Warren Murphy - The Ultimate Death

"The Leader?" Smith repeated, sounding more shocked than surprised. "But Remo, that is impossible."

"Oh, really?" Remo asked, planting his hands on his hips. "And why is that?"

"Because," Harold Smith said in a prim, colorless voice, "the Leader is safely confined here at Folcroft."

Chapter 17

Elvira McGlone felt like an outsider now.

Not that she hadn't felt like one since her first day at Gregory Green Gideon's Three-G, Incorporated. She simply didn't fit in. Never had. Elvira McGlone wore tailored business suits and severe skirts, while everyone else wallowed in tie-dyed jeans and bandannas. She ate pastrami sandwiches and drank tap water, while the others ate Three-G's bowel-busting health bars and drank bitter foreign bottled water; because they believed every stream and reservoir in America was polluted.

Elvira McGlone had thought things might change when the new owners took over. She recalled the old adage "a new broom sweeps clean," and fervently hoped that this new broom would sweep the rest of these retrograde hippies right back to the Age of Aquarium-or whatever starry era had spawned them. But if anything, the Three-G staff had only become more cliquish, leaving Elvira McGlone even further out in the cold than she had been.

And the worst, the absolute worst, thing about the whole affair, was that she was the one who had let the pair of them in.

It had happened right after what was to be her final meeting with Gideon, at which she had argued for better merchandising of their products. She had left her market projections in her Volvo and had gone out to get them.

When she had opened the entrance door, they were standing there. Just standing there. A redhead in a crisp nurse's uniform, and what was surely the oldest man in the world this side of Methuselah. They must have been staring at the closed door and when Elvira McGlone opened it, they stared at her.

"Do you invite us in?"

It was the old man who had spoken. Elvira figured they must be strung-out health freaks looking to take one of the free tours that Gideon gave to the public. He was forever giving away free samples, too, eating away at the Three-G bottom line.

"Why the hell not?" Elvira had muttered. "We welcome the halt and the lame, why not the blind and creepy?"

Elvira McGlone held the door open for them as they entered the Three-G building. They sniffed the air like dogs.

"We couldn't have come in unless you asked us," the redheaded nurse chirped inanely.

The elderly man-he looked Chinese-only smiled at her. His eyes were white as pearls and his breath smelled like he'd just swallowed a recently expired skunk.

Shaking her head, Elvira let the door swing shut behind them and went out to her car to retrieve her papers. She thought that it would end with that.

It didn't.

Somehow, that very week, the creepy pair had assumed ownership of Three-G. The stockholders, who consisted mainly of Gideon's fellow wallowers in granola, had installed them unanimously. Elvira McGlone was not told what had happened to Gideon. Her queries were met with blank-eyed evasions, even from the usually talkative veggie zealots, who until then had been a happy assemblage of Vegans and lacto-or lactovo-vegetarians.

Now they chanted "Reject meat!" and had become irredeemably macrobiotic.

It was all much too bizarre, even for Three-G.

Elvira McGlone clomped along the hallway nervously, her long, bloodred talons striking time on the back of her clipboard. It was funny how the place made her so uneasy now. She found herself missing Mr. Gideon. She felt bonecold every time she thought of him.

She steadied herself, realizing that she was being childish. She hadn't come this far this fast on the corporate fast track to be derailed by a mere change in management.

She breathed deeply, steadying her nerves as she reached for the knob to the office of the new vice-president, Mary Melissa Mercy. It was Mercy who made Elvira the most uncomfortable. She just wasn't . . . right. And she was just too healthy. Unhealthily healthy. If there was such a thing.

Elvira paused at the door. There were voices coming from inside the office. Chanting.

It sounded to Elvira McGlone like some very weird aerobics class. Mary Melissa was calling out disjointed phrases, the others responding with even weirder mantras.

"The stomach is the center."

"Where life begins."

"No place in the afterlife."

"No place by God's side."

"The death of the stomach is the death of life."

"The homage to our God."

"The skeleton in the tree, symbolizing our strength and power."

"The burial of the innards."

"The Final Death."

The faddists must be talking shop again, Elvira decided.

When she pushed open the door to the room, Elvira McGlone discovered that these Three-G staffers weren't as strict with their vegetarianism as she had been led to understand.

The Three-G staff was arrayed around a long conference table. And they were not alone. They had been joined by several of the day's plant visitors.

These latter were not seated around the table, but splayed out on top of it.

Half of the tourists had been stripped of their skin, and their pulpy red subcutaneous flesh oozed blood. The rest were in the process of being eviscerated by members of the Three-G staff. Bloody strings of internal organs were being dragged from freshly gouged openings in the visitors' bellies. Hearts feebly pumped their last into small silver goblets. Some of the carcasses were being hauled out the broken window of Mary Melissa Mercy's office and into the garden beyond.

The pine floor was awash with blood. It was spilling from the drunkenly tilted silver goblets lifted to blood-smeared mouths.

The Vegans were actually drinking blood!

Elvira McGlone's mouth fell open, uncomprehending. A few Three-G staff members glanced up at her, their hands and faces streaked with red, their eyes hungry and animallike.

At the center, surveying all, Mary Melissa Mercy sat quietly on her desk, her clothes immaculate, her manner that of the calmest CEO. She, too, looked over at Elvira McGlone.

Elvira's brian worked furiously, trying to sort out the horrors her eyes beheld and at the same time determine some way to save herself from the fate of the pathetic half-human corpses littering her superior's office. If business school had taught Elvira McGlone anything at all, it was how to think on her feet.

"Oh, dear," she said, a sort of quavering earnestness in her voice. "If this is a bad time for you, I can come back later."

She grabbed for the doorknob to pull the door shut.

Chapter 18

Grimly, Harold W. Smith led Remo into the security wing of Folcroft.

Entry into this area of the sanitarium was severely restricted. Medical staff were required to obtain special clearance before passing through the double-locked steel doors. Dr. Smith reviewed all applicants personally.

"Yes," Smith was saying, "this food-product tampering does bear a remarkable resemblance to events fifteen years ago. But as for the Leader's involvement, I believe Chiun is mistaken. It must be someone else. Perhaps the Leader had an ally or protege?"

Remo shook his head. "Chiun is positive it's the Leader," he said firmly. "End of story."

"Er, yes," said Smith, unconvinced. "I only wish you had informed me of your progress. We could have coordinated. The loss of Don Pietro is most regrettable."

Remo glared at Smith. "Would you be happier if I'd gotten zapped, too?"

"I might have come up with some alternative," Smith said.

"Give it a rest, Smitty," Remo growled. "We were on the damned assignment before you put the key in the ignition."

Stung, Smith reached down to buckle his belt. The movement brought a fresh wave of pain to his stomach, and he turned his head to conceal his grimace from Remo.