Warren Murphy: King's Curse

Remo reached down and with his left hand dislocated the beast's right front leg. The dog yelped and hit the ground. Remo walked away.

The dog got up on three feet, and dragging its dislocated leg, ran toward Remo again. Remo heard the injured limb scudding through the white gravel. He turned as the dog growled and reared up on its two hind legs, trying to bite him.

He slapped the big dog's wettish nose with his left hand and dislocated the other front leg with his right hand. This time, when the dog hit the ground, it stayed there, whining and whimpering.

In the window high above Remo, deJuin moved back from the curtain. He felt the feathers of the two men on his sides brush his face. "Marvelous," he said softly.

Below, as if he had heard the Frenchman, Remo turned, remembering the men who had been watching from the window, and he pointed an index finger as if to say "you're next."

Then he darted up one of the paths leading away from the central courtyard to the house.

Forty yards away from Remo, but separated by many twists and turns, Chiun had heard the dogs' frenzied barking and yelping and then the screeches and then the silence.

"It is well," he said, continuing to shuffle forward with the two women.

He stopped suddenly short and spread his arms to prevent the two women from lurching forward. The women bumped into his thin arms, extended outward from his sides. Each let out an "oof" as if they had walked stomach first into an iron guardrail.

Valerie got her breath back first. "Why are we stopped? Let's get out of here." She looked to Bobbi for agreement, but the buxom blonde stood silent, still apparently shaken from her near miss cardiectomy on the marble slab.

"We will wait for Remo," Chiun said.

From the window, Jean Louis deJuin saw the old Korean stop. He saw Remo now, atop the hedges, racing along them as if they were a paved road, coming toward the house, and he shouted, "Withdraw." He and Uncle Carl and the two men in feathered robes fled from the window.

Ten seconds later Remo came through the open window in a rolling vault from the top of the tightly packed hedges.

The room was empty.

Remo went out into the hall and searched each room.

"Come out, come out, wherever you are," he called.

But all the rooms were empty. Back in the room he had first entered, Remo found a yellow feather on the floor and consoled himself with the thought that even if he didn't find the men, the mange might yet carry them off.

He stuck the long feather into the hair over his right ear, like a plume, then dove through the window with a cry of "Excelsior!"

He turned a slow loop in the air, landed on his feet atop the hedge, and ran across the interstices of it toward where he saw Chiun and the two women up ahead.

DeJuin waited a few moments, then pressed the button which opened the wall panel in the room where they had been sitting. He and the other men stepped out from the secret room, and deJuin motioned to them for silence as they moved toward the window, standing alongside it, peering through the side of the curtain.

He saw Remo stop atop the hedges twelve feet above where Chiun and the two women still stood.

"Hey, Little Father," said Remo.

"What are you doing up there?" Chiun asked. "Why are you wearing that feather?"

"I thought it was kind of dashing," Remo said. "Why aren't you at the car?"

"There is a boomer down here," Chiun said.

Remo looked down. "Where is it? I don't see it."

"It is here. A wire buried under the stones. I saw the thin upraised line of rocks. I would not expect you to see it, particularly when your feathers get in your eyes. How fortunate that it was me leading these young people and not you."

"Yeah? Who took care of the dogs?" Remo asked. "Who always does all the dirty work?"

"Who is better qualified for dirty work?" Chiun asked. He liked that so he repeated it with a little chuckle. "Who is better qualified? Heh, heh."

"Where's the bomb?" said Remo, pulling the yellow feather from his hair and dropping it into the hedge.

"Right here," Chiun said. He pointed to a spot on the ground. "Heh, heh. Who is better qualified? Heh, heh."

"I ought to leave you there," Remo said.

As deJuin watched from the window, he saw Remo drop lightly from the top of the hedge to the outside of the tall iron fence that bordered one side of it. He could not see it, but he heard metal screeching as Remo separated the bars of the fence. A moment later he saw Remo stand up and he heard his voice.

"Okay, Little Father, it's disconnected."

"That means that it is safe?"

"Safe. I guarantee it."

"Say your final prayers," Chiun told the two women. "The white one guarantees your safety." But he led the two women past the wire imbedded under the gravel and toward the gate at the end of the pathway.

Remo walked along on the outside of the hedge.

"I have been thinking," Chiun said through the hedge to Remo.

"It's about time," Remo said. "Heh, heh. It's about time. Heh, heh."

"Listen to him," Chiun told the two women. "A child. Amused by a child's joke."

Which took all the fun out of it for Remo, and he said to Chiun: "What were you thinking about?"

"About the Master that I told you about, who went to far off places and new worlds and was not fully believed."

"What about him?" Remo asked.

"I am still thinking," Chiun said and would say no more.

DeJuin watched as the old Oriental led the two women through the open gate. Remo had trotted along outside the fence, and then vaulted the twelve-foot-high fence with no more effort than if it had been the low right field handrail in Yankee Stadium.

They started to get into the car, but then the old man turned around, looked at the house, and began to speak words that gave deJuin an unexplained chill.

"May your ears burn as fire," Chiun called toward the house in a voice suddenly strong.

"May they feel the tingle of cold and then snap as glass. The House of Sinanju tells you that you will tear off your eyelids to feed your eyes to the eagles of the sky. And then you will shrink until you are eaten by the mice of the fields.

"All this, I, Master of Sinanju, tell you. Be fearful."

And then the old man stared at the window, and deJuin, even concealed by the curtain, felt as if those hazel eyes were burning into his. Then the old man entered the blue Ford and the American drove off.

DeJuin turned to the other men in the room, whose faces had turned white.

"What Is it?" he said to Uncle Carl.

"It is an ancient curse, from the people of the plumed serpent in our land. It is very strong magic."

"Nonsense," said deJuin, who did not really feel such confidence. He had begun to speak again when the phone tingled softly at his feet.

He picked up the instrument and listened. Slowly his features relaxed and he smiled. "Merci," he finally said and hung up.

"You have learned something?" asked Uncle Carl.

"Yes," said deJuin. "We will leave these two alone. We no longer need them to bring us to their leader. The computers never fail."

"The computers?" asked Carl.

"Yes. The name our kinsmen learned in the hotel room. Harold Smith. Well, Dr. Harold Smith is head of a sanitarium near here called Folcroft. And it has a computer system with access to most of the major computers in this country."

"And that means?" asked Uncle Carl.

"That means that this Dr. Smith is the head of the organization which employs these two assassins. And now that we know that, we will leave these two alone. We do not need them to attain our goals of power for the Actatl."

"But that leaves us always vulnerable," Carl protested.

DeJuin shook his head and let a slow smile take over his face.

"No. These two men are the arms. Strong and mighty arms, but only arms nevertheless. We will cut off the head of this secret organization. And without the head, the arms are useless. So our trap did not work, but we have won anyway."