Destroyer 033 - Voodoo Die

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The Heart of the Matter

Remo decided to use force. The blade was -simpler.

"You're going to kill yourself with your own knife," Remo said softly. "Here we go."

He clasped the young man's hand around the knife so it could not let go and pressed it into the stomach, and,

feeling the blade had a sharpness to it, he very slowly brought it up to where he felt the heart muscle throb against it.

"Oh, God," said the young man who knew now he was going to die and had not expected

anything like that.

When the heart went, when the muscle was pierced and his blood flowed out of his stomach and now very fast out,

all over the place, and he finally was able to let go of the knife because the guy was walking up on the street, then it

dawned on the young man, in the final clarity of the last moment of life, even a seventeen-year-old life, that this guy

he had planned to stick had snuffed out his life without missing one step.

The city was dark and Remo moved on. There was some blood on his left thumb and he flicked

it off.

THE DESTROYER SERIES:

#1 CREATED, #20 ASSASSIN'S PLAY-OFF

THE DESTROYER #21 DEADLY SEEDS

#2 DEATH CHECK #22 BRAIN DRAIN

#3 CHINESE PUZZLE #23 CHILD'S PLAY

#4 MAFIA FIX #24 KING'S CURSE

#5 DR. QUAKE #25 SWEET DREAMS

#6 DEATH THERAPY #26 IN ENEMY HANDS

#7 UNION BUST #27 THE LAST TEMPLE

#8 SUMMIT CHASE #28 SHIP OF DEATH

#9 MURDER'S SHIELD #29 THE FINAL DEATH

#10 TERROR SQUAD #30 MUGGER BLOOD

#11 KILL OR CURE #31 THE HEAD MEN

#12 SLAVE SAFARI #32 KILLER

#13 ACID ROCK CHROMOSOMES

#14 JUDGMENT DAY #33 VOODOO DIE

#15 MURDER WARD #34 CHAINED REACTION

#16 OIL SLICK #35 LAST CALL

#17 LAST WAR DANCE #36 POWER PLAY

#18 FUNNY MONEY #37 BOTTOM LINE

#19 HOLY TERROR #38 BAY CITY BLAST

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PINNACLE BOOKS • LOS ANGELES

This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any

resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.

DESTROYER #33: VOODOO DIE

An original Pinnacle Books edition, published for the first time anywhere.

First printing, June 1978 Second printing, November 1978 Third printing, November 1979

ISBN: 0-523-40909-5

Cover illustration by Hector Garrido

Printed in the United States of America

PINNACLE BOOKS, INC.

2029 Century Park East

Los Angeles, California 90067

For a very real Ruby

voodoo die

CHAPTER ONE

Nothing in Rev. Prescott Plumber's past prepared him for making death so easy for anyone who wanted to die, and if

someone had told Plumber he would devise a prized war weapon, he would have smiled benevolently.

"Me? War? I am against war. I am against suffering. That is why I became a medical

doctor, to use my skills for God and mankind." That is what he would have told people if he

had not ended his life as a puddle on a palace floor.

When he left for the small jungle and volcanic rock island of Baqia, south of Cuba and north

of Aruba, just off the sea lanes where British pirates had robbed Spanish treasure ships and called

it war, the Rev. Dr. Plumber explained to another graduating student at medical school that

serving God and mankind was the only worthwhile medical practice.

"Bulldooky," said his classmate in disgust. "Derma-

tology, and I'll tell you why. Unlike surgery, your insurance premiums aren't out of sight, And nobody ever woke a

dermatologist up at four a.m. for an emergency acne operation. Your nights are your own, your days are your own, and

anybody who thinks they ought to have a face as smooth as surgical rubber is always good pickings."

"I want to go where there is suffering, where there is pain and disease," said Plumber.

"That's sick," said the classmate. "You need a psychiatrist. Look, dermatology. Take my advice.

The money's in skin, not God."

At the Baqian National Airport, Rev. Plumber was met by the mission staff in an old Ford

station wagon. He was the only one who perspired. He was taken to the offices of the Ministry of

Health. He waited in a room, whose walls were covered with impressive charts about ending

infant mortality, upgrading nutrition, and providing effective home care. When he looked closer,

he saw the charts were bilingual advertisements for the city of Austin, Texas, with Baqia stickers

pasted over Austin's name.

