In spite of the mocking presence in his mind, a swelling pride at Chiun's words took root within Remo.
"I will do my best, Little Father," he said, bowing to his Master.
"That is what I expect from you," Chiun replied with a nod of satisfaction. "For having been trained by the best, only the best resides within you."
"So, you going to wait here for me?" Remo asked. He feared this might be the last time he would ever see Chiun. A part of him did not want the moment to end.
Chiun shook his head. "I must now join Emperor Smith in town."
"Smitty's in Thermopolis?" Remo asked. "Why?"
Chiun shrugged. "The day I understand Smith is the day I surrender sanity,** he said. "But I have an obligation to my emperor." He started across the expanse between the fence and the woods, but paused after only a few feet. "Remember, Remo, the spirit of Apollo resides in the smoke. Be wary of it always."
They both seemed on the verge of saying more, but at last they bowed with respectful heads, then turned to their respective paths.
A few hundred yards from the first concrete building, Remo looked back. Chiun had already reached the edge of the forest. A moment later he was gone.
As he scanned the empty plain, Remo's eyes
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alighted on one of the vacant guard towers. Where were the Truth Church guards?
He made hard fists and spun back toward the buildings.
"Be careful, Little Father," he said softly to himself.
And somewhere in his mind he thought he heard Chiun's voice warning him to do the same.
"So, what are you, like Clint Eastwood in that movie?"
Smith raised a narrow grayish eyebrow. He was, of course, aware of the actor, but he had not seen one of his films in more than twenty years. He shrugged his incomprehension at the young Senator Cole staffer.
"You know, the one where he played the over-the-hill Secret Service agent?" he reminded. "I figured you must have seen it a hundred times."
The staffer had been stung by the way the senator had warmed up to Smith. He knew that in some circles it would be considered a pretty trivial thing to be worked up over, but in Washington entire careers had been built on things far less petty.
The staffer bobbed along annoyingly beside him as Smith attempted to survey the crowd. As far as the CURE director could tell, about twenty thousand people jammed Arapahoe Street, and so far he had only seen two uniformed police officers.
If an attack came, he would be alone defending Senator Cole.
The senator appeared to be unfazed by the crush of people. He worked the crowd like a consummate professional, calling many people by name.
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Smith didn't know what he was looking for, but his old instincts were alert. He sensed there was some kind of danger lurking just out of sight in the crowd.
As Senator Cole grabbed a few outstretched hands, his entourage moved deeper into the packed corridor of humanity that lined the street.
Smith's eyes scanned the crowd on either side as they went, carefully keeping things in view.
If he had looked more carefully behind, he would have noticed several Mark Kaspar campaign posters had drifted up, and were now following a safe distance in their wake.
Remo didn't bother with the bunker tunnels. He had gone straight to the old airplane hangar on the adjacent lot.
The goat pen he had seen on his first visit to the ranch was less full this day. The animals bleated in fear at his approach. ,
Remo rounded the back of the building from the direction opposite the one in which he had escaped—with Buffy Brand's help—earlier in the week. It was because he had not left by this route that he had not seen the pile of rotting carcasses.
Remo almost fell into it.
A shallow pit had been dug, but was nearly obscured by the mountain of dead goats piled on this side of the hangar. The ground around the pit was damp with oozing fluids.
The remains of Kaspar's sacrificial animals.
Pounds of powdered limestone had been shoveled onto the pitiful bodies. But no amount of lime would have masked the horrid stench. The stink of rotten
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flesh attracted all manner of scavenger insects. The air teemed with thick black swarms of flies. They bred in the naked eye sockets of the small corpses, and the oldest of the bodies were covered in part by wriggling white maggots.
Carrion flies buzzed and swirled around his head as Remo moved toward the hangar's side door. He steadied himself as he took hold of the handle.
The separate consciousness within his mind seemed poised to attack. He didn't know if opening the door to the Pythia chamber would unleash the floodgates once again. It had taken nearly every bit of strength he had to overthrow the presence of the Pythia back in the zoo.
And what of Apollo?
Remo didn't know if he was up to another conflict with the lesser entity of Apollo's emissary. The power of the sun god would surely be too great to withstand.
His only chance—a hunch really—would be to bound up to the top of the platform and to attempt to expel the spirit residing within him into the steam emanating from the fissure before Apollo could take full control of his mind. For Remo knew if that happened, the battle would be lost.
Nerves tight, Remo flung open the door and leaped into the Pythia chamber.
The noxious yellow smoke overtook him immediately.
A fresh cloud of the sickly sulphur fog belched up from the crevice like ash from a jaundiced volcano. It flowed around the room, slipping into every corner, enveloping Remo like an enticing shroud.
He grabbed the door frame for support.
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A voice cried out.
"Remo!"
His head swam. His vision blurred. He was seeing everything around him in a whirling kaleidoscope of overlapping images. Remo looked up, eyes seeking the point where he thought the voice had come from.
Buffy Brand was manacled at the top of the rocky hill. Her ankles and wrists were snapped securely in twin sets of iron shackles. The leg irons were fastened to the stone platform by a heavy length of chain.
