Summit Chase

by Warren Murphy

  The old man was praying. Remo grinned. He’d finally come to his senses and realized he was going to die, and now he was making peace with his ancestors. Well, good for the little chink, Remo thought, as he fastened the chains and locks.

  And then he listened to the old man’s words. They were soft and intended for the heavens alone.

  “Oh, Masters of Sinanju who have trod this earth before, forgive me my patience with these butchers and animals. Close your eyes to my display of inaction, and consider instead that I suffer their insults so that I may yet save the one who will be the next Master of Sinanju.

  “But my patience even now grows thin and the hour of the cat is near at hand. Guide my wisdom, as my experience will guide my hand.”

  “Say one for me, too,” Remo said, as he stood up from fastening the last chain. Then he strutted from the cell into the passageway where Nemeroff and the guard waited.

  To the guard, Nemeroff said, “You watch these two.”

  To Remo, he said, “You can dispose of them at your leisure later, but now you must come with me.”

  “I saw that your guests are arriving,” Remo said, as he followed Nemeroff down the passageway.

  “Yes,” Nemeroff said. “Our meeting will begin soon. But we have another visitor. One of our New York operatives has arrived. He has seen this Remo Williams. Perhaps he may be of help to you in capturing him.”

  “Maybe,” Remo said. “Who is this guy?”

  “His name is O’Brien,” Nemeroff said. “He is a guard at the New York federal prison. He has done invaluable service to us there.”

  “Good,” Remo said. “I can’t wait to meet him.”

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  REMO FOLLOWED NEMEROFF UP THE steep flights of damp stone stairs to the first floor.

  As they stood momentarily in the large entrance hall, Nemeroff walked away from him.

  “Mr. Fabio. How are you? So happy you could come.”

  An olive-skinned man had just walked through the glass doors from the first floor patio. He looked up at Nemeroff with the Mafia’s traditional look—halfway between cowardice and toleration—which passed for respect, and stiffly stuck out his hand.

  “Who’s that?,” he asked Nemeroff, gesturing with his head over the baron’s shoulder toward Remo.

  The baron laughed. It was that evil whinny of a laugh that greeted things he thought were funny.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, still braying. “I want the two of you to meet.”

  He took his visitor by the elbow and led him toward Remo. Outside, Remo could see Fabio’s bodyguard lounging on a chair on the patio, trying to appear unconcerned, but watching the activities through the glass, ready to move if it became necessary. He was exiled to the patio because it was considered bad form to bring one’s bodyguard into another man’s home.

  Then Remo had his hand stuck into the hand of Fabio.

  He looked hard at the face and knew he should have known it, but it was just another wop with the brains of an organ-grinder. Who he was just wasn’t worth the effort.

  He heard Nemeroff say: “This is Mr. Fabio. He is an important man in the United States.”

  Remo looked harder at him. The man had a fleshy face, and a small thin scar ran from the corner of his left eye to the bottom of his left ear. The skin was whiter than his normal skin, he had splashed powder on his face to try to equalize the color but he was still scarred and hideous.

  And then Remo heard Nemeroff say:

  “And this is my associate, Mr. P.J. Kenny.”

  Fabio’s hand tensed in his and then removed itself, not recoiling suddenly as if from fear, but moving back deliberately as if for a reconsideration, and then he heard Fabio speak:

  “Dat ain’t P.J. Kenny.”

  Nemeroff whinnied again, so Remo adopted his mood and smiled as Nemeroff said:

  “Good. That is proof of how successful the plastic surgery was.”

  Remo watched as Fabio’s little pig eyes burned into his. Then Fabio said:

  “P.J., is it really you?”

  Remo nodded. Fabio stared a little longer. Then his pig features relaxed into a smile. He took a step forward, raised his right hand, palm up, to signify surprise, and then brought his hand around Remo’s shoulders in a half bear hug.

  “P.J.,” he said. “I’ve been wondering what happened to you. Everybody was.”

  “I was under the knife for the new face,” Remo said, hoping that was the right thing to say. “And then the baron arranged for me to come here and join him.”

