by Paul Kenyon
At the same time, she felt the electric shocks from her wrist again. They were coming at three-second intervals now. If she didn't do something about them, they'd grow closer and closer until they merged into a single continuous shock.
"It's never been as great as that before," Brian was saying admiringly. "You're fantastic!" He raised himself on his elbows and sighed with contentment. His entire body was dripping with sweat.
He reached out to pull her over to him. She sidestepped his hand and said. "There's a little john through that door, Brian darling. You can freshen up if you want to while I make a telephone call."
He flushed with anger. "Who are you going to tell about it? One of your society girl friends?"
"Don't be silly," she said, tousling his hair. "You were superb, and we'll have a return game soon. But we've been in here long enough."
As soon as he had disappeared through the door to the little bath, the Baroness reached down and unplugged the phone jack beside the bed.
Then she pulled the round knob off the night table drawer.
There were four prongs protruding from the end of the knob instead of the usual screw. They were just the right size to fit into an ordinary phone jack.
She peeled an adhesive disc off the other end of the knob. It was plastic, grained to look like wood. Under the covering, the knob had four slots — the female plug for a phone jack.
The «knob» was the smallest scrambler ever made. It was packed solid with ultraminiaturized circuitry designed by the electronic geniuses of COMSEC, the Communications Security department at NSA's Fort Meade headquarters. It worked by pulse code modulation, converting the voice into an arbitrary series of signals that would hide, unnoticed, in some innocuous-sounding telephone conversation that had been taped at the other end.
The little electric shocks were coming only two seconds apart now. They were getting damned uncomfortable. The Baroness quickly plugged the jack of the bedside telephone into the midget scrambler, then plugged the scrambler's prongs into the outlet on the wall.
She picked up the phone.
The shocks stopped immediately. The little electronic device had completed the circuit through the telephone company's lines, without her dialing.
"What took you so long, Penny?" a familiar voice said in her ear. "You waited a hell of a long time to pick up a phone."
"John, there are just some things that are more important than saving the world. What is it this time?"
John Farnsworth cleared his throat. "Are you alone?"
"For the moment, John darling. By the way, what kind of a conversation are we supposed to be having?"
"I'm using the tape we made last week — the one where you tell me that you're bored with your jet set friends and demand that I find you something useful to do."
"Oh, no, John!" she groaned. "This is the biggest party of the year! Nobody would believe that I'd leave it under any circumstances!"
The man known as Key put on his official voice. "You'll find a way to do it, though, won't you. Coin?"
"Oh dear, John, you sound dreadfully stuffy!"
"Coin, this is highest priority. Sigma One."
She sighed. "I'll be there in ten minutes."
"I'll settle for fifteen. You can't get through midtown in ten."
"Try me."
She disconnected the midget scrambler and pressed the adhesive disc back in place before he had time to reply. The false knob was inserted a second later. She collided with Brian on her way to the shower, flung a terse "Wait for me!" at him, and was back, showered and dried, in ninety seconds. She stepped into her gown, settled her breasts into the ingenious hammock de la Renta had built into the scoop neckline, and was at the door while Brian was still zipping up his fly.
"Hey, hold it a minute," he said.
She opened the door, pleased that there were four people in the corridor outside who could see her leaving the bedroom with a man who was still fastening his trousers. It would simplify the explanations.
"Come on, darling," she said, tossing her mane of black hair.
"Where are we going?" he asked, catching up.
She plastered herself against his arm and guided him through the crowd. Helena Pontarelli tried to catch her eye, but she pretended not to see her. At the door she paused to kiss Brian full on the mouth. At least fifty people saw it.
That takes care of that, she thought.
On the way down in the elevator, she fiddled with her pearls. One of them was a pea-size FM transmitter. It was powered by four nickel-cadmium batteries, also disguised as pearls. The string, a fine platinum wire, was the antenna.
Thirty floors below, Dan Wharton caught the signal on the FM receiver that was built into the buttons on the chauffeur's jacket he was wearing tonight.
Instantly he gunned the motor of the big, silver, custom-built rolls. He sped up the ramp of the underground parking garage, horns blaring. The building's parking attendant, a little wiry man in coveralls, put up a hand to stop him. Wharton kept his foot on the gas, one hand on the horn. The attendant flattened himself against the wall just in time as the Rolls Royce sped past him.
When you worked for the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, you didn't keep her waiting.
Wharton, a big, shambling, bearlike man with unruly blond hair and a surprisingly sensitive face, was one of the Baroness's most trusted agents. He had been detached from the Green Berets by a top-priority order signed, simply, "Key." The army demobilized him in less than three hours. An hour after that he was on a military flight to the special intelligence school run by NSA in Maryland. He spent a year learning refinements in the art of killing, electronic surveillance, explosives, forgery — refinements that he'd never been taught, even in CIA Special Forces School. At the end of the year he was assigned to the Baroness's team. He liked his job. He loved the Baroness. Both emotions made him very efficient.
He pulled up at the curb just as the Baroness stepped out of the lobby of the building with Brian York. He was out, saluting like a proper chauffeur, opening the passenger door, before they reached the curb.
"The office," she said.
