“What about the other pack? You didn’t track them, did you?”
“I tried. The trail was cold and I lost it.”
Remo looked at the creature. “I didn’t know there were wolves still living in the desert.”
Freya’s eyes lowered. “Nobody did, and they really are gone now, I think,” she said. “She’s mute. I bet her entire pack was. It must have been just enough of an edge to keep them from being hunted. This might have been the last free pack of Mexican Gray Wolves in the Southwestern U.S. They were lucky and clever enough to stay hidden from man for decades. For generations. But now man’s finally found them and wiped them out.”
Remo considered what Freya had just said as he climbed out of the pit and as he ate his dinner, and when he lay down to sleep on his mat in Sunny Joe’s home.
Freya was intuitive. Remo never told her anything about the nature of the wolves that he was hunting, so how had she come to her conclusion that the pack of wolves that wounded her pet were “man”? How had she dared to go out in search of them?
What kind of a woman was Freya, anyway?
Chapter 3
James Sharma knew death. He’d seen death and delivered death, sometimes with a pen stroke, sometimes with his own bare fingers. He always thought he would recognize death when it came for him.
Three minutes before he died, Sharma was smoking a cigarette and standing at the window of his room. The cigarette smelled despicable, but it masked the stench of the city of Casablanca. Forget every preconception you had ever gotten from certain movies; Casablanca, in reality, was a hot, ugly outhouse of a city.
But some of the world’s biggest business deals were conducted here. Maybe one would go down within the hour. Sharma wanted to be in on it He had a suitcase full of U.S. currency tucked under his flimsy, lumpy mattress.
Two minutes before he died, Sharma took a call on his mobile phone. He spoke briefly in Langley-approved code words. The CIA had specific ways of delivering messages. He essentially told the operative that he was sitting on his ass waiting to hear from his contact.
One minute before he died, James Sharma spotted the biggest, ugliest centipede he’d ever seen, and it was scuttling around the floor of his hotel room. He tried to stomp it, but it shot under the mattress.
Yech, Sharma thought. Maybe that’s what all the lumps were in that bed. Bugs.
The centipede emerged from the other side of the bed and started up the wall. Sharma watched it as he reached for his vibrating phone.
“Our lookout says the store is open,” said his CIA mission coordinator.
“Shit!” Sharma said. “Why’d they open without telling me?”
“You tell me. We thought you were one of their preferred shoppers. Is it too late to get in on the fire sale?”
“I don’t know! I’ll call you.” Sharma disconnected and hit the number to dial his merchant contact. What had gone wrong? He was supposed to be one of the bidders! They knew he was CIA and they didn’t care— why should they? He had cash and he had a lot of it.
“Faizel?” he barked into the mobile phone. “You there?”
Faizel seemed unusually pleased to hear from him. “How are you, Jim?”
“Pissed off! What’s the problem? Why’m I being shut out of the bidding?”
“Because you’re dead, Jim,” Faizel said happily.
Eight seconds before he died, Central Intelligence Agency Field Agent Jim Sharma felt something drop on top of him. He knew it was the centipede, and then his mind registered the fact that it was very heavy. As his phone clattered on the floor and the centipede tightened around his neck, Sharma felt the cool touch of metal.
Some kind of a robot centipede? Didn’t make sense. The thing wouldn’t have the strength to strangle him, would it? He grabbed it and heard at that instant the high-pitched vibration of tiny spinning motors inside the centipede. His fingers were sliced to hamburger. He yelped and snatched his hands away, then realized his big mistake.
The thin tungsten centipede legs were unbelievably strong and micromachined to be razor-sharp. As they wiggled, they slid into Sharma’s flesh like hot knives into warm butter.
One second before he died, Jim Sharma felt his sweaty shirt become drenched in blood, and it smelled worse than the raw sewage on the streets of Casablanca.
Chapter 4
“It’s amazing.” The young man shook his head.
“It’s ludicrous,” added the elderly man with the gray complexion. “We have mobile phones smaller than a pack of playing cards and yet this organization can’t stay in touch with its enforcement arm.”
“It’s not a matter of technology. Dr. Smith,” Mark Howard said. “You could put a microchip in his skull and he’d still find a way to disable it.”
“I know,” sighed Harold W. Smith, the elderly director of the Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, as well as director of CURE, the supersecret organization for which Folcroft provided a front..
CURE was tiny in terms of its personnel, which numbered exactly four. Prior to the most recent major staff expansion, when Mark Howard was added to the payroll a few years previously, there had only been three official employees of CURE. Still, the scope of the organization’s activities had always been substantial. The impact CURE had on global events was incalculable.
The problem at the moment was not a new one. For years management, which consisted of Dr. Smith and Assistant Director Mark Howard, tried to set up a system for communications with its enforcement arm. The enforcement arm didn’t, couldn’t, wouldn’t cooperate.
“Why is it too much to ask him to carry a cellular phone?” Dr. Smith complained. “We could have it programmed to connect directly with our offices. All he would have to do is open it up.”
“He says they get ruined during the course of his field activities,” Howard added.
“We pay for his shoes by the gross, why not mobile phones?” Dr. Smith snapped. “What’s the situation with the CIA buyer?”
“He’s still waiting for a contact.”
“Sitting in a hotel room getting nowhere.”
“That’s about the size of it.”
Smith glared at the top of his desk, beneath which was hidden his new, enlarged flat-screen display. The brilliant, high-resolution images had been an unexpected quality-of-life improvement for Smith. The new image reduced the tension that Smith hadn’t even known he was experiencing when he viewed his old display. That didn’t make it any easier to see what he was seeing now.
“This is a failure. This should not be happening.” Dr. Smith spoke with subdued anger; this was not his usual sour disposition. “Remo could be at the buyers’ market right now, getting the answers, finding the stolen units, getting control of the situation. Instead our fate rests in the hands of one CIA operative who may or may not have a chance of even placing a bid.”
“We could send the Yuma police to find Remo,” Howard suggested.
“Remo would ignore them as he’s ignored our other messages,” Smith said dismissively. “When was our last call to Mr. Roam?”
“Four hours,” Howard answered, glancing at his watch.
“Intolerable.” Smith turned and looked out his window, where the waves of Long Island Sound crashed against the shore. He turned back. “Please get an update from the CIA while I try calling Mr. Roam myself.” Dr. Smith felt foolish as he rang the line of a mobile phone somewhere in southern Arizona. It picked up on the fourth ring.
“Hello?” The man sounded curious, and he sounded familiar.