Date with Death td-57 Read online

  It was a sad time for Miles Quantril. He was twelve years old, with nothing to do but ride the thoroughbreds in the family stable, watch one of his three TV sets, swim in the Olympic-sized pool with its automatic wave machine, play in the private bowling alley in the basement, shoot grouse, and while away his spare time in the multimillion-dollar chemistry lab his father had given him for Christmas the year before. It was a wretched existence.

  But Quantril persevered. In his lab, he discovered how to make bombs. They were crude at first, only blobs of plastique with varying amounts of nitroglycerine and TNT, but they improved with practice. Within six weeks, he was setting off land mines in the family rose garden. By the age of seventeen, he had developed an explosive powerful enough and accurate enough to blow up the local police headquarters.

  He was arrested, but since the incident occurred three days before his eighteenth birthday, he was charged as a juvenile. His sentence was suspended by a judge who was a golfing partner of Miles's father.

  "I'll take care of the boy in my own way," the elder Quantril promised.

  And he did. Young Miles Quantril, one of the richest heirs in America, was cut off without a cent.

  "I'll send you to college," his father said. "I'll give you an education. But that's all. No more allowance, no more cars, no more vacations on the Riviera. You're on your own."

  Miles Quantril accepted the tuition money and went to college. Unfortunately, on the very day he left for the university, the generations-old Quantril mansion perished in an explosion of flame. Neither of his parents survived.

  In college, he picked out the smartest kid in his dormitory, Bill Peterson, and asked him to write all his term papers for him.

  "Why should I do that?" Peterson asked.

  "No reason," Quantril said.

  "Go screw yourself."

  The next night, Bill Peterson's bed mysteriously caught fire.

  When Peterson was released from the hospital, he volunteered to write all of Miles Quantril's papers for him.

  From that beginning, it took little to organize all the straight-A students on campus into a term paper factory catering to the college's all-star football team.

  The football players didn't pay Quantril for his service. Instead, they agreed to supply him with girls— the most curvaceous, beautiful, sexy girls in the state.

  For a while, Miles Quantril was satisfied with having a different girl every night just for himself. But girls didn't make a man rich. One afternoon, as he was lying on his satin-sheeted bed while a gorgeous blonde panted between his legs, an idea occurred to him. The idea was brilliantly simple. It smacked of riches to come.

  Its name was Dream Date.

  Dream Date, as Quantril visualized it, would be a dating service. But unlike other wholesale matchmakers that saddled their customers with partners as unattractive and dull as they themselves were, Dream Date's clients would get only the best.

  As proof, Quantril's customers would, for stiff fees, receive video cassettes of their intended partners, but the videos would be unlike anything else on the market.

  Instead of seeing their potential mates as they really were, the recipients of Dream Date video cassettes would watch their fantasies come to life. Whatever they wanted— a Parisian aristocrat talking to them from the banks of the Seine, a harem beauty gyrating in transparent houri pants, a Chinese princess tiptoeing through ancient temples in Peking's Forbidden City— they would have, complete with music, sets, costumes, and prewritten dialogue. The Dream Date cassettes would be commercials for sex, love, and more Dream Dates.

  Quantril ran a test for his idea on campus, using talent from the film, theater, and communications departments to produce his first video cassette. For the subject of the cassette, he hired a call girl named Wanda Wett to dress up as a medieval damsel performing a slow striptease from the window of a stone tower.

  He tried it out on five of the richest guys in school. All five of them were willing to pay four-digit figures for a date with Wanda and the promise of another cassette with an equally scintillating Dream Date.

  By the end of his first term, Miles Quantril had made enough money to leave school and head for Hollywood, where he bought up as many cast-off stage sets as he could get hold of. He hired cameramen and directors from porno movies to execute his video extravaganzas. He made commercials of his cassettes and put them on television. Business soared.

  Within eight years, Dream Date had branches in fourteen major cities, and the company was grossing in excess of $100 million annually.

