The crowd surged forward as if physically expressing its anger.
"Who did it? Who? Who?" the crowd screamed.
"The pig police have not arrested anyone yet, but we know who did it," Carpathian said.
"Who? Who? Who?"
"A lumberjack for Tulsa Torrent. A lumberjack probably insane with guilt from the crazy demands of his job. Or else just one whose palm was greased with blood money."
Remo and Chiun moved closer to the speaker's platform.
Ararat Carpathian screamed, "Are we going to let them get away with it?"
The crowd screamed no, no, no, in one long, full-throated yell. Carpathian looked down and below his feet saw Chiun and Remo. He saw Remo smile and raise one finger, pointing it squarely at Carpathian's chest. The man's smile was cold as death.
Carpathian moved back from the microphone. By the time Remo brushed aside the crowd and hopped up onto the platform, Carpathian was gone and nowhere to be seen. Remo turned just as the crowd began charging the speaker's platform, deciding to take out their frustrated anger on their own property.
Remo looked around. He saw Carpathian's back disappearing through the trees across the road. Remo walked through the small glade of trees and into a clearing on the other side. A dozen snowmobiles were parked there. Carpathian was sitting astride one of them, talking to Harvey Quibble, the government inspector.
Remo called out: "A rat."
Carpathian looked around. He saw Remo. Then he seemed to slump forward over the controls of his machine, and the snowmobile jumped into action, driving straight ahead down a snow-covered trail.
Remo ran off after it. He had almost caught up with Carpathian when the trail made a sharp right-hand turn. Carpathian's snowmobile did not. Instead, it kept going straight ahead, plunging through a dense tangle of low underbrush and then out and over a hundred-foot-high drop-off.
By the time Remo got to him, Ararat Carpathian was little more than a sausage skin filled with once-human jelly...
Chapter Sixteen
Company guards and the town police arrived just before the disorderly gang of protesters could turn into a surging mob, and slowly herded them back into the protesters' camping grounds.
Arriving with the police was Roger Stacy, who walked away from the mob scene, went through the thin bank of trees, and entered the clearing where Remo was approaching Harvey Quibble.
Quibble saw Stacy approaching, and he pointed a long, tremulous finger at Remo and squeaked, "He did it again. I saw him with my very own two eyes. This... this ersatz tree inspector chased that poor man over the side of the cliff." As Remo drew near, Quibble drew himself up to his full height. "You, sir, are not merely an incompetent," he said, "you are a murderer." He turned to Stacy. "He is, he is," he said.
"Shove it," said Remo.
Stacy looked from Quibble to Remo, from Quibble to Remo, then back to Quibble again.
"I'm sure Mr. O'Sylvan didn't kill anybody," he said. He turned once again to Remo. "Did you?"
Remo said nothing. He saw Chiun approaching from across the road. Behind them, the police were setting up barricades penning in the protesters.
"See," Quibble said. "What did I tell you? He won't even dialog with us. We have no room on the government team for these kind of people... these killers. I don't care how much you may miss him, Mr. Stacy, but after I contact Washington tomorrow, this Remo O'Sylvan is going to be off the job." Quibble puffed out his tiny sparrow's chest.
"I told you, shove it," Remo said. "He was dead before I ever reached him."
"How do you know that?" Stacy said.
"I don't believe it," Quibble said.
"He didn't scream," Remo said. "He went ass over teakettle off the edge of a hundred-foot cliff and he didn't scream. He was either dead or unconscious already."
"Oh," said Stacy.
"You can give that lame excuse to the personnel department," Quibble said, "but my report goes in as I saw it."
The federal job inspector and Stacy began a heated argument and Remo, disgusted, walked over to Chiun. The old man was sniffing the air.
"They're using tear gas," Remo said.
Chiun shook his head. "Not that," he said. "Something else. Something sweet."
As he and Chiun disappeared into the woods, Remo looked back. Stacy and Harvey Quibble were still arguing.
No one challenged Remo and Chiun as they went back to the log cabin. When they went inside, Joey Webb was sitting in front of the fire, reading.
"What happened?" she asked Remo quickly. "Tell me all about it."
"Nothing happened. Where're the guards that were supposed to be here?"
"I don't know," Joey said. "I didn't see any guards."
"I told that horse's ass Stacy to send guards down here," Remo snarled.
"I'm all right. Stop worrying. What happened up there?"
Remo thought of telling her about Cicely Winston-Alright, about Carpathian, and about Pierre LaRue's death earlier in the night; but he decided not to — the girl had had enough to worry about in the past weeks, and the rush of events of the last twenty-four hours might be enough to snap her spirit, no matter how strong.
"Nothing much happened," Remo repeated as he walked to the telephone. "A lot of speeches, yakety-yak, the cops broke up the march, and that was that."
"Oh, you got a phone call," Joey Webb said.
"Who was it?"
"I think it was Dr. Smith. He said you are to call your Aunt Mildred."
"That was Smitty. I don't have an Aunt Mildred," Remo said.
He took the phone with him into the corner of the room and dialed Smith's direct number.
"Yes?" came Smith's voice.
"What was it? You called."
"The two dead men were Rhodesian nationals. They had no history in this country. Salisbury police suspect they might have been contract killers, but there is no firm evidence either way."
Remo nodded. "It's safe to assume that if they were here, they were here working for somebody," he said.
"That's right," Smith said.
"How about the Mountain High Society?" Remo asked.
"I don't know about that," said Smith. "Hiring killers would not seem to be their style. Basically, they have been just another one of hundreds of protest groups. Perhaps a little better financed than most organizations like that, but otherwise not much different."
"How about their leadership? That broad with two names. That little greaseball Carpathian?"
"Both clean," Smith said.
"Both dead, too," Remo said.
"Oh," said Smith.
Quickly Remo told him what had happened, without mentioning Pierre LaRue, trying to keep his voice down so that Joey could not hear him.
"Mrs. Winston-Alright was one of the founders of the society," Smith said. "And until a few years ago, she bankrolled it."
"And then what happened?" Remo asked.
"Her second husband, Lance Alright, left her. He left her penniless. There was a suspicion that he took her money and ran off to indulge in oil speculation. Nothing's been heard of him since."
"She didn't live like she was poor," Remo said.
"I don't know. She had no income. Carpathian drifted into this society right after graduating college. It upset his family, who are wealthy merchants in the Middle East."
"Oil. Middle East," Remo mused aloud. "What about the tape recorder? Anything?"
"A cheap type made by the hundreds of thousands. Most of this particular model was bought up by the federal government for its own use. I'm still trying to track down the specific model."
"Keep in touch," Remo said. He hung up, disappointed. The bodies were piling to the sky, and still there was no hard information, no solid lead. Just a lot of unanswered questions.