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  Skull Duggery

  ( The Destroyer - 83 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Destroyer 83: Skull Duggery

  By Warren Murphy apir

  Chapter 1

  More than a year after Tiananmen Square, the tanks still rolled through Zhang Zingzong's dreams.

  They lunged at him, their caterpillar-tread teeth seeking his feet, his hands, his frail human bones, and he would run. But there would be no place to run, for Zhang was surrounded by T-55 tanks.

  It was not the sound of their treads clawing for his bones that awoke Zhang Zingzong at twelve minutes past midnight on a Tuesday evening in the city of New Rochelle, thousands of li from Beijing.

  Even as he bolted from sleep, his ears rang with their clatter and the terrible pong polls pong sound that, more than the T-55's, haunted his waking hours.

  The room was too bright. Moonlight washing through the thin window curtains was like white neon. It made a distorted triangle pattern on the bedspread and wall.

  Blinking his almond eyes, Zhang Zingzong fumbled a pack of cigarettes off the nightstand. He speared out a single one. He took it in his dry mouth. The fibery taste of the American filter scratched his tongue. In disgust, he spit it out and threw off the covers.

  Zhang Zingzong perched on the edge of his bed, his brain thick with unresolved dreams, his lungs like concrete wings. As he pulled the nightstand drawer open, he saw why the moonlight was so intense.

  It was snowing outside. The flakes fell thickly, like scabs of lunar dust.

  A spidery cedar was already heavy with accumulation. Beyond it, housetops were pristine sugar-dusted fantasies.

  Zhang Zingzong found his last pack of Panda cigarettes, which he kept sealed in a plastic sandwich bag.

  He pulled apart the seal and fished out a single cigarette, noting he was down to four.

  He lit it with a Colibri lighter and sucked down the coarse, aromatic tobacco smoke. After two puffs, his head felt clearer and he went to the window.

  The ethereal beauty of New Rochelle wrapped in a midnight snowfall held his attention, all thought of Tiananmen Square dispelled by the swirl of countless white flakes.

  Then Zhang Zingzong saw the footprints.

  They were ordinary footprints. One pair, they broke the even snow on the safe-house walkway like well-spaced intrusions. Although they were fresh, the falling snow was already beginning to soften their cookie-cutter edges.

  Something disturbed Zhang Zingzong about the footprints. They appeared to lead from his front door to a long black car that was parked out front. For a moment his concentration shifted from the footprints to the silent car.

  Obviously a limousine, it was a model he had never seen. It was not a Lincoln Continental. One had whisked him from the San Francisco airport to the first of many safe houses strung across the United States. He wondered if it was an official car and why his guard had left the house to go to it.

  For Zhang Zingzong jumped to a logical conclusion. Except for a single FBI guard, he was the only person in the house. There were footprints leading from the house to the mysterious car; therefore, his guard had gone to the car.

  Why had the driver not come to the house? he wondered.

  Was something wrong? Would they have to move again, as they had in Paris, San Francisco, and again in that cold ugly city with the odd name, Buffalo? Zhang Zingzong had thought he would be liquidated in Buffalo. Only quick action by the FBI had extracted him from that situation.

  Zhang Zingzong was considering getting into street clothes when he took another look at the footprints. His sharp eyes told him something was not right. He looked harder, his eyes squeezing against the harsh moonlight reflecting off the snow until they were like black slits in his white-brown face.

  He saw it then. It made the skin of his bare back gather and crawl. He involuntarily worried the short hairs at the back of his neck with a nervous hand.

  For the accumulating snow was quickly filling the foot-prints. Soon they would be obliterated. That was not the thing that made a thrill of supernatural fear clutch at Zhang Zingzong's heart, a heart that had not quailed at the sight of tanks rumbling through Tiananmen Square, a heart that had seen what the cruel steel treads could do to human flesh and bone.

  What impelled Zhang Zingzong to jump into his jeans and throw on a shirt was the indisputable fact that the footprints furthest from the black limousine were freshest.

