Flicker of Doom Read online

  "This is a new one," Inga said. "Sumo left it for you." Penelope picked it up. It was a filmy black dress fastened by little glass buttons. She walked over to the mirror, holding it in front of her body.

  "Nice," she said.

  "It's made of optical fibers. The glass buttons are lenses. You look through one and see what's at the other end. It doesn't matter how you twist or fold it. The light's piped through the threads and gathered to form an image."

  "There are four buttons," Penelope said.

  "For seeing in the dark. One's for infrared, the other for ultraviolet. The generators are embedded in the seams of the dress — light-emitting diodes, MOSFET flakes for the circuitry, power source…"

  Penelope shook her head in amusement. "I'll be wearing a keyhole. What next?"

  "You can unravel the fabric," Inga continued earnestly, "and use it for spying over a distance of up to a hundred feet."

  "Fold it up, will you, Inga, and pack it with my computerized body stocking."

  The body stocking was another technical miracle made by Sumo. Sprinkled throughout its stretch fabric were millions of microscopic MOSFET flakes — metal oxide semiconductor field-effect transistors. The Baroness' skin served in place of the wires that would ordinarily have linked the components together. The current was so minuscule that she felt only a faint tingle over her body when she was operating the computer. It could be programmed to perform a variety of simple electronic tasks, with input in the form of a matchbox-size computer tape unit that could be plugged in at the waist.

  When the packing was complete, she dismissed Inga. "Get some sleep, girl! It's only a few hours till morning. You'll have a busy day ahead of you, learning your cover before you take off for Munich."

  "But, Baroness, aren't you going to get any rest?"

  "I'm going to be spending the next couple of hours talking to MESTAR. Key and I have a lot of details to work out. Your cover. Paul's cover. The weapons drops…"

  Inga disappeared reluctantly into the maid's quarters. The golden clock that was set into the Ritz's brocade wall said four a.m. Penelope sat in the dark for a while, sorting out her thoughts before signaling Farnsworth on the scrambler unit.

  Penelope Worthington seemed very remote at times like this. That Penelope had been a pampered debutante whose father's money and mother's family — the Appletons of Boston — had hoisted her to the top rank of Philadelphia and Main Line Society. Her beauty and her name had landed her John Stanton Marlowe when she was barely out of finishing school. Marlowe was bored with his money and the giant corporations he played with, and he joined the small elite running things in Washington. He could have had a Cabinet post, but he opted for a job with less title and more power. The job was at the top of the espionage establishment. He pulled strings at the CIA, the DIA, the NSA and State, and reported directly to the President.

  Then he died. The crash of his private jet was still listed as accidental. Penelope was left a very rich widow. She played at life for a while. One of the games was modeling. She was part of the select group that included the Countess Paolozzi and the Princess Pignatelli. She didn't have a title, but her name and her wealth made her the American equivalent of royalty. Then she acquired the title, too. She met the Baron Reynaldo St. John-Orsini while on a modeling assignment in Italy. Reynaldo was fun. He opened life up for her again, after the slump of John's death. They skied and sky-dived and climbed mountains and raced autos together. It was a glorious three years. But it was too good to last. Reynaldo's Ferrari exploded in flames against the seawall at Monte Carlo during a Grand Prix race.

  She was left with a second fortune and a lot of time. There wasn't much she cared about doing with either.

  The CIA gave her something to do with her time. They recruited her for a number of courier jobs that required a wealthy woman who wouldn't excite suspicion if she traveled around Europe a lot. The Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini was reliable. Hadn't she once been married to John Stanton Marlowe?

  The CIA assignments opened up new vistas for Penelope. She had a talent for espionage, the way other people have a talent for music or painting. But she didn't much care about working for the CIA. She thought they were bumblers. And there wasn't enough scope.

  She still had friends in Washington. One of them was a powerful, shadowy man who had had the ears of four Presidents. He was amazed when she sounded him out on her proposition. Then he began to like the idea.

