The End of the Game td-60

by Warren Murphy

  "An awesome picture," Chiun agreed amiably.

  "What do you want from me?" Remo asked.

  "Find out what's going on."

  "I hate machines. I'm lost with them. I can't even work those scrambler devices you gave me."

  "They were only two buttons," Smith said.

  "Right," said Remo. "Two buttons, and I never could remember which was which. I don't need that stuff."

  "Remo, the whole world could go up," Smith said.

  "Aieee," Chiun wailed. "We face doom together, O Emperor," said Chiun. His long fingernails were symbols of doom, pointing toward the penthouse ceiling.

  "I think Chiun grasps what is going on, Remo. This may be the end of the world. We send one investigator and then another and then another and all these people from all these agencies somehow stop working. They get locked out. They get killed. They get bought off. They go insane. It's a monster of a force and we might be already in the middle of a countdown to a war."

  "A countdown? That doesn't mean anything. When you need me to stop someone from pressing a button, then call me," Remo said.

  "Disaster," intoned Chiun. "Doom of world and empire."

  "Remo. Chiun understands this," Smith said.

  "Right," said Remo. He turned on his side on the couch so his back was to Smith.

  In tones of grave import, Chiun spoke to Remo in Korean:

  "Fool, do you not know that every emperor's sneeze is the end of the world? Emperors think only like that. They are like young women to whom all trivia makes the world hang in the balance. The wrong dessert for lunch is the end of the world to an emperor. Remember always. Never tell an emperor the truth. He would not know what to do with it and probably would resent it gravely. Make believe what he says is important."

  Remo answered also in the Korean he had learned:

  "It's not like that, Chiun. Smith doesn't get alarmed about small things. I just don't care anymore. We're always going to have a big war, every day you hear it, and we never have one."

  "Pretend it is important," Chiun responded. "This lunatic is the emperor."

  "He's not an emperor," Remo said. "Just because you work for him doesn't make him an emperor. He's a hired hand and he works for the President and I don't believe in lying to him."

  "An assassin who will not lie to an emperor is an assassin whose village goes hungry."

  "Sinanju isn't going hungry and hasn't been for three centuries," Remo said. Sinanju in North Korea was Chiun's native village. For centuries, its people had been supported by the labors of the Masters of Sinanju, creators of all the martial arts and the world's greatest assassins. Chiun was the latest in the line.

  "Sinanju has not gone hungry because it has had Masters of Sinanju who have served it well and faithfully," Chiun snapped in Korean. "You are not dealing with some new two-hundred-year-old country your ancestors just stumbled over. You are defending Sinanju itself."

  "Little Father, I've seen Sinanju. It's a mud village. C'mon. The only thing that ever came out of that dump was the assassins who supported it. Every one of those people are lazy incompetent slobs. You wouldn't have trained me if they weren't."

  "You have an ungrateful tongue for someone who didn't even remember melons on the ground."

  "How long am I going to hear that?"

  "Until you remember," said Chiun, and then to Smith, "He understands the gravity of it now."

  "I hope you do, Remo, because we don't know where to turn. We have only you."

  Remo rolled onto his other side on the couch and released a large sigh. He looked at Smith and said, "Okay. Will you go through it again please?"

  Smith described the defense networks of Russia and the United States in terms as simple as those of a children's book. The two nuclear powers had big guns ready to go boom. These were atomic weapons. But they were very dangerous. They could cause a war that would destroy the world, so, unlike swords and guns, these weapons could harm the users themselves. Therefore, the two powers had to have things that prevented the big guns from going boom as well as devices to make them go boom. Triggers and antitriggers.

  Now someone was fooling around with the triggers and the antitriggers. Was that clear?

  "Sure. Point me to those trigger things and I'll find out who has them and I'll nail them. Okay?" said Remo.

  "Well, it's not that simple," Smith said. "It's not like triggers on a gun."

  "I didn't think it would be. Nothing with you is ever simple. Where do I go then?"

  "There is a computer center in downtown New York City. Somehow it is involved with this thing. Money seems to be coming from there somehow and occasionally it turns up as part of a transmission link that we intercept."

  "All right," Remo said disgustedly. "Where's the computer center?"

  Smith gave him the address and explained the problem again in terms of a shelf loaded with canned goods that was being held up above the world with very light supports. The supports were designed both to collapse and not to collapse.

  "And someone's trying to make the supports not to collapse collapse," Remo said.

  "You have it," Smith said.

  "Not really," said Remo. "It sounds like a job for Abbott and Costello to me."

  "He only jests," said Chiun quickly. "You have no need to hire this Apple and Cosletto. Remo is ready to do your bidding. One who has been trained by the Master of Sinanju need only hear his emperor's desires, and then will deliver them to him."

  "Is that right, Remo?"

  "How the hell should I know?" Remo said. Remo had lost the address of the computer center. He knew he had put it somewhere. He might have torn it up also. Addresses were like that.

  Before he left, Smith asked the exact nature of the defense of the President against the Iranian truck bombers.

  "The best defense against an attacker is in the attacker's mind. It is not the real defense but what he thinks is the defense," Remo said.

