SAMPLE THE STORY BY READING CHAPTER ONE

I stood there in my bikini mini-panties with my bare cheeks hanging out and listened to David Anderjanian rant and rave about—of all things!—a ghost spy! I paid him no mind, just kept glancing at my reflected midriff in the mirror and wondered if I was gaining weight.

“David, do you think I’m putting on pounds?”

“Eve Drum!” he bellowed. “You listen to me!”

I lost pounds right there, with that bull voice exploding in my ears. I am a girl-girl spy for the League of Underground Spies and Terrorists, often called L.U.S.T. I jumped and squeaked and got honestly scared.

David usually resorts to biting sarcasm or a wallop on the behind to highlight a point. I have rarely known him to scream. Then it dawned on poor little me. David Anderjanian was scared himself. Badly.

He is a giant of a man, six feet four, and maybe bigger because he weighs in the neighborhood of two hundred and twenty pounds. Right now he was white as a sheet and his eyeballs were kind of popping. He ran his tongue around his lips and his breathing slowed a little.

“Will you please pay attention to me?” he begged. “This is a damn serious matter, Eve. Everybody in the Pentagon and the White House is damned near out of their skulls about what’s going on.”

“So okay, I’m listening.”

He went and stood at the window of my posh apartment on Park Avenue in New York City, right between the blue drapes so that his golden-haired head was almost touching the matching valance. He began hammering his big right fist into the palm of his left hand. The room shook slightly at each blow, or almost.

“The opposition has a spy who can’t be seen.”

“Oh, David—please!”

“I mean it literally. He gets in and out of places no flesh and blood person could go. Through locked doors. No guard can see him. The only sensible explanation is, he has to be a ghost.”

He was in one of his moods so I knew damn well I’d better sit down and listen like a good girl. He was using me as a sounding board, I figured, so what harm was there in behaving myself? I sat on the edge of my blue satin bed-cover and crossed my bare legs.

David muttered, “I didn’t believe it either, at first. A ghost spy! My common sense reared up and told me the Russians had a man who was so clever at thievery that he only seemed to be invisible.

“Then I learned better.

“Our first hint as to the existence of this character came from Great Britain. They’d had some hush-hush plans locked up in a building where more than fifty men were on guard. Ghost-man went into the locked room and read those plans. Or at least—somebody did. Because the M-16 boys got word from a member of theirs in the Kremlin five days later, that the Russians had those secret plans!

“When we had some of those security papers to study about that new airplane—the one that uses what passes for a magnetic motor—we put a hundred men in front of the door and along the corridor where it was being kept. I was one of them. Eve, nobody could have entered without our seeing him. Nobody! But the opposition knew about the magnetic motor; one of their diplomatic members let it slip in a sneering remark he made to one of our Air Force biggies.

“I tell you, I’m lost. And scared.

“If they have a ghost helping them, we might as well—I was going to say, give up the ghost—well, we might as well quit.”

With my unerring female logic I went right to the heart of the matter. “You mean I’d be out of a job?”

“Right along with me, sweetie.”

Yeah, hey. What sense did it make to maintain a flesh and blood spy ring to learn enemy secrets, when all the enemy had to do was unleash a ghost against us? I tried to be properly shaken, but all I could think about was how ridiculous this was.

“There’s an explanation,” I said. “There must be.”

“Good. I was hoping you’d say that. What is it?”

“How should I know?” I yelped. “I’m a spy, not a seer.”

“You may be right about the seer,” he muttered gloomily.

“How’s that again?”

“A seer, an expert in extra-sensory perception.”

“Not that too,” I groaned. “You’re really out there spearing clouds, David. Now just settle back and relax. It can’t be all that bad. Somebody will think of an explanation and do something about it.”

David smiled coldly. “Yeah. And it’s your job.”

I sat bolt upright, mentally cursing my stupidity. I should have known! Every time there’s an icky job around L.U.S.T. headquarters, they think only of one name. Eve Drum. Mine.

“Now wait just one darned minute,” I screeched.

“Sorry, Eve. The General himself tabbed you.”

