The Arms of Kali

"I have said it incorrectly, Emperor. It is not the fear that will stop Remo. He will find the source of the airplane killings, because he will not be able to stop himself. And he will fight whoever is at that source."

"Then what's the problem?"

Chiun sighed. "Remo will not survive the fight."

Smith took off his hat and turned the brim around in his hands. "How can you know that?"

"I know. I can explain no more. You are not of Sinanju and you would not believe." He lapsed back into silence as Smith twirled the brim of his hat.

"Are you saying this is the end?" Smith said at last. "The end of Remo? The end of our working together?"

"Perhaps," Chiun said.

"I'm not going to pretend I understand anything you are saying," Smith said. "And I don't know what I could do about it even if I did."

He looked toward the door, and Chiun said, "Do not go, Emperor. I have thought of a way to protect him." Smith's lips tightened. The usual, he thought. Just done with a little more dramatic flair this time.

"More tribute, I suppose," he said sarcastically. "Chiun, I'm a busy man. There was absolutely no reason to call me away from my office for this. If what you wanted was more gold, you could have told me over the telephone. I want you to know I don't appreciate this. Not one bit." He turned to leave.

"I do not want gold," Chiun said.

Smith's hand was on the doorknob. It froze there. "Then what?"

"I must go to Sinanju immediately," Chiun said.

"Out of the question. Things like that take time to set up."

"It is the only way," Chiun said.

"No."

"There is something in my village that can save Remo," Chiun said.

"And you just happen to get a free vacation at the same time," Smith said. "You've cried wolf once too often, Chiun." Smith opened the door.

"Hold!" Chiun's voice was like electricity cracking. He rose to his feet in one smooth movement that seemed like a puff of colored smoke rising, walked over, and pushed the door shut. "I rescind my request," he said.

"Pardon?"

"For the additional tribute. The extra four-weight of gold was not Remo's wish, in truth. It was my own for the welfare of my village. I hereby offer it back to you in exchange for my passage to Sinanju and back. Immediately."

Smith studied the old man's face. It was the first time he had ever heard Chiun give up an opportunity to amass gold. "This is serious, isn't it? It means that much to you?"

"Yes, Emperor."

"You honestly think it will help Remo?"

"I do not know. I can only try," Chiun said.

"Maybe if you'd tell me . . ."

"It is no dishonor to you, Emperor, that you would not understand. There are things in this world that none understand but me. This is because I am reigning Master of Sinanju and the history of scores of centuries rests with me. I must go. Now."

The two men looked into each other's eyes for a long time. Smith realized how small and old and frail Chiun was. Finally the American nodded. "Done. You'll go back to Folcroft with me. I'll arrange for jets and a submarine."

"Thank you, Emperor. Before I leave, I must see Remo."

"I'll send him in," Smith said.

"I'm glad you two had such a nice chat," Remo said as he plopped down on a chair.

"Our conversation had nothing to do with you. Nothing really," Chiun said.

"Oh, bulldookey. You think I was born yesterday? You think I don't know about your little arrangement to have me bumped off in case something goes wrong? Like if I can't work anymore?"

"That was an old agreement that I made with Emperor Smith. Long before I knew who you were and what you would become," Chiun said. "This did not concern that."

Remo stared at Chiun for a moment, then buried his head in his hands. "Maybe it should have," he said. "I'm ... I'm just ... nothing left. It's getting stronger, Chiun. The smell, the feeling. It's with me all the time now, and I can't shake it."

"And you will not be able to shake it, as you say," Chiun said.

"I'm losing my mind. That's all there is to it. Maybe you ought to go back to that old agreement and get it over with and send me to never-never land. Sometime when I'm not looking. No. Do it when I'm looking. I want to make sure you keep your elbow straight."

He smiled at the private joke between them. For ten years he had learned at Chiun's feet and absorbed all that the Master had given him of the disciplines of Sinanju. But praise was not Chiun's way to teach, and when Remo did something perfectly, without flaw, Chiun's final defense against having to praise him was to complain that Remo's elbow was bent and no one with a bent elbow had ever amounted to anything.

But Chiun was not smiling. "I am not going to remove you, no matter what my contract says with the Emperor," he said.

Remo was silent, and Chiun went on. "Instead, I will tell you a story."

Remo's face fell. "Maybe it'd be better if you just killed me."

"Silence, you pale piece of pig's ear. I have little time. This story concerns Master Lu the Disgraced."

"You gave me all that one before. He cleared the muggers off the roads of Rome and then went to work in a circus. Lu the Disgraced. Tsk, tsk."

"And I told you there was more to his story," Chiun said. "And now the rest. And don't you go telling anybody this, because the last years of Lu's life are a story so secret that knowledge of them is restricted always to the reigning Master. I am violating tradition by telling you."

"He must have done something really bad," Remo said. "What was it? It must have had something to do with money. The worst thing that all those old Masters ever did was forget to get paid: Master Lu the Unpaid. No wonder he was disgraced."

Chiun ignored him. He closed his eyes and spoke in Korean, his singsong voice taking on the cadences of ancient poetry as he unfolded the rest of the story of the disgraced Master Lu, who, after his shame in the arenas of Rome, fled that decadent city to wander through the uncharted regions of Asia.

The Master's wanderings, as Chiun related the story, gave Lu no peace in his heart until one day, after all the moons of the year had passed and come and passed again, he ventured into a small village high in the mountains of central Ceylon. The village was an isolated place, far smaller than Sinanju, and the people in it showed the effects of a population closed to outsiders. They were a beautiful people, unlike any the Master had ever seen. Neither white, nor black, nor red, nor yellow, the people of Bathasgata, as the village was known, resembled all the races of the world and yet none.

No one in Bathasgata knew the origins of the humans who lived there, but they were grateful for their land and their village and the companionship of one another.

As a token of their gratitude, the people created a statue out of the clay of their village. They fashioned the statue in the form of a woman more beautiful than any ever made of living flesh and worshiped her by the name of Kali.

But something happened after the statue was completed. The once peaceful villagers began to abandon their fields and flocks to devote all their time to the adoration of Kali. They claimed that although their love pleased the goddess, Kali wanted more than garlands of flowers and prayers written on paper, folded into the likenesses of animals.

She wanted blood. With blood, the devotees claimed, Kali would love them back. But none in the village was willing to sacrifice himself or a loved one to the statue.

It was then that Lu appeared in Bathasgata.

"It is a sign," the worshipers of Kali shouted. "The stranger has come just in time to serve as Kali's sacrifice."

And so the four strongest men of the village fell upon the traveler and sought to kill him. But Lu was Master of Sinanju, and greatest assassin on all the earth, and soon after their assault on him, Lu's attackers lay dead upon the ground.

"They seem only to be asleep," one of the village women said. "There is no blood."

Then the oldest of the village spoke. He said that the arrival of Lu the Master was indeed a sign from the goddess Kali. But the stranger was not to be the sacrifice, rather the instrument of sacrifice. Then the Old One instructed the others to take the bodies of the four dead men to Kali to see if their unshed blood, encased in death, pleased her.

They placed the four bodies at the base of the statue at the time of the setting of the sun, prayed, then returned to their homes.

With the break of the new day, they saw the result of their sacrifices. The statue had grown a new arm. "A miracle," the villagers exclaimed.

"A sign from Kali."

"Death pleases Her."

"She loves it."

"Kill for Kali."

"Kill for Kali."

"Kill."

"Kill."

"Kill."

With respect, they brought Lu forward to face the statue, and the Old One again spoke to the goddess. "Most revered Kali," he said, "this traveler has killed these men in Your service. He has shed no blood so that they might be delivered whole into Your embrace."

The growing of the new arm was the First Miracle of Kali, and now the Second Miracle of Kali happened. Although the statue was as hard as stone, Her eyes looked directly into those of the man standing before Her and the corners of Her lips curved up into a smile.

Astonished, the villagers knelt in obeisance to the goddess and to Lu, the man She had taken to Her heart, and the Third Miracle of Kali occurred.

A strange smell emanated from the statue. It permeated the small village square. Master Lu thrust his hand into his kimono and pulled forth a yellow cloth with which he tried to seal off his face from the aroma, but it was too powerful and finally he dropped to his knees and kissed the statue's feet and looked up at its face with the eyes of love.

"She has taken him for Her own," the old one said. "Kali has consummated the union of love."

Lu was frightened of the strange power which the stone statue had over him. At first, he said nothing to dissuade the villagers of Bathasgata from believing that he was of special importance to their homemade goddess, because he feared reprisal for killing four of their people. Then, during the second month of his stay, the Fourth Miracle of Kali occurred and caused him to fear for more than his life.

The remains of the first four sacrifices had long since rotted and been buried when the goddess again hungered for the taste of blood.

"She wants more," the Old One said, but Lu refused to kill senselessly for the appeasement of a piece of clay. "She will make you kill again for Her," the Old One prophesied.

"No one can force the hand of a Master of Sinanju," Lu said, and walked to the center of the village to stand before the statue of Kali. "You have no power over me," he told the stone goddess with all the conviction of his soul.

But it was not enough. Once again, the statue emitted the woman-scent of the goddess and the aroma insinuated itself into Lu's senses and he fell into a fierce and uncontrollable lust.

"He is ready to kill again," the Old One said.

The villagers talked excitedly. "Whom will he choose?"

"He will not choose," said the Old One. "Kali will choose."

"How?"

"We will know. We will have a sign," the Old One said.

And in the Fourth Miracle, the sign appeared. On the forehead of the Old One appeared a faint dot of blue. As the villagers gaped in wonder, the dot grew darker.

"It is the Old One she has chosen," the villagers shouted.

"No!" Lu struggled to pull away from the statue and the terrible power that filled him. "I will not . . . kill . . ."

But the Old One knew that the goddess he and his people had created would be satisfied only with his death, so he bowed before the Master Lu and exposed his throat.

Lu cried out in anguish, but the knowledge of right and wrong could not stop the goddess's wrath that coursed through his blood and directed his powerful hands. He took again the yellow cloth from inside his robe and wrapped it around the man's neck, and with one powerful wrench, the Old One lay dead at the feet of the statue.

Lu collapsed on the earth, a wail of defeat issuing from his now corrupt soul.

And the statue smiled again.

"C'mon, Chiun," Remo said in disgust. "A statue? Sticks and stones may break my bones, but statues you can shove."

"Some things are real even before they take form," Chiun said. "Look. I will show you." He lifted the small wooden chair from the writing desk of the hotel suite. "This, you say, is a chair. Correct?"

"Right. Chair," Remo said.

Chiun leaned over the desk, and with a pen and a piece of hotel stationery quickly executed a sketch of the same wooden chair.

"And this too is a chair?"

"Yeah. I guess so," Remo said cautiously.

Chiun folded his hands into his sleeves. "And there, Remo, is the failure of your thinking. For neither these pieces of wood nor this piece of paper decorated with ink is a chair. They only appear as chairs because you choose to believe that they are."

"Huh?"

"The true chair is in your mind, my son. And that too is a mere imitation. The original chair was an idea in the mind of someone long forgotten. But the idea is what is real. The solid object is no more than a house for the idea."

"That's too heavy for me," Remo said. "I'm not supposed to be a philosopher. I'm just supposed to kill people."

"No. You are supposed to be an assassin. It is just your ineptitude that reduces it to 'killing people.' But that is what Master Lu became at the bidding of the goddess Kali. No longer an assassin, he became a killer of people. Under the power of the real goddess, the formless force which had been encased in clay. But the force was before the clay."

"Why are you telling me this?" Remo asked.

Chiun's face was anxious. "I want you to understand, Remo. Because I believe that you are now facing the same power that Master Lu faced."

"I don't plan to visit Ceylon before Christmas," Remo said.

Chiun sighed. "If you feel Kali's presence here, then She is not in Ceylon," he said patiently.

"Who says I feel anybody's presence? I smell something. There's nothing supernatural about that. Maybe I just ought to change deodorants."

"Silence your face while I resume the tale," Chiun said.

"All right. I just don't see what any of this has to do with me."

"You will. Later. You will understand later, but first you will listen."

Lu continued to kill for the goddess, and with each death, more of his strength and skill diminished. Each time, as the bodies with their blue-marked foreheads lay still warm at his feet, Lu fell weeping to the ground, spent as if he had copulated with the stone image and delivered his seed into it. Each morning, after the kills, the goddess grew a new arm, while Lu was taken to rest in a bed of flowers. He slept for days on end, so drained was he of his powers. He belonged to Kali now, and all the discipline of Sinanju which Lu had spent a lifetime learning was used only to serve his mistress.

After two years, nearly the entire village of Bathasgata had been sacrificed to the goddess, and Lu found himself a sick, weak man, old before his time.

One who had watched his degeneration was a girl who lived in service to Kali. She was young and beautiful and loved the goddess she served, but the sight of the once powerful stranger reduced to a mass of skin and bones who left his bed only to kill at the statue's bidding saddened her. Although the others of the village feared Master Lu and did not come into his presence except on occasions of celebration, this young girl ventured at night into Lu's house of straw and flowers and began to nurse him back to health.

She could not much improve his physical condition, but the companionship of the young woman gladdened Lu's broken heart.

"Do you not fear me?" he asked.

"Why? Because you will kill me?"

"I will never kill you," Lu promised.

But the girl knew better. "You will surely kill me," she said, "as you will kill all of us. Kali is stronger than the will of a man, even a man such as you. But death comes to all who live, and if I were to fear death, I would also fear life. No, I do not fear you, Master Lu."

And then Lu wept, for even in the depth of his degradation, when he had betrayed all the teachings of his life, the gods of Sinanju had seen fit to bring love to him.

"I must leave this place," he told the girl. "Will you help me?"

"I will go with you," she answered.

"But Kali?"

"Kali has brought only death and sadness to us. She is our god, but I will leave Her. We will go to your homeland, where men like you may walk in peace."

Lu took the young woman in his arms and embraced her. She opened herself to him, and there, in the silence of Lu's sickroom, he gave her his true seed. Not the wretched parts of his strength that Kali took, but the inviolate essence of his own clean soul.

They left that night, in the darkness, and journeyed for moon upon moon toward Sinanju. Sometimes the fever of Kali would come upon Lu and he would cry out to his wife to tie him with weighted ropes until the terrible feeling passed and until the scent had left his nostrils.

She obeyed, glad that Lu trusted her. The seed in her belly had swollen and she was soon to deliver a child to him.

"Your son," she said when she presented Lu with their child. Lu had never been happier in his life. He wanted to cry out the news, but he was still a stranger who knew no one in this new land to which they had journeyed. He walked for miles, reveling in his good fortune at finding a woman who loved him enough to take him away from the evil goddess, a woman who had given him a son.

The countryside he walked through grew more familiar with each step. Sinanju? he wondered. But it did not look like the place of his birth. It was lush, while Sananju was cold and harsh. It was not anything like Sinanju. It was ...

He screamed when he reached the crest of the hill he was climbing. For below, in a shallow mountain valley, was the village of Bathasgata.

"Kali has brought me back," Lu whispered. His hopes shattered. There was no escape from Kali.

He went back to the crude camp where his wife had delivered their son to tell her the horrible news. When he saw her, he began to tremble like a palsied man. There was a blue dot on her forehead. "Not her," Lu screamed.

"Lu ... Lu . . ." His good wife tried to raise herself to find the ropes to tie him down, but she was weak from birthing and moved clumsily. She implored him to be strong, but his strength was as nothing compared with the power of Kali. He tried to cut off his own arm to prevent what he knew would happen, but Kali would not allow it. Slowly he pulled the yellow cloth from his kimono and wound it around the neck of his beloved, and then inexorably tightened it and squeezed the life from her body.

When it was done and Lu lay close to death beside the body of the beautiful woman who had loved him, he knew what he must do. He took a ring from the finger of the woman he had loved and killed, then buried her by the light of the moon. After saying a prayer to the old gods of Sinanju, he took his infant son in his arms and walked into the village. At the first house, he delivered the baby to the occupants. "Raise him as your own," he said, "for I will not live to see the sun rise."

Then he went alone to stand before the statue of Kali. The statue was smiling.

"You have destroyed me," Lu said.

And in the quiet of the still night, the statue answered him from a place deep within his own mind: "You tried to betray me. It was a just punishment."

"I am prepared to die." He touched his wife's ring and felt it give him strength.

"You will die when I command it," Kali said.

"No," Lu said, and for a moment the old power returned to him, and he said, "I am the Master of Sinanju. You will die when I command it. And I command it now."

With those words, he put his arms around the statue and uprooted it from the ground. Kali burned him with Her stone flesh, and Her many arms reached out to gouge his eyes, but Lu would not stop. He carried the statue down the mountain to the sea and with each step he was mutilated by the terrible force of the goddess. And with each step did he remember the love that had given him life, the love he had killed with his own hands, and he walked onward.

When he reached the cliffs overlooking the sea, the goddess spoke to him again.

"You cannot destroy me, fool. I will come back."

"It will be too late. I will be dead with you," Lu said.

"I will not come back for you, but for your son. Your descendant. One who follows your line will be mine, and I will exact my revenge on him, though it take many thousands of moons. He will be my instrument of revenge and my wrath will be mighty through him."

With the last of his strength, Lu cast the statue over the cliff. It sank into the blue water without a ripple. Then, as dawn sent out its first rays of light, the Master Lu wrote his story with his own blood on reeds that grew along the cliff's edge. With his final breath he wound the reeds through the ring which had belonged to his wife, and there he died.

"The Brothers Grimmsville," Remo said. "A fairy tale."

"We have the reeds," Chiun said.

"How? If Lu died in this mythical spot in Ceylon, how'd you get them back to Korea?"

"Fate works in strange ways," the old Oriental said. "Lu's body was found by a merchant who spoke many tongues. He delivered the reeds to Sinanju."

"I bet it was great for the merchant," Remo said. "Knowing your village, I suppose they slit his throat."

"He was not killed. He lived a long life of wealth and luxury with many wives and concubines."

"But he was never allowed to leave town, right?" Remo said.

Chiun shrugged. "Who would want to leave Sinanju?"

Far below, a horn sounded in the street and Remo parted the curtains and looked out. "It's Smitty. I recognize the Rent-a-Wreck. I thought he left an hour ago."

"He wishes for me to travel with him," Chiun said. "Where are you going?"

"I told you. I must journey to Sinanju."

"I'll wait here until you get back," Remo promised. Chiun smiled sadly. "Would that were true, my son. When you leave, leave a mark for me so that I may follow."

"Why should I leave? I can go nuts in Denver just as well as anywhere else."

"You will leave," Chiun said. "Just do not forget the story of Lu."

The old man gathered his kimono about him and glided toward the door. "Promise? You will not forget, Remo?"

"I don't know what any of this is about," Remo said. "I'm not Lu's descendant. I'm from New Jersey."

"You are the next Master of Sinanju. An unbroken line of thousands of years connects you with Lu the Disgraced."

"You're wasting your time on this trip," Remo said.

"Remember Lu. And try not to do anything stupid while I am gone," Chiun said.

Chapter Thirteen

If Ban Sar Din had learned one thing during his reign as head of an Indian religion, it was never to trust anybody who believed in an Indian religion.

So he had his doubts about A. H. Baynes, but the problem was that he could not figure out why. Because going against the tradition of centuries of his family and telling the truth-Ban Sar Din had to admit that Kali had no more loyal follower than the airline executive.

Baynes had taken to sleeping inside the ashram each night now, huddled on the floor at the foot of the statue, just "so no crazies come in and try to harm Our Lady." And all his waking hours, too, were spent in the ashram, and when Ban Sar Din asked him, if he didn't have an airline to run, Baynes had just smiled and said:

"It's running itself. We're the safe airline. No deaths. We don't even have to advertise anymore. The people are waiting in line for tickets on just Folks."

