Market Force td-127

by Warren Murphy

  "I've been meaning to talk to you both about that," Smith said. He continued to work, eyes trained on his computer screen. "It is too problematic for you to remain here any longer. Given current circumstances, it is time the two of you found alternative lodgings."

  "Oh, great," grumbled Remo. "Perfect timing."

  "Why would I expect anything more?" Chiun moaned. "Now you both wish to rid yourselves of the nuisance that is me. Why not smother me in my sleep? Or better yet, the two of you could take me into the depths of the forest and chain me to a tree like some unwanted dog. I will buy the chain."

  "Thanks a bunch, Smitty," Remo groused. "Couldn't you pick a better time to toss us out on our ears?"

  "Permanent residence for you here at Folcroft has never been an option," Smith insisted. "By allowing you to stay all these months, we have all been guilty of falling into a comfortable but dangerous habit. You knew you couldn't remain here forever." His eyes narrowed as he studied the data on his computer. "Oh, my," he said quietly.

  "What's wrong now?"

  "There is apparently some civil unrest in Harlem," the CURE director replied.

  "No kidding?" Remo said blandly. "What's the matter, Cincinnati run out of windows to break?"

  "This could be serious," Smith said gravely.

  As he spoke, his computer beeped anew. Tired eyes scanned the new information culled by the CURE mainframes. By the time he'd finished reading, the last of the color had drained from his gray face.

  "The president was visiting Harlem at the time. Initial reports are not clear, but he was apparently in the area when the mob action began. He may be in danger."

  "What the hell is he doing in Harlem?" Remo asked. "I thought he only left Camp David to fly to Texas."

  "It is a former president," Smith explained.

  "Oh." Remo's face relaxed. He glanced around the gloomy office. "Anything good on TV?"

  Chapter 7

  A dour winter's dawn was beginning to streak the sky above Harlem as Cindee Maloo stomped her size-five Timberland all-terrain boot on the potholed street.

  "Pooh," Cindee complained. "Pooh, pooh and more pooh."

  She had just been given some very bad news about the former president of the United States.

  "Are you sure he escaped in one piece?" Cindee demanded.

  "I'm sorry, Cindee," replied her assistant. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but there weren't any dramatic rescues or blood on the sidewalk or anything. According to the news people, he managed to get into his office after the mob attacked his car. When they didn't storm the building, he holed up in there for a few hours. The mob surrounded the place and screamed and yelled for a while, but when the police showed up, everything just sort of stopped. Everyone surrendered peacefully and the president took off. He's probably halfway to Chappaqua by now."

  Cindee stomped her little foot in its rugged outdoorsy boot again. "Pooh!" she repeated.

  Her nasal accent made the word come out sounding like "poe." The accent was Australian, which was no surprise since Cindee Maloo herself was Australian. She was Australian from her nasal accent to the top of her naturally curly Australian blond hair and to the toe of her pretty little Australian foot, which she stomped angrily on the ugly American pavement one more time.

  "Where's the drama in just having him escape like that?" Cindee complained. "Who's gonna stay tuned if they know he gets out of it alive?"

  Cindee cast a furious eye up at the building in which the former president had spent a harrowing night.

  Rocks had shattered most of the windows. The sidewalk was littered with glass.

  The thinning crowd gathered outside the building was mostly news people along with a few neighborhood residents who had come out to gawk when the fireworks started.

  Nearer, there were two men examining some of the debris that had been crushed by the mob's stomping feet.

  "I'll prove it to you," Cindee said to her assistant. "Let's ask Joe Sixpack here." She turned to the nearest of the two men. "You. Lemme ask you something."

  The man didn't even look at her. That was unusual. With her smooth skin, perfect teeth and piercing brown eyes, Cindee had the sort of features that usually had no problem turning men's heads.

  The man spoke without lifting his head. "Where'd you buy that accent, Paul Hogan's going-out-of-career sale?" he asked, his nose still in the gutter.