  Within another four years, Quantril owned controlling shares in more than twenty other companies, and Dream Date expanded to become the core of an international conglomerate spanning the globe.

  Within two more years, Quantril was one of the richest men in the world. He had everything he wanted.

  Then he got another idea.

  It was the same idea Napoleon had had. And Hitler. And Attila the Hun. And Charlemagne.

  Miles Quantril intended to control the continent on which he lived. He planned to own the United States of America.

  But the new idea required thought. Quantril knew that in a country as stable as the United States, he could never seize control by way of a splashy assassination or a well-armed coup. Nuclear threats were also out of the question. No, he would have to conquer America slowly and subtly, working from the inside out.

  It might, he admitted, even take as long as two or three years. But one morning, the country would wake up in Quantril's control without anyone knowing precisely how it happened.

  His master plan was centered around a key group of 242 unmarried men. Men who worked in government, banking, transportation, the military, and every other type of big business. All of the carefully selected men worked at the middle management level. They weren't bigwigs, but rather the men who pushed the buttons and filled in the forms, the men who actually did the work necessary to keep America running.

  They also all fit into a classic type. They were the kind of guys who, no matter how hard they tried, just couldn't score with women. Quantril had seen thousands of them during the years that Dream Date had been in business. They seemed to share a common leaning toward thick, black-rimmed glasses, plastic pocket pen holders, and bad breath.

  Dream Date was the other thing they all had in common. Quantril used the company to find exactly the right men for his needs.

  Dream Date's application forms were changed radically. No other dating service could approach the thoroughness of the Dream Date questionnaires. By the time the applicants were finished with the exhaustive battery of tests and forms, the Dream Date computer knew everything there was to know about them.

  The computer had calculated the exact number of men necessary for Quantril's plan to work. It still amazed him that one individual could actually take over a country the size of the United States with the aid of only 242 unwitting accomplices.

  He would send them the kinds of women they'd always dreamed of possessing, the kinds of women they could never get on their own. But that was nothing new. The incredibly attractive date was Dream Date's hallmark.

  The problem was the women. The call girls and runaways he'd been using would not do for this job. He needed new girls, innocents who knew next to nothing. He wanted each of the male applicants his computer had chosen to simply come home from work one evening to find a heavily sedated beauty waiting," stark naked except for a decorative bow and tasteful but anonymous gift card.

  According to their psychological profiles, the men would do exactly what Quantril expected them to do: take advantage of the situation. A few days later, when the women started to come out of their drug-induced stupor, Quantril's men would arrive on the scene. They'd come armed with full-color glossies of the debauchery as well as an offer to get rid of the now-enraged women. Quantril figured it would be more than enough to turn each man into a willing cohort in his plan to take over America.

  Supplying so many beautiful women had se
emed like a real problem at first. But then Quantril realized that kidnaping, like blackmail, could be practiced on a grand scale.

  The key word was subtlety. It just wouldn't do to have hordes of screaming women carried off from the same location at the same time. People tended to notice things like that.

  He chose instead to let a single man do all the snatching, and that man would never snatch more than two or three women at a time. Quantril had again used Dream Date's files to recruit just the right man for the job. In Wally Donner he recognized a natural predator, a handsome loser fueled by greed. Donner's almost pathological hatred of Mexicans made him perfect. The only thing Quantril had to do was to nudge Donner in the right direction. The man had no more intelligence than a brightly painted windup toy, but once Quantril got him moving, Donner produced a steady stream of dark-eyed beauties from the other side of the border.

  As per instructions, Donner delivered each load to an isolated airstrip south of Santa Fe. There the women were picked up and flown to an abandoned monastery in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. There were more than 180 women up there now, and there was no danger that any of them would escape. A combat-hardened veteran named Deke Bauer saw to that.

