"Wonderful," Remo said. "It'll make my whole day."
"And then I'll go to the Soviets. God knows, there are a million people the Russians want bumped off. And then there are the Red Chinese, of course."
"Of course."
"We'll make a fortune. The New Team. It's the best idea I've ever had. Think of it. Just think of it!"
"Think of this," Remo said, crushing his skull.
Foxx reeled and slumped to the ground. "So much for the New Team," Chiun said.
And then the two of them were silent, their mouths dropping open in disbelief as they watched death work
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a transformation on Foxx that had never been permitted in life.
As the last breath rasped out of his body, the man seemed to shrivel in front of their eyes. His skin stretched taut over the bones of his face, growing translucent and spotted with age. His eye sockets darkened and deepened to ghoulish hollows. One by one his teeth fell out, gray and cracked, and his lips whitened and puckered and sank into his flesh, like the discarded skin of a snake. In seconds, the mass of wavy dark hair on his head turned white and fell to the ground in tufts. His spine bent. His hands curled into gnarled, arthritic fists. His flesh seemed to melt away, leaving only a thin shell of withered skin over the frail bones. Foxx was suddenly old, older than anything Remo had ever seen, as old as the earth itself.
"Come," Chiun said softly. The corpse was crumbling into decay now, the bones turning to dust beneath the papery gray flesh, the eyeballs congealing into black jelly. A host of flies swarmed over it, feeding on the putrid remains.
Chapter Nineteen
Halaffa's palace was eerily still inside. There were no soldiers anywhere. No guards. The gaudy Palace of Anatola was as silent as a desert rock.
"I don't like this," Remo said as they passed through room after empty room.
"The silence of a thousand screams," Chiun mused.
The Prince's Chamber, still reeking of the festivities of the previous night, looked as if it had been abandoned in haste, its occupants vanishing in a moment of riotous merrymaking. The shouts and coarse laughter seemed still to ring in the shadows of the empty room. The stairways were empty, too. As Remo and Chiun walked up to the upper floors of the palace, the only sound was the soft flapping of Chiun's robes behind him.
There were no stirrings of life until they reached the level of the twelve towers. Chiun cocked his head at the top of the stone stairway and listened. "He is here," he said.
Remo nodded. He, too, had sensed the rhythmic expansion of air that signaled the presence of a breathing human being.
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"Over here, gentlemen." The voice sounded loud as a cannon's boom after the weird stillness.
Halaffa stood in a library housed in one of the cylindrical towers. Instead of the Zadnian military uniform, which he usually wore, Halaffa was dressed in the traditional flowing robes of Zadnia's ancient nomadic tribes. On his head was a white turban with a sapphire in the center. He was a handsome man, young and swarthy, bursting with a kind of exaggerated male-ness that gave an air of confidence and strength to him . . . except for the eyes.
Madman's eyes, Remo thought. They held the same look that other eyes had carried once the lust for power overcame their sanity. Idi Amin's eyes, as he starved his people to slow death. Hitler's eyes as he ordered the extermination of millions. Eyes of fire, burning with death.
"I have been preparing to welcome you," he said softly. He took a leather-covered volume from a high shelf. "Your exhibition in the courtyard was most impressive." He looked at them approvingly. "I take it you have traced the unpatriotic activities of our departed Dr. Foxx to me?"
"We have," Remo said.
Halaffa read from the book, seemingly unconcerned. "I see," he said at last. "And what, may I ask, is your purpose here?"
"We are assassins," Chiun said.
"A noble career. Then you have come here to the tower to kill me, I trust?"
"Right again," Remo said. Anytime now. His muscles screamed in readiness. Beside him, he could feel Chiun's energy coiling like a spring.
"Then step forward," Halaffa said coldly. "Make
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your attempt." He slammed the book shut with a bang.
A big bang. Six bullets fired out of the thick binding directly at Remo. He dodged them, but it was a distraction. And as he was distracted, the shelf-lined walls of the tower swung open and a host of fierce-looking nomad warriors swarmed into the room, their sabers slicing through the air like lasers.
"Now we do the inside-line attack," Chiun said.
The sabers flew. Blood flowed like fountains over the intricate designs on the carpets in the tower room. The screams of the dying echoed down the stone stairways and empty corridors. And then all was still again.
Remo, Chiun, and Ruomid Halaffa faced one another. Halaffa's caftan was streaked with blood. His madman's eyes shone with terror and the knowledge of doom. For several moments he stood stock still, his eyes darling around the death-filled room, seeking an avenue of escape.
There was none. Only the small turret window behind him offered a way to the outside world, and that way was several stories straight down. He looked out the window. The pavement of the filthy street below was already teeming with people. They stepped laconically over the fly-studded carcass of a dead dog lying near a vendor's cart filled with melons. The city was fully awake now, already blistering under the glare of the sun.
Halaffa faced his two assailants. "You will not take me!" he shouted, then turned and scrambled onto the window ledge. "My followers will smite you with wrath. They will finish you for the vile murderers you are. They will wreak vengeance on your paltry nation."
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Below, a few scattered onlookers glanced up to see their latest dictator ready to jump from a window ledge in one of the palace's twelve towers. He was shouting something. They were always shouting something. The last dictator, Anatole, shouted something before he died, too. So would the next one. The onlookers turned away and went about their business.
"Citizens of Zadnia," Halaffa bellowed. "The foes of our country have come to spread destruction and calamity in our midst. Rise up! Fight them! Fight them in the beautiful streets I have given you. Fight them in your comfortable homes, which have been my gift to you. Storm the palace and fight them as they stand ready to take your leader from you. Fight! Fight! Fight!"
"Enough of the pep talk," Remo said irritably. "Are they coming or aren't they?"
"Get up here and save my life, you miserable cretins," Halaffa yelled. "For the glory of ... glory of . . ." His arms windmilled. "Zad . . ." he shrieked, falling off the ledge.
He landed with a thud at the base of the melon vendor's cart, next to the dead dog. The vendor, seeing the wash of blood spray onto his pulpy fruit, screeched with annoyance at Halaffa's body. The flies on the dog quickly left their old meal and swarmed onto the new delicacy that had fallen into their midst. The people on the street stepped lazily over both of them.
"Thus dies the mighty rock," Chiun said. "Crumbled to dust and lost among the forgotten sands."
Remo looked at him. "Say, that's pretty good," he said.
"An old Korean saying." He stepped across the bodies strewn around the room and lifted a large painting of Haiaffa framed in ornately carved gold.
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"This will do nicely," he said.