Misfortune Teller td-115

by Warren Murphy

  Chiun did not give the corpse a second glance. A remorseless wraith in green, the Master of Sinanju moved on.

  REMO DROPPED THE BODY from his outstretched hand. Mouth hanging slack in death, it tumbled atop the other two.

  That was four assassins for him so far. There were at least that many in the other direction.

  He was much closer to the stage now.

  Sun was as oblivious to the threat beneath him as his followers.

  "...cannot allow the forces of evil to crush our future. I am your future. I am the future of the world ..."

  The cult leader continued to shout into the protesting microphone. In spite of the briskness of the day, his face was coated in a sheen of sweat.

  Remo turned from Sun. He looped around the stage, coming up on the far side. This was ridiculous. There should have been police here. He hadn't seen one uniformed officer since arriving at the stadium.

  He had no idea how many Chiun might have gotten so far. The crowd in the infield was too thick to see farther than the dozen or so people jammed in any given area. Remo had seen three assassins cutting through the throng on the right. If Chiun had gotten only those, that left two more. At least.

  The killers had been weaving and ducking through the vast collection of Sunnies. By this point, the final two Koreans would not be anywhere near the places Remo had first seen them.

  He moved swiftly, slipping like a shadow between groups of robed cult members.

  Out, look. Around, duck, look again.

  No one.

  The stage loomed high on his right. He was so close now he could no longer see the Reverend Sun. The cult leader's voice continued to roar out stridently across his throng of faithful as Remo swept around to the rear of the platform.

  Nothing. More blissfully ignorant couples. A line of Sunnies stood on the rear of the platform above, backs to the crowd.

  He must have missed them on the other side.

  Remo spun on his heel and was about to double back when he caught a sudden flash of movement from around the far side of the high-backed stage.

  White robe. Asian features.

  Yet another Korean assassin.

  Remo didn't give much thought to the man's nationality. He was nothing more than a threat to be neutralized.

  Spinning back, Remo raced along the rear wall of the platform toward the lone killer. He was not even halfway there before he knew he would be too late.

  The gun was already out and up. Clip in place. Finger caressed the crooked trigger. The explosive rattle of automatic-weapons fire drowned out the electronic bellow of Man Hyung Sun.

  Hot lead blasted the backs of the men lined along the rear of the platform. Flesh exploded into flecks of crimson-streaked pulp as the bullets ripped through the Sunnies clustered on the platform.

  Like too real ducks in a macabre shooting gallery, the men began toppling over. Some fell face forward onto the stage. Still more dropped in lifeless heaps to the grassy field behind the platform.

  The killer had a look of demonic possession in his eyes as he continued firing upward. Round after round rattled into the men on the stage, each bullet coming that much closer to the Reverend Man Hyung Sun.

  Oddly, there was no screaming.

  Remo assumed the reaction from the crowd would be one of terror. The instinct to flee-for self-preservation-would surely surface among the Sunnie multitude. It did not.

  The cult members remained mute spectators to the carnage. The only visible change was that the ones at the rear of the platform seemed a bit more attentive as Remo flashed over to the man with the gun.

  The Korean had nearly exhausted the bullets in the clip. He slipped the weapon back to one side, expecting to make a final sweep across the men on stage before the magazine was spent, when he felt an abrupt tug at his hands.

  Popping and wrenching sounds flooded the auditory void that a second before had been filled with the persistent clatter of autofire.

  The killer looked down for the source of the strange new noise. He found it at his hands. Or rather, where his hands had been.

  The hands were gone, as was the gun. Replaced by twin stumps of spurting red blood.

  As he looked down in dull amazement at his lifeblood pumping onto the ground, the assassin became briefly aware of his gun. The barrel was pointed back in his direction and was floating gently toward his face.

  Wait.

  Not floating.

  Hurtling.

  In fact, zooming in faster than the fastest thing he had ever seen.

