Holy Terror

by Warren Murphy

  “Right through the top, Smitty.”

  “I was about to say, except for you and me. Chiun, as you know, thinks I’m an emperor.”

  “Or a mark,” said Remo.

  “A fine emperor,” said Chiun. “One whose generosity marks him for eternal fame.”

  “One of the people who provides us with information, without knowing it, works in the newspaper business on the coast and somebody told him of something big, very big about to happen in America, and that only someone as shrewd as the Blissful Master could pull it off. The biggest ever,” Smith said.

  “The biggest what?” asked Remo.

  “That’s what we don’t know. We do know that with an army of religious fanatics, it could be almost anything. Which is why we set the meeting at the Rhoda Motel. This Divine Bliss thing, it has so many people around that I didn’t trust any of the usual channels. So I set up the meeting for here. Frankly I was a little worried when I saw you in that ditch waiting for me. The Blissful Master had one of his followers, a sheriff, put out a warrant for the defector. Three states. Poor devil was in hiding. We arranged to hide him near you, so you could question him. I’m sure your questioning techniques can get anything.”

  “The defector? His name Clete?” asked Remo.

  “That’s his hiding name.”

  “His girlfriend’s name Loretta?”

  “Yes, yes. Correct.”

  “He a big guy? Six-feet-four in bare feet?”

  “Yes. You’ve met him?”

  “He wear a Stetson?”

  “Yes. That’s him.”

  “Did he have a dish in his mouth and through the spinal column in the back?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “He does now,” said Remo.

  Chiun looked upon the blue heavens of New Mexico and the plains beyond. In the racist white man’s country, who knew what they would accuse a poor Korean of next?

  CHAPTER THREE

  “SO THAT’S WHAT YOU were doing in the river bed,” said Smith when he heard about the plate incident. “Maybe we should get off the road. They might have the motel staked out. You might be spotted.”

  “We might also be tailed,” said Remo.

  “Anything is possible in a racist country,” said Chiun, “where nude people invade your privacy.”

  Behind the gray Chevrolet Nova, a cream and beige Ford with a red bubble light on top and heavy black lettering just above the grill that read “Sheriff” cruised behind them. When Remo turned to look, the sheriff’s car whined its siren and picked up speed.

  “That may be the sheriff who is working for the Blissful Master,” said Smith.

  “Good,” said Remo.

  “Good? My Lord, they’ve got me with you. You know evasive techniques. I don’t. Great. That’s all I need, to be arrested in New Mexico.”

  “You like to worry, don’t you, Smitty?” said Remo. “Just give me the outlines of the assignment and stop worrying.”

  “Find out what that Indian faker is doing with Americans. Find out what this ‘big thing’ is, and stop it if it’s dangerous.”

  “Why didn’t you say that before?” said Remo, “Instead of committing us to a trip to Patna, and all this submarine and side excursion to Sinanju bilge?”

  “Because our emperor in his wisdom,” said Chiun, “has blessed us with his brilliance. If we are ordered to Sinanju, then to Sinanju we will go.”

  “There’ll be a sub, the Harlequin, at the naval base in San Diego. The captain will think you’re from the State Department on a secret mission. He’ll assume it’s a quiet overture to establish relations with a North Korean faction for eventual diplomatic recognition.”

  “I still don’t understand why we’re hitting Sinanju,” said Remo. “Other than it being closer to India than to Kansas City, why do we have to make the visit?”

  The sheriff’s car pulled alongside and a craggy-faced man under a light brown Stetson motioned the car to pull over. He motioned convincingly with a .44, whose barrel looked like a tunnel.

  “Don’t be shy, Remo. Chiun already warned me that you were thinking of dropping out to visit Sinanju yourself, the home of your training. And you’re just valuable enough that we didn’t want to lose you. So when this thing came up in India, I thought we could kill two birds with one stone, so to speak.”

  Remo glanced balefully at the back seat, where Chiun, his parched, delicate face set serenely, was a vision of calm innocence. Smith slowed the car.

