Prophet Of Doom td-111

by Warren Murphy

  It ended with this one. If Kaspar wanted more girls, then let him go out and get them.

  The money was good—that much was certain—but every time she'd had to go out on one of these damn missions, she found herself digging in the Ranch Rag-narok survivalist rations for painkillers just to relieve the stress-induced migraines that invariably followed. She had taken almost a dozen ibuprofens since the afternoon just to get through this night's ordeal.

  Enough was enough.

  She'd get this one, but then Esther Clear-Seer was cashing out of the virgin-procurement business for good.

  As for Kaspar—well, he would just have to worry about the next one on his own.

  That decided, Esther mounted the wooden steps of the deck double-time and slid stealthily across the green plastic outdoor matting mat had been designed

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  to look like grass by someone who had apparently never seen a square inch of genuine lawn.

  As foretold, she found the back door key in the clay saucer of a potted plant beside the rear steps. She let herself into the large house.

  By the harsh floodlight glow pouring in through every window, Esther made her way easily through the rear mud room, along the central hallway and to the main stairwell at the front of the house.

  The stairs were carpeted, and she made no sound as she climbed carefully to the second floor.

  Kaspar had told her that the fourth step from the top squeaked loudly, and so she avoided it, stepping gingerly from the fifth to the third.

  When she reached the second story, Esther moved quietly left. She counted down two doors. With more calm than she felt, she removed a small plastic sandwich bag from her pants pocket. Inside lay an ether-soaked square of surgical cotton. She pulled the moist wad free, stuffing the bag back into her pocket.

  She took one last deep breath, careful not to inhale any of the ether herself, and placed the palm of her free hand against the smooth painted surface of the heavy oaken door.

  The door swung inward on silent hinges.

  It took a moment for Esther's eyes to adjust to the room's interior.

  The shades on the two large windows had been drawn down to the sills, but stabs of light from outside sneaked around the sides of the shades and into the room.

  Stripes of light, like fire in the dead heart of night,

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  burned across the ceiling, the round braided rug and the plain white walls.

  A single beam crossed the peaceful, sleeping features of a young girl, no older than her late teens, stretched carelessly in an oversize T-shirt across the rumpled bedcovers.

  Even in the nearly complete darkness, Esther could see that the girl was beautiful. She had that wholesome, middle-American quality that Hollywood could never quite get right no matter how artfully the makeup technicians tried.

  There was also something strangely familiar about her. No big deal. Esther assumed she had seen the young girl in town.

  On tiptoe, Esther crossed over to the bed.

  She could hear the girl's breathing. A tiny, hissing intake of air, nearly inaudible.

  Esther looked down at the youthful, innocent features and, without hesitation, slapped the wad of treated cotton over the girl's mouth and nose.

  Green eyes snapped open; the head thrashed. Hands came up, first in shock, then in desperation, trying to ward off the terrifying attack.

  Esther immediately dropped onto the girl, using her imposing weight to pin the younger woman to the bed. It worked.

  In a second all resistance faded. The girl's arms dropped to her sides, but her fingers continued to move lazily, as if motioning for help to some unseen guardian.

  Soon her eyes rolled back in her head, and the lids gently fluttered closed.

  Testing, Esther pulled the cotton slowly away. She

  couldn't chance the girl playing possum. She stood ready to slap the ether-soaked wad back into place. But a minute passed and the young girl didn't move. Satisfied, Esther stuffed the cotton back in the sand­wich bag and shoved the package into the zippered pocket of her baggy khaki trousers.

  She got up from the bed and looked down upon the once more peaceful figure.

  Now came the hard part.

  Esther grabbed the girl by the arms and pulled her as gently as possible to the room's thick braided car­pet.

  As she dragged the limp body out into the hallway, she vowed once more that this was the absolute last one she was going to get for Kaspar. From now on the damn Greek was on his own.

