Death is a Ruby Light

by Paul Kenyon

  "I'm leaving," the porky man said. He started for the door.

  Wharton reached out a big, raw hand and pushed the bureaucrat, hard. Innokentyi staggered back and fell across the desk.

  He picked himself up painfully. "You are mad," he whispered. But he sat down, looking frightened and subdued.

  Three or four times during the morning there were discreet knocks on the door. Innokentyi, under Wharton's bullying glare, shouted through the glass and got rid of them. It was fortunate, Wharton thought, that Russians, like Germans and unlike Americans, believed in keeping office doors closed while they worked.

  It was past lunchtime when Eric removed his earphones and said, "Okay, Dan, I've got what we're after. The situation's wide open. It's not what we thought it was. We've got to get word to Coin."

  "Okay. Let's get the hell out of here."

  Eric had hardly begun dismantling the laser peeper when the door burst open. A uniformed security guard, a sidearm in a buttoned holster at his waist, walked in.

  "Innokentyi Pavlovitch…" he began. He looked across and saw Eric, holding the earphones. "What is going on here?"

  Wharton hit him from behind with the .45. He caught the limp body before it could hit the floor, reaching across at the same time to close the door.

  "Who is he?" Eric said.

  Innokentyi looked miserable. "I tried to warn you. He has lunch with me sometimes. I think he suspects me. Now he will be sure."

  "Too bad. But all those dollars in a Swiss bank should keep you warm."

  The fat man was getting panicky. "Wait, you cannot leave me like this! You're responsible for this. You promised to keep me safe."

  Wharton and Eric exchanged glances. The simplest thing would be to kill Innokentyi. But it would cause a hubbub, possibly redoubled surveillance of foreigners in Moscow. Better to have him disappear and create a diversion.

  Besides, he was the CIA's responsibility.

  "Okay," Eric said at last. "Wait till we're gone. Ten minutes at least, do you understand? Then leave. Lock the door behind you. Don't go home, whatever you do. Kill time until you can make your regular contact." He grinned. "Tell him Coin sent you. You'll be out of the country in twenty-four hours."

  They packed the laser and left. The sentry downstairs remembered Eric. He'd spent the last three hours screwing up his courage. He scowled when they walked past him.

  * * *

  They stumbled together into the Baroness' suite, their arms laden with bottles of champagne and cognac. Vassily was drunk, but not so drunk that he didn't remember about bugs.

  He put a stubby finger to his lips and made an exaggerated gesture of silence. Setting down his bottles, he tiptoed over to the wall and looked behind the pictures.

  He looked pleased as a child when he found the black perforated disc behind the frame. It was the obvious bug — the one that was meant to be found.

  Smiling broadly, Vassily worked loose the wires attached to the two terminals. Then he turned to Fiona.

  "Is safe to talk now."

  Fiona made herself look astonished. The Baroness had told her about the bugs — including the one embedded in the plaster, and the two television eyes.

  "You mean somebody's been listening to me? Everything I've said and done since I arrived in Moscow?"

  She tossed her head, letting the long black wig swing for the benefit of the TV cameras.

  "No more, my dear Penelope. We can make luff now, and no one will hear us."

  Fiona flung the Baroness' ermine coat on a chair. She pretended to pout. "But Vassily, why do you Russians do such things? Eavesdropping on tourists like that?"

  "Is because of spies. Shpionam! Everywhere they are coming into Soviet Union making us believe they are with trade delegations!" He hiccupped.

  "Vassily darling! Surely you don't think I'm a spy?"

  "Not you, my dear Baroness," he said with ponderous kittenishness. "But some of your countrymen — they are very naughty."

  "Whatever do you mean?"

  He lurched over to the bed and sat down heavily, directly under the KGB's television eye. The poor bastard, Fiona thought.

  "You may not know this," he said, "but I am important official on Intercosmos Council of Soviet Academy of Sciences."

  She looked deliberately blank. "Inter what council?" she said. Privately she thought, That's right, sweetie. You were my assignment. Vassily Tversky, second assistant technical director for communications satellites.

