Feast or Famine td-107

by Warren Murphy

  Feast or Famine

  ( The Destroyer - 107 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Invisible swarms of insects are in the rampage, heading towards America's heartland. Immune to pesticides, the creatures are consuming farms, leveling wheat and cornfields. On the frontlines, Remo and the Master of Sinanju face not only the insurgent insects, but the Iowa Disorganized Militia - convinced this pestilence is actually a government conspiracy.

  Is the insect kingdom mobilizing to reclaim the planet...or is it something entirely different behind it all? Unless the Destroyer can combat this disaster, a whole nation may start dropping like flies.

  Destroyer 107: Feast or Famine

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  At first, no one connected the hideous death of Doyal T. Rand with the greatest plague to threaten America's breadbasket since the Dust Bowl.

  Doyal T. Rand wasn't a farmer. He was a geneticist. His chief accomplishment in life was the discovery of the sex gland in roaches. Learning to shut off the pheromone-producing gland was the same as shutting off a roach's genetic ability to replicate itself. No more replication, no more roaches. While human birth control remained a subject of controversy, many on both sides of the argument practiced roach birth control without giving the moral implications a second thought. Nobody cared about roaches. Not even Doyal T. Rand, who had become a millionaire many times over defusing and frustrating their furtive little sex lives.

  Doyal T. Rand was on his lunch hour on a sunny April morning when he forgot a simple truism. There is no such thing as a free lunch.

  Technically, it wasn't a free lunch that killed him, but a candy sample.

  Doyal T. Rand stood on the corner of Broadway and Seventh Avenue in New York City making faces at the rows of restaurants while trying to decide whether he was in the mood for Chinese or Thai. Actually, he hungered for Korean barbecue, but the nearest Korean restaurant was in Herald Square, which was too long to walk, and Doyal T. Rand was too cheap to take a cab.

  While he was mentally tasting Bi Bam Bap on his hungry tongue, Doyal T. Rand heard what was to him music.

  "Free sample!"

  Rand turned. On the corner behind him, a man was standing in the cool of April, with a tray slung from his shoulders like those that cigarette girls carried in old B movies. He wore some kind of team jacket and cap. Doyal T. Rand didn't follow sports, so his eyes flicked from the team logo to the man's hands.

  He was handing out free samples of something to anyone who would accept them.

  "Free. It's free. Free to all," the hawker kept saying. His face was an animated shadow under the bill of his cap. He wore mirrored sunglasses tinted an iridescent emerald.

  Doyal T. Rand stepped closer. At first, it was curiosity. Then greed. And when he noticed people unwrapping the samples and popping them into their mouths, he had to have one. It didn't matter what it was. It was free. Doyal T. Rand liked free stuff. If someone were to can puppy poo and offer them two for the price of one, Doyal T. Rand would buy four cans and walk away grinning.

  "I'll take one," he told the vendor.

  "It's guarana candy," the vendor said.

  "I don't care. Just give me one."

  "It's made from a Brazilian berry supposed to have aphrodisiac properties. Not that we're guaranteeing anything."

  "I don't care what it is. I just want mine," Doyal T. Rand said impatiently because he took a strict forty-five minutes for lunch. Enough to wolf his food down and slide out the door before the waitress realized she'd been stiffed on her tip.

  The tray was filled with what looked like amber marbles wrapped in cellophane. When Doyal got a good look, his undersized heart sank. The stuff looked like hard candy. He didn't like hard candy. He preferred caramel or nougat. Bull's-eyes were his favorite. He loved chewing through sweet caramel to the dry, powdery confection center.

  Still, this candy was free.

  "Gimme," Doyal T. Rand said.

  The vendor ignored the dull amber candies rattling around his waist-high tray and palmed one from his pocket. That one was slightly larger than the others and slightly redder. Doyal, his eyes on all those free samples, failed to notice his came from the hawker's pocket.

  "Is it hot?" he asked, thinking of a peppery candy called Red Hots, which he detested.

  "No. Sweet."

