Warren Murphy: Timber Line

The passenger was a stocky, bullet-headed man whose name, Oscar Brack, suited his disposition. He not only disliked and distrusted people, he hated them, regarding dislike and distrust as mere pissant emotions, too moderate to count for anything.

Brack also hated animals, machines, and art. The only thing he cared for in the world were trees, which was suitable since, like Stacy and Webenhaus, he was a forester for Tulsa Torrent, the biggest and richest lumber and paper-products company in the world.

The plane coasted up to the riverbank by the camp. Brack jumped off the plane's pontoon and took the line ashore. He aimed his gun in the general direction of the pilot until Jesus cut the engines and joined him on land.

It was five minutes before they found Helga Webenhaus's body. She had been staked out on top of a fire-ant hill, twenty yards into the jungle from the main camp. It was obvious that something sweet, perhaps honey, had been stuffed into her body openings and generously applied to her breasts, where it now dripped as an invitation to the ants to come and eat.

Brack buried what was left of her before moving on. From a distance, he thought he saw a small stack of firewood. But that made no sense because there was already a big stack of firewood in front of what must have been Webenhaus's tent. Besides, the smaller stack was topped with a huge black ball.

Brack decided to take a closer look. Another man might have chosen not to. What from a distance seemed to be logs were actually parts of arms and legs. The black ball was Webenhaus's head, swollen to twice its normal size.

Jesus threw up. Brack came from New York City, so violence and brutality did not bother him. He buried what remained of Webenhaus, and then walked over to where the supply and laboratory tents stood. None had been broken into, and the supplies were still intact, even the liquor. He thought that was strange. If it had been Indians — and the jungle teemed with them — they certainly would have gone for the alcohol.

Outside the lab, Brack found two medium-sized wooden packing cases marked for delivery to the Tulsa Torrent headquarters. He motioned for Jesus to load them onto the plane. At first the pilot pretended not to understand him. He continued to pretend until Brack fired a warning shot at him.

From somewhere near the back of the camp, near what had been the cook's tent, a weak shout answered the gunshot. Brack walked toward it, not bothering to be cautious, and found once-elegant Roger Stacy hidden under a pile of canvas. The usually dapper young man apparently had not eaten or shaved or changed his clothing in two weeks. His cheeks and lips were sunburned and cracked, his eyes rolled madly, and he spoke in a soft croak.

"Indians," he whispered, looking around as if expecting them to return momentarily.

"When?" Brock asked.

"Last week." Stacy looked around, trembling and half-delirious, then struggled to take hold of himself. "They got all of them," he said.

"But not you?" Brack said.

"I hid," Stacy said. He looked at Brack with a combination of mistrust and wariness, then let himself faint.

Brack lifted Stacy to his shoulders and carried him back to the plane. All the way, he felt as if he were being watched. He dumped his burden at the edge of the river, then went back for one last look around. On the plywood floor of Webenhaus's tent, he found a scattered chess set and a manila envelope addressed to Webenhaus's superiors at Tulsa Torrent. He peeked inside. It was some sort of report, and stuffed between its pages was another, smaller envelope. He closed up the manila envelope, folded it, and put it into the pocket of his bush jacket

He turned back to the riverbank and had gotten halfway there when he knew there was someone behind him. He took his gun from its holder and dropped to the ground in one fluid motion, a motion surprisingly quick and graceful for a man so big and bulky.

Brack looked down the barrel of the weapon at a little red-haired girl standing on the path behind him, her dress torn, her face smudged with dirt, and her thumb firmly implanted in her mouth, as if it were her only means of getting oxygen in the Brazilian jungle.

She stared at him levelly for several moments, dropped her arm to her side, then ran toward him, crying all the way.

His name was Remo and the air was cold.

But what bothered him was that he felt the cold and he shouldn't have. Feeling cold or feeling hot was simply a matter of letting your body and senses control you, instead of you controlling your body and senses.

And as the heir apparent to the House of Sinanju, Remo was closer than any other Westerner to achieving control. For more than ten years, he had studied and trained until his body was no longer just a shell that housed the man; instead, it had become the man, and the man had become his body. Ten years. Ever since that day they had put him in the electric chair and turned the juice on, then brought him back to life to be trained as the official enforcement arm of CURE. A professional assassin for a secret agency of the United States government. The Destroyer who destroyed to save the Constitution of the United States when no other method would work.

Ten years of training, and still he was cold.

His concentration was faltering. And that was bad, because when one thing went, everything was in danger of going.

He tried to put the cold out of his mind and to keep the rhythm of his movements smooth. Not that walking on water was difficult. Especially when the water had gotten cold enough to freeze but had not yet crystallized into ice. It was actually easy, if your concentration didn't falter. Usually, walking on water required nothing more than synchronizing your body's movements with the crests and troughs of the waves. And all bodies of water, even those in bathtubs, had waves, no matter how slight.

Remo concentrated on moving with the energy currents as they built to a wave crest, and then just before they tumbled over into the trough he slid along to the next crest. Nothing to it. Especially with cold water. Cold water was easier because it was denser. Just about any clod with half a mind in working order could feel the energy pulses in dark, dense, cold water. It was the warm, light water that had once given him trouble.

But now he felt his shoes getting damp and that meant his concentration was wavering. Bad. Sloppy.

He sighed, even as he kept moving. It was one of those days. The dirty gray sky and the dirtier gray of the water were seeping into his dirty gray soul, but maybe it was just the dirty gray nature of his work that was getting to him. He was a killer of men. And now, because he was not what he had been years before, he had no choice. It was what he did.

He slowed down slightly to get his bearings. The heavy stench of oil refineries and coking furnaces told him that the Cuyahoga River was still a half-mile up the shore of Lake Erie to his right. He scanned the shoreline to the left until he picked out his target. He was a hundred yards offshore on Super Bowl Sunday, and no one in Cleveland was watching the water. That suited him fine because it made his job easier. He wouldn't have to eliminate any witnesses.

Remo began walking again with the half-loopy, half-gliding motion that walking on water requires. It took him only fifteen seconds more to get to the massive stone pier.

At the end of the pier was a large, squat wooden building with red neon beer signs in its windows. The Venetian blinds were closed. This was the place.

The assignment had been in the making for weeks. The Cleveland mob was having a summit, which meant that all the local gangs — the Mafia, the Jews, the Irish, and the Lebanese — were getting together in a sort of United Nations of mobdom to work out some problems they were having. And each of the gangs in the mob had called in cousins and in-laws and brothers who operated the feudal dependencies for them: feudal dependencies called Detroit and San Diego and Buffalo and Arizona and Central Florida and Louisville and Indiana.