Hard-core Murder

by Paul Kenyon

  She assembled the three crescents of the bolas into a gold ring and slipped it onto her finger. She held it critically to the light. It was a fine piece of jewelry — exactly the kind that the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini would wear.

  "What about the trick pantyhose and hair spray?" Penelope said.

  "Packed in your flight bag. Are we taking the Learjet to New York?"

  "No, Mario removed the extra fuel tanks for overhaul. We don't have the range. We'll take a commercial flight."

  "I'll phone for reservations."

  "Before you do, bring me the footprints."

  Inga fetched the false soles and handed them over. They looked like limp fish skins. The deadly skewers were visible, against the light, as a thin dark spine.

  Penelope bent over and pasted one against the bottom of her foot. She smoothed it over. She lifted the foot, turning it toward the light. The sole was invisible. It looked like the perfectly ordinary bottom of a foot.

  She stood up experimentally and took a few steps. The sole, skewer and all, flexed comfortably. She was hardly aware that it was there.

  She bent to peel it off and caught sight of herself in the mirror. She saw a breathtaking beauty, long black hair falling across one side of her face, breasts leaning forward slightly from her posture. She straightened and put her hands under her breasts, lifting them. They ballooned outward in the shape of a pair of artillery shells, as firm as they'd been when she was a teen-ager. Satisfied, she let them drop. They resumed their high, rounded shape with hardly a quiver. She inspected the supple waist and the flat, hard belly, sending the powerful muscles rippling across it. Hands on hips, she did a couple of deep knee bends, loosening up the bunched calf muscles, then, palms on the floor, shot one leg out in a practice savate kick that would have broken the jaw of a tall man if he'd been unlucky enough to be standing there. Flexing the other leg, she sprang to her feet in a limber, flowing movement that showed no apparent effort. The beauty in the mirror stared back at her, looking unruffled.

  The Baroness nodded to herself. The deadly mechanism that was her body was ready for anything that lay ahead of it. The bolas in her hair and the poison skewer glued to her foot and the little gold-plated automatic were handy tools. But she could kill without them. Her weapons were the edges of her hands, the heel and side of a foot, a sharp elbow or knee, the powerful fingers and thumbs that could break a man's larynx or rupture his spleen.

  Once the body hadn't been deadly — only lovely. She remembered her upbringing as a very proper young lady named Penelope Worthington. A father who was one of Philadelphia's most respected investment bankers. A mother who was an undisputed leader of Main Line society. She remembered the dancing lessons, the archery lessons, the fencing lessons. Her own horse, a handsome gelding named Major who was the best jumper in Delaware County. Dinner parties and concerts and formal dances and finishing school.

  And then, her debut barely behind her, her marriage to a dashing adventurer named John Stanton Marlowe. The other Marlowes, sipping expensive scotch in the exclusive clubs of Philadelphia, Boston and Atlanta, didn't consider John a gentleman. Young John was too restless. He hadn't been satisfied to sit back and manage his considerable inheritance. He'd actually gone out and run some of the companies he controlled. The young scoundrel had had the bad taste to pile up a second fortune by the time he was thirty. Then he'd become public-spirited. He'd forfeited the rest of his gentility by going to work for those fellows in Washington.

  They tried John out in State, in the Agency for International Development. When they saw he was sound, they moved him to Defense. His job was very hush-hush. They called it Research and Engineering. After John died, Penelope figured out that he was one of the civilian watchdogs overseeing the National Security Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency.

  He died in the crash of his private jet — a $3,250,000 Grumman Gulfstream II that he'd kept after the Senate confirmed his government appointment. He was flying it himself with an Air Force colonel as co-pilot. There was some speculation in the press as to what kind of errand Marlowe had been on, but the Defense Department maintained a discreet silence.

  Marlowe's beautiful young widow needed something to do with her life. She became a model. It started as a lark — a favor for a magazine publisher she'd once entertained as a Washington hostess. But her cool, flawless beauty caught Madison Avenue's attention. The calls from art directors and television producers kept coming in. Before long, she had to acquire an agent to screen them.