The minister for health had one important question for this new doctor serving the mission in

the hills:

"You got uppers, senor?"

"What?" asked Dr. Plumber, shocked.

"Reds. You got reds? You got greens? I'll take greenies."

"Those are narcotics."

"I need them for my health. And if I don't get them for my health, back you go to the States,

gringo. You hear? Eh? Now, what you prescribe for my bad nights, Doctor, greens or reds?

And my bad mornings, too."

"I guess you could call them greens and reds," said Dr. Plumber.

"Good. A pickup truck of reds and a pickup truck of greens."

"But that's dealing in drugs."

"We poor emerging nation. Now what you do here, eh?"

"I want to save babies."

"Dollar a kid, senor."

"Pay you a dollar for every child I save?" Dr. Plumber shook his head as if to make sure he

was hearing right.

"This our country. These our ways. You laugh at our culture, sefior?" ,

The Rev. Dr. Prescott Plumber certainly didn't want to do that. He came to save souls and

lives.

"You get the souls free and because I like sefior and because you are my brother from way up

north, and because we are all part of the great American family we let you save the babies

for twenty-five cents apiece, five for a dollar. Now where else you get a deal like that?

Nowhere, yes?"

Dr. Plumber smiled.

The mission was in the hills that ringed the northern half of the island. The mission

hospital was cinderblock and tin roofed with its own generator for electricity. Only one Baqian

city had electricity and that was the capital, Ciudad Natividado, named for the Nativity of

Christ by a Spanish nobleman, in gratitude for five successful years of rape and pillage between

1681 and 1686.

When he had first arrived at the mission, Dr. Plumber was amused to hear drums thumping

in the distance. He decided it was probably the natives' signal system to alert everyone that a

new doctor had ar-

rived. But the drums never stopped. From morning till night, they sounded out, forty beats a

minute, never stopping, never varying, steadily insinuating their sound into Dr. Plumber's brain.

He was there alone for a week, without a patient, without a visitor, when one high noon the

drums stopped. They had already become such a part of his life that, for a moment, Dr. Plumber

did not realize what had happened, what strange new factor had intruded itself into his

environment. And then he realized what it was. Silence.

Dr. Plumber heard another unusual sound. The sound of feet. He looked up from his seat at

an outdoor table where he had been going over the mission's medical records. An old man

with black trousers, no shirt, and a top hat, was approaching him. The man was small and

hard-looking, with skin the color of a chestnut.

Plumber jumped to his feet and extended his hand. "Nice to see you. What can I do for you?"

"Nothing," the old man said. "But I can do for you. I am called Samedi." He was, he explained, the hun-gan, the holy

man of the hills, and he had come to see Dr. Plumber before he would allow his people to visit the mission hospital.

"All I want is to save their bodies and their souls," said Dr. Plumber.

"That is a very big all-I-want," the old man said with a faint smile. "You may have their

bodies to treat, but their souls belong to me."

And because that was the only way he would ever get any patients, Dr. Plumber agreed. At least for the time

being, he would not try to convert anybody to any religion.

"Fine," Samedi said. "They have a very good reli-

gion of their own. Your patients will begin to arrive tomorrow."

Without another word, the old man got up and walked away. As he left the mission

compound, the drums began again.

The patients arrived the next day, first a trickle, then a flood, and Plumber threw himself

into the work he knew God had meant him to do. He treated and he healed.

Soon he installed an operating room with his own hands. He was a bit of an electrician, too.

He rebuilt an X-ray machine.

He saved the life of the minister of justice and was thereafter allowed to save babies for

nothing, although the minister of justice pointed out that if he saved just two good-looking

female babies, he could put them to work in fourteen or fifteen years at the good hotels, and if

they didn't get diseased, they would be good for at least $200 a week apiece, which was a

fortune.

"That's white slavery," said Dr. Plumber, shocked.

"No. Brown is the lighest color you get. You don't get white ones. Black ones, they don't make

too much. If you get blonde white one by some accident, you made, yes? Send her to me. We

make money, no?"

"Absolutely not. I have come here to save lives and to save souls, not to pander to lust."

