He padded to the door, his spirits soaring. With a grand flourish, he flung the door open.
She was, if anything, lovelier that Abaatira had expected.
"Ah, and you could only be the unrivaled Kimberly," he said, eyeing her yellow silk gown. A flash of thigh showed like a tantalizing dream.
"May I come in?" Kimberly asked demurely.
"Of course." She entered with a languid grace. Abaatira closed the door after her.
She stepped around the room, casually placing a small yellow purse on the nightstand by the bed. She turned. Her smile was red and inviting.
"And what would you like today?"
"I have been under a certain tension," Abaatira said. "I seek relaxation. And relief."
Kimberly perched on the edge of the bed. She patted it.
"Come. Join me."
Abaatira obeyed with alacrity. He rolled onto the bed.
"Lie back," Kimberly purred, leaning over to whisper into his ear. "Let Kimberly soothe you."
"Yes, soothing," Abaatira sighed. "I need soothing. Very much."
"I have brought love oil with me. Would you like me to use it?"
"Yes, that would be fine," Abaatira said, feeling his loins stir in response.
"Close your eyes, please."
Abaatira did as he was told. His ears were alert. Something else was coming to attention too. As he waited, delicate fingers tugged at the sash of his robe.
He felt himself being exposed. The coolness of the air conditioner passed over his stiffening member. He folded his hands on his bare stomach, swallowing with anticipation.
A hand took firm hold of his root, steadying his quivering tool. The sound of a small cap being unscrewed made his heart beat faster. He hoped this Kimberly would take her time. Abaatira preferred thoroughness in these matters, something he had stressed to Corinne D'Angelo when he had first explained his needs, many Kimberlys ago.
The cap was set down. There was a tantalizing drawn-out moment. Then the warm thick liquid began to pour. It slid over the tip of his Arab maleness, running down the shaft like warm, gooey syrup. A delicious scent tickled his nostrils. He sniffed curiously.
"Raspberry," Kimberly whispered naughtily.
"Ah, raspberry," Abaatira breathed. "Allah is just." He trusted that meant she would use her mouth. There was no rush. Eventually.
Then the other hand joined the first, and together they began kneading and manipulating him in clever, surprising ways ....
When Turqi Abaatira woke up, the first thing he noticed was that his erection was as proud as ever.
He blinked. This was unusual. He could distinctly recall climaxing. In fact, under the discreet manipulations of the girl named Kimberly, he had experienced the most nerve-satisfying climax of his life. It was also, oddly, the last thing he could recall.
He must have fallen asleep. It sometimes happened after he spent himself.
But there it was, proud and undaunted by its recent exercise.
Abaatira blinked again. There was something strange about his tool. It wasn't the yellow scarf that seemed wound rather loosely around the root of his intromittent organ. It was the color of the column of upright flesh towering above.
It looked rather . . blackish. Or was it green? No, greenish-black, he decided. He had never before seen himself turn that unlovely color. It must have been quite an orgasm to cause him to turn such a remarkable hue.
"Kimberly?" he called.
No answer. He tried to sit up. Then it was he noticed that his feet were lashed to the baseboard. By two yellow scarves identical to the one coiled on his belly.
"I did not ask for this," he muttered darkly.
He again attempted to sit up. His arms refused to move. He looked up. His wrists, too, were lashed to the bedposts.
"I definitely did not ask for this," he said aloud. Raising his voice, he called, "Kimberly, where are you, my apricot?"
Then he noticed his watch sitting on the nightstand. It said four o'clock. Much later than he had thought.
His eyes happened to alight on the tiny window that displayed the day of the week. They went wide. The red letters said: "THURSDAY."
"Thursday?" he gulped. "But this is Tuesday." Then the cold, mouth-drying realization sank in. His hot, dark eyes went to his defiantly inexhaustible manhood.
Ambassador Turqi Abaatira did the only thing he could do under the circumstances.
He screamed for his mother.
Chapter 6
The Master of Sinanju was dead.
Remo stared up at the cold stars wheeling overhead and tried to make sense of it all.
He could not. Nor had he been able to make sense of it in all the bitter months since the tragedy.
It had been, after all, a nothing assignment. Well, maybe not nothing exactly, but not as important as some. Looking back on it, Remo decided that he simply had underestimated what he and Chiun had gotten into.
It had started with a poison-gas attack on a failing northeast Missouri farm town. Remo had already forgotten its name. La Plume or something. Overnight, the town had been wiped out. Remo and Chiun had been out of the country when it had happened. No sooner had they returned to the States than Harold Smith had put them on the trail of the unknown culprits.
In Missouri they had collided with a strange group of characters, including a bankrupt condominium developer, a college girl with a no-nukes message, plus a working neutron bomb and an environmentalist group known as Dirt First!! The bomb had been stolen and, jumping to the conclusion that it had been the work of the Dirt Firsters, Remo and Chiun had gone after them. A mistake.
The neutron bomb had been stolen by the condo developer, Connors Swindell, whose grandiose visions of reversing his slumping business caused him to gas one town and plan on nuking another so that after the bodies were hauled off, he could scoop up the distressed real estate on the cheap.
"A frigging real-estate scam," Remo reflected bitterly. He lay in the coarse gravel of the Newark high-rise roof. He had lived here in the days after he had left St. Theresa's Orphanage. The day when, as a young Newark cop, he had opened up his draft notice, he had taken a bottle of beer up to this roof and lain back on the biting gravel to count the stars as he daydreamed of what Vietnam would be like.
Tonight, Vietnam seemed a thousand years distant. Tonight, his cop days were a receding memory, as were the cruel months he'd spent on death row, framed for the murder of a drug pusher he had never even laid eyes on. It had all been a gigantic scam engineered by Harold Smith and Conrad MacCleary, the one-armed ex-CIA agent who had seen Remo Williams in action in some forgotten rice paddy. MacCleary had mentally filed Remo away for possible future use. And when CURE had been sanctioned to kill, MacCleary had told Smith about a former Marine sharpshooter whom the Twenty-first Marines had nicknamed "The Rifleman."
Remo took a swig on a bottle of mineral water. His beer-drinking days were long behind him. So were his meateating days. So was the simple life of Remo Williams of Newark, New Jersey. These days his highly refined metabolism subsisted on rice, fish, and duck.
He had been electrocuted up at Trenton State Prison. They had strapped him in, sweating, frightened but outwardly cool. Zap! And he was gone.
The swimming darkness of oblivion gave way to the applegreen sterility of Folcroft Sanitarium and CURE.
Officially dead, his face recut into unrecognizable lines by plastic surgery, Remo found himself pressed into service for his country. As CURE's one-man killer arm. And he had taken the job-just as MacCleary and Smith had known he would. Remo Williams was, after all, a patriot. Besides, the cold bastards were ready to dump him into a shallow grave if he told them no.
In the spacious Folcroft gym, they had introduced him to the eighty-year-old Master of Sinanju, Chiun.
That meeting, Remo recalled as if it had happened last Friday.