King's Curse

by Warren Murphy

  Bobbi looked down at herself as if at a stranger, then took a deep breath before pulling her shirt closed and tucking the ends into the waistband of her tan shorts.

  “Did they hurt you?” Remo asked.

  “No. But they…they were going to cut my heart out.” The last words came out in a gush, as if speaking them slowly would have been impossible, but there was less horror in haste.

  Remo glanced toward the house. “Chiun, you get these girls out of here. I’m going after those two canaries.”

  “Girls?” shouted Valerie. “Girls? Girls? That’s patronizing.”

  Remo raised his left index finger in a caution. “You’ve been a very good girl up until now,” he said. “Now if you don’t want your jaw patronized by my fist, you’ll shut off that perpetual motion machine you call a mouth. Chiun, I’ll meet you at the car.”

  Behind him, deJuin heard the two men in feathered robes enter the room. Without looking, he waved them forward to the window. “This will be good now,” he said.

  The four men leaned forward to watch.

  “Be careful,” Chiun said to Remo.

  “You got it,” Remo said.

  He turned, but before he could take a step away, the corridors of the maze resounded with a deep angry baying. The sound was answered by another howl. And another.

  “Oh, my god,” said Valerie. “There are animals here.”

  “Three,” said Chiun to Remo. “Large.”

  The baying changed now into angry excited barks that moved closer.

  “Take the girls, Chiun. I’ll watch the rear.”

  Chiun nodded. “When you leave,” he said, “place your left hand against the wall. It will bring you back the way you came.”

  “I know that,” said Remo, who did not know that.

  Chiun led the girls away down one of the gravel paths leading from the central courtyard.

  The barking was louder now, growing more frenzied. Remo watched as Chiun and the two women hurried down the passageway, then turned left and vanished from sight.

  Along one of the paths to the right, Remo caught his first glimpse. It was a Doberman Pinscher, black, brown, and ugly. His eyes glinted savagely, almost taking on a blood-red glow, as he saw Remo standing in front of the marble slab bench. Behind him came two more Dobermans, big dogs, one hundred pounds each of muscle and teeth that glistened white and deadly, like miniature railroad spikes covered with dental enamel.

  When they all saw Remo, they drove forward even faster, each trying to be first to get to the prize. Remo watched them coming, the most savage of all dogs, a breed created by intermingling other dogs selected for their size, their strength, and their savagery.

  They moved together now in a straight line, coming at Remo shoulder to shoulder, like three tines of a deadly pitchfork.

  Remo leaned back against the marble slab.

  “Here, poochie, poochie, poochie,” he called.

  Remo moved a few feet farther to his right, away from the path Chiun and the women had taken. He did not want the dogs to be diverted from him and go off chasing a random smell.

  With one final growl delivered almost in unison, the three Dobermans moved into the clearing. They crossed the space between themselves and Remo in just two giant strides, and then they were in the air, their muzzles close together, their hindquarters separated, looking like deadly feathers attached to an invisible dart.

  Their open jaws all went for Remo’s throat.

  He paused until the final instant, then moved down under the three soaring dogs.

  He sent the center one up over his head with his shoulder. The dog did a slow, almost lazy flip in the air and landed on its back on the marble slab with a splat. He yelped once, softly, then slid off onto the gravel on the far side.

  Remo took out the dog on the right with an upward thrust of the bent knuckle of his right middle finger. He had never struck a dog before, and he was surprised at how much a dog’s belly felt like a man’s belly.

  The results of the stroke were the same, too, as with a man. The dog dropped dead at Remo’s feet.

  The Doberman on the left missed Remo, hit the marble slab, skidded on its paws, fell off the slab, scrambled to its feet again, and turned back with a snarl toward Remo, who was backing away.

  He came through the air at Remo just as Remo decided he did not like killing dogs, even Dobermans who would gladly kill him just to keep their teeth cavity-free.

