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  "Yes, Mister President."

  "What the hell is going on now? That lunatic Cora-zon has just broken relations with us again. What are your men doing, anyway?"

  "They've been captured, sir," said Smith.

  "Oh, my God," the President said.

  "I was told not to worry," Smith said.

  "Who told you that stupid thing?" the President snarled.

  "Ruby Jackson Gonzalez."

  "And who the hell is Ruby Jackson Gonzalez?"

  "I think she works for you, Mister President," Smith said.

  The President was silent a moment. He was remembering the CIA's "big effort" in Baqia. A woman. A black. Spanish-speaking. One Goddam person. Just one. He'd fix that CIA director's ass.

  "She say anything else?" the President asked.

  "Just one comment," Smith said.

  "Which was.?"

  "It's not really germane to our problem, sir," Smith said.

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  "Let me be the judge of that," the President said. "What'd she say?"

  "She said that I be one mean mother to work for," Smith said.

  The afternoon sun was like a hammer pounding at his skull and Remo groaned as he came to. His body felt cramped, as if he had been tied in a knot, and it took him a moment to realize where he was. He was in some kind of cage; the buzzing around him was the sound of people talking. He squinted and opened his eyes. There were faces staring at him on all sides. People jabbering at him in Spanish. Mira. Mira. They were calling their friends. Look. Look. Mira. Mira.

  They had caged him and he was in the city square of Ciudad Natividado. But where was Chiun?

  Remo opened his eyes wide. It felt as if they had been glued shut and it took all his strength just to open them. There was another cage next to him and Chiun was in it. He was lying on his side, his face toward Remo and his eyes open.

  "Chiun, are you all right?" Remo gasped.

  "Speak Korean," Chiun said.

  "I guess we've been captured," Remo said in his thin Korean.

  "You are very perceptive."

  Chiun was all right, still alive enough to be nasty.

  "What was it?" Remo said.

  "Apparently the machine with the rays."

  "I didn't think he could hit us with it," Remo said.

  "Probably he did not. But we were told it does not work well on drunks. It works best on those with well-developed nervous systems, whose senses all work. And since ours work so much better than any-

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  one else's, just deflected rays from the machine rendered us this way."

  A young boy slipped by the guard who stood in front of their cages and poked at Remo with a stick. Remo tried to grab it out of the child's hand, but the little boy easily pulled it away. Remo clenched his fist and he could not feel tension build up in his forearm. He was awake but without strength, without even the strength of an average man.

  The child started to poke again with the stick, but the guard slapped the side of the child's head and the young boy ran away crying.

  Remo looked to his other side for another cage. There was none.

  "Where's Ruby?" he asked Chiun.

  A woman's voice came from near his ear, softly. "Here's Ruby, dodo."

  Remo turned to look into the face of a woman with corn rows and a native dress. Only by her smile was he sure it was Ruby Gonzalez.

  He looked at her native dress again.

  "Now that's real country," he said. "Don't ever grouse about my white socks again."

  "I spoke to your boss, Doctor Smith," she said.

  "You did? How'd you get to him?"

  "Don't worry about it. He one mean bastard."

  "That was him," Remo said.

  "Anyways, I got to go after the machine first. But then I be back for you. You all right?"

  "No strength," Remo said. "The strength's been drained."

  Ruby shook her head. "I knew you was going to be trouble when I first saw you. I just knew it."

  "Listen, just get us out of here."

  "I can't do it now. Too many people. The head man

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  here, he just went off in his limousine with his machine. I'm gonna follow him. I'll try to get you loose tonight. Meanwhile, you rest up, try to get some strength back. Trust yo Aunt Ruby."

  "If it wasn't for you, we wouldn't be here," Remo said.

  "If it wasn't for me stopping you from going out that door at the jail, you'd be a puddle. I be back." Ruby saw the guard turn to look at her and she twisted her face into a mask of hatred and rage and began screaming at Remo in Spanish. "Yankee dog, Beast, Killer spy."

