Feast or Famine td-107

by Warren Murphy

  The next slide was the same. The third also showed no evidence of insect parts.

  Wurmlinger was selecting yet another slide when Remo asked rather casually, "What kind of bug is all mouth and has only one eye on the center of its forehead?"

  "Why, no insect known to man," Wurmlinger told him.

  "Check this out," said Remo, handing over a pinch of sawdust he had lifted from the dustpan.

  He did not look to be joking, so Wurmlinger caught the pinch in a glass slide, covered it and clipped it in place under the microscope tube.

  When he got the correct resolution, he saw it, lying on its side. It had eight barbed legs, classifying it as a member of the arachnid family, which included spiders and scorpions. Except it possessed wings, which was impossible. Arachnids do not fly.

  Lifting a probe, he moved the specimen around in its sawdust bed, excitement mounting in his pigeon chest. He got it turned around so that it faced the lens tube.

  "My God!" he gasped when its burning red cyclops eye glared back at him.

  "You found it, huh?" Remo asked.

  Wurmlinger swallowed his shock. His knobby Adam's apple bobbed spasmodically. Still, he couldn't get any words out. He nodded vigorously, then shook his head from side to side as his educated brain began denying the evidence before his very eyes.

  But it was there. A long silvery green body, more like a scorpion than anything else in the arachnid family, boasting eight barbed and pincer-tipped legs and a pair of dragonflylike wings. And instead of a multieyed spider face, or the compound eyes of a fly or a bee, there was only a single smooth round orb mounted above an oval mouth with tiny serrated teeth all around the edges. The mouth made Wurmlinger think of a shark, not an insect.

  "This is new!" he gasped. "This is incredibly new. This is a new class of insects. And I will go down in history as its discoverer."

  "I found it first," Chiun squeaked.

  "Are you accredited in any university?" Wurmlinger asked, regarding the old Korean with disapproval.

  "No."

  "Then your discovery does not count. I am one of the leading experts in the field of insects. This is my laboratory. Therefore, I am the discoverer of-" He paused, regarded his shoes a long moment while his long face worked. "Luscus wurmlingi!" he announced. "Yes, that will be its scientific name."

  "You named that ugly thing after yourself?" Remo blurted.

  "It is not ugly. It is unique. The name means One-eyed Wurmlinger."

  "Is that anything like one-eyed wonder worm?" Remo asked dryly.

  Wurmlinger ignored that. Reaching for a wall telephone, he said, "I must inform my colleagues before one of them happens to stumble upon a wurmlingi specimen in the field."

  Remo beat him to the phone, pulled it bodily from the wall and handed it to Wurmlinger. Wurmlinger took it, saw the trailing wires and said, "Um..."

  "Let's consider this classified for now, okay?" said Remo.

  "You have no authority over me."

  At that, Remo placed one hand on Wurmlinger's bony shoulder and said, "Pretend my hand is a tarantula."

  Wurmlinger's eyes went to the hand, which started creeping up his neck on plodding fingers.

  "Here comes the stealthy tarantula," Remo warned.

  Wurmlinger flinched. "Stop it."

  "The tarantula is on your neck. Feel its padded feet? Feel how soft they are?"

  "I don't-"

  "The tarantula is unhappy with you. It wants to bite. But you don't want it to bite, do you?" said Remo.

  "No," Wurmlinger admitted, shrinking from the soft pads of Remo's fingers. He had tarantulas for pets. It was amazing how Remo's naked fingers felt like plodding tarantula feet on his neck.

  "Too late," said Remo, his deliberately creepy voice speeding up. "The tarantula strikes!"

  Wurmlinger felt a pinch. The hand withdrew, and Remo stepped away.

  Wurmlinger had been bitten by tarantulas before. It was an occupational hazard. Their mandibles are poisonous, but not fatally so. Still, there is pain and numbness.

  Wurmlinger felt no pain. But the numbness came on him very suddenly.

  In a matter of seconds, he stood paralyzed on his feet. He swayed. Like a tree in the wind, he teetered from one side to the other. The horrible thing was that he couldn't move, couldn't stop himself from swaying.