  "I don't like hard candy," Doyal T. Rand muttered, ever the ingrate.

  "You'll like this."

  "We'll see," said Doyal T. Rand. Just as he turned to go, he caught himself and asked, "Can I have another?"

  "One to a customer."

  "It's for my secretary. She has a sweet tooth."

  "One to a customer."

  Shrugging, Doyal T. Rand walked off, absently unwrapping the ball of hard amber sugar. He still had to figure out where to eat. Lunchtime was ticking away.

  Rand finally decided on Thai food. He stepped off the curb as the light changed and, without thinking about it, popped the hard amber candy into his mouth.

  It was pleasantly sweet. There was a kind of tang to it that took the edge off the sweetness. Doyal T. Rand rolled it around on his tongue, paying more attention to the taste. It began tasting familiar. Then he remembered a soft drink that had come on the market last fall. It tasted just like this. It was good. The candy was good, too. Best of all, it was free.

  Rand was halfway across Seventh Avenue when he decided the candy was worth going after seconds.

  He turned, biting down on the hard, sweet ball, and instantly his head filled with a weird buzzing.

  Not his ears. His head. It started low, then swelled with incredible speed. He had a wild thought. He wondered if this was the aphrodisiac effect the vendor had mentioned kicking in.

  Then the buzzing filled his entire head, and the world winked out as if he had been struck blind by the very sweetness of the taste in his mouth.

  Doyal T. Rand took a halting step, then another. His head swayed, then jerked, and then he pitched forward on his face in the middle of the crosswalk.

  The light changed, and a phalanx of capsulelike yellow cabs surged toward him, honking and blaring for him to pick his lazy ass off the intersection so that Manhattan traffic could flow with its normal multidirectional pandemonium.

  When Rand refused to move, they went around him. At first, with care, but once traffic flow resumed, several vehicles left short stretches of smoking tread as testimony to their brake-pad strength.

  All that honking brought NYPD traffic cop Andy Funkhauser surging into the blaring congestion, blowing his whistle like a fury.

  Officer Funkhauser all but tripped over the body, dropped the whistle from his mouth and used his hands to direct the traffic flow while he tried talking into his shoulder radio.

  The ambulance pulled up while the light was red; and a pair of EMTs jumped out.

  "I didn't touch him," Officer Funkhauser said, one eye on a fresh barrier of yellow cabs that eyed him with hungry headlights as they waited for green.

  "Drunk?"

  "Could be diabetic."

  One of the EMTs got down on his knees. "Hey buddy, can you hear me?"

  The body of Doyal T. Rand declined to answer. So they rolled him over.

  Officer Funkhauser had one eye on the impatient traffic. The light had finally turned green, and engines were growling. He was keeping them at bay with only the upraised palm of his hand.

  He heard one of the EMTs say "Ugh."

  He had never heard an EMT go "Ugh" before. The poor bastards saw everything. Officer Funkhauser thought he had seen everything, too.

  So he took his eyes off the line of cars and cabs and glanced d
own.

  What he saw hit him like a mule's kick.

  The victim's face was turned up to the sky. The sun was shining down with a clarity New York City only enjoyed on cloudless days.

  The victim's eye sockets were scarlet caverns. There was no blood. No eyeballs. Just the red bone that was designed by nature to hold the human eye in place.

  "Jesus, where are this guy's eyes?" blurted the EMT who hadn't said "Ugh."

  At that point, the dead guy's mouth-there was no question he was dead-dropped open. The sun shone directly into it. It showed the interior of his mouth. And showed without a doubt that the dead man had no tongue. No uvula, either.

  "I think we have a homicide here," the first EMT muttered.

  "Fuck," said Officer Funkhauser, who knew he had to call for Homicide and a morgue wagon and didn't think his upraised hand and his badge could hold off the growling cabs much longer.

  "I think it was a mob hit," Officer Funkhauser volunteered when two homicide detectives made their appearance.

  "What makes you say that?" the black one asked while the white one knelt over the body.

  "Guy had his eyes gouged out, and his tongue is missing. That says mob hit to me."

