Buffy Brand was to the girl's right. She stared at Remo with frightened eyes and babbled some warning that he couldn't understand.
The world swam around him in swirls of colored light.
He moved across the platform.
The presence was seeping through Remo's disordered mind once more.
It was strangely comforting this time. Somehow here, in the Pythia Pit, it was soft and inviting, rather than something he should fear. It was something to accept. To embrace.
The thing that told him he should fight was small and weak within him. It was easy to ignore that stubborn part of his mind.
East had met West. It was his destiny.
Through drunken eyes, Remo watched someone else step out from behind a tapestry at the far end of the platform. A little man dressed in strange robes. He was uttering incantations that Remo couldn't understand. For a brief instant he thought he should
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recognize the man, but in his drunken state he couldn't tell. Remo ignored him and moved toward the tripod.
The Cole girl rose at his approach.
As if in some prearranged ritual, she moved aside as he stepped on the metal grate that traversed the rocky fissure.
Smoke poured from the crevice as thick as that from an oil-well fire.
It was his destiny. East had met West. There was no sense fighting destiny. Especially his own.
Carefully Remo took his seat on the tripod of Apollo's Pythia.
The white-robed man whom Remo thought he should have recognized stepped in front of him. He wore a wicked smile as he stared coldly into Remo's dilating pupils.
On the battlefield of his mind, Remo watched the fierce combatant strike a final, terminal blow against his docile opponent. And for the first time Remo saw the face of the victim. As the body fell to the barren plain, Remo saw that the combatant's face was his own.
And in that minuscule part of his mind that he could still call his own, Remo bade a silent farewell to his father and teacher, the Master of Sinanju.
Harold Smith didn't know what he had done to rankle Senator Cole's assistant, but he wished there was some way he could take whatever it was back. The young idiot was becoming a nuisance.
"When was the last time you fired a gun, Pops?" The question was asked with a malice bordering on glee.
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Smith continued to watch the crowd surging around them as the senator chatted with a group of older women near a booth that was stocked from top to bottom with rag dolls, patchwork quilts and a dozen other handmade items.
"I am regularly recertified." Smith didn't look at the young man as he spoke.
"No, did you ever fire at someone?" the staffer asked. He seemed to consider this a kind of witticism, for there was a humorous, self-congratulatory glint in the depths of his eyes.
"That is not something I wish to share with you," Smith replied. He noticed a woman standing over by one of the concession stands who was eyeing the senator strangely. She had a kerchief wrapped around her head, and wore a pair of dark sunglasses so large they made her look almost like an oversize insect. Was she looking this way or wasn't she? Smith couldn't tell for sure.
A moment later she had turned away, becoming fixated on something on the other side of the pavilion.
Probably just trying to find a lost friend, Smith decided, and continued scanning the crowd.
There certainly were a lot of supporters carrying Mark Kaspar signs beneath the tent. Some of them had to crouch so that the long poles didn't get caught against the festive, multicolored tarpaulin roof.
They seemed to be converging in Cole's general area.
Smith turned his attention back to the woman in the sunglasses.
What was it about her? She was somehow familiar....
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She seemed to be nodding to a cluster of supporters carrying Kaspar signs. Never uttered a word, but it appeared as if those she nodded to understood some unspoken command.
As she stepped from the cover of the tent back out into the bright sunlight, it suddenly occurred to Smith where he knew her from. He had seen her face several times while he was researching the Church of the Absolute and Incontrovertible Truth. She had even worn the same sunglasses in one picture.
Esther Clear-Seer.
The people with the signs supported Mark Kaspar. And they had surrounded Senator Jackson Cole on all sides.
"At your age, you probably need help loading the magazine, huh?" the Cole staffer was saying.
The young man chuckled at his own comment. The chuckle mutated into a choked gurgle when the part of his brain that controlled the laughing function was rudely disrupted by a small piece of soft lead that had traveled at great velocity from the other side of the tent.
The staffer's forehead exploded outward. Then the sound of the gunshot registered on this end of the tent. Dollops of blood and sticky gray brain sludge splattered across a quilt depicting meticulously sewn scenes of early Wyoming pioneer life.
The staffer fell to his knees, his mouth sagging in shock. Before he had even hit the asphalt, Smith had drawn his own gun and, crouching like a football lineman, threw one gray shoulder into the back of Senator Cole. The force propelled Cole through the open
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wooden archway of the quilting booth. When a second shot rang out, Smith threw himself atop the senator.
A fat woman Cole had been speaking with was struck in the shoulder by the bullet. It spun her around like a confused dancer without a partner. She dropped heavily to her ample bottom, stunned. A fountain of red burbled up from beneath her smart cotton blouse.
Screaming erupted all around. Most people had frozen in shock when the first shot rang out. By the second they were shocked out of their shock. The crowd under the tent scrambled in all directions.
Behind the cover of the small booth, Senator Cole sat stunned and blinking like a stupefied ostrich.
No time to check on him now. As he and Cole had ducked for cover, Smith registered the Kaspar campaigners drawing weapons from beneath their candidate's smiling face. They had been concealed in the hollow centers of the poles on which they had carried their posters.
The front of the booth was draped across with a sheet of wide crepe paper. Smith tore a hole large enough to see out across the main body of the tent.
Pairs of nervous legs went scampering close by. Not much farther away he could see an advancing group of armed men. Smith aimed his automatic at the closest gunman and pulled the trigger.
A satisfying explosion came from the heavy gun. The bullet struck the first man dead center in the chest. He toppled backward, his rifle clattering away from his twitching fingers.