Timber Line td-42

by Warren Murphy

  "Would you like some tea?" she asked him

  Remo hesitated. Since he had been brought, kicking

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  and screaming, into the House of Sinanju, his body had changed. He could no longer eat as he once did: Additives could kill him; most food made him want to throw up. His body was too closely tuned, too sensitive to sensation, to tolerate the garbage that most Americans compacted into their mouths. He was hesitant even to try other people's tea,

  "It is not bad tea," said Chiun.

  "For an American?" Remo asked.

  "For an American, it is excellent tea," Chiun said. "For a Korean, it is not bad."

  "Good. Then I'll have some," Remo said.

  "Same way, right. No sugar, no milk, no lemon, no anything," she told him

  "Right," Remo agreed.

  "I never could drink it that way," she said. She began to stutter slightly and then stopped. "Oscar always drank his the same way."

  "Don't dwell on it, kid," Remo said, rising to take the cup from her. "What's done is done."

  "I know." She made an obvious attempt to be more cheerful. "And now for the good news."

  "All right," Remo said. "What's the good news?"

  "We've figured out how to solve the problem of making the copa-ibas grow in this climate. Or, at least, I think we have."

  "Great," Remo said, "How'd you do that?" Behind him,'he heard Pierre LaRue lean forward on the rocking chair to listen.

  "Actually, Chiun figured it out."

  "It was nothing," Chiun said. Remo nodded agreement. Chiun added, "For me, that is. For Remo, it would have been impossible, because it involved thinking."

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  Joey reached out and touched Chiun's hand good-humoredly. For a fraction of a second, Remo thought he could see a flicker of pride pass through the old man's eyes.

  "So what's the solution?" Remo asked. "Or maybe I better ask first, what was the problem?"

  "The problem has always been that copa-iba is a tropical tree," Joey said.

  "Not Korean?" asked Remo, with a serious face.

  "We have resolved that satisfactorily," Chiun said. "Probably the tree was brought from Korea to Brazil many thousands of years ago. Then it was brought to this country."

  Remo nodded. "Got it," he said.

  "With a tropical tree," Joey said, "there's practically no place in the continental U.S. where we can grow them, except for a little fringe on the Texas gulf coast and a little tiny bit of southern Florida."

  "So the problem is trying to find a way to make them grow up here in this dismal climate," Remo said. "That's why all the blowers and the fans and heaters?"

  "That's right," she said.

  "Does it work?" '

  "In a way," Joey said. "I mean, we can grow the trees that way. No doubt about it. But it's not worth it. We use more oil and gasoline to run the equipment than the oil we can get out of the trees. The only reason we've been keeping it going is to have some adult trees to study."

  "Then the experiment was a flop?" Remo said.

  "No. I didn't say that. The big breakthrough was about six months ago. After all this time of planning and trying and fooling around, we finally discovered a way to get the copa-iba seeds to sprout quickly. It used

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  to take thirty to forty years for a single seed to germinate. Now we can get it to do that in only three or four weeks. That was the first breakthrough."

  "How do you do it?" Remo asked.

  Joey walked back to the fire. Behind him, Pierre was still not rocking, Remo noticed.

  "I'm not sure I should tell you," Joey said.

  "I think you should. It might help us figure out what's going on around here," Remo said.

  "What do you mean?"

  "I mean that people didn't start dying until your breakthrough with getting seeds to sprout or whatever."

  Joey hesitated for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, all I do is soak the seeds in this special mixture I've developed. And it works. It really works."

  "And who else knew about this mixture besides you?"

  "Knows it exists?" asked Joey.

  "Yes."

  "A hundred people at Tulsa Torrent," she said.

  "Who knew what was in it?" asked Remo.

  "Just Danny and Oscar and me."

  "And now they're, dead and somebody's trying to kill you," Remo said.

  "It looks that way," she said.

  "Why is this so important?" Remo asked. "So who cares if seeds whatchamacallit in weeks or years?"