  With great difficulty, and many rest periods, Esther used a modified fireman's carry to get the girl outside.

  The lights were on timers, set to go on and off at preset hours, and some had already snapped off by the time Esther reached the driveway. Most, however, still burned brightly; silent accusers in the chilly spring night.

  With her heart pounding, she dragged the uncon­scious girl as quickly as possible into the relative cover of the nearby strip of woods.

  It took Esther ten minutes to reach her car. Ten minutes. An eternity during which she could have been discovered by a nosy neighbor, a police patrol or anyone out for a late-evening drive.

  Fortunately the furor over the early abductions was keeping folks indoors, and she made it to her car with­out encountering a solitary soul.

  Once she had heaved the girl's limp body into the trunk and slammed the lid tightly closed, she allowed herself a second of relief.

  Esther was sweating profusely and panting like a woman in labor. She wiped the sweat from her brow with her now grimy, bare forearm and, with a final glance around the desolate access road, she climbed behind the steering wheel.

  As she drove back down Sagebrush Street, past the innocent-looking house and out onto the main drag, Esther, as she had coming in from the opposite direction, again failed to notice the mailbox at the end of the large home's driveway. It sat hidden between a well-tended rhododendron shrub and a hedge of budding forsythia bushes.

  Kaspar wouldn't have been surprised by her lack of perception. The Pythia had foreseen it.

  The mailbox sat atop a sturdy oaken pole and was designed to look like a scale-model barn. There was a tiny door for the hayloft, windows along the side, and the main barn door rested on a well-oiled hinge to allow for daily insertion of mail. The mailbox even had a freshly painted, bright red exterior, and a rooster weather vane perched atop the roof, shifting in whatever direction the breeze happened to blow it.

  There was, however, one small concession to the box's practical purpose. A street address and a name had been stencilled on the tiny barn's side to identify the occupants of the large home beyond.

  The street address was irrelevant to Esther, since she had gotten the number from the well-lit front door of

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  the house itself, but the name, had she seen it, might have held some interest to her.

  It read J. Cole.

  Virgin number five.

  The midnight sky over Wyoming was a limitless black canvas peppered with the white-hot specks of a million scattered stars as Remo Williams drove through the desolate stretch of country between the airport at Wor-land and Thermopolis.

  Houses—indeed, any sign of civilization—were few and far between for vast reaches along this lonely route, and Remo found it oddly disconcerting to be traveling through the darkened fields and forests with barely a road sign or streetlight to mark the presence of man in this nearly unspoiled wilderness. The highway itself ran like a flat black desecration through it. Driving along, Remo felt like he had taken a turn into the Twilight Zone—especially when he neared the hot-springs area and the air became humid and thick.

  He was relieved when he at last arrived in Thermopolis.

  Due to the lateness of the hour, the town was understandably quieter. The crowds were gone from downtown, but the place still held an old-fashioned charm about it. It was almost as if this tiny rural hamlet was a throwback to an earlier, simpler America.

  A
minute later Remo realized that life in Thermopolis was not as simple as he had thought.

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  State police cars patrolled the streets, backed by a handful of local police cruisers. Remo assumed this was connected to the spate of kidnappings two weeks earlier.

  He avoided two cruisers that flew angrily past in rapid succession, their blue-and-red lights cutting fierce wedges into the otherwise silent night. Another patrol car was parked near the edge of town, forcing Remo to detour around it, carefully threading his way through a maze of shadowy back streets. He eventually managed to slip out the far side of town undetected.

  The blinking amber light that signaled the turnoff to Ranch Ragnarok sprang up over the horizon like a gaunt, one-eyed sentry, and Remo eased onto the bumpy path, kicking up a cloud of dust in his wake. Gravel bounced back atop the asphalt road like excited popcorn kernels.

  Remo didn't slow the car until he was several hundred yards along the access road, in the secure darkness of a ponderosa pine forest. He killed the ignition.

