Warren Murphy: Misfortune Teller

TWO HOURS LATER, Michael Princippi was tinkering under the hood of his rusting 1968 Volkswagen Beetle. He had no idea what was wrong with the car, but there was no way he was going to take it to a mechanic. After his stint as governor, working types seemed to hate him more than most. Besides, it was cheaper this way. And Princippi was nothing if not cheap. At least when it came to his own finances.

Former governor Princippi was not mechanically inclined. Nonetheless, he was in the process of tugging furiously with a pair of pliers at some filthy black thing with other longer things sticking out of it when he became aware of someone standing near him. He glanced up suddenly, banging his head on the underside of the hood. Sheets of rust dropped into the sunlight like startled bats.

"Who the hell are you?" Princippi demanded of the man standing in his driveway. He blinked rust from his eyes.

"Hi!" said the earnest, chirpy young man. "Would you like to change your life for the better?"

Princippi sized up the intruder.

Early twenties. Pale. A little above average height and weight. Bizarre clothing.

The kid wore a flowing white gown with an open pink rote draped over it. A long braided ponytail stuck like a handle from the back of his otherwise bald head.

The governor tipped his head. "Are you a registered voter?" he asked.

"No, sir," replied the young man.

"Then get lost," Princippi suggested. He went back to work beneath the hood.

Maybe the thing he had been working on didn't actually have anything to do with the way the car ran. He yanked at it again, more furiously this time. One of the strange twisty things on one side snapped in half.

"Damn," Princippi complained.

"Everyone wants to know how to change his life for the better." The voice was closer now and more insistent. Near his ear.

Princippi continued working. "My life is going to change," he grunted. "And when it does, the Secret Service won't let nut jobs like you within a country mile of me."

He yanked harder at the little metal thing hanging off of the larger thing. It snapped off. As it did so, there was a rumble of an engine.

For an instant, Michael Princippi thought he had fixed his car. He realized momentarily, however, that the sound was coming from farther down his driveway.

The ponytail kid was standing next to Princippi. He was looking around the hood. "Ah, our ride," he enthused.

Princippi glanced around the other side of the hood. A dark blue, windowless van was backing up the driveway. One rear door was open. Princippi could see a pale forearm holding the door ajar.

This was ridiculous. The Brookline in which Michael Princippi had lived when he was governor had not allowed this kind of riffraff to drive around willy-nilly. Sure, on his watch other nearby towns might have had more nightly gunplay than a spaghetti Western, and convicted murderers had been given the keys to their own cells, but, dammit, Brookline had always been safe.

Princippi ducked back beneath his hood. "Look, I am in the middle of planning my triumphant return to politics, so if you don't intend to vote for me, get out of here before I call the cops."

The young man didn't leave. Instead, he said something strangely enigmatic.

"I'm sorry, Governor, but I'm about to change your life. Whether you want me to or not."

Princippi was almost going to lift his head from the grimy engine to ask what the kid was talking about when he noticed something odd. Through a gap beneath the engine, he suddenly saw a pair of sandals as the white robe rose a few inches around the man's ankles. The kid was standing on his toes for some reason.

All at once, Princippi heard a familiar creaking sound. It spurred him to action.

He tried hastily to climb up from the engine well. Too late. The back of his head slammed solidly against his rapidly closing hood.

Princippi saw stars. He saw bright light. As he lay, stunned, on the driveway, he saw figures in pink-and-white robes swoop from the rear of the van and gather him.

Then he blacked out.

IT SEEMED LIKE only a moment later when he came to.

He was lying on his back in the rear of the blue van. The vehicle was bouncing along a street somewhere. There were no windows.

Blandly smiling faces sat on benches on either side of him. They stared down at the former governor.

He took a good, long look at the shaved heads, the flowing robes, the dim expressions. The tambourines.

Tambourines?

"Oh, my God," Michael Princippi wheezed. The air spun crazily around him. "I've been kidnapped by Loonies."

And as the world swirled a midnight dance of fear, darkness took hold of him once more.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo and he was leaving Germany for what he hoped would be the last time in a long, long time.

Remo sat behind the weirdly angled steering wheel of a rented truck. He fidgeted as he drove.

From all outward appearances, Remo was an ordinary man. Lean and dark haired, Remo looked somewhere in his early thirties. Deep-set dark eyes lurked in a skull-like face that many had said was cruel, but nothing greatly beyond the norm. The only things visibly different about him were his freakishly thick wrists. These shifted now as he twisted in the uncomfortable truck seat.

The seat seemed to have been designed specifically to make one's lower back ache.

Remo was a Master of Sinanju. A man trained to the very height of physical and mental perfection. Most times, such a thing as an uncomfortable truck seat would not even remotely begin to bother him. But although Remo's perfectly attuned body did not experience the pains of ordinary men, he had ridden in this bouncing German truck so long that he was beginning to get a growing sense of prickling discomfort in his lumbar region.

This was the last truck in a seemingly endless convoy he had single-handedly driven from Bonn to Berlin. He could not remember how many times he had traveled the six-hundred-mile round trip in the past few weeks. This last journey was made to seem all the longer by the passenger who had insisted on chaperoning him.

"Cannot this carriage go faster?" the squeaky voice in the seat beside him demanded.

"I'm going as fast as the speed limit," Remo said with a sigh.

"The signs are configured in kilometers. You are used to miles. Perhaps you are improperly converting the speed in your mind."

"I'm going the speed limit, Chiun," Remo insisted.

"Humph."

The sound of displeasure emanated from the inscrutable face of the Master of Sinanju, Remo's passenger and teacher.

He was a delicate bird of a man. One hundred years old if he was a day, but possessed of piercing hazel eyes much younger than his wizened shell. Vaporous cotton-candy hair clung to a spot above each ear. His otherwise bald skull was enshrouded in an almost translucent film of walnut-hued paper flesh. A wisp of beard bobbed at his pointed chin.

The old Korean clasped his bony wrists with the opposing hands and stared glumly out the window. He remained silent for approximately ten seconds.

"Are we there yet?" Chiun asked.

"No!" Remo snapped. "Dammit, Chiun, why didn't you just wait for me in Berlin?"

"I did not trust you," Chiun said simply.

"You trusted me with the first gazillion dollars worth of booty," Remo replied.

"It is not that I thought you would steal any of my treasure," Chiun told him. "You are disgustingly honest and ill concerned with money. I find both character traits more than a little appalling, by the way," he added.

"Compliment taken," Remo said.

Chiun continued, "I did not trust that you would be thorough in your final search. I wanted to be certain that you did not carelessly leave behind a stack of gold bars or a crate of diamond tiaras when we at last shake the dust of this benighted land from our sandals."