The Black Death

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Six-foot-plus of whipcord strength, and he has something in his head besides bone. He has an almost phenomenal memory; a knowledge of many places, people, enemy weaponry and techniques. He doesn’t just love sex, he enjoys it enormously. He prefers to like the women he goes to bed with. He has inherited the mantle of the late Ian Fleming’s James Bond. He’s America’s Number One espionage agent and he mixes mystery, mayhem and loving in equal doses. He stands for counter-intelligence of the highest order.

Code-named Killmaster, his real name is Nick Carter.

It was only the faint, barely discernible tremor of a far-off subway train, — the sound imagined rather than heard, that kept my mind in New York. My guts and my heart were in a dark rain forest somewhere in Haiti where the drums muttered sullenly, the night pressed in and where things that could not be were.

I had drunk from the cup that had been passed about before the ceremony began, as had the girl beside me and the CIA man, Steve Bennett, and all the others in the small audience — and I knew I had been drugged. Only mildly, but drugged. I had expected it. It wasn’t too bad, and when the stuff started to hit me I put it down as either mescaline or peyote. Maybe psilocybin. I hadn’t had much time to figure it out. Things move pretty fast in a voodoo church, even one on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.

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