"I saw you tear it open. "
"You better take something for that concussion," Remo said. "You're imagining things."
"Have it your own way," she said. "Anything you want done?"
"Why me?"
"The cockpit crew died on impact. I guess you're in charge."
Remo nodded. He was watching the little girl he had pulled out at the last minute. She was kneeling in the sand beside two still figures, a man and a woman. Someone had placed a handkerchief over each of their faces.
Remo walked over and knelt alongside the girl. "Are these your parents'?" he asked.
"They're in heaven," the little girl said. There were tears in her eyes.
Remo hoisted her in his arms and brought her back to Lorna.
"Take care of her," he said.
"What are you going to do?" the stewardess asked.
"What I've been trained to do," Remo said, and he walked out into the desert alone.
The wind had shifted the sands, covering the tracks, but it made no difference to Remo. The wind followed its path and the sand moved according to subtle laws that in some way were clear to him.
There had been footprints, he knew. The way the sand had fallen in told him that, and now Remo was not tracking the footprints, but tracking the afterimages made by the footprints. Here the sand was piled too high. There it rilled and scalloped unnaturally.
He was close. Very close.
Remo Williams had killed more men in his past than he could count. Some were just targets, names punched up out of Smith's computers. Others he dispatched in self-defense or in defense of the nation. There were times he killed as casually as a surgeon scrubbed his hands and there were times Remo had been so sick of the killing that he wanted to quit CURE.
But tonight, with the dying red sun in his eyes, Remo wanted to kill for an unprofessional reason. For vengeance.
He found the hijacker standing on a low spur of rock. The man looked down when he saw Remo approach. He had worked his hands out of the mangled remains of his machine pistol.
"I do not see anything," the skyjacker said, indicating the horizon with a sweep of his arm.
"I do," said Remo through his teeth.
"Yes? What?"
Remo came up to the man with a slow purposeful gait. The sand under his shoes made no sound.
"I see an animal who places a cause over human life. I see someone less than human who, for stupidity, deprives a little girl of her parents."
"Hey. Do not shout at me. I am also a victim. I too could have been killed."
"You're about to be," said Remo.
The hijacker backed away, wide-eyed. "I surrender."
"So did everyone on that flight," Remo said.
He had been taught to kill three times in his life-in Vietnam, as a policeman, and as an assassin. Each approach was different, with only one rule in common: strike as quickly as possible.
Remo ignored the rule. He killed the hijacker carefully, silently, an inch at a time. The man died slowly and not easily. And when his final shriek had stopped reverberating, what remained of him did not look even remotely human.
When it was over, Remo dry-washed his hands with the fine red sand that rolled as far as the eye could see, like an ocean of blood.
Chapter 5
If success could be measured in newspaper headlines, Lyle Lavallette was the greatest automotive genius since Henry Ford.
The press loved him and his roomful of scrapbooks, which had become so voluminous that he had had all his clippings transferred to microfiche, were filled with references to "The Boy Genius of Detroit" or "Peck's Bad Boy of the Automotive Industry" or "Maverick Car Builder." That was his favorite.
He came by the headline coverage the old-fashioned way: he earned it. In one of the most conservative low-key industries in America, Lyle Lavallette was a breath of fresh air. He raced speedboats; he danced the night away at one fancy disco after another; his best friends were rock stars; he squired, then married, then divorced models and actresses, each successive one more beautiful and empty-headed than the one before. He was always good for a quote on any topic and three times a year, without fail, he invited all the working press he could get an invitation to, to large lavish parties at his Grosse Pointe estate.
Unfortunately for Lavallette, his bosses in Detroit were more interested in the bottom line than in the headline. So Lavallette had lasted no more than five years with each of the Big Three.
His first top-level job was as design head for General Motors. He advised them to make the Cadillac smaller. Forget the fins, he said. Nobody'll ever buy a car with fins. Fortunately, Cadillac ignored him and then fired him.
Later he showed up in Chrysler's long-range planning division. He told them to keep making big cars; people want to ride in plush-buckets, he said. When Chrysler almost went belly-up, Lavallette was fired. Some felt that it was one of the secret prices Chrysler had to pay to get a federal loan.
Lavallette worked for Ford Motors too, as head of marketing. He told the brass to forget building four-cylinder cars. They would never sell. Ford, he said, should forget about trying to compete with Japanese imports. The Japanese make nothing that doesn't fall apart. Eventually, he was fired.
It was in the nature of Detroit that none of these firings was ever called a firing. Lavallette was always permitted to resign; each resignation was an excuse for a press party at which Lavallette dropped hints of some new enterprise he was getting himself involved in and, their bellies filled with expensive food and expensive wine, the newsmen went back to their offices to write more stories about "What's Ahead for the Maverick Genius?"
What was ahead was his own car. Lavallette went to Nicaragua and convinced the government there to put up the money to open a car plant. His new car would be called, naturally, the Lavallette. Five years after he started gearing up, the first car rolled off the assembly line. Its transmission fell out before it got out of the company parking lot.
In the first year, seventy-one Lavallettes were sold. The transmissions fell out of all of them. On those sturdy enough to be driven for two months without breaking down, the bodies rusted. Fenders and bumpers fell off.
Lavallette sneaked out of Nicaragua late one night and in New York announced the closing of the Lavallette factory. He called the Lavallette "one of the great cars of all time" but said that Sandinista sabotage was behind its failure. "They didn't want us to succeed," he said. "They blocked us every step of the way," he said.
The press never noticed that he didn't really explain who "they" were. His wild accusations were enough to ensure him a spate of stories about the Maverick Genius that the Communists Tried to Crush. No one mentioned that the Nicaraguan government had lent Lavallette ninety million dollars and stood to lose its entire investment.
And now it was time to meet the press again.
In his penthouse atop the luxurious Detroit Plaza Hotel, Lyle Lavallette, president of the newly formed Dynacar Industries, primped before a full-length dress mirror.
He was admiring the crease in his two-hundred-dollar trousers. It was just the way he liked it, straight-razor sharp. His Italian-made jacket showed off his wasp-thin waist and his broad shoulders. After a moment's reflection, he decided his shoulders did not look quite broad enough and made a mental note to order more padding with his next suit. The white silk handkerchief in his breast pocket formed two peaks, one slightly higher than the other. Just right. It matched his tie and his tie matched his white hair. For years, he had told the press that his hair had turned white when he was fifteen years old. The fact was that as a teenager he was called "Red" and he now had his hair stripped and bleached every week by a hairstylist, that being the only way he could guarantee that he would not appear as a headline in the Enquirer: -MAVERICK CAR GENIUS SECRETLY A REDHEAD."