Killing Time td-50

by Warren Murphy

  "You could have killed them," Chiun said.

  "I know." His mouth was grim.

  "You should have killed them."

  Remo nodded.

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  "Does your word hold such importance to you?" Chiun asked, disgusted.

  After a moment Remo answered, "Yes. I suppose it does."

  They walked through the snow in silence. Remo knew he might have made the biggest mistake of his life. If he didn't get Foxx now, the president of the United States was going to pay for that mistake.

  Chapter Sixteen

  Harold Smith arrived at Shangri-la in a Grumann Air Force helicopter that touched down just outside the building. Its huge engine idled as Smith went inside.

  The smell hit him as soon as he walked in the door. He gagged and blinked back the automatic tears that sprang into his eyes. Holding a handkerchief over his nose and mouth, he propped open the door, then made his way through the darkened mansion.

  The place was perfectly still, silent except for the hum of the helicopter outside. The rooms were empty, their draperies drawn closed. Probably to conserve heat, he thought, eyeing the piles of ashes in each of the fireplaces. His breath came out in white plumes. But even with the cold, the stink of the place was over­powering, and growing stronger as he neared the heart of the house.

  At least it wasn't summer, he thought. The last time he'd known this smell was in Korea, in a village where the North Koreans had slaughtered every man, wom­an, child, and article of livestock within five miles in or­der to "save" it from the devil Yanks. Smith was with the CIA then, and traveling with a platoon of regu­lar army toward Pyongyang to rescue a handful of

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  stranded agents with vital reports that couldn't be transmitted through normal channels. By the time the Americans reached the Korean village, the dead had been festering in the August sun for three days or more. The reek of death pointed the way to the village more accurately than any road sign.

  In the middle of the village stood a squat mud hut. It was the only building among the strewn rubble and straw that was still standing. When Smith kicked open its woven reed and bamboo door, he was greeted by the sight of two dozen bodies, their eye sockets filled with maggots, their tongues lolling black out of their bloated faces as flies swarmed like living flesh over them.

  The stink of Shangri-la brought back the image of the inside of that mud hut with a vividness that caused Smith's hands to shake. Was Remo in there? Was Chiun?

  "Do your job," he muttered aloud as he hesitated a few feet in front of the arched doorway leading to the banquet hall. This was it, he knew; the smell was com­ing from here. He prepared himself, but as he walked inside, he knew that nothing could have prepared him for the sight in front of him.

  It looked like a mausoleum. The remains of thir­ty people of incredible age lounged on the elegant pieces of furniture like party guests at some macabre celebration of the dead. They were dressed in finery from a dozen different eras: A flapper from the twen­ties, her face now a mask of withered leather beneath her bright cloche hat, sat demurely beside a World War I army major in full dress uniform, his nose a trian­gular hole like a jack-o-lantern's in his skeleton's face. A man in tails stared up through eyes puckered like raisins from a copy of The New Yorker on his lap, his

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  bone-fingers clasped around a fresh glass of green Chartreuse. Near him, the last embers of a fire smol­dered in the fireplace.

  A crypt, Smith thought, taking in the rest of the room. A repository for the long dead. Except for the terrible odor of death that spewed from every crack, there was nothing to indicate that these people hadn't died decades ago. It was as if every person in the room had ceased to live long before death had actu­ally come to claim their bodies.

  in the corner, slumped over the keys of a highly pol­ished grand piano, was a woman dressed in a shim­mering white satin evening gown. An ermine stole was draped over her shoulders, and her blonde hair cas­caded over the gleaming wood. Her fingers were still resting on the piano's keys.

  She looks so young, Smith thought, going over to her. Maybe there was a survivor. If this one girl could remember. . . .

  He lifted her by her shoulders. With a brittle snap of her neck, her head lolled back to reveal the papery, veiled face of a mummy.

  With a gasp, Smith let her go. Her hand dropped again to the keyboard with a little ping of music that seemed to echo forever.

  Rattled, Smith picked up his attach^ case and bolted into the next room. It was empty. The kitchen was empty, too, as were the upstairs bedrooms. He was grateful. The shock in the ballroom had been enough.

