Timber Line

Chapter Thirteen

It was afternoon. Remo had spent much of the day wandering through the woods where they had found Oscar Brack, where he had found the buried tape recorder, looking for something, anything, that would indicate who was behind the violence.

But he found nothing.

Who was behind the violence? He didn't know. And if the trees were the target, why not just have burned them down? Why kill? Why kill Danny O'Farrell, Joey's fiance? Why kill Oscar Brack? Why try to kill Joey Webb?

Maybe the trees could be replaced too easily for burning them down to mean anything. But perhaps the brains at work trying to make the copa-ibas an alternate source of oil for America, perhaps those brains were not easily replaceable. Maybe that was the reason for the murders and the attempts on Joey.

But who? Who had used the tape recorder to lure him from the A-frame last night before putting it to the torch?

Who had killed Danny O'Farrell and Brack?

Last night, when the A-frame went ablaze, Pierre LaRue had said instantly that it was the work of the Mountain Highs. After all they had tried to set the forest ablaze earlier in the night. But, Remo felt, somehow killing would not be their style. And who was to say that it wasn't LaRue or Roger Stacy who were behind the killings?

So many questions and so few answers.

Remo walked back to Alpha Camp. He decided he had to start somewhere, and the Mountain Highs were as good a place as anywhere else.

He reached the log cabin just as Joey and Chiun were stepping outside.

"We're going to look at the copa-ibas," she said. "Chiun has an idea."

Remo leaned close and whispered, "He has an idea that this is a Korean tree that you people stole from his country. Be careful."

Joey just nodded and smiled. "There was a phone call for you," she said.

"Who?"

"No message. But it sounded like... well, like Dr. Smith."

"Thanks," Remo said. "Do you know where the Mountain Highs camp out?"

Joey pointed to the direction of the main road and told him he could find their camp about three miles from the main office of Tulsa Torrent.

"You going there?" she said.

"Maybe," said Remo. "Have to start looking somewhere."

"Be careful," she said.

"I'm always careful."

It wasn't really a town. It was just a small widening in the road as it passed through the California hills, and there was a gas station and a small grocery store. Behind these roadside structures a few hundred yards down the road, Remo could see the tents that belonged to the Mountain High Society.

He stopped in at the grocery store and dialed Smith's 800 area-code number.

Smith picked up the telephone in his darkened office at Folcroft Sanitarium.

"You called?" Remo said.

"Have you found out anything?"

"Nothing yet," Remo said.

"I heard of the trouble last night."

"Yeah," Remo said. "We've had nothing but trouble. Joey's all right, though."

"She is no more important than anyone else involved in this matter," Smith said sternly. "Do not let personal considerations..."

"You're a cold-assed fish," Remo said. "You helped raise the kid."

"I know," Smith said.

There was an awkward pause and Remo said, "Have you found out who those two guys were who tried to burn down the copa-ibas last night?"

"No," Smith said. "No information has been received yet in Washington."

"Damn local police," Remo said. "They were supposed to get the prints out right away, to try to identify them."

"I will keep my eyes open," Smith said. "Anything else?"

"Yes," Remo said. "A tape recorder. You think you could trace it from a serial number?"

"Perhaps. What is the number?"

Remo read him a long nine-digit number, written on the back of a matchbook.

"Whoever owns that recorder is involved," Remo said.

"I will try to run it down," Smith said. "Anything else you need?"

"You might run the Mountain High Society through your computers. I don't know if they're involved or not, but they're certainly all over this joint."

"Fine," Smith said. "I'll check."

"Oh, and one last thing," Remo said.

"What is that?"

"Smile. Remember this is the first day of the rest of your life."

"I'll keep that in mind," Smith said as he hung up.

For a gang of a hundred, the Mountain Highs had a small encampment, Remo thought as he approached it on foot.

There was a large trailer home set in back of the clearing. Scattered around the grounds in front of it were a half-dozen high-walled tents, which could sleep no more than four each.

Remo remembered all the designer jeans and snow-suits he had seen last night at the protest rally and decided that the majority of the Mountain Highs had chosen to forego the wilderness and sleep in hotel rooms in the nearby town. But he was interested in only one of them.

