"Funny, I always thought that one would at least be a message," said Vassily, remembering what he had tried in Omaha. Now he saw he would have needed at least two.
"But three, aimed directly at nuclear installations, would be more than a message. It would be war."
"But what about three unimportant cities?" asked Vassily.
"That I would estimate would be the gray area of nuclear war."
"I'd like to use the submarines."
"We have an admiral here tonight, Miss Ashford, but as you know, firing America's missiles is not an easy thing. There are safeguards upon safeguards."
"Well, Harold, work it out," said Vassily.
"Can I go to the bathroom first?" was Harold W. Smith's last question before he set the enormous network of CURE to subverting the nuclear safeguards of his nation.
It was perhaps one of the great hotwires of all time that Smith performed that evening. He first tickled out the defenses at the Strategic Air Command, and at the Naval Nuclear Strike Force.
The tickling was really seeing the defenses come into action, those passwords around the country that had to be sent in order to arm the nuclear arsenal. As a backup there had to be people physically placing keys into triggers, but Harold Smith, always an ingenious boy as well as a good boy, figured out that these keys used the same electronic codes. In other words, the physical backups were ordered by another set of electronics.
Everywhere Smith's computer encountered a code word, it marked a block. The organized mind, which Smith acutely had, understood that the way to solve a problem was not to batter one's head at an obstacle. An obstacle was just that. An obstacle. So when he came to a password defense he labeled it and moved on. Within twenty-five minutes he had a network of obstacles laid before him on his computer screen, but they also told him exactly how America's nuclear defense system could be used.
There were always two codes, each requiring the other to kick on with a yes before it went further. And they followed two distinct paths, as clear as telephone poles. Two parallel poles that were required to work in unison or the missiles would not be fired. They were the President and the military. Both had to agree along their lines of command or there would be no launch.
There had to be one high-ranking officer on one line to start the command and the President on the other. All Smith had to do was break the top password along both these lines and the rest of the orders would follow like a switch on a lamp. Bingo. He was going to light up the world.
The news was so good, he had to run to tell Miss Ashford. He almost skipped into her office.
"Harold," he heard her say. "Don't be ashamed to boast. Boasting is fine. Lets me know what I have. I think you've done good work. But we don't have to break any code at all. We have the admiral we need right here, at the party, and the President is arriving soon."
Vassily waved the happy old man out of the room with the one reward Smith had asked for.
"Sure I'll give you an A. I'll give you an A-plus. But only when the first three bombs drop. Hey, can you change one of those targets to be outside Russia? Maybe we can do Paris. Nice cloud over the Eiffel Tower and everything. Make sure you don't come anywhere near Dulsk. Not within a hundred miles. And send in the admiral for a little talk."
The talk lasted less than fifty-two seconds, whereupon he got the password from an admiral who would not even tell it to his father but would tell it to his subordinate when he believed a nuclear war had started.
Vassily removed that idea from the admiral before sending him down to the party, and then sent the first code word for what Smith had called first parallel path.
"All we need now is the President's code word to launch," came back Smith's voice over the line to his computer room in the Fifth Avenue duplex that combined two entire floors of a building. It was down the street from where Vassily had started his weight-loss/quit-smoking/improve-your-sex-life clinic.
"In a few minutes," said Vassily.
"I wonder if I might go to the bathroom again," came the voice of his computer operator.
"You've been," said Vassily, reminding himself that just because he was the most powerful man in the world didn't mean he should be the easiest to get along with. He was going to reduce the old man to one BM a day and that was it.
He walked to the large picture window. He could feel the vibrations from the dancing below. It was a very loud party, but there wasn't a neighbor important enough to complain. He looked out over Central Park. All of this might be a nuclear cinder before morning. Risk. It was a wonderful stimulant.
It made life livable. Down on Fifth Avenue he saw the motorcycle policemen lead the long dark limousine. It was the President of the United States. He wondered if he could spit down from the window and hit him. But he knew too many Secret Servicemen might panic and he could be dead. They were all over the place protecting the President, but Vassily knew they were no match for him. He had the best protection in the world.
A man moved through the Secret Servicemen like a ballet dancer through a subway crowd. They couldn't stop him. He got to the President. He pointed up toward the party. The President looked up. The man looked up. It was Vassily's only friend he met in America, Remo, the one who saved him from the Russian commandos.
The President nodded. The President turned back to his car, almost pushing his beautiful wife ahead of him. The motorcade sped off with sirens blaring, and the other password was going with him.
"Chiun. Chiun," called Vassily. "Get up here." Chiun was there so silently and so quickly, Vassily could have sworn he had been waiting all along.
"Get me the President. I want him here now. He's running away."
"Are we finally going to make Smith president, O Great Wang?"
"Just get him, and if you see Remo again, kill him. He's got to be killed. You must kill him. He's in my way. He has pushed friendship too far."
But something strange happened. The old Oriental with the great powers began to tremble, the beginning of the word "No" was coming out of his mouth, wrestled by his own mind back into his throat, and the very energy coming from the body began to vibrate the plaster off the ceiling.
