Feeding Frenzy

But the door did not open. His voice did not come again.

Behind the wheel, Cody Custer looked at his watch.

Someone shouted, "What's keeping him?"

"Probably in the john," Cody thought to himself. "But he picked a hell of a time for it." He turned on his radio. From the local station normally broadcasting The Thrush Limburger Show, there was only low static.

He cued up the announcement cassette again, louder this time, and leaned close to the radio speaker to see if Thrush's mike picked it up. It didn't.

They gave Thrush Limburger three more minutes, then someone walked up and knocked on the door.

There was no answer.

Finally, Cody Custer came out with the key to the door. He unlocked it, threw it open, and climbed in.

There was the miniature soundproof broadcasting booth. There was Limburger's microphone, his personal computer, his size fifty-seven coat draped over his big chair.

But there was no Thrush Limburger.

He was not in the john or in his sleeping cubicle or kitchenette.

He wasn't anywhere.

Cody Custer didn't have time to be shocked or frantic or anything. He poked his head out of the door and cameras clicked and mikes were thrust in his face.

"Thrush Limburger is missing!" he shouted. "Somebody call the police."

Pandemonium broke loose. Everyone wanted a shot at the empty microphone.

"I knew this would happen," a reporter crowed. "That bag of wind finally broke open and nothing came out."

There was a scramble for cellular phones.

From under his coat, Senator Ned J. Clancy pulled one of his own. It had been hanging from a hook sewn into the double-strength lining of his coat. He spoke in low careful phrases. When he was finished, he restored the unit to its hook, exactly where a pistol would be hidden in a shoulder holster.

"I have an important announcement to make," he bellowed.

"Senator Clancy has an announcement," repeated his chief aide.

"Senator Clancy is giving a press conference right now," added another.

The word spread fast. It passed from mouth to mouth.

And suddenly Senator Ned J. Clancy was exactly where he wanted to be-in the calm eye of a media hurricane.

"I have just been in consultation with my aides in Washington," he said, his voice steady as a rock, "who have just drafted in my name a bill that I will personally introduce into the Senate that will mandate research into the causes of, and provide free medical care for sufferers of Human Environmental Liability Paradox, a terrible scourge that threatens all humanity, possibly the worst health threat ever faced by middle-class America. I know my colleagues on both sides of the aisle will join me in supporting this important legislation."

"What caused you to change your mind, Senator?" a reporter demanded.

"I did not change my mind, I have been working quietly toward this end for some weeks now, and only wished to announce it at the proper moment."

"How are you going to fund the HELP bill, Senator?" Jane Goodwoman called out.

Clancy smiled boozily. "With a value-added tax on the sale of condoms."

Some reporters actually tucked their mikes and notepads under their arms and broke out into polite applause. They would have cheered, but their mouths were full of lobster salad.

"What do you have to say about the disappearance of Thrush Limburger, Senator?"

"My heart goes out to his family-if he has one."

And so the disappearance of Thrush Limburger became an instant page three item. Senator Clancy's proposed HELP bill led the evening newscasts and was destined to be tomorrow's headline.

At the edge of the swarm of reporters, Cody Custer tried to tell any reporter who would listen, "I think he was kidnapped. I think Thrush was abducted by his political enemies."

He was ignored. He was laughed at. Except by those who sneered.

"Everybody knew Limburger would pull something like this once his ratings started to fall," Jane Goodwoman spat, lobster salad fragments spraying from her rubbery mouth.

And even Cody Custer began to wonder if the conventional wisdom had been right all along.

There was no other reasonable explanation.

Chapter 12

Remo stopped by the front desk before returning to his bungalow.

"Water back on?" he asked the desk clerk, who held his red and tender fingers in the air as if afraid to touch hard objects with them.

"Not yet."

"Damn."

"Sorry."

"Not as sorry as you will be if I don't shower soon," Remo said.

"The drought is out of our control, sir."

"Remember my friend with the fast fingers?"

The desk clerk dropped his tender hand under the counter where it would be safe. "Indelibly."

"He wants me to shower more than anything in the world."

"More than he wants rice?"

Remo nodded soberly. "More than rice."

"I might be able to scare up enough water for a bath."

"Start scaring."

"It'll take a while for the ice to melt, though."

"I'll be in my room counting the minutes," said Remo, stepping out into the cool California air. He glanced up the road, but the Master of Sinanju was nowhere in sight.

"Let him play games if he wants to," muttered Remo, going in and turning on the TV.

He got the top of the hour CNN News.

"In Peoria, Illinois, authorities have just announced that Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian, self-styled thanatologist, has just assisted in his twenty-eighth suicide. The victim, forty-seven-year-old Penelope Grimm, was suffering from a severe vaginal yeast infection easily cured with an over-the-counter prescription. Unfortunately, the woman's Christian Scientist beliefs forbid their use. Asked to comment on his latest foray into medicide, as the practice of doctor-assisted suicide has come to be called, Dr. Gregorian said, 'This is a gigantic step forward for the medical community and for women, who no longer need to be terminally ill in order to end their suffering. My toll-free death-line number is-' "

"Damn," said Remo, grabbing up the telephone. He thumbed the 1 button. Relays clicked.

Harold Smith answered, "Yes?"

"It's me and I have a problem."

Smith's voice tensed up. "What is it?"

"I'm stuck in California when I should be in Peoria."

"What is happening in Peoria?"

"Dr. Doom just executed another sick woman. This time, she wasn't even terminal."

"I have heard that report. It is very disturbing. This man seems determined to test the euthanasia laws in every state in the union."

"It's sick, and I should be doing something about it, except I'm stuck here, dodging press and politicians and wasting my freaking time."

"One moment, Remo. I seem to have left the radio on."

In the background, Remo heard a hiss of static. It went away. Smith's voice returned, sounding faintly perturbed.

"Something must have happened to the feed for the Thrush Limburger radio show."

"Maybe that hippo sat on it," Remo growled.

"Remo, why are you in such a foul mood?"

"From the top, I can't shower because there's no freaking water; because I can't shower, Chiun won't have anything to do with me; and I can't do my job because Nirvana West is crawling with political freeloaders and media dips."

"You have made no progress?"

"I talked to the local coroner. One of the few sane people I've come across out here. He can't make any sense of it, either."

"Then you've learned nothing?"

"No." Remo was looking at the TV and said, "Hold the phone." He grabbed the remote and brought up the sound.

"What is it, Remo?"

"CNN just flashed Thrush Limburger's fat face."

"Thrush Limburger," the newscaster was saying, "had no sooner pulled into Nirvana West when it was discovered that the popular radio and TV personality was no longer on board his broadcast van. When questioned, his driver and personal assistant, Cody Custer, claimed that Limburger had been abducted en route by members of the California Highway Patrol."

"Oh, sure," Remo said skeptically.

"That may explain the static," Smith mused.

"Publicity stunt," said Remo.

"Perhaps not," Smith said thoughtfully. "Remo, I was listening to the Limburger show when you called. He claimed he was about to crack this thing wide open."

"He also got the last presidential election dead wrong," Remo said sourly.

The newscast continued. A clip of Senator Ned Clancy was thrown up on the screen. The newscaster was saying, "Shortly after the alleged disappearance of Thrush Limburger, Senator Ned J. Clancy of Massachusetts announced that he would sponsor a bill calling for a four-billion-dollar research program to combat the growing HELP crisis, entirely funded by a value-added tax on condom sales nationwide."

"It is my hope that the bulk of these revenues can go to ending this scourge, whatever it may be," he said in his broad Massachusetts accent.

Remo turned off the sound.

"You hear that, Smitty?"

"Yes."

"This is awful fishy."

"How so?"

"Yesterday, Clancy was ducking the question of HELP like crazy. You could tell he was worried about what Limburger was going to say and do. Now Limburger's vanished and all of a sudden there's a giant bill in the Senate."

"It is almost as if Clancy knows Limburger isn't coming back," Smith said slowly. His voice grew sharp. "Remo, can you get to Clancy?"

"As a matter of fact, I'm in good with his mother's nurse. I can talk to her."

"Do so," said Smith.

"I'll get back with you, Smitty," said Remo suddenly, hanging up.

Remo had spotted the Master of Sinanju through a bungalow window. He threw open the door.

"Hey, Little Father! I'm headed for Nirvana West. You coming?"

"Have you showered?" Chiun called back.

"The ice hasn't melted yet. But before you say no, Thrush Limburger just disappeared."

"The fiends!" shrieked Chiun, rushing forward, his wide kimono sleeves flapping like the wings of some ungainly bird.

"What fiends?" asked Remo, going out to meet him.

"Whichever ones abducted Thrush the Vocal. They must be depraved to commit such a heinous act."

"They also must be able to bench press elephants if they carried him off themselves. Come on. We gotta talk to Nalini."

The Master of Sinanju froze as Remo threw open the car door for him.

"Why must you do that?" he asked coolly.

"Clancy just pulled a flip-flop. He's sponsoring a bill to fight HELP. Could be he knows what happened to Limburger."

"Then we will rend his dissipated flesh from his treasonous bones," cried Chiun.

"Nothing doing. He's a U.S. senator. We don't mess with him without authorization from Smith. You know how he is about hitting politicians, especially if they're ours."

"I do not understand. What are assassins for but to do away with nettlesome rivals?"

"Look, Clancy belongs to a famous political family. I know they're mostly jerks, you know they're mostly jerks, and Smith knows they're mostly jerks. Could be he's more than a jerk. Could be he's pulling a scam for some reason."

"So?"

"So, he belongs to the same party as the new President."

"Ah." Chiun's eyes narrowed. "This new President, he is not to Emperor Smith's liking?"

"Every time Smith calls him, he's gotta remind the President to turn down the radio."

"The new President is an adherent of Thrush too?"

"Not Thrush. Elvis."

"The dead one whose restless spirit haunts supermarkets and post offices throughout this land?"

"That's the only Elvis I know about."

The Master of Sinanju's visage tightened in thought. "Perhaps after this assignment the opportunity I have been waiting for will come," he said thoughtfully.

"What opportunity?"

"To unseat the President and place Harold Smith on the Eagle Throne where he rightfully belongs and where he will be in a position to handsomely reward our loyalty."

"Never happen."

"Smith has secretly ruled this great nation for three decades. Is it not proper that he should come out of hiding?"

"Smith isn't in hiding. He's undercover. That's how he operates. Do us both a favor, don't bring this up."

"Why not?"

"Smith might be tempted this time."

Chiun smiled as he stepped into the car and allowed his penitent pupil to close the door for him.

They couldn't get anywhere near Nirvana West by car. Traffic was backed up. A half mile from the place, Remo eased the rented car up onto the soft shoulder of the road.

"Keep an eye out for anyone who might recognize us," Remo warned.

"I am not afraid of Ned Doppler and his ilk."

"Maybe not. But last time out an awful lot of TV anchors bought the farm. Smitty would be upset if you wasted any more."

"I only killed two. One by mistake."

"That was a hell of a big mistake."

"He was easily replaced," sniffed Chiun.

"Just be careful."

They slipped into the woods and made no sound as they worked their way to Nirvana West. Roosting birds were not disturbed by their passing.

"I guess we can scout the situation from that hill," Remo muttered.

They passed through an area of evergreens that had rubbery leaves instead of needles. Their scent was fresh and clean.

Something dropped from a branch onto Remo's shoulder.

He reached up and brushed it off. It scuttled away.

Further along, another sprang onto his head. Remo shook his dark hair and a brownish-red insect jumped off like a grasshopper to vanish amid the parched grass.

Chiun paused. "What is it, Remo?"

"Ant, dammit."

"Why are you so annoyed by a mere ant?"

"Because that's the second one that dropped on me since we got here."

Chiun shrugged. "Since you are an American, you should not complain when food offers itself to you."

They resumed walking. Remo had not gone six paces when another ant leaped onto his bare left forearm. This time, he lifted his arm to take a look at it. It was a rusty red and had the strangest head Remo had ever seen. It looked like a ram's head at the end of a long pipestem neck.

He shook it off, saying, "How come these pesky ants are after me and not you?"

"Because they are wise ants," replied the Master of Sinanju,

"Huh?"

"They understand the fate that awaits them if they intrude upon the Master of Sinanju."

"Ants aren't that smart."

"Nor are you, who cannot walk under a tree branch without acquiring passengers."

"Har de har har," said Remo.

Further ahead, they heard sounds. The noise of a car's suspension getting a workout, but no accompanying engine rumble.

"Better let me take point," said Remo, moving ahead.

Beyond a copse of trees with bark as smooth and shiny as watermelon rind, they came upon a long black limousine parked in the shade.

"We're in luck," Remo whispered. "That's Clancy's car."

"Leave him to me," said Chiun, leaping ahead.

The car was bouncing wildly now, Remo saw.

"Wait a minute, Chiun," he cautioned.

Before Remo could overhaul the Master of Sinanju, he had leaped to the right rear door and flung it open.

"Step into the light, pretender to the throne!" he cried. "For you have much to explain."

No one stepped out, so Chiun peered in. The limo had stopped bouncing on its springs.

Abruptly, the Master of Sinanju jerked back. He turned, his prim features shocked, his hazel eyes wide.

Remo looked in.

Blotto Clancy was sprawled on the spacious backseat, looking like a nude Jabba the Hut. He was sprawled over an equally naked woman.

The woman lifted her head to see over Clancy's cyst-pimpled shoulder. Her eyes went wide behind the eyeholes. The rest of her face was masked by a large fuzzy blue circle that seemed to be made out of cotton candy.

"Can't you see I'm interviewing Senator Clancy," the unmistakable voice of Jane Goodwoman snapped.

"I'm not Senator Clancy. I'm one of his aides," puffed Senator Clancy.

"If this is an interview, what's that blue thing on your face?" demanded Remo.

"Legal requirement," puffed Clancy.

"You told me you couldn't get it up unless I wore one," Jane Goodwoman complained.

"I can't--since my cousin's statutory rape trial."

Remo slammed the door and the limo resumed bouncing.

"What did I tell you?" Remo told Chiun as he led the Master of Sinanju away from the struggling limousine. "Nero would have been proud."

"Nero," said Chiun in a stiff voice, "would have had better taste in females."

"At least, it gets Jane Goodwoman off my back for a while. Let's see if we can't hunt up Nalini."

"Yes. By all means hunt up that other harlot. Perhaps Clancy will allow you two the use of his chariot when he is done."

"Blow it out your butt, Chiun," said Remo, walking away.

Coming to the base of a low hill, Remo started up the gentle slope. From the summit, he could see the rustic sprawl of Nirvana West, not much changed since the day before.

This time, the press had not gathered around Senator Ned Clancy. Instead, they were listening to Theodore Soars-With-Eagles.

He was trying to explain that Thrush Limburger had been spirited away by old-growth forest devils, angered that he insulted the proud Chinchilla tribe.

"Limburger said the tribe called themselves Chowchillas," a reporter shouted back.

"That was another tribe," Theodore retorted. "Our poor relations. We do not speak of them. I am a Chinchilla, from the soles of my chinchilla moccasins to the shoulders of my chinchilla cloak."

"There's no Chinchilla tribe registered with the Bureau of Indian Affairs."

"That is because my Chinchilla ancestors refused to register with the oppressive white man, so their braves would not be drafted into unjust foreign wars against other oppressed peoples. Because they were unregistered, they were denied food until their numbers dwindled until this day, in which I stand before you all-the last of the Chinchillas."

The press wrote down every word and asked no more questions.

The Master of Sinanju joined his pupil and said in a sere voice, "Yours is a cruel race."

"Oh, come off it. He's making it up as he goes along."

"Then why are the scribes not doubting him?"

"Because it's easier to copy than research." Remo frowned. "It's a sure bet we won't be able to get near Theodore any time soon. Damn. How are we going to investigate this mess with all this press milling around?"

"Perhaps by investigating Thrush Limburger."

"Good idea. Maybe we can locate the van he was supposed to have vanished from."

A change in the direction of the wind brought a familiar scent to Remo's nostrils.

"Hold the phone," he said.

"What phone?"

"Change in plan. I smell Nalini."

Chiun sniffed the air-or pretended to.

"I smell no such thing," he said thinly.

"Well, I do."

"Then you are smelling yourself."

Remo didn't answer. His dark eyes were raking the panorama below.

"There's her limo," Remo said, starting down the hillside.

Chiun called after him. "Remo, you are going the wrong way."

"Nice try, Chiun. But no sale."

Remo moved between the thick trees, stopping every so often to shake off the ants that seemed to like to drop off tree limbs and into his hair like hyperactive fleas.

He came out close to the black limousine that carried Senator Clancy's mother. The same security guards stood watch.

The back door was open and Mrs. Clancy sat inside, her paralysis-twisted features looking like something out of an old Creature Feature.

Her eyes happened to be looking in Remo's direction, so he thought what the hell and stepped into view.

Mrs. Clancy's eyes popped in their sockets and she began bouncing in her seat, obviously agitated. She brought her hands up to her mouth and her forefingers began gesturing crazily.

Nalini's voice called, "What is it, Adji? What is wrong?"

"It's just me," said Remo.

The guards snapped to attention and pulled Uzis from under their coats.

"It is okay," Nalini cried, stepping out from the other side of the limo. "It is okay! This man is not an enemy."

Reluctantly, the Uzis were lowered-but not reholstered.

Remo started for the limo.

Mrs. Clancy wriggled her fingers even more crazily.

One of the rusty ants leaped up from the ground and landed on Remo's bare wrist. Another came off a tree. Remo flicked them away without thinking.

Nalini ducked her head into the back of the limo and bulged her eyes out, bringing her fingers up to her mouth. She made the same crazy finger wriggling, and Mrs. Clancy settled down.

Her face tight, Nalini came to greet Remo.

Remo smiled. Nalini did not.

"Hi!" he said.

"What are you doing here, Remo?"

"Investigating. Nice job of humoring the old dingbat."

"Please do not call her that. She is Adji. I call her that because she is like a grandmother to me since I come to this country."

"Sorry," said Remo.

"And what you call crazy, is a form of signing."

"Signing?"

"You have heard of sign language? The deaf use it.

"She's deaf too?"

Nalini shook her covered head. "No. But she cannot speak and so must communicate some of her thoughts with her fingers."

"Right," said Remo. "Listen, I've been looking for you."

"And I, you."

"Want to have dinner later?"

"That would be nice."

"Good. Because after today, I have a feeling I'm going to need some R&R."

Nalini looked blank, then confused. Her face actually darkened in what Remo took for a blush.

"That means rest and recreation," he said quickly.

"Oh."

"Where can I meet you?" Remo asked.

Nalini reached up and drew him off to one side, her fruity perfume filling Remo's nostrils pleasantly.

"We are staying at Ukiah, but it would be better that I meet you at your motel. Are you staying at the little place of bungalows as I suggested?"

"Yeah. Unit sixteen. How's eight sound?"

"Eight o'clock will be fine. Now I must go. Adji does not enjoy being left alone."

"Catch you later," said Remo, fading back into the trees. He paused, took a look at Nalini as she slipped into the back of the limousine, and closed the door shut. Remo moved on.

