High Priestess td-95

by Warren Murphy

  "Good. I want you all to come visit me in Tibet once I settle in and kick out the Chinese army."

  Applause greeted the invitation.

  "If anyone can kick the Chinese army out of Tibet," someone said, "it's Squirrelly."

  "Absolutely. Look at how many Oscars she has."

  And over the cacophony of sounds, Denholm Fong raised his voice and said in Mandarin, "Now!"

  Out from under silk and poplin jackets came a narrow range of silenced 9 mm pistols.

  Fong let Nigel get his Tec-9 out and trained on the old Korean before he reached into his shoulder holster and grasped his Beretta.

  He had already decided to draw it only if absolutely necessary. The others could handle the killing. No point in Beijing's top assassin risking his life and blowing his cover just to liquidate an empty-headed over-the-hill actress with delusions of religious grandeur.

  Besides, he had his latest script in the car. The chances of a sale were pretty fair once the shooting stopped and his men had escaped in the confusion.

  As a precaution, Fong placed his thumb on the safety catch and pushed. The safety wouldn't budge. It felt as if it were welded in place. No matter, he decided. He held the tiny automatic low in both cupped hands and faced the veranda and his target. The first shots from the others would thin out the crowd and start the real party.

  Except that no shots came.

  A silver dagger did bury itself in Nigel's jugular, though.

  Nigel dropped his weapon and tried to grab at the fountain of blood that bubbled out. He spun in place as if trying to synchronize his hands with the blood flow. It was so unexpected, so comical, that Fong almost laughed.

  Then Fong became very busy trying to gather up his bowels and stuff them back into the raw hole that had been his abdominal cavity.

  This, too, had happened with great suddenness.

  Fong had been in the act of turning when he heard a short rip of a sound. His stomach suddenly felt very empty, and something wet and heavy plopped onto his shoes.

  He looked down and recognized the slimy grayish-white loops of human intestines. They were still piling up, and his heart gave a single dull thud when Fong realized that they could only be his.

  The old Korean who Fong was certain was the Master of Sinanju was already moving on to his next target. There was not a trace of blood on his extended forefinger with its viciously long killing nail. But there was a hell of a lot of it gushing onto the sand under Fong's feet.

  Fong folded up like a cheap telescope on the sand and tried to do something about his unraveling intestinal tract. It appeared intact. It was just hanging out of him. Then the bleeding began.

  Fong was too professional to delude himself. There was no hope. He looked up to see how the others were faring and watched, helpless, as one by one his men were taken out with such expert skill that most of the other party goers had no idea what was happening.

  A lean white man Fong had brushed past and noticed only because his wrists were freakishly thick stepped up to Lee and took hold of his pistol muzzle. It was a stupid thing to do. He might as well have attempted to fend off a stabbing sword by grasping the sharp blade.

  Yet before Lee could squeeze the trigger and destroy the man's hand, the weapon was forced upward. The white guy's free hand came up, slapped full on. When it came away, there was red jelly where Lee's face should have been.

  The white guy didn't even pause to watch the body fall. He moved on, found another Chinese agent and took hold of his gun arm by the shoulder. When he pulled, the arm came out of the socket like a cooked shoulder of ham, the pistol slipping unfired from dead fingers.

  The dismembered arm was flung carelessly into the sea. The rest dropped into the sand to writhe and scream until a descending shoe imploded the screaming man's larynx.

  It was that way all up and down the beach. Fong saw it all. The low kicks shattered ankles and kneecaps and brought exposed throats and skulls down to the sand where heels could be brought down with lethal force. That was the white guy's technique. The old Korean simply drifted up on the blind sides of Fong's dwindling agents and inserted one of those fingernails that looked like delicate ivory and were by reputation as sharp and unbreakable as tempered steel. Stealth and skill as one. And Fong's most highly trained men were no more than helpless children before the awful beauty of it.

