High Priestess td-95 Read online

  "In my namdu," he said unconcernedly.

  Hearing this, Lobsang Drom could not help but ask, "What manner of Mongol owns a skyboat?"

  At that, the Mongol Kula only laughed. He said no more as they picked their way down the mountainside.

  It was the Earth Dog Year. Exactly five astrological cycles had transpired since the Fire Dog Year. The wind howled, the snows of the Himalayas cut into the lines of the Most Holy Lobsang Drom Rinpoche's weathered features, and he refused to believe that the Bunji Lama would be found at the end of the long journey before him.

  For to hold hope in his embittered heart was to risk having his spirit crushed forever.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo, and he was trying to remember how to spell Buttafuoco.

  He stood before the automatic teller machine in the Plexiglas-enclosed outer lobby of the neighborhood bank in the seaside Massachusetts town he called home. It was night, so the green letters on the ATM screen were like jade on fire.

  They read: "Hello Mr./Mrs. XXXXXXXXXX, please spell your last name."

  "Damn," muttered Remo, staring at the huge, piano-sized keyboard. Streetlights reflecting off the clear Lucite picked up his lean-featured face with its grimly humorous mouth. Shadows pooling in the hollows of his deep-set eyes suggested a skull, with skin stretched drum tight over high cheekbones. It was not a happy face. It had never been a happy face. It would never be a happy face, but at least, after many plastic surgeries, it was pretty much the face he had been born with.

  His high forehead wrinkled as he struggled with his problem.

  It was a new wrinkle in ATM security. Four-digit password numbers were no longer enough. A customer had to correctly input his last name before accessing his account.

  It had not been a problem last night, when Remo withdrew a hundred dollars as Remo Brown, or the night before, when he pulled fifty out of the checking account he had under the name Remo Black, or the night before that, when he was Remo Green. He could spell those names.

  Remo really hoped he would be held up before he had to play the Buttafuoco card. But it was his own fault, he realized. After all, he was the one who picked the last-name aliases so Upstairs could provide phony driver's licenses, credit cards and ATM cards. There was, as he saw it, no problem being Remo Buttafuoco whenever he needed a quick hundred bucks.

  Until the banking industry, run ragged by a proliferation of ATM-based scams, decided four-digit pass numbers weren't secure enough.

  Remo stared at the screen, wondering if the number of glowing green X's corresponded to the number of letters in Buttafuoco. He hoped so. It would help a lot. He punched in the letters BUTT. That was easy. Simple word association.

  He saw that the string of green X's became "BUT TXXXXXX." '

  Next, he tried an E. So far so, good. Five X's left. How hard could it be?

  But when he punched in the letters FUOCO and pressed Enter, the machine displayed "you are an imposter" and ate his ATM card.

  "Hey! Don't I get a second chance?" Remo complained.

  A new screen came up. It was dense with fine print. Remo was reading how in the interest of customer-account security the ATM machine was programmed to shut down in the event of a misspelling.

  It apologized for the inconvenience, but pointed out that bank security was important, too. Besides, customers should know how to spell their own last names.

  "Not if it's Buttafuoco," said Remo, whose real last name, in the days when he was a good citizen and not a dead man, had been Williams. "Nobody can spell Buttafuoco right on the first try!"

  Remo was so upset he almost forgot about the ATM bandit who had been waylaying after-hours customers as they walked from area banks with their withdrawals. He had been striking on random nights. So far nobody had been hurt, but a few people had been roughed up, including a nun from the church across the street.

  Remo had a soft spot in his heart for nuns. He had been raised in a Catholic orphanage.

  When he'd read about the crimes in the newspaper, Remo decided to do something about it. It wasn't the kind of crime that ordinarily got his attention, but this was his neighborhood now and his bank-even if he did have four different accounts under four different aliases, and not one teller had ever noticed-and he wasn't about to let some lowlife ruin it for everyone else.

  He stormed out of the bank lobby and almost walked into the shiny blue .357 Magnum revolver. Almost but not quite. The second he exited the sense-deadening Plexiglas enclosure, he knew someone was lurking in the shadows. His nose picked up the sweat stink of fear. His ears heard a heart beating erratically.

