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First edition May 1998 ISBN 0-373-63226-6

Special thanks and acknowledgment to James Mullaney and Daisy Snaggers for their contribution to this work.

PROPHET OF DOOM

All rights reserved. Except for use in any review, the reproduction or utilization of this work in whole or in part in any form by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including xerography, photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, is forbidden without the written permission of the publisher, Worldwide Library, 225 Duncan Mill Road, Don Mills, Ontario, Canada M3B 3K9.

Printed in U.S.A.

To Father John Conneil. And the Glorious House of Sinanju.

PROLOGUE

She brought the goat as payment.

Some people brought jewels or perfume. Those who were poor brought food or even wine to Delphi. Gold was an offering worthy of a god. But without any of these things available to her, Nausicaa brought the goat that had been her responsibility ever since she had gone to live with her father's brother in Thebes.

Her uncle would be angry when he learned that the animal had been used in sacrifice at the temple in Delphi, but it was the only thing Nausicaa possessed that would be acceptable to the god of the smoke.

Not that the Pythia itself was a god. The Pythia of the Temple of Apollo was a servant. Within the vapor—the knisa—that flowed from the living rock inside the temple, there dwelled a spirit who infected any who sat above it. When the vapor was inhaled, the servant would become in its very essence the spirit of the Pythia. Whoever was fortunate enough to become Pythia was given the gift to prophesy.

As a result of its mysterious Oracle, Delphi attracted pilgrims from every corner of Greece who wished to see into the future. Because of this, the spirit of the Pythia was granted special status as a conduit to the gods.

But the Pythia served a greater master, the. sun god Apollo, who daily led his flaming chariot across the heavens.

It was the powerful Apollo, son of Zeus, to whom Nausicaa silently prayed as she made her way up the well-trampled road to the temple on the hill.

Her question for the Pythia would surely seem petty to some. Her uncle had arranged for her to marry the son of a prosperous neighboring farmer, but Nausicaa was opposed to the union. She would slaughter the goat before the Pythia and then ask the Oracle if the marriage was her true destiny. If the Pythia foretold this was her future, she would surrender herself to the will of her uncle and return with her slave, Tyrtaeus, to Thebes. Reluctantly.

When Nausicaa finally laid eyes on the magnificent Temple of Apollo, she was awed by the sight. The building was huge. Bigger than any other man-made structure Nausicaa had seen in all of her fifteen years.

The walls were towering vertical sheets of the smoothest quarry rock. Creamy white marble statuary dotted the landscape along the path up to the main entrance of the temple. Gleaming bronze likenesses of Apollo, carved with painstaking detail by the finest craftsmen in Greece, stood watch over the huge archway into the temple. Particular attention was paid in many of the statues to Apollo's defeat of the mighty scrpi-iit Python near Delphi, when the sun god was only an inlant. The Pythia was named thusly because of this event in the young god's life.

At the cntryway Nausicaa was confronted by one of the white-robed temple priests who demanded the customary fee before he would allow her entry. Meekly

Nausicaa offered him the cloth sack that she had brought. In the bag she had placed the pelanos, which was a type of cake, for payment to the lesser priests.

After inspecting it, the man seemed satisfied with the gift and he pulled the drawstring closed on the bag. Putting the sack aside, he led Nausicaa into the bowels of the temple.

Once inside, Nausicaa noticed the other priests, who stood in the darker recesses of the temple, motioning excitedly toward her. Some nodded and whispered among themselves as if some momentous decision had been made.

The hungry looks they gave her as she was led through the inner chambers made her uncomfortable. As they walked through chamber after massive chamber, the stares from Apollo's priests became more intense. She realized with growing concern as they negotiated the labyrinthine corridors that the world outside was getting farther and farther away.

Nausicaa began to feel uneasy. Her mouth felt dry.

When they at last reached the entryway to the Pythia Pit, the slave, Tyrtaeus, was made to remain behind. Alone and with a feeling of deep foreboding, Nausicaa followed the priest into the Pythia Pit.

Inside, the room was filled with a choking yellow smoke. Nausicaa knew that the Pythia divined the future by inhaling the noxious sulphur fumes, but she hadn't expected the smell to be so strong. A fine yellow film of sulphur powder coated the floor and walls of the inner chamber. Nausicaa began coughing uncontrollably as another priest came forward and led her goat up to the platform on which the Pythia sat.

The temple had been constructed around the rocky

fissure through which the breath of Apollo had first appeared, and so the floor of the Pythia Pit resembled the hillsides of the region.

The goat left tiny hoofprints in the yellow sulphur powder as the priest led the unwitting animal to the top of the hill. There, he held the creature firmly in place as he removed a ceremonial dagger from his belt. With a practiced motion the priest swiftly slit the animal's throat. The goat squirmed in pain and fright as a fountain of thick red blood erupted from its throat and poured out into the cleft in the mountainside.

As she watched the ritual from the floor of the chamber, Nausicaa grew more fearful. Perhaps she should have stayed at home and married the farmer's son. Since the death of her father, her life had been one of hardship, and the young farmer could offer her a warm home and freedom from want for the rest of her days.

There was something else that had troubled her since entering this inner chamber. If the Pythia was to predict Nausicaa's future—then where was the girl through which the Pythia spoke?

For the stool on which the young female servant of Apollo was meant to sit was vacant.

This, above all else, filled Nausicaa's heart with fright.

Nausicaa resolved to return to Thebes, to surrender It) the life her uncle had arranged for her. She would leave the oracles of the Pythia to generals and kings.

She turned to hurry from the temple—but a group of priests barred her way. She hadn't even heard them enter the room behind her. Now they blocked her path.

She pleaded with them to let her pass, but the priests didn't listen. They took up a low, lyrical chant.

Nausicaa tried to go around them, but they grabbed her arms and held her fast. As she screamed and struggled, they carried her slowly, almost reverentially up the incline to the rocky crevice. Nausicaa saw through frightened tears the yellow smoke pouring out of the mountainside in steadier bursts, keeping time with the chants of Apollo's priests.

For the first time she saw that the flat top of the tiny hill was moving in a strange, undulating pattern. She realized in horror that the entire upper platform was covered with squirming, wriggling snakes. The serpents slid atop one another, across the bare feet of Apollo's priests and in and out of the giant cleft in the earth through which the noxious smoke issued.

The stool on which the Pythia interpreted the oracles sat vacant. Nausicaa wept openly as many powerful hands forced her upon the small wooden tripod. The thick smell of sulphur wafted up through the rock, filling her nostrils, overpowering her reeling senses.

The chanting of the priests grew louder, more frenzied.

Nausicaa's head felt as though it had filled with the yellow smoke. Slick brownish bodies of dozens of slithering snakes moved with sickening slowness across her sandals, coiling up around her naked ankles.

She attempted a last scream, but the ecstatic cries of the priests muffled her voice so that only a whimper escaped.

Terror clogged her throat.

She felt the snakes tighten about her ankles. Cool,

flicking tongues were exploring her knees, her thighs. She could feel dry, scaly muscles sliding slowly across her neck—but it no longer seemed to matter.

Something terrible was happening inside her head.

The smoke continued to pour out of the crevice, surrounding her with its nasty old-egg stink. She became dizzy and fatigued. Nausicaa tried to blink at the sensation, but her eyes no longer worked. She thought hard on this, and realized that her eyes still worked. It was only that they no longer worked for her.

Through a strange, shifting haze, Nausicaa saw the temple priests surround her body, ankle deep in slithering snakes, but she was no longer in her body. She was beyond it, above it.

Somewhere from a distant, indistinct place her father was beckoning her to join him, and she left the temple and its chanting priests along with her body as she moved into a place of light and warmth.

As her thoughts fluttered free, a strong alien presence that had taken root somewhere in a far-off place within her mind told her that the events of this last day in her young life would have resonance down through the ages, and that the chain that began here would end as it was foretold.

The words spoken in her mind foretold that when East met West, a god of the past would meet a god of the distant future.

There was only one word in the prophecy Nausicaa did not understand, and as her essence vanished into the ethereal nothingness, that single word and its significance—along with all the troubles of her earthly self—vanished behind her.

The word she did not understand was "Sinanju."

Chapter one

This day the Prophetess foretold a great fire that would wash down from the mountains and scorch the valley below. The ground would quake beneath a stampede of mighty beasts, and the earth would give up its dead.

There was much excited discussion among the new arrivals upon hearing of the catastrophe that would soon befall mankind. They looked up and around as if the end were at hand, which it was, according to the pamphlets they had received upon passing through the high steel gates.

The sky was a warm pastel haze, the Wyoming sun a small spark of yellow white against the sea of ice blue. There wasn't much in the way of apocalyptic activity at present, but the Prophetess insisted it was on the way, and they had been assured that the Prophetess was never, ever wrong.

"Will the seas turn to blood, like in Revelations?" someone asked fearfully.

The Prophetess considered. "Like the blood of a thousand times a thousand souls," she intoned.

There were gasps.

"Will the sky darken?"

The Prophetess allowed that it would. "The sky will I turn the color of death for seven days, and on the

seventh it will be torn asunder and a hail of holy fire will pelt the valley below." Pelt? She'd have to reconsider that word. It didn't sound sufficiently lyrical, let alone apocalyptic.

The crowd was enraptured. "When will this come to pass?" they chorused.

The Prophetess held her right hand to the heavens, as if the sun's rays against her palm were the source of divine inspiration. Her hand made an arc through the still air as she thumped the heel of the long hickory staff clutched in her left hand against the ground three times, making tiny circular marks in the dirt of the compound. Puffs of reddish dust rose and fell as she considered the question.

Those gathered held their breath as the seconds slipped away.

The Prophetess stepped up onto the broad wooden porch of the ranch house so that the crowd, clumped together at the end of the long road leading up from the main gate, was a full head-length beneath her. It was a well-rehearsed move and one that placed her in a clear position of authority.

She suppressed a shudder as the air-conditioned coolness poured out through the open door of the house onto her back.

At last the Prophetess spoke. "It will happen in the time of which I have spoken and in the manner in which I have foretold." She said it with certainty. Her blue eyes, like azure pools, held each of theirs in turn.

There was power in the eyes. And wisdom. Those determined, unwavering eyes had converted many a disbeliever, leading the new faithful over to the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth like

Moses leading the Hebrews through the parted waters of the Red Sea.

At least that was how the faithful saw themselves. Esther Clear-Seer, the divine Prophetess, was nicknamed "Yogi Mom" by her followers. As founder and Beatific Head of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth, and possessing a mystifying gift of prognostication, she saw her followers less as Levites than as lemmings. They streamed willingly to Esther's wilderness church and flung themselves off the cliffs of reason with an almost violent eagerness.

This new group was no exception. They had been driven by bus from the nearby town of Thermopolis, Wyoming, to the Truth Church ranch for religious indoctrination. Esther could see from their naive, hopeful expressions that they were ripe for the picking.

There were about a dozen of them, men and women in their twenties and thirties. They stood there in the dirt of the arrival center of Ranch Ragnarok—duffel bags, knapsacks and third-generation suitcases bursting open at their feet—and Esther knew that they were all hers.

She had seen their type before. Despondent, lonely, downtrodden. These were her flock: people with an emptiness in their barren lives. They looked to Yogi Mom for deliverance. Many such converts were toiling on the grounds of the ranch or in the concrete bunkers beneath her gold-sandaled feet.

Some in this latest batch thought it odd that heaven could be achieved by sheer brute force, for that was the impression one got upon seeing the well-armed squads of Truth Church disciples who milled about at the periphery of the indoctrination area. It seemed that

everyone on this side of the Ranch Ragnarok gates carried some kind of pistol or rifle or machine gun. The new faithful were told in no uncertain terms that force was sometimes necessary to ensure harmony of spirit. They learned, soon enough, to adhere to this dictum, lest they find themselves staring down a 700-rounds-per-minute barrel of divine retribution.

Thus, surprisingly few questioned the wisdom of Esther Clear-Seer. Most who had joined the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth had nowhere else to turn. These were society's outcasts, desperate for something to cling to. Esther Clear-Seer gave them hope, family, community. A future. Her assurances that they would be the survivors of the coming Dark Times made them somehow special. And in the end, special was all they had to cling to.

These new arrivals were no different. Failure showed through the glazed look in their eyes and sat across their slouched shoulders. The world had dealt them many harsh blows, they believed, and they longed for some deus ex machina to alleviate their troubles.

Al Ranch Ragnarok in the piney woods of Wyoming, I hey were promised the secrets of the future and pmUMion Horn the things that were to come.

<)l miii.Ht-. nothing was ever given away, free of char yy

(in ilit* sU-ps of her sprawling ranch house, Esther ('Itai Si ti addressed this latest motley collection of human flotsan and jetsam.

"You all realize that you must suspend your belief in the rational. For to become one with truth is to that is false. Beyond those walls—" with

her staff she indicated the high hurricane fence and gun towers surrounding the ranch "—lies falsehood. Within these walls you will find safety and contentment. And spiritual knowledge. When the world as you know it has turned to ash, only those of us inside this fortress will be spared the ravages of the Dark Times." Her voice became a husky threat. "And you can only pass through to salvation when you have been stripped of all worldly trappings." With that she beckoned with her staff and, with a solemn bow of the head, backed through the open door behind her.

When she was gone, some of the older faithful, the few who had been around since Esther Clear-Seer had founded the Truth Church, descended like pack animals and began the inevitable shake-down of the new recruits. Cash was taken, credit cards impounded, bank books signed over, personal belongings searched. It only took a matter of minutes before the worldly trappings of the newly converted became the worldly trappings of Esther Clear-Seer.

Esther sighed inwardly as she watched the scene through the large bay window in the air-conditioned coolness of her Meditation Chapel.

Just another day in the God game.

Of course, the line she had fed this group was nothing new. She had predicted the whole "mountain, fire, burning valley, stampeding death" scenario before. In fact, she had given this particular prediction to every new arrival since Day One.

And when these events failed to come to pass, she reminded the skeptical that she had never mentioned what mountain or which valley, and if someone had the temerity to press further, she invariably ducked the

question and accused the questioner of heresy in shrill, demanding terms.

Heresy was always a good dodge, Esther Clear-Seer held. You could get away with nearly anything by calling someone a heretic.

But Esther didn't much care for heresy. She felt it was a sign of personal failure when she had to cast out one of her own flock, for when Esther Clear-Seer excommunicated someone, he or she remained excommunicated. There were about two dozen mounds of overturned earth baking in the Wyoming sun to attest to that fact.

No, maintaining faith was the real challenge, and no doubt about it: when choosing between either faith or heresy, faith was the far more lucrative.

All this Esther considered as she poured herself a tumbler of Scotch—a drink that was forbidden, as was all liquor, to her faithful acolytes—and slumped back into the tension-relieving vibrating recliner she had bought with proceeds donated by an unemployed auto mechanic from Duluth. She took a sip of the amber liquid from the heavy, hand-etched crystal and watched through drooping blue eyelids the activity outside her window.

There was some kind of problem out there.

It seemed that one of the new recruits was arguing with her acolytes.

She had noticed the funny little man, a Mediterranean type, when the rest of the group had descended from the rickety old bus that now sat in an overgrown patch of weeds near the gate.

He was older than the others, perhaps in his late forties, and he had a much younger girl with him who

seemed to follow him, step by step, wherever he went. When Esther had first seen him, he was in his shirtsleeves, having doffed his suit jacket, draping it over his forearms. But his clasped hands rested too far from his body, as if he was hiding something. Esther assumed that he was carrying something of personal value underneath the suit jacket. Whatever it was, her men would strip him of it when the time came.

Esther had dismissed the man from her thoughts. Now, watching with increasing concern, she hoped her Truth Church acolytes would resolve the situation peacefully. Unfortunately it seemed as though they were paralyzed with inaction.

The man barked something at them but Esther didn't catch it through the window.

The acolytes hesitated. This was not good. Why were they just standing there? Where was Truth Church discipline?

Quickly Esther Clear-Seer pressed the button that stopped the vibrating motion of her recliner.

The man snapped again. Even if Esther couldn't hear what he was saying, she could see her men backing off. The new recruits looked at the guards and at one another fearfully, faces confused.

"Damn!" Esther cursed. "This is my damn fault." Almost a year before, her acolytes had administered ultimate chastisement against a young man who had refused to surrender his wallet upon arrival. As a result, the rest of the group he had arrived with, who were not yet fully indoctrinated into the ways of the Truth Church and capable of talking to the authorities, were stricken from church rolls, as well. No one ever asked about them.

Since then, there had been a standing order, issued by the Prophetess herself, that no one was to be shot in the presence of any recruit still in the six-month initiation program.

That order came back to haunt her as she watched the small wiry man shove his way through the group of armed guards and gesture boldly toward the sprawling split-log ranch house. His hand snaked back under his rumpled jacket tail. His young companion followed, zombie like, in his wake.

The guards almost drew down on him, but the man was talking reasonably now. He gestured crisply toward the ranch. He had a definite way about him. Commanding.

The guards looked to one another in confusion.

The little man took this indecision as an opening and marched boldly past the guards, the girl following dutifully behind.

"Shit," spake Her Beatific Oneness.

She got up and went to the door.

The guards were behind him when she opened the door on the strange little man and his hidden package. Their confusion had already given way to alarm at his disturbing their divine leader. Their weapons were trained directly at the man's back.

He spoke without preamble. "A small biotechnical firm in Massachusetts has gone public as of 9:00 a.m. today," he said. "I have placed an order in your name. Your holdings have by now tripled in price. By closing today, you will have made a profit of 78,000 dollars on a ten-thousand-dollar initial investment, and by noon tomorrow it will pass the hundred-thousand-dollar mark. You may check with your broker to verify

this information. Until then, I would recommend that you instruct your followers to refrain from shooting me.

The man smiled a tight-lipped smile, told Esther the name of the company and took a seat on the small wooden bench beside her door. The girl stood dutifully beside him.

Esther was at a loss for words. The other recruits had seen all of what was going on and were watching for a reaction. The little man just calmly sat there. He tucked his coattails around the top of whatever he was holding in his lap. His eyes were black and unblinking, and his unwavering gaze reminded Esther of a dead-eyed reptile.

That decided Esther Clear-Seer.

She called her broker.

Yes, the information was true. Yes, if she had invested ten thousand when the exchange opened, she would have tripled her investment by this time. And did Esther want to sink some money into Biotechnics, Inc.?

Esther hung up the phone and went out to her porch. The man was wearing his jacket now, and there was something on the bench beside him.

"What's your game?" she asked the strange little man.

"You are rich?" he asked, standing.

Esther glanced at her acolytes. "I am rich in the things that matter," she pronounced boldly. She dismissed the guards, ordering them to deal with the other recruits. When the guards were gone, she leaned over to the little man, whispering, "What's your game? Insider trading?"

The man's smile broadened. Somehow the expression made his face appear even more reptilian. "In a sense," he admitted. He straightened himself up to his full height, but even so, Esther guessed that he could not be more than five foot five. "My name is Mark Kaspar," he said, "and we are destined, you and I, to become partners in the greatest enterprise in modern history." The smile flickered and faded, in an almost too-practiced manner, to be replaced by a more serious expression.

"We should go inside and talk." He collected his package from the bench and headed for the door. The dead-eyed girl followed, mute.

For the first time Esther clearly saw the item he hefted from the tiny wooden bench. It was a large carved stone urn with a heavy cracked lid. On the sides were intricate raised images of intertwined snakes that had been worn smooth with age.

As the strange man passed into her home, Esther Clear-Seer caught the pungent odor of rotten eggs.

