Holy Terror td-19

by Warren Murphy

  CHAPTER TWO

  His name was Remo, and he was bored with lacquered plates flying at his head, the ones with the fanged jaws of a dog inlaid over a calla lily background, the ones that came zipping in, sometimes with a curve or a dip or a hop, and sometimes straight for the cranium with enough speed to crack a skull.

  Remo's left hand seemed to float up and gently touch most of the plates. Some of the plates he did not bother to block, and in the plates that were not blocked was the skill he was reminding his muscles and nerves to perform. Skill was not muscle but timing, and timing was merely being in unity, making and then keeping his perceptions in tune with reality.

  This act of keeping the death plates from harming him reminded him of a simple lesson long ago when the Master of Sinanju had used slow bamboo spears that had at the time looked so fast that Remo had stood in terror as they came at him.

  But these plates came five times as fast, just slower than a .22 short bullet. They whacked into the pillows behind him, tearing plush red fabric and snapping the springs of the couch. But the lesson he had learned from the bamboo staves was still the lesson now. Do not defend where you are not, but only that which is valuable to you. The hooking, dipping plates would only harm him if he went at the plates themselves, instead of staying within the zone of his body, and merely protecting it from the plates' intrusion.

  The last plate came horizontal at his eyes, seemed to hang for a moment, then arched above his right ear and rose cracking into the wall, which opened a three-foot seam in the white plaster wall of the Rhoda Motel in Roswell, New Mexico. Outside was the Rio Hondo, a slip of a rocky stream that only in this parched summer would be called anything more than a brook.

  "Home run," said the hurler of the plates, whose joy, unmitigated and mounting, had made Remo's life hell. If one had to have hell, Remo had thought, why must it be in New Mexico? But that was where he had been told to be and that was where he was. Chiun, the hurler of plates, did not mind being in New Mexico. He was going home to his native village of Sinanju in Korea, which his labors supported, just as the services of his father and his father's father and ancestors back to the earliest recorded time had supported the village.

  Chiun was but the latest Master of Sinanju, and the services of the Master of Sinanju were always needed by one emperor or another. By czar and emperor, pharaoh and king, president and ethnarch, there was always work for the assassin, and the ancient House of Sinanju, sun source of all the martial arts, was simply the world's oldest, established, permanent repository of the assassin's skill. For hire.

  In America, the services that had been hired were slightly different from usual. The Master of Sinanju had been retained to train one man, a white man, a man who had been made publicly dead, an electrocuted man. Remo—who was then Remo Williams.

  And in the years that followed, the training changed the very nervous system itself so that the body and the mind of Remo could see plates come at him and know instantly which required his body's attention and which he could safely ignore.

  "It's no home run, Little Father. The pitcher doesn't get home runs. The batter gets home runs."

  "You change the rules on me because I am Korean and not expected to know. I am being cheated of home run," said Chiun, and he folded his long delicate fingers over each other so that his golden kimono with the white butterflies settled in repose. Even his wispy ancient beard seemed to rest triumphant. The Master of Sinanju had caught his pupil in an injustice that he was savoring.

  It had been like that since Chiun had been informed that since Remo would be going to Patna, India, going west over the Pacific, they would be going near Japan and Korea, and Chiun would be allowed to visit his home village of Sinanju, even though it was in the politically unfriendly northern part of Korea.

  Since that day that Upstairs had gotten riled over something that had happened in India—why India, Remo didn't know, since India had about as much to do with Upstairs' mission as potato soup did with the hypotenuse of a triangle—since that day Chiun had been collecting injustices, the long-suffering Korean in a land of white racists.

  He would return to his village to tell them what he had endured for them, while hiring out his talents so that the payments could support the aged and the infirm and the poor of the village of Sinanju.

  "If I were white, it would be a home run," said Chiun.

  "First, Little Father, we were exercising. I was, at least. And we weren't playing baseball."

  "You wouldn't play with a Korean. Like your Little League. I understand. You whites are all alike. Bigoted. Yet, I maintain myself above your pettiness."

