Warren Murphy: Bloody Tourists

"What's the problem, Art?"

"Well, Mr. President, it's about the hash brown potatoes."

Greg Grom felt his stomach tighten into a hard, knotted ball. "What about the hash brown potatoes?" he asked.

"Two men just came and stole 'em, Mr. President. All of them. Took every one of the tubs that you was working on tonight."

"Took them where?" Grom demanded.

"Down to the beach. That's the funny thing. They just heaved them out into the ocean. Never would have thought a man could send a plastic tub of hash browns that far. Splashed into the water so far out I couldn't see it and I could barely hear it."

"A white guy? With dead-man eyes? And a little Chinese grandpa?"

"Yeah! That's them!" Art exclaimed. "Asked for directions to the nearest resort and I told them because I wasn't going to say no to those two. Those two are crazy. I think they're gonna do the same fool thing over at Monte Carlo. What do those two have against perfectly good hash brown potatoes?"

Grom wasn't listening. His high spirits had fled like the breeze, when just a minute ago he thought everything was finally going his way, for once.

How come that pair of oddball agents wasn't dead? Grom had made sure that wherever those two showed up for dinner tonight they would get dosed with GUTX. A lot of it. Enough to send them into the deepest sleep of all.

That hadn't happened. The agents were alive, and they knew what Grom was doing. Which meant they knew why he was doing it. So they knew he had been using GUTX dosing to get him to where he was now.

Which meant they just might be able to bring it all to a screeching halt.

Unless, Grom thought determinedly, he screeching halted them first.

REMO HAD STOPPED explaining himself. At each resort they came to he simply barged in, headed for the kitchens and began looking for the tubs of thawing hash brown potatoes.

It was always the same. Big plastic ten-gallon or twenty-gallon tubs in the walk-in coolers filled with the same brand of spiced, shredded breakfast potatoes. The empty plastic bags would be in the trash can.

"You can't take the potatoes!" the night manager at the first resort had cried. "The visitors love our potatoes!" Apparently Greg Grom knew that. He had a system in place that so far seemed to include every hotel and resort on the island. In the evening the food-service crew would start thawing as many bags of hash brown potatoes as would be needed for the morning breakfast crowd. Grom would stop by and stir in a little poison. Next morning the thawed spuds were served to the tourists.

"The president come often to inspect your hash brown potatoes?" he asked the night manager at the first resort.

"Coupla times a week. Why shouldn't he?"

That was the really weird thing about it-the resort staff went along with it all as if it were perfectly normal. After Remo confiscated the tubs of spuds he would head for the ocean and shot-put them into it. Meanwhile, Chiun would be nosing around the kitchen looking for any other poisoned foodstuffs. But so far the poison was always in the hash browns.

The routine changed on their sixth stop, the Turquoise Seas Beach Resort. Remo wheeled the borrowed taxicab into the palm-lined front drive and found a throng of well-dressed vacationers in the lobby veranda.

"A reception line," Remo observed. "'Think it's for us?"

"I think it's for you," Chiun said.

The crowd came down to greet them. Some still had drinks in their hands.

"Grom must've heard we were after him and he suggested the late-night partyers come welcome us."

"I can smell the stink of intoxicants already," Chiun agreed.

Remo pulled the car away just before it came within reach of the crowd. Driving on the grass, he took the shortcut to the service entrance, hidden behind some decorative tropical topiary.

"They have a lot of staff on the late-night shift at this place," Remo noted. There were about twenty of them. Cooks and cleanup crew, bellhops and janitors. Every one of them had a big knife of some kind.

"They must do their butchering overnight," Chiun remarked.

"Well, let's try not to do any ourselves, okay?" Remo said. "These people aren't murderers."

Chiun waved imperiously. "Then you take care of the problem."

Remo didn't have time to argue. Besides, it was probably the best option. He stepped from the cab and found the gang of staff bearing down on him. More of them were streaming out of the kitchen doors.

These weren't skilled fighters. And their hearts weren't in it. "Sorry about this, buddy," said the chef in a white paper hat as he swung a cleaver at Remo's neck.

"Sorry? Sorry isn't good enough." Remo stepped around the cleaver and pinched the chef's neck. He had to smack away the blade of a kitchen assistant who was aiming for Remo and would have chopped the throat of the slumping chef in the process. Then he put the kitchen assistant to sleep, too. For the next few seconds he became a whirlwind of motion among the confused, drugged night staff, who slumped to the ground one after another until only Remo remained standing, surrounded by unconscious bodies strewed around the service bay.

He jogged inside, grabbed the poison-smelling breakfast potatoes in the walk-in cooler and headed for the beachside dock. Here the resort tied up a boat used to take snorkelers to the nearby reef. Remo stopped at the end of the dock and sent the tubs flying hundreds of yards out into the night. He turned and sped off the dock before the last of them had even splashed into the water.

Chiun had vacated the cab and was standing by the darkened swimming pool.

"I assumed you wanted the rest of the rabble to remain unassassinated," he commented. Behind him approached the party crowd.

"You let them take the taxi?" Remo asked.

"And the knives from the sleeping staff," Chiun said. "It was either that or kill them all."

"You know, it's not like it was one extreme or the other."

The mob, armed with knives confiscated from the unconscious kitchen crew, fanned out to create a half circle around its prey. Remo and Chiun were trapped with the swimming pool to their backs.

"Let's finish this up! I wanna go dance!" complained a young woman in a pink halter top and a short pink skirt, accessorized with a gold navel ring and a stainless-steel boning blade.

"Can we assassinate them now?" Chiun asked.

"No. Forget it," Remo said. He nodded over his shoulder. "We'll go this way and hope we can find another car."

"We run like cowards?" Chiun squeaked.

"Annihilating this lot would be the courageous thing to do?" Remo demanded.

Chiun sniffed. It was his "I concede the point" sniff. The first of many blades came slashing at the Masters of Sinanju, but the Masters of Sinanju were no longer there. They were speeding across the surface of the swimming-pool water in a blur of leather shoes and sandals, and then they had vanished into the blackness. The party crowd looked at one another, silent and very, very confused.

"Can we go dance now?" demanded the woman in the pink halter top.

As a group, they decided that was the only alternative.

Chapter 40

"Your shoes are wet," Chiun said accusingly when they reached the front of the hotel.

"They are not."

"They are."

Remo almost allowed himself to get dragged into the argument, but a distant sound distracted him. "Saved by the siren."

A moment later it had grown to a piercing wail. "A fast siren," Remo noted.

"Not as fast as your powers of deduction," Chiun remarked.

"Don't suppose the prez has got the cops out looking for us?" But Remo knew that wasn't the case when he caught the look in the eyes of the cop who was driving. A fraction of a second later the car was past them.

"I'm going to check this out," Remo said.