Prophet Of Doom td-111

by Warren Murphy

  In spite of the warm night, Esther felt a chill run down the gully of her back.

  I

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  "What would be finished?"

  "The temple, man, the temple," Gary intoned from his reclining position in the Wyoming scrub. He plucked a thorn from his lowermost chin.

  Esther furrowed her brow. No phones were allowed on ranch property except for the one locked away in her private ranch house. As far as she knew, Kaspar hadn't left the grounds since his arrival more than a month and a half before. How could he have known his temple would be completed today?

  With a shrug she led the pair the rest of the way across the field, through the gap in the hurricane fence and onto the newly purchased Truth Church annex.

  The partially collapsed hangar had been scraped and repainted by Esther's obedient acolytes. After the rubble had been cleared away, Kaspar had instructed the workers to create a new addition to the sixty-plus-year-old building. A two-story rounded cinder-block room bubbled from one end of the building and engulfed an area of the new property where jets of natural steam rose from fissures in the craggy black rock.

  Sections of the new ceiling were designed to roll away, and Esther noticed as they approached the building that the skylights were wide-open. Bursts of phosphorescent yellow smoke puffed from the roof holes and hung ominously in the hazy black sky.

  Kaspar met them at the main entrance.

  "What the hell are you wearing?" Esther whispered to him.

  Kaspar's outfit was ceremonial in the extreme. A long white robe, heavily pleated at the bottom, trailed the ground behind him. A yellow shawl was drawn over his narrow shoulders, and its ends were tucked

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  behind a wide lavender sash belted around his waist. A black skullcap, embroidered with the same inter-twined-serpent motif that adorned the urn he'd brought with him to Ranch Ragnarok, fitted perfectly over his thin hair.

  In his hand he carried a walking stick, no longer than a drum majorette's baton, but carved in the shape of a hissing snake. There was something in the strange image on the pole that reflected the reptile within the body of Mark Kaspar.

  The most startling thing was Kaspar's attitude. He not only ignored her question, but he also seemed to ignore her very presence.

  Without so much as acknowledging the Truth Church leader, he aimed his snake-staff at Zen and Gary and issued a single command.

  "Follow. The future awaits."

  Without another word, Kaspar spun on his heel and vanished into the smoky interior of the converted warehouse.

  Inside, construction had already begun to link the temple with the underground network of tunnels on the Ragnarok property. A concrete flight of stairs in the foyer led deep into the earth but stopped short of the original Truth Church perimeter fence. That phase of the project had yet to be completed.

  At Kaspar's insistence there was no generator for electricity. Along the walls, hundreds of flickering candles burned dimly among the clouds of yellow smoke.

  Esther had never been here this late at night and never with the strange yellow smoke swirling

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  everywhere. Kaspar's bizarre costume and mysterious attitude, plus the way the little man seemed to fade and reappear with the flickering of the candlelight, made for an unnerving experience.

  "This place is creepy," she hissed.

  Zen and Gary didn't seem to mind. The two of them babbled incessantly about ice cream, the evils of capitalism and their previous brief encounter with Mark Kaspar.

  "It was in New England," Zen confided to Esther.

  "That's where we got started," Gary explained.

  "And how did you come to meet Kaspar?" Esther had asked.

  Silent since they had entered the building, Kaspar spoke now with a quiet solemnity—like a priest in the confessional.

  "I once offered them a small glimpse of the future," Kaspar admitted.

  "The dude told us to go into frozen yogurt," Zen enthused.

  "We made a bundle," Gary agreed.

  Both of the men seemed suddenly ashamed.

  "Filthy bourgeois capitalist system," Zen spit.

  "Capitalism sucks," Gary agreed enthusiastically.

  They made it through the labyrinth of hallways, crossed an expansive interior chamber and moved back into a series of dank chambers on the far side of the building.

  It was easy to become disoriented. Esther wasn't quite certain where they were in the old building until she recognized the grey white smoothness of the recently constructed wall.

  They had reached Kaspar's special chamber.

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  A heavy woven tapestry blocked the doorway to the inner hall, but it wasn't so thick that the jaundiced smoke did not seep from beneath it.

