by Paul Kenyon
By the time she turned around, Farnsworth had taken Fletch's gun from him and tapped him behind the ear with it. Sumo was strangling Kev into a merciful unconsciousness. She could see a dark spattering of blood showing through Kev's trousers at the crotch.
"Thank you," she said to Fenshaw. She was looking dumpier than ever; the mousy brown wig had slipped, and a bra strap had snapped, turning her lopsided. Fenshaw averted his eyes like a gentleman as she adjusted herself.
"Saw those blokes parading down the corridor with guns, and thought I'd better pop back for a look," Fenshaw said.
"We're glad you did," Farnsworth said, unruffled.
Fenshaw's shrewd eyes were roving all over them. "Didn't think you were CIA," he said. "Not the right style, don't you know. And I don't suppose these chaps are bogies."
"Not exactly," Farnsworth said.
Fenshaw showed big teeth in a horsey laugh. "Don't suppose you are, either?"
"What do you think?"
"What agency do you work for? Never mind, I don't suppose it matters. You could tell me anything, couldn't you?" He looked at the unconscious CIA men. "Never liked working with that lot. anyhow."
The Baroness studied Fenshaw. She'd lost one contact lens, and she looked at him through one green eye and one brown. "Is our date still on?" she said.
"Of course it is," he said. "I don't think we'd better meet here, though. What are you going to do about this mess?"
She looked around at the basement room. The face of a one hundred thousand dollar computer had been smashed by stray slugs, and the ductwork was dangling cables that had been concealed in it. The man whose innards she'd abused would go to the hospital, but he'd recover. Fletch, the blown diplomat, would awake with a headache. She turned her attention to Kev. He was sprawled across the floor, his face looking shrunken. She doubted if he were a man anymore. She debated killing him but decided not to. He was the CIA's problem.
"Leave it," she said.
Chapter 4
"I want you to eliminate Russia," the Baroness said.
She was perched tailor-fashion on top of the long, gleaming conference table in the London office of International Models, Inc. Sitting in a chair would have been a bit stuffy at a meeting of people whose specialty was killing, wiretapping, and blowing up things.
She was dressed casually in stretch pants, canvas shoes, and a soft, black, V-necked sweater with the sleeves pushed up. The V was deep enough to show that she wasn't wearing a bra. With her glossy black hair tied back, her skin as fresh and glowing as if she'd had a night's sleep, she looked altogether too enchanting to be head of a worldwide business that grossed four million dollars a year. Or, for that matter, to be head of the deadly little organization that faced her across the table.
"I'll do my best, Baroness," said the man she'd addressed.
He was a startlingly handsome man with blond hair and Nordic features, his face pale above the black turtleneck. Eric was her top male model, commanding fees of over one hundred thousand dollars a year. He got paid far less for the other things she asked him to do.
"You'd better, darling," the Baroness said. "If you can't eliminate Russia as the prime suspect in this SPOILER affair, those maniacs in the CIA are planning to blow up the oil fields at Baku."
"What if I find they are involved?" Eric said.
"Then we'll take care of it ourselves. World War Three is one party I'd like to be late for."
"I'll check it out. I can get in as a Swedish businessman. The Russians are trying to borrow a couple of billion for oil pipelines in Siberia. The bankers are swarming to Moscow like flies these days."
The Baroness shook her head. "We haven't time. I'm going to gamble that the Russians are victims, not villains, in this case. Or are about to be. I want you to go to Georgia. If anything's going to happen, it'll happen either at the Baku refineries or at Batumi, their export center on the Black Sea. We'll smuggle you in through Turkey. Key will fix up the details."
Eric nodded.
The Baroness looked around the table at the others. If anyone had walked in at that moment, there would have been nothing odd about the meeting. The conference room was untidy with easel displays and product samples. Layouts and glossies were strewn across the table. It looked like a strategy session for the upcoming Amberson Net Worth ad campaign.
Tom Sumo dug into his briefcase and brought out a can of Net Worth hair spray. He handed it over to her.