He spotted Chiun floating away, a wraith of sky blue silk.

When Remo caught up, Chiun spat, "You smell worse than before."

Remo smiled. "Oh, I kinda disagree."

"You allowed her to touch you?"

"Don't sweat it. She used her right hand."

"You are a fool that goes wherever his aroused manhood points. It is a wonder you have not walked off a cliff to your doom before this."

"Aw, come off it. I just put up with your mooning over Cheeta Ching for what seemed like forever, and here I meet someone nice and you act like I caught leprosy."

"It is too early to tell if you have caught leprosy or not. The fingers do not fall off right away."

"You should have seen her, Chiun. That old bat Pearl Clancy was acting like a lunatic and Nalini settled her right down. You know how?"

"By acting like another lunatic," spat Chiun.

"Yeah-no. I mean, she tried to talk back in her own language. Some kinda sign language. It seemed to work."

"Lunatics understand one another and you are impressed."

"We got a date tonight."

"Wear a condom. If you can find one that fits over your empty head."

They walked along. Remo kept his eyes peeled for more of the flealike ants.

He spotted one on a branch, seemingly staring at him with two eyes like black spots set in front of its ramlike head.

It jumped. Remo faded back and the ant went sailing by. It landed on a leaf with a dry skittering sound.

Moving on, Remo brushed away a single strand of spiderweb draped between two trees and encountered no more of the ants.

They came upon a group of print journalists and Remo asked one of them, "I'm looking for Thrush Limburger's people."

"The Tell the Truth RV is around here somewhere. It's the red, white, and blue one."

"Thanks," said Remo.

Rejoining the Master of Sinanju, he said, "Limburger's van is red, white, and blue. It shouldn't be hard to find."

It wasn't. They found it parked at the north entrance to Nirvana West, a young man sitting on the rear bumper, looking miserable.

Remo stepped up to him.

"You belong to Thrush Limburger?"

The man jumped up. "Are you press?"

Remo offered a card and said, "Remo Zimbalist, Jr., FBI."

"He's disappeared!"

"So we heard."

"No, he really, really disappeared," the man said excitedly. "I keep telling people this, but these so-called journalists refuse to believe me."

"Start from the top," said Remo, trying to sound official.

"I'm Cody Custer, Thrush's chief of staff." He blinked. "Aren't you going to take notes?"

"Photographic memory," said Remo.

"And who's he?" Custer asked, indicating Chiun.

"That's my Korean crime-scene photographer."

"Where's his camera?"

"He's got a photographic memory too. Let's hear your story."

"We pulled into town about ten o'clock. Thrush stopped in at the local funeral parlor."

"Esterquest and Son?"

"Yeah, that was the name. He went in and talked to him a while and came out all excited. Thrush said he had the whole thing figured out, and told me to drive straight here."

"Then what?"

"On the way, we were stopped by the California Highway Patrol. They said they were quarantining the area, but we could go through once they explained the risk."

"Yeah?"

"I told them I was okay with it, and they went in back and talked with Thrush. Not more than a minute or two. I drove on, pulled into here, ran Thrush's ballyhoo tape like he told me to. But he never came out."

"Okay, let's look at this logically. You sure he got back on in town?"

"Positive. When Thrush gets on or off this thing, believe me, you know it. We gotta replace the shocks every six months."

"And you didn't stop except for the police."

"Yeah. It's the only way it could have happened."

"What is?"

"The highway patrol kidnapped Thrush Limburger. They must have."

"You know how that sounds?"

"Yeah, but I think they weren't really police. One of them had a ponytail tucked up under his cap."

Remo looked to the Master of Sinanju. The Master of Sinanju stepped up to Cody Custer and looked him straight in the eye with hazel orbs like cold lasers.

Custer looked at Remo and asked, "What's he doing?"

"Taking your picture. Just hold still."

"He is telling the truth, Remo," said Chiun, stepping back.

Remo frowned. "Great. As if we don't have enough to do, we've got a kidnapping. Maybe we'd better talk to the coroner."

"That's what I kept telling the press. Talk to the coroner. But all they're interested in is food service trucks and bugeaters. In that order."

Chapter 13

There was a crowd outside the Esterquest and Son funeral parlor. Police cars were pulled up before the door and an ambulance stood waiting, its rear doors open.

There was also a contingent of press. Minicams and print journalists jostled one another for position.

"I don't see anyone who might recognize us," Remo said, easing the car into a parking slot.

"Something is wrong," said Chiun. "I smell death in the air."

"I just hope it's not what I think it is."

They got out and sauntered up to the edge of the waiting crowd. A sheet-wrapped body was being carried out. The electronic press crushed close as if the anonymous body on the gurney were the most important figure on earth.

"Don't they normally take bodies into a funeral parlor?" Remo said, loud enough for anyone to hear.

"Not when the body is the owner," a print journalist said.

Remo winced. "Esterquest?"

"That is the name over the door."

"What killed him?" Remo asked.

"No one knows the what, but the police have a pretty good idea of the who."

"Who?"

"Thrush Limburger. He paid the guy a visit less than an hour ago, and now he's croaked."

"Yeah, and Limburger's missing," added another reporter.

"Which proves he's guilty," said a third.

"How does one thing prove another?" asked Remo.

"It ain't coincidence."

"Yeah," echoed the first reporter. "The only question is where Limburger went to."

"My guess is Argentina," yet another reporter ventured.

"Argentina?"

"Yeah." The man chuckled. "Argentina has a lot of beef and at three-hundred odd pounds, it's a cinch Limburger isn't about to hide out in a country where he has to eat bugs."

"Can I quote you on that?" the first reporter wondered.

The other shrugged. "Sure, just don't use my name."

The first reporter raised his voice and looked around. "Anyone else hear that Limburger took off for Argentina?"

A sharp-faced woman perked up and said, "Yeah. Just now."

The first reporter scribbled something on his notepad. "Good. That gives me two sources. My editor won't squawk."

"Wait a minute!" Remo said. "He just floated that rumor and now you're going to print it?"

"Now, it's rumor. After they print it, it will be news. Don't you know how this game works?"

"I'm getting an education," Remo growled. "Listen, while you're in the rumor-mongering business, I caught Senator Ned Clancy porking Jane Goodwoman in the back of Clancy's limo."

The reporter made a disgusted face.

"We can't print that!" he exploded.

"Why not?" asked Remo.

"It's unsubstantiated."

Remo cocked a thumb at Chiun. "My friend here also saw it."

"Yes, it is true," said Chiun. "The pig Clancy was porking the other pig Goodwoman."

"That makes two of us," said Remo. "And Clancy's a married man now, isn't he?"

The reporter made a face. "That's a character thing. We don't do character issue stories. They're no fun anymore."

"I give up," said Remo. He searched for a pay phone and finally found one. It was an old-fashioned glass booth, which meant he could call Harold Smith with a modicum of privacy.

"Smitty? Remo. This isn't getting any better. Everywhere Chiun and I go, we meet a face from our past. Remember that coroner I mentioned? He just turned up dead. And get this, before he disappeared, Thrush Limburger dropped in on him too. According to Limburger's assistant, he came out all excited, claiming he'd figured out HELP."

"It is possible," Smith said slowly.

"Maybe. But get this: I saw Limburger's van rolling in when I was pulling away from the coroner's place. I thought it was another politician, at the time."

Smith's voice grew concerned. "Obviously, Limburger spoke with the man just after you did."

"Yeah, but when I left him, Esterquest didn't have a thing. The way I figure the timing, Limburger couldn't have spent ten minutes with the guy-and he has HELP all figured out?"

Smith's dry voice grew doubtful. "Odd. For all his showmanship, Limburger has a reputation for telling the truth."

"Why? Because he calls his network Tell the Truth? Isn't that like a used car salesman calling himself Honest John?"

"This is very odd," Smith said. "Perhaps Limburger is not what he seems, after all."

"Well, Limburger's assistant seems to be telling the truth that Limburger was kidnapped, if the press's reputation for missing the real story still holds. But here's another flash: the assistant claims a California Highway Patrol roadblock stopped Limburger's van just before he turned up missing."

"He suspects them?"

"According to him, one of the cops had a ponytail tucked up under his uniform cap."

"California Highway Patrol officers must adhere to a strict grooming code," Smith mused.

"That's what I figured."

Across three thousand miles, Smith seemed to lean closer. "Remo, this whole affair is becoming very strange."

"Yeah. Any minute now I might start believing that Nirvana West is under a hole in the ozone, myself."

"Unlikely," said Smith. "But there is another thing you should know."

"What's that?" Remo asked.

"Before he went off the air, Thrush Limburger pointed out that there is no such thing as a Chinchilla Indian. The tribe is actually called the Chowchillas. Theodore Soars-With-Eagles is a fraud."

"That part I already figured out," Remo said dryly.

"Remo, I have looked into his background. His real name is Theodore Magarac."

"Doesn't sound very Chowchilla to me."

"It is Latvian. Magarac is Latvian on both sides of his family. It is strange that the press hasn't uncovered this fact, given the intensity with which they are covering this event."

"Nothing the press does or doesn't do is strange," said Remo, eyeing the reporters filming the departing ambulance. "Chiun and I will deal with Magarac-if we can get close to him."

"Any who stand in our path will die!" the Master of Sinanju cried in a loud voice.

"For God's sake, Remo. Do not let Chiun kill any more network anchormen!"

"I only dispatched two," Chiun cried. "I was referring to certain politically incorrect pretenders to the Eagle Throne."

"He means Clancy," Remo interjected.

"Remo, under no circumstances are you to molest Clancy in any way."

"No problem, there. He's not the molestee type anyway."

"Stay in close contact, Remo." And Smith disconnected.

Remo came out of the phone booth and said, "For your information, Clancy is politically correct."

"He is?"

"Uh-huh. At all times."

Chiun's parchment face gathered its wrinkles into a tighter web.

"If Clancy is a political enemy of Harold Smith, and Harold Smith runs this country, how can Clancy be correct?"

"Because being politically correct is incorrect and vice versa," explained Remo.

Chiun's hazel eyes thinned to steely slits. "Is this like cultimulcherism?"

"Multiculturism," Remo corrected. "And no. But if it will help you understand then I take it back. The answer is yes."

"Are we then politically correct, you and I?"

"No. But we are correct."

"Why is that?"

"Because we're the good guys and the good guys are always correct."

They began walking back to the car.

"I'll explain it on the way," said Remo.

"And if you cannot?"

"You can ask Theodore Magarac. I'm sure he'll give you any answer you want-once we promise not to scalp him when the cameras are on."

Chapter 14

Theodore Soars-With-Eagles Magarac squatted on his "Made in Japan" Navajo blanket in the center of his Naugahyde faux Chinchilla tepee, which when purchased had been advertised as a Hopi wigwam, and meditated.

It was happening. It was finally happening. He was on the threshold of the scam of his life. And all because he happened to overhear a restaurant conversation between Brother Karl Sagacious and his earliest adherents. And was quick to jump in the pool.

At first, Theodore Magarac had been content to grab for a piece of an emerging cult, gather together a few suckers, feed them bugs, fleece them when they least expected it, and blow town.

But when the first adherents of PAPA began dying of Human Environmental Liability Paradox, Magarac began packing. He had been eating the bugs all along too. Not exclusively, like the others. He couldn't go very long without prime rib and lobster-although the thunderbug was a good cheap lobster substitute.

In fact, once the PAPA angle had been milked to death, Magarac had envisioned marketing the thunderbug as minced lobster salad. He had read somewhere that a fast food chain was able to legally sell octopus and squid as crabmeat, just by adding a small percent of real crab into the meal and paying off a congressman or two to get the legalities squared away.

And he had written the first chapter of The Authentic Chinchilla Thunderbug Cookbook, which he hoped to sell to a New York publisher.

But HELP changed all that. At first for the worse. But then as only the members of the Snapper wing of PAPA began dying, he began to see fresh angles to the scam.

When some blamed HELP on the thunderbug, Theodore Magarac stood up and pronounced it the work of a new hole in the ozone layer. It was the biggest scare in the news that week and inasmuch as some were calling HELP the next AIDS, he knew he would need a bigger scare to offset the AIDS insinuations.

And it worked. Official Washington stampeded to stick its oar in and the next thing he knew, bug-eating was the top talk show topic and everyone wanted a taste. The more people who dared to eat thunderbugs, especially live on TV, the bigger PAPA was becoming.

And best of all, Washington had sent an army of bureaucrats to look into everything. Theodore Magarac, through some dummy catering company, had set up the food concession, and was raking it in. The press idiots never dreamed the lobster salad they were wolfing down was actually mashed thunderbug.

Now it was just a matter of moving to the next phase.

Theodore Magarac knew how the game was played. Senator Clancy had announced sponsorship of a bill to fund HELP research. He had asked Theodore Soars-With-Eagles for his support, and Theodore had been only too happy to give it, in return for an eight-by-ten of Magarac shaking hands with the senator. That alone would be worth its weight in gold once HELP took him to the next plateau.

There was only one fly in the ointment.

"What the hell was killing the Snappers? And why only them?"

In his mind, Theodore Magarac had assumed it was because they ate the bugs raw. But if that was so, why didn't they all die? Why was it only certain ones?

"Something's gotta be killing these Snappers," he muttered. "But what?"

A feminine voice he had never heard before said, "I know the answer to that question, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles."

"Hello? Who's out there?"

"Do not come out of your tent, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles. It is not permitted to see me."

"Why not?"

"Because I am the Eldress."

"Eldress?"

"Had Brother Karl never mentioned me?"

"He did sometimes babble about someone he called She."

"I am that She. It was my voice that drew Brother Karl to discover the bug which will nourish the world."

"Is that so?" said Theodore Soars-With-Eagles.

Surreptitiously, he crawled to a peephole in the Naugahyde tepee front. He peered out. He saw nothing. No one.

"So that crafty old Egyptian wasn't lying after all," he said after retreating to his blanket.

"No," said the female voice. It was thin and reedy, like the wind in the parched grass. "I bestowed the gift of the Miracle Food upon him and yet he proved unworthy of the boon. Thus, I was forced to harvest his soul."

"Sagacious died of HELP. He got weak, and two days later he was dead as an Egyptian mummy."

"The gift you call HELP is a tool, by which the Eldress claims her own when their rightful time comes---or punishes them for infractions against her will."

"You killed Sagacious?"

"I took what became mine at the moment he knelt in the grass and consumed my bounty."

"Why toast him-I mean, why claim him?"

"Because I saw in you greater purity. He claimed to be things he was not, but you possess a pure spirit. I knew with Brother Karl's return to the earth you would lift the thunderbug to greater world consciousness. And I have been proven correct."

"You got that right," said Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, trying to keep the suspicion out of his voice. If this Eldress is whatever she's claiming to be, how come she doesn't know I'm a Latvian from Pittsburgh? he wondered.

"Anything I can do for you; Eldress?" he asked, just to test the waters.

"I have given you the thunderbug and you have done well with it. Now I have something greater to bequeath upon you."

"Yeah? What's that?"

"I hold it in my hand in a small box of ivory and rosewood and I give it to you freely, for what is in the box means wealth and power beyond measure."

"You want me to come out and get it?"

"No, but I will pass it in to you. But you must close your eyes, for to behold the Eldress is to have one's eyes shrivel as the grass beneath my feet."

"You're responsible for this drought too?"

"No. But if it were my wish, the rains would come in plenty."

"Hey. California is parched. I do a mean rain dance. We could clean up."

"Are your eyes closed?"

"Yes," lied Theodore Soars-With-Eagles.

The flap of the tepee shook and a hand came in. The hand was dark. There was enough light coming in for him to see it clearly. It was a thin woman's hand, with tapering nails. And the fingers clutched a small box, not much bigger than a matchbox, and covered with decorative ivory inlays.

Theodore took the box. The hand withdrew.

"Open the box," commanded the thin voice.

Theodore did. The lid lifted and in the dimness of the tepee he saw a dark shape against the white velvet that lined the box interior. He had a penlight and used it.

He saw what appeared to be an ant. Rusty red with a weird bulbous head set at the end of a long bristly neck. It reminded him of a wooden match.

"What is this?" he muttered.

"A gift to mankind greater than what you call the thunderbug," promised the Eldress.

And as he watched, the bulbous head of the strange insect split in two from tip to neck. And like matched straight razors, curving black thorns unfolded from each half.

Chapter 15

"Basically," Remo was saying as he drove back to Nirvana West, "the people who call themselves politically correct are down on American culture."

Chiun frowned at the twisting road ahead. "And what is wrong with that? American culture is junk."

"Not all of it."

"It's true the so-called soap operas this nation once produced soared to magnificent heights. But in recent years they have sunk to abysmal depths of perversion. Now all your culture is junk."

"Western culture, I mean. They're down on Western culture."

"It is not as good as Eastern culture," Chiun allowed, "specifically Korean culture, but it is not as bad as French culture, which celebrates eating snails and imbecilic actors like Larry Jewish."

"I think you mean Jerry Lewis, Little Father, and for your information, French culture is part of Western culture."

"It is not. Even their language is debased. It is to Latin what the patois the black people of your magnificent ghettos speak is to English."

Remo looked doubtful. "Magnificent ghettos?"

"Show me a Somali who would not give all he owns to live in the worst of them."

"Show me a Somali who owns anything."

Chiun beamed. "My point is proven."

Remo rolled his eyes.

"Look," he said, "let's table this until after we've talked to Magarac."

"Not that all Eastern culture is good," Chiun went on as if his pupil had not spoken. "Hindus are considered Eastern by some and they eat with one hand because the other is perpetually unclean. Have I told you why that is, Remo?"

"Only once, but believe me the memory is going to be hard to shake."

"Even the women do this. Alluring as they may seem to innocent white eyes, they are no more clean than Hindu men."

"Leave Nalini out of this. We have a date for tonight."

Chiun frowned darkly and pretended to rearrange his kimono skirts. "You will need five condoms, then."

"Five?"

"One for each of the fingers of her unclean left hand and one for the unsanitary thumb. This is, if I correctly understand the purpose of this date."

"Which is?"

"To hold hands long into the night, so as to judge the suitability of this woman for matrimony."

"We might hold hands, yeah," said Remo. "On the other hand, we could just skip preliminaries and go all the way."

Chiun's wrinkled cheeks ballooned in anger. "You would not stoop to kiss a Hindu harlot!" he hissed.

"No, I would not. I'd stand on my own two feet, and then kiss her."

"Paughh! I do not wish to think of you touching that daughter of the Ganges."

"Nalini is very nice."

"She eats her rice with curry," Chiun spat. "As if rice is not perfect as it is. Heed my words, Remo. A woman who would soil good rice with curry would stoop to anything-including eating bugs."

"Nalini doesn't strike me as the bug-eater type."

"Bug-eating is a sickness. I have no doubt that curry is at the root of this plague. Curry and vile hygiene."

"I guess political correctness isn't limited to the West," muttered Remo.

And Chiun looked at him with the blank expression of a Buddhist monk who had stumbled upon a voodoo ceremony.