  “Get me out of this thing,” he said as the sheriff’s car nosed in ahead of them.

  “Anyone who’d believe that I would quit you to visit a fishing village in North Korea, a village that has such lousy fishermen it has to rent out assassins to stay alive, anyone who’d believe that could use help crossing a street.”

  “I can’t be arrested,” said Smith.

  “If this is our sheriff, he’s a gift,” said Remo.

  “That,” said Smith, squinting at the man with Stetson, badge, and gun, stepping from the car, “is our man. Probably, I think.”

  “All right, you there. Out of the car slow, and let’s see your hands at all times. Out,” said the sheriff.

  “You want to see my hands?” said Remo, putting them in front of Smith on the steering wheel and then sliding past Smith with his legs following through the window and out, a one-hand grip on the door post, and the feet touched the ground.

  “How’d you do that thing? Jeez, like you just went through the window!” The sheriff stepped back to keep the trio covered.

  “You want to see my hands?” asked Remo.

  “I want to see all hands.”

  Smith put his on the steering wheel, flat out, thumbs spread. Chiun’s long-nailed, delicate fingers rose to the closed window next to him and, opening slowly like a blossom, came to repose within themselves, fingers locking fingers until it looked as if two hands formed one fist. The sheriff seemed entranced for what he thought must have been less than a second, for he had been trained never to take his eyes off men he had covered. It was less than a blink of an eye, he was sure. But it must have been more. The young white man had his gun wrist, and then the fingers couldn’t move or squeeze, and he couldn’t even get a good kick at the guy because he didn’t see him. But he felt him behind at his neck, and at his spinal column he felt two sharp pains, and his legs were out of control, walking him to the car, where the old gook had the door opened. His own legs stepped into the car, and he felt what might have been a soft, warm pad farther up his back, and he was lowering himself into the back of the car and was seated looking ahead as if he had gotten into the car of his own free will.

  “You’re all under arrest,” he said.

  “That’s nice,” said Remo. “Hold this, will you, Chiun?” he said, and for a moment the sheriff felt the pad and pin prick on his spine release, and he almost crumpled. But then the identical feeling was there, and he was looking straight ahead again, not in control of his own body.

  Remo skipped out of the car, telling Smith to follow, and he slid behind the wheel of the still running sheriff’s car. He turned off the road and drove out into the flat scrub of the countryside, where the air was cleaner and where, far off, he saw a mesa. It was a good half-hour drive to that mesa, and when he stopped and Smith’s car pulled up behind him, he saw the old man perspiring freely and breathing hard.

  Smith must have noted Remo’s expression because he said, “I’m all right.”

  “No, you’re not,” said Remo. “Push your head back and blow the air out of your lungs. Do it. Now.”

  Remo saw the lemony face look upward, the lips pucker, and the cheeks contract. He leaned into the car, and with a flat hand, pressed the last air out of the lungs. Smith’s eyes went wide, his head popped forward in startled surprise, and then he settled down in the seat with a big smile. It was the first time Remo could remember him smiling that way. Probably the shock of the sudden relaxation.

  “Ahhh,” said Smith, sucking fresh air bac
k deep into his lungs. Recovering his senses, the smile disappeared.

  “All right, get on with it. I’ve got to get out of here as quickly as possible. I can’t be connected with any incident like this,” said Smith.

  “Not publicly,” said Remo.

  “Not publicly, of course,” said Smith.

  “The emperor’s eyes should never look upon the emperor’s business,” said Chiun, still holding the sheriff by the spine, like a ventriloquist with his hand in the back of a bigger than life-size dummy.

  “I wouldn’t mind seeing your techniques of questioning,” said Smith.

  “Unfortunately, they are a secret of Sinanju to be rented, but never sold,” said Chiun.

  When they got the sheriff out of view of the car, Chiun put him down on the ground, where the sheriff found himself still unable to move and listened in on a startling conversation.

