"So, you are a coward, after all."
Maddas flinched. "No Iraiti could call me that name and not be chopped into shish kebab," he flared.
"No Iraiti understands Maddas Hinsein as I do," Kimberly said. "If I disappear, there is no one strong enough to attend to your special . . . needs."
Maddas' dark features tightened in concentration.
And one hidden hand slipped from a slit in the black abayuh and roughly pinched Maddas Hinsein on the backside. He gave a little jump.
"Do not do that in front of the prisoner," he hissed, rubbing himself.
"Think of him as a tool. Just as I think the same of you."
Maddas Hinsein cocked a thumb at his broad chest. "I am the destined uniter of the Arabs."
Kimberly smiled. "And I am the only one who makes you purr. Your gas attack has failed. There has been no counterstrike. You are safe to strike again. This time in secret. Send this assassin to kill the one most dear to the sheik. It is a humilation he deserves."
"Agreed. But it will bring war down on my head. Is that what you want?"
"Yes," Kimberly Baynes said, drawing close to Maddas Hinsein like a black raven with a sunflower head. "War is exactly what I want."
Maddas looked aghast. "You want my ruin?"
"No, I want to see you lord of the Middle East, and if you obey me in every way, that is exactly what you shall be."
Maddas Hinsein furrowed his dark brow. His eyes went to those of the American assassin who was called Remo.
The man obviously worshiped Kimberly. He had obeyed her in every respect so far.
"How do we know that once he is free, he will carry out your will?" he asked at last.
"Very simply, Precious Leader. Because I will go with him."
"Why?"
"Because we are destined to dance the Tandava together."
"I do not understand. Is that an American word?"
"No. It is more ancient than even Arabic. And in time you will understand all."
"Very well. But do not spank him. You are my mistress now. Your ministrations are reserved for Maddas Hinsein alone."
"Of course. I only have hands for you."
Kimberly drew near Remo. Remo gritted his teeth. Sweat broke out over his face. Her nearness was unbearable. The way she swayed when she walked, the knowing, mocking light in her violet eyes. Hadn't they been blue before? He must have been mistaken. He wanted to run from her. He also wanted to push her down on the dirty floor and rut like animals.
But Remo did neither. He had been commanded to stand at attention, and so he stood, arms at his sides, his manhood at half-mast under his black kimono.
"I told you that you would come to me," Kimberly said in English.
"I came," Remo said dully.
"We are going on a trip together. To Hamidi Arabia."
"Yes."
"You know Sheik Fareem?"
"Yes."
Kimberly laid spidery hands on his shoulders, saying, "Tell me truly. Who is his closet relative?"
"His son, Abdul."
Cupping Remo's jaw, Kimberly turned his head around so their eyes met. "Then you will kill Abdul. Before my eyes. As a sacrifice to me. Do you understand?" "Yes." "Are you ready?" Remo's mind screamed no, but he was helpless. His mouth said, "Yes." But his heart told him that even the cold Void would be better than this living hell.
Chapter 35
Harold Smith tried to reason it through.
It made no sense, none of it. Why would Maddas Hinsein initiate a lame gas attack on the Hamidi Arabian front lines? It was as if he were trying to bait America into a war Hinsein could not possibly win.
His behavior was incomprehensible. He blustered and boasted and hurled desperate empty threats in a foolish attempt to forestall what the world thought was an inevitable all-out assault on bait now officially the Republic of Iran. That last decree, as nothing before it, told of the man's desperation.
Army intelligence dismissed the failed nerve-gas attack as the result of the usual confusion stress placed on a command structure when hostilities appear imminent. But Smith had run a thorough character analysis on Maddas Hinsein. He was fifty-four years old, nearly the top life expectancy of the average Iraiti male. A visionary, he would do anything to prolong his life and fulfill what he perceived as his destiny as the liberator of the Arabs.
He was not reckless, but ignorant. He had stumbled into this situation through miscalculation. It was not in his character to attack against such overwhelming odds.
And now he had Remo in his power. Somehow.
