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  Blood Ties

  ( The Destroyer - 69 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  The Guru of Garbage

  Lyle Lavellette was known to some as Detroit's maverick genius, and to others as the biggest gasbag the auto city had ever seen. But now this golden-tongued tycoon had proved his critics wrong by producing a car that could free Americans from the oily grip of OPEC. His new car would run on compressed garbage and consign all other carmakers to the refuse heap. When a deadly assassin is sent to throw a bloody monkey wrench into Lavellette's odiferous enterprise, the Destroyer and his Oriental mentor Chiun are sent in to stop the slaying-only to find out that the name of the mysterious hit man was Remo Williams. Remo Williams? The one man the Destroyer could not destroy!

  Destroyer 69: Blood Ties

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Prologue

  Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, aged head of an ancient house of assassins that had served the world's rulers since before the time of Christ, said wearily, "I am confused."

  "I knew if I waited long enough, you would come around to my way of thinking," said Remo Williams, his pupil.

  "Silence, white thing. Why is it that everything must be a joke with you?"

  "I wasn't joking," Remo said.

  "I will speak to you at another time when you can manage to keep a civil tongue in your ugly head," Chiun said.

  "Suit yourself," Remo wanted to say. But he knew that if he said that, his life would be made miserable and he would still wind up listening to what it was that had confused Chiun. So instead he said, "Forgive me, Little Father. What is it that has you confused?"

  "Very well," Chiun said. "I do not understand about Aids."

  "What don't you understand?" Remo said.

  "If Aids is so terrible, why does everyone want to have Aids?" Chiun asked.

  "I don't know of a single person who wants to have Aids," Remo said.

  "Don't tell me that. You think I am a fool? People are always getting together to have Aids. I have seen it many times with my own eyes."

  "Now, I'm confused," Remo said.

  "With my own eyes," Chiun insisted. "On television, often interfering with regular programming. All these famous, fat, ugly people running around, singing and dancing for Aids."

  Remo thought about this for a long time while Chiun drummed his long fingernails on the high-polished wood floor in the living room of their hotel suite.

  Finally, Remo said, "You mean things like Live Aid and Farm Aid and Rock Aid?"

  "Exactly. Aids," Chiun said.

  "Chiun, those have nothing to do with Aids, the disease. Those are concerts to raise money for the poor and hungry."

  It was Chiun's turn to ponder. Then he said, "Who are these poor and hungry?"

  "Many people," Remo said. "In America and around the world, poor people without enough to eat. Poor people who don't even have clothes to wear."

  "You say America. You have such poor in America?" Chiun said suspiciously.

  "Yes. Some," Remo said.

  "I don't believe it. Never have I seen a nation which wasted more on less. There are no poor in America."

  "Yes, there are," Remo said.

  Chiun shook his head. "I will never believe that," he said. He turned toward the window. "I could tell you about poor. In the olden days . . . " And because Remo knew he was now going to get for the thousandth time the story of how the village of Sinanju in North Korea was so poor its men were forced to hire themselves out as assassins, Remo sneaked out the hotel-room door.

  * * *

  When he came back, he paused in the hotel hallway outside the door to their suite. From inside, he heard a sobbing sound. Even softer than that, he heard singing.

  He opened the unlocked door. Chiun sat on a tatami mat in front of the television set. He looked up at Remo, tears glistening in his hazel eyes.

  "I finally understand, Remo," he said.

  "Understand what, Little Father?"

  "What you were talking about. What a terrible problem poverty and hunger are in the United States."

  He pointed to the television set where a man was singing. "Look at that poor man," Chiun said. "He cannot even afford trousers which are not torn. He must wear rags around his head. He probably cannot afford a haircut or even soap, and yet he keeps trying to sing through the pain of it all. Oh, the terrible pervasiveness of poverty in this evil, uncaring land. Oh, the majesty of that poor man trying to bear up under it."

  Thus Chiun lamented.

