The couple was flattered to have the island's president stopping by their restaurant table to chat. They were honored when he bought them a bottle of fine wine and decanted it himself. They never saw the extra ingredient he slipped into the wineglasses.
After drinking their wine, Grom suggested to the couple that they were having a fabulous honeymoon and they absolutely loved everything about Union Island.
The GUTX synthesis seemed to be working fine at first, then the newlyweds became agitated. Grom left, feeling the first twinges of alarm, and watched what happened next through the restaurant's front picture windows.
The couple began jumping around, boisterously conversing with other diners. Grom learned later that one of the other patrons mentioned that, while Union Island was indeed wonderful, the beaches could stand a little less litter.
That was all it took to set off the honeymooners. "It's perfect!" the blushing bride screeched at the naysayer. "Do you hear me! Do you understand, bitch?" The lady who had complained about the trashy seaside understood nothing except that she was being slashed to pieces by a maniac with a steak knife.
It wasn't easy downplaying the only murder in Union Island's recent memory. Reporters made much of the island's increased tensions resulting from its exploding tourism business. There were a few damaging "indepth" investigations by reporters who had never even been to the island.
Summens knew how to take care of assholes like that. She hurt those reporters in the worst possible way-by compromising their credibility. She invited them to the island personally, turning on her feminine charms full blast. "All I ask is that you join the president and myself for a welcome dinner," she explained. "After that you can spend as much or as little time as you like on the island and really get to know what it has to offer."
"What's your angle?" a Washington Post reporter demanded warily.
"My angle is that I believe you will see that most of what you wrote about is untrue," she said matter-of-factly. These hard-nose reporter types liked you to be straight with them.
"What if I think I was exactly right?" he probed.
"Then you let your first article stand," she said simply.
"What if I think it's even more of a shit hole than I wrote about the first time?" the Post reporter said with a sneer.
"You write whatever you think is true," Summens said, putting a smile in her voice. "We'll trust your judgment." It took a lot of persuasion, but persuasion was what Dawn Summens did best. Once she got two high-profile yeses, the other reporters fell in line.
As promised, she and Grom hosted a private dinner party at the presidential beach house. Oh, how smug that bunch had been when they arrived, just brimming with journalistic integrity.
"Giving journalists a dinner with the president is not going to influence our reportage," said one blackhaired woman from some big East Coast newspaper, then added, after an insulting pause, "Ms. Tourism Minister."
"Is 'reportage' a word?" Summens replied innocently. The newspaper bitch and her colleagues left the dinner with a new frame of mind, thanks to a healthy dose of GUTX-real GUTX, not the synthesized junk. They all wrote retractions and self-condemnations for their irresponsible and inaccurate earlier reports on the problems at Union Island.
The black-haired bitch was writing for the police beat now, from what Summens heard. Good riddance. All the others had suffered similar career disasters.
But that was enough trouble at home. Summens and Grom decided to take the testing abroad and arranged a PR tour for the president that would take him to some of the hottest vacation spots in the U.S., where he could test the GUTX samples on unsuspecting tourists. If the subjects went amok, it wouldn't be Union Island's problem.
Grom had taken delivery of more than thirty sample types from eight labs, and surely one of them would do what original GUTX did. One of them had to work, because their original GUTX supply was down to the dregs. However, each and every formula had ended with the subjects running amok. Grom created a swath of violence and insanity across the south-central United States. Now, if Dawn Summens was reading the clues correctly, Greg had finally found a formula that worked. Now he would betray her.
Summens's notebook computer was a sort of cybernetics nerve center for most of the systems on the island, and she tapped into the security cameras at the airport, witnessing the police preparations for the arriving 747. Grom and his dippy secretary were the first off. Even the small, grainy image from the security camera showed Greg looking haggard and nervous. His dippy secretary Amelia was a different story. Walking with confidence and a slight, assured smile, her eyes never left Greg Grom, and she never left her proper place-to his left and two steps behind him.