  As the dog’s massive head turned to the left so its powerful open jaws could encircle Remo’s throat, Remo leaned back, pulling his neck away, and the jaws closed harmlessly with a loud click as tooth surface contacted tooth surface.

  Remo reached down and with his left hand dislocated the beast’s right front leg. The dog yelped and hit the ground. Remo walked away.

  The dog got up on three feet, and dragging its dislocated leg, ran toward Remo again. Remo heard the injured limb scudding through the white gravel. He turned as the dog growled and reared up on its two hind legs, trying to bite him.

  He slapped the big dog’s wettish nose with his left hand and dislocated the other front leg with his right hand. This time, when the dog hit the ground, it stayed there, whining and whimpering.

  In the window high above Remo, deJuin moved back from the curtain. He felt the feathers of the two men on his sides brush his face. “Marvelous,” he said softly.

  Below, as if he had heard the Frenchman, Remo turned, remembering the men who had been watching from the window, and he pointed an index finger as if to say “you’re next.”

  Then he darted up one of the paths leading away from the central courtyard to the house. Forty yards away from Remo, but separated by many twists and turns, Chiun had heard the dogs’ frenzied barking and yelping and then the screeches and then the silence.

  “It is well,” he said, continuing to shuffle forward with the two women.

  He stopped suddenly short and spread his arms to prevent the two women from lurching forward. The women bumped into his thin arms, extended outward from his sides. Each let out an “oof” as if they had walked stomach first into an iron guardrail.

  Valerie got her breath back first. “Why are we stopped? Let’s get out of here.” She looked to Bobbi for agreement, but the buxom blonde stood silent, still apparently shaken from her near-miss cardiectomy on the marble slab.

  “We will wait for Remo,” Chiun said.

  From the window, Jean Louis deJuin saw the old Korean stop. He saw Remo now, atop the hedges, racing along them as if they were a paved road, coming toward the house, and he shouted, “Withdraw.” He and Uncle Carl and the two men in feathered robes fled from the window.

  Ten seconds later Remo came through the open window in a rolling vault from the top of the tightly packed hedges.

  The room was empty.

  Remo went out into the hall and searched each room.

  “Come out, come out, wherever you are,” he called.

  But all the rooms were empty. Back in the room he had first entered, Remo found a yellow feather on the floor and consoled himself with the thought that even if he didn’t find the men, the mange might yet carry them off.

  He stuck the long feather into the hair over his right ear, like a plume, then dove through the window with a cry of “Excelsior!”

  He turned a slow loop in the air, landed on his feet atop the hedge, and ran across the interstices of it toward where he saw Chiun and the two women up ahead.

  DeJuin waited a few moments, then pressed the button which opened the wall panel in the room where they had been sitting. He and the other men stepped out from the secret room, and deJuin motioned to them for silence as they moved toward the window, standing alongside it, peering through the side of the curtain.

  He saw Remo stop atop the hedges twelve feet above where Chiun and the two women still stood.

  “Hey, Little Father,” said Remo.

  “What are you doing up there?” Chiun asked. “Why are you wearing that feather?�
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  “I thought it was kind of dashing,” Remo said. “Why aren’t you at the car?”

  “There is a boomer down here,” Chiun said.

  Remo looked down. “Where is it? I don’t see it.”

  “It is here. A wire buried under the stones. I saw the thin upraised line of rocks. I would not expect you to see it, particularly when your feathers get in your eyes. How fortunate that it was me leading these young people and not you.”

  “Yeah? Who took care of the dogs?” Remo asked. “Who always does all the dirty work?”

  “Who is better qualified for dirty work?” Chiun asked. He liked that so he repeated it with a little chuckle. “Who is better qualified? Heh, heh.”

  “Where’s the bomb?” said Remo, pulling the yellow feather from his hair and dropping it into the hedge.

  “Right here,” Chiun said. He pointed to a spot on the ground. “Heh, heh. Who is better qualified? Heh, heh.”

  “I ought to leave you there,” Remo said.