  “And join him,” Fabio mimicked. “Maybe that doctor operated on your brain, too. You talk better than you used to.”

  “Thanks,” said the man who thought he was P.J. Kenny. “Part of my new image.”

  “I’ll tell you, your new image is a lot better than your old image,” Fabio said. “You was about the ugliest-looking thing I ever saw.”

  “Wasn’t I, though? I looked downright Italian,” Remo said. When Fabio paused, unsure how to answer, Remo added, “and now I look Neapolitan,” giving the word the extra Italian accent on the last syllable, guessing that Fabio was Neapolitan because of the way he had raised his hand in greeting.

  Fabio laughed out loud. “Yeah,” he said, “that’s a real improvement. And you’re in with the baron?”

  “Right-hand man,” Remo said.

  Nemeroff moved quickly into the conversation.

  “Mr. Kenny has agreed to join with all of us in insuring that whatever agreement we reach will be fairly kept. I think he has that reputation for fairness,” Nemeroff said.

  “You bet he has,” Fabio said. “Hey, P.J.—remember when you got my brother, Matty?”

  “Sure do,” Remo smiled. “It was some job.”

  “Some job?” Fabio laughed. “They was picking up pieces of him for weeks.”

  “Yeah,” Remo laughed. “I used my special cheese cutting knife for that job.” Then he added, “Ho, ho, ho.”

  “Hee, hee, hee,” laughed Fabio, remembering the one hundred twenty-seven pieces of the remains of his brother, Matthew, whose crime had been that he held up to ridicule the son of another gangland leader.

  “Ha, ha, ha,” whinnied Baron Nemeroff. Then he turned the smile and laugh off as if by a switch, and said,

  “Come, Mr. Fabio. We will go to the meeting room upstairs. Some of our mutual friends have already arrived.”

  He stepped toward the picture on the wall and pressed the button hidden in the molding of the frame. The door slid quietly open.

  He stepped aside to allow Fabio to enter first, and turned to Remo: “The man—O’Brien—is in the study. Perhaps he can tell you more about this Williams. What he looks like or what to look for.”

  Remo nodded and waited until Nemeroff had entered the elevator and pressed the button for the fifth floor. The painting moved softly back over the door opening.

  Remo turned and walked across the parquet floor, his tennis shoes noiseless on the highly polished wood. The door was a giant wooden panel, deeply carved with elaborate filigrees, but it pushed open as though it had been hinged on ball bearings.

  The room was dark. Remo found himself looking at the stark silhouette of a man, who stared out the first floor window toward the end of the house. Over his shoulder, through the window, Remo could see a red helicopter coming into view. He realized the man was following the helicopter’s flight with his eyes. Though neither knew, it was the craft that had taken Vice President Asiphar the few miles to the Scambian Presidential palace where he expected, within forty-eight hours, to occupy the presidential bed.

  Remo moved up behind the man, close enough to touch him, and he said, “O’Brien?”

  The man wheeled and as he turned, released the heavy drapes he had been holding, and the room again leaked into semi-darkness. But Remo could see the man’s face was startled, and the man said: “Boy, you gave me a fright, sneaking up on me like that.”

  “Tennis shoes,” Remo said, as if that explained it. “T
he baron tells me you know this Remo Williams?”

  “No,” O’Brien said, “I don’t know him. But I saw him once.” He brushed past Remo and walked back to a small chair alongside a desk, and plopped down heavily into it.

  Remo turned, the sun glistening between the drapes now at his back and shining into O’Brien’s face.

  “What’s he look like?” Remo asked.

  “Well, when I saw him, he was dressed like a priest,” O’Brien said.

  “That’s not going to help me much.”

  “Wait. I’m trying. He had brown eyes, but not like regular brown eyes. They were deep, like they had no black. All deep-colored. You know what I mean?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And he had a hard face. Like he was dressed like a priest, but he sure didn’t look like any priest. His nose was straight and he was the kind of guy that looked right in your eye.”

