Death is a Ruby Light

by Paul Kenyon

  "Catch," she said, and threw it at him. He plucked it out of the air. "Can you arrange a gun drop in Moscow, John? I'd rather not try to smuggle this through customs myself."

  He pocketed the weapon. "It'll be waiting for you." She drained the bloody mary. "Time for some breakfast?"

  "No, I'd better get to the airport. I don't want to be caught in the morning traffic with a corpse. Besides, Lindqvist will be waking up soon."

  She laughed. "I don't think it'll be any problem sidetracking him. He's going to be quite confused and flustered, poor man, when I ask him how he could possibly have spent the night in bed with me and not remember it."

  Farnsworth was suddenly brusque. "Let's get Antonelli downstairs."

  Together they lugged the Isfahan rug with its grisly contents down the marble staircase and into the trunk of Farnsworth's car. Inside the walls of the formal garden the early morning light was waking up all the invisible creatures. Somewhere a thrush began to sing.

  * * *

  Major Sung had a new toy. The toy's name was Nanoun, and he had the flat Mongol cheekbones and slitted eyes of a Buryat tribesman. He was suspended by his thumbs from an overhead beam, naked as a plucked chicken. There was a length of wire twisted around his testicles, and Major Sung was amusing himself by stringing small weights, like beads, on the end of the wire, a few taeh at a time.

  "Tell the truth, dog, or you will suffer for it," Major Sung said. "What were you doing alone in these mountains? You are a spy!"

  "No, no," the man said, his face a study in terror. "I lost my way. I was separated from my people. We were moving the herds."

  Sung selected a small weight, no more than three taeh. He held it up to the light and squinted at the tribesman through the square hole in the middle. "You are a spy for the Russians," he said deliberately. "All you Buryat are half Russian anyway."

  "I'm no Buryat," the man said. "I'm Nivkhi!" His Chinese was deplorable, barely understandable with the barbarous accent.

  "Nivkhi?" he said with heavy sarcasm. "You're a long way from home."

  "We have been moving our people since my grandfather's time. We have no love for the Russians!" Sweat dripped off his naked body, despite the chilly temperature of the small whitewashed room. Major Sung had the walls whitewashed once a week to cover up the blood.

  "Shuo huang che!" he hissed. "Liar!"

  He added the little brass weight to the weights that were already strung on the wire. Nanoun's scrotum looked elongated, like a water drop about to break loose from the tap. The man groaned.

  "Your kao wan will be hanging to your knees before the day is over, dog!" he said.

  "Please, honored one, let me go!" the man wailed. "I have done no harm."

  Sung smiled to himself. The Nivkhi, if that's what he was, was probably telling the truth. It didn't matter in the least. He'd get a confession out of his toy before he broke it. He had extracted more confessions than any other interrogator in the Social Affairs Department. Why they had sent him to this barren province to watch over a demented scientist who spent his time peering at the stars, he couldn't understand. There were no spies to be flushed out here in the Khingan Mountains. But if heaven sent him a few more fools like the sweating Mongol in front of him, the Department's leaders were bound to take favorable notice.

  He selected another weight, a big one this time, at least seven taels. That gobbet of flesh between the Nivkhi's legs was going to stretch to the breaking point. He showed the weight to the terrified man and was rewarded by a flood of babble.

  "Please, honored one! I will tell you the truth!"

  Sung kept the weight in his hand where the man could see it. "Well?" he said sharply.

  "I was not lost. I saw the great wang rise out of the top of the mountain, and I was curious. I only wanted to have a closer look!"

  Sung became interested. The tribesman had known enough to recognize the enormous rod as a telescope — a wang yuan ching, if you wanted to use the proper Chinese phrase. It would be instructive to see how much else this ignorant Nivkhi had figured out.

  "You are very fortunate, Nanoun," he said, the familiar excitement beginning to take hold of him. "You are going to receive my very best attentions, and I am an artist."

  He went to the cabinet on the wall and looked at his instruments, trying to decide. There were the little knives, and the long needles, and the screw presses shaped to fit specific portions of the anatomy. And there was the electric probe with the rheostat control. A pair of pliers. The steel whips. The blowtorch.