The man with her said, "Hey, I thought we were going to my pad!"
Wharton's eyes narrowed. He suppressed his jealousy. He wasn't a man to the Baroness. He was a tool. Keeping her alive, keeping himself alive, meant continuing to be a tool.
"I'll drop you off, darling," she said. She leaned forward to give an address to Wharton. It was only a block out of the way.
When he pulled up in front of York's apartment house, the big football player refused to get out. "I don't know what you're up to, Baroness, but this isn't what I had in mind."
She sighed. "Dan."
He was out of the driver's seat and leaning in the rear door in a split second. "Yes, madame?" he said.
She bent across the halfback as if to speak to her chauffeur. An instant later Wharton saw Brian York slump. She'd unobtrusively pressed the carotid artery, cutting off the blood supply to the brain.
Wharton pulled York out of the car, got an arm across his back and under the armpit and half-carried, half-dragged the football star's two hundred and twenty pounds up the front steps without apparent effort. A few curious celebrity-watchers paused to look. York was already gaining consciousness by the time Wharton set him on his feet. He supported him until he was sure he wouldn't fall over, then sprinted back to the car.
York looked around stupidly. He'd be feeling muzzy for a few minutes. "Hey!" he said, taking a stumbling step toward the car.
"Sorry, darling," the Baroness called out the window. "I'll make it up to you later. Call me in the morning."
Wharton hit the gas pedal. The Rolls Royce leaped forward, cut like an arrow through the sluggish mid-town traffic. The New York office of International Models, Inc. was only a few blocks away. He hit the brakes at the entrance.
The Baroness was out of the Rolls before it stopped moving. "Wait for me," she ordered Wharton. She ran into the dark
nighttime lobby, gown hitched up, black hair flying.
It had taken nine and one-half minutes.
3
Farnsworth was waiting for her, a gun in his hand.
He kept it pointed at her while he flicked a penlight beam over her face and body, even though he must have recognized her immediately. John Farnsworth had stayed alive as long as he had by never taking any chances.
"It's really me, John," she said in an amused tone.
He grunted and put the gun away. They picked their way through the deserted reception room with the help of the penlight. Penelope could have done it in the dark. She owned the place. International Models, Inc. — the part of it that was above ground — made two million dollars a year for her.
The lights were on in Farnsworth's private office. Penelope settled herself comfortably in a Chippendale armchair, her feet tucked under her. Farnsworth seated himself at his desk, crisp and impeccable in his custom-tailored suit, looking as if it were perfectly natural for him to be there at three o'clock in the morning.
John Farnsworth was a tall, distinguished-looking man in his fifties. He looked altogether lean and fit, with his sun-bronzed face and iron-gray mustache. There was the faintest suggestion of a military bearing left over from his days in the OSS. He was Penelope's business manager and a damned good one.
There were only three people in the world, outside of the Baroness and her team, who knew he was also the man called Key.
He slipped the gun into the spring clip fitted under his desk. Penelope yawned, showing white teeth, a pink tongue.
"Who were you expecting, John?"
"Damned CIA's been sniffing around. They think they've traced one of the Fort Meade transmissions to 'Key' to this city block. We'll do something to throw them off, but in the meantime they've got agents combing these office buildings, company by company. They're dying to find out who Coin is. Give Jim Schlesinger leverage at the White House."
"What would you have done if I'd been a CIA agent?"
The steel-gray eyes were hard. "I'd have shot the damned fool and hidden the body."
Penelope stretched, catlike. Her superb body rippled under the clinging nylon of the evening gown. "What kind of a job do you have for me, John? Sigma One has something to do with nuclear bombs, doesn't it?"
"Missile officer in Nebraska went berserk. Had his finger poised above the red button. Would have pushed it, too, if something hadn't made him too happy to bother."
"Happy?"
"So happy that he died of it."
Penelope stirred with interest. "There must be more, John. Otherwise DIA or NSA would handle the investigation. Why did we get it?"
"We're going to find out right now. Stand by for a briefing."
He slid open the deep drawer at the left of his desk. It was an elaborate electronic console, including something that resembled a dictaphone playback unit.
"You're not going to accept a transmission from Fort Meade? Won't CIA pinpoint it?"
He smiled grimly. "We're going to throw them off."
He inserted a blank tape cassette into the unit, then flipped the toggle switch that signaled "ready for transmission." A coded pulse went out over the telephone company's lines. It divided itself into sixty-four fractions that hid themselves cleverly in the pauses and silences of dozens of ordinary telephone conversations. Anyone tapping any of the lines would have heard only a minute crackle, indistinguishable from static.
Less than a second later the sixty-four pulses found their separate ways to a U-shaped building in Maryland, two-hundred miles away. An IBM 7090 computer reassembled them into a signal.
The computer searched its three-billion-dollar memory. It found a subprogram that ordered it to encode a certain stored message and send it off.
In New York John Farnsworth grinned wolfishly at the Baroness. "The transmission from Fort Meade's going to California," he said. "Our CIA friends will be out of our hair by sunrise. They'll be sniffing around the West Coast for weeks."
In California another NSA computer received the transmission in its temporary Memory Buffer Register. It consulted one of its subprograms.