  "I don't understand. We have suicide truck bombers. What sort of danger is death to someone who wants to lose his life?"

  "How can I explain? You only understand them through what you fear. All right. They will kill themselves, but only under certain circumstances, and I've changed the circumstances." He saw blankness on Smith's face and said, "Let me try it this way. Every weapon, for its danger, has a weakness. The sharper the point, the thinner the blade at that point, right?"

  "Yes. I think so. What does that have to do with your protection of the President?"

  "What makes these people willing to die is also their weakness. You have to get into their beliefs and make them work against them. Do you see?"

  "You convinced them it was morally wrong?" Smith asked.

  "No. Listen. It may not be popular in some dippy classroom to say it, but life is cheap there. They don't think of a human life with the same respect, let's say, that we do. It's just a fact of life for these people. Hell, they bury half their children before they're eight and if they didn't they couldn't feed them anyhow."

  "What are you saying, Remo?"

  "I'm saying I scared the shit out of them," Remo said.

  "What he is saying, O Emperor," Chiun interjected quickly, "is that you have chosen your assassins wisely because your President is safe from these vermin who dare threaten such a glorious life."

  "I guess that means he really does have this protection," said Smith, who had been trying very hard to follow this thing.

  "Yeah. Right. He's safe. They're not going to go at him anymore."

  "If you say so," Smith said.

  "He is as safe as you wish him," said Chiun with a tantalizing smile. The invitation was always there. If Smith should want to become President, all he need do was say the word and the present occupant of the White House would just simply cease to exist. Remo knew that Chiun could still not quite believe, even after all these years, that Smith was not plotting the overthrow of the President so he could become President himself. After all, why hire a Master of Sinanju to do someth
ing as foolish as protect a nation? In the history of Sinanju, nations were things of little import. It was the emperor who hired and the emperor who mattered.

  "I wish him safe," said Smith, thinking he had given an order for the protection of his President.

  "As you will it," said Chiun, who had heard a quite different command: "Not yet. I will let you know at the right moment when the President should be removed."

  "Well," sighed Remo. "Another assignment with no one understanding anybody."

  "We understand ourselves quite well," said Smith, nodding to Chiun. Chiun nodded back. Some of these whites could be quite cagey.

  Chiun insisted upon accompanying Remo to New York City because, he said, he had "some business there."

  "Inside America, you are supposed to serve no other," said Remo.

  "I am not betraying service. There are other projects of intellect in which I am involved."

  They were in a New York City hotel room.

  Chiun had a wide flat bundle in a manila envelope. It was about a foot long and nine inches wide. He held it close to his kimono.

  Remo suspected Chiun wanted him to ask about it. Therefore, he didn't.

  "I have treated you better in this than you deserve," said Chiun, holding up the package.

  "Is it a book?"

  "I should have some affairs that are private," Chiun said.

  "Okay," said Remo.

  "It's a book," said Chiun.

  But Remo didn't ask what kind of book. He had known that Chiun had once attempted to have some Korean poetry published in New York City and had received two rejections. One publisher said they liked the poetry but did not feel it was quite right for their list; the other said that they felt the poetry wasn't quite ready for publication.

  Remo never understood how the publishing houses had come to those conclusions since the poetry was in an ancient Korean form used, to Remo's knowledge, only by Chiun himself. Remo might have been the second person in the world to understand it because some of the breathing instructions were in the rhythms of that language. He only found out that the dialect was ancient when a Korean scholar pointed out that it was impossible for anyone to know it because it had been out of use four centuries before Rome was a city.

  Chiun was annoyed that Remo did not ask about this new book. He said, "I will never let you read this book because you would not appreciate it. You appreciate so little anyhow."

  "I'll read it when we get back," Remo said.

  "Never mind," said Chiun.

  "I promise. I'll read it."

  "I don't want you to," Chiun said. "Your opinion is worthless anyway."

  "All right," Remo said.

  "I will leave a copy out for you."

  Remo left the hotel wanting to take pieces of walls out of buildings. He had gotten himself into having to read one of Chiun's manuscripts. It wasn't so bad that he had promised to read it but he faced little questions for months about what he had read, and a failure to answer any one correctly would be proof to Chiun that Remo did not care.

  It hadn't always been like this. There had been times early on when Remo felt free of this feeling, this having to prove that he cared, having to prove that he was good enough, worthy enough to be Chiun's successor. He knew he was worthy enough. He knew he cared. So why did he have to go on proving it all the time?

  "Why?" said Remo to a fire hydrant on this chilly day near Times Square, and the fire hydrant, failing to give the correct answer, got a hand down its center splitting it to its base. It gushed up a stream of water between its two iron halves, split like two flower petals.

  "My God. That man just split a fire hydrant," said a woman shopper.

  "You lie," said Remo.

  "Whatever you say," said the woman. This was New York. Who knew? The man might be a member of a new fire-hydrant-splitting cult of killers. Or maybe he was part of a new city task force to determine how well fire hydrants were made by destroying them. "Anything you want," she said.

  And Remo, seeing the woman was frightened, said, "I'm sorry."

