The Last Monarch td-120 Read online

  The Last Monarch

  ( The Destroyer - 120 )

  Warren Murphy

  Richard Sapir

  CURED

  Thank's to Chiun's "emptying basin" technique, past U.S. presidents remember nothing about CURE, America's most secret defense organization. Now a former head of state believed to have lost his mind suddenly finds it - and calls Dr.Harold Smith to say hi. But before Remo and Chiun can redo their amnesia trick, the old guy is kidnapped by bumbling eco-terrorists eager to sell him to a desert despot with a grudge.

  As the ex-Mr.President doggedly tries to outwit his captors and single-handedly save the Middle East from extinction, Remo and Chiun pick up the trail, and a worried Dr.Smith fingers his cyanide pill, convinced that this is the end. For Remo, it will be...unless Chiun drops the altitude he's adopted over a certain fiasco involving his Hollywood screenplay, and the world's most deadly assassin's end up killing each other before they can save anyone else.

  Destroyer 120: The Last Monarch

  By Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

  Chapter 1

  It would be the his last photo op.

  His wife had objected. Insisted that it would never happen as long as there was breath in her body. Her unyielding passion on the subject would have surprised many of her harshest critics. Even a few of their oldest friends would have been stunned by her determination that the photo op not take place. "It's not so bad," one had ventured. He had been a close family friend since the California days. His once sharp face now sagged with age. "It might even be good for him to get out."

  "No," she replied with icy firmness. Sitting across from him in the sunroom, she sipped tea from a China cup.

  "The kids think it's a good idea," he advised.

  She laughed at this. "Why doesn't that surprise me?"

  He stiffened, embarrassed at her faintly bitter tone.

  "Oh, I'm sorry. I thought that was all settled."

  "It is." She sighed, setting cup to saucer with a tiny click. "It's just that they don't think things through very clearly. Everyone knows that."

  He tried one last tack. "Forget about the kids, then. Think about the country. Things have gotten bad in the past ten years. America needs to have its hope restored. And people love him."

  At this, the famous ice queen's veneer cracked ever so slightly. Her eyes began to well up as she fought back the memories. All the memories-for years they had been happy. Now they were bitter, tinged with great sorrow.

  She straightened her back, seemingly embarrassed by her inability to control her emotions.

  "No, Cap;" she replied, a steely resolve in her voice. "America or not, he's my husband, and I won't let him be used like some prop."

  That was that. Or so she thought.

  A few days after she'd spoken what she thought to be the final word on the subject, she flew back east for a weekend antidrug fund-raiser. Although she was reluctant to leave his side-especially now-the doctors insisted he was fine. At this point, there were no sudden changes expected in his condition. Besides, the fight against drugs had always been a pet project of hers.

  Wifely concerns heavy on her mind, she left his side.

  Her plane was barely taxiing down the runway before they came to collect him.

  It was his daughter who betrayed him. The Goneril to his Lear. Now in her forties, she had been young when he was climbing the ladder to his great perch.

  The girl had always been full of hate for her famous parents. This latest rebellion was more an act of revenge against the both of them than anything else.

  Her mother was airborne-on her way to Washington. Her father was helpless to stop her. Perfect timing.

  "Cowboy boots, denim shirt, jeans," she barked to the coterie of men who trailed her into her father's room. They began to dutifully raid closets and bureaus.

  Clothes were tossed onto the quilt.

  Through it all, her father sat there, oblivious. Perhaps a puzzled eyebrow arched as the men worked quickly. At one time the most famous face in the world, reduced now to a confused knot of sadly familiar wrinkles.

  He did nothing to stop them as the strangers began to strip him of his nightclothes.

  FORTY MINUTES LATER, they were on the range. Distant mountains undulated in blue-violet waves from the ruler-flat plain. Above, wisps of clouds reflected shades of orange and red from the fire of the setting sun.

  The Jeep they were in stopped beside an empty horse trailer. Father and daughter got out.

  Photographers were waiting. Two wranglers stood next to the trailer, one holding the reins of a big yellow palomino. The animal snorted nervously at the crowd.

  The crush of people encircled them immediately. Her father was typically disoriented.

  He had been enjoying the ride, the warm evening air sparking something in the hazy cloud that was his mind. But with the throng of people came confusion, almost a sense of fear.

  Makeup was quickly applied.

  "We're losing the light," a photographer complained tightly.

  "Get him on it," another urged. He was clucking impatiently as he checked his light meter.

  The old man's arms were grabbed. He didn't even try to fight them as they pushed and pulled him up on the horse.

  It was almost a familiar sensation. This had been his experience with many things the past few years. He could almost feel, almost remember....

  Almost, almost, almost.

  He was lost in a sea of almosts. With nothing to hold on to. Nothing to keep his sanity afloat.

  He had drowned long ago. Died. His mind was gone. It was only a matter of time before his body caught up.

  He was in a familiar setting now-in the desert, on a horse. And he didn't even know it.

  Coaxed by a wrangler, he grasped the reins.

  A long-faced girl with dark hair and a lean body looked up at him. She was the one who had orchestrated this event. She seemed very angry about something. Maybe if he smiled at her she wouldn't be so angry. He instantly forgot to smile.