Chapter Two

His name was Remo, and he was tired of repeating it. "Remo!" he shouted for the third time to the umpteenth set of nerve-deafened eardrums.

"Zemo?" asked the elderly woman. She checked a clipboard on her desk. The clipboard was upside down. "Oh, dear," she clucked.

"I'm looking for Dr. Coffin," Remo explained as she made a vain attempt to search for the name Zemo Welby on the upside-down visitor's list.

The woman seemed lost somewhere on the page before her. When she finally looked up, it was as if she saw Remo for the first time. "Oh, hello," she said with a quavering smile. "Name?"

"Lawrence Welk," sighed Remo, walking past her and up the hall.

That was at the fourth-floor duty station. Things had gone pretty much the same at the third-floor duty station, the second-floor duty station, the information booth in the lobby and the guard's shack at the main gate of Sunnyville Retirement Community in Tampa,

Florida.

No one Remo encountered was a day under eighty.

He wasn't surprised. Upstairs had told him that this would probably be the case. There were only six

members of the Sunnyville staff drawing a regular salary and, Remo was told, the half-dozen individuals he was after were fairly young and not likely to be doing anything more strenuous than overseeing the real Sunnyville workers.

It was no secret that Sunnyville thought the problem with most retirement homes was that the residents felt used up; they were of no account, their days as contributing members of society behind them.

It was with this mind-set that the upper echelon at Sunnyville reinvented the entire nursing-home concept from the ground up. The result was a pioneering retirement community boasting a totally new method of dealing with the elderly and infirm. They worked them like slaves. Some of the aged were put to work in the kitchen preparing the daily gruel. Those who were still lucid were put to work in administration, answering phones, filing or typing. The balance toiled as groundskeepers, cleaning women, carpenters and janitors.

In recent months, Sunnyville had made national news when an eighty-five-year-old retiree, tasked to cut down orange trees in the Sunnyville grove, was stricken simultaneously with a stroke, partial paralysis and a hemorrhaging occipital lobe. A cheery Sunnyville spokesperson, trying to happy-spin the "unfortunate, unavoidable incident," theorized the man's brain was probably already uncontrollably bleeding when he dropped the chain saw on his leg.

Once the story died down, Sunnyville lawyers opted for an out-of-court settlement, with a strict gag order. And so the matter faded from public view. But not in all quarters.

Remo had been told about a rumor that Sunnyville had recently refined its lucrative business. Word going around was that whoever was too tired or old to work any longer, would suddenly succumb to death due to "natural causes." Just like that. And the vacant bed and job would go to the person next on Sunnyville's phone-book-sized waiting list.

Remo didn't bother to ask how the word got out. A private memo, some loose talk in a bar—it didn't matter to him. An assignment was an assignment.

Remo strolled down the antiseptic-smelling hallway, his thick-wristed hands swinging casually at his sides. Today his T-shirt was crisply white, his chinos black.

The building almost looked abandoned. The doors to the private rooms were closed. Remo could hear the faint rasp of asthmatic breathing coming from several of them.

The hallway itself was the opposite of his image of a nursing home. There were no laundry baskets, chairs, stools or medicine carts parked haphazardly about. Nor were there any elderly people bent over walkers or slowly pushing their blue-veined hands over the rubber tires of wheelchairs. It was as if the residents were under lockdown.

And there was something else. Something that lingered beneath the thick, combined odors of a thousand different prescription drugs.

It was fear.

There was no mistaking it. The smell was almost palpable.

It clung to the corridor walls, and no matter how many gallons of antiseptic cleansers were applied daily

by overworked retirees, the odor couldn't be washed away.

Remo sensed the fear, though he didn't feel it himself, and he thought it odd that he could look back dispassionately on so strong an emotion.

When he was young, he had felt fear; but that was a million lifetimes ago, and at this point in his life he was able to remember the emotion as if it had been nothing more than a case of mild teenage acne.

The Sunnyville residents, however, didn't seem to have that option. The daily fear they lived with clung to them like garlic.

Perhaps, Remo thought, fear could be distilled like musk or sold in concentrated form like a can of frozen orange juice. Instant fear. Just add water. He decided that the market for prepackaged fear probably wasn't profitable enough. Why would people buy something they found in their everyday lives?

This in mind, he rounded a corner and nearly tripped over an elderly woman on her hands and knees on the floor.

A low, baleful moan escaped between the woman's parched and cracking lips. Her swollen, arthritic hands were extended before her. The flaking, bloated fingers of her right hand seemed to be clutching something as she painfully inched forward.

Remo gently took hold of the woman's birdlike shoulders and lifted her to her feet.

She wobbled unsteadily and leaned one gnarled hand against the wall for support, the other dangling by her side in a loose fist.

"Are you all right?" asked Remo softly.

"I'm not finished," the woman said. She panted as

she forced the words out. "Please, I can finish." She struggled to make a fist. "There," she said triumphantly. "See? I can still do it. It's not so hard. Really."

She tried to get back to her knees, but Remo's seemingly gentle touch on her upper arms held her firmly in place.

"Let me take you to your room," he said softly.

Sudden concern showed in her eyes. ' 'Are you with Dr. Coffin?"

"No," Remo admitted.

"Oh, dear," the woman said. What little color she had drained from her face, and her exhausted frame tipped against the wall. "You mustn't tell them I spoke with you," she said desperately. "Please. They can't find out." Her watery eyes darted up and down the empty hallway in fear.

"Relax," said Remo quietly. With great delicacy he pulled the woman upright. "Everything's going to be just fine. Is there a nurse around here somewhere?"

"No!" she shrieked. She pulled away from Remo's grip with surprising agility. "Not the nurses! Please," she begged, her voice now muted. "Please, just leave. Leave me alone."

"Can I help you with something?" a voice behind Remo asked icily.

Remo turned to see a severe-looking woman standing near the empty nurses' station down the hallway. The knuckles of her plump hands rested on her boxy hips, and her eyes shot daggers at him. Her plain hair was pulled back in a bun so tight her eyes bugged out. She sashayed over to Remo, the coarse fabric of her heavy tweed skirt swinging like Quasimodo's bell.

"Oh, no," groaned the old woman. "I'm fine, Dr. Coffin. Honestly. See? I'm working." Using the wall as a brace, she slid slowly to the floor and unfolded a moistened ball of rag clutched in her hand. Remo watched in amazement as the woman—she looked ninety if she was a day—began scrubbing the floor wildly.

"See? I'm still working. And happy," she added. "That's what I was telling this young man here. I couldn't be happier." Straining her neck, she looked up and forced a smile.

"This is ridiculous," Remo said, shaking his head. He drew the woman back to her feet.

"Stop that!" the old woman cried. "I'm not too old to work!" Her arms flailed as she tried to pull away from Remo.

"It's all right, Josephine," said Dr. Coffin. "You may go now."

"But I haven't finished scrubbing the floor yet. Please let me work!" The old woman was in tears. "I want to work!"

"I said you may go," snapped Dr. Coffin. Josephine turned her pitiful, red-rimmed eyes toward Remo and without another word shuffled painfully down the hall and out of sight.

"'So that our guests might enjoy their later years in quiet dignity and grace,'" said Remo, quoting from the Sunnyville brochure.

"Stuff it, Lean and Mean," snapped the woman. "What do you want?"

Remo shrugged. "Local reporter," he said. "Doing a piece for the Sunday supplement. Dr. Coffin, I presume?"

The nursing-home staffer suppressed a brief, mirthless smile. "Which local paper?" she sneered.

"Beats me," Remo admitted. "Daily something-or-other. Who pays attention to the masthead these days? I'm too busy racking up column inches. You up to an interview, Mrs. Coffin?"

"Doctor," she corrected. "Dr. Augusta Coffin." Her meaty face puckered painfully. Remo realized that this was what passed for Dr. Coffin's smile of triumph. "And you are no reporter," she added. With that, she whirled and, with a flash of thick calves, clomped over to the bare desk near the elevator foyer. With a stubby finger she dialed a security code on the old-fashioned rotary telephone.

"That's what my editor keeps saying," Remo said, "which is why I'm stuck doing Sunday fluff pieces." As he followed Dr. Coffin, he fumbled in the pockets of his new chinos for some paper but the best he could come up with was an Inspected By ##7 label. He held the tiny scrap of paper in the palm of his hand, ready to jot down notes when he suddenly remembered he had no pen or pencil.

Dr. Coffin didn't seem to care. She merely stood, bouncer-like, in front of the elevator doors, her arms folded across her crisply starched blouse.

"You've got other people here, don't you?" Remo asked. "Younger guys on the payroll? Where are they?"

Dr. Coffin ignored him.

"Is it true you recently unplugged an eighty-year-old woman from dialysis because her Medicare check was a day late?"

"I'm running a business here—not a charity." Dr.

Coffin's pug nose crinkled as she cast a sideways glance at Remo.

"Can I quote you on that?" Remo asked. He pretended to make a few scratch marks with his nonexistent pencil.

Dr. Coffin's gaze seemed to be hardening. "Who are you really?'' she asked, looking him up and down. The edge in her voice softened. She rubbed a shoulder against Remo's chest. Or tried to.

Remo dodged the meaty shoulder. "The woman died," he said.

"We all have to go sometime."

"I'm glad you feel that way," said Remo, deflecting a clumsy paw from the front of his trousers. "There have been nine other similar incidents here in the past month."

"A girl's got to keep busy," Dr. Coffin purred. "What's that cologne you're wearing?"

"Bee pheromones."

"Yowza, yowza." Padded fingers sought Remo's short dark hair.

"Oh, get real," said Remo. He smacked her thick fingers away. "I haven't got all night. My editor's a stickler for deadlines. Where are your accomplices?''

"Accomplices?" asked Augusta Coffin innocently. "We have nurses on staff at Sunnyville, but refer to them as associates, not accomplices. You make things sound so sinister." She ran her tongue across her thick red lips. "There's a vacant room just up the hall, sugar," she said suggestively.

Suddenly the elevator chimed, and the doors slid open.

Five burly men lumbered out as if joined at the hip.

The seams of their white cotton shorts were stretched to the bursting point as muscle fought fabric in a contest Remo was certain the fabric would lose.

The man at the fore of the group appraised Remo's lean frame. "Another Fed?" he asked Dr. Coffin. A pin over his breast pocket identified him as Roy Hark-ness, R.N.

Dr. Coffin's face was flushed. She smoothed her dress as if she and Remo had been discovered in flagrante delicto. "He says he's a reporter," she said to Roy, crossing her arms and plumping her ample bosom.

"He don't look like no reporter to me," one of the meat-piles said from the back. "Looks kind of faggy, in fact."

"That's not quite the look I was shooting for," said Remo. "I thought of going for the grizzled-news-vet approach, but opted for the cub-reporter persona instead. Now, how many of you are guilty of murder? Can I have a show of hands?" His invisible pencil hovered over his tiny notepaper.

Dr. Augusta Coffin sighed. "I suppose you have to take care of him now," she said to Roy.

"We can't let him escape," Roy suggested. He seemed puzzled that she even asked the question. "You want a piece of him?"

"In the worst way."

They looked at her.

I "I affect some women this way," offered Remo. "Just do it," Augusta Coffin said, a hint of regret in her voice. Roy and his male-nurse brigade escorted Remo onto the waiting elevator, piling in around the edge of the

tiny car like a solid, living wall. The elevator groaned under the weight as Roy stabbed at the Down button.

"Isn't there a weight limit on these things?" asked Remo. '"Cause if there is, you're it." He pointed at a nearby pectoral muscle that looked like a beef flank.

"What agency are you with?" Roy demanded.

"Agency?" said Remo, feigning surprise. "I told you. I'm cub reporter Remo Welby, hot on a story that's going to win me the big prize that all reporters dream of."

"Da Pulitzer?" suggested one of them.

"That's the one. I'm gonna win it hands down. Now, first nosy question—how many old people have you guys snuffed so far?"

"Apparently, one too few," said Roy.

The other nurses snorted.

The elevator stopped downstairs at a basement laundry room. The five nurses escorted Remo out into the room and fanned out in a circle, surrounding him.

Roy cracked his knuckles against his open palm. "Sorry about this, buddy," he said to Remo. "But business is business."

"I wouldn't know anything about business," Remo said. "I went to journalism school. They taught us to be suspicious of anyone who worked for a living. But if you want, I can put something special in your obituaries."

All live rushed him at once. Rippling arms and tree-trunk legs swung and flew in wild arcs around Remo's head. Remo yawned.

A meaty paw flashed at his face, and Remo leaned back. The fist swooped past his head and landed with a I hump on the temple of a male nurse closing in on

Remo. The man let out an "Oof and sank to the floor.

"Oh, now that isn't fair," said Remo.

Roy shot out a right hook that flattened the face of one of his comrades, tumbling him into a laundry basket. Soiled linen flew everywhere.

"Hey," said Remo. "You're not supposed to do it yourselves. Leave me something."

"Something this, buddy," growled Roy. He wrapped his arms around Remo's chest and squeezed. This was how he had finished the first government investigators who had come to nose around Sunnyville Retirement Community. Roy had snapped their spines like dry noodles.

The other men—even those injured—pulled themselves up to gather around their leader. They liked to watch Roy in action. Roy could bench-press a transmission. One of his favorite moves was to stretch his fingers all the way around the ankles of selected elderly patients and break both legs with one squeeze. He called it "making a wish."

But something wasn't right with this latest government snoop. The skinny guy hadn't even turned red yet. He seemed to be breathing, too. At least it didn't look as if he wasn't breathing. And he was whistling. The tune sounded like "Everything's Coming up Roses."

"Spiffy trick, Roy," Remo chirped. He slid from the huge man's grip like liquid margarine and trotted across the room. He scooped something up from the floor. "See if you recognize this one."

The men lunged all at once, Roy leading the charge.

"Hey, I didn't get my turn!" said Remo. He mixed

with the charging behemoths, joining their attack. "Naughty, naughty," he admonished, dancing between them and clanging a silver bedpan from head to head. "Must play fair."

Five sets of sounds echoed through the room.

Bong! Crack! Four left.

Bong! Crack! Three left.

Bong! Crack! Two left.

Bong! Crack! Roy left.

"Bye, Roy," said Remo. "I guess you won't be playing with old folks or government agents anymore."

Roy seemed genuinely disappointed. "No more old folks?"

Bong! Crack! No more Roy.

"I trust you incinerated the body?" asked Dr. Augusta Coffin without looking up from her desk.

"Which one?" asked Remo.

Dr. Coffin's head snapped up. "Sweet thing, you're back!" She rose from her seat as Remo clicked her office door shut. "Where's Roy?"

"He took something for his head," said Remo. He glided across the plush green carpet to the gleaming mahogany desk. "You're next."

"I don't know what you mean," said Augusta Coffin.

Remo glanced to his right. An enormous Plexiglas window overlooked a well-equipped gymnasium.

Basketball court, weights, parallel bars—Remo assumed all of this stuff had been used only by Roy and the other nurses. To one side of the gym was an unused shuffleboard court. He imagined that the residents

of Sunnyville—the people for whom all of this was intended—only saw the inside of the gym when they were forced to clean it.

"I'm glad you're all right," said Dr. Coffin. She circled the desk and pulled up beside Remo. "We can be good together, baby," she breathed.

"Did you have raw onions for dinner?" Remo tried to block the fumes with his hands.

"What's that?" asked Dr. Coffin, pointing to the shiny, dented metal object that Remo had been hiding behind his back.

"It's a bedpan," said Remo. "Don't see too many of these, do you?"

"Ick, of course not," said Augusta Coffin. "If they have to crap in a bucket, we don't want them around here. I didn't even think we had any more left. Where did you get that one?"

"Downstairs." Remo tapped it and smiled. "It's not supposed to look like that, is it?" "Nope. It should look like this." Remo flipped his wrist, and the bedpan, which had been dented by the skulls of the dead in the basement, popped back open like a folding top hat. "Hey, that's neat." "It gets better."

Dr. Coffin pushed in closer. "If you took care of Roy, you're somebody I can use." She rubbed her hands on his chest. "And you can use me, too," she added breathily.

"Keep it up," warned Remo. "It's only going to make it easier for me to kill you."

Augusta Coffin was startled back to attention. "Kill me?" she said.

"Thought you'd never ask," said Remo. He reached over and unplugged her life-support system, medically known as her cerebral cortex.

Whistling, Remo stuffed as much of her head as possible into the bedpan and flung her at the Plexiglas. The partition shattered, and Dr. Augusta Coffin skidded across the floor of the gymnastics area before landing on the "10" triangle at the top of the shuffle-board court.

"That's what you get when you mess with a member of the Fourth Estate," he pronounced solemnly.

Remo parked his rental car at a pay phone by a busy highway a block away from the nursing home.

He didn't have any change so he shattered the coin box with his forefinger and inserted one of the quarters that poured out back into the slot. He hummed to himself as he jabbed the "1" button a half-dozen times.

There was a series of clicks over the line as the call was rerouted halfway up the East Coast and back down again. Finally a parched, lemony voice came on the line.

"Report."

"The sun has set on Sunnyville," intoned Remo.

"Very poetic," the voice of Dr. Harold W. Smith responded dryly.

' 'And you might want to get someone over there to take care of the residents."

"I am making arrangements for the patients."

Remo sighed. "Knowing you, you're trying to sell the terminal cases on squandering their last days and life savings on the Folcroft three-meal-a-day plan."

Smith said nothing. The organization for which they

both worked operated under the cover of Folcroft Sanitarium. Although he had a virtually unlimited budget for clandestine operations, Smith insisted on running Folcroft as a business.

"I knew it!" Remo said.

"If there is nothing else to report, I suggest we sever this connection," Smith said tightly.

"There is just one more thing," Remo said. "About a hundred TV reporters saw me off that Coffin woman. I suggested they shoot me from the left. I think that's my better side. So if you tune in at about six-thirty tonight, you should see me on the news. And just so you don't think I hogged all the limelight for myself, I mentioned your name at least three dozen times."

Remo slammed the phone down, not even waiting for a response. Placing his hands on either side of the squat upright phone stand, he ripped the entire booth from the pavement and sent it skipping down the street like a flat rock on a placid pond.

"Connection severed," he announced to the empty night.

Chapter Three

Esther Clear-Seer couldn't believe her luck.

She had been in the religion business for nearly twenty years and in all that time she had never experienced a genuine miracle until the day late last summer when Mark Kaspar showed up on her doorstep.

The Biotechnics stock deal had pulled in nearly five hundred thousand dollars in three days before the little man had instructed her that it was time to pull out. She had wanted to let the money ride, but Kaspar had been firmly insistent and, reluctantly, she had acquiesced.

The next day the bioengineering company had gone down in flames after a patent dispute with a larger pharmaceutical conglomerate. By then Kaspar had dumped half the cash in a five-hundred-acre parcel of land abutting the Ranch Ragnarok property, thus doubling the Truth Church's real-estate holdings, and invested the balance in a relatively safe soft-drink company. The money didn't explode like the initial investment had, but its value continued to grow stead-ily.

Which was just fine with her. If there was one thing Esther Clear-Seer could appreciate, it was the enrichment of Esther Clear-Seer. Especially if she didn't

have to do anything to earn it. The land, however, was another deal entirely.

When she first learned about the property purchase, she had marched angrily over to confront Kaspar and to explain to him, in no uncertain terms, the Ranch Ragnarok pecking order.

The Truth Church ranch had been established by Esther on the grounds of a former industrial complex, and Kaspar and his silent female friend had moved into one of the many vacant cinder-block buildings that was set apart from the communal buildings where the rest of the faithful worked and lived.

As Esther approached the large building, she noticed a strange cloud of yellow smoke rising from the central chimney.