  As deJuin watched from the window, he saw Remo drop lightly from the top of the hedge to the outside of the tall iron fence that bordered one side of it. He could not see it, but he heard metal screeching as Remo separated the bars of the fence. A moment later he saw Remo stand up and he heard his voice.

  “Okay, Little Father, it’s disconnected.”

  “That means that it is safe?”

  “Safe. I guarantee it.”

  “Say your final prayers,” Chiun told the two women. “The white one guarantees your safety.” But he led the two women past the wire imbedded under the gravel and toward the gate at the end of the pathway.

  Remo walked along on the outside of the hedge.

  “I have been thinking,” Chiun said through the hedge to Remo.

  “It’s about time,” Remo said. “Heh, heh. It’s about time. Heh, heh.”

  “Listen to him,” Chiun told the two women. “A child. Amused by a child’s joke.”

  Which took all the fun out of it for Remo, and he said to Chiun: “What were you thinking about?”

  “About the Master that I told you about, who went to far off places and new worlds and was not fully believed.”

  “What about him?” Remo asked.

  “I am still thinking,” Chiun said and would say no more.

  DeJuin watched as the old Oriental led the two women through the open gate. Remo had trotted along outside the fence, and then vaulted the twelve-foot-high fence with no more effort than if it had been the low right field handrail in Yankee Stadium.

  They started to get into the car, but then the old man turned around, looked at the house, and began to speak words that gave deJuin an unexplained chill.

  “May your ears burn as fire,” Chiun called toward the house in a voice suddenly strong.

  “May they feel the tingle of cold and then snap as glass. The House of Sinanju tells you that you will tear off your eyelids to feed your eyes to the eagles of the sky. And then you will shrink until you are eaten by the mice of the fields.

  “All this, I, Master of Sinanju, tell you. Be fearful.”

  And then the old man stared at the window, and deJuin, even concealed by the curtain, felt as if those hazel eyes were burning into his. Then the old man entered the blue Ford and the American drove off.

  DeJuin turned to the other men in the room, whose faces had turned white.

  “What Is it?” he said to Uncle Carl.

  “It is an ancient curse, from the people of the plumed serpent in our land. It is very strong magic.”

  “Nonsense,” said deJuin, who did not really feel such confidence. He had begun to speak again when the phone tingled softly at his feet.

  He picked up the instrument and listened. Slowly his features relaxed and he smiled. “Merci,” he finally said and hung up.

  “You have learned something?” asked Uncle Carl.

  “Yes,” said deJuin. “We will leave these two alone. We no longer need them to bring us to their leader. The computers never fail.”

  “The computers?” asked Carl.

  “Yes. The name our kinsmen learned in the hotel room. Harold Smith. Well, Dr. Harold Smith is head of a sanitarium near here called Folcroft. And it has a computer system with access to most of the major computers in this country.”

  “And that means?” asked Uncle Carl.

  “That means that this Dr. Smith is the head of the organization which employs these two assassins. And now that we know that, we will leave these two alone. We do not need them to attain our goals of power for the Actatl.”

  “But that leaves us always vulnerable,” Carl protested.

  DeJuin shook his head and let a slow smile take over his face.

  “No. These two men are the arms. Strong and mighty arms, but only arms nevertheless. We will cut off the head of this secret organization. And without the head, the arms are useless. So our trap did not work, but we have won anyway.”

  He kept his smile, and it spread infectiously to the other three men. DeJuin looked out into the maze at the central court, where two dogs lay dead and the third Doberman lay whimpering with two dislocated front legs.

  Behind him, he heard the men say in unison: “You are king. You are king.”

  He turned. “That is true.” And to one of the feather-wearing men, he said: “Go out and kill that dog.”

  In the car leaving the Edgemont Estate, Remo asked Chiun: “What was that all about? Eagles and mice and eyeballs of glass?”

  “I thought of what that long-ago Master wrote in the histories. He said it was a powerful curse among the people he had visited.”

  “You don’t even know, though, if these are the same people,” Remo said.