  "A self-contained intelligence operation that's not on any of the organization charts. Indirect control through the National Security Agency — but an electronic cut-out to keep NSA from knowing the identity of its agent. No leaks. No busts. Even the President doesn't know who you are. But Penny — I'd know. And a few other people would have to know…"

  "I trust you, darling. And the other people would be my people."

  "But it can't be done. It's impossible."

  "Nothing's impossible, darling."

  In the end it was done. John Farnsworth was the answer. It took him a year to set it up. It was duck soup for him. After all, he'd helped set up the CIA, the NSA and the DIA. He snatched bodies — Wharton from the Green Berets, Paul from a street gang, Skytop from the freelance photography studio he'd tried to set up after leaving Vietnam, Sumo from a computer company, Yvette from the jaws of a CIA covert operation in the West Indies…

  Farnsworth set up International Models, Inc., for her, too. He saw to it that everybody who worked there got their job plausibly. And he made sure that the company turned a profit. The books were legitimate.

  The money needed for the Key-Coin operation was another matter. That was funneled to them from an NSA secret fund — a million and a half dollars annually.

  During that frantic year, while Farnsworth planted records and rewrote biographies, Penelope turned herself into a deadly weapon. She'd always had superb physical equipment — the swimming and the horseback riding and skiing saw to that. And she could shoot and fence — her upbringing as Penelope Worthington had seen to that.

  Now she learned the tricks of the trade.

  Her instructors at Special Forces School, and the other ugly little classes run by a half-dozen different intelligence agencies, never knew who she was. They thought she was one of the exchange students sent over by the spy mills of friendly foreign governments. It was done all the time.

  But they taught her karate and kendo and savate and kung-fu. They taught her how to kill with a knife, a shoe heel, an umbrella; a rolled-up newspaper. She learned all about picking locks, planting bugs, shaping a plastic explosive charge. They taught her about torture: how to administer it and how to stand it.

  She'd been a good student. At this point she could teach them a thing or two.

  She sighed. Light was starting to come through the curtains. She went to the window and looked out at the Place Vendôme. It was dawn. Napoleon's column was casting a long shadow across the square. There was the sound of a motor starting up. From somewhere across Paris came the braying of a police klaxon.

  She opened the double door and stepped out onto the balcony. Somewhere up there in the brightening sky was MESTAR. She looked up and whispered, "Are you there, John?"

  "I'm here, Penny," a voice whispered in her ear.

  It was hard to believe that the little plastic plug in her ear had carried his words four thousand miles across an ocean. Or that the tiny disc pasted to her throat had sent her voice on an errand to an artificial moon hovering somewhere up there in that dawn sky.

  Her fingers gripped the balcony rail, tracing the antenna that was strung along it — a spider thread that put her at the center of a communications web that would have been inconceivable to an earlier age.

  On a nearby balcony, a young couple who had been up all night together looked across at the beautiful dark-haired woman in a flowing negligee who was looking up at the sky, her lips moving.

  "What do you think she's saying, Claude?" the girl said.

  He pointed to Venus, a brig
ht dot above the horizon. "The morning star," he said. "But of course. She's making a wish."

  * * *

  They filed in one by one, bringing the smell of conspiracy with them. They were all young men, wearing identical scowls on their faces, dressed in the same shapeless jackets worn over cheap European suits.

  One of them was carrying a black leather valise. He hung onto it tightly, as if he were afraid that someone might offer to take it from him. When the butler led the five of them through into the main hall, he stayed well back, hugging the valise close to him.

  "Don Alejandro will be with you shortly," the butler said. He disappeared through an arched Moorish doorway.

  The young men sat down gingerly on the edges of chairs and hassocks. A servant came in with a tray of cakes and mint tea. They accepted the refreshments grudgingly, still scowling, except for the man with the valise. He kept it between his feet, both hands gripping the handle, and looked on longingly while his companions ate.