She sniffed the air like a hound on the scent of a fox. A smell like rotten eggs wafted through the afternoon breeze.

What was he cooking?

Esther stormed over to the building.

She had barely raised her hand to knock before Kaspar called out for her to enter. It was as if he anticipated everything. Shrugging, she pushed the door inward.

There was a communal fire area in the center of all Truth Church disciple buildings, and in this one, Kaspar had started a modest blaze out of sagebrush and broken fir twigs.

Over the flames he had set up some kind of staggered scaffolding system out of heavy barbecue cooking grates. A long pan of water shivered on the lowest rack. The water boiled relentlessly, bubbling up against the heavy stone bottom of Kaspar's mysterious

urn, which he had placed on a thick steel grate above the pan.

The lid was off the urn now. Esther caught a glimpse of a granular yellow substance just below the rim.

Kaspar's female companion sat on a simple wooden stool next to the fire, her frail arms stretching a blanket up over her head. The woolen blanket caught the noxious yellow fumes that poured freely from the ancient urn, and the girl inhaled greedily as if it were steam from a vaporizer.

The rotten-egg smell was stronger in here. As Esther studied the glazed look on the girl's face, she assumed that the yellow smoke was some kind of narcotic.

Kaspar was seated in a plain wooden chair, stoking the fire with a simple metal rod. He looked up wordlessly at Esther Clear-Seer, fixing her with his dead-serpentine regard.

Esther's smoldering anger was quenched by the unexpected strangeness of the scene within the building. She pointedly ignored the girl, who was gulping ecstatically at the smoke issuing from the pot, and focused her attention on Kaspar.

' 'Why did you buy that damn land?'' Esther asked.

"There are hot springs on the property," Kaspar explained.

"I already knew that," Esther told him. "That's why I didn't want it."

"The springs are crucial to our venture."

Esther hesitated. "How crucial?"

"They will make the difference between success and riches, and abysmal failure."

"Well, okay," Esther said grudgingly. "Just check with me next time."

Kaspar nodded agreeably. "Of course," he said.

And that was that.

What could Esther say? The strange little man deferred to her nearly every time she challenged him, and even when he didn't—as in the real-estate matter—he didn't strike up a bold or defensive posture. He merely stated his position quietly, almost subserviently, and half the time Esther walked away thinking she had come to the same conclusion herself.

Besides, the money Kaspar brought in was nothing to sneeze at. To Esther Clear-Seer, any business partner who swelled the coffers of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth and asked for next to nothing in return was the business partner for her.

The property Kaspar purchased had once housed a modest crop-dusting and stunt-flying business back during the 1930s. Today the only visible sign of that long abandoned enterprise was a rusting corrugated tin hangar squatting at the far end of a sage-covered, crumbling concrete runway. Kaspar had gone to work, refurbishing the structure and altering the basic design of the vacant building into a sanctuary for special worship.

At first Esther resisted the idea of using Truth Church funds on such an outlandish project. But after Kaspar had made her an additional four hundred thousand investing in a Texas cable company, Yogi Mom found her resolve weakened. The man did have a way with money.

"Besides," Kaspar assured her, "fabulous wealth

will begin rolling in just as soon as the temple is completed."

"How soon?"

"Very soon."

Esther was shocked at how soon.

It was the day after construction was completed, nearly two months after Kaspar's arrival. The night was hazy, and thanks to the nearby hot springs, humid for Wyoming in autumn. Esther fell sound asleep the moment her head touched her pillow. She dreamed of gold and greenbacks. A soft yet persistent tapping at her front door awakened her after midnight.

Esther was half-asleep when she answered. One of the female acolytes who was part of the compound's nightly patrol stood nervously on her front porch. She remembered the woman's name was Buffy something. An airhead, though she looked deceptively intelligent with her crystal blue eyes behind horn-rimmed glasses and her raven hair.

"What is it?" Esther asked. It was obvious by her tone that she didn't like being disturbed at such an ungodly hour.

"Zen and Gary are here!" Buffy Braindead whispered urgently.

Esther blinked sleep from her eyes. Beyond the young woman she could see a rickety old Volkswagen van parked in the washed-out light of the Ranch Rag-narok compound. It was stenciled with daisies.

"What are you talking about?" Esther demanded groggily.

"You know, the ice-cream moguls," Buffy whispered. She shot a dreamy glance at the van.

Only then did Esther notice the two men standing near the rear of the vehicle.

One was thin and reedy, with a mottled gray beard, thick glasses and a green snap-brimmed golfer's cap. The other was about five feet tall, 250 pounds, with a balding pate fringed by about a yard's worth of stringy graying black hair. The sheen of sweat on his scalp twinkled in the moonlight.

She realized, with no small amount of surprise, that she had seen the pair of them an hour before. Their picture stared back at her from the side of a quart of almond-swirl ice cream in her kitchen freezer.

Wide-awake now, Esther pulled the acolyte aside. "So what do they want?" she hissed.

"They want to see him," Buffy answered, nodding toward the buildings where Kaspar had constructed his temple.

So it was that at 2:00 a.m. that October night, Esther Clear-Seer had found herself—in khaki pants, Army boots and silk pajama top—trudging through the fields between the Ragnarok compound and Kaspar's new rusted-tin-and-concrete eyesore, trailed by the nation's leading producers of specialty ice cream.

Neither man was in very good shape, and Esther found herself stopping every few yards to allow the wheezing, stumbling ice-cream gurus to catch up.

"What are you two dinosaurs doing here?" she asked after Gary—the fat one—caught his foot in a gopher hole and fell nose-first into a thorn bush.

"He told us it'd be finished today," the thin Zen answered.

In spite of the warm night, Esther felt a chill run down the gully of her back.

"What would be finished?"

"The temple, man, the temple," Gary intoned from his reclining position in the Wyoming scrub. He plucked a thorn from his lowermost chin.

Esther furrowed her brow. No phones were allowed on ranch property except for the one locked away in her private ranch house. As far as she knew, Kaspar hadn't left the grounds since his arrival more than a month and a half before. How could he have known his temple would be completed today?

With a shrug she led the pair the rest of the way across the field, through the gap in the hurricane fence and onto the newly purchased Truth Church annex.

The partially collapsed hangar had been scraped and repainted by Esther's obedient acolytes. After the rubble had been cleared away, Kaspar had instructed the workers to create a new addition to the sixty-plus-year-old building. A two-story rounded cinder-block room bubbled from one end of the building and engulfed an area of the new property where jets of natural steam rose from fissures in the craggy black rock.

Sections of the new ceiling were designed to roll away, and Esther noticed as they approached the building that the skylights were wide-open. Bursts of phosphorescent yellow smoke puffed from the roof holes and hung ominously in the hazy black sky.

Kaspar met them at the main entrance.

"What the hell are you wearing?" Esther whispered to him.

Kaspar's outfit was ceremonial in the extreme. A long white robe, heavily pleated at the bottom, trailed the ground behind him. A yellow shawl was drawn over his narrow shoulders, and its ends were tucked

behind a wide lavender sash belted around his waist. A black skullcap, embroidered with the same inter-twined-serpent motif that adorned the urn he'd brought with him to Ranch Ragnarok, fitted perfectly over his thin hair.

In his hand he carried a walking stick, no longer than a drum majorette's baton, but carved in the shape of a hissing snake. There was something in the strange image on the pole that reflected the reptile within the body of Mark Kaspar.

The most startling thing was Kaspar's attitude. He not only ignored her question, but he also seemed to ignore her very presence.

Without so much as acknowledging the Truth Church leader, he aimed his snake-staff at Zen and Gary and issued a single command.

"Follow. The future awaits."

Without another word, Kaspar spun on his heel and vanished into the smoky interior of the converted warehouse.

Inside, construction had already begun to link the temple with the underground network of tunnels on the Ragnarok property. A concrete flight of stairs in the foyer led deep into the earth but stopped short of the original Truth Church perimeter fence. That phase of the project had yet to be completed.

At Kaspar's insistence there was no generator for electricity. Along the walls, hundreds of flickering candles burned dimly among the clouds of yellow smoke.

Esther had never been here this late at night and never with the strange yellow smoke swirling

everywhere. Kaspar's bizarre costume and mysterious attitude, plus the way the little man seemed to fade and reappear with the flickering of the candlelight, made for an unnerving experience.

"This place is creepy," she hissed.

Zen and Gary didn't seem to mind. The two of them babbled incessantly about ice cream, the evils of capitalism and their previous brief encounter with Mark Kaspar.

"It was in New England," Zen confided to Esther.

"That's where we got started," Gary explained.

"And how did you come to meet Kaspar?" Esther had asked.

Silent since they had entered the building, Kaspar spoke now with a quiet solemnity—like a priest in the confessional.

"I once offered them a small glimpse of the future," Kaspar admitted.

"The dude told us to go into frozen yogurt," Zen enthused.

"We made a bundle," Gary agreed.

Both of the men seemed suddenly ashamed.

"Filthy bourgeois capitalist system," Zen spit.

"Capitalism sucks," Gary agreed enthusiastically.

They made it through the labyrinth of hallways, crossed an expansive interior chamber and moved back into a series of dank chambers on the far side of the building.

It was easy to become disoriented. Esther wasn't quite certain where they were in the old building until she recognized the grey white smoothness of the recently constructed wall.

They had reached Kaspar's special chamber.

A heavy woven tapestry blocked the doorway to the inner hall, but it wasn't so thick that the jaundiced smoke did not seep from beneath it.

Esther's eyes watered. She wiped the tears on her pajama sleeve and tried to blink away the sharp, stinging sensation.

In the spooky gloom something brushed against her leg.

Esther nearly jumped out of her skin. "What the hell!" she shouted, spinning around wildly.

Some kind of animal was behind her. It stood quietly in the weirdly elongated shadows, the tiny bursts of candlelight reflecting in its frightened eyes.

It was a goat. Even in the darkness she could make out the rope that tethered the animal to a bronze ring in the cinder-block wall.

"What's with that?" Esther asked Kaspar.

Kaspar did not respond. Instead, he addressed Zen and Gary. "You will give the woman two hundred dollars, cash, for the sacrifice," he instructed.

Esther accepted the money sullenly, thinking she would eventually get Kaspar alone. What she was going to do to the insolent little turd when she finally did would be something.

Kaspar pulled the rope from the wall and handed the goat's leash to Zen. With no further comment, he swept the tapestry aside and ushered the others into the chamber beyond.

Esther Clear-Seer had watched the inner chamber take shape over the past month. On numerous occasions she had complained to Kaspar that it looked more like a bad Hollywood movie set than a legitimate place of worship. But in the eerie, scattered light of a

dozen torches, with the skylights opened on the moonless black sky and with a vaporous cloud of burning yellow smoke floating like mist through the lifeless air, the huge vault took on a paganistic aura.

As the visitors entered, the pile of stone around which the room had been built spit irregular bursts of steam. The rock suggested the summit of a trapped and nearly buried mountain and made the room look like some kind of animal habitat, as if the surrounding walls formed a cage through which visitors could glimpse zoo animals in their natural environment.

And high atop this pile of rock, on a small three-legged stool balanced above the uppermost sulphur vent, sat the mysterious young girl who had arrived at Ranch Ragnarok with Kaspar. Her vacant eyes stared through the veil of yellow smoke and into the mists of time.

"Welcome to the magnificence of the Temple of Apollo Reborn," Kaspar said.

"Far out," Zen said.

"Karma-licious," Gary agreed.

"Apollo?" Esther muttered. "What is this crap?"

Kaspar mounted the stone steps that had been carved into the side of the rocky hill. When he reached the top, he turned and regarded those below.

"Sacrifice, and you will hear the wisdom of the Pythia," he intoned.

Zen and Gary looked at one another. They shrugged.

"Sacrifice?" Zen asked.

Kaspar reached beneath his brightly colored shawl and removed a long, curving dagger from a hidden

scabbard. He threw the knife down to the waiting ice-cream merchants.

"Sacrifice," Kaspar repeated. He gestured toward the terrified goat.

It took some arguing and a lot of threatening and a great deal more work than they had expected, but in the end it was Zen who got to hold the wriggling goat while Gary stood ready to slit the throat of the hapless animal.

The girl on the stool writhed in ecstasy as the knife was drawn across the throat of the pitiful creature, and when the body was still she let out a cry that was distinctly sexual.

At Kaspar's instructions the bloody carcass was set at the foot of the stone staircase.

Afterward, when she sat back on her stool, her glassy eyes seemed somehow more fierce in the eerie torchlight. Esther noticed a flicker, almost a nervous tic, at the corner of the girl's mouth.

"You may ask your question of my master," Kaspar called down.

Nervously Zen and Gary stepped forward and addressed the girl who seemed not to be aware of their presence.

"What we need to know is should we open up a chain of Zen and Gary's Ice Cream Shops in Moscow?" Zen asked. "I mean, the political situation with the collapse of communism is awful from an anticap-italistic viewpoint, obviously. But..." Zen let his words trail away, looking for all the world as if he was ashamed of what he was thinking. He glanced at his partner.

"But can we make a buck at it?" Gary asked hurriedly.

Kaspar whispered into the ear of the young girl.

There was no considering the question. Seemingly no thought at all.

"The gods will smile on your venture," the girl called down, in a thick, rasping voice.

Zen and Gary high-fived one another.

At Kaspar's instructions, they paid Esther Clear-Seer a quarter million dollars with a Zen and Gary's corporate check—showing the Grateful Dead gorging themselves on Gary Garcia ice cream—and Esther didn't even notice that the check was made out to something called the Truth Church Foundation.

She was too busy watching the girl. It was the first time Esther had heard the girl speak, and the voice filled her with terror.

Of course Zen and Gary told their friends about Ranch Ragnarok.

In a country where new trends in spirituality were eagerly embraced and salvation was the nearest zir-conian crystal away, the idea of paying top dollar for the prophecies of a seemingly strung-out teenage girl was accepted with an alarming readiness.

Over the following winter a trickle of curious high rollers arrived at the Truth Church gates, all referred to Ranch Ragnarok by the ice-cream gurus. Several other New Agey business leaders, who were as ashamed of their success as Zen and Gary but who had nonetheless made small fortunes selling everything from preworn jeans to computers, posed questions to the oracle at Ragnarok. Esther once thought

she recognized a United States congressman, but Kaspar had shooed her from the temple and conducted the man's session with the Pythia—as Kaspar now called the girl—in private.

Nearly eight months had passed since Kaspar first arrived at the ranch, and as the money in the Truth Church Foundation swelled from hundreds of thousands to millions, Esther Clear-Seer found her desire to confront him about his occasional lapses of insolence subsiding.

Esther even dismissed her original fear at hearing the voice of Kaspar's young female friend. She convinced herself that the girl's strange, guttural rasp could have been the result of a decade of cigarette smoking. It could even have been bronchial pneumonia. Lord knew, the girl wasn't looking very healthy

of late.

Esther mentioned this to Kaspar as dawn broke one morning after a particularly grueling session with a sports announcer from one of the major television networks.

"Maybe you should have a doctor look at her,"

Esther muttered.

Kaspar was sorting through a stack of papers piled on a bench at the base of the central rock column. He seemed to have gathered a lot of paperwork since the start of this enterprise and he was becoming increasingly engrossed in whatever it was he was collecting.

With an effort he tore his eyes away from the papers before him. He looked up at the girl, still perched on the tripod, though the smoke from the rock fissure had subsided somewhat.

"Why?" Kaspar asked indifferently.

As if on cue, the girl on the stool swooned and

toppled over. The stool went one way, flipping out of sight down the back of the hill, and the girl did an unintentional somersault before tumbling roughly down the hard rock surface toward them.

Her bloodied, emaciated body landed in a crumpled heap at the feet of Esther Clear-Seer and Mark Kaspar.

Esther recoiled in horror. As the girl's breath became more and more ragged, she saw her increasingly opulent life-style slip away.

All at once the breathing stopped.

Esther crouched over the body. "She's dead," she announced anxiously.

Kaspar couldn't have shown less emotion if Esther had reported swatting a common housefly. He adjusted his bifocals.

"Then you'll just have to find me a fresh virgin," he said blandly.

"Me?" Esther gulped.

"You," Kaspar said, as if that ended the matter.

And he went back to studying his paperwork.

Chapter Four

Harold W. Smith, head of the supersecret government agency CURE, sat stiff-backed on the rickety wooden chair in the living room of Remo Williams's home in Quincy, Massachusetts.

The chair was old and creaked at his every movement but, Smith noted wryly, it wasn't nearly as old and rickety as he felt.

He had headed CURE—the agency set up outside constitutional limits, whose paradoxical mission it was to preserve the document CURE'S very existence flouted—since its inception, and had watched himself grow older and older in the post. Some said the presidency aged a man, but the pressures a President had to bear were nothing compared to the daily strains placed upon the tired, overworked shoulders of Harold W. Smith.

Intermittent humming came from another room. It was a strange, singsong melody with an odd cadence that stopped abruptly, only to begin again. The Master of Sinanju.

Smith squirmed in his chair. He prided himself on his excellent posture, but lately his lower back had been giving him trouble. Altogether it seemed to him that with his congenital heart defect that should have

been treated by a pacemaker, recurring ulcers, frequent headaches, his list of physical problems was growing by the day.

Smith tried to sit up straighter in his chair, hoping to alleviate the pressure on his lumbar region.

All at once the humming in the distant room stopped. A moment later Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, head of the most lethal house of assassins ever to grace the face of the earth, padded silently into the room on black sandals.

He was a delicate bird of an elderly Korean attired in a flowing kimono. His wrinkled skin had the consistency of rice paper. His bones looked fragile where they poked out from various joints. Puffs of cloudy white hair decorated his balding head. A wisp of a beard clung to his chin. His fingernails were long and wickedly sharp.

"Remo has returned," Chiun said to Smith.

Chiun had deserted Smith the instant the CURE director had arrived, claiming the need to attend to "other pressing matters" elsewhere in the house. Smith had volunteered his assistance—after all, Remo was not due for some time—but Chiun had quickly declined the offer, claiming that his work, if done in solitude, would bring even greater glory to his kind and gracious emperor. In truth, in the four hours since Smith had arrived, Chiun had been sitting by a back window watching the spring grass grow.

Remo entered the room a minute later.

"I see the gang's all here," he said, glancing at Smith. "What's up, Smitty?"

Smith stood, grateful for the chance to relieve the pressure on his spine. Chiun interposed himself

between the two men and drew Remo to the far corner

of the room.

"Where have you been?" Chiun demanded in a whisper. "I have been forced to entertain this decrepit white thing for ages." His hazel eyes cast a quick glance at Smith. ' 'Look how he stands. Like a woman in her last, swelling days of pregnancy. Get rid of him soon, Remo, so that we might eat our dinner in peace." With that the Master of Sinanju sent a gracious nod in Smith's direction and moved back closer to settle to a lotus position in the center of the floor.

"Er, is there a problem?" Smith asked uncertainly.

Chiun waved his hand dismissively. "I was rebuking Remo for a previous wrong," he sniffed.

' 'I see,'' Smith said. He retook his seat, and Chiun cast him an impatient glance from narrowed hazel

eyes.

Remo rolled his eyes. ' 'I saw your rental car in the

side lot, Smitty. What's up?"

' 'Remo, do you recall the incident with the Branch t>avidians in Waco, Texas, a few years back?"

Remo grabbed a chair and sat across from Smith. "I remember the headlines at the time," he said. "Feds Fry Wackos In Waco. You should have sent me and Chiun in to take care of business before it got

started."

' 'It was a consideration. Unfortunately you were on another assignment at the time."

