"Liar," boomed Corazon. "Liar, liar, liar. She was a liar. Liar."
"Quite, your excellency, but as to the matter at hand . . ." began Dr. Jameson. "The matter is a liar died a liar's death, yes?" "Yes, of course," said Dr. Jameson. He bowed. The British agents bowed and they left the palace. But they did not return immediately to their hotel rooms. They picked up a bit of South African tail, so to speak, and quite neatly they lured the African agents, posing as businessmen, into a side road, where the good old boys from Eton dispensed with the former colonial Afrikaaners.
Not much to make ado about, Dr. Jameson realized. You allowed the car to follow one of your cars, which led their car into where your chaps waited, and when they slowed to surround your stalled car, some very effective chaps from your show put on a rather neat display of Walther P-38 bullets into their foreheads. Jameson and his men had done it scores of times before, not only to enemy agents but to those of friendly countries-Americans, Israelis, French, Canadians. It didn't matter. The only immorality in spying was being caught.
"Good show,"'Dr. Jameson told his men.
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A South African, dying from a grazing miss that had taken off his left ear, raised a hand for mercy.
He held onto the steering wheel of one of the ambushed cars as if it were life itself.
"So sorry, old boy," said Dr. Jameson. "Cartwright, would you please?"
'"Course," said a bony-faced man. He was a bit sorry he had missed the first time. He put the fellow away with a .38 slug into the right eyeball, which popped like a grape pierced by a javelin. The head went back across the front seat as though yanked by snap pulleys.
It was neat, but then Dr. Jameson had put this unit together in a neat and proper manner. A simple ambush was not about to put anyone out of sorts.
They had worked at their craft with British pluck and a reasonableness so absent from that island's politics or journalism, and so had become that very rare thing: competent. Cartwright turned off the South African's motor.
"What say we do our readouts on the instruments here?" said Dr. Jameson. "The delays from using laboratories back home are really not worth it. Who wants to wait a month to find out that some chambermaid who handled something had tuberculosis or something, what?"
These questions were not really questions. That so-casual air Dr. Jameson had learned to affect encouraged success rather than heroism, and asking a question instead of giving an order kept the whole thing in proportion. No one on his M.I.5 team was about to say no or maybe to any of Dr. Jameson's questions.
The first readout was from the directional listening device.
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"Be nice to find out what the brown-berry bugger got so frothed about, what?" said Dr. Jameson.
Corazon spoke in Spanish to his cousin and she in island Spanish to him. It was not the finest, Castilian and had overlays of Indian words.
Corazon surprisingly had given his cousin a chance to live. All she had to do was to acknowledge that his power was the greatest on the island. And even more surprisingly, she refused to do this on the grounds that she and Corazon were dead anyhow and why bother. Dr. Jameson shook his head. He couldn't quite believe what the translator had just told him.
One of his crew, the expert on local culture, pointed out that the people of Baqia were quite fatalistic, especially the holy people connected with the island's voodoo religion.
"Give me a literal on that," said Dr. Jameson. He filled a small pipe with a stiff Dunhill mixture. The aide rewound the small tape recorder attached to the directional mike. He talked in English, translating the island Spanish.
"Juanita says "You dead and to die. Your force weak. You little boy. Mimado.' That means spoiled brat. Tfou trumpet big things. But you no big thing. You steal president's chair. When big thing and you come together, you lose.' Corazon says, 'Don't say that.' And she says, 'Real power on this island be with the force in the mountain. With the religion of our people. With the voodoo. With the undead. The holy man up there, he be one big power. He gonna be king. And now another big power come and he going make the holy man in the mountains king. And you going to lose.' Something like that. Not clear. And Corazon says, 'You got one more chance/ and she
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says, 'You got no chance at all,' and then, of course, he does in the poor old thing."
"Wonder," said Dr. Jameson, "who is this man in the hills? And what is this other man, this other force that's going to make the man in the hills king? And why didn't she tell him what he wanted to hear?"
"I think it would be like denying her religion," said the aide.
"Seems strange," said Dr. Jameson. "Dying probably denies her religion, too. She should have just told the mad bugger anything he wanted to be told."
"Not their culture, sir. This is voodoo. This is spirits. A smaller spirit acknowledges a greater spirit and the worst thing that can happen is that a smaller spirit does not acknowledge its relative weakness. That apparently is what Corazon has done. He's failed to acknowledge the supremacy of this holy man in the mountains. His cousin refused to commit the same thing."
"Seems strange," said Jameson. "I'd rather be an apostate than a puddle."
"Would you?" said the aide. "Would we? Why do we risk our lives in this work rather than tend shop or something in Surrey, sir? Why is running over to the enemy and getting rewarded handsomely something that just isn't done?"
"Well, ummm," said Dr. Jameson. "Just not done."
"Precisely. It's our taboopsir. And denying their voodoo is theirs. So there it is."
"You culture people are bonkers. You make the most absurd thing sound logical," said Dr. Jameson.
"One person's heroism is another person's insanity," said the aide. "It all depends on the culture."
Dr. Jameson waved the man to silence. Legends bothered him. They confused things. Instrumentation,
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on the other hand, was the great solver of life's puzzles.