He found her sitting in the trailer, on a sofa, drinking a martini with olives. Music played from a large wall-hung stereo. Through the back windows of the trailer, the sun was turning orange as it moved down toward the horizon.

She looked up as Remo came through the front door without bothering to knock. When she saw who it was, she smiled.

"I was expecting you," she said.

"I know," said Remo. He watched as Cicely Winston-Alright stood and stretched herself. She was wearing a tight T-shirt and skin-tight slacks.

She showed him a lot of teeth in a milk-white face. "Can I give you something? Anything?"

"Everything," Remo said and waited for her to put down her martini glass, before lifting her in his arms and carrying her over to the waiting bed.

There were thirty-seven steps in bringing a woman to total sexual ecstasy, and Remo had learned them many years before, back when he had been normal and sex had been a pleasure and not just another technique to learn perfectly or face Chiun's wrath.

But only once before had Remo ever found a woman who could manage to outlast step thirteen, even though Chiun regularly insisted that all Korean women progressed through each of the preliminary thirty-six steps before enjoying — if that was a strong enough word — the mind-numbing, soul-shattering release of the final, thirty-seventh step. Remo had seen women of Chiun's village, though, and he suspected that carrying off the thirty-seven steps might be the only way for a man to stay awake during the act.

But Cicely Winston-Alright was something else — Remo was up to step twenty-two. He had thought he could break down the woman's reserve, that knot of hardness that kept her mid-section stiff and unyielding, but he might as well have been making love to a log.

He moved to step twenty-three. Cicely smiled at him. Step twenty-four, and she allowed that it was nice.

It was only at step twenty-seven when she began to react. She started moaning, alternating short, biting screams with the tearful crying of his name and insistent demands for more.

Remo gave her more. He had gotten her halfway through step twenty-eight when she gulped two large drafts of air and tensed her body.

It was the right time, Remo decided. He smiled and lowered his face to her ear. "Who's doing the killings at the Tulsa Torrent Camp?"

"Oh, Remo, darling," she said softly. "You're a wonderful lover. Really wonderful."

"Thanks," he said. She shouldn't have been able to do that. She should have been putty in his hands, ready to answer anything he asked.

Step twenty-nine. Another smile, another approach toward her ear, another question.

"What is the Association?" he asked.

"It hasn't been this good in years," she said. "Not since him." She waved vaguely in the direction of a box on top of her small night table.

"The Association," Remo repeated.

"Must we talk now?" she said. "Can you do some more of that stuff with the back of the left knee?"

"No," said Remo. "Definitely not. That was step eighteen and I'm up to step twenty-nine. If I go back to step eighteen, I'll have to start up all over again from there. I might be here all night."

"Would that be so bad?"

"Not if we had something to talk about," Remo said. "Like the Association. Who's the Association? What is it?"

"It's our national group to preserve the environment," she said. "Keep going."

Step thirty.

"Then why would they want to kill anybody?" Remo asked.

"Kill? Them? Remo, stop it. They can't even fuck. How can they kill?"

"Well, who's doing all the killing down at the Tulsa Torrent project?"

"Got me," Cicely Winston-Alright said.

"What a waste of time," Remo said. He pulled back from the woman.

"Remo," she said, "would you do me a favor?"

"A small one," Remo said.

"Take me outside and do it in the snow, under the trees. I love doing it amid nature. It feels so good, so natural. Please."

"I guess so," Remo said.

"I like trees," she said. "They're so... so... symbolic," she said.

"Terrific," he said. Thirty steps wasted and he hadn't found anything out, and this woman was still as stiff from hip to knee as she had been when he had first seen her.

He lifted her up and carried her out the back door of the trailer. He dumped her roughly on the ground. For the first time she squealed, and it was an honest squeal of passion.

"Just jump on me and bang away," she said. "Forget technique."

Remo followed her instructions, landing on her roughly, pushing her arms far apart, pinning them down with his strong hands, pressing hard enough to bruise her creamy skin, and inside ten seconds the woman melted, trembling and quaking, shuddering with the intense release of passion.

She lay still under him, her shoulders trembling slightly against the snow.

"That was marvelous," she said.

"Why didn't you tell me you liked rough stuff?" he said. "I could have saved a lot of time."