"Yeah, it was a real mess," Remo said. "A bunch of peaceniks descending on women and children with tanks. Who would've thought the attorney general would have found time to play general in between lifting weights and initiating cover-ups?"

"Remo, please," Smith said. His back was sore, his ulcer was acting up and it seemed that he had completely lost the attention of the Master of Sinanju. He wanted nothing more than to return to his office in Rye, New York.

"Okay, Smitty," Remo said, waving a thick-wristed hand. "What's the deal this time?"

"A situation has developed in Wyoming, similar to the Branch Davidian problem. A woman claiming to be a prophetess of some new doomsday religion has isolated herself in a rural area of the state. She expects absolute obedience from her followers, as well all their worldly goods. In return she promises to protect them from the tribulations to come at the millennium's conclusion."

"This one cannot protect herself from Sinanju, O Emperor Smith," Chiun piped up. "Though she may surround herself with countless armies of fighting men, she cannot stay the shadowy hand of Sinanju." "Thank you, Master of Sinanju," Smith said with a polite bow of the head. "Until recently the authorities were willing to look the other way on this obvious cult of personality. They were even willing, it seemed, to disregard reports of large weapons storehouses on the property. But I have recently learned that the FBI had someone under deep cover at the camp and that this operative has failed to report for several months. If they decide to send in more agents, the situation could escalate. It is my belief that this cult is becoming far too powerful. I want you and Chiun to take care of it before federal foot-dragging allows the FBI to initiate another Waco."

"Since when is it our business to bail out the FBI?" Remo asked.

Smith straightened his rimless glasses on his patrician nose. "It is not a question of bailing out anyone, Remo," he said. "Waco was a disaster, not merely because of FBI-ATF bungling, but because of the lack of leadership up the chain of command."

"Shouldn't we blame the voters for that?"

Smith sighed. "During the Waco incident there was a general misunderstanding among those in power of the proper use of force. In the end it was the posturing before and the denial after the fact that transformed Waco into a public-relations debacle. The Justice Department and the Federal Bureau of Investigation received largely undeserved media attention because of their lawful actions against the Branch Davidians."

"Basically you're sending us in this time so the Justice Department can get better PR? No way, Smitty. It's not my job to make sure somebody else doesn't get a black eye from the press."

"Remo, this is important," Smith insisted.

"Well, I don't see the FBI getting us any positive ink."

"Hear, hear," Chiun piped up.

Smith removed his glasses and rubbed the bridge of his nose. He suddenly felt weary beyond belief. With a sigh that sounded like it could have wheezed from the rusted belly of an asthmatic furnace, Smith replaced the glasses and addressed Remo.

"You both know that for our overall mission to succeed, the organization must remain anonymous," he said slowly. "Our charter absolutely precludes us from continuing to exist if the organization becomes

compromised. We do not court popular opinion and we must absolutely not actively seek approval in a public forum."

"Dun, Smitty," Remo said. "Tell me something I don't know."

"A little positive press never hurts, Emperor," Chiun said slyly. "If your enemies were to discover that Sinanju was guarding your throne, your regal head would rest easier. And the exposure would not necessarily be adverse for the House, either."

"Remo, please," Smith said, urgently.

"Okay, okay, we'll do the hit, Smith," Remo said. "But if Sinanju can get a few column inches out of it, ace reporter Remo Williams will be there with a byline and a ruler. What's this prophetess's name?"

Smith furrowed his brow in confusion at the obscure reference, but did not question Remo further. More and more the ex-Marine and former beat cop was becoming as intractable as his Korean teacher.

"Her name," Smith said, "is Esther Clear-Seer."

Chapter Five

Bonnie Sweetwater was the oldest child of an upper-middle-class family in Thermopolis, Wyoming.

Bonnie was eighteen years old, bright, outgoing and, much to the chagrin of her contemporaries—both male and female—had neither "done it" nor intended to "do it" until her wedding night.

Bonnie didn't consider herself particularly religious, but she was a girl with old-fashioned moral values and she had no problem sharing this view with others. She belonged to the local chapter of Marriage First, a national grassroots organization for morally like-minded young people. They met every Friday night in the old city-hall basement from 7:30 to 11:00 p.m., rain or shine. It was an opportunity for Bonnie and the other Marriage Firsters to socialize without the worries and pitfalls of a typical teenage night out.

For most of the club's membership, the lack of pressure was a relief.

On this, as on most Fridays, Bonnie had volunteered to clean up the hall with her friend Kathy Kirtley after the meeting, but as usual Kathy had come up with a lame excuse to take off early, leaving Bonnie holding the bag. Literally.

Bonnie circled the hall methodically, scooping up

Pepsi-stained napkins and crumpled Dixie cups and dropping them into the large trash bag she lugged around behind her.

Somebody mustn't have liked the carrot cake she had made, for there was a half-eaten piece on a paper plate sitting smack dab in the middle of one of the seats at the rear of the hall.

Oh, well, she thought to herself, I'll try another recipe next week.

At the door Bonnie paused to survey the hall.

The place didn't look too bad. She'd come back in the morning to fold up the chairs and sweep the floor.

She snapped off the lights as she left.

Outside she deposited the trash bag in one of the large dented barrels that were lined up like tin soldiers at the rear of the former city-hall building and hiked up the small grassy embankment to the street.

Kathy had driven Bonnie, as well as two other friends, to the meeting that night. Kathy being Kathy, it was not unusual for Bonnie to be hiking home at 11:45 p.m. She didn't really mind. The streets were quiet, the April night air was warm and she liked to have a little think time to herself.

She had barely stepped out on the sidewalk when she heard a car engine start.

For a minute Bonnie thought Kathy had waited for her after all. She turned to look, but the car that pulled away from the curb was boxy and blue—not the fiery red Camaro Kathy's father bought her as a reward for passing her senior year at Custer High. Oh, well.

Bonnie continued down the sidewalk.

She walked a few more steps, but the car never passed by. The engine continued to rumble, and

Bonnie slowly became aware that it had moved up directly behind her, keeping pace like a stalking animal.

Bonnie felt her heart quicken. Could someone really be following her?

Her feet suddenly felt like lead, and she forced them to move faster down the sidewalk.

The car kept moving behind her. It was running with its lights dim.

Bonnie's ears were ringing as she broke into a run, and the blood pounded faster in her head.

Out of the corner of her eye, she glanced left. She could just make out the hood of the car. One headlight stared at her like an angry yellow eye. Bonnie sucked in a nervous gulp of air, and turned her eyes straight ahead.

It was like a dream. Her head swam.

She couldn't look.

She had to look.

Bonnie stopped all at once and spun on the stalking car.

She recognized the woman behind the wheel. It was the nutcase who ran that religious camp on the outskirts of town. Esther something.

When Bonnie turned, the woman hunched down farther in her seat and slammed on the gas. The car lunged ahead—and Bonnie felt a wave of sheer relief as she watched the car take the next right turn and race off into the night.

Bonnie stood on the sidewalk for a few long seconds after the car had gone. As her body relaxed, she felt an uncontrollable shudder, as if someone had just dropped an ice cube down her bare back.

It was probably all perfectly innocent, she thought

hopefully. The woman had likely mistaken her for one of her followers, out for a night stroll. They had strict curfews up there, Bonnie had heard.

By the time she reached the next intersection, she had convinced herself that it was all just a case of mistaken identity. She was about to cross the street when a figure stepped out from behind a high row of hedges at the corner lot and touched her arm.

Bonnie all but jumped out of her freckled skin.

It was that woman. Esther Clear-Seer. That was her name. The blue car sat silently a few house-lengths up the side street, its lights off.

Bonnie's heart pumped wildly.

"I'm sorry," Esther Clear-Seer said. She tapped her forehead with the palm of her hand and rolled her eyes heavenward as if she was the flakiest thing ever to come down the boulevard. "I think I probably scared you back there, and I'm really, really sorry. I just need directions, and usually I like to ask a man this late at night, but there's no one out around here for miles and, well, I saw you coming out of your little meeting..." She shrugged like a helpless sitcom housewife.

To Bonnie, the woman, who had been alternately laughed at and demonized by the local press, suddenly seemed more human.

She was friendly and scatterbrained and she continued apologizing profusely as she asked for directions to the police station.

Any concern Bonnie had immediately abated. After all, how dangerous could someone be if she was asking the way to the police station?

Bonnie pointed down Maiden Lane into the washed-out light cast by thirty-year old streetlamps...

A hand snaked out, unseen, from under Esther Clear-Seer's jacket.

Bonnie's was just explaining the sharp left on West Street when the metal tire iron collided with the bar-rette at the back of her head. She crumpled like an aluminum can. Strong hands reached under her armpits.

A moment later the blue car was gone and there was no sign of Bonnie Sweetwater.

Virgin number one.

Chapter Six

Remo and Chiun rented a car at the airport in Worland, Wyoming, and headed south along Route 789 in the direction of Hot Springs State Park.

According to Smith, the ranch belonging to the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth was located in the northwest corner of Wyoming, on the southern edge of the Hot Springs State Park, near the town called Thermopolis. The church owned several hundred acres of real estate in the area west of town.

Chiun had remained silent for most of the plane trip, stirring from his strange quiescence only long enough to shoo away the bevy of buxom stewardesses that had flocked around. They were ignoring Remo and fussing over the Master of Sinanju, who sometimes brought out the maternal instincts in women who generally looked as maternal as Anna Nicole Smith in crotchless panties.

It looked as though the car trip wasn't going to be any better.

There were times when Remo would have invited Chiun to clam up, but that was when the Master of Sinanju was haranguing him about some niggling little peeve. As far as Remo knew, this time he hadn't done anything whatsoever to tick off Chiun.

"You didn't have to come, Little Father," Remo said when he could no longer bear the silence. He glanced at the Master of Sinanju, who was watching the aspens and cottonwood trees zip by in blurs of brilliant green.

"I did not have to sit at home, either," Chiun replied.

"You got me there," Remo admitted.

They rode on in silence for a few minutes longer before the Master of Sinanju spoke again.

"Remo?"

"I'm still here."

"Perhaps it is time we sought another client for our services."

Remo arched an eyebrow. "What, did you and Smith have a fight?"

Chiun's hazel eyes leveled on Remo. "If we did, he would not have breath to order you hither and yon."

"Then what gives? I thought you were happy with the current contract—all the gold you can carry and all the fish you can eat."

Chiun glanced thinly out the window. "Riches are not always the sole consideration of a Master of Sinanju," he said softly.

Remo nearly drove the car off the road. Almost before Chiun had started training him in the earliest Sinanju breathing techniques, long before Remo had mastered the subtle feats of dodging bullets and scaling sheer rock faces, Chiun had instilled in him the one eternal, transcendent tenet of all previous Sinanju Masters: cash only, always up front. And although a lot of haggling went on between Smith and Chiun, in

the end Chiun was always secretly satisfied when their

contract was renewed.

lor Chiun to say that gold didn't matter was akin to O. J. Simpson pleading guilty, George Washington apologizing for the Revolutionary War and Santa Claus saying Christmas was a commercial scam—all rolled into one.

' 'Why would you want to just up and quit?'' Remo asked.

Chiun's parchment features grew impatient. "I do not 'up and' anything. This is not a decision to be reached lightly. Smith always paid on time and therefore will be remembered as a great and wise ruler in the scrolls of Sinanju, though the glossary will doubtless define him as a raving lunatic with pounded rice paste between his fat white ears."

"All historical inaccuracies aside, why now?" "Have you not noticed how his entire body creaks and groans? It is an effort for the man to stand straight. The vitality of Smith as emperor of America ebbs with each passing day." Chiun nodded at the wisdom of his own words. "It might not be long, Remo, ere we find ourselves without employment."

"We can cross that bridge when it falls," Remo said.

"We could send out feelers," Chiun suggested slyly, using a word he had picked up from television the previous day. "Smith need not know of our discreet, private inquiries."

"Look, I'm not ready to leave Smith in a lurch," Remo said. "Case closed." He gripped the steering wheel more tightly. "Why don't you check the map?"

he added, eager to change the subject. "See if we're anywhere near Thermopolis."

"I am an assassin, not a cartographer," Chiun announced haughtily. "And as the designated and sanctified chauffeur to the Master of Sinanju, it is your responsibility to find it for yourself." And with that he returned his gaze to the passing trees.

They rode the rest of the way to Thermopolis in silence.

The first thing Remo and Chiun discovered when they arrived in town was that there was a campaign

going on.

Of course, there had been indications of political activity along the highway—a road sign here, a bumper sticker there—but downtown Thermopolis looked like the epicenter of a political earthquake.

Bumper stickers were slathered haphazardly on cars, windows and telephone poles, colored flags flapped gaily between buildings and giant billboards squatted like primordial birds atop seemingly abandoned flatbed trailers.

"Remo, did not this unstable land just have a time for this buffoonery?" Chiun clucked disapprovingly as they drove past lawn after lawn decorated with red, white and blue placards announcing the political leanings of the home owners. Most seemed to favor the reelection of Senator Jackson Cole.

"If you mean did we just have an election, yes," said Remo. "But that was for President. This guy Cole is running for the senate."

Chiun was confused. ' 'Were not the senators elected at the same time as the President? I remember talk of

his garment hems failing to sweep others into office in his wake."

"You mean coattails," said Remo. "Some of the Senate was up for reelection during the presidential campaign. And all of the House, I think. But the Senate races are staggered so that everyone isn't up for reelection at the same time."

"Why is this so?" Chiun asked, puzzled.

And lest Remo find himself explaining a process he didn't fully understand himself, he parked their rental car on a side street and got out to ask for directions.

The main thoroughfares of Thermopolis were lined with hundreds of cars, all abandoned. In fact, the entire town looked abandoned.

"Where the hell is everybody?" Remo wondered aloud.

Chiun thrust his button nose in the air and sniffed delicately, like a foxhound on the trail of his elusive prey. His face immediately scrunched up in disgust.

"Pah! Is every corner of this land befouled by vile odors?"

Remo, too, caught the scent on the wafting breeze. "Popcorn," he said. All at once they heard a loud cheer from somewhere beyond the highest buildings, toward the center of town. "Must be some kind of rally, judging from all the signs," Remo guessed. "They start earlier and earlier every campaign season." He sniffed again, this time detecting the distinct odors of warming pretzels and syrupy soft drinks.

Chiun was waving his kimono sleeve before his face. "What this nation needs is one of those devices that is affixed to the sides of commodes to dull the effect of your foul white smells. And it should be built

in this state." Chiun gathered up the hems of his brilliant canary yellow kimono. "I will investigate the source of these noxious fumes, Remo, while you attempt to find someone who can make sense of your country's incomprehensible electoral process."

And with that the Master of Sinanju padded off in the direction of the commotion.

Remo headed off in the opposite direction, looking for someone who knew the way to Ranch Ragnarok, and didn't want his vote.

On the sidewalk in front of a hardware store, Remo cornered a man in a plastic foam hat and a bright blue blazer festooned with all manner of pins and buttons and insignia declaring his commitment to Jackson Cole. Even the T-shirt he wore sported a likeness of the popular senator, but Cole's silkscreened face was drawn so tightly across the man's protruding belly it made the senator's gaunt features look broad and vaguely piggish.

"Hey, Lester," Remo said, reading a name off a square of masking tape over the man's breast pocket. When the man looked his way, Remo figured he'd gotten the name right. "Which way is Ranch Ragnarok?"

Bloodshot eyes rolled in sockets that were rimmed by yellow fatty deposits. "What do you want to go out there for?" Lester asked.

Remo shrugged. He wasn't used to having his motives questioned when he asked simple directions. "Enlightenment?"

"You'll get more enlightenment out of a fortune cookie," Lester said. "Those Truth Church nuts are dangerous." He sized up Remo's lean frame. "You

don't look like you could handle the kind of trouble they dish out."

Remo was suddenly interested. "What sort of trouble?"

"Talk is they murdered a guy recently," Lester confided in a whisper louder than most people's normal speaking voices. "Some kids were out snooping by the ranch one night a couple of months ago—you know how kids are. Anyway, they saw some of them Truth Church psychos gun this guy down in cold blood. At least that's what / heard."

Remo thought of the missing FBI agent.

"Why didn't the police check it out?"

"You've obviously never seen the place," the man snorted. "They've got guns up the wazoo. That Clear-Seer battle-ax runs a tighter ship than the U.S. Navy. No one leaves unless there's at least three of them together, and that's just to buy supplies. Ask old Harvey in here—" he jerked a dimpled thumb toward the hardware store window behind him "—those nuts have bought enough concrete to build a hundred Moscow tenements. They've got bunkers filled with ammo and explosives. Is that what you want to get yourself into?"

Remo said, "I'm full-grown now. Just point me in the right direction...."

"If I don't tell you, I'd be doing you a favor," Lester cautioned. "Why don't you come along to the rally with me? The whole town's already there. We got a lot more serious stuff going on than those Truth Churchers." He tapped his largest lapel pin, which declared The GOP Does It On Its Platform.

"Look—"

"Senator Cole himself is going to be there," Lester interrupted. "This is his hometown, you know. He and me went to school together. You know, I remember one time..."

And with that Lester launched into a well-worn tale of how he had once backed up Jackson Cole in a junior-high-school fight.

Remo rolled his eyes heavenward and hoped that Esther Clear-Seer didn't die of old age before he had a chance to pay her a visit.

Senator Coles advance people had coordinated with the local police to ensure the senator would have a clear path from his limousine to the bandstand.

The townspeople of Thermopolis were cordoned off in a wide circle around the speaker's area, leaving enough room for the senator's family and staff, local politicians and business leaders, as well as their families, and whatever media were covering the relatively minor photo op.

As it was, there were only a few print reporters from nearby towns and a couple of camera crews. The first crew videotaping the speech was from a small local cable station, so it was naturally shuffled off to the back. The second was the more professional of the pair. It was from WONK, a larger station in Cheyenne that already had a deal with one of the major networks to run on the national nightly news any newsworthy footage they collected.

The WONK camera had the sweetest location for filming, directly in front of the bandstand, and when it was announced that Senator Coje's limo was a block away, the cameraman checked his small black-and-

while receiver to make certain the picture was in perfect focus.

He saw an egg.

The cameraman squinted his eyes in confusion.

An egg?

He looked through the camera viewfinder. There it was, a little fuzzy, but it was definitely egg-shaped. He brought the camera into focus, and the edges of the egg grew more defined. It was tan and unevenly colored, with puffs of angel's hair on either side. And it had ears.

The cameraman stuck his face around the camera.

A bald head that looked like it had escaped from an ostrich nest was positioned directly between the camera and the bandstand. Beneath the head the back of a golden kimono with brilliant red piping cascaded down to the well-trampled grass.

"Hey, Gramps, you're in the way," the cameraman complained.

The sounds of cheers suddenly erupted from the edge of the crowd and swept inward, toward the stand. The senator had arrived.

The cameraman looked around desperately. He could turn the camera to catch the senator as he climbed from his limo, but the wizened figure before him was casting a shadow across the equipment.

"Hey, you're standing in my light."

The old man didn't turn.

Maybe the old guy was hard of hearing, the reporter thought, so he spoke up again, louder this time.

There was an ever-so-slight movement of the gossamer webs above the ancient Asian's ears.

"The radiance of the Master of Sinanju is light

enough for a thousand of your recording devices," the old man intoned without turning.

"Wha—?" The cameraman looked around. The police were occupied with crowd control. The senator had climbed out of the car and was waving to the crowd. Graciously he helped his wife and daughter from the limo.

The wife was an attractive, sixtyish woman. Her hair color was right out of a bottle and her hair seemed lacquered so tightly into place that if one follicle broke free the entire cliff would explode in a spray of hairpins and dried Lady Clairol flakes. She smiled at the crowd with perfect capped teeth.

