"Who's 'she'?" Remo repeated, grabbing Belloc by the throat. Belloc only sobbed and hacked as the smoke filled the cockpit and the front of the windscreen burst into a wall of yellow flame.
Remo turned to the pilot. "What do you know about this?"
Thompson's mouth was set. "Mister, all I know is that this plane's been sabotaged. If I knew who did it, believe me, I'd tell you."
"Who's 'she'?"
"I never talked to her. Some woman gave Belloc his instructions over the phone. I didn't know they included you." He made a final desperate thrust on the controls. "Can't make it. Get the 'chutes from the back."
Belloc scrambled over Remo toward the back of the plane, weaving crazily with the craft's erratic movement.
"They're gone!" he screamed. "The parachutes are gone. The bitch! She did it. She wanted us all dead!"
The pilot sat back and exhaled deeply. "Nothing more I can do," he said.
"The bitch!" Belloc raged. He was like a crazy man, beyond comprehension, running through the fuselage as if he were on fire. "The murdering little bitch!"
Remo grasped the door by the hinges and ripped it off. A sheet of flames roared in. The pilot looked over incuriously.
"He's no use," Remo said, nodding his head toward Belloc. "But you're coming with me."
Thompson was stone faced. "Are you planning to get me down there in one piece?"
"No guarantees," Remo said. "You turning down the offer?"
The pilot unbuckled his safety belt. "Guess jumping's an easier way to die than burning."
Holding the pilot around the chest, Remo made a wide somersault clear of the flames lapping at the plane. Fifteen seconds later, the plane exploded in midair. A flying piece of metal struck Thompson in the chest. He cried out, and his head snapped back.
For a moment, Remo stared at the streaming wound in the man's chest, the blood flying into the air in spurting jets as the two men fell. If it weren't for the protection of Thompson's body, the metal would have hit Remo.
Isn't fate the damnedest thing, Remo thought as he floated in his free fall with Thompson's body lying weightless in his arms. He had made a decision never to kill again, and everyone around him had died. Now here he was, thinking he was saving a guy's life, and all he managed to save was his own. He wanted to feel relief. All he felt was nausea.
He directed his descent toward a cushion of trees on the top of a barren hill, turned onto his back to absorb the impact, crashed through, then landed flat on his feet on the downward slope and slid slowly to the bottom. It was as gentle as he could make it.
He felt Thompson's pulse. It was faint, but there. The wound was severe, and Thompson was unconscious. Remo examined him cursorily. Thompson wouldn't live much longer; he'd already lost too much blood.
He had two choices. He could kill Thompson now, painlessly, or he could try to patch him up with some of the regional herbs as Chiun had taught him to do.
Killing would be the easier way, and probably kinder, too, sparing the man from a lingering and almost surely painful death. There wasn't time for doctoring now. There was ajob to do. He didn't even know the pilot. And there was no point in carrying on the pretense that he wouldn't kill anymore. Death followed him like a shadow. Yes, killing the man would be easier.
Remo raised Thompson's neck, prepared to snap it, then stopped.
Killing was always easier. There had been so many killings lately that it seemed like the most commonplace thing in the world. If you didn't like the way someone looked at you these days, you killed him. Want a diamond ring for your girl? Walk into a store and murder the owner. Free gas? Just kill the station attendant. It's been done. Don't like the president? Piece of cake. Boom, problem solved. The easy way.
The easy way was how Remo and CURE had come to be in the first place. Too many people were taking it.
No, Remo decided, there had been enough killing. Someone had somehow found out about Remo, and so had decided— quite casually, it appeared— to kill everyone around him. Easy as pie. Well, at least one of those victims wasn't going to die any sooner than he had to.
Remo knew it was perverted thinking for a professional assassin, but then, killing for a living made you look at death from a funny perspective. From inside out and sideways, the way a magician looks at a deck of cards. Sometimes you just got so sick and tired of death you wanted to...
