“Bees don’t talk,” Remo said.

  “That one did,” Smith said tonelessly. He fumbled with his hunter green Dartmouth tie.

  “Bees don’t talk,” Remo repeated.

  “That one did,” Smith insisted, his voice rising in anger.

  When Chiun returned, he was holding an aquarium in the form of a cake holder. The bee floated in it, upside down like a defunct goldfish.

  “It is done. The fiend will trouble you no more.”

  “Thank you, Master Chiun.”

  A worried silence hung around the room.

  Remo broke it. “That bee said he served the Bee-Master.”

  Smith had his head in his hands as if he were experiencing a severe migraine headache.

  “I only know of one Bee-Master,” Remo added.

  Smith looked up. The expression on Remo’s face was approximately that of a man who had tried to scratch his nose only to find he’d grown a tentacle where his hand should be.

  “Bee-Master was a comic-book superhero when I was a kid. He was a scientist who invented a radio that could translate the language bees spoke.”

  “Bees do not speak,” Smith snapped. Then he caught himself.

  Remo kept talking in a distant voice. “Bee-Master became a friend to the bee kingdom. When spies tried to steal his insecto-radio to sell to Russian agents, his bee friends stung them into submission. From that point, they were a team. Bee-Master became a crime fighter. He wore a black-and-yellow costume with a helmet that looked like a hightech bee’s head. Everywhere he went, bees flew with him. They communicated through their antennae. Funny how I remember that story. I haven’t laid eyes on an issue of The Bizarre Bee-Master in a zillion years.”

  “It is not possible to communicate with bees in the manner you describe. The person who created that story knows nothing about bees,” Smith said firmly.

  “Hey, I’m only telling you what this crazy stuff reminds me of.”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Sure. But you could check it out.”

  Smith did. Grimly, he input “Bee-Master” into his system and executed the search command.

  Up popped a heroic figure dressed somewhat along the lines of a yellow jacket, with an aluminum helmet concealing his head. The helmet sported antennae and great crimson compound eyes in place of human ones.

  The figure was labeled The Bizarre Bee-Master.

  “That’s him!” said Remo. “Where’d you find it?”

  “This is the official Bee-Master web page, sponsored by Cosmic Comics,” Smith said dryly.

  Remo’s face lit with surprise. “I didn’t know they were still making Bee-Master comics. Check it out. It has Bee-Master’s complete history.”

  Remo read over Smith’s gray shoulder. Chiun, after looking briefly, made a face and went back to examining the dead bee corpse floating in water.

  “According to this,” Remo said, “Bee-Master is really Peter Pym, biochemist. He controls his bee friends through electronic impulses from his cybernetic helmet.” Remo grunted. “I always wondered what cybernetic meant. None of the nuns at the orphanage knew.”

  Smith tapped a key. The word cybernetic was highlighted. Another tap brought up a dictionary definition.

  “Cybernetic,” Smith explained, “means the science of control. And the concept described here is ridiculous. Insects do not communicate through electrical impulses, but via chemical scents only other insects comprehend.”

  Remo grinned “Maybe you should run a search on the name Peter Pym.”

  “Why? It is a fictitious name.”

  “Just a thought. It’s the only lead we have.”

  “It is no lead at all,” said Harold Smith, escaping from the official Bee-Master web page. His eyes went to the floating bumblebee under Chiun’s silent scrutiny. The expression on his lemony face suggested he had already begun to doubt his memory of the bee communicating in tinny English sentences.

  Briefly, he replayed the tape, and the bee’s nervous little voice was so disturbing, he clicked it off again.

  “Find that info I wanted, Smitty?” Remo asked after a moment.

  Smith snapped-out of his daze. Attacking his keyboard once more, he brought up a phrase in Hangul, the modern Korean alphabet.

  Remo read it.

  “Dwe juhla,” he said. Turning to Chiun, he asked, “Did I get the pronunciation right?”

  Turning dull crimson, the Master of Sinanju lifted his kimono sleeve before his face out of shame over his pupil’s severely coarse language.

