"Attention to details. Who was your target? What was her goal?"
"I think she had a grudge against Irugis."
"Iraitis. Irug is another country entirely."
"Irait. Irug. Irun. It's all the same. Except Irun. That's what I'm going to do now. Run. I don't know that I can take more than a week in Sinanju, but at least I gotta break the bad news to the villagers. If I'm lucky, they'll throw me out and I won't have to put up with them anymore either."
"Remo, who was this woman?"
"Called herself Kimberly. Had a mean way with a yellow silk scarf, too."
"And her last name?" Smith asked patiently.
"We never got that personal, Smitty. It's hard to get a complete biography when the target's trying to throttle you."
"She must have had personal identification."
Remo considered. "She did have a purse."
"Please, Remo, we have a dead Iraiti ambassador to explain. I must know who this woman is."
"Was. Dead as a doorknob now. But I'll admit she looks good. Natural, as the embalmers like to say."
"Remo, are you drunk?"
"Smitty," Remo clucked, "you know better than that. Alcohol would upset my delicate constitution. I'd end up on the slab next to poor Kimberly. Of course, a hamburger would do that. So would a hot dog. Even a good one."
"You sound unlike yourself."
"I'm happy, Smith," Remo confessed. "Really happy. I was scared for a while there. Scared because I was going up against something I didn't think I could handle alone. But I did. Kali was putty in my hands. So to speak. Damn. Should have used that line on her. Too late now."
"You are really happy?"
"Really," Remo said, scratching his initials in the pay phone's stainless-steel acoustical shield.
"Even with Chiun dead?"
Silence clogged the wire. Remo put a finishing flourish on the W for "Williams." His open, carefree expression froze, then darkened. Lines appeared. They etched themselves around his mouth, his eyes, his forehead.
"Smith," he said in a small voice, "you know exactly how to rain on my life, don't you, you cold-blooded son of a bitch?"
"That is better," Smith said. "Now I am speaking to the Remo I know."
"Fix this moment in your memory, because it may be the last," Remo warned. "I'm officially off the payroll."
"One last thing, Remo. The woman's identity."
"All right. If it's so important that you'd wreck my good mood, I'll root around in her purse."
"Good. I will remain here." Smith disconnected.
"Bastard," Remo muttered, hanging up the phone.
But by the time he returned to the eighth floor, he was humming.
Remo dug out the hotel key and used it. The door opened to the touch of his fingers. He hummed. The tune was "Born Free."
The moment he stepped across the threshold, the sound trailed away on a puzzled note.
Kimberly lay on the bed just as Remo had left her. Except her hands sat folded under her pyramidlike chest. He hadn't arranged her hands that way.
"What the hell?" Remo muttered.
He hesitated, his ears reaching for any telltale sound.
Somewhere, a heart beat. Remo zeroed in on the sound.
It was coming, he was more than astonished to realize, from the bed.
"Impossible," he blurted. "You're dead."
Remo glided across the rug, his heart beating a little high in his throat. His ebullient mood had evaporated. This was not possble. He had used an infallible technique to shatter her upper vertebrae.
Remo reached for the folded hands, intending to feel for a pulse. One wrist felt cool.
The indrawn breath came quick and sharp, sending the pyramid-sharp chest lifting. The innocent blue eyes snapped open. But they were not blue. They were red. Red from the core of their fiery pupils to the outer white, which was crimson. The orbs looked as if they had been dipped in blood.
"Jesus!" Remo said, jumping back reflexively.
Bending at the waist, the cool thing on the bed began to rise, yellow-nailed hands unfolded like poisonous flowers opening to the sun.
Remo watched them, mesmerized. And while his shocked brain registered the impossible, the corpse came upright.
The head swiveled toward him. It hung off to one side, as if from a neck crick. Her features were milk pale, the yellow eye shadow standing out like mold. The legs shifted to a sitting position.
"If you're auditioning for Exorcist IV," Remo cracked nervously, "you've got my vote."
"want . . . you," she said slowly.
