Warren Murphy: Slave Safari

"I knew a man who had a hundred dollars once," said Walla. "A very rich man."

"You will be rich too," said the cook.

"I will have to be. I can no longer return to Busati."

By nightfall, Walla was the richest man in the history of his village and J. Gordon Dalton was sending frantic codes to Washington. A top level officer unscrambled the message:

JAMES FORSYTHE LIPPINCOTT, BALTIMORE, MISSING. BELIEVED DEAD IN BUSATI BUSH. FOUL PLAY SUSPECTED. CYNTHIA FORSYTHE, BALTIMORE, HELD HOSTAGE. AWAIT INSTRUCTIONS. INVESTIGATING.

Since Lippincott was part of the famous Lippincott family which numbered governors, diplomats, senators and most important, bankers, the message went to several department heads at 4:00 A.M. There was one problem with Dalton's message. Cynthia Forsythe could not be a hostage in Busati. She had been killed in an auto accident three months earlier. It had made the papers because she was related to the Lippincotts.

It was decided quietly to check out the dead girl's body. By noon, from dental work and a thumb print, the body was identified as not, definitely not, the body of Cynthia Forsythe.

"Who is it then?" asked the State Department man.

"Who cares?" said the FBI man. "It's not the Forsythe girl. That means she probably is a hostage in Busati."

"Well, we're going to have to tell the White House," said State. "God help anyone who runs afoul of the Lippincotts. Especially the bankers."

Five reports on the case were made in the White House, four of which went to various Lippincotts. The fifth was hand-delivered to an office in the Agriculture Department in Washington, where it was coded and sent by scrambler to what the sender believed was an office in Kansas City. But the line went to a sanatorium in Rye, New York, and in that sanatorium a decision was made that unknowingly fulfilled an ancient prediction made soon after the Loni tribe had lost its empire:

"Terror from the East shall join with terror from the West, and woe to the enslavers of the Loni when the destroyer of worlds walks along the Busati."

CHAPTER THREE

His name Was Remo and his life was being made miserable by a television programming decision.

"Because of our coverage of the Senate investigation into Watergate, As the Planet Revolves and Dr. Lawrence Walters, Psychiatrist-at-Large will not be shown today," the announcer had said.

When Remo heard that, he uttered his first prayer since childhood. "Lord, have mercy on us all."

The wisp of an Oriental who had sat placid in his golden kimono before the colour television set, let out a sound Remo had heard him use but once before, and then only in his sleep.

"Yaaawk," said Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, his wisp of a white beard shaking in disbelief. It was if someone had hit the old man a body blow—that is, if there was a man who walked the earth who could do that, which Remo doubted very much.

"Why is this? Why is this?" demanded Chiun.

"Not me, Little Father. Not me. I didn't do it."

"Your government did it."

"No, no. The television people did it. They thought that more people would want to watch the Senate investigation than the soap operas."

Chiun pointed a long bony finger at the set The long fingernail seemed to quiver.

"Who would want to watch those ugly white men when they can see the beauty and the rhythm and the grace of true drama?"

"Well, they have polls, Chiun. And they question people about what they like and don't like and I guess they figured more people would want to watch the investigations than your serials."

"They did not ask me," said Chiun. "No one asked me. Who asked me? If they asked me, I would say let the beauty of the drama remain. Beauty is rare but investigations you have with you always. Where is this person who does the questioning? I would speak with him for surely he would be interested in my opinion also."

"You're not going to kill a pollster, Little Father," said Remo.

"Kill?" said Chiun, as if Remo had broached the subject to a Carmelite nun, instead of the most deadly assassin in existence.

"Those things do tend to happen, Chiun, when someone gets in the way of your daytime shows. Or are you forgetting Washington and those FBI men, or New York and all those Mafiosi? You remember. They turned off your programs. Chicago and the union thugs. Remember? Remember who had to get rid of the bodies? Do you forget those little things, Little Father?"

"I remember beauty being interrupted and an old man, who has given the best years of all his skills to an ingrate, being reprimanded for attempting to enjoy a moment of beauty."

"You have a very selective memory."

"In a country that fails to appreciate beauty, a memory which forgets ugliness is a necessity."

And that had begun the renewed personal supervision of Remo's training by the Master of Sinanju. No longer could Remo do his exercises alone. Deprived of his daytime TV shows, Chiun had to supervise the basics and Remo could do nothing right.

Sitting by Lake Patusick in the Massachusetts Berkshires where they rented a cottage for the spring, Remo heard Chiun tell him he breathed like a wrestler. During the water movements, Chiun screamed that Remo moved like a duck, and when Remo was doing the stomach flips—an exercise in which Remo lay flat on his stomach and then used his abdominal muscles to flip himself over onto his back—Chiun said Remo moved like a baby. "You should have a nurse, not the Master of Sinanju. That was slow and clumsy."

Remo assumed the position again, the spring grass near the cool Berkshire lake tickling his cheeks, the smell of the fresh muddy rebirth of life in his nostrils, the morning sun on his bare back, illuminating but not warming. He waited for Chiun's click of fingers to signal the flip. It was a simple exercise, trained into his reflexes more than a decade before, as he began the training that changed a man the public thought had been electrocuted into the killer arm of a secret organization that was designed to fight crime.

Remo waited for the snap of the fingers but it did not come. Chiun was having him wait. Better to wait, he thought, than have to find a place to put the body of the man who was responsible for taking As the Planet Revolves off the air. He felt a slight pressure on his back, probably a leaf failing.

He heard the snap of Chiun's fingers and his stomach muscles slapped the ground like springs released from restraint, but his body did not spin around as Remo expected. The instant pressure of two feet on his back sent his body flat down in the wet spring mud. Remo spit the mud out of his mouth. It was not a leaf he had felt fall on his back, but the Master of Sinanju alighting, weightlessly on him. Remo heard the chuckles above him.

"Do you need help, little baby?"

To the untrained eye, it would appear that a thirty-ish man of moderate build with extra thick wrists and dark hair had attempted a push-up and failed because an old Oriental was standing on his back. Actually, the force expended by both men could shatter slate.

This simple little accident was viewed by three men who had walked around from the front of the cottage and now stood watching the pair—the young white man face in mud, the aged Oriental giggling.

The three men wore dark business suits. The shortest carried a briefcase, the others .25 calibre Berettas that they believed were hidden under their jackets.

"I'm looking for a Remo Mueller," said the man with the briefcase. Remo lifted his head from the mud and felt Chiun alight from his back. He wanted to send a razor sharp hand into the old man's giggling face, but he knew the cutting edge of the hand would be jelly before it ever touched the face. Perhaps in ten years, his mind and body would equal Chiun's and then maybe Chiun would not use Remo as a punching bag for his frustrations.