  The skinny white guy wanted to know why the Oriental had told someone else he wanted to go to some place named Sinny or something, and the old gook said the white guy should want to go, and the white guy said he never said he wanted to go because he had about all he could take of Sinny-joo right here in America, and the old gook said he was Sinny-joo, and he was going home, and if Remo wasn’t good enough to want to go where he ought to go, then it wasn’t the old gook’s problem, and besides an emperor never wanted the truth anyway.

  Was that middle-aged white man at the wheel some sort of emperor?

  Then the pain began. But the sheriff found a way to control it. He could do it with his voice, by telling those fellas things. Like the happiness he had found. Yeah, he was a follower of the Blissful Master, but he didn’t tell his friends because they would laugh at him. In fact, an arch-priest of the Blissful Master’s had told him it was better for all if very few knew. In the Blissful Master, he had found true peace and happiness, the kind he had been looking for all his life. And yes, well, he would kill for the Blissful Master because the Blissful Master was truth incarnate, the center of the universe in man. He was going to get the fellow who called himself Clete, but he found out that was done for him.

  Suddenly the sheriff’s skin was on fire, and even the words couldn’t control it. No, he didn’t know what any big plan was, just that there was something big going to happen, and every one of the followers was going to be happy forever and ever and ever. And, no, he wasn’t sure of the arch-priest’s name. But he could be reached at a storefront in San Diego, a small Divine Bliss Mission. Yes, he was sure he didn’t know the name. The guy just phoned him once.

  “Anything else you can think of?” came the voice from above.

  “Nothing,” said the sheriff, and then he went on his last bliss of a trip. Total relaxation. Lights out.

  Remo stepped away from the body.

  “He did not mention Sinanju,” said Chiun. “But we do not have to let Smith know that.”

  “What are you angling for now?” asked Remo. “What did you tell Smith?”

  “In the car, the emperor demanded to know about the ancient Sinanju records, and feeling loyalty to him, just as you do…”

  “You don’t feel loyalty.”

  “Feeling loyalty, just as you do, knowledge of the ancient records was forced out of me.”

  “Like wet out of a baby,” said Remo.

  “And I told Emperor Smith that we had records in Sinanju of the lineage of this Blissful Master creature, whoever he is.”

  “Just in case one lie didn’t get you a free trip back home, another might.”

  “And Emperor Smith asked me if I remembered what the records said.”

  “And you couldn’t, but if you got a good look again, it would all come back.”

  “I think that was it. Sometimes my memory fails me; you understand.”

  “I understand that first we’re going to the San Diego mission.”

  There were mumblings in Korean about ingratitude and how only the most heartless of persons would deny a dying man a trip back home.

  “You’re dying, Little Father?” asked Remo, eyebrow cocked in an expression of suspicion.

  “We’re all dying,” said Chiun. “Death is but the handmaiden of life.”

  “I thought it was something like that,” said Remo.

  At the car, Smith was dozing; the parched face seemed truly relaxed.

  “He’s your man,” Remo told him.

  “Did you get a lead?”

  “To Sinanju,” said Chiun quickly.

  “With a stop in San Diego,” said Remo.

  “Good,” said Smith. “I guess we’re most afraid of the unknown, and this thing frightens me because we don’t know just what it is. You didn’t get any indication of what was going to happen, did you?”

  “Just something big.”

  “I believe we have read the prophecy of the ancient Blissful Masters,” said Chiun. “It is not clear, but there was to come a time that a calamitous…let me see, a calamitous calamity was to be started, and it would come quickly once it was decided upon. That is what I remember. The rest of it is back in Sinanju.”

  “You know we might be able to airdrop you two directly into Sinanju by tomorrow,” said Smith.

  “The sub will do,” said Remo. “After the stop in San Diego.”

  “Chiun knows about these things. You’ve got to listen to him,” said Smith.

  “And I know about Chiun. You’ve got to listen to me. The Master of Sinanju knows what he chooses to know. And what he chooses not to know is sometimes more effective.”