  He decided to start with the electric probe. It was long and slender and flexible as a willow wand. He had designed it himself. He attached the leads to the twelve-volt battery and dragged the whole apparatus over to Nanoun's dangling body. He looked at the man with a connoisseur's eye and decided to begin slowly. He wanted to make his toy last a long time.

  He applied the probe, a brief caressing touch. The tribesman screamed. His whole body writhed.

  The door opened. A soldier with a machine gun entered and inclined his head diffidently.

  "Professor Thing wishes to see you in the observatory, Comrade Sung," the soldier said.

  Sung cursed under his breath and put the probe down on his workbench. "Don't go away," he said to the hanging man. "I'll be back as soon as I can."

  4

  "Bugs," Sumo said. "I've got a suitcase full of them."

  "All right, Tommy," the Baroness said. "Let's take a look at them."

  They were gathered in the big, sunny salon that faced the rear gardens. Tom Sumo was sitting in one of the thronelike Renaissance chairs on the long east wall, under the row of Orsini ancestral portraits. Light from the tall glass doors spilled over the low marble table in front of him. He opened his briefcase and emptied a collection of tiny objects onto the table.

  "Good Lord, Tommy," Fiona drawled. With her abundant red hair and fine-drawn features, she looked like a Botticellian Venus in that setting. "Are those what I think they are?"

  Sumo grinned, showing a row of gold teeth and platinum braces that happened to be the components of a miniaturized transmitter-receiver he'd designed. "Right you are, Fi," he said happily. "They're false nipples. Go on, feel them."

  "I'll do that," Joe Skytop boomed, thrusting out an enormous hand that resembled nothing so much as a hunk of corned beef that somehow had sprouted five frankfurters. "I'm an expert tit man myself."

  Everything about Skytop was oversize. A full-blooded Cherokee with a bent hook of a nose and the broad, high cheeks of his forebears, he had enormous shoulders and a barrel-like torso that threatened to split the seams of the loud checkered sport coat he wore.

  "One of the pair is a microwave generator," Sumo said earnestly. "You stick it on a wall with the adhesive back, and it'll flood the adjoining room with microwaves. The other nipple reads the changes in wave configuration caused by voices in the room and broadcasts them back to you."

  Skytop thumbed one of the paps. It was a realistic pink, and gave under his thumb like rubber. "Feels okay," he leered. "A little hard."

  "I see four sets, Tommy," Inga said. She was a big-boned blonde with a baby face and a complexion like peaches and cream. Like Fiona, she was one of the Baroness' top models.

  "That's right. They're color matched for different skin tones. They fit over your breasts like pasties. Even if you're stripped naked for a search, they should be undetectable."

  "Those nice dark ones must be for me then," Yvette said with a flashing smile. She was a striking black girl, with skin as smooth and rich as milk chocolate. She'd been recruited by the Baroness after she'd almost single-handedly salvaged an ill-conceived CIA operation in Mozambique.

  The Baroness slipped a pair of the plastic nipples into the pocket of her jeans. "Good work, Tommy," she said. "What else have you got for me?"

  "Well — no buttons, this time. The Russian security people are starting to catch on to the fact that we can put microphones and FM transmitters inside them. So I've got a
pretty good supply disguised as five-kopeck pieces." He pushed a pile of coins across the table toward her.

  "They look genuine," the Baroness said.

  "They are. They're hollowed out. The electronic components match the weight of the missing metal, so they'll even operate a vending machine."

  Dan Wharton reached out and spun one of the coins. "Good idea, Tommy," he said. "If you trigger a metal detector, they'll search you and find coins in your pocket. They'll put 'em aside with your possessions, but nobody would think to look at the coins."

  Wharton was a muscular, weathered-looking man with close-cropped sandy hair. He'd been detached from the Green Berets to join the Baroness' team. He was a first-rate chemist and, despite his rugged looks, an authentic blueblood whose ancestors had been among the signers of the Mayflower Compact. He was an automatic-weapons specialist and almost as good at unarmed combat as Skytop.