  "It speeds up research. Look. Suppose we grow a hundred trees and two of them seem to have a special resistance to cold. Well, we can take those trees and cross-fertilize them and plant them and get a lot more trees and maybe if you're lucky a lot of them will be more resisfant to the cold. And you keep doing it. But if you can only get seeds every thirty years, it's going to

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  take you centuries to make a dent. That's why my breakthrough was so important; now we can speed up the research program."

  "I see. Now what does Chiun have to do with all this marvelous wisdom?" Remo said.

  "Black silk and spacing," she said. "It's just so obvious none of us ever thought of it."

  "You should have asked me," Remo said. "The first thing I think about in the morning is black silk and spacing."

  Chiun snorted. Joey laughed.

  "What are you talking about, black silk and spacing?" Remo asked.

  "The bottom line here is to get these trees growing in this northern climate. We know with enough time we're going to build a super-tree that can thrive up here. But what about in the meantime? All we've been able to figure out is this dumb heating system that uses fifty gallons of oil to make maybe a quart in a tree. Chain's found a better way to grow the trees."

  "It was easy," Chiun said. "In my village of Sinanju, everybody knows things like that. Except white people who visit occasionally. They don't know anything."

  "What Chiun said was this," Joey explained. "Thin out the copa-ibas. Then in the spaces between and around them, plant pine trees. Cover the ground under the trees with black silk with vents cut in it. Now, what happens is that the needles fall off the pine trees, through the vents in the silk, and pile up on the ground. With a watering system, you keep them wet. The black silk absorbs sunlight and heat, and helps build a giant compost heap under all the trees. Then the vents let out heat and moisture. This keeps the copa-iba trees warm and wet, just as they are in Brazil. What it does is to

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  use the pine trees to create artificial environment that can keep the copa-ibas alive anywhere in the world."

  "Will it work?" Remo said.

  "I think so," she said. "I'm sure it will. As soon as the winter breaks, we're going to give it a try. It's a brilliant idea."

  "I could have thought of that," Remo said. "It was just that no one ever explained the problem to me. It's obvious. The first thing to do would have been to use black silk. Anybody knows that."

  "Well, Chiun told me. He's so wise," Joey said.

  "He is something, that's for sure," Remo said.

  Behind him, he heard Pierre LaRue get to his feet, yawn elaborately, and walk toward them.

  "Peer turn in," he said. "A long night last night."

  Joey wished him good night, Remo nodded, and Chiun ignored the big Frenchman as he stomped heavily out the front door.

  But sleep was not on Pierre LaRue's mind.

  Once outside the bunkhouse, he started through the woods, down the hillside to the road, and along the road toward the Mountain High group's encampment and the luxuriously appointed trailer of Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright. It was Thursday night and he had made the trip every Thursday night for the past three months, ever since the Mountain Highs had arrived to harass this station of the Tulsa Torrent company.

  He remembered that first night. He was too bone-tired to do anything except chug down a few beers and collapse into bed, and she had come up to him in the
little tavern in the village down below and asked him to dance.

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  He asked her who she was, and she replied that she was the enemy. She had come to put him and his company out of business. She was a lady, a very important lady—no doubt about it—and he had not even had time to put on a clean shirt after his day's work, much less shower and splash himself with cologne. But it didn't matter to her. They danced, and he tried to reason with her. He explained why Tulsa Torrent was a good company that actually improved the land, by making it more fertile, and growing more trees than they cut down. But she ground her body against his and said she had heard all the arguments, and she was still against the company.

  Then she took him back to her trailer and did things to his body that he had only read about in books, and then he spent the rest of the night acting like a battering ram. In the morning, he could barely move; he was so stiff and tired he slept-walked through his day's work. But she had told him she wanted him back the following Thursday.

  And she insisted that he not shower first. So he came to her without washing the sweat from his bódy and never once would she let him out of her arms while they were together. If they even snacked at night, they did it while their loins were still locked, one into the other.

  But tonight, Pierre LaRue was not looking forward to lovemaking. The things that Joey had said about being the last one alive who knew how to make the copa-iba seeds grow faster made him uncomfortable, particularly with the growing craziness of the Mountain Highs.

