Warren Murphy: Prophet Of Doom

If he had looked more carefully behind, he would have noticed several Mark Kaspar campaign posters had drifted up, and were now following a safe distance in their wake.

Remo didn't bother with the bunker tunnels. He had gone straight to the old airplane hangar on the adjacent lot.

The goat pen he had seen on his first visit to the ranch was less full this day. The animals bleated in fear at his approach. ,

Remo rounded the back of the building from the direction opposite the one in which he had escaped—with Buffy Brand's help—earlier in the week. It was because he had not left by this route that he had not seen the pile of rotting carcasses.

Remo almost fell into it.

A shallow pit had been dug, but was nearly obscured by the mountain of dead goats piled on this side of the hangar. The ground around the pit was damp with oozing fluids.

The remains of Kaspar's sacrificial animals.

Pounds of powdered limestone had been shoveled onto the pitiful bodies. But no amount of lime would have masked the horrid stench. The stink of rotten

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flesh attracted all manner of scavenger insects. The air teemed with thick black swarms of flies. They bred in the naked eye sockets of the small corpses, and the oldest of the bodies were covered in part by wriggling white maggots.

Carrion flies buzzed and swirled around his head as Remo moved toward the hangar's side door. He steadied himself as he took hold of the handle.

The separate consciousness within his mind seemed poised to attack. He didn't know if opening the door to the Pythia chamber would unleash the floodgates once again. It had taken nearly every bit of strength he had to overthrow the presence of the Pythia back in the zoo.

And what of Apollo?

Remo didn't know if he was up to another conflict with the lesser entity of Apollo's emissary. The power of the sun god would surely be too great to withstand.

His only chance—a hunch really—would be to bound up to the top of the platform and to attempt to expel the spirit residing within him into the steam emanating from the fissure before Apollo could take full control of his mind. For Remo knew if that happened, the battle would be lost.

Nerves tight, Remo flung open the door and leaped into the Pythia chamber.

The noxious yellow smoke overtook him immediately.

A fresh cloud of the sickly sulphur fog belched up from the crevice like ash from a jaundiced volcano. It flowed around the room, slipping into every corner, enveloping Remo like an enticing shroud.

He grabbed the door frame for support.

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A voice cried out.

"Remo!"

His head swam. His vision blurred. He was seeing everything around him in a whirling kaleidoscope of overlapping images. Remo looked up, eyes seeking the point where he thought the voice had come from.

Buffy Brand was manacled at the top of the rocky hill. Her ankles and wrists were snapped securely in twin sets of iron shackles. The leg irons were fastened to the stone platform by a heavy length of chain.

Remo felt the spirit of the Pythia washing over the dams he had built up in his mind. It was like a violently roiling flood, sweeping away a helplessly inadequate levee made of twigs and sand.

He focused on the bottom step.

Must get to the top.

Remo took a few clumsy steps into the chamber.

"Get out of here, Remo!" Buffy yelled.

He didn't know where the voice came from this time. It was Buffy once again, but the disorienting effect of the swelling tide in his brain was worsening with every step. He couldn't tell if she was before him or behind.

His foot touched the first step.

The footfall was somehow soft and echoey. And far away.

Another step.

The black battlefield returned in Remo's mind. This time the bleak sky of the vision, which had been black, as well, was painted in sickly smears of bloody red.

The third step.

The combatants appeared. One vicious, the other docile.

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Over the horizon a black shape grew like time-lapse photos of the birth of a mountain.

Remo forced himself up. Must make it to the top.

He took the next half-dozen steps in jerky, uncertain strides, twice almost tumbling backward. Charged by some unseen electrical force, the yellow smoke crackled in minilightning bursts all around him. Remo bulled through it all.

Somehow, some way he reached the top.

The Cole girl. Somewhere in his mind Remo recognized her for who she really was. She sat on the tripod, glassy-eyed, face dead of all emotion.

Buffy Brand was to the girl's right. She stared at Remo with frightened eyes and babbled some warning that he couldn't understand.

The world swam around him in swirls of colored light.

He moved across the platform.

The presence was seeping through Remo's disordered mind once more.

It was strangely comforting this time. Somehow here, in the Pythia Pit, it was soft and inviting, rather than something he should fear. It was something to accept. To embrace.

The thing that told him he should fight was small and weak within him. It was easy to ignore that stubborn part of his mind.

East had met West. It was his destiny.

Through drunken eyes, Remo watched someone else step out from behind a tapestry at the far end of the platform. A little man dressed in strange robes. He was uttering incantations that Remo couldn't understand. For a brief instant he thought he should

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recognize the man, but in his drunken state he couldn't tell. Remo ignored him and moved toward the tripod.

The Cole girl rose at his approach.

As if in some prearranged ritual, she moved aside as he stepped on the metal grate that traversed the rocky fissure.

Smoke poured from the crevice as thick as that from an oil-well fire.

It was his destiny. East had met West. There was no sense fighting destiny. Especially his own.

Carefully Remo took his seat on the tripod of Apollo's Pythia.

The white-robed man whom Remo thought he should have recognized stepped in front of him. He wore a wicked smile as he stared coldly into Remo's dilating pupils.

On the battlefield of his mind, Remo watched the fierce combatant strike a final, terminal blow against his docile opponent. And for the first time Remo saw the face of the victim. As the body fell to the barren plain, Remo saw that the combatant's face was his own.

And in that minuscule part of his mind that he could still call his own, Remo bade a silent farewell to his father and teacher, the Master of Sinanju.

Harold Smith didn't know what he had done to rankle Senator Cole's assistant, but he wished there was some way he could take whatever it was back. The young idiot was becoming a nuisance.

"When was the last time you fired a gun, Pops?" The question was asked with a malice bordering on glee.

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Smith continued to watch the crowd surging around them as the senator chatted with a group of older women near a booth that was stocked from top to bottom with rag dolls, patchwork quilts and a dozen other handmade items.

"I am regularly recertified." Smith didn't look at the young man as he spoke.

"No, did you ever fire at someone?" the staffer asked. He seemed to consider this a kind of witticism, for there was a humorous, self-congratulatory glint in the depths of his eyes.

"That is not something I wish to share with you," Smith replied. He noticed a woman standing over by one of the concession stands who was eyeing the senator strangely. She had a kerchief wrapped around her head, and wore a pair of dark sunglasses so large they made her look almost like an oversize insect. Was she looking this way or wasn't she? Smith couldn't tell for sure.

A moment later she had turned away, becoming fixated on something on the other side of the pavilion.