  The bone-crushing impact of his own weapon a split second later was the last thing the killer would ever feel.

  Remo dumped the body with the gun sprouting from its forehead onto the ground. He was picking his way back through the carnage when a voice exploded on the PA system.

  "As I have foretold, so it has come to pass!" the booming voice of Man Hyung Sun announced proudly.

  Remo could not believe it. Sun was actually going on with the ceremony.

  "I am the seer of legend. I augur great things for the chosen few. Revel in the Sun Source, disbelievers! Let Man Hyung Sun be your guide to blessed pyon ha-da! Great shall be the rewards for him who joins our righteous cause!"

  "Sun! Sun! Sun!"

  The crowd began to chant his name once more.

  It was almost as if there had not been an attempted assassination a moment before. For all anyone knew, there were still killers lurking amid the crowd.

  The Sunnies didn't care. The bodies strewed around the rear of the stage did not matter. They screamed and chanted with religious zeal, eyes wild with righteous fire.

  Hands waved pink saris like trophies. As Remo came around to the front of the stage, he fought his way through the waving streams of silk, still searching for the last of the Korean hit squad.

  "One has come to deliver us to that which I have foretold!" Sun screamed, quieting the frenzied crowd.

  Remo stumbled on the last body. It was at the base of the stage. Every bone beneath the robe appeared to have been pounded to dust. Chiun's handiwork.

  He glanced around, looking for the Master of Sinanju in the sea of Sunnie faces.

  "It is he who saved your sacred leader! He of the Sun Source whose arrival I have presaged!"

  There it was again. Sun Source. The most ancient description of Sinanju, known only to a handful of people. For some reason, it angered Remo to hear the cult leader speak the words. Coming from a fraud like Sun, it was almost a desecration.

  "He will help lead us to glory!"

  Remo half heard the words.

  Chiun was nowhere to be seen. From the direction Remo had taken, there was really only one place the old Korean could have gone.

  "Speak that we may hear your words, Great Protector!"

  A thought struck Remo. It dropped like a lead ball into the pit of his stomach.

  Limbs stiff, face unreadable, he turned to the stage.

  The wizened form of the Master of Sinanju stood high on the platform next to the Reverend Man Hyung Sun. The cluster of wrinkles on his parchment face bunched into a tight fist of pleasure as Sun twisted the microphone over to Chiun.

  "All hail the Sun Source," the Master of Sinanju's squeaky voice boomed out over the public-address system.

  As the world spun and twisted and finally dropped out from beneath Remo's feet, the crowd of Sunnie disciples burst into frenzied cheers.

  Chapter 14

  The men wore the blue uniform of the New York City Police Department. Hip radios squawking, they forced their way through the crowd of mingling Sunnies to the pile of three bodies lying on the infield of Yankee Stadium.

  Remo was gone. He had seen the police arriving at the very end of the mass wedding ceremony and had taken off in the opposite direction with Chiun. The two Masters of Sinanju had left with the Reverend Sun's entourage.

  It was a testament to the brainwashing techniques the Sunnie cult employed that the men and women could ignore all the corpses lying
around their makeshift chapel.

  Chatting among themselves in the postwedding euphoria, they paid little attention as the police slipped the first trio of bodies into black zipper bags.

  Oddly enough, there were no homicide detectives on the scene. Stranger still, the police who were present used no gloves when handling the corpses. They merely stuffed the remains into the bags, zipped them up and moved on to the next bodies. They could have been state workers collecting litter at the side of the highway.

  Not one question was asked of the Sunnies.

  Not one fingerprint was taken.

  Not one hair or fiber or blood sample was lifted from any of the bodies, the ground or the stage.

  Nothing besides the actual collection of the corpses seemed to interest the police.

  It took little time for them to bag up the assassins, as well as the Sunnies who had fallen victim to the single successful gunman.

  The nine bodies of the hit squad were placed in the back of an unmarked van. The remains of the more than one dozen slaughtered Sunnie cult members were put in the back of another nondescript vehicle.