  Esther's eyes watered. She wiped the tears on her pajama sleeve and tried to blink away the sharp, stinging sensation.

  In the spooky gloom something brushed against her leg.

  Esther nearly jumped out of her skin. "What the hell!" she shouted, spinning around wildly.

  Some kind of animal was behind her. It stood quietly in the weirdly elongated shadows, the tiny bursts of candlelight reflecting in its frightened eyes.

  It was a goat. Even in the darkness she could make out the rope that tethered the animal to a bronze ring in the cinder-block wall.

  "What's with that?" Esther asked Kaspar.

  Kaspar did not respond. Instead, he addressed Zen and Gary. "You will give the woman two hundred dollars, cash, for the sacrifice," he instructed.

  Esther accepted the money sullenly, thinking she would eventually get Kaspar alone. What she was going to do to the insolent little turd when she finally did would be something.

  Kaspar pulled the rope from the wall and handed the goat's leash to Zen. With no further comment, he swept the tapestry aside and ushered the others into the chamber beyond.

  Esther Clear-Seer had watched the inner chamber take shape over the past month. On numerous occasions she had complained to Kaspar that it looked more like a bad Hollywood movie set than a legitimate place of worship. But in the eerie, scattered light of a

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  dozen torches, with the skylights opened on the moonless black sky and with a vaporous cloud of burning yellow smoke floating like mist through the lifeless air, the huge vault took on a paganistic aura.

  As the visitors entered, the pile of stone around which the room had been built spit irregular bursts of steam. The rock suggested the summit of a trapped and nearly buried mountain and made the room look like some kind of animal habitat, as if the surrounding walls formed a cage through which visitors could glimpse zoo animals in their natural environment.

  And high atop this pile of rock, on a small three-legged stool balanced above the uppermost sulphur vent, sat the mysterious young girl who had arrived at Ranch Ragnarok with Kaspar. Her vacant eyes stared through the veil of yellow smoke and into the mists of time.

  "Welcome to the magnificence of the Temple of Apollo Reborn," Kaspar said.

  "Far out," Zen said.

  "Karma-licious," Gary agreed.

  "Apollo?" Esther muttered. "What is this crap?"

  Kaspar mounted the stone steps that had been carved into the side of the rocky hill. When he reached the top, he turned and regarded those below.

  "Sacrifice, and you will hear the wisdom of the Pythia," he intoned.

  Zen and Gary looked at one another. They shrugged.

  "Sacrifice?" Zen asked.

  Kaspar reached beneath his brightly colored shawl and removed a long, curving dagger from a hidden

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  scabbard. He threw the knife down to the waiting ice-cream merchants.

  "Sacrifice," Kaspar repeated. He gestured toward the terrified goat.

  It took some arguing and a lot of threatening and a great deal more work than they had expected, but in the end it was Zen who got to hold the wriggling goat while Gary stood ready to slit the throat of the hapless animal.


  The girl on the stool writhed in ecstasy as the knife was drawn across the throat of the pitiful creature, and when the body was still she let out a cry that was distinctly sexual.

  At Kaspar's instructions the bloody carcass was set at the foot of the stone staircase.

  Afterward, when she sat back on her stool, her glassy eyes seemed somehow more fierce in the eerie torchlight. Esther noticed a flicker, almost a nervous tic, at the corner of the girl's mouth.

  "You may ask your question of my master," Kaspar called down.

  Nervously Zen and Gary stepped forward and addressed the girl who seemed not to be aware of their presence.

  "What we need to know is should we open up a chain of Zen and Gary's Ice Cream Shops in Moscow?" Zen asked. "I mean, the political situation with the collapse of communism is awful from an anticap-italistic viewpoint, obviously. But..." Zen let his words trail away, looking for all the world as if he was ashamed of what he was thinking. He glanced at his partner.

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  "But can we make a buck at it?" Gary asked hurriedly.

  Kaspar whispered into the ear of the young girl.

  There was no considering the question. Seemingly no thought at all.

  "The gods will smile on your venture," the girl called down, in a thick, rasping voice.

  Zen and Gary high-fived one another.