  Chiun padded up on one side and, when Wurmlinger swayed toward him, he blew out a strong breath.

  The force of the breath pushed his swaying body the other way, and Helwig X. Wurmlinger felt himself tipping precariously even as his mind assured him screamingly that this couldn't be happening.

  Fortunately, Remo caught him and carried him stiff as a stick to the bed and left him there, immobile. Time passed. Considerable time. During which the pair left without a word of farewell.

  Having no better option, Helwig X. Wurmlinger drifted off to a mindless sleep.

  When he awoke hours later, the slide containing the only known specimen of Luscus wurmlingi in the world was gone.

  But at least they had left his Bee-Master collection intact.

  And when he went out into the yard, the dead soldiers had begun fruiting, their mouths and empty eye sockets squirming with the most lovely maggots imaginable.

  AT A PAY PHONE, Remo called Harold Smith.

  "You want the bad news first or the good?" asked Remo.

  "Why do you always have good news and bad news to report?" Smith asked glumly.

  Remo looked to Chiun helplessly. Chiun got up on tiptoe, cupped the mouthpiece with one hand and whispered briefly into his pupil's ear.

  "Because we're thorough," said Remo, into the phone. "Isn't that right, Little Father?"

  "If we bear only bad tidings and not good, or good tidings, but no bad," Chiun said in a too-loud voice, "we would be accused of doing our duty without sufficient diligence. If in the future, Emperor Smith prefers not to know certain things, let him tell us of these things in advance and we will scrupulously avoid them in our travels."

  Smith sighed.

  "Give it to me as you wish," he said glumly.

  "Okay," said Remo. "Wurmlinger isn't our man."

  "How do you know this?"

  "We know when a guy is lying to us. He wasn't. He's just a bug nut, pure and simple. And the only bees we found were sick ones."

  "That proves nothing."

  "But we found a whole bunch of dead guys scattered around. Ever hear of the Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia?"

  Smith was silent, so Remo assumed he was working his silent keyboard. A sudden beep confirmed this. Then Smith said, "I have almost nothing on them other than they are commanded by a former corn farmer named Mearl Streep."

  "Well, that gives us one solid motive. He jumped to the same conclusion Tammy Terrill did and tore off to avenge the cornfields."

  "Odd," said Smith.

  "What?" asked Remo.

  "I have input his name, but the system keeps spell-correcting it and giving me information on a Hollywood actress."

  "Forget it. Those guys are out of the picture," said Remo. "Oh, there was one of those talking guard bees here. It tried to warn us away from Wurmlinger."

  "Is that not proof of his complicity?" asked Smith.

  "Nope. Not to us."

  "Then we are at a dead end," Smith said morosely.

  "Not exactly. The Bee-Master tried to sting us again. This time, he sent one of those swarms after us. You know, the things that got that guy in Times Square."

  "What did they look like?"

  "They looked like the way bees sound, only louder and meaner."

  "Excuse me?"

  "They're too small for the naked eye to see. We beat them off, but captured one. I guess it died in all the excitement."

  "You have another bee specimen?"

  "Sort of. It's no bee. It looks like something out of a monster movie except it's smaller than a nit."

  "Remo, an insect that small would be microscopic."

  "This one prac
tically is. And it's the ugliest thing you ever saw. What do you want us to do with it?"

  "Bring it here."

  "We're on our way."

  Hanging up, Remo turned to Chiun. "I guess it's back to Folcroft for us."

  Chiun held the glass slide up to the afternoon sun. "I pronounce you ...Philogranus remi."

  "What does that mean?" asked Remo.

  "Seed-lover Remo."

  "Why are you naming it after me?" Remo Hared.

  "Are you not both brainlessly drawn to corn seed?" huffed the Master of Sinanju.

  Chapter 41

  Edward E. Eishied couldn't be wrong. He wasn't wrong about Wayne Williams. He hadn't been wrong about the Green River Killer.

  How could he be wrong about this?

  All events leave a mark. All minds create emotional or circumstantial footprints. That was the key. Figuring out the whys and the wherefores of criminal acts.