That was all the proof Dawn Summens needed. Before Dawn came along, he had dosed up hundreds of women, and he always made them subservient-and that meant walking two steps behind him, always. Now he was back to his old ways. He had given his secretary a fresh dose of the new GUTX and she was playing the part he wanted.
That would be Dawn if she wasn't careful.
She almost began doubting her conclusions when she witnessed what happened next. Police stormed the aircraft and retreated minutes later with a severely wounded man. The next time they went inside they had guns and riot gear.
They hauled out prisoners too numerous to count, but enough of them were recognizable on the security video feed to assure Dawn that these were, in fact, island government employees. All appeared violently insane.
Why were they given the bad stuff and Amelia given the good stuff?
Dawn's system could tap into video signals from around the island. Hotels and department stores. Emergency vehicles and street-pole cameras. She was able to watch the convoy sneak across town, without emergency lights or sirens, and pull into the lot of the small police station.
She opened a line to the station cameras and audio feeds and saw the lunatics herded into the basement lockup.
She clicked over to her feed from the presidential beach house, finding Greg Grom in his bedroom. Grom didn't know she had tapped into his home security system. She had watched him perform some very vile deeds in that bedroom-deeds he never admitted to her.
There he was now, performing one of his favorite and most revolting acts with a screeching, sobbing Amelia Powlik. Oh, yes, he loved it when they cried in pain and begged for more in the same breath. Amelia didn't disappoint.
"Did it hurt?" he asked her afterward.
"I thought you'd rip me apart," Amelia whimpered. "How soon until we do it again?"
"I don't know. Maybe never. I have tastier fish to fry." Amelia was clearly hurt by this, but she was an innovator. "I know what would get you interested again, Mr. President."
Dawn had no inclination to view another such display, but she was mesmerized when the plain, unattractive Amelia came out of the bathroom seconds later wearing one of Dawn's very own bikinis. She had to have left it there months ago.
"I am Union Island," Amelia said in a pouty imitation of a Dawn Summens commercial. "Come to me." It was an unflattering imitation.
Greg Grom had not proved to be strong when it came to instant replays in the bedroom, but all of a sudden he was bolt upright and ready for more.
"Dawn!" he barked at Amelia Powlik. "Time for you to get what's coming to you."
"Will it hurt?" Amelia asked in a falsetto voice as she scampered to kneel at Grom's bedside.
"You better believe it will. It's been a long time coming."
Grom was true to his word. He made it painful, and he made it humiliating, and he made the fake Dawn sob. All the while he was violating her he was rattling off an endless litany of petty crimes that had been committed against him by Dawn Summens, and how she would endure endless nights of suffering and degradation as punishment.
When he was done, Amelia Powlik collapsed on the woven rug. "That was magnificent," she gasped finally.
"Wait until I get the real thing," Grom said. "I went easy on you compared to what I'
m gonna do to her."
"Ooh, can I watch?"
Grom considered that. "Sure. Why not? Maybe I'll let you have a go at her, too. I'm bound to need a break sometime."
"And what would you like me to do to her?" Amelia asked, raising her head, eyes glinting in the darkness. "Maybe you should demonstrate."
Incredibly, Greg Grom rose to the occasion. Soon he was taking out his anger once again on the Dawn Summens stand-in.
The real Dawn Summens could not tear her eyes away. She had never seen Grom so confident, or so cruel, and she had certainly underestimated his anger.
What if she ended up in that role? One dose of GUTX and Grom would have her, body and mind. She would accept whatever he dished out, and she wouldn't stand a chance of escaping. She wouldn't want to escape.
She watched the performance for hours. By sunrise Amelia was a mess of small wounds and bruises, and she finally passed out from exhaustion. Grom finished off with her anyway and then fell into a dead sleep.
But Dawn watched him still, her plans ripening in her brilliant, devious mind.
It was a desperate plan with no small risk, but she never even considered taking the safest approach-getting off Union Island and never coming back.
