But by the time he returned to the eighth floor, he was humming.
Remo dug out the hotel key and used it. The door opened to the touch of his fingers. He hummed. The tune was "Born Free."
The moment he stepped across the threshold, the sound trailed away on a puzzled note.
Kimberly lay on the bed just as Remo had left her. Except her hands sat folded under her pyramidlike chest. He hadn't arranged her hands that way.
"What the hell?" Remo muttered.
He hesitated, his ears reaching for any telltale sound.
Somewhere, a heart beat. Remo zeroed in on the sound.
It was coming, he was more than astonished to realize, from the bed.
"Impossible," he blurted. "You're dead."
Remo glided across the rug, his heart beating a little high in his throat. His ebullient mood had evaporated. This was not possble. He had used an infallible technique to shatter her upper vertebrae.
Remo reached for the folded hands, intending to feel for a pulse. One wrist felt cool.
The indrawn breath came quick and sharp, sending the pyramid-sharp chest lifting. The innocent blue eyes snapped open. But they were not blue. They were red. Red from the core of their fiery pupils to the outer white, which was crimson. The orbs looked as if they had been dipped in blood.
"Jesus!" Remo said, jumping back reflexively.
Bending at the waist, the cool thing on the bed began to rise, yellow-nailed hands unfolded like poisonous flowers opening to the sun.
Remo watched them, mesmerized. And while his shocked brain registered the impossible, the corpse came upright.
The head swiveled toward him. It hung off to one side, as if from a neck crick. Her features were milk pale, the yellow eye shadow standing out like mold. The legs shifted to a sitting position.
"If you're auditioning for Exorcist IV," Remo cracked nervously, "you've got my vote."
"want . . . you," she said slowly.
The hands flashed up, reaching for her chest. The nails began tearing at the yellow fabric.
Remo caught them, one hand on each wrist.
"Not so fast," he said, trying to control a mounting fear. "I don't remember promising this dance to the girl with the bloodshot eyes. Why don't you-?"
The quip died in his throat. The wrists struggled in his unshakable grip. They were strong-stronger that human limbs should be. Remo centered his hands and let their opposing force work against itself. The wrists made circles in the air, Remo's hand still tightly attached. Every time they pushed or pulled, Remo carried the kinetic energy to a weak position. The result was a stalemate.
Still, the thing that had been Kimberly persisted, its angry red eyes fixed sightlessly on Remo, head tilted to one side like a blind, curious dog. The cool spidery fingers kept gravitating to its heaving chest.
"You don't take no for an answer, do you?" Remo said, trying to figure out how to let go without exposing himself to danger. Kimberly was no pushover.
The question stopped being important a moment later when a familiar scent insinuated itself into Remo's nostrils like groping gaseous tentacles.
It smelled of dying flowers, musky womanhood, blood, and other impossible-to-separate odors commingled. The stuff slammed into his lungs like cold fire. His brain reeled.
"Oh, no," he croaked. "Kali."
And as his thoughts whirled between attack and escape, Kimberly's chest began heaving spasmodically. It convulsed and strained, and deep in the panicky recesses of Remo's mind an image appeared. It was a scene from an old science-fiction movie. He wondered why it jumped into his mind.
And then the front of Kimberly's yellow dress began a fury of rending, tearing cloth and Remo's horrified eyes went to the things that were breaking free.
And a familiar voice that was not Kimberly's snarled,
"You are mine! Mine! Mine! Mine!"
Chapter 13
Harold W. Smith waited an hour before he began worrying. After two hours, he became concerned. It should not take Remo this long to go through a dead woman's purse.
Smith reached into his right-hand desk drawer and stripped foil from a sixty-nine-cent roll of antacid tablets, causing two tablets to drop into his waiting palm. He put them in his mouth and went to the office mineral-water dispenser. He thumbed the button. Cool water rilled into a paper cup. Smith swallowed the bitter tablets, chasing them with water. After checking for leaks, he returned the paper cup to its holder. It hadn't started to decompose from repeated use yet. He might get another month out of it.
Smith returned to his desk as the phone rang.
He reached for the blue phone, realizing his error when the ringing repeated itself after he lifted the receiver.
It was the red phone.
Smith switched the blue receiver to his other hand and snatched up the red one.
"Yes, Mr. President?" he said with muted embarrassment.
"The lid has come off," the President said tightly. "The Iraiti government wants to know where their ambassador is."
"This is not my area, but I would suggest you arrange a plausible accident."
"It may be too late. They've taken a hostage. A big one."
"Who?" Smith asked tightly.
"That anchorman, Don Cooder."
"Oh," Smith said in a tone of voice that didn't exactly convey relief, but certainly wasn't concerned.
"I won't miss him either," the President said, "but dammit, he is a high-profile U.S. citizen. We can't let these repeated provocations go unpunished."
"The decision to go to war rests with you, Mr. President. I have no advice to offer."
"I'm not looking for advice. I want answers. Smith, I know your man did his best to find the ambassador alive. The FBI tells me he was already cold before we left the gate. So that's that. But what the heck is behind it?"
"The ambassador appears to have fallen victim to a serial killer, who I am pleased to report was . . . ah . . . removed from the scene only within the last hour."
"Who, Smith?"
"A woman I am now trying to identify."
"You mean this wasn't political?"
"It does not appear to be," Smith told the President. "Naturally, I will reserve judgment until our investigation has been completed. But from all accounts, the perpetrator seems to have been affiliated with a dangerous cult that was all but neutralized several years back. Other, similarly strangled bodies, have turned up in Washington. Identical yellow scarves wound around the necks of each of the victims."
"A cult, you say?"
"A single woman, who is now dead. There is no reason to believe the cult is active."
"In other words," the President of the United States pressed, "we don't have any live scapegoat to hang this on?"
"I am afraid not," Smith admitted. "Our task is enforcement, not arranging subterfuges."
"No criticism was intended or implied."
"I know."
"Keep working, Smith. I'll get back to you. I'm convening an emergency cabinet meeting to discuss our response to the Iraitis."
"Good luck, Mr. President."
"I don't need luck. I need a goddamned miracle. But thanks anyway, Smith."
Harold Smith replaced the red receiver. He noticed he was still holding the blue one tightly in his other hand. It began emitting the off-the-hook warning beep. Smith replaced it hastily, thinking that he never used to be so absentminded. He hoped it was age, not Alzheimer's. For if his twice-yearly medical exam should ever reveal such a judgment-clouding prognosis, Harold Smith would be forced to make a call to the President of the United States informing him that CURE could no longer function as a secure arm of executive-branch policy.
It would be up to the commander in chief to decide whether Smith would have to be retired or CURE must shut down. If the latter, it would be up to Smith to close down the organization, wiping clean the massive data banks of the four computers hidden behind false walls in the Folcroft basement and taking a coffin-shaped poison pill that he carried in the watch pocket of his gray vest. For only three living persons knew of CURE. And to publicly admit that it even existed would be to admit that America itself didn't work. When the time came for the organization that didn't exist to vanish, all traces-human and technological-would also have to be obliterated. Only a grateful President would remember.