsini. The ad agency had made arrangements to do the layouts against the background of his eighteenth-century palazzo on the outskirts of Florence, against the background of his walled formal gardens and the magnificent interiors with their Tiepolos and Bellinis and Giorgiones and the enormous Titian Dido and Aeneas that was the envy of museum curators throughout the world.

  Reynaldo turned out to be a slim, dark, intense man in his late thirties, full of nervous energy and impatient drive. He had family connections with both the British peerage and the Italian aristocracy, but he laughingly referred to the British branch as "that collection of cold mutton chops." He was always on the go: water skiing, sky diving, driving his own racing car in the Grand Prix competitions.

  He was thoroughly careless of his life. He had survived a burning car on the Silverstone track, come close to drowning while scuba diving and had sustained two broken legs when a chute he was wearing had partially fouled during a sky dive.

  "Life is keener when death is looking over your shoulder," he told Penelope.

  He begged her to stay on after the camera crew had packed up and returned to the States. She accepted. She was fascinated by this strange, restless man who held so cheaply the life that had been stolen from John Marlowe. They were married two weeks later.

  Reynaldo brought her to life again, spending his own vitality to ransom hers. God, what fun he was to be with! How exciting it was to make love after a full day of activity! He taught her to water ski, to scuba dive, to sky dive. But nothing matched their desire for each other after he had been in an auto race. She would watch him, racing on the brink of death to capture fractions of seconds, take corners, wheels adhering to the course with only a whisper of traction. She would think, this man whom I took within my body last night may be dead five seconds from now! When Reynaldo came grinning off the track, turning his Ferrari over to his mechanics, they would hurry back to their hotel and fall on one another with almost animal frenzy, making love over and over again until the next dawn found them sprawled, sleeping with arms and legs wrapped around one another.

  "Reynaldo," she once had whispered fiercely, "why is it so good?"

  "Because it may be the last time," he had said seriously. Then, laughing, slapping her on the rump, "Get dressed, my love, we are going to a garden party at the Contessa Paoli's."

  There were three years of it. Then the death he had been courting accepted his proposal. In the Grand Prix at Monte Carlo, his Ferrari blew a tire and went out of control, crashing in flames into the seawall.

  On top of her inheritance from John Marlowe, Reynaldo's death left her a woman of unsurpassed wealth. But there was nothing to spend it on.

  A second void opened before her. She filled it with parties, physical activity, an unsatisfying affair or two. She no longer remembered that year clearly, nor did she want to remember. It was all loud music, loud people, too much to drink, too little to do.

  A phone call from the American Embassy changed it all. A diffident voice asked if she could drop by at her convenience and see a Mr. Hewitt. When she asked what it was all about, he grew evasive. Though he did not say so, she somehow got the impression that there was a difficulty about her passport.

  Mr. Hewitt turned out to be Caleb Hewitt, a friend of John's from government, who had been a guest at several of her dinner parties when she was a Washington hostess. "Good old Cal," John used to call him. He was a tall man with a narrow face and a nasal Maine twang. "Penny," he said, stretching out his hands, "it's good to see you. It's been a long time. You're looking well."

  After a long time, he got around to telling her why he wanted to see her. He simply wanted her to invite an American whom she did not know to a dinner party she was giving the following week. The man was a minor and undistinguished writer. "I didn't know the State Department was acting as a social director for Americans abroad," she said dryly, but she agreed.

  The writer was an unpleasant little man with thinning hair and shifty eyes. He made a great production out of calling her «Penny» and pretending to know her. She did
nothing to correct the impression. Somehow during the evening, he succeeded in attaching himself to another guest, a Polish film director who had been let out to attend an Italian film festival. The two left together. All at once Penelope understood; the object of the exercise had been to get the two men to meet in a plausible fashion. The next day, Cal Hewitt sent her flowers.

  There were other errands for her to perform after that. Once she was asked to smuggle a small parcel past British customs. Once, on assignment in Berlin, she was asked to take along a «hairdresser» she didn't need. The «hairdresser» disappeared the first day and didn't show up until it was time for her to leave the city. Only it wasn't the same hairdresser. Once she was asked to cultivate a Swedish military attaché and make sure he stayed away from his quarters on a particular night. She enjoyed that job; the Swede was an accomplished, entertaining companion, and very handsome.

  The next time Cal Hewitt had a job for her, she went on the offensive. "I don't mind being used by the CIA or the DIA or whatever the hell outfit you work for, Cal darling," she said. It's all for flag and country, isn't it? John would have wanted me to make myself useful. But I have something else in mind."

  She told him. The Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini was a unique resource. She had money, was independently wealthy. She was welcome in the best homes of western Europe and the eastern United States. She had been — and could be again — a well-known model, with a plausible reason for crossing borders. She was quick, bright and physically fit. And in the Berlin affair and the matter of the Swedish attaché, she had proved her reliability and discretion beyond any question.

  She wanted to run an intelligence operation of her own, not do minor chores for the CIA. She wanted to run it without supervision, without surveillance, without interference from Washington. She knew, from things John Marlowe had let slip in the final months of his life, of the interagency rivalry between CIA and DIA and FBI and NSA and the rest of the alphabet soup — how they sometimes got in one another's way, interfered with one another, even killed one another's agents. Wouldn't it be useful to have a small, reliable organization that only a handful of discreet people knew about — one that wouldn't be vulnerable to interagency security leaks? One that could handle the delicate chores that couldn't be entrusted to ordinary agents?