Warren Murphy: Killing Time

"I'm glad you're enjoying yourself," Remo said, hefting the fattest soldier he'd ever seen into the air, while another attacked him from behind. "Personally, I'm getting a hernia." An inside line would have been so much easier, he thought as a soldier charged him with his AK-47. At the moment when the machinegun would have made contact, Remo was behind the guard, and then the guard was shooting forward and smashing into another, and then with a light blow to the man in front they were both airborne. Three others spiraied into the air like footballs, deflating as they im­paled themselves on three of the palace's towers.

"You see now the double-spiral air blow is not so easy," Chiun said with smiling triumph.

"Who said it was," Remo grunted, propelling an­other guard into the palace walls.

"You did. You told all those people that I was not re­sponsible for the beautiful attack on the two men at Shangri-la. You gave me no credit whatever."

"Chiun, look out!" Three men stood directly behind the old Oriental, their rifles leveled.

"It was masterful work," Chiun groused on without

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missing a beat, as the weapons in the hands of the sol­diers were suddenly buried in the dust and the men sailed upward, one after the other, in a giant oval. As each of them neared the ground, Chiun struck him up­ward again, bringing each blow in faster until the three men were nothing more than limp, boneless pulps, which Chiun juggled like boiled eggs.

"Okay, it's a tough attack," Remo panted, con­ceding the point. He flung an arm into the oval and the men crashed into a fleshy pile on the ground.

"What's going on?" came a muted, panic-filled squeak from in front of the wall.

Remo went to Foxx and pulled off the blindfold and the ropes that bound his wrists. Foxx took a look at the carnage in the courtyard, then at Remo. "You," he said, awestruck. "But I thought you were going to kill me."

"Naw," Remo said. "What's a little murder, trea­son, and assassination between friends? Your next target was only going to be the president of the United States. A little money in your pocket, a new govern­ment for America, run by a terrorist. What the hell?"

"I'm glad you see it that way," Foxx said, smiling.

"Just one question. Where's the procaine formula manufactured these days?"

Foxx winced. "Well, there's just a teeny problem with that," he said apologetically. "The lab in Switzer­land that was producing it burned down three weeks ago. But we can get around that. Smali amounts of the drug can be extracted directly from certain people. Horses, they're called, people with-"

"Yeah, I know. Like Irma Schwartz."

"Exactly." Foxx's face brightened. "They're rare, but not that rare, and it only takes six or seven bodies to produce the extract used in the mixture. It's easy,

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really. We can make it right at Shangri-la. I was plan­ning to, anyway. The Schwartz woman was the first. With your skills, we can have the rest in no time."

"Great to hear," Remo said. "Just knock off a few strangers, and there you have it."

"The fountain of youth."

"Except for the poor suckers you murder just to get at the juices in their bodies."

"Nobodies," Foxx said dismissively. "Never be missed. What do you say?"

"I say there are too many amateur assassins in this world," Chiun said.

"I agree," Remo said.

"What are you two talking about?" Foxx said. "We don't need assassins. We don't need anybody, now that the three of us are a team." He gestured expan­sively. "The New Team, that's what we'll be. First we'll approach Halaffa and see if the deal with the president is still on. You two can take care of that one with both hands tied, I'll wager. Halaffa will love us after that."

"Wonderful," Remo said. "It'll make my whole day."

"And then I'll go to the Soviets. God knows, there are a million people the Russians want bumped off. And then there are the Red Chinese, of course."

"Of course."

"We'll make a fortune. The New Team. It's the best idea I've ever had. Think of it. Just think of it!"

"Think of this," Remo said, crushing his skull.

Foxx reeled and slumped to the ground. "So much for the New Team," Chiun said.

And then the two of them were silent, their mouths dropping open in disbelief as they watched death work

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a transformation on Foxx that had never been per­mitted in life.

As the last breath rasped out of his body, the man seemed to shrivel in front of their eyes. His skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, growing translucent and spotted with age. His eye sockets darkened and deepened to ghoulish hollows. One by one his teeth fell out, gray and cracked, and his lips whitened and puckered and sank into his flesh, like the discarded skin of a snake. In seconds, the mass of wavy dark hair on his head turned white and fell to the ground in tufts. His spine bent. His hands curled into gnarled, arthritic fists. His flesh seemed to melt away, leaving only a thin shell of withered skin over the frail bones. Foxx was suddenly old, older than anything Remo had ever seen, as old as the earth itself.

"Come," Chiun said softly. The corpse was crum­bling into decay now, the bones turning to dust be­neath the papery gray flesh, the eyeballs congealing into black jelly. A host of flies swarmed over it, feeding on the putrid remains.

Chapter Nineteen

Halaffa's palace was eerily still inside. There were no soldiers anywhere. No guards. The gaudy Palace of Anatola was as silent as a desert rock.

"I don't like this," Remo said as they passed through room after empty room.

"The silence of a thousand screams," Chiun mused.

The Prince's Chamber, still reeking of the festivities of the previous night, looked as if it had been aban­doned in haste, its occupants vanishing in a moment of riotous merrymaking. The shouts and coarse laugh­ter seemed still to ring in the shadows of the empty room. The stairways were empty, too. As Remo and Chiun walked up to the upper floors of the palace, the only sound was the soft flapping of Chiun's robes be­hind him.

There were no stirrings of life until they reached the level of the twelve towers. Chiun cocked his head at the top of the stone stairway and listened. "He is here," he said.

Remo nodded. He, too, had sensed the rhythmic ex­pansion of air that signaled the presence of a breath­ing human being.

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"Over here, gentlemen." The voice sounded loud as a cannon's boom after the weird stillness.

Halaffa stood in a library housed in one of the cylin­drical towers. Instead of the Zadnian military uniform, which he usually wore, Halaffa was dressed in the tra­ditional flowing robes of Zadnia's ancient nomadic tribes. On his head was a white turban with a sapphire in the center. He was a handsome man, young and swarthy, bursting with a kind of exaggerated male-ness that gave an air of confidence and strength to him . . . except for the eyes.

Madman's eyes, Remo thought. They held the same look that other eyes had carried once the lust for power overcame their sanity. Idi Amin's eyes, as he starved his people to slow death. Hitler's eyes as he ordered the extermination of millions. Eyes of fire, burning with death.

"I have been preparing to welcome you," he said softly. He took a leather-covered volume from a high shelf. "Your exhibition in the courtyard was most im­pressive." He looked at them approvingly. "I take it you have traced the unpatriotic activities of our de­parted Dr. Foxx to me?"

"We have," Remo said.

Halaffa read from the book, seemingly uncon­cerned. "I see," he said at last. "And what, may I ask, is your purpose here?"

"We are assassins," Chiun said.

"A noble career. Then you have come here to the tower to kill me, I trust?"