The Final Reel td-116 Read online

All at once someone got it in his head to fire on the Fishbowl. As the sun breathed its last and fled over the horizon, a few shots clattered against the protective glass.

  Though his first instinct was to duck away, Omay did not flinch. He could not show weakness. For the moment weakness was displayed, he would be lost. The crowd would swarm the palace, killing him, his advisers, his servants.

  Instead, Omay watched the melee with curious detachment. He even leaned closer to the glass. Soldiers forced their way through the throng. With the butts of their rifles they subdued the lone gunman, beating and kicking him. He was dragged away quickly, lest others grow sympathetic for the single brave protester. As the dust settled back to the ground in the wake of the man's scuffing feet, the crowd regained its previous air of defiance. Not directed at Omay, but again directed at the hated West.

  He had been ready to leave before the shooting started, but afterward Omay lingered on a few minutes longer. It would not be seemly for him to give even the appearance of fear.

  Although the palace was air-conditioned, it remained hot in the Fishbowl. The sun was gone now. Bright floodlights from the palace and surrounding buildings washed Rebellion Square in sheets of stark white.

  His back was coated with sweat. He felt weak from standing. At long last Omay stepped back inside his royal residence. It was cooler in his private suite. He took a special, secret elevator from his bedroom down to a lower floor.

  As he passed through the great audience chamber, which was nestled amid a vast complex of offices immediately below his personal residence, Omay's thoughts lingered on the man who had been brave enough to take a shot at his nation's ruler. The sultan would send word that the offender was not to be mistreated. More than likely the protester's actions were an objection to the direction in which the sultan had taken Ebla over the past fifteen years. The truth was, Omay agreed with the man.

  That lone gunman would soon be surprised at the penance his sultan planned to make. As would the rest of the world.

  The sultan crossed the hallway adjacent to the audience chamber. A few ministers and their assistants scurried from office to office farther down the hall. These were the trusted few. There were not many with whom he had shared his plans, as Omay did not want the word to get out too soon.

  Another elevator intended exclusively for the sultan's private use waited in perpetuity on this floor. It was here now, doors wide.

  Omay stepped aboard.

  "Guest quarters," he hissed to the lift operator, his voice a weak rasp. He was immediately racked by a terrible cough.

  Omay was doubled over, clutching his stomach in pain when the doors opened once more. His coughing spasm brought instant attention.

  From the hall, servants' hands reached helpfully to the sultan. He swatted them all away.

  "Leave me!" he commanded breathlessly.

  The effort brought another coughing jag. Omay staggered from the elevator, falling weakly against the far wall.

  After a long moment in which he thought his lungs would burst, the sultan managed to get his coughing under control. Another moment and his breath returned to him.

  He straightened.

  The servants had stayed at a respectful distance, hands outstretched if their master should beckon them. Wiping away tears of pain, Omay left them all. Alone, he steered his uncertain way down a private corridor.

  Rich red tapestries lined the walls, stories of ancient Ebla woven into their ornate designs. This was the area of the palace where personal guests of the sultan stayed. He smiled through his pain as he thought of the three American secretaries of state who had stayed here over the past decade. Another would soon arrive.

  Omay found his way to the last room along the right wall of the hallway. As he approached the open door, his wan features pinched in displeasure.

  Desperate music flowed out into the hall. It had a loud, over-the-top brashness to it. Distinctly Western.

  Inside the room the sultan found a solitary man seated before an imported Japanese television. An old Nishitsu-brand VCR sat atop the TV chassis. Two figures cavorted on the dark television screen. Both wore the ridiculous cowboy livery of America's Old West.

  The lone man in the room stared unblinking at the action on the television. Although he had heard the sultan's wet coughing fit from the other end of the hallway, the man did not stir from his seat. He continued staring at the television even as Omay entered the room.

  The sultan took a seat on the edge of the bed. His breathing was uneasy. He felt drained.

  Outside, the sounds of street revelers filtered up through the thick palace walls-a reminder of glories past. And of triumphs yet to be.

