Market Force td-127

by Warren Murphy

  The doctor's face grew hard. "Not that it matters, but these people were black."

  "Were they Americans?" Chiun asked blandly.

  "Of course."

  "White as rice," Chiun concluded.

  "I don't know," Remo said, steering the doctor away from the Master of Sinanju. "A mob's a mob till someone proves otherwise. I mean, what would cause this dizzy-what's-it?"

  "Dissociation," the doctor repeated. "And I don't know. I've never heard of anything like this. To my knowledge, dissociation is always manifested in individuals, not groups. It wouldn't make sense the other way. Sleepwalking, psychotic delusions, certain forms of amnesia, automatic writing are all accepted forms of dissociation. Not this."

  "Automatic writing?" Cindee asked.

  "Just an aspect of the phenomenon. An individual's hand writes messages without conscious control."

  "Pretty much explains every screenplay in Hollywood," Remo commented.

  Cindee gave the hairy eyeball to her assistant. The woman shrugged apologetically.

  "Okay," Cindee droned to the doctor. "That was really fascinating stuff. I was-wow-just, well, fascinated. Bye." She turned to go.

  "But he didn't even turn his camera on," the doctor said, face collapsing in disappointment.

  "Outta tape," Cindee confided.

  "No, I'm not," said the cameraman.

  Cindee clouted the camera operator in the back of the head before spinning around and marching away. "Sorry," Remo said to the doctor after Cindee Maloo and her Winner crew were gone.

  As the desperate physician looked for someone else to tell his story to, Remo and the Master of Sinanju headed back down the sidewalk.

  In the street beyond the crowd of babbling reporters, two men watched Remo and Chiun go.

  The pair of Harlem police officers sat in a cruiser at the edge of the crowd.

  An alert had come over the radio two hours ago. All cruisers in the area had been given a description of two men, a young white and an elderly Asian. In Harlem, a pair like that would stick out like sore thumbs.

  The men in question were believed to be armed and were without doubt very, very dangerous.

  Starting their engine, the police officers drew cautiously away from the curb. Slowly so as not to attract attention, they began trailing the suspects down the litter-strewn street.

  Chapter 8

  With the mob dispersed and the former president safe, technically Remo's work was done. He would have been okay to head back to Folcroft. But Folcroft wasn't any fun at the moment, what with all the cops and dead bodies and crazy people. And even if Smith allowed them to stay in residence a few more days, Remo wasn't really in the mood to be cooped up in his quarters surrounded by packing crates and staring at the walls. Not with the Master of Sinanju in his current snotty mood.

  The Harlem doctor had sown a tiny seed of doubt in Remo's mind. When he asked a bystander, Remo found out that most of the rioters had been brought to the same nearby police station. He decided to check them out before leaving.

  On their way to the station he checked on his car. Since the most hardened Harlem criminals usually went home come sunup, the hours from dawn to noon were low tide for criminal activity. It was a little after seven in the morning, and all the pros were safely tucked away in bed. Consequently, instead of being completely stripped, Remo's car was only half-dismantled.

  "You've got twenty minutes," Remo announced to the gang of eight grammar-school kids who were tearing apart his car like wrench-wielding locusts.

  "What you talking 'bout?" one of the kids demanded.

  He was thirteen, looked nineteen and had a Glock pistol jutting from the waistband of his exposed underpants.

  Remo took the gun, shattered it into three fat pieces and skipped the parts down the street. Eight young jaws dropped.

  "Twenty minutes, class," Remo repeated. "I come back and my car's not back together by then, you're all going to be victims of white rage."

  Remo grabbed the oldest kid. "You're elected hall monitor." Climbing one-handed, he hauled the youth up a telephone pole. He hung him by his exposed underwear from the shattered overhanging streetlight.

  "You can oversee reconstruction," he said. "Anyone leaves, you're telling me names and addresses."

  "Yessir!" the terrified kid said.

  When Remo slid back to the ground, the others were already frantically trying to reassemble the car. The Master of Sinanju was supervising their work with a bland eye. As Remo headed off to the police station, the old man padded up beside him.