  Zhang Zingzong did not know what it truly meant. The footsteps were plainly going toward the car. But those nearest it were fast blurring in the gentle downfall. There was no wind, so drifting would not explain the phenomenon.

  Except that it meant the owner of them had come to the house from the car. Someone unknown to Zhang Zingzong, perhaps someone unfriendly to Zhang Zingzong.

  Zhang Zingzong shoved his sockless feet into his Reeboks and stuffed his wallet into the tight jeans pocket. He breathed through his mouth, in gulps like a beached fish.

  Creeping to the closed bedroom door, he put one ear to it. He heard no sounds at first, and then he detected footsteps. Padding footsteps, not like the American FBI agent. Six months on the run had made everything about the man, from his stale breath to his heavy-footed walk, as familiar to Zhang Zingzong as the rose-petal scent of his own wife, who was still in Beijing.

  These were not his footsteps. They moved unsurely. Once, a lamp wobbled on a coffee table and stopped suddenly. A leg brushing a table and two quick hands reaching out to prevent the crash of an upset lamp. The image leapt into Zhang Zingzong's mind as clearly as if the bedroom door was transparent.

  That settled the last of Zhang Zingzong's wavering indecision. He leapt to the bed and got down on his stomach. Reaching in with both hands, he found his khaki knapsack, the same one that had borne his meager supplies on the long trek to Canton. He yanked it out by the straps, felt the square-edged shape inside, and went to the window as quietly as possible.

  The pack on his back, he undid the window latch and shoved the pane up. It rose with barely a scrape, for which Zhang Zingzong was silently grateful.

  The storm window was another matter. He did not instantly fathom its construction. Did it lift or pull out? He felt around the edges, seeking a clue, his smoldering Panda dangling from his tight mouth.

  He sucked in a breath, tasting tobacco smoke. It reminded him of those precious last four cigarettes.

  Zhang Zingzong rushed to the nightstand and grabbed his last pack of Pandas. It was a foolish thing to do, but as it turned out, very fortunate.

  Turning from the nightstand, Zhang Zingzong saw the line of light spring to life under the bedroom door.

  The boldness of that act told him instantly that his FBI guard was no more.

  Zhang Zingzong picked up a wooden chair, and holding it legs-out as he had been taught by the FBI to ward off knifewielding assassins, charged the stubborn storm window.

  The stout legs splintered going through the thick glass and the chair back knocked the breath from Zingzong's smokefilled lungs. But it worked. The impact of the chair carried him safely through the glass and into the soft snow.

  He jumped up, throwing off shards of glass and dusty dry snowflakes.

  His eyes went everywhere, seeking a safe escape route.

  The driver's door of the limousine popped open, and an apparition stepped out.

  It seemed to be a man garbed entirely in a black uniform. He wore a peaked cap, military style. Its brim shadowed his face as he walked slowly and catlike toward Zhang Zingzong.

  He moved with an easy-limbed grace, as if he were in no hurry.

  And as he approached, his head lifted, revealing a cruel, certain smile-but o
nly gleaming black where his upper face should be.

  "Ting!" Zhang cried. "Stop! Come no closer!"

  The man in black quickened his pace.

  Zhang stood frozen, transfixed by the half-hidden gaze of the approaching man. His fear was palpable. Unlike the blind tanks, he felt there was no escape from this black devil.

  A shot broke his paralysis. It came from inside the house. Hoarse shouting followed. The FBI man! He lived!

  "Tom! I out here!"

  Another shot. A window broke, and from within the house another voice, guttural and harsh, spoke one word in Chinese: "Sagwa!"

  Zhang Zingzong's eyes were pulled from the house back to his stalker. Abandoning his sure pantherlike approach, the man in black raced for the front door, going through it like an ebony arrow.

  That was all Zhang Zingzong needed. Slipping and sliding, he ran down the streets of the foreign land of America, where he had thought he would be safe, and was not.

  As he stumbled around a corner, he wondered why the guttural voice had called him sagwa. He was a college student.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he really, really knew his rice.

  "Let me have a bag of that long white, and some brown," he told the blond at the health-food store. "Got any Blue Rose?"