Remo felt the spirit of the Pythia washing over the dams he had built up in his mind. It was like a violently roiling flood, sweeping away a helplessly inadequate levee made of twigs and sand.
He focused on the bottom step.
Must get to the top.
Remo took a few clumsy steps into the chamber.
"Get out of here, Remo!" Buffy yelled.
He didn't know where the voice came from this time. It was Buffy once again, but the disorienting effect of the swelling tide in his brain was worsening with every step. He couldn't tell if she was before him or behind.
His foot touched the first step.
The footfall was somehow soft and echoey. And far away.
Another step.
The black battlefield returned in Remo's mind. This time the bleak sky of the vision, which had been black, as well, was painted in sickly smears of bloody red.
The third step.
The combatants appeared. One vicious, the other docile.
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Over the horizon a black shape grew like time-lapse photos of the birth of a mountain.
Remo forced himself up. Must make it to the top.
He took the next half-dozen steps in jerky, uncertain strides, twice almost tumbling backward. Charged by some unseen electrical force, the yellow smoke crackled in minilightning bursts all around him. Remo bulled through it all.
Somehow, some way he reached the top.
The Cole girl. Somewhere in his mind Remo recognized her for who she really was. She sat on the tripod, glassy-eyed, face dead of all emotion.
Buffy Brand was to the girl's right. She stared at Remo with frightened eyes and babbled some warning that he couldn't understand.
The world swam around him in swirls of colored light.
He moved across the platform.
The presence was seep
ing through Remo's disordered mind once more.
It was strangely comforting this time. Somehow here, in the Pythia Pit, it was soft and inviting, rather than something he should fear. It was something to accept. To embrace.
The thing that told him he should fight was small and weak within him. It was easy to ignore that stubborn part of his mind.
East had met West. It was his destiny.
Through drunken eyes, Remo watched someone else step out from behind a tapestry at the far end of the platform. A little man dressed in strange robes. He was uttering incantations that Remo couldn't understand. For a brief instant he thought he should
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recognize the man, but in his drunken state he couldn't tell. Remo ignored him and moved toward the tripod.
The Cole girl rose at his approach.
As if in some prearranged ritual, she moved aside as he stepped on the metal grate that traversed the rocky fissure.
Smoke poured from the crevice as thick as that from an oil-well fire.
It was his destiny. East had met West. There was no sense fighting destiny. Especially his own.
Carefully Remo took his seat on the tripod of Apollo's Pythia.
The white-robed man whom Remo thought he should have recognized stepped in front of him. He wore a wicked smile as he stared coldly into Remo's dilating pupils.
On the battlefield of his mind, Remo watched the fierce combatant strike a final, terminal blow against his docile opponent. And for the first time Remo saw the face of the victim. As the body fell to the barren plain, Remo saw that the combatant's face was his own.
And in that minuscule part of his mind that he could still call his own, Remo bade a silent farewell to his father and teacher, the Master of Sinanju.
Harold Smith didn't know what he had done to rankle Senator Cole's assistant, but he wished there was some way he could take whatever it was back. The young idiot was becoming a nuisance.
"When was the last time you fired a gun, Pops?" The question was asked with a malice bordering on glee.
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Smith continued to watch the crowd surging around them as the senator chatted with a group of older women near a booth that was stocked from top to bottom with rag dolls, patchwork quilts and a dozen other handmade items.
"I am regularly recertified." Smith didn't look at the young man as he spoke.
"No, did you ever fire at someone?" the staffer asked. He seemed to consider this a kind of witticism, for there was a humorous, self-congratulatory glint in the depths of his eyes.
"That is not something I wish to share with you," Smith replied. He noticed a woman standing over by one of the concession stands who was eyeing the senator strangely. She had a kerchief wrapped around her head, and wore a pair of dark sunglasses so large they made her look almost like an oversize insect. Was she looking this way or wasn't she? Smith couldn't tell for sure.
A moment later she had turned away, becoming fixated on something on the other side of the pavilion.
Probably just trying to find a lost friend, Smith decided, and continued scanning the crowd.
There certainly were a lot of supporters carrying Mark Kaspar signs beneath the tent. Some of them had to crouch so that the long poles didn't get caught against the festive, multicolored tarpaulin roof.
They seemed to be converging in Cole's general area.
Smith turned his attention back to the woman in the sunglasses.
What was it about her? She was somehow familiar....
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She seemed to be nodding to a cluster of supporters carrying Kaspar signs. Never uttered a word, but it appeared as if those she nodded to understood some unspoken command.
As she stepped from the cover of the tent back out into the bright sunlight, it suddenly occurred to Smith where he knew her from. He had seen her face several times while he was researching the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth. She had even worn the same sunglasses in one picture.
Esther Clear-Seer.
The people with the signs supported Mark Kaspar. And they had surrounded Senator Jackson Cole on all sides.
"At your age, you probably need help loading the magazine, huh?" the Cole staffer was saying.