  "What kind of children are you raising in this country?" the old Korean asked.

  "No one's raising them," Remo said. "That's the problem. America's inner cities have turned into Children of the Corn with crappier production values."

  The Master of Sinanju stroked his thread of beard. "Perhaps it is not so bad that you wish to shoot me like the old horse that pulls the milk wagon, Remo. At the speed with which this nation is falling into ruin, it would only be a matter of time before a building drops on my head anyway."

  "Keep picking that scab, and I'll never take over as Reigning Master," Remo warned. "Those lazy slugs back in Sinanju'd have to find real jobs. How would it look to your ancestors if you became the first Master who trained a student who decided to ditch that craphole of a village?"

  "You would not be the first," Chiun said coldly. Remo realized he'd misspoken. He had forgotten about Chiun's nephew, Nuihc, the renegade Master of Sinanju who had trained Jeremiah Purcell in the ancient martial art.

  Rather than dig himself in deeper, he clammed up. As the two walked along, Remo noted that they had drawn attention from the surrounding buildings. About a dozen video cameras were trained on them from the windows.

  The riot and the subsequent police and news activity had drawn them out. The locals were hoping to catch an instance of police brutality they could sell to the networks.

  Chiun floated away from the cameras, finding blind spots and shadows where no lens could find him. Remo had his own technique for avoiding identification. Every time he felt the pressure waves of a camera aimed his way, he vibrated his facial muscles.

  Later on, when the camera operators tried to view the image on the tape, all they'd see was a blur where a face should have been.

  Remo had successfully negotiated his way through the gauntlet of window cameras when he spied yet another lens up ahead. It was nestled in a clump of ugly, snow-draped weeds that huddled at the corner of a squalid tenement. He recognized the face of the cameraman.

  Marching over, Remo dragged Cindee Maloo's camera operator from the bushes. The little red light on his camera was lit. It was still aimed at Remo. "What the hell is this?" Remo demanded.

  He addressed not the cameraman, but a broken-down wall that rimmed the adjacent vacant lot. A sheepish Cindee Maloo rose into view from behind the shattered wall. The cameraman turned the lens to the Winner producer.

  "I didn't get your name," Cindee asked.

  Remo's face fouled. "Bunny Wigglesworth," he said, dropping the cameraman to the sidewalk.

  "You're not very nice, are you?" Cindee frowned. "That could work. Someone nasty's always fun to toss into the mix. Are you a struggling actor?"

  "What is all this?" Remo asked. "Don't you have a game show to go rig?"

  Cindee waved a dismissive hand. "The cameras are rolling continuously back there. Whatever happens, we'll get it. Right now I'm thinking ahead. The next season of 'Winner' will have to get started soon. We've gotta get another cast assembled. You want to test for it?"

  "Oh, brother," Remo exhaled.

  He started down the sidewalk. Cindee and her cameraman hurried to keep up.

  "Seriously," Cindee insisted, dogging him. "You're kind of good-looking, in a mean sort of way. "

  "Kind of thanks a heap, in an up-yours sort of way." Remo snarled.

  "I will do it," Chiun announced.

  Cindee screamed, startled by the new voice. She wheeled around
, expecting a mugger or worse. "Oh, it's you," she breathed when she saw the wisp of an Asian trailing behind her. "I didn't see you there." She sniffled relief and rubbed her hands for warmth.

  "I will do your program," Chiun repeated.

  Remo could see the frozen earnestness in the old man's weathered face. The Master of Sinanju was serious.

  "No way," Remo said.

  "Still your tongue," Chiun hissed.

  "Well, we have had old people on before," Cindee said.

  "He's not doing it," Remo told her. "Chiun, Smith would have a heart attack if you went on 'Winner.'"

  "He has had them before and yet still lingers to vex the living," the Master of Sinanju said. "Worry not about Smith's strong heart, but about my weak one, which you have broken in your mad desire to hasten me out to pasture."

  "You could be interesting," Cindee admitted.

  "Not could be," Chiun corrected, "am."

