On a hunch, he keyed into the FBI nationwide alert for the true Kimberly Baynes-the thirteen-year-old girl who had been reported kidnapped from her grandmother's Denver house.
Up came a digitized photo of the missing poster. It showed a wide-eyed innocent young blond girl.
Smith placed the artist's sketch next to the screen. But for the more mature lines of the face, they might have been sisters. There was a definite familial similarity.
Smith executed a thorough check of social-security records, looking for any Baynes-family female cousins. He found none. There were none.
Smith called up the digitized photo once more. And this time he noticed that the missing poster noted a tiny scar visible on the chin of the real Kimberly Baynes.
A scar reflected on the FBI sketch too.
"How can that be?" Smith muttered. "There must be ten years' difference in their ages." As he stared, Smith noticed other too-close congruities. Too many to be coincidence.
Then it struck him. And cold horror filled his marrow. Suddenly everything that Remo Williams had said, the apparent nonsense about the Caldron of Blood and living Hindu gods, no longer seemed so preposterous.
These two-young girl and mature woman-were the same person.
And Harold Smith realized there was another way to spell Calley.
Kali.
"This cannot be," he said, even as he realized it was. He dug deep into his files, pulling up a long encyclopedia entry on the Hindu goddess Kali.
Harold Smith scanned the text. He learned that Kali was the terrible four-armed mother goddess of Hindu myth. Known as the Black One, she was a horrible personification of death and womanhood, who feasted on corpses and drank blood. She was, he read, the consort of Shiva the Destroyer, who was known as the Red One.
"Red One," Smith muttered. "Remo said Kimberly had called him that. And they would dance the Tandava in the Caldron of Blood."
Smith called up "TANDAVA."
"THE DANCE OF DESTRUCTION SHIVA DANCES IN CHIDAMBARAM, THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE," he read, "THUS CREATING AND RECREATING THE UNIVERSE OVER AND OVER."
He went to the Shiva file. Most of the information he knew. Shiva was one of the Hindu triad of gods, personification of the opposing forces of destruction and reintegration. His symbol was the lingam.
Smith input "LINGAM."
The definition was succinct: "PHALLUS."
And Smith remembered Remo's rather personal problem.
It was all, he decided, too much to be called coincidental.
Woodenly he logged off the encyclopedia file.
He leaned back in his chair, his gray eyes slipping out of focus.
"What if it's true?" he whispered, his voice awed. "What if it's really true?"
Stunned, he reached out for the red telephone. He hesitated, grimacing. What could he tell the President?
He turned in his big swiveling executive chair.
Out beyond the big picture window-his only window to the world during time of crisis-a bluish moon was rising over the liquid ebony waters of Long Island Sound. They were as black as an abyss.
Harold Smith was a practical man. The blood of his rock-ribbed New England ancestors flowed through his veins. Men who had come to a new world to carve out a new life. They had planted according to the almanac, worshiped in Spartan churches, and put aside family and farm when their country had called them to war and national service. Unsuperstitious men. Patriots.
But he knew in his heart that no ordinary power could sway Remo Williams to join the Iraiti side. He knew he had inadvertently sent Remo into the arms-the four arms, if his story could be believed-of an unclean thing that, whether or not she was Kali, possessed a supernatural power even a Master of Sinanju could not resist.
And he had lost Remo.
Now the world teetered on the edge of what Kimberly Baynes-if she truly was Kimberly Baynes anymore-called the Red Abyss.
No, Harold Smith realized, he could not tell the President. In truth, he could not do anything. He could only hope that some power greater than mortal man would intervene before the world was lost.
Harold Smith steepled his withered old fingers, as if in prayer. His dry lips parted as if to invoke salvation.
Smith hesitated. He no longer knew which gods he should invoke.
Finally he simply asked God the Father to preserve the world.
He was no sooner done than one of the desk phones shrilled in warning.
Smith turned in his seat. It was the multiline Folcroft phone. At this hour, it could be only one person.
"Yes, dear?" he said, picking up the phone.
"Harold," Maude Smith said. "How did you know it was me?"
"Only the director's wife would call at this hour."
Mrs. Smith hesitated. "Harold, are . . . are you coming home?"
"Yes. Soon."
"I'm a bit nervous tonight, Harold."
"Is something wrong?"
"I don't know. I'm uneasy. I can't explain it."
"I understand," Smith said in a comfortless voice. He was not good at this. He always had problems being warm. Even with his wife. "All this war talk."
"It's not that, Harold. I saw the strangest thing tonight."
"What is that?"
"Well, you remember those strange neighbors who lived next door. The ones who moved?"