But was that all Baynes wanted? Ban Sar Din wondered. So the American had struck a deal with Ban Sar Din and now there were no more killings aboard just Folks. But Baynes could have had more. He could have had a cut of the proceeds. He could have used the killers as instruments of revenge on people who had offended him.

But he seemed to want none of those things. He said he wanted only to serve Kali. "I've served Mammon, big business, all these years, " Baynes told him, and clapped a big hand on the small round Indian's shoulder. "It's time I served something I believed in. Something bigger than myself."

He had sounded sure of himself when he said that, and this morning, he was even more convinced. He had come running into the small yet luxurious apartment Ban Sar Din had built inside a garage across the alley, waving a fistful of tickets.

"She provided. She provided," Baynes was shouting.

"She provided what?" asked Ban Sar Din. "And who's She?"

"O blessed Kali," Baynes said. There were tears of joy streaming down his cheeks. "I slept all night under the statue. No one else was there. And when I woke up this morning, these were in Her hand." He waved the tickets. "A miracle," he said. "She blessed us with a miracle."

Ban Sar Din checked the tickets. They were all on Air Europa, all round trips, enough for an entire plane. A telephone call to the airline confirmed that they had all been paid for, in cash, but no one remembered who had purchased them. Ban Sar Din was nervous. God was one thing, but miracles, real miracles, were something else.

"Isn't it wonderful?" Baynes said.

"Well, it saves us some money anyway," Ban Sar Din said. "We'll give them out tonight. Along with a lot of rumals."

"A lot of rumals out," Baynes said. "A lot of cash coming back. And all through the grace of Kali. O Kali be praised." And he had left Ban Sar Din's apartment to go back to the burgeoning office he had set up in the small room behind the ashram where Ban Sar Din had been living.

Later in the day, when Bar Sar Din went into the office, Baynes had a finger stuck in his ear and was shouting into the telephone.

"Sure thing, Herb, old buddy," he yelled. He was yelling because the chanting in the outer room would have registered on a seismograph.

"No," Baynes shouted. "I can't go. I've got my religious work. But I thought it would be good for Evelyn and the kids to get away for a while, and they get along so well with you and Emmie."

"Kill for Kali," came the chant from the outer room. "Kill, kill, kill."

Baynes hung up the phone, and when Ban Sar Din's eyes questioned him, he explained: "That was my next-door neighbor, Herb Palmer. I'm sending the wife and kids and him and his wife on vacation to Paris. I don't think Kali wants us only to work and ... well, these tickets came into our hands ... so why not?"

"Why not indeed?" Ban Sar Din said. This was something he understood. Petty theft. Baynes was taking five of the ashram's tickets for personal use. It was worth it, just to know that the man was human after all.

"Unless you think I shouldn't?" Baynes said. "Unless you think there's something wrong?"

"No, no," Ban Sar Din singsonged back. "Nothing wrong. A vacation will do your family good."

He was brushed aside by Baynes's two children, who marched into the office, followed by Mrs. Baynes. "Kill for Kali," Joshua Baynes intoned in his most serious voice. He picked up a bottle of ink and upended it on Baynes' desk.

"Isn't he cute?" Mrs. Baynes said.

"Kill, kill, kill." Joshua made a paper airplane out of Baynes' computer printout.

"He sounds so darned grown-up already," Mrs. Baynes said, her eyes moistening.

The Baynes girl belched.

"They've lost so many of their inhibitions since they got here," Mrs. Baynes said, blowing kisses to her youngsters. "All this killing talk is keeping them off the streets, A. H. I am absolutely positive that Joshua has no desire to drink hard liquor or to experiment with girls."

"Kill," Joshua chanted.

"Isn't that sweet?" said Mrs. Baynes.

"Warms my heart," Baynes said.

"And you haven't noticed," the woman said accusingly.

"Noticed what?"

"My sari." She twirled in the center of the office. "You see, I've adapted to my new life-style, A.H. I don't need designer clothes or charity balls or a live-in maid. That motel down the block is fine for me. I've followed my husband to enjoy the spiritual fruits of a simpler life. Aren't you proud of me, dear?"

The chanting from the outside room was so loud now that Ban Sar Din went out to ask them to quiet down before someone called the police. His request resulted in an incense pot being thrown in his general direction, and he went back into the office, just as Baynes was telling his wife: "And Herb Palmer and Emmie are going too. I thought it would be a nice break for you and the kids."

"I want to stay here and kill for Kali," Joshua said sullenly.

"Me too," said the daughter.

"How they go on," Mrs. Baynes said with a smile.

"Don't worry," Baynes said. "I'll convince them."

He ushered his wife out of the office and looked at Ban Sar Din, who said, "They don't even listen to me anymore. Someone's going to call the police."

"Maybe they'll listen to me," Baynes said. "They know I'm one of them."

"Why should they listen to you?" said Ban Sar Din. "You're not even holy."

"Then make me holy," Baynes said.

The Indian shook his head. "You come in here, a walk-in, you take over my office with your computers, you encourage other walk-ins at our services. I don't think you're ready to be a Holy One."

"Maybe I should ask the people outside?" Baynes said. He started for the door.

"Welcome to the ranks of the holy, O Chief Phansigar," Ban Sar Din said, then sullenly traipsed out of the office to go back to his apartment across the alley. He saw Baynes put a big arm around the shoulders of his two children and pull them to him, just before he closed the office door.

A. H. Baynes stood on the raised platform next to the statue of Kali and looked out over the crowd in the ashram. It seemed as if every square foot of floor space was filled. The goddess was attracting new followers every day, and he felt proud of himself for the part he had played.

"Brothers and sisters in Kali," he intoned, "I am your new chief phansigar."

"Kill for Kali," someone murmured softly.

"That's right," Baynes said. "And She has provided us the means."

He waved the sheaf of airline tickets over his head. "This is a whole planeful of tickets for Air Europa, going to Paris," he said. "A whole planeful. Kali provided. "

"She always provides," said Holly Rodan.

"She loves it," someone else said.

"This is how we're going to use them," Baynes said. "Europa's got two planes leaving for Paris, just an hour apart. These tickets are for the first plane. All of you are going to fill up that plane and go over there, and then when the second plane lands, you're each going to latch on to somebody from that plane and do Kali's work. I don't want anybody who was on that second plane to be coming back to the United States," Baynes said. "Not one. That was what She meant when She gave us a full planeload of tickets."

"She is wise," murmured someone in the front row.

"So is our chief phansigar," someone else said, and for a moment they all chanted, "Hail our chief phansigar," until Baynes blushed and stopped them with a wave of his hand.

"We only reflect Her glory," he said, and then bowed his head as the wave upon wave of chants filled the room.

"Kill for Kali."

When the excitement had reached a fever pitch, Baynes tossed the batch of plane tickets out among the faithful, and a jubilant roar rushed from the throats of the disciples.

Baynes picked out his son among the crowd. The boy was standing with his arms folded, his Europa ticket held between thumb and forefinger. Baynes winked and the boy responded with a knowing nod.

Chapter Fourteen

The devotees had gone and the ashram's door was locked. Outside on the street, horns blared and people were singing. It was ten o'clock in the morning and drunks were already shouting to one another in the street.

"Sardine! Sardine!" bellowed A. H. Baynes. "You get your fat ass in here."

Ban Sar Din stepped into his former office from his current home in the garage.

"What the hell is that racket out there?" Baynes demanded.

"It is Saturday. People in this city celebrate many strange things. Today they celebrate Saturday."

"How the hell do they expect a man to get any work done?" Baynes said.

They stopped talking as they heard an insistent rapping at the front door.

"Why don't you go answer that?" Baynes said, and Ban Sar Din returned a few minutes later holding a brown envelope.

"Messenger," he said. "It is for me. It is addressed to the leader of the ashram."

"Hand it over," Baynes said. He tore the envelope from the Indian's hand.

"Why are you so belligerent today,. Mr. Baynes?" asked Ban Sar Din.

"Because I'm wondering about you," Baynes said. "I just don't know how devoted you are to Kaii, and I think maybe you're just in this for the money."

"It is not so," Ban Sar Din said stiffly. "I will have you know that I was worshiping Kali when you were decorating Christmas trees in your home."

"We'll see," Baynes said. "We'll see."

When Ban Sar Din left the office, Baynes opened the envelope and found a typewritten message:

Meet me at the Orleans Cafe at three o'clock. You will recognize me. The meeting will benefit you greatly.

The note was not signed, and Baynes said, "Usual nut," and tossed the paper away. He kept working all morning, but he was unable to totally forget the note. Something kept pulling his mind back to it, something subtle yet powerful. Several hours later he picked it out of the wastebasket and studied it.

The paper was of high quality, densely woven and difficult to tear, and its edges were lined with gold. But Baynes realized that that was not what had attracted him. It was something else.

Experimentally he held the letter to his nose. A sickly-sweet aroma, faint but compelling, held him suspended out of time for a moment. He clutched the letter tightly and ran into the empty sanctuary and pressed his face against the statue of Kali. It was there too. The same smell. He checked his watch. It was 2:51.

The streets of New Orleans looked like a dress rehearsal for Mardi Gras, and the Orleans Cafe was crowded with people in garish costumes. You will recognize me, the message had read. Baynes searched the clientele, which seemed made up mostly of large hairy men dressed as women.

He noticed a lean young transvestite wearing Dracula makeup eyeing him steadily.

"Do you know me?" Baynes asked.

"Depends," the creature said. "You into getting your tongue tattooed?"

Baynes slipped away and had almost reached the door when he saw someone sitting alone near a window. The someone was covered from head to foot in a costume of stone gray. Its head was adorned by a cap of rhinestones. Its face was a garish painted mask. It had eight arms.

"Of course," Baynes said. "Kali."

The person at the table nodded to him, and one of the hands, covered by thick gray gloves, beckoned to him. He sat down across from the uncanny replica of the statue.

"I knew it would be you who came," the person in the costume whispered. There was no hint of gender in the voice, no characteristics to mark it as male or female.

"How did you know?" Baynes asked. He had to lean forward to hear the answer.

"Because you are the true leader of the cult of the Thuggees. You control the members. You may do as you wish."

Baynes sat back and asked, "What do you want?"

"Kali," the statue whispered.

"Sorry. The statue's not for sale." He began to rise.

"One million dollars."

He sat back down. "Why so much?"

"That is my offer."

"How do I know I can trust you? I haven't even seen your face. I don't know if you're a man or a woman."

"You will learn in time. And to trust me, you need only test me."

"Test you? How?"

The statue took a pen and wrote a telephone number on a cocktail napkin. "Memorize this," it whispered. As Baynes looked at the number, the person said, "Call anytime. One favor. Anything. It is yours." Then the statue burned the napkin over a candle on the table, stood up, and left.

Chapter Fifteen

Numbers 129 and 130.

Mr. Dirk Johnson of Alameda, Illinois, squeezed his wife's hand as they stepped off the Europa L-1011 jetliner into the futuristic grandeur of Charles de Gaulle Airport.

"This'll make up for the honeymoon we never had," he said, smiling proudly. "I bet your daddy would never have believed we'd be standing here in Paris, France, one day," Johnson said.

"I always knew you better than he did," Mrs. Johnson said, pecking him on the cheek. "Isn't the hotel supposed to send a bus to pick us up or something?"

"Excuse me," a bright-eyed young woman interrupted. "If you need a ride, my friends and I are going right into the city. Can we give you a lift?"

"Now, isn't that nice, Dirk?" Mrs. Johnson said. "You know, well, it's really nice." She wanted to say a lot of things about there being so many nice young people today who contradicted the rebel-teenager stereotype, but she thought she might sound gushy.

"We'd be obliged, miss," Johnson said.

"I don't see the hotel bus anywhere."

"Believe me, it'll be our pleasure," the young woman said brightly. "Here's our car."

Mrs. Johnson noticed the twisted yellow handkerchiefs around the necks of the clean, good-looking young folks. "Don't you look nice," she said. "Are you students?"

"More like a club," the young woman said as the automatic door locks clicked the car's doors shut. "These rumals are our insignia."

"Isn't that sweet? Kind of like the Scouts."

"We'd like you both to have one," the girl said.

"Oh, no. We couldn't-"

"Please. It'll make our day. Here, just slip it around your neck. You, too. . . ."

Number 131, 132, and 133.

Samantha Hall and Roderick Van Cleef explained to the chauffeur that if he couldn't do his job, he could find another.

"But the car was running perfectly just minutes ago," the French driver said, with a touch of that French arrogance that wonders what it is doing even talking to lesser people, much less apologizing to them.

"Well, that obviously isn't the case now," Samantha drawled, spinning her Oscar de la Renta cape dramatically about her shoulders.

"What a bore," Roderick said with a sigh.

"It's all your fault, Roddy. If we had flown the Concorde . . ."

"What's that got to do with this? Besides, the Concorde's as uncomfortable as ballet shoes."

"We could have chartered a plane, then," Samantha said.

"For a bloody weekend?"

"My last lover did," Samantha said.

"Your last lover was too fat to fit into the seat of a commercial jet."

"She was not," Samantha said. "And anyway-"

"Pardon me, but I see you're having some car trouble," said a young man with a yellow handkerchief in his pocket. "May I give you a lift?"

"Roddy, have this person arrested," Samantha snapped.

"Why? He's offering us a ride."

"In a Chevrolet," Samantha hissed. "And he's wearing polyester. You don't want me seen with someone in a polyester jacket, do you?"

"Frankly, I wouldn't give a damn if he were wearing fig leaves. Look at the taxi line."

"Actually, the car's quite comfortable," the eager young man said with an engaging grin.

Samantha heaved a great sigh. "All right. My weekend's already ruined anyway. I might as well turn it into a total fiasco. Bring on the Chevrolet."

She stepped haughtily toward the blue American sedan. Another young man smiled at her from the front seat. He was holding a yellow handkerchief in his hands.

"You can come too," the young man told the French chauffeur.

"I will not ride with a paid laborer," Samantha screeched.

"It'll be all right," the young man said soothingly. "He can ride in the front seat with us. And the trip will be over in no time at all."

Number 134.

Miles Patterson sat in the airport bar sipping a martini, his well-worn leather bag at his feet. He had been flying internationally for twenty-five years and he had found that a couple of stiff drinks immediately after a long flight helped eliminate jet lag. Let others scurry through corridors dragging their bundles and bags and kiddies and then wait interminably at the baggage claim and then again for a cab ride. Miles Patterson prefered to blot up two martinis in silent ecstasy, until Paris looked like a warm and friendly place.

"Do you mind if I sit next to you?" a young pretty girl asked as Miles was nearing the end of his second martini. She was less than twenty years old and had Brooke Shields's hair and melon breasts. Paris had never before seemed so warm and friendly.

He shook his head and the girl asked shyly, "Are you visiting?"

Miles stared, stupefied for a moment, before dragging himself back to reality. "Uh, no. Business. I'm a jewelry merchant. I make this trip six, eight times a year. "

"Goodness," the girl said, looking down at the leather bag. "If those are your samples, you'd better be really careful."

"No, no," Patterson said, smiling. "The samples are on me. Big security risk, you know. I have a hell of a time getting through customs."

The girl laughed as if he'd said the funniest words ever uttered. "It's so nice to meet another American," she gushed. "Sometimes I get so . . . I don't know, hungry ... for men like you."

"Hungry?" Miles Patterson said, feeling the olives from the martinis tumbling around inside his stomach.

"Um," the girl said. She licked her lips.

"Where are you staying?" he asked quickly.

The girl leaned close and whispered. "Very near here," she said. "We can walk there. Right through a field of deep grass." Her chest rose and fell.

"What a coincidence," he said. "I've just been thinking that what I need most right now is a good brisk walk." He tried to laugh. She brushed her breasts against him as she stood up. A yellow handkerchief dangled from her belt.

"You lead the way," he said.

"Oh, I will," the girl said. "I will." As they left the airport, she took the handkerchief from her belt and stretched it taut between her hands.

Mrs. Evelyn Baynes was not wearing a sari. Not today. Not in Paris. She was wearing the latest Karl Lagerfeld walking suit in mauve and her hair had been done by Cinandre in New York. She was wearing the most uncomfortable Charles Jourdan shoes that money could buy and she felt terrific for the first time in weeks.

"Hurry up," she said, prodding her two children toward the portly couple waiting at the baggage claim area. "Joshua, take Kimberly's hand. And smile. This is the first time we've been out of that pit in God knows how long."

"The ashram is not a pit," Joshua said hotly.

"And I don't like Mrs. Palmer," Kimberly balked. "She always tries to kiss me. Can I kill her, Joshua?"

"Sure, kid," the boy said. "Just wait for me to give you the signal,"

Evelyn Baynes beamed. "That's using psychology, Joshua," she said. "You'll be a fine leader someday."

"Someday I will be chief phansigar," the boy said.

"Now, I don't want to hear another word about that god-awful place. We've got a whole week in Paris to be civilized again." She squealed as she embraced Mrs. Palmer. "My, Emmie, the extra weight agrees with you," she said.

"You've simply withered away to nothing, dear," Mrs. Palmer cooed back. "Have you been ill? Oh, no. That's right. You've been living with some religious cultists or something, haven't you?"

"Now, Emmie," Herb Palmer broke in.

"Well, it is the talk of the neighborhood, dear, The Madisons have already moved out."

"Emmie . . ."

"It's all right," Mrs. Baynes said, flushing violently, "Actually, the ashram's the latest. All the rage among the 'in' Europeans."

"You called it a pit, Mommy," Kimberly Baynes said.

"Where's the car?" shouted Mrs. Baynes.

"Coming around the corner."

The black driver smiled and touched his fingers to his cap as they climbed into the car. Joshua helped Mrs. Palmer and his mother and sister inside. He started to get in, then hesitated. "I have to go to the bathroom," he said.

"Oh, Joshua. Not now. It's not far to the city," his mother said.

"I said I have to go. Now."

Mrs. Baynes sighed. "All right. I'll go with you."

"I want him to take me." He pointed to the black driver.

"No problem," Herb Palmer said. "Go ahead. I'll just drive around the block and wait for you both." When he had circumnavigated the block twice, Joshua was waiting at the curb alone. "Your driver quit," he said as he got into the car.

"What?"

"He met some woman inside the airport. They told me to get lost and then they went away together. They said they'd never be back."

"Well, I never . . ." Mrs. Palmer said.

"We'll see what the company has to say about that," Palmer said through clenched teeth.

"You poor brave little boy," Mrs. Baynes said, clutching Joshua to her breast.

They drove away before the body of the black man was discovered in the men's room and the screaming began. Number 135.

Numbers 136, 137, and 138.

"We want to go to the Bois de Boulogne, Mother," Joshua said.

"Don't be silly, dear. We're going straight to the Georges Cinq."

"But it's special," chimed in Kimberly.

"Yes. Special. We read about a special place in a book. Kimmy and I wrote a special poem to recite to you there. The three of you. It has to be now."

"Hey, why not?" Herb Palmer said. "We're all on vacation. Forget schedules."

"Such sweet children, Evelyn," said Mrs. Palmer. They stopped by a swamp on the northern end of a swan lake.

"But don't you think it's nicer over there, children?" Mrs. Baynes suggested. "Near the birds, where the people are?"

"No. It has to be here," Joshua said stubbornly. "Oh, very well. Let's hear your poem, darlings."

"Outside," Herb Palmer said. "Poetry needs sun and sky and water and fresh air."