"I like rough stuff. Save time."

So they did it again. And again.

The third time, Remo asked her again: "Who's behind the killings?"

"I don't know," she said.

"What's the Association?"

"Ecology group. Pays our bills."

"Swell," Remo growled. He stood up and-looked down at her. "You better get inside before you catch cold."

She nodded. "Will you come and keep me warm again?"

"Absolutely," he said. "On June 17th, I'm free from eight till nine in the morning."

"I'll wait," she said, as Remo crunched off through the snow, leaving her lying on the ground.

Cicely Winston-Alright went back into her trailer and closed the door behind her, then leaned up against it. God, she thought, at last a man... someone who wasn't put off by her money or her beauty and wasn't afraid just to take her like an animal in the woods. She could feel a shiver down her back. She was still throbbing down there, for the first time in years. Only one other man had ever... it was just like in the movies... like the books she sneaked out of her mother's closet...

She sighed and wondered if Remo had left yet. She ran to the front window of the trailer and looked out into the clearing, but he had gone.

She smiled and ran her fingers over her body. He would be back, she thought. She would make sure that he came back. If only men knew that she wanted them to be men, that she wanted them to take her, to force her, to bend her to their will, to hurt her. Why didn't men ever realize?

She walked to her bed and put on a flimsy black peignoir. Then she heard a sound in her kitchen, at the other end of the trailer behind a thin plywood door.

It was short, dark, and pretty Ararat Carpathian. God, how she hated Armenians, she thought. Not that she knew that many. In fact, Carpathian was the only one she knew, but she hated him enough to make up for all the rest. If they could only find some way of boiling down those people, she thought, America could solve its oil problems by breeding Armenians.

She smiled at him and let her gown slip open slightly, making sure he got a good view of her front, then slowly pulled it closed.

"Why, Ari," she said. "How nice to see you."

"I've been waiting quite a while," Carpathian said. "But you were busy."

"Oh, you noticed," she said. "Yes. Quite busy."

"Your friend seemed to want to talk," Carpathian said.

"Men always do," she said. She busied herself at the stove, making a cup of hot chocolate. She did not offer him any. When she turned to come and join him at the kitchen table, she noticed for the first time that he had a lumberjack's double-bladed axe leaning up against the wall behind his seat.

"Well, what is on your mind, Ari?" she asked.

"Tonight's demonstration," he said.

"Ah, yes. The demonstration. We seem to live and die by our demonstrations, don't we, Ari?"

She noticed him smirking under the thin line of his mustache.

"You could say that, Cicely," he said.

She wondered why he was carrying that axe around.

"Our people are beginning to feel uneasy," Ari said. "After last night's fiasco and with the press watching, they're losing their enthusiasm for tonight."

"Go make a speech. That'll whip them up."

"No. They need more than that," he said.

Mrs. Winston-Alright shook her head from side to side.

"Well, go give them something more. You can't expect me to do everything, can you?"

"This is something only you can give them," Ari said. He shifted in his chair and she saw his hand move for the handle of the axe.

"Oh? What is that?" she said, sipping her chocolate. Maybe he wanted to rape her, maybe this poor insignificant little twerp had always longed for her body; maybe his manners and his deference and his courtliness hadn't worked and now he had decided to take her by force to satisfy his lust. She felt herself going wet again. She wouldn't fight. No woman was ever hurt by a good rape.

"Go ahead," she said. "I won't resist."

"You won't?" he said. "You know what's on my mind?

"Yes, you savage Armenian beast. You've come to rape me. Well, go ahead. Although what that's got to do with tonight's demonstration, I'll never know."

"Actually, nothing," he said coldly. "And that's not what's on my mind."

"It isn't?" Without realizing it, she had slipped down in her chair, and now Cicely Winston-Alright sat up straight again. She looked at him with a dowager empress's commanding eye.

"What then do our people need tonight?" she said, trying to get her mind back to business.

"I've talked to our backers at the Association," Ararat Carpathian said. "They agree with me. Totally."

"Agree with what?"

"That we need a martyr."

"A what?" she asked.

"We need a martyr. We need someone to be the victim of a gory, grisly murder — a particularly horrible, bloody thing that we can blame on the people of Tulsa Torrent. That'll bring out the marchers."