It was almost noon, so naturally, the lunch buffet had been laid out. Remo noticed a sign that read LOBSTER SALAD and said, "Whoever the caterer is, he has expensive tastes. Lobster isn't cheap."

He drove past the press enclave and found a spot to pull over. They worked their way in and found that the press had been pretty much congregated around the food.

Remo grinned. "Great. We get a break at last."

They slipped into the evergreens.

Immediately, the ants once again began dropping on Remo.

He flicked them off and watched the tree branches closely for others. He spotted one. It lifted its rusty hammer of a head and seemed to regard him with flat black eyespots.

"Watch out, Little Father, that bug is about to jump you."

"He would not dare," retorted Chiun.

Chiun passed under the branch. The ant stayed where it was.

But as Remo approached, it sprang toward him. Seeing it coming, Remo ducked. It shot over his head and landed on the ground. Remo stepped on it, and that was the end of the ant.

Remo caught up with the Master of Sinanju and asked, "Why the hell don't they jump on you?"

"I told you why. Ants respect the Master of Sinanju."

"That, I don't buy."

There was another ant on a tree trunk. They passed it on the right, which meant Chiun walked between it and Remo.

As they drew near, the ant sprang across their path to light on another tree. Then it jumped at Remo.

Remo caught it with the back of his hand and batted it away. It went ticking through the evergreen leaves.

"These guys definitely have it in for me," he muttered.

They came to the Snapper's pasture.

Chiun halted abruptly. He began tasting the air with his tiny nose, his mouth tightening into a concerned knot.

"What is it, Little Father?"

"I smell death."

Remo tasted the air. It was there. The gases of decomposition, the stale stink of sweat and stagnant blood.

They advanced, making absolutely no sound despite the dry underbrush. It was as if their feet knew exactly where to plant themselves.

And in the dry weeds, they found the first dead Snappers. They seemed to have died seated in the weeds, where they had been contentedly eating thunderbugs, and simply fell backward, their legs still folded. They wore pleasant smiles on their gaunt faces.

"Looks like they died happy," Remo muttered, kneeling to feel their flesh. Warm, but cooling. "And they didn't die all that long ago," he added.

Chiun nudged a body with a sandled toe. "They died of the dunderbug disease?"

"Sure looks that way to me," said Remo. "Come on."

They found more bodies further along. They too had died sitting in the weeds eating to their heart's content.

"I guess that cinches it," Remo decided. "You eat the bugs raw and you die. It just takes a little longer to get some people."

They crossed the Schism Line to the Happy Harvester Hunting Grounds. There, the Harvesters were gathering thunderbugs, of which there seemed an inexhaustible supply, and dropping them into the simmering communal pot.

"Anybody know where Theodore is?" Remo called.

"Sometimes he flies with the eagles, and can be seen wheeling in the sky above," a buckskin-clad blond girl called back.

Chiun looked up and said, "I see only crows."

"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles would not be caught dead flying with crows," the blonde said unconcernedly.

"That was my guess," said Remo.

"Therefore, he must be in his wigwam, thinking wise thoughts," she added.

"I'd bet on the former, but I have doubts about the latter."

They found Theodore Soars-With-Eagles in his tepee, his warbonnet and toupee askew. They seemed to be of one piece. He had collapsed in a seated position, and only the tepee wall kept his balding head from slipping to the grass floor.

His eyes were rolled up in his head, and the whites were blue.

"Remo!" squeaked Chiun. "Look at his eyes!"

"I see them. They're all blue."

"This man is not yet dead."

"Yet?"

"He is dying."

Remo knelt and shook the man.

"Magarac, can you hear me?"

Theodore Magarac stared sightlessly at nothing. His thin lips began to writhe. "She came . . ."

Remo knelt to catch the dying man's words. "Who is she?" he asked.

"Eldress. She . . . did . . . this . . ."

"What did she look like?"

"Didn't . . . see . . . her."

Then he died. He had been breathing in and out shallowly. Then the air began coming out of his mouth and nose in a long, slow exhalation, like a balloon slowly deflating. Ten seconds after his lungs went flat, Remo and Chiun heard his heart skip a beat, then stop beating altogether.

"Gone," said Remo, coming to his feet. "And I don't see a mark on him."

The Master of Sinanju began looking around the inside of the tepee. They found a modest cache of junk food, three back copies of The Girls of Penthouse, and not much else.

Remo heard a crunching sound and lifted a foot.

"What did I step on?" he asked.

Chiun looked at a mushy spot on the rug.

"A bug."

"Musts been a loose snack," Remo said. "I don't see much here." He stepped out of the tepee and looked around.

The Harvesters were busily cooking thunderbugs. They seemed oblivious to the death of their leader. In fact, they seemed oblivious to everything but thunderbugs.

Grabbing a passing Harvester, Remo asked, "Anybody visit Theodore lately?"

The man frowned and brushed back his pigtails before speaking. "There was a woman at the tepee."

"How long ago?"

"Ten or fifteen minutes."

"See what she looked liked?"

"I only saw her back."

"How was she dressed?"

"Like an Indian."

Remo looked around at the Harvesters dressed in their buckskins and growled, "That narrows it down a heap."

Remo returned to the tepee.

"Guy says there was a squaw hanging around not fifteen minutes ago," he told Chiun.

The Master of Sinanju lifted a wizened claw. "Look what I found in the man's hand, Remo."

Remo looked. It was a carved rosewood box covered with ivory inlays and lined with white velvet. Otherwise it was empty.

"He clutched this as he died," said Chiun.

"Mean anything?"

"I do not know . . ."

"Well, someone murdered this guy."

"I see no marks on him," said Chiun.

"Yeah. But he's not wasted enough to be a HELP victim. Besides, he wasn't sick when we saw him yesterday."

"We will extract the truth from the others."

The Harvesters were only too happy to answer their questions, even with their mouths full. They couldn't seem to stop eating thunderbugs.

"Yeah, I saw her too," a youth in a mohawk haircut admitted. "But only from the back. She had on a nice dress."

"Ever see her before?" Remo asked.

"I don't think so," he said, picking black bug meat from between his teeth with a toothpick. "She's probably a Snapper."

"What makes you say that?"

"I don't know. It was just a feeling. But she wasn't a Harvester."

"That's right. She wasn't one of us."

"I got news for you," Remo told them. "The only difference between you and the Snappers is that they're dead from eating bugs and you're not. Yet."

"Only Snappers catch HELP. And if they are dead, it is because Gitchee Manitou had decreed it. We will give them a proper burial once we are full of his children."

Remo asked, "If only Snappers catch HELP, what killed Theodore Magarac?"

"Who?"

"The Latvian Chinchilla. We just found him keeled over in his wigwam, scalped."

Assorted confused expressions crawled over the faces of the Harvesters. Disbelief won out in the end.

"Theodore Soars-With-Eagles is eternal," one shouted.

"Yes. Gitchee Manitou would not take him from us on the eve of a Chinchilla rebirth," insisted another.

"It can't hurt to look," prompted Remo.

The blonde in buckskin did look. She pulled aside the tepee flap and let out a screech.

"Brother Theodore is dead!" she cried.

Between mouthfuls, others took up the cry. "Oh, this is terrible!"

"Woe, we are leaderless!"

"The last of the proud Chinchillas has gone to the Happy Hunting Ground. It is the end of an era."

Through their plaintive cries, they kept stuffing bugs into their mouths.

"It might be a good idea to lay off the bugs until we know exactly what killed him," Remo suggested.

"We know what killed him."

"Yes, it is the hole in the ozone layer, created by the white man's inhuman progress."

"What if it was the bug?" Remo countered.

"Heresy. Don't let Gitchee Manitou hear you slander his powerful but humble creatures."

Remo looked at the thunderbugs as they were dropped into the boiling pot water. They immediately curled their inchlong bodies into tight brown balls, as if death relieved the tedium of their mundane existence.

"One last question," he said. "Ever hear of someone called the Eldress?"

No one had. Then someone remembered that in the days before the Great Schism, Brother Karl Sagacious spoke of the prophet he referred to as She.

"She?" said Chiun.

"That is the only name Brother Karl gave to her. We think it is one of the goddesses of his Greek ancestors."

"Sagacious was no more a Greek than I am," Remo said.

"You are too pale to be a Greek."

"Greeks were as pale as Americans," said Chiun.

"Pale as African-Americans, you mean."

The Master of Sinanju turned to Remo and undertoned, "These people are demented, Remo."

"Must be something they ate," Remo said, eyeing the contentedly boiling thunderbugs.

No one appeared to be lying-their pulse rates and respiration cycles were audible to both Remo and Chiun, and neither betrayed telltale nervousness-so there was no point in extracting any more information by force. Remo took Chiun aside and said, "Something's going on here. First the Snappers keel over, and now Magarac."

"These ones do not appear ill. Only hungry. Do they never stop eating?"

"What I want to know is how they stay so thin when all they do is eat bugs by the carload?"

"I do not know."

"Maybe they're bulimic."

Chiun's sparse eyebrows crept up his forehead. "What tribe is that?"

"Bulimic means they eat like pigs, throw up, eat some more, and throw up again so they can keep eating. It's called binging. Or purging. Maybe both."

"It sounds very Roman.," Chiun mused. "Romans would often eat and drink until their stomachs rebelled. Once emptied, they would resume eating. Between you and I, Remo, I think there was something in the water that made them demented."

"The Romans or the PAPAS?"

"Whatever," Chiun said vaguely.

Remo looked around. He saw no one throwing up. Just gorging. "We'd smell vomit if they were bulimics," he decided aloud.

"I would gladly inhale vomit if it would mean I no longer had to endure the stench that woman has attached to you."

Remo lifted his arm. He sniffed. "It's practically gone now." But a contented smile quirked his thin mouth.

Chiun made a disgusted face. "You reek and you do not even care. All my training, it was for naught. I have given a white man the sun source, and alas, he is still white."

"Forget it. Let's see, Brother Karl Sagacious is dead. The coroner is on ice. The Snappers have snapped their last. Theodore Magarac is now Theodore Worm-Food. And Thrush Limburger is nowhere to be found. It's gotta be Limburger behind this."

"Ridiculous," sniffed Chiun.

"Who's left?"

"We are. And as long as we remain upright while others recline, it will be recorded that we were the victorious ones."

"I mean who's left that could be behind this?"

Chitin looked skyward. His eyes tightened. "Perhaps there is a hole is the sky after all."

Remo threw up his hands. "I give up."

"But I do not," said Chiun, starting off.

Remo followed. As they passed from the Harvester area to Snapper turf, he noticed the parched grasses were springing up and down and he saw the rust red ants bounding from weed to weed just like grasshoppers. And like locusts on the march, they were hopping in their direction.

"Let's cut around," Remo said quickly. "Call me a fraidy cat, but I don't like the way those ants coming our way keep looking at me."

"Fraidy cat," said Chiun. "Had you bathed, you would have nothing to fear."

"What makes you say that?" asked Remo as they floated into a stand of evergreens.

"It is obvious that your unappetizing odor is attracting them."

"Oh," said Remo, suddenly realizing the Master of Sinanju was probably right.

When they got into the trees, Remo watched for lurking ants. There were none. Looking back, he saw the dozens of them leaping from weed to weed, and even the lethargic thunderbugs were compelled to get out of their way. The slow ones-which was most of them-were pounced upon.

Remo didn't wait to see what happened next. He was sick of bugs by now.

Chapter 16

Dale Parsons was puzzled.

They had brought the body of the Ukiah coroner Lee Esterquest to him because they feared he had died of HELP.

As a federal pathologist, Parsons was not licensed to autopsy people in Mendocino County. Drawing blood was another matter. He had done that, taken tissue samples, and was looking at them under the electron microscope powered by a portable gasoline generator. The generator whine was enough to permanently injure his hearing, but Parsons was so deep in his work he was barely aware of the racket.

He almost didn't hear the impatient slapping on his tent flap either.

"Go away," he snapped. "I'm working."

The flap was swept aside and a familiar face poked in.

"Remember me?"

"Salk. FDA, right?"

"You got it."

Parsons grunted. "Whoever named this virus got it exactly right too."

Remo Salk stepped in, followed by the Korean Japanese beetle expert. The old man simply stood there, stony and wordless, his long-nailed fingers clapped over his tiny ears.

"Paradox?" asked Remo.

"Here, take a look."

Noticing the draped form, Remo asked, "Dead Snapper?"

"No. That's the local coroner, Esterquest."

Remo's face grew sad. "I met him. He was a nice guy. Took a lot of pride in his work."

Parsons nodded. "I'm kicking myself for not talking to him before this. He tell you anything about the autopsies?"

"Just that he couldn't make heads or tails of it. But he found something strange in the bloodstream."

"He did? Now that's very interesting. Take a look through this microscope."

Remo put his eye to the eyepiece. Parsons said, "What you're looking at is a blood sample magnified ten thousand times. See those spindle-shaped things inside the blobs?"

"Yeah?"

"Protein particles, embedded in the cytoplasm of white blood cells. Dead matter that has lodged into the bloodstream after doing its work."

Remo looked away from the lens. "That what's been killing people?"

"Probably. But those aren't virus particles."

"What are they?"

"I don't know, but here comes the paradox. They match nothing I find in the thunderbugs I've autopsied."

"You autopsied bugs? With what-safety pins?"

"Very funny. What I found in the bug is interesting. An enzyme harmless to people. It's not poison, it's digestible and excretable. But it does have an interesting property."

"What?"

"Remember that the thunderbug is high in protein, nutrients, and carbohydrates, is easily digested, and even causes people to lose weight the more they keep eating them."

"Yeah?"

"Well, apparently this enzyme chemically bonds with receptors in the small colon, blocking them from absorbing the nutrients and proteins and carbohydrates."

"You can tell that from cutting open a little bug?"

"Actually, I couldn't make heads or tails of the enzyme itself. But I was walking around this place and happened upon the latrine. I noticed the awful smell."

"It's hard not to," Remo said dryly.

"When I looked in, I noticed almost all the stools were yellow and greasy-looking. A sure sign of steatorrhea-undigested fat in the stools. I took a few stool samples back and ran some tests."

"You're a braver man than me if you climbed into that mess."

Parsons nodded unhappily. "It's a gross job, but someone had to do it. My tests showed that not only was fat passing through the PAPA people's intestines unabsorbed, but so were carbohydrates and proteins. The way it works was the chemical receptors would latch on to these enzymes, thinking they were real food, and they'd get clogged up like the wrong key stuck in a lock. The poor proteins and carbohydrates would go marching past untouched. The human body extracts the value of food through the intestines, not the stomach."

"In other words, they were getting nothing out of eating?"

Parsons nodded. "You can eat thunderbugs all day long, and none of the nutrients are going to get into your system. You might as well be eating cardboard. Hell, cardboard would be a step up from thunderbugs."

The old Korean approached, his hands coming off his ears. "What is this you are saying?"

"Those people out there gorging themselves? They think they're eating well, but they're not. They're actually starving themselves. That's why they keep eating and why they keep wasting away. They're fooling their stomachs into thinking they're eating but their bodies keep demanding more and more nourishment. Not getting it from their diet, the body draws it from stored fat and muscle tissue. If they go on long enough, they end up looking like Somalis."

"So that's what's killing them, huh?" said Remo.

"No. Eventually, maybe. But none of the PAPAS ever reached the point of starvation. Yet they die. Before they starve."

"Of what?"

"I have absolutely no idea. But the same particles I found in the HELP victims are in Esterquest's bloodstream."

"If he ate any thunderbug," Remo said, "so will I."

"Reenter, the paradox. And here's another thing-the stuff in their blood doesn't seem connected with the thunderbug enzyme. More blood to test will verify that, but right now I'm leaning toward that theory."

"Well," said Remo, "you have a lot more of blood to draw."

"What makes you say that?"

"We just came from Snapper land. They're all dead."

"All?"

"Every finger-flicking one of them. But the Harvesters are still munching away. Except for Theodore Soars-With-Eagles. He's dead too. We found him in his tepee with the whites of his eyes all blue."

"Blue?"

"Robin's egg blue. Mean anything to you?"

Parsons pointed to the sheeted figure. "Yes. This man's eyes were blue when he was discovered in his embalming room, dying. But look-"

Parsons lifted the sheet and digitally opened the dead man's eyes. The whites were perfectly white.

"It's the only pathological clue and it goes away within minutes of death," he said.

"I've never heard of the eyeballs turning blue," Remo said after the sheet had been restored.

"In liver disease patients you can get a really striking yellow. But blue sclera-which is what it's called-is rare. Usually, it means osteoporosis-bone disease, which I can definitely rule out."

"So what's it mean?"

"If I find out, I'll let you know. Meanwhile, I'd better take a look at those Snappers you say are dead."

"Watch out for ants."

"Ants?"

"They're really active this time of year. They'll jump anything that goes near them."

"Except me," added the old Korean.

Parsons's brow furrowed. "Ants don't jump."

"These ones do," said Remo.

Shaking his head, Dale Parsons left the strange pair.

Chapter 17

Outside the tent, where he could hear himself think, Remo said, "As soon as word of the dead Snappers spreads, we're going to be in white water, media sharkwise."

"You are speaking Imbecile," said Chiun. "Speak English."

"We'd better clear out."

"It will grow dark soon, we will not be seen if we do not wish to be seen."

"I need a shower, remember?"

The Master of Sinanju's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "You need a cold shower, for you have lust in your eyes."

"Don't let's get started, Chiun. Come on."

They found their car and drove back to the motel in silence.

"You have any ideas about what's going on?" Remo asked after a while.

"Only the brilliant Thrush Limburger can explain it, but where is he?"

"One thing's for sure, he's not anywhere around here. He's too fat to hide inside anything smaller than the Goodyear blimp."

"He is not hiding. He has been spirited away by the secret fiends who are at work in these woods."

"Well, secret fiends or not," Remo said, looking around, "someone or something killed Theodore and that coroner. Something that turns their eyeballs blue temporarily."

"Poison."

"Huh?"

"Poison," repeated Chiun. "That is what the word virus means: poison."

"No, it doesn't. A virus is a bug."

"A bug is a bug."

"A virus is kinda like a microscopic bug. If it gets into your system, it reproduces and takes it over until nothing works. Kinda like congressmen."

"In Latin, a language that is good despite the fact that it is no longer spoken," said Chiun, "the word virus means poison."

Remo looked thoughtful. "I had some Latin when I was a kid. A lot of English words come from Latin, but they don't always mean the same thing as they did to the old Romans."

"You were taught Latin by pagans," Chiun sniffed.

"Those nuns at St. Theresa's taught me a lot."

"Trivia," Chiun sniffed. "They filled your empty head with trivia and superstition. I taught you everything that matters."

"I remember it a little different, Little Father." Remo suddenly remembered something. "Want me to drop you off at the Chinese restaurant?"

Chiun stroked his wispy beard. "Not unless you are going to eat too."

"I figure I'll eat later," said Remo.

"Then I prefer to starve. I am no better than a bug-eater if you prefer the company of that currymongering woman to that of the one who raised you from the muck and ignorance of the nunnery."

Remo sighed. He pulled into the bungalow just as it grew dark.