Corazon had showed them the machine and, with the miniaturized instruments hidden on their bodies, they had recorded its power and its sounds and its waves.
The conclusion of the experts-"just rough, of course, sir"-was that'at the point of impact, a rearranging signal was sent to the cells in the human body. In other words, the cells rearranged themselves.
"In other words?" said Dr. Jameson. "I haven't followed a bloody word."
"The machine sends out a signal that triggers matter to alter itself. Organic matter. Living matter."
"Good. Then if we have the signal we can make the bloody machine ourselves."
"Not quite, sir. The types of rays and waves in the world are infinite. The triggering device in Corazon's machine is probably some substance we know nothing about."
"Then how did that savage in medals figure it out?"
"He probably just lucked into it," said one of the scientific members of the team. "Just a guess, until we get lab reports, but I think the machine works off the human nervous system. That poor woman's dress was cotton. That was organic material. But it was unaffected."
"I felt a bit woozy, sir," offered the youngest member of Jameson's team. "When the machine went on, I felt woozy."
"Anyone else?" asked Dr. Jameson.
They had felt tingles. Only one man had felt nothing, and that was Dr. Jameson himself.
"You had a spot of brandy before our meeting, sir," offered an aide.
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"Yes. True," said Jameson.
"And there was that Umibian. We heard that Corazon had to hit him twice with the rays before he went. He was drunk as a lord, sir."
"Nervous system. Alcohol. Perhaps," said Dr. Jameson. "Perhaps we could assault the presidential palace roaring drunk, eh? And then we'd be immune to the machine."
The men chuckled. Unfortunately things were not that simple. The whole island, especially the capital of Ciudad Natividado, was seething with foreign operations. One might successfully get his hands on the machine, losing quite a
few men in the process, but then be too weak to get it out of the country. Because all the other agents seeing one with the prize would join together to thwart the winner. Whoever got the machine first would have to fight a mini world war. Alone.
Dr. Jameson had grown to love this keen working group of effective killers. They could get on with the dirty work and leave it behind. He would match his stout band against anyone else. But not against everyone else. The odds were just too great.
It was a weird island, this. And a weirder situation. The key to a situation with so many weird variables was to stay orderly and not try to match weird with weird, witch doctor with witch doctor, but just stay with what you knew. Keep the British square, so to speak. Let the others make the mistakes. Yes. Dr. Jameson sucked on his pipe and watched the scrub and palm whiz by his window on the dirt road.
Had Corazon stumbled onto some sort of magic? The dials on the machine were not all functioning. Unless, of course, the most destructive machine ever
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invented used parts from a Waring blender and a spring-motor from an Erector set.
In Ciudad Natividado, the British point man reported that their room in the hotel had been occupied by an aged Oriental and a skinny white man who, when confronted with the working end of a Walther P-38, replied that he wasn't that happy with the island, his own government, any other government, the day, the hotel, the man pointing the gun, or the taped soap opera blaring out of a television set that had been brought to play the tape, which he had seen twenty-two times and didn't like the first time, either. However, if the British agent wanted to do himself a favor, he would not interrupt the show. Especially since in this heat, he would also be doing the white man a favor because the white man didn't feel like disposing of bodies, but in this heat you couldn't just let them lie around.
Yes, the white man had responded further, he was aware it was a pistol being pointed at his face and, no, he did not know it was a Walther whatchamacall-it and it made no difference whether the man intended to shoot or not.
"Say anything else?" Dr. Jameson asked.
"Yes, sir. He didn't like those drums beating all the time either."
"Sounds like a nit," said Dr. Jameson over the radio.
"Yes, sir."
"Well, remove them from the room, if you would."
"By force?"
"Why not?"
"Yes, sir. Kill?"
''If you have to," radioed Jameson.
"It is for a room, sir. Only a room."
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"On Baqia, that is enough."
"They look so defenseless, sir. Not a weapon on them. And the white man is an American, sir."
"It's been a hard day," said Dr. Jameson. "Please." And he waited in his car, with the rest of his team in their cars, for the word that the room had been cleared out. When twenty minutes had passed, Dr. Jameson sent another man with a radio transmitter that worked and told him to report back that indeed the room had been cleared out, and if the first agent's radio had failed to work properly there would be what-ho in the supply room back in London.
The second agent did not return, either.
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CHAPTER FOUR
Remo looked at the pistol. There was a way a man cradled a pistol butt that was a fairly certain indication of when the trigger would be pulled.
Most people tended not to notice these things, because when you are looking at someone you think is about to kill you, the perceptions of trigger fingers and how the ridges of the skin rest on the gunmetal trigger just aren't there. Unless they were trained to be there. It was like hitting a baseball with a bat. It would be an impossible thing for someone who had never seen a baseball come at him before, but it was just a regular occurrence for a major leaguer who had hit baseball after baseball.
So Remo knew the man wasn't about to pull the trigger because he just wasn't ready for it. The pressure of the finger ridges wasn't there.
"Yeah, okay, thank you for the threat and come back when you're ready to kill," Remo said.
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Remo shut the door.