The adults all moved out and sat on the bank that ran down to the brackish water and looked out at the swans far away.

"The poem," Herb Palmer said. "Let's hear the poem."

Joshua smiled. Kimberly smiled. They pulled yellow handkerchiefs from their pockets.

Mrs. Baynes said, "Those look familiar. Did you bring them from that ... that place?"

"Yes, Mother," Kimberly said. "You all three have to wear them."

"No," Mr. Palmer said laughingly. "The poem first."

"For luck," Joshua insisted.

"Please," Kimberly pleaded. "Josh even has an extra one for you, Mother."

The children slipped the kerchiefs around the necks of the three adults.

"And now the poem," Joshua announced to the backs of the three adults.

"Is that the signal?" Kimberly whispered to him.

"That's the signal."

She jumped up behind Mr. Palmer, and as they chanted, "Kill for Kali, Kill for Kali," they pulled the yellow rumals around the Palmers' necks.

"Kill for Kali. She loves it. Kill, kill, kill."

Mrs. Baynes was watching the swans. Without turning, she said, "That's a strange poem. It doesn't even rhyme. Is that what they call free verse? Or blank verse?"

"Kill, kill, kill."

The Palmers' eyes bulged. Mrs. Palmer's tongue lolled out of her mouth, violet and swollen. Herb Palmer struggled to free himself but the metal clasp on the rumal around his fleshy neck held tight.

"I don't think the Palmers are enjoying your poem, children," Mrs. Baynes said acidly, still without turning.

"Kill, kill, kill."

When Herb Palmer's arms finally stopped twitching, the two children released the rumals.

Mrs. Baynes turned and saw the other two adults sprawled on the grass.

"Very funny," she said. "I suppose the four of you have staged this little farce to shock me. Well, believe you me, I'm not easily shocked. Remember that I changed both your diapers? At least Kimberly's. Once. It was in December, I think. The nursemaid was sick. Herb? Emmie?"

The Palmers did not move from their strange positions, faces bloated, eyes bulging from their sockets, staring directly up at the blue sky. Mrs. Palmer's tongue was blackening and hugely distended.

"Emmie," Evelyn Baynes said, shaking her. "I want you to know you don't look at all attractive. A stout woman should never let her tongue hang out, it makes her look retarded." She looked at her children. "Why don't they move? Are they ... ? I believe ... they are . . . they're dead."

"Really, Mother?" Joshua Baynes slid behind her.

"But it can't be-you were just playing, weren't you? You weren't trying to . . ."

"She loves it," Joshua Baynes said softly, tightening the yellow rumal around his mother's neck. "Kali loves it."

"Josh ... Jo ... J-"

Evelyn Baynes's dying prayer was that her children would at least have the courtesy to put her tongue back in her face after she was dead.

They didn't.

Chapter Sixteen

Harold W. Smith was alone in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium. He walked past the immaculately clean pipes, hearing his own footsteps clacking on the concrete floor.

He walked past the rows of unused and obsolete hospital equipment, past the sealed boxes containing files from decades past, to a small door with a keyhole so small that no one could see through it, and also six feet off the ground for good measure.

He inserted a special key that had no duplicate and walked into a small cubicle of a room. It was made entirely of wood, and beneath the wooden wall panels were layers of highly flammable plastic. The room had been designed to burn in case of fire.

Immediately above it was Smith's office. Unlike this room, its walls were covered with fireproof asbestos. But its floor was wood and would burn.

Smith checked his casket. It wasn't really a casket but more like a straw cot built on highly flammable materials. It resembled a Viking funeral pyre, but Smith's mind was not imaginative enough to think up any name for it but "casket." It was where his body would lie in death, and so it was as much a casket as anything else.

Inside the stuffing of the casket was a sealed bottle of cyanide. Smith held it up to the light and made sure that it had not leaked any of its contents.

The poison capsule he carried with him was uncertain. He might lose it, or he might have to use it on someone else. But the cyanide in the casket was always there.

If CURE should be compromised and its existence become known, a fire in Smith's office would first destroy the computers, the four enormous monoliths that had been adapted and improved for more than twenty years, the computers that held the secrets of almost everyone in the world.

Meanwhile Smith would come downstairs to his basement room and open the vial of cyanide. It would smell like almonds if he was among the fifty percent of human beings who were able to detect the scent in a lethal dose of the drug. It would be painful but mercifully quick. A wrenching agony, a convulsion, and then death. Just moments before the fire burned through the floor of his office and down into this room that had been designed to be a tinderbox.

Everything was in place and Smith felt a small touch of satisfaction. He clasped his hands together, as if holding on to himself for support. When he noticed the gesture, he stopped, but he could still see the white bands formed by the grip of his fingers on his skin. He pinched a piece of flesh from the back of his hand. It took several seconds for the skin to fall back into place.

His were old hands, he realized, dry and brittle. The elasticity of their skin had vanished, sometime between his youth, when the wrongs of the world had enraged him and filled him with righteous commitment to correct them, and now, when the sign of an unbroken bottle of poison, designed to give him death, could genuinely set his mind at ease. How small we become, he thought, walking upstairs. In what infinitesimal ways do we take our pleasures.

The red phone rang only moments after he entered his office.

"Yes, Mr. President."

"I've just been told that an entire flight of passengers on Air Europa has been wiped out. They were all found strangled in Paris."

"I know, sir," Smith said.

"First it was the International Mid-America disaster a week or so ago. Now Europa. The killers are spreading out."

"It appears that way."

"This isn't good," the President said. "The press is blaming us."

"That isn't unusual, Mr. President," Smith said.

"Dammit, man, we've got to give them something. What has your special person found out?"

"Still working on it, sir."

"That's what you said the last time," the President said.

"It is still a correct status report," Smith said.

"All right," the voice on the other end said with forced patience. "I'm not going to meddle in your methods. But I want you to understand the kind of crisis we're in. If the airways can't be kept safe, there really isn't a lot of reason for any of us to be here."

"I understand, sir," Smith said.

There was a click on the other end and Smith replaced the receiver quietly. It was all going downhill. What the President had meant was that there wasn't a reason for CURE to be kept in existence.

He plucked the skin on the back of his hand. Maybe it was his age. Maybe a younger man could have done something, maybe even the Smith of a few years ago could have stopped things before they got out of control.

Today, he didn't even know if Remo was working. And Chiun was somewhere in the Pacific Ocean with a notion that some sort of talisman was going to save America from slipping back into the Stone Age. Smith shook his head. It all seemed so ludicrous. He took a pen from a plastic coffee cup on his desk and began to compose a letter to his wife.

"Dear Irma," he began. But after that, his mind went blank. He was never much good at writing personal letters. Still, he couldn't very well die knowing his body would be reduced to just a thin layer of black ash, without at least trying something.

He turned on his office radio. Perhaps some music would help set the mood for the letter to his wife. He listened to the last few bars of "Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy" and decided it didn't offer the mood he needed. He was about to change the station when the announcer began reciting stock quotations.

"On the Big Board today," the smooth voice said, "stocks were mixed in active trading. But the big story continued to be in the airlines industry. On the heels of the murder tragedy in Paris, Europa Airlines dropped seventeen points in the first hour today and is now trading at ten dollars a share. International Mid-America Airlines, which ran into problems with passenger deaths last week, dropped another two points and is now trading at thirty-seven and a half cents a share, and inside talk along Wall Street is that the firm will declare bankruptcy this week. Bucking the trend continues to be just Folks Airlines. Its stocks opened today at sixty-seven, up two from yesterday's close, and an increase of more than forty-one points since the company began its new campaign of promoting itself as 'Just Folks, the Friendly, SAFE Airline.' In other stock activity, U.S. Steel-"

Smith switched off the radio. He felt his breathing speed up. Impatiently he crumpled the unfinished letter to his wife and tossed it into the wastebasket. He turned on the computer console at his desk and went to work.

He had been at the business of learning people's secrets for most of his life, and one of the things he had learned was that at the core of most mysteries was money. If you found something unusual going on, and if you stayed at it long enough and you dug into it deeply enough, sooner or later you would find somebody with a monetary interest behind it all.

When the airline deaths had affected only just Folks Airlines, he had been inclined to think it might have been the work of cultists or lunatics, attracted by the airline's low fares and willing to settle for the few dollars they might get from economy-minded passengers.

But suddenly just Folks had been moved off the passenger kill list and International Mid-America and Air Europa had been savaged, and in a different way. The Just Folks killings had been small, one at a time, small family groups. But the two other airlines had been hit in such a way as to maximize the impact of the killings on the airlines' reputations and stability.

Money was involved somehow. Smith knew it.

He had the computers roll up an ultrarapid scan of all U.S. airline ticket sales during the past month, and concurrently had the machines check for any sizable cash withdrawals from any airline official with IMAA or Air Europa. As an afterthought, he included just Folks.

Then he sat back and let the computers permute for all they were worth.

It was the great beauty of the computers-which he called the Folcroft Four and which he had personally designed - that their exteriors looked like oversize scrap heaps, obsolete in their technology, and excessively dependent on exotic maintenance systems. But inside, each one was a masterwork, with much of the technology invented by Smith himself when he could not find it available through commercial channels.

And for years, into the four computers had gone the information gathered by a network of people who reported all the bland and mediocre details of their jobs. For this work, they got a small stipend from Smith. Of course, none of them had ever heard of Smith or CURE and did not know who was sending them money. They just assumed it was the FBI or the CIA and didn't really care who it was as long as the small monthly checks kept coming.

These reports were organized by Smith's computers, indexed and cross-indexed, cataloged and cross-cataloged, so that they were able to answer within minutes almost any kind of question about any kind of activity in the United States.

And now they answered his questions, and from the answers Smith extracted one glaring, blinding detail:

A. H. BAYNES, PRESIDENT OF JUST FOLKS AIRLINES, REMOVED FIVE THOUSAND DOLLARS FROM PERSONAL ACCOUNT 7/14. On 7/15 TWENTY-ONE TICKETS ABOARD INTERNATIONAL MID-AMERICA AIRLINES PURCHASED BY UNKNOWN BUYER FOR $4,927 CASH. A. H. BAYNES SOLD STOCKS WORTH $61,000 7/23. On 7/24, 120 TICKETS ABOARD EUROPA FLIGHT TO PARIS PURCHASED FOR $60,000. PROBABILITY OF CONNECTION, 93.67 PERCENT.

Smith felt like whooping for joy. Instead he pressed the intercom button on his desk and said in his usual dry, lemony voice, "Hold my calls for a while, Mrs. Mikulka."

Then he called just Folks Airlines and got a cheerful recording saying that if he really wanted to talk to someone, he should hold. He waited through three long selections of Muzak, made even longer because it was the music of Barry Manilow, before a female voice broke through with a crackle.

"Just Folks, the friendly, SAFE airline," she said.

"I'd like to speak to Mr. A. H. Baynes, please," Smith said.

"I'm sorry, but Mr. Baynes is unavailable."

"Is this his office?"

"No, this is the reservations desk at the airport."

"Then how do you know he's unavailable?"

"Do you think a millionaire like A. H. Baynes would be standing here getting varicose veins and hawking tickets for poverty wages?"

"Would you please connect me with his office?" Smith said.

"Mr. Baynes's office," another female said. Her voice had the steel edge of the executive secretary.

"Mr. Baynes, please. This is the Securities and Exchange Commission calling."

"I'm sorry, Mr. Baynes isn't in."

"Where can I reach him? This is an urgent matter."

"I'm afraid I can't tell you," she said, the flinty voice mellowing with a kind of desperation. "He's away on personal business."

"Now? With the crisis in air travel?" Smith said.

"At Just Folks, there is no crisis," the secretary said levelly.

"Does he call in for messages?"

"Occasionally. Do you want to leave one?"

"No," Smith said, and hung up.

He realized he was alone. No Remo. No Chiun. And the clock was ticking away on CURE. But he knew Baynes had something to do with the airline killings. He knew it.

He would have to find Baynes. And he would have to do it alone.

Chapter Seventeen

Remo sat on the edge of the bed in the New Orleans motel room, his elbows braced on his knees, his hands covering his face. Why was he in New Orleans?

He didn't know. He had come on his own, walking, hitchhiking, following road by road, following something he could not explain or understand.

Where was Chiun? Chiun would understand. He knew about the Kali business. It had seemed to Remo like a fairy tale when he had first heard it-the hopeless fantasy of an old man who believed too strongly in legends-but Remo wasn't sure anymore. Something had brought him to this shabby room on this dark street. Something had pulled him all the miles from Denver to here.

The worst of it was that he could feel its influence growing inside him. There was something dark and alien and frightening right under his skin. That something that had compelled him to shame himself with that blond girl in a public alley. A normal man, burning up the way Remo was, might run amok and kill someone. But what of someone with Remo's strength and killing techniques? How many would he kill? How much damage could he do?

It was a nightmare and there was no way Remo could wake from it. Little by little, he had given in.

From his first tentative steps outside the hotel room in Denver, he had convinced himself that he was only going for a walk around the city streets. He had told himself, very calmly and logically, that he couldn't very well wait inside a closed room for the days or even weeks that it might take Chiun to return.

Reason was on his side and Chiun's story about Master Lu and the talking stone goddess was unreasonable. He would have been a fool to hide out for fear of a silly legend. So he walked out of his hotel room in Denver, and his reason told him that it was a perfectly reasonable thing to do. But something in the back of his mind knew better.

In the old days, before he knew of Harold Smith or CURE, when he was just a foot cop walking a beat in Newark, New Jersey, Remo had tried to quit smoking. The ritual occurred every year: he would stop cold, filled with righteous willpower and a sense of mastery over his own impulses. Then, generally after a week, he would allow himself one cigarette. It was nothing, one cigarette. His reason told him so. He didn't even enjoy the one cigarette. But it always marked the end of his good intentions, and even though his reason told him that one single cigarette was harmless, his inner mind knew the truth: that he was a smoker once again.

And so when he left the hotel room in Denver, he wrote the Korean characters for "going" in yellow chalk on the outside of the hotel building. He had marked it on two other places in Denver and sporadically throughout his journey, throwing out crumbs of bread for Chiun to follow.

Because he knew in the back of his mind that he was already lost.

Chiun, come find me. He clenched his hands into two fists and held them in front of him, shaking. The lust was growing within him. It, the thing, Kali, whatever. It wanted him to move. His destination was near. He had known it when he reached the dark street in New Orleans. The force inside him had grown so great that it had taken all his effort to fight it and duck into this seedy hotel with no bedspread, a battered television set strewn with wires, and only a thin yellow hand towel in the bathroom.

There was a telephone too. If he'd had a friend, he would have called just to listen to a voice. A voice might keep him sane. But assassins had no friends. Only victims.

He stood up. He was bathed in sweat and his breath was labored and rasping.

He had to get out. He had to breathe. It was only reasonable.

"What's happening to me?" he shouted aloud. The sound reverberated through the silent room. It wanted him out. It wanted him to come. It, with its sickly-sweet smell and arms of death.

He smashed his fist through the mirror. His image splintered into a thousand pieces and flew in all directions. With a sob, he sat down.

"Get it together. Calm down." He spoke the words softly, gently. He smoothed his hands together until their violent trembling stilled. He turned on the battered television.

"The victims of the most recent wave of airline killings which struck Air Europa earlier this week are still turning up in Paris," the announcer said.

Remo moaned and listened.

"The bodies of three prominent Denver-area residents were found early this morning in a public park near Neuilly, France, a suburb of Paris. They were identified as Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Palmer and Mrs. A. H. Baynes, wife of the president of just Folks Airlines. Apparently she was traveling with her two children, Joshua and Kimberly Baynes, whose whereabouts are still unknown."

"Oh, God," Remo said. It had been his job to stop the airline killings. His job.

How long had it been since he had given a thought to his job, to his responsibilities, to his country? He felt sick. He knew what to do now. He had to go back to work. He had to forget this force that was pulling him away.

He reached for the telephone and began to dial the complex routing code that would eventually connect him with Harold Smith.

The connections were slow. His hand strayed to replace the receiver, but he forced himself to hold on, knowing that It wanted him to hang up. It wanted him alone. For herself.

When Smith pulled into the driveway of his home, he thought about the letter he had meant to write to his wife. Like all the other letters he had planned to write her, it had not been written. And perhaps he would never have the chance again.

He was no fool. The President's phone call had been his last warning to CURE. Unless Smith could do something about the air deaths, the next communication from the White House would be to disband. And with Remo gone, with Chiun gone, Smith had no illusions. He might return empty-handed, and that would be the end of CURE, and of Harold W. Smith.

He owned Irma a good-bye.

As he got out of the car, he saw two neighbors sitting in their front yard and he realized that he had been living in the same house with Irma for twenty years and he did not know the names of any of his neighbors.

Irma, of course, knew everyone's name. She was like that. She was in, and of, the neighborhood. Her flower garden had won first prize in the neighborhood gardening contest for fourteen years in a row, until she had decided that delphiniums weren't worth the effort.

But each June, until then, a bright blue ribbon had hung proudly from the Smiths' door. Most years, it was the only acknowledgment Irma made that she had won, and Smith realized that he had never told her that the garden looked nice.

As he walked up the drive, he could see Irma, through the bay window, tearing off her apron and patting her hair in place in preparation for his arrival. It made him smile one of his infrequent smiles. His plump wife, her hair now a bluish ghastly silver, always treated him like a beau coming to call on their first date. If she was awake. Most nights, he would come home too late and she would already be asleep. But a plate of food, always awful, always covered with some kind of tomato-soup goo, would be waiting for him. But there were never any accusations, never any reciminations for keeping the hours he did. As far as Irma was concerned, anything was an improvement over the old days when Smith worked in the wartime OSS and then the CIA and was gone without a word for months at a time. During the whole of World War II, she had seen Smith twice. During the five tensest years of the Cold War, she had seen him only once, and had received two telegrams from him, each exactly ten words in length.

"You're just in time for supper," she said, pretending as she always did, not to be excited about seeing him.

"I'm not hungry. Please sit down."

"Oh, dear." She sat, her forehead wrinkled. "Is it very bad?" She picked up her knitting.

"No. Nothing of the sort." There was a long, awkward silence.

"Will you take off your jacket, dear?" Irma asked.

"No. I have to be going."

"Busy at the office, I expect."

"No. Everything's fine. I have to go out of town. Maybe for some time."

Mrs. Smith nodded and managed a smile. She had always smiled. Even when Smith had left for Europe at the start of the war, after they had been married only three weeks, she hadn't cried. She had only smiled. Smith looked at her and wondered: How do you tell a woman like that that you may have to commit suicide very soon?

She clasped his hands. "Go do what you have to do, dear," she said gently.

He stared at her for a moment. It had never occurred to him that Irma might know that he did secret work, that he had more of a job than just head of Folcroft Sanitarium. But maybe she did. No. She couldn't know. He had never discussed his work with her. Really, he thought with some shame, he had never discussed much of anything with her. And yet she had always made things easy for him. Even now, she was making it easy for him to leave, as if she sensed that it was somehow very important.

"Right." He cleared his throat, nodded, and left the table. Halfway out the door, he turned around. "Irma, I have to tell you something."

"Yes, dear?"

"I ... er, you ... that is, I . . ." He exhaled noisily. "The garden is lovely."

She smiled. "Thank you, dear."

A. H. Baynes's home was in a suburb of Denver where there were more trees, more schools, more parks, and more money than anywhere else in the area. All the houses were on large tracts of manicured lawn, with garages the size of most single-family dwellings in the city.