  Only one man, Wing, had the presence of mind to go for the target. He elevated the perforated muzzle of his Tec-9 and squeezed the trigger. The gun quivered. Wing cursed his weapon. It refused to fire. He pounded it with the flat of his hand. And then Fong recalled his own stubborn Beretta. He yanked it from his jacket, trying not to detach his guts, and saw that the safety latch had been mangled so it could not be undone.

  Someone had obviously slipped up on him and accomplished this with great skill and care.

  "The white guy..." he breathed. A trained US. agent would have spotted the shoulder bulge, unobtrusive as it was.

  Denholm Fong would have thrown up except that his stomach was already slipping into the pile made by his escaping viscera. And then all life and consciousness was slipping out of his mortal remains.

  While the light was going out of his eyes, Fong smelled a disagreeable body odor and sensed a heavy presence kneel beside him in the sand.

  A growling voice said, "I am Kula the Mongol. Why are you not dead, Chinese?"

  A Mongol! Fong thought, shuddering. They were more fearsome than Klingons.

  "I will cut your throat to send you on your way to another life. Perhaps I will have the honor of killing you in that life, too, Chinese."

  Denholm Fong never felt the blade that opened his throat and finished his dying. His last thoughts were of failure. Not of the miserable failure of his duty to the motherland, but the unrealized dream that had been his since he had come to America.

  He would never see the worthy name of Denholm Fong up on the silver screen.

  REMO Wits was making a pile of bodies in the sand.

  The cream of Hollywood stood around applauding as if he and Chiun had been some kind of floor show. Maybe, he thought, if they saw the dead pile high enough without moving, they'd figure it out. But he doubted it.

  "That was marvelous, Squirrelly," they were saying.

  "The special effects were great!"

  "That fake blood looks really, really real."

  "It's just Karo syrup with a dash of red food coloring," a punky-looking man said. And he dipped a fried shrimp into a thick scarlet pool in the sand.

  He bit down, tasted salt and not sugar, and turned green.

  Everyone saw him turn green. Not everyone realized what that meant, but enough of them did. One actress in basic black, too-pale skin and cherry red lips dipped a finger in, tasted and kept tasting. One of the producers present was casting a vampire movie, and a girl had to stand out in this town.

  "It's real!" a waiter gasped.

  "It is?" said Squirrelly.

  "Of course it's real," Remo shouted after depositing another body. "Unless you suddenly remember hiring someone to pretend to kill you."

  "Why would anybody want to kill me?"

  "Take a look at the guys. What do they look like?"

  Lifting her long skirts, Squirrelly came down off the veranda on bare feet.

  She looked at the bodies. Everyone looked at the bodies. They made faces. Some scratched their heads or other itchy parts of their anatomies.

  "What do they look like?" Remo repeated.

  "Dead?" Squirrelly guessed.

  "Yeah. Squirl's right. They look dead."

  "Okay. Given. They look dead," admitted Remo. "What else do they look?"

  More head-scratching and face-making followed. No one offered any theories.

  Then Squirrelly said, "Producers! They look like producers."

  Remo sighed. "Chinese. They look Chinese."

  "The Chinese are my friends," Squirrelly said indignantly. "I was a guest in their country. It was a paradise of sexual e
quality and happy, productive people living so close to the earth it brought tears of shame to my eyes to think that Americans are denied the kind of fulfillment even the poorest Chinese peasant enjoys as his birthright."

  "You were given the VIP bullshit tour. Everybody knows that. And now that you've announced to all the world that you're going to liberate Tibet, they're out to snuff you."

  "Remo is right," came the voice of the Master of Sinanju, indicating the stacked dead. "This is the true China."

  Squirrelly looked blank. "The true China is dead?"

  "The true China is treacherous."

  "I don't believe it," said Squirrelly.

  "Believe it," said Remo. "Now, before you call the police, we gotta get out of here. Our job is done."

  "Why would I call the police?" wondered Squirrelly Chicane.

  "To report a crime. To have the bodies carted off to the morgue."

  "That's not how we do it in the Hollywood community," Squirrelly said. "The business of Hollywood is publicity, and bad publicity is bad business."

  "You can't just leave them here."