  "Intercosmos Council. Is like your NASA."

  "You mean you're a space scientist?"

  He beamed. "Space administrator."

  "But what do you mean, Americans are naughty?"

  He put a finger alongside of his nose. "I cannot say much, you understand? But we think that your CIA is sabotaging our space satellites. Only last week, our most advanced Molniya communications satellite stopped working. Phhhht! Just like that! And there have been many other failures — too many for coincidence."

  "But how would the CIA do that way out in space?"

  "This is the point. If America was blowing up our sputniks with missiles or offensive satellites, we would know it by radar observation. So sabotage must be on ground. We have increased security at our space center in Baikonour. We are setting a trap for your naughty spy."

  Fiona's blood ran cold. She had found out two things. First, Russia was also suffering satellite losses and was just as puzzled about them as the U.S. was. Ergo, it wasn't the Russians who were knocking out American satellites. And second, the Baroness was walking into a trap and didn't know it.

  She knew that Sumo had heard every word Tversky had just said. He was bugging the room as well as the KGB. She'd have to trust him to get word to the Baroness, 1,500 miles away in Baikonour.

  Her job was to create a diversion.

  The KGB had heard Tversky give her vital information. He was in trouble — big trouble. But they couldn't be sure if she was a spy. She'd played the scene like an empty-headed innocent.

  If she were a spy, she'd be expected to get rid of Tversky and transmit the information as soon as possible. As long as she didn't, they'd be in no great hurry to take any kind of action. So she had to keep them watching her as long as possible.

  Her lips curved in a wicked smile. This was going to take all night.

  She joined Tversky on the bed. "Vassily, darling, all this talk about spies and space is so boring! I don't want to know such things anyway. Let's talk about something interesting."

  "For example?" he said slyly.

  "Us."

  She reached behind her back and unzipped her dress. She let it fall to her waist. She was wearing a black lace bra. Tversky reached out and grabbed with both hands, like a little boy after marshmallows.

  "Ah, so prekrahsnee!" he breathed. "So balshoi!"

  After a lot of fumbling, he got her bra unhooked. He buried his face in her breasts, rooting avidly from side to side. He found a nipple and began sucking loudly.

  Fiona reached between his legs and unzipped his fly. She fished around inside, through the opening in a pair of woolen long johns, and found his penis. It was half erect, a wobbly frankfurter. She pulled it through the opening and began to massage it.

  He squirmed with pleasure. "Oh, my dear Penelope! You are much spasobni! Would you do me a great favor? You are western woman, very sophisticated. You won't mind."

  "What's that, Vassily darling?"

  "Please to French me."

  She bent over and fastened her lips on his stiffening probe. The TV eye above the bed got an excellent view of the top of her black wig.

  In the security room in the basement, the KGB technician watched the scene jealously. The bitch, he thought. The whore. First the Evenki reindeer breeder, now the distinguished Vassily Tversky. Savagely he reminded himself that when he turned in his report, Tversky would be in trouble: probably kicked out of his job and sent to dig coal in Siberia.

  But he didn't have to turn in his report yet. There was plent
y of time till the end of the shift. He sat back to enjoy the goings-on in the monitor screen.

  The CIA operations man was furious. "Our best contact at COMECON! Blown, just like that! We spent four years bringing him along. We invested damn near two hundred thousand dollars in him. And then we have to smuggle him out of Russia!"

  "How did Coin find out about Innokentyi?" the deputy director said.

  The operations man looked embarrassed. "There must be a leak at Langley."

  "Innokentyi described some sort of a telescope they were pointing out the window — a telescope with earphones."

  "Right. Sounds like a laser windowpane tap. Must have been aimed at GRU headquarters." He looked bitter. "Just to gather low-level information for some routine NSA caper, they muscle in on one of our Russians and blow his covet. I think we ought to complain to the Intelligence Board."

  The deputy director made a tent of his fingers. "I don't believe we'll do that. We got something just as valuable out of this flap."

  "What do you mean?"

  "A description of Coin. According to Innokentyi, he's either a tall, good-looking blond man or a big roughlooking bozo with close-cropped sandy hair."