There was no answer at the home of Baynes or at the home of the late Mr. and Mrs. Herbert Palmer. The neighbors on the other side of Baynes's house were named Cunningham, and when Smith rang the bell, a stylish middle-aged woman in expensive tweeds answered.

"Mrs. Cunningham?"

She shook her head. "I'm the housekeeper. May I help you?"

"I'd rather speak with Mrs. Cunningham, if you don't mind." He took a Treasury Department ID card from his wallet. "It's rather urgent," he said.

"Mrs. Cunningham's in her studio. I'll announce you."

She led him through a house furnished with all the latest trends, from mauve furniture in the living room to a green-and-white kitchen adorned with butcherblock floor tiles, to a sparkling chrome gym in the rear of the house. Puffing on an exercise bicycle was a short woman, agonizingly underweight, wearing a trendy V-neck leotard and trendier, high-cut green sneakers.

"Mr. Harold Smith from the Treasury Department, ma'am," the housekeeper announced.

"Oh, all right. Bring in my breakfast, Hilary." She turned her attention to Smith, obviously appraising his unstylish suit. "You'll have to forgive me, but I won't be able to talk with you until I've eaten."

Hilary brought in an old Worcester china plate that held a single slab of raw tuna fish. Mrs. Cunningham picked it up with her fingers and popped it in her mouth. Smith closed his eyes and thought of the flag.

"There," she said with satisfaction. "Oh, I'm sorry. Would you care for some sushi?"

"No, thank you," said Smith, swallowing hard.

"Very low in calories."

"I'm sure," he said.

"Hilary won't work for anyone who eats meat."

"The housekeeper?"

"Isn't she a dream?" Mrs. Cunningham rhapsodized. "So Waspy. Nothing ethnic about her at all. Of course, she doesn't do much work. It would ruin her clothes."

"Mrs. Cunningham, I'm looking for A. H. Baynes," Smith said.

She rolled her eyes. "Please don't mention that name around here."

"Why not?"

"As acting chairperson of the Neighborhood Betterment Committee, I have forbidden it."

"You mean, because Mrs. Baynes is deceased?" Smith asked.

"Gawd, no. Dying was the first decent thing Evelyn's done in months. Too bad she had to take the Palmers with her. They were a good element."

"What about Mrs. Baynes?" Smith persisted.

"Dead in Paris."

"Before Paris," Smith said.

"Well, there was that awful business that ruined them in the neighborhood," she said.

"What was that? It's for the good of the country."

"In that case . . ." she said. She leaned forward. "They went to live in some religious commune." She stood back, eyes gleaming, hands on hips. "Can you believe it? I mean, it's not like throwing a party for revolutionaries. That's a statement. What sort of statement can religion make? They're not even doing that in Southern California."

"Was this commune in the neighborhood?" Smith asked.

"I should hope not. Episcopalians don't have communes. My church doesn't even have services. But that's what it was all about. The Bayneses were talking about communes in the neighborhood. Well, the last thing we wanted was some hairy old thing from China or someplace having religious sex orgies on our lawn. So we told the Bayneses we didn't approve."

"Have you seen Mr. Baynes recently?"

"Not a glimpse. Not even at the funeral. But then, he was always a strange one. He didn't even like racquetball."

"Do you know where this commune is that they joined?"

"No, I don't," she said. "And if you find out, don't bother to tell me. I want to think only beautiful thoughts."

Smith was sitting in his chair, pondering his next move, when a buzzing sound came from inside the attache case on the front seat. He opened the case and lifted the miniature telephone built into it.

"Yes," he said.

"It's ... Remo."

"Where are you?" said Smith. Remo sounded strange, hurt.

"New Orleans . . . don't know the street . . . a motel. . . ."

"Remo." The voice was a command. "Stay on the line."

"It wants me. I can't stay," Remo said.

"Pull yourself together."

"Too late.... I have to go ... have to-"

There was a sound as Remo dropped the telephone. Smith heard the receiver banging against the wall as it hung on its cord.

He called Remo's name several times, then punched a message into a secondary unit in the attache case, directing the Folcroft computers to trace the call on his telephone.

Remo started for the door of the room. He tried to stop, and at the last minute darted into the bathroom and slammed the door shut.

But he could still smell the scent. It wanted him. He tried to block out the smell. He took the yellow towel from the sink and tried to jam it under the door, but the smell persisted, filling his nostrils and his mind. He held the towel over his face, but it didn't stop the smell.

When he could resist no more, he stood and jammed the yellow towel into his pocket, pulled open the door, and walked toward the door to the hall.

A terrible sadness whistled through him like wind in a storm as he opened the grimy door to the room. From his pocket he pulled the piece of yellow chalk that he had used to mark his way from Denver. He would not need it anymore.

It was near, and his next stop would be with It.

He tossed the chalk to the floor. On the other side of the room, the telephone swung rhythmically from its cord.

Chapter Eighteen

Across the alleyway, Ban Sar Din could hear the ashram filling up. He rose from his brocade-covered water bed and stretched.

This was the day.

It was the first gathering of the Thuggees since A. H. Baynes had sent them all off to Paris aboard Air Europa, and he, Ban Sar Din, was now ready to speak to them.

He would tell them that their ways were in error. He would tell them that it was wrong to permit outsiders in the ashram. He would tell them that the true nourishment of the soul depended upon a true spiritual leader and that their leader should be treated with courtesy and respect. He would tell them that belief in Kali was the key to eternal happiness.

Ban Sar Din would tell them all that. He would speak and the faithful would listen, and then he would again take his rightful place as the head of the cult of Kali.

He walked across the alley, past his Porsche, through the heavy steel-reinforced door, and strode deliberately into the ashram. The roar of the devotees resounded in his ears.

He paused and saw at the foot of the statue four large woven baskets. Around the baskets were scores of yellow rumals, each of them twisted and soiled with use.

"Kill," the devotees shouted when they saw him, "Kill for the love of Kali."

Ban Sar Din stepped onto the dais in front of the statue and held his arms up high. "Listen, listen!" he shouted. But the crowd was still in a frenzy.

"I want to tell you, as your Holy One, that it is wrong what you do." His voice cracked from the strain and he looked around the room, waiting for an incense pot to come flying toward his skull. When he was not assaulted, he went on: "Kali does not wish you to kill so much. Kali does not want numbers of deaths; Kali wants the right deaths. Especially since the deaths make the front pages of the newspapers full every day. Soon the wrath of the authorities will be upon us."

The crowd was still chanting. Some of the members stepped forward, and Ban Sar Din flinched, but they merely went to the large baskets in front of the statue and removed the covers.

"I am your Holy One," Ban Sar Din shouted, "and you must listen to me."

The crowd quieted.

Ban Sar Din's eye caught a glimmer of blue-white coming from the baskets. They were filled with jewels. The jewels were lying on beds of green American cash.

"Yes, Holy One," Holly Rodan said. "We listen to your wisdom."

"Well, uh ... " Ban Sar Din picked up a diamond pendant. Five carats total weight, he estimated.

"Speak, O Holy One." The room reverberated with the chant.

There were about a half-dozen good sapphires.

"I ... um . . ." Rubies, he thought, digging into the baskets. The price of rubies was skyrocketing. A two-carat ruby was often worth more, than a two-carat diamond.

"I...um.."

"I think I can speak for the Holy One," said A. H. Baynes, stepping forward from behind the partition that separated the public part of the ashram from his office. His thumbs were hooked into his suspenders and he was grinning broadly, his teeth showing. It was his sincere grin.

"What old Sardine means is, golly, you're a swell hunch of kids."

The throng cheered.

"And don't think the little lady with the arms doesn't appreciate it."

"Hail, Chief Phansigar."

"Kill for Kali."

"Why, just the other day, I was telling Old Sardine here-" A. H. Baynes began, but he was interrupted. Holly Rodan screamed. Every face turned toward her.

"He's here. He has come."

Ban Sar Din pocketed a half-dozen of the biggest jewels in case someone bad had come. "Who?" he shouted. "Where?"

"There," Holly shouted. "He has come. Kali's lover. He has come."

"Oh, him," said Ban Sar Din, but he looked to the back of the ashram, even as he filled his other pocket with more jewels and cash.

In the doorway stood a tall thin young man wearing a black T-shirt. His wrists were large. His face was haggard and his eyes held a look of helpless despair. If someone had asked him who he was, he would have answered that his name used to be Remo Williams.

"Hail, Lover of Kali," the Thuggees chanted, falling to their knees before him.

Woodenly Remo walked forward.

"He is carrying the rumal," people shouted, for Remo was nervously twisting the thin yellow hand towel he had taken from the motel bathroom.

In the crowd, leaning against a pillar, was A. H. Baynes. It was a face that Remo remembered, but it meant nothing to him now. He passed on.

The pull on him was irresistible. It felt as if the statue had him by a rope and was pulling him toward her. He saw the statue on the raised platform. It was hideous, a different creature from a different world, but still he walked toward it. The stone face was impassive, but behind it, suddenly another face seemed to stir to life. It was a beautiful face, full of sorrow. Remo blinked, but the face lingered for a moment, then disappeared, again replaced by the pitted graven image of the statue.

"Who is he?" someone whispered.

Remo heard the answer. "He is Kali's lover. The one for whom She has waited."

A lover? He was not even a man, Remo thought. He was a puppet and his time was short. With each step, he felt something inside him weaken. By the time he reached the dais and stood face to face with the statue of Kali, he could barely move. The yellow towel slipped from his fingers and dropped onto the floor.

The scent pierced him, ancient and malevolent. It coursed through him like an evil, burning serpent, twisting its way through his bloodstream.

It is too late, he thought. Too late.

And even as the thought formed, he saw the lips of Kali curl into a smile.

Chapter Nineteen

"Bring me death."

The words echoed inside his head, and Remo jolted awake. He was in a small room on a narrow cot. Two large cubes of incense burned in a porcelain plate at the foot of his bed.

His skin was prickly white gooseflesh. He looked around, and his first reaction was one of relief that the ghoulish vision of the many-armed statue smiling slyly at him had been only a nightmare. But the faint smell of the goddess still hung in his nostrils, and he knew that the real nightmare was only beginning.

"Baynes," he said shortly. A. H. Baynes had been the face he recognized in the crowd. And Baynes, for better or for worse, was real. He had to concentrate on Baynes.

The smell was stronger now, and again he heard the words inside his mind: "Bring me death."

Quickly, noiselessly, still feeling a jittery fear at the base of his spine, Remo slid out of bed and moved toward the door to the room. It opened silently and he looked out at the ashram, where the mindless, chanting cultists slept on the hard wooden floor. He moved like a cat among them, but Baynes was not there. He turned and saw the statue of Kali. Its eight arms seemed to be waving to him, and the sight sickened him and filled him with fear. He ran toward the door in the back of the room.

He was in an alley. A large black Porsche was parked there, and beyond it, Remo heard humming coming from a garage. He went toward it.

Ban Sar Din ceased his tuneless rendition of "When the Saints Go Marching In" when he saw the haggard stranger in the doorway. He rose from his water bed where he had been busying himself, jotting down the telephone numbers of dating services that promised, in magazine advertisements, that Beautiful Scandinavian Blondes Want to Meet You.

"Shoo," he said to Remo. "Shoo, shoo, shoo. You are not allowed in the Holy One's quarters."

"I'm looking for Baynes," Remo said thickly. The smell was less strong here. He felt as if his head were starting to clear.

"Now I recognize you," Ban Sar Din said. "You are the lover."

"Lover?" Remo repeated.

"The one Kali has chosen to be Her husband."

"Scratch that," Remo said. "I'm a confirmed bachelor. I want to know what Baynes has to do with this place."

Ban Sar Din snorted. "Why don't you ask him?"

"I couldn't find him," Remo said. "And I wasn't feeling too good in there."

"Maybe you're not eating well enough," Ban Sar Din said. "You're too thin. I know this great French restaurant - "

"It's not the food. It's the statue," Remo said.

"It is only a harmless stone figure," Ban Sar Din said.

Remo shook his head.

Ban Sar Din pinched his nose. "All right. Maybe there is something unusual about it. I don't like it, but they do." He jerked his head toward the ashram.

"What is it, anyway?" Remo said. "What does it do?"

"It grows arms."

"Come on," Remo said in disgust.

"It's true. I don't know how. I just know some mornings I go in there and it's got more arms than it did when I went to sleep. It makes them crazy in the ashram."

"Crazy enough to kill people?" Remo asked.

Ban Sar Din swallowed as a long shadow hovered over Remo. "Whoa, there, pard," A. H. Baynes said, grinning his most sincere toothy smile. "Did I hear my name?" He reached out his hand to shake Remo's. "Let's press the flesh."

Remo kept his hand stubbornly at his side. "Keep your flesh to yourself," he said. He looked Baynes over. The airline president was wearing a checkered cowboy shirt and white pants tucked into intricately worked white cowboy boots. Around his bare throat hung a knit black string tie.

"That your concession to your wife's death?" Remo asked, touching the tie.

"I'd say that's my business, mister."

"How about the yellow handkerchiefs all over the floor of this place? Is that your business too?"

Baynes moved to the side so that Remo's body shielded him from the view of Ban Sar Din, and he pursed his lips and squinted, motioning Remo to be silent.

"Come on in the office and we'll talk," he said. Loudly, over Remo's shoulder, he said, "You can go back to sleep, Sardine. I'll take care of our guest."

"Good," the Indian said. "I was just in the middle of some very important paperwork."

Remo followed Baynes out of the garage, and as the airline man led him back across the alley to the ashram, he whispered, "I couldn't say anything in front of the old fraud, but I'm here for a reason, you know."

"I bet the reason has something to do with murder," Remo said.

"Damn right. I've been weeks tracing down these bugbirds. They're behind the killings on the airplanes," Baynes said.

"Odd you didn't think about going to the police or the FBI," Remo said. They were in Baynes's steel-walled office.

"Don't tell me, pal," Baynes said. He sat heavily in a chair and dropped his head into his hands. "I wanted to get proof, and I waited too long. Now my wife is dead and my kids are missing." He looked up at Remo and there were tears in his eyes. "I swear to you, mister, I'm going to get these bastards. Every last one of them."

"I'm sorry, Baynes," Remo said. "What do you know about the statue? Is it true, all that magic stuff?"

Baynes shook his head, a sly insider's smile on his mouth. "Hah. I'll show you how true it is," he hissed. "Come on."

He opened the door to the ashram, and the scent curled in, attacking Remo's nostrils, and he hung back. But in a sudden movement, A. H. Baynes grabbed his wrist and yanked him out into the ashram. Remo could not resist. The strength was gone from his body and he felt like a rag doll.

Baynes, with no more effort than he would have used to steer a child around the aisles of a department store, tossed Remo onto the platform at the foot of the statue, leaned over close, and whispered, "It is true. It's true," he said. His eyes glistened with excitement. "She is Kali and She loves death."

A small helpless cry escaped from Remo's lips. He could feel Her, close to him. She was suffocating him. "Baynes . . . Chiun . . . yellow cloth . . ." Remo mumbled, trying to preserve a part of his mind from the stupefying influence of the stone statue, but Her scent was filling his body, blocking out everything except a wild maniacal lust he felt swelling inside him.

The room swirled. Nothing existed for him except the statue. She was the goddess Kali and She owned him.

"Bring me death." He heard the voice again, but this time it did not seem to come from inside his own mind, but from the lips of the statue. And this time he knew he would obey Her.

A. H. Baynes watched Remo move like a zombie toward the door to the street and then go outside. He waited. Then he took the miniature camera from inside his shirt pocket, extracted the tiny roll of film, and put it into his pocket.

Inside his office, he made a telephone call. It was the first time he had ever used the number. The receiver on the other end was picked up but there was no greeting.

"Hello? Hello?" Baynes said.

"One favor you are allowed," the androgynous whisper said. "Then the statue is mine."

"A deal," Baynes said. "I've got a man here. He's a fed and he's got to go."

"I understand."

"I don't care how you do it," Baynes said.

"I will tell you how."

A half-hour later, Baynes met his contact at the site of a condemned building. The person was swathed in cloaks and wore gloves. Baynes passed over the roll of film.

"His name's Remo," he said to the invisible stranger. "This is what he looks like."

The figure nodded.

"I guess that's it, then," Baynes said.

"Prepare the statue."

"What if you fail?"

"I will not fail."

Baynes started to leave, then hesitated. "Will I see you again?"

"Do you want to?"

Baynes gulped and said, "Maybe not. Tell me, though. Why do you want that statue so badly? It's not worth a million dollars."

"I want many things . . . including you." The figure's hands went to its cloaks and began to open them.

Chapter Twenty

Remo careened crazily down the darkened street. The only sound he heard from the sleeping city was the insistent thrum of his heartbeat, and it seemed to be speaking to him, saying, "Kill for me, kill for me, kill for me."

His hands hung rigid at his sides. He staggered up the street like a man dancing with death, insensate, drunk with a lust he did not understand. Don't listen, a smaller voice inside him said, but it was too faint to hear now. And then it was stilled.

A pigeon startled him as it flew off its perch on a telephone line and fluttered to the ground in front of him. It walked in jerky circles, unused to the night.

Bring me death, Kali's unspoken voice called to him. The pigeon stopped and cocked its head to one side, then the other.

Bring me death.

Remo closed his eyes and said, "Yes."

The pigeon, only amused by the sound, looked at him quizzically as Remo crouched. Then, seeming to sense the power of the human who moved without sound, who could hold a position as still as a stone, the pigeon panicked and flapped its wings to soar upward.

Remo sprang then, leaping into a perfect spiral in the manner he had learned from Chiun, a way to cut through the air without creating countercurrents that pressed back against one's body, forcing it downward. It was pure Sinanju, the effortless bound, the muscles pulling in flawless synchronization as the body turned in the air, the hands reaching up to halt the pigeon in flight, the sharp snap that broke the tiny creature's neck.

Remo held the limp, still-warm body in his hands, and the sound of his heartbeat seemed to explode in his ears. "Oh, God, why?" he whispered, and fell to his knees on the oil-slick street. A car blared its horn as it swerved past him, setting his ears to ringing from the shock of the sound. Then it settled and his heartbeat slowed. The night was silent again and he still held the dead bird softly in his hands.

Run, he thought. He could run away again as he had before.

But he had come back before, and he knew he would again.

Kali was too strong.

He stood up, his knees weak, and walked back to the ashram. With each step, he realized he had disgraced Sinanju, had trivialized it by using its techniques to snuff out the life of a poor harmless creature whose only sin was getting in his way. Chiun had called him Master of Sinanju, the avatar of the god Shiva. But he was nothing. He was less than nothing. He belonged to Kali.

Inside the ashram, which still hissed with the sounds of the sleeping members, he placed his offering at the foot of the statue.

She smiled at him. She seemed to caress him, sending out unseen tendrils of passion to this man who gave Her his strength and had brought Her the bloodless death She craved.

He moved closer to the statue, and Her scent, like the fragrance of evil flowers, filled him with a blinding desire. For a moment the other face he had seen before hovered behind the statue's. Who was she? A crying woman, a real woman, and yet, the image of the weeping woman was not real. But somehow it made him ache in pain and loss. And the statue itself reached out toward him with Her strangling hand, and on his lips he felt Her cold kiss and he heard Her voice say, "My husband," and he was weakening, suffocating, giving in....

With a violent wrench he pulled his arm back and struck one of the statue's arms. As it fell to the floor with a shattering clatter, a horrible pain welled up inside him. He doubled over, sinking to his knees. The statue's hand leapt upward and fastened itself around his throat. He yanked it loose and turned, running toward the door of the ashram.

The devotees had been awakened by the noise, but he was out onto the street before they could react.