  "All right, you," the guard said. "Get outa there."

  Ruby winked at Remo and drifted off into the crowd, which was still pointing and jeering. Remo looked at the faces twisted in hatred at him and to close them out he shut his eyes and drifted back to sleep.

  He was not afraid for himself, but he was overcome with a feeling of shame that Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, should be subjected to this humiliation. The thought filled him with an intense fury, but he could not feel the fury fill his muscles with strength.

  Revenge would have to wait until later, he thought. At least until he woke up.

  But that was all right. Revenge was a dish best served cold.

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  CHAPTER TEN

  Following Corazon was easy for Ruby after she stole the army jeep.

  She just followed the sound of the gunshots, because Corazon considered himself a hunter and while he was being driven pegged shots through the window of his limousine at everything that was not rooted. And sometimes rooted.

  He shot at deers, at squirrels, at jungle rats and lizards, at cats and dogs, and when he did not see any of those he shot at trees, bushes, and, as a last resort, grass.

  Major Estrada, sitting in the back seat next to him, refilled the general's gun when it was necessary.

  "I get rid this old guy," said Corazon, "and then I boss of everything." He blinked a shot at a stump, which he thought had blinked at him. "No more worry about the voodoo people in the hills. No more

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  worry about the holy man leading a revolution. This take care of it all."

  "Sounds good to me," said Estrada. He took the pistol from the general and refilled it from a box of shells he carried on the back shelf ofthe Mercedes limousine.

  Corazon pressed the electric button to roll up the back window as the sky darkened quickly and a flash thunderstorm hit. It was one of the byproducts of the tropical breezes and the warm, humid weather. Every day there were more than a dozen thunderstorms, never lasting more than a few minutes, barely dropping enough rain to dampen the dust of the island.

  Five minutes later, Corazon depressed the switch again and lowered the window. The sun was shining brightly.

  They drove another twenty-five minutes before the driver stopped at the base of a small mountain. A narrow footpath curled its way around the side of the hill. It was not wide enough for a vehicle.

  The nose of the car was stopped at a slick black lake of goo, extending eighty yards long by twenty yards across.

  Corazon stepped from the car and looked at the oily pool.

  "If nature had give us oil instead of tar, we would be wealthy men. A wealthy country," he said.

  Estrada nodded.

  "Still, tar is all right," Corazon said. He plunked a pebble onto the lake of pitch. It sat atop the shimmery surface, floating there. "Tar all right. None of us starve," the Generalissimo said.

  He looked to the two soldiers in the front seat. "Come on along with that machine," he said. "And be careful. We gonna use it soon."

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  He laughed a rich big belly laugh as he walked off, the three soldiers following him onto a small path that skirted the tar pit and led to the walk up the mountainside.

  The four men were just skirting the pitch lake when Ruby Gonzalez' jeep pulled up behind the limousine. She saw them walking away, the two
soldiers lugging the heavy mung machine, and she could see their destination was the small cluster of huts at the top of the hill. The sounds of drums resonated in the air, gently, as if from far away.

  Ruby backed up her jeep and drove it into thick brush where it could not be seen from the road.

  She got out of the vehicle and looked up at the broad back of Corazon, slowly moving up the mountain. He was followed by Estrada and the two soldiers carrying the machine. As she looked the sun moved from behind a cloud and shone down brightly on the black lake of pitch, and at that moment Corazon, Estrada, the two soldiers, the entire mountain seemed to shift in Ruby's vision, as if it had all moved twenty yards to the left. She blinked her eyes, not believing what she saw. She opened them again. The images she was watching were still displaced.

  She realized she was seeing a mirage. The bright sun was shimmering on the rain water on the surface of the tar pit and the vapors acted like a giant prism, moving images from where they should be.

  She filed the phenomenon away as incidental information, then pushed her way through the brush and overgrowth and around the left side of the tar pit and began to clamber up the hill.