  Remo grinned. “I guess that’s my answer.”

  Chapter Twenty-nine

  Helwig X. Wurmlinger drove his grasshopper green Volkswagen Beetle from the airport to his private residence outside Baltimore, Maryland.

  When the mud dome appeared, his twitchy face began to relax. He was home. It was good to be home. It was often useful and necessary to travel, but Helwig X. Wurmlinger wasn’t a social insect, but a solitary one. His preference for solitude enabled him to toil long hours and perform experiments that would frighten those who didn’t share his appreciation of the insect world in its multitudinous harmony with nature.

  Friendless, wifeless, Wurmlinger saw nothing wrong with living in what was for all intents and purposes a mud nest. There were no dissenting opinions in Helwig X. Wurmlinger’s life. No one to gently inform him that he had crossed the line from the merely eccentric into the truly weird.

  When, turning up the path to his home, he saw the white satellite truck marked Fox News Network, Wurmlinger became agitated. His mouth twitched, and his face joined in.

  He was shaking when he unfolded himself from the cramped confines of his Beetle. And when he saw the cameraman with his minicam jammed up against a side window, he ran so fast his arms flapped loose as sticks at his sides.

  “What is the meaning of this!” he demanded. “What are you doing on my property?”

  The cameraman flung himself around, and Wurmlinger found himself looking into the glassy eye of the camera.

  A frosty female voice intruded. “Maybe you’re the one who has some explaining to do…”

  It was that Fox woman. Wurmlinger had already forgotten her name, but he recognized her voice and facial contortions.

  “You are trespassing!” Wurmlinger told her with studied indignity.

  Instead of answering the undeniable charge, the blond woman said into a microphone she lifted to her mouth, “I am here with insect geneticist and etymologist—”

  “Entomologist,” Wurmlinger corrected tersely.

  “—Helwig X. Wurmlinger of the USDA Bee Research Lab. Is that correct, Dr. Wurmlinger?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  “If you work for the federal government, why do you have your own private laboratory here in the outback?”

  “This is the backwoods. The outback is in Australia!”

  “Answer the question, Doctor.”

  “This, my private laboratory, is where I do my work for the USDA. Here, I also conduct other experiments. None of them the business of the general public or yourself.”

  “I draw your attention to the strange buzzing coming from the boxes in back of your property, Dr. Wurmlinger.”

  “That is my apiary. It is where I keep my bees.”

  “Is that so? If ordinary bees are your business, why are they making such a strange sound?”

  “What strange sound?”

  “Are you denying your bees are abnormal?”

  “These are perfectly normal Buckeye Superbees. I employ their products to sweeten my tea and maintain my health.”

  “Step this way.”

  Walking backward, Tammy and her cameraman worked their way to the rear of Wurmlinger’s odd home. He walked after them, his thoughts confused. Why were these people here? What did they want? And why were they filming him walking around his hive?

  When they reached the back, the cameraman swung around to capture the apiary on film.

  From the bee boxes came a weird, doleful humming.

  “My bees!” Wurmlinger bleated. He rushed toward them.

  The sound was sinister and eerie. It wasn’t a drone, nor was it a buzz. It was something unhappy and anguished.

  Dropping to one knee, Wurmlinger unlatched one of the steel frames that contained honeycombs. He lifted it up and scrutinized the bees crawling along it with naked concern on his long face.

  “Mites!” he groaned. “Mites have gotten to my poor bees.”

  Dropping the comb frame back, Wurmlinger went to another bee box. Another batch of bees was brought to light. They moved sluggishly among their waxy honeycomb cells.

  “More mites!” he groaned.

  A third box came up with honey and a gooey mass but no bees.

  “Foulbrood! These bees are dead.”

  “What happened to them?” Tammy demanded, sticking her microphone into his bitter face.

  Woodenly, Helwig X. Wurmlinger came to his feet. He steadied himself. “My bees are ruined,” he said helplessly.

  “Are these killer bees?”