By instinct, he ran blindly across the street to the shabby motel. It was only when he was in his room, safely behind a locked door, that he realized he still held the hand of the statue. In revulsion he threw it across the room. He heard it hit and skitter along the floor. And then the room was still.

He should do something, but he didn't know what. Maybe he should call Smith, but he couldn't remember why. Maybe he should find Chiun, but it would do no good. He should do many things; instead, he collapsed on the bed and slept.

He was asleep in seconds, but his sleep was not peaceful. He dreamed of the beautiful face he had seen behind the statue's face, the weeping woman whose mouth had parted to kiss him. But before they touched, the face vanished and there was Kali's garish face and Her words, Her voice, saying: "Bring me death."

He turned in his sleep. He imagined someone entering and leaving his room. He tried not to dream, but always there was Kali's face, and suddenly he sat bolt upright in bed, his body drenched with sweat, his heart pounding. He couldn't allow himself to sleep again. He had to leave this place now. Go anywhere, he told himself, sitting up, holding his throbbing head. If It catches you again, you're lost. Go.

He stumbled toward the door and stopped short. He turned and saw the hand of the statue on the floor, but there was something in its fingers.

Frightened, Remo went to it and cautiously plucked the piece of paper from the shattered hand. In the hallway he looked at it.

It was an airline ticket. To Seoul, Korea.

Korea. That's where he would find Chiun. He knew he must go.

"It doesn't matter if it's a trick," he said. He had to get to Chiun. No one else could help.

Once more he walked out into the darkness. This time he could breathe.

Inside the ashram office, A. H. Baynes lit a cigar. The smoke burned his eyes and tasted good.

It was almost time to pack it in, he told himself. He had accomplished everything he'd set out to do, and then some.

All he had to do now was to wait for the final report on the thick-wristed federal agent, and then get rid of the statue.

Maybe someday in the future he would do the whole operation all over again. But not just now, not just yet. There was a faint tapping at the door, and he said, "Enter."

Holly Rodan stepped inside.

"Chief Phansigar," she said, and bowed.

"What is it?"

"Your children have arrived back safely." She stepped aside, and Joshua and Kimberly Baynes walked into the office.

"Nice to see you home, kids," Baynes said. They smiled at him.

Chapter Twenty-one

The face was what stopped him.

Remo was at the airport, standing among the crowd ready to board the flight for Seoul, when he saw her. And as soon as he did, he knew he had not made a mistake by planning to go to Korea to find Chiun.

She was tall and slim, dressed in a white linen suit. Her dark hair was pulled under a small hat with a veil that partially covered her face, but nothing could hide her beauty. Her skin was pale and translucent, like the petals of a flower. She had full lips that looked as if they were unaccustomed to smiling; a narrow, highbridged nose; and eyes like a deer's, wide-set and soft.

She looked like no other human being Remo had ever seen. There were no traces of any racial ancestry in that face. She looked as if she had been created, apart from the evolution of the planet earth.

Without realizing it, Remo was moving out of the throng of passengers waiting to board and was working his way through the press of people around her. "Excuse me ... Miss ... Miss . . ."

She looked up, registering mild alarm. "Yes?" Remo swallowed, unable to speak.

"Did you call me?"

He nodded, and she nodded back.

He tried to think of something to say to her, but his mind had voided all the words in his vocabulary. Looking at her, all he could think of was the sound of a choir singing in church on Christmas Eve.

"I'm sorry," he said lamely. "I guess I just wanted to look at you."

She picked up her suitcase and turned away.

"No," he said. He took her arm, and her eyes widened in fright. "No. Don't be scared," he said. "Honest, I'm not a nut. My name's Remo and-"

She wrenched herself free of him and scurried into the crowd. Remo sat back against a railing, ashamed of himself. Whatever had possessed him to approach a perfect stranger while a wave of killings was frightening airline passengers all over the world? And then he had behaved like some lunatic wand-waver. He was lucky she hadn't called the police.

Maybe there was something wrong with him. Maybe Sinanju started to play tricks on you after a while. Nothing like this had ever happened to Chiun, but Chiun was Korean. Maybe the old man had been right when he had said, all those thousands of times, that the knowledge of Sinanju was not meant for white men. Maybe there was something in Western genes that couldn't tolerate the training and caused insanity.

Oh, Chiun, he thought. Be there when I come. The woman had been right to run away from him. He shouldn't even be permitted to walk among normal people. If he ever saw her again, he resolved, he would ignore her. It was a good thing he would never see her again. Damned good, because he would cut her dead. Besides, she probably wasn't as beautiful as he had thought. He would ignore her. Too bad he would never get the chance again, because he would ignore her to the point of insult.

She was on the plane, and Remo bodily ejected the man who was seated next to her.

"You're the most beautiful thing I've ever seen," Remo said.

The woman reached for the stewardess call button. "No. Don't do that," Remo said. "Please. I won't say another word to you for the entire flight. I'll just look."

She stared at him blankly for several moments, and finally said, "Is that all?"

Remo nodded, unwilling to break his promise so quickly by saying even a single word.

"In that case, my name is Ivory." She extended a small white hand, manicured and sporting a large diamond ring on its index finger. She smiled and Remo wanted to curl up inside that smile like a cat.

He smiled back. "Can I talk now?"

"Try. I will let you know when to stop," she said.

"Where are you from?"

"Sri Lanka," she said.

"I don't even know where that is," he said.

"It is an old, small country with a new, large name," she said.

"Is that where you're going now?"

"In a roundabout way. Mostly I'm going to travel the Orient, shopping."

"Tough life," Remo said.

"At times," she said. "It's my job, you see, not my hobby. I buy antiquities for collectors. Some might call me a glorified errand boy."

Remo thought that no one would ever call her any kind of boy, but he simply asked, "Antiquities? Are they like antiques?"

She nodded. "Only older. My clients want Greek wall friezes, lintels from Egyptian temples, things like that."

"Like old statues," Remo said softly, thinking of something else.

"Sometimes. As a matter of fact, I was looking for one in America and traced it all the way to New Orleans. But I lost it. The one who owned it sold it, then died, and no one knows who bought it."

"Was it valuable?"

"Very old, worth perhaps a quarter of a million dollars," Ivory said. "The owner's landlady said he sold it for forty dollars."

"Must be a beautiful statue to be worth that much," Remo said.

She shrugged. "I've never seen it myself, but I've seen replicas. A stone goddess with several arms. The exact number differs in the catalogs."

"Kali," Remo said, closing his eyes.

"I beg your pardon."

"Nothing. Never mind. Maybe you weren't meant to find it. Maybe it would have been bad luck or something."

"If I worried about curses or luck," she said, "I'd probably never buy anything more than a week old. But this statue might have been special."

Remo grunted. He didn't want to be reminded of the statue. It made him nervous. He imagined he could smell the scent of Kali on the airplane. But it would be gone soon. And perhaps Chiun could rid him of it forever.

He caught her staring at him. For a moment their eyes locked and a terrible sadness came over him. "You look so familiar," he said, his voice almost a whisper.

"I was just thinking the same thing about you."

As the engines began to rev up, he kissed her. He couldn't explain why, but he saw the haunting, longing look in Ivory's eyes and knew if he couldn't touch her, couldn't have her, his heart might as well be torn out of him. As his mouth touched hers, she accepted him with a hungry urgency. Time vanished. In the woman's embrace, he no longer felt like Remo Williams, assassin, running away from his fear. Instead, he was only The Man and Ivory was The Woman and they were in a place far removed from the noise of a twentieth-century jet engine.

"Oh, no," she said, pulling away abruptly.

"What's wrong?"

"My gifts." She rose hurriedly, squeezing past Remo's knees. Her face was suddenly lined with worry. "I bought some presents and left them at the check-in counter. I'll be right back."

"Hurry," he said.

Ivory argued for a few seconds with the stewardesses at the front of the plane before they let her leave. When she rushed down the steps, the two attendants looked at each other and shrugged. One of them picked up a microphone.

"Ladies and gentlemen, we are ready for departure. Please take your seats and observe the seat-belt sign." Remo looked at the small bag Ivory had left behind in front of her seat. He strained to see through the tinted glass of the airport. A woman's figure was running, stopping, fidgeting with something, running back.

The plane began to move.

"Hey, stop this," Remo yelled. "A passenger's coming."

Several of the other passengers looked over at him, but the stewardesses pointedly ignored him and went to the front of the plane. Remo pushed all the lights and buzzers he could find as he saw Ivory step out of the airport building. "Hey. Stop the plane. The lady wants to get on."

"I'm sorry, sir. No passengers are permitted to embark at this time," the frazzled stewardess said, turning off the fifteen call buttons Remo had activated.

"She doesn't want to embark," Remo said. "She wants to get on."

But the plane was moving away from the terminal. Through the window, Remo saw Ivory stopped by a maintenance man wearing headphones. She looked up at the taxiing plane in despair, then set down the boxes and bags in her arms and waved at the plane. It was a good-humored gesture, the resignation of a victim to one of life's little screw-ups.

Remo felt worse, hurt and cheated. He had barely known the woman named Ivory, but still he felt that he had known her forever, and now, as quickly as she had entered, she was gone from his life.

As the plane roared into takeoff, Remo picked up the soft fabric overnight bag Ivory had left under the seat. Perhaps there was some identification in it, he thought. But inside were only a couple of nightgowns, all lace and silk-like her, he thought-and a small bag filled with toiletries that carried the same soft scent he remembered from the brief moment he had held her.

It was a strange scent, not flowery like most perfumes, but deeper, somehow intoxicating. And for a moment he didn't know if he really liked it, but then he remembered her face, and decided he did.

But there was no identification in the bag, and sadly he put it back under the seat.

The plane was up now, barely a hundred feet in the air, but instantly turning west away from Lake Pontchartrain. Remo heard a deep rumbling from beneath the craft, as if it were a large flying bird noisily digesting its dinner. Within a half-second the sound had exploded into a deafening roar. In another second the whole front of the plane had ripped off and shattered into fragments before his eyes. A stewardess screamed, blood pouring from her mouth and ears, then fell backward toward the gaping hole, hit a ragged metal edge, then flew into space, leaving a severed arm behind. Everything loose in the plane fell through the opening. Some seat belts snapped under the strain and gave up their passengers to the gaping maw in the front of the craft.

The plane was tumbling toward the water. Remo heard someone whimper, "Oh, my God." And he wondered if even God could help them all now.

Chapter Twenty-two

It was late and Smith was bone-tired when he reached the ratty Seagull Motel on Penbury Street.

As he started to enter the building, he heard chanting coming from a nondescript structure almost directly across the street from the motel.

Chanting?

Across the street from where Remo had stayed? Smith's fatigue disappeared. His heart racing, he walked across the street, pushed open the door, and stepped inside. The big room was dark. Immediately he was assaulted by the acrid sting of burning incense and the overpowering heat from too many human bodies in an enclosed space.

The people were young, some of them barely into adolescence, and they were chanting at the top of their voices. The object of their attention was a statue set in a prominent position on a small platform at the front of the room. The chanters bowed frequently to the statue, raised their arms, and whirled around in improvisational ecstasy. It seemed to Harold Smith that every activity the group embraced was singularly useless and undignified.

He scanned the room thoroughly, then sighed and backed toward the doorway. His weariness returned. A. H. Baynes was not there, and neither was Remo. It had been an idea worth exploring, he told himself, even though it had led, like all his other ideas in this case, to a dead end.

He was at the door when a strange little Indian man shouted to him. "You. What do you want here?"

None of the chanters paid any attention to them, and Smith said dryly, "I doubt very much if I want anything here."

"Then why are you here? You just walk in?"

"The door was open. I did just walk in."

"Why did you walk in?" the Indian asked irascibly. "Are you looking for religion?"

"I'm looking for a man named A. H. Baynes. My name is Smith."

The Indian took a sharp, startled breath of air. "Baynes?" he squeaked. "No Baynes here. Sorry." He pushed Smith firmly to the door. "You find yourself another church, okay?"

"There's another man I'm looking for," Smith said. "Tall, with dark hair. He has thick wrists-"

The Indian pushed him out the door and Smith heard it lock behind him.

On the other side, Ban Sar Din leaned against the door sweating. Then he pushed his way through the crowd of faithful and went into A. H. Baynes's office in the rear of the ashram.

"A federal agent was here," he said.

Baynes looked up, bemused, from behind the desk. "But he's not here anymore, is he?"

"He was here. Just a few minutes ago, looking for you. Oh, unfortunate star that I was born under . . ."

"How did you know he was a fed?" asked Baynes, suddenly more interested. "Did he tell you that?"

"I knew," the Indian said. The veins in his neck throbbed visibly. "He is of the middle age, with tight lips. He wears steel eyeglasses and he has a briefcase and he says his name is Smith. Of course he is a federal agent."

Baynes rubbed his chin. "I don't know. It could be anybody."

"But he was looking for you. And when I told him you weren't here, he wanted the other one."

"What other one?"

"The one that the crazies said is supposed to be Kali's lover."

Baynes stiffened, then relaxed with a smile. "He'll have a hard time finding him," he said.

"It doesn't matter," Ban Sar Din said, his voice now rising near the panic level. "He'll come back. Maybe next time with the immigration people. I can be deported. And if they find out about you . . ."

"If they find out what about me?" Baynes asked chreateningly.

Ban Sar Din flinched at the hint of violence in the man's eyes. It had been growing, a deep malice that had swelled as he had extended his power over the devotees of Kali. Ban Sar Din could not answer. Instead he just shook his head.

"Damn right, Sardine," Baynes said. "There's nothing for anybody to know about me. Nothing at all. All I do is go to church a lot, and don't you forget it. Now, get out of my way. I've got to go talk to the troops."

"I'm looking for a man named Remo. Tall, dark hair," Smith told the clerk at the Seagull Motel.

"Big wrists?" the clerk said. Smith nodded.

"You're too late. He went out a few hours ago. Tossed some money on the counter and left."

"Did he say where he was going?" Smith asked.

"No."

"Is his room still empty?"

"Sure. This isn't that kind of place. We rent rooms by the night, not by the hour," the clerk said.

"I'll take his room," Smith said.

"It hasn't even been cleaned yet. I got some other rooms."

"I want his room."

"All right. Twenty dollars for the night. Payable now."

Smith paid him, took the key, and went up to the room. The bed had been slept on, not in, but there was nothing to give him a hint of where Remo had gone.

He sat heavily on the bed, removed his steel-rimmed spectacles, and rubbed his eyes. Just a few hours' sleep. That's all he wanted. Just a couple of hours' sleep. He lay back on the bed in the dingy room, his hands folded across the attache case which he held on his stomach, and the case buzzed.

Smith dialed the combination which freed the two locks, opened the case, and lifted the telephone. When he received a series of four electronic signals, he put the telephone receiver into a specially designed saddle bracket inside the case. Seconds later, the instrument noiselessly began printing a message which emerged on a long narrow sheet of thermal paper from a slot inside the case.

There was another sequence of four beeps which indicated the message was over, and Smith replaced the receiver, tore off the paper, and read the message that had come from his computer at Folcroft:

ADDITIONAL INFORMATION ON A. H. BAYNES. TWO DAYS BEFORE FIRST DEATH REPORTED ON INTERNATIONAL MID-AMERICA AIRLINES, BAYNES SOLD SHORT 100,000 SHARES OF IMAA AT $48 PER SHARE. AFTER DEATHS ON IMAA, STOCK DROPPED TO ONE DOLLAR PER SHARE AND BAYNES COVERED HIS SHORT POSITION. PROFIT TO BAYNES, $4.7 MILLION. DAY BEFORE AIR EUROPA KILLINGS, BAYNES PURCHASED THROUGH BLIND STOCK FUND SIMILAR NUMBER OF SHARES OF AIR EUROPA AND AFTER DEATHS COVERED SHORT POSITION. PROFIT REALIZED, $2.1 MILLION. BAYNES HAS REINVESTED MOST OF PROFITS INTO PURCHASING STOCKS OF BOTH COMPANIES AND NOW HOLDS CONTROLLING INTEREST IN BOTH AIRLINES AS WELL AS MAINTAINING CASH PROFIT OF $1.9 MILLION. END MESSAGE.

Smith reread the message before he touched a match to it and watched the chemically treated paper flash instantly into a small pile of ash.

So there it was. Baynes not only improved just Folks Airlines' stock performance when the killings stopped there, but also moved into position to make a fortune and take over the two other airlines.

It was enough motive for murder, Smith thought, even for mass murder.

It was Baynes.

He swung his legs off the bed and sat up again. There was no time for rest now.

Then he saw something he had not seen before. He walked across the room and fished the object out of a corner. It was a hand, the hand of a statue, made of some kind of fired clay. As Smith turned it around in his own hand, he realized where he had seen that kind of hand before. It was on the statue in the little storefront temple across the street. So Remo had been there. And probably so had Baynes. His Denver neighbor had said he had joined a religious cult, and it would be too much of a coincidence for that ashram not to be Baynes's new headquarters.

He sighed, readjusted the locks on his attache case, and left the room.

When he got to the storefront church, the door was locked. From inside, he could hear voices, but they were muffled and indistinct. He backed off to the curb, looked the building over, but saw no way to enter it from a higher floor. So he walked to the corner and into an alley to see if he could find a back entrance.

A. H. Baynes thought that politics had lost a star performer when he had decided to become a businessman. But there was still time. He was still young and now he owned three airlines, and when he stopped the killings aboard Air Europa and International Mid-America and merged them with just Folks, his stock interests would be worth a quarter of a billion dollars. Not too shabby, and a pretty good campaign fund with which to launch a political career.

It made pleasant thinking, but first he had the crazies to deal with.

He stood alongside the statue of Kali on the raised platform and looked out at the expectant young faces. "She loves you," he said.

And they cheered.

"And I, your chief phansigar, love you too."

"Hail the phansigar," they shouted back.

"The European operation was a total success and Kali is pleased. And I am pleased that my children have returned to this country safe and sound." He tried a warm smile as he nodded to his son, Joshua, standing nearby. "Of course, it's a little late for my daughter to be up, so she's staying with friends. But Joshua is here to be with you other sons and daughters of Kali. Isn't that right, Joshua?"

"Kill for Kali," Joshua said in a dull monotone. "Kill."

The others picked up the word and soon the room throbbed with the chanting. "Kill. Kill for the love of Kali. Kill. Kill."

Baynes raised his hands for silence, but it took several minutes to quiet down the crowd.

"Soon there will be another trip that you will take for Kali," Baynes said. Just then, Baynes saw in a mirror near the door the reflection of a man in steel-rimmed spectacles. He must have come in the rear door because he was standing in the small hallway that led to Baynes's office.

The federal man, he thought.

He turned back to the crowd. "Our path has not been easy, and tonight it grows even more difficult," he said.

The faces of the young people looked up at him questioningly.

"At this moment there is a stranger in our midst. A stranger who seeks to do us harm with lies and hatred for Kali."

Smith heard the words and felt a tightening in his throat. The crowd, unaware of his presence, murmured among themselves. He started to back away. They had not seen him yet; he might still escape.

A hand reached out and grabbed his wrist. He turned and saw the pudgy little Indian man.

"Psst. In here," Ban Sar Din said. He pulled Smith into Baynes's office and locked the steel door behind them.

"He is going to kill you," Ban Sar Din said.

"I gathered that was his intention," Smith said.

"I'm not going to let him kill a federal agent," Ban Sar Din said.

"I never said I was a federal agent," Smith said.