  "Why must you watch that?" the sultan asked once his breathing had steadied. He turned his nose up in disgust as he indicated the picture on the television.

  "To study the beast welcomes understanding of it," the man said simply.

  "It is a strange way of preparing oneself for a jihad," the sultan countered.

  "We embark now on a most unusual stage in our holy war against the hated West, Omay sin-Khalam."

  The sultan no longer reacted as he once had to this man's habit of calling him by name, not title. Omay was an Eblan. The man before him was a Saudi.

  The sultan watched as the film ran out. The music ended. The filmed images disappeared for good. The VCR began to automatically rewind the videotape.

  "Ebla's long sleep is at an end," the sultan announced softly as the visitor turned his attention to the old man on the bed. "As is my own. Ebla has paid a heavy price for my selfishness." Absently he felt through his shirt for the declivity beneath his arm where the first of the cancer had been removed. "It is time we cut the Jewish infestation from the Middle East and avenge ourselves to those who would aid the desecrators of the al Aqsa mosque."

  "As you say, it will be done, Omay sin-Khalam."

  "When do you depart?"

  "This very hour. I arrive in the belly of the beast tomorrow."

  Sultan Omay sin-Khalam smiled broadly. "Then tomorrow the ulema will begin writing a new, glorious chapter in Islamic history."

  "And the streets of the infidel West will flow thick with blood," intoned Assola al Khobar. A rotten-toothed smile cracked the face of the renegade Saudi multimillionaire who had once been called the "most dangerous nonstate terrorist in the world" by U.S. national-security experts.

  Across the room the VCR spat out Assola's bootleg copy of The Wild Wild West.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was happy.

  It had taken a long time for him to isolate and identify the emotion. After all, happiness wasn't something he was used to grappling with.

  As a professional assassin in the employ of CURE, the most secret agency in the United States government, his mood had long ago found root in the darker end of the emotional spectrum. And there it festered. Throughout his adult life he had been by and large a dour person with flashes of annoyance colored by shades of bile.

  But not anymore. At least not right now.

  Only a few months before he had brought to an end one of the most miserable years of his life. During that time duty had skipped Remo Williams across the globe like a flat stone hurled across the water's surface. He had gone from compass point to map speck, crossing longitudes and latitudes, dropping down in countries he hadn't even known existed. But it had now, finally, completely, come to an end.

  And it was at the end of this dark cycle that Remo found himself experiencing an alien sensation. When he stripped away all other emotional possibilities there was only one he was left with. Happiness. Remo was startled at the discovery. And, he quickly found, the fact that he was happy made him even happier.

  For a man who had nearly always found gloom to be the most comfortable part of his simple emotional wardrobe, it was like entering a new world. He was a walking corpse who, after years of wandering, had miraculously shed its eternal shroud.

  And so it was that the evening breeze
found Remo Williams whistling happily to himself as he loitered on the broad front steps of Boston's city hall.

  Remo smiled at passing pedestrians. Few smiled back. Although he had been standing in the yellow lamplight for almost half an hour, few of the passersby even paid him any attention at all. This was because there was precious little about him that would have warranted a second glance.

  Remo was a thin man who appeared to be somewhere in his early thirties. Although the air was cool on this late-May evening, he wore a simple black cotton T-shirt and a pair of matching chinos. He was of average height, with a face that usually skirted the border between average and cruel.

  In point of fact there were only two things about him that were outwardly unusual. First were his wrists. They were freakishly large-like enveloping casts of solid flesh and bone. The second was the copper-bottomed stainless-steel pot that dangled from his right index finger.

  Given his attire, it was easy for those who saw him to assume he was some kind of indigent. In fact, of the people who did notice him, a few who passed him as he was waiting attempted to flip change into Remo's pot. These were obviously tourists.

  In a state like Massachusetts-whose citizens had a habit of making virtues out of vices-Boston was still an enclave of extremists. Its residents were of the breed that regularly chastised the government for not offering more handouts to every group that screamed its disenfranchised status on the nightly news. In short, Boston's residents were extremely generous when it came to everyone else's money but were as tight as a Gabor face-lift when it came to their own.

