The Ultimate Death td-88

by Warren Murphy

  Remo was about to ask him what he meant by that when Poulette continued, "Don Pietro asked me to put Sal on the inspection line. I think Sal was family-you know, blood family-but kind of soft in the head, so I put him on the payroll."

  "So Scubisci is poisoning America," Remo said.

  "No." It was Chiun. He was shaking his bald head.

  "What do you mean, 'no'?" Remo asked. "He probably has some scam worked out where he sells the antidote to local supermarkets. He's our man."

  "I agree with him," Poulette said, indicating Chiun.

  "Big surprise there," Remo said, sarcastically.

  "No. Listen. Don Pietro has too big a stake in Poulette Farms," Poulette continued. "Besides, Sal has been spending quite a bit of time up the hill lately. If there's anyone who put him up to it, it's those vegetarian loonies."

  "Who?" Remo asked.

  "You must have seen them on the way in," Poulette said. "The nuts with the 'Reject Meat' signs? They're from Three-G."

  "What is this 'Three-G'?" Chiun asked, suddenly interested.

  "A pain in the crop," Poulette responded. "The guy who used to run it, Gideon, was kind of offbeat, but friendly: A good neighbor, member of the local chamber of commerce, that sort of thing. Since he left, I don't know what it's become. Some sort of commune, I think. They started picketing me last week."

  "We will go there," Chiun said firmly.

  Remo frowned. "Whoa! Could you check that enthusiasm for a minute, and tell me where the hell it came from?"

  "They are closest to this den of horror," Chiun said, reasonably. "And they did not wish for us to eat duck. Therefore, we must investigate these vegetable-devourers."

  "Yeah!" Poulette's head bounced wildly. "Motive and opportunity! He's right!" He waved a bony finger at Chiun.

  "Since when did you two get so chummy?" Remo demanded. He turned to the Master of Sinanju. "And I say it's Don Pietro, and we should be halfway to Little Italy by now."

  "No," said Chiun, firmly. "We will go to this G-spot."

  "Mind telling a fellow duck-aficionado why?"

  "It is the logical place to begin."

  "Logic, my ass," Remo said. "You're up to something. What is it? If this is another excuse to bust my balls over leaving you in the desert, I'll say it again. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I apologize most sincerely. Now can we go?"

  The Master of Sinanju lifted his brittle eyes to the face of his pupil. They softened ever so slightly.

  "If you honor the man you call your father," he said softly, "you will go."

  Remo was taken aback by the old Korean's tone. All he had heard from Chiun so far was carping. Carping about stranding him below the California desert. Carping about Remo's secret desire to supplant him as Master. Carping about Remo's embarrassing performance while he was Master. Carping about the color of the damned sky, and somehow blaming it on Remo. Now something had changed.

  Remo heaved a sigh. "If I go up there with you, will you promise to get off my back about this kohi thing?"

  "I would not make a promise I could not keep," Chiun replied.

  And understanding that his pupil had already relented, he swept through the door like a tired wind blowing.

  Chapter 10

  He felt tired. Tired, weak and old. Oh, so old.

  They had denied him the Final Death. The one, great sweeping of the meat-eaters into Eternal Oblivion. The mass sacrifice had been intended to feed those who had passed before him in the Life from Death until the Great End when all that was would be no more. Only in the throes of the Final Death would he be allowed to join the others of his ancient Creed.

  The Final Death was the sustenance that would nourish the undead in the womb of eternity.

  He was the last of the gyonshi. The blooddrinkers of old China. It was his destiny.

  But the Sinanju master had stopped him. He and his cursed gweilo. They had halted the Final Death.

  He allowed himself an evil smile. His yellowed teeth were exposed to the light, like the mouth of a rotting jack-o'lantern decorated with Indian corn.

  Not halted, he reminded himself. Merely postponed.

  The child had come to him before. Was it a minute? An hour? The Leader did not know. In the ceaseless dark in which he dwelt, time no longer mattered.

  "It has begun, Leader," the girl chirped happily.

  The Leader cleared the phlegm from his aged throat.

