Warren Murphy: Fool's Gold

"What?"

"Those two men who have been guarding her. I'm sure they will be coming here."

"Should I leave the country?" Moombasa said worriedly. "I can easily schedule my triumphant tour as national liberator. Cuba and Russia keep inviting me."

"No," said Wissex. "I'll deal with those two men. I just wanted you to know."

"Where are you now?" Moombasa asked.

"Just off the coast."

"Don't bring the girl here," said Moombasa.

"Why not?"

"If you bring her here, those two are liable to follow. I don't want them here unless they're already in pieces."

"I won't bring her there. I'm taking her to that hill near your border."

"Mesoro? Why there?"

"Because it suits my purposes," Wissex said.

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"It's flat and high and they won't be able to sneak up on me."

"I'll send the Revolutionary Commando Brigade or whatever they call themselves to help you."

"Perish forbid, Wissex said. "Just leave it to me. You could help by keeping patrols and army and everybody else out of the area. I don't want my equipment to be hindered by your people marching around."

"Hokay. I want that woman to talk," Moombasa said.

"She will."

"What does she look like?"

"She's attractive but not your type," Wissex said.

"Too bad. Keep in touch," Moombasa said.

Wissex smiled, replacing the phone. Of course she was not Moombasa's type. The woman had an IQ over 70.

Wissex left the cabin and herded Terri, her hands tightly bound behind her, into the back seat of a helicopter, lashed to a takeoff pad on the small ship's bow.

"Where are we going?" she asked.

"To await the arrival of your friends," Wissex said. He smiled at her and she noticed that his blue eyes were cold and unfeeling. The eyes of a killer. She shuddered at his touch as he pushed her roughly into the aircraft.

From the airport, Remo called Smith again but the CURE director had not been able to find out where the girl had vanished to.

"What the hell good are those computers of yours, Smitty, when they can't find anything out?"

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"You forget, Remo. I don't have the computers any more. All the records are still missing. That's why I want you to forget that woman and get back here to the States. Get our records back."

"What about the mountain of gold?" Remo asked. "The death of Western civilization as we know it? What about all that?" Remo asked.

"You know now there is no mountain of gold. So all this is is a kidnapping. The mountain of gold might have been more important than our records, but that woman professor isn't. Come back."

"I can't do that," Remo said.

"Why not?"

"Because her safety is my responsibility. Because the House of Sinanju can't walk away from a challenge."

"I don't understand all that tradition business," Smith said.

"That's because you're uneducable, Smitty. You just hold the fort. We'll get there when we get there," Remo said as he hung up.

As he walked away from the phone booth, Remo saw the same spy who had been dogging his footsteps earlier through Bombay Airport.

The short, squat man was now wearing a flamenco dancer's costume. Little puffballs hung from the fringes of his flat-brimmed hat. He stood by the wall next to the phone booth, edging closer to Remo. His satin trousers squeaked as they rubbed against the marble airport wall.

He smiled at Remo as Remo stepped nearer, the smile one gives a stranger he doesn't really wish to talk to.

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"Where is the girl?" Remo said.

"Beg pardon, Senor?"

"The girl."

"We Flamenco dancers have many girls," the man said.

"You know the girl I want," Remo said.

The man shrugged. He was still half shrugged when Remo upended him and dragged him by one fat ankle over to the railing of the observation deck.

Remo tossed him over. The fat man hung upside down, suspended only by Remo's grip on his ankle.

"Where have they taken her?" Remo growled.

"Hamidia," the man screamed in terror. "Hamidia. To Mesoro. True. True. I tell the truth, Senor."

"I know you do," Remo said. "Have a nice trip."

He let the man fall and walked away, even before the scream died out with a fat splat. Chiun was standing in front of an arcade filled with electronic games.

"They've gone to Hamidia. Some place named Mesoro," Remo said.

Chiun nodded and said, "Japs are treacherous. I bet we could have played Space Invaders on that other one's machine."

Generalissimo Moombasa didn't like to rise before noon. It was his opinion that in people's democratic republics, anything that happened before noon deserved to wait for the great man to get out of bed.

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But the call from Lord Wissex had disrupted his smooth sleeping pattern and he rested only fitfully for two more hours until his private telephone rang again.

If this kept up, he was going to have it disconnected, he decided.

"Hello," he yelled into the phone.

"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. This is Pimsy Wissex," a voice rattled.

"Sony, you got wrong number. You want asthma clinic, you look up number. The house of fancy boys is down the street too. You look up their number."

He hung up the telephone but it rang again instantly.

"What now?"

"Listen to me, you bleeding wog," Pimsy snarled. "I've got something to tell you."

"This better be important."

"It is," said Uncle Pimsy.

Seventeen

Night was falling. She had hung there through the brutally hot sun of the day with not a drop of water for her lips. Her arms felt that they were going to snap out of her shoulder sockets and twice during the day when she could stand the pain no more, she had screamed and Wissex had lowered her to the ground for fifteen minutes before hoisting her up again.

Her throat was parched and her lips were dry. She touched them with her tongue but it felt like rubbing wood over wood.

At least the night would bring some coolness, some relief from the day's heat. But in the grassy fields below that surrounded the flat-topped hill they were on, Terri could hear the insects and then the sounds of larger animals-a snarl, a growl- and the thought of what was out there chilled her.

She was hanging from a long boom, extended out over the edge of the Mesoro Hill. Ropes tied roughly around her wrists were fastened to the boom, and she was able to rest only by grabbing the boom with her hands and holding on, to rest

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her wrists, until her hands tired of supporting her weight and she had to let go. And then the pain in the wrists began again.

The boom was attached at its other end to a heavy, complicated tripod in the center of the flat table of rock. And Lord Wissex sat there, at a table which he had unloaded from the helicopter, a table with controls built into it. During the heat of the day, he had opened a bottle of white wine which he had carried in a cooler, had poured himself a glass, and had toasted Terri Pomfret's beauty.

But he had offered her none for her dry throat.

He was a sadist and a brute. She had fallen for the accent and the superficial charm and the tweedy British clothes and she realized that if Jack the Ripper had ben been soft-spoken and full of "yes, m'dears" and worn an ascot, she probably would have crawled into a blood-stained bed with him.

She saw Wissex looking at her and she asked again, "What are you going to do with me?" He had not answered her all day when she had asked that question.

Wissex smiled at her. "Do you know that that imbecile Moombasa still believes there is a mountain of gold?" he asked.

"And there isn't," she said.

"Of course not," Wissex said.

"Why did you put up all those plaques? It was you, wasn't it?"

"Of course m'dear. It was my plan. There is, you know, this idiotic Hamidian legend about a mountain of gold. It was my idea that if I got Moombasa to believe the United States was looking for it, then he would spend any amount of