  What he was looking at, Cindee had no idea. "I wanna ask you about TV," Cindee pressed.

  "Go squat on one."

  "Did you hear the president got away?" Cindee demanded.

  The man let loose a protracted exhale of air. Turning his attention from the junk on the ground, he straightened, settling his gaze on Cindee.

  "What part of me being rude to you so you'll go away don't you understand?" asked Remo Williams.

  "I just want to ask you a question. Why won't you let me ask you a question? You Americans are so vulgar."

  "This one speaks with a wisdom beyond her years," announced the Master of Sinanju, who had been studying the trash in the road alongside his pupil.

  Remo shook his head, irritated. "Thanks a heap, Waltzing Matilda," he growled at Cindee. "He wasn't on the rag enough already without a jump start from you. What do you want to ask me? And make it quick."

  "Drama," Cindee said. "I want the opinion of the man in the street about what he thinks makes good drama. You couldn't get more in the street than you, since you're actually standing in the street." She frowned. "What are you doing in the street, anyway?"

  "Going back to ignoring you," Remo said.

  "Wait," Cindee insisted. "Even you must understand what makes good drama. The ex-president here, a mob on the street hurling flaming bottles and rocks at the building where he's hiding. That's drama. You'd watch that, wouldn't you?"

  "No," said Remo impatiently. "Are we done now?" Not waiting for a reply, he returned to examining the street.

  A man with a camera near the battered building caught the eye of Cindee's assistant. The young woman hurried over to him, leaving her boss in the company of Remo and Chiun.

  "Of course you would," Cindee persisted. "Don't try to pretend you're not like everybody else in this country. You people love that kind of violent drama. Why do you think you're glued to the set every time some kid opens fire in his high-school cafeteria? You got helicopters overhead, police cordons, kids climbing out windows. Drama."

  When Remo looked back up, his face was cold. "Don't tell me what I love," he said, voice chilly. She was momentarily taken aback by the icy menace in his tone. It was in that moment of hesitation that the Master of Sinanju inserted himself. The old Korean took Cindee's gloved hands in his frail fingers, patting gently. His face was the personification of ancient wisdom.

  "Of course you are correct, my dear," Chiun said.

  "I have maintained for years that the American culture revels in violence. I hear others out there saying the same thing now, but I was first."

  "Good for you," Cindee said. She tried to extricate her hands, but they wouldn't budge. It was as if the old man's hands were fast-drying concrete that had firmed up around her own.

  "This is a new kind of violence," Chiun continued. "There are some who might think it began with your foolish Revolution or the things you would call world wars, even though everyone knows the only important part of the world wasn't involved in them. There was violence there, yes, but it was men killing men, which has gone on forever. Do you want to know when your culture truly turned to violence?"

  "Technically, I'm Australian, not American," Cindee said. "Not my culture." She tugged at her hands.

  "June 11, 1975," Chiun said. "A day that will live in infamy." He hung his head.

  Cindee's eyes narrowed. "What happened then?"

  "Some dippy soap opera actress hit some dippy soap-opera actor," Remo supplied.

  The Master of Sinanju's face tightened. "It was Rad Rex, it was 'As the Planet Revolves' and it was the end of your American culture," h
e said over his shoulder to Remo. "Since then there has been nothing but car crashes and shooting guns. Poor Mr. Rex, whose autograph remains my most prized possession, had to retire. A gentle soul, he left before his dignity could be sullied by the death of art in this land."

  "Yeah, he was really worried about preserving his dignity that time I saw him hawking some pocket wiener pump on a 1980s infomercial," Remo said.

  "Pay him no heed," Chiun confided. "He only says such things to appeal to prurient minds. How typical he is of the current state of this nation's culture."

  This time when Cindee yanked her hands, Chiun allowed her to have them. She pulled so hard, she smacked herself in her Australian forehead. She quickly stuffed her hands in her pockets, lest the old geyser with the viselike grip latch on to them again.