And the look the Rev. Dr. Plumber got was the same as the one given him by the

medical student who planned on dermatology. The look said he was crazy. But Dr. Plumber

didn't mind. Didn't the Bible tell him he should be a fool for Christ, which meant that others

would think him a fool, but they were those who had not been blessed with the vision of

salvation.

The dermatologist was the fool. The minister for health had been the fool, for right here in the Lord's dark brown

earth was a substance, called "mung" by the villagers, which when packed against the forehead relieved depression.

How foolish it was, thought Dr. Plumber, to deal in narcotics when the earth itself gave so much.

For several years, as he rebuilt the mission clinic into a full-fledged hospital, Dr. Plumber

thought about the earth called mung. He made experiments and determined to his satisfaction

that the mung did not seep through skin and therefore it had to affect the brain by rays. A

young assistant, Sister Beatrice-unmarried, like the doctor himself-arrived at the mission one day

with the distinction of being the first white woman to pass through Ciudad Natividado

without being propositioned. Her stringy brown hair, thick glasses and teeth, which looked as if

they had collided beyond the ability of modern orthodontics to straighten them out, had more to do

with her freedom from pesty men than her virtue.

Dr. Plumber fell instantly in love. All his life he had saved himself for the right woman

and he realized that Sister Beatrice must have been sent to him by the Lord.

More cynical Baqians might have pointed out that Caucasians working among the natives

for three months tended to fall in love with their own kind within five seconds. Two minutes

was an all-time record of composure for a white working among Baqians.

"Sister Beatrice, do you feel what I feel?" asked Dr. Plumber, his long bony hands wet and

cold, his heart beating with anxious joy.

"If you feel deeply depressed, yes," said Sister

Beatrice. She had been willing to suffer all manner of discomfort for Jesus, but somehow suffering discomfort seemed

more religious while friends and relatives were singing hymns in the Chillicothe First Church of Christianity. Here in

Baqia, the drum sounds twenty-four hours a day pounded at her temples like hammer thuds, and cockroaches were

cockroaches, and not a bit of grace about them.

"Depression, my dear?" said Dr. Plumber. "The Lord has provided from his earth."

And in a small laboratory he had built with his own hands, Dr. Plumber pressed the greenish

black mung to Sister Beatrice's forehead and temples.

"That is wonderful," said Sister Beatrice. She blinked and blinked again. She had taken

tranquilizers at times in her h'fe and to a degree they had always made her drowsy. This

substance just snapped you out of it, like a rubber band. It didn't make you overly happy, to be

followed by a trough of unhappiness. It didn't make you excited and edgy. It just made you

undepressed.

"This is wonderful. You must share this," said Sister Beatrice.

"Can't. Drug companies were interested for a while, but a handful of mung lasts forever and

there's no way they can put it in expensive pills for people to take over and over again. As a

matter of fact, I believe they might kill anyone trying to bring it into the country. It would ruin

their tranquilizer and antidepressant market. Put thousands out of work. The way they explained

it, I'd be robbing people of jobs."

"What about medical journals? They could get word to the world."

"I haven't done enough experiments."

"We'll do them now," said Sister Beatrice, her eyes

lit like furnaces in a winter storm. She saw herself as assistant to the great missionary scientist, the Rev. Dr. Prescott

Plumber, discoverer of depression relief. She saw herself appearing at church halls, telling about the heat and the

drums and the cockroaches and the filth of missionary work.

That,would be so much nicer than working in Baqia, which was the pits.

Dr. Plumber blushed. There was an experiment he had been planning. It had to do with rays.

"If we shoot electrons throu gh the mung, which I believe is actual l y a

glycolpolyaminosilicilate, we should be able to demonstrate its effect on cell structure."

"Wonderful," said Sister Beatrice, who had not understood one word he had said.

She insisted he use her. She insisted he do it now. She insisted that he use full force. She sat

down in a wicker chair.

Dr. Plumber put the mung in a box over a heavy little gas generator that provided electricity

for the tubes that emitted electrons, smiled at Sister Beatrice, and then fried her to a gloppy stain

seeping through the wicker.

"Oh," said Dr. Plumber.

The stain was burnt umber and the consistency of molasses. It seeped through what had been

a plain white blouse with a denim skirt. The thick-soled plastic shoes were filled up to the top

with the slop.