  Before the engine fully died, Remo was out of the vehicle and moving along the narrow dirt road like a fitful shadow.

  As he moved, his heightened senses detected a pack of four large animals—most likely wolves—tramping among the trees to his left. Their stealthy movements would have been undetectable by ordinary human ears, but to Remo they might as well have been baying and howling with every clumsy footfall.

  They had heard his car and were coming to investigate.

  The wolves wouldn't find anything. Remo left the car and the wolves behind as he ghosted into the

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  blackened pines toward Truth Church ranch, leaving neither scent nor spoor.

  At the precise moment Remo disappeared into the woods, Buffy Brand was wondering what the devil was going on at Ranch Ragnarok.

  The blare of Klaxons had awakened all true acolytes from their bunkers only hours before. Buffy had followed her squad to the main compound, where they met up with the rest of the two hundred or so permanent ranch residents.

  It wasn't unusual for residents of the Truth Church ranch to be roused in the middle of the night. At times Esther Clear-Seer called Armageddon alerts at least twice a month—most notably four years ago when she had insisted that all Truth Church followers worldwide quit their jobs and move to the ranch in preparation for the final nuclear holocaust that would wipe out Western civilization. The warheads had, of course, never landed. Esther had brushed aside the false alarm as a "reality-derived readiness drill."

  She had also come away from that panicky period several million dollars richer.

  There had been other, more subdued drills since then—smaller in scope, mostly owing to the diminished church membership since the failed Apocalypses of previous years—and so no one blinked when they were suddenly put on final alert. What was unusual this time, they soon learned, was that the acolytes, after being issued antiheathen arms, had been instructed to stay topside. Up where Yogi Mom had always insisted the deadly firestorms and radioactive

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  fallout would obliterate the planet's less blessed inhabitants.

  Only a handful of Esther's followers remained underground. Buffy Brand was one of them. She had been placed in front of a bank of monitor screens in the situation room and told to remain on alert. When she asked the acolyte master sergeant what she should be looking for, he had snapped that she'd know it when she saw it. Truth be told, Buffy doubted that the man knew himself what terror they were awaiting.

  And so, like the others, Buffy was kept in the dark as her weary eyes shifted from screen to screen across the high-tech board.

  The area the exterior cameras monitored was vast. It included the exteriors of the Ragnarok buildings, as well as the plains and forests surrounding the ranch. Mounted on poles and trees, on the high guard towers or on the desolate stretches of fence that cut across the lonely prairie, the cameras kept vigilant eye on the unsuspecting night.

  Occasionally a camera would swirl around, and Buffy would catch a glimpse of a Truth Church foot patrol stomping its way through the brush, their black-clad shapes bathed in the washed-out green of night-vision filters.

  As her eyes wandered across the vast Wyoming frontier—made alien by the eerie green glow of the cameras—Buffy took a deep breath.

  Half the screens before her remained black. They had been hastily shut off earlier in the evening after some of the Ragnarok technicians had recalibrated the positions of the cameras to which they were connected. At each of the five other monitoring stations

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  in the security room, the corresponding screens had been shut down.

  Unbeknownst to Buffy, the man beside her, who was staring with a sullen intensity at the board in front of him, had been instructed by the Prophetess herself to turn on each of the four dormant cameras at predetermined times. Yogi Mom had been quite specific about when they were to be reactivated, down to the precise second, calibrated to Greenwich Mean Time.

  Buffy checked her synchronized watch. She felt weary to the very core of her being.

  It was probably the lateness of the hour. Since she had come to Ranch Ragnarok, all members of her acolyte shift were required to go to bed at precisely nine o'clock each night. It was now past midnight, and Buffy was bleary-eyed.

  She yawned loudly, rubbing her bloodshot eyes. The acolyte at the adjoining monitoring station shot her an angry look. It had been his job to guard Ragnarok against any and all evil infiltrators, and the racoon-rims around his bloodshot eyes were testament to the fact that he took his job very seriously.