  "Russians are very moralistic — very honest," Eric said. "After they search you, they'll give the coins back." Eric's pale Nordic good looks and sun-bleached hair had made him one of the Baroness' most popular male models. But he was tough as well as handsome — a vicious street fighter, and a linguist who could speak eight languages without a trace of an accent and make himself understood in a dozen more.

  Sitting next to him was a slim, elegant black man in a fawn-colored Cardin suit and narrow Italian shoes. This was Paul Jackson, the Baroness' other top male model. Paul was much in demand for beach- and evening-wear ads, where his darkly handsome looks and perfect poise made him an eye-catching clotheshorse. If there was anything about guerrilla warfare tactics or high explosives he didn't know, it wasn't worth knowing.

  "Glad I don't have to wear them there plastic tits," Paul said, "Now, a plastic swinger — that'd be something else."

  Skytop's chair creaked as he leaned toward Paul. "With those tight pants you wear, you better not try to hide anything there. They're so tight they not only show your sex — they show your religion!"

  Paul groaned. "It's bad enough being a member of one minority group, redskin."

  "Hush, children," the Baroness said. "Let's get on with it." She turned to Sumo. "What about the receiver-recorder to go with all these bugs?"

  Sumo produced a slender, flexible oblong case that had the approximate dimensions of a flattened cigar. "The special effects boys have it down to less than two ounces. It loads eight hours of tape at a time and picks up a transmission at a thousand feet. You can sew it into the lining of a sleeve, on the outside where they usually don't pat you down, or you can hide it internally as a tampon or suppository. It'll go on working all the same."

  "In other words," Skytop said, "shove it!"

  The Baroness gave Skytop an impatient glance, and he subsided. "What about offensive weapons, Tommy?"

  He handed her an assortment of what looked like leather belts. "I thought we'd forget about the plastic sandal straps that straighten out into knives when you heat them over a match. Sandals are conspicuous in Moscow at this time of year. These belts are made out of the same neo-methylmethacrylate co-polymer. When you heat them, the molecules remember that the belt is supposed to be a sword."

  "What else?"

  "It ought to be safe to take your cigarette holder through customs. Dan's crystallized a fresh supply of black widow venom needles to go with it."

  "What about the Spyders?"

  "They'll be waiting for us in Russia, along with the guns. Too chancy to try to smuggle them inside Russia." The Spyder was an ingenious pistol-winch that shot a threadlike plastic line made of an incredibly strong, long-chain polymer. With it you could climb the blank wall of a skyscraper, walk up the sheer face of a cliff or — with the powerful clutch in the butt — unreel yourself down a thousand-foot drop.

  The Baroness frowned. "I especially asked for something that would fog photographic film, Tommy. What have you got?"

  He looked unhappy. "X-rays will do it. But generating them from a source hidden in your body would be dangerous. Same goes for ultrasonic waves. The smallest unit I could give you would be the size of a pocket camera. And I gather that's not good enough."

  Wharton spoke up eagerly. "You can't do it electronically. But you can do it chemically. I've been working on it."

  "What have you got, Dan?"

  He handed her a small capsule. "There's a metallic mercury compound in there. Not enough to make you sick, unless you swallowed the whole thing. It's under pressure, and comes out as a fine vapor. I thought you could hide it in the hollow tooth, instead of the cyanide capsule."

  "How do you use it?"

  "Just break off a corner of the crown by biting down hard. Then blow."

  She thought it over. "I'd have to do without the cyanide. But if I get into a corner — there are other ways to kill yourself."

  The Baroness knew at least a dozen. She could render herself unconscious — or kill herself — while tied hand and foot. They'd taught her how during the hard, grueling year she'd put in at the CIA Special Forces School and the secret classrooms run by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  "Thank you, Dan." She smiled warmly at him.

  Wharton beamed. He lived on the scraps she threw him. He'd been in love with her for a long time. But he was too realistic and tough minded to think that anything could ever come of it. In the cruel trade Wharton plied, you picked your playmates from outside the group. You had to stay sharp, alert, merciless. Your life depended on it — and the lives of the rest of your team. You had to keep things uncomplicated.