  He set the case on an eyelet-covered bed and used his handkerchief to wipe the perspiration off his clammy palms. When the phone inside the case rang, the handkerchief flew into the air. His stomach felt as if it had turned a complete revolution inside his body

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  as he wiped the dried spittle from his lips and fumbled with the catches on the case.

  "Yes," he said, hearing the hoarseness in his own voice.

  "It's Remo. I'm at a ranch somewhere near the South Dakota Badlands." He capsulized Sergeant Riley's story, leaving out the fact that he'd released all the members of the Team. Smith would never have understood that part. "Foxx'll be in Zadnia by tonight. I've got to get over there. Now."

  "Can you get me the exact coordinates of your loca­tion?" Smith asked.

  "I've got them." he rattled off the coordinates.

  "Hold your position," Smith said. "I'll have a plane pick you up."

  "Make it a fast one," Remo said. "While you've been at home snoozing, I've been freezing my butt off in the mountains."

  "I'm at Shangri-la," Smith said.

  "Oh?" There was a deliberate casualness in Remo's voice. "How are the folks there?"

  After a pause Smith said, "They're dead."

  There was silence on the line. "All of them?" Rerno said quietly. "The blonde?. . ."

  "All." Smith swallowed. "We'll talk about it later. Hold your position." He hung up. His next call was to the president. Then he made an anonymous call to the local county morgue, alerting them to the presence of thirty bodies in the mansion near Enwood.

  Outside, he scrambled into the helicopter and signalled the pilot to lift off. The pilot had been given instructions to follow the lemony-faced man's orders to the letter. He was a test pilot at Edwards Air Force Base who had flown every experimental aircraft

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  brought into the base and dealt with every manner of off-the-wall order handed down by the brass, so he didn't so much as blink when he was given emergency top-security clearance to fly the Grumann to a destina­tion known only to his civilian passenger. And he ex­hibited no surprise when the passenger told him to re­route the helicopter to the nearest airbase housing su­personic jets. Nor did he offer up any questions when he arrived at the base and was immediately handed a new set of top-security clearance papers to land a massive F-16 on a stretch of barren ground some­where in western South Dakota and pick up two other civilian passengers who would direct him to his next destination. The pilot took one look at the amount of liquid oxygen and hydrogen peroxide fuel being pumped, boiling and steaming, into the F-16, and knew it was going to be a long flight, wherever he was going.

  But it was all in a day's work. The pilot didn't much care who gave the orders, as long as they didn't try to fly the plane. He sat back in the flight lounge and poured himself a cup of coffee as the lemony-faced man called a taxi to take him to the nearest airport. He was probably some bureaucrat, sent to check out the efficiency of emergency operations, or some kind of nonsense like that. The two guys in South Dakota were probably doing the same thing.

  The F-16 was going to be a ride and a half for them. Well, what the hell, the pilot thought. Let them have their thrill. It'll probably be the high point of their entire boring, ordinary lives.

  Civilians, he thought, nodding off for a q
uick nap. They'll never know what real excitement is. He felt sorry for them.

  Chapter Seventeen

  Felix Foxx lit a slim cheroot in the anteroom to the Prince's Chamber in the Great Palace of Anatola in Zadnia. Prince Anatole had built the palace and named it, like his country's capital city, after himseif. During the corrupt and pagan days of Anatole's reign before Ruomid Halaffa and a handful of treasonous soldiers deposed him in the name of justice and de­cency, the Prince's Chamber had been shamefully misused as a playpen, where Anatole and his confi­dantes carried on affairs of state through orgies of drinking and gambling and wenching with a bevy of girls imported from the deserts of the south.

  Halaffa heaped scorn on the playboy prince for his wanton ways. After Anatole's execution, when the prince's bloodied head was impaled atop a minaret tower for all to see and despise, Halaffa announced the roster of sweeping changes he would bring to Zadnia. One of the main points of his stirring speech that day was that never again would the urgent mat­ters of state be discussed in an atmosphere as besot-ten and sinful as the notorious Prince's Chamber.