The young man chuckled at his own comment. The chuckle mutated into a choked gurgle when the part of his brain that controlled the laughing function was rudely disrupted by a small piece of soft lead that had traveled at great velocity from the other side of the tent.
The staffer's forehead exploded outward. Then the sound of the gunshot registered on this end of the tent. Dollops of blood and sticky gray brain sludge splattered across a quilt depicting meticulously sewn scenes of early Wyoming pioneer life.
The staffer fell to his knees, his mouth sagging in shock. Before he had even hit the asphalt, Smith had drawn his own gun and, crouching like a football lineman, threw one gray shoulder into the back of Senator Cole. The force propelled Cole through the open
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wooden archway of the quilting booth. When a second shot rang out, Smith threw himself atop the senator.
A fat woman Cole had been speaking with was struck in the shoulder by the bullet. It spun her around like a confused dancer without a partner. She dropped heavily to her ample bottom, stunned. A fountain of red burbled up from beneath her smart cotton blouse.
Screaming erupted all around. Most people had frozen in shock when the first shot rang out. By the second they were shocked out of their shock. The crowd under the tent scrambled in all directions.
Behind the cover of the small booth, Senator Cole sat stunned and blinking like a stupefied ostrich.
No time to check on him now. As he and Cole had ducked for cover, Smith registered the Kaspar campaigners drawing weapons from beneath their candidate's smiling face. They had been concealed in the hollow centers of the poles on which they had carried their posters.
The front of the booth was draped across with a sheet of wide crepe paper. Smith tore a hole large enough to see out across the main body of the tent.
Pairs of nervous legs went scampering close by. Not much farther away he could see an advancing group of armed men. Smith aimed his automatic at the closest gunman and pulled the trigger.
A satisfying explosion came from the heavy gun. The bullet struck the first man dead center in the chest. He toppled backward, his rifle clattering away from his twitching fingers.
The rest scattered like roaches, taking cover behind the dozen other carnival stands that stretched across the far side of the tent.
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The burp of an automatic weapon preceded a shower of bullets across the open face of the booth where Smith and Cole were hidden. Fabric from shrapnel-torn quilts exploded in every direction, blowing wildly from the various impact points before settling softly to the asphalt floor.
A gunman appeared over the top of one of the concession counters. But before he was able to squeeze the trigger on his AR-15, Smith loosed two more shots. The gunman flung up his arms, then he sank behind the counter. He didn't appear again.
"Who is it?" Cole hissed. "Who's trying to get me?"
Smith was surprised that the man sounded so calm. Probably still in shock.
"I believe they are members of the Truth Church, Senator."
Cole screwed up his leathery face in confusion. "The cult?" he asked.
Smith had no time to respond. Two other members of the Truth Church were moving out from behind the raffle stand. They moved from folding chairs to tables, and when they were close enough, Smith fired his last three shots at the pair. He only hit one.
Jamming a hand into his jacket pocket, Smith fumbled for the spare ammunition clip he brought with him. But even as he did, he knew that if the gunman had continued moving forward he wouldn't have time to reload before the assailant made it to the booth.
Smith had just rammed the clip home, and was yanking back on the slide, when he saw the barrel of the AR-15 appear over the counter of the booth above t
heir heads like the snout of a curious anteater.
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Another second, and the barrel would be aimed at them. A second after that, Harold W. Smith and Senator Jackson Cole would be dead.
But those two seconds were precisely two seconds too long.
A shrill voice ripped the deathly still air.
"Hold, vassal of evil!"
A blur of crimson whirled across Smith's field of vision.
Before he knew what had happened, the rifle had vanished back over the top of the counter. Smith again peeked out through the hole in the booth, and he saw the gunman lying facedown on the ground, his own weapon jutting from his back like the dorsal fin of a shark.
A wizened face appeared over the counter.
"What are you doing here!" Smith exploded. "Where is Remo?"
The Master of Sinanju's eyes grew heavy of lid.
"Normally, when one preserves the life of one's emperor, the skies rain soft gold, not hard questions," Chiun said aridly.
Smith pushed himself up to a crouching position. "There are other assailants here," he warned Chiun.
"I will deal with such ruffians," Chiun said. "I have cleared a path so that you may lead your charge to safety." He gestured back in the direction from which he had come, behind Smith.
Smith glanced over his shoulder. He saw a motionless leg lying at an unnatural angle through the nearby rear tent flap. Close by lay a trampled Mark Kaspar poster.
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Without another word Chiun moved toward the center of the tent.
The other members of the Truth Church, emboldened by the absence of return gunfire, had come out of hiding and were again advancing on Smith's position.
Like a fiery red dervish, Chiun swirled into the center of the mob.
One gunman, then another, raised their weapons to fire upon the Master of Sinanju. But it seemed as if he was never where they expected him to be. And as they redirected their fire, trying to fix their bizarre target, one by one they began dropping.
Smith watched for a moment. Only when he was certain that Chiun had crowded the remaining gunmen inside did he urge the senator to his feet. The two men scurried, crouching, out the rear tent flap to safety.
Esther Clear-Seer had watched the attack from a safe distance outside the tent.
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