  Her direct path was rougher, but would get her to the village before Corazon and his men.

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  As she neared the crest of the small mountain and the grass huts there, the sound of the drums grew louder.

  There were a half-dozen huts, built in a semicircle around a pit in which logs burned, despite the blistering heat of the Baqian summer. The drums which Ruby thought might come from the village were still sounding, from even farther away.

  There was a sweet flower smell in the air, the scent of cheap after-shave.

  As Ruby pushed onto the crest of the hill, she felt a strong pair of arms encircle her from behind. She looked down. They were bare black arms, a man's.

  "I want to talk to the old man," she said in island Spanish. "Hurry, fool."

  "Who are you?" a voice asked. It was a voice that sounded as if it had been rebounding around the walls of a tunnel for six weeks before reaching someone's ears.

  "Some people are coming here to kill him and you, fool, stand here with your arms caressing my breasts. Quickly. Take me to him. Or are you afraid of a woman who carries no weapons?"

  Another voice bit the air.

  "A woman without weapons would be a strange woman indeed." She looked across the clearing. A small, wizened man with skin the color of roasted chestnuts was walking toward her. He wore black cotton trousers with ragged bottoms and no shirt. Ruby guessed his age at seventy.

  He nodded as he reached them and the arms came loose from around Ruby. She bowed to the man and kissed his hand. She knew nothing of voodoo, but marks of courtesy were marks of courtesy everyplace.

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  "Now what is this about someone coming to kill me?" the man asked. Behind him, Ruby saw people peering from behind the grass huts.

  "Corazon and his men. They are on the hillside now. He wants to kill you because he fears you threaten his rule."

  Without taking his eyes from Ruby's, the old man snapped his fingers. Behind him a young woman ran from behind one of the huts over to the edge of the clearing, looking down on the path below.

  She scurried back to the old man.

  "They come, master. Four of them. They carry a box."

  "Corazon's new weapon," said Ruby. "It kills."

  "I have heard of this new weapon," the old man said. He looked at the man behind Ruby and nodded. "All right, Edved. You know what to do."

  The man brushed by Ruby and walked away. She saw he was a giant of a black man, almost seven feet tall, skin glistening plum-colored in the hot afternoon sun.

  "My son," the old man said.

  "Most impressive," Ruby said.

  The old man took her elbow and led her to the other side of the small plateau.

  "I guess it would not be good for the Generalissimo to find you here?" he said.

  "No, it wouldn't."

  "An American?" he asked as he led Ruby down the hillside, away from Corazon's men.

  Yes.

  "I thought so. But you speak the island language well. And your costume would fool almost anyone." Forty feet down the hillside, the old man stopped

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  on a flat outcropping of rock. He pushed aside heavy brush and vines that grew from a tree and Ruby saw the opening to a cave. The cool air from inside felt like full-blast air conditioning.

  "Come. We will be safe here and we can talk," he said.

  He led her inside and as the vines closed, they muffled the sound of the distant drums, beating their insistent forty beats a minute, and she realized that she had become so accustomed to their sound that she no longer heard them.

  The old man squatted on the ground in the dark cave, managing somehow to look regal in that inelegant posture.

  "My name is Samedi," he said.

  The name hit Ruby like a sudden attack of migraine.

  She was five years old again and visiting her grandmother in Alabama. And one evening she wandered away from the shabby little house near the fly-buzzing pond and down the road and found herself outside a cemetery.

  Night was falling fast, but she saw people inside the cemetery and she leaned on the stone wall to watch, because they were dancing and they seemed to be having a good time. Ruby started dancing, too, where she was standing, wishing she was grown so she could go over and dance with the big people. And then their dance stopped and a man with no shirt but wearing an Abraham Lincoln stovepipe hat came out of the far darkness, and the dancers fell to the ground and began to chant.

