by Paul Kenyon
"Ah, yes," the sheik said politely.
"But solid evidence is hard to come by," Eric said, sweating.
The sheik gave him an ironic smile. "Unfortunately, my subjects tend to carry their righteousness to extremes. When they come upon a tablet or a clay idol from the Time of Ignorance before Mohammed, they immediately smash it. To do otherwise would be impious."
Eric pointed toward a large mound some distance away. Two tiny figures — Paul and Fiona — could be seen at its summit, the tripod of a theodolite between them.
"We thought we'd begin by excavating that large tell over there," he said. "We're making a triangulation grid now."
The sheik nodded indifferently. "Just be careful not to go more than a mile or two in that direction. That will put you over the border. My neighbor, the Emir of Ghazal, isn't very friendly to archaeologists. Or to me, for that matter."
Eric remembered the Baroness' description of the village of jellied corpses. The site was only a few miles away, on the shiek's side of the border. If the Emir had been responsible for that, then he certainly wasn't very friendly.
The shiek was already climbing into his black limousine with its desert tires. Around him, the trucks and cars of his hunting party started their engines. Eric watched the procession pull away and disappear into the desert.
Skytop was at his side. "Think we convinced him?" he said.
"I don't know. He's a pretty shrewd old bastard."
"We're really gonna dig, huh? Make like a bunch of professors and graduate students?"
"That's our cover."
Skytop shook his lion's head. "I'm going to go nuts. Sitting around here while we wait for a call from the Baroness. Suppose she's in trouble?"
"We sit," Eric said flatly. "Until the Baroness says otherwise. And we dig for pottery for the Tyler Foundation."
"I don't like it."
Eric shrugged. He'd managed somehow to age himself ten years, with the gold-framed spectacles and the gray streaked into his blond hair and the bent, fussy way he was holding his long, spare frame.
"I'm going to take a couple of the workmen and make the first cut. I see Dan waving that they're ready. Why don't you set up your cameras? You're going to be photographing a hell of a lot of potsherds in a little while."
"Okay. Give me half an hour."
Skytop clumped off toward the camp compound, a double row of low thatched buildings that had been left there by previous archaeological expeditions. Nobody was around. The workmen had set up camp at the other side of the dig, and they hadn't yet hired a cook or servants.
His Cherokee instincts alerted him while he was still a dozen yards from his hut. Perhaps it was a lingering trace of human scent on the air. Or it might have been some minutely disturbed straw or pebble on the ground, remembered only by his subconscious.
His big clumsy body suddenly took on an animal grace. His huge bulk moved as lightly as a puff of smoke across the enclosure. He made no sound at all. None.
The man's back was to him as he entered the hut. It was a big, broad back, bigger than is usually seen among the underfed inhabitants of the Arab villages in the area. He was wearing a dirty twisted turban and a ragged shirt and shorts.
Another alarm went off in Skytop's head when he saw how the man was searching the hut. It wasn't the kind of quick, careless plunder you'd expect from an ordinary thief. Skytop's camera accessories and the contents of his personal kit were spread out methodically, so they could be put back in the same order. The search was supposed to have gone undetected when it was over. The intruder was after information, not goods.
The Arab whipped around when Skytop's bulk darkened the doorway. He had a machine pistol in his hand.
Bad. It was very bad. Skytop had been expecting a knife, and could have dealt with it. But the machine pistol could spit out its deadly steel-jacketed spray before he could get close to the man. And the man didn't have to aim very well. The effect of that hail of metal would be devastating in this enclosed space.
"Awiz ay?" Skytop said in his pidgin Arabic.
He recognized the man now. It was one of the laborers they'd hired that morning, a sullen brute who'd given his name as Farid.
"What I want I have found," the man said slowly in passable English.
Bad. It was still bad. When they talked to you like that, they'd made up their minds to kill you.
"Let me guess," Skytop said. "You belong to PFLOAG. Right, friend?"
He began edging closer, unobtrusively, he hoped. Farid stopped him with a wave of the machine pistol.