Seven hundred miles out in space the NSA satellite called MESTAR (Message Storage and Relay) absorbed a transmission from California. It held the message in its electronic womb for the nine minutes it took MESTAR to travel the 3,000 miles to the skies above New York. Precisely over Manhattan it gave birth.
"Ah, it's coming in now," John Farnsworth said.
The cassette recorder whirred for four seconds. The tape now contained thirty minutes' worth of sound, imprinted at high speed.
Farnsworth switched the cassette unit to play back at normal speed. Penelope leaned forward in her chair. The exquisite beauty of her face turned into a mask of total concentration.
A half hour later she leaned back in her chair and lit a cigarette, her expression thoughtful.
"What do you make of it?" Key said.
"I knew Cynthia Rawlings. A fifth of gin a day, pills by the handful. But she always knew exactly where she was. She took her acting seriously. There's nothing that could have made her do what she did."
"What about Reginald T. Perry?"
"Poor Reggie! I used to catch a glimpse of him once in a while at a party or formal dinner. He never could resist a second helping. Chubby little man!"
"He wasn't chubby when they found his body."
"And the missile officer. There might have been a connection between Cynthia and Reggie — they moved in the same circles. But he doesn't fit in at all.
"He's the one we're interested in. He scared the pants off the President."
"I think he's just a coincidence. Somehow all three of them got hold of something that makes you feel so good you die. It may be the first trickle before a flood. And that scares the pants off me!"
He raised an eyebrow in interest. "You're proceeding on the assumption that it's some kind of new drug then?"
"For the time being."
"How are you going to proceed?"
"I'm going to start by tracing the movements of the first three victims."
"First three?"
"Yes. I'm assuming there'll be other, similar, incidents stored in the 7090's memory cores at Fort Meade."
"But, Penny, my dear. NSA threw it to us. We can't throw it back at them. DIA and CIA are being held at arm's length — but only temporarily. We'd stir up a hornet's nest!"
She smiled sweetly. "No one has to know. Not even that dear general at Fort Meade."
He looked at her narrowly. "Penny, you're up to something. Something specific."
"Tom Sumo's found a way to tap that li'l old computer from a distance. We're going to write a new program that'll ask it some questions they didn't think of the first time."
Farnsworth sputtered, his face growing red. "You can't bug the 7090! It's NSA's nerve center!"
"Oh, but I can. And I have."
Abruptly he laughed. "Thank God you're not working for the other side! How are you going to go about tracing the movements of the subjects?"
She got to her feet in a sinuous, flowing movement. "Cynthia had a younger brother. He turned hippie. Maybe he knows something about a new drug. I'll put Dan Wharton on it. I'm sending Joe Skytop out West to start looking into the private life of our missile man. A Cherokee Indian won't attract too much attention in that neighborhood."
"What about our chubby friend who dieted himself to death?"
"I'll do that one myself. I heard that his current mistress was some kind of fashion or ad model." She gestured toward the outer office of International Models, Inc. "That'll give me an in."
"Coin, this may be dangerous. If it's drugs, the syndicate's probably involved. If the target was our nuclear rockets, you may run into the KGB or Liu Hung-Fu's boys from Peking. They all play rough."
Penelope gave a short laugh. "They taught me one hundred and eighty-three ways to kill a man at Special Forces School and at those darling little NSA classes I attended
incognito."
"All the same… See here, what kind of hardware are you packing now?"
"A. nice little Beretta Jetfire."
"I seem to recall that you prefer a Bernadelli VB."
"I left it in Brazil on my last job."
Farnsworth reached into his breast pocket and took out a slim jewelry box, about four inches long. It might have held a wristwatch. "A little present for you, Penny."
She opened the box. Nestled in black velvet was a tiny gold-plated automatic.
"Oh, John! You're a dear!"
It was a customized Bernadelli VB, the smallest .25 automatic ever made. It held five rounds, despite the fact that it was only four and one-eighth inches long and three-fourths of an inch through the grips. You could hide it in a pack of cigarettes.
Impulsively, Penelope flung her arms around Farnsworth's neck and planted a kiss on his lips. He harrumphed and disengaged himself. "Coin! Is that any way for an agent to behave toward her control?"
She smiled wickedly. "I hear that agents in some other agencies do!"
He laughed in spite of himself. "All right, my dear. Get your team together. And be careful."
"I always am, John."
She tucked the Bernadelli VB into the scoop neckline between her breasts. It didn't show at all. She turned with supple grace and headed for the night elevator. The guard on duty in the lobby stared admiringly after her as she swept past him. Outside, a few nighttime strollers glanced toward the skyscraper entrance as a tall spectacular brunette emerged, clad in a stunning black nylon evening gown that was cut dangerously low in front. If any of them happened to be among the cognoscenti who followed Suzy Knickerbocker's column or read Town & Country, they might have recognized the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini, model, millionairess, and international beauty.
The Baroness slid gracefully into a gleaming silver Rolls Royce. The chauffeur, a big sandy-haired bear of a man, touched his cap respectfully and drove off.
Coin had been dropped into the slot.
* * *