The senator was tall and gawky. His hairline had long ago scurried to the back of his head, and his awkward height had given him a slight hunch. Good humor danced in his beady eyes.

Their combined effort, however, was far greater than the sum of both their parts. The daughter, Lori Cole, was beautiful. Fifteen years old and already a heartbreaker. Her wave to the crowd was almost regal.

No sense thinking it, the cameraman thought. Fif-teen'll get you twenty, and besides she was said to be even more conservative than her old man. And anyway, he had a job to do.

A job!

He had forgotten about the old man.

The Asian still stood rooted before him, seemingly as immobile as an ancient, slender elm.

The arrival footage was completely ruined. Maybe he could make up for it with coverage of the speech itself.

The thick black cable that connected his mountain

of remote equipment to the WONK news van snaked directly beneath the robes of the tiny Asian.

The cameraman glanced around. The cops were still busy with the senator. No one was looking his way.

He grabbed the cable in both hands and yanked.

Later, when he awoke in the hospital, the cameraman was assured that he need never worry about adequate lighting again. The small battery-operated light meter that he usually affixed to his camera had somehow found itself embedded between his ribs. The far end had been lodged in his heart in such a way that any attempt to remove it would prove fatal.

One of the doctors suggested that until the batteries ran down, he might have a hard time sleeping, but he'd have no trouble reading in bed.

Lester's childhood story had gone on way too long, and appeared to have no point whatsoever-at least none that Remo could discern. Remo was ready to sever Lester's spinal column and go off in search of Ranch Ragnarok by himself, when the large man's attention drifted to somewhere across Remo's right shoulder.

"Lordy, Lou, will you look at that," said Lester.

Remo glanced over his shoulder and saw a long black stretch limousine turn onto Thermopolis's main drag.

He looked back at Lester. "So what?" he said.

"So we don't get too many of them stretch jobbies in Thermopolis," whispered Lester. "It must be Senator Cole himself."

The limousine drew to a stop in front of Remo and Lester. For one horror-filled moment Lester thought

that it was indeed Jackson Cole, come to confront him about the bogus childhood story he had been boring people with for the past forty years. But when the tinted rear window powered silently down, a familiar head that didn't belong to Jackson Cole jutted into view.

Remo recognized the giant ears and nose, as well as the close-cropped stubble of steely gray hair. The forehead seemed to go on forever, and the spindly neck vanished below the edge of the car window. On TV, Moss Monroe looked like Mr. Potato Head, but in real life he looked like Mr. Potato Head on steroids, thought Remo.

Lester was beside himself with shock. "Dang!" he gasped. "Moss Monroe in the flesh!"

"Could you boys just tell me where I could find that Ragnarok Ranch I keep hearin' so gol-darned much about?" a familiar nasal twang asked. His sharp Adam's apple bobbed enthusiastically.

"Um, it's..." Lester began, "you, well, you follow this road to the edge of town and then take a right— no, a left. A left to a blinking amber light. Then just follow the road through the woods." He looked to Remo for agreement.

"How the hell should I know?" Remo returned sharply.

Lester shrugged feebly.

"Well, that's just wonderful, that's just great," came the excited drawl of Moss Monroe from the back of the limo. "I'm much obliged, son. I'm more grateful than a live turkey on the day after Thanksgivin'."

The darkened window rolled back up, and the limo sped off.

Remo pointed after it. "You'd tell him, but you wouldn't tell me?" he said, peeved.

"Hey, I still remember the '92 campaign," Lester explained nervously. "If he asked for directions to the inside of a lion cage I would have driven him there myself."

Chiun was waiting in the car when Remo returned.

"Things have just gotten more complicated," Remo informed him as he slipped back in behind the wheel.

"I saw the funny little man with the big ears," Chiun said. "Was his friend with him?"

Remo raised an eyebrow. "What friend?"

"The one who did not know his name or where he was. You remember, Remo, he starred in the television program where the president of vice won an argument, but was declared the loser, the next president of vice lost, but was declared the winner and the old man with the hearing aid did not listen to the questions at all."

After the most recent presidential race, which had practically put the nation to sleep, the previous contest seemed like ancient history.

"General Stocking?" Remo said finally. He remembered the geriatric general Moss Monroe had dragged out of mothballs to be his running mate, thus proving to the vast majority of American voters that he was about as serious a presidential contender as Pat Paulsen. "No, Stocking wasn't with him."

Chiun considered. "It is a shame that program was canceled," he said pensively. "It was very funny."

Remo nodded. "At least America would have had a good laugh while it was being mugged," he agreed,

starting the engine. "Find out anything, Little Father?"

"Do you know those little lights on the sides of television cameras?"

Remo arched an eyebrow. "Yeah?" he said lead-

ingly.

"They are detachable."

And by the look of serenity on the Master of Sin-anju's face, Remo knew enough not to ask.

Chapter Seven

Moss Monroe had become a multibillionaire by accepting a huge number of lucrative business contracts from the federal government, before making himself a household name by publicly railing against the same government policies that had launched him from the ham-and-beans income-tax bracket to the stratosphere of the caviar and private Learjets.

Of course, Moss didn't start complaining until the last of the government checks had cleared.

Monroe first exploded onto the political scene as a guest on the "Barry Duke Live" cable-TV program. On that show Moss Monroe fielded phone calls from average Americans as if he were just another John Q. Public. And when those typical citizens asked what could be done to fix what ailed their country, Monroe was blunt: absolutely nothing could be done. America was finished. He said this, however, with a down-home folksiness that made him sound like a cross between Will Rogers and Jed Clampett, and won over people who couldn't tell down-home from dumbed-down.

From the beginning, people were so captivated by the way Moss Monroe spoke, no one paid much attention to what he was actually saying.

His legislative agenda had the intellectual complexity of a Road Runner cartoon, and his entire political philosophy—though discussed with a reverence that made one think it had been carved of Mount Sinai granite—had been written by a five-hundred-dollar-per-hour PR agent.

The pithiest of these "Mossy Musings" were laminated on a set of giant glossy placards that Monroe carted around wherever he went to sell himself. Because that was exactly what his entire game was: selling Moss Monroe, political savior.

He had once stormed out of a live network-news broadcast because the anchorman conducting the interview insisted that Moss Monroe answer a direct question without referring to the large shiny charts that had been set up on an easel next to the anchor's desk. Without his charts Moss Monroe was as helpless as a baby. A crybaby.

That this man, whose main asset was a well-stocked cupboard of aw-shucks platitudes, had risen to national prominence by declaring the nation was completely bereft of ideas was, perhaps, the most ringing endorsement of his own premise.

In spite of his best attempts at blowing smoke, Moss Monroe hadn't been much of a player in the most recent presidential race. It had been an unspirited snore in which he had been relegated to the role of yapping Chihuahua.

And while to his supporters Moss would always be the ultimate political outsider, to Moss himself it was getting pretty cold outside.

Since the time nearly two years before the 1992 campaign when Moss had begun carefully orchestrating

his "surprise" announcement to run, to the point in 1996 when his hopes had been dashed almost before they had gotten off the ground, Monroe had been forced to postpone the year he expected to finally take possession of the Oval Office. He was now looking at the year 2000, and if past experience had taught him anything, it was that he couldn't win now without a truckload of luck.

What to do. What to do.

He heard through the grapevine that, for the right price, luck could be purchased inside the hurricane-fenced perimeter of a small ranch somewhere in northwest Wyoming. And if there was one thing Moss Monroe had, it was purchasing power.

The shiny black limousine with the Stand Tall, America vanity license plate ground to a halt before the high metal fence of the Truth Church ranch.

The place looked like a Second World War prisoner-of-war camp. Through the tinted rear windows, Moss Monroe could see a pair of concrete towers on either side of the main gate. High above, beneath slanting corrugated-steel roofs, snipers peered down suspiciously at the new arrival, sunlight reflecting brilliantly off matching black sunglasses.

About a hundred yards away in either direction, another pair of sentry posts squatted amid the Wyoming brush.

Moss Monroe understood that some denigrated the Truth Church as a cult, but those were probably the same individuals who labled him a crackpot, and so when the gates creaked open to swallow him, he didn't hesitate to order his chauffeur to drive on in.

There was a perfectly ordinary-looking ranch house

about a half mile up the packed dirt drive within the Ragnarok compound. Behind the ranch, Monroe could see a series of low-lying, interconnected concrete structures obviously built for function rather than style. On these, fatigue-clad men strolled back and forth with high-powered rifles hanging in the crooks of their arms.

Monroe's limo circled around, ghosting to a stop alongside the long, rough-hewn porch running the length of the split-log ranch house.

A robust woman with long coal black hair stood at the top of the rickety wooden staircase, waiting to greet the perennial odd man out of U.S. politics.

"You have come to acquire spiritual enlightenment," Esther Clear-Seer announced as Moss Monroe's slight, four-foot-six-inch frame climbed down out of the limo.

"Now, hold on there, missy," Moss Monroe said. His nasal twang sounded peeved as the red Wyoming dust settled atop his hand-tooled ostrich-skin cowboy boots. "I got one thing to say to you and one thing only—where's the feller what can tell me the future?"

Her face sunk. "You want to see Kaspar," she said glumly.

"Yeah. Kaspar. That's the jasper's name. I hear he can tell a feller when he's next gonna get paid, laid or made," Monroe whanged. "Trot him on out."

Esther Clear-Seer composed her crestfallen face. Lately fewer and fewer supplicants came to the ranch willing to cede their wills to her. The money from Kaspar's venture was good, but Esther felt she was losing control over the crucial aspect of the Truth

Church ranch-the need to manipulate the drones. The acolyte pool was stagnating.

Esther nodded to Moss Monroe. "Very well," she said resignedly. "I'll take you around back."

A new voice cut the air.

"Don't bother."

Esther turned. Stepping out of the door behind her was Mark Kaspar. He must have taken the newly completed tunnel that connected the Pythia Pit to her ranch, she knew. Esther was surprised. Rarely these days did Kaspar venture from the Pythia Pit.

"Are you the feller I came here to see?" Moss Monroe demanded, clomping up on four-inch heels.

"The question is irrelevant," Kaspar replied calmly. "There will be no oracles for you. Please leave."

"What are you doing?" Esther asked out of the side of her mouth. "Do you know who this little martinet is?"

"Now, looky here, son," Moss Monroe protested. "I don't think you unnerstand who you're talkin' to."

Kaspar smiled. "On the contrary. I know all too well."

He clapped his hands twice, sharply. Instantly squads of Truth Church disciples appeared from coigns of vantage around and atop the surrounding buildings, all training high-powered weapons on the diminutive but unmissable target that was Moss Monroe.

"Are you out of your mind?" Esther hissed. "This is Moss Monroe. The guy blows his nose on thousand-dollar bills. Take his damn money."

Moss Monroe tilted back a ten-gallon hat that sat

atop his head like a pelican about to lay eggs on a rock. His eyes got beadier, if possible.

"Son, I am prepared to offer you one hundred million out of my own personal savings account if you'll get your little future teller to do some predictin' for me."

Kaspar ignored Monroe. He gestured to the poised snipers above.

"Granted, they are not the feared Black Panthers, who I'm told are fond of performing calisthenics on your front lawn, but they are still quite effective."

"This is crazy." Cupping her beringed hands before her mouth, Esther Clear-Seer barked, ' 'Everyone, back off!"

The Truth Church squads didn't move.

Esther's eyes flew wide.

"Back off!" she shouted once more. Still nothing. "This is Yogi Mom speaking. As the Beatific Head and Prophetess of your church, I command you to return to normal sentry stations."

But her acolytes refused to budge. When Esther turned to face Mark Kaspar, her pale face was a marble mask of pure hate.

"The power of the Pythia's prophecies is great," Kaspar intoned with a broad, knowing smile.

Despite public impressions to the contrary, Moss Monroe was a man who knew which way the wind blew. When he saw that the woman had failed to order back the throng of armed zealots, he beat a hasty retreat to the rear his limousine and hightailed it from Ranch Ragnarok. Pronto.

He watched out the rear window as the twin watch-towers of Ragnarok's front gates slipped below a hill

in the road behind him, and silently vowed to make it his mission on earth to destroy everyone who promised that pack of crazies could tell him at all about his future. From now on, for Moss Monroe, it would be nothing but tea leaves, tarot cards and an occasional seance.

"What did you do to my acolytes?" Esther Clear-Seer demanded. They were in her ranch house, away from prying ears. Kaspar had dismissed his troops, and they had obeyed.

Now he dismissed Esther Clear-Seer's concerns.

"It is irrelevant. There are more pressing matters at hand."

"Pressing, my ass. You've corrupted them. You've turned them against me. Do you have any idea how long it takes to break their will? Some of them have been here for years."

"They will still obey you," Kaspar intoned.

"But they obey you first."

"Irrelevant," Kaspar repeated with a wave of his hand. "We must prepare."

"For what?"

"The force the Pythia spoke of. This Sinanju. It is an ancient power that can destroy everything we've worked for."

"So what is it?" Esther asked testily.

Mark Kaspar closed his eyes. His face assumed a wary cast. His voice grew doleful and full of portents.

"It is here."

Chapter Eight

Remo had contacted Harold Smith before leaving Thermopolis, and the CURE director's orders had been explicit: they were not, under any circumstances, to enter Ranch Ragnarok while Moss Monroe remained on the premises.

"What if he stays there a week?" Remo complained.

"You will wait."

"Great," Remo said sarcastically. "Smitty, the local paper is reporting there was a kid kidnapped in town last night. Maybe Chiun and I could take a look into that while we're waiting." "That is not our business." "You're all heart, Smitty," Remo groused. "You will proceed to the ranch," Smith instructed, "where you will await Monroe's departure." As it turned out, they didn't have to wait long. Remo had barely turned off the rural asphalt route onto the wide dirt path that wound through the woods to Ranch Ragnarok when Moss Monroe's limousine burst into view over a rise in the rutted, dusty path.

The limo became airborne for a split second before it bounced roughly back to earth. The driver momentarily lost control and nearly broadsided Remo's rented

Jeep before he skidded out onto the mangy strip of state tar in a cloud of dust that obscured the entire vehicle.

But only for a second.

As if yanked by a giant rubber band, Moss Monroe's limo launched from beneath the cloud cover and rocketed back toward Thermopolis. Smoking rubber strips burned up the road nearly a quarter mile behind America's premier political outsider.

"That man departs in haste," Chiun intoned, the sides of his mouth a network of wrinkles.

"He probably remembered the deadline for filing papers to run for king of Rwanda," Remo suggested.

They ditched their Jeep and ducked into the dense woods that closed in on either side of the narrow dirt access road. There were various cameras and motion-detection devices hidden in the trees and along the forest floor, but the two men avoided the electronic devices with ease, sensing their vibrations and magnetic fields instinctively. Sinanju made them at one with the universe and honed their awareness of all its combined forces.

It was not long before they found a path. Nearly imperceptible indentations marked it.

"Foot patrols?" Remo asked Chiun.

The Master of Sinanju nodded. "They have passed five times so far today," he said, noting barely visible heel marks and freshly snapped twigs.

Remo cocked an ear. "Sounds like they're going for six."

His sensitive ears had picked up the sounds of heavy breathing and of awkward, stumbling men progressing from the direction of the ranch.

Chiun nodded and slipped wordlessly into the woods beside the path.

There were still times when his teacher's skills amazed Remo. Here was Chiun, a century old and dressed in a kimono—the garish yellowness of which made him resemble a ripe, ambulatory banana—vanishing in an evergreen forest with the utterness of a scrap of ignited magician's flash paper.

Remo had little time to appreciate the artfulness of the move. As the patrol closed in, he also faded into the patchy shadow of the forest, his black T-shirt and chinos becoming part of their warp and woof.

He met up with Chiun a few feet off the beaten path.

"Why did you hesitate?" Chiun demanded in a squeaky whisper.

"I was just thinking...." Remo said, smiling knowingly at Chiun.

When Chiun detected the softness in Remo's voice, his features became less harsh. ' 'Please, Remo, refrain from thought when we are on a mission. I would not want the smoke issuing from out your ears to give away our position of vantage."

He raised a bony finger to his lips to stifle Remo's inevitable retort. "Silence. They come."

There were four of them—all dressed in Army-surplus cammies. They carried AR-15 rifles balanced across their shoulders like yokes for carrying water buckets. According to Remo's highly trained senses, an unusual and difficult posture.

Every man on the path—and especially the leader—seemed anxious to brandish the weapons before him. And although he didn't completely

understand why, Remo was certain that was exactly what they ordinarily did.

These men were used to carrying their weapons in their hands. So why weren't they?

It was clear that none of them ever had any serious military training, and it became more clear with every stumbling misstep that they were as out of place in the woods as lost Rockettes. They lumbered up the path, wheezing with every uncertain footfall.

From the way they were peering into the overgrown brush as they moved along, it was apparent they were in search mode.

Whatever it was they were after didn't matter. If they were disciples of Esther Clear-Seer, they were expendable.

"I'll take the right," Remo whispered. He shot a glance to Chiun, but the Master of Sinanju was already gone. Remo caught a glimpse of yellow silk as Chiun glided between a pair of giant, pitted evergreen trunks.

"And why don't you take the left?" he suggested to the unhearing wind.

Remo slipped silently right.

The patrol was clumsy. They had probably made this same circuit through the woods hundreds of times, but not one of them seemed comfortable in the forest environment. Remo noticed a tree root that had been worn smooth from countless stubbed toes. He pictured booted feet tripping over that same root a dozen times in the same week, surprised that it was still there.

Amateurs.

As the group advanced, Remo circled around before them, at times keeping pace, other times moving a few steps ahead. He knew Chiun would be mirroring his

own moves on the soldiers' opposite flank. There was no hurry.

All at once the group came to a halt.

Remo froze. What were they up to?

The men fell to discussing something among themselves.

"This is the spot?" the leader asked. "You sure?"

"I counted it off," offered one of the others with a nod. "It's 334 paces."

The leader stepped away from the other three and stared into the depths of the forest, nearly at the spot where Remo stood.

The leader shot a glance back at his men. "You're positive?"

The other soldier nodded.

Enough was enough. Remo's curiosity was piqued, but not so much so that he'd stand in the middle of the woods until moss sprouted out his north side. He moved an inch.

The lead soldier spoke up. "Hello?" His voice echoed uncertainly in the forest.

Remo remained frozen, his breathing keying down to minimal cycles of respiration.

The Ragnarok soldiers searched the silent evergreens with nervous eyes.

"This is the foretold spot?" the leader said, turning to his men once again.

"And the right time," stressed the second man.

"Maybe they're not here," someone else suggested.

In the thicket Remo focused his senses beyond the soldiers. A few yards into the woods on the opposite side of the path, he could hear the sound of Chiun's breathing—inaudible to anyone's ears but his own.

The Master of Sinanju had stopped beneath the lazily swaying bows of an evergreen. Remo could tell by his shallow intake of air that Chiun was pondering the strangeness of their situation.

It looked like the soldiers were expecting someone. Intruders. Infiltrators. But other than he and Chiun, there was no one around. And there was no way they had been detected. Even something as impalpable as an infrared beam would have been felt by either Remo or the Master of Sinanju if they had interrupted the beam with their stealthy bodies.

Yet the leader was calling out to someone. Calling in their approximate direction.

"Hello? Excuse me, gentlemen."

He couldn't be talking to us, Remo thought. I didn't make a sound.

He thought of Chiun. Not only would the Master of Sinanju never make an unintentional sound, but he would also disown Remo at the merest suggestion of such an accusation.