  Automatically he pretended not to notice the lurker. Just as automatically he changed direction so he could pretend to walk into him.

  "Right there!" a raspy voice warned.

  There wasn't much to the man holding the revolver. He had dead gray skin and the emaciated aspect of a drug addictall bone and sinew, with nerve endings jangling like wind chimes. The only thing about him that stuck out was his weapon.

  Remo allowed his eyes to rest upon the well-crafted pistol. In his previous life, the sight of a .357 bore pointed at his solar plexus would have started the adrenaline flowing. Instead, Remo simply relaxed.

  Where once he would have been intimidated by the precision steel and smoothly fitting parts designed to inflict massive internal injury to human flesh and bone and organs, Remo saw the weapon for what it was-a crude, almost medieval device.

  Chiefly it was a conglomeration of the most primitive of man-made tools-the wheel, the lever and the hammer. After all, the trigger was just a lever designed to trip the hammer, the action of both actuating the bullet-bearing cylinder, which was really a form of wheel.

  As these idle thoughts passed through the remarkably calm brain of Remo Williams, the gunman growled, "Give me your money." He pulled back on the hammer. The thick wheel turned with all the smoothness of a windlass, bringing a bullet into line with the barrel, which was the most primitive of tools-a hollow tube. It happened in the blink of an eye, but to Remo's heightened senses, the action had all the subtlety of a drawbridge clanking into the raised position.

  "You the one that's been holding people up?" asked Remo in the cool, unruffled voice which, like his body language, was calculated to relax the target.

  Nonthreatening was better. They never saw it coming.

  "No, I'm the one who's holding you up," the gunman snapped.

  And while he was snapping out the words, Remo's right hand, dangling loosely at the end of an unusually thick wrist, came up. One finger went into the gun barrel like a long cork.

  The gunman looked at Remo as if he were crazy. He didn't fire. Remo knew he wouldn't. If Remo had tried to run away or fight or yell for help, he would have fired. All the gunman wanted was Remo's money.

  He didn't expect his victim to do something as stupid as trying to stop a bullet with his finger.

  "What're you, on drugs or something?" the gunman demanded in an indignant voice.

  "That's right," said Remo, holding his finger steady because it would hold the Magnum steady.

  The gunman squinted at Remo in the yellowish haze of a nearby streetlight.

  "Yeah?" he asked curiously. "What is it? Crystal meth? Crank? Acid?"

  "Sinanju," said Remo.

  "That's a new one on me," the gunman muttered. "What kinda high do you get from it?"

  "The ultimate high. It teaches you to breathe with your whole body, think with every part of your brain and not the ten percent most people use-in your case, two percent-and become at one with the universe."

  "Sounds like acid," the gunman said in a disappointed voice. "You trippin' on acid, man? Acid ain't new."

  "No," returned Remo. "But this is."

  And holding the .357 Magnum steady with his right index finger, Remo used the stiff, steel-hard fingers of his right hand to spank the heavy cylinder out of the frame.

  The cylinder flew a short distance and bounced off the Plexigla
s door, scattering soft-nosed bullets on the walk.

  The gunman's reflexes weren't bad. He was pulling the trigger at the first loud sound. He never saw Remo's hand or felt the cylinder jump off its sheared pins. He was reacting to the impact of the cylinder against the door, never realizing he was dropping the hammer on thin air.

  The gun went click. The gunman blinked. Remo let a cool, insolent smile touch his thin lips. His dark eyes, set deep in his skull, grew grimly humorous.

  The gunman kept pulling the trigger and getting noisy ineffectual clickings.

  Removing his index finger, Remo brought the precision-machined weapon up and turned it sideways so that the gunman could see the square aperture where the cylinder had been. For an instant in eternity the gunman saw it for what it actually was-a crude contraption of steel.

  Then it turned lethal again as Remo's hands drove the shiny barrel up and back into the gunman's surprised brain.