  Without a single siren or light to herald their way, the trucks took off in different directions.

  The bodies of the Sunnie victims turned up over the course of the next two days, scattered in a wide area around the East River near Riker's Island and in Flushing Bay near LaGuardia Airport.

  The remains of the Korean hit squad showed up in a completely different place.

  Chapter 15

  It was the beginning of his second full day of work back behind his familiar desk at Folcroft Sanitarium, and Harold W. Smith felt like a new man.

  The winter sun reflected brightly on Long Island Sound, dappling in shades of white and yellow the waves that lapped at the rotting dock behind the private sanitarium's administrative wing.

  Though the calendar had lately crept into December, a substantial snowfall had yet to come. The crispness of the air and lack of icy buildup on the ground erased images of the deep winters of years past. Residents of the Northeast were enjoying the guiltless lie that this was merely an extended autumn. True winter was still far off.

  Typing at his desk computer, Smith was basking in the comforting fiction, as well.

  For a time the day before yesterday, he had thought he might be having some kind of relapse. Of course, he knew that was not likely. He had been assured that his recovery would be complete.

  However, after he had hung up from Remo, he had a creeping, unnerving sensation in his skull.

  It was a strange afterimage of his illness. Almost like exploring the spot where a troubling canker sore had been, expecting the pain to still be there.

  Of course Smith was nothing if not logical. He knew exactly why he had felt the way he had. But Remo and Chiun had gotten out of Germany without further incident.

  According to the latest information he had gotten from the wire service, the police cordon was still in place around the North Korean embassy. They did not know their quarry was long gone. Let the Koreans at the Berlin mission try to explain their way out of it. It was not a CURE affair.

  Just to be certain that every loose end was tied up, Smith was in the process of checking the records of Kim Jong Il's personal jet.

  His gnarled fingers ached as he drummed them swiftly and precisely against the surface of his desk. Buried beneath the lip of the onyx slab, alphanumeric keys lit up amber when struck. Dancing fireflies entombed in a sea of black.

  While he was convalescing, Smith had gotten used to typing on his small laptop. The sensation was different with the high-tech keyboard on his desk. His body was not as adaptable as it had once been. It would take a little time for his fingers to get used to the different sensation.

  Smith soon learned that the aircraft had touched down in North Korea the previous day. That meant that the Master of Sinanju's share of the Nibelungen Hoard would be halfway to his village by now. Away from the world for centuries-perhaps aeons-to come.

  The CURE director breathed a sigh of relief on learning the news. The Hoard would not be a threat to world commerce in Harold Smith's lifetime. And for Smith, that was the best he could hope to accomplish.

  As he was exiting the record of flight-log data, Smith's computer system emitted a small electronic beep. It was a signal that the massive mainframes in the basement beneath him had dredged something of interest from the vast stream of facts and curiosities coursing endlessly along the invisible information stream that was the World Wide Web.

  Closing out his current application, Smith brought up a window containing the information.

  It was a news story from nearby New York City. Eight bullet-riddled bodies had washed up from the East River. Although the features had been carefully mutilated to make identification impossible, police were willing to admit that the victims all appeared to be rather young-ranging from their early twenties to midthirties.

  It was being treated as a mystery. The deceased were white males. They did not appear to be victims of a gangland slaying, nor was there evidence of drugs. There had been no missing-persons reports filed.

  Until new evidence came to light, the men had each been given a John Doe classification.

  Smith wondered briefly if this might not be the work of some new serial killer. If it was, it did not fit any pattern Smith knew of.

  He decided that an explanation would most likely present itself eventually. Smith was about to close out the file when the blue contact desk phone rang. He left the story on his computer as he turned his attention to the telephone.

  "Yes, Remo," Smith said efficiently.

  "Smitty, I figured I'd better let you know about the bodies before those damned computers of yours flagged the story," Remo's familiar voice announced glumly.

