Flicker of Doom Page 6

  "Congratulations, Don Alejandro. So, after all, you have managed to go beyond life and death. You are producing a hallucination."

  "A very crude hallucination, my dear Funke. Hardly more than an extension of what we have already been doing."

  Down in the garden, hundreds of little spotlights winked on and off, a thousandth of a second at a time. They were the sort of lights you often see on the grounds of rich men's estates, scattered unobtrusively among the shrubbery and ornamental borders. They flashed in a kaleidoscopic sequence of shifting colors dictated by the computers — too briefly to register on the conscious mind. The dull black cylinders of the baby spotlights moved, always staying aimed at the running man.

  Ali ben Driss wasn't aware of the flashes or the hidden lights. He was aware only of the strange thorn hedges that surrounded him. He could have sworn that the hedges hadn't been there when he started across toward the buildings. But his mind seemed a little cloudy on that point. The hedges must have been there. Because here they were, surrounding him, leading him on through their dense, poisonous corridors.

  He paused, confused, and rubbed his eyes. That last turning — had it led him in the wrong direction? If only he could push his way through that wall of leaves. But the thorns were too thick. Some of them were a foot long, like the thorns in a tale of magic. And he didn't like to get too close. The leaves gave off a foul, putrid odor that made him sick — like rotting meat.

  He started forward, feeling a little dizzy. He had a strange, flickering sensation behind his eyelids, as if he were watching an old movie with scratched film. He closed his eyes for a moment, but it didn't help. The flickering seemed to come right through the lids.

  Ali forced himself to go on. The Spaniard was rich; you could tell that from the scale of the villa. Even if he got no further than the boathouse or a tool, shed, he'd get away with something worth selling. He always had, in all the Spanish villas he'd been systematically robbing along the coastal road between Tetuan and Ceuta. He'd cleverly questioned the local villagers, pretending that he was a poor outcast from the hills to the south, looking for work. They'd warned him away from this ripe plum of a seaside estate, but he hadn't been fooled. It proved that the place was easy pickings — the locals had probably been making off with booty for years, a little at a time, careful not to become so greedy that the robberies would be noticed. They were afraid that Ali would spoil it for them.

  He turned a corner of the maze. There were two corridors. Which should he take?

  He began to tremble. The decision was too much for him. What was wrong with him? He'd always been a cool customer before. "Anah kwiyis," he muttered for luck.

  The wall of foliage ahead of him took on a sinister appearance. The branches seemed to writhe. He stared fearfully. "Mah'lesh," he whispered. It was nothing; a trick of the imagination.

  A tic started in his face. The bad smell grew worse.

  There was a face in the leaves of the hedges — an evil face, flickering like a flame.

  "Djenoun!" he cried. "A genie!"

  He turned to flee, but the walls seemed to have closed in behind him. More faces appeared in the foliage, with long yellow teeth, like tusks. The branches turned into claws that reached for him. He backed away.

  "Sibnee fi'halee," he whispered. "Leave me alone!"

  He sank to his knees. Above him, in a black tunnel, the stars wheeled in the sky.

  The flickering faces of the evil spirits grew brighter. As he watched, they changed colors.

  He gave a great cry, and his body arched like a bow. There was a blinding light, then darkness.

  "Is he dead?" Don Alejandro said.

  "I don't think so," Doctor Funke grunted.

  "Good, I'd like to experiment on him further."

  He pressed a buzzer, and two liveried figures emerged into the garden. He watched them on the television screen: Sancho and Esteban. They picked up the limp form and carried it into the building.

  "It would be nice to question him," Funke said. "Find out what he thought he was seeing."

  "Precisely. And then use him as a subject under more controlled conditions. Plant visual cues and see how they affect the hallucinations."

  Doctor Funke's bald globe of a head was nodding. The little legs dangled limply. There was a snore.

  "Doctor Funke!" Don Alejandro snapped.

  The monkey eyes flew open. "Sorry."

  "Tomorrow I want you to begin installing the projection devices in the garden. We'll need a new computer program to correlate the various images with the changes in brain waves. And then I want you to begin to wire up the inside of the villa, too."

  "It's a big job," Funke said reluctantly. "It will take much money."