  Bauer first came to Quantril's attention sometime around the end of the Vietnam War, when Bauer— then an army major— was tried and convicted of war crimes against foreign civilians. During the ensuing flurry of press coverage, it came out that Bauer amused himself during lonely jungle vigils by decapitating young children from both North and South Vietnam. He also mutilated old women, conducted mass hangings of entire villages, and was rumored to have cut off the fingers of the enlisted men under his command when they failed to execute his orders to the letter. Unfortunately, none of the military victims lived to testify against him.

  Bauer was Quantril's kind of man. Using the vast resources of Dream Date to bring the major up for retrial and an eventual acquittal, Quantril personally met with Bauer upon his release from the penitentiary.

  "What do you know about prisons?" he asked Bauer.

  The military man sneered. "They're not so tough."

  "Make me one that is," Quantril said. "One that can't be cracked. Ever." Then he took Bauer to the monastery in the mountains.

  Bauer was as good as his word. Within a month, he turned the old ruin into an unassailable fortress.

  Miles Quantril leaned back in his chair. Today the first of the women was going to be delivered to the first of Quantril's unsuspecting recipients. He smiled at the image his mind conjured up. What would the poor bastard do when he found this unique gift stretched out on his bed?

  The phone on the desk purred softly. Quantril slowly crossed the room and lifted the receiver. He didn't bother to say hello. Words like hello, good-bye, and thank you were not part of his vocabulary. Or Deke Bauer's.

  "The gift has reached its destination," Bauer said.

  Quantril gently replaced the receiver. Feeling a tingle of triumph, he sat down and crossed his legs, taking care not to mar the razor-sharp crease in his trousers. The great game had finally begun. Now it was just a matter of time before it reached its inevitable conclusion.

  ?CHAPTER FOUR

  No one knows where the Kanton Indians came from. They simply appeared one day, stepping out of the swirling mists that clung to the upper reaches of the mountain. The first thing their chief did was to borrow a blanket from the startled Hopi shepherd who witnessed their sudden appearance. The chief explained that he hadn't expected it to be terribly cold on the mountain and that he would be sure to return the blanket at first light the next day.

  The chief never did get around to returning the blanket. It became the first item in a centuries-long line of unreturned objects and promises postponed for "just another day."

  That first night, the Kantons moved into an abandoned campsite and cooked their first meal with pots and food donated by the good-natured Navajo. In the days that followed, it became apparent to all the neighboring tribes that the Kantons had arrived without anything— not even a culture or heritage they could call their own. The Kanton chief kept muttering about "lost baggage" and a great supply of trade goods, precious metals, and gems that were due to arrive in "just another day." But they never did materialize.

  So the Kantons kept on borrowing, mainly because the other tribes found it difficult to say no. The Kantons were so charming, so quick to smile and laugh and to break out with the verse and chorus of a recently borrowed song. As the weeks stretched into years, the Kantons continued to raid their neighbors' cultures. Baskets were acquired from the Chacos, weaving and pottery from the Navajo, while the great Anasazi donated an entire pantheon of gods. The Kantons themselves never did much more than sit in the sun. The simple life seemed to suit them, and over the centuries the tribe grew and prospered.

  Then one morning the Kantons disappeared as mysteriously as they had come. They were there one moment, and then they were gone, swallowed up by the swirling mountain mists. A few, however, remained behind. There were no more than a half-dozen of the tribe left to carry on the great Kanton traditions. Among that noble six was the woman who would become Sam Wolfshy's great-great-grandmother.

  Sam sat on the curb of Harry's Payless service station and garage, tossing pebbles onto the dry ground and occasionally glancing over his shoulder to look at the seatless hull of his jeep.

  He was a handsome man in his late twenties. His face was long and angular, with copper-hued skin stretched taut over jutting cheekbones and a prominent chin. There was a mischievous twinkle in his soft black eyes. Hair of the same color brushed the tops of his shoulders while the rest of it was hidden under a ragged-brimmed straw hat. There'd been no customers for three weeks at Harry's Payless, and Sam was bored. The blood of his Indian ancestors stirred in his veins, but he was helpless to follow his instincts.