"Look," he said, getting out. "Eat or don't eat. Just don't lay any guilt trip on me because I want to enjoy a little female companionship once in a while."

"You are welcome to females by the score. As long as they are appropriately colored."

"You mean white?"

"No. Korean. Have I ever told you that the Korean woman is the fairest flower of them all?"

"Yes, and I can dig up my own female companionship, thank you."

"I am going to my room," said Chiun. He eyed his pupil for a reaction.

"Okay by me," said Remo in an unconcerned voice.

"To sleep," added Chiun.

"Pleasant dreams," said Remo.

"If my slumber is troubled by the sound of rutting, I will make myself heard."

"You make yourself heard every night with that goose-honking of yours."

Chiun drew himself up to his full five-foot height. "Slanderer! I do not snore!"

"And I tell no lies."

The Master of Sinanju flounced into his bungalow, slamming the door after him. Remo slammed his door too.

But a few minutes later, Remo was humming. He had hot water and it felt good coursing soapily down his lean, hard body. He was going on a date. He had not had a date-a real date-in years. Women he had had. Dates, no. It was nice to think he could still date, have a good time and get away from work. Especially this assignment.

By the time the knocking came at the door, Remo was whistling.

His whistle trailed off into a startled squawk when he threw open the door.

For there stood Jane Goodwoman, stark naked. More stark than naked, although she was totally naked. She was very stark.

"What are you doing here?" Remo demanded.

Jane Goodwoman smiled as wide as a Cadillac grille. "I got your note, lover!" She threw out her arms and her breasts wobbled like mismatched pink jello molds, setting her hoop earrings jangling.

"What note?"

"The one you sent to my hotel that said 'I love you madly.' "

"I hate you absolutely," said Remo. "Therefore, I sent no mash notes."

Jane Goodwoman gathered up her E-cup breasts, shoved there into Remo's face and demanded, "How can you hate these?"

Looking at the mass of flesh slopping over Jane Goodwoman's clutching hands, Remo remarked, "I didn't know tits could have thyroid problems."

Jane Goodwoman turned red and threw her hand back to slap Remo in the face. Remo was too quick. He slammed the door. The slam and the smack of her hand hitting the door blended into a single short, sharp sound.

"This despicable harassment will be in tomorrow's Blade!" she called through the quivering door.

"Get stuffed. Just be sure you spell my name right. It's Salk. S-A-L-K. With the FDA. And it is Association."

"Bastard!"

"At least I had one parent who owned up to having me."

The sound of a car going away was a relief. It was almost eight. Nalini was due any minute. Remo went over to the connecting wall with Chiun's duplex and slammed it hard enough to loosen plaster.

"Nice try, Little Father, but you blew it. She couldn't wait till eight."

The sound of snoring came loudly. It was not the usual goose-honking, so Remo knew Chiun was faking it, surrendering dignity in return for avoidance of blame.

When she came, Nalini entered the room like a balmy breeze. Her sari was a livid pink and clung to her willowy body like ocean foam. Framed by her shawl, her dusky face was like some dark-hearted lotus blossoming.

"Hello, Remo," she said, lowering her big luminous eyes coyly.

Remo couldn't suppress a grin. "You're right on time. Wanna eat?"

"Certainly."

She took his arm and her perfume flavored the walk to the car.

At the Chinese restaurant, they talked over their meal. Remo was surprised at how he hung on Nalini's every word. He found her fascinating, in a mysterious way. He was halfway through dinner before he remembered he needed to pump her too.

"Clancy still hanging around?" he asked.

"Yes. He is very determined to save mankind from this terrible HELP. It has been his burden since the death of his brothers. Those poor men, Remo. Dying of overwork because they cared about helping people too much to rest themselves properly."

"You don't buy that crap?"

Nalini shrugged languidly. "I am a simple nurse from a foreign land. What do I know of such things? Some say there is a hole in the sky and others a disease in the air. I do not know. Others wiser than I will tell me what is truth."

"I heard that Jimbo and Robbo Clancy both died of syphilis."

Nalini's dark eyes flared. "That is not true!"

"How do you know it isn't?"

"I hear all the secrets of the Clancy family and I have never heard such a thing said. Why do you ask me these things, Remo?"

"I told you. I'm looking into HELP, and Clancy's been acting strange since he got here. I'm trying to figure out where he fits in."

Nalini looked at him closely. She leaned across the table and said, "You are not with the FDA. Who are you? You can tell me. I am good with secrets."

"Then here's one you'll appreciate. The thunderbug isn't giving people HELP. It isn't helping them either. It's worthless as food, despite what people are saying. Those PAPA crazies are starving with every bite."

"I do not believe that," Nalini said doubtfully. "You are making fun of me because I am different from you."

"There's a pathologist with the CDC who figured it out. He's going to blow the thunderbug part of the scam apart once he finds a reporter with a working brain."

Eyes darkening, Nalini said, "These things are beyond a poor foreign girl like me."

"Where are you from originally?" asked Remo, changing the subject quickly.

Nalini leaned back and toyed with her curried rice dish. "Ceylon," she said, her voice a pout. "It was called Ceylon when I was a girl. It is Sri Lanka now."

"So you're not Indian?"

"I am a Tamil, a Hindu. It is not so very different to Western eyes. I left my country to escape the strife."

Looking into her large black eyes, Remo felt he had known Nalini a long time, or in some past life. He kept forgetting his food. He kept forgetting everything except those alluring eyes and the perfume that made him feel pleasantly restless. His steamed rice had grown cold and the duck greasy. He had barely touched them.

Before he knew it, they were driving back to his bungalow and she was sitting close to him, her fruity perfume filling his head. He could feel the heat of her body. It was pleasant too. It also made him anxious to get to his destination.

Remo didn't have to invite her in. Nalini entered as if the invitation need not be spoken, and it was not long before they were kissing experimentally. Remo led Nalini to the bed and she smiled unabashedly as he tried to figure out how to remove her sari.

Laughing, she reached down and took it up by one trailing bit of silk. Then, coming up on one foot, she spun in place-unwrapping herself for him. To his surprise, she wore no undergarments.

Her body was a supple brown masterpiece with nipples as dark as her eyes. They seemed to stare at him.

She bent to turn off the light beside the bed. In the darkness, her smile was a thousand silent invitations to pleasure. They began exploring each other's bodies. Remo found her skin silky smooth.

Remo pushed everything he had ever learned about Sinanju sexual technique to the back of his mind and took her the way he would have in the carefree days before he had come to Sinanju.

Nalini was no coy maiden, for all her demureness. She knew sex, and she knew men.

What followed was rough and wild and Remo lost himself in her perfect, responsive body.

After Remo had rolled off her, Nalini surprised him by mounting him. Before, she had been warm and delicious. Now she became a tigress, moving up and down, making tiny, inarticulate sounds of pleasure that built into a crescendo so acute she closed her eyes and bit her lips as if suddenly ashamed to give voice to her passion.

The last thing Remo remembered was her dark breasts bouncing before his eyes, her nipples, so close to his face, like flat, alien eyes. They reminded him of something, but he was suddenly too busy responding to her rhythms to care what.

They came together, and then sleep came.

Sometime in the hours past midnight, Remo woke up with Nalini's scent still in his lungs and a relaxed feeling that he had not felt in many years. His bones felt loose and easy in his skin and his muscles were completely devoid of tension.

Then, a wrench turned something in his stomach.

He was instantly aware that he was alone. No warmth came from the empty spot on the bed beside him.

He was naked, the covers down around the foot of the bed.

And on his stomach something crawled.

Remo lifted his head carefully. Eyes adjusting to the darkness, he spied a long grotesque shape where his navel was.

Even in the gloom, he could see the flat alien eyespots. And he remembered what Nalini's nipples had reminded him of.

And before Remo could react, the longhead opened like a scissors, and from the inner edges of each separate bulb, long pincerlike mandibles unfolded like biological straight razors.

His Sinanju-trained nervous system kicked in and Remo's hand was moving before he willed it to move.

He slapped the hideous thing off his belly and across the room, where it struck the wall with a dry but final sound.

Remo rolled off the bed, hit the lights, and knelt to see exactly what he had killed.

It was dead, its legs already curling up.

The head was in two parts. Long fangs lay revealed.

It was one of the rust-colored ants that had been such a nuisance. Definitely. Only now it looked less like an ant than something else. Remo didn't know what.

Then he felt something on his back.

Remo whirled, and the sensation was abruptly gone. He heard the sound of something tiny slapping into a window curtain.

He looked at the rug under the curtain. Scrambling to find its legs was another of the ant things. Remo dropped a telephone book on it, and that was that.

More came. He brushed one off his shoulder, crushed it under a bare heel. It was like stepping on dry prickly twigs.

They were coming from the window. It had been closed. Now it was open a crack.

Remo slammed the sash down, crushing at least three. Their separating heads wilted, fangs not quite in open position.

He made a sweep of the room and found one more. He killed it with a shoe.

Then Remo day down on the bed and willed the wrench in his stomach to loosen whatever emotional bolt had been tightened.

When he got his emotions under control, he felt very cold. And angry.

In the darkness, Remo whispered a single soft word.

"Nalini."

Chapter 18

In the morning, after Remo had explained it all, the Master of Sinanju did not say, "I told you so." His eyes said it, but his mouth only whispered, "I did not know." His tone was strange.

"Know what?" wondered Remo.

"That they still lived."

"Who does?"

Chiun shook away the clouds in his hazel eyes. They cleared. "I have never told you of the Spider Divas," he said solemnly.

"Spider Divas?"

"They were great rivals of ours in the days of the Mogul emperors."

"In India?"

"Yes."

"Nalini told me she was from Sri Lanka."

"Which was once known as Ceylon. The Spider Divas came from the island of Ceylon."

"Why are they called Spider Divas?" asked Remo.

"Because it is said that they could speak the language of the spiders and make them do their wicked bidding."

"Spiders don't speak."

"And ants do not hop. Yet we have seen ants do just that."

They were in Remo's room. The Master of Sinanju was examining the crushed bodies of the dead antlike things. Remo had flushed most of them down the toilet. One or two mashed dry corpses remained.

"They look like ants to me," Remo said.

Chiun frowned. "I can make nothing of them, but it is possible it is true."

"What's true?"

"Although the Spider Divas were seen, their assassins were not. That was the mystery Master Sambari failed to fathom."

"I detect a legend coming on."

Chiun pointed to a spot on the rug. "Sit."

Obediently, Remo sat, first checking the rug for vermin.

The Master of Sinanju sat too. They faced one another, their legs tucked in the classic lotus position.

"Master Sambari," Chiun said, "is a Master of whom I never before spoke."

"Another black sheep?"

Chiun's tiny nose wrinkled slightly. "No. I tell you these stories of my ancestors so that you may learn. The lesson of Sambari was never necessary for you to learn because Sambari vanquished the last of the Spider Divas in the days of the Mogul emperors."

"So how come we have them in this country? Sambari was before Columbus, right?"

"Who is to know?" Chiun said dismissively. "When we return home, I will have to revise the scrolls that extoll Sambari's achievement. The man was a bungler. He let one get away."

"Nalini looked a little young to be this Eldress," Remo pointed out. "Or a long-lost Spider Diva."

"She is obviously a descendant of that unclean clan. There can be no doubt that it was she who dispatched Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, possibly by sending one of her spiders to his toupee."

"Tepee," said Remo absently. "Still, the Harvesters did say that a strange Indian girl had been hanging around Magarac's tent."

Chiun's face gathered up in annoyance. "Indian! You told me a squaw."

"I know I did," Remo said heatedly. "I was told Indian. I thought that meant squaw, not East Indian."

"If you had repeated to me the word Indian, I would have guessed the truth instantly!"

"You'd only have jumped to a conclusion."

"A correct conclusion. One that would have spared you the terror of this night."

Remo folded his arms stubbornly. "So what's the story?"

The Master of Sinanju's bony fingers found their opposite wrists and his kimono sleeves came together, hiding them from sight.

"The Spider Divas were assassins," he said. "Exceedingly cunning temptresses who seduced their victims and left them to sleep the sleep of eternity with their unclean creatures. This is known."

"You're losing me."

"You almost lost yourself through ignorance and lust. I will begin at the beginning."

Chiun looked down at his ivory white sleeping kimono and began speaking. His squeaky voice grew stern in timbre.

"The days of which I speak were the days of the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb. These were glorious days, although not as glorious as the days of the Egyptians or the Romans or especially the Persians. Still, the Mogul emperors of India had much to offer Sinanju, for they presided over a fractious empire, in which Hindus and Sikhs and unimportant others were persecuted. For the Mogul emperors of India followed the Prophet Mohammed."

"Lotsa enemies to be killed, huh?"

Chiun shrugged. "Enemies exist to be crushed. Aurangzeb knew this and so offered good gold to insure that the House of Sinanju stood by his throne. In time, his enemies waned. But a foe is often more dangerous when his power wanes, for when he recognizes his fate approaching, he often lashes out with no regard for his own life. It was so here, Remo.

"Now one of the more tenacious foes were the Rajputs, who were Hindus. They revolted often. They were in truth revolting inasmuch as they ate with their right hands only. They did this because-"

"Can it, and move on."

"As you wish," Chiun said thinly. "Now the Rajputs sent to the island of Ceylon for one to succor them. They knew they could not harm the Mogul emperor, for he was shielded by the awesome hand of Sinanju, through Sambari the Careless, formerly known as Sambari the Protector."

"How fast they fall from grace once the truth leaks out," Remo said wryly.

The Master of Sinanju frowned primly and spoke on.

"Now in Ceylon lived a people called the Tamils. Although they were not Indians, they were Hindus. And among them lived a clutch of females known as the Spider Divas, who lived without men, taking mates but once in their lives, and then only to reproduce, as is proper. After that, they ate them."

"They ate their husbands?" Remo exclaimed.

"The lucky ones, yes."

"What about the unlucky ones?"

"Slaves. For the Spider Divas were said to possess charms beyond those of mortal woman. No one knew what these were. They were temptresses and were said to converse with spiders, thus impelling them to do their deadly bidding. For the Spider Divas, having ill luck with their menfolk, made their way through the world by hiring themselves out as assassins. This is a terrible thing, Remo."

"Competition always is, to the one being competed against."

"I meant that women would take on honorable work rightly belonging to men. In Korea, women stand on pedestals of honor."

"So they don't catch on how unimportant they are. Let's get back to the Spider Divas."

"These base females stole the very food from the mouths of the babes of Sinanju, whom my ancestors fed."

"Let's just skip the part about the starving babies," Remo said impatiently. "What happened next?"

"Now in these days, the Spider Divas were in decline. They had suffered greatly whenever they challenged the hand of Sinanju. Their numbers were few. And they were having difficulty finding willing men."

"No kidding," Remo said dryly.

"People had begun to talk."

"Imagine."

Chiun leaned forward to whisper, "It is rumored, Remo, they had had been reduced to harlotry."

"No!"

Chiun nodded wisely. "At this time, it was known that only three Spider Divas still lived in seclusion. But when they made their appearance in the city of Ahmadnagar, where the Mogul Emperor held forth, persecuting his subjects prudently and with wisdom, all knew of their purpose. For they were known for their great dark eyes, and the bright harlot colors of their saris.

"Hearing this, Master Sambari sought out the Spider Divas. The first, he killed in her sleep. The second he surprised when the harlot was dallying with one of the dandy soldiers of the Mogul Emperor, for knowing their lord was protected by the House of Sinanju, they had grown soft in their ways. Sambari dispatched both with a single blow and jellied their loins as they copulated, unwitting."

"At least they died happy," said Remo.

Chiun made a face, then went on.

"But the third Spider Diva, whose name comes down to us as Padmini, proved elusive. Master Sambari hunted her high and low, finally learning that she had slipped out of the city, in rightful fear of her life."

The Master of Sinanju closed his eyes and began rocking to and fro, as if reliving the events of centuries gone by.

"Sambari followed her, and in a forest whose name is unimportant, otherwise he would have mentioned it in his scrolls, Sambari came upon Padmini, the last Spider Diva.

"She slept by the firelight, her perfect face peaceful as that of a child. The wind toyed with her apricot sari. And for a moment Sambari took delight in her aspects. "

"Nice tits, huh?"

"You are cavalier for one who has been seduced and abandoned," Chiun scolded, eyes remaining shut.

Remo scowled darkly. "Don't remind me."

"It is my job to remind you, lustful one."

And when his pupil had no reply to that, the Master of Sinanju went on. "Sambari looked upon this sleeping vision and grew intrigued by this creature. He wondered about stories he had heard as a boy of the Spider Divas. For strange tales were told by men who had seen them naked, Remo."

"Yeah?" said Remo, recalling Nalini's smooth brown body. "Like what?"

"That under their saris, they possessed the ugly bristled limbs of spiders."

"Nalini wasn't like that."

"In the dark, all women are alike," said Chiun in a careless tone. "As the Spider Diva Padmini slept, Master Sambari reached down to expose her nakedness so as to satisfy his curiosity. The silk came away and he saw that the Spider Diva did not sleep alone. Crouching in the moist warm spots of her body, under her arms and in back of her knees were dark shapes. They were decorated with eyes, Remo. Black unwinking eyes. They peered from everywhere, from even the less wholesome hollows of her alluring form.

"Frightened, Sambari restored the cloth and slew the hideous sleeping creature with a single blow to her forehead. Then he ran. Not in an unseemly fashion, of course, but in a prudent one."

"Of course."

Chiun's hazel eyes snapped open. His voice resumed its normal squeaky tones.

"No more was ever heard of the Spider Divas after that," he said.

"So it was a happy ending," said Remo.

"Not exactly. For upon returning to Ahmadnagar, Sambari discovered that the Mogul Emperor Aurangzeb had died in his sleep."

"A spider got him?"

Chiun shrugged elaborately. "There was no mark, no sign, and as the Mogul Emperor had achieved the age of eighty-nine - old for him but young for Sinanju - death was credited to his advanced years. Except for one thing Sambari wrote in his scrolls but told no one else."

"What's that?" asked Remo.

"There was a scent clinging to the dead emperor and he died with a contented smile on his face. The scent was a scent Sambari had smelled when in the presence of the Spider Divas, Remo."

"So they got him despite Sambari?"

Chiun shrugged. "No one knew this, so Sambari was properly compensated for his work and no blame attached itself to him-until now."

Remo snapped his fingers suddenly. "The ants! Maybe they're not ants, after all."

"Perhaps they are spiders," agreed Chiun.

"It would explain why the spiders were never seen. These things look like ugly ants, but when they strike, their heads split open and these pincers pop out."

"Poison. That has been what has been killing the bug-eaters. Poison spiders, not dunderbugs. Just as I foretold."

"That doesn't explain HELP. People who catch it take forty-eight hours to die. Magarac died instantly."

"Details," sniffed Chiun.

Remo snapped his fingers in the air. "Hey! There was an army of these things moving in on the Harvesters when we left Nirvana West."

"No doubt they have all succumbed."

"Why do you say that?"

"The wicked ones are through with their tools and wish to be rid of them."

"Nalini, you mean?"