  “No, I breed only European honeybees and a few exotics.”

  “Are you aware, Dr. Wurmlinger, of the rash of killer-bee related deaths in New York and Los Angeles, information that the U.S. government is withholding from the public?”

  “I know nothing of New York—and you know as much as I do about the inexplicable events in Los Angeles!” Wurmlinger said in exasperation. “You were there.”

  “Answer the question,” Tammy undertoned.

  “Yes, yes, a new species of venomous feral bee has been introduced into the ecosystem of North America.”

  “Do you deny knowing the true origin of these killer bees?”

  “Please do not use that unscientific term. The correct term is ‘Bravo bee.’”

  “You sound like a man sympathetic to bees?” Tammy prompted, all but scaling Wurmlinger’s greenish teeth with her mike.

  “Bees are the most beneficial insects known to man. They pollinate eighty percent of crops in the country. Without them, mankind would not eat.”

  “I’m not talking about friendly bees, but the death’s-head bee that the United States government has unleashed upon the world.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “New, vicious kinds of bees created by the USDA for reasons still unknown. Bees that sting over and over again. Bees that inject a fatal poison to which modern medicine has no antidote. Bees that have so far inflicted horrible deaths on eight persons with no end in sight. Do you deny, Dr. Wurmlinger, that in Los Angeles three people alone have succumbed to the bite of the death’s-head superbee?”

  “Sting,” Wurmlinger said testily. “Bees do not bite except for a few harmless species.”

  The insistent reporter stepped in and demanded in a stern voice, “Only a trained insect geneticist could create a race of superbees. Only someone with the scientific knowledge, the funding and a secluded laboratory away from curious eyes.”

  Tammy ducked behind the cameraman and pointed an accusing finger so that the camera captured it from its own point of view.

  “Only you, Dr. Helwig X. Wurmlinger!”

  “Nonsense.”

  “Nonsense? Do you deny conducting secret genetic experiments in this lab of yours? Do you deny unleashing unknown horrors on an unsuspecting world?”

  “I do deny these insane allegations,” Wurmlinger sputtered.

  “Then how do you explain this!” Tammy crowed.

  And turning to her cameraman, Tammy said, “Show America what Dr. Wurmlinger has been doing with their tax dollars.”

  The cameraman pivoted and trained his minicam at a handy window. He zoomed in.

  And in the Baltimore Fox affiliate, a news director watched tensely as the feed came in. Clearly visible through the chicken-wire-reinforced window was a dragonfly whose body and legs were studded with dozens of unwinking compound ruby eyes.

  It looked for a reassuring moment like a weird model of a dragonfly from another dimension.

  That illusion was broken with startling suddenness when the dragonfly’s wings came to life and it floated away, leaving the unnerving impression that it had been staring at them with its narrow rear end.

  Chapter Thirty

  Mearl Streep watched the Fox broadcast from the comfort of his RV barreling along Interstate 80 to Washington, D.C.

  He had purchased the RV with the monthly dues from his loyal Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia, christening it the IDSM Mobile Guerrilla Command HQ and Recreational Center, and installed a close aide to drive it.

  He was leading a convoy of pickup trucks, sport utilities and off-road vehicles—all made in the U.S.A.—to Washington. They were taking the long way around, because Mearl understood that taking the capital of the greatest nation in the world required more manpower than his thirty or so militia members, none of whom had actually served in a peacetime army or national guard, much less fought in an actual war.

  After all, they were corn farmers mostly.

  Their war fever was pretty high by the time they rolled out of the Corn State with its mysteriously precise checkerboard of desolation.

  “When we get back, we’re taking over the surviving farms,” Mearl boasted. “Taking ’em back from the collaborators.”

  “We’ll run ’em off,” his aide-de-camp, Gordon Garret, called from behind the wheel.

  “Naw. You can’t merely run collaborators off. That’s why I’m calling it Rope Day.”

  “You’re going to hang farmers, Mearl?” Gordon asked in horror.