  Since their acts of personal charity extended only as far as the voting booth, it was a simple enough matter for Remo to weed the residents from the tourists. Those offering him handouts were the tourists.

  As he stood waiting, a middle-aged pedestrian strolled by.

  "You all set, pal?" the passerby asked, fishing in his pockets as he spoke. He didn't wait for a response. The man tossed a few crumpled singles at Remo's dangling pot.

  With a speed that startled the pedestrian, Remo flipped the pot around. In a blur he used the bottom of the pot to swat the money away. The bills fluttered to the sidewalk.

  "I'm fine," he promised with a smile.

  Remo's would-be benefactor seemed surprised when his money was refused. He became even more so when he stooped to pick the bills up. Another hand was already on them.

  "Just what do you think you're doing?" demanded a new voice. This one was shrill and tyrannical-and female.

  The woman's face was a jiggling mass of sagging, angry flesh. Her prominent blue-blooded jaw quivered furiously at the man whose money she was attempting to take.

  Remo recognized her. For years Jullian Styles had had a national cooking show, The Master Culinarian, on public television.

  On TV she was comically frightening. In real life the octogenarian chef was a hunching, six-and-a-half-foot-tall walking parody of herself.

  Remo remembered reading a blurb about Jullian Styles in one of the local papers a few years back. A black family had decided to move into her exclusive lily-white neighborhood in the Boston suburb of Brookline. A good liberal, Ms. Styles was a firm believer in the equality of all persons just as long as the people she considered equal to her had the good sense not to reciprocate those feelings.

  When equality and decency threatened the bastion of racial purity that was her own neighborhood, the famous chef had been quoted as saying, "Why don't they ship these hubcap-stealing darkies to Harlem or wherever it is they keep those people?" In the ensuing melee her publicist claimed poor Jullian had been jet-lagged, drunk on cooking sherry and quoted out of context. Anyone else would have been run out of town on a rail. But because of her political leanings, reruns of Jullian's show were still a staple on public TV.

  As Remo watched, the Master Culinarian shoved the man roughly to one side. Quick as a wink, she snatched up the crumpled dollar bills in her blueveined hand.

  "Excuse me, but that's mine," the man explained weakly.

  "This sidewalk is public property," Jullian Styles announced imperiously. "Therefore anything that lands on it becomes public property. I am the public. Therefore," she said, drawing herself up as far as the considerable hump on her back would allow, "this money is mine."

  With that she turned on one sensible heel and marched away with the cash. The startled tourist didn't know what to say. He looked to Remo for help.

  "Ah, Boston in the spring," Remo sighed in explanation.

  As the baffled man wandered off in the wake of the haughty TV chef, Remo felt a sudden change in air pressure at his back. He glanced up at the Cambridge Street doors of Boston's city hall.

  An entourage of six men had just stepped out into the chill night air. The man Remo was searching for was in the center of the small crowd. He looked like a walrus that had been kidnapped from an Arctic ice floe and stuffed into an ill-fitting blue suit. The too short arms that bounced at his sides seemed as if they'd just stopped by his body for a visit. His porcine eyes lacked even a rudimentary flicker of human intelligence.

  The knot of men descended.

  As the group passed by him on the staircase, Remo took a step forward. "Mr. Mayor?" he called, just to make sure.

  When the lifeless eyes turned his way, Remo knew he had the right man.

  When the mayor stopped, the group paused around him.

  "What?" barked Boston's chief elected official, sounding for all the world like a yelping sea lion. His mumbling speech pattern sounded worse than it did on TV. It was as if his lips and tongue got in the way of his words. Remo was half-tempted to toss a fish into his mouth. Instead he smiled broadly. "I'd like to show you something," Remo offered grandly.

  The men around the mayor tensed. They didn't see Remo as any great threat, since he wasn't carrying a visible weapon. Unless they counted the Revere Ware pot that Remo held up in the air before them.

  "The mayor doesn't have time," one of the men snarled.

  He was trying to get a clear look at Remo's face. It seemed to be vibrating in such a way as to make his features unrecognizable. Of course this was impossible. The man rubbed at his eyes, trying to force the blurriness from them. He noted as he did so that a few of the others were also rubbing at their eyes. "Of course he has time," Remo said. "Look at this."

  Balancing the black handle on the tip of his index finger, Remo gave the pot's broad bottom a smack. With an audible whir it began to spin in place like a basketball on the fingertips of a Harlem Globetrotter.

  "Impressed?" Remo asked.

  "Is he supposed to be some kind of street performer?" the mayor asked his aide.

  "Sort of," Remo answered as he gave the pot another slap. The whirring made the mayor's ears itch.

  "Do you do anything else with that thing?" the mayor asked, childlike interest already waning. "Just one more thing. The Astounding Disappearing Ears Trick. But I need a volunteer from the audience."

  "Let's go, sir," an assistant urged. His inability to focus on Remo's face was making him nauseous.

  "Not you," Remo admonished. The whirring pot stopped.

  There was a metallic gong. All at once the mayor's aide was sleeping on the city-hall steps. "What happened?" the mayor demanded. Another gong. A second man joined the first. "Will a volunteer please step forward?" Remo announced, seemingly oblivious to the gathering pile of unconscious civil servants.

  "Stop doing that," the mayor complained to his staff. He nudged one of the men with his toe. Gong. Another man dropped onto the inert pile. "I just gave you an order," the mayor whined as another gong heralded the collapse of a fourth man. The final city-hall worker was pointing at Remo. "I think he's doing it," he announced, concerned, just before the last gong sounded, this one inside his own head.

  The mayor stood, dumbstruck, within the slumbering rubble of his personal staff. When he turned to Remo, there was just the first flickering hint of understanding in the backs of his dull politician's eyes.

&n
bsp; Remo held the gleaming pot aloft. A smile wrapped his face. "I see we have a volunteer," he announced.

  To the mayor the kettle seemed to move with the slowness of a hypnotist's watch. Only when he was engulfed by a darkness more complete than the night in which he stood did he realize that this was an illusion.

  It felt as if someone had clamped his head in a vise.

  "You will notice, Mr. Mayor," said the street performer, his voice muffled by the pot's interior, "that your ears have completely disappeared. That's the 'astounding' part of the Astounding Disappearing Ears Trick."

  Outside the pot Remo examined his handiwork. Too much head fit into too little pot. Mouth, chin and jowls stuck out from below the steel rim. The curved black handle jutted forward like a crooked witch's nose. The mayor's twitching mouth beneath the handle helped further this image.

  "Is this a kidnapping?" the mayor asked fearfully.

  "Only in the strictest sense of the word," Remo replied. "It's more like a lesson in good mayoring." And, taking Boston's mayor by his handle, Remo led the shaking, kettle-domed official down the broad staircase.

  THE LIBERTY RALLY, which took place annually on historic Boston Common, had, over the course of its decade-long life, grown into the single largest prodrug event in the United States. Born of the radical 1960s hippie culture, the gathering managed to each year dump some forty thousand assorted drug addicts, pushers and thieves onto the Common's well-tended green lawns. Thrown into this mix of human flotsam were the requisite soulless teenagers, college-age revolutionary wanna-bes and celebrity activists.

  In a land where freedom begat folly and true sacrifice came when daddy refused to give the kids gas money for the new cars he'd just bought them, the Liberty Rally became a focal point of rebellion among a class too strung out to realize how privileged it truly was.

  On this first night of the eleventh such rally to be held, the air of Boston had taken on a hallucinatory quality. A smoky fog hung above the park. Even this late in the evening, city workers were still mopping up the remains of the unfortunate birds that had made the mistake of flying through the smokechoked sky above the Common earlier in the afternoon, only to end up as anesthetized splats against the sides of the Prudential and John Hancock Buildings.