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  Next Of Kin

  ( The Destroyer - 46 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  Remo and Chiun arrive at the vacation paradise of St. Maarten, only to find they're deep in Dutch. The beautiful island is a very ugly scene. A lot of corpses have been showing up, each one bearing the unmistakable stamp of Sinanju, the ancient Korean martial art known only to the two men. The trail of bodies leads to a strange castle . . . and a young Dutchman - a man, it turns out, who's taken a blood vow to send both disciple and mentor to their deaths. A man who knows all their secrets . . . and has a few of his own. It's up to Remo and Chiun to stop him, but this time they're skating on thin ice. And if they slip, the whole world may go under.

  Next of Kin

  The Destroyer #46

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  ?

  Copyright © 1981

  by Richard Sapir & Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved.

  Next of Kin

  A Peanut Press Book

  Published by

  peanutpress.com, Inc.

  www.peanutpress.com

  ISBN: 0-7408-0569-X

  First Peanut Press Edition

  This edition published by

  arrangement with

  Boondock Books

  www.boondockbooks.com

  For Dave Slobodin and the House of Sinanju,

  Box 1454, Secaucus, N.J. 07094.

  ?Prologue

  It was known to the natives as Devil's Mountain. The white men on the island were unfamiliar with the name or the mountain, since the ragged lump of volcanic rock straddling the French/Dutch border of Sint Maarten did not reach even half the height of Paradise Peak or any of the other more picturesque and geologically newer mountains in the area.

  But the native islanders knew. In the hushed and reverent tones reserved for telling their children the island legends that would be passed on to the next generation, the elders among the hill dwellers spoke of Devil's Mountain and its legacy of death.

  It was on Devil's Mountain that the Carib Indians performed their rites of war against invading tribesmen, eating the flesh of their enemies to take their strength. A thousand years before Columbus came to claim the island for Spain, the Caribs squatted along the rim of the already long-dead volcano to toss the gleaming bones of the vanquished into its crater.

  And after the Spaniards came, with their muskets and cannons, trying to wipe them off the face of the earth, the Carib Indians assembled on Devil's Mountain to decide their fate. The brave elected to fight the strange and powerful new enemy. The proud killed their wives and children so that they would not be slain by the metal-wearing invaders. But the old, the infirm, and the wise fled to the caves in the hills, where they watched their ancient race plunge toward extinction. And by night they brought the bones and bloodied bodies of their fallen tribesmen to Devil's Mountain to lie for eternity among the spirits of the dead.

  In the hills these cautious few waited as the Spanish left and the English came. As the Dutch came, and the Portuguese, and the French. They waited as the island changed hands sixteen times in two hundred years, through the sugar boom and the slavery boom, which changed the island's color from white to black.

  And slowly, as the island evolved into the mutual territory of the Dutch and the French, reigning over an African population, the handful of Carib Indians nurtured among the hills in the shadow of Devil's Mountain ventured one by one toward the shore and the towns where they found women among the black-skinned slaves and took them back to the hills.

  Their children were strong and wise in the island ways. And after slavery was abolished from the island, they came out of hiding and married among the island's population, now grown into a race of its own with African and European blood and handsome features and strong bodies. The Caribs added their blood to the brew and mellowed it in the tropical sun and lived in peace with their new brothers for the rest of their days.

  And so the fiercesome Carib Indians became extinct as a race. But they did not forget Devil's Mountain.

  In the latter half of the eighteenth century, a prosperous cloth merchant from Holland sailed to Sint Maarten with a shipload of lumber and carpenters and European stonemasons to build a replica of a tenth-century castle on the mountain that stood between the French and Dutch borders. He chose the mountain because its ancient volcanic lip still protruded four feet high, making it a natural fortification, and because he didn't give a hang whether or not the French thought half the island was theirs. He was Dutch, the island was Dutch, and he would build his castle wherever he wanted. Besides, the French prefect accepted the Dutchman's gift of 1,000 guilders to leave him alone.