He didn't know what he wanted. That was why he was still an assassin, whether he ever killed again or not. And why he was gathering leaves to stem the bleeding of a man he didn't care about much.
"I don't think you're going to live more than an hour," he said out loud to the unconscious man.
An hour. An hour of life.
Suddenly it all made sense. It wasn't killing or not killing that was important. It was knowing the difference between who was decent and who wasn't. Thompson was a decent man. Remo didn't know him and didn't care about him, but he understood that much. An hour of life was Remo's gift to a decent man.
Remo searched the area for some herbs, made a poultice for the wound, then left Thompson to rest in a shaded area near a field of coffee plants.
After walking a half-mile or so, he could see, high on a cliff in the distance, the large house he had seen from the air. The odd-looking dome was invisible now, on the other side of the hacienda. Beneath the cliff, in the coffee fields, several dozen laborers, wearing straw hats against the sun, worked.
At Remo's feet lay a charred arm, ripped from the body at the shoulder. Melted into its blackened fingers was something dark that used to be a revolver.
Belloc.
And Arcadi. And Hassam. And the women. Sandy, soon. Ty. Sloops. Probably Thompson. Who would die next?
Killing was so easy, after all.
?Chapter Ten
A gray-gloved hand.
The case.
The case with the CURE telephone, the notes on Arcadi and Hassam and the others, the name of Hugo Donnelly, Smith's contact in the Department of the Interior, the preliminary printout research on the coffee plantation in Peruvina. By now, whoever took Smith's attaché case knew everything there was to know about the investigation into the heroin-laced coffee. And more.
CURE was compromised. Without doubt. The discovery of the portable telephone with its direct line to the president of the United States revealed more about the illegal nature of CURE than a thousand documents.
Smith's head swam. He became dimly aware of his surroundings, a large room sectioned off with panels of Lucite around small white beds. The beds were hooked up to monitors and all manner of science fiction-type devices. Men and women in white patrolled the room briskly, silently. A hospital. Intensive care, probably, Smith thought.
He himself was attached to a series of tubes and bottles suspended above him. A constant beep somewhere over his head announced his life functions with every heartbeat. An uncomfortable apparatus led into his nose.
Gritting his teeth with the pain, he pulled up his hospital gown to see the heavily bandaged wound on his side. It was a blur of white against his skin. Reaching carefully over to the small metal table beside him, he held his breath while he searched for his glasses and put them on. It was a large bandage, already beginning to spot with blood.
So he had been shot, after all. And the attacker was probably the same man who had eliminated the others.
Consciousness drifted in and out in waves. His fingers were cold; his vision, even with his glasses, was fuzzy. He was, he reasoned, sedated to the hilt.
Had to stay awake. Had to think.
Using an old trick he learned years before in the OSS, he bit down hard on the inside of his cheek, hard enough to send pain shooting through his head. God knew, he had enough pain already, but it wasn't the sort of attacking, localized pain he needed.
The trick had worked to keep him alert when he'd been captured and interrogated at a Nazi outpost in Danzig, when the enemy had deprived him of sleep for five days; and he'd never forgotten it. Pain made thi
ngs real, kept your ideas clear. He swallowed the blood and concentrated.
There was some luck on his side. The president was out of the country, so the thief wouldn't learn of the direct link with the White House for a few days. But there was another problem, a much bigger problem: The phone in the stolen attaché case was an extension of the telephone in the office at Folcroft. Whoever had the portable phone had access to every call incoming to CURE.
He had to get back to Folcroft. He had to destroy CURE before the thief figured out that the U.S. government operated a secret agency that broke every rule of the Constitution.
The destruction of CURE meant Smith's own death, of course. The series of events leading to the dissolution of the organization had been planned in minute detail years before. Should CURE become compromised for any reason, Smith was to engage the self-destruct mechanism of the computer banks, then see to his own death. Quietly, quickly, CURE would no longer exist.
It had to be done. Now, before whoever had shot him discovered that he was still alive and returned to finish the job.
