The Last Dragon td-92 Page 5

  "You mean the one I got isn't full grown?" King gulped.

  Nancy nodded soberly.

  Everyone carrying rifles clenched them more tightly, and those who had no weapons crowded closer to those who did.

  "Let's keep our heads, shall we?" Skip suggested.

  "What do you think, Thorpe?" Nancy asked.

  "Why do you ask him and not me?" King demanded. "I'm expedition leader."

  He was ignored.

  Thorpe was looking at the tracks now. He motioned to Tyrone, who joined him. They exchanged short words in Bantu and Thorpe looked up.

  "The freshest tracks are those going in. I'd say there are at least three more of the brutes in that cave, trapped."

  "No!"

  " 'Fraid so, Dr. Derringer."

  "Is there anything we can do to get them out?"

  "Doubtful. You're looking at tons of dirt and rock that came down all at once. And there's no guarantee that the beggers inside survived the cave-in."

  "Then our beast might be the last survivor!" King said.

  "It's likely," Thorpe admitted glumly.

  "That makes him worth a fortune!"

  "That makes him an endangered species," Nancy said fiercely, "and I will not have him endangered any further by your irresponsible macho bull."

  "I resent that!"

  "Resent it all you want, about from now on, I'm calling the shots."

  "My ass," King snarled.

  "All in favor of doing things my way," Nancy announced to everyone within hearing, "raise their hands."

  The natives immediately lifted their hands. First, those who spoke English, and then the others when the first ones nudged them into following suit. Thorpe lifted one hand. As did two of the camera crew.

  "All in favor of doing what Mr. King demands may now raise their hands," Nancy said.

  Skip King raised his hand defiantly. His was the only one aloft.

  "What about you clowns?" he yelled at the remaining members of the Burger Triumph observation team.

  "We're abstaining," said one.

  "In the interest of our long-term career prospects," said another.

  "And our short-term survival," added the third man.

  "Now that the new pecking order has been established," Nancy said. "Let's look around."

  "For what?" King wanted to know.

  "Anything that might be useful."

  Circling the great lake, they found more dinosaur trails. The creatures seemed to have dwelt close to the cave and the pool, where fruit-bearing lianas grew thickest.

  Nancy stopped to examine one. The creeper was thick and dotted with broad white flowers. At intervals, the great fruit sprouted like oversized greenskinned footballs.

  "Jungle chocolate?" Nancy asked Thorpe.

  "Likely. Recognize it?"

  "Botanically, no. Earlier researchers have theorized it's probably a species of Landolphia-some unknown wild mango."

  Thorpe took a knife to one of the big melons and hacked out a piece. It smelled like a green apple and had a vaguely nutty taste, like avocado.

  They spit out their pieces and washed their mouths clean with canteen water.

  The dinosaur trails ended at the line of hills that seemed to cut the Kanda Tract in two.

  They found, on the other side of the great escarpment, a long stretch where the earth was flat and tawny grass grew around sparse, wind-slanted baobab trees. Savannah. Mixed in the grass were fields and fields of toadstools, every one a glossy orange color, like crouching elves who had pulled their caps down protectively.

  "Odd," Nancy said, fingering one of them.

  "Yes?" asked Thorpe.

  "These are the same orange coloration as the Apatosaur's markings."

  "You imagine a connection?"

  "We know from old stories that N'yamala is reputed to eat so-called jungle chocolate. And we saw him eating fronds."

  "We did."

  "But his markings are all wrong for a jungle dweller. He's black and orange, like a salamander. If he had natural jungle camouflage, he should be green or brown or gray. Not orange and black."

  "What are you suggesting?"

  "Remember a year or so ago, they found the largest living creature in a Washington state forest? A behemoth underground fungus ten miles long, which had been feeding off dead tree roots?"

  "Vaguely."

  "They estimated it was thousands of years old. And it was entirely underground. Except for the mushrooms."

  "Mushrooms?"

  "They sprouted up all along the ground that covered it," Nancy said distantly as she crumbled the toadstool to fragments and watched the spongy bits cling to her fingers. "According to our best knowledge, Apatosaurs ate ginkgo trees, conifers, and other roughage."