  He found later that the bribe was unnecessary. No one wanted the mountain. Europeans would visit the Dutchman in his castle, but they could find no guides to take them there. No island cooks would come to the place, no maids to clean it. No messengers, farmers, laborers. The islanders would not touch Devil's Mountain with the soles of their shoes.

  So, bitter and lonely, the Dutchman sailed back to Holland, leaving his castle to fall into neglect and decay for more than a hundred years.

  Then, amazingly, the castle came alive again. The natives whispered to one another as the helicopters whirred above the plateau of Devil's Mountain and as the team of burros led by a single, silent man made its way up the slope, dragging behind it the bulky furnace that was to heat the place. They gasped in amazement as the small planes at Juliana Airport disgorged their cargoes of dozens of magnificently beautiful women bound by helicopter for Devil's Mountain. And they stared up at the castle with curiosity and dread as they discussed its new occupant. Who would live in such a place, some asked, with its crumbling walls and smell of death and sadness? Only a European, others answered, like the old Dutchman himself.

  Some had seen him, walking through the village with the small, silent man who obeyed his orders and talked to him with his hands. He was extraordinarily handsome, the women said, with yellow hair and eyes of ice blue. He walked like a cat. He would be a good lover. Still, there was something odd about him, something too still. He never smiled, and when he walked into a store, where people could see him, his footsteps made no noise on the floorboards. Animals hated him. He could not come within twenty feet of a donkey or a goat without sending the beast into panic. And though he spoke many languages, he never talked except in the briefest of business exchanges. He had no friends. Not even the Europeans on the island knew him.

  They called him the Dutchman.

  And all feared him. And avoided Devil's Mountain.

  ?One

  The Dutchman waited.

  On a deep ledge beneath a bank of narrow archer's windows in the castle, he squatted on his haunches like a cat about to spring. He was dressed in an Oriental gi and his feet were bare on the cold stone of the ledge. In the twilight, his golden hair glinted as the island breeze brushed past his face.

  Below him, on the Dutch side of the island, spread the immense Soubise Harbor Transportation Corporation with its thousands of tons of cargo packed into truck containers, awaiting the great ships that would heave into Sint Maarten Harbor. Beyond the harbor, on the other side of the castle, the French section of the island formed a steep cliff overlooking the white beach and coral-dappled shallows of the ocean.

  The French side was prettier, but the young man who sat so tensely on the window ledge was drawn, day after day, to the sight of the harbor. His harbor, now.

  He smiled to himself. His harbor. He had never even visited the place during operational hours. Each day, hundreds of stevedores, shipping agents, transport crew workers, machinery operators, and sailors went to work at the pier to
make a sizable fortune for a man they knew only by rumor. Each day, other men in Phillipsburg and Marigot, the Dutch and French capitals of the island, would arrange the business of the day and chart the company's progress. Each day those men would skim off whatever profit they wished for their own uses. They would pay lawyers, make deals, bribe officials, and build splendid houses for themselves and their families. And each month an envelope filled with 5,000 American dollars would be left in a safety deposit box in Marigot's post office.

  Most of the senior officials of the company earned far more than $5,000 a month, but that was the Dutchman's stipulation: $5,000, in exchange for never having to be bothered about the Soubise Harbor Transportation Corporation under any circumstances. It was a strange setup, but they could live with it in considerable comfort. And anyway, everyone knew the Dutchman was mad as a hatter, sitting up in his castle year after year, not seeing anyone but that deaf-mute servant of his and those French whores he was always flying in from Paris. They said in the village that the Dutchman didn't eat meat and didn't even have electricity in the castle. They speculated that even. the big oil-burning furnace he'd had towed to the place wasn't large enough to heat the medieval fortress on the hill. He'd probably had it installed just for the girls. It didn't take more than $5,000 a month to take care of a crazy young man who didn't even have electricity.