As the CURE terminal scrolled news digests emanating out of the Middle East, one report caught his eyes.
"My God," Smith croaked.
He read an AP digest of a rash of strangulations that had taken place in the Star in the Center of the Flower of the East base.
Two people had been throttled-an Arab motor-pool corporal and a U.S. servicewoman, Carla Shaner. They had both been strangled with yellow silk scarves. This fact was the cause of much speculation in the Arab press, inasmuch as yellow ribbons symbolized U.S. hostages. Infidel Moslem-hating elements in the U.S. armed forces were being blamed.
Smith ran an in-depth computer analysis of the incident. A picture emerged. A picture of a nameless non-Arab American woman who had strangled the U.S. servicewoman, stolen her uniform, and used it to gain entry to the base, where she subsequently strangled the Hamidi corporal and obtained a Humvee vehicle.
To what purpose? Smith wondered.
"To penetrate Irait," he said hoarsely in the shaky fluorescent light of his Folcroft office. "To incite the other side." And suddenly Smith understood why the Iraiti ambassdor had been strangled with a yellow scarf in Washington. That was simply phase one, designed to exacerbate U.S.-Irait tensions.
"Who is this woman?" Smith asked the walls. "What goal could she possibly have in doing this?"
He recalled with a brain-clarifying shock the pretext under which he had sent Remo into the Middle East. The Calley Baynes who had flown to Libya was also the woman pretending to be Kimberly Baynes. But who was she?
Smith shut off the news-digest program and went into the airline file. There, siphoned off the national network of travel-agency and airline reservation computers, lay the last six months' worth of passenger reservations.
Smith called up the Middle East runs and ran the name:
"BAYNES, KIMBERLY."
After a moment the screen said: "BAYNES, KIMBERLY, NOT FOUND."
He keyed in: "BAYNES, CALLEY."
Up came: "BAYNES, CALLEY."
Under the rubric was a record of a flight from Tripoli to Nehmad, Hamidi Arabia.
With a tight grin of triumph, Harold Smith logged off that file and began a global search of the name Calley Baynes.
His smile quirked downward. The computer spat out another "NOT FOUND."
"Odd," he muttered. He stared at the screen. The name was an alias. Why had she chosen it?
Smith reached into his in basket, where the FBI artist's reconstruction of the Washington strangler reposed. He stared at the face. It was a pretty face, almost innocent.
On a hunch, he keyed into the FBI nationwide alert for the true Kimberly Baynes-the thirteen-year-old girl who had been reported kidnapped from her grandmother's Denver house.
Up came a digitized photo of the missing poster. It showed a wide-eyed innocent young blond girl.
Smith placed the artist's sketch next to the screen. But for the more mature lines of the face, they might have been sisters. There was a definite familial similarity.
Smith executed a thorough check of social-security records, looking for any Baynes-family female cousins. He found none. There were none.
Smith called up the digitized photo once more. And this time he noticed that the missing poster noted a tiny scar visible on the chin of the real Kimberly Baynes.
A scar reflected on the FBI sketch too.
"How can that be?" Smith muttered. "There must be ten years'
difference in their ages." As he stared, Smith noticed other too-close congruities. Too many to be coincidence.
Then it struck him. And cold horror filled his marrow. Suddenly everything that Remo Williams had said, the apparent nonsense about the Caldron of Blood and living Hindu gods, no longer seemed so preposterous.
These two-young girl and mature woman-were the same person.
And Harold Smith realized there was another way to spell Calley.
Kali.
"This cannot be," he said, even as he realized it was. He dug deep into his files, pulling up a long encyclopedia entry on the Hindu goddess Kali.
Harold Smith scanned the text. He learned that Kali was the terrible four-armed mother goddess of Hindu myth. Known as the Black One, she was a horrible personification of death and womanhood, who feasted on corpses and drank blood. She was, he read, the consort of Shiva the Destroyer, who was known as the Red One.
"Red One," Smith muttered. "Remo said Kimberly had called him that. And they would dance the Tandava in the Caldron of Blood."