  By that time she was the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. Her second husband, Reynaldo, was a member of the Italian nobility and, through the English branch of his family, belonged to the peerage. Reynaldo was a daredevil. Life with him was an exciting round of skiing, sky diving, skin diving, mountain climbing. In the end, it was one of his dangerous sports that killed him. Racing his cherished Ferrari in the Monaco Grand Prix, he blew a tire and crashed in flame against the seawall.

  His death left her rich, young, beautiful and bored. She was heiress to two enormous fortunes: the Marlowe and Orsini inheritances. There was the Worthington money, and the six-figure income she was getting as a model and actress. But spending money wasn't enough of an occupation.

  She still had influence in Washington. They remembered John Marlowe. And she'd taken two or three very important men as lovers in the wasted year after his death.

  She'd also been doing an occasional favor for the CIA. They were delighted to be able to call on a wealthy American citizen who knew everybody worth knowing in a dozen countries, and who crossed borders frequently without arousing suspicion.

  She put her case to one of John's old friends. He was discreet. He had the ear of the President. In the end a secret Presidential directive was issued. The entities code-named Key and Coin were created. The President disqualified himself from knowing who they were. "You can't carry security too far," he'd laughed as he signed the directive.

  Key was an amazing man named John Farnsworth. He was a former OSS man who'd helped Truman set up the CIA in 1947. During the early Eisenhower years, he'd helped nurse the National Security Agency into being. In 1961 McNamara had called on his services in creating the Defense Intelligence Agency. Farnsworth was officially retired. He'd taken on his new challenge with zest.

  It took him the better part of a year. In that time he set up International Models, Inc., as a healthy, functioning company. It made money. Its books could stand anybody's inspection. The owner of record, and the company's chief asset, was the Baroness Penelope St. John-Orsini. Officially, Farnsworth was her business manager.

  During that year, Penelope went to school. She went through the deadly courses the CIA gives at the place in rural Virginia known as The Farm. She attended the still deadlier courses taught by the NSA at its own enclave in Maryland. She got more special instruction at the spy schools run at various military bases in the U.S. and abroad. They taught her how to use plastic explosive, automatic weapons, radio equipment, bugging devices. They schooled her in the art of hand-to-hand combat, with or without weapons. She knew more than thirty ways to kill a man, instantly, with her bare hands. With a loop of wire, a rolled-up magazine, or some innocuous object like a pencil or a kerchief, she could kill even more swiftly and surely.

  None of her instructors knew who she was. They thought she was one of the visiting foreigners that friendly governments are sometimes allowed to send through the special classes, or a courtesy student from another agency. There was no file on her. Coin was born.

  Coin got the tough jobs, the nasty jobs, the jobs that were too sensitive for the CIA or the DIA or the NSA. The Presidential directive that created Coin explicitly forbade NSA — which in theory employed Coin — from knowing its superagent's identity. They funded Coin's operations through a hidden budget of $1,250,000 annually, were ordered to cooperate with Key's requests for equipment, information and support. But including Farnsworth and the eight members of her team, there were only twelve peopl
e in the world who knew who Coin was.

  The President wasn't one of them. Neither was the director of NSA.

  The secret agent called Coin smiled at herself in the dressing table mirror and picked up one of her deadly weapons.

  It was a bra. A beige spandex bra with delicate lace panels, size 36C.

  It made an efficient garrote. You could strangle a man with it, or break his neck. You could use it as a sling and smash a man's skull with a hurled stone. Or you could weight the cups, fold it over and turn it into a sap.

  There were a dozen ways to kill a man with a bra.

  The Baroness had used them all.

  She lowered her breasts into the cups and fastened the bra behind her back. Inga came back into the room, a slip of paper in her hand.

  "We're booked on TWA. First class. Flight boards in an hour. We'll have to leave almost immediately."

  The Baroness zipped up her dress. "I'm ready," she said.

  Chapter 4

  The buggy was going seventy when it hit the bed of the dry lake. It sent up a spray of fine white powder that caked the two young people in the exposed Baja seats, filling their nostrils and mouths with salty particles.