That brought it back to Remo again.

Remo tried to recall if he'd stepped on a branch or dried leaf. One thing was certain: if Remo had made a noise, he'd never hear the end of it.

"They're not here," said another of the soldiers.

"He insisted they would be. He also said they'd be hiding." The lead soldier addressed the woods once more. "We've been instructed to meet the two of you and lead you back to Ranch Ragnarok," he called out.

How could they possibly know we'd be here? Remo thought.

And because Remo could think of nothing better to do, he stepped out onto the path.

Even though they were looking for someone, the soldiers were still surprised to see their quarry materialize before them. The three at the back started to reach for their weapons, but thought better of the move. Their hands returned to their sides.

"Looking for me?" Remo asked airily. He pointed a finger at his own chest.

"Yes, sir," said the lead Ragnarok soldier. "We're your escort."

"We didn't call ahead for an escort," Remo said reasonably.

"But you are expected."

Remo pitched his voice over their heads. ' 'What do you think, Chiun?"

"It is rude to refuse an escort," a squeaky voice came from too close behind the soldiers.

They spun around, coming face-to-face with the Master of Sinanju. He perched on the path like some great yellow parrot, face inscrutable, hands tucked inside the sleeves of his billowing kimono. The elderly Korean had slipped up behind them without so much as a whisper of his sandal soles.

"That's it," said the second man to the patrol leader. "Two of them." He and the others glanced nervously up and down the path, obviously uncomfortable with the idea that the woods through which they had marched so frequently could have harbored unseen assailants all along.

"Will you gentlemen follow us?" the patrol leader invited.

And with that the patrol turned and headed back down the path.

Remo shot a glance at Chiun. The Master of Sinanju

wore a puzzled frown. What else could they do? They were obviously expected.

They fell in step behind the soldiers.

"Think Smith told them we were coming?" Remo whispered out of the corner of his mouth. A tree branch hung in his way. It became so much falling wood chips after Remo made busy motions with his hands.

Chiun's hazel eyes squeezed like a wary cat's. "Smith is a lunatic, but he is not stupid."

"Did you tell him you wanted to quit? Maybe this is his idea of an ambush. Dead assassins tell no tales."

"And live ones sometimes speak too much," Chiun replied. "I am not stupid, either. Of course I did not speak to Smith of our intentions."

"Your intentions," Remo corrected.

"Details," the Master of Sinanju said dismissively.

About a half mile along, the path opened up on a vast expanse of virtually barren fields. An eight-foot-high fence, woven at the top with tumbleweeds of gleaming razor wire, sprouted from the parched Wyoming plain—the only crop in this wide, alien vista.

The fence was broken up at regular intervals by concrete guard towers. Remo and Chiun were escorted between a pair of the three-story structures. A small gate, just large enough for one man to pass through, swung open at their approach.

"Side door?" Remo asked the soldiers.

The patrol leader grunted his assent.

Within the Ragnarok compound, Remo and Chiun found a cluster of ugly concrete salt-box structures squatting together about a hundred yards beyond the fence.

Another building was set apart from the others. It stood alone on a tract of land beyond a section of rolled-up fencing and looked for all the world like a giant, half-buried tin can. Remo could tell by the fresh scars in the earth that the hurricane fence had only recently been extended around this new area.

There was a smaller area corralled off by the isolated building, and Remo could see hundreds of tiny black heads speckled within the pen. Some were butting horns, others were running frantically for reasons that were entirely their own, but most were standing around, sullenly chewing whatever vegetation they could scrape up.

' 'You boys must be on that strict all-goat diet I keep hearing about," Remo commented, nodding across the field toward the pen.

The soldiers didn't respond.

Near the main grouping of structures, a young woman stood patiently waiting, an AR-15 slung across her shoulder as casually as a handbag.

"A reception committee?" Remo said quizzically. He shot a look at Chiun, but found the old Korean distracted.

The Master of Sinanju had raised his nose barely perceptibly and was pulling in delicate puffs of air. He seemed focused on the solitary building beyond the goat pen within the newly constructed fence.

"I'll take them from here," the woman announced when they reached the perimeter buildings.

The men nodded and headed in toward the largest communal building.

"Welcome to Ranch Ragnarok," the woman said

once the men had left. Her intelligent blue eyes swam behind horn-rimmed glasses.

"I've got to compliment you. This must be the most hospitable concentration camp I've ever been in," Remo said. "Don't you agree, Little Father?"

Chiun ignored him.

"Now, of course you don't really mean that," the girl admonished. But there was a twinkle in her eyes.

"Are you the Clearasil woman?" asked Chiun.

"Hardly," the girl said. "My name is Buffy Brand. I'm an acolyte in the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth. Welcome again."

"Care to share this incontrovertible truth with a disbeliever?" prompted Remo.

"You're standing in it, Mr....?"

"Falwell," said Remo, adding, "and I find it hard to believe that a trainload of mortar mix dumped out in the middle of nowhere somehow holds the mystery of creation."

"It's not creation that's a concern to us here at the Truth Church," Buffy explained. "We're looking more toward the other end of the time line. We are preparing for the End Times."

"That anything like halftime?" asked Remo.

"Remo, why prolong this prattling?" Chiun squeaked. "This is not the one you seek. You," he commanded imperiously, pointing to Buffy Brand, "show us the way." His hazel eyes strayed back toward the distant building.

"Who put a knot in your bloomers?" Remo asked.

"This is not the time for insolence," Chiun warned, chopping the air with one long-nailed hand.

Remo accepted the rebuke in silence. "I guess he's

calling the shots," he said, turning to the girl. "Lay on, MacBuff."

"You are father and son?" Buffy asked once they were hurrying alongside the nearest buildings. Her squeal of excitement when Remo nodded made it sound as if until that moment, she had thought that such a family relationship was only possible in a fairy tale. "How wonderful for you." She searched their faces. "You don't really look much alike, do you?"

"He is adopted," Chiun confided.

"Actually, I adopted him," Remo said, peeved. He was sick of being passed off as some kind of charity case.

"I allow him his delusions," Chiun declared. "For if I did not, he would never listen to me. Not that he heeds well now," he added quickly.

" 'A wise son heareth the doctrine of his father: but he that is a scorner heareth not when he is reproved.' Proverbs, chapter thirteen, verse one," Buffy said.

"Shut up," Remo suggested.

"Let the child speak, Remo," Chiun said. "This one is wise beyond her years."

Buffy blushed. "I'm only quoting," Buffy said, embarrassed. "The Prophetess says anyone can quote. She comes up with wholly original doctrine. She insists that it's as good as gospel, though."

"I'll bet she does," Remo muttered.

Buffy frowned intelligently. "She doesn't seem to know too much about the actual Bible, either."

"That way she can make it up as she goes along," Remo suggested.

"That's not a very nice thing to say," Buffy chided.

There wasn't the venom one would expect from a religious fanatic, Remo noticed.

"And anyway, she sure as shootin' knew you were coming," Buffy added.

"How did she know that?" Remo wondered.

Buffy shrugged. "Beats me. Maybe Kaspar told her."

"And I'll bet Richie Rich gives her the weather forecast."

"Don't be, silly," Buffy said. "Mark Kaspar showed up a couple of months ago. The rest of the acolytes seem to gravitate more toward him lately, but my allegiance is still to Yogi Mom."

Remo nodded to himself. It sounded like there was some kind of power play going on in paradise. He'd have to check out this Mark Kaspar once he was finished with Esther Clear-Seer.

They rounded the last of the concrete buildings near the main gate of the complex, and Remo was startled to see a perfectly ordinary-looking ranch house jutting out from the cluster of converted warehouses.

It looked like the giant urban cinder-block nightmare that was the rest of the Ragnarok complex was in the act of gobbling up a defenseless western cabin, but upon closer examination Remo realized that the cabin had been constructed after most of the other buildings.

"'Behold the dwelling of God with men, and he will dwell with them,'" Buffy piped up. "That's in chapter twenty-one of Revelations. And this is it." She motioned to the small, rustic ranch home.

"I think the Almighty probably had something other than a six-room, split-entry ranch with attached

garage in mind when he wrote that," Remo pointed out.

Buffy led them up to the porch and rapped carefully on the heavy oak door. It swung open at her touch.

"Prophetess?" Buffy called as she stepped through the doorway. Remo and Chiun followed.

There was no one in the house proper, but Remo detected the odor of freshly overturned earth and felt the rush of cool air that preceded the smell. Somewhere in the back of the house a tunnel had recently been dug.

There was movement from a rear room, and a beautiful raven-haired woman stepped out into the living room, looking like a cross between Liz Taylor and Imelda Marcos.

The earth smell was strong on her, so she had come up through the tunnel, Remo reasoned. But there was another, stranger odor. Remo sniffed the air. Beneath a thick layer of expensive bath soaps and perfumes, the woman smelled of rotten eggs.

"Your friends are here, Prophetess," Buffy announced respectfully.

Esther Clear-Seer smiled coolly.

"Ah, Mr. Williams. Mr. Chiun. Welcome to your unavoidable destiny."

"You seem surprised, Mr. Williams," Esther Clear-Seer said calmly. She dismissed Buffy Brand with a nod, and the girl backed out dutifully from the house.

Remo and Chiun exchanged narrow glances.

"An assassin doesn't make many friends," Esther speculated. "Would you feel better if I called you Remo?"

"Whatever you call me, it won't be for long," Remo replied flatly, but his eyes, usually as cold and unwavering as a midnight sea, could not mask a spark of confusion.

"Spoken like a true professional," Esther murmured. She turned her attention to Chiun. "But you, Korean, are the truest professional. Master Chiun.

Elder of the House of Sinanju. I feel as if I've come face-to-face with history personified."

Chiun's wrinkled visage was impassive. He deigned not to look at Esther, but stared at the wall beyond.

Esther went on thoughtfully. "You truly are an assassin's assassin, aren't you, Master Chiun? How old were you when you killed your first man?" She passed a hand before her face, as if the movement would erase the words she had just uttered. "You were thirteen," she said. "A boy by any standards, but an infant

according to your House. He was a Japanese soldier, scrounging for food in your village. He stole. You stumbled upon him. And you slaughtered him like a mongrel dog. Strange how his deathly face appeared in your dreams all those years afterward."

"Chiun?" Remo asked, bewildered. "This true?"

The Master of Sinanju made fists like thorns, his eyes frosty and still.

"It's encouraging that you two hooked up," Esther said to Remo. ' 'You an orphan, Remo. Master Chiun, a maker of orphans. You were meant for each other."

"That's it, lady, you're dogmeat." Remo made a move toward her.

A pipe-stem arm lashed out before Remo like a crossing gate. "Halt, Remo," Chiun commanded.

"Huh?"

Esther laughed. "I'd heed him if I were you, Remo."

"You're not me, sister," he growled. But he didn't move.

"No, that's true," Esther said, drawing close. "But there have been times when you wished you weren't, either."

Remo whirled on the Master of Sinanju. He seemed to have some idea of what was going on. "Chiun, what the hell is this?"

"Examine her hands," Chiun commanded.

Remo did. A powder, the color and consistency of mustard flour, coated Esther Clear-Seer's slender fingers.

"She's as hygenic as one of those goats," Remo said. "So what?"

Chiun held up a restraining hand. He tilted his nose

into the air and sniffed once, all the while watching Esther Clear-Seer through steady, thm-lidded eyes.

"That scent, Remo..."

"I smell it," Remo snapped. "It stinks like an egg-salad-sandwich factory."

"It is sulphur," Chiun explained.

"It is rank," Remo retorted.

"The old man knows," Esther said, pleased at his deduction. "By the way, is it permissible to be seated in the presence of the Master of Sinanju?'' Not waiting for a response, she gathered up the trail of her robes and dropped to a crushed velvet sofa.

Remo had had enough. He meant to flash over to the sofa. He intended to crack every one of Esther's vertebrae one at a time. He planned to crush her skull to powder, do a little jig on the woman's body and then run tear-ass back to Folcroft where Smith and his damn computers would be able to figure out what the hell was going on here.

All this Remo fully intended to do. But when he tried to move, a bony hand on his chest stopped him dead in his tracks and as unmovable as a redwood.

"Quit it, Little Father," Remo said. He tried to move his legs, but they had taken root in the highly polished hardwood floor. His arms, too, hung uselessly at his sides. Only then did Remo realize Chiun's free hand had drifted around to his lower spine. By manipulating the proper pressure points simultaneously, the Master of Sinanju had effectively paralyzed his pupil.

"Come, Remo," Chiun said softly. "We go."

"Go?" Remo said, dumbfounded. "We can't go."

101

"Oh, you will leave," Esther said with infuriating certainty.

Remo ignored her. "Now is not the time to give our notice, Chiun. She knows too much. She can blow the whole shooting match. We can't leave her."

Remo strained until beads of perspiration and frustration formed on his forehead, but he failed to move a single millimeter.

"We cannot help by destroying this one," Chiun said, sniffing the air once more. "She is a mere agent of her master."

Esther got back to her feet and strolled over to Remo, standing nose-to-nose with him. The noxious rotten-egg smell clung to her billowy garments.

"Listen to your father," Esther breathed. "The House of Sinanju has reached the end of its cycle in this millennium. It is time for one more powerful than the mortals of your pitiful village to rule the earth. Be frightened, Sinanju, for your every thought, your every action, your every reaction, is known. Your years of glory are near an end." She smiled gleefully. "East has met West, the prophecy is fulfilled."

Her smile rapidly changed to a look of horror as Esther found herself suddenly airborne and sailing backward into her living room.

She slammed full force into the wall over the couch. Her head snapped back, cracking soundly into a wide, gleaming window frame. She crashed painfully to the floor, upending cushions from the couch. Her nose gushed a fountain of bright, sticky blood.

In that flash of time Remo saw the blurry hand of

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the Master of Sinanju—kimono sleeve flapping—as it settled back to Chiun's side.

"Know you this, agent of evil," Chiun intoned. "Sinanju will never be sport for your master's underlings. We acknowledge his presence in the world at this time and will lie in wait for the day when he once again walks among the gods. Until that hour, Sinanju yields."

With that, Chiun whirled the protesting Remo around like a mannequin and propelled him hastily from Ranch Ragnarok.

Once they were gone, Esther pulled herself painfully to her feet. She ripped a handful of tissues from an end-table dispenser and tried to soak up the ceaseless How of blood that ran from her rapidly swelling nose.

When she heard the footsteps coming down the hallway, she didn't even bother to look up. She knew that sleady, confident tread.

"Aren't you worried they'll come back?" Esther honked.

"They are gone for now," Kaspar said. He eyed her appraisingly. "You performed well."

"Thanks," Esther said snidely. "That's the last lime I take a crash course in your gobbledygook. I think that old fart broke my nose."

"The Master of Sinanju is a formidable opponent," Kaspar agreed. He sat in one of Esther's garish Louis Oiiainrxc chairs.

"What is a Master of Sinanju?" Esther asked.

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"And what was all that assassin crap you made me parrot for them?"

"It does not matter now," Kaspar said thinly.

"Bull—"

Kaspar shot her a controlling glance.

Esther let the matter drop. She tested her bloody nose with a clean tissue. The crimson flow had slowed.

Kaspar paused briefly, watching as Esther heaved the scattered cushions back on the sofa.

"The latest oracles appear to have drained the current mortal vessel."

Esther glared up at him through tearing, blurry eyes. "Don't even think it," she snarled.

"The appearance of the Sinanju masters was disturbing to Apollo's emissary. He vented his agitation through the Pythia."

"I am not doing a kidnapping a day for you, Kaspar!" Esther railed. "No matter how good the money is." Esther gathered up her bloody tissues in a damp wad and fell back onto the couch. ' 'Tell him to count to ten before he vents next time." She massaged her temples gently with pale, tapering fingertips.

"It might not be immediately necessary," Kaspar said, knowing full well that the latest vessel would not last the week. He brushed the crease of his dress pants casually. "The Pythia has indicated that there might be a new investment opportunity for you," he added slyly.

Esther considered his words. She dropped the gory wad on the end table. At last she spoke. "I make no promises," she said dully.

Kaspar smiled. For her the money was everything.

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She would gather more vessels for his master. The Pythia had foreseen it.

To Esther, he said, "You have done well so far. Our master is pleased."

"He ought to be." She pinched her nose gingerly and winced at the pain. "I've got to get some ice on this," she said morosely. Then she got up and headed for the kitchen.

"I have to go away on business in a few days," Kaspar called after her. "Will you be able to handle things in my absence?"

Esther came out holding a dish towel clinking with ice cubes to the injured bridge of her nose. "I was handling church affairs long before you showed up, Kaspar," she snapped.

"Of course," he demurred. "It was not my intention to insult. It is just that, in dealing with our master, there are matters with which you might not be wholly familiar."

"Wholly familiar, please," she mocked. "I've seen you do it a hundred times," she said. "Kill a goat, hatch a prophecy. How hard can it be?"

"How hard, indeed?" Kaspar smiled an infuriating, tight-lipped smile. He stood to go. ' 'If we have guests, you will escort them to me?" he said unnecessarily.

"With bells on," Esther muttered. She screwed her eyes shut, trying to blot out the image of the annoying little Greek.

"In that case, good night." He headed for the door.

"Good night," Esther murmured.

After he had gone, she fumbled the makeshift ice bag back onto her nose, wincing at a flash of new pain.

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As the soothing ice numbed the stinging, she wondered briefly who this Master of Sinanju was and why Kaspar had refused to meet with him himself. For Esther's part, she hoped she'd see him again. She'd see to it that the old man wouldn't land another cheap shot on her holy person.

In the meantime, she would have to secure Kaspar's continued investment advice by supplying virgin number two.

Chapter Nine

The last rays of the dying sun had burned away in streaks of orange brilliance across the gently undulating surface of Long Island Sound, and Harold W. Smith had completely failed to notice.

To some the setting sun was a grand testament to nature's awesome design, but to Smith it was nothing more than the inevitable rotation of the planet on its axis.

Harold Smith felt that it was foolish to be awed by something that happened 365 times a year—366 times during leap year, because whoever had come up with the twenty-four-hour day had produced a flawed model.

And so the sun had set, the shadows in Smith's office elongating slowly to envelop the sparsely furnished room, while Harold Smith continued to sit hunched over his desk oblivious to, what was for most, the completion of yet another life-affirming day.

Smith typed with swift, precise pecks at the touch-sensitive computer keyboard at the edge of his desk. The computer screen, buried beneath the glossy black surface of the desktop, as was the keyboard, shed a weird amber glow upon his pallid features.

He was repeating a procedure Smith thought he had

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used for the final time only a few short days before. And while he monitored his progress on the angled computer screen, one nagging question continually tugged at the back of his mind.

What was Moss Monroe's business with the Truth Church?

As part of his preliminary research into suspected illegal activities on the part of Esther Clear-Seer, Smith had executed a background check on the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth weeks ago. It was during this search that he learned of the purchasing and stockpiling of armaments on the grounds of the sprawling ranch complex, and of the lavish lifestyle the self-proclaimed Divine Prophetess enjoyed on the backs of her shorn flock.

Even with that evidence in hand, Smith remained leery of committing CURE'S resources to the destruction of the Truth Church. The public memory of the Branch Davidian fiasco was too fresh, and at the time of that siege Smith was concerned the federal government was involving itself in a quagmire of sticky constitutional issues it had no business testing. To this day Smith felt America had sat in their living rooms and calmly watched the violation of the First and Second Amendments and, quite probably, the Fourth and Fifth, as the fires in Waco raged.