"And Clancy the clown."

"No way, Chiun. The guy's plastered most of the time. "

"Who else then?"

"Maybe Thrush Limburger. Maybe Jane Goodwoman. Hey, she was here before Nalini. Maybe she left the spiders, not Nalini."

"You are a fool who has been blinded by the irresistible scent of the Spider Divas, which still clings to your selfindulgent body."

"Yeah, well, I saw Jane Goodwoman naked, and if there was ever a Spider Diva, she wins the blue ribbon. Her legs belonged on a tarantula."

"Then why did the Tamil harlot steal away in the night? What woman, when she encounters the power of Sinanju, can abandon the bed in which she was pleasured beyond her wildest imaginings?"

"You got a point there," said Remo, reaching for the phone. "We'd better call Smith."

"Emperor Smith will be pleased at our progress."

"He's going to strangle us when we tell him the guy behind HELP may be a U.S. Senator. You know how he is about domestic political messiness."

Chapter 19

In his office overlooking Long Island Sound, Harold W. Smith listened in silence, the color going out of his pinched patrician face. There was not much color in it to begin with. It was a gray face. Smith was a gray man. After he had listened to Remo's report, his face was the color of ashes, in which the gray color of his eyes resembled dark stones.

"These ants," he croaked. "How many legs do they possess?"

"What does that have to do with anything?" Remo wondered.

Smith fingered the too-tight knot of his hunter green Dartmouth tie. "Please."

Remo went away and came back.

"Eight legs," he reported.

"It is not an ant. They are called hexapoda because they possess six legs. Spiders, which are arachnids, possess eight. What you have there is some exotic form of arachnid capable of mimicking an ant."

"Never heard of such a thing."

"One moment, Remo."

Smith went to his computer. He punched in some key words, and moments later he was scanning an on-line encyclopedia with wireframe illustrations. The illustration showed a many-segmented antlike insect whose bulbous nose could separate and reveal extremely vicious curved fangs.

Smith picked up the receiver again. "Remo, I have it."

"You do?"

"Yes. It is called Myrmarachne plataleoides. It is a species of jumping spider, indigenous to Sri Lanka. They do not dwell in webs, but in trees from which they leap upon their prey, trailing a thin strand of silk which enables them to ease themselves to the ground with their catch."

"That's gotta be it."

"Except that my information is that they are not poisonous," said Smith.

"It's a sure bet this one is," said Remo. "But what about the real problem, Clancy?"

"We have no proof Senator Clancy is behind this. The finger of guilt clearly points to his mother's nurse, Nalini, who must be this mysterious Eldress."

"But what would a nurse be doing orchestrating a fake viral plague?"

"What would Clancy get out of it?" countered Smith. "He is at the pinnacle of his political career right now. In fact, it is widely rumored that Clancy is contemplating retirement after his current term in office expires."

"Who knows?"

"Remo, proceed with your investigation, but tread carefully. Make no moves that might expose you or endanger Clancy."

"You got it."

Smith disconnected. He looked to the dialless red telephone that was the dedicated line to the White House. He would not apprise the President of these facts. The situation was still fluid. All might not be as it seemed. It might not even be necessary to order his agents to quietly terminate a United States senator.

But if it was, Harold Smith was capable of giving the order. It was his job.

Chapter 20

Senator Ned J. Clancy heard the sound of the ringing telephone through a fuzzy alcoholic haze.

"Answer the phone," he mumbled, rolling over in the big hotel bed. The spring groaned in complaint.

A muffled voice he mistook for his wife's mumbled something he couldn't quite make out.

"I said, answer the telephone," Clancy repeated.

The phone kept ringing. The muffled voice kept trying to say something, and between the two sounds, Ned Clancy surfaced from sleep like a submarine breaking the surface.

He blinked blearily at the motel room ceiling. He knew it was the ceiling because it was white. If it had been another color, it would have been the floor. Clancy had awakened with his burst-capillaried nose pressed into many a hotel room rug in his long lifetime of public service. Once, he had awakened in a standing position, his face against a wall. Naked.

The phone was still ringing and he flopped an arm to the night table, knocking the receiver loose. Over the muffled voice he mistook for his wife, he distinctly heard the dial tone hum.

And the phone rang again.

It was then Clancy realized it was not the motel room phone summoning him, and he found his motivation. He rolled over on the horribly lumpy mattress and the muffled voice suddenly broke into clearly audible gasps.

Clancy looked over his pimpled shoulder.

And there on the bed-the bed which his bloated body had completely dominated-lay a spread-eagled woman whose flattened breasts resembled giant pink sunnyside-up fried eggs. Her breathing came in spasmodic gulps.

"I thought I was going to suffocate," she wheezed.

"You're not my wife! Who are you?"

The woman bolted up. "You bastard! Don't you remember?"

"No," admitted Ned Clancy, reaching over to yank off the fuzzy blue ball she wore over her head.

"I still don't recognize you," he muttered.

"I'm Jane Goodwoman, you sexist swine!"

"Oink. Oink. Didn't I pork you once before this?"

"You don't remember!"

"All women look alike to me-above the neck."

Jane Goodwoman grabbed up her clothes and stumbled into the bathroom. She slammed the door after her and Ned Clancy rolled off the bed and onto his jacket, which he had hung up for the night by dropping on the carpet. He fumbled for the cellular phone clipped to the lining.

"Hello?" he undertoned, one eye on the closed bathroom door.

A thin female voice he knew well said, "This is the Eldress, Senator Clancy."

"Keep it low. I'm not alone."

"It is time."

"What is?"

"Clear your brain, fool. If you go to Nirvana West, you will find the Harvesters have departed this mortal vale. Go there. Make a speech. Blame their deaths on Human Environmental Liability Paradox and swear an oath to get to the bottom of it all."

"What about the growing hole in the ozone layer?"

"There is no hole."

Clancy drywashed his bloated face. "You mean the whale was right?"

"Never mind him," the thin voice snapped. "After your speech, fly home."

"Home Cape Cod or home Washington?"

"To Washington. You must ram the HELP bill through the Senate, and increase your prestige."

"Why?"

"That is not for you to know. But go quickly. There is no time to lose."

"You're not my wife, are you?"

"I am not your wife. You would know your wife's voice, would you not?

"Just checking. Sometimes I'm not even sure you're a woman."

"Why do you say that?"

"You got too much balls to be a woman."

"I will take that as a compliment," said the voice of the Eldress. "Your plane is waiting for you at San Francisco International Airport. Everything is in readiness."

"What about, you know who?"

"The whale?"

"Yeah. Him."

"The whale has been beached. His ultimate fate is for the Eldress to decide, not you. You are only a pawn in the great plan."

"Now you remind me of my father-pushing. Always pushing. He never let me have any fun."

"I am not your father, Senator Clancy. And if you do not do as I say, I will release to the media the tape recording of your drunken confession. The girl was only fifteen. Remember?"

"Not clearly," Ned Clancy said honestly.

"She never saw sixteen. She never saw the age of consent. Do you recall the day you confided the indescretion to your father? It broke his heart. After that, he would not eat. You were the last politically viable son he had. After that day, he allowed himself to slowly starve to death."

Senator Ned J. Clancy shuddered uncontrollably.

"My mother will kill me if it all comes out," he croaked.

"Obey, then. Obey the Eldress. I am your truth."

The line went dead and Ned Clancy tried to pull his clothes on in a way that made it clear he didn't quite recognize them.

From one wall of the motel room, the hard sound of a cane rapping against plaster came insistently.

"Coming, Mother!" Ned Clancy called.

From the bathroom, Jane Goodwoman snapped, "I'm not your damn mother!"

"My mother had nicer tits," mumbled Ned Clancy, deciding not to wear underwear since he wouldn't be in town much longer. His second pair was pretty gamey already.

The sacrifices he made to keep the family name from being tarnished. No wonder Jimbo and Robbo died so young.

Chapter 21

CDC pathologist Dale Parsons awoke with the dawn. It had been a busy night. He had supervised the removal of the bodies from the Snapper wing of the People Against Protein Assassins.

With the local coroner dead, there was no one to do it on an official basis. It had to be done and Parsons had shouldered the burden because no one else wanted to touch it.

At the Harvester wing, the survivors were too distraught over the death of their leader, Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, to care. They refused to abandon their encampment.

"Only Snappers catch HELP," they repeated.

"What about Eagles? He's dead too."

"Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles will never die. When we breathe the good clean air, we inhale his protective spirit."

There was no reasoning with these dimwits, Dale Parsons had concluded. He had left them there. There was paperwork still to be done.

The only good thing was the press had gotten bored with Nirvana West and had gone to town for the night.

Now with the red sun peeping over the ponderosa pines, Dale Parsons set out to ask the Harvesters some questions.

He found instead only silence.

The Harvesters had passed the night in their tepees and wigwams and somewhere in the night, they had died there.

Parsons hurried from tent to tent, examining the bodies.

"Damn! What hit these people?"

At one tent he came upon a woman with some life still in her.

"Can you hear me, miss?"

The woman could manage only subvocal murmurings. Parsons knelt and lifted her eyelids. The whites of her eyes were a distinctive blue. Not the light blue of osteoporosis, but a livid blue.

The woman's pupils relaxed first, then the rest of her, and the air coming out of her lungs came slow and final.

Parsons straightened and finished his rounds.

There was no question. Every Harvester was dead. It was not HELP. They had not seemed ill the day before. In fact, they had been carrying on something awful when he had last seen them.

When he brought the word to the arriving news media, there was a mad rush for the Harvester encampment.

"Hey!" he called after them. "We don't know what killed them! It may be dangerous to go into the death zone."

"It was HELP, right?"

"I don't think so," Parsons said.

"Then maybe the ozone hole cracked wide open."

A number of photographers pointed their cameras skyward to catch the gaping hole they imagined was up there.

"I see it! It's pink!" one shouted.

Parsons said, "That's the sun coming up. You couldn't see the hole if there was one. Ozone is invisible."

"Just in case," a TV news producer said, "record every square inch of that sky."

Disgusted, Dale Parsons trudged back to his tent.

He came upon a food service truck, where two young men in white were spooning mayonnaise into great steel pots. He noticed that with every spoonful, they were sprinkling in tiny brown things that could only be thunderbugs.

"What are you making?" he called.

"Lobster salad," said one.

"For the press," added the other. They both wore guilty expressions.

"Since when are bugs part of lobster salad?"

"There's no bugs in here. Only shredded lobster."

"Guess I was mistaken," said Parsons, going on. "Something's sure fishy in Nirvana West," he told himself.

Returning to his tent, he discovered the flap was open. He had closed it. Rushing in, he was relieved to find all his equipment present and intact. He wouldn't have put it past those sneaks from the National Institutes for Health to have liberated his centrifuge.

Then he noticed the rosewood box on his workbench. There was a note attached to it. It read:

"ENCLOSED YOU WILL FIND THE SECRET OF HELP. TELL THE WORLD."

He opened the box. Inside, he was surprised to see a red ant. He grunted, looked closer.

For an ant, it was pretty strange-looking. And as he watched, it lifted its grotesque, many-segmented body up on its rear legs. Two eyespots at the end of its head seemed to glare at him.

Then Parsons noticed the thing had lifted itself up on four rear legs, and was waving four more in the air threateningly.

"An eight-legged ant?"

He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, the picture was the same. It was not a hallucination caused by lack of sleep.

Then Parsons noticed the other set of black eyes dotting the second segment. He counted six eyes. Two great big ones and at least four smaller satellite eyes.

"If you aren't a spider, I'm an embalmer," he muttered, reaching for a pair of tweezers to hold the thing still while he got it under a lens.

He turned his head aside for only a second. He missed the switchblade action of the thing's separating head. When it sprang for him, fangs extended, it was already too late.

Chapter 22

Traffic was backed up between the town of Ukiah and Nirvana West. It wound between the piney hills like a torpid blacksnake and reminded Remo of the first time he had come here-except now they were north of Nirvana West instead of south.

Remo got out and walked up to the next car in line.

"What's the holdup?" he asked the driver.

"They're dying at Nirvana West," the man said excitedly. "It's the story of the decade!"

"The Snappers?"

"The Snappers and Harvesters, and even some of the feds."

"Feds?"

He nodded his head. "They're dropping like flies. People are saying, the ozone hole is cracking wide open."

"If it is, wouldn't it make sense to be going the other way?"

"You crazy? The other way is Ukiah."

"Nobody's dying in Ukiah," Remo pointed out.

"There's no story in Ukiah. It's all happening in Nirvana West. This is going to be great!"

And the man leaned on his horn so hard Remo gave up trying to talk to him. He retreated to his car.

"What news?" asked Chiun.

"They're dropping like flies," said Remo, climbing in. "And it's not just the Snappers. It's the Harvesters too. Just like we figured."

Chiun regarded the line of cars visible through the windshield with doubtful eyes. "Then why are these people so anxious to go to the place of death?"

Remo shrugged. "I guess they wanna drop like flies too."

"We will walk," said Chiun, stepping out.

Remo started to get out and almost lost his door to a speeding line of limousines that came flying up the other lane, going in the wrong direction. He ducked back behind the wheel, pulling the door after him.

There were three limos. A white one trailed by two black town cars.

"Damn! That's gotta be Clancy," Remo said, getting out. "Get back in, Little Father. If he can go that way, so can we."

They piled back in and Remo pulled into the other lane.

The press had the same idea. They started pulling into the other lane too, blocking Remo's rental car.

Instead of one blocked lane, now there were two. And nobody was going anywhere fast. Horns started honking again.

"I'll bet Nalini was in one of those limos," Remo said bitterly. "We could have nailed her right here."

"We will walk," said Chiun. "And then we will nail her."

So they walked.

Twenty minutes later, they reached Nirvana West, where Senator Ned Clancy had seized the podium that was still there from the day before.

"I vow on the sacred memory of my dear departed brothers," Clancy was saying, his voice ringing with righteous indignation, "to do all I can to rid the world of the curse of Human Environmental Liability Paradox in our lifetime. No price is too high to pay. No cost too burdensome. No-"

"-tax too outrageous," grumbled Remo, watching from the shelter of some evergreens. "I don't see Nalini anywhere," he added.

"I do not see the other limousines," said Chiun, his hazel eyes raking the jam of still-arriving press vehicles. "Only the white chariot of Clancy."

"We gotta get close without being seen," Remo said, starting off.

They moved in on a pair of cameramen who were filming establishing shots from a distance, and as if their plan had been worked out beforehand, Remo and Chiun slipped up behind them and found nerves in the back of unwary necks with their fingers.

Both cameramen buckled at the knees, and after they had collapsed on the ground, their equipment was in Remo and Chiun's hands.

"How do you operate these contraptions?" asked the Master of Sinanju.

"Just carry them on your shoulder and close to your face," said Remo. "That way no one is liable to recognize us who shouldn't."

Cameras high, they advanced toward the media circle, and gravitated to its outer edges.

Clancy continued speaking.

"I have come to believe that there is no hole in the ozone," he was saying. "My dear departed blood brother, Theodore Eagle-That-Soars, the great Mohair Indian warrior, was wrong in his assumptions. Whatever is visiting the HELP virus on innocent, environmentally aware Americans, it will be unmasked for what it is. Whatever it is."

On the other side of the gathering, Remo came upon a chauffeur trying to get his feet untangled from a knot of remote cables on the ground.

"We're looking for Senator Clancy's mother," he said.

"She went on ahead," the chauffeur said, without looking up.

"Ahead where?"

"To the SF Airport."

"Damn!"

Remo rejoined the Master of Sinanju.

"We missed her, Little Father."

Chiun's face darkened. "What do we do now? We are forbidden from harming Clancy the clown."

Remo looked around. "I dunno, but follow me."

They worked their way from the press conference, toward the area where federal agencies had set up operations-such as they were. Not much was going on. Except breakfast.

The federals were eating, of all things, lobster salad sandwiches and packing them away as if there were no tomorrow.

"These people are pigs," Chiun observed.

"They're acting like PAPAS, all right," muttered Remo.

Abruptly, the Master of Sinanju flitted to the nearby food service wagon. He disappeared behind it. Frowning, Remo hurried to catch up with him.

He found the Master of Sinanju squeezing the earlobe of a man in cook's whites. The man was dropping to one knee and he would have howled for his life, but the pain was already too intense. Remo knew that there was a nerve cluster in the earlobe that Chiun had trained him to find.

"What's the problem?" Remo asked Chiun.

"This man has been collecting dunderbugs."

"So? It's a fad."

"And feeding them to the unwary," Chiun added.

Remo blinked. He noticed then the stainless steel pot that was filled with mayonnaise. There were thunderbugs in the mix. They moved their hairlike legs sluggishly as if enjoying the prospect of becoming food.

"Whose idea was this?" Remo demanded.

Chiun eased up on the pressure so the man could speak.

"That Chinchilla," the man gasped. "He set up the food concession. We're just hired hands."

"Food concession?"

"After this, we were going to go national. We'd have cleaned up."

"Probably would have too," Remo muttered. "Okay, forget him. He's small potatoes."

Chiun gave the man's lobe a final squeeze and the pain was obviously too much because he fainted dead away.

Back at the press conference, Senator Clancy was still going strong.

"And if it should turn out that the thunderbug, the Miracle Food of our age, should harbor the HELP virus, I pledge to you my fellow Americans to lift any rock, to move any mountain, to find some way to allow Mankind to consume this wonder bug in complete safety."

Remo lifted his voice.

"You better hope it's not the bug because you've all been eating it."

Clancy tried to locate the voice in the sea of media faces. "Who is that? Who is speaking?"

Keeping his minicam up to his face so no one would see his mouth move, Remo added, "Those lobster salad sandwiches you've been wolfing down? It only tastes like lobster. It's thunderbug."

"What!"

"If eating thunderbug gives you HELP," Remo went on, "you're all overdue for a dose."

At that, the food service truck's engine started and began backing out toward the highway.

Its erratic behavior was not lost on the press, some of whom clutched lobster salad sandwiches.

A few brave souls ventured toward the spot where the truck had been set up and came upon the stainless steel mixing pot and its wallowing thunderbugs.

"It's true!" Nightmirror correspondent Ned Doppler cried. 'We've been eating the bug all along!"

"But it tastes exactly like lobster!" MBC News anchor Tim Macaw screamed.

"Thunderbug is supposed to taste exactly like lobster," Remo shouted, after shifting position.

"How do we tell?" a voice wondered.

Just then, a woman came stumbling back from the far side of Nirvana West. Her chest bounced with every halting step. It was Jane Goodwoman. Her face was as white as a sheet.

"I think I'm dying!" she moaned. "I think I'm dying!"

Jane Goodwoman was immediately surrounded by whirring videocams. "Why do you say that?" a reporter asked.

"Because the others are dying too, you idiot!" she snapped, dropping to her knees.

"What others?"

"The other reporters. We went to look over the Harvester encampment, and they started to drop in their tracks."

"The Harvesters?"

"No. They're already dead. Other journalists! It was awful. It was as if their cameras and press credentials couldn't protect them."

The woman's eyes suddenly rolled up in her head and everyone noticed that the whites were turning blue. Jane Goodwoman slumped forward on her face.