  Remo shook his head firmly. "He is not interesting and he is not going on some game show where the other contestants vote the rest off the show. And I'll tell you why. He wouldn't hunt, he wouldn't forage, he wouldn't lift a goddamn finger to help anyone else out. He'd be the laziest sack of egomaniacal selfishness you ever had on that show. He would be the first-the very first-they would vote off, and then he'd win the million bucks because the whole rest of the cast along with the production staff would get snuffed out one by one on national TV like tiki torches until someone cut him a check. He is not interested."

  "Silence, O basher of the aged and infirm," Chiun hissed.

  "Oh, if you're not in good health, we couldn't use you," Cindee apologized.

  "I am healthy as healthy can be," Chiun said rapidly, with a wave of his frail hand. He pitched his voice low. "Do not ruin this for me," he warned Remo.

  Remo threw up his hands. "Fine. Kill Smith by going on national TV. Just remember, you've lost your fallback position. The little prince is on his way out the door."

  Cindee was pulling some business cards from her pocket. She passed one to the Master of Sinanju.

  "Here's the address to send your demo tape to." Chiun happily accepted the card. It disappeared inside the voluminous folds of his kimono.

  Cindee tried to give Remo one of the cards. As he walked along, he tore the card to confetti with blurry hands and let the hundred fragments flutter to the cold street.

  "Don't you want to be famous?" Cindee asked.

  "Fame ain't all it's cracked up to be," Remo said. "For what I do, reputation is better. The parts of the world where they need to know me? Believe me, they know me."

  "That doesn't make sense," Cindee said. "Reputation is fame. If someone knows you, they know you."

  Remo shook his head. "They only need to know what I am, which they do. The 'who' changes. That little glory hound back there-" he nodded over his shoulder to where the Master of Sinanju padded along behind them -he's the current who. I'm the next who. There have been five thousand years' worth of us. The faces have changed, the reputation remains the same. And we got all that without sucking up to key demos or studying overnight ratings in Pittsburgh."

  She saw that he spoke without boasting. As if he knew what he was saying to be true. And the way he walked. More a glide than a normal man's stride. He had a confidence and inner grace that she found at once mysterious and sexy. He seemed to just know what and who he was.

  Cindee was a twenty-eight-year-old Australian woman who had risen in the American TV ranks to be producer of one of the biggest cultural phenomenons to hit the small screen since Uncle Miltie donned his first dress back in television's golden age. She was well on her way up the professional ladder. Cindee Maloo had arrived. Yet for some reason he made her feel as if she'd done nothing with her life. She suddenly felt the need to justify herself to this stranger.

  "I didn't start out doing 'Winner,'" Cindee confided all at once.

  "Are you still here?" Remo asked, irritated.

  "'The Box,'" she said. "That was something I produced all by myself for one of the nets last year. We took fourteen real people and put them in a big steel box and buried it under a pile of sand. Every day for two weeks the people in the box would vote one person out of the box."

  "I never heard of it," Remo said. Cindee's face grew glum.

  "Well, that's because things didn't go too well with the pilot." She raised a gloved finger. "Technically, it wasn't my fault. I assumed someone else would figure out all that stuff about air holes and oxygen. Fortunately, all our contestants had signed releases, so their heirs didn't have much of a leg to stand on legally."

  "As reality shows go, I guess 'This Old House' doesn't cut it anymore," Remo said dryly.

  "I don't do boring," Cindee said. "The public likes their stuff to be edgy. I did another pilot, this one for syndication. It was called 'Sea of Love.' In that one we took seven men and one woman and put them on a yacht out in the middle of San Francisco harbor. Every day for a week the woman voted one man off the boat till only one was left."

  "I sense a common thread here," Remo said.

  Cindee bristled. "There isn't one," she insisted. "If you're saying that they're just like 'Winner' and all I was doing was copying that show, you're wrong. They were both very different. One was underground and one was on a boat in the water. Are you stupid or something?"

  "Yes, he is," Chiun replied.

  "So what happened to the boat one?" Remo asked.

