It sometimes seemed that way to Remo. Successive Presidents had been hamstrung by the press and Congress, and it would take mandatory testing to convince Remo that Congress itself wasn't on drugs. America wasn't going forward into the next century. It wasn't even standing still. It was unravelling.
Remo could wash his hands of it without a second thought.
Except for Chiun. Chiun would hector him into an early grave, play on his sympathies and, all else failing, rain guilt down on his head the way the weakening ghost of Elvis was raining on him now, if Remo walked away from the latest contract.
Maybe, Remo thought, it was time to put some distance between himself and the Master of Sinanju. The thought made him cringe inwardly. Chiun had been like a father to him. More than a father, really. But his training was over. He had mastered Sinanju now. Maybe, Remo thought as he looked out over the rain-dimpled bay, it was time to make a clean break with everything. Maybe he needed to find himself, make some decisions that had nothing to do with CURE's mission, America's needs or a tiny fishing village in North Korea that hadn't changed in the three thousand years since it had first sent its sons out into the world to kill in support of its people.
Maybe it was time to stand on his own feet and live his own life. If Chiun cared about him, he would understand that. He had been young himself once, seventy or eighty years ago.
Remo had reached the rocky end of the beach as he came to his decision. He kept walking, his soft Italian leather loafers finding and pushing him along the great granite blocks that had been placed there to hold back the relentless erosion of the Atlantic. He felt the obdurate hardness of the stone even through his leather soles, and it seemed to suggest the rockiness of the path he was about to set out on.
Remo stopped on one of the largest stones. He looked down. Where others saw hard granite, he saw a flawed chunk of the earth's mantle. There were chisel marks at the edges where it had been cleaved from the old Quincy quarries untold generations ago and dressed into a rough oblong. It had rested on this beach since before Remo had been born, and even Hurricane Nornan couldn't move it.
With his left foot Remo traced circular patterns in the stone face, sensed a weak point and without any further thought dropped to one knee, bringing the flat edge of his right hand in contact with the weak spot.
Flesh met granite, and a sharp crack like a peal of thunder resulted.
With a grinding separation, the granite cube split along a perfect line. The two sections fell away from each other, and Remo leaped onto the next stone.
If nothing better came along, he could work as a stonecutter, Remo thought wryly.
The wry grin faded from his face when a squeaky voice called out his name.
"Remo! Is that you?"
"Chiun?"
BEYOND the sprinkling of stones, near a shaded beachfront park, the Master of Sinanju lifted his birdlike head. He was seated on a bench. Spying Remo, he flung the remnants of popcorn to the wheeling cormorants and sea gulls he had been feeding.
The Master of Sinanju crushed the popcorn container into a ball, and it disappeared up one sleeve for disposal later. He padded along on his sandaled feet to meet his pupil. There was the hint of a smile on Remo's face. Perhaps his mood had improved.
But as they drew near each other the Master of Sinanju saw his pupil's features settle into unhappy lines. How often they did that, he thought. It had been Remo's lot to suffer many hardships in life, and the gift of Sinanju bestowed upon him had not erased all cares.
As Remo came to a stop before him, Chiun searched his eyes and said, "You have been thinking."
"I have come to a difficult decision, Little Father." His voice was sad.
And the Master of Sinanju decided to make this moment easier on his pupil. "You wish to seek other horizons?"
"How did you know?" "A father knows his son."
"No offense, Litt- I mean, I don't have a father."
"Not so. You simply do not know your father. You stand here breathing and tasting of Earth's sweet grandeur. The truly fatherless have no such luxury, for they have never been born."
"Point taken. What I meant was you're my teacher and my friend. Not my father."
Chiun cocked his head to one side. "Yet you honor me with the title-when the mood strikes you."
"I have been honored by your teachings and your guidance. But I have come to a place in my life where I must find myself."
"Find yourself? But you are here. Standing on a beach in the land of your birth." Chiun looked out over the rain-troubled bay. "I sometimes long to be standing on a beach in the land of my birth. But alas, this is not for me at this time."
"If you're about to lay a guilt trip on me," Remo warned, "don't."
"I was merely musing on my lot in life. As were you."
"Touché. But I gotta move on."
"I cannot go with you, my son. You know that."
"Where I have to go, I have to go alone."
"And the contract I have yet to sign?"
"That's between you and Smith now. It's only a year. Maybe after a year, I'll be back."
"I can keep Smith happy for a year." "I expected more of an argument."
"That explains the disappointed expression on your sad-sack face," said Chiun. "Heh heh. That explains the disappointed expression on your sad-sack face. Heh heh heh."
And to the relief of the Master of Sinanju, Remo found spirit enough to smile at his poor joke.
"I'm glad you're not giving me a hard time about this," Remo said.
They began walking back toward the sandy end of the beach, the Boston skyline at their backs.
"You are old enough now to make your own decisions," Chiun allowed.
The rain lessened, and behind the endless gray expanse of storm clouds, the sun slid toward the horizon. Shadows grew long and lean as the light began to fail.
"Where will you go?" asked Chiun in a quiet voice.