  "I never heard of Blue Rose," the blond admitted. She was tall and willowy. Her long straight hair looked as if it had been ironed. Remo didn't think anyone ironed her hair anymore. Not since Janis Joplin.

  "Grows only in Thailand," Remo told her. "Has kind of a nutty taste."

  "Really?" the blond said, her deep brown eyes growing limpid. "Maybe I can special-order some."

  "In that case, put me down for as much as you can get."

  "You must like it a lot."

  "I eat a lot of rice. A lot of rice. When you eat as much rice as I do, variety is important."

  "I'll bet."

  "In fact it's critical," Remo went on. "If I had to go on just domestic Carolina, I'm not sure my sanity would survive."

  "Sounds tres New Age," the blond prompted.

  "It's not," Remo said flatly. "How about Patna? Got any of that?"

  "That's another one I never heard of," she admitted. "Are you some kind of rice connoisseur?" "I didn't start out that way," Remo admitted glumly, his eyes scanning the shelves of glass containers with their heaps of hard rice grains. Most of them contained the usual boring domestic lowlands, California Carolo's and Louisiana Rexoro's and Nato's. "Let's see . . .

  "How about wild rice?"

  Remo frowned. "Not really." He was going to say that wild rice was no more rice than white chocolate was true chocolate. But why bother? Only another rice connoisseur would appreciate the distinction.

  "Guess I'll take some short-grain white," Remo said. He pointed at one container and said, "Let me see that one."

  The container came down off the shelf and Remo lifted the lid. As the blond watched, he took a pinch of grain to his lips and tasted it carefully.

  "Pearl," he pronounced with the authority of a wine taster. "Grown in Java."

  The blond's eyes widened in surprise. "You can tell that by tasting?"

  "Sure. It has that iron tang. Goes away in the cooking-unless you undercook it, of course."

  "I'll bet your wife never, ever undercooks your rice."

  "Absolutely correct," Remo said, disposing of the tasted grain in a wicker wastebasket.

  The blond acquired a slightly sad pout.

  "Since I don't have a wife," Remo finished.

  The pout jumped back into her mouth and her lips curved into a smile.

  Her reaction was not lost on Remo Williams. He pretended not to notice it as the blond busied herself scooping quantities of rice into clear plastic bags, tying them with twister seals and making small talk.

  "Hope you're not planning to carry all these home on foot," she quipped.

  Remo jerked a thumb over his shoulder. "That's my car out front."

  The blond looked up, her brown eyes curious to see what kind of car a rice authority would drive. Her curiosity froze.

  "What car?" she asked.

  "The blue one," Remo said absently, scanning rice labels.

  "Shouldn't it be waiting for you?"

  Remo turned. There was no blue car parked out front.

  Came a screeching of tires and a blue Buick Regal suddenly jumped into view, going in the opposite direction it had been pointing when Remo had parked it minutes before.

  Hunched behind the wheel was a black man Remo had never seen before.

  "Damn!" he bit out. Remo raced for the door as the car picked up speed. The blond followed.

  "Should I call 911?" she gasped, her eyes fever-bright.

  "No," Remo said grimly. "I'll handle it."

  "You will?"

  Remo Williams began running. He started off with an easy, joggerlike pace, his bare forearms up, fists not loose-fingered, but tight. His thin, just-this-side-of-cruel mouth was grim.

  He hit his stride at forty-five miles an hour, his mouth slightly parted. If he was exerting himself, there was no sign of strain on his high-cheekboned face. Only tight determination showed in his deep-set brown eyes.

  He caught up to the Buick at a stoplight.

  The driver wore a pea jacket and his hair was razored close at the temples. The name "Shariff " was shaved in bare scalp. He pretended not to notice Remo tapping on his window, so Remo planted his feet the way he had been taught and grasped the door handle firmly, waiting for the red light to change.

  The driver-he looked about twenty-two-continued to ignore him as he fiddled with Remo's radio. The arrogance of the youth's nonchalance made Remo's blood boil. He calmed himself, thinking that he was not going to be ignored much longer.

  The light turned green.