The General was the boss-man of L.U.S.T.. He has a one-track mind. You’d think I was the only agent drawing those scrumptious paychecks. However, I have learned from experience it does no good to protest, so I heaved a big sigh and batted my eyelashes.

“What do I do?”

David grinned. I could see there was a big load off his mind. “You go to dinner with me—and the Rorwicks.”

“So I’ll ask the silly question. Who are the Rorwicks?”

“Experts in ESP. They’re very well known, actually.”

“Never heard of them.”

My case officer glared down his nose at me. He does it very well, it is his bag. I dimpled a smile and eased back with my arms behind me on the bed. I did a little shimmy so that my out-thrust breasts played follow the leader. David melted, as he always does. Sometimes I think he has a thing for mammaries.

“Come on, Eve,” he cajoled. “Be rational.”

“I’m afraid to,” I told him quite honestly, “because I know where my rational thinking always takes me. Right behind the eight ball.”

I stood up and walked across the room. All I had on, outside the cutest pair of feathery mules you ever saw, was the bikini mini-panties. They are about as minimum as minimum can get. They resemble the Riviera bikini in this sense; there is a tiny black cache-sexe partly covering my golden fleece and the rest is narrow spaghetti straps that do nothing to hide my dimpled buttocks.

David growled softly, “Put some clothes on or I won’t be responsible, damn it. And we have a dinner date.”

My shrug went up and down my body, shaking the softer parts. I paused before a long door-mirror to assess my girlishness. I liked what I saw as I turned this way and that, and so did David. He stepped up behind me so I could have the full effect of his manhood and put his arms around me.

His big hands closed on my breasts, almost hiding them. He let my dark nipples peep between the first and second fingers of each hand, and he used them to give my jutting breast-tips a little squeeze.

“Dinner, David,” I reminded him.

“Eve, we have a little time,” he groaned.

“Uh-uh. Be late for the eats, and that will never do.”

He gave me a shove and a brisk rub where he knew I would feel his ready randiness and then he stepped back, breathing like a horse. Just to show I wasn’t angry I turned around and threw my arms about his neck. I kissed him with open mouth and added a bump and a grind where my mons veneris was shoved against his straining flesh.

“I’ll only be seconds, honey,” I whispered.

It took longer, but not much, to slip my sun-kissed curves into a low-cut black evening dress with a micro-skirt that showed off my gams up above the middle of my curvy thighs. I slipped my feet into a pair of pumps.

David rolled his eyes when he saw me. “Honestly, Eve—don’t you have anything more—er—restrained? You’ll attract every eye in the joint.”

“This is bad?”

“We’re going to meet the Rorwicks! They’re happily married folks. I don’t want his eyeballs falling out while he’s trying to explain about astral projection.”

I giggled. “He’ll be more interested in another kind of projection, I’ll bet.” Really, I just couldn’t help it.

David was having none of my insipid funnies. He snatched up my autumn haze mink—we L.U.S.T. agents get to live pretty well in between cases—and threw it about my shoulders. Then he hustled me out of my apartment door, down the carpeted hall and into the elevator.

We got to The Perch on time.

The Perch is the latest thing in New York private clubs. It is swank, posh and with it! Glass doors tinted blue, a uniformed doorman, thick carpeting and soft lighting inside where the chink of glassware and table china is muted and rich-sounding to the ears. An orchestra played all kinds of music, out of sight.

In sight, and depending on what type of music is being played, nude girls dance in golden cages above our heads. Since this is a private club, to which only wealthy people can belong, the police are very lenient about what goes on behind its glass doors. Right now the orchestra was giving out with Ravel’s Bolero, and the four unclad lovelies in the cages were doing a rhythmic hula. David stumbled twice, following me between the tables, so that I had to tell him to watch where he was going, not where he’d like to be.

A table had been set for four in an alcove hidden by a maroon brocade hanging. David helped me into my chair, then seated himself so he could watch the nearest of the bare-skin beauties without straining his neck muscles.

“What’ll it be?” he asked, eyeing a joggling behind.