Ban Sar Din slapped his forehead in despair. "Okay, look. I won't argue. Let's just get out of here." Suddenly there was a thumping on the door of the office, and then the thumping took on the rhythm of the chanting voices and the chant was: "Kill for Kali. Kill for Kali. Kill for Kali."

"Maybe withdrawal would be reasonable," Smith said.

"And you'll put in a good word for me with your immigration people?" Ban Sar Din asked. "Remember. I killed no one."

"We'll see," Smith said noncommittally.

The wood around the steel-reinforced door began to squeak ominously under the thudding of many fists. "You got a deal," Ban Sar Din said desperately. He went to the far wall, pressed a button, and a steel panel slid back, opening the room to the back alley. "Quick," he said. He reached the passenger door of the parked Porsche and got in. Smith got in beside him and the Indian started the motor, then peeled away down the alley toward the street.

"Whew," Ban Sar Din said. "That was close." Smith didn't want to hear small talk. "Before, I asked you about the other American. The dark-haired one with thick wrists. Where is he?"

Ban Sar Din turned to glance at Smith. "He's dead," he said.

Smith winced involuntarily. "Dead? Are you sure?"

"I heard Baynes talking," Ban Sar Din said. "That man, Remo?"

"Yes, Remo."

"He was on a plane that took off from the airport a couple of hours ago. It crashed into the lake. I think Baynes put a bomb on it."

Numbly Smith said, "There's no end to his killing, is there?"

"He's crazy," Ban Sar Din said. "He makes the airlines go broke with the murders, and then he buys them. But he doesn't want just money. He wants power, but now the power is too great. He doesn't understand the source of the power."

"The source?" Smith said. "Isn't the source killing?"

"The source is Kali," said Ban Sar Din.

They were two blocks away from the ashram, and Ban Sar Din stopped for a red light. "I don't understand it myself," he said. "The statue was just a piece of junk I bought. But it has power, some kind of power, and I don't-"

They came out of the bushes. They came from behind trees, from beneath the manhole covers in the street. Before the Indian could slam his foot on the accelerator, the Porsche was surrounded by people, dozens of them, male and female, every one of them carrying a yellow rumal.

"Good God," Smith said as they started beating on the car.

They got Ban Sar Din first, smashing through the windows with sticks and rocks, then dragging the little Indian through the splintered glass and beating him until he screamed with the pain.

They beat him repeatedly with bloody rocks and stubs of branches until their faces glistened and their eyes shone wild and hungry, and then Ban Sar Din screamed no more.

Then they came back for Smith.

They opened the door and pulled him out. My attache case, he thought. The lunatics were going to kill him and take the case too. They couldn't do anything with it, of course. The technology of the computer-hookup telephone was probably too sophisticated for any of them. But even if the executive offices at Folcroft Sanitarium caught fire, as they should if Smith failed to make contact within twelve hours, the case would still exist and it might be traced back to Folcroft. And there was a chance, a slim chance, that someone might find out what CURE had once been and the government of the United States would surely topple.

"The case," he called out as the first blow from a stick staggered him.

There were rocks and fists and clumps of hard dirt too, before someone finally said, "What about the case?"

It was the young boy, the one Smith had seen in the ashram. He picked up the attache case off the street. "Hold it, hold it," he said softly to the attackers as he walked through the crowd. "Let's just see what's going on." He extended the case to Smith as if to give it to him. "Here's your case. What's in it?"

But as Smith reached for it, the young boy yanked it back and kicked Smith in the shoulder.

"Important papers, maybe? Or just a little black book with hookers' names in it?" The boy laughed.

"Don't open it. Please," Smith pleaded. Open it, you little bastard.

"Why not?" the boy said. He stood over Smith with his legs apart. His expression bore the unmistakable mark of someone who enjoyed looking down at people. In that instant Smith knew that the boy was A. H. Baynes's son.

"Please don't. Don't," Smith said. "Don't open it." He closed his eyes and tried not to think of it. Joshua Baynes propped the case against the over turned Porsche, just as Smith knew he would. He manipulated the clasps in the usual way, just as Smith knew he would, and the explosives set into the hinges of the case went off with their predictable fireballs. Afterward, the boy lay on the street with black formless stumps where his head and hands had been and the case was gone, an unrecognizable lump of melted plastic and metal.

The body of the car had shielded Smith from the blast, but now he felt a yellow kerchief looped around his neck. He barely minded it. Now I can die, he thought. CURE will die too, but the United States will live.

On his right lay Ban Sar Din's body, little more than a mound of exposed flesh awash in blood. A stone smashed against one of Smith's legs and he flinched. It would be a hard death, as hard as the Indian's had been. Maybe all deaths were hard, he thought. But his was long overdue and his only regret was that he had not been able to report in that A. H. Baynes and this crazed cult were behind the airline murders. But someone else would find out; someone else would stop them. It wouldn't be Remo; Remo was dead, as Smith soon would be. And without Remo, there would be no reason for Chiun to stay in the country. He would return to America, find that his disciple had been killed in a plane crash, and return to his life in his Korean village. Maybe, Smith thought, maybe someday there would be another CURE. Maybe someday, when things got bad enough and America's back was pressed against the wall hard enough, some President would stand up and say: Dammit, we're fighting back. The thought gave him some comfort as, with shaking fingers, he tried to breathe deepy and evenly to control the pain that coursed through his body.

It was time. He reached for the white capsule in his vest pocket, the pill that promised a death fragrant with almonds. He rolled over onto his stomach and popped the pill into his mouth, just as the rumal tightened around his neck.

Then there was a scream. Just one. Before Smith could register the fact that the beating on his body had suddenly stopped, he was being jerked to his feet. He choked, and the poison capsule lodged in his throat. Then he felt himself sailing in free flight. He landed belly-first in an empty lot and spat out the cyanide capsule whole. He lay there staring at the white plastic cylinder for a moment, until his senses awakened again and he turned to see what had happened to his attackers.

There were bodies strewn all over the street, and while a dozen still stood, something seemed to be whirling in their midst, something turquoise that moved so fast there did not appear to be any substance behind the movement.

One by one the young killers dropped, until only one was left, a woman, and she fled. There, on the street, surrounded by bodies, stood Chiun. He folded his hands inside his turquoise brocade robe and walked slowly toward Smith.

"Chiun," acknowledged Smith.

"I am really disappointed in you, Emperor," Chiun said. His voice sounded like bacon sizzling.

"Why?" Smith asked in honest puzzlement.

Chiun raised his heel and ground the cyanide capsule under his foot. "Do you think I will have it said of me by future generations that an emperor under my protection was forced to take poison? Oh, the shame of it."

"Sorry," said Smith. It was the only thing he could think of to say. He tried to rise, but his legs were wobbly under him, and then he felt himself being lifted into Chiun's arms as if he were a baby.

At the Seagull Motel, Chiun told the clerk, "We do not wish to be disturbed."

"Just a minute, there. You got to register like everybody else," the clerk said.

Holding Smith in one hand, Chiun used his other hand to rip the stairway railing from the banister. He tossed it onto the desk of the clerk.

"On the other hand," the clerk said, "you can register in the morning."

Inside the room, Chiun placed Smith on the bed and then began probing his body with his long-nailed fingers. After several minutes, he stood and nodded.

"There is no serious injury, Emperor," he said. "With rest, your body will return to the same despicable condition which is its normal state."

Chiun looked around the room, distaste evident on his parchment-like face, and suddenly Smith realized that Chiun did not know about Remo. How could he tell him? He reached deep down into his reserves of rock-hard New England character and said, "Master of Sinanju, Remo is dead."

For a moment Chiun did not move. Then he turned to face Smith. His hazel eyes flashed in the glare from the bare overhead light. "How did this happen?" the old Oriental said slowly.

"In a plane crash. Someone at the ashram over there . . ." He tried to point across the street but was unable to move his arm because of the pain. " . . . over there told me," he said.

Chiun went to the window and looked out. "That slum is a temple?" he said calmly.

"Yes," Smith said. "Kali, I think."

"Is the statue there?" Chiun asked.

"It was a half-hour ago," Smith answered.

"Then Remo is not dead," Chiun said.

"But I was told ... The crash . . ."

Chiun shook his head slowly from side to side. "Remo must yet face death," he said. "That is why I went to my village."

"Why?" Smith said. "I don't understand."

"I went for this." Chiun reached into the sleeves of his robe and pulled forth a tarnished silver ring.

"For that?" Smith said.

"For this."

Smith reddened. It had cost untold thousands of dollars and threatened all kinds of security to send Chiun to North Korea, and he had gone there to bring back a silver ring worth twenty dollars at a generous pawnbroker's.

"For just a ring?" he said.

"Not just a ring, Emperor. The last time it was worn, it gave a man like Remo the strength to do something he had not the courage to do before. Remo needs that courage because he faces that same adversary."

"A. H. Baynes?" Smith asked.

"No. Kali," Chiun said.

"Chiun, why do you think that Remo's alive?"

"I know he is alive, Emperor."

"How do you know?"

"You do not believe the legends of Sinanju, Emperor. No matter how many times you have seen them come true, you believe only in those ugly metal cabinets you have in your office. I could tell you, but you would not understand."

"Try me, Chiun. Please," Smith said.

"Very well. Remo came to me a dead man after you brought him into the organization. Did you ever wonder why I deigned to train a white when it is well-known that whites are incapable of learning anything important?"

"No," Smith said. "Actually, it never occurred to me to wonder about that."

Chiun disregarded the answer. "I did it because Remo fulfilled one of the oldest prophecies of Sinanju. That someday there would be a dead man that would be brought back to life. He would be trained and would become the greatest Master of Sinanju, and someday it would be said of him that he was not just a man, but the rebirth of Shiva, the Destroyer god."

"And that is Remo?" Smith said.

"Such is the legend," Chiun said.

"If Remo is this Shiva god, why doesn't he just armwrestle with Kali and beat her?"

"You scoff," Chiun snapped, "because you choose not to understand, but I will answer anyway. Remo is still just a child in the way of Sinanju. The power of Kali now is greater than his power. That is why I brought this ring. I believe it will make him strong, strong enough to win and to live. And someday he will be Sinanju's greatest Master. Until that day, I continue to teach him."

"Because of that, you know he's not dead?" Smith said.

There was utter disgust on Chiun's face, the countenance of someone trying to teach calculus to a stone. "Because of that," he said simply, and turned away. It was too much for Smith. Sadly, he felt that Chiun was deluding himself, holding on to the slim hope of some legend because he refused to face the hard fact that his disciple, Remo, was dead. But all things die. Didn't the old man know that?

"I have to call the police," Smith said. "I have to get them to round up everybody at that ashram."

"No," Chiun said.

Smith walked to the telephone, but Chiun took his arm and led him back to the bed.

"We will wait for Remo," Chiun said coldly. "This battle belongs to him, not to the police."

Harold Smith decided to wait.

Chapter Twenty-three

Remo held Ivory's hand as they drove from the airport back toward downtown New Orleans. For him, the miracle was not that he had survived the explosion on the plane, but that he had found Ivory after it was all over.

During the panic-stricken seconds right after the blast, the scene in the Air Asia plane was a horrible vision. Remo had felt his seat belt come undone and his body being tossed into a group of hysterical passengers who were trying, illogically, to undo their seat belts to free themselves.

Remo had scurried to the big yawning hole where the cockpit had once been, and stationed himself there to stop people from tumbling out into the nighttime sky.

The lake below was racing up toward them. Those who survived the impact had a chance to live if they all kept calm. Every nerve, every muscle fiber in Remo's body was pulled violin-string-tight. He had no time for horror and none for rage, even though he knew this had not been an accident.

The muffled thunder he had heard had come from the belly of the plane, not its engine. As soon as he had heard it, he knew it was a bomb. Some lunatic had somehow managed to plant an explosive inside the plane.

Some lunatic, he thought, as a piece of the plane hurtled down the last few dozen feet toward the lake. Why hadn't he thought of it before? It had been set up so simply. Someone had wanted him dead, someone careless enough about human life to be willing to sacrifice a hundred innocents just to kill him.

Who else but A. H. Baynes? He caught an old woman who was sliding down the aisle toward the ripped-open front of the craft and held her in his arms. He glanced behind him. Twelve feet. Six. Impact.

The plane hit with the flat slap of an egg dropped onto a tilted kitchen floor. As soon as he felt the first pressure of contact under his feet, he put the old lady into a seat and unstrapped a stewardess who was still buckled in.

"Are you all right?" he asked her.

She looked at him, in shock, as if unable to comprehend what had happened. Remo reached behind her head and pressed a hard index finger into a cluster of nerves at the back of her neck.

Suddenly her eyes cleared and she nodded decisively. In the rest of the plane, people were screaming, breaking from their seat belts, starting to claw their way to the front of the plane to get out.

"All right," Remo said. "You help these people. Make sure they've got floats or whatever they need. Get all the uninjured ones off. Give me room to work." She got to her feet.

"We're going to die. We're going to die. We're drowning." Voices came down the aisle of the plane. Remo's voice barked above all the others. "Shut up and listen. You're not going to die and you're not going to drown. One by one, you're going to leave this plane and get away from it before it sinks. Just do what this lady says."

"What are you going to do?" the stewardess asked. "I've got to see if anybody's alive in the forward section. If I can find it."

Remo turned and dived out into the cold black water of the lake. As he surfaced, he heard the stewardess's calm voice behind him, telling the passengers to remove their seat cushions and use them as floats and then slide out into the water.

Through the darkness, he saw a faint bump in the water fifty yards away and moved to it, not slapping his way through the water like a high-speed competition swimmer, but sliding through it like a fish, in movements so smooth that someone might look at the lake and see, not a human swimmer, but just one ripple among many.

When he was closer, he saw that the small bump he had seen was the hump atop the cockpit. The front half of the plane was settling, sinking down into the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Another minute or so and it would be totally submerged.

He dived down under the water and into the forward section of the plane, past the twisted ripped metal that showed where the bomb had exploded.

The pilot and copilot were still in their seats. Peering like a fish under the inky water, Remo could see that their eyes and mouths were open. They were beyond help, and he only hoped that their deaths had been swift. They hadn't deserved this.

He felt the rage he had been controlling starting to rise in his throat. The plane had been snapped apart just slightly behind the pilot's cabin. All the passengers were in the section that Remo had left behind, and he swam through the forward section of the plane for a few moments, but there were no other bodies. He felt the pressure as the plane began to slip under the water, and he swam out and surfaced.

On the shoreline of the lake, he could see the revolving lights of emergency vehicles, and his ears picked up the onrushing whirring of a helicopter.

Good. Help was coming. He looked quickly around him, but he saw no bodies floating, no one who needed help.

As he swam back to the other section of the plane, he was able to see the stewardess moving people out in a rapid line, one after another, into the water.

But the section of the plane had begun to tilt forward, and soon it would knife its way under the lake.

Remo slipped back to it and pulled himself into the cabin section.

"How we doing?" he asked the stewardess.

"I lost one," she said. Tears streamed down her face. "A little boy. He dropped his float and then went out. And I couldn't reach him. He went under." She was sobbing even as she was continuing to help people into the water.

"We'll see what we can do," Remo said. He let the air from his body and dropped like a stone under the waters of the lake. As he dropped, he rotated his body in the Sinanju spiral so that he commanded a full 360-degree view. The Sinanju spiral, he thought. This is how it should be used. For people's good. The last time he had used it, it was to kill a pigeon.

He saw a dark shape floating aimlessly in the water a dozen feet away. It was the young boy, and Remo wrapped him in his arms and shot back to the surface like a bubble.

He hoisted the boy's body into the cabin and put him on a seat.

"Oh. You got him. Oh . . ." The stewardess could barely talk. The plane had now been emptied except for six people who lolled unconscious in their seats. The others bobbed like cork chips in the water, away from the plane.

"Will he be all right?" she asked.

"Get yourself a float and get out of here," Remo said as he pressed his fingers into the boy's solar plexus. He had stopped breathing, but it had only been a minute or so. There was still time. With his fingertips, Remo grasped a small clump of tissue and twisted it.

"He's dead, isn't he?" the stewardess said. "He's dead."

The boy's mouth opened and then a flood of water and bile came pouring out. The boy gasped and sucked up a huge mouthful of air.

"Not anymore," Remo answered her. "He'll be all right. Take him with you."

He handed the boy to the stewardess, who wrapped her arms about him, then took a seat-cushion between her hands and slid out smoothly into the water.

She was a good one, Remo thought, moving toward the back of the plane. She deserved a medal.

The water now was above his waist and he knew that in only a few minutes this section of the fuselage would go under the lake waters.

The six people still in their seats were unconscious, and a mere glance told Remo that their injuries were more serious than he was able to deal with.

He couldn't let them drown.

He remembered the emergency kits he often saw in the rear of plane compartments, and he went under the water to the very tail of the plane, where he found a large metal container. It was closed and locked, but he ripped off the metal top and felt vinyl under his hands. As he brought it closer to his face, he could see that it was an inflatable raft.

He surfaced again.

The water in the cabin had risen another foot.

He pulled the control on the raft and it began to hiss and expand. Remo moved it toward the jagged opening of the fuselage and pushed it out into the waters of the lake. Then one at a time he came back for the passengers and carried them out and placed them in the raft. He had just gotten the last one on the bright yellow float when he turned and saw the silver section of the plane tip once, as if making a final bow, and then slide down under the water.

He heard the sound of boat motors racing across the water toward them. Fifty feet away he saw the stewardess, still clinging grimly to her life preserver and to the young boy, and he pushed the raft over to her.

When he tried to take the boy from her, she tightened her grip around his body until Remo said, "It's me. It's all right." She recognized him and released the boy, and Remo put him in the raft.

"You're a helluva lady," Remo said, and then he let himself slide under the water and propelled himself toward the shoreline. He didn't want to be "rescued," and he didn't want to be interviewed, and he didn't want to be seen. Perhaps it would serve his purposes best if A. H. Baynes was allowed to think that Remo had died as planned.

He swam away from the large cluster of people standing on the shore, manning emergency lights and playing them on the faces of the survivors a few hundred yards out into the lake. When he was sure that no one could see him and he was out of the ring of lights, he walked slowly onto dry ground.

And couldn't believe his eyes.

There stood Ivory. Her white suit was rumpled and her face looked tense and anxious. "Oh, Remo," she said, and ran into his arms. "Somehow I knew," she said.

He kissed her and immediately felt a rush of triumph flood over him. This is why I'm alive, he thought. And all the guilt and self-recriminations about the people who had died because of him retreated to a remote area of his mind. He was alive and Ivory had come back for him. "How did you know?" he asked.

"I didn't. I just hoped, and then there was the crash and I came running here and somehow I knew that this would be the spot."

"That's one plane I'm glad you missed," Remo said, holding her close to him. "Come on, let's get out of here before the crowds arrive."

"You're wringing wet," she said. "You'll freeze."

"Don't worry about it," he said.

He took the first car he found in the parking lot. The driver had left the keys under the front seat, and as he drove from the airport, slowly, past the police emergency lines that had been set up to control sightseer traffic, he turned to her and said, "I have to tell you something about the statue."

"Statue?" Her expression was bewildered.

"The statue you were looking for in New Orleans. I know where it is."

"What? Why didn't ... ?"

"Too long a story for now," he said. "But I'm going back there, and when I'm done, well, then you can have the statue."

"Doesn't the owner have something to say about this?"

Remo wanted to tell her that no one could own Kali, but he stopped himself. Ivory had a hard enough time believing that he had somehow survived the plane crash. Anything more might drive her away in fright. Instead, he just reached over and touched her knee.

"I don't understand it," she said, and he knew what she meant.