The hands flashed up, reaching for her chest. The nails began tearing at the yellow fabric.
Remo caught them, one hand on each wrist.
"Not so fast," he said, trying to control a mounting fear. "I don't remember promising this dance to the girl with the bloodshot eyes. Why don't you-?"
The quip died in his throat. The wrists struggled in his unshakable grip. They were strong-stronger that human limbs should be. Remo centered his hands and let their opposing force work against itself. The wrists made circles in the air, Remo's hand still tightly attached. Every time they pushed or pulled, Remo carried the kinetic energy to a weak position. The result was a stalemate.
Still, the thing that had been Kimberly persisted, its angry red eyes fixed sightlessly on Remo, head tilted to one side like a blind, curious dog. The cool spidery fingers kept gravitating to its heaving chest.
"You don't take no for an answer, do you?" Remo said, trying to figure out how to let go without exposing himself to danger. Kimberly was no pushover.
The question stopped being important a moment later when a familiar scent insinuated itself into Remo's nostrils like groping gaseous tentacles.
It smelled of dying flowers, musky womanhood, blood, and other impossible-to-separate odors commingled. The stuff slammed into his lungs like cold fire. His brain reeled.
"Oh, no," he croaked. "Kali."
And as his thoughts whirled between attack and escape, Kimberly's chest began heaving spasmodically. It convulsed and strained, and deep in the panicky recesses of Remo's mind an image appeared. It was a scene from an old science-fiction movie. He wondered why it jumped into his mind.
And then the front of Kimberly's yellow dress began a fury of rending, tearing cloth and Remo's horrified eyes went to the things that were breaking free.
And a familiar voice that was not Kimberly's snarled,
"You are mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
Chapter 13
Harold W. Smith waited an hour before he began worrying. After two hours, he became concerned. It should not take Remo this long to go through a dead woman's purse.
Smith reached into his right-hand desk drawer and stripped foil from a sixty-nine-cent roll of antacid tablets, causing two tablets to drop into his waiting palm. He put them in his mouth and went to the office mineral-water dispenser. He thumbed the button. Cool water rilled into a paper cup. Smith swallowed the bitter tablets, chasing them with water. After checking for leaks, he returned the paper cup to its holder. It hadn't started to decompose from repeated use yet. He might get another month out of it.
Smith returned to his desk as the phone rang.
He reached for the blue phone, realizing his error when the ringing repeated itself after he lifted the receiver.
It was the red phone.
Smith switched the blue receiver to his other hand and snatched up the red one.
"Yes, Mr. President?" he said with muted embarrassment.
"The lid has come off," the President said tightly. "The Iraiti government wants to know where their ambassador is."
"This is not my area, but I would suggest you arrange a plausible accident."
"It may be too late. They've taken a hostage. A big one."
"Who?" Smith asked tightly.
"That anchorman, Don Cooder."
"Oh," Smith said in a tone of voice that didn't exactly convey relief, but certainly wasn't concerned.
"I won't miss him either," the President said, "but dammit, he is a high-profile U.S. citizen. We can't let these repeated provocations go unpunished."
"The decision to go to war rests with you, Mr. President. I have no advice to offer."
"I'm not looking for advice. I want answers. Smith, I know your man did his best to find the ambassador alive. The FBI tells me he was already cold before we left the gate. So that's that. But what the heck is behind it?"
"The ambassador appears to have fallen victim to a serial killer, who I am pleased to report was . . . ah . . . removed from the scene only within the last hour."
"Who, Smith?"
"A woman I am now trying to identify."
"You mean this wasn't political?"
"It does not appear to be," Smith told the President. "Naturally, I will reserve judgment until our investigation has been completed. But from all accounts, the perpetrator seems to have been affiliated with a dangerous cult that was all but neutralized several years back. Other, similarly strangled bodies, have turned up in Washington. Identical yellow scarves wound around the necks of each of the victims."
"A cult, you say?"
"A single woman, who is now dead. There is no reason to believe the cult is active."