  At Kaspar's instructions, they paid Esther Clear-Seer a quarter million dollars with a Zen and Gary's corporate check—showing the Grateful Dead gorging themselves on Gary Garcia ice cream—and Esther didn't even notice that the check was made out to something called the Truth Church Foundation.

  She was too busy watching the girl. It was the first time Esther had heard the girl speak, and the voice filled her with terror.

  Of course Zen and Gary told their friends about Ranch Ragnarok.

  In a country where new trends in spirituality were eagerly embraced and salvation was the nearest zir-conian crystal away, the idea of paying top dollar for the prophecies of a seemingly strung-out teenage girl was accepted with an alarming readiness.

  Over the following winter a trickle of curious high rollers arrived at the Truth Church gates, all referred to Ranch Ragnarok by the ice-cream gurus. Several other New Agey business leaders, who were as ashamed of their success as Zen and Gary but who had nonetheless made small fortunes selling everything from preworn jeans to computers, posed questions to the oracle at Ragnarok. Esther once thought

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  she recognized a United States congressman, but Kaspar had shooed her from the temple and conducted the man's session with the Pythia—as Kaspar now called the girl—in private.

  Nearly eight months had passed since Kaspar first arrived at the ranch, and as the money in the Truth Church Foundation swelled from hundreds of thousands to millions, Esther Clear-Seer found her desire to confront him about his occasional lapses of insolence subsiding.

  Esther even dismissed her original fear at hearing the voice of Kaspar's young female friend. She convinced herself that the girl's strange, guttural rasp could have been the result of a decade of cigarette smoking. It could even have been bronchial pneumonia. Lord knew, the girl wasn't looking very healthy

  of late.

  Esther mentioned this to Kaspar as dawn broke one morning after a particularly grueling session with a sports announcer from one of the major television networks.

  "Maybe you should have a doctor look at her,"

  Esther muttered.

  Kaspar was sorting through a stack of papers piled on a bench at the base of the central rock column. He seemed to have gathered a lot of paperwork since the start of this enterprise and he was becoming increasingly engrossed in whatever it was he was collecting.

  With an effort he tore his eyes away from the papers before him. He looked up at the girl, still perched on the tripod, though the smoke from the rock fissure had subsided somewhat.

  "Why?" Kaspar asked indifferently.

  As if on cue, the girl on the stool swooned and

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  toppled over. The stool went one way, flipping out of sight down the back of the hill, and the girl did an unintentional somersault before tumbling roughly down the hard rock surface toward them.

  Her bloodied, emaciated body landed in a crumpled heap at the feet of Esther Clear-Seer and Mark Kaspar.

  Esther recoiled in horror. As the girl's breath became more and more ragged, she saw her increasingly opulent life-style slip away.

  All at once the breathing stopped.

  Esther crouched over the body. "She's dead," she announced anxiously.

  Kaspar couldn't have shown less emotion if Esther had reported swatting a common housefly. He adjusted his bifocals.

  "Then you'll just have to find me a fresh virgin," he said blandly.

  "Me?" Esther gulped.

  "You," Kaspar said, as if that ended the matter.

  And he went back to studying his paperwork.

  Chapter Four

  Harold W. Smith, head of the supersecret government agency CURE, sat stiff-backed on the rickety wooden chair in the living room of Remo Williams's home in Quincy, Massachusetts.

  The chair was old and creaked at his every movement but, Smith noted wryly, it wasn't nearly as old and rickety as he felt.

  He had headed CURE—the agency set up outside constitutional limits, whose paradoxical mission it was to preserve the document CURE'S very existence flouted—since its inception, and had watched himself grow older and older in the post. Some said the presidency aged a man, but the pressures a President had to bear were nothing compared to the daily strains placed upon the tired, overworked shoulders of Harold W. Smith.

  Intermittent humming came from another room. It was a strange, singsong melody with an odd cadence that stopped abruptly, only to begin again. The Master of Sinanju.

  Smith squirmed in his chair. He prided himself on his excellent posture, but lately his lower back had been giving him trouble. Altogether it seemed to him that with his congenital heart defect that should have

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  been treated by a pacemaker, recurring ulcers, frequent headaches, his list of physical problems was growing by the day.