  "Thanks for the input, Fops," Cindee said. "But you're not my ideal demographic."

  "What does that mean?" Chiun asked suspiciously.

  "It means you're too old for your opinion to matter," she explained. "Advertisers skew younger and-I hate to break it to you-you're way beyond that prized eighteen-to-forty-nine range. Like two hundred years beyond it."

  "I will let that insult pass because you are obviously possessed of a deranged mind," Chiun said thinly.

  "What she obviously is is some kind of TV exec," Remo said. "They're deranged on a good day. On the rest, they're just stupid as a sack of doorknobs." He was annoyed at his teacher for wasting time with the Australian ditz.

  "I'm a producer," Cindee corrected.

  "Same pot, different crack," Remo said.

  "You do not listen to anyone older than forty-nine?" Chiun interjected, steering her back to what was now, for him, the main point.

  "Not if I can help it," Cindee said. "No offense, but that's just the way the business works."

  "What of the wisdom derived from age and experience?" Chiun said, astonished. "They mean nothing to you?"

  "Sorry," Cindee said. "Now him," she added, pointing at Remo. "He's in the right demo group. His opinion holds weight."

  "Go cuddle a kangaroo," opined Remo.

  Chiun thrust his hands deep in the sleeves of his kimono. "You and my son have much in common," he said unhappily. "He, too, believes that people of a certain age have nothing more to contribute to the world. He has often said that he would send all of us over sixty-five on buses to the cemetery today, just to save the young the time and expense of having to bother with funerals later on."

  "Not true. Not listening," Remo said. He was leaning over, hands on his knees.

  Chiun nodded to Cindee. "It is true, no matter what he tells you," he confided.

  "Hey, lady," Rema said, ignoring the old man, "you're a TV expert. Does this look like a little TV to you?"

  Cindee went over to him. She peered down at the object that had so fascinated the two men.

  "Yeah," she said. "It's one of those little handheld numbers you get at the mall."

  The plastic case was cracked, the electronic guts spilled out onto the road. The mini-television set looked as if it had been crushed flat by hundreds of stomping feet.

  "So that's one, too?" Remo said.

  He pointed a few feet away. There was another small television there, no bigger than a person's palm. Near it were two others. All of them had been stomped by the mob.

  When Cindee looked around, she saw that there were dozens of crushed televisions around the area. They were mixed in with the rest of the street litter.

  Cindee's pretty little Australian nose crinkled in confusion. "Why are all those TVs here?" she asked.

  "I don't know," Remo said. "Ordinarily, I'd say that a cop shot a black murderer and the community expressed its outrage that a killer got killed by helping itself to the inventory of the local electronics store. But this is Harlem. There isn't a lootable Circuit City within a trillion-mile radius."

  He stood back up.

  "Any thoughts, Little Father?" Remo asked.

  "Why do you care what I think?" Chiun sniffed.

  "Okay, had enough of that already," Remo said. He turned back to Cindee. "I wonder who dropped these here. How long have you been here?"

  "I just got here about ten minutes ago," she replied.

  "So you didn't see the mob?"

  Cindee's face sagged. "Don't remind me," she griped. "By the sounds of it, we didn't get any usable footage."

  "What do you mean, footage?" Remo asked.

  Cindee huffed impatiently. "For 'Winner,'" she explained. "We're taping in the area."

  Remo recognized the name of the program. It had been on the television in the lobby of General Zhii Zaw's hotel in Cancun.

  "That stupid TV show?" he asked. "I saw part of it just the other day. It looked like you were filming in Bosnia."

  "We're not," she said, sounding almost as if she wished they were. "We're right around the corner from here. And don't remind me that they decided to run more than just the Thursday-night episode this week. The network is going to run us into the ground putting us on two nights a week. They said it's only because of the holiday next week. It better be. We don't want a 'Millionaire' overexposure problem. Of course, it might be okay to double up if we had some action to blast into people's living rooms. That mob would have been great for background-you know, set the stage on the real-life hardships in Harlem. Show how gritty these streets can get. But the three cameramen we had on the scene panicked and ran. They didn't even get the murder on tape."