  Remo said, "Little Father, that's Willie Nelson."

  "Hail, Nelson," Chiun said, brushing away a tear. "Hail, the brave and indomitable poor man."

  "Willie Nelson, for your information, is rich enough to buy most of America," Remo said.

  Chiun's head snapped toward Remo. "What?"

  "He's a singer. He's very rich."

  "Why is he dressed in rags?"

  Remo shrugged. "This is Farm Aid. It's a concert to raise money for farmers," he said.

  Chiun examined the singer on television again. "Perhaps he would be delighted to have a concert for something that will ensure this dirty thing"---he waved at the television set-"a place of honor in the history of the world. "

  "I'm waiting," Remo said.

  "Assassin Aid," Chiun said. "This creature can present a concert with the proceeds to go to me."

  "Good plan," Remo said.

  "I am glad you think so," Chiun said. "I will leave it to you to make all the arrangements."

  "Gee, Little Father," Remo said. "I would love to." Chiun looked at him suspiciously. "But unfortunately I called Smith while I was out and he has an assignment for me. "

  Chiun dismissed it with a wave of his hand. "A mere trifle," he said. "Assassin Aid. Now this is a major thing."

  "We'll talk about it when I get back," Remo said. When he left the suite, he heard Chiun yelling to him. "A concert. And I will recite a poem, an Ung poem, written especially for the occasion. 'Hail, Nellie Wilson, Savior of the Poor.' He will love it."

  "Why me, God?" Remo mumbled.

  Chapter 1

  Maria had a gift. Others might have called it a talent or a power, but Maria was a religious woman, a devout Catholic who took Communion every day at St. Devin's Church and she believed that all good things came from God. To Maria, her ability to see into the future was just simply a gift from the Almighty.

  The gift had saved her life once before. And as she pulled away from the florist's shop with a bouquet of spring flowers on the seat beside her, it was about to save her life again.

  But not for long.

  Maria drove with a string of black rosary beads clutched between her right hand and the steering wheel. She kept looking into the rearview mirror for the silver sedan she half-expected to be following her and when it was not there, she exhaled a sigh, whispered a quick "Hail Mary" and counted off another bead on the rosary that had belonged to her mother, and to her mother before her, back in Palermo, back in the old country.

  I never should have confronted him, she thought. I should have gone straight to the police.

  Maria was almost out of Newark when she had the vision. There was a quiet intersection ahead and suddenly Maria felt light-headed. Her field of vision turned a flat gray and then there were the familiar thin black crisscrossing lines she had seen so many times before and never understood. She braked to a stop. When her vision cleared an instant later, she saw the intersection again-but not as it was. She saw it as it would be.

  There was the little Honda she was driving. Maria could see it as it approached the intersection, paused, and started through. It never reached the other side. The car was obliterated by a monster
of a tractor trailer which rolled right through the car before skidding to a stop. Maria saw a hand sticking out of the shattered windshield of the small car and with a sick shock she recognized the black rosary entwined in the lifeless fingers. Her lifeless fingers.

  As the vision faded, Maria pulled over to the side of the road and parked. A metallic-gold van passed her, heading toward the intersection. She had only seconds to bury her head in the steering wheel before the chilling squeal of brakes forced her head up.

  Ahead, the van slewed to a ragged stop, then spun around. There came a dull crump as the trailer, the same one she had seen in her vision, sideswiped the van's front end and roared on.

  "Oh, God."

  Maria jumped from her car and ran to the damaged gold van. A young man in jeans climbed out on wobbly legs. "Are you all right?" Maria asked.

  "Yeah . . . yeah, I think so," the man said. He looked at the crumpled front of his van. "Wow. I guess I was lucky. "

  "We were both lucky," Maria said and went back to her own car, leaving the young man standing in the middle of the road with a puzzled expression on his face.

