Fool's Gold (21 page)

"Good," said Remo. "Now we've got that squared away. If we ever get a bellhop asking for the just-right man, I'll know right off it's you."

"Don't forget," said Chiun.

"Open the package," Remo pleaded.

Chiun delicately slit the paper with the long nail of his right index finger. Inside was a small box which he opened and took out a golden object.

"What is it?" Remo asked. "It looks like the handle of a knife."

"It is the handle of a knife. It is a challenge. They have the woman."

Remo got up from the sofa. "Who does?" he asked.

Chiun tossed the knife handle across the room to Remo. Remo caught it and examined the engravings on it: a lion, a sheaf of wheat, and a dagger.

"Same crest we saw back at the bullrun," Remo said. "This is them? The House of something or other?"

"The House of Wissex," Chiun said.

"You're sure this means they have the girl?" Remo asked. He turned the knife handle over in his hand, as if by inspecting it closely he might find something more there than just a knife handle.

"Of course they have the woman," Chiun said. "It is the tradition of the challenge. First they take something of value to you, and then they send a knife to challenge you to come and reclaim your property."

"She's just more trouble than she's worth," Remo said. "Let them have her."

"It is not that simple," Chiun said.

"It never is."

"She is our client and her safety is our responsibility. The House of Sinanju cannot walk away from such a challenge."

"I knew she was going to be troublesome," Remo said.

"It is our responsibility, but it is my challenge," Chiun said. "It is from one assassin to another."

"And what am I, a chicken wing?"

"No. You are an assassin, but this is a challenge from the Master of Wissex to the Master of Sinanju."

"Tough luck," Remo said. "We go together."

Chiun sighed. "You are truly uneducable."

"Probably, but let's go find the girl," Remo said.

When the long yacht came within sight of the Hamidian coast, the first faint streaks of sun were smearing the gray sky with pink smudge.

From a telephone in the main cabin, Neville Lord Wissex called Moombasa and awoke him in bed.

"I hope this important," Moombasa said thickly.

"It is. This is Wissex. I have the girl."

"Good. Where's the gold?"

"We don't have that yet," said Wissex.

"Why don't you call me back when you find it?" Moombasa said.

"Wait," said Wissex. "There's more."

"What?"

"Those two men who have been guarding her. I'm sure they will be coming here."

"Should I leave the country?" Moombasa said worriedly. "I can easily schedule my triumphant tour as national liberator. Cuba and Russia keep inviting me."

"No," said Wissex. "I'll deal with those two men. I just wanted you to know."

"Where are you now?" Moombasa asked.

"Just off the coast."

"Don't bring the girl here," said Moombasa.

"Why not?"

"If you bring her here, those two are liable to follow. I don't want them here unless they're already in pieces."

"I won't bring her there. I'm taking her to that hill near your border."

"Mesoro? Why there?"

"Because it suits my purposes," Wissex said. "It's flat and high and they won't be able to sneak up on me."

"I'll send the Revolutionary Commando Brigade or whatever they call themselves to help you."

"Perish forbid," Wissex said. "Just leave it to me. You could help by keeping patrols and army and everybody else out of the area. I don't want my equipment to be hindered by your people marching around."

"Hokay. I want that woman to talk," Moombasa said.

"She will."

"What does she look like?"

"She's attractive but not your type," Wissex said.

"Too bad. Keep in touch," Moombasa said.

Wissex smiled, replacing the phone. Of course she was not Moombasa's type. The woman had an IQ over 70.

Wissex left the cabin and herded Terri, her hands tightly bound behind her, into the back seat of a helicopter, lashed to a takeoff pad on the small ship's bow.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"To await the arrival of your friends," Wissex said. He smiled at her and she noticed that his blue eyes were cold and unfeeling. The eyes of a killer. She shuddered at his touch as he pushed her roughly into the aircraft.

From the airport, Remo called Smith again but the CURE director had not been able to find out where the girl had vanished to.

