Warren Murphy - Prophet Of Doom

It was man-made, obviously. The ceiling was cut of large, rough-hewn stone. The walls, as well, were stone. The floor was dirt. Kaspar guessed that the room had filled with sand over the years. It was possible that the original floor was much farther below.

As Kaspar examined his surroundings, he noticed that the stones in the wall and ceiling were strangely marked. He had heard that the temple had been destroyed by an earthquake around 400 B.C. and he reasoned that the rocks had probably been shattered and then salvaged for the rebuilding. But the pitted areas in the stone were odd. Kaspar peered at the markings. Each came in a series of four. As he studied them closely, he realized they looked almost like...knuckle marks.

As he moved along the interior of the chamber, examining rock after rock, each etched with the same knucklelike indentations, Kaspar's curiosity heightened. Several yards in he stumbled upon something of recognizable historical value.

It was a large stone urn, still intact.

It rested on a rock shelf and was half-buried in two thousand years' worth of settled earth. Excitedly Kaspar brushed the dirt away with his hands, exposing a stone exterior that was decorated with delicately intertwined serpents.

Kaspar's mind fired.

He knew that Greece was once a powerful civilization. He knew that historically, powerful civilizations were always, always very wealthy. And he knew that he had discovered something in the ruins of an

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ancient temple from what, in its day, had been the most powerful civilization on earth. And in that ancient urn had been placed something mysterious that someone back then thought valuable enough to store for safe keeping.

Ignoring all protocol for a discovery of such magnitude, he pulled the lid from the top of the dust-covered urn.

And in the sickly beam of the flashlight, Mark Kaspar thought he had unearthed an ancient pot of pure gold.

With a shaking finger, he touched the glistening yellow substance.

His hopes were immediately dashed.

It was powder. A pot full of some ancient spice, probably.

In disgust Kaspar started to replace the heavy stone lid.

All at once he felt something slither into his mind.

The sensation shocked him. He dropped the lid to the ground. It landed on a slab of rock and its edge chipped off a dozen small stone pieces.

Kaspar watched in wonder as the yellow substance in the urn began to glow brightly in the center of the ruins of Delphi. The strange, powdery residue on his hand flared up in sympathy.

And a voice inside his mind spoke to him, and it said, You have returned, my peristiarchoi. Your great future is at hand.

And he accepted the truth of the voice in his excited mind.

When Kaspar left the ruins, the shelf on which the

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ancient urn had sat for more than two thousand years was empty.

The spirit of Apollo's Pythia was weak in the yellow powder.

Kaspar found it necessary to enhance the strength of the oracles by artificially steaming the powder, just as had been done in the hills of Greece all those years ago.

Back in America he began harvesting virgins himself, at the urging of his unseen master. The first was a freshman in his English class. He used her in the spare bedroom of his attic apartment and, when she was of no further use to him, he drove her out into the night like a stray dog.

The last Kaspar had heard, she had been institutionalized, her mind a gibbering blank. But that didn't matter to him. The girl was no more than a vessel. Something to be used and discarded by his master.

There were other vessels as the years wore on. Kaspar was forced to move from city to city. The Pythia always provided for him, and he never had cause for any bitterness at the life he had been chosen to lead. Fate had led him to Delphi. And it was fate that led him back to his home in Wyoming. It was here, in a dingy boardinghouse room in Thermopolis and through the utterances of the gymnast Pythia—the girl he would eventually bring with him to Ranch Rag-narok—that he finally learned of his great destiny.

America was a nation where many had gotten out of touch with its Judeo-Christian roots. New Age mys-licism and faith healing had taken the place of a mono-ihcistic religion. The Pythia foretold that the greatest

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of all Western nations would become the seat of Apollo himself in the dawn of the next millennium. And Telemachus Anaxagoras Kaspurelakos, the high priest of Apollo, would be the herald of the great new era.

You are destined, Telemachus, it said, to rule the land in which you dwell. The prophecy had sent a chill up his spine.

But it was only fitting that the god of the new American theocracy have a proper place to reside, a place from which it could spread its influence to the powerful and influential.

Esther Clear-Seer's ranch was the perfect choice.

Esther had founded the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth with her husband during the 1970s. When he had passed away, she had nearly bankrupted the entire church by trying to cash in on the faith of all of her worldwide members. She thought that if she bilked her entire membership in one fell swoop, she could live like a queen for the rest of her life. And so, even as the United States and the Soviet Union were beginning to ease nearly fifty years of tension, Esther had created Armageddon in her own mind.

She had made a young fortune in the single venture but lost out in the long run. After her predicted apocalypse failed to materialize, members of the International Truth Church finally figured out that they had been had. Church membership dropped off dramatically, and what with all the bills she still had to pay, Esther found that her anticipated windfall was only a passing breeze.

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It took years to rebuild an acolyte pool productive enough to sustain her lavish life-style.

When Mark Kaspar showed up at her door with his ancient urn and uncanny stock-market predictions, Esther thought at last she had hit the mother lode.

With greed, power and corruption to unite them, Mark Kaspar and Esther Clear-Seer were truly a perfect match. And the Pythia's plan for the future of America moved along with flawless rapidity.

There was only one small problem.

Mark Kaspar didn't know why the President of the United States hadn't yet responded to his threats.

Former governor Michael Princippi had assured Kaspar that the leaders of the President's party had informed the Chief Executive that more congressional resignations would follow if the young Sinanju Master wasn't turned over at once.

In actual fact the sorry truth was that without the Pythia, Kaspar's threat was hollow. He only had minor dirt on two other members of Congress, and the nature of the charges was survivable in the new permissive political climate in America. What Kaspar had done was fire all of his seven major salvos at one time, hoping sheer numbers would force the President to turn over Remo and thus return the essences of Apollo and his Pythia.

But official Washington had so far refused to take the bait.

"He's got to respond," Michael Princippi insisted. He wrung his hands as he paced anxiously.

They were in Kaspar's office in the corner of the abandoned hangar on the Ranch Ragnarok site.

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"Now that you're a bona fide candidate, he can no longer ignore you," Princippi added worriedly.

Kaspar had taken out the proper papers and filled out the necessary disclosure forms several weeks before. In a brief statement to the press that morning, on the heels of the congressional resignations, Mark Kaspar had declared himself an official candidate for the United States Senate.

"He is doing just that, my friend Michael," Kaspar said, leaning back in his leather chair.