  "No pine cones hereabouts," Thorpe snorted.

  "But there might have been prior to the period of continental drift that dispersed its populations to the newly created continents," she returned. "When flowering plants came along in the Cretaceous, Apatosaur would have suffered from a severe food shortage, but could have survived in small numbers on a modified diet."

  "I fear I do not follow."

  "Suppose the Apatosaur population went underground with the onset of the Lower Cretaceous period, induced by climactic changes and the rise of unfamiliar and unappetizing fauna?" Nancy mused. "Not excusively underground. But feeding on great subterranean expanses of fungi, and only occasionally emerging to forage for palatable food, like lianas and jungle chocolate."

  "Would that turn the beasts orange?"

  "It might. Or the coloration might be an adaptive response to cave living."

  "A kind of underground camouflage, eh?"

  Nancy shook off the last bits of toadstool and her voice cleared. "It's a theory," she said. "Let's find the others. We have to do something about our young Apatosaur."

  "Such as?"

  "If it is the last one, then we have no choice but do exactly what that idiot King wants if it is to survive."

  "How are we going to move a brute that size, Dr. Derringer?"

  "We'll ask B'wana King."

  Ralph Thorpe looked skeptical.

  "And then we do the opposite," Nancy said archly.

  Chapter 4

  At the Salt Lake City Airport payphone, Remo reported in.

  He lifted the receiver and depressed the One button until the automated switching relays clicked into place and a distant phone rang once.

  A thin, lemony voice said, "Yes, Remo?"

  "Chalk up another triumph for the ACLU," Remo said airly.

  "I beg your pardon?"

  "I told my targets I was with the ACLU. It cut through a lot of unnecessary bull."

  "I trust these individuals are-um-no longer . . ." "You can say it, Smitty. Go ahead. Say, 'dead.' "

  Remo could almost hear his superior wince over two thousand miles away.

  "Remo, please."

  "Okay, they're landfill. Happy now?"

  "That is satisfactory."

  "All except Roy Shortsleeve."

  "He did not get away?"

  "No. I left him where he sat."

  "Why, Remo?"

  "Because he's innocent. I could tell, having been an innocent on death row once myself. I think someone should reopen his case."

  "That is not our mission," Smith said flatly.

  "And I say it is."

  The line hummed in the silence that followed.

  Remo shifted his feet. He had reverted to his habitual wardrobe, a T-shirt and chinos. Today the T-shirt was white and the chinos tan. Loafers of Italian leather covered his feet. They looked brand new. They were. When they lost their original shine or got scuffed, he just ash-canned them and bought a fresh pair. This was his third pair this week.

  "Very well, Remo," Smith said in his eternally bitter voice. "I will make inquiries. But I do not expect miracles. It is very difficult to overturn such convictions."

  "Tell that to the ACLU-who are going to have a lot of explaini
ng to do after Roy Shortsleeve tells his story."

  Smith groaned audibly. In the phone booth, Remo smiled to himself. The hand holding the receiver was of average size, but the attached wrist was freakishly thick.

  "Anything else I can do?" Remo asked. "How about Dr. Gregorian? I sent you a bunch of clippings on that dried-up old ghoul. I can be in Milwaukee by sundown."

  "Do not go to Milwaukee."

  "No?"

  "Fly to Boston."

  "What's there?"

  "I will be there," said Smith. "With Master Chiun."

  "Yeah? What's up?"

  "I have concluded purchase negotiations on the new residence Chiun has requested-"

  "You mean extorted."

  "-as a part of the latest contract negotiations," Smith finished.

  "Boston, huh? I guess you talked Chiun out of living in a castle."

  "No, I did not," said Smith.

  Remo gripped the receiver so tightly he left fingerprints. Fingerprints that could never be traced because Remo had been declared dead, his identity files pulled. "You got him a castle! In Boston?"

  "Outside Boston, actually. Try to catch the nine o'clock plane, and we will rendezvous at the airport."