  The driver hit the accelerator.

  The rear tires spun, throwing off rubbery clouds of smoke.

  The Buick stayed in place. A station wagon directly behind started to honk. With his free hand, Remo waved the car to go around him. His other hand held on to the driver's-side door handle, his feet rooted on the asphalt street as if by Super-Glue.

  Remo waited patiently for Shariff to notice him. It was taking a while. The guy jammed the accelerator to the floor. The rear tires spun faster, shaving hot rubber off his treads. They were winter tires, so Remo didn't sweat the loss of tread. Besides which, he'd get satisfaction from the car thief soon enough.

  Finally the driver released the gas. He put his nose to the glass and looked up at Remo.

  Evidently he was not frightened by what he saw, a skinny dude of indeterminate age wearing-despite the winter chill-a black T-shirt and black chinos, because he rolled down the window.

  "You mind?" he said.

  "Yes, I do mind," Remo said pleasantly. "You are sitting behind the wheel of my car."

  "This?"

  "Do you see any other wheel you're sitting behind?"

  "This your car?"

  "I answered that. Now, you answer this: Why are you driving my car?"

  "You weren't using it."

  "So you just felt free to steal it, is that it?"

  "I ain't stealin' it! Get outta my face with that shit!"

  Remo leaned down. He bestowed a friendly disarming smile on the tough's scowling face. "Correct me if I'm mistaken, Shariff, but isn't that a screwdriver where my ignition used to be?"

  "What you expect? You forgot to leave me the keys." His tone changed. "How you know my name?"

  "ESP," Remo said.

  "ESP? How you do that?"

  "Do what?"

  "That thing you did before. Had the pedal to the metal and I wasn't goin' nowhere. You shoulda been yanked along for the ride. Instead, I'm wastin' time talkin' witchu."

  Remo made his voice contrite. "Sorry about that."

  "You gonna tell me how you do that, or what?"

  "Sinanju."

  "Spell it. I wanna buy it, learn it, or steal it. Whatever it takes."


  "Actually, it takes about fifteen years and seventy tons of rice just to master the basics. Then you really have to buckle down."

  "Don't have that kind of time. Now that I got this fine car, I plan on moving up in the world, Jim."

  "The name's Remo."

  "Thought you said it was Sinanju."

  "I can see why you're stealing cars," Remo sighed. "Sinanju is what I do. It's kinda like . . . fahrvergnugen."

  "Say what?"

  "You know the TV commercials about being at one with your car?"

  "Mighta come across it once or twice," Shariff allowed.

  Remo waved another car through the intersection. "Well, Sinanju is kinda like that, except you don't need a car."

  "That's good," Shariff said, "because you ain't got a car no more. Now, if you don't mind, I'll be gettin' on my way."

  Shariff hit the accelerator. Remo was ready. The black car thief had telegraphed his intentions so loudly he might as well have shouted them.

  This time, Remo didn't hold the car in place. He let it accelerate. But he stood his ground, keeping hold of the door handle.

  As a result, the Buick described an arc in the slippery snow until it spun into the opposite lane, pointing back toward the health-food store where the blond stood watching him, clutching herself against a shivery wind.

  "Why you do that for?" Shariff complained. "Now I'm pointin' the wrong way!"

  "Because that way's where my car was parked before you interrupted my life with your sociopathic intrusion," Remo said without malice.

  "Was that farfarnugat?"

  "You must mean fahrvergnugen, and no, you weren't paying attention. Sinanju is what I do. Fahrvergnugen was only a metaphor."

  "Yeah, well, metapor this, sucker!"

  A machine pistol jumped into the man's hand.

  "Nice Uzi," Remo commented.

  "You stupid? This here's a Mac-10. Drive-by heaven."

  "All guns look alike to me," Remo said, "and don't tell me you're going to shoot me simply because I want my car back."

  "No, I'm gonna shoot you because you're holdin' up my life."

  "That's even less of a reason," Remo said, and stuck his index finger into the muzzle of the weapon. It didn't quite fit.

  "You think I'm jokin'?" Shariff spat.