The gray-gloved hand... There was something about that hand....
There was no more time to ruminate about it. It was a hand in a glove that had pulled a trigger and then taken Smith's attaché case. Any other details were probably the result of the vast number of drugs in Smith's system.
He bit himself again to keep awake, and watched. The ICU was busy and understaffed. Most of the nurses were gathered in one section in the far corner of the ward, where an old man bleeding profusely from the head was being wheeled in. The normal scrutiny of the staff had momentarily ceased. Now was the time.
Quickly, he removed the needles from his arms and the tube from his nose. Then, struggling not to cry out in pain, he slipped from the bed and crawled to the double doors leading from the unit.
He needed clothes. Where was the supply room? Staggering, he clutched the slippery tile wall of the corridor and stopped for breath. To his horror, he saw that the wound in his side was bleeding again and spreading a large red stain on his gown. Blindly, he pulled himself along the wall, one hand after the other.
It wasn't working. Even the pain wasn't going to keep him on his feet.
Quick steps clattered toward him. "What are you doing here?" a male voice demanded.
Smith opened his eyes slowly, trying to focus. The man was dressed in white. From his neck hung a stethoscope. He lifted Smith's wrist, where his name tag was. The man looked from the name tag to the spreading red mark on Smith's gown.
"What in hell are you doing out here, Mr. Smith?" the doctor asked, appalled.
Smith tried to push him away. It was a feeble attempt.
"Orderly!" the doctor shouted.
"No," Smith whispered. "You don't understand."
"Orderly!"
Smith was only vaguely aware of another form rushing forward. "Please," he said. "You can't—"
And then the doctor was lying on the floor in the empty corridor, and Smith felt himself being lifted into the air and carried outside in a manner so gentle that it felt as though he was riding a cloud.
The yellow shape of a taxi loomed in front of him, and the next moment, it seemed, he was inside, being jostled into the white uniform he recognized as belonging to the doctor who had stopped him.
"It is not an attractive garment, but it does close in the back, o Emperor," Chiun said, visibly embarrassed.
"How did you find—"
Chiun held up a hand. "Conserve your strength. Suffice it to say you are not the only man who rests this night in a hospital."
Smith smiled. "Folcroft," he said.
The vision of the gray-gloved hand came back to him, weaving, distorted, as if seen from underwater. The smallest hand...
And then he permitted the painless blackness of unconsciousness to take over.
?Chapter Eleven
Remo made it up the almost sheer cliff face leading to the Peruvina mansion in twenty minutes. It would have taken a mountain climber in full gear an hour to make the journey; a normal man, three times that. Obviously the owner of the plantation didn't welcome drop-in visitors.
The view from the top, at the front of the house, was breathtaking. Nearly 1200 feet below, the army of laborers, prodded on by a half-dozen field bosses, stooped over the acres of coffee plants. The air was rarified and clean.
West of the cliff, Remo could make out the copse of trees where he had left Thompson. The pilot would most likely never regain consciousness before he died. But if he did, Remo thought, he would at least be aware of spending his last moments in a beautiful place with good air and the sound of birds singing.
He walked into the house through an open side door. It was magnificent, the home of a king. One wall, made of curved sheet glass, looked directly over the cliff, so that from the inside the house appeared to be floating, baseless, in the sky. The enormous room he was standing in was richly appointed with fine, tasteful furniture and works of art of a quality and antiquity usually reserved for museums.
Remo followed the long corridor leading into the interior of the house. The place seemed empty. He saw room after room of magnificent tapestries, priceless collections of English and Chinese porcelains, ancient scrolls glittering with gold leaf painted by the Japanese masters of the eleventh century. Peruvina was a far cry from Amfat Hassam's gaudy finery. Whoever owned the plantation evidently was accustomed to wealth.
The corridor led him into a dimly lit room redolent of old leather. The walls were lined with first-edition volumes and scholarly works in both Spanish and English.