  Cindee flushed. "It wasn't my fault," she said. "Someone else suggested that it'd be sexy to make them go skinny-dipping by moonlight. Who knew there were sharks swimming around in San Francisco harbor?"

  "I did," said both Remo and Chiun.

  "Well, I should have hired you both as consultants, shouldn't I?" Cindee said sarcastically. "Anyway, my shows didn't get picked up, but they got noticed. That's how I got the job with 'Winner.'"

  They had arrived at the steps of the police station. Remo turned to Cindee Maloo.

  "Are you through following me?" he asked.

  Cindee gave a reluctant frown. "I still think you'd be great on the show. You've got something. I think people would find you appealing. Anyway, your friend's got my card if you change your mind."

  Remo was grateful when Cindee and her cameraman turned to go. As the Winner crew went back down the street, Remo and Chiun mounted the station house steps.

  "You know we're being watched," Remo said to the Master of Sinanju once they were alone.

  "Of course," Chiun sniffed, insulted. "I am not an invalid. They have been following us for ten minutes."

  At the top of the stairs Remo shot a glance back at the street. The police car that had been tailing them ever since they'd left the front of the ex-president's building was slowing to a stop in front of the precinct house.

  "We don't exactly look like we live around here," Remo said. "Probably just making sure we're okay." As a former beat cop, Remo was heartened to see there were still dedicated officers who took seriously their duty to protect the public. Leaving the pair of uniformed patrolman out in the street, he ushered the Master of Sinanju inside the station.

  Remo felt the vibrations of a pair of video cameras as soon as he stepped inside. One was directed at the door; the other swung his way as he walked up to the desk.

  Chiun was playing coy with the cameras again. He found a blind spot where neither lens could track him, settling on a bench where several handcuffed men awaited processing.

  When Remo presented his phony FBI identification at the desk, the sergeant on duty seemed a little more interested than he should. He studied Remo's picture ID and his face several times before allowing him inside.

  "You coming with, Little Father?"

  The old Korean shook his head. "This seems like as good a place as any to observe the collapse of Western civilization," he replied.

  Leaving the Master of Sinanju in the lobby, Remo followed a uniformed officer into the bowels of the station.

  The cells in the back of the station
were full. Remo found that the Harlem doctor had been right about the rioters. Many of the people in the cells he passed seemed lost and frightened, completely out of place in a jail environment. The people were mostly middle-aged or older. Women outnumbered men.

  The officer led him to a rear cell where one prisoner had been isolated from the rest.

  When Remo entered the cell, he found Minister Hal Shittman sprawled on a soiled bunk like a velour-wrapped whale. With every snoring exhale, the famous minister's giant belly deflated only to strain velour once more on the inhale. The rancid wind that passed his lips reeked of the two dozen stale Twinkies and gallon of grape Kool-Aid that had been his previous night's supper.

  Only at the clank of the closing cell door did the minister awaken. As sleep fled, bleary red eyes looked up unhappily at the white man standing in his cell. "Who are you?" Shittman demanded.

  "Adidas corporate lawyer," Remo said. "Since you insist on dressing in our clothes, we'd like you to either lose nine hundred pounds or stick masking tape over our logo. It's bad for business having a guy with breasts bigger than Pamela Anderson's waddling around in our sports gear."

  "You ain't my lawyer," Shittman declared. "I put in a call to Mr. Johnnie. Get lost, skinny."

  He flopped back on his bunk.

  Remo didn't feel like wasting more time than he had to in that cell. Shittman's cologne was vying with his breath for the title of worst stink in the tristate area.

  Remo drove two hard fingers into a neck that felt like sweaty pudding. He only knew he'd somehow found the proper pain receptors when Shittman's eyes sprang open wide.

  "Youch!" Shittman yelped. Fat arms flailing, the minister rolled to a sitting position.

  "Now that I've got your attention," Remo said, "tell me what happened last night. And make it fast, 'cause that aftershave of yours smells worse than a lying, shit-smeared teenaged girl."

  The shock of pain that had shot through his body was still reverberating through his most distant extremities. The minister's great blubbery jowls jiggled in fear.