Warren Murphy - Timber Line

He looked up as Remo came in. "I am glad you are here," he said. "Should I call this chapter 'Chiun Saves the Barbarians' or 'Chiun Saves Everybody'?"

"Who the hell cares?" Remo said.

"That is a stupid title," Chiun said.

But Remo wasn't listening. He was on the telephone, dialing Smith. It was after midnight on the East Coast, but Remo knew that did not matter. When Remo was off on an assignment, Smith could almost always be found in his office.

He was there now.

"Don't you ever sleep?" Remo asked.

"How is that relevant?" Smith asked.

"Never mind," Remo said. Quickly, he filled him in on the death of Pierre LaRue and Mrs. Winston-Alright.

"Did he kill her?" Smith asked.

"I don't think so. I think somebody else did, then bushwhacked him; and was trying to wrap the frame all in a neat package by getting pictures of me, too."

"That might be," Smith agreed. "What did he mean 'A rat did this'?"

"I don't know. Have you found out anything about the dead men? The tape recorder? The Mountain Highs?"

"That is why I'm waiting here," Smith said. "The computer has not yet finished scanning its memories."

"Swell," Remo growled. "People are getting swatted around here like flies, and we're waiting for some big goddamn machine to finish scanning its memories."

"I will call as soon as I have anything," Smith said blandly.

Remo slammed the phone down onto the base. He looked to Chiun, but before he could speak, the telephone rang.

"What now?" he growled into the mouthpiece, thinking it was Smith calling back.

It was Roger Stacy.

"What the hell is going on?" Stacy demanded.

"What are you talking about?" Remo said.

"I've just heard that those Mountain High lunatics are massing down at their camp. They're screaming murder and protests and who knows what else. You murder somebody?"

"Not yet," Remo said coldly. "Stacy, I want you to send some guards down here."

"What for?"

"To guard Joey. I'm going to be out."

"All right. They're on their way. But listen, O'Sylvan ..."

"What?"

"Don't cause any trouble."

By the time Remo and Chiun reached the encampment of the Mountain High Society, carnival time had begun. The night before, the society had had only a hundred demonstrators in its candlelight march, but already, more than five hundred people had swelled the small camping ground. With them came a full complement of entertainers, souvenir vendors, and instant health-food snack bars set up by local impresarios who knew nut cases when they saw them.

As Remo and Chiun moved through the crowd, Chiun was besieged by pimply-faced sixteen-year-olds and face-lifted thirty-eight-year-olds looking for guidance and wisdom. He told each in Korean that they were lower than snake droppings. Each accepted this bit of Oriental wisdom and went off enriched.

Remo was listening to snatches of conversation. Something big was supposed to happen. Something big was going to be announced.

"What's happening?" Remo asked a young woman whose shirt proclaimed that she liked dogs better than men, apparently having sampled both.

"The fascists have gone too far this time," she said.

"What's that mean?" Remo asked her.

"I don't know. That's what I was told," she said.

Remo moved off. He heard other rumors. That the police were going to arrest all the demonstrators; that Tulsa Torrent goon squads were going to use tear gas, mace, and nerve gas against the demonstrators just to protect their filthy profits. Both these rumors were generally believed. A third was offered up as just a rumor, probably groundless. According to this least believable rumor, one of the leaders of the Mountain High Society had been hacked to pieces by a Tulsa Torrent lumberjack.

A makeshift stage had been set up. A trio of superannuated, beatnik folk singers who had never been known to miss a paying date climbed onto the stage and began running through a catalog of their greatest hits from twenty years before. The crowd began pressing forward. Remo and Chiun moved along with them.

After the crowd had been warmed up, Ararat Carpathian came onto the bandstand. Remo recognized him as Cicely Winston-Alright's aide-de-camp and heard the people around him call the curly-haired man's name. "Ari. Ari. Ari." Then he heard others yell "A rat. A rat. A rat."

"What are they yelling?" he asked a nearly hoarse young woman who was screaming the name with almost religious fervor.

"Arat," she said.

"That's not a nice thing to call him," Remo said.

"That's his name. Ararat Carpathian. He's Mrs. Winston-Alright's right-hand man. We call him Arat."

"Oh," said Remo, remembering Pierre LaRue's last words. "Thank you."

"That's okay," the woman said. "Anyone ever tell you you've got nifty dark eyes?"

"No," Remo said. "You're the very first."

"That's him," Remo told Chiun. "He's the one who killed LaRue." He muttered to himself: "A rat. A rat."

Carpathian had raised his arms for quiet and the crowd followed his lead.

"Friends," he yelled into a microphone. "I have bad news."

There was a groan from the audience.

"Our leader, the beloved Cicely Winston-Alright, is dead."

There were screams of anguish from the crowd, sobs, shouts of disbelief.

"This loving woman, who so loved us and so loved the good earth, was struck down in the prime of her life by a murderer most vicious and foul," Carpathian bellowed.

The crowd surged forward as if physically expressing its anger.

"Who did it? Who? Who?" the crowd screamed.

"The pig police have not arrested anyone yet, but we know who did it," Carpathian said.

"Who? Who? Who?"

"A lumberjack for Tulsa Torrent. A lumberjack probably insane with guilt from the crazy demands of his job. Or else just one whose palm was greased with blood money."

Remo and Chiun moved closer to the speaker's platform.

Ararat Carpathian screamed, "Are we going to let them get away with it?"

The crowd screamed no, no, no, in one long, full-throated yell. Carpathian looked down and below his feet saw Chiun and Remo. He saw Remo smile and raise one finger, pointing it squarely at Carpathian's chest. The man's smile was cold as death.

Carpathian moved back from the microphone. By the time Remo brushed aside the crowd and hopped up onto the platform, Carpathian was gone and nowhere to be seen. Remo turned just as the crowd began charging the speaker's platform, deciding to take out their frustrated anger on their own property.

Remo looked around. He saw Carpathian's back disappearing through the trees across the road. Remo walked through the small glade of trees and into a clearing on the other side. A dozen snowmobiles were parked there. Carpathian was sitting astride one of them, talking to Harvey Quibble, the government inspector.

Remo called out: "A rat."

Carpathian looked around. He saw Remo. Then he seemed to slump forward over the controls of his machine, and the snowmobile jumped into action, driving straight ahead down a snow-covered trail.

Remo ran off after it. He had almost caught up with Carpathian when the trail made a sharp right-hand turn. Carpathian's snowmobile did not. Instead, it kept going straight ahead, plunging through a dense tangle of low underbrush and then out and over a hundred-foot-high drop-off.

By the time Remo got to him, Ararat Carpathian was little more than a sausage skin filled with once-human jelly...

Company guards and the town police arrived just before the disorderly gang of protesters could turn into a surging mob, and slowly herded them back into the protesters' camping grounds.

Arriving with the police was Roger Stacy, who walked away from the mob scene, went through the thin bank of trees, and entered the clearing where Remo was approaching Harvey Quibble.