  "Won't the tide be in soon?" inquired the actress who wanted to play a vampire. She had stopped tasting the blood, and with the aid of a compact mirror was using it to freshen her lipstick.

  "Yes," said Lobsang, appearing as if from nowhere. "The tide will be in soon. It will return their useless husks to the sea, for they no longer reside therein."

  Squirrelly clapped her hands together like a child. "Oh, that is so Buddhist. I love it when you talk like that. Teach me to talk like that."

  "Look," Remo said, dumping the last body onto the pile, "do what you want. Chiun and I have stuck around too long as it is." He turned to Chiun. "Isn't that right, Little Father?"

  "We have paid our respects to the forty-seventh Bunji Lama and done her a service, as well." Chiun bowed. "Let that be a gift to you, Light That has Come. May you reign in wisdom and glory."

  "Do not fear, Master of Sinanju," said Kula stoutly. "I will see to it that the Bunji arrives in Lhasa still wearing her pink skin. Farewell."

  Squirrelly waved them off. "Kale pheb! Go slowly. Or softly. Or whatever. Has anybody seen my roach clip?"

  ON THE WAY to the rental car, Remo said to Chiun, "What happens when the Chinese government discovers that Squirrelly's still alive and their agents are dead?"

  "They will realize that a message has been sent to them. Perhaps they will discover the wisdom to do the correct thing."

  "Is this what you meant by the message traveling far?"

  "Possibly," said Chiun.

  "Do me a big favor. Let's keep this entire episode between you and me. Okay?"

  "Agreed. I do not wish to anger my emperor with my sunlighting. "

  "That's 'moonlighting!'"

  "We practice the sun source. We are sunlighters. And by the next sun I will have much gold to count"

  "I still say there's going to be blood on that gold."

  "Spoken like a true Buttafuoco," said Chiun, standing by the passenger side door and pretending to look at the waves until Remo got around to opening it for him. Once that was done, he would remind his pupil to fetch his trunks.

  Chapter 13

  Dr. Harold W Smith arrived for work promptly at 6:00 a.m. He was a very punctual man. The gate guard had a habit of checking his wristwatch as soon as Smith's beat-up station wagon rolled past the gate, and if it was more than thirty seconds off, he reset it. Smith was that punctual.

  The lobby guard knew to expect him to walk in at precisely 6:01. If 6:01 came and went without Smith striding into the lobby attired in his unvarying uniform consisting of a gray three-piece suit, the guard knew that Harold Smith wasn't late. He was out sick. That's how punctual Harold W Smith was.

  Smith's personal secretary knew that her employer invariably stepped off the second-floor elevator at exactly 6:02. When she heard the ding of the elevator, she didn't bother to look up. She just said, "No calls, Dr. Smith." That's how tied to his routine was Harold W Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy little private hospital nestled amid the poplars and oaks of Rye, New York.

  Once Harold W. Smith closed the door marked Director, the portion of his routine that was known to no one but him began.

  He settled into the cracked leather chair before the picture window of two-way glass that gave an excellent view of Long Island Sound. It was wasted on Smith because his back was to it, but it had the advantage of being opaque to prying eyes.

  Smith looked at his pathologically neat desk, saw nothing out of place and took that as a sign Folcroft's cover had not been penetrated and pressed a concealed stud under the oaken desk.

  A section of the desktop to his immediate left dropped, slid away, and up from the exposed well hummed an ordinary-looking computer terminal. The keyboard unfolded itself, and Smith addressed the keys with his long thin gray fingers.

  Everything about Harold Smith was gray. His eyes, shielded by rimless glasses, were gray. As was his thinning hair and his dryish skin. He was the grayest of gray men-colorless, uninteresting, a bureaucrat to the bone.

  Smith entered a password known only to him, and the computer screen began scrolling the Bill of Rights, which Harold Smith read silently as a reminder of the awesome responsibility that had sat on his gray shoulders since that long-ago day when a much-admired United States President had plucked him out of the bowels of Langley to offer him the position of director of CURE, the supersecret organization that didn't exist.