  O’Brien squinted to try to get a better look at the man standing in front of the window, but all he could see was the outline of his head and body.

  “All right,” Remo said, “cut the art class lectures. How big was he?”

  “He was a big guy, but not that big. Maybe six feet. Not heavy either. But big thick wrists, like he worked on a chain gang or something.”

  Remo moved closer to O’Brien’s chair. O’Brien was casually inspecting his toes. Remo leaned onto the desk top.

  “Yeah, go on,” he said.

  O’Brien looked up, squinting. “As I said, he had thick wrists. Like yours,” he added, glancing down at Remo’s hands on the desk. “And there was something else.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It was his mouth. It like didn’t have any lips. It was thin and hard looking and you just knew he was a badass. That was some bad mouth,” O’Brien said. He looked up and squinted again into Remo’s shadowed face, reflecting slowly, “It was like yours.”

  “And his eyes were brown?” Remo asked.

  “Yeah. Brown…like yours.”

  “And his hair?”

  “It was dark,” O’Brien said. “Dark…like yours.” He jumped up from the chair and his hand flashed to his side, but then his hand didn’t work anymore and he was back in his chair, and a pain more excruciating than any he had ever felt before was happening along his partially-crippled right arm, and the man who thought he was P.J. Kenny said, “What the hell’s the matter with you? What are you trying to pull a gun on me for?”

  O’Brien said, “Don’t give me that. How’d you get here?”

  “What are you talking about?” Remo said. “I work for the baron.”

  “Sure,” O’Brien sneered. “He just went ahead and hired Remo Williams.”

  “Remo Williams? What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You’re him, man. Maybe you can shit the baron but you can’t shit me. You’re Remo Williams.”

  “And you’re nuts. I’ve been assigned to kill Williams.”

  “Well, just cut your wrists, man,” O’Brien said. “And Williams’ll die of the bleeding.”

  “You’re dreaming,” Remo said.

  “Look, Williams,” O’Brien said. “I don’t know what you’re pulling here, but how about letting me in on it? I can probably be some help to you.”

  Remo was busy trying to sort out what O’Brien had said, but it was all wrapped up in darkness. He was P.J. Kenny. But this man said he wasn’t. This man would know and he said that he was Remo Williams. But how could he be?

  “I just had plastic surgery,” Remo said. “It must just be a coincidence.”

  “No way,” O’Brien said. “How about it? You and me? Fair split?”

  A fair split. Remo thought about it for a second, O’Brien’s hand went toward his gun again, and Remo suddenly hated this man who had brought confusion into a life that was simplifying into the daily humdrum of the professional assassin. So he reached high into the air and brought the side of his fist down against the top of O’Brien’s skull and heard the bones cracking like ice cubes splintering in a warm mix and O’Brien slumped forward in his chair, dead.

  Remo let the body fall heavily onto the floor.

  Remo Williams? How could it be? He was P.J. Kenny. Nemeroff had known him. Maggie had known him. How could he be Williams?

  But there was the chink. Had the chink recognized him when he stepped into that door at the hotel? Had the chink known he was Remo Williams? Then why hadn’t he said something? Why had he just stood there, waiting to be killed by P.J. Kenny?

  He tried to consider the moves and every move came back to Chiun, to that old Oriental calmly awaiting death in his cell, humiliatingly bound, wrist and ankle to the floor, and Remo knew his answer was there and he would have to confront the old man.

  At that moment, the telephone rang. It sat on a small walnut table in the center of the room and Remo stepped over and picked it up. “Hello.”

  “This is Nemeroff. Was O’Brien any help to you?”

  “Yes,” Remo said. “A great help.”

  “Good. May I talk with him, please?”

  “Afraid not, baron,” Remo said, looking at the body. “He’s lying down.” He saw the brains and blood oozing from O’Brien’s skull. “He said he had a splitting headache.”

  There was a pause. “Oh, all right,” Nemeroff said. “I am just beginning my meeting now. My men will have to forego their pleasure with the Englishwoman. Would you please dispose of her and the Oriental and then join us up here in the fifth floor conference room?”

