by Paul Kenyon
She let herself down by a spider's thread and flattened herself next to a window. In the courtyard below, troops had drawn up in front of jeeps, submachine guns held at port. Le Sourd was strolling among them, giving instructions. It was a damned funny way to go prospecting.
There was another vehicle there, one of those enormous sand trucks with tires as tall as a man. There was a cannonlike device mounted on its flat top, with a cluster of horns at its muzzle instead of the rose-petal shape that she'd seen on the ultrasound gun he'd used to punch a hole in that sheet of steel. This one was going to spread the vibrations, not concentrate them.
She waited until they'd pulled out of the courtyard and roared out into the desert. Then she clambered down a drainpipe into the shrubbery fringing the palace façade.
There was plenty of cover all the way to the outer wall. The trees, drinking the precious desert water that had been so lavishly piped in. All those toybox outbuildings and peppermint-striped gazebos. The tiled crazy-puzzle walls that enclosed nothing. She got past them, and there was that final bare strip, thirty feet wide, to the solemn sandstone outer wall that had been built by the Emir's ancestors.
It was meant to keep people out, not in. The watch-towers faced outward. In the stretch ahead of her, there was only a lone sentry, lounging by the side of a miniature minaret.
She could kill him, but she couldn't get past him. Of course a dead sentry or even one that turned up missing would blow her whole mission.
There was only one thing she could do.
She arranged a sensuous smile on her face and stepped out into view. The sentry jerked his head in her direction immediately. She walked toward him, hips undulating, breasts writhing in the body stocking's Spandex cups.
He stared at her, jaw hanging open. She was an apparition, a female djinni out of the Arabian Nights, a woman the color of sand who was naked and yet not naked.
And then, in the last few steps, in the harsh sunlight, she was a woman, a shameful woman with a bare face and a garment that molded her skin. One of the Emir's imported Western entertainers. He opened his mouth to reprimand her, and then her soft arms were snaking around his neck and her cheek was pressing against his and her melonlike bizaz was digging into his chest, and the little man between his legs was stretching and waking up.
The Baroness held her breath. He smelled of rancid oil and garlic. Her thumbs found the carotid and she pressed. Hitting him would have been quicker, but she couldn't afford to leave a bruise.
He grunted, surprised at the sudden firm pressure. He put a hand on her wrist to tear her grip away and found that she was too strong for him. He dropped his gun with a cry and tried to pry her away with two hands, but by that time he'd gone weak. He faded into unconsciousness.
The Baroness lowered him to the ground. He'd be out for all of two or three minutes, waking up in time to spread the alarm about the Emir's sand-colored lady.
She found the little syringe in her kit and pumped two cubic centimeters of Puromycin into the carotid artery. The antibiotic had a peculiar effect when you flooded the brain with it. It interfered with the chemical activity of RNA, erasing the immediate memories before they had a chance to become permanent. Rats forgot how to run mazes. The sentry was going to forget everything that had happened in the last ten minutes. He'd assume that he'd fallen asleep at his post, and he'd be damned careful that no one ever found out.
She shinnied up the side of the little minaret and leaped to the top of the wall. Just before she went over, she caught a glimpse of the sentry stirring, rubbing his eyes.
She rolled over the top of the wall, a sand-colored blur, and dropped straight down into soft sand, taking the shock with her feet and collapsing immediately into a ball. She was bleeding from a gash in the thigh — the broken shard of an old bottle embedded in the top of the wall. Thank heaven the Emir hadn't bothered to maintain his forefathers' defenses against desert raiders; otherwise her entire body would have been slashed to ribbons! She sprayed antiseptic in the gash and arranged the lips of the wound carefully. From the little bottle in her kit she sprayed an instant-drying cellulose solution that sealed it and held the edges in place; it would be a little stiff and painful, but there'd be nothing but a thin red line there till it healed. Another spray bottle repaired the rip in the body stocking, almost invisibly.
Now she had to get across at least a hundred yards of sand and gravel till she was out of sight of the watch towers. If she couldn't be inconspicuous, she was going to have to be conspicuous.