It smelled like pork fried rice left out in the tropical sun for a day. Dr. Plumber lifted the edge

of the blouse with a tweezer. He saw she had worn a little opal on a chain. That was

untouched. The bra and snaps were untouched. A cellophane bag that had

held peanuts in her shirt pocket was safe, but the peanuts were gone.

Quite obviously, shooting electrons through the substance destroyed living matter. It probably

rearranged the cell structure.

Dr. Plumber, a man who had found his one true love only to lose her immediately, made his

way in a daze to the capital city of Ciudad Natividado.

He turned himself into the minister of justice.

"I have just committed murder," he said.

The minister of justice, whose life Dr. Plumber had saved, embraced the weeping missionary.

"Never," he screamed. "My friends never commit murder, not while I am minister of justice.

Who was the communist guerilla you saved your mission from?"

"A member of my church."

"While she was strangling a poor native, yes?"

"No," said Dr. Plumber sadly. "While she was sitting innocently, helping me with an

experiment. I didn't expect it to kill her."

"Better yet, an accident," said the minister of justice, laughing. "She was killed in an

accident, yes?" He slapped Dr. Plumber on the back. "I tell you, gringo. Never let it be said

of me that one of my friends ever went to jail for murder while I was minister of justice."

And thus it began. El Presidente himself found out about this wonderful thing you could do

with mung.

"Better than bullets," said his minister of justice.

Sacristo Juarez Banista Sanchez y Corazon listened intently. He was a big man with dark jowls

and a flaring black handlebar mustache, deep black eyes, thick lips, and a flat nose. Only in the

last five years had he admitted to having black blood and then he did it with glory, offering his

city to the Organization of Af-

rican Unity, saying, "Brothers should meet among brothers." Before that, he had explained to all white visitors that he

was "Indian-no nigger in this man."

"Nothing better than bullets," said Corazon. He sucked a guava pit from a cavity in his front

tooth. He would have to appear again at the United Nations, representing his country. He

always did that when he needed dental work. Anything else could be left to the spirits, but

major cavities could only be trusted to a man named Schwartz on the Grand Concourse in the

Bronx. When Dr. Schwartz found out that Sacristo Juarez Banista Sanchez y Corazon was the

Generalissimo Corazon, Butcher of the Caribbean, Papa Corazon, Mad Dog Dictator of Baqia,

and one of the most bloodthirsty rulers the world had ever known, he did the only thing a

Bronx dentist could. He tripled his prices and made Corazon pay in advance.

"Better than bullets," the minister of justice insisted. "Zap, and you got nothing."

"I don't need nothing. I need the dead bodies. How you going to hang a dead body in a village

to show they should all love Papa Corazon, with all their minds and hearts, if you don't have

no dead body? How you do this thing? How you run a country without bodies? Nothing better

tihan bullets. Bullets are sacred."

Corazon kissed his thick fingertips, then opened his hands like a blossom. He loved bullets.

He had shot his first man when he was nine. The man was tied to a post, his wrists bound with

white sheets. The man saw the little nine-year-old boy with the big .45-cali-ber pistol and smiled.

Little Sacristo shot the smile off the man's face.

An American from a fruit company came one day

to Sacristo's father and said he should no longer be a bandit. He brought a fancy uniform. He brought a box of papers.

Sacristo's father became El Presidente and the box of papers became the constitution, the original of which was still in

the New York office of the public relations agency that wrote it.

The American fruit company grew bananas for a while, and hoped to expand into mangoes.

The mangoes didn't catch on in America and the fruit company pulled out.

Whenever anyone asked about human rights after that, Sacristo's father would point to that box over there. "We got

every right you can think of and then some. We got the best rights in the world, yes?"

Sacristo's father would tell people that if they didn't believe him, they could open the box.

Everyone believed Sacristo's father.

One day Sacristo's father heard that someone was planning to assassinate him. Sacristo knew

where the assassin lived. Sacristo and his father went to slay the man. They took Sacristo's

personal bodyguard of fifty men. Sacristo and the fifty men returned with his father's body. The

father had fallen, bravely charging the enemy. He was killed instantly when he led the charge.