Another reporter started to ask, "How does it feel to know you're dying from HELP, Ms. Goodwoman?"

There was no response, so a line producer gave the body a push so the camera could film the columnist's dying face.

"What does it mean?" someone asked.

And not far from Remo and Chiun, Tim Macaw intruded his boyish face between his cameraman's lens and the scene being recorded.

"What does it mean? This is the question of the hour as America asks itself if dying Americans is too high a price to pay in return for a chance to eradicate the specter of world starvation."

The dying columnist was asked, "Did you eat any of the lobster salad sandwiches?"

"Yeah . . . ," she gasped. "They were . . . delicious."

"They weren't lobster," Remo called out. "They were thunderbug."

"The . . . sign . . . said . . . lobster. . . ."

Then, all over the place, reporters, cameramen, and other journalists inserted fingers down their gullets and started retching.

"Our cue to exit, Little Father," said Remo.

That seemed to be Ned Clancy's idea too. Without concluding his remarks, he allowed his press aides to hustle him into the waiting white limousine.

"Let's find Parsons," Remo said.

They found Parsons in his tent. It was the Master of Sinanju who discovered his inert, blue-eyed body. Remo came up in response to Chiun's call.

Remo saw the man's dead face and said, "It got him too?"

"Alas, yes," said Chiun sadly.

"Now there's nobody credible to tell these people the truth about the thunderbugs."

Chiun looked over to the press, who were now in full flight.

"They would not listen to him or anyone," he said thinly. "Not even to the illustrious Thrush Limburger."

"What's that?" Remo said suddenly.

The Master of Sinanju went to the ornate rosewood box on the bench.

"This is the same box that the false Indian clutched," he intoned. "And here is a note, promising the secret of the dunderbug disease if one opens the box. The Eldress murdered this poor man."

"Damn!" said Remo.

"What?"

"Last night over dinner, I let slip to Nalini that Parsons figured out the thunderbug was harmless."

"And she slipped away to silence him."

Remo was looking around the floor, his face tight. In a corner, something skittered. He stepped on it, hard.

"That's what I'm going to do to whoever killed Parsons," he promised.

"We will see," the Master of Sinanju said thinly.

When they emerged from the tent, Nirvana West was a ghost town. All that remained were the dead.

Remo and Chiun were sweeping the area when Remo noticed something red moving on the branch of a tree.

"Hey! There's one of the spider things."

"I see it," said Chiun, edging closer.

"Notice something?"

"Yes, it is very ugly, even for a spider."

"No. It isn't trying to jump me."

"Perhaps it has heard how you slew its brethren."

"Not likely." Remo stepped closer. The reddish spider lifted up on its rear legs and waved its long bulbous nose at Remo. The nose split and out unfolded the dark fangs that were so deadly.

Remo set himself to dodge, but the thing remained on the branch where it sat.

"Why isn't it trying to jump me?" he muttered.

Chiun regarded the thing curiously. It shifted slightly, waving its fangs at him. Its black eyes stared with an alien malevolence.

The Master of Sinanju lifted his right hand. The spider shifted again, prepared to defend itself. And a single curved fingernail sliced both poison fangs off. The spider leapt away, and because they were looking for it, Remo and Chiun both saw the thin strand of spider silk spinning out behind it.

Chiun dismembered the spider with fingernails too fast to be seen. It fell in three sections.

Chiun stroked his wispy beard thoughtfully. "Perhaps it did not attack because you no longer smell of the Ganges."

"Huh?"

"The scent that Hindu harlot placed upon you. You have washed it off?"

"Yeah. I showered before we left the motel."

Chiun nodded sagely. "That is how it was done. The Spider Divas would place their scent on their intended victims so their tools would know whom to bite."

"There was no scent on Magarac when we found him."

"He was in a confined place with no place to hide. No doubt the spider that was his end fell upon him the very moment he opened the box that contained death."

"And the other HELP victims didn't smell either," added Remo. "Parsons too."

"Perhaps there is more to this than meets the eye, Remo, but it is clear now how the Spider Divas worked their wicked will in days gone by."

"Makes sense," Remo admitted. "Sort of. But I still can't figure out how some people buy it as soon as they're bitten and others take forty-eight hours to go out."

Harold W. Smith could not understand it either, when they reached him by phone. He listened in tightlipped silence to Remo's report.

"Much of what you have told me has come over the airwaves, Remo," Smith said. "However, the death of Dale Parsons is a serious setback. He is the only one who could prove the thunderbug is not the source of HELP."

"So what do we do now?"

"One moment," said Smith.

Remo heard the clicking of computer keys as he waited. They had commandeered a cellular phone at another federal tent. In the distance, sirens wailed.

Ambulances and other official vehicles had been summoned from surrounding towns. There were a lot of dead. The ambulances had been coming and going for the last hour.

Finally, Smith said, "I have accessed the airline reservation computer system, Remo. Senator Clancy appears headed back to Washington. His mother and a woman identified here as Nalini Toshi were due to arrive in Boston's Logan Airport in five hours, with connections to the Hayannis Airport."

"We go after her?"

The line hummed in the silence that followed.

"Remo, this is a very sensitive matter. But yes, go to the Clancy Compound, locate and interrogate this woman. Do it quietly. There is no telling where this could lead."

"What about Clancy?"

"If the trail leads to the senator, it leads to him and that bridge will be crossed if and when necessary."

"We're on our way."

"First, there is something you must do."

"What's that?"

"Eradicate those infernal spiders before more people die."

And Smith hung up.

"Guess who just pulled extermination detail?" Remo told Chiun.

Chapter 23

The spiders that resembled ants were very easy to kill. And because they were a distinctive rusty red, they were easy to locate too.

The trouble was, there were tons of them. And the press was starting to creep back into Nirvana West.

Remo caught up with the Master of Sinanju and said, "This could take all day."

"Then it will take all day," said Chiun. "It is our assignment. "

Remo lowered his voice. "We might not get them all, you know."

"We are Sinanju. We will get them all if you have to get down on your hands and knees and pursue them into their very lairs."

"Thanks for volunteering me," Remo said dryly. "But I have a better idea."

Chiun looked doubtful. "Yes?"

Remo stepped on a patch of dry grass and weeds with his shoe. The underbrush crackled.

"One match would get rid of all the bugs and this ecological sinkhole too."

Chiun gasped. "We are assassins, not arsonists. Would you shame the art?"

"Would you rather chase spiders into next Tuesday?" Remo countered.

The Master of Sinanju stroked his wispy beard thoughtfully.

"I will turn my back. What you do or do not do shames your ancestors, not mine."

Remo grinned broadly. "Fine with me. I don't even know my ancestors."

Remo picked up a dry twig, found another, and knelt in a particularly dry patch of brush. He tried the old Boy Scout trick of starting a fire. After ten minutes, he had a hole in the ground on two well-worn twigs.

He found a piece of hard rock and held one in the brush. With the edge of his other hand, he began chipping off pieces. Sparks flew. One started smoldering in the grass and Remo blew on it until he got fire.

He stood up and stepped back.

"I think I did it," he called over to Chiun.

"I am not looking," replied the Master of Sinanju. "To look is to accede. I am ignorant of any disgraceful behavior.

The fire was going good now. It leapt and spread outward. Spiders scurried. They were fast. The flames were faster.

"Okay, let's get out of here," said Remo.

It took two or three hours, but Nirvana West was a conflagration, kept from enveloping the surrounding hills by fire trucks and helicopters dropping orange fire retardant chemicals.

Surveying the scene from a nearby hill, Remo and Chiun were confident they had gotten them all.

"I think we're leaving Nirvana West in better shape than we found it," Remo said happily.

Chiun cast his eyes skyward. "I know nothing of what this uncontrollable white is saying," he informed his ancestors.

They were walking back to their car, which they had parked in a secluded area, away from everything, when a black hearse pulled up.

A desiccated voice asked, "Is this Nirvana West?"

"What's left of it," Remo said.

"Where are the dying?"

"There aren't any."

The hearse door popped open and the last person Remo expected to see in Nirvana West emerged. He wore black. His round-brimmed hat was black. As was his string tie. He was a tall, hollow-cheeked cadaver of a man, with dry skin and quarrelsome birdlike eyes.

"I have come a long way to assist them in their final agony," said the disconsolate voice of Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian.

"You know," said Remo, his eyes going hard, "I've been hoping to meet up with you for a long, long time."

Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian shifted his quick black eyes from Remo to the Master of Sinanju.

"You do not look well," he told Chiun.

Chiun lifted his chin proudly.

"I have the strength of a lion and the heart of an eagle."

Dr. Gregorian looked back at Remo and said, "Alzheimer's. Very sad. I will be happy to ease him to the other side. For a modest one thousand dollars. Less than the cost of a common vasectomy."

And Chiun gasped like a startled old maid.

Remo moved then. He grabbed the man's shoulder and squeezed. Instantly. Dr. Gregorian's eyes popped out in his gaunt face and he went down on his knobby knees.

"This is for all the little old ladies you keep snuffing," Remo growled, lifting his hand.

A thin wrist blocked the blow before it could begin. Chiun's.

"He's mine," said Remo.

"He is not!" snapped Chiun. "He is not to be killed. "

"We've had this argument before. He's a ghoul."

"I'm a licensed pathologist," gasped Gregorian, his eyes closed in pain. "Retired."

"He performs a service," said Chiun.

Remo glowered. "Not good enough, Chiun."

"And he is not an assignment."

"So? He's a freebie."

"If the House of Sinanju performs service without proper compensation, then word will get out and no gold will be offered to us."

"Take it up with Smith."

"Remo, do not be an amateur."

Remo hesitated. There was cold fire in the Master of Sinanju's eyes.

And because he respected his teacher above all others, Remo gave Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian a final squeeze that left him squirming in a spreading pool of a bodily fluid that was not blood.

"Some day," Remo vowed, walking away, "I'm going to get to waste him."

"And if Emperor Smith so decrees it, I will be the one to dispatch that ignoramus," Chin spat.

Remo looked surprised. "What changed your mind?"

"I do not care that he eases the suffering of those who choose to hire his services, vile as they may be. But did you hear the pitiful price he quoted for my life? One thousand dollars, Remo. Paper money. Not even gold. The man obviously has no idea who he wished to snuff."

And despite himself, Remo laughed as he started up the car.

Chapter 24

Harold W. Smith sat before his computer screen. On it he had typed the names of the key players in the problem of Human Environmental Liability Paradox. His analytical mind found working with tables very productive as a focusing tool.

He went down the list.

It had all begun with Brother Karl Sagacious, now deceased. He appeared to be a fool who stumbled across fool's gold.

Theodore Magarac, alias Brother Theodore Soars-With-Eagles, was now deceased too. It no longer appeared to be likely that Magarac had done away with Sagacious. But someone had murdered him, Lee Esterquest, and all the remaining members of People Against Protein Assassins at Nirvana West. But who?

Jane Goodwoman, also dead, was never much of a suspect, despite Remo's suspicions.

The loss of Dale Parsons, the CDC pathologist, was more troublesome. Even if Smith could somehow get out the word of the truth behind the HELP scare, without a credible spokesman wielding hard evidence there was no turning back the thunderbug mania. All over the country, teenagers and people seeking to lose weight without going on starvation diets were eating thunderbugs. It was ridiculous. And here was a United States senator, attended by a pack of media hounds, vowing to expend unguessed sums of taxpayer moneys just so people could go on eating an unsafe bug, instead of counseling against the cheaper and more reasonable solution of not eating the thunderbug in the first place.

Where was everyone's common sense?

Now that Smith knew the truth-that Ingraticus Avalonicus was not the source of HELP-it was just as important that the facts come out. Those people were slowly starving themselves by eating a worthless nugget of undigestible protein.

Which brought Smith back to the central problem. Who was behind HELP?

Senator Ned J. Clancy remained the top suspect. There was no doubt that he was tied into it all. His mother's nurse, Nalini Toshi, clearly controlled the exotic but venomous spiders that were--or seemed to be-responsible for the actual HELP, in reality not a virus, or a disease at all. But a subtle toxin, administered by a spider.

Was Nalini the mastermind? If so, what was her motive?

Was she a tool of Senator Clancy? If so, what could his motive be?

And there was the missing Thrush Limburger. He had been as quick as Clancy to leap on the HELP bandwagon. Except that he had been out to expose it. Or so he had claimed until his bizarre and puzzling disappearance.

Had Limburger discovered the truth? If so, who had abducted him? And where was he now? Was he even alive?

Harold Smith preferred not to think the worst. That Thrush Limburger was in fact the author of the Human Environmental Liability Paradox, and had engineered this entire scenario as a way to boost his already meteoric ratings.

Still, in some way, it was preferable to the only other probability.

Namely, that Senator Ned J. Clancy was orchestrating everything and had from the very beginning.

There remained one unknown. The Eldress. Theodore Magarac had spoken of her in his dying moments. Who was she? There was ample evidence that she was Nalini Toshi, who although young, seemed to be the last survivor of an ancient cult of assassins who killed via venomous spiders.

There was no one else left on the board.

His computer beeped, and Smith froze his on-screen table and shrank it into a corner of the screen. An incoming news bulletin, siphoned off the wire services, was appearing.

It was a report of a speech Senator Ned J. Clancy was giving upon his arrival at Washington National Airport. It was about HELP.

Smith read the text through rimless eyeglasses and muttered, "The man sounds like he has begun his reelection campaign early."

And then it hit Harold W. Smith.

A motive. There was a motive for scaring the nation with a plague that defied analysis. A virus that did not exist in the first place. Smith knew that in the history of the human race, no cure had ever been found for a virus. The common cold, a virus so simple it killed no one but the very infirm, had never been cured despite intense medical research.

But if the virus was a fraud, a fraudulent cure could be made to appear to succeed.

And the man or woman who cured that virus would be a national hero. He would be lauded and lionized and there would be no stopping him.

Even if he chose to ride his fame to the highest office in the land.

And in that flash of realization, Harold W. Smith got his first inkling of who the Eldress was and why she had set into motion the events that were now culminating in CURE's enforcement arm about to infiltrate the Clancy family compound.

Harold W. Smith removed his glasses and, closing his tired eyes, he murmured a heartfelt prayer.

In his heart, he knew he had sent his enforcement arm after the wrong target. He only hoped they realized the truth in time ....

Chapter 25

Darkness had fallen when Remo piloted his car over the Sagamore Bridge to Cape Cod, Massachusetts.

They had flown to Boston, stopping to change clothes in their condominium castle. Chiun had taken the time to excavate a scroll from one of the many steamer trunks, which he immediately began to write on.

"We don't have time for this," Remo had said impatiently.

"It is important that the truth be recorded about Master Sambari and the Spider Divas," returned Chiun, setting up his ink stone and weighing down the four corners of the peeling scroll with polished sapphires.

"Why?"

"Because if we fail, future generations must know that the Spider Divas employed a certain perfume to mark their intended victims." He inscribed slashing strokes on the scroll.

Remo blinked. "What future generations? There's only you and me."

"If I perish, I know you will be too lazy to record this important truth. I am only protecting your future pupil. Besides, your Hangul characters are atrocious. No one can read them."

"If we don't get a move on," Remo warned, "we're going to blow this mission and we'll be out of a job."

"I am nearly finished. And for what we must do, darkness will be our friend."

Now they were driving through the Cape Cod darkness, past slant-roofed capes with their weathered cedar shingles. The Atlantic rushed and roared in the near distance. The moon was an ivory coin low on the horizon. As it rose in the sky, it seemed to grow in size.

It was probably for the best, Remo had decided as they neared the Clancy compound, the tension going out of his body. Darkness would help them. Chiun had changed into a night black stalking kimino, with a slightly shorter skirt and high sleeves. Remo wore the traditional two-piece fighting outfit of the night tigers of Sinanju's early days.

Chiun, noticing Remo's slow relaxing, said, "You have no qualms about facing the temptress Nalini?"

"I owe her for what she tried to do to me," said Remo, not taking his eyes off the road. "And for murdering Parsons."

"You care for her still?"

Remo frowned. "I hardly got to know her. A one-night stand. Big deal."

"Your words mask your hurt."

Remo was silent a long time.

"She's mine."

"If you will have her."

"I have no problem taking out somebody who tried to dump me in the boneyard," Remo said tightly.

"You will be able to prove this very shortly," the Master of Sinanju said in a warning tone.

Remo said nothing. His flat dark eyes, fixed on the road ahead, were as unreadable as obsidian chips.

On either side of the road, Cape Cod saltbox cottages whisked by like mausoleums.

Chapter 26

Seamus O'Toole was head of security for the Clancy family.

He was of solid, Irish-Catholic stock, born and bred in South Boston. For twenty years he had walked a beat on Broadway, from the quiet days of the early 1960s through the tumultuous events of the busing crisis to the day they found his police cruiser parked behind the Gillette factory, with Seamus slumped over the wheel, two quarts of good Irish whiskey burning in his belly.

He had not responded to the officer down radio call and because of his dereliction of duty, a gut-shot rookie had bled to death. At the hearing, he was thrown off the force without so much as a by-your-leave. After twenty good years. And for what? The one who had died was only an Italian.

But a fondness for the bottle was not looked upon as a weakness in the Clancy compound, and when his brother, a ward heeler of the old school, told his cousin, who in turn passed word to an aide to Senator Ned Clancy, a spot was made for Seamus O'Toole on the security staff of the Clancy compound.

They only had to fire one Polack to make the spot too.

In the decade following, O'Toole had risen to the exalted position of head of Clancy security, which was not so exalted in these days of dwindling elder Clancys and rambunctious younger Clancys. One by one, all the others had been laid off and only O'Toole remained, in charge of electronic gadgets he didn't understand. What was the world coming to?

Thank goodness, he reflected as he made the round of the walled compound before shutting the electric gate for the night, that the young rambunctious ones took their highjinks down to Florida and other such warm climates. Seamus O'Toole could abide with high-spirited drinking and ravishing a semiwilling girl or two, but it was getting out of hand, what with the rape trials and the accidental drownings and the like.

Seamus liked to keep his conscience as clear as possible. The fewer trips to the confession box the better for him. His knees were so bad it was all he could do to properly kneel during the Communion service.

The last of the bushes checked, O'Toole wandered back to the electric gate. The elder Mrs. Clancy and her entourage had returned to the compound and were now safely bedded down for the night.

There was no reason to leave the gate open any longer, and so he went to the guard box and tripped the red switch. The gates closed with the well-oiled silence that only the finest security system money could buy could guarantee.

Then he flipped the black, green, and blue switches that activated the motion sensors, video cameras, and other more exotic devices.

Then, confident that his charges were as safe as in the Virgin's arms, Seamus O'Toole stripped the paper wrapping off the fresh jug of Gallo cream sherry and settled down to a long, comfortable evening's diversion.

He needed it after lugging that huge steamer trunk into the cellar. It felt like it was stuffed with baby elephants.

Chapter 27

Remo parked the car within sight of the high brick wall of the Hyannisport compound where three generations of Clancys had retreated when they wished to escape the glare of the press-or the consequences of their actions.