She sighed. "I suppose so, if that's what the Association thinks."

"I'm glad you feel that way."

Carpathian picked up the double-bladed axe and set it on the table.

"That's what I got this for, Cicely."

"I see," she said, and shuddered visibly.

"It should be most effective for our purposes," he said softly.

"I suppose so. But I hate to look at it." It was funny, she thought; she had never realized how much the little man's eyes looked like a cobra's. They were almost hypnotizing.

Ari stood up and took the axe in hand, almost as if he were about to chop a log.

"That thing gives me the creeps," she said.

"It won't for long."

"Have you picked your victim yet?" she asked. She looked in his eyes. His eyes held her. She had her answer without his saying a word. She wanted to scream but couldn't.

Finally he answered her. "Yes, Cicely. I have." It took him ten chops to get exactly the effect he wanted.

The moon was high in the sky when Remo came back across the snow to Alpha Camp. There was a large mound of snow where the A-frame building had been, and the air still carried the faint aroma of burnt wood, an aroma faintly redolent to Remo of his childhood days in Newark when he and some friends would start a fire in a vacant lot, then throw in raw potatoes to char them black. The burnt potato skins gave off that woody smell.

Remo was thinking of Cicely Winston-Alright as he walked past the mound that had been the A-frame, when suddenly he felt a pair of strong arms surround him, and a heavy weight bear him to the ground.

"Gotcha, you bet," he heard the French-accented voice roar in his ear.

"Goddammit, Pierre, it's me," he said. Remo had a mouthful of snow. He felt the big weight get off his back, then a strong hand pulled him to his feet.

"Peer sorry," the big man told Remo. "But you sneak across the snow like an Indian, and Peer think it somebody coming back to make trouble."

"All right," Remo said. "No harm done." He realized how much Sinanju had become a part of him. He had not been sneaking back to camp; he had just been strolling. But his stroll today was a soundless, ghostlike movement, beyond the ability of an ordinary man. He was glad that Pierre LaRue was alert.

The two men went inside the log cabin bunkhouse. Chiun and Joey Webb were sitting on a couch. Chiun was sipping daintily from a cup of tea. Joey's hands held a big tea mug, and from time to time she took a big gulp from it. The fireplace gave off the only light and heat in the room, and the young woman seemed to be vacillating between moving closer to it and pulling away from it. Pierre went to a corner and sat his big body down in an old rocking chair. A cat that had been hiding under the chair scurried out into a dark corner.

Looking at Joey, Remo thought about how much the girl had gone through in the last few weeks and how close to the edge of breaking she must be.

Joey looked up at Remo as he stepped into the jagged circle of light thrown off by the fire.

She smiled a hello to him, and he nodded back.

"Everything all right down with the copa-ibas?" he asked.

She said something in answer, but Remo didn't hear it.

He had turned to face the fireplace and let his mind go out to embrace the flames. For the next two minutes, he thought of nothing but his breathing and the rhythm of his blood as it coursed through his body.

When he came back from his rhythm fix, he saw Joey standing next to the fireplace. An old-fashioned standing hook was set into one side of it, and suspended from the hook was an equally old-fashioned teapot.

"Would you like some tea?" she asked him

Remo hesitated. Since he had been brought, kicking and screaming, into the House of Sinanju, his body had changed. He could no longer eat as he once did: Additives could kill him; most food made him want to throw up. His body was too closely tuned, too sensitive to sensation, to tolerate the garbage that most Americans compacted into their mouths. He was hesitant even to try other people's tea.

"It is not bad tea," said Chiun.

"For an American?" Remo asked.

"For an American, it is excellent tea," Chiun said. "For a Korean, it is not bad."

"Good. Then I'll have some," Remo said.

"Same way, right. No sugar, no milk, no lemon, no anything," she told him

"Right," Remo agreed.

"I never could drink it that way," she said. She began to stutter slightly and then stopped. "Oscar always drank his the same way."

"Don't dwell on it, kid," Remo said, rising to take the cup from her. "What's done is done."

"I know." She made an obvious attempt to be more cheerful. "And now for the good news."

"All right," Remo said. "What's the good news?"