  And he waited. Twilight became night, and the workers left the shipyard. The bright lights above the harbor compound went on, illuminating the palm trees outside the shipyard's fence and the calm ocean beyond. The warm trade winds blew stronger now. They smelled of sea and magic. The Dutchman closed his eyes and remembered.

  The Dutchman. Who had ever given him that name? Jeremiah Purcell was about as Dutch as a corn fritter...

  Corn. It had all begun with corn! The Master had told him that many wondrous things come from strange beginnings, but even the Master himself would have been surprised that Jeremiah's extraordinary talent was brought to light by a tub of field corn.

  He was eight or nine years old when it happened. The Incident. The First Time. The Beginning. He had come to call It by a variety of names, that afternoon in Kentucky when the wheels of his rare and horrifying destiny began to turn.

  The family pig was eating corn behind the mountain shack where Jeremiah lived with his parents. He was an only child; his birthing had nearly killed his mother. There were a lot of chores to be done, and looking after the pig was the least enjoyable of them, so Jeremiah was pleased that the pig would buck and snort and roll its eyes insanely whenever he came near the pen.

  His father wasn't pleased. Slopping the hog should have been Jeremiah's job.

  "What you do to that hog, boy?" his father would ask every day as he emerged filthy and stinking from the pen, collaring Jeremiah so that the stink would be on him, too.

  "Nothing, Pa."

  And his father would shove him aside and take a swig from the whiskey crock on the porch. "Musta done something. Threw stones at it, something."

  "I didn't do nothing, Pa. He just don't like me."

  "One a these days I gonna catch you, boy, hear? And I gonna give you a lickin' you won't forget."

  The pig was going to get him a licking, Jeremiah knew, whether he did anything to provoke it or not. His father would use any reason to beat the boy for not slopping the hog himself. Damn fat pig, Jeremiah thought as he leaned against the corncrib at a safe distance from the animal. Probably eat anything, eat until it burst. His fingers played at the crinkly dry ears of corn in the crib. Pig food.

  And suddenly, he could see it, an image so real, it blocked out all the sights and sounds around him, a picture in his mind more intense with color and texture than anything in reality. The image was of the pig gobbling up corn until it exploded, raining pork chops all over the yard. It was a funny image, but so real that Jeremiah's laughter was more hysterical than mirthful.

  At the same time the picture popped into Jeremiah's brain, the pig began to huff and skitter around its pen, drawing toward the trough, where it began to eat voraciously.

  "Pig food! Pig food!" Jeremiah shrieked gleefully, and threw two ears of corn into the pen. The pig finished everything in its trough and went for the corn.

  "Pig food!" He carried an armload of corn to the pen. The pig reared back on its hind legs, screaming, as he approached, but began gobbling the corn as soon as the boy moved back toward the corncrib, its eyes frenzied and wide.

  He brought over four more armfuls. "Eat till you burst, fat pig," Jeremiah whispered, the image in his head still vibrating quietly. The pig snorted and stomped and ate and searched for more food and ate it.

  "Till you burst."

  And then the pig moaned, a low, keening sound, and sniffed at the half-eaten ear of corn at its feet, and shuddered. It lay its head in the mud, and with a great thump, its massive body followed. The pig kicked twice in the air with its hind legs, panted, moaned, twisted its neck so that its head faced Jeremiah, and died. Its eyes were open. They stared vacantly at the boy. Jeremiah screamed.

  Inside the house, his father stumbled off the couch, shaking himself awake and growling, "What'd he do now? Snotty little pup, prob'ly bothering with that hog again."

  He had killed it. Through his screams, a part of Jeremiah realized with utter coldness and clarity that he had done something— something with his mind— to cause the occurrence in the pigpen.

  His father saw the pig, started to drag its immense corpse out of the mud, then stopped.

  "I think I'm going to take care of you first," he said. He ran for Jeremiah, but the boy didn't move. He was still thinking of the pig and the strange, unearthly image that had come into his sight, the killing picture. He had seen death, and death had been created.

