"Am too!"
"By the way," the officer informed him, glaring balefully at him, "you've got a message waiting for you back at my HQ. Eyes-only, urgent. Better check it out."
"Aw, crap." Remo sighed. "I'll need the chopper, I guess."
"No sweat." There was a softening, however marginal, about the Navy officer's attitude. "I've got a full night's work ahead of me right here, just cleaning up your mess."
Remo strolled toward the chopper and called from just below the whirling rotor blades and flicked the object in his hand with one finger. It rocketed at the Navy officer.
"Hey!" Remo shouted.
The officer practically bounced off the ground and spun in place, almost losing his balance and desperately trying to crane his head to see what had just happened to his rear quarters. He discovered the seat of his trousers was wet with fresh blue paint.
The officer shot Remo a look that was disbelief and fury. He didn't know what to do first: ball him out or demand to know how he'd fired a paint ball without actually having a gun.
"Am too!" Remo shouted over the rotor noise.
Chapter 3
The red-eye into White Plains managed to arrive six minutes earlier than its absurdly precise ETA of 6:13 a.m. The plane was nearly empty, leaving Remo thankful for small favors, even though a fat man in a rumpled polyester suit had snorted, wheezed and rumbled in his sleep throughout the flight, directly opposite the seat in coach that Remo occupied.
A rental car was waiting for him at the airport, subcompact, no doubt the cheapest one available. Economy was critical to Dr. Harold Smith and CURE, the supersecret crime-fighting agency that Remo served, although its budget was so well disguised that only Dr. Smith himself had any real idea of the resources at his fingertips.
Remo had an odd relationship with money by the standards of most people, in that he didn't care about it. He had a lot of it, certainly. Being Reigning Master of Sinanju made him, technically, the custodian of Sinanju's wealth. He had no idea how vast his resources actually were. Chiun, Reigning Master Emeritus, smacked his hand if he tried to get anywhere near the money.
To Remo, you bought things with various plastic cards that were issued to him by CURE. The cards had lots of names on them. Most of them had the first name Remo, and they never ever had the last name Williams.
He didn't mind flying coach most of the time. He would have upgraded himself if he wanted to and nobody, but nobody, would have stopped him. He didn't mind driving an inexpensive set of wheels if it got him where he needed to go. But when he saw the three-year-old Beetle with a partially detached fender he went back to the Rent Cars Cheap! desk and said no thanks. "Got something a little bigger?"
The pretty young Rent Cars Cheap! clerk looked doubtful.
"Newer?" Remo asked. The clerk looked sad.
"Do you have a car without metal parts hanging down far enough to drag on the pavement?"
The clerk looked despondent.
Remo moved on to the next car-rental booth in the airport concourse and asked for something nice. "Yes, sir!" said the middle-aged man in a buttoned double-breasted jacket and neat tie, with gold tie clip. He looked more like a bank president than a car-rental clerk. "What are you looking for? Sporty? Luxury? An SUV?"
"Sporty?" Remo asked. "Define sporty."
The bank-president-type got a gleam in his eye. "Define sporty? I'll define sporty. V-12 engine, 6-speed stick, 580 horsepower and a top speed of 205 miles per hour."
Remo looked at the clerk, then took a step back and looked at the sign on the desk. The name of the car-rental agency didn't have the word "budget" or "cheap," and there wasn't an "econo-something" to be found. The name was something like Alucci-Fine Motorcars for the Discriminating Driver."
"You Al?"
"Pardon me, sir?"
"I guess that sounds kind of sporty, if it's red," Remo said.
"It's bright red," Al said. "Cherry strawberry bloodred. It is-" he inhaled before he spoke the words "-a Lamborghini Murcielago."
"Smitty'll have steam coming out of his ears," Remo said.
"Pardon me, sir?"
"Nothing. I'll take it if you don't ask me to pronounce it," Remo said.
Al couldn't have been happier. "An excellent choice, Mr.... ?"
Remo glanced surreptitiously at the credit card as he slid it over. "Quartermaster. Remo Quartermaster."
"I just need to check and be sure your card will take the security deposit."