No one thought it strange that he was killed by a bullet in the back of the head when the

enemy was in front of him. Or if anyone thought --it strange he did not mention it to Sacristo,

who had been following his father, and was now El Presidente.

For allowing a potential enemy to kill his father, Sacristo personally shot the generals who

were still loyal to his father.

Sacristo loved the bullet. It had given him everything in his Me.

So El Presidente was not about to listen to tales that there were things better than bullets.

"I swear to you on my life it is better than bullets," said the minister of justice.

And Sacristo Corazon gave his minister a broad fat smile.

"As a figure of speech," said the minister, suddenly panicked by having wagered his life.

"Of course," said Corazon. His voice was soft. He liked the very big house of the minister of

justice, and while it looked shabby on the outside there were marble floors and baths on the

inside, and pretty girls who had never left the minister's compound.

And they were not even his own daughters. It was a fact of life that any family with a

pretty daughter let her be deflowered by El Presidente or one of his cronies, or kept her forever

behind closed doors. Now Corazon was a reasonable man. If a man prized his daughters, he

could understand that man hiding them. But not the daughters of other men. That was sinful.

To keep a girl from your leader, from El Presidente, was immoral.

So the minister of justice brought this thing that was supposed to be better than bullets. A

missionary from the hill hospital came with a very heavy box. It was a two-foot cube and required

great effort to move it.

The missionary was a doctor and a preacher and had been in Baqia several years. Corazon

gave him the usual flowery praise due a messenger of God, then told him to perform his magic.

"Not magic, El Presidente. Science."

"Yes, yes. Go ahead. Who you going to use it on?"

"It's a health device and it failed. It failed to help

and it .. ." Dr. Plumber's voice crackled and faltered with his great sorrow. "It killed and it did not cure."

"Nothing more important than health. When you have health, you have everything.

Everything. But let us see how it does not work. Let us see how it kills. Let us see if it is better

than this," said El Presidente, and drew a shiny .44-caliber chrome pistol with mother-of-pearl

handles, inlaid with the seal of the presidency and a good luck charm that, according to some of

the voodoo priests, helped make the bullets go straighter, bullets having a mind of their own

and at times defying the will of El Presidente.

Corazon pointed the shiny big-barreled pistol at the head of his minister of justice. "There are

some who believe your box there better than bullets. There are some who bet their lives on it,

no?"

The minister of justice had never realized how big, how truly big the barrel of a .44 was. It

loomed like a dark runnel. He imagined what a bullet might look like coming from it. If there

were time to see. He imagined there would be a little explosion down at the other end of

the barrel and then, thwack, he would not be thinking anymore because .44s tended to take

out very big pieces of the brain, especially when the slugs were of soft lead with little dumdum

holes in the center. There was a bullet waiting at the other end of that barrel.

The minister of justice smiled weakly. There was another element here, too. There were

Western ways and island ways. The island ways were rooted in the hill religion known to the

outside world as voodoo. Anyone bringing in the Western magic of science was pitting it against

the island magic of voodoo.

Western magic was the plane. When the plane crashed, that was island magic. The island

had won.

When the plane landed safely, it had won, especially when it landed safely with gifts for El Presidente.

So what was pitted now between the old reliable pistol and the machine of the missionary

doctor was island magic in Corazon's hands and gringo industrialized magic in the hands of the

bony, sad Dr. Plumber.

A pig was brought into the presidential chamber, a huge, domed, marble-floored formal room

for giving medals, receiving ambassadors, and sometimes, when El Presidente had drunk too

much, sleeping one off. He could lock the thick ironclad doors here and not be murdered in a

drunken sleep.

The pig was a sow and reeked of recent mud, which was dried gray on her massive sides.

Two men had to poke her with large sharp sticks to keep her from trampling everything in sight.

"There. Do it," said Corazon suspiciously.

"Do it," said the minister desperately.

"You want me to kill the pig?"

"It have no soul. Go ahead," said Corazon.

"I've only done it once," said Dr. Plumber.

"Once, many times, always. Do it. Do it. Do it," said the minister of justice. He was

crying now.

Dr. Plumber turned the switch on the battery that started the ignition on the small generator.

