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  The Arms of Kali

  ( The Destroyer - 59 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Death was in the air

  All over America the airline travelers were dying, seduced by lovely young women and strangled by silken scarves in savage hands. The security of the nation hung over an open grave - and Remo Williams, the Destroyer, and his oriental master and mentor Chiun, were ordered to slay the slayers and save the free world.

  Little did Remo and Chiun suspect that their enemy was an ancient goddess who had a fifteen-hundred-year-old score to settle with Chiun. She commanded an army of youthful devotees and had the power to turn even Remo into her helpless slave. Now the Destroyer was being used for evil rather than good in an ultimate struggle between light and darkness that even Chiun feared he might not win...

  Destroyer 59: The Arms of Kali

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter One

  He wouldn't take a tip for helping her home from the airport. No, not even a nice frosted piece of yellow cake or even a cup of tea from the old woman.

  All he wanted was to put a pale yellow cloth around her neck, and he wouldn't take no for an answer. He also wouldn't stop tightening it.

  The Chicago police found her body in the morning. Her bags had not been unpacked. A homicide detective thought he recognized a pattern he had seen before, and he thought he had read about another death like that in Omaha: a traveler found strangled to death with the luggage still packed.

  The detective checked with the FBI clearinghouse in Washington to see if this might be some sort of pattern. "The dead woman had a ticket with just Folks Airlines?" asked the FBI voice from Washington.

  "Yes, she did."

  "She met someone on the plane? A nice young person, perhaps?"

  "We don't know that yet," the detective said.

  "You will soon enough," the FBI voice answered.

  "So there is an M.O.," said the detective, referring to a repetitive crime pattern.

  "Like a clock ticking," replied the FBI agent.

  "A national pattern? Or just here?"

  "National. She was the hundred and third."

  "A hundred and three people strangled?" asked the detective. His voice rose in horror as he imagined that old woman back in her picked-clean apartment, her purse open, her furniture rifled. More than a hundred, just like that? Impossible, he thought. "But this one was also robbed," he said.

  "So were all hundred and three others," the FBI agent said.

  Number 104.

  Albert Birnbaum was in seventh heaven. He had found someone who was not only willing to listen to the problems of selling retail hardware but was actually enthralled.

  His late wife, Ethel, may she rest in peace, used to say: "Al, nobody cares about the markup on a three-quarter-inch screw."

  "That markup gave you Miami Beach every year for two weeks during the winter, and-"

  "And the ranch house in Garfield Heights and the educations for the children and those charge accounts. I've heard it, but nobody else wants to hear it. Not even once do they want to hear it. Albert, precious, sweetheart, loved one, a three-quarter-inch screw lacks glamour."

  Unfortunately, she did not live to see the day that she would be proved wrong. Because Albert Birnbaum had found a young woman, a beautiful young thing with pink cheeks and yellow hair and innocent blue eyes, and a little shiksa nose and she was fascinated about hardware markup. Truly fascinated.

  Albert had thought for a moment that she might be after his body. But he knew his body, and what he knew about it was that no one as good-looking as this lovely young thing would have to listen to hardware stories to get it, if she even wanted it in the first place already.

  She had the adjacent seat on the just Folks Airlines flight to Dallas. She had asked him if he were comfortable. He had said he was, considering that this was an economy fare. For a reduced rate, he said, it was a wonderful flight. However, she could keep the sandwich and candy bar they had tried to hand out at lunch. "Cheap planes serve cheap food and it'll rot your stomach."

  "Isn't that ever so?" she said. "You really have such a philosophy of life. Even something like a flight, Mr. Birnbaum, you turn into an object lesson of comparative values."

  "Listen, I don't need big words," he said. "Life is life, right?"

  "So well put, Mr. Birnbaum. That's just what I mean. Life is life. It has majesty. It rings."

  "You're putting me on," said Al Birnbaum. The seat was pinching his hips. But the way he looked at it, everything but a first-class seat pinched his hips nowadays. And he wasn't going to pay five hundred dollars extra not to get a pinched hip. He didn't mention this. The girl couldn't see the few extra pounds he was carrying around, as long as he was sitting down, so why mention it, right? And as pretty as she was, she was allowed to exaggerate a little bit -about his philosophy of life being so wonderful.

  But when he talked hardware and she really listened, Al Birnbaum realized he had found someone who would not lie. You did not keep those big blue eyes transfixed on the speaker, without honestly caring, not when you were able to say:

  "You mean a little three-quarter-inch screw is the backbone of hardware-store profits? The ones I used to apologize for, buying just a few and wasting the clerk's time? Those screws?" she said.

  "Those screws, those nails, those washers," Al Birnbaum said. "They're the gold of hardware. A sixty-maybe sixty-five-percent markup on every one of them, and next year they won't go out of style or be replaced, but the price'll go up. The screw and the nail are the backbone of the business."

  "Not the big appliance? That's not your big moneymaker?"

