As the visitors entered, the pile of stone around which the room had been built spit irregular bursts of steam. The rock suggested the summit of a trapped and nearly buried mountain and made the room look like some kind of animal habitat, as if the surrounding walls formed a cage through which visitors could glimpse zoo animals in their natural environment.
And high atop this pile of rock, on a small three-legged stool balanced above the uppermost sulphur vent, sat the mysterious young girl who had arrived at Ranch Ragnarok with Kaspar. Her vacant eyes stared through the veil of yellow smoke and into the mists of time.
"Welcome to the magnificence of the Temple of Apollo Reborn," Kaspar said.
"Far out," Zen said.
"Karma-licious," Gary agreed.
"Apollo?" Esther muttered. "What is this crap?"
Kaspar mounted the stone steps that had been carved into the side of the rocky hill. When he reached the top, he turned and regarded those below.
"Sacrifice, and you will hear the wisdom of the Pythia," he intoned.
Zen and Gary looked at one another. They shrugged.
"Sacrifice?" Zen asked.
Kaspar reached beneath his brightly colored shawl and removed a long, curving dagger from a hidden
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scabbard. He threw the knife down to the waiting ice-cream merchants.
"Sacrifice," Kaspar repeated. He gestured toward the terrified goat.
It took some arguing and a lot of threatening and a great deal more work than they had expected, but in the end it was Zen who got to hold the wriggling goat while Gary stood ready to slit the throat of the hapless animal.
The girl on the stool writhed in ecstasy as the knife was drawn across the throat of the pitiful creature, and when the body was still she let out a cry that was distinctly sexual.
At Kaspar's instructions the bloody carcass was set at the foot of the stone staircase.
Afterward, when she sat back on her stool, her glassy eyes seemed somehow more fierce in the eerie torchlight. Esther noticed a flicker, almost a nervous tic, at the corner of the girl's mouth.
"You may ask your question of my master," Kaspar called down.
Nervously Zen and Gary stepped forward and addressed the girl who seemed not to be aware of their presence.
"What we need to know is should we open up a chain of Zen and Gary's Ice Cream Shops in Moscow?" Zen asked. "I mean, the political situation with the collapse of communism is awful from an anticap-italistic viewpoint, obviously. But..." Zen let his words trail away, looking for all the world as if he was ashamed of what he was thinking. He glanced at his partner.
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"But can we make a buck at it?" Gary asked hurriedly.
Kaspar whispered into the ear of the young girl.
There was no considering the question. Seemingly no thought at all.
"The gods will smile on your venture," the girl called down, in a thick, rasping voice.
Zen and Gary high-fived one another.
At Kaspar's instructions, they paid Esther Clear-Seer a quarter million dollars with a Zen and Gary's corporate check—showing the Grateful Dead gorging themselves on Gary Garcia ice cream—and Esther didn't even notice that the check was made out to something called the Truth Church Foundation.
She was too busy watching the girl. It was the first time Esther had heard the girl speak, and the voice filled her with terror.
Of course Zen and Gary told their friends about Ranch Ragnarok.
In a country where new trends in spirituality were eagerly embraced and salvation was the nearest zir-conian crystal away, the idea of paying top dollar for the prophecies of a seemingly strung-out teenage girl was accepted with an alarming readiness.
Over the following winter a trickle of curious high rollers arrived at the Truth Church gates, all referred to Ranch Ragnarok by the ice-cream gurus. Several other New Agey business leaders, who were as ashamed of their success as Zen and Gary but who had nonetheless made small fortunes selling everything from preworn jeans to computers, posed questions to the oracle at Ragnarok. Esther once thought
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she recognized a United States congressman, but Kaspar had shooed her from the temple and conducted the man's session with the Pythia—as Kaspar now called the girl—in private.
Nearly eight months had passed since Kaspar first arrived at the ranch, and as the money in the Truth Church Foundation swelled from hundreds of thousands to millions, Esther Clear-Seer found her desire to confront him about his occasional lapses of insolence subsiding.
Esther even dismissed her original fear at hearing the voice of Kaspar's young female friend. She convinced herself that the girl's strange, guttural rasp could have been the result of a decade of cigarette smoking. It could even have been bronchial pneumonia. Lord knew, the girl wasn't looking very healthy
of late.
Esther mentioned this to Kaspar as dawn broke one morning after a particularly grueling session with a sports announcer from one of the major television networks.
"Maybe you should have a doctor look at her,"
Esther muttered.
Kaspar was sorting through a stack of papers piled on a bench at the base of the central rock column. He seemed to have gathered a lot of paperwork since the start of this enterprise and he was becoming increasingly engrossed in whatever it was he was collecting.
With an effort he tore his eyes away from the papers before him. He looked up at the girl, still perched on the tripod, though the smoke from the rock fissure had subsided somewhat.
"Why?" Kaspar asked indifferently.
As if on cue, the girl on the stool swooned and
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toppled over. The stool went one way, flipping out of sight down the back of the hill, and the girl did an unintentional somersault before tumbling roughly down the hard rock surface toward them.
Her bloodied, emaciated body landed in a crumpled heap at the feet of Esther Clear-Seer and Mark Kaspar.
Esther recoiled in horror. As the girl's breath became more and more ragged, she saw her increasingly opulent life-style slip away.
All at once the breathing stopped.
Esther crouched over the body. "She's dead," she announced anxiously.
Kaspar couldn't have shown less emotion if Esther had reported swatting a common housefly. He adjusted his bifocals.
"Then you'll just have to find me a fresh virgin," he said blandly.
"Me?" Esther gulped.
"You," Kaspar said, as if that ended the matter.
And he went back to studying his paperwork.
Chapter Four
Harold W. Smith, head of the supersecret government agency CURE, sat stiff-backed on the rickety wooden chair in the living room of Remo Williams's home in Quincy, Massachusetts.
The chair was old and creaked at his every movement but, Smith noted wryly, it wasn't nearly as old and rickety as he felt.
He had headed CURE—the agency set up outside constitutional limits, whose paradoxical mission it was to preserve the document CURE'S very existence flouted—since its inception, and had watched himself grow older and older in the post. Some said the presidency aged a man, but the pressures a President had to bear were nothing compared to the daily strains placed upon the tired, overworked shoulders of Harold W. Smith.
Intermittent humming came from another room. It was a strange, singsong melody with an odd cadence that stopped abruptly, only to begin again. The Master of Sinanju.
Smith squirmed in his chair. He prided himself on his excellent posture, but lately his lower back had been giving him trouble. Altogether it seemed to him that with his congenital heart defect that should have
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