  The homicide detective grunted and said, "We deal in facts."

  "And it's a fact that poor guy's lacking eyes and a tongue. They didn't melt in the heat. It won't break sixty-five today."

  "We deal in facts," the detective repeated. "Harry, what have you got?"

  "I think we'd better get this guy photographed and off the street before we all get run down."

  That took all of thirty minutes, and when the body had been photographed from every angle and the outline traced in metallic silver to withstand tire prints, the coroner's people laid him on a gurney and started to cart him off.

  The body wobbled on the gurney, and as they raised it to the level of the wagon, the eyeless head rolled to the left. Out of the left ear poured a pinkish gray gruel, and the seasoned veterans on the scene recognized it as brain matter.

  "Jesus."

  They gathered around the gurney as it was set back on the ground.

  "Brains don't liquefy like that, do they?" Funkhauser muttered.

  "How long has this guy been dead?" an EMT wondered aloud.

  They poked and prodded and noticed the flesh hadn't even cooled, and decided less than an hour.

  "Brains don't liquefy," the homicide detective repeated.

  No one disputed him. But they were looking at human brain matter lying like so much custard beside the man's left ear.

  The medical examiner got down on one knee and shone a light into the corpse's right ear.

  "What do you see?" asked Officer Funkhauser, who was by this time fascinated. He had always wanted to go into Homicide. This was very educational.

  "Step aside," the M.E. barked.

  When he did, the M.E. gasped.

  "What is it?"

  "I see daylight. I can see clear through this man's skull."

  "Is that possible?"

  "If the man's head was empty, it is," he said, climbing to his feet. His knees were shaking. He said, "Load him up and get him out of here."

  Officer Funkhauser watched the body slide into the back of the meat wagon and spoke the obvious.

  "The mob doesn't normally mess with a guy's brains. Do they?"

  AT THE MANHATTAN MORGUE, the body was identified as that of Doyal T. Rand by the contents of his wallet.

  Chief Medical Examiner Lemuel Quirk X-rayed his skull and determined it was empty of all soft tissue. No tissue, brains or soft palate. Other organs were missing, too. The pineal gland. The thyroid. The sinuses. And the entire auditory canal.

  When they cut him open, they discovered an undigested mass in his stomach that caused Quirk to go as pale as sailcloth.

  "If I didn't know better, I'd say I was looking at human brain matter," he muttered.

  His assistant took a quick look, gulped hard and grabbed at his mouth. As he ran from the autopsy room, he could be heard retching all the way down the hall.

  Dr. Quirk scooped out the contents of the stomach, weighed them and, with a stainless-steel scalpel, probed them.

  Brain matter all right. Liquefied, like scrambled eggs that had set. But mixed in were red bits of pulp and flecks of matter he realized with a heart-pounding start were the clear lenses of a human eye.

  "How...?"

  Going to the head, Quirk pried open the mouth and shone a penlight down the man's gullet.

  "No soft palate ...yes, it was possible."

  Somehow the man's brain, eyes and other soft tissues had been churned to a liquid and simply slid down his unobstructed esophagus into his waiting stomach via natural apertures in the basal skull like the foramen magnum, the clivus and possibly the cribiform plate. Since there had been no digestion, the liquefaction had occurred at or just before the time of death. It was all very logical, the biology of it.

  Except it was impossible. People's brains did not turn to liquid and go sliding down their gullets.

  Not unless there was a terrible new agency of death out there.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo, and he didn't look like a walking sanction.

  In fact, he was the United States of America's ultimate sanction. He stepped off the plane at Sarajevo looking like a typical American tourist. Except for the fact that tourists don't come to the former Yugoslavia. No one comes to the former Yugoslavia. They only try to get out. Ethnic fighting had reduced the nation to the status of a Third World hellhole with former neighbors accusing one another of genocide, ethnocide, patricide, matricide, infanticide and even worse horrors.

  At the bottom of the air-stairs stood a uniformed agent who directed Remo to customs.

  "Where can I get a cab?" Remo asked him.