"And you, Amreekani, you and your friends belong to the CIA."
Skytop sighed. Farid had found some of the communications equipment hidden among his possessions. It was no use trying to explain that he wasn't CIA.
Ten feet. He took another experimental step forward.
"Ist!" the man warned. The trigger moved. Skytop decided he was within a millimeter of being killed.
He saved himself from being shot by flinging his hands up. His body was rigid and there was a proper look of terror on his face. His arms strained. His fingertips were touching the ridgepole of the low roof.
"Kwi-yis," Farid said, "good. Do not move and maybe you will live a few minutes longer."
"You can't shoot me," Skytop said. "The sound will bring my friends."
"Your friends are at the tell," Farid said. "By the time they get here, I will be far away. In any case, your friends will not live long once I tell my unit that you are American spies."
"That's why you got yourself hired? To check us out?"
"We control this area absolutely."
"That'll be news to Sheik Hamad."
"Hamad!" The lips curled in contempt. "He is finished. So are all the other sheiks and their American money. The Arabian Gulf belongs to us."
"And you belong to the Chinese," Skytop taunted.
"The Chinese comrades are our friends!" the PFLOAG agent said angrily.
"Tell me this," Skytop said. "What use is it giving a man a political re-education lecture just before you kill him? You're an amateur, friend. You like to wave your gun around and talk."
Farid's face was dark with fury. Good! He aimed the gun at the center of Skytop's belly.
"You do not want to listen? Very well! Die, then!"
Skytop's huge hands gripped the ridgepole. It was mangrove wood, smooth and hard to the touch.
Then he simply pulled the roof down.
The machine pistol went off, probably into the ground, because Farid's shoulders and arms were imprisoned in a trellis of bent and broken side poles whose landings had come loose.
There was a crazy moment when the two heads, Skytop's and Farid's, faced one another over a sheet of broad banana leaves. Both their heads had broken through the roof thatching when Skytop pulled the ridgepole down. They were wearing the barasti roof on their shoulders like a vast vegetable cloak.
Then Skytop ducked down, breaking the imprisoning supports like twigs. There was enough light under there so he could see the man's form, headless, struggling to get loose and bringing the gun up.
Farid fired another burst, trying to hit Skytop. But he couldn't see anything below the level of his chin. Skytop could.
He came in sideways and plucked the machine pistol out of Farid's hands like a grownup taking a toy away from a naughty child. He had to break Farid's trigger finger to do it. He threw the gun away. Then he pulled Farid down through the thatching and pinned him to the floor.
"Sorry, fellah," he said, "but you're not going to tell your friends anything."
He put a big hand over the man's face and pushed until he heard the neck snap. Farid's body shuddered and went limp.
Dan Wharton and Eric arrived a couple of minutes later. They'd been close enough to hear the shots. Both of them raised their eyebrows when they saw the collapsed hut and Skytop's bearish form crawling out from beneath it.
"We've got a dead terrorist under there," Skytop said. He told them what had
happened.
"Do you think any of the Arab laborers heard anything?" Wharton said.
"Probably," Eric said. "But they couldn't have known where it came from or what it was all about. Gunshots aren't that uncommon in this part of the world."
"Do we have to worry about his friends?"
A big cracked grin split Skytop's features. "Not if they're like Farid. They'll all be pussycats."
"PFLOAG spotted us. Do you think they spotted the Baroness?"
For the first time, Eric looked worried. "If they're operating in Ghazal, they're bound to be keeping an eye on the Emir's palace. Probably have agents inside."
"Then the Baroness is in the jaws of a vise. The Emir and the revolutionaries. If they break her cover, she's had it," Wharton said.
Skytop put an enormous hand on Wharton's shoulder. "Listen, Dan," he said, "don't worry. I'm just a two-hundred-plus-pound Cherokee Indian with Special Forces training, and I was able to handle one of those PFLOAG guys. You can imagine what'll happen if they tangle with the Baroness. God help them!"
That got a reluctant smile out of Wharton. He punched Skytop in the upper arm and said, "Okay, Chief! Let's get rid of the evidence."