"What the hell good are those computers of yours, Smitty, when they can't find anything out?"

"You forget, Remo. I don't have the computers any more. All the records are still missing. That's why I want you to forget that woman and get back here to the States. Get our records back."

"What about the mountain of gold?" Remo asked. "The death of Western civilization as we know it? What about all that?" Remo asked.

"You know now there is no mountain of gold. So all this is is a kidnapping. The mountain of gold might have been more important than our records, but that woman professor isn't. Come back."

"I can't do that," Remo said.

"Why not?"

"Because her safety is my responsibility. Because the House of Sinanju can't walk away from a challenge."

"I don't understand all that tradition business," Smith said.

"That's because you're uneducable, Smitty. You just hold the fort. We'll get there when we get there," Remo said as he hung up.

As he walked away from the phone booth, Remo saw the same spy who had been dogging his footsteps earlier through Bombay Airport.

The short, squat man was now wearing a flamenco dancer's costume. Little puffballs hung from the fringes of his flat-brimmed hat. He stood by the wall next to the phone booth, edging closer to Remo. His satin trousers squeaked as they rubbed against the marble airport wall.

He smiled at Remo as Remo stepped nearer, the smile one gives a stranger he doesn't really wish to talk to.

"Where is the girl?" Remo said.

"Beg pardon, Señor?"

"The girl."

"We Flamenco dancers have many girls," the man said.

"You know the girl I want," Remo said.

The man shrugged. He was still half shrugged when Remo upended him and dragged him by one fat ankle over to the railing of the observation deck.

Remo tossed him over. The fat man hung upside down, suspended only by Remo's grip on his ankle.

"Where have they taken her?" Remo growled.

"Hamidia," the man screamed in terror. "Hamidia. To Mesoro. True. True. I tell the truth, Señor."

"I know you do," Remo said. "Have a nice trip."

He let the man fall and walked away, even before the scream died out with a fat splat. Chiun was standing in front of an arcade filled with electronic games.

"They've gone to Hamidia. Some place named Mesoro," Remo said.

Chiun nodded and said, "Japs are treacherous. I bet we could have played Space Invaders on that other one's machine."

Generalissimo Moombasa didn't like to rise before noon. It was his opinion that in people's democratic republics, anything that happened before noon deserved to wait for the great man to get out of bed.

But the call from Lord Wissex had disrupted his smooth sleeping pattern and he rested only fitfully for two more hours until his private telephone rang again.

If this kept up, he was going to have it disconnected, he decided.

"Hello," he yelled into the phone.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. This is Pimsy Wissex," a voice rattled.

"Sorry, you got wrong number. You want asthma clinic, you look up number. The house of fancy boys is down the street too. You look up their number."

He hung up the telephone but it rang again instantly.

"What now?"

"Listen to me, you bleeding wog," Pimsy snarled. "I've got something to tell you."

"This better be important."

"It is," said Uncle Pimsy.

Chapter Seventeen

Night was falling. She had hung there through the brutally hot sun of the day with not a drop of water for her lips. Her arms felt that they were going to snap out of her shoulder sockets and twice during the day when she could stand the pain no more, she had screamed and Wissex had lowered her to the ground for fifteen minutes before hoisting her up again.

Her throat was parched and her lips were dry. She touched them with her tongue but it felt like rubbing wood over wood.

At least the night would bring some coolness, some relief from the day's heat. But in the grassy fields below that surrounded the flat-topped hill they were on, Terri could hear the insects and then the sounds of larger animals— a snarl, a growl— and the thought of what was out there chilled her.

She was hanging from a long boom, extended out over the edge of the Mesoro Hill. Ropes tied roughly around her wrists were fastened to the boom, and she was able to rest only by grabbing the boom with her hands and holding on, to rest her wrists, until her hands tired of supporting her weight and she had to let go. And then the pain in the wrists began again.