She took a handkerchief out of the suede case. It was a nice white handkerchief, trimmed with Irish lace. Customs officials never gave it a second thought.
She peeled the lace from the edges and unfolded the handkerchief. It unfolded again. And again. And again. The layers of synthetic fabric were finer than cobwebs, but they were as strong as sailcloth and impregnated with chemicals that made them opaque.
She arranged the billowing cloth into a passable imitation of an Arab robe and headdress, with a couple of twists of black cord holding it in place. She stood up and walked with a man's strides across the sand.
There were other people wandering around outside the palace walls, petitioners for the Emir's daily majlis, tradesmen, curious Berbers on donkeys or camels. She kept her face hidden and gave everybody a wide berth.
Transportation. That was what she needed next.
She found it in a grove of date trees, a couple of hundred yards from the palace. An adolescent boy in a dirty dish-dasha was dozing against a palm bole, guarding a half-dozen tethered camels; his family had gone to the palace for the majlis.
He stirred as she approached. Arabs of the desert have a hair-trigger subconscious that protects them against nighttime theft of utensils or animals. She stopped at a distance of forty feet.
There was no wind. She took the black cigarette holder out of the suede case and replaced the needle of black widow venom with something else from the collection. She wasn't going to kill the boy. He'd be in enough trouble when his family came back and found a camel missing.
She pointed the holder like a long finger and squeezed. There was the sharp hiss of escaping CO2. The boy stirred again, but this time he wasn't going to wake up. There was a microscopic quantity of etorphine in his bloodstream. It was ten thousand times more powerful than morphine.
Gently, she took one of the camel ropes out of his hand, unwrapping the slack from his wrist. She debated leaving him some money to soften his family's wrath, but decided against it. It was entirely plausible for a thief to have come along and lifted a camel, but no one would have left money. It would cause talk.
She smiled wryly. The penalty for what she'd just done was the loss of her right hand.
Then she was on the camel, a balky, ill-tempered beast with a threadbare coat and trappings of greasy rope. She kicked him into motion, swaying atop the floppy hump, and headed straight out into the desert.
She picked up the tracks of Le Sourd's task force without any trouble and began following them. They headed in a southwesterly direction. She furrowed her brow trying to remember what lay that way. Just another flea-bitten Arab village, she recalled from the Ghazali map.
On the way she passed the evidence of Le Sourd's industry and the Emir's wealth. A little cluster of automatic pumping stations rose out of the sands, the steel arms bobbing up and down like chickens after corn. They fed into a half-buried pipeline that stretched ahead into the desert. Le Sourd's tracks seemed to be following the pipeline. Penelope tugged the camel's head around by the nose ring and changed course, proceeding more cautiously now.
The bodies were a couple of miles ahead, at the next pumping station. She reined in the camel and looked down at them from her high perch.
They were wearing olive-green guerrilla uniforms, with the trousers pulled down to allow them to be castrated. Their noses and ears had been cut off too. She assumed it had been done after they were dead, as an object lesson, because she could see a ragged sti
tching of machine gun wounds across the chests of two of them. They'd been crucified to the rocker arms of the pumps, two bodies to a pump for balance. The mutilated bodies rose and fell, rose and fell, the noseless faces staring grotesquely.
Who were they? Members of the Chinese-backed PFLOAG insurgents? Friends of Amar's from the royalist GFP? It didn't matter. They'd been caught trying to sabotage a pumping station. The evidence was nearby — a detonator, thoughtfully smashed by Le Sourd's men; wires spread over the sand. Le Sourd's task force had had a little morning workout.
She took a last look at the seesaw dance of the bodies and continued following Le Sourd's track.
Her instincts warned her a good half-mile in advance. There was nothing to tether the camel to, so she gave him a shot of etorphine. The beast sank to the sand, a big floppy mound. She hoped he wouldn't be too drowsy when she needed him.