  A serial killer had been assassinating people who had only one thing in common: insects. They either killed them, or ate them and killed them. Therefore the unknown subject felt a kinship with insects.

  That much seemed reasonable.

  Eishied had generated a profile. Certain elements were basic. Well educated. A WASP. Drove a Volkswagen Beetle. It was amazing how many serial killers were WASPS who drove VW Bugs. The irony of that linkage had never occurred to Edward Eishied until these insect-related serial killings. He wondered if this might open up an entirely new psychological aspect to serial killers, but he had no time for that now.

  He was the FBI's chief profiler, and the word coming back from ASAC Smith was that his profile was in error. An UNSUB fitting the profile perfectly had been investigated and it wasn't him.

  When he received the e-mail message from ASAC Smith to that effect, Eishied had e-mailed back, "Then look for another UNSUB fitting that profile. I have never been wrong."

  ASAC Smith had replied almost before the message was sent:

  "Your profile is in error."

  To which Eishied rebutted, "Your data may be in error."

  Smith said nothing to that. Maybe he was steamed, but Eishied took the silence as a signal to keep working.

  So he did.

  There were certain unavoidables. The UNSUB had to be highly educated. An idiot doesn't breed new kinds of insects. That was a given.

  The UNSUB was a Charlotte Hornets fan, but maybe that wasn't an indicator of geographic locality as much as a need to announce his kink to the world.

  The longer Eishied pondered the facts in the case, the more maddening it became.

  For some reason, his mind kept drifting back to his childhood. There used to be a cartoon character on TV. Bee-Man. No, Bee-Master. Yeah, that was the name. Guy could fly like a bee, sting like a bee and control bees like a queen bee, even though there was nothing fey about him. Other than his leotards, that is.

  Maybe it was the long hours. More than likely, it was the growing indignation Edward Eishied felt that his ability as a profiler had been called into question. But he decided to have some fun with ASAC Smith. He began typing.

  UNSUB was traumatized by multiple bee stings as a child. As time went on, he learned to master his fear of the insect kingdom. A more serious tragedy in his young adult life-possibly the murder of parents or spouse-had caused him to dedicate his life to causes he believes to be worthwhile. However, owing to trauma, even this positive expression takes a dark turn.

  It was as near as he could dredge up the thirty-year-old memory of the origin of the Bizarre Bee-Master. "UNSUB's initials will be 'P.P.,'" he added, grinning in the privacy of his office. "Let that Smith bastard figure this one out," he chortled, and he pressed the Send key.

  Chapter 42

  Harold Smith was looking at the insect through a microscope borrowed from the serum lab of Folcroft's medical wing.

  Remo and Chiun were hovering beside his desk like expectant parents.

  "Brace yourself," said Remo as Smith brought the slide into focus. "It's uglier than sin."

  "I have named it Philogranus remi," sniffed Chiun, "in honor of its corn lusts, but its hideousness of countenance also played a role in my decision."

  Remo glared at Chiun.

  "A minor one," Chiun amended.

  Smith brought the slide into focus. His rimless glasses lay on the desk. One eye was pressed to the microscope eyepiece.

  He said nothing. There was no gasp of surprise, no outburst or expression of shock.

  But when he looked up from the lens, his grayish face was drained bleached-bone white.

  "The mind that created this hellish thing," he said thickly, "is that of a twisted genius who must be stopped. This infernal insect has been bred to be a combination flying shark and multilimbed buzz saw capable of ripping through flesh, grain and wood in an instant. There is no defense against it. All it has to do is enter the human ear and attack the brain. Death is almost instantaneous. No wonder the various medical examiners found nothing." Smith actually shuddered.

  "What's the latest on the farm crisis?" asked Remo.

  "The swarm-and it appears to be a swarm-has reached California. There is considerable crop damage. But again, it is fiendishly selective. In this case, citrus growers experimenting with a new pesticide have been hit."

  "Don't all farmers use pesticides?" asked Remo.

  "Yes, of course," said Smith, uncapping a bottle of Zantac 75 and swallowing two dry. "But these-these vermin seem to be targeting only the latest or most advanced insect-resistant crops."