  “Yes, sir. As fast as my little legs can carry me,” Remo said.

  “Thank you. We will all be waiting.”

  Remo hung up the telephone, looked at it momentarily, then stepped out into the hall. He would have to confront the old Oriental, and clear up this mystery once and for all.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE DUNGEON CORRIDOR WAS empty, even though Nemeroff had told ferret-face to watch the prisoners. The mold felt damp and slippery under Remo’s feet as he slid down the dungeon corridor to Chiun’s cell.

  The door was locked, bolted heavily with an iron lock that weighed four pounds. Remo took the lock in his hands, and looked around to call the guard for the key, but then changed his mind for some reason, and twisted the lock in his hands until the metal fractured and it came loose from the door.

  He quietly laid the two pieces on the floor, listening. There was no sound in the dungeon except the soft sobbing of Maggie in her cell, behind the closed door, across the narrow passageway. She would be next, but first, the Oriental.

  Remo pulled the door open slowly, and remembered how he had last seen the old man, helpless, wrists and ankles chained to the floor.

  The door opened softly. The old man sat on the bunk in the cell, a full six feet away from the metal ring, and Remo looked toward the ring.

  It was inch-thick steel and it had been sheared in half. Laying next to it were the chains. Broken. So were the ankle and wrist manacles, mashed and broken as if they had been pounded by a hammer wielded with enormous power.

  But of course that was impossible, since the old man’s hands and feet would have been in the chains when such a hammer was wielded and he would have suffered injury.

  The old man stood as Remo walked into the cell, then bowed from the waist and smiled.

  For the moment, Remo would not ask how he had escaped. There were other, more important, things for the man who thought he was P.J. Kenny.

  “Old man,” he said, “I need your help.”

  “You have but to ask.”

  “I think I know who I am, but I’m not sure. Help me.”

  Chiun looked at the small bandage still covering Remo’s temple. “You received a blow on the head, did you not?”

  “Yes.”

  “And it was after that that your memory disappeared?”

  “Yes.”

  “Then perhaps a similar blow,” Chiun said, and before Remo could move or react, a small rock-hard fist lashed out, and a thumb knuckle hit against his temp
le, missing the exact mid-point of the bone by a precise 32nd of an inch, and Remo lived by exactly that distance. He saw stars. He shook his head to clear it. And then in a rush of memories, his life flooded back into him: his identity, his mission, who he was and why he was here.

  “I know,” he said, smiling happily, yet shaking his head from the shock of the attack. “I know. I’m Remo.”

  “I am glad,” Chiun said. “I have something for you.” And then, quicker than eye could see or body could move, the old man’s hand lashed out, open, fingers extended, thumb drawn in alongside the fleshy part of the palm, and the four extended fingers slapped Remo’s cheek with a sharp report.

  Remo’s head spun, and he growled, “C’mon, Chiun, now what the hell was that about?”

  “That is for calling Sinanju a suburb of Hong Kong and for calling me a Chinaman. That is for being insolent to your elders. That is for not staying on your diet and for consorting with women and for bothering Doctor Smith and for endangering your country’s interests.”

  “Had you worried, huh?”

  “Worry? About a piece of worthless carrion who will, without me, eat himself to death in a week? What is to worry?”

  When he had been P.J. Kenny, Remo had planned to ask how the old man had broken his iron bonds. Now that he was again Remo Williams, the question was not necessary. The old man had broken his bonds because he was Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, and because there had never been anything quite like him in the world before. Even if he felt he was getting old, there was color in his cheeks now and the happiness of the hound on the chase.

  “Come, Chiun, we have things to do,” Remo said, turning toward the door.

  “A common pattern,” Chiun said. “First the personal abuse, and now the orders. Do this. Do that. Am I to be treated like a wage slave? Is there no respect due a man my age, a frail old specter barely able to stand erect?”

  “Don’t,” Remo said. “You’ll have me in tears. And let me warn you. If you kill anybody this trip, you clean up the bodies yourself.”