Feeding Frenzy td-94

by Warren Murphy

  Finally, Smith said, "I have accessed the airline reservation computer system, Remo. Senator Clancy appears headed back to Washington. His mother and a woman identified here as Nalini Toshi were due to arrive in Boston's Logan Airport in five hours, with connections to the Hayannis Airport."

  "We go after her?"

  The line hummed in the silence that followed.

  "Remo, this is a very sensitive matter. But yes, go to the Clancy Compound, locate and interrogate this woman. Do it quietly. There is no telling where this could lead."

  "What about Clancy?"

  "If the trail leads to the senator, it leads to him and that bridge will be crossed if and when necessary."

  "We're on our way."

  "First, there is something you must do."

  "What's that?"

  "Eradicate those infernal spiders before more people die."

  And Smith hung up.

  "Guess who just pulled extermination detail?" Remo told Chiun.

  Chapter 23

  The spiders that resembled ants were very easy to kill. And because they were a distinctive rusty red, they were easy to locate too.

  The trouble was, there were tons of them. And the press was starting to creep back into Nirvana West.

  Remo caught up with the Master of Sinanju and said, "This could take all day."

  "Then it will take all day," said Chiun. "It is our assignment. "

  Remo lowered his voice. "We might not get them all, you know."

  "We are Sinanju. We will get them all if you have to get down on your hands and knees and pursue them into their very lairs."

  "Thanks for volunteering me," Remo said dryly. "But I have a better idea."

  Chiun looked doubtful. "Yes?"

  Remo stepped on a patch of dry grass and weeds with his shoe. The underbrush crackled.

  "One match would get rid of all the bugs and this ecological sinkhole too."

  Chiun gasped. "We are assassins, not arsonists. Would you shame the art?"

  "Would you rather chase spiders into next Tuesday?" Remo countered.

  The Master of Sinanju stroked his wispy beard thoughtfully.

  "I will turn my back. What you do or do not do shames your ancestors, not mine."

  Remo grinned broadly. "Fine with me. I don't even know my ancestors."

  Remo picked up a dry twig, found another, and knelt in a particularly dry patch of brush. He tried the old Boy Scout trick of starting a fire. After ten minutes, he had a hole in the ground on two well-worn twigs.

  He found a piece of hard rock and held one in the brush. With the edge of his other hand, he began chipping off pieces. Sparks flew. One started smoldering in the grass and Remo blew on it until he got fire.

  He stood up and stepped back.

  "I think I did it," he called over to Chiun.

  "I am not looking," replied the Master of Sinanju. "To look is to accede. I am ignorant of any disgraceful behavior.

  The fire was going good now. It leapt and spread outward. Spiders scurried. They were fast. The flames were faster.

  "Okay, let's get out of here," said Remo.

  It took two or three hours, but Nirvana West was a conflagration, kept from enveloping the surrounding hills by fire trucks and helicopters dropping orange fire retardant chemicals.

  Surveying the scene from a nearby hill, Remo and Chiun were confident they had gotten them all.

  "I think we're leaving Nirvana West in better shape than we found it," Remo said happily.

  Chiun cast his eyes skyward. "I know nothing of what this uncontrollable white is saying," he informed his ancestors.

  They were walking back to their car, which they had parked in a secluded area, away from everything, when a black hearse pulled up.

  A desiccated voice asked, "Is this Nirvana West?"

  "What's left of it," Remo said.

  "Where are the dying?"

  "There aren't any."

  The hearse door popped open and the last person Remo expected to see in Nirvana West emerged. He wore black. His round-brimmed hat was black. As was his string tie. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked cadaver of a man, with dry skin and quarrelsome birdlike eyes.

  "I have come a long way to assist them in their final agony," said the disconsolate voice of Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian.

  "You know," said Remo, his eyes going hard, "I've been hoping to meet up with you for a long, long time."

  Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian shifted his quick black eyes from Remo to the Master of Sinanju.

  "You do not look well," he told Chiun.

  Chiun lifted his chin proudly.