  "After undergoing customs and baggage reclaim, you will find signs."

  "I'm not carrying baggage."

  "What? No baggage?"

  "I travel light," said Remo, who was attired for shooting pool. He wore gray slacks, a crisp white T-shirt and Italian loafers that fit his sockless feet perfectly.

  "You must come with me if you have no baggage."

  "No," Remo corrected. "I must catch a cab."

  "Why?"

  "Because the quicker I catch the cab out of here, the quicker I can get the cab back to my return flight."

  The uniformed man looked at Remo with unhappy eyes.

  "When are you leaving Bosnia-Herzegovina, sir?"

  "Four-thirty."

  "You are in Sarajevo for only four hours? What is your business here?"

  "My business," said Remo.

  "You are reporter?"

  "No."

  "UN observer?"

  "I heard the UN got chased out."

  "They are forever trying to sneak back in," the customs official said pointedly.

  "I'm not UN. If I had a safe area to protect, it wouldn't be overrun by a bunch of big-mouthed goons with guns."

  The uniformed agent flinched. "You must come with me."

  "If with you means to the cab-stand, sure. If not, go screw."

  "Go screw what?" asked the agent, who was obviously unfamiliar with current U.S. slang. Actually, Remo's slang wasn't that current, but it usually got the point across.

  "Go screw yourself onto a cactus and go for a spin," returned Remo.

  The Yugoslav-Remo couldn't tell if he were a Serb, a Croat or a Bosnian-probably didn't know what a cactus was, but he knew an insult when he heard one. And he was convinced he had heard one. Even if he didn't exactly understand it.

  "I am insisting," he said, his voice and spine turning to ice.

  "Okay, but only this once," said Remo, changing attitude because he had been ordered to Sarajevo not to clean up Dodge, but to take out one Black Hat.

  "Come with me," the man said, turning around like a man used to being obeyed.

  In an interrogation room, they sat Remo down and surrounded him.

&nbs
p; "Empty pockets, please."

  Remo laid his billfold with its Remo Novak ID and approximately three thousand in U.S. bills and the folded article from the Boston Globe. He figured the money would distract them from the clipping. He was wrong. The Serb who detained him slowly unfolded the article. It was headlined A "Wanted" Poster That Leaves Pursuers Wanting.

  "What is this?"

  Remo decided what the hell. They didn't sound as if they were planning to let him go any time soon, and he had that plane to catch.

  "It's the reason I'm here," he said nonchalantly.

  "You are reporter?"

  "Assassin."

  "Again, please?"

  "I'm here to nail one of the war criminals on the list."

  "This is a reproduction of a Wanted poster for UN war criminals."

  "That's right," Remo agreed.

  "It is useless."

  "Next to useless," Remo corrected.

  "These are posted all over former Yugoslavia. There are almost no photos. Just silhouettes. The descriptions are a joke. Look at this one. It said, 'Bosko Boder. Six feet tall. Known to drive a taxi in Sarajevo. Wore gold."'

  "Know him?" asked Remo.

  "I could be he. It could be any Serb who drives a taxi and stands so tall."

  "I'm not allowed to nail just any Serb. I have to nail the correct Serb."

  "What means this 'nail'?" asked a brooding-faced man who looked like the local torturer. He had a scar running across his forehead like an exposed red vein. Remo grabbed the clipping from the lead interrogator's grasp. The third blacked-out face down in the second column mentioned a Serb concentration-camp guard with a jagged scar running from temple to temple.

  "Your name wouldn't be Jaromir Jurkovic, would it?" asked Remo.

  "I deny being Jurkovic!"

  "And what if he is?" pressed the lead interrogator.

  "If he is, I get to nail his sorry butt."

  "It is illegal to nail Serbs in Sarajevo. Whatever that is." And the man snapped his fingers.

  At that, Jagged Scar Jurkovic stepped behind Remo and laid two meaty paws on Remo's shoulders. Remo sensed the nearing pressure waves and allowed this to happen, although his reflexes screamed at his brain to strike back with all the power at his command. Which was considerable.