Warren Murphy: High Priestess

Lobsang Drom blinked. "You know where he is to be found?"

"No, but there is one who, among men, can find him if anyone can."

"How can that be? I am the last of the Worshipful Nameless Ones in the Dark Who See the Light That is Coming."

"Which is why I am about to dishonor my fine pony by letting you mount him, unwashed one," returned the Mongol. "Now hurry. We have only fourteen or fifteen years to find the Bunji Lama. Otherwise, the damned Panchen Lama will ascend to the lion Throne, and the thrice-damned Chinese will control Tibet until the Kali Yug comes."

Striding stiffly because he was unaccustomed to walking and not due to the bitter cold that had long ago settled into his bones, Lobsang Drom donned the rich snow-leopard pelt. It steamed as if cooking, and felt comfortingly warm against his wind-dried skin.

Mounting the wooden saddle chased with silver filigree, Lobsang Drom struggled to retain his balance as the Tibetan led the pony around in a circle and started down the precarious two-foot-wide mountain pass.

"Mongol, what is your name?" he asked after a time.

"I am called Kula."

"And who is this person who will locate the longlost Bunji Lama when the Worshipful Nameless Ones in the Dark Who Sea the Light That is Coming, of which I am the last, have all failed?"

"He is the Master of Sinanju," said Kula the Mongol over the cannonading of Chinese artillery. "And if there is enough gold in the bargain, he will find the moon in a blizzard"

"It is a long trek to Korea, where the Master of Sinanju dwells. All of it through Chinese territory."

"It is even longer journey to America, where the Master of Sinanju will be found."

"The Master of Sinanju is an exile, too?"

"Hush, Priest. You will need your breath and all of your strength if you are to negotiate the Karo La Pass."

By that, Lobsang Drom knew that the Mongol sought to escape into India.

"There is a mighty ocean between India and America," he said. "How are we to cross it with only one horse?"

"In my namdu," he said unconcernedly.

Hearing this, Lobsang Drom could not help but ask, "What manner of Mongol owns a skyboat?"

At that, the Mongol Kula only laughed. He said no more as they picked their way down the mountainside.

It was the Earth Dog Year. Exactly five astrological cycles had transpired since the Fire Dog Year. The wind howled, the snows of the Himalayas cut into the lines of the Most Holy Lobsang Drom Rinpoche's weathered features, and he refused to believe that the Bunji Lama would be found at the end of the long journey before him.

For to hold hope in his embittered heart was to risk having his spirit crushed forever.

Chapter 2

His name was Remo, and he was trying to remember how to spell Buttafuoco.

He stood before the automatic teller machine in the Plexiglas-enclosed outer lobby of the neighborhood bank in the seaside Massachusetts town he called home. It was night, so the green letters on the ATM screen were like jade on fire.

They read: "Hello Mr./Mrs. XXXXXXXXXX, please spell your last name."

"Damn," muttered Remo, staring at the huge, piano-sized keyboard. Streetlights reflecting off the clear Lucite picked up his lean-featured face with its grimly humorous mouth. Shadows pooling in the hollows of his deep-set eyes suggested a skull, with skin stretched drum tight over high cheekbones. It was not a happy face. It had never been a happy face. It would never be a happy face, but at least, after many plastic surgeries, it was pretty much the face he had been born with.

His high forehead wrinkled as he struggled with his problem.

It was a new wrinkle in ATM security. Four-digit password numbers were no longer enough. A customer had to correctly input his last name before accessing his account.

It had not been a problem last night, when Remo withdrew a hundred dollars as Remo Brown, or the night before, when he pulled fifty out of the checking account he had under the name Remo Black, or the night before that, when he was Remo Green. He could spell those names.

Remo really hoped he would be held up before he had to play the Buttafuoco card. But it was his own fault, he realized. After all, he was the one who picked the last-name aliases so Upstairs could provide phony driver's licenses, credit cards and ATM cards. There was, as he saw it, no problem being Remo Buttafuoco whenever he needed a quick hundred bucks.

Until the banking industry, run ragged by a proliferation of ATM-based scams, decided four-digit pass numbers weren't secure enough.

Remo stared at the screen, wondering if the number of glowing green X's corresponded to the number of letters in Buttafuoco. He hoped so. It would help a lot. He punched in the letters BUTT. That was easy. Simple word association.

He saw that the string of green X's became "BUT TXXXXXX." '

Next, he tried an E. So far so, good. Five X's left. How hard could it be?

But when he punched in the letters FUOCO and pressed Enter, the machine displayed "you are an imposter" and ate his ATM card.

"Hey! Don't I get a second chance?" Remo complained.

A new screen came up. It was dense with fine print. Remo was reading how in the interest of customer-account security the ATM machine was programmed to shut down in the event of a misspelling.

It apologized for the inconvenience, but pointed out that bank security was important, too. Besides, customers should know how to spell their own last names.

"Not if it's Buttafuoco," said Remo, whose real last name, in the days when he was a good citizen and not a dead man, had been Williams. "Nobody can spell Buttafuoco right on the first try!"

Remo was so upset he almost forgot about the ATM bandit who had been waylaying after-hours customers as they walked from area banks with their withdrawals. He had been striking on random nights. So far nobody had been hurt, but a few people had been roughed up, including a nun from the church across the street.

Remo had a soft spot in his heart for nuns. He had been raised in a Catholic orphanage.

When he'd read about the crimes in the newspaper, Remo decided to do something about it. It wasn't the kind of crime that ordinarily got his attention, but this was his neighborhood now and his bank-even if he did have four different accounts under four different aliases, and not one teller had ever noticed-and he wasn't about to let some lowlife ruin it for everyone else.

He stormed out of the bank lobby and almost walked into the shiny blue .357 Magnum revolver. Almost but not quite. The second he exited the sense-deadening Plexiglas enclosure, he knew someone was lurking in the shadows. His nose picked up the sweat stink of fear. His ears heard a heart beating erratically.

Automatically he pretended not to notice the lurker. Just as automatically he changed direction so he could pretend to walk into him.

"Right there!" a raspy voice warned.

There wasn't much to the man holding the revolver. He had dead gray skin and the emaciated aspect of a drug addictall bone and sinew, with nerve endings jangling like wind chimes. The only thing about him that stuck out was his weapon.

Remo allowed his eyes to rest upon the well-crafted pistol. In his previous life, the sight of a .357 bore pointed at his solar plexus would have started the adrenaline flowing. Instead, Remo simply relaxed.

Where once he would have been intimidated by the precision steel and smoothly fitting parts designed to inflict massive internal injury to human flesh and bone and organs, Remo saw the weapon for what it was-a crude, almost medieval device.

Chiefly it was a conglomeration of the most primitive of man-made tools-the wheel, the lever and the hammer. After all, the trigger was just a lever designed to trip the hammer, the action of both actuating the bullet-bearing cylinder, which was really a form of wheel.