This bikini model was fated for greatness, and she would not back down in the face of danger-no matter how terrible the consequences of failure.
Chapter 30
Chiun stood outside the cab and slowly craned his ancient head to take in the entire facade of the faded pink Many Palms Resort. Clearly he wasn't pleased with what he saw.
"This," he said, turning to Remo, who was extracting chests from the overstuffed cab trunk, "is your fault."
"Huh? What?" Remo balanced the chests on his shoulders, "My fault? What is my fault and why is it my fault and why the hell can't it be some other guy's fault this one time?"
"This hotel," Chiun said evenly.
"Finest on the island," piped up the taxi driver.
"That's what you keep telling us," Remo muttered. "It's a frigging dump, but you know what, Chiun, it ain't my hotel."
"You brought us here," Chiun said reasonably.
"American Airlines brought us here."
"It was your investigation that led us to the Caribbean. Again."
"So you think I should have come up with different suspects or what?"
"It's a vacation paradise," the taxi driver enthused.
"Shut up," Remo told him. "You keep telling me to use my head and this time I used my head, and I'm getting nothing but grief for it. From you. From Smitty. From Junior. You think I'm any happier about coming back to the Caribbean? You think I want to spend time in this sleazy little junkyard with a beach?"
"Everybody says that at first," the taxi driver assured them. "I promise-by the time you leave, you'll love it!"
"Didn't I tell you to shut up?" Remo snarled. "You can't blame me for this, Chiun."
"I do."
"Stick it in your ear."
They passed through the front entrance into an open-air lobby with a stone floor and a freshly thatched roof. The walls were open to the beach.
"See?" Remo said. "Not so bad."
"It's ugly," Chiun pronounced with a dismissive wave. Remo went to the front desk, leaving Chiun standing there to wait.
"You wanna see ugly, go look in a mirror." Chiun turned slowly to face the insulting party.
"I like your pretty dress." The comment dripped with sarcasm.
Chiun found himself face-to-face with a bird. A big one. It was a strange and vibrant bluish parrot with a huge beak. Its small, shining black eyes were set in big yellow patches. There were other parrots inhabiting the display of driftwood in the middle of the open air lobby, but they were green and tiny, dwarfed by the macaw. "Don't make trouble," Remo called as he returned.
"Ringing its neck would be no trouble at all," Chiun commented.
"Not from Smitty's point of view."
"Old man wanna prune?" the parrot demanded.
"Who would teach a bird to be impolite?" Chiun asked.
"How should I know?" Remo said.
"I was not asking you." Chiun leaned close to the big parrot. Then leaned closer.
"Halitosis halitosis!" The bird squawked.
"Yellow and blue make a hideous color combination," Chiun told it, moving in even closer.
"Awk!" The bird tried to peck him, but Chiun held its beak in his fingers. The great black eyes rolled and the bird shifted on its driftwood perch.
"Not so long ago, in Rome, the Caesars considered parrots a delicacy," Chiun said.
He released it and the bird scrambled away, trembling. Chiun chuckled.
REMO WAS on the phone as soon as he had settled into the presidential suite at the Many Palms Resort. Settling in consisted of putting down the assortment of eight trunks Chiun had chosen for their short jaunt to the Caribbean, while the old Master himself plopped down in front of the television and began channel-surfing for Spanish-language soap operas.
"I think you sent us to the wrong island, Smitty," Remo declared.
"I doubt it," Harold W. Smith replied curtly.
"This place is a dump. And by place I mean the whole island, including this hotel."
"The Many Palms Resort is supposed to be the finest hotel-"
"Oh, Christ all-mighty, not you, too," Remo said, cutting him off. "Okay, it's not so awful, but it's strictly two-star and that doesn't bode well for the rest of the island."
"You don't know that. The U.S. has invested a half billion to improve the island infrastructure."
"I'll believe it when I see it."
"You're not there to look for evidence of a public works embezzler," Smith reminded him. "You're there to put a stop to the killing."