"Okay."
"The deposit required is-"
"Whatever."
Al was visibly surprised and greatly pleased when the card was authorized.
"Sign here, please," he said, slipping over the company's standard contract. "And here. And here, here and here."
Al noticed that the man slapped his hand over the rental fee and the security amount before signing the document. Al couldn't care less. He had his credit-card approval.
BEFORE HE GOT INSIDE the sleek, stubby, scarlet Lamborghini Murcielago, Remo walked around it. He couldn't help but notice that none of its fenders was dragging on the pavement.
He pulled out onto the road, and the Lamborghini did something unusual when he hit the gas. It didn't go faster; it sort of burst ahead. He wondered if there was an exhaust pipe with flames shooting out like on the Batmobile.
It had been a while since he had driven anything like this, and he found himself liking it. The speedometer needle nudged up to the hundred-miles-per-hour mark and still had lots of little numbers to the right of it. Remo wondered if he could make the little needle move all the way over to the right-hand side of the speed indicator. He maneuvered around the traffic on the highway as if it were standing still. When he got ahead of the traffic, he really let the car show itself off.
A state trooper was impressed by his efforts and tried to catch up. Remo left the guy behind and exited quick when the trooper was out of sight, then took side streets for a while. The rest of the drive was on smaller roads where he never had the chance to get the car over 120.
A CASUAL OBSERVER WOULD have guessed-and rightly so-that Folcroft Sanitarium was a retreat for the elite who needed someplace to dry out, unwind or simply get their act together in an age when wealth and social standing were no guarantee against the standard nervous breakdown. It was also home to many patients with more serious psychological or psychophysical problems.
Dr. Harold Smith had earned his reputation as an extremely efficient administrator, but none of the Folcroft clientele-not even the most savvy, well connected of them-would have guessed his secret.
Smith was the director of CURE, probably the most secret intelligence agency in the world. The President of the United States knew about CURE. Dr. Smith and his assistant, a young ex-CIA analyst named Mark Howard, knew of it, of course. And then there was Remo-and Chiun.
And that was all. Even the former presidents who had overseen CURE activities no longer knew that they had done so, their memories purged of the information.
The problem was this: CURE was fundamentally illegal. The methods it employed were almost always in violation of the United States Constitution-the very document that CURE was intended to protect.
The gates at Folcroft Sanitarium were open, and Remo parked out front in the visitors' lot, then jogged around to the side entrance he typically used to avoid attention.
A CIA PSYCHOLOGIST HAD once stated, officially and on the record, that Dr. Smith had "no imagination whatsoever." That was not strictly true, of course, but he was perhaps the most bland, gray individual one was likely to meet, ever. He was gazing at his blank glass desktop when Remo walked in. Mark Howard, his assistant, was in one of the chairs in front of the desk.
"Hey, Smitty. Hey, Junior."
Howard gave Remo a meaningful look and said nothing. Smitty seemed not to notice Remo's arrival, staring dumbly at his desktop like one of the patients in Folcroft's Veggie Ward.
"Fine, thanks," Remo said. "Spent some time with the kids and the biol
ogical dad, you know. Had a few laughs out on the big res. Got some sun. Got some SEALs in New Mexico. Didn't get any wolves, though."
Mark Howard glared.
"Thanks, I'd love to sit down," Remo said as he sat. After a moment he nodded at Smith and said in a stage whisper to Mark Howard, "Better run for a drool bucket, Junior."
Howard responded by lifting up several sheets of Folcroft Sanitarium paperwork to reveal a printout of a Visa bill. It was dated that day. The charge amount had a bunch of numbers, a comma, and a bunch more numbers. Remo saw the words "Alucci-Fine Motorcars for the Discriminating Driver."
"What do you know about the Devil's Triangle?" Smith asked abruptly, looking up from his desktop.
"Some porn movie?" Remo asked.
"As in Bermuda Triangle," Howard clarified.
"Oh," Remo said. "I know it was a popular unexplained mystery in the sixties and seventies, but I thought the gullible masses were off that kick."
