"Chiun, I guarantee I will never eat a pork tamale, especially not after watching what they did to Moroza. And I must have been onto something. I had Prince Junior check into it, and he figured out that this bus has been within strike range of all the outbreaks of violence."
"Was anyone else?"
"Well, yeah, a few hundred people, according to the flight schedules."
The trooper was standing outside his car having an animated exchange with whoever was on the other end of his radio. Someone was reading the trooper the riot act for harassing a politically sensitive elected official.
The trooper's face was as red and hot as a freshly murdered lobster being lifted out of the boiling pot. "Go!" He shouted at the bus crew. "Get out of my state!"
The occupants joked and tittered at the expense of the trooper as they filed back inside and the bus pulled off the shoulder. The trooper kept his lights on until the bus was getting up to speed, then he zoomed ahead. Remo and Chiun ran up behind the bus, keeping themselves in the blind spots of the windows, and leaped aboard. By the time they had seated themselves again, they could see the trooper up ahead in a U-turn lane reserved for emergency vehicles.
Remo waved. The trooper snatched off his mirrored sunglasses, uttered a handful of profanities, then slammed his car into Reverse.
"Not again, you don't." Remo tossed one of the rocks he had gathered during their stop. The little stone sped through the air too fast to be visible and tore through the sidewall of one of the trooper's rear tires. A second rock deflated a front tire. The trooper jumped out of his car and danced in frustration.
"So why are we again on this bus?" Chiun asked.
"To see if my lead pans out."
"Did you not admit that the lead already panned in? We are wasting time. Let us look for an eastbound bus. Perhaps we'll find one that will even allow us to take passage on the inside. I understand this part of the nation has loosened its bus travel restrictions."
"Look, this is my gig. I thought it up. I'm doing what I think I ought to do."
"And I have warned you that thinking is not always your best skill, my son."
"Cram it, Chiun."
"This advice I offer with the best intentions...."
"If you mean your intention is to be a first-class son of a bitch then you pull it off with flying colors." The youthful eyes seemed to withdraw into the eggshell skull.
"Why do you insult me with bitter words?"
"Me? Insult you? I'm so freaking stupid I don't know that you just called me a moron. And you know what? Now that I think about it, you called me moron the very first time we met. And, wait a second, unless I'm a total moron, you've called me a moron every day in between!"
"Control yourself."
"Smith thinks I'm an idiot, the Little Prince thinks I'm a dull-witted playground bully and every President whose life I every saved thought I was a dumb bouncer. You know what, they even thought I was a dim bulb back when I was on the force. Hell, when I was in the freaking Marines they used to say behind my back that I could fight my way out of a steel cage, but I couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag. And you know where it started? The nuns used to whack me on the shoulder blades when I'd get it wrong and say, 'Think, Remo. Why won't you just think?'"
"Is that the cause of this outburst?" Chiun demanded. "Have you been carrying around this anger toward the Virgins of the Carpenter sect for so long that it has finally boiled to the surface?"
"What brought it to the surface was you treating me the same damn way as the Sisters," Remo said hotly. Chiun gasped and shot to his feet. The wind turned his kimono into a furiously flapping flag, like a hundred silk fingers wagging disdainfully at Remo Williams.
"You compare me to the foolish nuns of the Christian cult?" Chiun challenged.
"If the habit fits, wear it."
"I will not stay and be insulted!" Chiun warned.
"Don't let the overpass hit you in the ass on the way out."
Chiun stamped his foot in impotent fury, creating a foot-deep crater in the aluminum roof of the bus, then turned and jumped up. It looked like a light hop, but the leap carried him twelve feet into the sky and his feet settled perfectly on the rail of an overpass.
He walked along the steel rail, then leaped down again, alighting atop a moving van heading east, and sat with his back to Remo Williams as the distance grew rapidly between them.
Remo had not even bothered to watch where his mentor went. Right now, just the fact that Chiun was gone was good enough.