"Present for you, Baroness," he said. "Brought it over from New York."
Sumo smiled, enjoying himself. He was watching for her reaction. She turned the spray can over in her hands, trying to get a clue. Sumo liked to tinker. The last can of hair spray he'd doctored had turned out to be a thermite bomb. Once he'd made her a radio whose miniaturized components were concealed in a string of pearls. When the CIA was still bugging martinis with plastic olives, Sumo had contrived a bug that looked like a twist of lemon peel.
"I give up, Tommy. What's in the can?"
"Look at the picture on the label."
She looked at the spray can again. It showed a picture of herself.
All of a sudden she burst into laughter. "Life size?"
"Life size. I've been working on it for weeks. Fiona volunteered for the original mold."
Fiona yawned, showing perfect white teeth and a pink tongue. She was sitting next to Wharton, leaning too close to him and making him uncomfortable. She was a fine-drawn redhead with skin like skimmed milk, wearing a green pajama outfit that fit her like a snakeskin. Except for the Baroness herself, Fiona rated International Models' highest on-camera fees. She slept a lot, both alone and otherwise, but when she had to kill a man or extract information from him, she became very wide awake indeed.
"Tired, Fi?" the Baroness said with silky sympathy.
"A little," Fiona said. She stretched, sending the pajama top ballooning alarmingly. Wharton reddened and turned away. "Mr. Armstead kept me awake all night. He wasn't a very nice man. He insisted on dressing me in the most peculiar costume. And he made such a fuss when he found that his embassy night pass was missing."
Farnsworth harrumphed. "Yes. Well, thanks for keeping him busy."
Fiona smiled maliciously. "But I made him forget all about his night pass. He wasn't able to go to work this morning. I don't think Mr. Armstead will be up to much of anything for a while."
Sumo said hastily, "And here's another piece of ordnance. Dan helped me whip it up."
It was a sheer white bra, size 36-B. He held it out to her. She pulled at it experimentally. It seemed to be an ordinary stretch fabric.
"What does it do?" the Baroness said.
"It turns into a bow."
"I don't have to heat it, do I?" She was thinking of the watchbands and sandal straps that Sumo and Wharton had made for her. They looked like leather, but they were made of a plastic whose molecules "remembered" their original form when you held them over a fire. The original form was a knife.
Sumo looked horrified. "No, this is a different plastic. Spun out into fibers with boron nitride filaments. There's a place in the polymer structure that grabs two hydrogen and one oxygen atom."
"So I rinse out my bra. Then what happens?"
"The front becomes rigid and superhard. It assumes a bow shape. The back, where you hook it, stretches out into a bowstring. Heavy pull, wicked range. Takes an expert archer like you to use it."
"What about arrows?"
He spilled a jarful of toothpick-sized objects on the table. The Baroness picked up one and examined it. They were little plastic skewers, the kind you use for martini olives. There was a little spearhead on one end and a notched chevron at the other.
"What do I do with these?" the Baroness said dryly. "Stir them in gin?"
"They absorb water. Swell up to ten times their size. But the polymer structure stays rigid, even though it's honeycombed with water-filled spaces."
"Thank you, Tommy. And Dan. That's a lovely present to give a girl."
&nb
sp; She pulled her sweater off over her head and put on the bra. It was a gesture as natural and unaffected as trying on a pair of gloves. It didn't occur to her to worry about the others seeing her breasts. They'd worked with one another in every stage of dress and undress — both on the fashion modeling side and in their more clandestine activities. Prudishness was a luxury none of them could afford. Even Wharton made a point out of not looking away, though he was obviously uncomfortable until she put the sweater back on.
"Smashing!" Fiona said. "Do you have one for me, Tommy?"
"Yeah," Joe Skytop leered. "I'll help Fi string her bow. Us Indians are good at that."
Skytop was a full-blooded Cherokee, with a face as rugged as a carved totem pole. He was huge, with an enormous barrel chest and bulging arms as thick around as logs. His fingers were a bunch of bananas that looked as if they wouldn't be able to do anything more delicate than tear a grizzly bear apart, but, in fact, Skytop was one of the most sensitive and poetic photographers in the business.