  “I don’t understand that,” said Smith.

  “Remo just pledged his loyalty thrice over,” said Chiun, and now he was angered with his pupil. One did not tell emperors too much about one’s real business.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  The Blissful Master, Maharaji Gupta Mahesh Dor, chosen by the force of the universe, born of that which had been born before and would be born again, heard the warnings from his priests and arch-priests. He listened from the golden pillow throne to this worry and that worry. Heard his women and his men tell of tales of this follower lost and that one killed. Heard, he did, of warnings from the east. Heard supplications that he delay, if only for a year, the big plan of which he sometimes spoke and which all knew would soon come to pass.

  Women with heads shaved, and women with but the forelock left, and women with their hair full around their shoulders pressed their foreheads to the mosaic floors. Sweet incense rose from silver and ruby bowls. New flowers graced the mosaic ceiling.

  And the Blissful Master spoke.

  “Frankly, I don’t need this shit. If you want to know where I’m at, that’s where I’m at.” His voice was squeaky fifteen, his round face glistened with sweat, his small mustache struggled hopelessly over a young brown lip.

  “O Chosen One, O Perfect One, would that you would not turn your perfect face from us. Would that you would consider our supplication,” said a man with wizened brown face, an Ilhibad hill tribesman who had come down from the hills with his brothers to serve the father of the Blissful Master and who now served the son, for did not the son have the spirit of the father, and was not the spirit perfect, the way it would lead, the perfection it enjoyed, proof of the force itself that kept the community of faithful alive and fruitful and growing. And especially growing.

  “Consider again,” said the man.

  “Consider. Consider. Consider,” chanted the throng.

  “All right, what’s your name, let’s hear it again,” said Maharaji Dor to the brown man who was an arch-priest. The old buzzard had been around since Dor could remember, and he was tired of the dippy advice. “Go ahead, what’s your name.”

  “Is it not written that there are three proofs of our truth?”

  “Hey, sweetie, I run this lashup. You don’t have to go back to basics with me. I’m the Blissful Master.”

  “First,” said the arch-priest, his brown hands arching above his head, “is the proof of reality, of that which is. We are. That is proof number one.”r />
  “That’s also a proof for Disneyland and the Taj Mahal,” mumbled Dor to no one in particular. His eyes settled on the pale neck of the girl who had gotten that black Baptist, Powell, out here with her letter. Why was that man’s name plaguing him? Of all the ministers he had seen here, of all the people he had met, that name stuck. He looked at the neck and remembered the Reverend Mr. Powell and, looking at the lines of the young thigh stretched against the pink sari, he thought it might be nice to bed again with what’s her name.

  “Proof two is that for generations we have always had a Blissful Master.”

  “Which would prove the Catholic Church more than it would us,” mumbled the maharaji.

  “And third, and final, absolute proof, we have grown, always grown. From a handful of the enlightened in your great grandfather’s day, to more in your grandfather’s day, to a large community in your father’s day, and now to the worldwide enlightenment in your day. These are the proofs.”

  “Hail, Blissful Master. Hail him who brings peace and happiness, hail the truth in man’s form,” chanted the throng.

  “All right, all right,” said the maharaji.

  “Thus we ask, lest wrong ideas about our growth cloud your truth, let us postpone your great plan for but a year until we are more secure from the negative forces,” said the arch-priest.

  “If we wait until all the negative forces are gone, we’ll be sucking our thumbs here in Patna for another generation.”

  “But a follower has been killed in a disturbing way, a follower who carried arms.”

  “What was he doing with a gun? I assume it was a gun?”

  “He was a sheriff. A man of one of the many governments in America. An enlightened one who had seen the true way.”

  “I’m sorry to hear that. We are deeply grieved that one of our true ones has suffered an ill fate physically. However, he has had in his life more happiness than those who have not been enlightened. Let us be thankful for his brief happiness. Next case.”

  “The manner in which he was killed causes alarm,” persisted the arch-priest.

  “You get alarmed at a change in the weather.”