  He hardly felt his father's rough hand grab hold of his arm and whirl him around. Then the big hand headed straight for his face and jolted it back. The sting brought involuntary tears to his eyes. His father hit him again.

  "Don't," the boy said, feeling light-headed. The hand came down again, across his eyes.

  "Don't!" It was a command. And while the blow struck, Jeremiah's watering blue eyes locked into his father's, and the lights and colors appeared again. But this time there was a sound along with the colors, a hissing, crackling noise mixed with the orange and yellow of... his father's hair...

  "You're on fire," the boy said, astonished.

  His father screamed, a wild, mountain yell, and slapped frantically at the too-orange flames on his too-blue flannel shirt.

  It's the picture, Jeremiah said to himself. It's not real— yet. He wanted to move— help his father, run away, anything— but he was rooted to the spot. He tried to make the killing picture go away, but he knew it was too late. He couldn't stop.

  His mother, alarmed by the screaming, ran onto the porch, a broom in her hand. She dropped the broom, and both her hands flew to her mouth. She was running toward her husband.

  "Go away," the boy snapped, but the picture was too strong. With a gasp, she clutched at the place on her skirt where the flames had erupted. His father caught her by the wrist, and they stumbled off together like two giddy dancers engulfed in flame.

  It's not real yet...

  They were headed for the pond.

  It's not real...

  Where they drowned.

  * * *

  "Can't nobody rightly say how it happened," Pap Lewis told the woman from the welfare office a week later at the train station. The woman had come to take Jeremiah to Dover City where, she told him, he would live in a place full of other children who'd lost their parents. Pap Lewis had wanted the boy to live with him and his family, but the welfare office said they were too poor to support another child.

  Jeremiah waited quietly as the train steamed up to the platform and the woman took the boy's hand. Pap Lewis gave him a pat on the back and hoisted him up the steps into the train.

  That was the last time Jeremiah saw him, because the train ride to Dover City was the
setting for the second incident, the one-in-a-million chance that took Jeremiah Purcell from the ordinary world and thrust him, literally kicking and screaming, onto a new pathway that ended at Devil's Mountain, with the ultimate Master of Death as his guide.

  On the train, Jeremiah left the woman from the welfare office to make his way to the lavatory two cars away. The route took him past a bank of sleeper cabins, where a boy not much older than Jeremiah sprawled on the floor with dozens of baseball cards around him. When Jeremiah tried to step around the boy, he accidentally walked over some of the cards. The boy scrambled to his feet with a shout and pushed Jeremiah into the door of one of the sleeper cabins. Jeremiah didn't strike back, since the boy was bigger than he was and, besides, Jeremiah wasn't much of a fighter. But as he watched the boy gather up his baseball cards, one odd, incongruous thought entered his mind and glowed there like a beacon: Rabbit.

  The boy did look like a rabbit, with his knees bent near his body as he hunched over the floor. Still, the color in the train was so bright...

  The boy looked up, his eyes frozen with terror. He abandoned his cards with a sniff. No, Jeremiah thought. As the boy bounded away on all fours, Jeremiah ran with all his strength in the other direction.

  At the end of the sleeper car, he smashed full force into a man who had emerged from one of the cabins. A witness! Jeremiah looked around wildly to see if others had been standing around while he had turned the boy into a rabbit. There was only this single passenger, dressed in a blue suit like any businessman, whose face was expressionless as Jeremiah disengaged himself and continued running.

  But what a face, he thought as he ran cold water over his head in the lavatory. It was the strangest face he had ever seen. A face that was human, and not disfigured, but unlike, any face he had ever looked upon. The color, the shape, the features. He had never seen a face that even remotely resembled it...

  The man was waiting for Jeremiah when he returned.

  The boy didn't acknowledge him, but he knew that the strange man was following him through the cabin. When he arrived back at the welfare lady's side, the stranger sat down opposite them. Jeremiah trembled with fright. But the man opened a newspaper— harmless enough— while the welfare lady slept.