Three, quarters of the device was devoted to producing electricity which, in a civilized country,

could be gotten with a wire cord and a plug and a socket. But here in Baqia, everything had to

be overcome. Dr. Plumber felt very sad and while it was only two days since the awful accident

with Sister Beatrice, she became more beautiful with each passing minute. His mind had even

achieved what breast cream, exercise, and suc-

tion cups had failed at: He imagined her with a bosom.

Dr. Plumber checked the mung supply. He checked the level of power. He pointed a small

lenslike opening in the front of the box at the pig and then released the electrons.

There was a zap like a tight piece of cellophane snapping and then a smell of roasting rubber

and the 350-pound pig smoked briefly, crackled once, and settled into a greenish black glop

that spread across the marble floor.

Not even the hide was left. The wooden poles that had been poking the pig were cinders,

but the metal points were there. They had hit the floor as soon as the pig melted. And the goo

rolled over them.

"Amigo. My blood friend. My holy man friend. I really like Christ," said Corazon. "He one of

the best gods there ever was. He my favorite god from now on. How you do that?"

Dr. Prescott Plumber explained how the machine worked.

Corazon shook his head. "Which button you push?" he asked.

"Oh, that," said Dr. Plumber and showed Corazon the red button that started the generator

and then the green one that released the electrons.

And then a horrible accident ensued. Corazon accidentally killed his minister of justice just as

Plumber had accidentally killed beautiful Sister Beatrice. The room smelled like a smoldering

garbage dump.

There were goose bumps on Dr. Plumber's skin. The rays created vibrations in people

standing too near a target.

"Oh, God. This is awful," sobbed Dr. Plumber. "This is horrible."

"Sorry," said Corazon. And he said "Sorry" again when he accidentally put away a captain of

the guard whom he suspected of blackmailing an ambassador from another country and not

giving his president a cut. This was at the palace gate.

"Sorry," said Corazon and the driver of a car disappeared from the window of a sedan and the

car went crazily off the dusty main road of Ciudad Natividado and into the veranda of a small

hotel.

"I believe you did that on purpose," sputtered Dr. Plumber.

"Scientific exploration has its price, yes?" said Corazon.

By now his guards were hiding, no one was in a window, and everywhere Corazon lugged the

heavy thing, people hid. Except for tourists in the Hotel Astarse across the street. They

watched, wondering what was going on, and Corazon did not zap them. He was no fool. He

was not going to frighten away the Yankee dollar.

And then his luck changed. He found a soldier sleeping on duty in the palace.

"Punishment is needed," Corazon said. "I will have discipline in my army."

But by now Dr. Plumber was sure the machine had fallen into the hands of someone who

killed on purpose. He put himself in front of the snoring Baqian corporal, who was sprawled in

the island dust like a dozing basset hound.

"Over my dead body," said Dr. Plumber, defiantly.

"Okey-dokey," said Corazon.

"Okey-dokey what?" demanded Dr. Prescptt Plumber, American citizen and missionary.

"Okey-dokey over your dead body," said Corazon, and with a bit of English-for with his natural talent

Corazon had found the rays took English somewhat like a billiard ball-he threw a little curve into the bony Dr.

Plumber. A gold-covered bible suddenly appeared, resting on the metal part of a zipper, all atop a dark smelly puddle

where Dr. Plumber had stood.

The Bible sank into the slop, pushing the strand of zipper beneath it. There were little bumps at the edges. Dr.

Plumber had worn old-style shoes with nails in the heel. The nails remained.

When word reached the American State Department that one of its citizens had been

coldly murdered just for the fun of it by the Mad Dog of the Caribbean, Generalissimo Sacristo

Corazon, and that Corazon had in his sole possession a deadly weapon he alone understood, the

decision was clear:

"How do we get him on our side?"

"He is on our side," explained someone from the Caribbean desk. "We've been putting about

two million a year into his pocket."

"That was before he could turn people into silly putty," said a military analyst.

He was right.

Generalissimo Sacristo Juarez Banista Sanchez y Corazon called a special third world resource

conference at Ciudad Natividado and, in unison, 111 technological ambassadors voted that

Baqia had "an inalienable right to glycolpolyaminosilicilate" or, as the chairman of the

conference said, "that long word on page three."

