"I thought I saw one of them not an hour ago."
Smith blinked, his heart racing. Remo! He had returned.
Smith took hold of his voice. "The young man?"
"No," Mrs. Smith said. "It was the other one."
"Impossible!" Smith blurted out.
"Why do you say that, Harold?"
"I . . . understood he returned to his home. In Korea."
"You did tell me that, yes. I remember now." Mrs. Smith paused. "But I happened to look out the dining-room window, and I saw him in the house."
"What was he doing?" Smith asked in a strangely thin tone.
"He was . . ." Mrs. Smith's somewhat frumpy-sounding voice trailed off. She gathered it again. "Harold, he was staring at me."
"He was?"
"I lifted my hand to wave to him, but he simply threw up his hands and the most ungodly expression came over him. I can't describe it. It was terrible."
"You are certain of this, dear?"
"I'm not finished, Harold. He threw up his hands and then he simply . . . went away."
"Went away?"
"He . . . vanished."
"Vanished?"
"Harold, he faded away," Mrs. Smith said resolutely. "Like a ghost. You know I don't put any stock in such things, Harold, but that is what I saw. Do you . . . you don't think that I could be coming down with that memory disease? Oh, what is it called?"
"Alzheimer's, and I do not think that at all. Please relax, dear. I am coming home."
"When?"
"Instantly," said Harold W. Smith, who did not believe in ghosts either, but who wondered if he had not beseeched the proper god after all.
Chapter 36
Abdul Hamid Fareem had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. He was proud to bear the name Hamid.
But pride alone is not enough to make one worthy of standing in line to be the next sheik.
Abdul Fareem had been disinherited by his father, the sheik of the Hamid tribe. He had been forced to divorce his good wife, Zantos, whom he had not appreciated-doing this by pronouncing the words, "I divorce you, I divorce you, I divorce you," in the manner prescibed by Islam. Then he was forced to marry a Western woman of low morals, whom he did deserve.
The Western woman of low morals put up with him but three months as Abdul, exiled to Kuran, tried to scratch out a living as a moneylender. The white woman left when he had gone bankrupt. Lacking good judgment himself, he could hardly recognize a poor credit risk when he saw one.
When the Iraitis rolled over helpless Kuran, Abdul Fareem was the first to break for the border. And the first to find sanctuary.
He would have kept on going, straight for the emirates, but he had no money. Settling in the windblown border outpost of Zar, he earned a meager living as a camel groom. He let anyone who would listen know that he had once been a prince of Hamidi Arabia. And all had laughed. Not because they disbelieved his tale, but because they knew that fat Abdul Fareem had been of so base a character that even the right-thinking and kind sheik had disowned him.
Abdul Fareem had never sunk so low as these days. He had no money, no wife, no respect. Only the contempt of his fellow Arabs.
So it came as a tremendous surprise to him when soldiers in desert camouflage utilities stole in and abducted him as he slept on a bed of straw and camel dung in an open-air stable.
They gagged his mouth. They bound his struggling hands and feet as his three-hundred-pound body squirmed helplessly. And they bore him off to a waiting Land Rover.
The Land Rover chewed up sand and barreled north. North-to occupied Kuran. Abdul Fareem's heart quailed at the fearsome realization.
They took him to a desert camp and flung him overboard like a sack of meal. It took all four of them.
Soldiers fell on him. Others, bearing video-camera equipment, trained their glassy lenses on his shame. Many brought lights that were trained on him. He felt like a bug. But then, he had always felt like a bug. A corpulent bug.
A woman stepped from between two lights. She was a black silhouette, her abayuh flowing, impelled by a warm desert breeze.
Bending over, she removed his gag. It flashed before his eyes, and he saw for the first time that it was of silk. Yellow. No wonder it had felt so fine in his mouth. It had reminded him of the silk sheets on which he had passed many nights with the good Arab woman who had been too good for him.
"If you have abducted me for ransom," he told the woman, "you have wasted your time."
The woman's violet eyes flashed. She turned to the others.
"Fools! This is a mere fellahin. He smells of dung. He is not the sheik's son."
"I am the sheik's son," former Prince Abdul insisted, gathering the ragged shreds of his pride around him.
Another figure stepped forward. He wore a black silk costume like a thobe, two tigers stitched on the chest. An American, from the look of him. His eyes were like gems of death.
"That is he," the man said in numb English. "That is Abdul Fareem."
"But he smells," the woman said, also in English. American English. She sounded like his wife. The loose one. He wondered why she wore the abayuh.
The man in the black tiger costume shrugged.
"He is an Arab," he said woodenly.
"My father will not ransom me," Abdul said in English.
"That is well," the woman said. "The money he will save can be put to your burial."
And at that, the video cameras began whirring.
The woman in the abayuh stood up. She faced the man in the silken regalia. "There is your first sacrifice to me. Lay his broken corpse at my feet."