  "Man, we're flying!" the boy said.

  He turned to grin at the girl beside him. She was a funky blonde with a sunburned nose and big flaky blue eyes. She was dressed exactly the way he was: flare jeans and sandals and a sleeveless yellow jersey with daisy decals sewn all over it.

  She looked back over her shoulder. Her long blonde hair whipped along her cheek. "Hey, Kenny, cool it! We're losing the others!"

  The two dune buggies that were following them hadn't made the plunge into the salt bed. They continued at right angles across the scrub and sand of the desert, sending up smoky columns of dust, getting smaller with distance.

  "Who cares?" he shouted above the unmuffled roar of the VW engine. "It's groovy out here!"

  "But we'll miss the race!"

  "Aahh, the race is a bummer since those Establishment types from the off-road association took over."

  He shifted down as the skeleton-frame vehicle hit the opposite bank. The big balloon tires bit into the crystallized brine. The dune buggy bounced over the top, its canvas awning flapping, and headed into the barren desert flats.

  After a half-hour of riding, the girl said: "I'm scared, Kenny. We only have that one can of water. If anything happens to the motor we could die out here."

  "Relax, babe." He slowed the buggy down and passed her a joint. "Take a puff."

  They passed the stick back and forth as they sped through the hellish landscape. The sun climbed higher, a naked orange ball that sucked the moisture from their bodies. A long plume of rising dust followed them through the blistered sands.

  "Doesn't it blow your mind?" Kenny said. "It's like driving across the moon."

  The girl shook their canteen. It was almost empty now. "You better turn back, Kenny."

  "In a little while, doll. I heard there's an old ghost town somewhere in this direction. I want to get a look at it first."

  He braked to a sudden stop. They pitched forward in their seats. The girl grabbed the roll bar for support.

  "What's the matter?"

  "Barbed wire."

  It stretched across the desert in front of them, disappearing into infinity at either side. Kenny got out to inspect it.

  "Kenny, isn't this the restricted site? Where the government was doing research on some kind of nuclear rocket?"

  "Naah, that's west of here. And the military reservation is further north."

  "Well, it's something."

  "Bring me the tool kit, babe."

  She climbed out of the buggy and handed it to him. "What are you going to do?"

  "Take a look." He snipped the fence with a pair of wire cutters, then jumped. "Son of a bitch is electrified."

  "Kenny, let's get out of here."

  "Cool it. We'll leave pretty soon. I'm just going in a little way."

  "Kenny, I'm scared."

  He looked at her. "Hey, you really are, aren't you. Look, we'll go back to the race. We can still make the last half, even enter a few events. When we get back to L.A., we'll hit the Strip with the gang. Only let's just have a look past that rise."

  "All right. If you say so."

  He turned back toward the buggy. His sandaled foot hit something. He looked down. It was a bleached white skull, paper thin from exposure.

  "Kenny!"

  "It's just some kind of animal skull."

  They got back into the buggy. He took them through the gap in the wire, creeping along in first.

  They saw it as soon as they topped the rise.

  It rose out of the tumbledown collection of wooden shacks that surrounded it like a dropped skirt. It was a fantasy of classical architecture — tall fluted columns supporting the fragments of marble pediments, massive stone arches, a huge round stadium with ragged banners flying from the top.

  "Crazy!" Kenny breathed.

  "It's… it's sort of like ancient Rome," she said.

  "That's really weird! All that Quo Vadis stuff in the middle of a bunch of western saloons and livery stables! Some cat must of really been wigged out!"

  "Kenny, that's the Colosseum!"

  They sat side by side, staring open-mouthed at the scene below. It was incredibly unreal. The sun beat down from a clear and innocent blue sky, baking the ancient ruins gold. A lone buzzard circled overhead. There was a bleak expanse of rippling sand dunes, dotted with scraggly mesquite and cactus. Beyond were the tumbled slabs of a mountain range. And between them, a vision of the distant past.

  He heard it before she did. His expert ears recognized it as the sound of a turbocharged VW engine like his own.

  "We've got company," he said.