  "God should never have invented them," said Al Birnbaum. "You take some six-hundred-dollar-ticket item, they see a scratch on it, they don't want it. Back it goes. You put one out for display, kiss it good-bye, you sell it for junk. Then you've got your markup. How you going to compete with a discount store? I saw a convection oven at a discount house selling for fifty-seven cents over what I purchased it for wholesale."

  "My God," gasped the girl, clutching her breast.

  "Fifty-seven cents," said Al Birnbaum. "On a hundred-and-fifty-dollar-ticket item."

  The girl was close to tears hearing that. Al Birnbaum had found a wonderful young woman and his only problem was that he didn't know a young man good enough for her. Which he told her.

  "Oh, Mr. Birnbaum, you're too kind."

  "No. You're a very special young lady. I'm only sorry I'm not young enough."

  "Mr. Birnbaum, you're just the sweetest man I have ever met."

  "C'mon," said Al Birnbaum. "Don't give me that." But it was nice to think about.

  Later on, when the girl had trouble getting her own baggage, Al Birnbaum offered to step in. Al Birnbaum wasn't going to leave a decent young girl stranded. He wouldn't leave someone he didn't like stranded, so why should he leave this young girl who didn't even have a way to get into Dallas to visit her fiance? He hailed the cab. He rode in with her. He even said he would like to meet her boyfriend.

  "I wish you would. I know you'll just love him, Mr. Birnbaum. He's thinking of going into hardware too, and he could use advice from someone experienced."

  "Tell him for me, it's a hard business but an honest one."

  "Oh, you should tell him. You know so much more about it."

  "He's got to watch out for buying now. American tools are getting killed by Korea and Taiwan."

  "Please, not me. You tell him. You just can't buy experience like yours."

  "Oh, you can buy it," said Al Birnbaum. "It just won't be any good." He liked that.

  Her boyfriend lived in one of the city's
worst neighborhoods and the apartment had virtually no furniture. He wondered how he might be able to offer them some help in getting a decent place to live. But he had to be careful. You didn't just barge in on a nice young couple like this and insult them by offering to help with the rent.

  He sat on a simple wooden box under a bare light bulb, smelling old coffee grounds and a mustiness as if the place hadn't been cleaned in a year or two. Then he remembered that the door hadn't required a key. This was an abandoned apartment. They had no place to live. He decided he would have to help them.

  He heard a creaking of footsteps behind him and he turned to see another clean-cut young man with a yellow handkerchief that he held by each end, spinning it into a pale yellow rope.

  "Excuse me," the young man said. "Can I get this around your neck?"

  "Wha-" Al Birnbaum started to say. He felt hands grab his legs, pulling him off the box, while other hands grabbed his right wrist. It was the girl. She had thrown her entire body on his right hand, and his left was pinned behind him and the ropelike pale yellow handkerchief was around his throat.

  The handkerchief tightened. At first it just hurt, like something cutting into his neck, and he thought: I can handle this for a while.

  He tried to twist away, but they seemed to twist with him. At his first try for air, that helpless try to breathe, he gave a violent lunge and when no air would come into his body, he felt a searing, desperate lust for just one breath. For mercy's sake, one breath. Give him one breath and he would give them anything.

  They were chanting. He was dying and they were chanting. Strange sounds. Un-English sounds. Maybe he was too far gone to understand words? Already that far gone?

  Darkness, darkness in the room, darkness in his skull, darkness in his convulsing, air-desperate body. And he heard very English words.

  "She loves it."

  And then, strangely, in the darkness, the deep darkness, there was no need for air, just a great peace upon him with much light, and there was Ethel waiting for him and somehow he knew that now, at this time, she would never tell him he bored her with talk about hardware. Never again would she be bored. She was so happy to see him.

  Then he heard a voice, far off somewhere, and it was a promise: "They will not get away with this, these players with the gods of death."

  But he didn't care now in this place of light. He didn't even have to tell anyone about hardware. He had forever to be absolutely happy.

  Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and they had not given him the right breathing equipment. They were going to kill him. He realized it even before the diving boat pulled out from the Flamingo Hotel in Bonaire, a flat jewel of an island in the Netherlands Antilles.

  During the winter, Americans and Europeans came here to escape the cold and dive in the turquoise waters and watch the fish of the Caribbean reefs as the fish watched back.

  Tourism had been quite profitable to the island, and then someone wanted more profit. So Bonaire became a pumping station in the cocaine pipeline into the United States, and there was so much money, people would kill to protect it. Local police had disappeared, Dutch investigators from Amsterdam had disappeared, but when American assistance personnel disappeared, America told the Antillean government that the United States would take care of it in another way.

  Then nothing seemed to happen. No American investigators came down. No intelligence agents came down. And no one in America seemed to know what on earth America had promised. All anyone knew was that it would be taken care of.

  A highly placed American assured the Bonaire governor who was his friend:

  "I've seen things like this happen before. Usually with the CIA, but sometimes with the FBI or the Secret Service. It's usually something at crisis level and nothing seems to work. Then somebody says: Stop everything, forget it. It will be taken care of."

  "And then what happens?" asked the Bonaire governor, his voice a stew of Dutch and English accents on a stock base of African dialects.

