Warren Murphy: Blood Lust

"If you mean what I think you mean . . ." the secretary of defense began.

"I do. I'm going to have the body released to the Iraiti consulate. No choice."

"There is no telling how Abominadad will react."

"Mr. President, let me suggest a first strike."

"Mr. President," the secretary of defense jumped in, "let me suggest that you ignore the chairman's suggestions, since this is a cabinet meeting and, strictly speaking, he is not a cabinet member."

"How about we adjourn to the War Room?" the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff said hopefully.

The President held up a quieting hand.

"No first strike. I will have the body released. But we must be ready to react to the Iraiti response-no matter what it is."

Every man in the cabinet room understood what the President's words meant.

They were about to take a giant step closer to war.

Chapter 39

In the lowermost dungeon of the Palace of Sorrows, Remo Williams awoke.

He tasted the dried blood on his lips.

And then he remembered the feverish bloody kisses Kimberly Baynes had showered on him as they lay on the corpulent body of Prince Abdul Fareem. The many yellow-tipped talons of Kali had taken him to an exquisite hell of sexual torment, after which he had collapsed on the sand, spent and unconscious.

Remo had awoken with the dawn.

The blazing sun had burned his skin to a lobsterlike hue. He was naked, but no longer erect. That pleasant relief had barely sunk in when Kimberly Baynes, also naked, stood up from her throne-the corpse on which a buzzard had already begun feasting-and lifted four arms to the sun.

"Stand up. Red One."

Remo had climbed to his feet.

"Now you are truly red, as befits Kali's mate."

Remo said nothing. Her parched lips were caked with rustlike dried blood. Her head lay on her shoulder, almost perpendicular to her broken neck. Behind her, the buzzard looked up, his ghoulish head tilted, in echo of Kimberly's own.

"Now what?" Remo asked dully.

Kimberly Baynes snapped a yellow silk scarf between two hands like a whip, her small breasts bouncing with each snap.

"We wait for the Caldron of Blood to churn. Then we will dance the Tandava together, O Triple World Ender."

But the Caldron of Blood did not begin churning. The sun ascended and, hovering like a superheated brass ball, began its slow sink into desert and darkness.

Reluctantly Kimberly Baynes had donned her abayuh and ordered Remo back into his soiled kimono.

They had returned to Abominadad by plane and, after being whisked to the Palace of Sorrows, Remo had been cast into the dungeon, where he had immediately sunk into defeated, dreamless sleep.

Now, tasting blood on his lips, he stared into the unrelieved darkness with hollow, burning eyes.

If he was himself, he could have stood up and ripped through the thick iron-bound hardwood door to freedom.

But Remo was no longer himself. He was Kali's slave.

It would have been a fate worse than death, but Remo had had a taste of the Void-the cold merciless place where Chiun now suffered. Just as Remo suffered.

Alive or dead, on earth or in the Void, Remo no longer cared. He was beyond help, and beyond hope.

He would have preferred to die, but he knew what awaited him in death.

And so he waited in the dark.

Chapter 40

It was a good thing that Turqi Abaatira was dead.

Had he been alive, the late Iraiti ambassador would have been in excruciating pain.

His dead body had spent four days in a refrigerated morgue under police guard while official Washington considered what to do with him.

When it was decided that the concern voiced in the press could not longer be ignored, a CIA "inert-assets" team came for the body. "Inert asset" is a CIA term for "inconvenient corpse."

The dead ambassador was taken to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, where dirty Potomac river water was pumped into his lungs through a garden hose stuffed into his slack mouth. The inert-assets team leader in charge of the operation kept the water flowing until it backed up from the late ambassador's lungs and dribbled from his nostrils.

The body was then placed behind the wheel of a rented car, whose backdated papers would prove the ambassador had rented it the day he disappeared. The car was rammed into a soft barrier at sixty-two miles an hour-enough to put the ambassador's bloodless face through the windshield and create convincing scars.

The body was then extracted and cured in a water tank until the soft tissues turned puffy and gray from immersion. When the stomach became bloated from expanding intestinal gases to the equivalent of a third-trimester pregnancy, Ambassador Turqi Abaatira was pronounced "processed."

The car was then transported by car carrier to a sheltered section of Boiling Air Force Base and pushed into the river.

The CIA agent whose responsibility it was to "process" the ambassador's body watched the bubbles rising from the sinking car. When the last bubble blurped to the surface, he found a pay phone, where he made a call to the D.C. police.

The police, unaware that they had been set up to add credence to the story, dutifully investigated. Divers were sent in. A wrecker was called. And the body was extracted by paramedics who took one look at the puffy wormlike face and fingers and pronounced the body deceased.

The same medical examiner who had pronounced the ambassador dead of strangulation two days later went through the motions of a new autopsy. This time he certified the cause of death as drowning.

He didn't question the procedure. He understood the sensitivity that usually surrounded a diplomat's death, and had done this before.

More important, he had a son stationed in Hamidi Arabia whom he would like to see rotated back to the States alive when his tour was up.

Ambassador Abaatira's body, along with the falsified autopsy report, was released to a tearful Iraiti embassy staff. Word was cabled to Abominadad.

A long silence followed.

When instructions finally came back from the Iraiti Foreign Ministry, they were terse: "SEND BODY HOME."

Since the national airline of Irait was forbidden to overfly every country except Libya and Cuba, the body had to be flown to Havana, where an Air Irait civilian plane ferried Ambassador Turqi Abaatira on his last voyage.

At Langley, the CIA congratulated themselves on a cover-up well done.

At Maddas International Airport, Kimberly Baynes, wearing an all-concealing black abayuh, waited patiently for the body to arrive. She mingled with the tearful family of the ambassador, out of sight of President Maddas Hinsein and his escort, indistinguishable from the other women beneath her black veil. A national day of mourning had been announced. Flags drooped at half-mast all over the airport.

The plane touched down. The women threw back their heads and gave vent to mournful ululations of grief.

Unseen, Kimberly Baynes slipped from the passengers' waiting area to the cargo-receiving terminal.

In her black native costume, she lurked in the shadows as the polished mahogany coffin was hoisted onto a toiling conveyor belt and carried down to waiting baggage handlers.

The handlers lugged the coffin to a waiting baggage truck.

Five minutes passed while the driver of the truck finished a cup of bitter chicory coffee-the only kind available in sanction-strangled Irait.

In those five minutes, Kimberly Baynes slipped up to the coffin and unlatched the lid. Lifting it with both hands, she held it aloft while a second pair reached through slits in the abayuh to twist a long yellow silk rumal around the dead ambassador's puffy, discolored neck.

She pulled it tight.

No, tighter, a voice from deep within her urged. The same voice that had guided her through her days in Irait, imparting secrets and hidden knowledge and even teaching her Arabic in a way she could not understand.