  It was hard for Ruby to make out what they were saying because she had never heard the word before,

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  but she listened carefully, and she recognized it. They were saying:

  "Samedi. Samedi. Samedi."

  Suddenly, Ruby didn't feel like dancing anymore. A chill swept her body, a sense of nameless fear, and she remembered she was five years old and this was a graveyard and it was night and she was far from home, and she bolted and ran back to her grandmother.

  The old woman comforted the frightened child in her big warm arms.

  "What happened, child?" she asked. "What give you this fright?"

  "What is Samedi, Granna?"

  She felt the old woman stiffen.

  "You was down de cemetery?" the old woman said.

  Ruby nodded.

  "Some things child just don' gotta know about, 'cep-pin' you stays 'way from de graveyard at night," her grandmother said.

  She squeezed Ruby hard to her, as if to accentuate her order, and Ruby stayed there, feeling warm and loved and protected, but still wondering, and later when her grandmother tucked her into bed, she asked again.

  "Granna, please tell me, what is Samedi?"

  "All right, chile, 'cause I get no rest iffen I don' answer you. Samedi be the leader of them people you saw dancin' down there."

  "Then why was I ascared?"

  "Because those people not like us. Not like you and me."

  "Why aren't they like us, Granna?" Ruby asked.

  Her grandmother sighed in exasperation. "Because they be already dead. Now hush your face and go to

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  sleep." And the next day her grandmother would not speak about it anymore.

  Ruby's mind was back in the cave and the old man Samedi was talking to her.

  "Why would Corazon be here to kill me?" he asked.

  "I don't know," said Ruby. "There are two Americans in town and he thinks that they're here to make you the ruler of this country."

  "These Americans, they are with you?"

  "No. We came separately to Baqia. They are now captives, so I am responsible for them. Corazon must want you dead so they will have no chance of succeeding in making you ruler."

  The old man looked at Ruby with coal black eyes that sparkled even in the faint light of the cave.

  "I don't think so," he said. "Th
e government is Corazon's. The religious life is mine. It has always been that way and these mountains are far from Ciudad Natividado."

  "But you thought enough of what I said to come to this cave with me to avoid Corazon," Ruby said. "You did not do that because you trust him as a brother."

  "No. One must never trust Corazon too much. He killed his own father to become president. If he were to be leader of the island's religion he would rule for life. No one could oppose him."

  "He has the army. Why hasn't he come for you before then?"

  "The people of the island would not tolerate an attack on a holy man," Samedi said.

  "But if they never knew? If you were one day just to vanish from the earth and Corazon made himself religious leader, he would be invincible. And as sure

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  as God made green apples, he would lead Baqia into disaster and maybe war."

  "You overstate it," Samedi said. "He is not a good man. He is not to be trusted. But he is not the devil."

  "He is the devil," said Ruby. "And that is why I want you to help me overthrow him."

  Samedi thought for only a few seconds before shaking his head no. Over the very faint thump of distant drums, there were suddenly women's screams to be heard, drifting down from the mesa above their heads.

  Samedi cocked his head toward the sound, then looked back at Ruby.

  "Corazon is asking where I am," he said. "But they will not speak. The only words spoken in these hills are the words of the drums and they speak all words to all men. No. As long as Corazon does not attack me, I will not attack him."

  They sat in silence. There was a sharp crack and another set of women's screams and then all was silence except for the faraway thumping and bumping of the drums, like slow lazy rubber hammers attacking the skull.

  They continued sitting in silence until they heard a woman's voice. "Master, Master! Come quickly."

  Samedi led Ruby out onto the hillside, then strode quickly up the hill to the grass huts. A woman waited for him at the top of the hill. Tears rolled down her black face, like glycerine drops on chocolate pudding.

  "O Master! Master," she sobbed.

  "Be strong now," he said, pressing her shoulder. "The general is gone?"

  "Yes, Master, but..."

  Samedi had walked away from her. He stood in the