"You wanna see ugly, go look in a mirror." Chiun turned slowly to face the insulting party.
"I like your pretty dress." The comment dripped with sarcasm.
Chiun found himself face-to-face with a bird. A big one. It was a strange and vibrant bluish parrot with a huge beak. Its small, shining black eyes were set in big yellow patches. There were other parrots inhabiting the display of driftwood in the middle of the open air lobby, but they were green and tiny, dwarfed by the macaw. "Don't make trouble," Remo called as he returned.
"Ringing its neck would be no trouble at all," Chiun commented.
"Not from Smitty's point of view."
"Old man wanna prune?" the parrot demanded.
"Who would teach a bird to be impolite?" Chiun asked.
"How should I know?" Remo said.
"I was not asking you." Chiun leaned close to the big parrot. Then leaned closer.
"Halitosis halitosis!" The bird squawked.
"Yellow and blue make a hideous color combination," Chiun told it, moving in even closer.
"Awk!" The bird tried to peck him, but Chiun held its beak in his fingers. The great black eyes rolled and the bird shifted on its driftwood perch.
"Not so long ago, in Rome, the Caesars considered parrots a delicacy," Chiun said.
He released it and the bird scrambled away, trembling. Chiun chuckled.
REMO WAS on the phone as soon as he had settled into the presidential suite at the Many Palms Resort. Settling in consisted of putting down the assortment of eight trunks Chiun had chosen for their short jaunt to the Caribbean, while the old Master himself plopped down in front of the television and began channel-surfing for Spanish-language soap operas.
"I think you sent us to the wrong island, Smitty," Remo declared.
"I doubt it," Harold W. Smith replied curtly.
"This place is a dump. And by place I mean the whole island, including this hotel."
"The Many Palms Resort is supposed to be the finest hotel-"
"Oh, Christ all-mighty, not you, too," Remo said, cutting him off. "Okay, it's not so awful, but it's strictly two-star and that doesn't bode well for the rest of the island."
"You don't know that. The U.S. has invested a half billion to improve the island infrastructure."
"I'll believe it when I see it."
"You're not there to look for evidence of a public works embezzler," Smith reminded him. "You're there to put a stop to the killing."
"Yes, of course. I'll call you."
Remo replaced the phone as Chiun gave a disgusted sound, flicking off the TV and tossing the remote, which buried itself in the wall.
"No soaps?" Remo asked.
"None."
"My fault?"
"Of course."
Remo sighed. "I'm going for a walk."
Chapter 31
Dawn Summens didn't move. Her face was blank, as if her emotions had been erased.
"I had to do it," Greg Grom apologized. She just stood there.
"I had no choice," Grom insisted.
"Christ, Greg," Dawn said, turning away from the small barred window in the steel door. "It's horrible."
"They'll snap out of it. I'm sure they'll snap out of it," Greg Grom said worriedly, his own alarm growing. Dawn had been too shocked to react at first, but now her face was pale and she looked frightened. She leaned against the bare concrete wall.
"I had to do it," he whined. "The Feds were there. Those special agents I told you about? They were right there! The only way to get away was to cause such a big mess I could get lost in it. So I dosed everybody on the bus."
She looked at him with a stark eye. "Then what happened?"
"They went crazy. Just like all the others. They went on a rampage. It was just, just insanity."
"Rampaging?" she asked.
Greg nodded vigorously. "Yes. Not like they are now. This didn't happen until a few hours ago. They were still full of energy when we locked them up. Then this morning-this."
Dawn didn't want to look again, but she was drawn to the steel door. Through the bars she saw a large, low-ceilinged room containing fully half the administrative staff of the island government, maybe forty people in all, and not a word was spoken. Most of them simply stood in one spot, eyes wide, looking slowly around with bloodshot eyes. Several were pacing the cell slowly. One woman was putting her hand to the cold concrete wall again and again, and Dawn realized she was trying to flatten a spider. It wasn't fast, but the woman moved as if in slow motion and she kept missing it.
"Are they dying or what?" Grom whined.
"I don't know," Dawn Summens said slowly, although her thoughts were beginning to race. Schemes and strategies began to construct and collapse rapidly as she considered how she might use this development to her own advantage.
"What about the others on the mainland?"
"Some are normal and don't remember a thing," she said. "Some of them, if they weren't killed, are just like this."
Grom's jowls and baggy eyes drooped. He was worried. Dawn was delighted. Grom had intended to turn the tables against her, but the tables had lurched a little back in her direction.
"Greg, I'm scared," she said, putting a vulnerable lilt in her voice. "None of the ones on the mainland turned this fast. It took days and days. But it hasn't even been twenty-four hours since you dosed our people. What if they all die? We won't be able to cover it up. Not without GUTX."
"Yeah," he admitted, nodding and avoiding eye contact.