The place was a sprawling white monstrosity that looked like someone with too much money and not enough taste had taken a simple Victorian house and added wings and gables until he had finally run out of money or land or both. Its yellow-lit windows peered over the barbed wire and jagged glass of the compound wall like a crouching octopus in fear of the encroaching sea. Waves crashed against stone jetties down by the private beach.

"This place has probably got more security than the White House," Remo warned Chiun.

The Master of Sinanju shrugged his frail shoulders in the darkness.

"A fortress is a fortress," he sniffed. "If there are ways out, there are ways in. We will discover the one that affords us the greatest element of surprise."

"What's the best way in?" Remo asked.

Chiun looked up. "Why do you ask me?"

"You're the teacher."

"And you are the pupil. Therefore, you must find your own way if you are to learn."

"You think I can't?" Remo said tightly.

"I am willing to accept the possibility," Chiun said thinly.

"Fine. We'll split up then."

Chiun regarded his pupil coolly. "If we split up, the first to come upon the Spider Diva will have the privilege of vanquishing her."

Remo thought about that a moment. "I'll take my chances."

Chiun bowed. "Then we will split up."

Remo looked back to the walled compound. He saw vague movement in one of the lighted windows, but even his trained eyes could make out nothing more than an unrecognizable shape.

Remo turned back to the Master of Sinanju. "I say the best way in would be-"

But Chiun was no longer there. The Master of Sinanju had disappeared like a shadow in the greater darkness.

"Damn," said Remo. And he started for the walled compound himself. Chiun was trying to beat him in. Maybe he figured Remo wasn't up to the job. Remo planned to prove him wrong.

Remo went up the wall like a climbing spider, a black shape against a blacker sky. Below, the grassy grounds were lit here and there with spotlights and monitored by motion sensor detectors. The zones didn't overlap perfectly. A mistake.

Taking the coil of barbed wire in his hands, Remo felt along it until he found a weak spot. It snapped when he tugged it apart.

Then he rolled off and dropped to the ground in a pool of shadow.

A Plexiglas guard shack was not far away. The guard was hard at work emptying a green jug. He had his eyes on a TV monitor. He would not be a factor, Remo decided.

Moving with an economy of motion that would not attract the human eye or show up on a video screen, Remo eased along the inner wall until he came upon one of the gaps in the sensor zone. He dropped to his stomach and began to crawl on elbows and knees. He could feel the weak outer edges of the ultrasonic motion-detecting field on his exposed skin. He kept from intruding on its integrity.

There was enough light to show him up if anyone happened to stare into the patch of darkness, so Remo wasted no time. He gained the wide veranda, slipped up the rail, and dropped onto the porch.

So far, so good. He wondered how the Master of Sinanju was doing. There had been no sign of him.

The Master of Sinanju dismissed the idea of scaling the wall as too obvious. Any amateur could scale a wall. The best approach to a fortress, he knew, was to employ the fortress's own secrets against itself.

And no fortress built by man existed without a secret escape tunnel for the convenience of the owner. He went in search of it.

There was a saltbox home situated on a dune well back of the beach, within line of sight of the sprawling Clancy compound, but beyond its walls. It was the only such place within practical tunnel-digging distance, so he went to it.

The door was padlocked. The padlock surrendered to a single chopping blow and the door opened but a crack. The crack was sufficient to swallow the Master of Sinanju, unseen.

Furnishings were sparse, but there was a single decorative rug. With a sandaled toe, he eased this from its accustomed place, revealing a not very cunning trapdoor and a rusty steel ring. Bending, he lifted the ring from its circular socket and the trap opened upward.

It was a concrete-lined tunnel, which meant there would be no unpleasant vermin to contend with.

Chiun dropped into the space, his black skirts billowing and his hazel eyes adjusting to the utter blackness.

Moving in no particular hurry because he knew he would not be expected, the Master of Sinanju wondered if his pupil had yet succeeded in breeching the wall.

There were alarm wires on the door and windows Remo was able to check, so he slipped along the veranda that dominated the white Victorian house along two sides.

He went up a round supporting column, gained the porch roof, and lay flat among the shadows. Through the columns would be transmitted any sounds of warning.

There were none. Footsteps came and went, unhurried and unimportant. No buzzers buzzed. He had tripped no alarms.

Remo got up enough to creep along and no more. He went to a darkened window.

There were foil strips attached to the other side of the glass. An alarm system.

So he stood up under a gable, reached high to grasp some decorative gingerbread, and pulled himself up onto the central roof, like a coiling snake.

Remo had a wide menu of chimneys to choose from. The wings must have been added in the days before central heating, because each wing had its own chimney.

The main chimney was the largest, so he went to that.

Remo peered down and saw darkness. No crackling of a fire came to his ears. Grinning, he climbed in, and used the spaces between the crumbling bricks to descend. They might as well have left out a ladder for his convenience.

His frown vanished when his feet encountered a stubborn obstruction.

It was solid enough to take his weight so he dropped on it. It was the flue, down in closed position.

Remo leaned his hands against one chimney wall and walked his feet back until his heels found the opposite side. He kept walking backward until his body was horizontal and he was suspended by the pressure of hands and feet pushing in opposite directions.

One hand reached down and he pulled up the flue. It barely creaked.

He dropped into the fireplace, paused to wipe soot onto his face and spread the rest on his hands, and peered out.

The room-a big spacious New England parlor with overstuffed chairs and antique armoires-was empty of people.

Remo slipped out and straightened up.

Almost immediately, he heard the whining of something mechanical coming his way.

The Master of Sinanju followed the concrete tunnel that was inexplicably littered with women's undergarments until he came to a set of crude wood steps. He mounted these in silence. There was a trapdoor above his head and he placed one ear to it.

No sounds reached his ears, so he placed his hands against the trap and straightened his pipestem arms.

The trap lifted into a room filled with darkness.

The Master of Sinanju, like a furtive moth, stood in the darkness a moment, swiveling his head from side to side, ears hunting for sounds.

He heard none.

He began walking to a pair of doors that lay open.

And a strange sound came to his ears.

It was a low, whining sound, and it was approaching rapidly.

Chiun faded back, disappearing behind a curtain from which he could safely view the strange threat before deciding to attack or retreat.

Into the room scooted a thing no bigger than a punch bowl. In fact, it very much resembled an upside-down bowl moving on tiny tires close to the floor. It was blue and black and an orange light blinked on its chrome face.

It paused and circled as if sniffing the air like a curious dog. The orange light blinked silently.

The Master of Sinanju remained still.

The round thing continued to circle the room. Then, apparently deciding the room was empty, it abruptly backed up and disappeared up a long corridor.

When the sound of its rubber wheels was far distant, the Master of Sinanju detached himself from the curtain and followed its path.

He did not know what the thing was, but he knew it was but a machine of some sort and therefore no threat to a Master of Sinanju. Perhaps it would be something for Remo to play with.

Remo crouched in the fireplace as the whining grew closer.

He began to recognize the sound for what it was and was not surprised when Pearl Clancy entered the room in a motorized wheelchair.

She was seated in the wheelchair like a corpse that had been left there to dry up and shrivel. One gnarled hand clutched the control stick, a silver pen in a universal socket.

Her eyes, like two wicked buttons, swept the room.

Seeing nothing, her hands fumbled for a button on the armrest and the overhead lights came on.

Remo kept still. He was still in shadow.

Then her gaze fell on him and her mouth made a grimace of surprise.

Remo came out of the fireplace too fast for a healthy person to react, never mind a stroke-debilitated old woman. Pearl Clancy's hand was on its way to the control stick when Remo intercepted it. He detached the stick and tossed it out of reach.

"Sorry," he said softly. "Can't have you causing problems." And Remo reached around for the battery cables. He pulled them. The electric motor cut off.

"Remind me to plug you back in on my way out," he whispered.

Pearl Clancy only bugged her eyes out at him. She seemed to be trying to stare him to death. Lifting her forefingers to her slack mouth, she began making animated wriggling motions.

"Crazy as a bedbug," said Remo, closing the door behind him.

He eased up a long corridor whose walls were decorated with oil portraits of previous generations of Clancys. Remo could tell he was starting at the older end because the further along he moved, the more bloated and dissolute the Clancy clan faces became.

At Senator Ned J. Clancy's portrait, he took a left without thinking. It was as if he were being drawn toward a specific goal.

There was something in the air. He recognized it. It was Nalini's scent. The fruity smell was coming from somewhere in the corridor ahead.

Remo found himself quickening his pace without realizing it. He paused at each door. The scent wasn't coming from any of them. He moved unerringly toward the end of the corridor door.

The scent was definitely coming from the other side of the door now. His heart started beating faster. He willed it to calm down. What was wrong with him? Was he afraid of what he had to do?

Remo took the knob and with infinite slowness, turned it. The lock tongue coming out of its groove made no sound. He eased the door in. The hinges were quiet. He expected that. It was an old house but well maintained.

The room was dark except for a slice of moonlight slanting in through a curtained window, and Remo slipped in, closing the door behind him.

Eyes and ears alert, he oriented himself. The fruity scent was all around him. And he zeroed in on it.

It was coming from a big four-poster bed in the center of the room.

Remo moved to it, walking on the outsides of his soles. He made no more sound than the curtains waving in the open window.

Nalini slept under a quilt coverlet, her dark hair a spray of ebony on the big white pillow. She breathed through her open mouth, and her lips were as red as when Remo had last seen her. Moonlight gleamed on the hard edges of her perfect white teeth.

And as Remo watched, he was overcome by the urge to lift the covers and see her perfect brown body one last time. Before he took her out.

Remo's hand drifted out. He snagged the hem of the quilt. Nalini slept with one hand tucked under the pillow and the other resting on the exposed sheet. She would not feel the quilt move.

Remo, surprised at his own curiosity, drew away the quilt.

He saw her perfect body lying there, rounded breasts rising and falling with her breathing, dark nipples like flat unseeing eyes. He noticed something he had not noticed before-a wealth of thick black hair under each armpit. They seemed to stir.

And the hairs on the back of his neck lifted.

Crouched in the shadowy hollows of Nalini's exquisite body, dark shapes crawled and squirmed. And all at once, myriad black eyes winked open.

There were fumblings coming from the main section of the house. The Master of Sinanju crept in that direction.

Surprisingly, there were no guards. Once, he encountered a clod-footed man making the floorboards creak under his feet as he passed through the darkened house, his breath reeking of alcohol.

The Master of Sinanju eluded him easily. It was less trouble to fell him with a blow to the back of his neck and leave him where he fell than to concern himself about where to hide the overweight carcass.

The fumbling sound came from a door that was closed. There was a keyhole and Chiun bent to put his eye to it.

He recognized the seated figure of Pearl Clancy, her arms flopping in her wheelchair, as if trying to goad it into life.

The Master of Sinanju saw the soot-smeared severed battery cables and the fireplace beyond, and deduced how his pupil had gained entry.

Chiun nodded to himself. It was a serviceable approach. There was little art in it, but the Master of Sinanju expected no art from his adopted son, who although practiced, was white and therefore congenitally graceless.

He left the woman to her helplessness. She was not important.

He walked along, seeking the familiar scent he knew would lead his unfailing senses to the last Spider Diva-and a reckoning that was long overdue. There was no hurry. Remo had had time to find the Hindu harlot by this time-and face a test of his ability to meet the difficult demands of a Master of Sinanju in training.

The jumping spiders began leaping at him from the moist hollow places in Nalini Toshi's brown body.

Remo used his hands to fend them off. There were too many of them for him to do otherwise. They leaped for his face, his hair, and his arms.

And encountered an invisible barrier that was Remo's flashing hands. They bounced back, not always whole.

The jumping spiders struck walls, bedclothes, and Nalini herself.

Her eyes snapped open. They fixed on Remo, and on the shattered, squirming rust-red body segments accumulating on the white sheet.

"My children!" she shrieked.

Immediately, she hugged her nakedness, trying to locate still-living spiders on her person. She seemed to find none.

"Who are you?" she demanded.

Remo batted away the last two attackers and said, "Forget me already?"

"Remo!"

Her voice was dull with shock.

"Surprised?"

She pulled the sheet over her breasts. "What-what do you do here?"

"I came for answers."

"To-to what?"

"To why you tried to kill me. To why you're killing people with spiders and blaming a virus that doesn't exist."

"I-I harm no one . . . ."

"Can it. I know everything. How you murdered Magarac, Parsons, and for all I know Lee Esterquest."

Nalini's eyes became wary slits. "If you know so much, you would not come seeking answers to questions."

"I know about the Spider Divas," Remo said.

Nalini just stared. "Who are you?"

"Not who. What. I am Sinanju."

And Nalini hissed like a cat in the darkness. Her eyes became hot. She flung off her sheet to reveal her splendid body anew. "If you are truly Sinanju, then I am helpless before you," she said submissively.

A cool, musty breeze was coming from under the door. The Master of Sinanju detected other smells mixed in with the mustiness. Sweat. Fear. He opened the door and descended unpainted steps.

A heartbeat in the cool darkness, muffled and sluggish. Great lungs labored for air. The Master of Sinanju sought those sounds.

There was a steamer trunk standing on end near the cold furnace. He went to it, knowing the sounds of life came from within.

The trunk was closed with padlocks but they surrendered to fingers that understood their strengths and weaknesses.

The Master of Sinanju pushed the halves of the trunk apart, and a great form rolled out and stopped at his feet.

"Roger, Thrush," said the Master of Sinanju.

Nalini was saying, "Please do not harm me, Man of Sinanju. I am but a poor servant who cannot harm you." Her voice was pitiful. Her heart was beating wildly.

Remo hesitated. Her fruity scent was in his nostrils, tickling them.

"Straight talk," he said.

Nalini gathered herself up, her liquid eyes steady on Remo's towering form.

"What do you wish to know?" she murmured.

"There's no HELP, right? Just poison spiders."

Nalini nodded. "There is no HELP, yes. Only spiders."

"So how come some people die in two days and others go as soon as they're bitten?"

The Spider Diva mustered up a tentative smile that made her dark eyes sparkle alluringly. She stretched her legs, revealing no hidden arachnids.

"It is very simple," she said, averting her eyes. "My pets are no different from other creatures. Some are male. Some are female. The bite of the male brings weakness and a slow death. Those whom my sisters bite succumb at once."

Remo grunted. "Okay, why?"

"It is my duty." She lay back, stretching her arms, arching her back like a supple brown cat. "If you are Sinanju, I do not have to explain duty to you."

"Who's your boss-Clancy?"

She closed her eyes. "Yes, my boss is Clancy."

Remo listened to her beating heart. It had been slowing down, and was now beating normally. She was telling the truth, he decided.

"What's his game?"

"To be President of the United States."

"Blotto? Who'd vote for him?"

"Grateful Americans, once he delivers them from the terrible Human Environmental Liability Paradox."

"Smart. All you gotta do is pull your spiders back and anything he does will look like a cure. But it won't work."

Nalini found his eyes with hers. Her voice grew pleading.

"It could work, Remo. If you were to join us."

Remo shook his head. "No chance."

"I am sorry you say that," she said petulantly, lying back. Her head fell on the pillow. More of the fruity scent billowed up and Remo found himself breathing more rapidly. "I looked forward to more lovemaking with you."

"Sorry."

"You will not kill me."

"It's my job," said Remo.

"I too have a job. I am sorry that your job and my job have made us adversaries. But we need not be enemies."

"That's the biz, sweetheart," said Remo, trying to decide whether to shatter her face or deliver a simple heart-stopping blow over the left breast.

"I understand," Nalini murmured. "But I do not think you will kill me."

"Why not?"

"Because you cannot."

"Wrong," said Remo. Lifting his right hand, he made the stiffening fingers into a spear point.

Nalini spread her legs apart in the darkness, and her scent filled Remo's head. She lay open to him like a burst plum.

"Kill me then-if you can."

And Remo found he could not strike. Instead, he desired her. It was against all his training, but his mind kept flashing back to their wild lovemaking of the night before. And his body yearned to join with hers.

"Mount me," Nalini whispered. "Take me. I will be your slave if I am allowed to live."

Remo started to laugh, but his manhood was stirring. He willed the engorging blood back, but his desire was stronger than his will.

Eyes dark with want, he got onto the bed and straddled her.

Nalini smiled wantonly. "I knew your blood would hear the call of my blood," she whispered.

Remo grasped her under the arms, squeezing the bushy hair hard as he could. The crunching of tiny insect bodies rewarded him.

Nalini's smile melted, her eyes widening with shock.

"You thought I didn't figure they'd be there," said Remo, reaching down to remove his pants.

Nalini closed her eyes in surrender. "You are wise for a man of the West. I want you, therefore I will not resist you."

Remo took her. She threw her head back and gave a tiny grunt that mixed pleasure and pain. Her features softened, and a slow cunning smile touched the dark corners of her lips.

And before he could begin the first return thrust, Remo felt tiny fangs puncture the tip of his swollen manhood.

Chapter 28

The Master of Sinanju employed his long nails to sever the cloth gag and bonds of Thrush Limburger.

"You are safe now," he intoned, stepping back, restoring his hands to his sleeves.

"Who the heck are you?" Limburger demanded, shedding his bonds.

"I regret that I cannot speak my name to you, but I am here to rescue you from a cruel fate."

Limburger blinked in the gloom. He looked around. "Where am I anyway?"

"The house of Clancy."

"Not the Black Hole of Hyannisport?"

Chiun nodded. "The very same."

"Unbelievable. I guess Clancy must be behind HELP, if they kidnapped me just to shut me up. I knew those California Highway Patrol guys were fakes the minute I laid eyes on them. But they had their guns out and snapped off my mike before I could say anything."

"Speak to me the truth. What did you discover?"

"There is no Human Environmental Liability Paradox. It's a scam. The bugs are harmless. What's killing people are poison spiders."

"Yes. We have learned that much."

Limburger looked quizzical. "We?"

"How did you come upon the truth?" Chiun asked.

"I happened to drop in on the Ukiah coroner when he was autopsying a local guy who died mysteriously. While we were talking, a red bug crawled out from under the dead guy's leg. We thought it was an ant, until its head split apart and two fangs popped out like switchblades. That was when I recognized the thing as a Ceylonese jumping spider, Myrmarachne plataleoides. I figured it got into the guy's clothes and bit him."

Chiun narrowed his eyes. "How do you know its name?"

Limburger grinned proudly. "I saw a picture of one once in a National Geographic. I just happen to have a photographic memory. That's how I knew those CHP guys were phonies. I recognized them as Clancy campaign aides. Just one of the varied talents of Thrush Limburger, Renaissance talk show genius."

"And how did you know this insect to be poison?"

"Simple. It up and bit the coroner. He keeled over, and his eyes turned blue." Limburger shook his head sadly. "Poor guy was dead in a New York minute."

"But you told no one?"

"Wasn't any time," Limburger protested. "I had to go on the air with it as soon as possible. The sooner I warned the world, the sooner people could avoid the damned spiders and lives would be saved. There was nothing I could do for Esterquest."

Chiun nodded. "This was wise, except that there are those who blamed you for the man's death."

