Through the sizable gap between the door and its frame, Puma could see the Nordic princess on her knees before the porcelain god. She tugged at the handle a little harder.
Removing her finger from down her throat, Vindaloo cried, "For Christ's sake, didn't you hear what I said? Go away!"
That was not in the cards. Puma made a flat blade of her right hand and, as if the door had been made of two layers of aluminum foil instead of two layers of eighth-inch sheet steel, she thrust her fingers through to the other side.
At the shriek of splitting metal, the Swede twisted around and saw the woman's hand poking through the rip in the door, the long, perfectly manicured fingers turning the inside lock button.
"What do you want?" Vindaloo bawled as the door slowly swung open. When it came to a full stop and she saw who the intruder was, she had her answer. And it was murder.
Even though the door was no longer a barrier to Puma's desires, in her rage she stripped it off its hinges, and in the same motion sent it crashing sideways into the line of mirrors behind her.
Like a spooked rabbit, Vindaloo scuttled under the dividing wall between toilet stalls. Puma lunged for her, but not in time. The Nordic model's slim ankle slipped out of reach.
Undaunted by the steel partitions, Puma pursued her prey, cleaving through the intervening walls with downward slashes of her arms. She made the astounding feat look easy, as easy as the way a circus poodle breaks through a paper-covered hoop. But there was no mistaking the difference. In the tiled room, the impacts of her arms flailing upon the steel boomed like a squadron of jets breaking the sound barrier. And instead of bits of brightly colored tissue paper fluttering about, shards of red-hot metal sang through the air.
Somewhere, under the din of Puma's singleminded attack, Vindaloo squealed desperately for help.
CHIZ STOOD at the end of the buffet table, staring at the women's-room door as he waited for the shit to hit the fan. He hadn't tried to calm his bride or to divert her from her purpose because he'd known it wouldn't have done any good. Her strength was such that he could no longer dominate her physically. As an icon of alpha-maleness, he understood Puma's need to control her own turf, to have free range within boundaries of her own making. He also understood-and shared-her lust to destroy something living, to rip it apart for the best of all possible reasons: because she could do it.
The mob milling around the party food practically begged to be torn to shreds. But as luck would have it, Chiz could find no one to focus his homicidal urges upon. No Vindaloo counterpart. Like a school of bait fish, the benefit crowd was a shifting, dizzying mass of virtually identical targets. And on top of that, unlike his wife, Chiz still felt caution in the presence of so many. He wanted to do bad things, but was held in check by the fear of being caught and punished. The action-adventure star considered his new desires a consequence of the bigger, better body he inhabited. As his power and muscle mass increased, so had his contempt for those who were weaker.
A noise cut through the vintage rock and roll, the rumble of talk and laughter, and froze every person in the room. It sounded like someone had rammed a truck into the bathroom wall. A very big truck. The club's floor rippled underfoot as the noise boomed again and again.
When the disk jockey cut off the music, everyone could hear the shrill screams.
Then Chiz smelled it. Over the spicy aromas of the buffet table and the various costly unguents and perfumes of his fellow guests, he caught the odor of freshly spilled blood. And lots of it.
Before anyone else could connect the dots, and with a speed no one in the club could match, he raced for the women's bathroom. The door opened as he reached it, and Puma Lee stepped out, spattered from head to foot in blood.
People standing close by saw her like that, and with the sounds that might have been explosions fresh in their minds, began to yell, "Bomb! Bomb!" Panic spread like wildfire through the crowd.
Chiz took advantage of the general pandemonium and replayed a scene that had appeared in virtually every movie he'd ever made. He scooped the damsel in distress in his bared, bulging arms and rushed her to safety-in this case, the fire exit.
WITH HIS CREW OF BOUNCERS busy calming and evacuating the crowd, it fell to Pismo Pete to be first to enter the women's bathroom. He didn't want to do it, but he had no choice. Even though there was a possibility of another explosion, the job couldn't wait for the Hollywood cops and the paramedics. If a bomb or bombs had been set off by terrorists or some lunatic fan, somebody had to go in at once and check for survivors. After all, a big-time celeb could be down and hurt, even dying inside.
As he pushed open the door, the ex-outlaw biker and sometime stunt double thought he was prepared for what he might find, but he was wrong. He'd never seen so much blood. It was spattered everywhere on the white floor and walls, making them look pink. And every toilet-stall partition had been jaggedly breached down the middle, as if slashed by a chain saw.
What kind of a bomb was precise enough to do a thing like that?
Equally puzzling was the absence of any lingering odor of explosives, no pall of smoke in the room, no sign of heat scorching anywhere. Glass from the shattered mirrors crunched under the stacked heels of his cowboy boots, but amazingly the lavatory's high, narrow windows remained intact.
Behind him, the bathroom door swung open a crack, and one of his bouncers said, "Need any help, Pete?"
"Stay the fuck out," he growled over his shoulder. "This is a one-man job until I say different." Something dripped from the ceiling onto the cuff of his ankle-length leather trench coat.
"Shit!" he said, wiping off the splat of blood with the heel of his hand. Then he looked up. Beads of red clung to the ceramic-tile ceiling like a nightmare dew. One of the ruby droplets broke free and hit him square on the chin.
"Jesus," Pismo Pete gasped, quickly rubbing it away.
"Don't think about it, just fucking do it," he muttered to himself as he hurried down the line of stalls, hoping to find a survivor, expecting to find a body or bodies.
He found no one, no grisly litter of body parts, either, but he did notice that each of the toilet-tank tops was slightly askew and he couldn't miss the bloody handprints all over them. Water ran in all the toilets, like they'd just been flushed. Or their tank balls were stuck.