The world response was eight books on how Corazon had been slandered by the industrialized

world's propaganda, a resurgence of interest in the deep philosophical meaning of the island's

voodoo religion, and an international credit line for Corazon of up to three billion dollars.

The ships were stacked up outside Natividado harbor for miles.

In Washington, the President of the United States called the top representatives of his intelligence, diplomatic, and

military establishments together and asked, "How did that lunatic down there get hold of something so destructive

and what are we going to do to get it out of his hands?"

To this call for help, the answer was generally contained in long memos, each declaring,

"You can't blame this department."

"All right," said the President, opening another meeting on the subject. "What can we do

about this maniac down there? What is that weapon he's got? Now I want to hear suggestions.

I don't care whose fault it is."

The gist of the meeting was that each department didn't have to handle it because it wasn't

their responsibility, and no, they didn't know how the gizmo worked.

"There are only two things you people know. One, you're not guilty and two, don't ask you to

do anything lest you become guilty of something. Have all these Congressional hearings made

you into cowards?"

Everybody looked at the CIA director, who cleared his throat for a long time before replying.

"Well, Mister President, if you don't mind my saying so, the last time somebody in my job tried to

protect America's interests like that, your Justice Department tried to send him to jail. It doesn't

exactly inspire us all with extracurricular zeal. No Congressional hearing ever blamed anybody

for what he didn't do. None of us wants to go to jail."

"Isn't there anyone who cares that an American cit-

izen has been killed? In all the reports, that was the least important thing," said the President.

"Is there no one who is worried that a mad dog killer is on the loose with a dangerous weapon

we have no defense against because we don't know how it works? Doesn't anyone care? Will

someone speak up?"

Generals and admirals cleared their throats. Men responsible for the nation's foreign policy

looked away, as did the chiefs of intelligence.

"To hell with you all," said the President in a soft Southern drawl. His face flushed red. He

was as angry at the defense establishment as he was at himself for swearing.

If there wasn't any legal organization that could take care of this mess, then there certainly

was an illegal one.

Midday, he retired to the Presidential bedroom in the White House and, reaching into a

bureau drawer, put his hand on a red telephone without dials. He hated this phone and hated

what it represented. Its very existence said his country could not operate within its own laws.

He had thought of abolishing the organization to which this one telephone was attached and

which operated in emergencies, doing things he didn't want to know about. He thought at first

he could quietly put the organization to rest. But he found he could not.

In a pinch, there was only one group he could count on and he sadly realized that it was

illegal. It represented everything he hated.

It had been created more than a decade earlier, when covert operations were standard. And so deadly and so

secret had been this organization, called CURE, that it alone, of all America's intelligence net-

work, had escaped public inquiry without ever coming to light.

The CIA and military alike were open books, while no one but the President knew of CURE.

And, of course, its director and two assassins. The government, his government, supported two of the deadliest killers

who ever existed in all the history of mankind and all he had to do was say to the director of CURE: "Stop."

And the organization would cease to exist. And the assassins would not work in America anymore.

But the President had never said stop, and it bothered his righteous soul to its deepest roots.

Even worse, he was about to find out that day that now he no longer had that illegal arm.

CHAPTER TWO

His name was Rerno and the lights went out all around him. To most people in New York

City, it was light, then suddenly blackness, in the summer night. The air conditioners stopped, the

traffic lights disappeared, and suddenly people out on the street noticed the dark sky.

"What?" said a voice from a stoop.

"It's the 'lectricity." And then frightened noises. Someone laughed very loud.

The laughter did not come from Remo. He had not been plunged into sudden darkness. The

lights did not go out for him in a split second.

For him there had been a flutter of light and then it died, in the street bulb above 99th Street and Broadway. It was

a slow giving up, quite obvious if your mind and body rhythms were attuned to the world around you. It was only

an illusion that there was

sudden blackness. People helped this illusion, Remo knew.

They were engrossed in conversation, tuning out other senses to concentrate on their

words, and they only tuned back the senses when they were already in darkness. Or they

were drinking alcohol, or had loaded their stomachs with so much red meat that their

nervous systems devoted all energies to laboriously processing it in an intestine designed for

fruits and grains and nuts, and in a bloodstream that had ancient memories of the sea and

could absorb quite well those special nutrients that came from fish. But never hoofed meat.