They crawled back under the debris and stripped the body. They rolled it in a piece of canvas. When night came, they lugged it over to one of the hundreds of grave mounds that archaeologists of a dozen nations had opened up over the years.
They dumped it into a narrow slot that had been left in the half-excavated mound and heard it drop with a thud some fifty or sixty feet below. Nobody was going to bother it for a while. Archaeologists don't like to pick over someone else's leavings. Maybe after another seven thousand years had passed, somebody would find one more skeleton. There were plenty of them around.
"I don't understand it," Sumo said. "No bugs."
He hadn't uttered a sound. If there were microphones in the room, they hadn't heard a word. If there were cameras, they hadn't seen him move his lips.
"That's hard to believe, Tommy," the Baroness said. "Keep working on it."
Her lips hadn't moved either. Not a sound had escaped them.
She'd smuggled in the devices among her jewelry and her toiletries. There was a button in her ear, and one in Sumo's, that had been part of a string of pearls. No X-ray examination would have revealed them to be anything but authentic pearls — expensive pearls, too, and, ironically, from the Persian Gulf area. The electronics were sandwiched in between the layers of nacre that some obliging oyster had secreted around an irritating grain of sand. The original grain of sand had been replaced by a tiny cesium seed that supplied power.
The microphones were two flesh-colored Band-Aids that the Baroness and Sumo wore on their throats. The woven diaphragm was mixed with the cotton fibers of the antiseptic pad. You could have picked the Band-Aid apart without finding it. But it picked up the vibrations of the larynx when Sumo and the Baroness talked silently to one another.
It was a little more sophisticated than the old days, when an agent had to resort to running water or flushing the toilet to evade the opposition's bugs.
Sumo continued unpacking her luggage, a good servant for all anyone could tell. "I mean it, Baroness," a little insect voice said in her ear. "So far I haven't detected anything. No FM or VHF wave fronts transmitting microphone information, no magnetic field effects in the walls or ceiling — nothing! Of course I still have a lot of surfaces to cover. But so far it looks as if the Emir is as trusting as a child. And that's hard to believe."
"We'll play it safe, Tommy," the Baroness subvocalized. "We'll assume that we're being watched. All the time. Somehow."
Sumo took an armload of dresses over to the closet. "All right, Baroness," the insect voice buzzed. "I'll warn Yvette and Inga."
She finished changing: a pair of billowing harem pants in a red-and-white polka dot pattern and a top that was a pair of criss-crossed bandannas tied in the back.
"I'm going down to the kennel to check on Igor and Stasya," she said. "In the meantime, don't get hung up on electronics. Maybe we're assuming too much of the Emir. They've been spying on people a good many centuries in this part of the world. Long before Thomas Edison."
A delighted sound vibrated in her ear: as delighted a sound as a diaphragm only two millimeters square is capable of making. "Peepholes! I'll look for peepholes!"
"And listening tubes! And midgets under the bed!"
Sumo had to laugh out loud that time. He covered it up by holding up an evening gown and saying out loud, "Baroness, this is much too daring for a Moslem country!"
"I'm wearing it to dinner tonight," she said. That would give the Emir something to look forward to — if he was bugging her quarters.
She left the suite and proceeded down a great ringing arcade decorated with brilliant tiles in jewel-like colors. It was like being inside a kaleidoscope. A servant with a tray hurried by, his felt slippers making no sound. The vast concourse, with its thirty-foot-high arched roof and rows of ornate pillars, seemed to go on forever. In the distance, she saw a man with a sword standing outside a flame-shaped archway. She hurried toward him, her heels echoing on the tiles.
As she drew closer, she saw that the man was a young eunuch — probably guarding the harem. There was a well-shaped mouth and a nice bone structure underneath the rounded cheeks with their subcutaneous fat deposits. She felt a momentary wave of pity; he might have been a handsome young man if he hadn't had his balls cut off.
"Te'dar tisahedni?" she said. "Can you show me the way to the kennels?"
