Warren Murphy - Blood Lust

Harold Smith scanned the text. He learned that Kali was the terrible four-armed mother goddess of Hindu myth. Known as the Black One, she was a horrible personification of death and womanhood, who feasted on corpses and drank blood. She was, he read, the consort of Shiva the Destroyer, who was known as the Red One.

"Red One," Smith muttered. "Remo said Kimberly had called him that. And they would dance the Tandava in the Caldron of Blood."

Smith called up "TANDAVA."

"THE DANCE OF DESTRUCTION SHIVA DANCES IN CHIDAMBARAM, THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE," he read, "THUS CREATING AND RECREATING THE UNIVERSE OVER AND OVER."

He went to the Shiva file. Most of the information he knew. Shiva was one of the Hindu triad of gods, personification of the opposing forces of destruction and reintegration. His symbol was the lingam.

Smith input "LINGAM."

The definition was succinct: "PHALLUS."

And Smith remembered Remo's rather personal problem.

It was all, he decided, too much to be called coincidental.

Woodenly he logged off the encyclopedia file.

He leaned back in his chair, his gray eyes slipping out of focus.

"What if it's true?" he whispered, his voice awed. "What if it's really true?"

Stunned, he reached out for the red telephone. He hesitated, grimacing. What could he tell the President?

He turned in his big swiveling executive chair.

Out beyond the big picture window-his only window to the world during time of crisis-a bluish moon was rising over the liquid ebony waters of Long Island Sound. They were as black as an abyss.

Harold Smith was a practical man. The blood of his rock-ribbed New England ancestors flowed through his veins. Men who had come to a new world to carve out a new life. They had planted according to the almanac, worshiped in Spartan churches, and put aside family and farm when their country had called them to war and national service. Unsuperstitious men. Patriots.

But he knew in his heart that no ordinary power could sway Remo Williams to join the Iraiti side. He knew he had inadvertently sent Remo into the arms-the four arms, if his story could be believed-of an unclean thing that, whether or not she was Kali, possessed a supernatural power even a Master of Sinanju could not resist.

And he had lost Remo.

Now the world teetered on the edge of what Kimberly Baynes-if she truly was Kimberly Baynes anymore-called the Red Abyss.

No, Harold Smith realized, he could not tell the President. In truth, he could not do anything. He could only hope that some power greater than mortal man would intervene before the world was lost.

Harold Smith steepled his withered old fingers, as if in prayer. His dry lips parted as if to invoke salvation.

Smith hesitated. He no longer knew which gods he should invoke.

Finally he simply asked God the Father to preserve the world.

He was no sooner done than one of the desk phones shrilled in warning.

Smith turned in his seat. It was the multiline Folcroft phone. At this hour, it could be only one person.

"Yes, dear?" he said, picking up the phone.

"Harold," Maude Smith said. "How did you know it was me?"

"Only the director's wife would call at this hour."

Mrs. Smith hesitated. "Harold, are . . . are you coming home?"

"Yes. Soon."

"I'm a bit nervous tonight, Harold."

"Is something wrong?"

"I don't know. I'm uneasy. I can't explain it."

"I understand," Smith said in a comfortless voice. He was not good at this. He always had problems being warm. Even with his wife. "All this war talk."

"It's not that, Harold. I saw the strangest thing tonight."

"What is that?"

"Well, you remember those strange neighbors who lived next door. The ones who moved?"

"Of course I do."

"I thought I saw one of them not an hour ago."

Smith blinked, his heart racing. Remo! He had returned.

Smith took hold of his voice. "The young man?"

"No," Mrs. Smith said. "It was the other one."

"Impossible!" Smith blurted out.

"Why do you say that, Harold?"

"I . . . understood he returned to his home. In Korea."

"You did tell me that, yes. I remember now." Mrs. Smith paused. "But I happened to look out the dining-room window, and I saw him in the house."

"What was he doing?" Smith asked in a strangely thin tone.

"He was . . ." Mrs. Smith's somewhat frumpy-sounding voice trailed off. She gathered it again. "Harold, he was staring at me."

"He was?"

"I lifted my hand to wave to him, but he simply threw up his hands and the most ungodly expression came over him. I can't describe it. It was terrible."

"You are certain of this, dear?"

"I'm not finished, Harold. He threw up his hands and then he simply . . . went away."

"Went away?"

"He . . . vanished."

"Vanished?"

"Harold, he faded away," Mrs. Smith said resolutely. "Like a ghost. You know I don't put any stock in such things, Harold, but that is what I saw. Do you . . . you don't think that I could be coming down with that memory disease? Oh, what is it called?"

"Alzheimer's, and I do not think that at all. Please relax, dear. I am coming home."

"When?"

"Instantly," said Harold W. Smith, who did not believe in ghosts either, but who wondered if he had not beseeched the proper god after all.

Chapter 36

Abdul Hamid Fareem had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. He was proud to bear the name Hamid.

But pride alone is not enough to make one worthy of standing in line to be the next sheik.

Abdul Fareem had been disinherited by his father, the sheik of the Hamid tribe. He had been forced to divorce his good wife, Zantos, whom he had not appreciated-doing this by pronouncing the words, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," in the manner prescibed by Islam. Then he was forced to marry a Western woman of low morals, whom he did deserve.

The Western woman of low morals put up with him but three months as Abdul, exiled to Kuran, tried to scratch out a living as a moneylender. The white woman left when he had gone bankrupt. Lacking good judgment himself, he could hardly recognize a poor credit risk when he saw one.

When the Iraitis rolled over helpless Kuran, Abdul Fareem was the first to break for the border. And the first to find sanctuary.

He would have kept on going, straight for the emirates, but he had no money. Settling in the windblown border outpost of Zar, he earned a meager living as a camel groom. He let anyone who would listen know that he had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. And all had laughed. Not because they disbelieved his tale, but because they knew that fat Abdul Fareem had been of so base a character that even the right-thinking and kind sheik had disowned him.

Abdul Fareem had never sunk so low as these days. He had no money, no wife, no respect. Only the contempt of his fellow Arabs.

So it came as a tremendous surprise to him when soldiers in desert camouflage utilities stole in and abducted him as he slept on a bed of straw and camel dung in an open-air stable.

They gagged his mouth. They bound his struggling hands and feet as his three-hundred-pound body squirmed helplessly. And they bore him off to a waiting Land Rover.

The Land Rover chewed up sand and barreled north. North-to occupied Kuran. Abdul Fareem's heart quailed at the fearsome realization.

They took him to a desert camp and flung him overboard like a sack of meal. It took all four of them.

Soldiers fell on him. Others, bearing video-camera equipment, trained their glassy lenses on his shame. Many brought lights that were trained on him. He felt like a bug. But then, he had always felt like a bug. A corpulent bug.

A woman stepped from between two lights. She was a black silhouette, her abayuh flowing, impelled by a warm desert breeze.