"Ehhhhhhhhhhhhh. This is Pimsy Wissex," a voice rattled.
"Sony, you got wrong number. You want asthma clinic, you look up number. The house of fancy boys is down the street too. You look up their number."
He hung up the telephone but it rang again instantly.
"What now?"
"Listen to me, you bleeding wog," Pimsy snarled. "I've got something to tell you."
"This better be important."
"It is," said Uncle Pimsy.
Seventeen
Night was falling. She had hung there through the brutally hot sun of the day with not a drop of water for her lips. Her arms felt that they were going to snap out of her shoulder sockets and twice during the day when she could stand the pain no more, she had screamed and Wissex had lowered her to the ground for fifteen minutes before hoisting her up again.
Her throat was parched and her lips were dry. She touched them with her tongue but it felt like rubbing wood over wood.
At least the night would bring some coolness, some relief from the day's heat. But in the grassy fields below that surrounded the flat-topped hill they were on, Terri could hear the insects and then the sounds of larger animals-a snarl, a growl- and the thought of what was out there chilled her.
She was hanging from a long boom, extended out over the edge of the Mesoro Hill. Ropes tied roughly around her wrists were fastened to the boom, and she was able to rest only by grabbing the boom with her hands and holding on, to rest
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her wrists, until her hands tired of supporting her weight and she had to let go. And then the pain in the wrists began again.
The boom was attached at its other end to a heavy, complicated tripod in the center of the flat table of rock. And Lord Wissex sat there, at a table which he had unloaded from the helicopter, a table with controls built into it. During the heat of the day, he had opened a bottle of white wine which he had carried in a cooler, had poured himself a glass, and had toasted Terri Pomfret's beauty.
But he had offered her none for her dry throat.
He was a sadist and a brute. She had fallen for the accent and the superficial charm and the tweedy British clothes and she realized that if Jack the Ripper had ben been soft-spoken and full of "yes, m'dears" and worn an ascot, she probably would have crawled into a blood-stained bed with him.
She saw Wissex looking at her and she asked again, "What are you going to do with me?" He had not answered her all day when she had asked that question.
Wissex smiled at her. "Do you know that that imbecile Moombasa still believes there is a mountain of gold?" he asked.
"And there isn't," she said.
"Of course not," Wissex said.
"Why did you put up all those plaques? It was you, wasn't it?"
"Of course m'dear. It was my plan. There is, you know, this idiotic Hamidian legend about a mountain of gold. It was my idea that if I got Moombasa to believe the United States was looking for it, then he would spend any amount of
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money to find it. So far, he has been good for twenty million dollars."
"He's not going to be happy when he finds out there's no mountain," Terri said.
"He thinks there is one. He thinks you'll tell him where it is."
"It doesn't exist," Terri said. "I'll tell him that. And that it was all your idea."
Wissex chuckled. "I know that and you know that. But I'm afraid you won't get a chance to tell him. Unfortunately, m'dear, you're going to have an accident. A fatal accident."
"But why the plaques?" she asked again.
"That was to lend authenticity to the scheme," he said. "You should realize that true genius involves painstaking attention to detail. I wanted everything to look correct. It had to be good enough not only to fool Moombasa-I could fool him with a map drawn in the sand with a stick-but also to fool you and the United States until I extracted enough money from that idiot. He is not a trusting sort. Did you know that he has had one of his would-be spies traipsing around, trying to keep an eye on you and your bodyguards?"
"That fat man at the airport?" Terri said.
"Yes. I made sure to tell him where we were going. I have no doubt that your friends have, by now, extracted that information from him."
Terri felt her heart add a little extra happy beat. "But why?" she asked him and because she guessed it would feed his macho sense of himself, she added, "I don't understand. Why would you want them to know where we went?"
"Because I am going to kill them. Those two
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have spoiled my calculations long enough and they have been a shadow over the House of Wissex for far too many years. When they come for you, all three of you will die."
He spoke with an unemotional flatness as if he were discussing the score of last year's semifinal soccer game.
"They'll get you, you know," Terri said, the anger spilling out of her, fueled by his smugness. "They're better than you are."
"Don't you believe it, girl. Don't you believe it. And now I wish you would please be still. I have some cogitation to do to prepare my welcome for the House of Sinanju."
"Still? I won't be still. I'll shout and scream and let the world know I'm here." Terri opened her mouth to scream, but it changed to a shriek of pain as Wissex pressed a button on the panel in front of him and the boom yanked her upwards, almost dislocating her arms from her shoulders. She bit her lip and hung there in silence, looking across at him, at the helicopter parked on the hilltop behind him. Wissex must have set a trap for Remo and Chiun-but what could it be? She would not let them die, not if she could help it. When she saw them, she would shout and scream and let them know it was a trap. And if she died, then maybe she deserved it for being stupid, but at least she would have evened the score with this English monster.
But while the night grew darker, her resolve and her courage weakened, as the night sounds surrounding the hilltop grew in intensity. She tried to spin on her ropes, to look around her in a full
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360-degree circle, to see if she could see a light that might be Remo and Chiun, but even as she made the effort, she heard Wissex' mocking voice.
"Don't trouble yourself. When they arrive, I will let you know. Nothing can move out there without being detected by my sensors. That is why we came to this godforsaken lump of dirt. It is the only high ground in this entire country and I will know they are coming long before they get here. So just hang there and rest." He laughed again and Terri felt her heart sink.
There was just no hope, no chance for survival, no way to save Remo and Chiun from this evil madman.
"Oh, that's awful," Remo said. He was looking up at Terri, perilously extended from the boom out over the edge of the hill. "That bastard."
He dropped back to the ground alongside Chiun.