  It was the second time the gift had saved Maria. She had been driving the first time it happened too, on her way to Newark Airport to catch a flight. But there was traffic on Belmont Avenue and while she fretted and waited, the same black crisscrossing lines swept her vision and suddenly she saw a jetliner lift into the sky, then drop like a brick across the bay to crash and burn in Bayonne Park. Maria knew that it was her flight: She didn't know how she knew; she just knew. She also knew that the flight had not actually taken off yet and there was still time.

  Maria had leapt from her car, ignoring the honking horns and the cursing of motorists, and frantically called the airline terminal from a pay phone. But no one at the airport wanted to believe that a jetliner was about to burn on takeoff. Was there a bomb on the plane? they asked her. No.

  Was she reporting an attempted hijacking? No.

  Then how did she know the plane was going to crash when it took off?

  "I saw it in a vision," she blurted, knowing that it was the wrong thing to say.

  Oh, the people at the airport said. Thank you very much for calling. And the line went dead.

  Maria walked back to her car, tears streaming from her eyes, knowing it would have been better to have lied, to have said anything else, just so they delayed the flight. She should have told them that she was a hijacker and demanded a ransom.

  She eased her car out of traffic and turned around to return home. She had gone only a few blocks when the plane appeared in the sky. It looked like any other jet but Maria knew it wasn't just any other jet. The plane climbed laboriously, hesitated, the sun flashing on its tipping wings. For a moment, she thought everything would be all right. Then it fell. Maria squeezed her eyes tightly, twisting the steering wheel in her hands, trying to block out the sound. But she couldn't. It was a dull faraway explosion that might have been distant thunder.

  All 128 passengers died that day, but Maria was not one of them.

  For Maria, the gift had begun in childhood with the ability to know who was on the other end of a ringing telephone. As she grew, the gift got stronger, but she did not take it seriously until her senior year in high school.

  Then, in art class, Mr. Zankovitch had assigned everyone to work in clay. Maria found a soothing pleasure in kneading the moist gray material in her hands and out of her imagination fashioned the bust of a young man with deepset eyes, high cheekbones, and strong handsome features. Everyone was amazed at the realistic quality of the face, including Maria, who had never worked with clay before.

  Maria took the fired-clay head home and set it on a bookshelf and did not give it another thought until the day she brought her fiance home to meet her family. Her mother had remarked at the close resemblance the young man bore to that familiar bust. Before the young man became her husband, Maria destroyed the small statue, lest the young man ask embarrassing questions to which, truthfully, Maria had no answers.

  She misjudged her husband. He would have asked no questions, just as he answered none about his "business" that kept him away more than he was home. They were intimate strangers and when Maria could bear it no longer, she shocked and humiliated her family by getting a divorce. There had been a baby but he went with the father and Maria never saw her son after that. And now he lay buried in a small New Jersey cemetery, with only Maria to bring flowers to his grave.

  She was fifty-six, black-haired, with the full figure of a thirty-five-year-old. Her eyes were the color of Vermont maple syrup and there was pain and wisdom in them in equal measure. She wore a pale lavender coat as she stepped from her car at the entrance to Wildwood Cemetery, slipped past the wrought-iron gates and down the grass-lined path she had walked so many times before. She clutched the flowers tightly in her arm. The air was sweet with the scent of fresh pines. And as she walked, she thought about death.

  Much of her life, she realized, had involved death, because of the gift. It had been a mixed blessing, her ability to see into the future. Sometimes it had been useful, but when she began to foresee the deaths of friends and relatives-often years before the fact-it could be depressing. Maria had known the exact hour of her mother's death three years before the cancer claimed her. Three long years of holding that terrible secret in her heart while she pleaded with her mother to go for that long-deferred physical examination. By the time Maria had gotten her mother to the doctor, it was already too late.

  So Maria had learned to keep her visions to herself, learned that some things were just meant to be. But she had seen her own death twice and had avoided it both times. Yet one day, Maria knew, death would not be denied.