Chapter 17
The elected president of the United States Protectorate of Union Island was sporting a bad case of bed head and rubbing the sleep gunk out of his eyes when he emerged from his bedroom into the outer cubicle occupied by his secretary.
"You missed the excitement." Amelia Powlik made a sound like a small dog choking on a chicken bone.
"What's so funny?" Grom asked.
"We got pulled over by one of North Carolina's finest. He said we had people riding on the roof."
"What?"
"When he looks on the roof and can't find anybody, he says there must be a trapdoor on the roof to let people get up top from the inside. You know what I think?" She pantomimed drinking out of a flask and then rolled her eyes like a drunk. Amelia thought she was immensely humorous and hacked at her own hilarity.
"So what happened?" Grom demanded.
"He wanted to get into your private room to look for this trapdoor, and that's when I called and got the Feds involved. By the time he goes to his car to radio for backup he's got his CO on the other end telling him to back off."
Grom felt like he was missing a piece of information. "But did he really smell like he'd been drinking?"
"Naw, but he was out of it. Wacko." She barked delightedly. "By the way, we're twenty minutes from the photo-op stop."
Grom retreated into his room to get washed up in his phone-booth-sized shower. Funny how talking to his secretary made him feel strangely unclean. In fact, every woman on board the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus was less than attractive. This was one of the attributes that got them their high-ranking positions on the president's staff.
President Greg Grom didn't have much say in the matter. At some point the personnel responsibility had been usurped by his minister of tourism, although Grom couldn't quite explain how or when it had happened. Somehow Dawn Summens had wiggled her way into the role as personnel manager, and Grom's access to women was curtailed. That was fine so long as he had access to Dawn Summens. There wasn't a straight guy on the planet who wouldn't trade his own mother for a taste of Dawn Summens's goodies.
But pretty soon that well had all but dried up, too. It hadn't always been like this. Before Dawn Summens came onto the scene, Greg Grom had been awash in women. There had been women by the boatloads, women of every color. Shy ones and bold ones. Fresh faced college girls on spring break and sophisticated aristocrats. Even royalty. It didn't matter to Greg Grom as long as they were attractive. He scored with just about every woman he went after.
Greg Grom, once upon a time, had made a very important discovery.
THE DARK AND FOREBODING shadows of the pile of rubble would have frightened your run-of-the-mill, superstitious rabble. Greg Grom was highly educated superstitious rabble, and he was scared out of his socks.
Even in daylight the overgrown ruins were ominous. At night, the shadows held primordial demons that disregarded all the education and sensibility of a twentyfirst-century man.
Greg Grom stood in the open area that had once been the town center. Around him the earth swarmed at knee level with weeds and shrubs. All around the periphery of the buildings waited the dark, huge malevolence of the rain forest trees, silent minions of the long-gone inhabitants. Once this was home to Miytec, which, as far as anyone could tell, was a little-known Mayan-Toltec breakaway group that thrived on Union Island briefly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the time Columbus landed in the New World, Union Island was empty.
Grom still felt the Miytec. They were all around him, and they weren't happy to have a grave robber in their midst. He was quivering with fear. A mosquito flew up his left nostril, and he slapped at his face and snorted for fifteen seconds. The moon peeked cautiously over a nearby tree.
Forget this! Grom thought. I'll do it in daylight! But he stayed where he was. There was no way to do this during daylight, when the ruins were full of excavators. Grom was himself part of a team of students from all over the U.S. doing an internship on Union Island. It wasn't a prestigious dig site, but it was mostly unexplored, and all the enthusiastic young people came with high hopes of making a major find.
Greg Grom actually made a major find-and he wasn't telling a soul. He wouldn't share this with anyone, which was why he had to do his excavating in the dark of night.
The second level of the massive stone building had collapsed in on itself during the five centuries since the mysterious disappearance of the Miytec. It was on the ground-floor level that the real finds were being made. Some of the rooms had become sealed by earth or by flora, preserving their contents.