"All right, all right already," yelled Vassily. "He's not Remo, but your worst enemy wanting to do battle. Is that easier? Do I have to go back to the stuff I used on you back at Sornica? All right, I've done it. I'm Mr. Easy. The guy who looks and acts like Remo is your archenemy. Now kill him in peace. Or he'll kill you. But on one condition, the same I gave you at Sornica."
Chiun listened and felt a relief of such sweetness as he had never felt before in his life. He did not know why he was relieved, but the world was now good again, devoid of the awful conflict that had racked his soul.
"Bring your great enemy before me and let me see a fight between you two. The kind of fight I would have seen if he didn't run from you back in Sornica. Okay? That kind of a fight. Could you give me that?"
"Great Wang, it shall be a fight to glorify you and Sinanju. It shall-"
"All right already," said the Great Wang, in the person of Vassily Rabinowitz. "Can we have it here right after you get the President?"
But the fight was not to be in the living room of the Great Wang on Fifth Avenue. In the elevator of the building, coming in as Chiun was going out, was his worst enemy.
He looked like Remo. He spoke like Remo, and that made it all the more onerous. Chiun felt a deadly hiss emerge from his throat. His entire body assumed its most acute form of power, as he had been trained since childhood. Total energy. Total concentration as the hands made wide circling arcs in the death challenge.
Anna Chutesov screamed and tried to press herself into the walls of the elevator. The light bulbs above them shattered from the force of a human being coming into its total power.
"Little father. Don't fight me. Don't fight me. I'm Remo," said Remo, even though he was not sure whether he was facing Chiun or Vassily Rabinowitz. Anna had warned him about that and he had practiced in his mind, going
up against Chiun despite his own will. This was what he had to do. His mind had to conquer itself. It was like turning one's own intestines inside out.
And it was not working. Remo could not lift his hand against this man.
And then he knew his body would do it for him. The stroke was coming from Chiun. That perfect stroke of pure cleanliness made more powerful by its purity. He knew it and his little father knew it, as his little father had taught it so long ago, so often, over and over from those first days right after the breath training.
The stroke that Remo did not even think about making because it was more a part of him now than his most intimate ideas.
And the horrible thing about that stroke was never before in all his years had Remo in the training sessions been able to stop it. Chiun, by his own volition, had stopped himself. But this stroke was not going to stop until Remo was crushed by it, the one stroke made perfect by a lifetime of devotion. His body moved in what was the defense, trained into him over and over, and never before able to stop that blow. And the stroke went by him, deflected by the proper acceptance of it, fast enough and strong enough for the first time in Remo's life.
Remo had done it. He had transcended Chiun for the first time, and even as he drove into his beloved teacher's body with a stroke to destabilize but not harm Chiun, Remo understood why. It was the Great Wang's visit.
When Wang visited Remo it was at Remo's transition to his ultimate.
"You are at your peak," Wang had said.
When Wang had visited Chiun, Chiun was at his peak. And it was the law of the universe that that which was at its most powerful was beginning its decline. All these years Chiun had been declining, and now Remo had made that transformation to stand above him.
There was both sadness and relief as Remo laid the great Chiun, now stunned, in the corner of the elevator.
The lights came back on.
"What happened? The lights blinked off and now they're on. What happened to Chiun?" asked Anna.
"The greatest fight of my life," said Remo.
"But it happened so quickly. It was an instant," said Anna.
"What do you want, fifteen rounds of people punching at each other's bodies in padded gloves?"
"I wish I could have seen some of it, at least," said Anna.
"You wouldn't have been able to, even if the lights were on. Too fast for your eyes. But even if I slowed it down, you wouldn't know what was happening."
"That is Chiun," she said. "Unfortunately you have met the Chiun who is not the most Chiun. He's waiting for us somewhere in this building under the name of Vassily Rabinowitz. Good luck, Remo."
"Thanks, and when Chiun gathers himself together again, don't tell him he lost a fight, all right?"
"He'll remember, won't he?"
"I don't know what he'll remember," said Remo, and he took the elevator up to the floor where the big party was going on, and asked around for Vassily Rabinowitz.
Everyone knew Vassily. He was either a great guy or a person one should know. It was a room filled with people impressed by their own importance. The very fact of being with each other seemed to make these people turn on to themselves.
There were bankers and publishers and owners of networks. There were surgeons and scientists, and industrialists and politicians. There was the presidential cabinet. All the power brokers in America were here, and there was the only one person Remo cared much about and he was unconscious in an elevator. And another he cared about somewhat and that one's brains were fried. And the man who did it could do it to Remo.
Everyone knew Vassily but no one knew where he was. A television anchorwoman turned her charm on Remo. Remo turned it back to her.
"You don't have to be rude," she said.
"Yes I do," said Remo.
"Do you know who I am?"
"Another jerk in a roomful of jerks," said Remo. Suddenly in the vast length of the floor, there was silence. Someone had called this august assembly of personages "jerks."
A titter of laughter played through the crowd. Most of the important people dared not laugh lest someone think they were threatened.
"Jerks?" asked the anchorwoman. And she laughed quite loudly.