Smith believed to the very core of his rock-ribbed, patrician soul that the Davidian leader was delusional, and that those who followed him were doomed dupes. But there was no law against religious cupidity or blind, unswerving acceptance of a madman's ravings. In the end the Davidians had simply fallen victim to a different kind of zealotry.

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It was this frame of mind that had Smith willing to shelve the potential problem near Thermopolis earlier in the year. Only recently, after learning of FBI interest in the ranch and of the disappearance of one of their operatives, had Smith reexamined the situation.

As Smith's knobby fingers tapped remorselessly along the desk's edge, the mute computer keyboard lit up like a patchy pale fireworks finale.

What was Moss Monroe's interest? he wondered.

A red alarm light in the upper left-hand corner of the screen began blinking.

Smith had hacked into the files of the Thermopolis First State Bank, and now the computer was demanding the proper access code.

At this, as at each subsequent level of the system, Smith repeated the codes that had gained him admittance once before.

It took but a moment to access the account files of the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth and its head, Esther Clear-Seer.

Smith's brow furrowed as he scanned the information. Nominal changes since the previous check. In fact, there was too little change. Nothing had been taken out of either account in more than a week, and even then it was only a pittance. He reviewed the computerized records. Up until eight months before, there had been a constant cash flow in and out of both accounts. Understandable, considering the funds required to run a complex the size of Ranch Ragnarok.

Smith pursed his thin, bloodless lips.

If these accounts were now dormant...

Smith pecked rapidly at the keyboard, calling up a

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listing of all accounts controlled by either Esther Clear-Seer or the Truth Church.

It took only three seconds for the computer to respond. There was only one other account, opened at the precise time the other two had been virtually abandoned.

It was an ancillary account in the name of the Truth Church Foundation. The account was wholly separate from the main church account, which was part of the reason Smith had missed it until now.

He cursed inwardly, remonstrating himself for allowing his advancing years to taint the methodical manner with which he approached a problem. Not too many years ago it would have been routine for him to examine the bank files thoroughly the second time through. As it was, he had settled for the two known accounts on his reexamination of the records, and then he was largely concerned with the earlier weapons and explosives purchases. Whatever the reason, it had simply never occurred to him to check for a new account.

For the man who virtually pioneered the discipline of forensic accounting, it was an unforgivable lapse. Age was taking its toll.

Smith read the first few lines detailing the Truth Church Foundation account transactions, then stopped before he came to the first withdrawal.

Smith removed his rimless glasses and blinked several times, as if his vision had suddenly become blurry.

Once he had replaced the glasses, he checked the screen again.

There was no mistaking the figure glowing in amber. The funds of the Truth Church had exploded into the millions of dollars in a matter of two short months.

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Urgently Smith traced the numbered record of the first major deposit.

He had the answer in a matter of seconds. Zen and Gary, the ice-cream kings of New England, had dropped a quarter million dollars into the Truth Church coffers. Their bank kept digitized photocopies of all canceled checks. Smith called up the record of this particular transaction. He was presented with a color image of a garish check. In the lower left, on the memo line, someone had scrawled, "Prophecy."

Smith frowned like a lemon drying.

Was this a joke? Esther Clear-Seer had been calling herself Prophetess. But that was just her title. Or was it?

Smith dismissed the possibility. No one parted with a quarter of a million dollars to hear his fortune.

Smith returned to the Truth Church Foundation account and traced the next deposit. It was a woman's name that meant nothing to him, but when he cross-referenced the name with those listed in CURE'S massive database, he discovered that she was a Hollywood actress, famous for her roles as a defunct prime-time soap-opera diva and subsequently as mistress to a New Age faith healer.

Smith felt a tightening in his throat.

He scanned the computer files rapidly.

Some of the checks were harder to trace than others, but the pattern formed by those that were more easily identified demonstrated that the Truth Church ranch had recently become a magnet for the crystals-and-cuviur segment of American society.

At the beginning of the cycle, it seemed as if the church had touched only the fringes of wealthy

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society. Transaction after transaction showed that numerous celebrities had made the Truth Church the payee on dozens of checks. But the most alarming aspect was the trend appeared to have begun moving into the mainstream. The CURE computers traced checks to various political figures and business leaders whose names Smith recognized.

That's why Moss Monroe had gone out there. The specific motivation was as yet unclear, but obviously there was something to be had at the Truth Church ranch for which these people were willing to pay dearly.

Smith withdrew from the Truth Church Foundation account and severed his computer connection with the Thermopolis First State Bank.

Once he backed into the computer's main drive, he leaned back in his cracked leather chair. The instant his fingertips left the keyboard's capacitor field, the letters winked out. The desktop became a pool of blackish onyx, the computer screen a single, unblinking amber eye staring sullenly up at him from some fearful nether region.

There was nothing more to go on.

Smith glanced at his Timex. It was 11:00 p.m.

Remo had yet to check in. But that wasn't unusual. CURE'S enforcement arm had never been as punctual as Smith would have liked, and it was possible that Moss Monroe was still at the ranch. Engaged in what, Smith did not know.

There was no doubt that something strange was going on out in Wyoming. Something larger than Smith had originally guessed. Perhaps it had something to do with Zen and Gary's "prophecy," but until he had

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something more concrete to go on, this part of the investigation was dead in the water.

Smith was shaken from his reverie by the ringing of a telephone. For an instant he thought it was Remo checking in, then he realized it wasn't the blue contact phone jangling. He pulled open a drawer desk and lifted the receiver of the clumsy red AT&T standard phone that was his direct line to the White House.

"Yes, Mr. President," Smith said crisply.

"Smith," the familiar hoarse voice said. "Sorry to call this late."

"Go ahead, sir," Smith prompted.

The President seemed to be at a loss for words. He cleared his throat a few times, uncertainly.

"Is there something I can do for you, Mr. President?" Smith queried. His clipped, lemony tones showed no underlying curiosity.

The President forced the words out. "It's been brought to my attention that out west there's an establishment of—let's say ill repute. Members of my party have been...frequenting this establishment."

The uncharacteristic trepidation in the man's voice led Smith to a safe conclusion. Circumstances had often brought the world's two oldest professions into conflict from time immemorial, and it appeared as if the President had a potentially embarrassing political situation on his hands.

Whatever else Smith was, he was not a pawn of any political party.

"Mr. President, you are aware that it is not part of our charter to get involved in domestic political situations."

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"I know that," said the President. "Of course. But—"

"Then you agree it would be inadvisable for us to investigate a matter of a delicate political nature."

"Ordinarily, yes," the President agreed. "But there's more to this than that."

Smith pursed his razor-thin lips. "I am listening."

' 'Have you ever heard of a place called Ranch Rag-narok?"

Harold Smith listened to the President for barely five minutes.

The Chief Executive explained how he had been approached at a party fund-raising dinner earlier that evening by a congressman who had helped the President win a surprise victory for a piece of important legislation in the House. The man insisted that he had been told at a ranch in Wyoming the identity of those in the opposition who needed to be strong-armed and precisely what personal information would persuade the men to sway their votes. In private life this was considered blackmail, but in Washington it was business as usual.

The President was willing, at first, to dismiss the man and his claim as mildly eccentric, but twice during the same dinner—once by another congressman, once by a contributing business executive—it had been confided to the leader of the free world that all his questions about the future could be answered at the same small ranch.

The President cleared his throat noisily. "Do you—do you think there's anything to this?"

"To fortune-telling?" Smith retorted skeptically.

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"When you put it that way, no. Of course not. But—"

"But what?"

"Well, my wife believes in this stuff. In fact, she spends a lot of time in the Red Room talking to Eleanor Roosevelt."

"Claiming to talk to Eleanor Roosevelt, you mean," Smith said.

"Er, sometimes I listen at the door," the President said guardedly. His voice dropped to a hoarse whisper. "Sometimes I hear two voices. What do you think of that, Smith?"

"Not much," Harold Smith said truthfully. "And I would steer your political allies away from Ranch Ragnarok, if I were you," he added.

Repeating CURE's directive to avoid political entanglement, Smith excused himself and hung up.

For a long time after he had replaced the receiver, Smith's hand continued to grasp the warm red plastic.

He had his answer. The cryptic scrawl in the corner of that first check had been no joke. Reputable people with something to lose were willing to risk public ridicule to travel to the Truth Church ranch.

For a glimpse into the future.

At long last Smith released the receiver and pushed the desk drawer silently back into place.

He spun his chair toward the window behind him and stared at the silent, black waters of Long Island Sound.

For the first time that evening, he noticed that night hud fallen.

Chapter Ten

Michael "the Prince" Princippi had been out of politics for a decade, and although most Americans were relieved by this prolonged absence there were some—granted, a very small minority—who longed for the Prince of Massachusetts politics to return to the public spotlight. There was no one who held this view more strongly than Mike Princippi himself.

His rise to the head of the presidential pack a decade before had been both surprising and meteoric. He was far from flamboyant, but not deliberate enough in his demeanor to be considered reserved. He was, quite frankly, dull.

No one thought Princippi would get the nomination of his party during the 1988 presidential contest and, therefore, no one in his party campaigned much against him.

After the dust of the primary battles had settled, the other contenders were shocked to find out that their previous year of squabbling and backstabbing had effectively handed over the presumptive nomination to a man with the charm of a haddock and the charisma of a bucket of chopped ice. A broken space heater projected more warmth, the party chairman had lamented.

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Princippi had staked his claim to the White House by touting the exploding economy he had presided over as governor of Massachusetts, and he was right in singling out his stellar achievement. What he failed to tell the nation was that the real miracle in his home state was the fact that the makers of red ink were able to produce enough of the stuff to keep up with Prin-cippi's wild spending spree. This was the secret Michael Princippi effectively hid from the voters for so long: although he was an experienced technocrat with a penchant for knowing where all the paper clips in the governor's office were, his administration blew through money like a thresher through a field of autumn wheat.

For much of the race, it seemed that the voters would overlook Princippi's obvious shortcomings.

That was until the question.

It was at the second debate. He was up against the then vice president, and Barney Shea, the cable anchorman, had asked a personal question that the reporter hoped would help the governor dispel the silly notion that he lacked passion.

"Governor Princippi," the anchorman began, "Kiki Princippi is decapitated and her twitching body violated by four sweating stevedores. What do you do?"

Kiki. His wife. As the cameras whirred away, as the satellites beamed the small man's image to millions of homes across the country, Michael Princippi paused for dramatic effect, pondering the question.

At long last the man who would be president spoke.

"I'd identify the body, obviously, Barney—well, at least the head...."

The full text of the response, though telecast almost

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daily up until election day, was irrelevant. The Prince had screwed the pooch.

Princippi lost the race in a landslide.

When his party surged ahead four years later, retaking 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue for the first time in twelve years, Michael Princippi had gone on the few talk shows that would have him and pontificated his opinion that the then president-elect's victory was a ratification of Princippi's own abortive campaign. Four years after his dream had gone down in flames, Michael Princippi was still claiming victory. Something deep about having lost the battle but won the war.

During the most recent presidential race, his party had treated him like a poor relation. His calls to offer assistance to the national committee headquarters in Washington had gone unreturned. He'd gone full cycle from being courted to becoming a pariah.

He swore for the absolute last time, as he had so many times in the past, that his career in the fickle world of politics was at a definite end.

And this time his resolution held, until he heard through his remaining political connections of a place out west where all questions could be answered...and all answers were guaranteed to come true.

It was after midnight when Michael Princippi arrived in Thermopolis, Wyoming. The battered Volkswagen Beetle he had driven since his days in law school coughed clouds of thick exhaust into the warm spring air.

The former governor's excessive personal frugality had been fodder for the stand-up comedians during the heady days of the '88 campaign, and the rickety old

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car had borne the brunt of many an attack. While the worst of the barbs were flying, Michael Princippi's only concern was that the ridicule would force him to go out and buy a new car. After all, this one only had 190,000 miles on it and forty-eight oil changes.

Ten years later, with the odometer a few miles shy of its fourth restart, Michael Princippi chugged past the sleepy Thermopolis houses with their Re-elect Senator Jackson Cole signs tapped arrow-straight in their neatly tended lawns.

He remembered with some bitterness that Jackson Cole had been a friend of his opponent during the presidential race and he briefly considered aiming the Volkswagen across a few of the tidier lawns that displayed the senator's owlish visage. But back in Ohio, he had been forced to bind the rusted-out muffler in place with his shoelaces, and he was afraid the jostling would snap them loose.

Princippi left the images of Cole behind him as he passed through the far side of town. A few miles out he came upon the flashing amber light that was suspended above the twisting paved road, and he turned left onto the well-marked dirt path that led to Ranch Ragnarok.

He drove several miles into the thickening woods before his washed-out headlights caught sight of armed patrols. At each twist in the path where he saw them, the Ragnarok guards would pause briefly—like deer mesmerized by the flash of light from the oncoming vehicle—before resuming their march through the cluster of trees.

Princippi passed through the gate without incident. Either no one recognized him after so many years out

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of the political spotlight, or the Ragnarok soldiers were trained not to be awed by celebrity—something Michael Princippi still considered himself to be. Whatever the reason, no one batted an eye as Mike "the Prince" Princippi pulled up to the ranch house at the end of the main path.

A full-figured woman in white-and-gold vestments waited for him on the wide hacienda-style porch. When Princippi climbed out of his car, she rose from a small wooden bench beside the door.

"You're here for Kaspar," she intoned.

It was a statement, not a question. Her eyes were dull and her voice flat. For a second he thought she was wearing a mask. On closer inspection, he realized both of her eyes had been blackened. Painful dark rings encircled both eyes, making her resemble a raven-haired raccoon. Her nose was bluish and slightly swollen.

Princippi cleared his throat. "I'm here to see my future."

The woman sighed. "You want Kaspar," she said, nodding to herself. "Everyone wants Kaspar."

She beckoned him inside the ranch.

There was an office in a former bedroom at the rear of the building and, between a pair of four-drawer filing cabinets, a concrete staircase descended into the earth below.

Princippi followed the woman down.

The tunnel was cool and musty. Lally support columns held up iron cross beams, and the side walls were stacked with cinder blocks as far into the distance as Michael Princippi could see.

The dirt floor was boxed in with open frames of

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wood, which butted up against one another. Princippi had to step over the four-inch-high cross sections of wood every few feet.

"They start pouring the concrete tomorrow," the woman called over her shoulder by way of explanation.

At several points along the way the new tunnel met with sections that appeared to be older. Vast storehouses faded into the distant shadows both left and right of the tunnel.

There were rooms packed to the ceiling with U.S. Army surplus supplies. Boxes of K rations left over from the Korean War were piled neatly on forged metal shelves. One room held nothing but jug upon jug of bottled water. Most of the rooms, however, seemed stuffed to near overflowing with crates bearing sinister-sounding names like White Phosphorus and Thermite in bold black stenciled letters on the sides. There were various cryptic warnings on all of the containers concerning the danger of exposure to fire or extreme heat. Disconcertingly these were packed next to huge galvanized steel drums that reeked of gasoline.

Other rooms were lined with rack upon rack of guns. More weapons than Princippi had ever seen— even during his famous photo-op tank ride during the 1988 presidential race. Ragnarok soldiers shuffled sleeplessly through the underground chambers in a human parody of a paramilitary ant colony.

Judging from where they had entered the tunnel, Princippi guessed that the rooms were all near or beneath the large, warehouse-type buildings he had seen in the distance on his drive up, and he was relieved

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when the woman led him beyond this area and into another long stretch of newly constructed tunnel.

This section seemed to go on forever, but at last he saw that the thread of insulated wire that was tacked to the cinder-block wall and hung at regular intervals with sickly yellow lights along the whole length of the tunnel finally turned upward.

He was escorted up another flight of concrete stairs and soon found himself in the torch-lit interior of the old airplane hangar.

Without a backward glance, Esther Clear-Seer led him through the building to the Pythia Pit.

Inside the newly constructed room, Princippi saw an emaciated girl with stringy hair perched atop the rocky hillock in the center of the room. The girl stared, immobile, into space. Thin wisps of yellow smoke spluttered up from somewhere in the riven rock beneath her.

Resplendent in his priestly garb, Kaspar stood at the base of the small hill, a tethered goat staked to the dirt floor near him. He smiled when he spied Princippi.

"I was expecting you," he said politely. "I am Kaspar. Present your offering to the priestess of the Ragnarok Oracle."

Princippi blinked at the name, but said nothing. He nodded and fished in the jacket pocket of his suit, pulling out his checkbook.

"How much was it again?"

"The fee is twenty thousand."

Princippi gulped. "Dollars?" he squeaked.

"You were aware of the fee before you came," Kaspar said flatly.

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"I'm a former presidential candidate. Is there a discount?"

When he saw the stony expression on Kaspar's face, Princippi dragged a Bic pen from his pocket. Reluctantly he filled out the check, double-, then triple-checking the amount he had filled in before turning the scrap of paper over to Esther Clear-Seer.

"Give the woman two hundred dollars for the goat," Kaspar commanded.

Princippi balked. "I don't want a goat," he complained.

"The goat is for sacrifice. This you knew, as well."

Princippi was ready to put up a stink about the goat clause, but it seemed as if this Kaspar already knew everything Princippi himself knew. Suppressing a shuddery wave of personal anguish, he handed over the cash to Esther.

Kaspar next presented Princippi with a gem-encrusted knife.

"Slaughter the animal."

Princippi stared at the knife dully. He looked down into the wide, fear-filled eyes of the tiny creature before him.

"What if PETA hears about this?" he asked fearfully.

"Oh, for heaven's sake," Esther snapped. "Give me that." She grabbed the knife away from Michael Princippi and slit the throat of the terrified animal. At the top of the rock incline, the ecstatic twitching of the young girl became a bizarre parody of the spastic death movements of the bleeding goat.

The smoke from out of the fissure grew more dense.

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Kaspar slowly mounted the hewed-rock steps and took his place beside the dazed girl.

"The Apollo Pythia awaits your question," Kaspar intoned.

The former governor of Massachusetts swallowed hard. "Can you make me President?" he blurted out. His glowering features brightened momentarily with a hopeful half grin. His fat black eyebrows bunched together like butting sheep.

The Pythia's reply was immediate. "I foretell events. I do not affect them." The girl bounced like a palsy victim on her tripod.

Princippi appeared crestfallen. "You've got to," he begged. "I've got to get back in the game. Please. I gave you twenty grand."

"It is as I have spoken."

Kaspar interceded. "That is not to say, Mr. Princippi, that foreknowledge of events does not allow you to alter your approach to those events, thus changing the presaged outcome."

"I can change the future?" Princippi asked. "Is that what you're saying?"

"Most assuredly."

Princippi faced the Pythia once more. "Tell me how to affect the future so that I can one day become President," he asked boldly.

The Pythia twitched on her tripod.

"Your future exists as one with him who stands before you. You are the past. My priest is the future. Together you will change tomorrow."

Princippi scrunched up his face.

"I don't understand."

The girl appeared to be tiring. Her body twitched

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less spastically now, like the faint spasms of someone in her death throes.

"My priest," she wheezed. "He is your destiny."

And with that, she fell from the tripod.

"Shit!" snapped Esther Clear-Seer. She bounded up the stone staircase as Kaspar made his somber way back down to Princippi's level.

"I still don't get it," Princippi said, once Kaspar was beside him again. "What did she mean?"

"She's dead, Kaspar," Esther Clear-Seer shouted down. "You told me she'd last a while longer. It's been barely ten hours."

Kaspar ignored her.

"You have maintained your contacts with your state organizations?" he asked Princippi.

"Some," Princippi admitted with a shrug of his sagging shoulders. "But they're not mine anymore. They go with the flow."