  Where was the adventure of yesteryear? he wondered. Where were the mountain ponies and the bonfires that crackled on the desert breeze? Sam went into the station, prepared to quit his job to explore the unknown wilderness. His uncle sat behind the counter, reading a newspaper.

  "What do you want now, fathead?" his uncle asked.

  "Uh, Uncle Harry—"

  "Want maybe to quit? Here's your salary." The old man rummaged in the cash register and waved some bills in front of him. "Nice countryside out there. Young man like you could find a job if he wanted to."

  Sam swallowed. "Well, actually I was just wondering if I could borrow a Coke."

  The hopeful smile on his uncle's face withered as he put the bills back in the register. "No guts," the old man muttered. "You're the damnedest Indian I ever seen. You're dumb, and a coward to boot. You get lost walking around the block. Jesus, a blind man'd be more help around here than you."

  "About the Coke, Uncle Harry—"

  Harry threw a warm can at his nephew. "Get out of here," he growled.

  Sam Wolfshy went back to the curb and sat down. Another attempt at freedom squelched. Ah, well, he reasoned, a guy had to have some loyalty to his family. Especially if they were supporting him. He took a deep drink of the warm soda and closed his eyes. Things weren't so bad, he guessed. It was a good day for working on his tan.

  Chiun had not stopped complaining since they left their motel room in Santa Fe.

  "Lout. It is an insult."

  Remo gripped the wheel of the Chevy until his knuckles turned white. "Little Father, I've already told you a dozen times. We can't wait forever in a motel room. That's not what Smitty sent us here for."

  "Imbecile. It is exactly what the Emperor sent us for. If we had waited just a few minutes longer, Mona Madrigal would have come. You have ruined everything."

  "For crying out loud, Mona Madrigal doesn't even know we're here."

  "Pah. In my village, when a Master of Sinanju appears, the whole village turns out to welcome him."

  "Santa Fe's not in Korea."

  "The Emperor will be mightily displeased. He sent us to this arid wasteland so th
at Mona could be presented to me. Now we have insulted his graciousness by leaving so rudely."

  "Smitty doesn't even know who Mona Madrigal is," Remo shouted. "There are bodies lying all over the desert—"

  "A mere ruse," Chiun said with exaggerated patience, wagging his eyebrows up and down. "Can't you see anything? Oh, I should never have accepted a white pupil. You understand nothing."

  "I understand that we're supposed to go to the Sangre de Cristo Mountains," Remo said stubbornly. The car produced a series of sputtering, clanking sounds. "That is, if this junk heap will take us there."

  With that, there was a scraping sound and then a clunk as the tail pipe clattered to the ground.

  "You see?" Chiun grinned in malicious satisfaction.

  "See what? I see we lost the freaking tail pipe." As soon as he spoke, two of the hubcaps sprang off the wheels. Remo watched in the rear-view mirror as they spun in lazy circles on the road far behind them.

  "See that," Chiun said triumphantly. "This automobile is a sham."

  "I can think of other things to call it," Remo said between clenched teeth.

  "Emperor Smith never intended for us to drive it. It was part of the pretense. We should have waited in the motel room. The Emperor clearly wished to surprise me."

  "Well, he doesn't surprise me. He probably picked up this rattletrap for twenty bucks somewhere, the cheap…"

  The steering wheel came off in his hands. Seething, Remo tossed it into the back seat. He edged his fingertips into the steering mechanism to maneuver the car as if he were tuning a radio.

  Chiun cackled mercilessly. "You see? You should have listened to me before. Now we must return to the motel. Perhaps Miss Madrigal is already there."

  "Forget it. We're not turning back. All we need is another car."

  The engine sputtered. Remo pumped the gas pedal. The car moved forward erratically.

  "I can't believe it," Remo said. "The gas gauge is broken, too. I think we're out of gas."