She took off the white shroud and folded it up again. She wasn't a solitary Arab on the desert any more. She was part of the sand, the barely discernible outline of a woman drifting across the dunes.
A green pennant fluttered above a hillock just ahead, like a golf flag. The Ghazali emblem on a jeep antenna. She burrowed her way up the face of the next dune, the warm sand laving her. At the crest of the dune she raised her head cautiously.
They were drawn up in an open-ended square at the top of the hillock, about a thousand yards away, two soldiers to a jeep and a handful of white-coated medics. The huge sand truck was in the center of the square, towering above the jeeps. As she watched, the big chrome cannon lifted itself in the air and turned to point.
It was pointing toward a miserable collection of mud huts about a mile farther on. There were crumbling clay walls and the dusty gray-green of thatched roofs, and a couple of acres of scraggly date palms. She judged that, at most, there might have been a hundred people scratching a living out of the desert.
It was still inside Ghazali territory. They were the Emir's subjects. Why was Le Sourd waging war against them?
She dug into the little suede kit and took out a plastic disk, a piece from a game of checkers. She twisted and pulled and it was a short tube with a lens at either end.
She focused the folding telescope on the sand truck.
Le Sourd and a couple of technicians sprang into view. They were going through some kind of arming sequence, with Le Sourd reading from a checklist on a clipboard.
Le Sourd sat down at the console. There were a lot of buttons and a computer-type CRT display. She could see Le Sourd's delicate profile through the scope, a sylvan outline that reminded her of the Great God Pan. His curly chestnut hair moved in the wind. But there was no wind. She zoomed in on a tuft of hair and got the shock of her life. There was a little creature nesting in it. A wing fluttered. By God, it was a bat! A little brown bat! Le Sourd had taken a mascot along for security. She'd bet that he had a cage of the creatures in his quarters, the way other people kept canaries or goldfish.
Even from here she could feel it: that inexplicable uneasiness that accompanies ultrasound vibrations. It raised goosebumps on her flesh, set her teeth on edge. It must be worse down there. The soldiers were fidgeting uneasily. As she watched, one of them broke and ran. Another soldier tackled him and an officer walked over and. slapped the man who had panicked.
Now the intensity was building. Her flesh crawled. Her heart was beating faster. The eerie music building up in that long pipe couldn't be heard, but it was there. You could tell by the sense of nameless dread it inspired, by the raw edge of terror just out of ken.
A little gasp was torn from her throat, and there was a feeling as if someone were dragging a thousand fingernails across a thousand blackboards, and then it was over.
Across the dunes, the tension had gone out of the soldiers' bodies. They were slapping one another on the back, handling one another Arab-fashion, laughing. The motors coughed, and the column of jeeps was chugging across the loose sand toward the mud village.
She trained her scope on the buildings. Nothing had been disturbed, as far as she could see. Not a cloud of dust had been raised. Not a mud flake was out of place on those sun-baked walls.
She moved the scope down the walls and came upon the first body. It was a child. At least, as far as she could tell, it once had been a child from the size of it. It was grotesquely bloated, a beachball with inflated arms and legs sticking straight out. The skin looked as if it were ready to burst.
She moved the scope some more and found other bodies, all swollen and shiny. There was a donkey, too, looking like a horrible balloon with bladderlike ears.
She curled her lip. It was the ultimate weapon. It killed the people and left the real estate intact. Better than atom bombs. She imagined New York or Chicago or Washington after an ultrasound attack, lying lifeless and rich, waiting for an enemy column to roll in and cart away the goodies.
Le Sourd's convoy had entered the village now. The medics were taking tissue samples. The soldiers were conducting a house-to-house search.
As she watched, a couple of soldiers dragged a body out of a doorway by a rope attached to the ankles. They didn't want to touch it. She didn't blame them. The body was a guerrilla in a green uniform. It bounced on the doorstep and burst, spraying the soldiers with a pink froth. The jellylike contents of the corpse spilled out into the street.