  "It began before you were born," he instructed the girl he called 'Missy.' "It had its beginnings before my birth, before the birth of this strange land we find ourselves in. It began in the mist. In the distant past of two great Houses."

  The Leader smiled wickedly. "Here, it ends."

  The girl left him to his meditations. His one great desire returned to him then. The thing that drove him in his age, in his infirmity. A calling greater than the Final Death.

  The extinction of Sinanju.

  It dwelled in his thoughts like a half-remembered lover. Tantalizing. Alluring. Obtainable.

  He allowed the delicious sensations to fill his mind with visions that could only be imagined.

  Her presence was in the room with him again. Young, vibrant. Everything he was not. He knew it was she before she could speak.

  "Missy," the Leader said, nodding permission for her to speak.

  "They come."

  Her voice was tight, concerned. Still a child.

  The Leader nodded. An infinitesimally small move of his purplish, skull-like head. The head swayed in its continual side-to-side movement. "They have stepped into the Shanghai Web, as expected," he rasped.

  "But they are coming here, not to Little Italy."

  "It is of no moment. There is no strand of silk in the Shanghai Web that will not lead to the inevitable. Do you recall the edict of old?"

  "Yes. 'Separate and conquer.' "

  The Leader nodded again. "Do as instructed." His paper-thin lids slid unconcernedly over his sightless white eyes.

  "Leader," Mary Melissa Mercy nodded. She backed respectfully from the room in her sensible white shoes.

  Chapter 11

  The Three-G, Incorporated, headquarters was an ultramodern building with all of the accoutrements that would be expected in the main facility of the leading producer of health foods in America. It boasted solar-heating roof panels and a satellite dish, and, if the clouds of flies swarming overhead was any indication, it eschewed the use of environmentally harmful pesticides to protect its landscaping.

  The Three-G staff was a throwback to another era.

  They were the same types Remo and Chiun had encountered down at Poulette Farms. The only notable distinction was that the same seldom-washed individuals were now wearing white lab coats. Over the breast pocket of each coat was an emblem of three interlocking uppercase "G" 's, in lime-green stitching.

  Remo and Chiun had entered through the side door of the hilltop packaging plant, with the Master of Sinanju leading the way.

  "We will surprise the dastardly poisoners," he had promised.

  "If we do," Remo growled, "I promise you ruddy duck every Sunday for the next year."

  "You are either foolhardy or very addled."

  "How about confident we're quacking up the wrong tree?"

  "Then why do you follow, round-eyes?"

  "My round eyes want to get this silly wildgoose chase over with as soon as possible, okay?" said Remo, checking his reflection in a nearby window. His eyes did look kind of squinty.

  On the packaging floor, Chiun accosted the first employee they came across. This was a man of about forty, with a tangled mass of hair and a dull look on his face. He had a tag on his chest identifying him as "Stan." The name fit him about as well as his flannel shirt, which had burst three buttons in the vicinity of his expanding gut. The fourth was straining to the breaking point.

  "I would speak with someone in authority," Chiun said.

  "Hey, I'm shift supervisor," Stan replied. "At your service."

  "Where are your pois
ons?" Chiun demanded loudly.

  The potbellied man snorted, swatting at a pesky fly. "You've come to the wrong place, man. Three-G is all healthy and all natural."

  "A transparent subterfuge," Chiun spat.

  Remo looked around, and saw only wilted flower children stacking bundles of Fru-Nutty Bars into cardboard boxes for shipment to discriminating palates everywhere. The very air smelled of chrysanthemum sugar, which Remo had read was healthier than cane sugar even though it was the color of coal tar.

  "Chiun, come on," he said. "It's some kind of candy factory, for crying out loud."

  "Not candy, Mr . . . ."

  The voice was silky and lilting, and came from behind Remo.

  As Remo turned, he half expected to see a halo. The woman was that much of a vision. She crowded her loose-fitting blouse, and looked as if she'd been poured into her modest, calf-length skirt. Her hair was a reddish-blond nimbus, like follicle fire. A light dusting of freckles danced lightly across her nose and cheeks, just under the incongruous mirror shades. They were green, and made her resemble a pretty insect.

