Warren Murphy - Skin Deep

"How would you do it?"

Wolfe held up his signet ring with the embossed spider design on the front. "Poison. I have carried it for many years. It will be quick, I promise."

He flipped open the gold spider top and stood staring into the hollow ring for some moments.

Remo stepped forward. "Is it powder?" he asked, thinking afterward that his question must have sounded flip at such a moment.

"No," Wolfe said, smiling faintly. "Acid," He hurled his arm at Remo, sending the liquid shooting directly toward him.

Remo ducked quickly enough so that the acid missed his face, but he felt the burn of the droplets on his back and shoulders. The cloth of his T-shirt disintegrated in huge holes, uncovering deep red marks on his skin. By the time he could stand upright, Wolfe was halfway out the door.

Remo caught him before he had taken another step. "Ancient and noble house," he said. He took hold of Wolfe's hand with its spider ring still on it and pulled slowly toward Wolfe's face.

The Nazi was panting, his eyes darting frenetically around the silent cave halls. "Who are you?" he whispered.

Remo looked him dead in the face. "I am Shiva," he said. "My line is ancient, too." And with that, he pressed the ring into Wolfe's forehead until the skull cracked. When he was finished, Wolfe lay alone in the empty hallway, his brain oozing from the back of his head. His eyes were wide and staring. On his forehead was stamped the red silhouette of a spider.

?Chapter Twenty-One

The sky was dark with the huge, low-flying shadows of the birds. The clearing, once filled with villagers, was empty except for the two figurs of Ana and Lustbaden, standing among the dead.

Ana's face was expressionless. She dropped the knife from her hand. "You have won, Zoran," she said. "We will all die now. I did not think you had the courage to give up your own life in order to kill us."

Lustbaden laughed, convulsive and maniacal. "But don't you see?" he said, tittering. "I won't die." He pulled a small vial of liquid from the breast pocket of his lab coat. "They will not attack me with this. Only you will be killed. You and the rest of your leper friends."

Seeing the girl's shock, he waved the vial at her tantalizingly. "But before you go, Ana, I wish to tell you a story. It's about the incident at Molokai. Your violation, my dear girl. By the gang of strangers. Remember that?"

He waited for a reaction from her, but the girl didn't move. He arched an eyebrow in mock commendation. "Better, Ana," he said. "There was a time the mere mention of it would have sent you into paroxysms."

"I no longer fear the past," she said.

"Good. Good, good, good. Because I wish to inform you, in the hour of your death, that the men who raped you were my men, SPIDER corps troops I had been gathering from all over Europe."

"What?" The color drained from her cheeks.

"I kept them on Molokai, outside the leper colony, where I knew the authorities wouldn't come. Through hypnosis, I trained your mind not to remember their faces. But they've been here with you all along, ever since that day in Hawaii." He laughed uproariously.

"But you— you found me," she stammered in a small voice.

"Naturally I found you," he said. "My darling, I was the first to have you."

She seemed to explode from within. "You!" she cried, picking up the knife at her feet and running toward him.

With remarkable deftness for a man his age, Lustbaden lunged forward and grasped her wrists. Then, with her hands struggling in his, he kicked her between her legs. The air whooshed out of her in a gust. She crumpled to the ground in a heap.

He unscrewed the lid to the glass vial. "Good-bye, Ana," he said quietly.

Suddenly a loud bang reverberated in the clearing. Lustbaden screamed, his face twisted in amazement as he looked at his left hand, which had held the vial. In its place was a broken shard of glass embedded in a bloody mass of tissue and bone.

Through his blurred vision, he saw a wisp of smoke lingering in front of one of the huts in the village. A man leaned in the half-shadow of the doorway, a Nazi Luger smoking in his hand.

It was Harold Smith.

"Nein!" Lustbaden shrieked above the noise of the oncoming birds. "Gott, nein!" It was a cry of rage and despair, the helpless wail of a man defeated on the verge of triumph.

"I won't kill you," Smith said. His face was bathed in sweat, the muscles of his neck straining with each word. "The birds will do that."

Lustbaden searched the sky, as if he remembered the birds' presence for the first time. He waved his arms at the flying killers above. There were hundreds of them, a blizzard of white beasts, mindless and lusting after prey. Lustbaden's arms, the injured one shooting off jets of fresh blood, fell to his sides in dull resignation. He looked like an old, old man.

"Not the birds," he whimpered. "Please. Don't leave me to them. Use your gun. Shoot. Please, Smith."

Smith looked pityingly at him. Thirty-six years. He had spent more than half a lifetime chasing this old man who begged for death.

He raised the Luger. Death was bad enough. But death by the birds would be slow and painful and terrible.

Lustbaden stood before him, trembling as he waited for the bullet. He covered his face with his bloody hands like a frightened child.

This was not the Prince of Hell, Smith thought. Like Zoran, the island deity, the mad genius of the war camps was just another disguise Lustbaden had donned to hide his insignificance.

Smith aimed. A shot in the head would be painless and swift. He squinted through the sight. His head was swirling again. At the end of the pistol's barrel he saw a face, Dimi's face.

There was Dimi, alone and white-haired, shuffling in his shabby room, remembering his wife and daughter and his twin boys. Had their deaths been painless, those children under Lustbaden's knife? Did the daughter, with her sea-green eyes, die easily when she tore the broken glass into her own arm? And what did Helena, the kindly wife who had given Smith soup and a blanket, feel when she was marched into the showers at Auschwitz and found a stone in place of soap?

Smith threw the gun to the ground. "No," he said. "I'm sorry for you. The end will be bad. But I owe a justice."

Lustbaden stood still for a moment, his shoulders slumped. His round face was streaked with blood. With a final glance at the sky, turbulent with the flapping of birds' wings, he tucked his exploded hand close to his chest and scrambled on his fat, short legs toward the rain forest, seeking shelter from the birds he knew would find him.

Smith went back into the hut and collapsed. Before he lost consciousness, it occurred to him that the birds would be coming for him, too, and for Chiun who had saved his life. Remo was probably already dead. And the plane would take off as scheduled. It was a sorry end for all of them, perhaps for all the world. A sorry end, senseless and mad.

In the darkness of unconsciousness that slowly enveloped him, he saw himself, as if from a great distance. He was weeping— for Dimi, for his family, for Remo and Chiun. Even for Lustbaden, the Prince of Hell, who was, after all, no more than a fool cursing in the shadows. And for himself, too, for the man with no answers. He wept for them all.

* * *

Remo ran toward the clearing at top speed. Overhead, the birds shrieked menacingly. Ahead, he saw Ana, standing alone and oblivious to the danger in the sky. Her face was starkly white, and she stood as still as a corpse, her hands crossed in front of her chest, as if preparing herself for death.

He reached her just ahead of the birds and pushed her into the hut. As the gulls descended, Chiun appeared from behind the hut, pale and trembling from his trance.

"Help me, Chiun," Remo said.