  "Why not get them all?"

  Smith considered. "To make a statement. Perhaps this is just the first wave."

  "If this guy is so big on bees, he's not going to kill every crop. Bees pollinate crops. Take crops out, and bees are out of work."

  Smith considered. "Very good, Remo. That is an excellent observation."

  "But it still doesn't get us anywhere," Remo muttered.

  Smith was about to acknowledge that unfortunate state of affairs when his computer beeped a warning of an incoming message. He called it up, read it and his jaw sagged.

  "What is it?" asked Remo.

  "It is the latest psychological profile from FBI Behavioral Science."

  "I thought they gave up on that stuff after they fingered Wurmlinger."

  "This particular profiler is the Bureau's top man. He has never been wrong. Until now."

  "He still flogging the Wurmlinger theory?"

  "No, he has revised his profile. It is radically different." Smith's voice grew marginally excited. "We may have something here."

  Remo looked over Smith's gray-flannel shoulder at the buried desktop screen and frowned the longer he read.

  "Smitty, that's Bee-Master he's talking about."

  "Yes, of course."

  "No. That's the story of how Peter Pym became Bee-Master, right down to being stung by a swarm of radioactive bees."

  "I don't see the word radioactive."

  "He left that out," said Remo. "Look, he's even claiming the guy has the initials 'P.P.' How can he know that from the facts of the case?"

  Smith frowned. "He is the best. These profilers can perform miracles of induction."

  "He's pulling your leg. You're just too stiff to see-"

  Smith frowned. Remo looked out the window, and the Master of Sinanju paced the room. Back and forth, back and forth, in incredible concentration.

  "What are you doing?" asked Remo.

  "I am attempting to conjure up a vision of the wretch."

  "Oh, yeah?"

  "Yes. This thing you call profiling is known to Sinanju, only it is called Illuminating the Shadow."

  "Illuminating the Shadow?"

  "Yes, from time to time, Masters of Sinanju were called upon to divine the identities of shadowy persons who plotted against thrones or had struck in vain against those thrones only to escape into the shadows. I am attempting to divine the identity of this man by piercing the shadows that surround him."

  "Feel free,
" said Remo. "But if it turns out to be Lamont Cranston, we're no better off than we were before."

  But Smith looked interested.

  "I envision," Chiun said at last, "a Byzantine prince."

  "Byzantium no longer exists," Smith argued.

  "Told you it was a crock," muttered Remo under his breath.

  "A prince of Byzantium who conceals his face from view with a crown of great complexity," added Chiun.

  "Sounds like the Man in the Iron Mask," said Remo.

  Smith hushed him. Remo subsided.

  "This prince rules over a kingdom of subjects who are not of his flesh."

  "Bee-Master rules over the insect kingdom," Smith said.

  "But these subjects that are not of his flesh are not of any flesh," continued Chiun.

  "Insects are not made of flesh, but of a material like horn," said Smith. "Very good, Master Chiun."

  "I don't believe you two are doing this ...." Remo moaned.

  "Can you envision where this person can be found?" asked Smith.

  Chiun continued pacing. His face was twisted up in concentration, his eyes squeezed to the narrowness of walnut seams. "I know that this prince is drawn back to the scene of his depredations."

  "Sure," said Remo. "The criminal always returns to the scene of the crime."

  "No, that is not it," said Smith. "That is an old adage, but it is not exactly true. Criminals are not drawn to the scene of their crimes so much as they feel compelled to insinuate themselves into official investigations. It is very common that the chief murder suspect is the first person to offer eyewitness testimony or suggestions on how to solve the murder. It is a control issue with them."

  "That's Wurmlinger again," said Remo.

  "No, it is not Wurmlinger," said Chiun. "But another prince."

  Smith was at his computer again.

  "What are you doing, Smitty?" asked Remo.

  "Calling up the facts in the Rand killing, the one that started this chain of fantastic events."

  Smith skimmed the report carefully. "Here is something."

  "What?" asked Remo.

  "I hadn't noticed this before, but the killing of Doyal T. Rand occurred in Times Square at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue."