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  Abdul Fareem felt implacable fingers take him by the neck. They lifted him, bringing pain to his strained neck vertebrae.

  Inexorably his face was brought up to eye level of the man he understood Allah had ordained to be his executioner.

  Fingers dug in. The pain came so quickly that Abdul Fareem's frightened brain seemed to explode in his very skull like a hand grenade.

  The world went red. Then black. Then away.

  Before his ears died, he heard the man's voice-twisted, as if he too were dying.

  "I'm sorry," he choked. "I can't help myself."

  And behind his pain, the American woman in the abayuh laughed and laughed and laughed like the drunken church bells of the infidels.

  Sickened, Remo Williams dropped the limp corpse. It fell like a great bag of meat, shaking the sands. He stepped back. The lights blazed in his tormented eyes. Kimberly Baynes drew near. She pushed the yellow silk scarf into one of his limp hands.

  "You may have the honor of tying the rumal of Kali about his throat," she said. "For you are now my chief phansigar."

  Remo knelt and did as he was bidden. He regained his feet. His stomach felt like an old kettle that had collected rusty rainwater. He wanted to vomit it up, but he could not. He had been instructed not to.

  Kimberly Baynes stood looking down at the cooling corpse. Her violet eyes flared avidly. She saw a dab of blood at one corner of Abdul Fareem's slack mouth.

  She fell on it eagerly and began licking like a dog.

  It was then that Remo Williams lost control. He fell to his knees and emptied out the contents of his stomach into the desert sand.

  "Don't bother getting up, lover," her mocking voice called over. "You have hungered to mate with me since when we last met. This plump carrion we have together made shall be our nuptial bed. And he will be only the first as we dance the Tandava that will stir the Caldron of Blood and remake this planet into a Hell of Delight."

  And despite his revulsion, Remo felt his manhood stiffen as if about to burst blood at the tip from desire. Like a whipped dog, he crawled toward her.

  And he wept.

  Chapter 37

  Harold Smith waited until Maude was asleep.

  Slipping out of bed, he went to the hallway and padded in his ancient slippers to the end of the corridor, where he reached up for the pullcord that lowered the folding staircase to the attic.

  The stairs creaked from disuse. Smith pulled them up after him, and only then turned on the light with a twist of a turn-of-the-century rheostat.

  Since only Harold Smith ever ventured into his own attic, it was as tidy as the proverbial pin. A few old steamer trunks sat stacked neatly at the far end, covered with the fading labels of many half-forgotten trips. Nearby, his old army colonel's uniform-which still fitted-hung on a wooden coat hanger from the ceiling, protected by a dusty plastic dry-cleaning bag.

  Smith ignored these artifacts. He went instead to a nest of electronic equipment, dominated by a modern videotape deck attached to a 1950's Philco TV set. Beside it, on the floor, sat an old-fashioned reel-to-reel tape recorder.

  Smith knelt before the array. Although most of the equipment was antiquated, it still worked and was actuated by state-of-the-art sensors that he had secretly planted in the house next door-Remo's home.

  Smith turned the tape recorder on, his face glowing cherry red from the tiny bubble monitor light. He jerked the lever that sent the tape wheeling back, stopped it with another twist, then hit the stainless-steel play button.

  The quiet buzz of dead air came from the cloth speaker grille. Smith repeated the operation and got the same response.

  Unlike the sound-actuated tape recorder, the video camera ran continuously. Smith checked it every day, and had even after Remo had vacated the house. The dwelling remained a security risk until it had been sold, owing more to Chiun's trunks than anything else. The Master of Sinanju had been in the habit of recording his assignments on his scrolls. No doubt sensitive, if distorted, information on CURE operations could be found in those scrolls.

  Smith turned on the TV. A snowy black-and-white picture showed the dim outlines of a room. Smith stopped recording and rolled back the tape to approximately 8:45 that evening: the time his wife had pinpointed as when she had seen-or apparently seen-Chiun.

  Smith watched a replay of the same dim room in silence. Minutes crawled past. Then a white light appeared.

  Smith gasped.

  The light devolved into the half-transparent image of a familiar kimono-clad figure.

  The Master of Sinanju faced away from the camera. But the bald back of his head was unmistakable. It was Chiun. He stood immobile for perhaps three minutes. Then he simply faded away, leaving no trace.

  Harold Smith turned off the recorder. Resetting everything, he padded back to the folding stair.

  Dawn found him next door examining the darkened living room in his flannel bathrobe, purchased in 1973 at a yard sale and still serviceable.

  The room was unremarkable, as was the floor where the apparition had appeared.

  Smith stood on that spot, mentally summoning up every kernel of knowledge he possessed that related to paranormal phenomena. Smith did not believe in the paranormal, but over the years he had been exposed to enough imponderables that his once-razorlike skepticism had been dulled to a vaguely suspicious curiosity.

  The room itself was unremarkable. No cold spot. He checked each window, knowing that lightning flashes had the ability to imprint the photographic image of a person who stood too close the glass. No angle of examination revealed a lightning-flash print, however. Not that he expected to find one. His video camera had absolutely picked up a three-dimensional phenomenon.

  When he had exhausted every possibility, Harold Smith prepared to go.

  He was walking to the kitchen when the light grew. It was lavender. Like a distant flare.

  "What on earth?" Smith whirled. His gray eyes fluttered in disbelief.

  The Master of Sinanju stood only inches away, looking stern and vaguely afraid.

  "Master Chiun?" Smith asked. He felt no fear. Just a cool intellectual curiosity. He had never believed in ghosts. But having come to the conclusion that Hindu gods might have entered the affairs of men, he put his skepticism aside. Momentarily.

  The apparition gave him a querulous look. It had animation. Smith reached forward. His hand passed through the image. His gray eyes skating about the room, he dismissed a holographic source for the image.

  "Er, what can I do for you, Master Chiun?" Smith asked, at a loss for something more appropriate.

  The Master of Sinanju pointed down at the floor.

  "I fail to understand. Can you speak?"

  Chiun pointed once more.

  Smith tucked his white-stubbled chin in one hand. His pale eyebrows crept together in thought.

  "Hmmm," he mused aloud. "Remo said something about this. Now, why would a spirit point to the floor? You cannot be pointing specifically at this floor, and therefore at the basement, because I understand you first appeared to Remo in the desert, where you . . . um . . . apparently died. Am I warm?"

  Chiun's birdlike head bobbed in agreement.

  "And you cannot be telling Remo that he now walks in your sandals because that would not be an appropriate message to give to me, correct?"

  Chiun nodded again. His hazel eyes brightened with hope.

  "Therefore, the meaning of your gesture is neither abstract nor symbolic. Hmmm."

  Smith's fingers came away from his chin. He snapped them once.

  "Yes, I understand now."

  A look of relief washed over the wrinkled visage of the Master of Sinanju-then he was gone like a dwindling candle.

  Harold Smith turned determinedly on his heel and left by the rear door, locking it with the same duplicate key that had given him secret access to install the monitoring equipment that might just have saved the Middle East from conflagration.

  If he hurried.

  Chapter
38

  For once, official Washington was not leaking.

  Despite the Iraiti feint into forward positions of the Hamidi Arabian Defensive Fan-as the Pentagon called it with straight-faced soberness-the news media were unaware of the fact that for a few brief moments in the neutral zone there had been hostilities.

  The blustering from Abominadad continued. And was ignored.

  The story of the U.S. assassin-defector prompted only the most peremptory journalistic questions at the daily press briefing held at the Department of State.

  "The U.S. government does not employ assassins," was the curt reply of the briefing officer, a serious-voiced spokeswoman who had been accused by the press of being dull as dirt. Which in journalese meant that she did her job and did not leak.

  A reporter pressed the point.

  "Is that a denial?" he asked blandly.

  "Let me remind you of Executive Order Number 12333, which specifically forbids the use of assassination as a tool of foreign policy," she retorted. "And further, I can confirm to you that this individual, who has yet to be identified by name, is neither a current nor a past employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency., or the Defense Intelligence Agency. We do not know him."

  The briefing moved on to the real meat. Namely, the whereabouts of Reverend Juniper Jackman and news anchor Don Cooder.

  "Our sources indicate that both men are sharing a suite at the Sheraton Shaitan in downtown Abominadad and are not repeat, not being used as human shields," the spokeswoman said.

  "Are they getting along?" asked anchorwoman Cheeta Ching, who had lunged for Don Cooder's anchor desk like a hammerhead shark after a bluefin tuna.

  A ripple of laughter floated through the press.

  "I have no information on that," was the clipped, nononsense reply.

  At the Sheraton Shaitan, Don Cooder was climbing the walls.

  More accurately, he was trying to climb the door of the suite he shared with Reverend Juniper Jackman, The transom was too narrow to admit his brachycephalic head, never mind his body.

  "I can't stand it anymore!" he howled in anguish. "That Korean witch has probably ruined my ratings by now!"

  "Improved them, if you ask me," called Reverend Jackman from the bathroom. He had been sitting on the toilet, with the seat down, all during their captivity. He figured the tiled bathroom was the safest place to be in the event of a U.S. air strike.

  "They won't strike while I'm a prisoner. I'm a national symbol," Don Cooder had said.

  "You're a bleeping journalist," Reverend Jackman retorted hotly. "I'm a presidential candidate. They won't bomb 'cause of me, not you."

  "Failed presidential candidate. You're irrelevant."

  "Says who. Mr. Dead-Last-in-the-Ratings?"

  "Me, for one. To ninety million people. Besides, you're a syndicated talk-show host now. That puts you on the same plane as Morton Downey Jr. There's an idea. Maybe he'll be your running mate next time."

  They had argued thus for two days. The argument had grown particularly heated since Reverend Jackman had refused to give up the toilet seat to Don Cooder, fearing that, once lost, it could never be regained.

  As a consequence, Don Cooder had been holding all bodily functions in abeyance for two days and was now approaching criticality. And he was not going to go on the rug. If they ever got out of this alive, his critics would be armed with another embarrassing personal anecdote for him to live down.

  So, the closed transom looked like his best bet.

  "If you're so important," Reverend Jackman taunted, "why are you trying to save your skin? I should be the one trying to escape. I'm a political bargaining chip."

  "Trade?" Don Cooder asked hopefully, feeling his bowels move.

  "No."

  Cooder resumed his attempt to climb the door to the transom, impelled by visions of Cheeta Ching chaining herself to his anchor chair and refusing to give it up. She was a notorious glory hound.

  And if there was anything Don Cooder despised, it was a glory hound.

  Ultimately. it was not concern over the fate of either Don Cooder or Reverend Juniper Jackman that forced the President of the United States to cave in to the President of Irait's demands that Ambassador Abaatira be produced.

  It was the American news media.

  The ambassador's death was one of Washington's best-kept secrets. It had been easy enough to disclaim any knowledge of the ambassador's whereabouts when even his own consulate had no inkling of what might have befallen him.

  But when CNN reports coming out of Abominadad replayed the accusation that Ambassador Abaatira had been murdered by U.S. agents, the President knew he had a problem.

  "They're demanding answers," the President glumly told his cabinet.

  "I say screw Abominadad," the secretary of defense said.

  "I am not talking about Abominadad," the President said. "I'm talking about the media. They're sniffing around like bloodhounds after a possum. It's only a matter of time before they discover the truth."

  As one, the President's cabinet looked up from their briefing papers. This was the first they knew that their President had direct knowledge of the Iraiti ambassador's fate.

  This, more than anything else, explained why Washington was not leaking as it usually did.

  It was the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sitting in on a cabinet meeting because of the gravity of the situation, who broke the long hush with the question on all the world's lips.

  "Do we know what happened to the ambassador?"

  "He was murdered four days ago. We have the body on ice."

