Prophet Of Doom td-111 Page 6

  Remo said, "I'm full-grown now. Just point me in the right direction...."

  "If I don't tell you, I'd be doing you a favor," Lester cautioned. "Why don't you come along to the rally with me? The whole town's already there. We got a lot more serious stuff going on than those Truth Churchers." He tapped his largest lapel pin, which declared The GOP Does It On Its Platform.

  "Look—"

  71

  "Senator Cole himself is going to be there," Lester interrupted. "This is his hometown, you know. He and me went to school together. You know, I remember one time..."

  And with that Lester launched into a well-worn tale of how he had once backed up Jackson Cole in a junior-high-school fight.

  Remo rolled his eyes heavenward and hoped that Esther Clear-Seer didn't die of old age before he had a chance to pay her a visit.

  Senator Coles advance people had coordinated with the local police to ensure the senator would have a clear path from his limousine to the bandstand.

  The townspeople of Thermopolis were cordoned off in a wide circle around the speaker's area, leaving enough room for the senator's family and staff, local politicians and business leaders, as well as their families, and whatever media were covering the relatively minor photo op.

  As it was, there were only a few print reporters from nearby towns and a couple of camera crews. The first crew videotaping the speech was from a small local cable station, so it was naturally shuffled off to the back. The second was the more professional of the pair. It was from WONK, a larger station in Cheyenne that already had a deal with one of the major networks to run on the national nightly news any newsworthy footage they collected.

  The WONK camera had the sweetest location for filming, directly in front of the bandstand, and when it was announced that Senator Coje's limo was a block away, the cameraman checked his small black-and-

  72

  while receiver to make certain the picture was in perfect focus.

  He saw an egg.

  The cameraman squinted his eyes in confusion.

  An egg?

  He looked through the camera viewfinder. There it was, a little fuzzy, but it was definitely egg-shaped. He brought the camera into focus, and the edges of the egg grew more defined. It was tan and unevenly colored, with puffs of angel's hair on either side. And it had ears.

  The cameraman stuck his face around the camera.

  A bald head that looked like it had escaped from an ostrich nest was positioned directly between the camera and the bandstand. Beneath the head the back of a golden kimono with brilliant red piping cascaded down to the well-trampled grass.

  "Hey, Gramps, you're in the way," the cameraman complained.

  The sounds of cheers suddenly erupted from the edge of the crowd and swept inward, toward the stand. The senator had arrived.

  The cameraman looked around desperately. He could turn the camera to catch the senator as he climbed from his limo, but the wizened figure before him was casting a shadow across the equipment.

  "Hey, you're standing in my light."

  The old man didn't turn.

  Maybe the old guy was hard of hearing, the reporter thought, so he spoke up again, louder this time.

  There was an ever-so-slight movement of the gossamer webs above the ancient Asian's ears.

  "The radiance of the Master of Sinanju is light

  73

  enough for a thousand of your recording devices," the old man intoned without turning.

  "Wha—?" The cameraman looked around. The police were occupied with crowd control. The senator had climbed out of the car and was waving to the crowd. Graciously he helped his wife and daughter from the limo.

  The wife was an attractive, sixtyish woman. Her hair color was right out of a bottle and her hair seemed lacquered so tightly into place that if one follicle broke free the entire cliff would explode in a spray of hairpins and dried Lady Clairol flakes. She smiled at the crowd with perfect capped teeth.

  The senator was tall and gawky. His hairline had long ago scurried to the back of his head, and his awkward height had given him a slight hunch. Good humor danced in his beady eyes.

  Their combined effort, however, was far greater than the sum of both their parts. The daughter, Lori Cole, was beautiful. Fifteen years old and already a heartbreaker. Her wave to the crowd was almost regal.

  No sense thinking it, the cameraman thought. Fif-teen'll get you twenty, and besides she was said to be even more conservative than her old man. And anyway, he had a job to do.

  A job!

  He had forgotten about the old man.

