Black Gold

by Paul Kenyon

  The body underneath the face was still Penelope St. John-Orsini's, with long, clean lines, and a flat belly, and breasts as high and firm as a teen-ager's. There wasn't an ounce of fat anywhere on her. There was useful muscle under the feminine curves.

  She dressed the body in black tights and top, with a no-nonsense stretch bra that would hold her in place without hindering her movement. She didn't bother with the lumpy padding of the night before. She was going to have to do some climbing.

  Clive Fenshaw had called her just five minutes earlier. She'd looked at the bedside clock. It was three in the morning.

  "Miss Thwaite," he'd said, "I think I've got what we're after. But I'll need your help."

  Fenshaw didn't know that he was reaching her the long way around. The number she'd given him didn't exist. It was a little electronic bump that Sumo had raised in the telephone exchange's circuitry. Fenshaw's call had been automatically routed to her townhouse phone. The number was good for one call. When she hung up, it was erased.

  "Where are you?"

  "In the London office of the Caledonian Oil Corporation. Ninth floor. I'm using their night line. Please hurry."

  "I'm on my way."

  "Miss Thwaite, be careful. There's a guard in the lobby."

  "I won't come through the lobby."

  She'd paused only a moment to look at the rumpled pillow. Tony's head wasn't on it anymore, and his clothes were gone from the chair. He must have tiptoed off while she was asleep. He'd been able to leave without waking her up because she'd been exhausted from the night before, with no sleep at all, and the long day.

  She hoped he hadn't gone to the office.

  She checked the clip of the tiny gold-plated automatic. There were five .25-caliber shells in it. The Bernardelli VB was smaller than a derringer, but it packed a lot of punch. She slipped it into the side of her bra, under her left arm. Its flat, squarish shape hardly made a bulge, and the low neck of the body stocking made it easy to reach quickly. With a wrap-around skirt over the tights, she'd get by in the street.

  She parked a couple of blocks away from the Caledonian building. It was one of those sheer glass boxes that they were putting up all over London. Tony was quite proud of it.

  She strolled past the lighted lobby, feeling conspicuous in the empty street. There was the guard, a heavy man with a face the color of raw beef, sitting on a stool just inside the door. He was alert. He looked up as she walked by. She kept walking.

  The side street was darker, and there was a row of plane trees along the sidewalk. There was a bobby across the street, but he was looking into a shop window. The Baroness walked with a normal stride until she was behind a tree, then stopped abruptly.

  She made herself wait thirty seconds, then risked a peek. The bobby was continuing on his patrol. A young couple was coming down the street on the other side, arguing loudly. They stopped their fight when they saw the bobby. He looked at them and they looked at him. She couldn't ask for anything better.

  From her shoulder bag she drew something that looked like a target pistol: the Spyder. The reservoir in the handle contained a liquid polymer that hardened instantly into a silken thread on contact with air. On its way out through the chamber, the thread picked up an explosive piton that unfolded into a grappling hook.

  She aimed at a spot just above the ninth-floor windows and pulled the trigger. There was a sound like a snake's hiss, and another sound like a popped cork above. She pulled on the butt to test the thread. It held firm. She thumbed the release and leaped straight into the air.

  Instantly the powerful spring took up slack. She swung against the side of the building, planted the soles of her boots squarely against it, and started walking up the glass wall. By the time she was above the plane trees' foliage, she was thirty feet up, a black shape in the night. Across the street the bobby was soothing the arguing couple. They were both drunk. Even if he'd looked up, the bobby probably wouldn't have noticed the fleeting shadow against the building.

  The Baroness pressed her face against the glass. Fenshaw's coat and umbrella were on a chair, and there was a small burglary kit beside it, but there was no sign of the little man.

  She tapped on the glass. No Fenshaw. He probably wasn't within earshot.

  There was no way to open the window. Tony's building was one of those sealed glass tombs that depend on air conditioning. That kind of architecture helped sell his oil.

  Dangling with one hand from the polymer thread, she groped with the other in her shoulder bag and put on the cat's-paw glove. She traced a large circle on the glass with the diamond claw and then pressed quickly with the glove's spongy suction pad.