  “No. But I am bound and determined to hang any collaborators and traitors to the Constitution of the United States that I find, agricultural affiliations notwithstanding.”

  “Oh, that’s different.”

  Along the way, they kept watch out for the much-dreaded black rotary-winged aircraft of the New World Order, but no mysterious helicopters came into view.

  They checked for bar codes on the back of highway signs, and when found, spray-painted them black because these were the guide posts by which the combined forces of the Trilateral Commission, the UN peacekeepers and ethnic irregulars pulled from the nation’s worst ghettos, would use to find their targets on zero hour of H Day. They also defaced various billboards advertising the latest Meryl Streep film.

  Along the way, they took in some mighty fine countryside, and Mearl got to swig a refreshing assortment of locally brewed beers. It was the good life in its way, and sure beat shucking corn.

  When the Fox special entitled “The Death’s-Head Superbee Report” came on, he immediately took notice.

  A blond reporter with the suspiciously foreign name of Tamara Terrill started off the broadcast by asking some fascinating questions.

  “Has a new species of killer bee been unleashed upon the United States of America? How many have died, and how has the United States Department of Agriculture covered up the growing threat?”

  At the mention of the USDA, Mearl sat up straight. He never trusted the Agriculture Department, or any branch of the federal government except where it came to farm subsidies that he figured were his due. And the word cover-up was one of the most active in his vocabulary.

  “More importantly,” Tamara Terrill was saying, “has the federal government itself created this death bee in hidden USDA laboratories? And for what sinister purpose? Are these merely superbees or the vanguard of a new kind of bee destined to ravage the globe?

  “For the answer to these questions, we begin with the strangely underreported death of insect geneticist Doyal T. Rand in Times Square several days ago.”

  At that, Mearl Streep hollered for his driver to pull over. Behind him, the Convoy to Freedom likewise pulled over.

  “Hey, you men gather around. You gotta see this.”

  They clambered into the RV, hunkering down on the floor and open seats. Those who didn’t fit, crowded around the outside, listening from the open windows.

  There by the dusty dirt of the road in Pennsylvania, they watched in growing fascination as an unassailable chain of logic was woven from rumor, facts, innuendo and sloppy reportage. But to Mearl Streep and his Iowa Disorganized Subterranean Militia, it not only rang with truth, but it fit perfectly with everything they believed.

  The clincher came when footage from Iowa was shown—footage of the bizarre hours-old ravaging of previously sacrosanct corn country.

  “Is this, too, the work of the superbee of doom?” Tamara was asking.

  Mearl brought a fist down on his padded armrest, crushing an empty can of Sam Adams. “As sure as the CIA has a surveillance microchip in my left butt cheek,” he said, “it’s gotta be. I can feel it in my bones.”

  The program grasshoppered from Iowa to Los Angeles and the successive deaths of two county coroners and “a brave but nameless Fox cameraman who dared to investigate the truth,” according to Tamara Terrill.

  Then came the portion of the program that made their blood run cold. The program had been hinting at USDA involvement and denials and was leading up to some incredible revelation. When it hit, it left Mearl Streep and his men sitting slack jawed in their seats.

  The program cut to a weird mud hive of a building in God alone knew where. And it showed a long drink of weird with the alien name of Helwig X. Wurmlinger denying all manner of schemes and horrors.

  The capper came when the TV screen filled with the image of a big dragonfly with red eyes everywhere except on his head. When it took off, showing it was alive, the assembled militiamen jumped in place and began scratching themselves as if feeling vermin on their patriotic hides.

  There were other things glimpsed through the window of the “laboratory from Hell,” as Fox was calling it.

  Roaches with prosthetic limbs. Two-headed spiders. And other things God never meant to be.

  And over these accusations came the disembodied voice of Helwig X. Wurmlinger protesting his innocence over and over again, as the evidence of his ungodly tampering with nature filled TV screens all over America.

  After the program ended with the promise of further reports from Fox, Mearl Streep sat in his cammies, oblivious to the spilled can of Sam Adams in his lap, and said, “You freedom fighters listen up now.”