  She gave him a lopsided smile by way of apology and turned her attention back to the screens.

  The other guard harrumphed in displeasure and began drumming his fingers on the metal console before him. He glanced at his watch.

  It was almost time.

  Five minutes after he'd left his car, Remo encountered the first night patrol. The man leading the group of ragtag soldiers was

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  the same one he and Chiun had encountered the last time he had penetrated Ranch Ragnarok.

  The man held his AR-15 menacingly before him. The rest of his patrol did likewise. Remo counted eight in all.

  Remo tipped an ear toward the forest and listened. Still more soldiers carrie stomping jthrough the thick woods, some nearby, others farther away. Since the nearest patrol was brandishing weapons—Remo could tell by the way the soldiers carried themselves—he had to assume that the others were armed, as well.

  This time Remo was absolutely certain he hadn't tripped any motion detectors or been spotted by any cameras. He had been extracareful since leaving his car. Every time he sensed the hum of electrical equipment, he cut a wide swath around the offending piece of technology.

  So why were the soldiers out in force?

  Remo figured he'd stumbled into the middle of some sort of night training exercise.

  He had to remind himself that these men weren't innocents. In spite of the promise of universal love they preached, these Truth Church crusaders had killed at least one FBI agent and possibly dozens of their own cult members.

  Regardless of their reason for being here this night, they were unlucky enough to find themselves between Remo and Esther Clear-Seer.

  The eight soldiers moved loudly through the woods. The leader had positioned himself in the middle of the pack, thinking that he would be better protected from attack with the rest of his command surrounding him. Two of the others had been part of the original group

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  that had collected Remo and Chiun, and one of these fanned out before the rest, taking point.

  Remo slid silently behind a tree, and waited for the men to approach.

  The path veered sharply to the right, and for a moment the pointman dropped out of sight of the others.

  Remo reached a hand out from behind the tree and wrapped his fingers around the barrel of the rifle. He pulled.

/>   The soldier had no time to react. His feet left the path and he disappeared into the woods, still clutching his weapon. There was a short snap—no louder than a breaking twig—and then nothing more from the limp sack of camouflage-dappled meat.

  Remo used the butt of the rifle to stuff the body into the hollow of a fallen log. It felt like tamping powder into an old-fashioned cannon. Most of the man fit, and those parts that didn't Remo covered with a few strategically placed handfuls of pine needles.

  As the body of the patrol filtered down the path, Remo slid back into the shadows, circling around behind them.

  The soldiers had started to miss the pointman. Some were puzzled, while others were beginning to grow fearful. One of the men began to recount how they had encountered two men in the woods not long before who seemed able to appear and disappear at will.

  The patrol leader ordered silence and feigned a lack of concern. But Remo could smell the fear building up around him like an odor of bleach.

  As the Ragnarok patrol picked its way through the spot where the pointman had vanished, Remo slipped up behind a pair of soldiers at the patrol's rear. With

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  a single swift, fluid motion he reached out and wrapped his fingers around the tops of their spines. He exerted pressure. Bones creaked and snapped under the pressure. And before the men had time to cry out, their spinal columns snapped free of their skulls. Two bodies collapsed like discarded marionettes in Remo's outstretched hands.

  He drew them silently back into the woods, their boots dangling free of the ground.

  Their disappearance went unnoticed for only seconds.

  "Where's Adams and Caine?" the patrol leader demanded.

  The remaining five soldiers looked fearfully about. "Maybe they're taking a leak," a man offered nervously.

  "Abel is gone, too," another muttered soberly. A quick head count revealed that there were now only four of them.

  "Where did he go?" the leader demanded. "I don't know," a soldier said, hanging back by the sentinel pines. "He was next to me, and then he was just gone."

  "Like Wainwright," another soldier announced. A moment later the group didn't need a head count. What had started out as eight strong had now become two.