  Don Alejandro came down the stone staircase, a tall imposing figure in black with a ruffle of white at the wrists and throat. He gave them a devilish smile.

  "Well, gentlemen," he said, "I trust you had a pleasant flight from Rome."

  The five of them muttered and nodded.

  "And that our joint enterprises met with success?"

  The young Arab who had led the way in spoke. "The airline gave us the money. But there was nothing about it in the newspapers."

  "Of course not. They don't want to advertise their vulnerability. Encourage threats from others. Frighten off their passengers. But you can rest assured that word of this will get around in airline circles. It will set a precedent. It will make it easier for others to contribute to our cause."

  The Arab spat on the tile floor. "It is our cause. You are just after the money."

  Don Alejandro's face went livid with fury. He took one long step toward the sitting man and fetched him a slap on the face that sounded like a rifle shot. Five pairs of hands fumbled beneath jellabas for guns. Don Alejandro stared them down, coldly. One by one, the hands dropped. The five faces looked sheepish.

  "That's better," Don Alejandro said. He was still breathing hard. "I do not encourage rudeness in my house." He brought himself under control. "Now… shall we try to remember that we are partners? I provide the science and you provide the manpower." His voice grew smooth. "Both are expensive. But we have an interest in common, do we not?"

  One of the Arabs coughed and said, "We have established the new training camp on the Lebanon-Syrian border. Those accursed Israelis don't know about it yet. We are drilling the men with the weapons we stole in Belgium."

  "Excellent, excellent."

  "And it now appears that we will be able to destroy the naval base at Bandar Abbas completely — not simply shoot it up."

  Don Alejandro looked skeptical. "And how do you propose to do that?"

  "We have an American atomic bomb."

  Don Alejandro was taken aback. "An atomic bomb?"

  "We took it from the Belgian arms depot," the Arab said smugly.

  "Are you sure it's an atomic bomb?"

  "Yes. We tested it for radioactive materials with a Geiger counter."

  "And are you able to explode this atomic bomb?"

  The Arab looked affronted. "We are not ignorant men. There are technical experts among us."

  Don Alejandro stroked his pointed beard. "An atomic bomb was not in the original Deathshine plan. But perhaps it will speed things up."

  "They'll take PAFF more seriously!" the Arab said.

  "Yes, yes, of course. But I was thinking of the OAPEC conference. The attention of the world will be heightened. There will be more drama — some of the oil countries will be sure to blame the United States for the atomic explosion — for propaganda, whether they believe it or not. Privately, they'll be pleased to see Iranian influence in the Persian Gulf damaged. But they won't break up the conference itself. They're too pragmatic for that. And the President of the United States will have to risk more exposure to counteract the charges of American involvement."

  "Some of our comrades want to explode the atomic bomb in Tangier, and wipe out all those Arab traitors at the same time."

  Don Alejandro grew alarmed. "No, no, you must not do that! The conference must not be jeopardized!"

  "Your idea, not ours. We don't like to be used as tools."

  "Trust me," Don Alejandro said in a voice of silk. "Remember Leclerc? Imagine the effect when the same thing happens to the President of the United States."

  He looked over at the black valise. The man who had it shifted protectively, moving it further between his feet. The other Arabs exchanged glances.

  "Is your large-scale apparatus ready?" the spokesman said.

  "Almost. Another day or two."

  "It is dangerous for us to be in Morocco."

  "Life is dangerous."

  All the Arabs glowered. Finally, the spokesman said, "We have a boat, fishing craft. We'll transport it by water. How close must we be for your apparatus to work?"

  "Within a mile."

  "The shore batteries will never let us get that close."

  "First they'll send a patrol boat out to examine you. You can get that close in the patrol boat."

  The Arabs exchanged glances and nodded. One of them actually smiled.

  "And now," Don Alejandro said, "the money."