So it was dark and he had seen it coming and someone shrieked because she was afraid.

And someone else shrieked because she was happy.

So it was dark and he had seen it coming and someone shrieked because she was afraid.

And someone else shrieked because she was happy.

A car came up the block and lit it with its headlights and there was a noise in the streets of

the city people, a mingling of nervous voices trying to establish contact in what they

thought was a suddenly unnatural world.

And only one man in the entire city understood what was happening, because he alone

had reawakened to his senses.

He knew that young men were running up behind him. It was not strange to listen for that

or to know where their hands were and that one had a lead object he was trying to crack

down on Remo or that the other had a blade. They moved their bodies that way.

You could explain it in a few hours to someone, using motion pictures of how every person gave obvious signs

of their weapons by the way they moved their bodies. Some you could even tell what sort of weapon they had

by looking at their feet alone. But the best way was feel.

How did Remo know? He knew it. Like he knew his head was on his shoulders and that the ground was down.

Like he knew he could slow-catch the force of the lead object and readjust the boy's momentum to send him down

into the concrete sidewalk so that he cracked his own ribs on collision.

The blade was simpler. Remo decided to use force.

"You're going to kill yourself with your own knife," Remo said softly. "Here we go."

He clasped the young man's hand around the knife so it could not let go and pressed it into

the stomach, and feeling the blade had a sharpness to it he very slowly brought it up to where

he felt the heart muscle throb against it.

"Oh, God," said the young man who knew now he was going to die and had not expected

anything like that. He had done hundreds of stickings in New York City and no one had ever

given him trouble, especially not when he worked with someone who used lead.

Sure, he had been arrested twice, once for cutting up a young girl who wouldn't give him

any, but then he only spent a night in youth detention and he went back and settled with her.

He got her in an alley and he cut her up good. So good that they had to bury her in a closed

coffin and her mother wept, and asked where justice was, and pointed a finger at him, but that

was all she could do. What was she going to do? Go to the police? He'd cut her up worse

then. And what would they do? Give him a lecture? Put him up for a night in jail?

There was nothing that was going to happen to you for sticking someone in New York City. So

it came as a great surprise to this young man that there would

be some sort of violent objection from this person about to be mugged.

After all, he wasn't wearing a gang jacket, or riding around like he was connected to the

mob, or wearing a gun. He had looked like a simple citizen of New York City, the kind

anybody could do anything to. So what was this great pain he felt in his body? Was the guy a

cop? There was a law against killing cops, but this guy didn't look like a cop.

They had been watching him just before the lights went. They had seen him buy a single

flower from someone on Broadway and give the old woman a ten-dollar bill and tell her to

keep the change.

And he had bills in his pocket. Then the guy took the flower, smelled it, and tore off two

petals. And he chewed the damned things.

He was about six feet tall but skinny, and he had high cheekbones, as if he might have been

part Chink or something. That's what one of the guys said. He had real thick wrists and he

walked funny, like a shuffle. He looked easy. And he had money.

And when he turned into 99th Street, where it was not as well-lit and where no other

citizens would come to his aid, where he was just beautiful pickings, the lights went out.

Beautiful.

He didn't even wait. He knew he had a partner with a lead pipe, because that's what his

partner was ready to use while the lights were on.

They closed in on the guy at the same time. It was beautiful, double beautiful. Wham. He should have collapsed.

But he didn't.

He hardly moved. You could feel him not move. You could make out that your partner fell

onto the sidewalk like he was dropped off a roof. And then the

guy spoke to you very softly and he had your hand in his and you couldn't even let go of the knife.

And he punctured your belly and you slammed desperately at your own hand trying to get the

knife out of it so it wouldn't tear your insides out, but it felt like someone had taped your belly

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TheHeartoftheMatterRemodecidedtouseforce.Thebladewas-simpler."You'regoingtokillyourselfwithyourownknife,"Remosaidsoftly."Herewego."Heclaspedtheyoungman'shandaroundtheknifesoitcouldnotletgoandpresseditintothestomach,and,feelingthebladehadasharpnesstoit,heveryslowlybroughtituptowherehefelttheheartmusc...

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Destroyer 033 - Voodoo Die

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