"We've figured out how to solve the problem of making the copa-ibas grow in this climate. Or, at least, I think we have."

"Great," Remo said, "How'd you do that?" Behind him, he heard Pierre LaRue lean forward on the rocking chair to listen.

"Actually, Chiun figured it out."

"It was nothing," Chiun said. Remo nodded agreement. Chiun added, "For me, that is. For Remo, it would have been impossible, because it involved thinking."

Joey reached out and touched Chiun's hand good-humoredly. For a fraction of a second, Remo thought he could see a flicker of pride pass through the old man's eyes.

"So what's the solution?" Remo asked. "Or maybe I better ask first, what was the problem?"

"The problem has always been that copa-iba is a tropical tree," Joey said.

"Not Korean?" asked Remo, with a serious face.

"We have resolved that satisfactorily," Chiun said. "Probably the tree was brought from Korea to Brazil many thousands of years ago. Then it was brought to this country."

Remo nodded. "Got it," he said.

"With a tropical tree," Joey said, "there's practically no place in the continental U.S. where we can grow them, except for a little fringe on the Texas gulf coast and a little tiny bit of southern Florida."

"So the problem is trying to find a way to make them grow up here in this dismal climate," Remo said. "That's why all the blowers and the fans and heaters?"

"That's right," she said.

"Does it work?"

"In a way," Joey said. "I mean, we can grow the trees that way. No doubt about it. But it's not worth it. We use more oil and gasoline to run the equipment than the oil we can get out of the trees. The only reason we've been keeping it going is to have some adult trees to study."

"Then the experiment was a flop?" Remo said.

"No. I didn't say that. The big breakthrough was about six months ago. After all this time of planning and trying and fooling around, we finally discovered a way to get the copa-iba seeds to sprout quickly. It used to take thirty to forty years for a single seed to germinate. Now we can get it to do that in only three or four weeks. That was the first breakthrough."

"How do you do it?" Remo asked.

Joey walked back to the fire. Behind him Pierre was still not rocking, Remo noticed.

"I'm not sure I should tell you," Joey said.

"I think you should. It might help us figure out what's going on around here," Remo said.

"What do you mean?"

"I mean that people didn't start dying until your breakthrough with getting seeds to sprout or whatever."

Joey hesitated for a moment. "Maybe," she said. "Anyway, all I do is soak the seeds in this special mixture I've developed. And it works. It really works."

"And who else knew about this mixture besides you?"

"Knows it exists?" asked Joey.

"Yes."

"A hundred people at Tulsa Torrent," she said.

"Who knew what was in it?" asked Remo.

"Just Danny and Oscar and me."

"And now they're dead and somebody's trying to kill you," Remo said.

"It looks that way," she said.

"Why is this so important?" Remo asked. "So who cares if seeds whatchamacallit in weeks or years?"

"It speeds up research. Look. Suppose we grow a hundred trees and two of them seem to have a special resistance to cold. Well, we can take those trees and cross-fertilize them and plant them and get a lot more trees and maybe if you're lucky a lot of them will be more resistant to the cold. And you keep doing it. But if you can only get seeds every thirty years, it's going to take you centuries to make a dent. That's why my breakthrough was so important; now we can speed up the research program."

"I see. Now what does Chiun have to do with all this marvelous wisdom?" Remo said.

"Black silk and spacing," she said. "It's just so obvious none of us ever thought of it."

"You should have asked me," Remo said. "The first thing I think about in the morning is black silk and spacing."

Chiun snorted. Joey laughed.

"What are you talking about, black silk and spacing?" Remo asked.

"The bottom line here is to get these trees growing in this northern climate. We know with enough time we're going to build a super-tree that can thrive up here. But what about in the meantime? All we've been able to figure out is this dumb heating system that uses fifty gallons of oil to make maybe a quart in a tree. Chain's found a better way to grow the trees."

"It was easy," Chiun said. "In my village of Sinanju, everybody knows things like that. Except white people who visit occasionally. They don't know anything."