  There were two of them, bright toys speeding across the desert from the direction of the hole he'd made in the barbed wire. He squinted against the sunlight. They were stripped Volkswagen frames with low, fiberglass Sand Hopper bodies and blue-and-white striped canvas tops. From the engine sounds, somebody had fine-tuned them. They were really zipping along!

  "Some of the gang must have followed us after all," the girl said. She frowned. "But I don't recognize the buggies."

  "Let's give them a race!" he said cheerfully. He put the buggy back into gear. They rolled across the fiery sands, picking up speed.

  "They're gaining on us, Kenny!"

  His foot was all the way to the floor. The supercharged engine was putting out for all it was worth. Sharp particles of sand and salt bit into their exposed faces.

  Still, the two blue-and-white dune buggies continued to close the gap. Kenny fiddled with the choke and coaxed another burst of speed out of his vehicle. The three buggies shot along the desert floor in an elongated triangle that kept getting shorter.

  "Kenny!" the girl shouted. "That's not anybody we know!"

  He swiveled his head to look. The sight was another mind-blower. There were two men in each of the buggies, sitting as rigidly as department store dummies. These were no kids, dressed in casual jeans or wind-breakers. They were grimly wooden men, in double-breasted pinstriped suits and light-colored fedoras, their faces half-concealed behind dark glasses. Somehow, the fedoras stayed on, though their wide brims flapped in the breeze.

  One of the men raised a megaphone to his face. "Stop!" he boomed.

  Kenny kept his foot down. The buggy jolted over a washboard series of ripples in the sand. The two strange buggies drew closer.

  "Stop," came the command again.

  "Kenny, maybe you better do what they say."

  "Not a chance. Those guys look like something out of The Godfather."

  One of the blue-and-white buggies drew alongside Kenny and kept pace with him. The two men, sitting like statues in their natty suits, turned their faces toward him. Their expressions were blank and impersonal.

  "Kenny!" the girl screamed.

  The man on the passenger side picked a shotgun from the floor. He
put the stock to his shoulder, unhurriedly, and aimed it at Kenny's face.

  Frantically, Kenny tried evasive action. He swerved the buggy sharply to the right, lurching crazily. The other buggy matched his maneuver exactly. The two men remained sitting bolt upright, rigid as posts. The hats stayed on their heads.

  The other buggy was right behind them. Another shotgun swung upward and aimed itself at the girl.

  Kenny had just time enough to see the man in the pinstriped suit smile. A broad leer crossed the froglike face.

  Then two shotguns went off simultaneously, with an end-of-the-world roar. Kenny's whole head disappeared. The girl's head vanished too. There was nothing but two ragged, bloody stems rising above the headless bodies. The torso that had belonged to Kenny continued to grip the wheel for several seconds. The dune buggy jounced along, holding to a straight course. Then the torso jerked in a reflex spasm of death. The dune buggy careened wildly and turned over. It flung the two bodies out like headless dolls and rolled over twice. It came to a stop, wheels still spinning.

  The two blue-and-white dune buggies parked beside the bodies. The four men sat in silence for a few moments, contemplating the wreckage. After a while, one of them got out with a shovel. He began digging a hole.

  The driver of the other buggy spoke. "Angelo, you stay here and help Joey bury the bodies. I'll go back and tell Sully."

  * * *

  The barber was sweating as he applied the lather. He dabbed it carefully around the big man's ears. He stropped his razor far longer than necessary. Finally it couldn't be put off any longer. His hand trembling, he placed the sharp blade under the sideburn.

  "You'll be careful not to nick me, Vito?" the big man said pleasantly.

  "Yes sir, Mister Head. I'll be very careful."

  "Fine, Vito, fine. My last barber wasn't so careful. He gave me a cut on the cheek yesterday. That was Vincent. You remember him?"

  "Yes sir, I remember Vincent."

  "I told Vincent that if he liked the sight of blood so much, I could arrange it for him."

  "I wouldn't cut you, Mister Head." Vito took a deep breath and squared off the sideburn. It was a nice clean stroke. He relaxed.