"Kill, kill, kill."
When Herb Palmer's arms finally stopped twitching, the two children released the rumals.
Mrs. Baynes turned and saw the other two adults sprawled on the grass.
"Very funny," she said. "I suppose the four of you have staged this little farce to shock me. Well, believe you me, I'm not easily shocked. Remember that I changed both your diapers? At least Kimberly's. Once. It was in December, I think. The nursemaid was sick. Herb? Emmie?"
The Palmers did not move from their strange positions, faces bloated, eyes bulging from their sockets, staring directly up at the blue sky. Mrs. Palmer's tongue was blackening and hugely distended.
"Emmie," Evelyn Baynes said, shaking her. "I want you to know you don't look at all attractive. A stout woman should never let her tongue hang out, it makes her look retarded." She looked at her children. "Why don't they move? Are they ... ? I believe ... they are . . . they're dead."
"Really, Mother?" Joshua Baynes slid behind her.
"But it can't be-you were just playing, weren't you? You weren't trying to . . ."
"She loves it," Joshua Baynes said softly, tightening the yellow rumal around his mother's neck. "Kali loves it."
"Josh ... Jo ... J-"
Evelyn Baynes's dying prayer was that her children would at least have the courtesy to put her tongue back in her face after she was dead.
They didn't.
Chapter Sixteen
Harold W. Smith was alone in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium. He walked past the immaculately clean pipes, hearing his own footsteps clacking on the concrete floor.
He walked past the rows of unused and obsolete hospital equipment, past the sealed boxes containing files from decades past, to a small door with a keyhole so small that no one could see through it, and also six feet off the ground for good measure.
He inserted a special key that had no duplicate and walked into a small cubicle of a room. It was made entirely of wood, and beneath the wooden wall panels were layers of highly flammable plastic. The room had been designed to burn in case of fire.
Immediately above it was Smith's office. Unlike this room, its walls were covered with fireproof asbestos. But its floor was wood and would burn.
Smith checked his casket. It wasn't really a casket but more like a straw cot built on highly flammable materials. It resembled a Viking funeral pyre, but Smith's mind was not imaginative enough to think up any name for it but "casket." It was where his body would lie in death, and so it was as much a casket as anything else.
Inside the stuffing of the casket was a sealed bottle of cyanide. Smith held it up to the light and made sure that it had not leaked any of its contents.
The poison capsule he carried with him was uncertain. He might lose it, or he might have to use it on someone else. But the cyanide in the casket was always there.
If CURE should be compromised and its existence become known, a fire in Smith's office would first destroy the computers, the four enormous monoliths that had been adapted and improved for more than twenty years, the computers that held the secrets of almost everyone in the world.
Meanwhile Smith would come downstairs to his basement room and open the vial of cyanide. It would smell like almonds if he was among the fifty percent of human beings who were able to detect the scent in a lethal dose of the drug. It would be painful but mercifully quick. A wrenching agony, a convulsion, and then death. Just moments before the fire burned through the floor of his office and down into this room that had been designed to be a tinderbox.
Everything was in place and Smith felt a small touch of satisfaction. He clasped his hands together, as if holding on to himself for support. When he noticed the gesture, he stopped, but he could still see the white bands formed by the grip of his fingers on his skin. He pinched a piece of flesh from the back of his hand. It took several seconds for the skin to fall back into place.
His were old hands, he realized, dry and brittle. The elasticity of their skin had vanished, sometime between his youth, when the wrongs of the world had enraged him and filled him with righteous commitment to correct them, and now, when the sign of an unbroken bottle of poison, designed to give him death, could genuinely set his mind at ease. How small we become, he thought, walking upstairs. In what infinitesimal ways do we take our pleasures.
The red phone rang only moments after he entered his office.
"Yes, Mr. President."
"I've just been told that an entire flight of passengers on Air Europa has been wiped out. They were all found strangled in Paris."
"I know, sir," Smith said.
"First it was the International Mid-America disaster a week or so ago. Now Europa. The killers are spreading out."
"It appears that way."
"This isn't good," the President said. "The press is blaming us."
"That isn't unusual, Mr. President," Smith said.
"Dammit, man, we've got to give them something. What has your special person found out?"
"Still working on it, sir."
"That's what you said the last time," the President said.
"It is still a correct status report," Smith said.
"All right," the voice on the other end said with forced patience. "I'm not going to meddle in your methods. But I want you to understand the kind of crisis we're in. If the airways can't be kept safe, there really isn't a lot of reason for any of us to be here."
"I understand, sir," Smith said.
There was a click on the other end and Smith replaced the receiver quietly. It was all going downhill. What the President had meant was that there wasn't a reason for CURE to be kept in existence.
He plucked the skin on the back of his hand. Maybe it was his age. Maybe a younger man could have done something, maybe even the Smith of a few years ago could have stopped things before they got out of control.
Today, he didn't even know if Remo was working. And Chiun was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with a notion that some sort of talisman was going to save America from slipping back into the Stone Age. Smith shook his head. It all seemed so ludicrous. He took a pen from a plastic coffee cup on his desk and began to compose a letter to his wife.