  She leaped into the room, holding the glass circle in front of her like a shield. Before she did anything else, she fitted it back into the window and fastened it in place with transparent tape.

  Fenshaw had been busy. File drawers were open. Papers were scattered. A small safe in the corner stood open.

  Or had he? Penelope frowned. MI5 agents were discreet. They were trained to clean up and leave no traces of a search. And one didn't leave the cleaning up for last. One did it as he went along.

  There was something on the floor. A tooth.

  She flicked on the little penlight and examined the carpet. Blood. Little droplets leading to the next office.

  Her hand dipped into her neckline for the gun. She dropped the skirt and the shoulder bag to the floor and moved silently across the room.

  She paused at the door to listen. Nothing.

  She pushed the door open swiftly and stepped through, hurling herself to one side. There was a blaze of light.

  The light went off instantly, but it had done its work. Her night vision was gone. She couldn't see a thing.

  But in that split second of illumination she'd seen Fenshaw. The vision lingered as an afterimage on her retinas.

  He was lying on his back, the soles of his shoes facing her. His head was resting on the floor in front of them.

  The head was upside down, but she'd recognized it anyway by the bristly mustache. It was cradled in Fenshaw's bowler hat, like a cabbage in a pot. Blood from the stump of the neck ran over the face like sauce.

  The room was a bedlam of broken and overturned furniture. The little man must have put up a terrific battle.

  But she had no time to think about that because there was someone in the room trying to kill her. She spun toward the sound, her gun extended, but there was a whipping noise through the air and something hard and flat struck her a violent blow on the wrist. The gun went spinning off somewhere. Her hand was numb and useless. It felt as though her wrist were broken.

  She stumbled to one side, tripping over an overturned wastebasket, and again there was that whizzing sound. There was the sound of splintering wood where she'd just been, and a grunt of effort. Whatever it was had gone through the wall paneling.

  She dived to the floor just in time to feel the breeze of the weapon pass over her. An axe or a sword. The thing that had cut off poor Fenshaw's head.

  She rolled toward her invisible assailant and bumped into a pair of legs. She grabbed for them, but Whoever it was jumped back with astonishing agility, eluding her grasp. She had a moment to realize that her hand had clutched at a woolen skirt and a bare knee under it.

  A woman. It was an enormously quick and powerful woman.

  The weapon thudded into the floor, an inch from her head. She rolled away and leaped to her feet, one hand dangling numbly.

  For a moment, her assailant was silhouetted against a window, outlined by London's dim nighttime glow. Penelope's vision was still gone, but she'd seen a vague blurred outline of someone as tall as she was, though bulkier, holding what looked like a broad, huge sword in two hands, an ample skirt swirling around knobby legs. The woman was a big one, and dangerous.

  Penelope had one hand, with nothing in it. The bulky shape came bounding toward her again, swinging the sword — a left-handed swing that caught her by surprise.

&nb
sp; She dodged out of the way. It was no use. She was trapped against a filing cabinet, with no room to sidestep.

  She sensed rather than saw the sword slicing toward her, and then there was a gasp of surprise and the figure in the wool skirt was falling, flailing at the air for balance.

  The head. The big woman had tripped on Fenshaw's head.

  There was a sickening thump as the head in its bowler hat landed a few feet away. The Baroness had no time to think about it. With her good hand she caught the woman's wrist, the one holding the sword, and whipped the arm around. The arm would have snapped, except that the woman's body twisted with it. The sword clattered to the floor, and then she was grappling one-handed with someone as strong as she was.

  Her right hand wouldn't work, but there was nothing wrong with her right elbow. She jabbed it into the woman's ribs. There was a gasp of pain, and then there were hands clawing at her.

  She had a knee wedged between the woman's legs, trying to force her off balance, when she was surprised to feel something dangling there.

  And she suddenly realized that it wasn't a woman at all. It was a man!

  She grabbed for the dangling thing between his legs just as he. fell backward. She gave a sharp tug, and pulled it off.