"I don't know. I don't have any roots to go back to. The orphanage burned down long ago. I can't go back to Newark. Someone might recognize me. I'm supposed to be dead."
"It is good that your thoughts are not of returning to places you have been before."
"Why's that?"
"Because one looks for one's future in places he has yet to go."
"Good point."
"There is one thing that concerns me, however."
"What's that?"
"Shiva."
Remo was silent a long time. Their feet in the sand made no sound. No footprints appeared behind their track.
"I don't believe in Shiva."
"You are the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer, according to the legends of my House. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju."
"The legends are dead wrong," Remo said with more than a trace of an edge in his voice.
"It is not only the death of this innocent man that troubles you, is it?"
"It's been building a long time," Remo admitted.
"It has been especially troublesome since your last assignment. Tibet seemed very familiar to you, yet you had never before visited that land. A land legends tell is the abode of Shiva the Destroyer. A land your brain remembers from a past life your mind does not."
Remo shook his head in annoyance. "I don't believe in Shiva. I don't believe in reincarnation. I'm Remo Williams. Always have been, always will be."
"Not always."
"Correction. Before I was Remo Williams, I wasn't alive. After, I'll be dead. End of story."
Chiun's sparse eyebrows lifted in mock astonishment. "What, no Christian Heaven for Remo Williams? No angels in white to expiate your earthly sins with their many graces?"
"Not after Roger Sherman Coe," said Remo.
"If the error was not yours, the retribution is not yours, either."
Remo said nothing.
"You have one problem, not two."
"Yeah?"
"You are trying to find yourself but you do not know who you are."
&nbs
p; "I just told you. I'm Remo Williams. No more. No less."
"And how do you know you are Remo Williams?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you come into this world with the name Remo Williams stamped upon your backside? Or tattooed to your arm?"
"That's what they called me at the orphanage."
"And you believed them? Just like that?"
Remo frowned. "You're trying to confuse me."
"No, I am trying to unconfuse you. You have been confused by the virgins you call nuns. This happened before I first heard your ridiculous name. You say you have no roots, but what you mean is that you do not know what your roots truly are."
Remo stopped in his tracks. "You mean my parents?"
"Perhaps."
"I've gone through that. Smith says there's no record. And as I recall, you've always steered me away from this line of thought."
"You were younger then. Perhaps you are old enough to seek them out."
"What do you mean, seek them out? You don't think they're still alive, do you?"
"I did not say that," Chiun said quickly.
"I always figured they must have died in a car accident or something," Remo said slowly. "Why else would they give me up for adoption?"
"Why do you think that?"
"Because," said Remo, with a suggestion of tears starting in his eyes, "I couldn't bear to think they just abandoned me like a stray dog."
"And this fear has haunted you all your life?" Chiun asked gently.
"Yeah."
Chiun nodded sagely. "Then it is time to put it to rest. Seek out your parents, Remo Williams, be they living or dead. And put the darkest fears of your childhood behind you."
Remo brushed a single tear away. "I can't believe you're being so understanding about this. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Little Father."
"It is nothing. I may not be your father in truth, Remo Williams, but I have tried to be one in spirit."
"Thanks again."
Chiun regarded his pupil with understanding eyes. "When will you leave?"
"I don't know. Tomorrow. The next day. I don't know where to start."
"I do."
"Yeah? Where?"
"Begin with Smith. His oracles have proved exceedingly accurate in the past."
"Not in the past few hours," said Remo darkly.
Chapter 7
Harold Smith prided himself on being logical.
Logic ruled his life. Long after he'd stopped attending church services regularly, logic had remained the driving force in his waking life. Every mystery had a solution. Any column of numbers could be added, and the result was predictable, unvarying, and the end product as sound as money in the bank. The product of a mathematic operation was subject to division, multiplication, addition or subtraction, and the answer could be looked up in a table and verified.
As the sun set on Long Island Sound, Harold Smith sat in his leather chair, his Dartmouth tie loose at his throat, fine gray stubble on his lean cheeks, his face dappled with the phosphorescent green glow of his monitor.
He was also sweating.
It was a hot, creeping sweat, and from time to time Smith felt flashes of a chill deep in his logical bones. "This makes no sense," he mumbled as he manipulated his clicking computer keys.
Just as two plus two always and invariably totalled four, the two Roger Sherman Coes did not add up.
The dead Roger Sherman Coe of Wilmington, North Carolina, had an electronic trail that went back to his Selective Service file.
The Roger Sherman Coe of the National Computer Crime Index was a ghost. Smith could find nothing about him. There was no IRS record, no listing in any motor-vehicle registry in any of the fifty states. His credit cards had all been overcharged and abandoned, the balances unpaid.
Yet according to his computer, these two men, sharing one name but utterly different life-styles, were one. They could not be one, Smith saw as darkness clamped down on Folcroft Sanitarium and the shaky fluorescent tights of his office automatically came on. Smith paused in his search to sip mineral water. It was after hours and his secretary had gone home for the day. The night shift had come in, and no one would disturb him while he was at his work.