  Maria passed behind a man standing with his head bowed before a grave, but she scarcely noticed him. She was thinking of another death-her son's. The gift had not been with her then and she had not foreseen it, never imagined that her son would be arrested and die in prison for a crime he never committed.

  There was nothing she could have done. She had let her husband have the boy when they were divorced, thinking he would be better able to give his son the advantages he needed to succeed. At that time she told herself it was for the best. Who could have foreseen that it would turn out like this?

  I should have, Maria said to herself.

  One final visit to the grave and she would go to the police. After that, it wouldn't matter. Nothing would. Maria's heels clicked on the black asphalt as she came to the fork in the cemetery path. She knew it well. There was the desiccated old oak tree and beyond it, the marble shaft with the name DeFuria cut on its face. The sight of it meant she should leave the path.

  She picked her way to the grave of her son.

  As she walked toward the familiar stone, measured footsteps sounded behind her and Maria, stirred by an, impulse that was at first surprise and then intuition, turned on her heel and saw death walking toward her.

  Death was a tall man in a gabardine topcoat, a man with deep-set eyes and a hard face, made harder by a scar that ran along his right jawline. She had never seen his face look so uncaring before.

  "You followed me," she said. Now there was no surprise in her voice, only resignation.

  "Yes, Maria. I knew you would be here. You always are at this time. You never could let go of the past."

  "It's my past to do with as I will," she said.

  "Our past," the man with the scar said. "Our past, Maria. And we're stuck with it. I can't let you go to the police. "

  "You killed our . . . my son."

  "You know better than that."

  "You could have saved him," Maria said. "You knew the truth. He was innocent. And you stood by. You let him die."

  "I'm sorry I ever told you about it. I wanted you back. I thought you'd understand."

  "Understand?" The tears were flowing now. "Understand? I understand I let you have the boy and you let him be slaughtered."

  The tall man held his gloved hands out, palm
s up. "All I wanted was a second chance, Maria." He smiled at her. "We're not young anymore, Maria. It makes me sad to see you like this." His smile was wistful and sad. "I thought we could be together again."

  Maria held the flowers to her chest as the man casually drew a long-barreled pistol from under his coat.

  "If I didn't know you so well, my Maria, I would trade you your life for a promise of silence. I know your word would be good. But you would not give me your promise, would you?"

  The smooth fleshy pouch under Maria's chin trembled, but her voice was clear, firm, unafraid.

  "No," she said.

  "Of course not," the tall man said.

  At that moment, the black lines crisscrossed in her sight and Maria saw the vision. She saw the gun flash, witnessed the bullets thudding into her body, and saw herself fall. And she knew that this time, the premonition had come too late. This time there could be no escape. But instead of fear, Maria felt a calm suffuse her body. For she saw beyond her death, beyond this cool fall afternoon with the sun dying behind the pines. She saw the fate of the man, her ex-husband, her murderer, with a clarity of vision she had never before experienced and she intoned her last words:

  "A man will come to you. Dead, yet beyond death, he will carry death in his empty hands. He will know your name and you will know his. And that will be your death warrant."

  The smile left the tall man's face like an exorcised ghost.

  "Thanks for the prediction," he said. "I know you too well to ignore it, but I'll worry about that when I come to it. Meanwhile, there's now. I'm sorry it had to be like this." He raised the black pistol to his eye. "Good-bye, Maria."

  He fired twice. Two coughing reports, like mushy firecrackers, slipped from the silenced weapon. Maria skipped back under the impact and lost one open-toed shoe. Her body twisted as she fell and the bosom of her lavender coat darkened with blood. She was already dead when her head struck the gravestone.

  Death wasn't what Maria had expected. She did not feel herself slip from her body. Instead, she felt her mind contract within her head; contract and shrink, tighter and tighter, until her head felt as small as a pea, then as small as the head of a pin, then smaller still until her entire consciousness was reduced to a point as infinitesimally tiny as an atom. And when it seemed that it could compress no tighter, her consciousness exploded in a burst of white-gold light, showering the universe with radiance.