  There was a dreadful bellow, and then the other person landed with a crash on the floor. He was still amazingly quick. He scuttled halfway to the door on all fours, rising to his feet on the way, and he got out before she could go after him.

  She looked at the thing she'd pulled loose.

  It was a sporran.

  It swung limp in her hand, its tassels hanging. It probably had looked quite dashing, suspended in front of her opponent's kilt.

  She opened the leather flap and looked inside. There was nothing in it except a few small coins, some stale crumbs that looked as if they were the remains of an oat cake, and a bagpiper's practice chanter. Nothing that might provide a clue to his identity.

  The sword was lying in the corner of the room. She inspected it with the penlight. It was a huge double-edged weapon that was so long that it could only have been worn in a scabbard suspended from the swordsman's shoulder and hanging down his back. A claymore. The Scottish claith mhor, or great sword. It was an authentic antique. The edge was still sticky with Fenshaw's blood.

  She found the little man's head lying on its side, over by a desk. The blue eyes were open, looking surprised.

  "Thank you, Clive, darling," she whispered. "That was the second time you saved my life."

  She gave a short, bitter laugh. She needn't have bothered with the Miss Thwaite disguise, after all. Fenshaw had never had a chance to see her face.

  Chapter 5

  "It's the Clan Bane," Farnsworth said. "The colors in those bits of woolen fuzz that were clinging to the sporran add up to one combination — the Bane tartan."

  The sporran lay on the table between them, along with a copy of Clans and Tartans of the Scottish Highlands. The claymore was there, too. The fingerprints on the hilt had been too smudged for identification.

  "It doesn't necessarily implicate Sir Angus, of course," the Baroness said. "There are thousands of people who wear the Bane plaid."

  Farnsworth nodded. "True."

  "And Sir Angus is an eminent man," the Baroness went on. "One of the sixteen Scottish peers in the House of Lords until his retirement."

  "I can't dispute that," Farnsworth said.

  "He's been heaped with honors by the British Crown for his humanitarian work. And he's won the Nobel Prize."

  "There's no denying it."

  "It would be absolutely unthinkable for a man like that to be involved in something shady," the Baroness said.

  "I'd have to agree with you there," Farnsworth said.

  The Baroness smiled wickedly. "So maybe we'd better take a closer look at him. He's too good to be true."

  Sumo bared his teeth. "Yvette's coming in," he said.

  He had a pained expression on his face. Transmissions always gave him a toothache. It was the one drawback in his electronic dentistry. The radio in his mouth had its ultraminiaturized components scattered among his fillings and braces and gold inlays, using his saliva as the electrolyte for the few milliamperes of current it required. But it always seemed to trigger a sensitive nerve in his molar.

  "Can we hear it, Tommy?" the Baroness said.

  "In stereo," he said, giving her a glittering gold smile. He went over to the hi-fi set in the bookcase wall and plugged himself into the amplifier. He sat there, a look of rapt attention on his face, a pair of fine gold wires trailing from his lips.

  "I couldn't get in," Yvette's voice said from the speakers.

  She was somewhere in the Scottish Highlands, talking into her tape recorder. It was a standard model machine, the kind any journalist would use for interviews. But Sumo had rearranged its innards to do the job in a fraction of the space. The rest of the recorder's interior was crammed with space-age components. It bounced its signals off an orbiting satellite down to Sumo's rooftop antenna. A VHF transmitter with a range of six hundred yards fed the transmission directly into Sumo's mouth.

  "I couldn't even get near the castle," Yvette said. "Big pile of stone with a moat. This tough-looking dude in a plaid skirt said the laird wasn't seeing anyone. Especially reporters."

  The Baroness raised an eyebrow. "That doesn't sound like Sir Angus. Up until a few years ago, he was very free about giving interviews. He even appeared on a couple of science specials for the BBC."