Who lived here? Remo wondered as his hand brushed against the polished, rust-colored wood of an enormous Cuban mahogany desk. His footfalls were silent on the deep gray carpet. Who was the master of Peruvina?
"You are looking for someone, señor?" a woman's throaty voice whispered from the doorway. In the deep silence, it sounded to Remo like the din of cannon. He caught his breath.
She was beautiful, one of those women you only see in ads for liquor. Five-foot-seven or so, every inch of it perfect, with thick curly black hair and green-blue eyes that got hotter as she narrowed them. Beneath the eyes there was a nose straight and aristocratic enough to have been the masterpiece of some Latin plastic surgeon, but somehow Remo didn't think so. There was something in the ripe mouth, in the carriage of her breasts, that suggested she'd never been less than perfect, and knew it.
In her manicured hands was a pistol, a chrome and mother of pearl Rohm RG-7 .22 caliber.
"If I were you, I'd get a better gun," Remo said.
"Oh, jes?" She fired. Straight into the Shakespeare first folio Remo had been standing in front of.
"Jes indeed," Remo said.
She smiled. "You are a man of humor, señor. I like that," she said. "Although you are very quick. I do not know if I like that so much in a man." Watching Remo, she slowly laid down the weapon on a small table. She folded her arms across her chest and caressed herself languidly. The movement made her breasts swell over the low neckline of her dress.
"I am Esmeralda," she said in a way that made Remo's mouth feel as though he hadn't swallowed in days. "Why are you here?"
He tried to clear his head. She was wearing perfume. Or something. Spanish Fly, maybe, Remo thought stupidly. Digitalis. Something that made standing seem like the wrong position for them both to be in.
"I want to see the owner of this place."
The impossibly rich mouth curved more deeply. "Well?" She spread her arms. "How much more do you wish to see?"
"You run Peruvina?"
"You expected maybe Juan Valdez?"
He looked at the splendor around them. "Alone?"
"This was my father's house before he died," she said. "Peruvina has belonged to my family for centuries. But I am its last descendant."
She. Belloc had taken orders from a woman. But hell, Remo thought as Esmeralda shimmied out of the loose garment she was wearing, did it have to be this woman?
&n
bsp; "The beans," he said, averting his eyes. It was difficult. Her breasts were high and full, the nipples erect. The skin of her belly was taut and tan, and the place above her long legs glistened with anticipation.
"There's a drug in the coffee beans that comes from Peruvina and nowhere else. It's heroin. I want to know how you get it into the coffee."
She moved closer to him. With each slow step her flanks rippled like a leopard's. He had never seen any woman so unself-conscious about her nakedness.
"When I tell you— and I will," she purred, "you will understand many things." She nuzzled his ear. "Perhaps you will be angry. Perhaps only indifferent. You will tell your government, whomever you work for, or else you will steal the secret of the beans for your own profit. I do not know which." She ran her soothing, hypnotic hands through his hair and down his back as she continued to tease him softly with her words. "What I do know is that things will be forever changed between us. We will no longer be strangers. The fire here, in our bodies, will be cooler, because we will have spoken too much. It will be like the marriage, yes? With friendship but not the magic of first love."
She pulled off his shirt and rubbed herself on him like a cat. Hot, she was. Silky. Unknown. Dangerous. "Let us enjoy each other once, when the magic is strong."
It was wrong. Remo knew that. There was a dying man in a grove of trees outside, Remo was on assignment, and Esmeralda had probably ordered the deaths of nearly a score of people, including his own. Dead wrong. All of his discipline fought against it.
And lost. They sank together to the plush carpet. The fire inside them both burnt into incandescent, uncontrollable flame. Her mouth opened for him.
A door slammed, bringing Esmeralda gasping to attention, followed by the sound of heavy footfalls.
"Caramba, my husband," she squeaked.
"Come on," Remo grumbled. "This is like a rotten movie." He struggled into his clothes. "You said you were alone," he complained.
"No," she whispered excitedly. "I said I was the last descendant of my family. My husband, he is of another family."
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