At an impasse, Smith logged off his search and switched to monitoring other areas of CURE activity. Out there in business, government agencies and other walks of life, ordinary Americans routinely sent anonymous tips on ongoing or suspicious activities. They thought they worked for various government agencies-the FBI, the CIA, OSHA and many others-as paid informants. The checks came in the mail at the same time every month. And they filed their reports electronically.
Only Harold Smith received them. These ordinary citizens helped satisfy CURE's vast need for raw information.
Smith paged through the latest reports. They were unremarkable. A warning of a crooked state senator in the far west. A coal-mine owner who was routinely ignoring federal safety standards. Price-fixing among New England dairy farms. In the old days Smith would simply drop a dime on these people and hope the justice system did its job. Now it made just as much sense to tip off one of the proliferation of investigative-news television shows, trusting in the resulting broadcast exposure to coax the proper authorities into doing their jobs.
One report caught Smith's attention because it involved XL SysCorp, the computer giant that had manufactured the WORM arrays Smith now relied on.
It said that XL SysCorp was being picketed by a black special-interest group that accused the computer giant of discriminatory hiring practices. The matter did not fall under Smith's purview, so he passed on.
Another report emanated from within the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had already moved into the area of North Carolina struck by Hurricane Elvis. The complaint accused FEMA of not addressing the situation quickly. It was an old complaint about FEMA. Smith passed on.
In the end there was nothing CURE sensitive. But the respite had cleared Smith's stymied thought processes. He returned to the vexing Roger Sherman Coe conundrum.
Smith ran audit trails from every angle. Nowhere did the two Roger Sherman Coes intersect. As the night wore on, it became more and more obvious that they could not be identical.
That left only one possibility: that the criminal Coe had appropriated the identity of the other Coe. It was a not uncommon ruse. And in this computer age, anyone with access to the net or computer-generated mailing lists could compile the basic information on an individual through IRS and DMV records. Those alone were sufficient to allow a hired killer to create a shield identity called Roger Sherman Coe and, when it had been milked for all it was worth, drop it for another.
It made sense. It was logical. It explained Smith's error. He began to breathe more normally. The tightness in his ribs loosened.
It was only a matter of proving it.
Somewhere in the hours past midnight, Harold Smith's faith in a universe of logic shattered forever. Smith had just returned to his chair after a bathroom break. The sweat of his early-evening's toil had turned clammy, and his pants legs were sticking to his skin. His tie was on the desk now, and the top button of his shirt lay open.
A routine message came over the screen. It was a report from COMSUBPAC that the USS Harlequin, which had left San Diego Naval Terminal for Pacific manoeuvres, had declared radio silence.
Smith nodded to himself and returned to the task at hand. Only he and the captain of the Harlequin knew that the sub was in fact heading for the dangerous waters of the West Korea Bay, where, as scheduled for every year for the past twenty or so years, a cargo of gold siphoned from the federal emergency reserves would be off-loaded and left on the beach of the tiny fishing village of Sinanju.
By now it was a routine mission. The Harlequin commander had his sealed orders, his superiors were instructed to ask no questions, and nothing was ever said about it.
So Smith settled down to a final effort at finding the false Roger Sherman Coe.
The world of re
ason collapsed in on him when, frustrated at the interminable dead ends he kept reaching, Smith decided to log onto the National Crime Computer Index in the National Crime Information Center. It was routinely updated. It was a long shot, but perhaps in the handful of days since he had downloaded the massive data file, new information had been added.
Smith accessed the data base with the coded passwords he had on file and called up the Roger Sherman Coe file.
It would not come.
The glowing green read simply, mockingly, NOT FOUND.
"Impossible," Smith said tightly. "I have that file in my own data base."
On the theory that the file had been closed, Smith called up the inactive portion of the data base records. NOT FOUND, the screen read.
"Impossible," Smith repeated in a low, almost tremulous voice.
Smith tried again. He knew it would be a waste of time, but he tried again. A computer does not make logical errors, he knew. Ask it to find something, and as long as the operating system and its logic circuits were functioning, it would find the object of its search-this time, next time and every time, just as a calculator would always report the sum of three plus seven as the number ten. There was no room for error, uncertainty or what people like to call fuzzy logic these days.
NOT FOUND, reported the monitor.
Smith stared at the screen, oblivious to the drop of sweat being squeezed out of the tightening notch between his tired eyes. It rilled down the bridge of his patrician nose, slowed at the tip and clung by static tension until it fell on his unfeeling left hand.
A hand that trembled uncontrollably.
Smith hesitated. Less than a week ago, there had been a file on Roger Sherman Coe in the NCCI. Smith had downloaded it. It was now in his own duplicate of the NCCI data base. He had called it up just hours before. Read it with his own eyes.
Files do not uncreate themselves. Computers are not thinking, creative mentalities, he knew. A clerk had keyed the Roger Sherman Coe file onto the NCCI data base. Smith had merely vacuumed it up through the magic of fiber-optic cable and dumped it onto an optical WORM disk through the medium of laser writing. It was now permanently written onto a CD-like platter.
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