  All around the room, eyes went round and fixed, like those of children listening to Halloween ghost stores around a wooded campfire.

  No one said anything.

  "Under the circumstances," the President said slowly, "it's only a matter of time before this thing breaks. We're going to have to get out in front of this thing. Pronto."

  "If you mean what I think you mean . . ." the secretary of defense began.

  "I do. I'm going to have the body released to the Iraiti consulate. No choice."

  "There is no telling how Abominadad will react."

  "Mr. President, let me suggest a first strike."

  "Mr. President," the secretary of defense jumped in, "let me suggest that you ignore the chairman's suggestions, since this is a cabinet meeting and, strictly speaking, he is not a cabinet member."

  "How about we adjourn to the War Room?" the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said hopefully.

  The President held up a quieting hand.

  "No first strike. I will have the body released. But we must be ready to react to the Iraiti response-no matter what it is."

  Every man in the cabinet room understood what the President's words meant.

  They were about to take a giant step closer to war.

  Chapter 39

  In the lowermost dungeon of the Palace of Sorrows, Remo Williams awoke.

  He tasted the dried blood on his lips.

  And then he remembered the feverish bloody kisses Kimberly Baynes had showered on him as they lay on the corpulent body of Prince Abdul Fareem. The many yellow-tipped talons of Kali had taken him to an exquisite hell of sexual torment, after which he had collapsed on the sand, spent and unconscious.

  Remo had awoken with the dawn.

  The blazing sun had burned his skin to a lobsterlike hue. He was naked, but no longer erect. That pleasant relief had barely sunk in when Kimberly Baynes, also naked, stood up from her throne-the corpse on which a buzzard had already begun feasting-and lifted four arms to the sun.

  "Stand up. Red One."

  Remo had climbed to his feet.

  "Now you are truly red, as befits Kali's mate."

  Remo said nothing. Her parched lips were caked with rustlike dried blood. Her head lay on her shoulder, almost perpendicular to her broken neck. Behind her, the buzzard looked up, his ghoulish head tilted, in echo of Kimberly's own.

&nbs
p; "Now what?" Remo asked dully.

  Kimberly Baynes snapped a yellow silk scarf between two hands like a whip, her small breasts bouncing with each snap.

  "We wait for the Caldron of Blood to churn. Then we will dance the Tandava together, O Triple World Ender."

  But the Caldron of Blood did not begin churning. The sun ascended and, hovering like a superheated brass ball, began its slow sink into desert and darkness.

  Reluctantly Kimberly Baynes had donned her abayuh and ordered Remo back into his soiled kimono.

  They had returned to Abominadad by plane and, after being whisked to the Palace of Sorrows, Remo had been cast into the dungeon, where he had immediately sunk into defeated, dreamless sleep.

  Now, tasting blood on his lips, he stared into the unrelieved darkness with hollow, burning eyes.

  If he was himself, he could have stood up and ripped through the thick iron-bound hardwood door to freedom.

  But Remo was no longer himself. He was Kali's slave.

  It would have been a fate worse than death, but Remo had had a taste of the Void-the cold merciless place where Chiun now suffered. Just as Remo suffered.

  Alive or dead, on earth or in the Void, Remo no longer cared. He was beyond help, and beyond hope.

  He would have preferred to die, but he knew what awaited him in death.

  And so he waited in the dark.

  Chapter 40

  It was a good thing that Turqi Abaatira was dead.

  Had he been alive, the late Iraiti ambassador would have been in excruciating pain.

  His dead body had spent four days in a refrigerated morgue under police guard while official Washington considered what to do with him.

  When it was decided that the concern voiced in the press could not longer be ignored, a CIA "inert-assets" team came for the body. "Inert asset" is a CIA term for "inconvenient corpse."

  The dead ambassador was taken to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where dirty Potomac river water was pumped into his lungs through a garden hose stuffed into his slack mouth. The inert-assets team leader in charge of the operation kept the water flowing until it backed up from the late ambassador's lungs and dribbled from his nostrils.