One of the lower-level rooms had been opened just two days earlier, and there the team discovered its first human remains. It was a middle-aged man slumped against a wall. In his hand was a paintbrush. On the floor was a pot of dried, cracked paint. On the walls were painted his final words.
They were in Miytec, which was tough enough to translate. But they were in such crudely penned Miytec as to be almost illegible. None of the others could make sense of it. Not even Burnt Haller, the professor in charge of the group.
But Central American languages were Greg Grom's specialty. And what he read there made his feet perspire with excitement. He took some snapshots to study. He translated them carefully in the hotel bar, when none of the other team members were around.
If true, it was an amazing find.
The dead man and author claimed to be the last Miytec holy man, imprisoned in the tomb by attackers from other islands and from the mainland. The small allied army that had come and wiped out the Miytec on Union Island had been afraid even to touch a Miytec holy man, let alone risk the wrath of the Miytec gods by striking him dead. They had satisfied themselves with sealing him alive in his precious storeroom.
"Here I tell the secret of the Miytec power to rule," the holy man wrote. "With this rite, a man loyal to the pantheon of Miytec deities will gain control of the will of all men."
When Greg Grom read this he thought, Interesting. Something persuaded him to keep it to himself. On some strange impulse he tapped the cracked pouch in the skeletal fingers of the long dead Miytec priest and was surprised when a bit of coarse powder trickled out.
The powder was the source of the Miytec's strange ability to "control the will of all men." It had to be a myth. It couldn't be true. Could it?
Greg Grom knew he had to test it. He had to know. His test was a big success.
Now he was coming back to get the powder-all of it. In the black of night the old corpse was a hideous specter. It stared up at Grom with gaping eye sockets, and laughed at him with yellow teeth. Grom couldn't stop thinking about how the man died.
The old Miytec holy man was trapped underground.
The oil in his lamp was nearly exhausted. "I taste of the powder. I descend into death. I perform the ritual of resurrection upon myself."
Grom knew what that meant. Too much powder worked like Haitian zombie powder. The metabolism slowed and the body seemed to die. Pulse and respiration slowed until they were virtually undetectable. The subject appeared dead. Days later, the subject's metabolism sped up again. The subject, to all appearances, died and came back from the dead.
The holy man took the powder in hopes of extending his life in the unlikely chance that the tomb would be opened up again.
In the irrational, superstitious part of his brain Grom was convinced that now, finally, after seven centuries, the Miytec holy man would resurrect.
It took hours for Grom to get up the nerve to move the holy man. He had to move him-the old Miytec had inconveniently laid himself on top of the stone slab that led into the storage chamber. Using a wide broom, Grom gingerly shifted the body off the stone, only to have it crumble into pieces. After that he felt less anxiety. The old Miytec wasn't a body any longer, just a pile of bones. Grom swept him into a corner, then pried up the big flat stone. Underneath was blackness.
Grom poked his flashlight inside and looked around, and had to clamp a hand over his own mouth to keep from laughing out loud.
There were dozens of stone jars. Dozens of them. Grom worked hard that night, carrying jar after jar out of the storeroom to his rental car. He checked every single jar, and every single jar was brimming with powder. An hour before dawn saw him replacing the stone entrance and shoving the crumbling bones back into place. He drove back to the hotel and used the luggage cart to move the stone jars to his room.
Heidi Fenstermaker was there waiting for him. She helped him pile the jars in the closet, then gave him a nice long back rub. In fact, she did whatever Greg wanted.
Heidi, after all, had been the subject of the very first test.
THE MORNING BEFORE, Greg had waited under a vinecovered arch that had grown shaggy from neglect. It was the only entrance to the hotel's dismal patio restaurant where the crew of archaeology interns took their meals. Heidi Fenstermaker couldn't avoid him.
"Morning, Heidi," Grom greeted her cheerfully. "Join me for breakfast?"