Smith called up "TANDAVA."
"THE DANCE OF DESTRUCTION SHIVA DANCES IN CHIDAMBARAM, THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE," he read, "THUS CREATING AND RECREATING THE UNIVERSE OVER AND OVER."
He went to the Shiva file. Most of the information he knew. Shiva was one of the Hindu triad of gods, personification of the opposing forces of destruction and reintegration. His symbol was the lingam.
Smith input "LINGAM."
The definition was succinct: "PHALLUS."
And Smith remembered Remo's rather personal problem.
It was all, he decided, too much to be called coincidental.
Woodenly he logged off the encyclopedia file.
He leaned back in his chair, his gray eyes slipping out of focus.
"What if it's true?" he whispered, his voice awed. "What if it's really true?"
Stunned, he reached out for the red telephone. He hesitated, grimacing. What could he tell the President?
He turned in his big swiveling executive chair.
Out beyond the big picture window-his only window to the world during time of crisis-a bluish moon was rising over the liquid ebony waters of Long Island Sound. They were as black as an abyss.
Harold Smith was a practical man. The blood of his rock-ribbed New England ancestors flowed through his veins. Men who had come to a new world to carve out a new life. They had planted according to the almanac, worshiped in Spartan churches, and put aside family and farm when their country had called them to war and national service. Unsuperstitious men. Patriots.
But he knew in his heart that no ordinary power could sway Remo Williams to join the Iraiti side. He knew he had inadvertently sent Remo into the arms-the four arms, if his story could be believed-of an unclean thing that, whether or not she was Kali, possessed a supernatural power even a Master of Sinanju could not resist.
And he had lost Remo.
Now the world teetered on the edge of what Kimberly Baynes-if she truly was Kimberly Baynes anymore-called the Red Abyss.
No, Harold Smith realized, he could not tell the President. In truth, he could not do anything. He could only hope that some power greater than mortal man would intervene before the world was lost.
Harold Smith steepled his withered old fingers, as if in prayer. His dry lips parted as if to invoke salvation.
Smith hesitated. He no longer knew which gods he should invoke.
Finally he simply asked God the Father to preserve the world.
He was no sooner done than one of the desk phones shrilled in warning.
Smith turned in his seat. It was the multiline Folcroft phone. At this hour, it could be only one person.
"Yes, dear?" he said, picking up the phone.
"Harold," Maude Smith said. "How did you know it was me?"
"Only the director's wife would call at this hour."
Mrs. Smith hesitated. "Harold, are . . . are you coming home?"
"Yes. Soon."
"I'm a bit nervous tonight, Harold."
"Is something wrong?"
"I don't know. I'm uneasy. I can't explain it."
"I understand," Smith said in a comfortless voice. He was not good at this. He always had problems being warm. Even with his wife. "All this war talk."
"It's not that, Harold. I saw the strangest thing tonight."
"What is that?"
"Well, you remember those strange neighbors who lived next door. The ones who moved?"
"Of course I do."
"I thought I saw one of them not an hour ago."
Smith blinked, his heart racing. Remo! He had returned.
Smith took hold of his voice. "The young man?"
"No," Mrs. Smith said. "It was the other one."
"Impossible!" Smith blurted out.
"Why do you say that, Harold?"
"I . . . understood he returned to his home. In Korea."
"You did tell me that, yes. I remember now." Mrs. Smith paused. "But I happened to look out the dining-room window, and I saw him in the house."
"What was he doing?" Smith asked in a strangely thin tone.
"He was . . ." Mrs. Smith's somewhat frumpy-sounding voice trailed off. She gathered it again. "Harold, he was staring at me."
"He was?"
"I lifted my hand to wave to him, but he simply threw up his hands and the most ungodly expression came over him. I can't describe it. It was terrible."
"You are certain of this, dear?"
"I'm not finished, Harold. He threw up his hands and then he simply . . . went away."
"Went away?"
"He . . . vanished."
"Vanished?"
