GREG GROM FONDLY recalled those first heady days spent testing the capabilities of the powder. It worked just as well as the translations promised. In fact, it seemed too good to be true. Grom kept waiting for his test subject to develop horrific medical problems or dementia or, well, something.
There were a few glitches along the way. When Heidi Fenstermaker discovered that Grom was regularly bedding nine of the fourteen female interns, she became hysterically jealous. Grom calmed her down and gave her a cup of coffee. He suggested to Heidi that she was not angry with him for sleeping with every other attractive woman in the group. As a matter of fact, Grom suggested that...
Well, that opened up whole new vistas of opportunity. Even after Grom began using his powder for other purposes he still enjoyed many and various sexual exploits. He learned from his mistakes and soon developed a very effective set of suggestions. He took his women, enjoyed them, then discarded them with a code word. They went away just as happily as they had come to him.
Grom could have gone on like that for a lifetime had it not been for the arrival of Dawn Summens. She was just some bikini model hired for a commercial. By then Grom had engineered for himself a rapid rise through the ranks of the tiny Union Island government bureaucracy and was already chief of staff to the island administrator. Grom invited Summens to dinner after the commercial shoot and, somehow, in just one evening, everything changed.
It was as if Summens had used his own powder against him, captivating him entirely. That wouldn't have been such a bad thing if she had not outsmarted him at the same time. She learned about the powder, somehow, and threatened to expose him. She had documented evidence hidden somewhere. She blackmailed him at the same time she was giving him the best sex he had ever had. He never quite got around giving her the Miytec powder until it was too late.
He had to admit that it had all turned out for the best. Summens had assumed control of his ambitious strategies and pushed them further. He rarely let her touch the powder, but she strategized how he used it. Pretty soon Grom found himself elected administrator of Union Island. He changed the office to president, and the islanders loved him for it. His tourism initiative succeeded wildly. Union Island prospered and Greg Grom got rich fast.
Could he sustain this pace? Maybe. Maybe not. There had been a lot of dried-up octopus powder in the stone jars from the Miytec ruins, but those jars emptied fast when he began sprinkling it on the hotel breakfast buffets. The supply was virtually exhausted. The synthetic version of dried-up octopus powder seemed prone to triggering side effects.
Grom was getting nervous. They were at a crucial stage. Union Island had to break away from the United States of America. U.S. restrictions were hindering his income potential. When he was the one and only rule of law on the island, he could tax tourism as much as he wanted.
But independence would come only with strong federal-level support. Since no elected official in his right mind would support Union Island independence, Grom needed the powder to make it happen.
But the powder was almost gone.
Chapter 18
The Union Island Freedom Tour bus was nearing its stop at a restaurant at one of the highest points in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. President Grom was scheduled to partake of the restaurant's famous down-home pie and fresh-brewed coffee, then make a brief speech.
Remo thought it was odd. Why here? It was picturesque, sure, but he couldn't see what connection it had with Greg Grom's independence movement.
Remo stepped off the roof and jogged easily along the hiking trail for the last few miles. The bus was straining against the incline, and it didn't take much effort for Remo to beat it to its destination. He entered the restaurant and found it to have a large two-tiered interior, giving all patrons an unobstructed view of the mountains through the glass wall. He took a table on the top tier and watched Greg Grom perform below, at the best seat in the house.
"What'll it be?" The waitress didn't even look in his direction. She was watching Greg Grom. Remo asked for steamed rice and fresh fish, only to be told there was no rice on the menu. Did he want his fish deep-fried or pan-fried?
"Steam the fish, too, would you?" Remo asked. The waitress took all of six minutes to return with a plate of smoked ham, candied carrots and mashed potatoes under a vast, gelatinous pool of auburn gravy. By then Greg Grom had finished his public pie-eating and was delivering a brief speech on the indomitable spirit on the Smoky Mountain folk. Somehow his compliments dovetailed into an exhortation for the freedom of Union Island. Remo didn't try to follow the logic. Grom made his excuses and headed for the men's room. "Second helpin's on the house," Remo informed the old man in the next booth, handing over his own untouched and inedible plate of country victuals. The old man looked as if he'd won the lottery.
Remo slipped from the restaurant without being noticed by the wait staff, who were busy discussing their brush with a world leader.
With a little fast footwork Remo got outside and under the exterior window to the men's room, but he kept on moving. Union Island staff were wandering the grounds casting their suspicious gaze on any and all patrons. Two of the agents had clearly had U.S. Secret Service training in how to blend into a crowd. The others were regular staff drafted into security duty and spent most of their time actually watching the suit-and-sunglasses twins, imitating their behavior strategies for looking natural. Remo passed through them unseen, but he wasn't sure a passle of teenagers doing a Big Stomp line dance couldn't have passed unnoticed through this self-absorbed bunch.
Still, Remo was interested in some quality alone time in the men's room, and he didn't want to be bothered. He sought a distraction.
The wide, manicured lawn was dotted with wooden lounge chairs inhabited by relaxing guests of the hotel that was attached to the restaurant. Most were elderly widows reading sleazy hack romance novels and occasionally looking up to admire the view. The lawn went down the mountainside for a quarter mile, then ended at a white picket fence. Beyond that stretched a mile-deep canyon. Even in the late-morning sunshine the verdant crevices and mountainsides were caressed by the clinging veils of mists that gave the Smokies their name.