  Below him, the horse snorted angrily at the air. Cameras clicked madly.

  Men moved around, framing quickly. Click, move. Click, move.

  The horse snorted once more, scuffing a thick hoof at the cracked and dusty ground.

  Men swirling. Skipping, sliding, twisting all around him. He was becoming dizzy.

  A loud whinny.

  Other men coming forward, pushing past those with the cameras. The world dropping out below him. The horse rearing, rising furiously to its hind legs.

  "Hold him!"

  "Get beneath him!"

  Sliding backward. Falling. The ground racing up to him.

  There was a sharp pain at the back of his head. Stars exploding behind his eyes. A flash of sudden, stark memory.

  Darkness. Then light.

  They were all above him, faces cast in silhouette. Behind them loomed the vast orange sky.

  And he remembered nearly all of them. Those he didn't recognize, he knew he had never met before. He knew. Remembered everything. And it was wrong.

  Before losing consciousness once more, he murmured something to those kneeling above him. A single word. His eyes rolled back in his head, and he was gone.

  Guiltily, his daughter cradled his head in her hands, less concerned with her father's health than with what her mother would do when she got back home.

  "What did he say?" a Secret Service agent asked, unhappy with himself for not being more firm with the daughter of his charge.

  "I don't know," his partner said.

  "It sounded like 'cure,'" a photographer whispered.

  "Cure? What do you suppose he meant?"

  The photographer shrug
ged. "Who knows with Alzheimer's?" he said.

  For an eternity on that dusty California desert bluff, with a soft breeze blowing down from the Santa Ana Mountains, everyone stood around in shock, not knowing what to do.

  They looked down on the tired, weathered face of the former President of the United States, little realizing that their unauthorized stunt had unlocked a decades-old secret so dangerous it could very well topple the government of the nation he had served so well.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and from where he was standing he couldn't see a single pitchfork or burning torch.

  There were no chants. No banners, per se. A few signs here and there, but these were feeble at best. The only real effort shown by the protestors was their jockeying attempts to get their faces in front of the many television cameras that whirred up at them from the sidewalk.

  The Bronx police station had become a magnet for protestors over the past few weeks. More than two hundred were there today.

  Leaning against a fire hydrant across the street from the milling crowd, Remo frowned. After standing in the sunlight for just a few minutes, he'd come to a single, inescapable conclusion: They just didn't make mobs like they used to.

  No one paid any attention to him. And why would they?

  Remo was a thin man of indeterminate age. Height, weight, hair-everything about him was determinedly average. The only things an observer might think to be outwardly abnormal about his appearance were his freakishly thick wrists, which, at times of agitation, he would rotate absently. This was not one of those times.

  As he studied the crowd, Remo's arms were folded firmly over his chest.

  The men and women had dressed down for the occasion. They were all meticulously swathed in sedate designer jeans and coordinating shirts. Here and there, diamond or gold accessories peeked from cuff or earlobe, but for the most part the more ostentatious signs of wealth had been checked at JFK Airport.

  A line of long black limousines waited like somber sentries down the block-away from the news cameras.

  Everyone wore a serious face. After all, racism and police brutality were serious matters.

  It had happened again. New York City, already reeling from a simple, tragic mistake that had blossomed into a racially charged incident, was being forced to contend with the second such event in less than two years.

  A cabdriver had been stopped by police. A Haitian immigrant, the man spoke little English. He pulled his wallet and jumped from the car, screaming at the officers. Sadly, the black comb jutting from his wallet was mistaken for a gun barrel. The two police officers reacted instinctively. They opened fire.

  Nineteen bullets later, they realized their mistake. But it was too late.

  The cabbie died at the scene. And the protests that had been dwindling in the wake of the first terrible accident had erupted anew.

  The usual Hollywood horde had taken up the call to action. The socialist elite from both coasts descended like well-dressed locusts on the steps of the police precinct where the two officers worked.

  And there they sat.

  During the day, they chanted. At night, they lit candles. And through it all, deals were discussed and lunches scheduled. It was less a protest than a three-week-long networking session. Plus the press coverage didn't hurt their careers.

  Since he'd taken up his late-morning position on the sidewalk twenty minutes ago, Remo had singled out a bunch of celebrities he recognized.

  There was Susan Saranrap and her companion, Tom Roberts. Remo made a point of avoiding their line of sight.

  By the looks of it, Saranrap had followed through on a threat to became pregnant yet again. But at age seventy-six, she'd had to put an entire team of Frankenstein-inspired physicians to work revving up her dusty womb. Whatever injections they were giving her made her bugging eyes launch even farther from their sockets. The ability to blink over her trademark swollen orbs had been lost somewhere in the early part of the first trimester.

  The famous Afrocentric movie director Mace Scree had abandoned his courtside L.A. Lakers seat to fly in for this day's rally. His slight frame was draped in an oversize basketball jersey. A goateed face that looked as if it had been borrowed from a cartoon weasel peered millionaire malevolence from beneath the brim of his omnipresent baseball cap.