"Yeah. None of you or anything you do will be remembered a thousand years from now. Even your children, if they're twice as important as you are, won't be remembered. So who are you?"
"It's not a thousand years from now that matters, but now," said the woman.
"Now you always have," said Remo, and someone said that because he wore jeans and a T-shirt, he probably was never invited at all, and several of the many bodyguards were invited to throw Remo out, to loud applause.
They joined the art on the walls, some of them sticking, some of them not.
"Rabinowitz," bellowed Remo. "I want you. And I want you now."
The room was quiet. A door opened. The crowd parted.
A little man with sad eyes walked in quite confidently. Remo went for his head, but this time he did not harm Chiun. Chiun was more frail than he should have been. More worthy of love than usual.
"Are you all right, little father?" said Remo.
"Yes. But I'm your friend Vassily Rabinowitz and you do whatever I say."
"Good, Vassily. I'm glad to see you again. For a moment I thought you were Chiun."
"You're going to kill Chiun. He's no good."
Remo was nodding yes, when he thought of Chiun. All the being that was his said kill Chiun. Everything said kill Chiun. All breathing said kill Chiun. He would kill Chiun, except there was a thing coming up in his throat, and it was something far off in the cosmos that he was a part of. It required the answer "No." And the answer "No" came out of his mouth. No was the answer to that.
"I've got to have your total loyalty. You cannot resist. There is nothing left in you to resist," came the words, and even Remo's blood cried out: Kill Chiun.
Remo threw himself onto the floor and fought his blood. He fought his blood and his being and his knowledge and everything he felt and saw and understood. His hands and his heart would not lift against his little father, Master of Sinanju. If they reached for Chiun, Remo would crush them. If his legs carried him to Chiun, Remo would break them, and far off in a place without light, but of all light, Remo heard the word he needed to hear. It was the great answer to the greatest of all questions.
And the answer was "Yes." The Hebrews heard it in the words of Mount Sinai which said: "I Am Who Is." And the Christians heard it on the third day, when the answer for all eternity was a yes to life.
"Yes," was the answer to all that was. All that was good was yes. All being was the great yes of the universe. And Remo saw the Great Wang laughing at him, and in the cleanest strokes of the history of Sinanju, Remo did as his little father taught him, bringing the blow from the very breathing itself, and severed the head of the Great Wang laughing at him.
When Vassily Rabinowitz' head rolled on the ballroom floor people screamed in horror. Remo's eyes cleared. His body ached where he had hurled it down, shattering parquet flooring into splinters.
He had performed a perfect blow. There was not a drop of blood on his hand. It had been in and out of Rabinowitz' vertebrae at the precise speed to sever with both heat and force. In fact, it was only now that the heart muscle of the headless corpse on the floor finished its last pumping action, creating a dark red pool where the head containing the sad brown eyes had been.
"Who are you?" asked a stunned broadcaster.
Remo didn't answer questions. He went upstairs and following wire circuitry to its source found Smith behind a computer terminal.
Smith was tired and confused. "Remo. Where are we?"
"Fifth Avenue. Rabinowitz' duplex."
"Strange. Last thing I remember is preparing to kill him. What's this on the computer screen?" Smith shook his head. "Oh no. Have they gone off yet?"
"Have what gone off?" asked Remo.
"You would have known if they did. I hot-wired our whole nuclear-defens
e establishment. Has the President been here?"
"No. I turned him back," said Remo.
"Good. I see. Yes. Right. Let me close this down before we all go up. Where's Rabinowitz?"
"Part of him is in the ballroom and another part, I think, has rolled into another room. I'm not sure."
"Thank you. We needed you and you did your job. You can go now, Remo."
"Here's as good as anywhere," said Remo. "I'm an American. I believe in this country."
"You mean you've veered away from Sinanju philosophy?"
"No. It is Sinanju philosophy. Here is good. I'm here. Yes. I'll stay."
"Did Rabinowitz find out about CURE?"
"You not only told him about it, you put it at his service. "
Smith groaned. "Anyone else?" he asked.
"There's a Russian lady who knows."
"She's got to go."
"I think she's a good person."
"I'm not judging anyone. I'm trying to save the country."
"I don't think there'll be any harm to her knowing. Talk to her."
"Is she good-looking?"
"She's stunning, Smitty."
"I thought so," said Smith suspiciously.
"She's got brains."
"Even more reason to terminate her."
"Talk to her."
Anna Chutesov was still cradling Chiun's head in her hands when Remo helped them both out of the elevator, carrying Chiun in his arms.
He hated himself for the blow he had delivered to Chiun, and yet if he had not, he would have been in pieces like Rabinowitz.
"Remo says I should talk to you," said Smith to Anna. "I'm afraid you understand why we must terminate you. You know about us."
"Typical stupid male response. If you don't know what to do, kill. Gorilla."
"We can't be compromised," said Smith.
"Why would I want to compromise you?"
"To take over our country. Weaken America."
"Why on earth would I want to do that? Do you think we don't have enough troubles in Russia? Do you think we need two countries to mismanage instead of one?"
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