  "So I started asking • questions around the neighborhood," Yvette said. She gave a mirthless chuckle. "Do you know that man owns the neighborhood? Everybody for miles around seems to belong to the Bane clan. They all clammed up. Next thing I know, I lose my room at the inn. They tell me my reservations aren't in order. Man, like it was darkest Mississippi! They say my room's reserved by another guest, but I hung around. Wasn't no other guest. And I can't get served in the hotel dining room. Can't even get a sandwich at the pub. And the taxi driver in the village won't take me around. Finally I got the idea. I ask if he'll drive me the fifty miles to Aberdeen so I can get back to London." She chuckled again. "He's glad to do that. So I said I'd let him know, and left him standing there." She paused. "Do you want me to keep on? I can make another try at the castle tomorrow."

  "Tell her no, Tommy," the Baroness said. "Sir Angus doesn't seem to like people asking questions about him. I don't want to put him on his guard."

  Sumo's teeth began to chatter. It was ordinary Morse, but scrambled in transit the way Yvette's voice had been.

  "I dig," Yvette said. "I'll get out of here today. One more thing. I've been keeping watch on Castle Bane from the moor, with binoculars. For a man who isn't seeing anybody, there sure is a lot of activity. People arriving every hour, with luggage. Lots of guns in the luggage."

  She signed off. Sumo looked relieved. He untwisted the gold wire from his braces.

  "There's a distinct smell of fish from Castle Bane," the Baroness said.

  "I agree," said Farnsworth.

  The Baroness stared thoughtfully at the sporran, and at the sword that had killed Fenshaw.

  "I've got to get inside," she said. "Somehow."

  * * *

  "I'll miss you," Tony said.

  "When are you leaving?" the Baroness said.

  "First thing in the morning. I'll be gone three weeks, at least. That's three weeks with a bloody great hardon."

  "You'll find someone," she said.

  He grimaced. "In Scotland?"

  She rolled over on her stomach and put her cheek on the pillow, facing him. He was lying on his back, his hands clasped behind his head, staring morosely at his penis. It was standing straight up, a dark, angry newel post pointing at the ceiling.

  She wrapped her fingers around it and thumbed the tip. It gave a bit, like a hard rubber ball. "Well, we can do something about this one, at least."

  "It'll just come back," he said. "It always does."

  "I know," sh
e said. "That's part of your charm. Old reliable Tony."

  She gave the shaft a squeeze. He yelped. His breathing started to come faster.

  "You just treat me as a convenience," he complained.

  "Poor thing," she said. She draped a leg over him and stroked his foot with her toe. The warm, meaty maleness of him rubbed against the inside of her thigh.

  He spread his hands over her buttocks. His lean, hawklike face stared up at her. "I mean it," he said. "Why can't you come up to Scotland with me? Christ knows, you need a holiday."

  "Need one, darling. Can't afford one."

  She was going to have to spend her time following up other leads. Sir Angus had priority. Wharton could watch Tony. By now, Wharton must already have gotten a job as a roughneck aboard Tony's drilling platform. And before Tony left, she could plant another bug on him.

  She eased herself over on top of him. His harpoon was standing up between her thighs, the top edge of it pressed against her outer labia. A gnawing ache took shape in her loins.

  Tony was spreading her buttocks apart. The lips of her sex parted and nibbled at the packed tubular thing that was pressed against her.

  "I'd be busy out at the rig most of the day," he said, breathing hard, "but we'd have the nights. And I could take a few days off so we could shoot together. The grouse season starts next week."

  "Fuck the grouse season," she said. She rubbed her breasts over his hairy chest. The wiry hairs scrubbed her nipples. They were hard to bursting. A warm generalized thrill spread through her breasts. Her swollen paps pressed into his chest like a pair of insistent thumbs.

  She raised her behind eight inches and located the end of his penis with her oozing cleft. He gave a sudden gasp as she pushed downward. The angle wasn't just right. It slipped past and stabbed her in the belly. She lifted up again and drew in her behind. This time she got it notched. Tony was sweating. The bulbous head of his scepter was embedded in her niche like a cork. She savored its presence for a moment before impaling herself all the way.

  He made one last try, his voice shaking. "The Bane estate has some of the best shooting in Scotland."