"You won't have time, Joseph, darling," the Baroness said. "I'm sending you to Israel."
"You oughta be used to the climate, man," Paul said. "I hear it's just like Oklahoma."
He gave Skytop a cool, mocking grin. Paul was the model the Baroness used when the layout called for a black male with an elegant style. He was a slim, handsome man with fine-etched milk-chocolate features and an urbane aura. Once he'd been a street fighter, a member of a militant organization, on the run from the FBI. Farnsworth had taken him away from all that, recruiting him for the Baroness' elite organization and giving him two new lives to go with his new persona. His old identity had been wiped out — Sumo had even erased his social security number in the government computers — and he'd gone so far as to have attended some of the FBI classes undetected. Paul could have taught them a thing or two about bombs and underground terrorist groups.
"And you're going to sign up for a long ocean voyage, Paul, dear," the Baroness said.
"Where am I going?" he said warily.
"You're going to be a crewman aboard the Leviathan. It's one of the new supertankers — the biggest ever commissioned. It's the first of the new megaton class. Fifteen hundred feet long with a displacement of a million tons."
"Hey, wow," Paul said. "That's ten Torrey Canyons."
"Enough oil in one ship to keep Europe running for a week," Eric said. "What a spill that would be!"
"That's why I'm shipping you out on it," the Baroness said. "Anglia Petroleum is still refusing to pay blackmail to SPOILER, after that first tanker went down. The Leviathan is the next likely target."
"I hope you can swim, Paul, baby," Skytop said cheerfully.
"How do I get aboard?" Paul said.
"They're tied up at the terminal in Ras Tanura on the Persian Gulf right now," the Baroness said, "taking on a load of Kuwait crude. Sailing time's day after tomorrow. They're going to suddenly find themselves short one crewman. You'll be on the spot with a union card."
"I better get my ass right down there, then," Paul said, getting up.
Farnsworth handed him a manila envelope. "Here're your papers, and a few things about supertankers you'd better brief yourself on."
"I already know the worst," Paul said. "I got to give up smoking."
"And cigarettes, baby," Skytop rumbled.
"What's going to happen to this sailor I'm replacing?" Paul said.
Farnsworth looked at the table. "Poor fellow's going to have an accident. Nothing serious. But he won't be able to sail."
"He's lucky," Paul said, "if SPOILER really has it in for the ship."
He left the conference room, whistling. Skytop looked up at the Baroness expectantly.
"Your contact in Tel Aviv is a Professor Teitlebaum," the Baroness told him. "He'll tell you all about Israeli research on the new strain of oil-eating bacteria they've developed." She gave him an intense look. "But it's the things that Professor Teitlebaum can't tell you that I'm interested in."
"I dig," Skytop said. He took the manila envelope that Farnsworth handed him. "My ticket in there?"
"Yes. And some money. And your cover."
Skytop looked at the envelope suspiciously. "I don't have to get circumcised, do I?"
The Baroness laughed. "That depends on who you get friendly with."
"I mean, it might not be so good if I got my cover blown, huh?"
"Out!"
Skytop left with a big, ugly grin that resembled a mouthful of broken crockery. Yvette said, "That man's tongue's going to get him in trouble some day."
She was a stunning black girl, with smooth caramel skin and small perfect features, graceful as a gazelle in a paisley frock and a wide leather belt that emphasized the narrowness of her waist. The slender, tapering fingers could handle a submachine gun or sail a craft over open sea with equal facility. She still retained a trace of Port-au-Prince in her accent. Farnsworth had recruited her after she'd been abandoned by the CIA during the course of blowing up a Russian submarine facility in Cuba, killing four men and making her way across the Windward Passage to Haiti in an open boat. The CIA wouldn't have recognized her now in the fashion ads and TV commercials she appeared in. •
"Yvette," the Baroness said, "you're going to Scotland. You're a television journalist from America. You're going to ask Sir Angus Bane for an interview about the most recent developments in bacteriology."