  "But we've had field reports indicating that Coin might be a woman."

  The deputy director looked complacent. "We know better now."

  * * *

  Sumo took off the earphones and put them down on the bed. His face was a study in despondency.

  "It's no use," he said. "The Baroness is off the air. She's missed three transmissions in a row."

  Wharton gave him a worried look. "Can't you raise her, Tommy?"

  "No. There's a feedback syndrome built into this setup. If I was getting through to her, I'd know it."

  Skytop swung a meaty fist into his palm. "You've got to get through to her! It's a whole new ball game now! She'll be walking into that place blind!"

  "What happened?" Paul said. His eyes were stark in his handsome ebony face. "Another one of our satellites out?"

  Sumo shook his head. "We're not using a satellite. Key thought it would be too uncertain. He arranged to have the Air Force sow a whole line of triggered transceivers along the Soviet border between Turkey and Afghanistan. Each about the size of an orange, and plenty of extras for redundancy. The link's completed between Moscow and Tbilisi by half a dozen agents working for NSA, and we've got two more links in Samarkand and Tashkent."

  Wharton said, "Then it looks like something's happened to her transceiver."

  "Or to the Baroness," Eric said glumly.

  "Let's get back to Fiona," Sumo said. "She's still pumping Tversky."

  He flicked a switch. The room was suddenly full of the sound of a man's huffing and puffing. Fiona's voice was giving little encouraging cooing noises.

  "She's pumping him, all right," Skytop said with an automatic leer. His expression sobered. "Look, Dan… Eric… according to what you heard with the laser tap, and what Fiona confirmed with Tversky, the Russians aren't zapping our satellites. They think we're doing it to them. Somebody's after both of us. Who?"

  "The Chinese. Who else?"

  "But the Russians are looking for an American in Baikonour. And they're hopping mad!"

  Tversky came. There was a long, drawn-out sigh from the loudspeaker, and a few contented baritone grunts.

  "That's it for Vassily," Skytop said. "He sounds like he's through for the night."

  "Fiona stalled him as long as she could," Paul said. "I bet she kept that KGB man glued to his set. If Moscow thinks Tversky's indiscretion is worth radioing to the security chief at Baikonour, at least he won't get it for another hour or two."

  Sumo looked at his watch. "Just about dawn in Baikonour now." He hit the useless transmitter with his fist. "And the Baroness is in the dark!"

  7

  Toward the east the sky was getting light. The Baroness flattened herself against the corrugated-iron wall of the service shed and listened for voices. She had to hurry. After the sun came up, she'd have no chance of getting to the Baikonour command building unobserved.

  She slid sidewise along the wall, a black shadow in her body stocking and mask. The Spyder was bolstered at her hip; it had lofted her over three walls so far. The rest of her kit was in the black silk pouch at her waist.

  She heard footsteps approaching, and froze. Two white-coveralled technicians came down the irregular alley, looking sleepy and disgruntled.

  "The Doktar has us up early this morning," one of them yawned.

  The other one laughed. "Let's hope the operation is successful."

  They walked by without seeing her. The Baroness waited until they were two distant white blobs, then ran, crouching, to the corner of the building.

  The Vrach command center was only thirty yards away, a squat concrete structure with slitted windows, its roof cluttered with spidery antennae.

  But it might as well have been thirty miles away. The concrete apron surrounding it was milling with people reporting for work. They were nakedly exposed in the light of the spots that bathed the shallow steps and the entrance.

  Still worse, there were four armored personnel carriers parked in front. At least fifty soldiers and security guards armed with automatic weapons were visible. More uniformed guards were checking the credentials of the huge sleepy crowd that was flowing inside.

  The Baroness spat a muffled curse under her mask. The security precautions were unusual. She'd already squeezed through a half-dozen security rings surrounding the space complex. Something big was going on!

  She thought back to what she'd heard the technician say: The Doktar has us up early. The bugged five-kopeck coins she'd scattered around the grounds as she progressed had given her additional clues, heard in random scraps whenever she could snatch a few moments to listen to her little short-range receiver. The Russians had designated this launch series "Vrach." Literally, it meant "doctor" or "surgeon."