  The Asian still stood rooted before him, seemingly as immobile as an ancient, slender elm.

  The arrival footage was completely ruined. Maybe he could make up for it with coverage of the speech itself.

  The thick black cable that connected his mountain

  of remote equipment to the WONK news van snaked directly beneath the robes of the tiny Asian.

  The cameraman glanced around. The cops were still busy with the senator. No one was looking his way.

  He grabbed the cable in both hands and yanked.

  Later, when he awoke in the hospital, the camera­man was assured that he need never worry about ad­equate lighting again. The small battery-operated light meter that he usually affixed to his camera had some­how found itself embedded between his ribs. The far end had been lodged in his heart in such a way that any attempt to remove it would prove fatal.

  One of the doctors suggested that until the batteries ran down, he might have a hard time sleeping, but he'd have no trouble reading in bed.

  Lester's childhood story had gone on way too long, and appeared to have no point whatsoever-at least none that Remo could discern. Remo was ready to sever Lester's spinal column and go off in search of Ranch Ragnarok by himself, when the large man's at­tention drifted to somewhere across Remo's right shoulder.

  "Lordy, Lou, will you look at that," said Lester.

  Remo glanced over his shoulder and saw a long black stretch limousine turn onto Thermopolis's main drag.

  He looked back at Lester. "So what?" he said.

  "So we don't get too many of them stretch jobbies in Thermopolis," whispered Lester. "It must be Sen­ator Cole himself."

  The limousine drew to a stop in front of Remo and Lester. For one horror-filled moment Lester thought

  75

  that it was indeed Jackson Cole, come to confront him about the bogus childhood story he had been boring people with for the past forty years. But when the tinted rear window powered silently down, a familiar head that didn't belong to Jackson Cole jutted into view.

  Remo recognized the giant ears and nose, as well as the close-cropped stubble of steely gray hair. The forehead seemed to go on forever, and the spindly neck vanished below the edge of the car window. On TV, Moss Monroe looked like Mr. Potato Head, but in real life he looked like Mr. Potato Head on steroids, thought Remo.

  Lester was beside himself with shock. "Dang!" he gasped. "Moss Monroe in the flesh!"

  "Could you boys just tell me where I could find that Ragnarok Ranch I keep hearin' so gol-darned much about?" a familiar nasal twang asked. His sharp Adam's apple bobbed enthusiastically.

  "Um, it's..." Lester began, "you, well, you follow this road to the edge of town and then take a right— no, a left. A left to a blinking amber light. Then just follow the road through the woods." He looked to Remo for agreement.

  "How the hell should I know?" Remo returned sharply.

  Lester shrugged feebly.

  "Well, that's just wonderful, that's just great," came the excited drawl of Moss Monroe from the back of the limo. "I'm much obliged, son. I'm more grateful than a live turkey on the day after Thanksgivin'."

  The darkened window rolled back up, and the limo sped off.

  76

  Remo pointed after it. "You'd tell him, but you wouldn't tell me?" he said, peeved.

  "Hey, I still remember the '92 campaign," Lester explained ner
vously. "If he asked for directions to the inside of a lion cage I would have driven him there myself."

  Chiun was waiting in the car when Remo returned.

  "Things have just gotten more complicated," Remo informed him as he slipped back in behind the wheel.

  "I saw the funny little man with the big ears," Chiun said. "Was his friend with him?"

  Remo raised an eyebrow. "What friend?"

  "The one who did not know his name or where he was. You remember, Remo, he starred in the television program where the president of vice won an argument, but was declared the loser, the next president of vice lost, but was declared the winner and the old man with the hearing aid did not listen to the questions at all."

  After the most recent presidential race, which had practically put the nation to sleep, the previous contest seemed like ancient history.

  "General Stocking?" Remo said finally. He remembered the geriatric general Moss Monroe had dragged out of mothballs to be his running mate, thus proving to the vast majority of American voters that he was about as serious a presidential contender as Pat Paulsen. "No, Stocking wasn't with him."