  Chiun formed his fingers into a delicate steeple. “Ah,” he said. “But if it is, they will have sleepless nights.”

  Remo shrugged. When he glanced in the rear-view mirror, Valerie was sitting sullenly against the door on the right side, but Bobbi Delpheen’s face was white and drawn. She had really been frightened, Remo realized.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE POLICE FOUND JOEY 172 that night under a railroad bridge in the Bronx.

  They did not find his heart.

  There was almost a witness to the killing, who said that he was walking beneath the bridge when he heard a scuffle and a groan. He coughed and the sound stopped, and then he left. He came back fifteen minutes later and found Joey 172’s body.

  Alongside his body was a small note on the pavement, apparently written in his own blood by Joey 172. It said “Maine next.” Police believed that in the brief reprieve Joey 172 got by the presence of the passerby, he had written this message on the ground. This was all reported the next day by the Post, which Remo read.

  That the Post took the message “Maine next” to “mean that the killing was the work of a right wing lunatic fringe whose next mission was to go to Maine and make sure that the fascists won the Presidential election there was immaterial.

  That the Post first and alone promulgated this theory on page one, and by page twenty-four, the editorial page, had promoted it to the status of fact by referring to it in an editorial entitled “Heartless in America” did not impress Remo at all.

  What impressed him was the contents of the message. “Maine next.”

  What else could it mean but Dr. Harold Smith?

  · · ·

  Throughout the Actatl tribe, the word had flashed on the death of Joey 172: The despoiler of the great stone Uctut is no more.

  Another message flashed through, too. Soon the Actatl would be hidden no more; their proud historical traditions would no longer be kept secret by fear of annihilation and reprisal.

  Soon the Actatl and their god Uctut, of the secret name, would stand high among the peoples of the world, proud and noble, for even now the leaders of the family were planning to humble a secret organization of the United States.

  DeJuin sat in his hotel suite and gathered to him the bravest of the Actatl. They planned their t
rip. And when Uncle Carl insisted upon going, deJuin made no argument. The old man, he felt, deserved to be in on the moment of glory.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  BEFORE REMO COULD PICK UP the telephone to call Dr. Harold Smith, the phone rang.

  It was uncanny, Remo thought, how Smith sometimes seemed to be able, across many miles, to read Remo’s mind and call just when Remo wanted to speak to him. But Smith had a far stronger track record of calling when Remo did not wish to speak to him, which was most of the time.

  The phone rang again.

  “Answer the instrument,” Chiun said, “or else remove it from the wall. I cannot stand all this interruption when I am trying to write a history for the people of Sinanju.”

  Remo glanced at Chiun on the floor, surrounded by sheets of parchment, quill pens, and bottles of ink.

  He answered the phone.

  “Hello, Smitty.” he said.

  “Remo, this is Bobbi.”

  “What do you want? A fourth for doubles?”

  “Remo, I’m frightened. I’ve seen men around the front of my home and they look like the men who were at Edgemont.”

  “Mmmmm,” said Remo. He had sent Bobbi Delpheen home with orders to be careful, hoping he would never hear from her again. Happiness was never having to hear her Adidas tennis shoes scuffling along the rug in his room.

  “Can I come and stay with you, Remo? Please. I’m frightened.”

  “All right,” Remo said. “But be careful coming here. And wear something warm. We’re going on a trip.”

  “I’ll be right there.”

  Remo hung up with a grunt.

  When he had sent Bobbi home, Remo had told her to be careful. When he had sent Valerie home, he had told her to be quiet. He wondered now if she were being followed also.

  “Hey, Chiun, you writing anything good about me?”

  Chiun looked up. “I am writing only the truth.”

  Remo was not going to stand there and be insulted, so he called Valerie. He found her at the desk in the museum.

  “It’s about time you called, freak,” she said. “When are you going to get rid of all that…all those…you know, in the special exhibit room? How long do you think this can go on? What do you think I am anyway?”