"I will assume you know the basic legend," Dr. Smith went on. "Ships and planes that disappear without a trace, or sometimes turn up drifting without passengers or crew. Speculation has fingered every conceivable explanation from flying saucers to magnetic vortices and time warps."
Remo snapped his fingers. "There was an old TV movie with MacMurray called Devil's Triangle. Pee-yew."
"Of course, official explanations have been more mundane," Smith continued. "The Caribbean-indeed, the whole Atlantic-can have sudden storms. Some pilots and sailors are clearly less than competent. Without beacons or other homing equipment, there's no reason to assume that searchers would locate wreckage or survivors in time to effect a recovery."
"Makes sense," said Remo.
"More recently," Dr. Smith continued, as if on cue, "the Coast Guard, DEA and CIA have suggested another cause for some of the regional disappearances, at least where surface ships are concerned. Piracy."
"Piracy?"
"Indeed."
"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum?"
"Nothing so quaint, I'm afraid. It's believed that certain well-organized rings may be involved in the theft of private pleasure craft and murder of their crews, with an eye toward resale of the vessels or conversion into smugglers."
"That should be right up the Coast Guard's alley," Remo said. "Glad we got the whole jurisdictional thing figured out. Can I go home now?"
"In theory, yes, the Coast Guard and DEA would handle this." Smith said. "Unfortunately, for all their discussions of the problem, none of the agencies involved have managed to prove their case. To date, they have no pirates, no hard evidence of their existence. That is, until last week."
Remo was pretty sure he wasn't going to get to go home.
"Are you familiar with Senator Chester Armitage?" Smith asked.
"Is he the guy who said he wished Strom Thurman had won his presidential bid in the 1940s and resegregated the U.S., then tried to claim he wasn't a racist?"
"That was another senator. Armitage is vicechairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, heavily involved with half a dozen other major Senate groups. As if that weren't enough, he's an intimate friend of the sitting President, dating from their college days. Altogether, a man of great influence." As Dr. Smith spoke those final words, the corners of his mouth turned downward in a clear expression of distaste.
"So what? I hear the President dated a lot of people in his college days."
"Two weeks ago, Senator Armitage lost his son and daughter-in-law in the Devil's Triangle," Smith said morosely. "That is, both were presumed lost until Saturday, when Kelly Bauer Armitage was pulled from the water west of Fort-de-France by a pair of sport fishermen from South Carolina. She was half-dead from exposure, nearly drowned and she had suffered ...um...extensive physical abuse. It's no immense surprise to learn that she was-and remains-nearly incoherent."
"Nearly?" Remo prodded, sensing that he was about to hear the crux of Dr. Smith's unusual problem.
"She was able to report her husband's death-a homicide-and to describe her own abduction by... well, that is ...by a group of pirates."
"Hijackers, you mean," said Remo.
"Not exactly," Dr. Smith replied. "From her description, sketchy and disjointed as it was, it would appear that her assailants were, in fact, for all intents and purposes identical to pirates of the seventeenth or eighteenth century."
"Identical?"
"I'm filling in some gaps, of course, but from the woman's somewhat fanciful description of their primitive lifestyle-boats and weapons aside, I believe we may safely assume-they appear to emulate the tactics of such men as Blackbeard and Captain Kidd."
"So we are talking yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum," Remo said. "So what's CURE got to do with it? Why can't the FBI and Coast Guard handle this?"
"Normally, I would assume they would," Dr. Smith allowed. "They've tried and gotten nowhere. They have no leads, Remo. The woman can't provide them with directions or locations, names or any meaningful descriptions-anything at all, in other words. She doesn't know or can't remember where her husband's yacht was captured by the men who killed him and abducted her. There's a suggestion that a newly added member of the crew was possibly involved, but the only name she can offer is Enrique. After the murder and abduction, of course, she has no clue where she was taken or exactly how long she was held or by whom. In short, she's virtually useless."
"So the Feds are giving up," Remo said.