  He fulfilled his promise. During Halaffa's own orgies of drinking and gambling and wenching, absolutely no

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  affairs of state were discussed. Discussion of affairs of state were limited to Monday morning between 10:00 and 10:30 A.M., immediately following the morning executions and just before the palace's mid-morning hashish break.

  Foxx tipped the ash off the cheroot onto the floor, where it joined the mound of butts already deposited at his feet. Behind him, the gilded double doors lead­ing to the Prince's Chamber reverberated with rau­cous shouting and singing and the high screams of Halaffa's concubines.

  "But it's important," Foxx had told the guard at the gate, who had received instructions to send away any­one who didn't bring a bottle. "It's an affair of state."

  "Come back Monday," the guard said in a nasal singsong. "Affairs of state between ten, ten-thirty."

  "It's an emergency."

  "Emergencies between one, one-thirty," said the guard, sounding like an Eastern bagpipe.

  "This could mean world disaster," Foxx said in des­peration.

  "World disasters between three, three-thirty."

  Foxx was frantic. "Look, I've got to see him. Aren't there any circumstances where Halaffa would see me before ten o'clock Monday morning?"

  "Only super-duper emergency-casualty-world-destruction priority come before Monday morning, ten o'clock," the guard said.

  "Fine. I'll take that."

  "Monday morning, nine-thirty," the guard said.

  At last Foxx managed, with the help of a fifty-dollar bill, to persuade the guard to escort him to the ante­room. That was six hours ago. Since then, Foxx's agi­tation had blossomed into the beginnings of a nervous breakdown. His hands trembled. He saw spots in front

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  of his eyes. His mouth was dry. With every swallow the membranes of his throat stuck together like two pieces of Scotch tape.

  it was blown! The whole beautiful, foolproof cover of Shangri-la had been discovered and somehow infil­trated by some lunatic in a tee-shirt. The man named Remo had gotten as far as the Team itself. Of course, the Team would have made short work of the thin young man and his ancient Oriental partner, but it was the principle: They knew. After almost thirty years, someone knew about the Team. And if they knew, who else might know?

  It was time to go underground, to hole up in Zadnia for a year, until things blew over. He'd brought enough procaine in his plane to last him as long as it was nec­essary to hide out. Of course, the Team didn't have enough to get them through the next week, but he couid form a new Team. It would take work, but it was possible. As for the fools at Shangri-la, there would al­ways be more people with money, willing to trade their millions for Foxx's fountain of youth. The guests at the house in Pennsylvania were dead by now, anyway. He couldn't afford to waste time, worrying about them.

  The double doors opened a crack, filling the ante­room with noise and the scent of stale smoke and whiskey fumes. Halaffa stood inside the doors, his back to Foxx, laughing and shouting in Arabic to the others in the Prince's Chamber. He was still laughing when he stepped into the anteroom.

  "Your Highness," Foxx said, bowing on his knees before Halaffa. Halaffa's smile broke off and was re­placed by a scowl.

  "What do you want that is important enough to dis­turb me from the responsibilities of high office?" he bellowed.

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  "I seek asylum, Magnificence," Foxx squeaked. "There is a madman who has learned of our plans. He pursued me to the secret lair of my soldiers. He knows all. Perhaps he has communicated with others. The plan has been ruined. I come to you now to ask, not for payment for the three assassinations already per­formed perfectly, but only for a place where I may hide from the authorities of my pig-governed country until we have disappeared from the minds of those capital­ist buffoons."

  "I beg your pardon?" Halaffa asked.

  "They're onto us. We have to-"

  "Us? We?" Halaffa roared. "Your idiot plan goes up in smoke, and you dare to implicate me, Halaffa himself?"

  "But it was your pla-"

  "You are stupid enough to get caught performing treacherous acts against your country, and you expect me to grant you asylum?"

  "Well, I only thought-"

  "Where are your soldiers?"

  "They're at my base, sir, your Highness, sir."

  "You left them?"

  "Well, this man was after me, sir, quite an extraordi­nary man, really. He hung out of a window-"

  "You are a bigger ass than I thought. By Allah, you must be the biggest, roundest, reddest ass in the world! Are you mad? Do you think I would give even one moment's consideration to a man who would de­sert his own soldiers, while he flees to safety?"