  "We'll have the money. The first airline has just come through with its million dollars. PAFF will deliver our share tomorrow. And that's just the beginning."

  "Good, good!" Doctor Funke hastily covered up a yawn.

  Don Alejandro gave him an amused look. "And now, my dear Doctor Funke, shall we go and finish our sherry?"

  4

  Eight pairs of eyes looked up at her as she entered her suite at the Ritz. The air was thick with cigarette smoke. She sniffed. No pot. Very good. They were reliable agents, all of them. They all knew, even Fiona, that there was a time and place for everything.

  "Hello, children," she said, closing the door behind her.

  She glanced at her watch. The luminous numbers said midnight. They'd been waiting for hours.

  It had been almost impossible to get rid of Morgan. She'd dawdled in his bed at the Crillon after a late, lingering lunch, then let him take her to dinner at L'Orangerie, where he'd grown horny again immediately after the basket of crudites. They'd left without finishing their ecreyisses with scrambled eggs. When she told him she wouldn't be spending the night with him, he'd grown puzzled and angry. "The hell with this cinq-à-sept stuff! What do you mean, you need your sleep tonight?" She'd continued dressing, saying, "I'm leaving for Tangier in the morning, darling. Besides, it hasn't exactly been cinq-à-sept. It's almost midnight."

  Paul stubbed out a cigarette, an irreverent grin on his handsome, caramel-colored face. Once he'd been a black militant and street fighter; she'd made him the highest-paid black male model in the fashion industry.

  "We thought you'd turned into a pumpkin," he said.

  She smiled back coolly. "No, darling," she said. "I've just turned into the coach."

  She took her place at the center of the group. They faced her attentively, waiting.

  "We finished up the Vogue pictures," Dan Wharton said. "It would have been nice to have you in a few of them, but we're covered."

  Wharton was a big, rugged man with close-cropped sandy hair and an outdoorsman's squint to his blue eyes. His suits were always rumpled, and his tie carelessly knotted. He didn't look as if he belonged in the Social Register, but his Puritan forebears had put him there. Wharton himself didn't give a damn about it.

  "Thank you, Dan," the Baroness said, throwing a smile at him. Wharton lived for her, and some day, probably, he'd die for her, but a few crumbs like the smile were all he'd ever get. He knew it without being reminded. Members of a team didn't mess up their efficiency with irrelevant emotions.

  She turned to Skytop. "By the way, Joseph, dear, you're the new photographer for the Amberson Angel-Face campaign. We'll begin scouting locations in Tangier tomorrow."

  Skytop whistled. "I'd heard the AngelFace assignment was up for grabs. Congratulations."

  He took a swig out of the quart bottle of bourbon he'd brought with him, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then stoppered the bottle firmly and put it down. The Baroness noted with approval that the bottle was still half full. Skytop knew his capacity; he wanted to keep a clear head for the briefing.

  Inga got up immediately. "I'll make reservations on tomorrow's Air France flight."

  "Just two," the Baroness said. "For Skytop and me."

  "You're not taking me?" Inga said, s
urprised.

  "No, love. You're going to Germany."

  Wharton said, "What about me?"

  "You'll join us in Tangier later. But first you're going to Rome."

  Eric's expression grew thoughtful. "Tangier, Germany, Rome… sounds interesting. What's it all about?"

  She waited until Inga was off the phone and had returned to her place on the couch, then told them.

  "There's a pattern there, somewhere," she said, after she'd ticked off the incidents that John Farnsworth had briefed her on. "Somehow it involves Arab terrorists and airline crashes and blackmail — and an awful lot of prominent people who seem to be having epileptic fits in public. The President's trip to Tangier is connected. I know it in my bones. But I can't quite put the pieces together."

  "That's because there aren't enough pieces," Tom Sumo suggested.

  He looked at her mildly. Sumo looked slight and boyish until you saw him with his sleeves rolled up; then you noticed the hard, sinewy forearms that all the karate exercise had given him. He was a first-generation American; his parents had emigrated from Japan just in time to let him be born in Oakland, California. He was an electronics prodigy who talked to computers as if they were backward children. Turn him loose in a bugged room, and he'd de-bug it before you could say E. Howard Hunt.

  "That's where you come in, Tommy," the Baroness said. "I want you to tap a few computers. The CIA especially. They like to keep things to themselves. If they're operating in Tangier, protecting the President, I want to know what they're up to. I don't want them getting in our way."

  "Can do," he said happily. "I'll catch a flight to Washington tonight."

  "And while you're at it, see what's in the computer memory banks at the FBI, DIA and NSA."

  "NSA? But don't you already have their data?"

  "They only gave John what they thought was important. I have a hunch there's more. Information that even the computer doesn't realize is significant."

  "Okay. The FBI is easy. They like to show their facilities to tourists. I can get a tight beam with a query program into their memory banks. DIA's a little tougher, but their computer room has a window. I can fly a trained pigeon up to it by flashing a laser at the pane. The pigeon'll stick an adhesive-backed magnetometer and transmitter on the glass, and I can pick up whatever's in the magnetic cores. And bosses at NSA don't know that we've got the PMC code that links the 7090 at Fort Meade to their remote terminals over the phone company cables. I'll just call up that little old computer on the telephone."

  The Baroness laughed. "I want you to look for anything, worldwide, that points to a pattern of violence involving psychomotor epilepsy."

  "Psychomotor epilepsy?" Inga said. "But how could those incidents be anything but coincidence?"

  "That's what I want you to find out. You're going to pose as a graduate student and visit the Breuer Institut fur Psychologie in Munich. They're doing the most advanced research in the world on psychomotor seizures. I want you to find out if there's any way an attack could be induced." She narrowed her green eyes. "And who the leading researchers in the field are."

  The Baroness turned to Eric. "Darling, French jails aren't very pleasant, so I know you'll do your best to stay out of them. I want you to burgle the files of the Deuxième Bureau. They've closed up the dossier on Gaston Leclerc's death. I want to know why."

  Eric nodded. "I'll contact you in Tangier. It'll take a day or two."

  Fiona yawned, showing white teeth, a pink tongue. She was a fragile vision out of a Botticelli painting. It was a vision that men found themselves telling secrets to. For a few of them, it had been the last vision they'd seen before they died.

  The Baroness studied her speculatively. "Fiona, you're going to Tangier on vacation. You're an American tourist. Check into the Hotel Sheherezade. Don't take a gun with you. It'll be chancy getting it past customs, with the tightened security for the OAPEC conference coming up. I'll have Key arrange a gun drop for you inside Morocco."

  Fiona stretched, showing off her body for Wharton's benefit. He flushed and looked away hastily.

  "What do you want me to do in Tangier, Baroness?" Fiona said.

  Skytop leered. "Your specialty, sweetheart, what else? The crew of that aircraft carrier is on shore leave in Tangier. Four thousand sailors. You're supposed to screw them all until you find out what made them jump overboard."

  "Joe Skytop, you hush," Inga said. "You should be ashamed of yourself."

  "Yes, Joseph," the Baroness said. "Actually, I want you to investigate the crew of the aircraft carrier." She turned again to Fiona. "Fi, you don't do anything except your cover. I'll contact you as soon as Tommy digs up a few leads for you to follow up."

  "No gun?"

  "No gun."

  "Not even the derringer?"

  "Not even the derringer. Let's have it."

  Pouting, Fiona hitched up her skirt. It was a tight skirt, and she had to wiggle a lot to do it. Wharton studiously looked in the other direction. Fiona pulled out the palm-sized, double-barreled weapon and handed it over. The Baroness tossed the little gun onto the coffee table without looking at it.

  "Yvette," the Baroness said, turning to the exquisitely beautiful black girl sitting primly in a straight-backed chair. "You've been booked into the Morocco Palace as a belly dancer. John fixed it up."

  A brilliant smile grew on Yvette's smooth milk-chocolate face. "I think I still remember how," she said. "I just hope my tummy muscles are still up to it."

  "They looked fine in that bikini picture this afternoon," Skytop said sincerely.

  "Why, thank you, Joseph," Yvette said.

  The Baroness said, "If there's any interesting gossip around Tangier, you'll pick it up in the dressing room at the Palace. And make yourself particularly charming to out-of-town Arabs."

  "Palestine out-of-town?"

  "Anyone out-of-town."

  Over on the couch, Paul nonchalantly crossed an ankle over his knee. He lounged back against the cushions, looking slim and elegant in his Cardin sports jacket and paisley scarf and skin-tight white trousers.

  "That leaves me," he said. "Coach."

  "Paul, do you still have any of your old connections?"

  "I keep up," he said cautiously. "Some."

  "Good. Because you're going to have to establish a good cover — one that can be verified by a number of convincing black militants back home."

  "First I going to have to convince them!" Paul said, slipping into the cadences of street talk. "How good this cover have to be?"

  "Good enough to keep you alive."

  He waited.

  "I'm sorry, Paul," she said. "But you're the only one who can do it. I want you to try to infiltrate PAFF."

  He broke into a grin. "Is that all? I thought you wanted me to do something dangerous!"

  "Why is it you always get the easy jobs?" Skytop said.

  "Guilt," Paul said. "White folks' guilt. You making up for two hundred years."

  "I'm making up for two hundred years?" the big Cherokee roared. He gave Paul the finger. Paul solemnly gave him the peace sign.

  The Baroness said, "Key is arranging an SLA-style bank robbery in California. You're going to be identified as one of the robbers. You're going to spray the place with machine gun bullets when you leave. We've even got a man planted to get hit by you — with a bladder filled with blood under his shirt. We've arranged for him to 'die' at the hospital. You'll be wanted for murder. You'll have to leave the country."

  "I get the picture," Paul said. "I turn up in Lebanon. I shoot my mouth off a lot. Sooner or later I get picked up by one of my expatriate ex-brothers. I offer my services to our Arab brothers. I want to help in their fight for freedom. I'm a valuable commodity. I still have a reputation as an explosives expert. PAFF takes me up on it if they have any sense."

  "We can't cover you, Paul," the Baroness said. "You'll be on your own."

  Paul gave a jaunty smile. "Don't I know it."

  * * *

  Aft
er the others had gone, Inga helped the Baroness pack. She spread all the murderous little devices on the bed, deciding which to take.

  They didn't look at all deadly. And most of them wouldn't have been, except in her hands. They were perfectly ordinary things, the things you'd expect to find in the luggage of a rich, beautiful woman. Lingerie, for instance. But you could garrote a man with a lace bra, cosh him with a weighted stocking, break his neck with a pair of pantyhose. Then there was the jewelry. The pin in the emerald brooch was only two inches long, but that made it long enough to slip between the first and second cervical vertebrae into the base of the brain. The prongs of the diamond ring stood straight out when you pried the diamond loose, sharp enough to sever one of the major arteries. And there was a platinum bracelet, a thin hoop that didn't have its ends joined. Straighten it out and you have a nine-inch stiletto.

  Not that she needed them. The deadliest weapons of all were the striking edges of her hands and feet, her knees and elbows, her strong fingers. Stark naked, she knew over thirty ways to kill a man. With a pair of high-heeled shoes on, it was forty. Give her a scarf or a belt or a shirt and blouse and the Baroness had a choice of some seventy different ways to kill you.

  The gun seemed superfluous.

  "You're not going to take it?" Inga said. "After taking Fiona's derringer away from her?"

  The Baroness fingered the little gold-plated pistol. It was only four inches long, and slim enough to fit in a cigarette case. It was a Bernardelli VB, the smallest automatic ever made. But despite its size, it held five .25-caliber cartridges.

  "Of course I'm taking it, darling. I'll just slip it into my bra."

  Inga looked doubtful.

  Penelope laughed. "Fiona's luggage is one thing. But can you imagine a customs inspector having the courage to poke around a baroness's bazoom?"

  She put the gun down in the little pile of personal accessories she'd be carrying aboard.

  There were other things, the things that Sumo and Wharton made in their workshops, and the things that John Farnsworth sent over from the stream of gadgets that NSA developed in its laboratories at Fort Meade. The cigarette lighter that shot a needle of crystalized Black Widow spider venom. The Spyder: a pistol-winch that shot a gossamer thread capable of supporting a half-ton weight. The Spinneret: a gadget that looked like a bulb syringe with a shower nozzle that sprayed a fine mist that turned into an unbreakable plastic net in midair.