He looked at her in alarm. A woman, wandering around loose! And her breasts spilling out of a bandanna! And still worse, her unveiled face!
She tried again. Anah badowahr achla kalb…"
He tightened his grip on his sword hilt. His face worked with effort, and his eyes rolled round in their sockets. She smiled to encourage him. A thick muffled sound came from his mouth.
"He not can tell you," a soprano voice said behind her. "His tongue it cut out."
She turned. It was Ebrahim, the chief eunuch. He stood there smiling at her, his fat face pebbled with sweat.
"I didn't know it was their tongues you cut off, darling," she said.
"That so he cannot tell what he sees in harem."
Penelope could think of another reason. But then, perhaps they weren't that sophisticated in a place like Ghazal.
"How about you, Ebrahim? Can you tell me where the kennels are?"
"I take you there," he said complacently. It was uncanny, hearing that high, clear voice coming from that waddling mountain. He started down the corridor, motioning her to follow.
The kennel was a low, spotlessly whitewashed structure in a beautiful garden. It was probably better quarters than most of the Emir's human subjects had. There were cool arcades and marble fountains for the dogs to drink out of, and long fenced runs, wide enough so the salukis could get up speed and turn around.
The kennel master was polite but reserved. "Your dogs will eat only grain with clear beef broth today. Meat tomorrow. It is best after a journey."
He took her down a long row of carpeted pens. The eunuch followed them. The dogs didn't like him. They set up a chorus of hysterical barking as Ebrahim passed. The kennel master looked annoyed.
He paused about halfway down the aisle. The two salukis she'd brought as gifts for the Emir were there. A boy in loincloth and turban was brushing their long silky hair. The dogs looked up and wagged their tails when they saw her.
"They will be good hunters — the finest," the kennel master said. "In two years. After they are trained to work with the falcons. The Emir is very pleased."
It was the closest thing to a thank-you she'd got.
Ebrahim giggled. "You should feed them the same meat the Emir feeds the falcons," he said. "Perhaps they run faster then."
The kennel master regarded the eunuch with distaste. "Never!" he choked. He recovered his composure and said, "By the Emir's grace and the will of Allah, as long
as I am in charge of these dogs, they will eat the food that is good for them."
"And what do the falcons eat?" Penelope said.
Ebrahim giggled again. "Pieces of meat," he said. "The best parts."
"Pay no attention to this foolish eunuch," the kennel master said, visibly angered. To Ebrahim, he snapped: "Kali balik!" Penelope noticed that he'd used the grammatical form for talking to women. Ebrahim's blue-black face grew even darker, but he kept smiling.
"Take care yourself, old man," he said softly. He took out an odd little curved knife and began playing with it. The kennel master looked at the knife with contempt.
"Come this way, khanom," the kennel master said to the Baroness. "I have your dogs down there."
Igor and Stasya shared a double cage, with carpeting on the floor and a horsechair divan for comfort; salukis' bones are close to the skin. The two white wolfhounds barked excitedly at the sight of the Baroness, standing on their hind legs and wagging their tails. They were as tall as a man. Ebrahim edged away.
She unlatched the cage and let herself in, letting the dogs greet her. They swabbed her face with their rough tongues, sobbing with delight. "Good boys," she told them, roughing up their fur.
"What happened to their collars?" she said.
The kennel master gave her a peculiar look. "The Emir sent a servant to take them away. He says he has a surprise for you."
Almost, the blood draining from her face gave her away. She forced it back into her skin by concentrating on one of the simpler Yoga dharana exercises. The bugs in the jewels of the dog collars weren't obvious, but they couldn't survive an interested search undetected. If the Emir discovered them, the game was over. She forced her mind into another Yoga channel, pranayama, and felt her breathing slow down. She was going to have to be fatalistic. If she was blown, she was blown.
What did the Emir mean by "surprise"?
"Very well," she said briskly. "Grain and broth for today. Feed them what you see fit after that. They'll need plenty of exercise every day. But don't let them run with the Emir's salukis. They tend to get carried away when they play. I don't want any injuries."
