Warren Murphy - The Ultimate Death

At the door, Chiun's head snapped around.

Remo, his attention trained on Poulette, failed to notice the reaction.

Remo blinked. "Scubisci? The Mafioso?"

"Don't know!" Poulette howled. "Don't know!"

"Do better, or join your dearly departed flock," Remo warned.

"I swear-I don't know if it was Scubisci! Mondello could've been working alone."

From the, door Chiun remarked, "He speaks the truth."

Reluctantly, Remo released Poulette's neck.

Poulette caressed his injured muscles. His wattle jittered with the agitation. "Sal was a plant." He shook his head to clear his thoughts. His head pecked at the air, and he took a deep breath. "You see," he added, expelling the air, "years ago, when I was starting this place up, I was having trouble with the union help. They were causing me so many headaches that I threatened to fire the lot of them and hire all nonunion. Then stuff started happening. Trucks overturning while delivering my birds. Mysterious fires on my loading docks. And there were picketers everywhere. I was going to go under. If Don Pietro hadn't stepped in, I wouldn't have made it."

"Nice of him," Remo said dryly.

"Hey, my problems were solved!" Henry Poulette said. "He arranged a sit-down with the union, and everything went back to normal. In return, I gave one of the Scubisci subsidiaries the hauling and carting contract on all Poulette Farms refuse."

"Nice way to do business," Remo commented.

"It is better than some others," Chiun muttered.

Remo was about to ask him what he meant by that when Poulette continued, "Don Pietro asked me to put Sal on the inspection line. I think Sal was family-you know, blood family-but kind of soft in the head, so I put him on the payroll."

"So Scubisci is poisoning America," Remo said.

"No." It was Chiun. He was shaking his bald head.

"What do you mean, 'no'?" Remo asked. "He probably has some scam worked out where he sells the antidote to local supermarkets. He's our man."

"I agree with him," Poulette said, indicating Chiun.

"Big surprise there," Remo said, sarcastically.

"No. Listen. Don Pietro has too big a stake in Poulette Farms," Poulette continued. "Besides, Sal has been spending quite a bit of time up the hill lately. If there's anyone who put him up to it, it's those vegetarian loonies."

"Who?" Remo asked.

"You must have seen them on the way in," Poulette said. "The nuts with the 'Reject Meat' signs? They're from Three-G."

"What is this 'Three-G'?" Chiun asked, suddenly interested.

"A pain in the crop," Poulette responded. "The guy who used to run it, Gideon, was kind of offbeat, but friendly: A good neighbor, member of the local chamber of commerce, that sort of thing. Since he left, I don't know what it's become. Some sort of commune, I think. They started picketing me last week."

"We will go there," Chiun said firmly.

Remo frowned. "Whoa! Could you check that enthusiasm for a minute, and tell me where the hell it came from?"

"They are closest to this den of horror," Chiun said, reasonably. "And they did not wish for us to eat duck. Therefore, we must investigate these vegetable-devourers."

"Yeah!" Poulette's head bounced wildly. "Motive and opportunity! He's right!" He waved a bony finger at Chiun.

"Since when did you two get so chummy?" Remo demanded. He turned to the Master of Sinanju. "And I say it's Don Pietro, and we should be halfway to Little Italy by now."

"No," said Chiun, firmly. "We will go to this G-spot."

"Mind telling a fellow duck-aficionado why?"

"It is the logical place to begin."

"Logic, my ass," Remo said. "You're up to something. What is it? If this is another excuse to bust my balls over leaving you in the desert, I'll say it again. Sorry. Sorry, sorry, sorry. I apologize most sincerely. Now can we go?"

The Master of Sinanju lifted his brittle eyes to the face of his pupil. They softened ever so slightly.

"If you honor the man you call your father," he said softly, "you will go."

Remo was taken aback by the old Korean's tone. All he had heard from Chiun so far was carping. Carping about stranding him below the California desert. Carping about Remo's secret desire to supplant him as Master. Carping about Remo's embarrassing performance while he was Master. Carping about the color of the damned sky, and somehow blaming it on Remo. Now something had changed.

Remo heaved a sigh. "If I go up there with you, will you promise to get off my back about this kohi thing?"

"I would not make a promise I could not keep," Chiun replied.

And understanding that his pupil had already relented, he swept through the door like a tired wind blowing.

Chapter 10

He felt tired. Tired, weak and old. Oh, so old.

They had denied him the Final Death. The one, great sweeping of the meat-eaters into Eternal Oblivion. The mass sacrifice had been intended to feed those who had passed before him in the Life from Death until the Great End when all that was would be no more. Only in the throes of the Final Death would he be allowed to join the others of his ancient Creed.

The Final Death was the sustenance that would nourish the undead in the womb of eternity.

He was the last of the gyonshi. The blooddrinkers of old China. It was his destiny.

But the Sinanju master had stopped him. He and his cursed gweilo. They had halted the Final Death.

He allowed himself an evil smile. His yellowed teeth were exposed to the light, like the mouth of a rotting jack-o'lantern decorated with Indian corn.

Not halted, he reminded himself. Merely postponed.

The child had come to him before. Was it a minute? An hour? The Leader did not know. In the ceaseless dark in which he dwelt, time no longer mattered.

"It has begun, Leader," the girl chirped happily.

The Leader cleared the phlegm from his aged throat.

"It began before you were born," he instructed the girl he called 'Missy.' "It had its beginnings before my birth, before the birth of this strange land we find ourselves in. It began in the mist. In the distant past of two great Houses."

The Leader smiled wickedly. "Here, it ends."

The girl left him to his meditations. His one great desire returned to him then. The thing that drove him in his age, in his infirmity. A calling greater than the Final Death.

The extinction of Sinanju.

It dwelled in his thoughts like a half-remembered lover. Tantalizing. Alluring. Obtainable.

He allowed the delicious sensations to fill his mind with visions that could only be imagined.

Her presence was in the room with him again. Young, vibrant. Everything he was not. He knew it was she before she could speak.

"Missy," the Leader said, nodding permission for her to speak.

"They come."

Her voice was tight, concerned. Still a child.

The Leader nodded. An infinitesimally small move of his purplish, skull-like head. The head swayed in its continual side-to-side movement. "They have stepped into the Shanghai Web, as expected," he rasped.

"But they are coming here, not to Little Italy."

"It is of no moment. There is no strand of silk in the Shanghai Web that will not lead to the inevitable. Do you recall the edict of old?"

"Yes. 'Separate and conquer.' "

The Leader nodded again. "Do as instructed." His paper-thin lids slid unconcernedly over his sightless white eyes.

"Leader," Mary Melissa Mercy nodded. She backed respectfully from the room in her sensible white shoes.

Chapter 11

The Three-G, Incorporated, headquarters was an ultramodern building with all of the accoutrements that would be expected in the main facility of the leading producer of health foods in America. It boasted solar-heating roof panels and a satellite dish, and, if the clouds of flies swarming overhead was any indication, it eschewed the use of environmentally harmful pesticides to protect its landscaping.