  Chiun considered. "It is a shame that program was canceled," he said pensively. "It was very funny."

  Remo nodded. "At least America would have had a good laugh while it was being mugged," he agreed,

  77

  starting the engine. "Find out anything, Little Father?"

  "Do you know those little lights on the sides of television cameras?"

  Remo arched an eyebrow. "Yeah?" he said lead-

  ingly.

  "They are detachable."

  And by the look of serenity on the Master of Sin-anju's face, Remo knew enough not to ask.

  Chapter Seven

  Moss Monroe had become a multibillionaire by accepting a huge number of lucrative business contracts from the federal government, before making himself a household name by publicly railing against the same government policies that had launched him from the ham-and-beans income-tax bracket to the stratosphere of the caviar and private Learjets.

  Of course, Moss didn't start complaining until the last of the government checks had cleared.

  Monroe first exploded onto the political scene as a guest on the "Barry Duke Live" cable-TV program. On that show Moss Monroe fielded phone calls from average Americans as if he were just another John Q. Public. And when those typical citizens asked what could be done to fix what ailed their country, Monroe was blunt: absolutely nothing could be done. America was finished. He said this, however, with a down-home folksiness that made him sound like a cross between Will Rogers and Jed Clampett, and won over people who couldn't tell down-home from dumbed-down.

  From the beginning, people were so captivated by the way Moss Monroe spoke, no one paid much attention to what he was actually saying.

  79

  His legislative agenda had the intellectual complexity of a Road Runner cartoon, and his entire political philosophy—though discussed with a reverence that made one think it had been carved of Mount Sinai granite—had been written by a five-hundred-dollar-per-hour PR agent.

  The pithiest of these "Mossy Musings" were laminated on a set of giant glossy placards that Monroe carted around wherever he went to sell himself. Because that was exactly what his entire game was: selling Moss Monroe, political savior.

  He had once stormed out of a live network-news broadcast because the anchorman conducting the interview insisted that Moss Monroe answer a direct question without referring to the large shiny charts that had been set up on an easel next to the anchor's desk. Without his charts Moss Monroe was as helpless as a baby. A crybaby.

  That this man, whose main asset was a well-stocked cupboard of aw-shucks platitudes, had risen to national prominence by declaring the nation was completely bereft of ideas was, perhaps, the most ringing endorsement of his own premise.

  In spite of his best attempts at blowing smoke, Moss Monroe hadn't been much of a player in the most recent presidential race. It had been an unspirited snore in which he had been relegated to the role of yapping Chihuahua.

  And while to his supporters Moss would always be the ultimate political outsider, to Moss himself it was getting pretty cold outside.

  Since the time nearly two years before the 1992 campaign when Moss had begun carefully orchestrating

  his "surprise" announcement to run, to the point in 1996 when his hopes had been dashed almost before they had gotten off the ground, Monroe had been forced to postpone the year he expected to finally take possession of the Oval Office. He was now looking at the year 2000, and if past experience had taught him anything, it was that he couldn't win now without a truckload of luck.

  What to do. What to do.

  He heard through the grapevine that, for the right price, luck could be purchased inside the hurricane-fenced perimeter of a small ranch somewhere in north­west Wyoming. And if there was one thing Moss Monroe had, it was purchasing power.

  The shiny black limousine with the Stand Tall, America vanity license plate ground to a halt before the high metal fence of the Truth Church ranch.

  The place looked like a Second World War pris­oner-of-war camp. Through the tinted rear windows, Moss Monroe could see a pair of concrete towers on either side of the main gate. High above, beneath slant­ing corrugated-steel roofs, snipers peered down sus­piciously at the new arrival, sunlight reflecting bril­liantly off matching black sunglasses.

  About a hundred yards away in either direction, an­other pair of sentry posts squatted amid the Wyoming brush.

  Moss Monroe understood that some denigrated the Truth Church as a cult, but those were probably the same individuals who labled him a crackpot, and so when the gates creaked open to swallow him, he didn't hesitate to order his chauffeur to drive on in.