"Dear Irma," he began. But after that, his mind went blank. He was never much good at writing personal letters. Still, he couldn't very well die knowing his body would be reduced to just a thin layer of black ash, without at least trying something.
He turned on his office radio. Perhaps some music would help set the mood for the letter to his wife. He listened to the last few bars of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and decided it didn't offer the mood he needed. He was about to change the station when the announcer began reciting stock quotations.
"On the Big Board today," the smooth voice said, "stocks were mixed in active trading. But the big story continued to be in the airlines industry. On the heels of the murder tragedy in Paris, Europa Airlines dropped seventeen points in the first hour today and is now trading at ten dollars a share. International Mid-America Airlines, which ran into problems with passenger deaths last week, dropped another two points and is now trading at thirty-seven and a half cents a share, and inside talk along Wall Street is that the firm will declare bankruptcy this week. Bucking the trend continues to be just Folks Airlines. Its stocks opened today at sixty-seven, up two from yesterday's close, and an increase of more than forty-one points since the company began its new campaign of promoting itself as 'Just Folks, the Friendly, SAFE Airline.' In other stock activity, U.S. Steel-"
Smith switched off the radio. He felt his breathing speed up. Impatiently he crumpled the unfinished letter to his wife and tossed it into the wastebasket. He turned on the computer console at his desk and went to work.
He had been at the business of learning people's secrets for most of his life, and one of the things he had learned was that at the core of most mysteries was money. If you found something unusual going on, and if you stayed at it long enough and you dug into it deeply enough, sooner or later
you would find somebody with a monetary interest behind it all.
When the airline deaths had affected only just Folks Airlines, he had been inclined to think it might have been the work of cultists or lunatics, attracted by the airline's low fares and willing to settle for the few dollars they might get from economy-minded passengers.
But suddenly just Folks had been moved off the passenger kill list and International Mid-America and Air Europa had been savaged, and in a different way. The Just Folks killings had been small, one at a time, small family groups. But the two other airlines had been hit in such a way as to maximize the impact of the killings on the airlines' reputations and stability.
Money was involved somehow. Smith knew it.
He had the computers roll up an ultrarapid scan of all U.S. airline ticket sales during the past month, and concurrently had the machines check for any sizable cash withdrawals from any airline official with IMAA or Air Europa. As an afterthought, he included just Folks.
Then he sat back and let the computers permute for all they were worth.
It was the great beauty of the computers-which he called the Folcroft Four and which he had personally designed - that their exteriors looked like oversize scrap heaps, obsolete in their technology, and excessively dependent on exotic maintenance systems. But inside, each one was a masterwork, with much of the technology invented by Smith himself when he could not find it available through commercial channels.
And for years, into the four computers had gone the information gathered by a network of people who reported all the bland and mediocre details of their jobs. For this work, they got a small stipend from Smith. Of course, none of them had ever heard of Smith or CURE and did not know who was sending them money. They just assumed it was the FBI or the CIA and didn't really care who it was as long as the small monthly checks kept coming.
These reports were organized by Smith's computers, indexed and cross-indexed, cataloged and cross-cataloged, so that they were able to answer within minutes almost any kind of question about any kind of activity in the United States.
And now they answered his questions, and from the answers Smith extracted one glaring, blinding detail:
A. H. BAYNES, PRESIDENT OF JUST FOLKS AIRLINES, REMOVED FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM PERSONAL ACCOUNT 7/14. On 7/15 TWENTY-ONE TICKETS ABOARD INTERNATIONAL MID-AMERICA AIRLINES PURCHASED BY UNKNOWN BUYER FOR $4,927 CASH. A. H. BAYNES SOLD STOCKS WORTH $61,000 7/23. On 7/24, 120 TICKETS ABOARD EUROPA FLIGHT TO PARIS PURCHASED FOR $60,000. PROBABILITY OF CONNECTION, 93.67 PERCENT.
Smith felt like whooping for joy. Instead he pressed the intercom button on his desk and said in his usual dry, lemony voice, "Hold my calls for a while, Mrs. Mikulka."
Then he called just Folks Airlines and got a cheerful recording saying that if he really wanted to talk to someone, he should hold. He waited through three long selections of Muzak, made even longer because it was the music of Barry Manilow, before a female voice broke through with a crackle.
"Just Folks, the friendly, SAFE airline," she said.
"I'd like to speak to Mr. A. H. Baynes, please," Smith said.
"I'm sorry, but Mr. Baynes is unavailable."
"Is this his office?"
"No, this is the reservations desk at the airport."
"Then how do you know he's unavailable?"
"Do you think a millionaire like A. H. Baynes would be standing here getting varicose veins and hawking tickets for poverty wages?"
"Would you please connect me with his office?" Smith said.
"Mr. Baynes's office," another female said. Her voice had the steel edge of the executive secretary.
"Mr. Baynes, please. This is the Securities and Exchange Commission calling."
"I'm sorry, Mr. Baynes isn't in."
"Where can I reach him? This is an urgent matter."
"I'm afraid I can't tell you," she said, the flinty voice mellowing with a kind of desperation. "He's away on personal business."
"Now? With the crisis in air travel?" Smith said.