  The man with the valise looked unhappy.

  "Come, come," Don Alejandro said.

  "Give it to him, Selim," the leader said.

  Reluctantly, the man handed over the valise. Don Alejandro rang and a servant came in and took it, leaving the room.

  "Don't you want to count it?" the leader said. "Your share was half a million dollars."

  "Count it?" Don Alejandro said. "But we are men of honor."

  They left, scowling as fiercely as they had when they had come in. The ancient taxi that had brought them from town was waiting outside the gates of the villa. They crowded in with the driver. He was reliable: a young Palestinian who was a new local member of the organization.

  The man who had been slapped rubbed his cheek.

  "Some day," he said, "we kill the Spaniard."

  5

  "Beat it!" Skytop bellowed at the army of scruffy urchins who had materialized when the cab pulled up in front of the Tangier hotel. He picked up six suitcases — wrapping his frankfurter-size fingers around the handles of four of them, and tucking the others under his bulging arms — and stomped toward the hotel entrance.

  The doorman looked after him in astonishment, then shrugged and signaled for a pair of bellboys to unload the rest of the luggage. He was a tall, dignified Frenchman who looked something like De Gaulle — probably the reason he'd gotten the job — and his uniform was resplendent with gold braid. He frowned as he approached the taxi. One didn't carry one's own luggage at the International, and, besides, the fellow looked like a ruffian.

  The doorman's frown turned to deference when he saw the Baroness, and bordered on obsequiousness when he saw the two Russian wolfhounds that were riding with her in the back seat.

  "Allow me," he said, touching his cap and reaching for the leads.

  "I'll take the dogs," the Baroness said. "See to the rest of my luggage, will you?"

  The doorman looked puzzled. There were no other bags. The taxi driver was just closing up the trunk.

  "In the other taxi," the Baroness said.

  He turned toward the taxicab that was just pulling up behind, its back seat piled high with trunks and suitcases. His face showed that he was impressed. Another whole taxi just for the luggage!

  "At once, Madame," he said. He blew his whistle for another couple of bellboys.

  The Baroness got out of the cab, holding the chains while the two borzois jumped out. They were magnificent creatures: tall, narrow dogs, pure white, with needle faces.

  The Baroness was a magnificent creature herself, in her black silk pajama suit with its flopp
y legs and deep slash down the front. Her only jewelry was a string of jade beads to match her huge green eyes. Her long black hair swung loose and straight, framing a face that was chiseled out of alabaster. It was the kind of face that comes along once every generation, like Garbo's or Loren's or Veruschka's, and defines the ideal of perfect beauty. Heads turned and postures snapped to attention as she swept through the lobby, the two borzois trotting, stilt-legged, at her side.

  The manager hurried toward her, his hands outstretched.

  "Baroness, we would have had you met at the airport! We had no idea you'd arrive this early. Your suite is ready. We are just preparing quarters for your, ah, companion."

  He stopped, flustered. It was clear that he didn't know how to classify Skytop, in his cowboy boots and faded jeans and buckskin jacket. He wasn't a servant — he was too independent and rigoureux for that — but he didn't have the quality to be the Baroness' amoureux. Some kind of celebrity himself, the manager decided. Many of the international rich who came to Morocco these days wore faded denim and had rough-hewn manners.

  "The rest of my entourage will be arriving later," the Baroness said with a dazzling smile.

  "We'll see to them," the manager said, anxious to please.

  But she was already past him, following her luggage to her suite. The manager turned for a surreptitious look at her rear. It was a marvelous rear, waggling like a dream in the black pajamas. For the hundredth time that day, the manager thanked Allah for the fortune that had placed him, the son of a simple pottery maker, in this position of trust and affluence, where every day he had the opportunity of seeing the shameless foreign women with their unveiled faces and the clothes that revealed the shape of their bodies. He, himself, thank God, had an old-fashioned wife who spoke only Arabic and knew her place.