  Remo left him jittering on the sidewalk, the maimed weapon sticking out of his shattered forehead, gun hand frozen on the grip as if he had lain down preparatory to putting a bullet in his own brain.

  The next morning, when the police found him there, they would run a check on fingerprints found at the crime scene. When all was said and done, every set would be accounted for, and every possible suspect questioned and released. Except one set: Remo's. The police never found that set in any fingerprint file on record.

  They had no way of knowing the file on Remo Williams had been pulled two decades ago. After he was pronounced dead.

  As he walked home, whistling, Remo didn't think of himself as dead. He felt very much alive. The night wind was blowing the cool salt tang of the Atlantic Ocean inland. A sea gull perched on top of the street lamp, eyeing the ground for scraps.

  As he walked, Remo thought that he was a long way from the orphanage of his earliest memories, from the jungles of Vetnam, where he had been a Marine, from the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, where as Patrolman Remo Williams, he had tried to protect honest citizens from the kind of criminal scum who changed only their tactics, and from death row in Newark State Prison, where he had lived out his last days. He was home.

  It had taken a year to come to think of Quincy, Massachusetts, as home. Not that it was a bad place to live. It was fine-a residential suburb of Boston with a nice beach busy with cormorants and sea gulls, sand you could sit on and calm blue water you could swim in when the fecal coliform bacteria count was safe. Usually twice a year.

  It was convenient to Logan Airport when work called him to travel and handy to the Weymouth Naval Air Station when a national emergency required flying at taxpayers' expense. You could be on the Southeast Expressway within five minutes of starting the car-not that you ever really wanted to be in Boston traffic-and except for the odd convenience-store robbery and night burglary, it was pretty quiet.

  No, the problem with getting used to Quincy, Massachusetts, was not in thinking of it as home, but in thinking of the house where Remo lived as home.

  As he turned off Hancock Street and came within sight of the high school, Remo was reminded why he had had such trouble adjusting.

  There it was, a warm golden brown in the light of the street lamps, tucked behind the high school. Once it had been a Congregational church. According to neighborhood legend, it had served as a Sikh temple after the church fathers had sold it. Then, at the height of the condo craze, a real estate developer had condoized it into its current state.

  Technically it was still a condo. There were sixteen units, but only Remo and the man who taught him Sinanju, which was not a drug but a way of life, lived there. But it looked like some mad cross between a church and a Tudor castle.

  It was ugly. The peaked roof had been built up to form a third floor with rows of closely spaced dormer windows. The outer walls were fieldstone and set with Tudor-style decorative panels high up in the eaves, and the concrete foundation had been painted beige. Here and there a few jewellike stained-glass windows remained.

  Still, it was home. Remo was used to it now. The crenellated tower was like a lighthouse shedding an amber glow that called him home.

  Yes, it was a long way from his past life, where he had been Patrolman Remo Williams, veteran, honest citizen and patsy. It had not been a great life. What child who couldn't remember his parents could say he had enjoyed a great life? But the nuns at St. Theresa's orphanage had raised him right, the Marine Corps had made him a man, and in police work he had found something he could believe in.

  Until the detectives came to arrest him.

  It was easy to fall into the trap of thinking a mistake had been made. Remo had been an honest cop. But his badge had been found next to the pusher's body lying in an alley on his beat. No cop would have gone to trial on such circumstantial evidence, but Remo Williams had. No cop would have been convicted. But Remo Williams was.

  By the time he found himself on death row, Remo still hadn't stopped believing in the American justice system. But he had begun to wonder if he was being railroaded because he was honest.

  He still wondered who among his higher-ups had hung him out to dry when the Capuchin monk came to deliver the last rights. The monk had slipped him a black pill and whispered instructions to bite down when they pulled the knife-blade switch that sent current to the electric chair. Then they took him to the death house of Newark State Prison.

  He had bitten down on the black pill just as the first jolt ripped through his shaking body.