Chiun sat lotus-position before the television set. Old actors were young again on this television screen, brought down to Baqia from the States in the luggage along with the tapes. Chiun did not like the modern soap operas. When sex and violence began to appear, he called it blasphemy and refused to watch the new shows. So he had taken to rewatching what he called "the only redeeming thing in your culture, your one great art form."
For a time, Chiun had tried to write his own soap opera, but he had spent so much time working on the title, the dedication, and the speech he would make when he received an Emmy that he never quite got around to writing the script. It was one of the things that Remo never mentioned to him.
"What is wrong with love and concern and marriage?" Chiun asked.
He answered himself. "Nothing," he said.
Now he mouthed the words of Dr. Channing Murdoch Callaher telling Rebecca Wentworth her mother was dying of a rare disease and that he felt he couldn't operate on the mother because he knew who Rebecca's real father was.
The organ music heightened the drama. Chiun's lips ceased to move as a commercial for a soap powder came on. It advertised that it had more zyclomite than any other cleaner. Remo knew the commercial was old, because modern commercials advertised that cleansers were zyclomite free.
"Who was at the door?" asked Chiun during the commercial.
"Nobody," said Remo. "Some British guy."
"Never speak ill of the British. Henry the Eighth always paid on time and purchased regularly. Good
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and noble Henry was a blessing to his people and a pride to his race. He showed that no matter how funny a person's eyes were, he could still show that he had a Korean heart."
"You know what you're going to do here?" asked Remo.
"Yes," said Chiun.
"What?"
"See what happens to Rebecca," Chiun said.
"Rebecca?" asked Remo, shocked. "Rebecca lives for seven more years, has fourteen major operations, three abortions, becomes an astronaut, a political investigator, a congressperson, gets a hysterectomy, and then gets raped, shot at, and inherits a department store before her contract with her studio runs out, whereupon she is run over by a faulty truck that was supposed to be recalled to Detroit."
Chiun's eyes moved slowly, as if searching for someone to share his shock at such a dastardly deed as destroying many many hours of what a poor, delicate kind gentle soul took his small pleasures in. There was no one else in the room but an ungrateful pupil.
"Thank you," said Chiun. His voice was laden with hurt.
There was a knock at the door again. The Briton in the blue blazer, light summer slacks, and the dandy Walther P-38 was at the door. This time the finger was closed on the trigger and the butt was set to take the slight kick. He was ready to kill.
"I'm afraid, old boy, you're just going to have to toodleoo off, what?"
"No," said Remo. "We just got here."
"I really don't want to kill you, you know. A bit of a mess."
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"Don't worry. You're not going to kill anybody."
"I am pointing the gun directly at your head, you know."
"I know," said Remo. He rested one hand against the doorjamb.
Chiun glanced over at the intruder at the door. Not only was his joy with the show spoiled by the revelation of the next six-hundred episodes, of which four-hundred were absolutely the best, but now Remo was going to put a body in the room while the main show was going on. He wasn't going to wait until the next commercial, Chiun knew. And why? Why would Remo kill that man at the door during the show, instead of waiting until a commercial?
Chiun knew the answer.
"Hater of beauty," he snapped at Remo.
The Rritish agent took a tentative step back. "I don't think you realize with whom you're dealing," he said.
"That's your problem, not ours," Remo said.
/>
"You're a dead man, you know," said the agent. He had the forehead of this casual American directly in line with his gunsights. He would blast out the frontal lobe with such force there probably would be a king-sized hole in the back of the head, also.
"He's gonna shoot, Little Father. You hear him? He's gonna shoot now. It's not my fault."
"Beauty hater," said Chiun viciously. . "If you'll bother to look, you'll see his hand is gonna move that gun. Any moment now, he's gonna squeeze that trigger."
"Any moment now," said Chiun in a whiny, imitative voice, "he's going to squeeze the trigger. He's going to squeeze the trigger. So let's all interrupt
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anything that's going on because he's going to squeeze the trigger."
The agent had waited long enough. He did not understand why these two so casually faced death. Nor was he all that concerned. He had killed many men before and sometimes there was a dumb disbelief on the part of the victim. At other times fear. But never casual cattiness like between these two. Still there was a first time for anything.
He squeezed the trigger. The Walther P-38 jumped in his hand. But he did not feel the kick. And the white man's forehead was still there. AH of it. Un-punctured. What wasn't there was the Walther P-38 or his hand. At his wrist, there was the incredible wrenching like a giant tooth being taken out of his arm. He had felt force but no pain.
And he hadn't seen the man's hands move. He did catch a glimpse of a finger moving between his two eyes and he could have sworn he had seen it go in up to the fist knuckle of that hand and it was like a very big door had slammed on his head. He could have sworn that. But he wasn't swearing anymore. His last thought was a memory and by the time his body hit the floor he was not feeling anything.
His nerve endings were sending messages, but that part of the brain that was to receive them had been traumatized into a loose bloody pudding.
Remo wiped his finger off on the man's shirt and stacked him neatly in front of the room with the Bulgarians in it. A Kalishnikov assault rifle poked its way out of the door.
Someone asked a question in Russian, then French, and finally English.
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