  Her lips parted, in a smile that showed off a row of dazzingly white teeth. They matched her shoes.

  "Call me Remo," Remo supplied.

  The vision took a step forward. "You can go back to work, Stan," she said quickly. "I will attend to our guests."

  Chiun stepped between his pupil and the bewitching redhead. "You are in charge?" he asked.

  "I am executive vice-president of Three-G, Incorporated," she answered. "Mary Melissa Mercy is my name."

  "Show me your poisons," Chiun demanded. He crossed his arms in punctuation.

  "If your body craves poisons, Three-G is not where you will find them I'm afraid, Mr . . . ." She paused once more, but the Master of Sinanju made a deliberate point of not answering. Covering, she said, "We have nothing here that is not wholesome and natural."

  "A likely story," Chiun said. "I will investigate myself."

  "Feel free," Mary Melissa waved. "We're open to public inspection here. We've nothing at all to hide."

  "I will be the judge of that," Chiun said, storming off.

  Mary Melissa watched him go, her head tipped pensively to one side. "An interesting man," she remarked. "He reminds me of someone I know."

  "Then I feel sorry for you," Remo growled. "He's a freaking time-waster."

  One eyebrow shot up above the top edge of her mirror shades. "You do not wish to be at Three-G?" she asked.

  "Lady, it wouldn't be my first choice," Remo said.

  "Oh?" Mary Melissa raised a second eyebrow.

  Remo took in Mary Melissa Mercy's perfect figure. "Maybe second choice," he admitted.

  She laughed. Remo liked the way her chest moved with her humor. He was searching his mind for an appropriate one-liner, when she resumed speaking.

  She took a mock-serious tone, saying, "Really? I wonder what could be more important than the two of us getting to know each other better?"

  "Getting through the day without having him drop a guilt trip on my head the size of Mount Everest."

  "I'm afraid I don't understand."

  "That makes two of us."

  Mary Melissa Mercy hooked her arm in Remo's. There was something exciting about her touch. It was more than mere warmth. It was almost electric. But Remo did have one question.

  "What's with the gloves?"

  Things had gone terribly wrong. More wrong, in fact, in the past year than at any time in the Master of Sinanju's long life.

  It wasn't only that he had missed his kohi-although that calamity was something that Remo deserved to hear about, and would as long as Chiun had anything to say about it.

  It was after that, when the tables had been turned and Chiun had thought he'd lost Remo to the toils of the demon goddess Kali, during what the whites in their ignorance celebrated as "the Gulf War." That had been a wrench to his spirit that the Master of Sinanju had had a hard time dispelling from his thoughts. It was a subject he and his pupil had mutually chosen to avoid. Remo, because it represented a blank period in his life he would rather not have revealed, and the Master of Sinanju because, without Remo, he understood that the Sinanju line would end with Chiun.

  It was not any of these things singly, but all combined. It was as if every force in nature-physical, natural, man-made, supernatural-had combined to send the ancient house of assassins spinning into oblivion.

  And now this . . .

  He had almost lost Remo again. The slashing fingernail would have inflicted a more-than-mortal injury. Remo had not even seen it coming, and he still did not realize how close he had come to a walking death.

  The Master of Sinanju slid along the corridors of the ultramodern Three-G building in silence, his sandaled feet making not so much as a whisper on the highly waxed floors, his elongated shadow a stab of black behind him in the scald of light burning down through the huge glass walls.

  It would have been too familiar, what had nearly befallen Remo. Painfully familiar.

  For all his lecturing on Sinanju's past, Chiun had spent little time dwelling on his own.

  As he walked, he allowed his thoughts to wander back through the years. Before Remo, before America. To the brief time youth had allowed him. The hours, days, months, and finally decades peeled away in flickering shades, at last replacing the muzzy image of ordinary recollection with a mental picture so sharp and clear it could have been recreated before his inward-looking eyes.