"Including the developments in Israel?" Yvette said.
"Right. But play it carefully. Drop it in with a lot of other questions. You know the kind of story — 'Germs Are Man's Best Friend' — that kind of thing."
"Gotcha."
"And I want to know if anyone else has been sniffing around Sir Angus. I gather he's a saint, but saints tend to be unworldly. Somebody may have used his knowledge."
"I'll play it by ear."
The Baroness turned to Fiona. "Fi, you have cousins in the eastern Highlands, don't you?"
"Haven't seen them for years." She wrinkled her nose. "The dear Muirs and Mackies and Fifes. But I'm sure they're still there."
"Good. You're going to have a wee family reunion. A sentimental pilgrimage to the ancestral banks and braes."
"My God, there's no plumbing!"
"Pay attention, Fi!" the Baroness said sharply.
Fiona gave her a sulky look. "What do you want me to do?"
"The Scottish nationalists are up in arms over the oil discoveries in the North Sea. Over a thousand recruits a month are joining the Scottish National Party. A lot of splinter groups are forming. Extremists. Militants. I want you to find out what's going on. Infiltrate the movement."
Fiona leaned forward, her attention caught. "You think Scottish revolutionaries may be behind what's happening in the North Sea?"
"It's a possibility. The Scots resent being under England's thumb. The separatist movement keeps getting stronger. Now the oil boom is stirring them up further. They think all those lovely new oil revenues should go to Scotland, not England. The SNP has a slogan: 'It's Scotland's oil.' With two billion dollars a year in oil money, Scotland could be independent again."
"But SPOILER'S threatened to destroy the North Sea oil reserves."
The Baroness made a grimace. "Extremists might think that way. Sort of an if-I-can't-have-it-nobody-can attitude. But if they win their gamble, they get the money."
Fiona sighed. "I'll pack my woolen underwear."
"Inga," the Baroness said, "you're going to join an ecology group."
The blond girl smiled. "I'm already an ecologist."
"Have you heard of FOE?"
"Friends of the Environment? Yes. They're an international group, with members from America, the British Isles, Scandinavia, and Holland, mostly."
"They're protesting the drilling in the North Sea. They're getting up a flotilla of small boats, hundreds and hundreds of them. They plan to picket the offshore oil rigs. Keep supply boats from getting through. Make it difficult for the oil companies to carry on operations."
/> "But they're a very moderate organization. They couldn't be behind the SPOILER sabotage. They believe in peaceful protest."
"They make a big enough blanket to cover an extremist fringe. I want you to infiltrate them. Join the North Sea protest."
"I'll fly to Stockholm tonight. I know people in the Swedish branch of FOE."
Wharton said, "That leaves me. Where do I go?"
Dan Wharton was a large, rugged man with sandy hair, crinkly blue eyes, and an outdoor complexion. He was good with his hands, especially when it came to stripping an automatic weapon or coaxing a dead engine to life. He'd been the toughest sergeant ever to lead a squad. He liked working for the Baroness. He never thought about the fact that his name, courtesy of his Pilgrim forebears, was still in the social register. The social register never thought about him, either, if they could help it.
"To Aberdeen," the Baroness said. "It's the jumping-off point for the North Sea fields. It's turned into an oil-boom town. There's a labor shortage. I want you to get a job as a roughneck."
Wharton wrinkled his brow. "Aboard the Illingford rig?"
She paused, looking him over. She thought he'd take it all right. Wharton was a pro. He never let his emotions get in the way of a job. He thought she didn't know that he was in love with her. She'd trust him with her life.
"No," she said. "The Caledonian Oil Corporation rig. Tony Cavendish's company."
* * *
She didn't bother putting on the body, just the face.
She stood naked in front of the mirror and put in the teeth with their overbite, the contact lenses that turned her eyes brown, the cheek pads that nullified her superb cheekbones. She put on the brown wig and the spray-on cosmetic that turned her complexion dull. The plain, almost homely, face that smiled with toothy shyness from the mirror was Miss Thwaite.
