Chiun appraised Heidi's back. "She killed a mere hour ago and is able to sing?" he said. "This female has a heart of stone." There was admiration in his squeaky voice.
Heidi had begun singing softly as they strolled out onto the sidewalk.
"You wouldn't know it to listen to her," Remo snarled. "If she was any damned perkier, I'd kill her myself."
They followed the singing murderess down the busy streets of Uruguay's capital to Heidi's parked jeep.
Chapter 9
Veit Rauch did not like the Numbers. He had been assigned three of them at his shack near the bottom of the lonely mountainside road that led up to the IV village.
The only route by land into the village, theirs was the first line of defense against intruders. It should, therefore, have been the most heavily manned area within the IV perimeter. Instead, there were only the four of them.
While Veit sat on his stool in the small shed, the three Numbers stood at attention along the road. Numbers. That's what they were called around the village. They didn't have names; they had assigned digits. They were the blond-haired, blue-eyed creations of the late Dr. Erich von Breslau and his team of neo-Nazi geneticists.
The eggs of a violently unwilling host had been "harvested" by von Breslau. The woman, of course, had been sacrificed to a greater cause.
Through some genetic tinkering that Rauch could not begin to understand, a strand of perfect Aryan DNA had been produced in a laboratory. It combined the flawless traits of a dozen male volunteers. This genetic information was injected into the many egg cells, and the whole melange was introduced into the bodies of local peasant women whose families had been well compensated for their nine-month inconvenience. The result was the Numbers-hundreds of identical soldiers programmed to blindly serve the leaders of IV.
It was discovered after the birth of the first infants that there had been some unseen flaw in the DNA cocktail. Von Breslau's monsters were born incapable of speech.
Not long after this failed experiment, Adolf Kluge had assumed his post as head of IV. The genetics lab was closed down and its research was halted. Proof of IV's sorry flirtation with manufactured perfection, the Numbers were kept alive as workhorses.
Rauch looked at the three men lined up along the road. He found them particularly unnerving in those instances when they happened to blink in unison. They could not even rightly be termed freaks of nature, Rauch realized, for nature had little to do with their creation.
They stood-each one interchangeable with the next-as monuments to failure. Rauch vowed that if there was any trouble, they would bear the brunt of it.
Rauch frowned as he considered the events of the past few months. It was disgusting that IV had come to this. Rauch was the grandson of an important Gestapo officer. The IV village had always been an unassailable bastion against the perverted thinking of the modern world. It had never seen any kind of trouble since his grandfather's day.
But there had been so many deaths in recent months. Some of the dead were people Rauch knew. IV was at the center of an ever tightening noose. And in the darkest corners of Rauch's mind, he wondered if any of them could survive.
There was a small black phone on the narrow shelf near Rauch's elbow. It squawked suddenly, causing him to jump.
He hadn't realized he had been so self-absorbed. Rauch glanced at the Numbers. They hadn't seen his display of nerves. Not that it mattered. The brutish mutes would not have been able to tell anyone even if they had. He picked up the phone.
"Rauch," he barked.
The whining voice of Kluge's assistant, Herman, came on the line.
"There has been an incident in Uruguay."
"Yes?" Rauch said evenly.
"One of our contacts was found dead."
His heart skipped a beat. "Is it them?" Rauch asked.
"Not likely," Herman said. "Groth was shot to death, and the men we expect do not use weapons. Still, he is a direct link to us. Remain alert."
The line went dead. Rauch's frown deepened.
Getting up from his stool, he stepped out onto the road.
There was no wind today. The lush green scenery that stretched out around them was a painted canvas remarkable only in the diversity of tone. There were greens in these low hills unseen anywhere else in nature.
The mountains loomed high to his right. There were only two types of peaks from Rauch's vantage point. Tall and taller. To his left, down a short incline, the mountain road snaked a sharp U-turn, disappearing into the forest. Beyond the visible stretch of road was a wide-open field, and beyond that, still more mountains.
Though it was a breathtaking vista, Rauch barely saw it.
He was fingering his swastika collar pin as he stepped over to the three Numbers.
"Stay alert," Rauch ordered in a growl, repeating the command he had been given.
It was unnecessary. The men did not even turn his way. They continued staring intently down to the point where the road cut sharply down around an island of foliage.
"Freaks," Rauch muttered.
He turned around and was heading back for the shack when he heard something new echoing against the slowly rising hills. Rauch paused, listening intently.
The sound grew louder.
An automobile engine!
He glanced down the incline to the lower half of the road just as the jeep broke into view.
The vehicle drove swiftly up the steady incline, engine working overtime. As it approached on the lower level, Rauch could see only the driver. There were no passengers.
When the jeep passed on the road beneath, Kluge could clearly make out the face behind the wheel. It was a woman. And there was something about her features that seemed strangely familiar.
The car disappeared behind the stabbing strip of trees and overgrown shrubs. Back near the shack, the Numbers were already aiming their guns down the road. Ready to shoot the incoming car the instant it broke cover.
It never did.
The engine continued to whine, but the car didn't drive forward. It remained hidden behind the copse of trees.
"What is she doing?" Rauch hissed nervously.
"Maybe she had to make a pit stop," suggested a voice at Rauch's elbow.
He wheeled around.
Remo was leaning against the guard shack, a placid smile decorating his hard features.
"There is no need to be vulgar," the Master of Sinanju admonished. He stood next to Remo, dressed in an orange kimono with red piping. A pair of fiery red dragons reared on their hind legs across the front of the flowing garment.
"They are here!" Rauch screamed, stumbling back to the trio of men who still stared down the road. "Shoot them!"