  She turned again to Sumo. "Now, about the electronic countermeasures. You understand we're not going to try to de-bug our hotel rooms, or deactivate any body tags they plant on us. That would be the worst thing we could do. But we do want to locate any surveillance devices. And feed them the false input I mentioned."

  "No problem."

  Wharton cleared his throat. "Here's the other item you wanted."

  She took the little box from him and opened the lid. Inside was an assortment of little oval membranes, so tenuous that they were almost transparent.

  "Self-adhesive?"

  "If you moisten them."

  She tried one against the pad of her thumb. It fit perfectly. "A whole new identity. Is there a life story to go with it?"

  Wharton nodded. "A female CIA agent. The Russians know about her. They don't know she's dead."

  Inga looked worried. "Excuse me, Baroness, but shouldn't they be the fingerprints of somebody innocent? Or false fingerprints entirely."

  The Baroness closed the lid. "It won't matter unless they catch me. And if they do, I want to give them something worth digging into. Something that isn't me, I mean."

  She stood up, a graceful, athletic figure in skintight jeans and a loose pullover. The sunlight streaming through the glass doors highlighted her perfect features, gave a warm glow to her flawless complexion. She gave them a dazzling smile. She looked like a cosmetics ad. She didn't look at all like the deadly, efficient machine for killing that they all knew she was.

  "That's it for now, boys and girls," she said. "Pack your kits. Get a good night's sleep. We're leaving for Moscow in the morning."

  * * *

  There wasn't much left of the Nivkhi. He hung from the rafter, the tattered shreds of a man. The wall was spattered with blood, and there was a horrid collection of glistening giblets under the body.

  Major Sung yawned lazily, feeling warm and satiated. His fish-like mouth was slack. The Nivkhi had lasted a long time — more than two days. In the end he would have confessed to being Beria himself, if he'd still had a tongue left to confess with.

  "Clean up that mess," Sung said to the two security guards lounging with automatic weapons against the far wall. One of them, a peasant lad from Kwangtung, looked ill. "Feed it to the wolves."

  He rode the elevator to the main observatory chamber. As he stepped out, he could feel the floor shift underfoot. There was a deep rumble overhead that meant that Professor Thing was refining the coor
dinates of the giant telescope. Sung reached the top of the winding iron steps in time to see the slot in the great dome slide smoothly open, like a vast eyelid, letting in a blast of cold mountain air.

  Professor Thing was up in the nest of girders that supported the enormous reflector, a stick-man in red silk. He looked spindly, ungainly, like some magnified praying mantis.

  Major Sung shivered at the sight of him. Professor Thing's physical peculiarities were quite enough to make one feel uneasy in his presence, without his additional eccentricity of dressing himself in the traditional color of death.

  He clambered up the catwalk toward the observation platform. He was out of breath by the time he got there.

  Professor Thing was bending over a star chart. He straightened up to face Sung. He was at least seven feet tall, with cotton-white hair and eyebrows and a complexion as pale as rice paper. Only by his features could you tell he was Chinese.

  He turned his gaunt lantern face to Sung, the single bloodshot eye blinking painfully, even in this dim light. In the other socket he wore a polished ruby egg.

  "Well, Major," he said in that hollow voice of his, "you're just in time to watch. I'm about to pluck another star from the sky."

  5

  The borzois caused a sensation at Sheremetyevo Airport when the Baroness walked down the ramp of the Ilyushin aircraft, holding their chains in one hand.

  She strode across the tarmac toward the drab arrivals building, slim and elegant in her ermine-trimmed coat and boots, her cheeks touched with pink from the Moscow cold, the big, white wolfhounds bounced along beside her, their primitive narrow heads held high, their nostrils sniffing the new smells.

  A uniformed porter tried to take the leads from her. She walked past him, not turning her head, and left him to argue with Wharton and Skytop, who were just behind her. Heads turned as she pushed through the glass doors, and she heard someone say, "Volk!", the Russian word for "wolf," and then, "Russkaya sobaka," in an admiring tone.