  Not one, but two former New York mayors had joined the cause. The first was an elderly man who looked like a frog starving for a fly. He'd found time to protest in the downtime between his twice yearly heart attacks.

  The second ex-mayor was dressed in a thin cotton sweater, white shorts and carried a tennis racket. Though his detractors would have found it difficult to believe, this rally seemed to interest him even less than his stint in Gracie Mansion. Sitting on the precinct steps, bored, he bounced his racket off one knobby knee.

  Crowded up on the stairs, farther from the news cameras, was the usual assortment of community activists and gawkers who were always a phone call away when the evil specter of racism reared its ugly head.

  And presiding over them all was Minister Hal Shittman.

  The clergyman had come to national prominence back in the eighties when a young black woman claimed to have been assaulted by a group of white men. Worse than the attack was the fact that her assailants had smeared her with excrement. Hal Shittman had taken up her cause with a vengeance, screaming for justice for this poor, frightened child.

  After ruining the lives of the men she accused, the girl was exposed as a liar. Although it had been proved beyond any doubt that the young woman had fabricated the entire tale, Shittman's career had yet to suffer as a result of his involvement in the fraud. Indeed, by the looks of him, he hadn't missed a single meal in the past twenty years.

  A purple velour jogging suit top had been zipped over the minister's great protruding belly. Matching stretch pants were tugged up over his massive thighs. His long hair had been ironed flat and swept into a mighty pompadour.

  His fingers were like ten fat, dark-as-night sausages as he raised them beseechingly to the heavens. "How long!" Minister Shittman wailed. Diamond-and-gold rings worth tens of thousands of dollars sparkled on his pudgy knuckles.

  The former mayor with the tennis-court date checked his watch. Even from so great a distance, Remo's supersensitive ears heard the man mutter, "I've been wondering that, too."

  "How long?" Shittman cried out even louder. As if in response, a door opened. A middle-aged police detective appeared at the top of a second set of stairs farther down from the protest site. His every move was blandly courteous as he raised a megaphone to his thin lips. His polite voice carried loudly over the crowd.

  "Good afternoon," he announced in a booming, staticky tone. "The New York City Police would first like to apologize for having kept you waiting so long." He raised one hand in a beckoning fashion. "Now, those of you who want to get arrested, please move over to this door in an orderly fashion. Those of you who do not wish to be arrested today, please remain in your current protest position. The NYPD thanks you for your cooperation."

  As if drawn by some hidden vocal pheromones released via the plainclothes officer's affable voice, approximately half of the two hundred people sitting around the main steps got up and moved toward the megaphone.

  Like a purple Buddha, Shittman shepherded his flock of celebrities and politicians to the second staircase.

  "Let's get a move on," he urged, his gloomy, sweating face always turned to the nearest available camera. "We don' want none o' that plunger action if we late."

  Other uniformed officers had come out from behind the megaphone detective. As Shittman's group began to form neat queues, the newer NYPD arrivals began processing the protestors inside.

  Several of the uniformed men came down into the street just to make sure there weren't any hard-of-hearing stragglers wanting to be locked up. The line was just beginning to inch its way inside the precinct when one of the youthful policemen found his way over to Remo.

  "Excuse m
e, sir," the young officer began agreeably. He squinted in the sunlight. "Did you want to get arrested today?"

  Everything about him and his colleagues was agreeable. To Remo, it seemed that everyone was agreeable. It was annoying in the extreme. Which was part of why he was here.

  "No," Remo replied, eyes leveled on the crowd. "I'm just wondering when the jugglers and elephants are gonna join this three-ring circus."

  "Sir?" the policeman asked.

  His eyes were blandly noncommittal-a Stepford Wives replacement for the human cops of days gone by.

  "Nothing." Remo sighed, shaking his head.

  The officer stubbornly refused to leave. He was examining Remo's clothing.

  "Are you homeless?" the cop asked sympathetically. He was careful to keep a nonjudgmental face as he nodded to Remo's navy blue T-shirt and tan Chinos.

  Tipping his head, Remo seriously pondered the question for a long second.

  "No," he replied at last. "I just can't go home." It was true. It was too dangerous for him to go home right now. Not that Remo couldn't handle most dangers. But this was different.

  Remo was a Master of Sinanju, an honorific so rare that only twice in a century, on average, was a single man allowed to hold that vaunted title. Remo was the Apprentice Reigning Master. His teacher was the Reigning Master.

  Chiun, for that was his teacher's name, had trained Remo in the most deadly martial art the world had ever known. And all had gone well-more or less-for three decades.

  But being the world's most lethal assassin was only Chiun's vocation. To Remo's eternal regret, the frail old Asian with the fatally fast hands had an avocation.

  For years, the Master of Sinanju had wanted to be a writer. Since both men were in the employ of CURE, a government agency so covert its existence was known at any given time to only four men, it was problematic for Chiun to fulfill his dream.

  Ordinarily, the risk of exposing the most damning national secret to exist in the country's short two-hundred-year history wouldn't have mattered a hill of beans to the wily Korean. But fortunately for CURE, for a long time Chiun's attempts at writing had been universally rejected. That had all changed a year ago.