  "On my way," Remo said, not sounding at all happy about it.

  Remo wore a long face as he cabbed to the airport. It was not a face that was at its best when it was long. Remo's face-resculpted over the twenty years he had worked for CURE-had been turned pretty much back to its original contours. Twenty years of faces. Twenty years of changing identities. Twenty years of assignments. And twenty years-minus a four-year period in which he had actually lived in a home in the New York suburbs-of living out of suitcases in hotels and motels all over the world.

  And now, thanks to the Master of Sinanju's insistence, CURE was going to provide them with a permanent place to live.

  It should have been something Remo would look forward to. But there were problems. For one thing, Chiun had insisted on a castle. Remo had no desire to live in a castle.

  For another, Chiun was about to become a father. And it was his stated intention to prepare his new domicile for the baby and its mother.

  For weeks now, in anticipation of this joyous occasion-dreaded by Remo-Chiun had been preparing.

  And ignoring Remo. Remo had started to feel left out and between that and boredom, he had taken to calling up Smith and asking for missions. At first, Smith had little for Remo to do. A crooked judge in Buffalo. A gang leader in Detroit. Piecework. Nothing big. Definitely nothing challenging. Mostly it was fly to the hit's city, locate the hit, say hello to the hit and hit the hit. Wham, bang, thank you, hit. Have a nice death.

  After a while, Remo had taken to cutting out newspaper articles about people worthy of being hastened to the boneyard and sending them to Folcroft Sanitarium by Federal Express. Always making sure to check off the "bill recipient" box on the airbill to give the penurious Smith added incentive.

  An article on the ACLU's attempt to win reprieves for four death row inmates had been one of the latest. Remo was hoping Smith would send him after Dr. Mordaunt Gregorian next. Maybe tomorrow, Remo reflected. After they had gotten settled in.

  The flight across the U.S. seemed longer than it should be because the stewardess kept trying to sit in Remo's lap.

  Remo was not in the mood for stewardesses who wanted to sit in his lap, and he told the woman so.

  This did not dissuade her. "How about I just kneel at your feet and massage them lovingly?" she countered.

  "Won't they fire you?" Remo wondered.

  "If they do, will you make it worth my while?"

  "Not on this leg."

  The stewardess looked ready to burst into tears. Remo, to avoid a scene, tried to head off the cloudburst.

  "You know, you don't really love me," he pointed out.

  "I do! I do! Since forever."

  "Since exactly twenty minutes ago when I got on this plane," Remo said. "Before that you never saw my face."

  "It just seems like forever," she said, brushing at his dark hair.

  "It's only pheromones," Remo said.

  "Huh?"

  "I read about them in a magazine. Pheromones are personal odors. Sexual scents. People give them off. Some give off stronger pheromones than others. Me, I got pheromones that won't quit. Which is why I can't take naps during long flights because of the stewardess factor."

  "Don't I give off pheromones, too?" she asked in a pouty voice.

  "Sure you do."

  She bent forward, giving Remo a dose of some fruity perfume and an intimate look at her freckled cleavage.

  "Aren't my pheromones good, too?"

  "They're okay. It's just that I give better than I get.

  Which was the wrong thing to say, Remo saw immediately, because the stewardess fell to her knees and said in a very, very earnest voice, "I give good pheromones, too. I swear."

  She lay one hand over her heart.

  Remo read her nametag: Stephanie.

  "Listen, Stephanie-"

  The hand came off her heart to Remo's hand, still warm. "Oh, you spoke my name!"

  "Only in passing. Look, I can't help being the way I am."

  She took his hand in both of hers now. They were sweating. She looked him dead in the eye and said, "I understand. Truly, I do."

  "I was trained to be this way. It's not something I can control."

  "I have absolutely no use for control, right now," Stephanie said, making her voice breathy.

  The other passengers were staring now. Their expressions broke down into gender-specific categories. The men were envious and the women disgusted.

  "You're making a scene," Remo pointed out.

  "We can go into the galley. It's private there."

  "What about the other stewardesses?"