"But there are people who are loyal to you exclusively. People who would obey your orders. People who, if asked, would help you mount another campaign?"

Princippi felt an old thrill return to the pit of his stomach. "Absolutely," he replied quickly.

"Then the wish of my master will be realized," Kaspar said with certainty. "Together we will change the course of tomorrow."

Michael Princippi could hardly contain his excitement. "Then that's it?" he said, awed. "Finally? After all these years in the wilderness I'm going to get another shot at being President?"

Kaspar allowed himself a small smile.

"Not you," the strange little man said. "Me."

It was early Sunday morning when Harold W. Smith pushed open the side stairwell door of Folcroft Sanitarium and stepped out into the light of a brand-new day.

His weary eyes winced at the brightness of the rising sun.

Smith had stayed at his desk throughout the night, awaiting Remo's report. When dawn broke without a call from his enforcement arm, Smith decided to allow himself the luxury of a brief trip home for a shower and a change of clothes. As he walked from the building, he fumbled in his pocket for his car keys.

Smith rarely used the building's main entrance, preferring instead to use the parking-lot door. This allowed him to come and go with relative anonymity, without alerting the civilian staff to his irregular work hours. But this early on a Sunday the sanitarium was operating on skeleton staff, with most staff spending time with their families. So there was no one to see the spare-framed old man as he crunched across the gravel driveway toward the staff parking area.

The parking lot was spotted with only a few cars. Smith's ancient station wagon sat unobtrusively in the space nearest the building.

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As he approached, Smith noted with some concern the growing patch of rust that had formed the previous winter over the right rear tire well. He had been warned that if the spot wasn't properly attended to it would continue to eat like a cancer at the helpless fender.

Smith placed his battered leather briefcase on the ground before him and stooped to examine the scab of rotted metal. He pursed his lips disapprovingly as he squinted at the jagged, rusted edges.

While he contemplated having the rust patch taken care of, he noticed a blur of yellow in the dull surface of the pitted chrome strip along the side of the car.

Placing his left hand carefully beside the rust spot for support, he turned on creaking bones and noted with some curiosity the arrival of a Checker cab by Folcroft's main entrance.

There was a guard's shack near the closed gate, and the man on duty leaned out the door. Smith could hear him shout something to the cab and he assumed that the guard was informing the cab's occupants that visiting hours at the sanitarium did not begin until eleven o'clock.

The taxi didn't move. In fact, it sounded as if someone inside the vehicle was yelling.

Still crouched near his own car, Smith pitched an car toward the gate, his face puckering unhappily as he attempted to discern the focus of the commotion.

A shrill voice began squabbling with the driver from the cab's rear, and it was with a sudden burning sensation in the pit of his acid-churned stomach that Smith realized he recognized the voice.

All at once the taxi's rear door burst open, and the

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Master of Sinanju spilled from the back seat like an angry summer squall. Before Smith's horrified eyes, Chiun wrenched the driver's door from its hinges and hurled the offending chunk of metal and glass down the road as if flinging papier-mache.

This accomplished, Chiun plucked the driver from behind the steering wheel and repeated the same maneuver, except the door had bounced less.

Ignoring the stabs of pain in his knees, Smith pushed himself quickly to his feet. Briefcase in hand, he hurried down the driveway to the gate.

The Master of Sinanju had ducked back inside the cab by the time Smith got there. The guard had abandoned his post and now stood on the Folcroft side of the gate, uncertain what to do, but obviously wishing he could do it somewhere else.

Through the iron bars of the gate, Smith spied the cab driver up the road and was relieved to see the man dragging himself up on wobbling legs.

"Is there a problem?" Smith asked crisply.

The guard spun around, surprised. "Oh, Dr. Smith." He relaxed slightly. He had unfastened the snap at the top of his hip holster, and his hand rested nervously on the butt of his revolver. "We've just had an assault on that man up there," he said, pointing at the taxi driver, who stood about twenty yards away from the cab and seemed unwilling to come any closer. "I was just going to call the police."

"Don't bother."

"Huh?"

"Have the driver treated for any abrasions he may have suffered. I will see to it that he is compensated for his trouble."

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"But the cabbie," the guard said, pointing. "That old guy tossed him up the road like he was a rag doll."

Smith dismissed the guard's complaints. "He is on a special vitamin diet."

The guard looked toward the cab where the parchment-covered skeleton had vanished moments before. "Whatever he's on, better cut the dose down," he said.

Chiun chose that moment to exit the taxi a second time and, simultaneously, the opposite rear door sprang open and Remo popped from the cab like a tightly wound jack-in-the-box.

"It's about frigging time!" Remo yelled at Chiun.

Smith's eyes darted around the empty road, grateful that it was still early morning.

"There is no need to shout," the Master of Sinanju said calmly.

"There is every damn need to shout!" Remo shouted. "In fact, I don't think I'm shouting enough!"

"Perhaps we should discuss this matter inside," Smith suggested nervously through the metal bars. He ordered the guard to open the gate.

Remo wheeled on him. "Perhaps I don't want to discuss it inside. Maybe I want to discuss it out here, in front of the whole damn world."

The guard had unlocked the gates but held the bars open only one inch. "Shouldn't I check their ID or something?" he asked. He still wasn't sure this wasn't some kind of bizarre security drill.

"That's quite all right," Smith said quickly. "He . is a former patient."

With a great deal of hesitation, the guard pushed the • gate open and Chiun breezed through.

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"Do not tip the driver, Emperor Smith," he instructed. ' 'The lazy lout would not carry a lone inert, bundle."

"Stop talking about me like I'm some frigging hat-box,' ' Remo snarled, storming through the gate behind Chiun.

Smith pulled the Folcroft checkbook from the pocket of his gray suit and reluctantly filled out a generous amount to ensure the driver's silence. He then hurriedly ushered Remo and Chiun up to his office.

Once he had closed and locked the office door and taken his seat behind his black-topped desk, Smith asked the pair what had happened in Wyoming.

"Nothing happened," Remo groused. "Chiun got a breeze up his skirt and dragged me from the ranch before I could make the hit."

"Would you have come voluntarily?" Chiun asked, calmly.

"Hell, no," Remo snapped.

"My actions, therefore, were justified." With the smug expression of a television commentator, Chiun sank to a lotus position in the center of the threadbare

rug.

"Justified, my ass," Remo snapped. He whirled to Smith. "He froze my vocal cords over South Dakota."

' 'It was the most peaceful airplane ride I have taken in years," Chiun chimed in.

"Master of Sinanju, am I to understand you paralyzed Remo and carried him through a public air terminal?" Smith asked.

"Right onto the damn plane," Remo interjected.

Smith thought of all the people who had seen the tiny Asian transporting the much larger man through

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the airport parking lot, into the airport terminal, onto the plane, off the plane at LaGuardia, through the terminal and out to a waiting cab. His eyes darted longingly to the drawer where his antacids and aspirins were stored.

"The Clear-Seer woman is still, er, with us?"

"Could be," Remo said sarcastically. "Unless Chiun has her stashed in the taxi's glove compartment." He slumped into Smith's office sofa.

"This is important, Remo," Smith said. "I would like a straight answer."

Remo sighed. "Yeah, she's still alive. Chiun was too busy hauling me like a donkey from there to here to worry about her."

Smith forced his thoughts away from Remo and Chiun's trip to Folcroft and considered the problem at Ranch Ragnarok.

"Perhaps it is for the best at the moment," Smith said absently.

"Best?" Remo asked. "What the hell does that mean? Did you want her snuffed or didn't you?"

Smith winced at Remo's choice of words. "It may be that you were sent in before I learned all the facts," he said. "Was Moss Monroe at the ranch when you arrived?"

"Barely," Remo replied. "He almost ran us down on our way in."

"Did you notice any other celebrities on the grounds?"

"Yeah, Soupy Sales tried to get the jump on us, but Chiun creamed him," Remo said dryly. "What the hell kind of question is that?"

"I have just learned that in recent months Ranch

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Ragnarok has become popular with a great many famous people."

"Well, I didn't see any paparazzi there," Remo said. "Just a bunch of weekend warriors with guns. And that's another thing," he said suddenly. "Everyone knew we were coming."

Smith sat up even straighter in his chair. "Explain," he said.

"It was like they were expecting the freaking queen or something. They met me and Chiun in the woods and escorted us through the gates like we were royalty."

Smith considered the information for a moment. "Perhaps this is the way they treat all their guests," he said slowly.

"They meet them in the middle of the woods, Smitty?" Remo asked sarcastically. "Besides, they said they were looking for two guys. Me and Chiun. They even seemed to know where we were hiding in the bushes. They called out to us. I have to admit, they were pretty polite about the whole thing."

"Is it possible they saw the two of you with surveillance equipment?"

Remo shook his head. "There were cameras and motion detectors and a bunch of other stuff, but Chiun and I don't have a problem with gizmos. The only way these guys could have known we were there is if we made noise."

Smith's mouth had grown dry. "They were somehow alerted to your presence," he said, shaking his head. "Is it possible you made some noise you were unaware of?"

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"Hey, I didn't make a sound," Remo said defensively.

"And I do not make sounds," Chiun said from the floor.

Smith shook his head. "It is a coincidence," he said. "It cannot be anything else. A sentry must have seen you enter the woods. His companions merely guessed your position."

"Brace yourself for an even bigger coincidence, Smitty. Esther Clear-Seer knew who we were."

Smith placed his palms flat on his desk. What little saliva remaining in his usually parched mouth dried to sand. "What do you mean?" he croaked.

"She knew it was us specifically," Remo explained slowly, as if to a particularly thick child. "She called me Remo and called Chiun the Master of Sinanju." A concerned frown crossed his face. "She even knew my real last name, Smitty."

Smith felt his larynx constrict like a knotted drinking straw. He gulped but could pull nothing down his cracking throat. "CURE," he ventured, his voice a grating rasp. "Did she know about CURE?"

"Relax," Remo said. "She never mentioned the organization. She just went on about me and Chiun and Sinanju."

Smith felt some of the pressure drain from his chest. He loosened the knot of his green Dartmouth tie and forced himself to swallow calmly.

"That is somewhat of a relief," Smith said. "But until we learn more, we cannot disregard out of hand her knowledge of Sinanju." He turned to Chiun. "Master Chiun, is it possible that you have, er, advertised your services?"

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This had been a problem several times in the past. -Chiun would sometimes take out a full-page ad or buy airtime on a local television station in order to scare up business or to rail against "amateur assassins." It was possible that one such advertisement had eluded Smith.

"I know of your desire for secrecy, Emperor Smith," Chiun informed him. "Inexplicable as it might be, this wish will remain inviolate evermore."

Smith raised a puzzled eyebrow. "I appreciate that, Master Chiun," he said.

"You might want to check up on a guy named Kas-par and his connection to all this," Remo suggested. "One of this Clear-Seer woman's cronies mentioned him. It sounds like there's some sort of schism going on at the Truth Church. Kaspar's the head of one of the factions."

"I will look into it," Smith assured Remo. With practiced fingers Smith booted up his computer. "I must sift through this new data before I decide our next course of action," he said, drumming his fingers atop the surface of the gleaming black desk. The faint glow of the buried keyboard responded to his touch. "In the meantime I want you to remain on alert. It may become necessary to send you back to Ranch Ragnarok on short notice."

"On alert?" Remo complained. "Geez, Smitty, what do you think we are—a couple of battleships?"

Chiun had slipped from the floor like a puff of steam rising from a teakettle. "Know you this, Emperor," he intoned. "That even in the darkest center of the coldest night, Sinanju is alert. Distance does not

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weaken the mighty bond of my House to one as great and worthy as you."

Smith shot a confused look to Remo. ' Thank you, Master of Sinanju," he said in puzzlement.

Chiun bowed to Smith across the room. "The thanks are mine," he said. "Your name, Wise Emperor Harold, shall be recorded in the histories of Sinanju by my very hand. Rest assured, you will be remembered forever as the greatest and most benevolent of rulers. Great reverence for your limitless beneficence shall grace the lips of Masters of Sinanju long after your earthly form has taken glorious flight into the Void. All hail, Emperor Smith."

Smith seemed more embarrassed now than confused. "Again, thank you," he said, nodding awkwardly. The formality of Chiun's words made him feel as though he should stand or bow or something equally unseemly.

Remo recognized the big kiss-off when he heard it. "Um, Smitty," he said, casting a weary eye at Chiun. "He's telling you he's quitting."

Smith shot to his feet. "Quitting?"

Chiun wrinkled his nose distastefully. "A crude term," he said to Smith. "And inaccurate." He shot a withering glare at Remo. "I assure you that Sinanju does not quit. It moves on. But you need not be concerned, Wise Harold, for only a very small percentage of former emperors have met with foul play. Your safety is virtually assured, though vast oceans separate us."

"But—but we have a contract," Smith sputtered. "Remo?"

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Remo held up his hands. "Don't look at me. I'm not getting into the middle of this again."

"The gold for the unfulfilled portion of the current contract will be returned to you," Chiun assured him.

"Whoa," Remo said, wheeling on Chiun. "You're giving rebates now?"

"Quiet, insolent one," Chiun shushed.

Smith was calculating quickly. "It will take several days to prepare the submarine for your return to Korea," he said. "I assume this is still the mode of transportation you prefer?"

"I do not wish that fat-faced son of Kim Il-Sung to greet me like a weepy maiden at the Pyongyang airport," Chiun sniffed.

' 'Then let your final days in my service end as they began. Here, at Folcroft. I will have your old rooms reopened and I will send for your things in Massachusetts."

Chiun considered. "You are gracious to the end, Emperor Smith," he said with a polite bow.

"And you honor me with your presence, Master of Sinanju," Smith replied. He returned the bow.

"Let's hold the frigging phone for a minute, shall we?" Remo countered, shocked by Smith's easy acceptance of Chiun's resignation. "You're just going to let him up and hi-de-ho out the door?"

"I don't seem to have a choice," Smith said.

"Wisdom flows like honey from your delicate lips," Chiun said, nodding serenely.

"Bulldookey," Remo snapped. "Each one of you thinks you're scamming the other, and whenever that happens I'm the one that always winds up holding the stinky end of the stick."

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"Forgive him, Emperor," Chiun said. "He is crass and does not understand an agreement between his betters."

"Of course," Smith replied. He retook his seat. "I will make the preparations for your departure." And with the promise made, Smith once more began typing swiftly at his keyboard.

"Come, Remo," Chiun commanded. "We shall retire to our rooms." And with that the Master of Sin-anju breezed from the office.

Remo watched Chiun go and then glanced back at Smith. The CURE director was hunched diligently over his hidden computer console.

"Right smack in the middle, every time," he muttered to himself. He slowly pulled the door closed.

Once Remo was gone, Smith peered up over the top of his rimless glasses.

His promise to Chiun of a submarine had been a delaying tactic.

While Smith ordinarily didn't like to proceed on instinct, at the moment his instincts were screaming that something big was happening in Wyoming. This was not the time for hardball contract negotiations.

Whatever Chiun's game was, Smith had to move fast. He had effectively stalled the Master of Sinanju for a few days. He hoped it would be enough.

Smith attacked the keyboard with renewed vigor. Time was of the essence.

Chapter Eleven

Candy Clay was hiking through town on her way home from the movies.

It was late—much later than Candy was supposed to be out alone—but Heidi Lovell's father had gotten called away on an emergency job, so he wasn't able to give Candy a ride home like he'd promised. He left a note on the kitchen table telling Candy that she was welcome to stay overnight if she wanted and that he'd pick up the tab next time the two girls went to the movies together.

But Candy had swimming lessons early in the morning, so even though her father would kill her when he found out, she decided to walk the three miles home. Her father would have to leam that he couldn't treat her like a kid anymore. After all, she was starting fourth grade in the fall.

Arapahoe Street in Thermopolis was quieter than on most nights. Folks were worn-out after the big weekend rally. There was barely any traffic as Candy crossed the street. She saw a sign advertising the upcoming Hot Springs State Fair on the first weekend in May and she was a little embarrassed that she was as excited about the event as she had been when she was

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little. Passing the fair advertisement, she cut through the park toward the west side of town.

There were still signs and banners everywhere left over from the Jackson Cole rally, and when Candy saw his big owlish head staring at her from a poster in Pumpernick's restaurant window, she wondered what the big deal was. Everyone in town seemed to worship the senator. Heck, it was practically a public sin to say you were voting for T. Rex Calhoun.

She wondered what her father would say if she told him that Heidi's dad was voting for Calhoun.

Candy cut across the new construction site at Canyon Hills Road onto Shoshoni Street.

Shoshoni was still mostly wooded, though a few washed-out flecks of light in the distant blackness hinted that two or three new homes had been constructed at the far end of the street.

The city had recently sold this stretch of land to a private contractor, and development was supposed to begin in September.

Candy remembered hearing that there had been a big fight about the Thermopolis city council approving the sale, and now there was an even bigger fight about the lack of streetlights on this stretch of Shoshoni.

The city had a policy of not putting streetlights in wooded areas, and that was going to stand until the new houses were complete.

Candy knew her father had been upset about that decision. He railed about how dangerous Shoshoni Street was and how a lot of high-school kids used the area for a drag-racing strip weekend nights. Over and over he vowed that there was going to be hell to pay the day somebody got killed.

(

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Her father could be such a drip sometimes.

Candy picked up a stick and dragged it in the powdery dirt at the edge of the road.

As she walked deeper into the enveloping darkness, she noticed for the first time a car parked in the shadows at the side of the road.

Candy heard the vehicle before she had really become aware of it, for, though its lights were off, the engine was running.

The car didn't move as she approached.

Candy couldn't see anyone inside, and when she was a few feet away from the vehicle, she stepped up onto the grassy embankment so she wouldn't get hit if the car drove off in a hurry. She was also a little curious to see what the car's occupants were doing hidden down behind the dashboard.

When she had gotten high enough up on the embankment and had drawn parallel to the car, she peered carefully down into the vehicle.

In spite of the darkness she could see the front and back seats of the big blue car clearly. But to Candy's great disappointment there was no one visible inside.

There was something spooky about the abandoned car.

Candy Clay was about to run home to tell her father about the parked car with its engine running, when something happened that would confirm the elder Clay's worst fears about the darkness on Shoshoni Street.

Someone suddenly raced out of the woods and grabbed Candy from behind.

Candy tried to fight as she felt a strong hand wrap around her neck. All at once she felt herself lifted into

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the air and she realized with horror that she was being carried bodily to the phantom car.

She thrashed and twisted frantically in the air. A hand covered her mouth, its thumb and forefinger clamped firmly over her nose. Candy tried, but couldn't pull in a breath.

The young girl twisted her head hard to the side one last time, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of her attacker, but her kidnapper jerked the head back. A little too hard.

There was a hideous snap, and Candy Clay's head lolled lifelessly to one side.

Candy's attacker propped the girl—now deadweight—against the side of the quietly purring car and spun her around. A pair of small, dead eyes stared blankly back at her.

"Shit," said Esther Clear-Seer. She shook Candy Clay a few times. The little girl's head flopped from side to side like a rag doll that had lost all the stuffing in its neck.

She dropped Candy Clay into the litter-strewed gutter and climbed quickly behind the wheel of her car, muttering all the way.

"Spit, shit and double shit," Esther Clear-Seer hissed angrily. She drove away, leaving the body of Candy Clay at the roadside. Esther needed another virgin. Fast. She hoped the nine-o'clock show at the local movie theater hadn't gotten out yet.

Ten-year-old Candy Clay lay in the filth of the gutter for almost six hours until she was spotted by a police cruiser. They would have found her sooner, a police spokesman said the next day, but they were already busy, what with the abduction of the eleven-