  "I have the strength of a lion and the heart of an eagle."

  Dr. Gregorian looked back at Remo and said, "Alzheimer's. Very sad. I will be happy to ease him to the other side. For a modest one thousand dollars. Less than the cost of a common vasectomy."

  And Chiun gasped like a startled old maid.

  Remo moved then. He grabbed the man's shoulder and squeezed. Instantly. Dr. Gregorian's eyes popped out in his gaunt face and he went down on his knobby knees.

  "This is for all the little old ladies you keep snuffing," Remo growled, lifting his hand.

  A thin wrist blocked the blow before it could begin. Chiun's.

  "He's mine," said Remo.

  "He is not!" snapped Chiun. "He is not to be killed. "

  "We've had this argument before. He's a ghoul."

  "I'm a licensed pathologist," gasped Gregorian, his eyes closed in pain. "Retired."

  "He performs a service," said Chiun.

  Remo glowered. "Not good enough, Chiun."

  "And he is not an assignment."

  "So? He's a freebie."

  "If the House of Sinanju performs service without proper compensation, then word will get out and no gold will be offered to us."

  "Take it up with Smith."

  "Remo, do not be an amateur."

  Remo hesitated. There was cold fire in the Master of Sinanju's eyes.

  And because he respected his teacher above all others, Remo gave Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian a final squeeze that left him squirming in a spreading pool of a bodily fluid that was not blood.

  "Some day," Remo vowed, walking away, "I'm going to get to waste him."

  "And if Emperor Smith so decrees it, I will be the one to dispatch that ignoramus," Chin spat.

  Remo looked surprised. "What changed your mind?"

  "I do not care that he eases the suffering of those who choose to hire his services, vile as they may be. But did you hear the pitiful price he quoted for my life? One thousand dollars, Remo. Paper money. Not even gold. The man obviously has no idea who he wished to snuff."

  And despite himself, Remo laughed as he started up the car.

  Chapter 24

  Harold W. Smith sat before his computer screen. On it he had typed the names of the key players in the problem of Human Environmental Liability Paradox. His analytical mind found working with tables very productive as a focusing tool.

  He went down the list.

  It had all begun with Brother Karl Sagacious, now deceased. He appeared to be a fool who stumbled across fool's gold.

  Theodore Magarac, alias Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, was now deceased too. It no longer appeared to be likely that Magarac had done away with Sagacious. But someone had murdered him, Lee Esterquest, and all the remaining members of People Against Protein Assassins at Nirvana West. But who?

  Jane Goodwoman, also dead, was never much of a suspect, despite Remo's suspicions.

  The loss of Dale Parsons, the CDC pathologist, was more troublesome. Even if Smith could somehow get out the word of the truth behind the HELP scare, without a credible spokesman wielding hard evidence there was no turning back the thunderbug mania. All over the country, teenagers and people seeking to lose weight without going on starvation diets were eating thunderbugs. It was ridiculous. And here was a United States senator, attended by a pack of media hounds, vowing to expend unguessed sums of taxpayer moneys just
so people could go on eating an unsafe bug, instead of counseling against the cheaper and more reasonable solution of not eating the thunderbug in the first place.

  Where was everyone's common sense?

  Now that Smith knew the truth-that Ingraticus Avalonicus was not the source of HELP-it was just as important that the facts come out. Those people were slowly starving themselves by eating a worthless nugget of undigestible protein.

  Which brought Smith back to the central problem. Who was behind HELP?

  Senator Ned J. Clancy remained the top suspect. There was no doubt that he was tied into it all. His mother's nurse, Nalini Toshi, clearly controlled the exotic but venomous spiders that were--or seemed to be-responsible for the actual HELP, in reality not a virus, or a disease at all. But a subtle toxin, administered by a spider.

  Was Nalini the mastermind? If so, what was her motive?

  Was she a tool of Senator Clancy? If so, what could his motive be?