  He would reason with Mrs. Winston-Alright tonight

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  and ask her to pack up her band of followers and go home, and the first one she should send away was that oily little assistant of hers. The man's name was Ararat, and the woman always called him Ari. But to Pierre, the man was Arat. As he walked through the moonlight and the snow, Pierre laughed aloud. Arat was a good name for the man, he thought, because that was what the little fellow was : a rat.

  When LaRue got to Mrs. Winston-Alright's trailer and knocked on the back door, he was surprised to see Arat open the door. The little man smiled at him; he looked so greasy that Pierre thought if he gave him one good squeeze, the man would ooze juice.

  "Ah, Pierre," the small man said. "How nice to see you again."

  LaRue mumbled an acknowledgment.

  "Cicely's waiting for you in the back room," the man said.

  Pierre stepped inside the trailer and walked toward the small bedroom in the back. He heard the steps of the small man behind him. The door to the bedroom was closed. Pierre opened it, then stopped short, in horror, as the butchered pieces of Cicely Winston-Alright's body, strewn onto the bedspread, filled him with fear and shock.

  He wheeled to face the little man.

  Ararat Carpathian raised Mrs. Winston-Alright's little silver-plated revolver and shot the big Frenchman in the chest twice.

  Pierre fell like one of his beloved trees.

  The small man took the double-bladed axe from behind the door and carefully fitted it into the dead lumberjack's huge hands.

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  Then he searched carefully to find Mrs. Winstpn-Alright's right hand, put th« gun in it and dropped it onto the floor.

  Having completed his mission, Ararat Carpathian fled from the trailer.

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  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The bunkhouse was quiet. Joey Webb slept curled like a two-year-old on a fur rag in front of the fire. Not far away, Chiun sat on the floor, legs folded under him. He had managed to confiscate some paper and an old fountain pen from the desk, and despite grumbling that it was impossible for a civilized man to write with junk and toys, he was busy writing another chapter for the History of Sinanju. Now that Joey had explained to him how he may have saved the Western world from the Arab oil threat by discovering how to make the copaibas grow, Chiun thought that all generations to come should know of this.

  He had tentatively entitled the chapter: "Chiun Saves the Barbarians."

  Remo sat in a chair, watching Chiun.

  The telephone rang. It was a soft ring, and Joey did not even stir in her sleep. Chiun said, "It is becoming impossible to work with all these interruptions. Please answer that thing."

  "Let it ring," Remo said.

  "Answer it," Chiun commanded.

  Remo walked over to the telephone. He half expected Smith's acid voice to bite at him over the phone, but instead the voice was one he had not expected.

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  It was an oily, insidious half-whisper, hissing "Remo, Remo, Remo." It was the same voice Remo had found on the tape recorder the night before.

  "Who is this?" Remo said.

  The faraway voice ignored the question. Instead it hissed, "LaRue needs you. At Cicely's trailer. Hurry, Remo."

  "Who is this?" Remo said again. The voice was familiar but not familiar—as if it were a voice he had heard before but talking through a series of bafñes that changed its pitch and rhythm.

  The telephone clicked in his ear.

  "I have to go," Remo told Chiun.

  "Good. Take the telephone with you," Chiun said.

  Remo pushed off through the woods, jogging up to the road, and then down toward the Mountain High encampment. Of course, it was a trap. He knew that. But right now, walking into a trap might be his best lead, his only w.ay out of the dead-end of this puzzle.

  Still, he was on his guard as he moved toward the clearing that the Mountain Highs infested.

  The first thing he noticed was the silence. Before, there had been people moving around inside the tents, talking, cooking, making love. Now, there was only stillness. He moved into the shadow of a tree to look over the area.

  OS in the far left corner of the clearing, he saw a cluster of three people. They were holding portable lights and camera equipment. Remo was puzzled. Apparently what they wanted was to film him. But why? And what about Pierre LaRue? How was he involved?

  In the cluster of people in the far corner, he recognized the oily little man who was Cicely Winston-Alright's aide. Some kind of setup, he thought again.