“Sazerac,” I told him, wanting to kick his ankle.

“Two,” he told the waitress, worth looking at in micro-skirt and see-through blouse. She glanced at me and smiled. I tried to smile back.

David Anderjanian and I are unofficial sweethearts. We have never discussed getting married but it has always been somewhere in the backs of our heads. It must have been far back in David’s head, judging by the way he was eyeballing the dancing nude. I drew back my foot to let him have one in the ankle.

“Well, hi!” said a rich male voice.

A man in a charcoal gray suit right out of a Brooks Brothers display window leaned over to shake hands with David. His face was craggily handsome; there was a thatch of curly black hair on his shapely skull and a big smile on his full, sensuous mouth. He was almost as big as David, but leaner, without so much bulk. He turned and let his eyes touch all my points of interest.

David introduced us. Martin Rorwick told me with his big black eyes that I was something else again. I preened at his stare. Then a head was poked into view from somewhere behind him.

Marion Rorwick was a dish, herself. Long brunette hair was gathered in a bun on top of a sultry face with bold red lips and mascaraed brown eyes. Bare shoulders went all the way around and down to the upper swells of quivery breasts inside a scanty shift gown covered with sequins. She glittered every time she so much as flicked a fingernail.

She snuggled up to me on one side, her husband on the other. I made a cute little sandwich filling in between. David beamed on all of us, and then gave his complete attention to Marion.

We chatted about nonsense and trivia over our Sazeracs.

With the soup, David got down to business. Between sips of the potage puree de pois casses, I listened to a dissertation on extra-sensory perception and how the Rorwicks were the finest examples of ESP expertise that L.U.S.T. was able to find. You gather from this that I was the target of his talk.

A hand patted my left thigh as Martin Rorwick leaned closer. “Don’t you fret, love. Marion and I will fill you in on the details.”

A red fingernail scratched my right thigh. “Indeed we shall, pet,” smiled Marion. “We’ll make it all as easy as falling off the log they’re always talking about.”

I finished the split pea soup.

“You’ve got to be kidding,” I said. “Nobody but nobody can do what you three seem to think that Russian did. Or whoever he was. Maybe he was disguised as one of the guards.”

“He’d never have had a key, and the door to the airplane plans was locked,” said David. “Besides, I was there myself. Only a ghost could have gone into that room.”

“Or an etheric body,” murmured Marion.

“How’s that again?” I chirped.

Marion smiled at me. Her eyes were bright, highlighted by the bluing of her eyelids. Silver dust was sprinkled on her long lashes so that I swam in a barrage of glamour for a moment while her stare lingered on me.

“Everyone has an etheric body,” she told me. “Quite recently the medical fraternity has discovered it. You may have noticed write-ups in the paper about a body halo that can give doctors information about the well-being of the merely flesh and blood body. Their body halo is nothing less than the etheric body of a person which we in ESP have known about for ages.”

I nodded to make believe I understood.

Her husband put his hand over mine, giving me a gentle squeeze. “You can call it a soul, or a ka as the Egyptians did, but it amounts to the same thing. This spirit form of your identity, the thing that exists after death as sheer energy, is linked to your flesh and blood body by a thin cord of luminous matter.

“Now it is possible, while you’re still alive, to remove this etheric body from your flesh and blood body, to set it free so it can travel like a thought here and there around the world.

“Many books have been written about such astral traveling. Oliver Fox wrote the best known one, although Sylvan Muldoon and a man named Tyrrell also wrote on the subject. The term out of the body experiences is also used, instead of astral projection. I admit that very few of us come face to face with such a thing during our lifetimes, but that’s no reason to deny it exists.

“The Russians are smarter than we are where such things are concerned. They have a regular school for ESP research under the guidance of a Professor Vasiliev. Read Pratt’s book, Parapsychology if you don’t believe it.”

I believed it, remembering other instances where I had come in contact with these Muscovites. I folded my hands and felt numb. I was going to do some astral traveling, my good common sense told me.

“You mean there really is such a thing,” I marveled.