  And there was the missing Thrush Limburger. He had been as quick as Clancy to leap on the HELP bandwagon. Except that he had been out to expose it. Or so he had claimed until his bizarre and puzzling disappearance.

  Had Limburger discovered the truth? If so, who had abducted him? And where was he now? Was he even alive?

  Harold Smith preferred not to think the worst. That Thrush Limburger was in fact the author of the Human Environmental Liability Paradox, and had engineered this entire scenario as a way to boost his already meteoric ratings.

  Still, in some way, it was preferable to the only other probability.

  Namely, that Senator Ned J. Clancy was orchestrating everything and had from the very beginning.

  There remained one unknown. The Eldress. Theodore Magarac had spoken of her in his dying moments. Who was she? There was ample evidence that she was Nalini Toshi, who although young, seemed to be the last survivor of an ancient cult of assassins who killed via venomous spiders.

  There was no one else left on the board.

  His computer beeped, and Smith froze his on-screen table and shrank it into a corner of the screen. An incoming news bulletin, siphoned off the wire services, was appearing.

  It was a report of a speech Senator Ned J. Clancy was giving upon his arrival at Washington National Airport. It was about HELP.

  Smith read the text through rimless eyeglasses and muttered, "The man sounds like he has begun his reelection campaign early."

  And then it hit Harold W. Smith.

  A motive. There was a motive for scaring the nation with a plague that defied analysis. A virus that did not exist in the first place. Smith knew that in the history of the human race, no cure had ever been found for a virus. The common cold, a virus so simple it killed no one but the very infirm, had never been cured despite intense medical research.

  But if the virus was a fraud, a fraudulent cure could be made to appear to succeed.

  And the man or woman who cured that virus would be a national hero. He would be lauded and lionized and there would be no stopping him.

  Even if he chose to ride his fame to the highest office in the land.

  And in that flash of realization, Harold W. Smith got his first inkling of who the Eldress was and why she had set into motion the events that were now culminating in CURE's enforcement arm about to infiltrate the Clancy family compound.

  Harold W. Smith removed his glasses and, closing his tired eyes, he murmured a heartfelt prayer.

  In his heart, he knew he had sent his enforcement arm after the wrong target. He only hoped they realized the truth in time ....

  Chapter 25

  Darkness had fallen when Remo piloted his car over the Sagamore Bridge to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

  They had flown to Boston, stopping to change clothes in their condominium castle. Chiun had taken the time to excavate a scroll from one of the many steamer trunks, which he immediately began to write on.

  "We don't have time for this," Remo had said impatiently.

  "It is important that the truth be recorded about Master Sambari and the Spider Divas," returned Chiun, setting up his ink stone and weighing down the four corners of the peeling scroll with polished sapphires.

  "Why?"

  "Because if we fail, future generations must know that the Spider Divas employed a certain perfume to mark their intended victims." He inscribed slashing strokes on the scroll.

  Remo blinked. "What future generations? There's only you and me."

  "If I perish, I know you will be too lazy to record this important truth. I am only protecting your future pupil. Besides, your Hangul characters are atrocious. No one can read them."

  "If we don't get a move on," Remo warned, "we're going to blow this mission and we'll be out of a job."

  "I am nearly finished. And for what we must do, darkness will be our friend."

  Now they were driving through the Cape Cod darkness, past slant-roofed capes with their weathered cedar shingles. The Atlantic rushed and roared in the near distance. The moon was an ivory coin low on the horizon. As it rose in the sky, it seemed to grow in size.

  It was probably for the best, Remo had decided as they neared the Clancy compound, the tension going out of his body. Darkness would help them. Chiun had changed into a night black stalking kimino, with a slightly shorter skirt and high sleeves. Remo wore the traditional two-piece fighting outfit of the night tigers of Sinanju's early days.

  Chiun, noticing Remo's slow relaxing, said, "You have no qualms about facing the temptress Nalini?"

  "I owe her for what she tried to do to me," said Remo, not taking his eyes off the road. "And for murdering Parsons."

  "You care for her still?"

  Remo frowned. "I hardly got to know her. A one-night stand. Big deal."