  "Actually, it wasn't quite that dramatic," Foxx tried to explain.

  "Would I trust for one second a man who, without hesitation, would expose me and my country in a scheme that would cast us as villains the world over?"

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  "Oh, I think it'll all blow over in a few weeks-"

  "Guard!" Halaffa screamed. "Take this vermin away. Place him before the firing squad at dawn tom­orrow."

  "The firing squad?" Foxx wriggled vainly to free himself from the iron grip of the two giants on either side of him. "But, Your Excellency . . . Your Worship ... I have worked for you."

  "You have failed."

  "Prison, then," Foxx shouted frantically. "I'll take prison. You can't murder me just for making one mis­take, can you?"

  "No," Halaffa said thoughtfully. "Guards, halt." The giants stopped in their tracks. Halaffa rubbed his chin, deliberating. At last he said, "You are right, Dr. Foxx. I cannot in good conscience have you executed for abandoning your mission. After all, I am a fair man. A merciful man. A man who treads in the steps of Allah to bring peace and prosperity to Zadnia."

  "Thank God," Foxx whispered. He fell to his knees. "Praise be to you for a thousand years, Your Perfect-ness."

  "So it is my decision that you shall not be shot to­morrow morning for making a mistake."

  "Your Splendidness, Your Divinity ..."

  "You will be shot for interrupting my festivities this evening. Good-bye."

  "No! No!" Foxx screamed as the burly guards led him down the filthy stone stairwell into the dungeon, where rats picked clean the bones of those who had preceded him to the courtyard in which he would stand tomorrow.

  After the crusted iron bars of his cell slammed shut, one of the beefy guards shook a finger at him. "Next time, wait till Monday morning," he said.

  Chapter Eighteen

  The pilot of the F-16 put on his best aviator's smile for his two civilian passengers as the sleek craft screamed over the Mediterranean.

  "Sure sump'in' up here, idn't it?" he said in his avi­ator's fake Southern accent.

  Chiun shrugged. "No movies," he said.

&nbs
p; Remo focused in on the city of Anatola through the pilot's powerful binoculars. The mission. Don't think about anything but the mission now, he told himself. Posie was dead, and he might have been able to save her if... but don't think about that. It was over. She was dead. Period. From this distance, the city's white stucco walls and winding streets seemed almost washed clean of filth and dung and disease-bearing flies that were Zadnia's trademark the world over.

  "Okay," Remo said. "You can park anywhere."

  The pilot smirked behind his proteptive headgear. Civilians. Nonpilots. Well, who expected the lower forms of life to know beans from barnacles?

  "Sorry, pal. That's Zadnia," he said.

  "We know what it is," Chiun snapped. "Do you think we would fly in this noisy machine without even in-flight movies if we were going to Cleveland?"

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  "Fine," the pilot said, "but you can't land in Zadnia. They'll blow us up before we hit the ground."

  "All right," Remo said. "That makes sense. Where do you keep the parachutes?"

  "We don't have parachutes," the pilot said.

  Remo shook his head. "And you'd probably iose our luggage if we had any. All right. How low can you take this thing?"

  "Low?"

  "Weil, of course, low," Remo said. "Low."

  "Right down to wave top," the pilot said.

  "You don't have to go that low," Remo said. "Any­thing inside a hundred feet or so is good."

  "What for?" the pilot asked, even as he pushed the control forward and moved the plane down toward the blue waters of the Mediterranean.

  "What do you think for?" Remo asked. "Are your belts fastened?"

  "Yes."

  "Good-bye forever," Remo said. He punched out the plane's canopy, and then spilled out of the plane in a tumbling free fall, that quickly turned into a smooth eagle-soaring toward the white waves below.

  "Sloppy," Chiun said. He moved up in his seat.

  "You're not jumping, too, are you?" the pilot shouted over the scream of the wind.

  "If you'd rather land. ..."

  "Can't." It was the CIA. It had to be the CIA. Some kind of nutty suicide mission, with these two ninnies the victims.