Homogenized. Le Sourd had reached inside that skin with his long sensitive ultrasonic fingers and stirred up all that quivering cytoplasm and broken down the cell walls and left a reddish mesh sloshing around inside a bag in the rough semblance of a man.
The soldiers were bringing more guerrilla bodies out of doorways. An Arab photographer was taking pictures for the Emir. Le Sourd was listening gravely to the officer, nodding his head.
Now she knew the reason for the operation. The village had been harboring guerrillas. Probably unwillingly, but that didn't matter these days. It had been the base from which the guerrillas who had been surprised and slaughtered at the pipeline had been operating.
There was a whine overhead, and a gleaming F-4 Phantom jet streaked through the sky. It circled a couple of times, probably taking aerial photos, then headed back toward the coast and the Ghazali airport. Le Sourd was in charge of a formidable operation.
Time to go. She didn't want to press her luck. She inched backward down the slope until she was out of line-of-sight, then hurried back to where she'd left the camel.
There was a Ghazali soldier looking at it, an automatic rifle slung across his back. He was prodding the beast with his foot. He'd been left behind to patrol the area. Probably there were a few more of them around.
His back was toward her. She hurtled across the sand, a sandy streak with arms outstretched. He turned when she was only ten feet away. He opened his mouth and tried to unsling his gun, but she was already in midair, like an arrow, her body in the posture of a diver. The palms of her hands hit him in the chest, bowling him over. She'd done a back-flip at first contact, somersaulting over his head and landing on her feet behind him. The soldier was struggling to get up. He raised his head in time to receive a karate kick that knocked him senseless.
She killed him with his own knife, pushing the point between his ribs until the hilt guard stopped her.
She looked around. Nobody else was in sight, but she could hear the motors of Le Sourd's cavalcade starting up again. They'd be fanning out over the area now, looking for rebel stragglers.
She turned back to the body. Another problem. And after she'd been so careful. Fighting revulsion, she pulled the knife out of the body and butchered him the way he and his friends had butchered the rebels back at the pumping station. That's what a PFLOAG man would do if he'd caught one of the soldiers responsible. An object lesson to the Emir. She hoped Le Sourd would buy it.
The camel couldn't be roused. The great stinking beast lay on its side, breathing stertorously. She poked and kicked it to no avail. With a sigh, she searched in her kit for a stimulant. How much did a camel weigh? She
guessed at the proper dosage and injected it close to the heart. The camel gave a great shudder and struggled to its feet, its legs rubbery. She led it by the halter for a quarter-mile before mounting, and it took her weight, staggering. After a couple of miles of acting dopey, it started to recover. By the time she got within sight of the Emir's palace, it was loping along at a decent rate of speed.
She turned it loose near the date grove she'd stolen it from. Perhaps it would find its way home after all. She buried herself in the sand and settled down to wait. Up there, in her bed, her ultrasonic ghost was reading a book and eating candy. She'd wait until after dark to exorcise it. There was no way she was going to get back into the palace in broad daylight.
13
The naked man in the stainless-steel tub screamed. His body writhed upward as far as the restraining clamps would let him. All his muscles popped out in momentary relief. There was a thin red thread of blood in the water, which the circulating pump immediately began to remove.
"Amazing," the Emir said.
Le Sourd looked pleased with himself. "That was a junction in the sciatic nerve," he said. "There shouldn't have been any blood, but I got a little too close to the surface. Here, I'll adjust the focus."
He turned to the big color TV monitor hanging over the tub. It showed a magnified portion of the nerve trunk, like twisting vines. A green cross hairs was superimposed at the branch in the upper thigh. Le Sourd twisted dials, and the two tubular devices, rather like dentists' drills in their universal mountings, moved minutely. The cross hairs moved deeper into the thigh.
"Let's try again," Le Sourd said.
"Try all you like," the man in the tub said in a strained voice. "I won't tell you anything." He was a young, wiry-looking Arab with a cropped military-style haircut and big dark eyes that were too young for the predicament he was in. There was an interesting tattoo on his arm: a pair of hands breaking a chain that was wrapped around a green crescent.