  The Russians were going to perform something they thought of as surgery. It confirmed the long-distance view she'd had of the Vrach capsule, with its claws and grapples and the space scooter in its webs.

  They were going to cut another American satellite out of the sky.

  But even so, the security precautions here on the ground looked excessive. She frowned. She didn't like the look of it.

  A long shadow grew on the ground in front of her. It was her own. She checked the sky. It was visibly brighter. A few more minutes and dawn would break over the eastern horizon.

  Whatever she was going to do, it had to be immediately.

  She dropped a five-kopeck coin on the ground and scuffed some dirt over it: her last listening post.

  She squinted at the roof of the command building, trying to pick out detail against the muddy pre-dawn sky. Under the huge dish of a tracking radar, she found what she wanted. The steel supporting legs were sunk into wedgy concrete piers — massive and oversize for their function, the way Russians liked to build things. She ought to be able to get an explosive piton into the concrete without damaging anything sensitive and perhaps bringing a repair team up to have a look.

  She was just going to unholster the Spyder when something hard poked into her back.

  "Ne dyshyte!" a harsh voice said. Don't breathe.

  She could tell from his shadow which arm he had the submachine gun crooked in. The other hand was moving, toward his pocket, up toward his face. A whistle. He was going to blow a whistle.

  She laughed, a low chuckle, and turned her head slightly but not enough to alarm him.

  It worked. She saw the shadow of the gun droop a fraction of an inch as he was distracted by the motion and the inappropriateness of the laugh. That meant that the pressure of his hand on the grip safety of the gun was minutely relaxed. For a half-second, the gun wouldn't fire.

  She whirled, her hand stabbing like a spear, the first two fingers rigid, correcting her aim as she moved. The fingers went into his eyeball, pushed through the socket up to the knuckles. Her other hand slashed a
t his larynx, crushing it, cutting off his air before he could scream.

  She caught the beefy body before it could fall, one hand grabbing for the machine gun. She lowered them both quietly to the ground and wiped her fingers on his tunic.

  Now she had a problem. If she left the body where it was, it would be found, probably in minutes. That was all the time of semidarkness she had left.

  She drew the Spyder and thumbed a couple of feet of plastic line out of the spinneret compartment. It was gossamer fine, but the long-chain molecules gave it a tensile strength of over a thousand pounds. She knotted it in a quick timber-hitch around the dead man's upper torso, then unreeled another sixty feet of line. She snipped the end with the little snicker blade and attached it to her own belt.

  The water tank perched atop the service shed loomed over the edge. That was good; she only had to step a couple of feet away from the shelter of the wall. She aimed at a point near the top and fired. The piton bit into tin sheeting. She tested the line and walked up the wall. The powerful spring in the butt of the Spyder reeled the line in as she climbed, giving her a substantial assist.

  She scrambled to the top of the water tower and worked the piton loose. There was a little stainless-steel set of pulleys in her pouch, mounted in a frame no larger than a sardine can. The pulleys had a four-to-one ratio. She untied the plastic line at her belt and threaded the end through the sheaves. She fastened the pulley system to a ring-bolt in the tower and hauled the body up sixty feet to where she stood. It came up, creaking and swaying, the machine gun dangling from the wrist where she'd tied it. She caught it by the belt and tunic collar and heaved it onto the roof, well away from the edge.

  She checked the sky again. The stars were fading as it grew lighter. There was still enough darkness to cover her if she moved swiftly.

  From where she stood, she'd have to fire the Spyder at a shallow upward angle to the concrete pier across the way. She estimated distance and height and did a rough geometric calculation in her head. If she were swinging off the water tank with an ordinary line, her body would slam into the ground only some twenty feet from the base of the service shed. With a powerful leap, and the spring taking up the line, call it thirty-five feet. But the spring-and-clutch arrangement would do more than just take up the line; it would pull her along through the air, shortening her pendulum swing downward by quite a few yards.