"I don't think you have the full picture, Smith," the President said tersely. "You know about this Mark Kaspar?"
"I am aware of him."
"Well, I just got off the phone with the minority and majority leaders in the House. It seems Kaspar has done an end run around me on this State Department appointment. They're voting in ten minutes, and I've just been informed that my shoo-in is going to
lose."
Smith pursed his lips. "Really." He tried to force indifference into his voice, but interest silvered his lemony tone.
"At least the members of my own party had the decency to let me know they were turning on me," the President went on bitterly. "The House Minority Whip hinted that Kaspar prodded Princippi to use political leverage against him and a bunch of the others." The President sighed. "I wish I knew what it was, because I'd sure as hell use it now," he added.
Smith's mind leaped to the Zen and Gary check with the word "prophecy" scrawled on the memo line. He turned his attention back to the matter at hand.
' 'I sympathize, Mr. President. But as I said, CURE cannot become embroiled in a domestic political situation. If there is something else...?"
"No," the President said levelly. "But you might
224
want to keep an eye on Kaspar. At the rate things are going now, when you pick up this phone in a couple of years, he might be the one on this end of the line."
The President hung up.
Smith slowly replaced his own receiver.
Mark Kaspar. The enigmatic little man seemed to be at the center of everything swirling around the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth. And now the field was being cleared for a run for the Wyoming Senate seat.
As Smith worked to isolate a dozen separate trains of thought, his computer screen began to flash a silent amber signal.
The Folcroft system had picked up something relevant to the events unfolding in Thermopolis. It was just a stroke of luck that half an hour before, upon learning of the abduction of Jackson Cole's daughter, Smith had included the disappearances of the other young girls within the search parameters of the CURE computers.
As he read the information on his buried computer screen, Smith's leaden pallor grew darker with something almost bordering on excitement.
One of the kidnapping victims had been recovered one hundred miles away from Thermopolis in the dense woods of Hot Springs State Park.
And she was alive....
Chapter Seventeen
The chatter of human voices pushed slowly into his consciousness.
Remo opened his eyes. The room was small and sparsely furnished. He was lying on a single bed beneath a set of long, tightly closed Venetian blinds.
There was another bed, still made, next to his own. Beyond that was a simple dresser, a chair and a console television. The set was on and was the source of the muted conversation that had awakened him.
The morris chair before the television was occupied.
Remo sat up, swinging his legs around to the floor. Despite a slight feeling of dizziness, the strange sensation he had experienced at Ranch Ragnarok seemed to have passed.
The person in the chair sensed Remo's movement and quietly shut the television set off.
"Welcome back to the land of the living."
Remo ignored the speaker, noticing for the first time the items atop the bureau. A bottle of hydrogen peroxide, a torn-open package of gauze and two spools of white adhesive tape. A small tin trash barrel beside the bureau overflowed with bloodstained rags.
He looked down. He wore only his shorts. His bare thighs were bound with tape and gauze. In the center
226
of each bandage, halfway up his thigh, was a half-dollar-size spot of brown dried blood. Other bandages covered the minor wounds on his back.
"You're a medic now?" Remo asked the room's other occupant.
"I wear a lot of hats," Buffy Brand admitted.
"This was a nice thought, but unnecessary," Remo said, indicating the bandages. He jammed his index finger in under the tops of each bandage and slit down toward his knees. The gauze section underneath the adhesive popped free. Remo peeled off the rest of the tape, exposing the wounds beneath.
The blood flow had abated, and the bullet holes had collapsed into angry patches of congealed plasma. A pinkish pucker of skin burned around both entry and exit wounds.
Buffy tried to conceal her surprise at the rapidity with which the wounds were healing. When she had brought Remo to this motel only hours before, it looked as if the blood loss he had sustained could prove fatal.
Remo stood. His legs felt good and solid, though he still sensed something malevolent hovering at the murky fringes of his mind. He took a step toward Buffy.
"Hold it," she commanded. She lifted her hand from beside the chair, revealing a nickled revolver that she trained carefully at the center of Remo's chest.
"You brought me here and bandaged me up just to kill me?" Remo's voice was flat, but there was a spark of humor in his deep-set eyes.
"Maybe," Buffy Brand said, her voice unwavering. "If you don't do exactly as I say."
227
"Sorry," Remo said with an apologetic shrug. "No can do." In a flash he was across the room and at Buffy's side. Before her eyes could register the blur Remo had become, he plucked the gun from her hand.
"I've had enough of these things lately," he growled. And with that he wrapped his fingers around barrel and butt and twisted. With a creak of protesting metal, Remo wrenched the revolver into two large halves. He then tossed the useless sections onto the unused motel bed.
"Who are you?" Buffy asked, her seemingly unflappable exterior giving way to a moment of amazement as she goggled at the remnants of her weapon.
"Ace cub reporter Remo Olsen," Remo announced. "Here to uncover the truth behind the Truth Church. And you are?"
"Special Agent Buffetta Brand, Federal Bureau of Investigation," Buffy said. "And you are full of crap."
"Aren't most reporters?" Remo asked. "Besides, I don't see you waving around any ID."
Buffy allowed him a tight-lipped smile. "It's buried in the woods a mile outside Truth Church property. Yogi Mom likes to conduct spontaneous searches, and I don't think she'd appreciate it if she found out one of her disciples was government-issue."
"Probably not," Remo agreed.