  Smith tried to sit up straighter in his chair, hoping to alleviate the pressure on his lumbar region.

  All at once the humming in the distant room stopped. A moment later Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, head of the most lethal house of assassins ever to grace the face of the earth, padded silently into the room on black sandals.

  He was a delicate bird of an elderly Korean attired in a flowing kimono. His wrinkled skin had the consistency of rice paper. His bones looked fragile where they poked out from various joints. Puffs of cloudy white hair decorated his balding head. A wisp of a beard clung to his chin. His fingernails were long and wickedly sharp.

  "Remo has returned," Chiun said to Smith.

  Chiun had deserted Smith the instant the CURE director had arrived, claiming the need to attend to "other pressing matters" elsewhere in the house. Smith had volunteered his assistance—after all, Remo was not due for some time—but Chiun had quickly declined the offer, claiming that his work, if done in solitude, would bring even greater glory to his kind and gracious emperor. In truth, in the four hours since Smith had arrived, Chiun had been sitting by a back window watching the spring grass grow.

  Remo entered the room a minute later.

  "I see the gang's all here," he said, glancing at Smith. "What's up, Smitty?"

  Smith stood, grateful for the chance to relieve the pressure on his spine. Chiun interposed himself

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  between the two men and drew Remo to the far corner

  of the room.

  "Where have you been?" Chiun demanded in a whisper. "I have been forced to entertain this decrepit white thing for ages." His hazel eyes cast a quick glance at Smith. ' 'Look how he stands. Like a woman in her last, swelling days of pregnancy. Get rid of him soon, Remo, so that we might eat our dinner in peace." With t
hat the Master of Sinanju sent a gracious nod in Smith's direction and moved back closer to settle to a lotus position in the center of the floor.

  "Er, is there a problem?" Smith asked uncertainly.

  Chiun waved his hand dismissively. "I was rebuking Remo for a previous wrong," he sniffed.

  ' 'I see,'' Smith said. He retook his seat, and Chiun cast him an impatient glance from narrowed hazel

  eyes.

  Remo rolled his eyes. ' 'I saw your rental car in the

  side lot, Smitty. What's up?"

  ' 'Remo, do you recall the incident with the Branch t>avidians in Waco, Texas, a few years back?"

  Remo grabbed a chair and sat across from Smith. "I remember the headlines at the time," he said. "Feds Fry Wackos In Waco. You should have sent me and Chiun in to take care of business before it got

  started."

  ' 'It was a consideration. Unfortunately you were on another assignment at the time."

  "Yeah, it was a real mess," Remo said. "A bunch of peaceniks descending on women and children with tanks. Who would've thought the attorney general would have found time to play general in between lifting weights and initiating cover-ups?"

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  "Remo, please," Smith said. His back was sore, his ulcer was acting up and it seemed that he had completely lost the attention of the Master of Sinanju. He wanted nothing more than to return to his office in Rye, New York.

  "Okay, Smitty," Remo said, waving a thick-wristed hand. "What's the deal this time?"

  "A situation has developed in Wyoming, similar to the Branch Davidian problem. A woman claiming to be a prophetess of some new doomsday religion has isolated herself in a rural area of the state. She expects absolute obedience from her followers, as well all their worldly goods. In return she promises to protect them from the tribulations to come at the millennium's conclusion."

  "This one cannot protect herself from Sinanju, O Emperor Smith," Chiun piped up. "Though she may surround herself with countless armies of fighting men, she cannot stay the shadowy hand of Sinanju." "Thank you, Master of Sinanju," Smith said with a polite bow of the head. "Until recently the authorities were willing to look the other way on this obvious cult of personality. They were even willing, it seemed, to disregard reports of large weapons storehouses on the property. But I have recently learned that the FBI had someone under deep cover at the camp and that this operative has failed to report for several months. If they decide to send in more agents, the situation could escalate. It is my belief that this cult is becoming far too powerful. I want you and Chiun to take care of it before federal foot-dragging allows the FBI to initiate another Waco."