"Harold, he faded away," Mrs. Smith said resolutely. "Like a ghost. You know I don't put any stock in such things, Harold, but that is what I saw. Do you . . . you don't think that I could be coming down with that memory disease? Oh, what is it called?"
"Alzheimer's, and I do not think that at all. Please relax, dear. I am coming home."
"When?"
"Instantly," said Harold W. Smith, who did not believe in ghosts either, but who wondered if he had not beseeched the proper god after all.
Chapter 36
Abdul Hamid Fareem had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. He was proud to bear the name Hamid.
But pride alone is not enough to make one worthy of standing in line to be the next sheik.
Abdul Fareem had been disinherited by his father, the sheik of the Hamid tribe. He had been forced to divorce his good wife, Zantos, whom he had not appreciated-doing this by pronouncing the words, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," in the manner prescibed by Islam. Then he was forced to marry a Western woman of low morals, whom he did deserve.
The Western woman of low morals put up with him but three months as Abdul, exiled to Kuran, tried to scratch out a living as a moneylender. The white woman left when he had gone bankrupt. Lacking good judgment himself, he could hardly recognize a poor credit risk when he saw one.
When the Iraitis rolled over helpless Kuran, Abdul Fareem was the first to break for the border. And the first to find sanctuary.
He would have kept on going, straight for the emirates, but he had no money. Settling in the windblown border outpost of Zar, he earned a meager living as a camel groom. He let anyone who would listen know that he had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. And all had laughed. Not because they disbelieved his tale, but because they knew that fat Abdul Fareem had been of so base a character that even the right-thinking and kind sheik had disowned him.
Abdul Fareem had never sunk so low as these days. He had no money, no wife, no respect. Only the contempt of his fellow Arabs.
So it came as a tremendous surprise to him when soldiers in desert camouflage utilities stole in and abducted him as he slept on a bed of straw and camel dung in an open-air stable.
They gagged his mouth. They bound his struggling hands and feet as his three-hundred-pound body squirmed helplessly. And they bore him off to
a waiting Land Rover.
The Land Rover chewed up sand and barreled north. North-to occupied Kuran. Abdul Fareem's heart quailed at the fearsome realization.
They took him to a desert camp and flung him overboard like a sack of meal. It took all four of them.
Soldiers fell on him. Others, bearing video-camera equipment, trained their glassy lenses on his shame. Many brought lights that were trained on him. He felt like a bug. But then, he had always felt like a bug. A corpulent bug.
A woman stepped from between two lights. She was a black silhouette, her abayuh flowing, impelled by a warm desert breeze.
Bending over, she removed his gag. It flashed before his eyes, and he saw for the first time that it was of silk. Yellow. No wonder it had felt so fine in his mouth. It had reminded him of the silk sheets on which he had passed many nights with the good Arab woman who had been too good for him.
"If you have abducted me for ransom," he told the woman, "you have wasted your time."
The woman's violet eyes flashed. She turned to the others.
"Fools! This is a mere fellahin. He smells of dung. He is not the sheik's son."
"I am the sheik's son," former Prince Abdul insisted, gathering the ragged shreds of his pride around him.
Another figure stepped forward. He wore a black silk costume like a thobe, two tigers stitched on the chest. An American, from the look of him. His eyes were like gems of death.
"That is he," the man said in numb English. "That is Abdul Fareem."
"But he smells," the woman said, also in English. American English. She sounded like his wife. The loose one. He wondered why she wore the abayuh.
The man in the black tiger costume shrugged.
"He is an Arab," he said woodenly.
"My father will not ransom me," Abdul said in English.
"That is well," the woman said. "The money he will save can be put to your burial."
And at that, the video cameras began whirring.
The woman in the abayuh stood up. She faced the man in the silken regalia. "There is your first sacrifice to me. Lay his broken corpse at my feet."
And with tears coming into his cruel dark eyes, the vision in black silk strode forward. His strong hands lifted, the cables and thews of his thick wrists working and pulsing, as if fighting the task the hands were about to undertake.
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