“Learn the secret of it,” Marion murmured, “and you can go anywhere you will on this Earth, almost instantly.”

“Oh, come on now!” I burst out.

Martin breathed, “we’ll show you the way to do it this very night, if you care to try.”

“Yeah!” snapped my pal, David.

I opened my mouth to protest, but it was Marion who did the talking. “There really isn’t anything to it, darling. You merely concentrate a little in the proper atmosphere, and—poof—away you go.”

Martin cleared his throat. “It isn’t all that simple,” he murmured. “But on the whole I’d say Marion gave you the right information.”

In something of a daze, I watched a hand take away my empty soup plate and replace it with a platter containing my duckling. I told myself these three were dipping their daisies in pot or worse. They had to be goofed-off. In this day and age, nobody believed in living ghosts.

I ate, arguing with myself. All right, assume the Russians had come up with a way to contact the dead. Some super perfect medium who could talk to ghouls and goblins. They had found one Russian ghost willing to come back from the Elysian Fields to do spy work for the Kremlin. The ghost-spy was alive and well in Uncle Sam land, stealing all our military secrets.

Okay. Given all that—

There was no way for me to go tramping bodiless after him. I liked my body. I wasn’t about to go off and leave it; not even for L.U.S.T. and David Anderjanian. Assuming that Martin and Marion had told the truth about this astral projection bit.

I finished most of my duckling.

I said, “I don’t believe a word of it. You’re putting me on, the lot of you, but I can’t figure out just why.”

Marion murmured, “Darling, we’re not!”

David growled, “If you think this is just a lot of foolishness, you don’t know me very well.”

I sighed. He was right about that, it was the one thing that worried me. David Anderjanian was no prankster. He took a dim view of life, even at best. It was not in his make-up to be party to a practical joke, no matter how elaborate.

“Let me explain,” said Martin Rorwick quietly.

“Astral projection is not a new concept, by any means,” he went on. “There are records of such flights of etheric bodies as far back as the thirteenth century. I’m taling about authenticated cases. Why, Saint Anthony of Padua, in 1226, appeared at the same time before his congregation and in a monastery at the other end of the city. Hundreds of men and women saw him in both places.

“In 1779, a man named Liguori was in prison at Arezzo—yet attended the death of Pope Clement. He was seen in prison and at the deathbed, at the same time.

“There are many other instances. I won’t bore you with them, but I could talk for hours about them. Let me tell you about the experiments of a Doctor MacDougall in Massachusetts, who weighed his dying patients as an experiment. In every instance, at the moment of death, the body lost a little more than two ounces. This is the general weight of the etheric body, or the soul.”

“You said it, I didn’t,” I muttered.

He smiled faintly. “An unbeliever. Good. It will be all the more enjoyable to prove that what I say is true.”

I glanced at David who looked very grim. It was his look that did more than anything to make me shiver in my shoes. These Rorwicks meant every word they said. They had a way to free their personalities from the prisons of their bodies and send them roaming all around the world. Or so they claimed.

I swallowed hard, not quite ready to surrender.

“All right, tell me more,” I urged.

“Pictures have been taken of these etheric bodies, that are also known as etheric doubles,” Marion said. “It is true there have been many frauds. Bisulfate of quinine, which cannot be seen by the naked eye, shows up on photographic film. It was one of the favorite ways to commit hoaxes on the gullible, some years back. Here, I want to show you something.”

Her hand dipped into her sequinned handbag and brought out a photograph. Two nude people lay on their backs on a black velvet cloth. They were Martin and Marion Rorwick. I goggled a little at the perfection of their bodies, but my gaze was also caught and held by two golden statues of them, stark naked, standing to the left and framed against black velvet.

“Those statues are masterpieces,” I gasped.

Marion smiled faintly. “Those aren’t statues. They’re our etheric doubles, our spirit selves. We used a Graflex camera with a timing device on it, to snap it.” Her hand reached out for the photograph which she put away in her purse because the waitress was approaching. “I don’t show that to everyone, my dear. And there’s no reason for me to try and bamboozle you, because in a little while Marty and I are going to take your spirit out of your body—with your cooperation; naturally, we couldn’t do it without that—and roam about the city with you.”