  Through the crack in the motel room wall, a face peered. As the face retreated, Remo and Chiun saw a ten-gallon Stetson on top of the face that was on top of a bare chest, bare waist, and bare everything else. The man retreated further from his side of the wall. There was something on the bed, however. Blond and ass sassy and nude as a defrocked tick.

  "Hi, there, fellas," she cried.

  "Shut your mouth, woman," said the man from under the hat. He turned back to the wall. "You there. You and the gook."

  "Aha," said Chiun. "Gook."

  "Shit," said Remo.

  "You heard me. Gook. Gook. Gook."

  "Aha. Aha. Aha," said Chiun. "I stand here humbly insulted. Yet enduring, for I am a man of peace. Of love. Of tranquility."

  "Here we go," said Remo.

  "You make this hole in the wall?" asked the man under the hat.

  A long, bony finger disengaged from the tranquility of rest with the other hand and pointed accusingly at Remo.

  "You did, fella, right?" said the hat to Remo.

  "You have brought grief into my life," said Remo.

  "You want gree-yuf? You gonna get gree-yuf," said the man under the hat, and Remo saw him put on tooled leather cowboy boots, pick up a shiny six-shot revolver from the clothes pile, and walk out of sight. Remo heard the door in the next room open and close and then heard a knock on his door.

  "It's not locked," said Remo.

  The man entered, six-feet-four of him, six-feet-eight of him in his boots. The gun pointed at Remo's head.

  "You sumbitch, you fuck round with me and my woman, I blow yo' head off."

  "You do it, Clete," shrieked the girl through the broken wall. "You down and do it. Shoot me somebody. If you love me, you'll shoot me somebody." She bobbled off the bed, her chest poppity popping up and down in front of her. She stuck her face close to the hole in the wall. Remo could smell the sickening booze on her breath.

  "Which one you want first, Loretta?" said the man with the gun.

  "The violence of Americans is shocking," said Chiun.

  "Get the little talky gook, honey," said Loretta.

  "Violence against a minority," intoned Chiun. "Whipped and scorned and abused."

  "When have you ever been scorned, abused, or whipped? No Master of Sinanju has ever suffered," said Remo.

  Clete cocked his gun. Chiun looked heavenward in beatific innocence. A martyr to violent racism. There was one small drawback to his suffering. As the gun cocked, ready and raised, and the finger closed on the trigger, a white plate moved at such a speed that its blur followed it and made its way underneath the hat to where Clete's mouth had been, to where Clete's cheek had been, so that now there was the hat and the top half of a face biting down on a white plate filling red with blood and the remnants of a lower jaw spread out red and bone fragments on a hairy chest. The gun dropped, unfired.

  "Drat damn," said Loretta. "I never get anything I want. Clete? Clete? Clete?"

  Clete went forward, clumping into the gray-carpeted floor. Around his head, the gray darkened in an ever widening pool.

  "He couldn't raise it too good, neither," noted Loretta. "How 'bout you fellas, you want a piece?"

  "A piece of what?" asked Chiun, who was suspicious of all Western dietary practices. He had promised Remo a real meal when they got to Sinanju, glory home of the East, pearl of the West Kor
ea bay.

  "A piece of me, pops."

  "I am no cannibal," said Chiun, and Remo knew that this offer would also be included in tales of America… how some not only were cannibals, but some were volunteer dinners. This strangeness did the Master of Sinanju commit to memory.

  "Oh, no, not that," said Loretta and made a circle of her left forefinger and thumb and rapidly penetrated and withdrew her right forefinger. "This," she said.

  "You have done nothing to deserve me," said Chiun.

  "How "bout you, cutie?" she said to Remo, who stood just about six feet tall, with a lean, sinuous body that aroused many women just when he walked in a room. His eyes were dark, deep-set above high cheekbones, and his thin lips creased in a small smile. His wrists were thick.

  "I've got to get rid of the body," said Remo, looking at the nude, dead man.

  "No, you don't. There's a reward for him. Clete's wanted in three states. You're gonna be famous. Famous."

  "See what you did," said Remo, and Chiun turned his head away, above it all.

  It was a good thing, thought Remo, that the room was only a meeting place and that none of Chiun's heavy baggage accompanied them.