"The media, right?"

"And certain others."

"That's what it is to be Thrush Limburger. If I cured cancer, they'd bitch that I overlooked the common cold. Well, let's get the heck out of this pest hole of permissiveness."

And from somewhere above, a voice emitted a startled cry of pain.

"What was that?" Limburger demanded.

"Remo!" cried Chiun. And because he could not have a human elephant stumbling after him, he felled Thrush Limburger with a short, chopping blow to the side of his head.

The man fell like an up-ended rain barrel.

Nalini Toshi laughed with musical mockery as Remo pulled himself free of her, a jumping spider clinging to the tip of his male organ.

He whacked it off, crushed it under a stamping heel.

And Nalini cried, "It is a she-spider! Your death is upon you, Western fool!"

Remo felt his manhood wilt, and knew the toxin-filled blood was returning to his body. His crotch was already growing numb. And a coldness crept into his upper thighs and solar plexus. He fought to keep the blood in check, but the coldness was already spreading toward his heart.

"Die! Die!" shrieked Nalini. "But be sure to fall where the moonlight will show me your eyes. I want to see them turn blue. I want to look into your dying eyes, Sinanju fool."

Remo sank to his knees. His arms went as limp as liver. As if they were only balloons, all the air seemed to leak out of his muscles. Closing his eyes, he bowed his head.

For a moment, he was still. For a moment, his heart stopped. And for a moment, the air in his lungs began to escape with a steady tired hissing. Then, a long silence fell.

Nalini laughed. She climbed off the bed and took his dark hair in her grasping fingers.

"Show me your dying eyes," she sneered, jerking his head backward on its unresisting neck. "So I will know that my ancestors have been avenged."

Remo's eyes snapped open. The whites were bright blue. But deep in the black core of his pupils a red spark flickered angrily.

And out of his mouth, mixed with a hot black spray of expelled venom, came a hollow roar of a voice.

"I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; Death, the shatterer of worlds!"

With a startled shriek, Nalini Toshi recoiled.

"What is this! What is this!" she said, shrinking against a wall.

And as she watched, the figure on its knees began jerking as if reviving electricity were jumping through every lean muscle and sinew.

"What are you doing?" Nalini moaned. "You should not die like that!"

And the figure came to its feet, tall, unbowed, erect in every way. The eyes were red coals and the surrounding whites where white again.

The mouth dropped open. "Who is this dog meat who stands before me?"

Nalini pressed her back to the wall in fear. "I-I am the last living Spider Diva, Nalini."

"No," said the voice of Shiva the Destroyer. "You are the dead Spider Diva, Nalini."

Nalini Toshi watched the hand lift to her eyeline as if it were in slow motion. She realized the hand was not moving in slow motion. These were the last moments of her life and her senses were doing this-trying to hold on to every precious moment the turning wheel of destiny had allotted her.

She saw the hand, like a weaving cobra's head, form a wedge and aim blunt fingers toward her face. The cruel face behind the hand went out of focus as her eyes were mesmerized by the fingertips she knew had the power to obliterate her, just as other empty hands had obliterated those of her kind who came before.

"I consign you to a place of no returning," said the hollow voice.

And the hand struck.

There was nothing more after that. No thought. No fear. There was not enough time for her brain to call up in kaleidoscope all the images it had recorded in life.

Nalini Toshi collapsed, her face an inverted mask of crushed bone and raw meat, onto the broken bodies of her children.

And in Remo's dark eyes, a red spark flared, then dwindled. He shook his head as if to clear it of cobwebs.

Chapter 29

Remo was putting his pants on when the Master of Sinanju burst into the room. Chiun froze.

"What has happened here?" he demanded, his cold eyes switching between the calm figure of his pupil and the sprawled inert thing that was the last of the Spider Divas.

"Figure it out," said Remo, his voice stripped of all emotion.

"I see the Spider Diva, dead."

"That's all you need to know."

Chiun hovered over the dead woman, taking in her nakedness. "You could not resist her, could you?"

"That's between her and me," said Remo, avoiding his Master's searching eyes.

Chiun cocked his head to one side. "But you paid a price."

"How do you know?"

"I heard the mantra of Shiva."

"I don't know what you're talking about," said Remo, buckling his belt.

"We will speak of it later. I have found Thrush Limburger, a prisoner in the basement. He has told me all he knows."

"Clancy's behind this," said Remo.

"She told you that?"

"Yeah. "

"And you believed her-a Hindu and a harlot?"

"Who else could it be?" said Remo, his voice returning to its normal timbre. "Come on, let's get out of here."

They stepped out into the corridor and a blue disk of a thing came wheeling toward them.

"What is that, Remo?" Chiun asked.

"A security robot. No big deal."

An orange light winked on and Remo stepped forward. His foot came up and down, and the robot broke like a china plate.

"See?" he said. "No big deal. They just came on the market. This is one of the cheaper models. All they do is beep out a warning."

"Ah. "

"So where's Limburger?" Remo asked.

"I left him sleeping below."

"It might help if Smith sent in the cavalry and they found Limburger here."

"That is for Smith to decide."

Remo peered about, his thick wrists rotating absently. "So what is the best way out of here?"

"Have you forgotten something, Remo?"

Remo frowned. "What?"

"You left an old woman helpless."

"Oh, yeah. Pearl Clancy. That won't take a minute."

The Master of Sinanju followed his pupil to the great parlor in the center of the rambling house.

"The whole thing was a scheme to get Ned Clancy into the White House next time around," Remo was saying. "Nalini was the Eldress. She set up all the dominoes at the start, and once HELP was a big deal, started knocking them down so Clancy could rehabilitate himself politically."

"You walk unsteadily," Chiun pointed out.

"I caught a dose."

"It does not appear to trouble you very much."

They came to the door.

"Did I mention I saw the same thing that Sambari saw in the forest?" said Remo.

"And?"

Remo threw open the door. "Sambari was a fraidy cat."

Thinning his dry lips, the Master of Sinanju followed his insolent pupil into the room.

Pearl Clancy crouched in her wheelchair like a mummy refusing to die. Her head jerked around, and her eyes widened. She began bouncing in place.

"This poor woman has been through much," Chiun said.

"She could've done a better job of raising her kids," Remo said, kneeling down to reconnect the battery cables.

The wheelchair motor whined back into life and Pearl Clancy grabbed for the control stick. Since it wasn't there anymore, she made a fist and beat the armrest futilely.

Chiun regarded her with compassion.

"She is a pitiful sight. There is almost nothing left of her but her mind."

"If that," Remo grunted, restoring the silver pen to the universal socket on the wheelchair armrest. "Let's go, Little Father."

And as they started from the room, Pearl Clancy grasped the pen and pushed it forward. The wheelchair whined after them, and Pearl Clancy tried to run them down.

They walked faster.

Then Pearl Clancy bugged out her eyes, bringing her outstretched forefingers to her slack mouth. They began wriggling up and down, in and out.

"She is still following us," Chiun told Remo.

"Big deal."

And from the gray disorder of Pearl Clancy's hair emerged red matchstick heads that split to reveal curving black fangs.

Walking along, Remo felt something in his hair, and brushed it off. He stomped the scuttling red thing into the floor.

"Musta missed one," he muttered.

"You smell of that harlot again," Chiun sniffed.

Then one landed on the bald top of his head.

The Master of Sinanju hissed, "What is this?" and shook his head once sharply.

A jumping spider landed in a corner and skittered out again. It lifted itself up on its rear set of legs and wriggled its fangs in their direction.

And behind them, Pearl Clancy wriggled her forefingers back.

As they watched, the jumping spider crouched and launched itself at her head. It crawled into her hair as two more heads poked out, separating.

"Chiun, do you see what I see?" Remo said.

"She is a Spider Diva too!" Chiun cried.

And Pearl Clancy leered at them, drool leaking from her slack mouth.

Two spiders jumped, one for Remo and one for Chiun.

They fended them off with quick blows, bringing their heels down on the dying things as soon as they hit the floor.

That seemed to be the end of the spiders.

"Remo, do not stand there. Dispatch that evil creature!"

"Hey, I don't snuff old ladies."

"I will not lower myself to kill an old woman."

"Well, I took care of Nalini."

"And you may take care of this one too," said Chiun.

"No way, Chiun. I'm not Dr. Doom."

Remo blinked. The Master of Sinanju looked up into his pupil's face.

"Maybe we'd better call Smith on this one," Remo muttered, keeping his distance from the agitated woman bouncing helplessly in her chair.

When Remo finished explaining himself, Harold Smith said, "Yes, I know."

"What do you mean, you know?" Remo said hotly.

"I deduced the truth-too late to communicate it to you. But it appears that you have neutralized the situation."

"Except for this old dingbat. I won't do her and neither will Chiun. Sorry."

"Have you secured the house?" Smith asked after a moment.

"There's a guard around somewhere, but that's all."

"Lock him up somewhere and keep Thrush Limburger out of sight," said Smith.

"And?"

"Wait."

"For who?"

Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian answered his beeper at a payphone outside San Francisco. Listening as his secretary informed him of the urgent need for his services in Massachusetts, his cracked dry lips quirked into a thin smile.

"Tell them I am on my way," he said, and drove his hearse to the airport. There was no business in California for him anyway.

He arrived at the walled compound as dawn was breaking. The electric gates opened automatically and he drove up the driveway past a guard in a box who seemed to be asleep, an empty liquor bottle in one hand.

The door opened before he could touch the pushbell.

"What kept you?" a man's voice said impatiently.

"Why is it so dark in here?" Dr. Gregorian wondered, looking around. There was a tall man standing in the gloomy vestibule. His face was indistinct. It was very dirty, as if smeared with coal dust.

"Power outage. It's straight ahead. Past the two doors. Here's a pillow."

"Pillow?"

"She specifically asked to be suffocated with her favorite pillow."

"But I have brought my medicide machine. Most people prefer to be eased across the River Styx chemically, I have found."

"Not this time. If you can't grant a dying woman's final wish, we'll get someone who can."

"That would be illegal. I offer physician-assisted suicide, not murder."

"I guess I had you wrong," the man said with a hint of flat amusement in his voice.

"I could do both, I suppose . . . ."

"Now you're talking."

"I will need to be alone with her," Dr. Gregorian said. "There must be no witnesses."

"Be gentle with her. She's as old as the hills."

"This should have been done long ago, you know. To allow a person to reach this state of debilitation, it's just criminal."

"Couldn't agree with you more," said the faceless man.

Dr. Gregorian stepped through the door and closed it behind him.

Thirty minutes later, he emerged, flushed of face, his eyes feverishly bright, his medicide machine tucked under one skinny arm.

"How'd it go?" asked the male voice.

"She struggled more than I expected."

"You look kinda funny. Hope you didn't catch anything."

"No, no," Dr. Gregorian said absently. "I always use a condom."

"What?"

"I mean, I always take precautions against infection."

"You dried-up old ghoul! No wonder you snuff only women!"

"You misunderstood me, I assure you." Dr. Gregorian suddenly passed a hand over his face. "I don't feel very well."

"Uh-oh."

"What is it?"

"The old bat had contracted HELP. Hope you didn't catch it."

Dr. Gregorian blinked. "HELP? But I have eaten no bugs."

"Not even one? Back at Nirvana West?"

"How did you know I have been to Nirvana West?"

"The same way I know you've killed your last little old lady. I was there and I saw a lot of HELP victims. You look just like one."

Dr. Gregorian took an involuntary step backward. "You-you mean I'm dying?"

"Your eyeballs are still white. That means you've got forty-eight hours."

"But I have so much work to do. So much suffering to end. My life's work will die with me." Dr. Gregorian looked back at the closed doors. "Should I-should I go back for seconds?"

"Not a good idea since the police are going to be here any minute now."

"What good will they do?"

"For you, not much. But when they find out you snuffed Senator Clancy's mother without family permission, they'll probably lock you up for Murder One."

"But I have your permission. You told me over the phone it was your mother."

"Not me. You must have talked to somebody else."

"I was asked to come here."

"You got that in writing?"

Dr. Gregorian's black eyes went dull. "No."

"Malpractice lawyers love guys like you."

Dr. Gregorian looked at his medicide machine.

"I think I need some of my own medicine. Could you help me?"

"Sorry, I have better things to do."

Woodenly, Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian sat himself down on the hard pine floor and hooked himself up. He was about to trip the switch that would pour the painless barbiturates into his own bloodstream when a tiny old Asian stepped from the shadows and said, "Next time, demand a fair price for correct services."

His last thoughts were a confused question. What did that little man mean?

When the police came, they recognized Mordaunt Gregorian from his TV appearances. No one could tell if he was dead or not, because he looked the same in life as he had in death. Which was to say, dead.

Just to be sure, they cuffed the corpse before they shoved it into the body bag.

Chapter 30

"It is obvious," Harold Smith was saying two days later, "that Pearl Clancy was the true Eldress."

"No way she was traipsing around Nirvana West, whispering in people's ears," Remo said. He was in the kitchen of his home, steaming rice for the midday meal, the telephone receiver cradled under his chin. It buzzed with Smith's lemony tones.

"She was the Eldress, but Nalini Toshi served as her eyes, ears, and when necessary, personal assassin. It was her voice that spoke to Karl Sagacious and Theodore Magarac, precipitating the events that led to the discovery of the so-called thunderbug, the founding of PAPA and all the events that followed."

"The whole thing was loony, trying to get Blotto Clancy back on the presidential fast track."

"It had been a Clancy dream-some might say obsession-to get one of their sons elected President," Smith said.

"At the rate new Clancys are entering politics these days," Remo sighed, "it's bound to happen one of these days."

"Perhaps in your lifetime, Remo. But not in mine. In any case, we need not fear for Senator Clancy running for high office again."

"Why not?"

"It was announced today that Senator Clancy is vacating his Senate seat."

Remo checked the rice. It was almost done. "Grief over his mother's death?" he asked.

"Not from the sound of his plans. He has also filed for divorce and run off to Tahiti with his secretary."

"Guess the only thing keeping him in politics was family pressure," said Remo. "Do we go after him?"

"Not necessary. Acting on statements Thrush Limburger made to the FBI, three of Clancy's aides have been arrested for the Limburger kidnapping. They have confessed and have implicated the senator. Extradition may be difficult, but Clancy appears to be not much more than a drink-sodden pawn to his mother's ambitions. Needless to say, the HELP bill has been quietly killed in committee."

"One thing I don't understand. What was all that finger wriggling about?"

"I have looked into that, Remo. It is believed that arachnids, specifically certain species of jumping spider, communicate through semaphorelike signals using their palpi."

"Their what?"

"Palpi. They are in the nature of-um-sexual organs and situated on either side of a spider's head. From the behavior both the Toshi woman and Pearl Clancy exhibited, it appears they were bugging their eyes to give them the semblance of a spider's unwinking orbs, their fingers mimicking the palp signals. Obviously, this was a method of directing the deadly spiders to specific actions. The perfume scent you describe was some sort of olfactory signal to bite the wearer. As well as a natural pheromone of some sort, no doubt passed down along with the secret of communicating with spiders from Spider Diva to Spider Diva."

"That would explain why I couldn't keep my hands off her, even when I knew better," Remo said. "So why didn't the spiders just bite Nalini?"

"Perhaps they did. Perhaps she had built up an immunity to the spider venom. More likely, the spiders considered her one of their own species. No doubt the Toshi woman passed her secrets on to Pearl Clancy. The finger signals were clearly their method of communicating with one another."

"I'll try explaining that to Chiun, but I'm not sure he's gonna believe it. I'm not sure I do."

"Where is Master Chiun?"

"Upstairs, listening to Thrush Limburger."

"I have been monitoring his broadcast as well. He seems to have single-handedly quelled the HELP scare. Bug-eating has tailed off now that people understand the bug is neither a disease carrier nor nutritionally fulfilling."

"Tail off? What's wrong with stopping altogether?"

"Certain people with eating disorders have been unable to cease eating them. Anorexics, mostly."

"Anything that can be done about that?"

"The FDA is looking into banning the bug, but we may have underground bug-eating in this country for years to come."

"Different strokes for different folks," said Remo. "How did the President take the news?"

Smith cleared his throat nervously. "The President is, as you know, a longtime admirer of the Clancy clan and their contribution to American politics. And Senator Clancy was one of his most important political allies in the Senate."

"He blew his top, huh?"

"He was relieved to know he would not have to fight Senator Clancy for his party's nomination in the next presidential election," said Smith.

"I guess he owes us one."

"He was not entirely pleased, since we were responsible for restoring Thrush Limburger to the airwaves again."

"Maybe there's something to that windbag after all," said Remo, laughing.

Later, rice in hand, Remo went upstairs, where the Master of Sinanju was seated on a tatami mat before a clock radio that was booming in sympathy with the voice of Thrush Limburger.

Limburger was saying, "Put away your sunblock, my friends. There is no ozone hole over northern California. But if you are a regular listener to this show, you knew that. Because here at the TTT Network, we always-but always-tell the truth."

"I guess he turned out to be useful after all," said Remo.

"Hush," admonished Chiun.

Limburger went on. "And there is no HELP. Oh, we have a lot of dead people out in California. But they're not dead because they've taken a bite from Ingraticus Avalonicus, an insect so retarded it commits suicide at the first opportunity. They're dead-and you might want to write this down-they're dead because they were the bitee, not the biter. Doing the biting-listen to these verb endings carefully now-is a rather venomous tropical spider salted into the California wilderness. Mercifully, they're all dead now, thanks to me and Mother Nature."

"Mother Nature!" said Remo. "Where does he get that?"

"You've heard me tell you," boomed Thrush Limburger, "that the California drought is no end-of-the-world catastrophe, but a mere inevitable cycle of nature, serving some useful but as yet unfathomable purpose in the great scheme of things. Well, I'm here to tell you, that purpose revealed itself. Yes, it did. Because if we hadn't had that drought, and if those northern California grasses hadn't been so crackly dry, and a careless match had not been dropped, we'd still have a jumping spider infestation out there on the coast and we'd still be here talking about Human Environmental Liability Paradox, the virus that does not, and never did exist. Investigated, unmasked, and eradicated by Yours Truly. Thrush Limburger."

A musical chime began ringing, signaling the close of another broadcast.

And without warning, the Master of Sinanju brought his hand crashing down on the radio.

"What'd he say to tick you off?" Remo demanded.

"It is not what he said, it is what he did not say."

"Which is?"

"He did not give proper credit where proper credit is due."

"He can't give us any credit. He doesn't even know who we are."

"He could have dropped a hint. I would have settled for a hint. Even a niggling one."

"You wouldn't have settled for anything less than a guest spot on his show and you know it."

"He does not have guests," Chiun spat. "He is an air hog. It is bad enough that he is a credit hog, but he is an air hog too."

"Forget him. I cooked you some of your favorite rice."

"I am not hungry. Instead, fetch me my scrolls. If that loud, fat white will not give Sinanju proper credit, at least I will record the truth for future generations. Taking care to correctly spell Flush Hamburger's name, of course."

And Remo laughed. After Nirvana West, it was good to be home again-such as it was.