  "What murder?"

  Cindee clapped a hand over her mouth. "Forget I said that," she insisted.

  "Gladly," said the Master of Sinanju, bored. He was watching the gathering crowd of reporters, which by now filled the sidewalks around the former president's office building in numbers greater than the previous night's mob.

  "Was one of the people on the show killed?" Remo asked.

  "I'm not confirming or denying," Cindee said quickly. "You'll have to watch and see. We're taping what will be week eight right now, and next week's episode will only be the second week of the season, so you have a while to go."

  Rema shook his head. "Not me," he said. "I do reality, not reality shows. Your little friend wants you."

  He pointed down the sidewalk. Cindee's assistant was waving for Cindee to join her. She and a Winner cameraman had cornered an interview subject on the sidewalk. Cindee hurried over to join them. Remo and Chiun followed.

  The two Sinanju Masters were careful to avoid the many cameras. There were local and national reporters on the scene. Some were doing live interviews for the morning network news programs. They weren't lacking for interview subjects. In the wake of the riots, dozens of experts on the black community had swarmed into Harlem. They had done their swarming that morning from white communities. Like most experts on the black community, none of them actually lived in an actual black community.

  Remo passed by four very angry women with bulging, lunatic's eyes who were screeching into cameras that the CIA and not poor, maligned Minister Shittman was actually responsible for the previous night's events. Three of the women were tenured professors at prestigious New York universities. One was a bag lady. The only difference Remo could see between the professors and the bag lady was that the professors apparently took off their tinfoil-lined hats while on camera.

  The man Cindee's assistant had scraped up was a middle-aged black doctor with a kindly face who actually lived in the community and knew many of the people involved in the riot. He was soft-spoken and unobtrusive and, thus, no one was interested in anything he had to say.

  "This could be good for a few seconds' footage," Cindee's assistant promised when Cindee and the two Masters of Sinanju arrived. "Tell her what you were telling me."

  "Oh," said the man. "I was trying to tell these people that something is wrong here, but no one will listen."

  His wet eyes were pleading with them to understand.

  "Of course something's wrong," Cindee said. "A mob tried to kill the president last night and we miss
ed getting so much as an inch of footage." She shot a dirty look at her assistant for wasting all their time.

  "No," insisted the doctor. "That's what they wanted it to look like. But it couldn't be."

  The doctor was on the verge of tears.

  Remo would have dismissed him as just another one of the crowd of sidewalk apologists who had crawled out of the woodwork to offer excuses for the mob's actions, but there was something about the man. He seemed so sincere.

  "Why isn't this riot like every other one?" Remo asked.

  "The people involved," the doctor said. "Most of them were patients of mine. They weren't the kind of people to riot. They're just regular folks. There was even an elderly couple who were afraid to leave their apartment. I used to have to make house calls to them. It doesn't make sense that they'd come out in the middle of a mob like that."

  "Unless their son who coveted their possessions sent them out in the hope that they would not survive the civil unrest," the Master of Sinanju pointed out.

  "Put a sock in it," Remo suggested. To the doctor he said, "So what do you think happened with them?"

  "Not just with them," the doctor said. "With the whole mob. It looks like some sort of dissociation to me." He noted all their blank faces. "It's a psychological state," he explained. "Internally, the mind can disconnect certain ideas and behaviors from the main body of a person's belief system. An individual in a dissociated state acts and talks and reacts in ways they never would consciously."

  "You're saying this is some sort of sleepwalking," Remo said dubiously.

  "In a way. That's what it looks like to me. Normal people don't just run out and join a mob if they're not divorced from their conscious minds."

  "Nonsense," Chiun sniffed. "You whites do nothing but play around in mobs. Then the mobs get too big and you have to have a war to make them smaller. That is what what's-his-name did in Europe a few years ago. The one with the funny little mustache. He was white like these people."