  "Where are you two running to? The television cameras will be here. The reporters too. You'll be famous."

  "Yeah, great," said Remo, and they went quickly down the motel hallway with the blonde yelling after them. They moved in such a way that the blonde thought they took off up the road for Texas when they really slipped down into the parched bed of the Rio Hondo and moved upstream along the bleached gravel 200 yards west of the motel, and there they waited and saw policemen and ambulance and newsmen. And on the second day, when a particular gray Chevrolet Nova came up the road, Remo ran out of the river bed and flagged it down.

  "A little incident, Smitty," said Remo to the lemony-faced man in his late fifties, heading off any questions about why he was not in the prearranged motel room.

  Remo signaled Chiun to follow him to the car, but the Master of Sinanju did not move.

  "Will you come on? We've already spent a night in a frigging ditch because of you."

  "I would talk to Emperor Smith," said Chiun.

  "All right," said Remo sighing. "He'll only talk to you, Smitty."

  As Remo watched Smith's gray head disappear into the river bed behind a large brown bush where Chiun sat, he could not help but think of the first time he had seen Smith. Remo had just come to in Folcroft Sanitarium on Long Island Sound, so many years before. As it was explained, Remo had been recruited, via a phony electrocution for a framed-up murder, to work for a secret organization, one that would work quietly outside the law to help give the law a better chance to work.

  Smith was the man who headed the organization, and, besides Remo and the president of the United States, was the only person who knew it existed. Remo had lived with the secret for years. He was officially dead, and now working for an organization that did not exist. He was its one-man killer arm, and Chiun his trainer.

  Remo watched Smith trudge back up the wash.

  "He wants an apology," said Smith, who wore a gray suit and white shirt even in Roswell, New Mexico.

  "From me?"

  "He wants you to take back your racist remarks. And I think you should know we value his skills highly. It was a great service he did making you what you are."

  "What was I while all this was going on? An innocent bystander?"

  "Just apologize, Remo."

  "Go dip a donkey," said Remo.

  "We're not getting out of here until you apologize. Frankly I'm surprised that you are a racist. I thought you and Chiun had become very close."

  "You're off limits," said Remo. "This is our thing. You don't understand it, and you don't have any business in it." Remo picked up a pebble and at 20 yards split a cactus at its base.

  "Well, unless you apologize, all of us are going nowhere," said Smith.

  "Then we're going nowhere," said Remo.

  "Unlike you two, I happen to need water and shelter and food at reasonable intervals. Besides, I don't have a week to wait in a New Mexican river bed."

  "With all your computers back at Folcroft, you don't need to know what we're all doing out here?"

  "From what I gathered from Chiun, you're here because you changed some baseball rules on him and got another white to side with you. I gather he might be willing to forget this if a proper apology were offered. Something to do with tokens."

  "Feed this into your computer. The last time Chiun wanted a token, it turned out to be Barbara Streisand. You ready for that?"

  Smith cleared his throat. "Go tell him you're sorry so we can get on with the matter at hand. There's work to do. Important work."

  Remo shrugged. He found Chiun where the Master had been sitting, his legs folded under him, his arms at rest on his lap, the dry desert breeze playing with his wisp of beard. Remo spoke to him only briefly and returned to Smith.

  "Get this. The token he wants to mend his hurt is fourteen fatted cows, a prize bull, flocks of ducks, geese and chickens in the hundreds, bolts of silk the length of castle walls, or Folcroft's walls since he still thinks of the sanitarium cover as a castle, ten handmaidens and a hundred carts of our finest brown rice."

  "What's that?" said Smith, unbelieving.

  "He wants to bring it home to Sinanju with him. That was your mistake, telling him last week he could visit his village. Now he wants to bring home something to show that his time in the West hasn't been wasted."

  "I already told him you've got to go in by submarine. That's how the gold is delivered to his village. I think it's enough. You know we're supposed to be a secret organization, not a circus. Tell him providing transportation to take him home is enough."

  Remo shrugged again, and again returned to Chiun, and again returned with an answer. "He says you're a racist too."