  There was a perfectly ordinary-looking ranch house

  about a half mile up the packed dirt drive within the Ragnarok compound. Behind the ranch, Monroe could see a series of low-lying, interconnected concrete structures obviously built for function rather than style. On these, fatigue-clad men strolled back and forth with high-powered rifles hanging in the crooks of their arms.

  Monroe's limo circled around, ghosting to a stop alongside the long, rough-hewn porch running the length of the split-log ranch house.

  A robust woman with long coal black hair stood at the top of the rickety wooden staircase, waiting to greet the perennial odd man out of U.S. politics.

  "You have come to acquire spiritual enlightenment," Esther Clear-Seer announced as Moss Monroe's slight, four-foot-six-inch frame climbed down out of the limo.

  "Now, hold on there, missy," Moss Monroe said. His nasal twang sounded peeved as the red Wyoming dust settled atop his hand-tooled ostrich-skin cowboy boots. "I got one thing to say to you and one thing only—where's the feller what can tell me the future?"

  Her face sunk. "You want to see Kaspar," she said glumly.

  "Yeah. Kaspar. That's the jasper's name. I hear he can tell a feller when he's next gonna get paid, laid or made," Monroe whanged. "Trot him on out."

  Esther Clear-Seer composed her crestfallen face. Lately fewer and fewer supplicants came to the ranch willing to cede their wills to her. The money from Kaspar's venture was good, but Esther felt she was losing control over the crucial aspect of the Truth

  82

  Church ranch-the need to manipulate the drones. The acolyte pool was stagnating.

  Esther nodded to Moss Monroe. "Very well," she said resignedly. "I'll take you around back."

  A new voice cut the air.

  "Don't bother."

  Esther turned. Stepping out of the door behind her was Mark Kaspar. He must have taken the newly com­pleted tunnel that connected the Pythia Pit to her ranch, she knew. Esther was surprised. Rarely these days did Kaspar venture from the Pythia Pit.

  "Are you the feller I came here to see?" Moss Monroe demanded, clomping up on four-inch heels.

  "The question is irrelevant," Kaspar replie
d calmly. "There will be no oracles for you. Please leave."

  "What are you doing?" Esther asked out of the side of her mouth. "Do you know who this little martinet is?"

  "Now, looky here, son," Moss Monroe protested. "I don't think you unnerstand who you're talkin' to."

  Kaspar smiled. "On the contrary. I know all too well."

  He clapped his hands twice, sharply. Instantly squads of Truth Church disciples appeared from coigns of vantage around and atop the surrounding buildings, all training high-powered weapons on the diminutive but unmissable target that was Moss Mon­roe.

  "Are you out of your mind?" Esther hissed. "This is Moss Monroe. The guy blows his nose on thousand-dollar bills. Take his damn money."

  Moss Monroe tilted back a ten-gallon hat that sat

  83

  atop his head like a pelican about to lay eggs on a rock. His eyes got beadier, if possible.

  "Son, I am prepared to offer you one hundred million out of my own personal savings account if you'll get your little future teller to do some predictin' for me."

  Kaspar ignored Monroe. He gestured to the poised snipers above.

  "Granted, they are not the feared Black Panthers, who I'm told are fond of performing calisthenics on your front lawn, but they are still quite effective."

  "This is crazy." Cupping her beringed hands before her mouth, Esther Clear-Seer barked, ' 'Everyone, back off!"

  The Truth Church squads didn't move.

  Esther's eyes flew wide.

  "Back off!" she shouted once more. Still nothing. "This is Yogi Mom speaking. As the Beatific Head and Prophetess of your church, I command you to return to normal sentry stations."

  But her acolytes refused to budge. When Esther turned to face Mark Kaspar, her pale face was a marble mask of pure hate.

  "The power of the Pythia's prophecies is great," Kaspar intoned with a broad, knowing smile.