  "It really gets taken care of."

  "By whom?"

  "I don't know."

  "An agency?"

  "I really don't know."

  "It must be something," the governor said.

  "I don't think it is like anything we know of."

  "Then what is it?" the governor insisted.

  "I heard of somebody who once had an idea what it was," said the highly placed American.

  "Yes?" asked the governor.

  "That's it," said the American.

  "That's it? You just heard of someone who possibly knew what America was using to solve its unsolvable crises and then nothing more? Who was he?"

  "I'm not sure. I just heard," the American said.

  "Why didn't you try to find out?" the governor asked.

  "Because I heard that they found a finger of his on one continent and a thumb on another. They didn't match prints when they found him, they matched fingers."

  "Because he knew?" the governor said.

  "I think- I'm not certain- that he was trying to find out who or what this thing was."

  "Not certain, eh?" said the Bonaire governor, a bit exasperated at the American who knew so little about what he was talking about. "You don't know who. You don't know what. Would you please be so eminently kind as to tell me just what you do know?"

  "I know that if America says it's going to do something to solve your problems, your problems are solved."

  "Anything else?"

  "Watch out for the falling bodies."

  "We don't have any heights here," the governor said.

  "Then watch where you step."

  Nothing unusual had happened. The usual tourists came down for the usual summer vacation season, and no one noticed another white skin, a man around six feet tall with high cheekbones, death-dark eyes, and thick wrists. They might have noticed that in the three days he was there he ate only once and that was a bowl of unseasoned rice.

  Someone did notice that he refused tanning lotion to protect his white skin. They were sure he was going to end up in the hospital, the color of raspberry soda. But no matter how long he stayed in the sun with his skin exposed, he did not burn, nor did he tan, and everyone was sure this man had some sun-blocking lotion, although no one had ever seen him use it and it certainly was invisible.

  One cleaning woman who practiced the old religion, honoring African gods as well as the Lord Jesus, wanted to see what this lotion was, this lotion that did not glisten in the sun and did not look like cold cream lathered thick on a porcelain-white body. So she tried to touch him with a finger to see what it was that kept that white skin safe. Later, she would swear that she could not touch him. Every time she reached out a finger toward his body, the skin itself moved, the flesh pulling back away from her touch.

  She had the voodoo and she knew the spells and she knew her prophecy and she warned all those who would listen that no one would be harmed if they did not seek to do the white man harm. She said he had the power.

  But since she was, after all, only a cleaning lady in the hotel, richer and more powerful men did not listen to her. They were sure, within a day, who that man was. Some sort of American agent setting up some sort of raid. He went to the old slave huts on the windward side of the island to try to set up a deal too large to be trusted. He asked questions that dealers wouldn't ask. He virtually set himself up to be killed. People who could make a million dollars in a week certainly were not going to listen to a warning of a woman who cleaned rooms not to harm him. They were going to harm him. And when he signed up to take the diving excursion, they knew how they were going to harm him.

  Remo leaned against the railing of the boat, glancing once at the yellow air tanks set up like huge wine bottles in a wooden rack. One of them was supposed to kill him. He did not know how it was supposed to be done and he might not even understand if someone tried to explain it to him. Mechanical things always seemed to go wrong, and it had gotten worse with the years.

&nbs
p; But he did know one of those tanks could kill. He knew it by the way the diving instructor had set it down into the rack. He had been taught to know this, in a learning so deep that he could not imagine not knowing it.

  The diving instructor had set the heavy tank down the same way he had lowered the other fifteen tanks of air. Knees bent, arms close to his body, and, kerplunk, metal tank banging down onto wooden rack. So what was different?

  How did Remo know that the third tank from the right contained death? How did he know that the very loud diver from Indiana, who said he was part of a diving club, had never used that diving knife he kept waving about? Was it that the man talked too much about "how to disengage from an octopus"? Was rapid, loud talk the tip-off? Was that how Remo knew?

  No. Others talked like the man who said he was from Indiana, and Remo knew that they had used their knives in diving. Remo thought about it and finally realized, there on that boat in the Caribbean sun, that he no longer knew how he knew some things. His training had been that good. And if it hadn't, if he had needed to think about such things, then perhaps he would not be alive today.

  The two who would kill him were on opposite ends of the boat, one up front with the captain, the other at the diving platform in the rear, making jokes with a young woman who was trying to seduce him. They motored for twenty minutes, until they came to an island even flatter than the one they had just left.

  "We are now at Little Bonaire, the best diving island in the world. The fish you are about to see represent the highest concentration of reef fish found anywhere," announced the dive instructor. He mentioned that there was a pair of giant French angelfish that would eat from the hands of divers. He warned about moray eels. He had seen them many times, and one of them was even named Joseph.

  "But he doesn't answer to his name," the instructor said with a laugh. Remo laughed too. He laughed while looking at the man in the rear of the boat, who was also laughing. The man had a big gold tooth right in the front of his mouth and he was looking at Remo.

  The diving instructor, on the other hand, did not look at Remo. Thus, Remo thought, men differed in the way they approached their victims.