"At Just Folks, there is no crisis," the secretary said levelly.
"Does he call in for messages?"
"Occasionally. Do you want to leave one?"
"No," Smith said, and hung up.
He realized he was alone. No Remo. No Chiun. And the clock was ticking away on CURE. But he knew Baynes had something to do with the airline killings. He knew it.
He would have to find Baynes. And he would have to do it alone.
Chapter Seventeen
Remo sat on the edge of the bed in the New Orleans motel room, his elbows braced on his knees, his hands covering his face. Why was he in New Orleans?
He didn't know. He had come on his own, walking, hitchhiking, following road by road, following something he could not explain or understand.
Where was Chiun? Chiun would understand. He knew about the Kali business. It had seemed to Remo like a fairy tale when he had first heard it-the hopeless fantasy of an old man who believed too strongly in legends-but Remo wasn't sure anymore. Something had brought him to this shabby room on this dark street. Something had pulled him all the miles from Denver to here.
The worst of it was that he could feel its influence growing inside him. There was something dark and alien and frightening right under his skin. That something that had compelled him to shame himself with that blond girl in a public alley. A normal man, burning up the way Remo was, might run amok and kill someone. But what of someone with Remo's strength and killing techniques? How many would he kill? How much damage could he do?
It was a nightmare and there was no way Remo could wake from it. Little by little, he had given in.
From his first tentative steps outside the hotel room in Denver, he had convinced himself that he was only going for a walk around the city streets. He had told himself, very calmly and logically, that he couldn't very well wait inside a closed room for the days or even weeks that it might take Chiun to return.
Reason was on his side and Chiun's story about Master Lu and the talking stone goddess was unreasonable. He would have been a fool to hide out for fear of a silly legend. So he walked out of his hotel room in Denver, and his reason told him that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But something in the back of his mind knew better.
In the old days, before he knew of Harold Smith or CURE, when he was just a foot cop walking a beat in Newark, New Jersey, Remo had tried to quit smoking. The ritual occurred every year: he would stop cold, filled with righteous willpower and a sense of mastery over his own impulses. Then, generally after a week, he would allow himself one cigarette. It was nothing, one cigarette. His reason told him so. He didn't even enjoy the one cigarette. But it always marked the end of his good intentions, and even though his reason told him that one single cigarette was harmless, his inner mind knew the truth: that he was a smoker once again.
And so when he left the hotel room in Denver, he wrote the Korean characters for "going" in yellow chalk on the outside of the hotel building. He had marked it on two other places in Denver and sporadically throughout his journey, throwing out crumbs of bread for Chiun to follow.
Because he knew in the back of his mind that he was already lost.
Chiun, come find me. He clenched his hands into two fists and held them in front of him, shaking. The lust was growing within him. It, the thing, Kali, whatever. It wanted him to move. His destination was near. He had known it when he reached the dark street in New Orleans. The force inside him had grown so great that it had taken all his effort to fight it and duck into this seedy hotel with no bedspread, a battered television set strewn with wires, and only a thin yellow hand towel in the bathroom.
There was a telephone too. If he'd had a friend, he would have called just to listen to a voice. A voice might keep him sane. But assassins had no friends. Only victims.
He stood up. He was bathed in sweat and his breath was labored and rasping.
He had to get out. He had to breathe. It was only reasonable.
"What's happening to me?" he shouted aloud. The sound reverberated through the silent room. It wanted him out. It wanted him to come. It, with its sickly-sweet smell and arms of death.
He smashed his fist through the mirror. His image splintered into a thousand pieces and flew in all directions. With a sob, he sat down.
"Get it together. Calm down." He spoke the words softly, gently. He smoothed his hands together until their violent trembling stilled. He turned on the battered television.
"The victims of the most recent wave of airline killings which struck Air Europa earlier this week are still turning up in Paris," the announcer said.
Remo moaned and listened.
"The bodies of three prominent Denver-area residents were found early this morning in a public park near Neuilly, France, a suburb of Paris. They were identified as Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Palmer and Mrs. A. H. Baynes, wife of the president of just Folks Airlines. Apparently she was traveling with her two children, Joshua and Kimberly Baynes, whose whereabouts are still unknown."
"Oh, God," Remo said. It had been his job to stop the airline killings. His job.
How long had it been since he had given a thought to his job, to his responsibilities, to his country? He felt sick. He knew what to do now. He had to go back to work. He had to forget this force that was pulling him away.
He reached for the telephone and began to dial the complex routing code that would eventually connect him with Harold Smith.
The connections were slow. His hand strayed to replace the receiver, but he forced himself to hold on, knowing that It wanted him to hang up. It wanted him alone. For herself.
When Smith pulled into the driveway of his home, he thought about the letter he had meant to write to his wife. Like all the other letters he had planned to write her, it had not been written. And perhaps he would never have the chance again.
He was no fool. The President's phone call had been his last warning to CURE. Unless Smith could do something about the air deaths, the next communication from the White House would be to disband. And with Remo gone, with Chiun gone, Smith had no illusions. He might return empty-handed, and that would be the end of CURE, and of Harold W. Smith.
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