  "Tell him we just can't make the delivery of all that stuff, not until we establish diplomatic relations with North Korea. Tell him we'll give him a ruby the size of a robin's egg."

  Chiun's response through Remo was that every Master of Sinanju who had ever ventured across the seas before had returned to Sinanju with tributes to his glory. All except the one who was unfortunate enough to work for racists.

  "Two rubies," said Smith.

  And when it was agreed under the hot New Mexico sun that the tribute to Chiun would be two rubies, a diamond half their size, and a color television set, Smith was informed that the good thing about Americans was their ability to see the flaws in their character and to attempt to amend them.

  In the car Smith outlined the problem. CURE, the organization he headed and for which Remo and Chiun worked, had lost four agents checking out the Divine Bliss Mission, Inc. While the criminal potential for the DBM, Inc., was minimal, just another money hustle, its implications worried Smith. Thousands of religious fanatics loosed upon a country and directed by—there was no other word for it—a hustler.

  Chum, in the back seat, thought this was horrible.

  "There is nothing worse than a hustler," said Chiun. "Woe be to the land to which a hustler comes, for the fields will lie fallow and the young maidens will abandon their chores for the flimsiness of his words."

  "We thought that you, with your knowledge of the East, would be especially valuable in this, beyond just your training of Remo," said Smith, checking his rear-view mirror. Remo had early observed how Smith drove; every ten seconds he looked in the rearview mirror and for every five looks in the rearview mirror, there was a glance in the outside mirror. He drove this way on a highway or in a driveway, a routine, controlled discipline that never varied. The dead president who had started CURE had picked the right man for the job, a man of stern self-control, a man whose ambition would never drive him to use the organization to control a country, a man incapable of ambition because ambition implied imagination, and Remo was sure that the last fantasy that had ever entered Smith's crusty New England mind was goblins in the closet and would Mommy tur
n on the light so they would go away.

  "Sinanju is here to serve in truth and honesty," said Chiun, and Remo looked out the window, nauseated.

  "Which is why I told Remo we would provide you with a trip home as a bonus for the wonderful job you've done with him."

  "It has not been easy, considering the condition of the material," said Chiun.

  "We knew that, Master of Sinanju," said Smith.

  "Speaking of hustlers," said Remo, "what size rubies are you getting, Chiun?"

  "There is a difference between accepting tribute and hustling, but I would not expect a racist to understand that. Emperor Smith, who is not a racist, understands this. He understands the meaning of tribute so well that to enhance his position in the grateful village of Sinanju, he may make the tribute three rubies and a diamond, instead of two rubies and a diamond, which is what the Chinese would probably pay. Such is the decency, Remo, of the most honorable Harold W. Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium—a man more fit to rule than your president and a man who need but say the word and this injustice of rule could be amended."

  Smith cleared his throat while Remo chuckled.

  "Getting down to business," Smith said, "we've been lucky. Somehow one of the Divine Bliss converts has defected. He was in Patna and was sent back to help work out what the Blissful Master's followers call some kind of big thing. The man had been elevated to, I think they call it, arch-priest. We're not certain. As you know, our organization works without people knowing what they're doing."

  "Right through the top, Smitty."

  "I was about to say, except for you and me. Chiun, as you know, thinks I'm an emperor."

  "Or a mark," said Remo.

  "A fine emperor," said Chiun. "One whose generosity marks him for eternal fame."

  "One of the people who provides us with information, without knowing it, works in the newspaper business on the coast and somebody told him of something big, very big about to happen in America, and that only someone as shrewd as the Blissful Master could pull it off. The biggest ever, he said."

  "The biggest what?" asked Remo.

  "That's what we don't know. We do know that with an army of religious fanatics, it could be almost anything. Which is why we set the meeting at the Rhoda Motel. This Divine Bliss thing, it has so many people around that I didn't trust any of the usual channels. So I set up the meeting for here. Frankly I was a little worried when I saw you in that ditch waiting for me. The Blissful Master had one of his followers, a sheriff, put out a warrant for the defector. Three states. Poor devil was in hiding. We arranged to hide him near you, so you could question him. I'm sure your questioning techniques can get anything."