  When he'd woken up, Remo had a new face, no last name and two options, neither one good. No higherup had framed Patrolman Remo Williams. His own government had set him up. His name had been on file ever since a one-handed spook of a CIA agent had noticed his cool, methodical ability to kill Vietcong snipers with a bolt-action Garand rifle. The file had been pulled, and as a result Remo Williams became a living dead man. Officially in his grave, file closed, end of freaking story.

  But the grave, Remo was told, could be opened at any time and he could be dumped into it, his body cooked by electrocution, if he chose not to cooperate.

  Remo chose to cooperate. And so became the sole enforcement arm for CURE, a supersecret government organization created in the early 1960s by a United States President who would not live to see the experiment he had launched come to fruition. Because in those dark days, the American flirtation with democracy was close to the breaking point. Organized crime was reaching high into the government. Laws designed to protect the lawful instead shielded the lawless from simple justice. The young, idealistic President faced two choices-suspend the Constitution and admit that democracy was a dead end, or set in place a secret agency to bridge the gap.

  Thus CURE. Not an acronym, but a code name. It represented a remedy for America's social ills. And when CURE, working quietly behind the scenes, reached the point where its anonymous brand of justice was not enough, the director of CURE reached out and chose honest, patriotic but lethal Remo Williams to be the assassin sanctioned to destroy a struggling country's enemies, foreign and domestic. The Destroyer.

  It had been so long ago that Remo had all but forgotten the early days when he had been retrained in weapons handling, exotic poisons and other deadly arts that became instantly obsolete once he was introduced to the elderly Korean who was the Master of Sinanju, a discipline that people who thought kung fu was something special would call a martial art.

  If Sinanju was a martial art, it was the original martial art. The ultimate system of attack and defense. It was practiced by the greatest house of assassins in human history, taught to only one man in a generation and never taught to anyone who was not born in the obscure Korean fishing village of Sinanju-until the American government asked the last living Master of Sinanju to train a white man in the forbidden discipline. Remo Williams.

  Now Remo would no sooner carry a gun than wear a gorilla for a hat. The sight of a firearm no longer triggered his survival instincts. And he walked the earth, one hundred fifty-five pounds o
f lean muscle and perfectly coordinated bone, the most remorseless and implacable killer since Tyrannosaurus rex.

  It felt good. It always felt good. His blood surged through his circulatory system pure and untainted by chemicals or drugs, and his lungs processed oxygen with such efficiency that every cell in his body worked like a miniature furnace. Whatever the human body was capable of at its maximum potential, Remo could do on his off days. And more.

  Across the night came a strange haunting sound. Aummm. . . .

  It came again. "Aummm. . . . "

  Then Remo saw the unfamiliar silhouette in the north window of the square tower.

  He ran, shifting from an easy, efficient walk to a graceful run that looked slow but covered space like a ray of light.

  He hit the front door and went up the stairs. Every sense was operating. He smelled death. And unfamiliar living bodies. Not Americans. No American had such a buttery smoky odor.

  At the top of the stairs, his reflexes carried him over the scattered luggage without thinking, and he hit the door to the tower room.

  In the center of the square room, squatting in a lotus position, sat an Asian in a saffron robe. His head was shaved close to his skull, and his face was as smooth as soaked tissue paper.

  His mouth was parted and out came a mournful sound.

  "Aummm . . ."

  Then, noticing he was not alone, he stuck his tongue out in Remo's direction as far as it would go.

  "Who the hell are you?" Remo demanded.

  Behind him, down the stairs, a door banged open and a pungent human scent came to Remo's sensitive nostrils. He was in the act of turning when a booming voice cried, "Ho, White Tiger! I bring you death. Catch it if you can!"

  And the unmistakable sound of a knife whizzing toward his exposed back came to Remo's ears.

  Chapter 3

  The skills that Remo Williams had learned under the tutelage of Chiun, the last Master of Sinanju, were so ingrained that his reactions to danger were automatic.

  All thrown blades make a specific sound. Remo had learned to differentiate among these sounds in the long-ago days of his early Sinanju training when the Master of Sinanju would pluck assorted dull knives, daggers and even scissors from his wide sleeves and send them arrowing toward Remo's back.