Beautiful, Remo thought. Not the scenery, but the nifty diversion that just popped into his head. As he walked, he reached out with one foot and gave a nudge to one of the lounge chairs.
The chairs were outfitted with large wooden wheels, which were functional enough when it came to moving the heavy chairs from one place to another but were not designed for locomotion. Despite the long decline of the lawn, the hotel management had never worried about one of their chairs rolling off with one of their patrons. Maybe they should have.
The chair shot across the lawn like a rocket, the front legs sheering off so that the front end flattened on the neatly mown grass. One of the federal-trained Union Island security agents was scooped off his feet. He collapsed onto the chair and then just kept going, zipping down the hill at a speed that should have been impossible.
The security detail responded with raised eyebrows, and the other tall agent, the one with the darkest sunglasses of all, showed real concern.
Remo was mildly impressed when the man in the fleeing lounge chair had the wherewithal to operate his radio. "This is Samson-I'm under attack!"
"Oh, shit!" said the agent in charge, snatching at his two-way radio. "Samson, this is Hercules-maintain radio silence! We've got journalists in the vicinity."
"Did you hear me?" squawked the panicking agent. "I'm under attack!"
The Union Islanders ran off in pursuit. The speeding lounge chair lost its wooden wheels a few yards short of the end of the lawn, spun sideways and slammed into the white picket fence. Wood splinters flew in all directions. The chair and its occupant vanished into the brush-filled drop-off beyond. The running bodyguards tried to slow down but realized the slope of the lawn wasn't as gentle as it looked. They tried to stop, but they just kept on going....
"Thought they'd never leave," Remo muttered, entering the men's room. He moved with inhuman silence, and Greg Grom, president of Union Island, never knew the Master of Sinanju was with him.
It was a while before Remo emerged again, breathing for the first time in minutes. "Well, that was a lot of work for nothing," he said to no one in particular. He had been convinced he was going to catch Greg Grom red-handed accepting a pickup of whatever poison he was using, but all that happened in the men's room was what was supposed to happen in the men's room.
Dammit, he wanted to be right about this.
He hadn't seen that minivan that parked out front. There were lots of cars coming and going and this one wasn't unusual, except that the driver wore a navy-blue jumpsuit with a logo on the pocket. He checked his clipboard and jumped from the van, yanking on the sliding door and rummaging in the back. He found a heavy, square box with several Warning! tags, skull-and-crossbones labels and the occasional Danger-Poison label.
"I'm looking for the United States Protectorate of Union Island tour bus," he asked the bus driver.
"You found it."
"I'm the SIC man." His eye twitched involuntarily.
"Sorry to hear that."
"I'm from Ship It Carefully. We have a package."
"Hello!" Grom said, wiping his hands on his pants as he came from the restaurant. He had no idea where his security team had got to, but that was just as well. With a minimum of fuss he showed his ID to the deliveryman, and then practically ran inside the bus with the package. The SIC man wished people would treat their deliveries with a little more respect. The company slogan was Special Shipment? Ship SIC!, but special was euphemistic. They delivered dangerous chemicals, flammables, other specialty items that UPS and FedEx and those other wussies wouldn't touch. SIC had all the hazardous-materials transport permits, federal and state.
They were as expensive as hell. So you would think that people who accepted a package from SIC would treat it with a little dignity. Not go running up the bus steps like a kid with a box of candy.
The side of the SIC man's face spasmed nervously. He returned to his minivan and closed the door-gently. He checked all his rearview mirrors and turned in his seat twice before backing out of the parking place. He drove five miles under the speed limit all the way down the mountains and back into North Carolina, face twitching all the way, but the angry honking of other drivers never bothered him in the slightest. It took a special kind of man to be a SIC man.
AS THE SCRATCHED and tattered army of security agents clambered up the hill, Remo walked away, finding the hiking trail and feeling disconsolate.
He had expected Greg Grom to accept delivery of a package in the men's room at the restaurant. It would have made sense. It would have solved his dilemma. It would have answered a lot of questions. And for once it would have been Remo Williams who did the solving. Sure, it was a long shot. Mark Howard thought so. Chiun had been so sure Remo was wrong he hadn't even bothered to wait around to see the facts prove Remo wrong.
Distantly he heard the tour bus start up and minutes later it low-geared down the Blue Ridge Park past him. Over the fragrance of pine needles and mountain ferns Remo tried not to breathe the diesel smell and just as unsuccessfully tried to come to a decision about what to do next.
He would not rejoin the Union Island entourage. What was the point?
He kind of liked the woods. Maybe he'd just hike his way through the Smoky Mountains for a few weeks, catch his dinner out of the cold freshwater mountain streams, maybe nab any abortion-clinic arsonists he happened to cross paths with along the way.
It wasn't like he'd be missed by Upstairs. He hadn't exactly been doing them a lot of good in recent days. Two things made him stop where he was, on a small rock overlooking a vast space between the mountains. The first thing was the thought that he was feeling awfully effing sorry for himself.
The second was the smell.
It wasn't a smell that belonged in the mountain woods. And it wasn't the diesel smell from the bus, but it had come with the diesel smell and was fading with it. It was chemical and vaguely familiar.
"Mother of crap!" Remo Williams exclaimed when he recognized the smell.