Warren Murphy: The Final Reel

Grunting, Reggio leaned one hand on the crate, careful not to touch any of the blood-and-saliva mixture.

Nope, the hammer wasn't there. He was beginning to think he'd left it in his truck.

"I can get you more than that," al Khobar said. His voice was close to Reggio. His tongue lisped through the newly formed gaps in his gum line.

"Thanks. I'm all set here, Mr. Koala," Reggio said.

Of course it wasn't in his truck. He'd used it to pound the nails into the Arab's lip.

Reggio exhaled loudly. A puff of confectioner's sugar blew from his large lower lip.

It must have fallen to the floor somehow.

With an effort Reggio got to his knees. They ached from the strain. He felt around the side of the crate.

Nothing.

There was really no place the hammer could have fallen. And wouldn't he have heard it?

"You Americans are all the same. Fools motivated solely by money."

Al Khobar sounded more confident now. Even with the nails which still fixed him in place. His voice came from above Reggio as the big man crawled on all fours around the side of the small wooden crate.

"Yeah, we all gotta make a living, right, Mr. Koala?" Reggio Cagliari asked, red faced.

"Death is my living," al Khobar hissed.

Reggio looked up in time to see the grimace of fierce intensity on the face of Assola al Khobar. He also saw his missing hammer. It was in the terrorist's hand and was even now in the process of swinging down toward Reggio's own head.

The hammer connected solidly. Reggio felt a surge of sudden, intense pain above his right temple before the world grew coldly black.

AL KHOBAR WATCHED the Mafia thug drop to the floor.

Red-rimmed eyes traced the hammer. The irony that it should be his salvation was not lost on the terrorist. He could almost hear the snide laughter of his billionaire construction-magnate father.

The pain in his lip was excruciating. Quickly Assola twisted the claw end around, slipping it awkwardly into the space beneath his nose. He pushed it under a nail head.

With a scream that made the nearby lions bellow in rage, he pulled the first nail free.

THE FIRST THING REMO SAW inside the Los Angeles Zoo was what appeared to be the half-eaten carcass of a metallic creature lying in the bushes just inside the main entrance. A mangy-looking pelt lay near it.

"Hey, what's my animatronic camel doing here?" Hank Bindle demanded.

Remo spotted the reason why a few moments later. They were zipping along the pedestrian path in their Taurus jeep when he caught a glimpse of several Arabs near the monkey house. They appeared to be handling one of their fellow Eblans roughly. As they shoved the man forward toward the gorilla cage, Remo recognized a familiar voice.

"Do you people have any idea how many Academy Awards I've been nominated for?"

Bindle and Marmelstein spun toward the shouted voice. From where he sat in the speeding studio jeep, Hank Bindle was only able to see the animals on exhibit.

"Hey, that monkey sounds like Tom Roberts," Bindle mused, nodding toward the gorilla cage.

"Monkeys can't talk," Bruce Marmelstein said, irritated. He had seen the Arabs and suspected who was really shouting. The Eblan soldiers vanished inside the monkey house.

"Oh," said Hank Bindle. "So I guess those ones must be animatronic."

No one bothered to explain the truth.

They found the lion cage a few minutes later. "Stay here," Remo ordered.

Bindle and Marmelstein didn't argue. They sat dutifully in the rear of the jeep while Remo trotted over to the lion paddock.

There was the familiar scent of blood in the air. Remo attributed it to the carcasses that were regularly fed to the jungle predators. He circled the large pen from west to east, keeping his senses tuned to their maximum.

The path he took brought Remo near a large shedlike structure built into the side wall of the pen. He noted as he passed around the front of the building that a gate at its rear, which led into the lion's pen, had been left open.

At the front of the building, he noted a pair of fresh skid marks in the asphalt. Someone had left here recently. And whoever it was had been in a hurry.

As he reached for the door, he caught another whiff of blood. Unlike the stale scent wafting from the main paddock, this was not from an animal that had been prepared for consumption by a zookeeper. The smell of blood here was fresh.

Pausing for a moment outside the door, Remo sensed a few large and distinctly nonhuman heartbeats coming from the interior of the shed. Having seen the open gate on the other side of the shed, Remo had little doubt what was inside.

If Assola al Khobar was alive in the small building, Remo would have preferred to leave him there. However, he couldn't afford to. Not with the unknown elements of Sultan Omay's trap still prepared to spring.

Placing the flat of his palm against its surface, Remo pushed the door steadily open. When the gap was wide enough for him to fit through, he slipped inside.

He pulled the door shut behind him.

Chapter 28

In his air-conditioned basement office in the Great Sultan's Palace in the Eblan capital of Akkadad, Mundhir Fadil Hamza was trying to make sense of what he was seeing.

Nothing seemed to add up properly. And as a fastidious bookkeeper, he was used to things adding up. Hamza was finance minister of the nation of Ebla and was perhaps the only man in the country not concentrating on the war that was raging at the mouth of the Anatolia Corridor. This was because he had a mission. One that was far more important than the war itself.

His mission had been given him in secret by none other than Sultan Omay sin-Khalam himself. As one of the sultan's oldest and most trusted friends, Minister Hamza had been put in sole charge of the Great Plan.

And it was a great plan.

It was a scheme that would ultimately and assuredly upset the political order in this region of the world, more than the war itself. Even if the sultan were to perish in battle-even if the battle were a complete disaster-the Great Plan would assure ultimate victory.

Hamza had learned in their parting conversation that the sultan never even expected to live until the end of the skirmish with Israel. If he was not killed by an enemy of Ebla, his illness would surely take him before his return.

But the war was only the foundation for a far more diabolical plan. Omay had revealed to Minister Hamza a singularly brilliant stratagem that would crush Israel and banish the influence of the West from the Mideast forever.

It could not fail. Not as outlined by Omay.

But something about the outline was not quite right. The Great Plan relied heavily on one element. This was the precise aspect that did not add up correctly for Ebla's finance minister.

Minister Hamza scrupulously checked and rechecked the finances of the Ebla sultanate. As he did so, and the answers kept coming up the same, he felt his stomach turn slowly to water. There were no errors.

It was not just the private area that was the problem. It was public, as well. It had happened quickly. Too quickly for the finance office to even be aware it was happening. The insidious tentacles stretched everywhere through the Eblan economy. And it seemed to come from one place.

Hamza reached a shaking hand out to his intercom. A woman's voice answered, muffled through a traditional chador.

"Please get me Taha al-Sattar," he said, head pounding.

As he waited for the call from Akkadad's premier banker, Hamza felt the first reflexive wave of panic grip his bowels.

Chapter 29

There were several large shapes within the small shed. A few lionesses had moved in around the open gate. Some had chosen to remain in the paddock outside. The rest were sprawled lazily in the cool interior of the shed.