"Neither do I," he said. "I hardly know you, but . . ." He couldn't finish.

"Maybe we knew each other in a previous life," she said with a smile.

"Don't tell me you grew up in Newark too," Remo said.

"No. I grew up in Sri Lanka. An old family. But I studied in Switzerland and Paris. Did you ... ?" Remo shook his head. "I don't think our backgrounds have much in common. Time out. Where's Sri Lanka, anyway?"

"It's near India. It used to be called Ceylon."

"Ceylon?" He stared at her so long that he nearly veered off the road.

"You have been in my country?" -she asked.

"No. I've just got the jitters, that's all. Ivory, about that statue."

"Yes?"

"Every time I looked at it, I saw another face over the statue's. I'm sure it was your face. But it was sad and it was crying."

"Is this flattery? Telling me I look like a two-thousand-year-old statue?"

"It wasn't the statue," Remo said. "That's what I'm saying. There was another face behind it, or over it, just hovering there. Your face. I . . . Oh, forget it."

She smoothed his hand. "Are you all right, Remo?"

"Fine. Just forget I mentioned the statue and the face, okay?"

"Okay," she whispered, and kissed him softly on the cheek.

But he could not forget it. The face hovering behind Kali's stone visage had been Ivory's, absolutely, unmistakably.

She was the Weeping Woman.

Chapter Twenty-four

A five-foot-tall box sat in the corner of A. H. Baynes's office, but Holly Rodan did not even glance at it as she dragged herself into the ashram. Tears streamed down her cheeks and her voice caught and broke. "He got away," she gasped.

"Ban Sar Din?"

"No. He's dead. The one that Kali wanted us to kill, the one with the briefcase. He got away."

A. H. Baynes looked up as she said, "And all our people are dead."

"Josh too?" Baynes asked. "My son?"

"I'm sorry," she said. "All of them. I'm the only one who escaped. It was terrible. That awful man had help. This Oriental creature jumped in to save him and it was just brutal and vicious what he did to our people."

Baynes was holding a pencil as he sat behind his desk. The pencil had not moved since Holly had told him of his son's death, but now he tossed it onto the desk blotter and stood up.

"It's time to move on then," he said. "We can't stay here anymore."

"But where will we go?" she asked tearfully.

"Kali has provided," he said. "I have a bunch of Air Asia tickets. What would you think about a place like, say, Hong Kong?"

Her eyes twinkled through her tears. "Hong Kong? Really?"

"Why not. You use those tickets and we'll set up a new temple, a bigger one, in Hong Kong. And we'll start all over again."

"Will we kill some more?" she asked hesitantly.

"Of course," Baynes said.

"That will please Kali," Holly said.

"And what pleases Kali pleases me," he said.

"I know that, Phansigar." She frowned. "But you can't be chief phansigar anymore."

"Why not?"

"Because Ban Sar Din, the Holy One, is dead. That makes you the new Holy One."

"Good. Then you'll be the new chief phansigar," he said, and checked the cash in his wallet.

"Me? A female phansigar? I-"

"Why not? Kali understands. She was the very first feminist," he said, and he had to hold back the laughter when Holly Rodan nodded sincerely in agreement.

"What about you?" she asked.

"I'll meet you in Hong Kong. I have to prepare myself for my responsibilities as Holy One. I think I'm going into the mountains to meditate."

"I'm from Denver," Holly said. "If you need a place - "

"No. I've got a place of my own in the mountains near there. Nothing like a little Colorado mountain air to prepare a man for his lifelong calling." He put an arm around her and said, "You round up whoever's left, get the van, and go to the airport."

"What about Kali? Should I prepare her for the journey?"

"No," he said, his eyes as hard as steel. "I'll wrap the statue."

"But-"

"We don't have any time to waste," he said. "We are surrounded by unbelievers. We must move quickly."

"I'll get everybody right now."

Five minutes later, he heard a horn beep in front of the ashram. He swore to himself. The stupid little broad didn't even have enough sense to park in the alley behind the building.

He struggled outside, carrying a large object wrapped loosely in cloth.

There were only six Thuggees left, besides Holly, and they were crammed into the silver-striped van like creamed herring in a jar. They were chanting and the van reverberated with their noise.

"Quiet down," Baynes snapped as, he opened the van's rear door. "Do you want the cops to catch you before you make it to the airport?"

"We care nothing for police. We kill for Kali."

"Kill. Kill."

Baynes slugged the nearest chanter in the face. "Well, I care, you assholes. They're swarming all over the place, so let's get a move on."

He hauled the heavy object to the front of the van and placed it on the front seat. Holly Rodan was behind the wheel and he handed her a sheaf of Air Asia tickets.

"Guard this carefully," he told her, pointing to the object. "It is Kali."

"With our lives, Chief Phansigar," she said zealously.

"No. You are chief phansigar. Now I am the Holy One."

Shyly she nodded. "Go with Kali, Holy One."

"Enjoy your trip, Chief Phansigar," Baynes said.

Smith turned from the window and bolted to the door of the motel room. "They're getting away," he said.

"Remo is not yet here," Chiun said.

"We'll save the statue for Remo," Smith said. "But I'll be damned if I let those killers get away."

He was out in the hallway and heading down the stairs, when Chiun decided to follow him. Smith was still suffering from the injuries he had received earlier. He might need Chiun nearby.

On the street, Smith flagged a taxi. "Follow that van ahead of us," he said as Chiun entered the cab behind him, his bright turquoise robe flowing.

"Come on, mister. Mardi Gras ain't for another six months or so."

A yellow hand reached out and twisted the cabbie's head around with a pain more excruciating than any the driver had ever known.

"The emperor requests that you follow this vehicle in front of us. Do you agree to perform this service?"

"Sure thing, Emperor," the cabbie squeaked.

"Then do it with eyes open and lips closed," Chiun ordered.

"Now, keep your heads down and keep quiet," Holly commanded through the window that led to the back of the van. She liked being chief phansigar. She decided that giving orders was basically what she liked doing best in the world.

"We're going to the airport," she yelled, "and take Kali to Hong Kong."

"What'll we live on?"

"There'll be other passengers on the plane," she said. "Somehow Kali will provide, from them." Feeling good about flexing her authoritative muscles, she pulled over at the next red light and ordered one the Thuggees to come up from the rear and take the wheel.

"It's the chief phansigar's job to protect Kali," she said, sliding in on the passenger's side of the front seat and twining her arm around the-cloth-covered figure. "Hey, what's this?"

Something was protruding from Kali's stomach. "Maybe She's growing another arm," Holly said, loosening the cloth that encased the statue. "If it's another arm, then it's a sign that She approves of this move to Hong Kong. She is giving us a sign." Excitedly she peeled the cloth away, then stared at the statue in bewilderment.

"Is it an arm?" The Thuggees in the back of the van strained against the small window opening to see. "No. It's ... it's a clock." Holly touched her finger to the numbered disk embedded in the statue's belly. "What's a clock doing in Kali's stomach?" one of the Thuggees asked.

Holly didn't want to admit surprise. Officiously she said, "The Holy One consulted with me about it. He said that it would make it possible to get the statue past customs."

"Good thinking," a Thuggee said. "Hail the Holy One," several chanted.

"Hail the chief phansigar," Holly shouted, when no one else did.

Why was there a clock in Kali's stomach? she wondered. She looked at it carefully. In the rear of the van, they were still praising A. H. Baynes and somehow it annoyed her. "The foolish Holy One," she said. "He didn't even set the time correctly."

"It's nine-oh-four," a Thuggee said.

"Thanks," she said, moving the hands on the clock to the correct time. Nine-oh-two, nine-oh-three, nine-oh-

When the statue exploded, a piece of it jammed into the driver's brain and killed him instantly. A secondary blast from the van's engine blew the vehicle apart in a cloud of flame and smoke. Holly Rodan was blasted through the windshield into the shrubbery of someone's front lawn. This she took as a sign that Kali did not want to go to Hong Kong.

Holly felt herself dying in the smooth dirt behind a row of hedges. And suddenly she knew why she was dying and who had caused it. She tried to speak, but when she opened her mouth, only blood came out. With an effort, she tried to feel her fingers, to see if they were still attached to her body. They moved. Alongside her face, she began to scrawl a message in the dirt.

"C . . ." she began. Just moving her finger enough to form the letter exhausted her. She wrote an O. She traced an L.

It was all she could do. In her last moments, Holly Rodan was too tired even to chant "Kill for Kali." But she smiled anyway, because she knew that above all else, Kali loved to see Her own die.

The explosion was so powerful that the taxicab following the van spun about in the middle of the street. Smith gasped as he saw the bodies fly out of the flaming vehicle like pieces of popcorn over a high flame. Chiun was already out of the cab, and the moment Smith's reflexes could work again, he followed the Oriental toward the wreckage.

They pulled five injured young men from the flaming van. House lights came on along the street and a police siren screamed in the distance, growing louder.

The young men were dying, but still chanted. "Kill."

"Kill for Kali."

"We die and She loves it."

". . . loves it."

Smith looked at Chiun, who pronounced the five young men's death sentences by slowly shaking his head. They would not live.

"Emperor-" he started.

"Not now, Chiun. Wait," Smith snapped. He leaned over one of the cultists and pointed a fountain pen at him. "Who is your leader?" he asked.

"The Holy One. Ban Sar Din."

"No," a youth lying next to him said. "Ban Sar Din has fallen in disgrace. The new Holy One is our leader."

"What's his name?" Smith asked.

"Baynes," the Thuggee said proudly. "He has given all to Kali. And we follow his bidding."

Smith rummaged in the man's pocket and brought out the Air Asia ticket.

As the police and ambulance sirens wailed to a stop, Smith led Chiun back to the throng of bystanders who had gathered on the sidewalk around the wreck.

"Forgive me, Emperor," Chiun said. "I did not mean to interrupt you while you were threatening these cretins with your writing tool-"

"It's a microphone," Smith said, nervously watching as the police moved the injured into ambulances.

"Whatever it is," Chiun said, "I thought you would like to know who is arriving."

"Who?" Smith squinted to see in the direction that Chiun was pointing. Past the blockade of police cars, two figures ran toward them. One of them was Remo. Remo strolled up, surveyed the accident, and said, "I go away for just a few minutes, and look at the mess you two make."

"Maybe if you had been around tending to business-" Smith began.

"Take a hike. I was busy being blown out of the sky," Remo said. "Anyway, I hope this teaches you a lesson."

"What kind of lesson?" Smith asked.

"Sign Chiun's petition. If you have amateur assassins, you're going to have mess after mess, just like this."

"I have one here," Chiun said, reaching a longnailed hand into his kimono.

"No, no, no," Smith said. "Please, Master of Sinanju. Put it away. You and I will discuss that another day."

"Maybe these people standing around would like to sign," Chiun said hopefully. "They must be disgusted by all this noise and waste."

He looked around, but then stopped as Smith suddenly wobbled a little on his feet and began to sink toward the sidewalk. Remo caught him and held him in his arms.

"What happened, Chiun?" he asked.

"The Emperor was assaulted tonight by these creatures. He will be all right."

"I'm okay now," Smith said, pulling himself away from Remo, obviously embarrassed at his momentary display of human weakness. "Let's just collect A. H. Baynes and put him away, and I'll feel fine."

"I figured Baynes," Remo said. "I think he planted a ticket on me while I was sleeping and then rigged a bomb on the plane to try to kill me."

Ivory caught up with them, slightly breathless and wobbling on her high-heeled shoes. She looked around at the accident victims, then placed her hand on Remo's and said, "Is there anything we can do?"

Smith eyed her coldly, then called Remo away from the woman. "Who is she?" he demanded.

"Somebody I met."

"How can you bring a stranger in on the middle of a case like this?" Smith hissed. His anger was visible.

"She doesn't how anything."

"She better not," Smith said. "As it is, she's seen the three of us and-"

"Remo," Ivory called. She was standing behind some shrubs and her face was ashen. He walked over and she pointed down to the body of Holly Rodan. Smith and Chiun came over also.

"She's dead," Remo said, feeling for a pulse.

"There is dirt beneath the fingernails of her right forefinger," Chiun said. "She was trying to write a message in the earth." He looked up at Ivory. "Right where you are standing, madam."

Ivory gasped and moved backward. Just above Holly's finger was the smeared footprint of a highheeled shoe.

"I'm ... so sorry," Ivory whispered.

"It's all right," Remo said gently. He put his arm around her. His eyes were on Smith and in those eyes was a challenge.

Chiun dropped to the ground beside Holly and looked carefully at the earth. "She had written a C," he said. "But that is all I can discern."

"I don't know if it means anything," Ivory said, "but I called you over because of that." She pointed to Holly's left hand. In it was clutched a fragment that looked like stone.

Chiun removed it and held it up. The fragment was in the shape of a small hand.

"The statue?" Remo said.

"Not the statue," Ivory sighed. "It can't be. I've got to see if there are other pieces around." She darted away from Remo into the crowd.

"It is apparently the hand of a statue," Chiun said.

Smith looked at the fragment carefully. "What's this all about?"

"The statue, Emperor," said Chiun. "The one of which we spoke. Of Kali."

"Well, thank God we'll have no more talk of magical statues," Smith said. "Now all we've got left to do is get Baynes."

He handed the statue fragment to Remo, who said casually, "There's one other problem."

"What's that?"

Remo held the piece of statuary up to his nose. "It's the wrong statue," he said.

"What?" asked Smith.

"I don't feel anything. Baynes switched statues. This isn't Kali."

There was a long silence. Finally Chiun said softly, "There is another problem, Remo."

"Huh? What?"

"The woman."

"Ivory?" Remo looked around, but Ivory was nowhere in sight. He combed through the crowd, even slipping past the police to look into the wreckage of the van, but the woman was gone.

He stood in the middle of the street and yelled, "Ivory."

But there was no answer.

The three men returned to the ashram. Remo hoped that Ivory had gone there looking for the statue. But there was no sign of the statue, of Ivory, of A. H. Baynes. All had vanished.

Chapter Twenty-five

"Ivory," A. H. Baynes whispered to the beautiful woman who lay next to him in bed.

Outside, the sun was rising in the Rockies beyond the glass wall of the chalet. The tips of tall pines glistened with dew in the valley below the cliff where Baynes's mountain house stood, surrounded by earlymorning fog.

It was a perfect sunrise, and with Ivory's creamy body rubbing against his, Baynes was glad she had awakened him to see it.

"How did you know I'd be here?" he asked, stroking the inside of her white thighs.

"The girl. The stupid one with the blond hair."

"Holly? She told you?"

"Of course not. She was dead. She wrote C-0-L in the dirt. I assumed it meant you had a place in Colorado."

"Dead? What are you talking about?"

"You can stop the pretense, darling. I'm the one who wears disguises, remember? Anyway, I erased the message with my foot. No one knows we're here."

"All right," Baynes said. "She was getting to be a pain in the ass anyway. All of them with that chanting crap. I got a lot out of them anyway. Two new airlines to add to just Folks. If the feds aren't after me."

Ivory rose languidly and walked over to a creamcolored suitcase. She opened it. "And if they are," she said, "this will set you up all over again somewhere else." She tilted the suitcase to show neat rows of used hundred-dollar bills.

"I have something for you too," he said.

"I was hoping you'd say that."

Baynes hauled a large box from behind the sofa in the living room. He tore open the box and set the statue of Kali on a low table in front of the glass wall overlooking the cliff. Against the background of peaked mountains and clouds, the statue looked for a moment like a real goddess to him, serene and inscrutable, floating in the sky.

"She's magnificent," Ivory said in hushed tones.

"A hell of a lot of trouble for a hunk of stone," he said. "I can tell you I'm glad to get it off my hands." Ivory went back inside the bedroom to dress. She emerged wearing a pair of slacks and a heavy sweater. "Planning on going out?" he asked.

"No, just a little chilly," she said.

"Well, sit down and have a drink." He poured bourbon for both of them. "You are a marvelous-looking woman," he said, handing her a glass. "I'll never get over my surprise when I met you at that abandoned building. I thought you were a man, for Christ's sake."

"I was wearing cloaks."

"With nothing underneath. I've never been seduced like that before," he said.

"You never owned the statue of Kali before," she said.

His pride felt perforated and he said, "Damn that hunk of rock. Who's willing to pay so much money for it, anyway?"

"No one. Kali is for me. My people."'

Baynes guffawed. "Your people? Where are your people from? Scarsdale?"

She looked at him levelly. "I am from a mountainous region in central Ceylon. My ancestors created the statue. It belongs to their descendants."

"This piece of junk?"

"I would advise you not to refer to Kali as junk," she said.

"Hell, you believe it too. I used to have those ninnies at the ashram running around in circles, making believe that the airline tickets grew magically out of Her fingers every night. And all I did was stick them there."

"And the arms the statue grew?" she asked.

"That was Sardine's con. I never did figure out how he did it, but it worked. It kept the crazies in line pretty well."

"The Indian had nothing to do with it," she said.

"You really believe it," he said, making no attempt to hide his astonishment. "Growing arms, needing a lover, wanting deaths and all that slut. You believe it."

"How little you really know," she said. "I have spent six years tracking this statue."

"Well, if you think there's anything special about it, you ought to be disillusioned now. Look at it. It's junk, and it's ugly junk to boot."

She walked behind him slowly, caressing his shoulders. "Perhaps you weren't worthy enough to see its beauty," she said, and pulled from her pants pocket a yellow silk rumal. "You see, Kali only intervenes for those She loves. You were only a small link in the chain, Mr. Baynes. I doubt if She will intervene in your behalf."

She slid the rumal around his neck. Number 221.

Chapter Twenty-six

The oxygen-thin mountain air filled Remo's lungs with cold and he adjusted his breathing to allow his body to absorb more oxygen.

"What a godforsaken dump," he said.

"I thought white people were always enamored by the mountains and the snow," Chiun said. "That as they succumbed to frostbite and starvation, they always shouted 'back to nature.'"

"Not this white person," Remo said. "I hope Smitty's right about this."

"Those four piles of mechanical junk in his office-"

"His computers," Remo said.

"Correct. Those four piles of mechanical junk determined that this house is secretly owned by A. H. Baynes," Chiun said.

"Yeah. He owns it," Remo said, "and he's probably in Puerto Rico, sunning himself on a beach."

They bounded silently up the craggy cliff. Above them, on a rock overhang, stood the modernistic chalet with its glass walls overlooking the cliff.

Neither man had spoken the thought that was most on their minds. If Baynes was here, so was the statue of Kali.

As they approached the turnoff to the house's driveway, Chiun said, "Hold, Remo. There is something I must give you." He reached under his robe. "You have not asked me about my visit to Sinanju."

Remo felt his nerves tighten. "I don't want to think about that now, Little Father. I just want Baynes, and then I want to get out of here."

"And the statue?"

"Maybe he doesn't have it. He might have sent it somewhere," Remo said.

"Do you believe that?" Chiun asked softly.

"No." Remo leaned against a tree. "You were right about the statue having some kind of power," he told Chiun. "I couldn't destroy it, and every time I was near it, something happened inside me." He closed his eyes tightly.

"What causes you such pain?" Chiun asked.

"It was a bird," Remo said. "Just a bird, and I killed it. It could just as easily have been a person. I killed it and I brought the body back for Kali. It was for Her."

"That was then. This is now," Chiun said.

"And it's going to be different? Chiun, I ran away from that place. I was trying to get to Korea so I could hide behind you." He laughed mirthlessly. "The history of Sinanju thinks Lu was bad for fighting tigers in the circus. I couldn't even face a statue, Chiun. That's what I'm really made of."