  His reading done, Smith called up the night's news extracts. Deep in the basement of Folcroft, sealed behind a concrete wall, was a bank of mainframe computers that twenty-four hours a day scanned data banks throughout North America, extracting raw data according to programs Smith himself wrote, seeking threats to US. security, whether domestic or foreign.

  It had been a light night. Only two events stood out.

  Squirrelly Chicane, noted actress, was claiming to be the long-lost Bunji Lama, an obscure Tibetan spiritual leader dead nearly half a century.

  Smith frowned. This seemed not to fall under any of the program rubrics he created. Then he read further and saw that Beijing had denounced the announcement as a transparent American provocation.

  Smith blinked. It had been a long time since Beijing had used such harsh language to describe a US. action. Relations between the two countries these days were relatively settled.

  Smith went on to the next extract.

  It was the report of the death of an obscure screenwriter named Denholm Fong. Fong's body had washed up on a California beach, disemboweled.

  Smith blinked again. This was not right. Was the computer acting up?

  He pressed the question-mark key, and the computer responded by highlighting the single common word in both reports.

  The word was "Malibu."

  "Odd," said Smith in the dry, lemony voice that betrayed his New England upbringing. "Could there be a connection?"

  Smith logged off the extract program and ran a background check on Denholm Fong.

  Smith had only to glance over the dead man's bank account activity, IRS files and permanent-resident immigration status in order to come to a conclusion.

  "A Red Chinese sleeper agent," he muttered. "But who killed him-and why?"

  Smith considered that matter for a few silent moments, decided there was insufficient data for a working theory and dumped his findings into a new file he labeled "Bunji" for brevity's sake. He instructed the computer to dump any related discoveries into the Bunji file. Perhaps a pattern would reveal itself.

  Smith turned his attention to Folcroft matters. From time to time the terminal would beep and display an incoming fragment of data that programming had culled out of the billions of bytes of raw data being transmitted across the nation. Nothing escaped the Folcroft Five, and nothing that they brought to his attention escaped the tired gray eyes of Harold W. Smith.

  It was close to noon when the intercom buzzed and Smith said, "Yes,
Mrs. Mikulka?"

  "A Mr. Buttafuoco to see you:'

  Smith blinked. "First name?"

  "Remo," said the very recognizable voice of Remo Williams.

  "Yes, send him in," said Smith quickly, adjusting his hunter green Dartmouth tie.

  "Remo, what brings you here?" asked Smith after Remo had closed the door after him.

  "Just thought I'd drop by," Remo said in a subdued voice.

  "You do not just drop by. Is something wrong?"

  Remo dropped onto the long couch by the door and crossed his legs. He looked everywhere except directly at his employer.

  "Nah. I was just in the neighborhood."

  "Remo, you are never just in the neighborhood. What is wrong?"

  "Nothing," said Remo, absently rotating his thick wrists. Smith recognized the habit as something Remo fell into when restless or agitated.

  "Have it your way," Smith said dismissively. "But I am very busy."

  Remo came out of his seat and wandered over to the terminal.

  "Anything up?" he asked.

  "No."

  Remo's face fell. "Too bad. I wouldn't mind an assignment right about now. You know, just for something to do."

  "I would think that you would enjoy some time off after your last assignment."

  "The HELP scare? It wasn't so bad." Remo was looking out the window now. Seen in profile, his face was troubled.

  Smith took off his glasses and began cleaning them with a cloth. "According to Master Chiun, you came close to death at the hands of that Sri Lankan woman assassin. Have there been any aftereffects of that poison?"

  "No. I feel great. I shrugged that stuff off like a twenty-four hour flu."

  "People do not shrug off lethal toxins," Smith pointed out.

  "I do."

  Smith cleared his throat and said, "Er, Master Chiun said you had one of those . . . episodes again."

  Remo whirled. "He told you about it?"

  "Yes. He has told me about most of them."

  Remo frowned. His mouth compressed, and he seemed to be looking inward.

  "Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Remo?" asked Smith in a voice he tried to keep calm.

  Remo shrugged. "What's to tell? I don't remember them."

  "Any of them?"