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  Remo pushed his way quietly along the edge of the clearing, watching for movement, traveling noiselessly across the top of the snow. When the trailer was between him and the cluster of people, Remo dropped to -the snow and, skittering across its surface like a crab across sand, slid under the trailer.

  Quietly he moved to the far end of the trailer. In the shadows, he could not be seen. He heard their voices.

  "Be ready," he heard the oily man say. "When he goes in, we'll set up, and then when he comes out, we'll film him. Then we'll niove right into the trailer and film inside."

  "What's inside that's such a big deal?" someone asked.

  "You'll see," the oily man said.

  Remo moved back to the far end of the trailer. He would be just about under the kitchen, he figured. He reached up with both hands and felt one of the metal panels that provided the sub-flooring for the trailer. He slammed out with the spear of a hardened fingertip and punched a hole into the thin steel. There was one muffled thump and then silence. He waited. No one had heard. The three people in the corner of the clearing kept whispering to each other.

  Carefully, Remo extended the hole in the steel, until it was large enough for both his hands to dig into. Then he carefully, slowly, and quietly ripped out the panel and set it on the ground. Above him, the flooring was a series of plywood squares, covered, he remembered, with nine-inch-square vinyl tiles. Remo used the heel of his hand to thump up against the plywood. It gave immediately, and a wedge of space opened up into the trailer above. Remo waited for a few moments to make

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  sure no one had heard, then moved through the narrow opening up into the trailer. *

  The structure was dark, but light filtering in from outdoors made it seem as bright as daylight to Remo.

  He moved toward Cicely Winston-Alright's bedroom at the far end of the trailer. On the floor, in the doorway, he saw Pie
rre LaRue. He bent down next to the man. He saw the bullet wounds in the chest. There was a faint pulse in LaRue's neck and as he touched it, Remo heard the big Frenchman groan softly.

  There was nothing Remo could do. Perhaps if he had come ten minutes sooner. But too much blood had been lost.

  Remo tried to make him comfortable.

  "Pierre, who did this?" he asked.

  "A rat," LaRue said. "A rat did zees. And inside, too."

  "Worse than a rat," Remo said, not understanding.

  "A rat," LaRue said. In the dimness, his eyes pleaded for understanding, for comprehension on Re-mo's part. "A rat. A rat."

  He bubbled blood for a few seconds, then his lips turned blue. His hands began to slash and his eyes rolled back in his head. Pierre LaRue died.

  What had he meant, "Inside, too"? Remo stood up and looked into the bedroom. He found Cicely. There was no need to check to see if she were dead. There weren't any pieces big enough to sustain life.

  Remo understood now why the men were outside. They wanted to film him and LaRue and the woman. They were going to blame her death on Tulsa Torrent, perhaps use it all to kick off a riot that could sweep like a flood through the Tulsa Torrent land and destroy the copa-ibas.

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  r

  Remo was angry. He had liked LaRue.

  He lifted LaRue in his arms and brought him back to the trapdoor he had cut in the kitchen floor. Gently, as if the man were still alive, he lowered him down to the ground.

  Then he went back to get LaRue's axe. He dropped it, too, through the opening. For a moment, he considered disposing also of Cicely's butchered body, but decided it was too messy. He let himself back down through the kitchen floor, then pulled the plywood and tile back into place from below. He bent up the ripped steel panel.

  He had the feeling that he was forgetting something, something he should check. It gnawed at him, but he shrugged it off and scrambled to the end of the trailer, pulling Pierre LaRue's body after him.

  Once he got out from under the structure, he hoisted Pierre LaRue into his arms, grabbed the double-faced axe in his right hand, and moved off silently into the safe darkness of the trees.

  As he walked back through the woods toward Alpha Camp, Remo could feel Pierre's body growing cold in his arms. Remo stopped on the hill overlooking the valley of copa-iba trees. The heat from the generators and blowers moved up around them, along with the scent of gasoline and the noise of motors. Remo shook his head. Was it all worth it? Were these trees worth so many lives? Were they worth the life of this big, glorious, happy Frenchman he carried in his arms?