I gulped. “I’ll cooperate, of course. And if you can do it, I’ll—I’ll—”

“Careful, Eve,” warned David.

“I’ll do whatever David wants me to!” I yelled.

“I was hoping for something like that,” my case officer grinned. “I want you to see if you can get that etheric body outside your flesh and blood body. If you can—and mind you, I said, if—why, drop down to Washington and have a look about the Pentagon. We think our ghost will make another try for that plane design he’s so anxious to lay eyes on.”

I glanced at Martin, who nodded. “Oh, yes. You’ll be able to get to Washington in a matter of seconds, or as fast as you will yourself to travel. Doors and walls will be non-existent to you. But we’ll explain more about that, later.”

The waitress was putting a crème caramel before me, as dessert. I caught hold of my spoon and attacked it, figuring I would need a lot of energy to get out of the bind David Anderjanian had wedged me into. Marion was nibbling daintily at a tart aux fraises, and giving me a big smile with her large red mouth. David and Martin had ordered mousses aux chocolats, which they devoured like hungry children.

Over coffee, the men smoked cigars. Marion and I lighted up cigarettes. Marion said, “It is necessary to be in the proper mood for astral projection, darling. We have it down to a science, I believe. It resembles the deep meditation of a holy man, withdrawal from the flesh.”

“You mean I’ve got to go spiritual on you?”

“It’s a little like reaching down into your every pore and cranny and dragging your etheric body out by its roots. Naturally, Marty and I will be there helping you, so it won’t be too hard.”

“Like taking a trip,” I muttered dazedly, “without pot.”

Her white teeth gleamed like pearls as her lips parted in a smile. “Imagine it that way, if it helps. But we don’t use drugs.” Her long lashes lowered as she gave David a glance. “Would you like to try it too? We would help you as well as Eve, if you like.”

David reared back in alarm. “No thanks. Eve is the agent on this case. I don’t want to steal her thunder.”

“Too bad,” murmured Marion. “We do our thing nude, you know.”

“Clothes are a distraction,” smiled her handsome husband.

David blinked and looked at the three of us, turning over in his mind just what he would be missing. He cleared his throat, then asked, “Couldn’t I come along on the preparations without going along on the trip?”

Marion laughed softly and covered his big hand with her own. “Darling, of course! Whatever you like. Marty and I are free thinkers. Glad to have you aboard.”

David preened himself. I could have walloped him.

There was no sense wasting any more time, Martin suggested, glancing into my low-cut bodice. Their astral room was ready, they had prepared it before dressing for dinner. If David and I would join them, we would go to their apartment.

We joined them, my arm through Martin Rorwick’s, his wife’s fingers resting on David’s muscular forearm. We decided to take David’s car, since the Rorwicks had come downtown by taxi.

I sat in the back with Martin.

He amused us with experiences he’d had in his spirit travelings. “The first time I was introduced to astral journeying was when I was barely past seventeen. My mother was very strong on the bit, like my grandparents. They had been followers of Madame Blavatsky, the founder of Theosophy. She had been taught to project her spirit-self by going into a trance like state, and she taught the method to her only child.

“I’m afraid I was something of a callow cad back in those early years,” Martin admitted with a grimace. “All I could think about was a teacher of mine, a redheaded divorcee. I was in her English class, and wasn’t sure that I was going to make a passing grade.

“So when mother suggested I learn projecting, I was all for it. I intended to visit my teacher—who shall be nameless—and try and surprise her in some wicked proceeding, which I would then hold over her head as a kind of club to get my grade. Naturally, since every projectionist has to strip, mother felt that I’d do better with a male teacher than with herself, so she talked one of her friends into assisting me.”

Martin sighed, “It took me over an hour to project, and that was after three prior attempts.” He patted my hand when he saw my look of alarm. “Don’t be disappointed if you don’t make it right away, my dear. Not everybody can.”

