The Arms of Kali

An FBI agent identifies a growing series of airline-passenger stranglings, beginning with an unnamed older woman in Chicago and then hardware retailer Albert Birnbaum, who is lured from a Just Folks flight and killed by a young woman and male accomplices using a yellow handkerchief. Remo Williams survives a separate attempted killing during a dive in Bonaire, follows the traffickers to Curacao, and returns to Chiun and CURE. Smith assigns him to investigate the airline murders. Remo and Chiun pose as inspectors from the National Aeronautical Agency at Just Folks Airlines in Denver, whose president Aldrich Hunt Baynes III has built a corrupt, fee-driven service model.

The text introduces Holly Rodan, a young woman from an affluent Denver family, and Ban Sar Din, an organizer of a Kali cult whose followers target travelers. Ban expands the killing operation to first-class passengers, recruits Reverend Tee Vee Walker, and later receives tickets from Baynes for Air Europa. Remo intervenes in an attempted killing and leaves Holly and one attacker alive; his violence fascinates Holly, who becomes fixated on him. Chiun tells Remo an attributed Sinanju legend about Lu the Disgraced, a Master who served Rome and became entangled with Kali and a priestess. These historical and religious statements belong to the novel’s legend and characterization, not independently verified history.

Baynes’s family and neighbor Herb Palmer are drawn into the cult. In Paris, Baynes’s children Joshua and Kimberly kill Herb and Emmie Palmer and their own mother Evelyn, while other travelers are killed in the airline operation. Smith’s computer finds that Baynes withdrew $5,000 and sold $61,000 in stock around cash ticket purchases for IMAA and Air Europa; it calculates a 93.67 percent probability of a connection, without naming the ticket buyer or proving a trading scheme or profit. A cloaked contact offers Baynes help in exchange for the statue; the person is later revealed as Ivory, an antiquities buyer from Sri Lanka.

Remo is pulled toward Ban’s New Orleans ashram by an unexplained force and becomes impaired by a scent there. Ivory plants a bomb on an Air Asia flight to obtain the Kali statue, not knowing Remo is aboard. The plane crashes in Lake Pontchartrain; Remo rescues multiple passengers and survives, while both pilots die and no exact total casualty count is given. Smith investigates the cult, Ban helps him escape, and Ban is killed by cultists; Joshua dies when he opens Smith’s booby-trapped briefcase. Baynes sends Holly and followers toward Hong Kong with the statue, but the van explodes; its driver dies and Holly is mortally wounded.

Ivory follows Holly’s dirt-written clue to Baynes in Colorado and strangles him. At the chalet, Ivory says she planted the plane bomb and claims her ancestors’ connection to the statue. The story portrays a supernatural confrontation in which Ivory dies, Chiun is marked, and Remo crushes and discards the statue. Remo asks if he is Lu, but Chiun says he is not. In a final scene in a Denver suburb, Kimberly makes a small pink Kali statue that grows another nub, leaving the danger unresolved.