"Time and history will judge what you are made of, Remo," Chiun said. "I have brought you a gift." From his sleeve he brought out a band of silver and handed it to the white man. "It was the ring Lu wore when he thrust the statue of Kali into the sea. Take it."

"Is that why you went to Sinanju?" Remo asked. "To help me?" Suddenly he felt very small.

"That is the duty of a teacher," Chiun said. He proferred the ring again.

Remo took it, but it did not fit any of his fingers. "I'll keep it in my pocket." He smiled gently. The old man really believed that a silver ring might just make a man out of a coward, and Remo loved him for that. "You are no weaker than Lu," Chiun said. "Remember that you are both Masters of Sinanju."

Remo wanted to tell him that he was not a Master, that he would never be a Master, and that all the times Chiun had called him an untrainable, unruly pale piece of pig's ear, he had been dead right. Remo Williams was a nobody from Newark, New Jersey, and that was all he would ever be. He thought those things, and to Chiun he said, "Right. Let's get on with it."

They moved from beneath the tree and broke into the chalet silently, through the garage. They heard no one, and it was not until they reached the large, airy living room on the upper level that they found A. H. Baynes sprawled across a sofa, his head bent backward in an unnatural position, his eyes bulging, tongue black and swollen, a red ring around his neck. His flesh was still warm.

"He's dead," Remo said. Suddenly he began to pant and he could not breathe. His legs weakened and he felt dizzy. Above all, the scent that filled the room seemed to clutch at his insides and paralyze his thoughts.

"It's here," he whispered. "The statue."

"Where?" said Chiun.

Without bothering to look, Remo pointed to a corner of the room, where a cardboard box had been heavily taped for shipping.

But as if the spirit inside the box had seen him, the cardboard sides split from the middle outward. The torn edges singed and smoke poured from the corners of the box. The stiff cardboard melted away to black ash, and in the middle of the container's charred remains stood the statue of Kali. As Remo turned to look, its mouth appeared to smile.

Remo fell to his knees. Only Chiun turned when the sound of footsteps came from the bedroom.

"We have a visitor, Remo," he said.

Remo whirled around, then rose to his feet shakily. In front of him stood the woman named Ivory. There was a gun in her hand, but her face was not that of a killer. Her eyes were full of pain and sadness.

"Why did it have to be you?" Remo asked, feeling his heart break.

"I asked myself the same," she answered quietly. "You don't have to lie now, Ivory. I may be stupid but sometimes I can see things. Like how your foot just happened to rub out that dead girl's message."

"I didn't want you to come here. I didn't want to have to kill you."

"That didn't seem to stop you from trying on the plane," he said. "You checked a bomb with your baggage and you knew it would go off right after takeoff."

"I had to have the statue," she said. "I did not know you then, Remo. If I had, I could not have killed you."

"But now you can," he said, nodding toward the gun in her hand.

"Not now. Not if I don't need to. Remo, the statue of Kali belongs to the people of Bathasgata. It is a danger anywhere else. Kali is not a kind goddess."

"The statue is a danger wherever it is," Chiun said. "It must be destroyed."

"And will that destroy the goddess within it?" she asked.

"No, it may not," Chiun said. "But she walked the earth for thousands of years before she found her home in that statue. She may yet walk homeless again, not killing, not driving others to kill. The statue must be destroyed."

"You will not harm it," Ivory snapped, her eyes flashing. "You two leave and no harm will come to you. I wish only to go with the statue. Let me go and I promise you that the statue and I will never leave Bathasgata."

"What of your people?" Chiun asked. "Do they understand what Kali lives on?"

"Some do, the wise ones," Ivory said. "The rest only want their deity returned to them. They will accept."

"Until the village runs with blood and there are no more left to kill. And then somehow the statue will leave your village and its evil will spread, as it had already spread among those foolish children who did its work."

"It is not your right to interfere," Ivory said tearfully. And in her face, Remo saw it once again, and now he was sure. She was the Weeping Woman, the face that hovered behind Kali's, the shadowy image that persisted in being seen.

"Ivory," Remo whispered, and their eyes locked. "I know who you are and I know who I am now too. I don't care what happens to the statue. I love you. I have for two thousand years."

She looked at him, then dropped the gun silently into the thick carpet and took a step toward him. "I feel it, but I don't understand it," she said.

"Two thousand years ago," Remo said, "we were lovers. I was a Master of Sinanju and you were a priestess of Kali and we loved. Until Kali separated us."

The name forced Ivory to glance again at the statue, and she said, "But I serve Kali." Her face bore a bewildered expression.

"Don't serve Her," Remo said. "Don't leave me again." He stepped forward and kissed her, and again he felt the peace of a quiet valley in a distant time. Once again he was with her, just as he had lain with her in a bed of flowers.

"Destroy it," she hissed. "Do it quickly, while there is time. Do it for us. I love-"

She stiffened.

"Ivory," Remo said. He shook her. Her hands clawed at her neck, tore at her clothing. Her eyes, round with fear, pleaded silently with him. From her lips came a choking gasp. She grasped Remo's arms, but a convulsion shook her and her hands fell limply as she sank into Remo's arms.

"Ivory!" Remo screamed. He lifted her in his arms and turned toward the statue.

The statue sprouted a small bud of an arm.

"Kali is a jealous goddess, my son," Chiun said. He took Ivory's body from Remo's arms and floated to the carpet in lotus position, gently setting the body down. The only sign of tension in the old man was in his hands as he placed them together, like a child in prayer.

He began to moan, and Remo dropped to his side. "Chiun. Are you all right?"

"There ... is no air to breathe," Chiun said softly. He bowed his head, his white hair trembled. Then his whole head shook in a violent spasm and lurched backward as if some invisible hand had yanked it.

Remo touched the old man briefly in panic, then rose and turned toward the statue.

"You've done this," he shouted, and threw a lethal kick at the head of the stone carving. His foot never reached it. His legs buckled and he sprawled on the floor. He rose again and tried to smash the statue with his hands, but his arms hung uselessly, refusing to serve him.

He turned toward Chiun and his mouth hung open in horror. A small blue spot had appeared on Chiun's forehead and it was growing.

The ring, Remo thought. He fumbled in his pocket. What would he do with it? He couldn't wear it. Would its mere presence be enough? He wrapped his fingers around it and pulled it out. Then, holding it in front of him as if he were confronting a vampire with a cross, he approached the statue.

His legs could barely move. Inside him was a heaviness that seemed to drag his heart into the depths of hell. He had no strength and it took all the concentration of his mind and muscles to lift his palm with the silver ring in it and move it toward the impassively malicious face of the idol.

The ring glowed for a moment, and for that instant Remo thought that the ring-Lu's ring, given to him by the woman he loved-could save him. But the glow faded and scores of small pits appeared in the silver as it melted and the molten metal, burned through his skin and his flesh with a terrible searing pain.

He screamed and fell thrashing to the floor. The pain pounded through his body and the tender flesh on his palm sizzled. The bud of an arm on Kali's torso grew before his eyes, and the goddess's sickly-sweet smell overpowered the room. Remo knew that the power of the ring was as nothing compared with the foul energy that emanated from the hideous stone sculpture.

As he lay there, he looked toward Chiun. There was no pleading in the old man's eyes, as there had been in Ivory's. There was no fear, no shame, no accusation. Remo, numb in his own pain, ached for the old teacher. Chiun's eyes looked ancient and hollowed, and the blue mark on his forehead was growing, darkening. Chiun was dying, more slowly than most because he could control the responses of his own body, but dying. And there was nothing in the dying old eyes except peace.

"Chiun," Remo whispered. He tried to drag himself across the floor. If he must die, let it be with the man who had given him life. But nothing inside him worked anymore. Remo could not even lift his head from the floor.

He closed his eyes. He could not bear the sight of Chiun's proud face as it succumbed to death.

Then a voice spoke.

Its origin was not outside Remo, but somewhere in the recesses of his mind. It was more a feeling than a voice, but it carried the acrid scent of the goddess, acrid and cloying. It might have been the stink of his own burning flesh, he thought, but the pain was so great and the certainty of Chiun's death was so hard that he was forced to accept the truth: that Kali was now inside him, controlling and mocking him. Then She spoke to him in Her own tongue just as She had spoken to Master Lu two millennia before.

"This is only the beginning of your punishment," the voice said. Then it laughed, high and tinkling as a chorus of tiny bells.

"I brought her back for you, child of Lu," the voice told Remo. "A different body, but the same woman. Born to bring you a moment's joy, as Lu's woman served him. And taken by me just as quickly."

The bells were gone from the voice now, and it was rock-hard ice.

"You could have loved me as Lu could have loved me. You could have served me. But you chose to die instead. And you shall: As your woman has died. As the old man now is dying. Except their deaths will be quick. Yours will be the best that I can provide."

Remo forced his eyes open. The voice disappeared. Chiun lay on his side, unmoving. He had given up. He had waited for Remo to save him, and Remo once again had chosen to hide behind his own closed eyelids.

"You will not kill him," Remo said, pulling himself with a desperate effort to his knees. A wave of unseen energy slapped him hard across the chest. Bile rose in his throat, and he wavered, but he pulled himself up still further. "Maybe I deserve your punishment," he whispered. "Maybe Lu did. Maybe even Ivory. But you will not have Chiun."

He brought himself to his full height. His hand still burned. His head still spun. His insides were water. His legs were immobile, but he was standing and he knew in that moment that he would never kneel before Kali again.

"False hero," the voice said again. "You are weak. Your teacher was weak. All are weak before me." But I will not bow before you, another voice inside him said. It was a small voice, from a place very far removed from his mind, but it spoke, and Kali listened. "No."

A sharp stab of pain clutched at his stomach. Blood spurted from his nose and mouth.

Remo stood.

The glob of molton silver in his hand sizzled into liquid again, burning down the length of his fingers. Remo stood.

His ears were pierced by something that felt like two hot wires jabbed into his eardrums. They filled his ears with a sound like the wail of a thousand screams.

And yet he stood, and quieted them with his will. He could feel his strength returning. He raised his head and stared directly into the evil eyes of the stone goddess.

"You are not Lu," the voice said.

"No," Remo answered coldly, speaking aloud in the silent room.

"But you have his spirit."

"And another's," Remo said.

"Who are you?" The demand was a shriek, silent in the physical room he occupied, but reverberating inside him like the keening of a banshee.

And then he answered, from the place inside himself, the place that did not make itself known even to Remo, and the voice from the place spoke its own words, the words of the old prophecy of Sinanju:

I am created Shiva, the Destroyer; death, the shatterer of worlds. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju."

Remo moved toward the statue. In his mind he heard a scream.

The statue repelled him with wave after wave, silent, invisible blows that pulled the skin from his face. But Remo was no longer afraid. He grasped the statue by its head. The touch of it burned him. The force inside it propelled his feet off the floor and sent him hurtling across the room. He crashed against the glass wall and went through in a sunburst of light and sound.

But he held the statue.

It moved. It twisted as if it were made of the softest clay. Its arms seemed to flutter and dance until they were around Remo's neck, clutching, squeezing, infecting him with their poison.

"You don't frighten me anymore," Remo said aloud. "I am Shiva." He let the arms twine about him. With each twist, he compressed the statue more tightly between his two burned hands. With a final gasp, it spewed a yellow vapor from its nostrils. The vapor hung like a pall, thick and foul, for a moment in the clear Colorado sky. Then it dissipated like so much morning mist.

The stone crumbled in Remo's hands. He crushed the head to powder, then broke it all apart and threw the other pieces over the side of the cliff. They made little thudding sounds as they struck the earth and rocks below.

He walked back inside the room. Fresh air poured into it through the shattered picture window, and there was no trace of the foul odor the statue had always carried with it.

Sadly Remo knelt beside Chiun. He placed a hand gently over the blue dot on the old man's forehead. The forehead was cool and smooth to his touch. Tears streamed down Remo's face and he asked whatever gods might hear him: "Let me die so well as the Master of Sinanju."

The forehead beneath his palm wrinkled. There was a fluttering of eyelashes and then Chiun's squeaky voice:

"Die well? You will die immediately if you do not remove your big barbarian hand from my delicate skin."

"Chiun."

Remo sat back. The old man straightened himself with great dignity, and as he did, the blue spot on his forehead slowly faded until it was gone.

"How are you still alive?" Remo asked.

"How?" The Korean's hazel eyes widened. "How? How indeed, considering that I am always burdened by you."

"I...?"

"Yes. You," Chiun snapped. "I was halfway into the great Void and you performed as usual. You did nothing."

"l-"

"You should have used the ring as I told you."

"I did use the ring. I held it-"

"You did nothing," Chiun said. "I watched."

"But my hands." Remo offered his burned palm for Chiun's examination. There was not a mark on it. "The ring ... I saw ... It burned . . ." He reached into his pocket. There was something there. He pulled out a pitted ring, cheap and impure, fashioned of silver.

"Was it all in my mind?" he asked incredulously.

Chiun snorted. "If it all fit into your mind, it must have been a very small thing indeed," he said.

"But I swear," Remo said. He felt something on his hand and lifted the ring from his palm. Beneath it, in the circle of the ring, was a drop of water. He tasted it. It was salt, the salt of tears.

"Oh, Ivory," Remo said. He went to the cold, dead body of the woman. Her face was wet with tears. Silently Remo placed the ring on her finger. Perhaps, he thought, it would bring the Weeping Woman some peace at last.

Chapter Twenty-seven

"Am I Lu, then?" Remo asked.

"Well, aren't you an idiot," Chiun said. "Of course you are not Lu. Lu has been dead for two thousand years. Do you not yet know who you are, fool?"

"But what about Ivory? The Weeping Woman. The ring."

They were interrupted as Dr. Harold W. Smith entered the hotel room in New York and sat down behind the large writing desk.

"Well?" Remo demanded of Chiun. "What about those things? What about the statue? It talked."

He saw Smith glance upward sharply.

Chiun said in Korean to Remo, "Such subjects should not be discussed with men of bound minds such as the emperor."

"I beg your pardon," Smith said.

"Ah, Illustrious One. Forgive me my prattle. I was merely telling Remo to remain silent about the cure for the malady which has affected his reason."

"What cure?" Smith asked.

"Something that will ease his burdened mind and make these visions of spirits within statues vanish forever, thus freeing him to be of greater service to you. But we do not wish to waste your time, O Emperor. Please do not give this a second thought."

"But, well, if there's something I could do . . ." Smith said.

"Truly, it is nothing," Chiun insisted. "While it would heal Remo in a moment, you should not be troubled with such trivialities."

Remo cleared his throat. "Well, since you asked, I guess I could use a couple of weeks in Puerto Rico."

"Pay him no heed, Emperor," Chiun said. He kicked him in the shins, out of Smith's view. "That is not what he needs."

"How do you know what I need?"

Chiun kicked him again, harder this time. "Sire, this boy is like a son to me, even if he is white. A son whose innermost thoughts find their way to my heart. I know what he truly needs."

"Really?" Smith said. He sounded even more lemony than usual.

"Indeed. But it is so minor, I will say no more."

"Very well," Smith said agreeably.

"Except that Remo wishes, above all things, to be able to give to his adopted village of Sinanju the tribute it so justly deserves," Chiun added quickly.

"I do?" Remo said.

Chiun ignored him. "A mere five-weight of gold is so little. It shames my student."

Smith sighed. "I thought you gave up the extra tribute in exchange for the trip back to Sinanju."

"That is correct, O Just and Enlightened One. And so it is not I who ask for a ten-weight of gold to replace the paltry five-weight-"

"Ten? Before, we had settled on nine," Smith said. "Yes, O All-Recalling One. But now it is not I who ask for the ten-weight. It is Remo."

"So far, he hasn't said a word about it," Smith said. "It is because he is a shy and reticent thing, Emperor. But in his heart, he wants above all things to see the people of Sinanju clothed and fed. Is that not so, Remo?" He looked sharply at his pupil. Out of Smith's sight, he jabbed a long fingernail into Remo's thigh.

"Ow." Remo yelled.

"You see, Emperor? So great is his concern for the village that he cries out in despair. Truly, there is no other way, lest we lose him to heartsickness."

Smith exhaled in noisy resignation. "All right," he said. "An additional five-weight of gold annually."

Chiun beamed. "He is most pleased, Emperor." Remo yawned.

"But it has to come out of somewhere," Smith said. "For instance, Remo, these expenses you keep running up."

"Of course, Emperor," said Chiun. "Remo is willing to restrict his food intake for such a worthy cause."

"And we'll have to cut your vacation time too," Smith said.

"Now, hold on just a minute," Remo said. "After the Seagull Motel, I want to go to Puerto Rico."

"Make your choice," Smith said. "More gold for Sinanju or Puerto Rico?"

"That's easy. Ow."

"He desperately prefers the ten-weight of gold, Emperor," Chiun said, leaning forward. "Desperately."

Smith looked at Remo, doubled over and racked with pain. "I'm glad that's settled," Smith said.

"For now," Remo grumbled. "Only for now." After Smith had left, Remo and Chiun again spoke. "What of Kali?" Remo said. "Is she dead?"

"The gods do not die. It is as I told that woman. Perhaps it will be many centuries before Kali finds another home on this earth."

"I hope so," Remo said. "My clothes stunk for days afterward. "

In the handsome suburb of Denver, little Kimberly Baynes sat in her playroom making shapes out of a mound of pink Play-Doh. She wore a tiny apron over her frock, as her grandmother had instructed her, and she worked cleanly and quietly.

Mrs. Baynes peeked in and felt the same thrill she had felt every day since she had taken custody of Kimberly. Life had been grim since the death of her son and his wife and their son. It had seemed for a while that there would be nothing remaining to fill the last years of her life, but then Kimberly had come and the little girl's laughter had made Mrs. Baynes feel young again.

Children were wonderfully resilient. After the police had found the poor little creature, Kimberly had done nothing but chant insensibilities for a week. But that had all passed. Now she was as normal as blueberry pie. She never even mentioned that terrible place where her parents had taken her and Joshua to live. They forget, Mrs. Baynes thought. That's how the young stay happy.

Mrs. Baynes left the playroom to fix herself a cup of tea. She was sipping it in front of the television when Kimberly raced in, grinning, a wad of pink Play-Doh stuck to the end of her nose.

"Come see, Grandma. See what I made."

"Oh, my," the old lady said. "So this is the grand unveiling. Well, all right. I can't wait to see."

But Grandma Baynes had to blink hard as she entered the playroom. The pink blob of Kimberly's miniature worktable was nearly two feet high and formed into the shape of a mature adult woman, complete with breasts. Its face, childishly scrawled with a pencil point, seemed strangely malevolent. But the oddest thing about the statue was the number of arms it had.

Five.

"Why did you give the lady five arms, Kimberly?" Mrs. Baynes asked gently.

"So it'll have room to grow more, silly," Kimberly said.

"Ah, I see," Mrs. Baynes smiled. "It's . . . very pretty, darling." She didn't know why, but the sculpture filled her with loathing. Still, it was Kimberly's, and the child should be allowed to express herself. Maybe during the day sometime, she thought, she could fix the face herself with a nice smile and a pair of M es.

"She's beautiful," Kimberly said. "She's my friend."

"Does your friend have a name?" Mrs. Baynes asked.

"Yes. Her name is Kali."

"Isn't that nice?" Mrs. Baynes said. "Shall we have some ice cream now?"

"Oh, yes," Kimberly said. She held her grandmother's hand and skipped from the room.

The sun set, shrouding the room in darkness. And there, on the miniature worktable, covered with crayons and paper dolls and smudges of Play Doh, the tall pink statue produced a small pink nub in a space between its arms.