  "You should be," said the woman. He had shown weakness and New Yorkers were trained to attack the weak. "That was a brand-new fire hydrant."

  "No, I mean for frightening you."

  "It's all right," said the woman. In New York, one did not go around letting people suffocate on their own guilt.

  "I don't want to be forgiven," Remo said.

  "Go fuck yourself," the woman said, because when all else failed in New York, there was always that.

  When he reached the computer center, he was not in the mood for the cheery bright British presence of a woman whose desk plate identified her as Ms. Pamela Thrushwell.

  "Are you interested in our new model?" said Pamela. She wore an angora sweater over her ample front and smiled with many long perfect white teeth appearing between very red lips.

  "Is it better than the old model?" Remo asked.

  "It will satisfy every one of your needs," Pamela said. "Every one." She smiled broadly at that and Remo looked away, bored. He knew he did this to many woman. At first, it was exciting, but now it was just what it really was: an expression that women found him fit and displayed their natural instinct to want to reproduce with the fittest of the species. That was all handsomeness or beauty ever was, an expression of a function as basic as breathing or eating or sleeping. It was how the human race kept going and Remo wasn't interested anymore in keeping the human race going.

  "Just sell me a computer. That's all," he said.

  "Well, you've got to want it for something," she said.

  "All right," Remo said. "Let me think. I want it to start World War III. I want to tap into governments' computer records so I can destroy foreign currency. I want to make banks go broke by giving money away to paupers. I want to detonate nuclear warheads."

  "Is that all?" Pamela said.

  "And it's got to play Pac-Man," Remo said.

  "We'll see what we can do," Pamela said and she took him to a corner where there was a library of programs that could do things from calculating building construction to playing games of shooting things.

  In doing her duty, she explained how computers worked. She started at the idea of gates with a simple binary command. There was a yes command and a no command. The "no" closed the gate; the "yes" opened it. Then she was off and running into how these yeses and nos made a computer work and as she delivered this incomprehensible gibberish, she smiled at Remo as if anyone could follow what she was talking about.

  Remo let her go on as long as he could stay awake, then he said, "I don't want to balance my checkbook. I don't have a checkbook. I just want to start World War III. Help me with that. What do you have in the way of nuclear devastation?"

  Before she could answer, someone called out that she had a telephone call. She picked up the phone on an adjacent desk and began to blush. Remo noticed the television monitors in the ceilings. Their random movement, sweeping the office area, stopped and they focused on Pamela Thrushwell. He glanced at Pamela Thrushwell and saw her reddened face turn from embarrassment to anger and she snapped, "Naff off, you bloody twerp." As she slammed the telephone toward the receiver, Remo felt high-wave vibrations emanating from the telephone. If Pamela had still had the phone next to her ear, her eardrum would have burst.

  She did not notice it. She smoothed her skirt, let her flush subside, and returned to Remo, the proper British salesperson.

  "Not a friend, I take it," he said.

  "Somebody who's been bothering me for months," she said.

  "Who is it? Why don't you call the police?"

  "I don't know who it is," she said.

  "Who runs these cameras?" Remo asked, nodding toward the ceiling.

  "No one. They're automatic," she said.

  "No, they're not."

  "Excuse me, sir, but they are."

  "No," Remo said.

  "They are our equipment and we know how it works, so if you will kindly pay attention, I will explain a
gain how the simple computer works," she said.

  "Those cameras are focused by someone," Remo said. "They're watching you right now."

  "That's impossible," said Pamela. She glanced up at the cameras in the ceiling. When she glanced again a few moments later, they were still pointed at her.

  Remo said, "This place is obviously set up for something. Can you trace the controls on that monitor?"

  "I'm afraid to," Pamela said. "Last week, I traced that telephone caller who keeps bothering me, and our office manager picked up the phone and got broken eardrums. I don't know what to do. I've complained to the police and they say ignore it. But how can you ignore it when somebody has people come right in and grab you and touch and pinch and do all sorts of things? I know that obscene caller is behind it."

  "And you don't know who it is," Remo said.

  "No, do you?" she asked.

  Remo shook his head. "Why don't we find out together?" he said.

  "I'm sorry. I don't know you and I don't trust you," she said.

  "Who are you going to trust?"

  "I don't trust the police," she said.

  "I'm the guy who showed you how you're being watched," he said.

  "I don't know who to trust at this point. I get phone calls at all hours. The caller seems to know what I'm doing. Strange men come up to me and do stranger things in public. The caller knows. He always knows. I don't trust you. I'm sorry."

  Remo leaned close and let her feel his presence. Her blue eyes fluttered.

  "I don't need a romantic involvement at this point," she said.

  "I was thinking more of raw sex," Remo said.

  "Beast," said Pamela Thrushwell, but her eyes sparkled when she said it and her dimples virtually popped in her cheeks.

  "Let me show you how to start a nuclear war," she said.

  "Sure," Remo said. "And I'll show you how we can both go out in a blaze of glory."

  She took Remo into a back room of the computer center. There was a large computer screen and a pimply-faced young man with dilated pupils hung over a keyboard like a ham in a smokehouse, as still as dead meat. But unlike a ham, his fingers moved.