Cautiously, the security chief entered the last stall and, doing his best to avoid the gory smears, he swung aside the tank's heavy porcelain lid.
Long blond hair swirled in the pink water, momentarily obscuring the pale face that lay beneath, trapped under the arm of the tank float.
Evidence that sunk the bomb theory, once and for all.
Chapter 6
"What would you like, Dr. Smith?" asked the woman behind the serving counter at the Folcroft Sanitarium cafeteria. The clock on the wall behind her read 10:49 p.m., eleven minutes until the food concession shut down for the night.
"I'd like to be home," Smith told her as he surveyed neatly arranged dishes of orange Jell-O, fruit salad and vanilla pudding sitting on a bed of flaked ice. It was another one of those nights. No home cooking for him. No delightful "Matlock" rerun to settle his meal. And later, as he drifted off to sleep, there would be no wide, warm, wifely backside in a flannel nightgown pressed against his own. Once again, in the name of duty, Dr. Harold W. Smith had been forced to sacrifice his simple comforts.
"I don't see any prune whip," he complained.
"If it isn't already set out, Dr. Smith, I'm afraid it's all gone until tomorrow."
Smith scanned the cafeteria case until he located his second choice. "Then I'll just have the shredded beets."
"That's all you're going to eat?" the counterwoman said, aghast. "Good grief, you're not a caterpillar. You can't live on beets. You need something more substantial under your belt. Look over here, we've still got some of tonight's special beef stew...."
Smith followed her plastic-gloved finger to the wide stainless-steel serving pan. Embedded in pasty, dark brown sauce were yellow bits that might have been potatoes, orange bits that might have been carrots, green bits that might have been peas and gray, gristly chunks that were most probably meat. The woman picked up the serving spoon and stirred in the shiny golden grease that had floated to the surface.
"How 'bout a nice big plate of piping-hot stew?" she asked him. "If you're going to work late again, it'll help you keep up your strength."
The doctor shuddered at the idea. Past middle age, he was a spare-looking man who had given the best part of a lifetime to the enjoyment of Spartan pleasures. His ideal main course was his wife's famous meat loaf, which consisted of five parts uncooked oatmeal to one part ground chuck, all bound together with her own family-secret moistener of corn starch dissolved in warm tap water. Maude precooked this confection in the microwave on high for twenty minutes to fully render the fat and juices. After a thorough draining, which included some manual compression, she baked the loaf in her conventional oven at four hundred degrees until it gave off a noise like a snare drum when she thumped it with the back of a spoon.
"I'll just have the beets, thanks," he said.
"You're going to turn into a beet one of these days," the counterwoman warned him as she filled a small ceramic bowl with a heap of dark purple shreds. "Or a puddle of prune whip."
"I do appreciate your concern," Dr. Smith said as he accepted the dish from her. "But I'm afraid I have a very sensitive stomach. I have to be extremely careful what I put in it."
Sitting down in the deserted eating area, he took three paper napkins from the dispenser, flattened them one on top of the other, then tucked the triple layer into his collar. With the front of his gray suit thus defended from accident, Smith ate quickly and confidently, tipping the bowl so he could spoon up every last drop of the ruby juice.
After bussing his single dish, Dr. Harold Smith trudged back down Folcroft's well-waxed hallway. He'd been doing the same job, in the same location, for more than three decades. His work had nothing to do with the business of the sanitarium, which existed largely, if not completely, to conceal the nature of his work. From his second-floor office overlooking Long Island Sound, Smith tracked current events both at home and abroad, ever alert for any threat to the republic. His secretary and the mainframe computers deep in the bowels of the brick building were his only company. And that suited him just fine.
Computer science had been his chief passion for better than thirty-five years. At the height of the Cold War, as a midlevel CIA programmer, he had combined the then fledgling field with his innate skill as a forecaster of future events. His predictions were not only based on mind-boggling rows of numbers, reflecting shifts in industrial production, annual rainfall and immigration rates of certain insect pests; they also factored in reports from CIA field operatives on the ambitions and mental states of key political figures. Sometimes it turned out that the critical element in an equation wasn't a dictator's relationship with the Kremlin, but how he got along with his live-in mother-in-law.
The accuracy of young Smith's analyses eventually came to the attention of a visionary new President, who had immediately sensed his patriotism, dedication and moral rectitude. Before his murder in Dallas, that President had done some oracling of his own. He had become convinced that, Cold War appearances to the contrary, internal threats not external ones were the real danger to the nation's survival. The limits of his constitutional powers prevented him from protecting democracy from its true enemies: the criminals eroding it from within. He created CURE as a temporary measure, a stop-gap to steer the country past the bad patch he was certain it faced. CURE was designed around the singular talents of Harold W. Smith. It was a one-man black-ops show with no direct support staff, no money trail leading back to Congress. Smith's task was to deploy his unique abilities to identify and defuse potential disasters. He had the authority to do whatever it took to ensure the survival of the nation, and his secret brief included the power to target selected individuals for assassination. Smith's only overseer was the Commander in Chief himself.
Since that bright late-November day so long ago, he had worked with a succession of Presidents, resolving a succession of do-or-die problems. Some of the Chief Executives had been pleased when they learned of CURE's existence; others had not. Whether they approved or disapproved, it changed nothing. The covert intelligence network Harold W. Smith had built had already acquired a life of its own. As is so often the case, what had been originally intended as temporary, had out of necessity become permanent.
As Smith shut his office door behind him, he decided he felt a little better for having eaten something. It had been a very frustrating day for the director of CURE. Like Chicken Little, he was having trouble convincing anyone of the danger he saw ahead.