"In other words," the President of the United States pressed, "we don't have any live scapegoat to hang this on?"
"I am afraid not," Smith admitted. "Our task is enforcement, not arranging subterfuges."
"No criticism was intended or implied."
"I know."
"Keep working, Smith. I'll get back to you. I'm convening an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss our response to the Iraitis."
"Good luck, Mr. President."
"I don't need luck. I need a goddamned miracle. But thanks anyway, Smith."
Harold Smith replaced the red receiver. He noticed he was still holding the blue one tightly in his other hand. It began emitting the off-the-hook warning beep. Smith replaced it hastily, thinking that he never used to be so absentminded. He hoped it was age, not Alzheimer's. For if his twice-yearly medical exam should ever reveal such a judgment-clouding prognosis, Harold Smith would be forced to make a call to the President of the United States informing him that CURE could no longer function as a secure arm of executive-branch policy.
It would be up to the commander in chief to decide whether Smith would have to be retired or CURE must shut down. If the latter, it would be up to Smith to close down the organization, wiping clean the massive data banks of the four computers hidden behind false walls in the Folcroft basement and taking a coffin-shaped poison pill that he carried in the watch pocket of his gray vest. For only three living persons knew of CURE. And to publicly admit that it even existed would be to admit that America itself didn't work. When the time came for the organization that didn't exist to vanish, all traces-human and technological-would also have to be obliterated. Only a grateful President would remember.
As for Remo Williams, the human superweapon Harold Smith had created, Smith had several ways of retiring him.
If Remo hadn't already abandoned America forever, which was a growing suspicion in Smith's mind.
His weak gray eyes went to the silent blue telephone.
He felt a vague apprehension, but not panic. There had been so many near-disasters in his thirty years as director of CURE that Smith could not summon up any panic. Perhaps, he thought, that was a bad thing. Fear had motivated him in the past, forcing him to go to superhuman extremes to fulfill his mission. Without fear, a man was too prone to let the tides of life swamp him. Smith wondered if he hadn't simply lost the fire in his belly and if that wasn't reason enough to make the termination call to the White House ....
Chapter 14
"Mine! Mine! Mine!"
Two grasping hands exploded for Remo's throat like pale spiders with yellow feet, a banana-colored silk scarf strained between them.
Fighting the clogging miasma in his lungs, Remo released Kimberly's wrists. Or what he thought were her wrists.
He didn't know what to think. In the instant of time in which his mind was paralyzed by impossibility, his Sinanju-honed reflexes took over.
He got one attacking wrist, clamped hard on it. It felt solid. Whipping away the scarf, the opposite hand snapped it at his eyes. Remo ducked instinctively. He snared the other wrist by feel, and twisted it against the natural flex point.
That hand was solid too. Not illusionary. His furiously working brain had begun to question their reality.
A snarl blew hot breath into his face. And as Remo tightened his death grip, two more yellow-nailed hands snatched up the falling scarf and slipped it over his head.
It was happening faster than Remo could comprehend. He had had Kimberly by the wrists. Yet her hands had exploded toward him. He had grabbed them, and now the others were back, the phenomenon repeating itself like a nightmare record skipping. And an absurd thought welled up in his brain.
How many hands did Kimberly have, anyway?
"You will never escape me, Red One," the voice snapped.
"Wanna bet?"
Pivoting on one leg, Remo launched into a Sinanju Stork Spin, taking the girl with him.
Kimberly's feet left the floor. Her legs lifted from centrifugal force. The silken noose tightened around Remo's throat. He ignored it. This would take only a minute.
His eyes fixed on the spinning figure, Remo watched the room blur behind it. Kimberly was helpless in his grip, her body practically perpendicular to the spinning floor. He had her wrists for sure.
The trouble was, she had another pair of arms that were busily engaged in the serious task of throttling him.
Her eyes were hot orbs of blood. Her mouth contorted in a mirror image of the Kali statue's writhing snarl.
She hissed like a burst steam value.
As Remo watched, the wet scarlet color drained from her eyes.
That struck Remo as a cue, so he simply let go.