David Anderjanian muttered something under his breath.

Martin Rorwick heard him, because he chuckled. “This isn’t unlike learning to fly a plane, you know. You just don’t solo until you’ve been up a few times. But Miss Drum may have all the necessary attributes to make it, right off the bat. We’ll see, we’ll see.”

“What about that redhead?” asked David.

“Oh, yes. Well, when I finally did project, I went sailing up out of our house and flew around to sort of get my bearings. Then I headed for my teacher’s apartment. It was on the far side of town. I’d never been there before, but after a few hits and misses, I waltzed into her bedroom. She was getting into a nightgown. My eyes bugged out at the sight of her in that transparent red thing—I was only seventeen, a virgin at the time—but despite all that, I kept my mind on my job. I was out to get some sort of hold over her, remember.

“Unfortunately for my plans,” Martin sighed, “she got into bed, read a few papers propped up on a couple of pillows, then put out the light and went to sleep. For the next few nights, I projected to her apartment again and again. I never caught her in anything shady, though I must admit I enjoyed watching her undress and slip into those nighties. She had quite a collection. They were all wasted, all of them.”

Marion giggled, “Tell the epilogue now.”

Martin said, “Ah, yes. I managed to pass her course without blackmail, after all. But in our yearbook, I wrote: To the teacher with the prettiest nightgowns in the whole world. She flushed and stammered when she saw it. She demanded how I knew about her nighties, but I was very secretive. To this day, I think that line I wrote is the greatest mystery of her life.”

David was braking the car, turning into the curb before a large apartment house in the upper Sixties.

I asked, “Could you have touched her if you’d wanted to?”

“No, no. Anything as tangible as human flesh and blood is off limits to the etheric body. However, two etheric bodies can touch, since they’re operating on the same plane—or wavelength.”

I thought about that. I asked, “Do you mean to tell me that if I found another—er—etheric body cavorting around I could injure it by an attack?”

“You certainly could. So be careful. What goes for you, goes for the other astral image as well. He or she can hurt you.”

David always gave me the good ones.

I slid across the back seat as Martin got out, giving him a good view of my thighs.

He pulled back even more. The dear boy looked, all right, and I saw his tongue-tip run around his lips. I smiled up at him and gave him my hand to yank me out.

Marion went ahead with David while Martin and I brought up the rear. I urged him to tell me about the necessary preparations for my astral journeying.

“The main thing is quiet and meditation,” he explained. “You’ll see, when we get you into our projection room. Disassociate yourself from everything but your inner self. Think into your body. There’ll be music to help, and blue light, not to mention Marion and me.”

We rode up in the elevator to a really mod apartment.

The foyer of the Rorwick place was done in shrimp-pink and black. There was an ebony environmental structure set against a red brick wall with a cushioned wooden bench, also in black, and a little fountain that purled water into a shrimp-pink bowl. The effect was delightful.

The living room was something else again, tastefully done in red brick, with dark-wood paneled walls and a tiled ceiling, from which hung futuristic electrical fixtures. Highly polished cherrywood tables stood here and there, and a gigantic couch took up all of one wall. Oil paintings of varying sizes hung above it. Two big oriental rugs lay on the floor, tempting one to take off one’s shoes and walk bare-foot in its deep pile.

“I like it,” I told Marion. “It’s swift.”

She hugged me and brought me past a small spinet to an arched doorway leading into a hall. It was floored with a deep blue runner, and had oil paintings on either side, colored predominantly blue. The overhead light shed a dim azure radiance.

At the far end of the hall was a black door on which was painted a golden phoenix rising from ashes. Marion smiled. “Before we go in there, let me show you our bedroom.”

It was a large room with windows looking out over the street. There was a king-size bed. The headboard was built into the wall, and formed part of a unit that included bookshelves, a stereo set, a swing-out television cabinet, and various assorted knickknacks. A vanity table, bench, chaise, and small writing desk with chair did not crowd the large room.

“Breathtaking,” I murmured, meaning it.

Marion said, “We’d better get ready, hon.”

She bent and started taking off her dress.