The boom was attached at its other end to a heavy, complicated tripod in the center of the flat table of rock. And Lord Wissex sat there, at a table which he had unloaded from the helicopter, a table with controls built into it. During the heat of the day, he had opened a bottle of white wine which he had carried in a cooler, had poured himself a glass, and had toasted Terri Pomfret's beauty.

But he had offered her none for her dry throat.

He was a sadist and a brute. She had fallen for the accent and the superficial charm and the tweedy British clothes and she realized that if Jack the Ripper had ben been soft-spoken and full of "yes, m'dears" and worn an ascot, she probably would have crawled into a blood-stained bed with him.

She saw Wissex looking at her and she asked again, "What are you going to do with me?" He had not answered her all day when she had asked that question.

Wissex smiled at her. "Do you know that that imbecile Moombasa still believes there is a mountain of gold?" he asked.

"And there isn't," she said.

"Of course not," Wissex said.

"Why did you put up all those plaques? It was you, wasn't it?"

"Of course m'dear. It was my plan. There is, you know, this idiotic Hamidian legend about a mountain of gold. It was my idea that if I got Moombasa to believe the United States was looking for it, then he would spend any amount of money to find it. So far, he has been good for twenty million dollars."

"He's not going to be happy when he finds out there's no mountain," Terri said.

"He thinks there is one. He thinks you'll tell him where it is."

"It doesn't exist," Terri said. "I'll tell him that. And that it was all your idea."

Wissex chuckled. "I know that and you know that. But I'm afraid you won't get a chance to tell him. Unfortunately, m'dear, you're going to have an accident. A fatal accident."

"But why the plaques?" she asked again.

"That was to lend authenticity to the scheme," he said. "You should realize that true genius involves painstaking attention to detail. I wanted everything to look correct. It had to be good enough not only to fool Moombasa— I could fool him with a map drawn in the sand with a stick— but also to fool you and the United States until I extracted enough money from that idiot. He is not a trusting sort. Did you know that he has had one of his would-be spies traipsing around, trying to keep an eye on you and your bodyguards?"

"That fat man at the airport?" Terri said.

"Yes. I made sure to tell him where we were going. I have no doubt that your friends have, by now, extracted that information from him."

Terri felt her heart add a little extra happy beat. "But why?" she asked him and because she guessed it would feed his macho sense of himself, she added, "I don't understand. Why would you want them to know where we went?"

"Because I am going to kill them. Those two have spoiled my calculations long enough and they have been a shadow over the House of Wissex for far too many years. When they come for you, all three of you will die."

He spoke with an unemotional flatness as if he were discussing the score of last year's semifinal soccer game.

"They'll get you, you know," Terri said, the anger spilling out of her, fueled by his smugness. "They're better than you are."

"Don't you believe it, girl. Don't you believe it. And now I wish you would please be still. I have some cogitation to do to prepare my welcome for the House of Sinanju."

"Still? I won't be still. I'll shout and scream and let the world know I'm here." Terri opened her mouth to scream, but it changed to a shriek of pain as Wissex pressed a button on the panel in front of him and the boom yanked her upwards, almost dislocating her arms from her shoulders. She bit her lip and hung there in silence, looking across at him, at the helicopter parked on the hilltop behind him. Wissex must have set a trap for Remo and Chiun— but what could it be? She would not let them die, not if she could help it. When she saw them, she would shout and scream and let them know it was a trap. And if she died, then maybe she deserved it for being stupid, but at least she would have evened the score with this English monster.

But while the night grew darker, her resolve and her courage weakened, as the night sounds surrounding the hilltop grew in intensity. She tried to spin on her ropes, to look around her in a full 360-degree circle, to see if she could see a light that might be Remo and Chiun, but even as she made the effort, she heard Wissex' mocking voice.

"Don't trouble yourself. When they arrive, I will let you know. Nothing can move out there without being detected by my sensors. That is why we came to this godforsaken lump of dirt. It is the only high ground in this entire country and I will know they are coming long before they get here. So just hang there and rest." He laughed again and Terri felt her heart sink.