The silken noose around his neck jerked, and ripped free.
Threshing wildly, Kimberly struck the far wall with a spasmodic twitching of many white limbs. She collapsed to the rug like a broomed scorpion. Her eyes shut slowly, the red hue fading to a bald white like shelled eggs.
Remo moved in fast, ready to deal the coup de grace with a demolishing snapkick to the temple.
He stopped dead in his tracks.
The sight of Kimberly's now-tattered dressfront did it. It looked as if her brassiere had exploded, spilling white lace and heavy support wiring. Her breasts, pale and pink-nippled, hung from the torn bra. They were very small, practically breastlets.
Remo gaped stupidly, but not at the breasts that had proved to be almost nonexistent. Just under them, lying across her lap, was Kimberly's right arm. Remo registered its existence, noting the banana nail polish.
What made his jaw drop was a second right arm that lay straight out, cradling her crazily angled blond head.
A matched pair of left arms splayed over her left side like puppet limbs after the strings had been cut.
"Jesus Christ!" Remo exploded. "Four arms! She's got four frigging arms."
Hovering just out of striking range, as if before a venomous jungle insect, Remo eyed the bizarre collection of arms. The hidden pair was rooted just below the normal set. All twenty fingernails were painted banana yellow. They were otherwise ordinary arms. Obviously the lower set had been crossed inside her oversize brassiere, clutching the hidden scarf.
The sight made Remo shiver and think of the multiple-armed Kali statue and the terrible unearthly voice that had snarled up from Kimberly's throat.
Years ago he had first heard that voice. In his mind. Kali's voice. And it was Kali's scent in the room. It had been overpowering but even as it faded, Remo shook inside with an unreasoning fear of it. The thing with four arms had been Kimberly. And Kimberly had died. Then it had been Kali. Somehow the spirit of the statue had entered her dead shell and reanimated it.
Still, i
t was dead now. That was certain. Remo forced himself to approach, fascinated as if at the sight of a dead sea creature flung up on an ordinary beach. But no earthly ocean had spawned the thing that was Kimberly.
He knelt, lifting one bruise-yellow eyelid. The revealed pupil was slack, dilated as if in death.
"Funny," Remo muttered. "I thought they were a lighter blue."
His sensitive fingers felt no pulse of life, no hum of blood, no sensation of life coming through the lifted lid.
Kimberly was definitely dead.
"Little girl," Remo said with relief, "you've had a busy day."
The pupil imploded with life, iris turning cerulean blue to deep violet like splashing paint.
"It's not over yet!" Kali's hateful voice ripped out, and the overpowering smell shot into Remo's lungs like poison gas.
As if through a yellow haze, Remo fought back. But the hands were everywhere, in his face, at his throat, grabbing his wrists, pulling him down, overwhelming him, smothering him.
And in the haze, something was wrapped around his throat, something slick and slippery. And even though Remo Williams dimly understood what that was, and the danger it represented, he was helpless to resist it because the scent of Kali was stronger than his will.
"Who is putty now!" Kali mocked.
When Remo woke up, he was nude.
The dawn light was coming in through the chinks in the closed hotel-room drapery. A ray of sunlight fell across his eyes. He blinked, shaking his head, and tried to throw one arm across his face.
The arm hung up. Craning his neck, Remo saw the yellow silken fetters around his thick wrist.
His startled eyes went immediately to his crotch.
To his horror, he saw the encircling yellow scarf, and an evilly gleaming spot of red at the tip of his erect manhood. He was not greenish-black like the late Iraiti ambassador, but closer to purple.
Remo ripped one arm free. He pulled the other loose. Silk thread smoked and parted. He sat up. The yellow scarves around his ankles were anchored to the bedposts.
They snapped with a single rip of complaint when he retracted his legs.
Remo drew himself into a seated position on the bed. His eyes were bleary, and the ugly scent was like old mucus in his nostrils. Compressing his lips, he blew out through his nose, trying to force the detestable odor from his lungs, his senses, his very essence.
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