"What Chiun said was this," Joey explained. "Thin out the copa-ibas. Then in the spaces between and around them, plant pine trees. Cover the ground under the trees with black silk with vents cut in it. Now, what happens is that the needles fall off the pine trees, through the vents in the silk, and pile up on the ground. With a watering system, you keep them wet. The black silk absorbs sunlight and heat, and helps build a giant compost heap under all the trees. Then the vents let out heat and moisture. This keeps the copa-iba trees warm and wet, just as they are in Brazil. What it does is to use the pine trees to create artificial environment that can keep the copa-ibas alive anywhere in the world."

"Will it work?" Remo said.

"I think so," she said. "I'm sure it will. As soon as the winter breaks, we're going to give it a try. It's a brilliant idea."

"I could have thought of that," Remo said. "It was just that no one ever explained the problem to me. It's obvious. The first thing to do would have been to use black silk. Anybody knows that."

"Well, Chiun told me. He's so wise," Joey said.

"He is something, that's for sure," Remo said.

Behind him, he heard Pierre LaRue get to his feet, yawn elaborately, and walk toward them.

"Peer turn in," he said. "A long night last night."

Joey wished him good night, Remo nodded, and Chiun ignored the big Frenchman as he stomped heavily out the front door.

But sleep was not on Pierre LaRue's mind.

Once outside the bunkhouse, he started through the woods, down the hillside to the road, and along the road toward the Mountain High group's encampment and the luxuriously appointed trailer of Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright. It was Thursday night and he had made the trip every Thursday night for the past three months, ever since the Mountain Highs had arrived to harass this station of the Tulsa Torrent company.

He remembered that first night. He was too bone-tired to do anything except chug down a few beers and collapse into bed, and she had come up to him in the little tavern in the village down below and asked him to dance.

He asked her who she was, and she replied that she was the enemy. She had come to put him and his company out of business. She was a lady, a very important lady — no doubt about it — and he had not even had time to put on a clean shirt after his day's work, much less shower and splash himself with cologne. But it didn't matter to her. They danced, and he tried to reason with her. He explained why Tulsa Torrent was a good company that actually improved the land, by making it more fertile, and growing more trees than they cut down. But she ground her body against his and said she had heard all the arguments, and she was still against the company.

Then she took him back to her trailer and did things to his body that he had only read about in books, and then he spent the rest of the night acting like a battering ram. In the morning, he could barely move; he was so stiff and tired he slept-walked through his day's work. But she had told him she wanted him back the following Thursday.

And she insisted that he not shower first. So he came to her without washing the sweat from his body and never once would she let him out of her arms while they were together. If they even snacked at night, they did it while their loins were still locked, one into the other.

But tonight, Pierre LaRue was not looking forward to lovemaking. The things that Joey had said about being the last one alive who knew how to make the copa-iba seeds grow faster made him uncomfortable, particularly with the growing craziness of the Mountain Highs.

He would reason with Mrs. Winston-Alright tonight and ask her to pack up her band of followers and go home, and the first one she should send away was that oily little assistant of hers. The man's name was Ararat, and the woman always called him Ari. But to Pierre, the man was Arat. As he walked through the moonlight and the snow, Pierre laughed aloud. Arat was a good name for the man, he thought, because that was what the little fellow was: a rat.

When LaRue got to Mrs. Winston-Alright's trailer and knocked on the back door, he was surprised to see Arat open the door. The little man smiled at him; he looked so greasy that Pierre thought if he gave him one good squeeze, the man would ooze juice.

"Ah, Pierre," the small man said. "How nice to see you again."

LaRue mumbled an acknowledgment.

"Cicely's waiting for you in the back room," the man said.

Pierre stepped inside the trailer and walked toward the small bedroom in the back. He heard the steps of the small man behind him. The door to the bedroom was closed. Pierre opened it, then stopped short, in horror, as the butchered pieces of Cicely Winston-Alright's body, strewn onto the bedspread, filled him with fear and shock.

He wheeled to face the little man.

Ararat Carpathian raised Mrs. Winston-Alright's little silver-plated revolver and shot the big Frenchman in the chest twice.

Pierre fell like one of his beloved trees.

The small man took the double-bladed axe from behind the door and carefully fitted it into the dead lumberjack's huge hands.

Then he searched carefully to find Mrs. Winstpn-Alright's right hand, put the gun in it and dropped it onto the floor.

Having completed his mission, Ararat Carpathian fled from the trailer.