  He was in Sinanju. The sky was the hue of blue steel. Streaks of white clouds painted the distant horizon. The wind blew in off the sea, the salt spray collecting in beads on his coarse black hair.

  The eyes he peered through were his own, but they were a young man's eyes.

  Above him stood another figure. Taller than the man the boy named Chiun would grow to be. His hazel eyes burned with the inner fire that was the sun source.

  Chiun's father-himself a master of the deadly art that fed the poor fishing village on the West Korean Bay-was called Chiun the Elder.

  His father seemed taller on this day. At this point in Chiun's recollection, the Master-to-be was kneeling. The clear eyes of his father were cold. For Chiun the Younger had neglected his training in order to play with the children of one of the fishermen near the unforgiving waters of the Bay. It was not the first time it had happened. Chiun had been an obstinate young man.

  Chiun the Elder scolded the younger Chiun in severe tones-but there was a touch of humor mingled in his father's admonishing tone. They both knew it would happen again. For Chiun the Younger was still just a boy, and boys never understand the responsibilities of manhood until they grow into men themselves.

  "As punishment," his father had told him, "you will repeat the thirty-seven basic breathing techniques."

  They were in the third hour of the exercise when a commotion broke out at the edge of the village.

  It began with a single shout, but soon others had joined the cry.

  Chiun the Elder started for the village so quickly, young Chiun did not register his sudden evaporation until the Master was a full thirty feet away. With the grace of a gazelle and a speed five times that, Chiun the Younger followed.

  They were nearing the outer houses at the edge of the shore road. An elder of the village, whose responsibility it was to safeguard Sinanju while the Master was away, was running toward them. There was much weeping and shouting behind him.

  "Master of Sinanju, protect us!" a woman's voice cried.

  "Where is the danger, that I may crush it to dust?" Chiun the Elder had called back, his voice charged with fury.

  They were met by a confusion of shouted pleas.

  The village elder accosted them at the outskirts of the ramshackle fishing village. There was a frenzied look in his eyes that frightened young Chiun. He circled the Master of Sinanju and his pupil, while baring his teeth and grunting strange inarticulations.

  The villagers were coming out of their houses now, some holding the limp bod
ies of dead relatives. Several more bodies lay unmoving along the main street.

  "He has killed many, Master," the blacksmith accused.

  "He will kill more! I am frightened!" a woman wept, drawing her child close to her.

  A wailing chorus went up. "Protect us, O Master! We beg you!"

  "Kill him!" several implored.

  The Master lowered his head. "People of Sinanju, I cannot," he said gravely. "For it is written that no Master shall raise his hand against one of the village."

  "But he will kill us all!" lamented an old woman.

  "You would condemn us all to death for one man?" the basket weaver demanded.

  And it was at that moment that the village elder had lunged at young Chiun. His father's hand sliced through the air like a falcon descending on a pheasant. A perfect line was drawn through the man's throat, and he dropped heavily to the thick dust.

  The villagers gasped. They gathered first with hesitation, then with increasing boldness around the fallen body.

  Chiun the Elder dropped to his knees beside the stricken villager and gently cradled the man's head.

  The wretch looked up into the face of the Master of Sinanju, a ghastly cast of evil on his calm features.

  "The one you called master is not the true master, people of Sinanju!" he cried. "The Leader is master of all! The gyonshi die in life! The Final Death nears! Reject meat! Prepare for the hour of reckoning!"

  At that, an exhalation of orange smoke escaped his throat with his dying gasp, to fade in the chilling air.

  Woodenly, Chiun the Elder lowered the man to the ground and wept. The people of the village formed a curious ring.

  Chiun the Younger could only stand and watch, helpless.

  From the back of the gathering crowd the murmurs began. They rolled toward the inner circle, where the keen ears of the Master of Sinanju could pick them up.

  "If he would kill him, he would kill us," the old woman whispered.

  "He has shamed our traditions," the blacksmith agreed.

  "He is a disgrace to Sinanju," the basket weaver added in a hushed voice.

  The Master of Sinanju slowly rose to face the villagers. As one they drew away from him, pulling their shivering loved ones closer to them.