"But not the senator," Mark Howard chimed in. Remo could guess the rest: an urgent phone call to his college chum on Pennsylvania Avenue, demanding justice. If he played the angles properly, there was a decent chance the senator could parley private tragedy into a winning hook for his next election campaign, combining the tried-and-true sympathy vote for a grieving father with support for a tough, no-nonsense law-and-order candidate. A die-hard cynic might suggest that a dead or missing son was a reasonable down payment on six more years in Washington, sitting at the right hand of power.
Or maybe not.
The man could just be grieving, like any other outraged father, pulling any strings within his reach to gain justice, revenge, satisfaction-call it what you like. Who would deny him that, except for certain bleeding hearts who still regarded vicious criminals as the moral superiors of their victims?
Still. "Smitty," Remo said testily, "don't tell me we're doing a freaking favor for somebody."
The expression of distaste was back on Dr. Smith's face, as if a reek of flatulence had crept into his office. "We're not in the business of doing favors," he said tartly. "That's not what CURE is for."
"Oh, sure, I know that. And you know that. But every good old boy who gets into the White House has a hard time figuring out this is the one and only thing in their lives that can't be treated as a political tool."
Smith looked sharply at Remo. "We're not being used as a political tool, but you've raised a good point."
"Huh?"
"I was called by the President and he suggested CURE look into this," Smith said.
"So it is a favor," Remo said.
"Once we started looking into it, we began seeing the possible true extent of the damage being done in the Caribbean to U.S. interests," Mark Howard explained. "Since we don't know who or what is behind this, we can only make assumptions about their implication in various losses throughout the region going back over the past few years. But the scale is staggering."
"That qualifies it as a threat to U.S. security?" Remo probed. "Convenient justification."
"We don't do justification, Remo," Smith retorted seriously.
"Sure. I believe you."
"We're going to have to make sure the President believes that, too," Smith said to Howard. "But that doesn't mean we're not going to check into it."
"Check into what?" Remo said. "I mean, if you're expecting me to search the whole Caribbean, it just might take a while."
"Richard Armitage and his wife departed from Miami aboard their private yacht, Solon II, on the morning of March seventeen
th. They stopped at Nassau and at Caicos on their way to the Dominican Republic, where they apparently hired an extra crewman, an elusive figure named Enrique, at Puerta Plata, on the twentieth. We've no idea why he was needed, how they met him-anything at all, in fact. You may be able to learn more from the woman herself."
"Say again?"
"You have a scheduled interview this afternoon," said Dr. Smith.
"You told me she was incoherent," Remo said.
"It's relative. You may get lucky," Smith replied. "I'm hoping that you can draw her out in ways the authorities could not."
"Uh-huh." Remo was clearly skeptical. "You said they found her west of Fort-de-France. No sign of the yacht or her husband?"
"None so far," Dr. Smith replied. "Of course, if the DEA and Coast Guard suppositions are correct, the Solon II will have a new paint job by now, perhaps new ID numbers. Nothing that an expert couldn't spot, but ample change to get it through a cursory inspection. With any luck, it could make two or three smuggling runs into the Keys before it has to be replaced."
Remo didn't have to ask about Richard Armitage. The Caribbean was wide and deep enough to hide countless bodies, its shark and barracuda hungry enough to make short work of human remains. Pirate victims in the old days had traditionally gone over the side. It would be simple for a modern-day practitioner to emulate their lethal methods.
"Who was Richard Armitage," Remo asked, "besides an influential politician's son?"
"CEO of a smallish but expanding software company in his own right, Harvard educated, with a trust fund and family stock portfolio to see him over the rough spots."
"It's a tough life," Remo said.
"From all appearances, his life is over," Dr. Smith replied.
"Well," said Remo, "what kind of an investigation did you have in mind? Am I supposed to drift around the islands until Long John Silver tries to take me off, or what?"
"Essentially," said Dr. Smith, "you'll be provided with a boat, of course, and cash enough to make your cover stick."
"Which is?"
"You'll be executive material, well-bred and groomed. I hope that won't be too much of a stretch."
"I'll try to manage," Remo said. "There must be more to it than looking rich, though, or the Coast Guard would be losing half the tourists in the islands."
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