"Yes, of course. I'll call you."
Remo replaced the phone as Chiun gave a disgusted sound, flicking off the TV and tossing the remote, which buried itself in the wall.
"No soaps?" Remo asked.
"None."
"My fault?"
"Of course."
Remo sighed. "I'm going for a walk."
Chapter 31
Dawn Summens didn't move. Her face was blank, as if her emotions had been erased.
"I had to do it," Greg Grom apologized. She just stood there.
"I had no choice," Grom insisted.
"Christ, Greg," Dawn said, turning away from the small barred window in the steel door. "It's horrible."
"They'll snap out of it. I'm sure they'll snap out of it," Greg Grom said worriedly, his own alarm growing. Dawn had been too shocked to react at first, but now her face was pale and she looked frightened. She leaned against the bare concrete wall.
"I had to do it," he whined. "The Feds were there. Those special agents I told you about? They were right there! The only way to get away was to cause such a big mess I could get lost in it. So I dosed everybody on the bus."
She looked at him with a stark eye. "Then what happened?"
"They went crazy. Just like all the others. They went on a rampage. It was just, just insanity."
"Rampaging?" she asked.
Greg nodded vigorously. "Yes. Not like they are now. This didn't happen until a few hours ago. They were still full of energy when we locked them up. Then this morning-this."
Dawn didn't want to look again, but she was drawn to the steel door. Through the bars she saw a large, low-ceilinged room containing fully half the administrative staff of the island government, maybe forty people in all, and not a word was spoken. Most of them simply stood in one spot, eyes wide, looking slowly around with bloodshot eyes. Several were pacing the cell slowly. One woman was putting her hand to the cold concrete wall again and again, and Dawn realized she was trying to flatten a spider. It wasn't fast, but the woman moved as if in slow motion and she kept missing it.
"Are they dying or what?" Grom whined.
"I don't know," Dawn Summens said slowly, although her thoughts were beginning to race. Schemes and strategies began to c
onstruct and collapse rapidly as she considered how she might use this development to her own advantage.
"What about the others on the mainland?"
"Some are normal and don't remember a thing," she said. "Some of them, if they weren't killed, are just like this."
Grom's jowls and baggy eyes drooped. He was worried. Dawn was delighted. Grom had intended to turn the tables against her, but the tables had lurched a little back in her direction.
"Greg, I'm scared," she said, putting a vulnerable lilt in her voice. "None of the ones on the mainland turned this fast. It took days and days. But it hasn't even been twenty-four hours since you dosed our people. What if they all die? We won't be able to cover it up. Not without GUTX."
"Yeah," he admitted, nodding and avoiding eye contact.
"What about Amelia?" she asked, and was satisfied to see him stiffen.
"What about her?"
"She's the only one missing from the lockup. Don't tell me she was killed?" Dawn pleaded.
"No. She was the only one who didn't get a dose. She's fine."
"Oh, thank God. How's she dealing with all of this?"
"She's fine," Grom said quickly. "Dawn, they're here."
"The agents. The two who've been after me. They were on the morning flight out of Miami. That's where I really need your help now."
"What can I do?"
Grom gave her a sick smirk. "You're Dawn Summens. You know what to do."
THE BEACH WAS rocky and dirty. The ocean wasn't so much turquoise blue as it was sea-slime green. The clientele were less attractive. Around the swimming pool, lounge chair after lounge chair strained under the massive pasty skin-sacks of American vacationers. Not one of them was flattered by the tiny straps and G-strings that were standard swimming attire.
The waiters, all local islanders, strolled among the vacationers and looked tiny by comparison.
Remo went the long way around the pool, but he could feel the eyes on him. There were a few catcalls and three drink offers. One woman jumped off her lounge chair-quite agile, considering her age-and started toward him with a gleam in her cataracts. Remo sped up.
"Not so fast, sweetums! Let's get to know each other over foreplay."
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