  "What bodies?" Smith asked, sitting up in his chair. He became instantly aware of his surgery scar. He felt gingerly at it with his gray fingertips as he spoke.

  "The ones Chiun and I whacked at the Loonie wedding yesterday," Remo explained. "I know you've got some screwy program that recognizes mine and Chiun's techniques. Before you go apeshit, we are not freelancing."

  "That is comforting to know," Smith said dryly. "However, I have received no such information."

  "Really?" Remo said, surprised. "I figured those machines of yours would have read the police reports by now."

  "Perhaps we should begin at the beginning," Smith said. "Who did you, er, remove?"

  "Nine Korean killers," Remo said. "They were armed to the teeth and tried to bump off Man Hyung Sun himself."

  "There was an assassination attempt against Sun?" Smith asked. It was his turn to be surprised.

  "You didn't hear about that, either?" Remo asked.

  "No, I did not."

  "Gee, maybe it's time for an upgrade or a lube job or something," Remo suggested. "Your computers are slipping."

  "That is not possible," Smith insisted. But even as he denied the possibility that the Folcroft Four could fail, Smith was diving into the system.

  He quickly found the reports on the mass Sunnie wedding ceremony. There was nothing to indicate that it had not gone off without a hitch, so to speak.

  "Remo, the stories I am reading recount a rather dull ceremony," Smith said, puzzled.

  "Whoever wrote that wasn't there," Remo said. "Come to think of it," he added, "I don't remember seeing anyone who looked like a reporter there."

  "I think I see why," Smith said, scanning the lines of text on his computer screen. "All of these stories appear to be pretty much identical to one another. Typical for reporters who have written their stories from either a pool source or a press release."

  "You're saying the Sunnies kept the assassination attempt under their hats?" Remo asked.

  "So it would seem."

  "That doesn't make sense. Sun doesn't seem like the kind of guy who would hide from something that might give him positive press."

  "No, that does not seem to be in keeping with the cha
racter of the Sunnie leader," Smith agreed.

  "You knew he had a new psychic infomercial on," Remo said. It was not a question.

  "I have heard as much," Smith replied crisply. "It is my understanding that former presidential candidate Michael Princippi is a featured performer." He did not attempt to hide the distaste in his tone. "Apparently, he has sunk even lower since his dealings with Mark Kaspar and the Truth Church."

  Remo stiffened at the reference. "Don't even mention that, Smitty," he complained. "Those ghosts are all behind us, so let's just forget about it." He took a deep breath, banishing thoughts of a more painful time. "Anyway, it seems crazy that Sun wouldn't want to capitalize on some screwballs trying to kill him on the same week he goes national with some new scheme."

  "I am at a loss to explain it, as well," Smith admitted. "You say these men you eliminated were Korean. Did you think to question any of them?"

  "There wasn't time," Remo explained.

  "That is unfortunate. Sun is a fervent antiCommunist who has at different times been accused of involvement in illegal activity against both North and South Korea. It is possible that one of the governments on either side of the Thirty-eighth Parallel sent agents to dispose of him for some reason. Why they would choose to do so at this time, I would not begin to speculate."

  "Maybe they just don't like weddings," Remo suggested.

  "Yes," Smith said humorlessly. "In any event, I will be on the alert for any report concerning the Korean deaths. If there is any new information available, I will let you know. You are at home, presumably."

  "Not exactly," Remo hedged. Before Smith could press further, he changed the subject. "By the way, Smitty, the other weird thing about the whole mess is that there weren't any police there during the assassination attempt."

  "Did Sun not wish them inside the stadium during the ceremony?" Smith asked.

  "In or outside," Remo explained. "There weren't any cops around anywhere. More than twenty bodies raining down all around us, and not even a beat cop with a billy club to give me and Chiun a hand."

  "Twenty?" Smith asked, gray face creasing in tart displeasure. "You said there were only nine."