“Hello, Mr. Roam?”
“You want Sunny Joe?”
“Yes, please, this is extremely urgent.”
“Uh-huh. Hold on.” The voice called out to someone else. “It’s Dr. Smith-for-brains. Where’s Sunny Joe?”
Smith felt cold numbness grip his hands. Who was this? Why had Remo revealed Smith’s name to him? A young woman answered, “Riding the lines.”
“He’s out checking fences,” said the young man on the line. “Call back tomorrow.”
Smith said, “Mr. Roam went out to check the fences and he did not take his mobile phone with him?”
“Yes.”
“That seems unlikely.”
“Oh, you think I’m lying? You’ve got some nerve calling me a liar after what you’ve done.”
“Who is this?”
“Hanging up now, Smith-for-brains.”
“Wait! I’m looking for another man by the name of Remo. It’s possible he’s a guest of Mr. Roam’s.”
“No duh, Smitty.”
Smith breathed deeply and asked, “May I speak to Remo, please?”
“Doubt it.” The young man lowered the phone and announced, “It’s Dr. Strangehate from the loony bin. You home?” Then the young man said, “He says he’s not home right now.”
“I must speak to him—it’s extremely urgent,” Dr. Smith said sternly.
“Go to hell, asshole.”
Smith seethed and dialed again. It rang once. “I’m sorry,” said the young man when he answered again, “but the mobile phone you have called has been flushed into the septic system. Please try your call again never.” The speaker filled with an intense flushing sound, then the strange acoustical muffling that came of being under water. The phone functioned for an amazing four seconds before the electronics shorted and Smith was left listening to silence.
Mark Howard entered.
“Bad news.”
Smith said nothing.
“The CIA buyer was made. They murdered him in his hotel room. The Company watchers think the buy went down about the same time he was getting his throat hacked.”
Dr. Smith nodded stiffly, then said. “Mark, you will please go to Arizona at once.”
Chapter 5
Nightmares are usually the stuff of fantasy, conjured to help the subconscious face its fears. In nightmares, one can live through the worst possible events and it makes the trials of real life seem less awful.
But Remo Williams was dreaming of the past, of events that had actually happened, and it was worse than anything his mind could have imagined.
First came the horror of Kali. Kali confronting them. Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Jilda, mother of Freya.
Almost as soon as he saw her confronting him, Remo saw her dead, killed by an Asian man so small, so old, he looked too feeble to brush a spider from the kitchen table. Horror and self-condemnation dawned on the face of the little Asian man as he realized who he had just killed.
Then came the horror of Kali, the Devourer, alive inside the body of Freya herself. Remo’s daughter. His little girl.
“Red One, remember me,” his little girl said to him in the voice of something ageless and evil.
Then came the collapse of brick and stone, and the hours of digging in the rubble, the flash of golden hair. He extracted her little body from the ruin, a limp thing that wasn’t dead—Remo would not let her be dead. Almost through his own force of will he breathed life back into her.
So it was a dream that ended well enough, as in reality. Freya survived, and she still lived, but in his dream there was a nameless dread.
The dream shifted abruptly. Now there were no great events. No four-armed inhuman beings, no speaking gods. There was just Remo and a friendly woman, who was not an enemy, in a narrow room. Somehow every item in the room clashed in color and design with every other item in the room.
The woman was a seer, and when she started laying out her cards, it looked like a bad late-night television commercial for phone-in psychics, but this woman was one of the few who could truly see.
This was when the dream became, once again, a nightmare.
“I see you,” said the seeress. “I see your fathers and your daughters and your sons, battling one another…”
“I have one son. I have one daughter. That’s all.” Remo was trying to convince himself more than the seeress.
“I did not say soon,” the seeress reminded him. “I did not say when….”
“When,” breathed the Sonoran Desert as he awoke. It was after two in the morning and the village of Sun On Jo was silent. Remo counted the steady heartbeats in the house and felt reassured. He stood at the window and watched the desert, feeling sorry for himself.
He came to Sun On Jo more often now and found it a place where he felt peace and a sense of belonging, but this time there was foreboding. He felt like a fisherman standing on the rail on a perfectly calm sea, with no sign of heavy weather in any direction, but knowing a killer storm was moving in. The weather reports wouldn’t tell him how soon or from which direction the storm would come.
He didn’t know how to steer around it.
He heard a slight snuff from the pit where Freya’s wolf was having its own nightmares, or maybe it was hunting in its sleep. Better not be hunting, Remo thought with a wry smile. Freya didn’t approve of hunting animals for food, even by natural carnivores. She didn’t eat meat and she had poor Sunny Joe packing in more vegetables than he ever ate in all his life. Remo had heard some Sun On Jos complaining that Freya was again stealing ammunition so they couldn’t go out after game.
Freya, Remo decided happily, simply did not have a killer instinct.
As if that revelation wasn’t enough, Remo had another. Without even being aware of it, he’d been evaluating Freya as a potential heir.
Freya, his heir? His trainee? Freya, an assassin?
“What was I thinking?”
Freya embracing the dangerous, bloody existence that was the life of a Sinanju Master? Freya, placed in harm’s way, by her own father? Remo could never do such a thing.
“Well?”
Remo wasn’t alone. It was the man himself, Sunny Joe, who was Remo’s own biological father, who had placed Remo on the doorstep of an orphanage in New Jersey so many years ago. This was also the man who had become the father to Remo’s children, taking them in when they were in distress and in need of the comfort and care of a true home.
“Didn’t mean to wake you,” Remo said, turning away from the desert.
“Why were you breathing so loud, then?” Sunny Joe gave Remo a tight smile that said it was a joke— they both knew Remo was probably the most skilled inhaler/exhaler on the planet. “Let’s go,” Joe said, “before you huff and puff and wake the whole town.”
Sunny Joe Roam had once been a famous movie star, more or less. Using the professional name William S. Roam he appeared in cinematic gems like Muck Man. He even starred in the Muck Man sequels, but those were uninspired efforts that lacked the passion of the original. Roam’s most important role was as the symbolic leader of the village, the Sunny Joe.
They were out in the desert, walking on the rocky earth under the brilliance of the stars, and in the sandy places they left no footprints.
“You were thinking about Freya, but I guess I’m still not so sure what you meant when you said, ‘What was I thinking?’”
Remo felt the night around him, and he felt comfortable in it. Sun On Jo wasn’t a rich place, but it was beautiful. What some saw as a stark wasteland, Remo saw as a magnificent landscape of nature, active and vibrant. He felt at home here. He felt unpressured being here, and unpressured by Sunny Joe. The question was a probing, sensitive one, but Joe wouldn’t be offended if Remo never answered it. Joe—unlike some fathers Remo could mention—wasn’t the harping, nagging, complaining type.