  "Your words mask your hurt."

  Remo was silent a long time.

  "She's mine."

  "If you will have her."

  "I have no problem taking out somebody who tried to dump me in the boneyard," Remo said tightly.

  "You will be able to prove this very shortly," the Master of Sinanju said in a warning tone.

  Remo said nothing. His flat dark eyes, fixed on the road ahead, were as unreadable as obsidian chips.

  On either side of the road, Cape Cod saltbox cottages whisked by like mausoleums.

  Chapter 26

  Seamus O'Toole was head of security for the Clancy family.

  He was of solid, Irish-Catholic stock, born and bred in South Boston. For twenty years he had walked a beat on Broadway, from the quiet days of the early 1960s through the tumultuous events of the busing crisis to the day they found his police cruiser parked behind the Gillette factory, with Seamus slumped over the wheel, two quarts of good Irish whiskey burning in his belly.

  He had not responded to the officer down radio call and because of his dereliction of duty, a gut-shot rookie had bled to death. At the hearing, he was thrown off the force without so much as a by-your-leave. After twenty good years. And for what? The one who had died was only an Italian.

  But a fondness for the bottle was not looked upon as a weakness in the Clancy compound, and when his brother, a ward heeler of the old school, told his cousin, who in turn passed word to an aide to Senator Ned Clancy, a spot was made for Seamus O'Toole on the security staff of the Clancy compound.

  They only had to fire one Polack to make the spot too.

  In the decade following, O'Toole had risen to the exalted position of head of Clancy security, which was not so exalted in these days of dwindling elder Clancys and rambunctious younger Clancys. One by one, all the others had been laid off and only O'Toole remained, in charge of electronic gadgets he didn't understand. What was the world coming to?

  Thank goodness, he reflected as he made the round of the walled compound before shutting the electric gate for the night, that the young rambunctious ones took their highjinks down to Florida and other such warm climates. Seamus O'Toole could abide with high-spirited drinking and ravishing a semiwilling girl or two, bu
t it was getting out of hand, what with the rape trials and the accidental drownings and the like.

  Seamus liked to keep his conscience as clear as possible. The fewer trips to the confession box the better for him. His knees were so bad it was all he could do to properly kneel during the Communion service.

  The last of the bushes checked, O'Toole wandered back to the electric gate. The elder Mrs. Clancy and her entourage had returned to the compound and were now safely bedded down for the night.

  There was no reason to leave the gate open any longer, and so he went to the guard box and tripped the red switch. The gates closed with the well-oiled silence that only the finest security system money could buy could guarantee.

  Then he flipped the black, green, and blue switches that activated the motion sensors, video cameras, and other more exotic devices.

  Then, confident that his charges were as safe as in the Virgin's arms, Seamus O'Toole stripped the paper wrapping off the fresh jug of Gallo cream sherry and settled down to a long, comfortable evening's diversion.

  He needed it after lugging that huge steamer trunk into the cellar. It felt like it was stuffed with baby elephants.

  Chapter 27

  Remo parked the car within sight of the high brick wall of the Hyannisport compound where three generations of Clancys had retreated when they wished to escape the glare of the press-or the consequences of their actions.

  The place was a sprawling white monstrosity that looked like someone with too much money and not enough taste had taken a simple Victorian house and added wings and gables until he had finally run out of money or land or both. Its yellow-lit windows peered over the barbed wire and jagged glass of the compound wall like a crouching octopus in fear of the encroaching sea. Waves crashed against stone jetties down by the private beach.

  "This place has probably got more security than the White House," Remo warned Chiun.

  The Master of Sinanju shrugged his frail shoulders in the darkness.

  "A fortress is a fortress," he sniffed. "If there are ways out, there are ways in. We will discover the one that affords us the greatest element of surprise."

  "What's the best way in?" Remo asked.

  Chiun looked up. "Why do you ask me?"

  "You're the teacher."

  "And you are the pupil. Therefore, you must find your own way if you are to learn."