  "I'll stick plastic knives in their backs. We can use them for pillows after we're done. I give great afterglow, too." "Sorry," Remo said.

  "I'll hold my breath."

  "Let me hold it for you," said Remo, reaching out for her throat. He found her throbbing carotid artery and squeezed until the blood stopped flowing to her brain. After twenty-two seconds, she was out like a light.

  Remo hit the stewardess call button and explained to the new stewardess that Stephanie had fainted, "or something."

  She was carried to a first-class chair, checked for signs of injury, and allowed to sleep the rest of the flight away.

  In Boston, Remo made a point of being the first one off the plane.

  He was not surprised when Harold W. Smith met him at the gate. Smith was seated in an uncomfortable plastic chair looking uncomfortable. Harold Smith always looked uncomfortable. He probably looked uncomfortable sleeping in his own bed.

  It was early spring, but Smith wore the same ensemble he wore summer or winter, rain or sun. A gray three-piece suit. The only splash of color was his hunter green Dartmouth tie.

  He was a tall, thin man of Ichabod Crane proportions. His hair, thin as the first dusting of autumn snow, was grayish white. His skin was actually grayish, as were his weak eyes.

  He might have been an accountant or a college professor or a retired undertaker. He was none of those things. He was Harold W. Smith, ostensibly head of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, secretly the director for CURE, the supersecret government agency that didn't exist-officially.

  Smith was reading The Wall Street Journal.

  Remo padded up to him on silent Italian loafers.

  "Uncle Smitty!" Remo cried. "It's been-what?-years. Am I still in the family will?"

  Smith looked up from his paper with genuine horror on his patrician features. "Remo. Please. Do not make a scene."

  Smith got up, folding his paper. He pushed back on the bridge of his rimless glasses, restoring them to correctness.

  "You old softie," Remo said. "Still shy in public." Then, in a quieter voice he asked, "Where's Chiun?"

  "He will be along shortly." Smith was tucking the newspaper und
er his arm. He clutched a worn leather briefcase in one bloodless hand. It was so scuffed that no selfrespecting thief would lower himself to steal it. It contained the computer link to the hidden CURE mainframes in Folcroft's basement.

  They started walking.

  "So, tell me about this castle," Remo prompted.

  "It might be better if you see it without any prejudicial preconceptions."

  "Has Chiun seen it?"

  "No."

  "You pass papers yet?"

  "Yes." Smith avoided Remo's eyes.

  "Which means if Chiun doesn't like it, you eat the mortgage, right?"

  Smith actually paled. Although he had at his disposal a vast black-budget superfund of taxpayer dollars, he spent it as if the copper in every penny came out of his own bloodstream.

  "Master Chiun stipulated a castle," Smith said. "Castles are not exactly plentiful in America. I have found him a perfectly good equivalent. Please do not spoil it."

  Remo eyed Smith doubtfully. "You trying to pull something here, Smitty?"

  "No," Smith said hastily.

  "We'll see," Remo said slowly. "Let's find Chiun."

  "He is coming in on Kiwi Airlines."

  "Wonderful," Remo said. "That means either he'll be six hours late or he went down in flames over Pittsburgh."

  "It was the most reasonable flight I was able to book for him on short notice."

  "And they have the most wonderful frequent flier program in the air," Remo added. "Right?"

  "Er, that is true."

  "Which no one has ever managed to collect on, because they either ate tarmac or couldn't stomach flying Kiwi a second time."

  "Those stories are exaggerated," Smith said defensively.

  They found the Master of Sinanju in the baggage area, patiently waiting for his luggage.

  He stood regarding the unmoving baggage conveyer belt like a tiny Asian idol carved from amber and dressed in scarlet silk. His face, in repose, might have worn the accumulated lines of his combined ancestors, the previous Masters of Sinanju, heirs to the House of Sinanju, the oldest line of professional assassins in human history and discoverers of the sun source of all the martial arts, which was also known as Sinanju.

  "Hey, Little Father," Remo called. "I see you made it in one piece."

  Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, turned. At the sight of Remo his wrinkled little face broke out in a beaming smile. His wise hazel eyes brightened.