Heidi's eyes flitted around the empty tables as she tried to come up with an excuse to have breakfast with anyone else. However, Grom's bold and overtly friendly invitation gave a polite girl like Heidi no way out.
Grom led her to a tiny round table for two. A surly waiter appeared long enough to deposit two cups of coffee.
"You're heading back to the States in a couple of weeks?" Grom asked conversationally.
"Yes, finally." Heidi sighed.
"I wish you wouldn't go."
"Why not?"
"I like having you around."
She was taken aback. "Greg, you haven't said ten words to me since I got here."
He lifted the cup of coffee out of her hands. "Ugh. A bug just flew in it," Grom said. "I'll get you a fresh cup." He stood and tossed the coffee over the patio rail into the weeds, then got her a clean cup at the waiter's station. He sprinkled in the precious, tiny bits of powder and added fresh coffee.
"Dash of cream, no sugar, no bugs just the way you like it," he announced as he placed the coffee before the lovely Heidi Fenstermaker.
"Thanks."
Grom tried not to stare as she lifted the white porcelain to her full, beautiful lips. The moment of truth. What did dried, ground-up, poisonous octopus powder taste like, anyway? It couldn't be good. He half expected Heidi to spew java all over him.
Instead, she rewarded him with a faint smile. "It's okay?" he asked.
"As good as it gets around here." He nodded. Now the next big test. Would it work?
It couldn't work. How could it work? The Miytec story had to be just a myth.
Well, he would know soon enough.
"I was saying, anyway, I was hoping we might get to know each other," Grom suggested.
"So why'd it take you three months to talk to me?"
Grom tried to look self-effacing. "I'm shy around women." He drank his own coffee, hoping to encourage her by example.
"You're not acting shy now." She sipped.
"You know, for once this is pretty good coffee," Grom said.
Heidi Fenstermaker nodded. "It's not bad at all, really."
"You'd like a little sugar." He said it simply. Not a question. Not a command. He just said it.
Heidi started to say something, then stopped. "I would like some sugar," she said.
Grom poured it in for her.
"It was nice of me to pour your sugar," Grom suggested.
"It's very sweet of you to sweeten my coffee," Heidi said with a wide smil
e. She sipped it.
"Great joe they have here," Grom observed.
"It is wonderful!"
"I'm attracted to you Heidi. And you are extremely attracted to me."
"I am, Greg. I guess I never really admitted it to myself until this very minute."
"You are in love with me, passionately. You want me. You'd do anything for me, Heidi."
"Yes, Greg, anything. " She leaned over the table, her eyes drinking him in lustily and giving him a fine view down the front of her light cotton shirt. She looked around and surreptitiously opened a couple more of the shirt buttons. Grom's view got even better.
Heidi pulled the rubber band out of her hair, transforming her tight ponytail into a bountiful spill of cornsilk. "Let's skip breakfast and go back to my room," she suggested.
Grom leaned back, brimming with satisfaction. His future was assured. His success would know no bounds. And what better way to celebrate it all than with a morning romp with Heidi Fenstermaker? He said, "Finish your coffee for me first, will you, honey bunch?"
The cup was drained before he reached the "unch" part.
GREG GROM FONDLY recalled those first heady days spent testing the capabilities of the powder. It worked just as well as the translations promised. In fact, it seemed too good to be true. Grom kept waiting for his test subject to develop horrific medical problems or dementia or, well, something.
There were a few glitches along the way. When Heidi Fenstermaker discovered that Grom was regularly bedding nine of the fourteen female interns, she became hysterically jealous. Grom calmed her down and gave her a cup of coffee. He suggested to Heidi that she was not angry with him for sleeping with every other attractive woman in the group. As a matter of fact, Grom suggested that...
Well, that opened up whole new vistas of opportunity. Even after Grom began using his powder for other purposes he still enjoyed many and various sexual exploits. He learned from his mistakes and soon developed a very effective set of suggestions. He took his women, enjoyed them, then discarded them with a code word. They went away just as happily as they had come to him.
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