There was a faint hissing sound as one of the oaken walls began to slide to the right, revealing another passageway.
Chiun led Nina and the premier through the opening. The four KGB men followed. Remo turned his back and ran back down the dark passageway toward the front entrance.
For ordinary eyes, it would have been almost impossible to see in the corridor. But for Remo, there was no such thing as darkness; there was only less light and more light, and the eye adjusted accordingly. Once all men had seen this way, but now after thousands and thousands of years of laziness, the eye muscle had lost its tone and the eye surfaces their sensitivity, and men had adopted the habit of being blind in the dark. Only a few animals had retained their ability to see at night, and the darkness belonged to them. It belonged to Remo, too.
Flush against one of the wooden panels on the corridor walls, he saw a pushbutton. He pressed
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it, and the panel hinged back and opened into a small room.
Vassily Karbenko lay on the floor of the room. Blood stained the front of his light blue shirt. His own gun lay in a corner of the room.
Remo knelt over him and Karbenko slowly opened his eyes. He recognized Remo and tried to smile. Blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
"Hiya, pal," he said.
"Who did it?" Remo asked.
"Stantington's men. That was one of them at the entrance way who let us in," he said. "My own fault. I should have known."
"Don't worry," Remo said. "I'll get help."
"Too late," Karbenko said. "Is the premier all right?"
"He's okay," Remo said. "And I'll keep him that way."
"I know," said Karbenko. He tried to smile again, but the small facial movement caused him pain. His voice came in a slight whisper and his breath in a heavy gasp.
"Sorry I didn't meet you sooner," Remo said. "We could have been a helluva team."
Karbenko shook his head.
"No," he said. "Too many miles between us. If Stantington didn't get me today, it would've been you. You'd have to do it later on 'cause I knew too much about you people."
Remo started to protest, then stopped. Karbenko was right, he realized. He remembered the scene in Smith's office. Smith had told him to protect the premier. He had said that was all ...
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"for now." But later, he would have sent Remo after Karbenko.
"Don't feel bad," Karbenko said. "That's the business we're in." He opened his mouth to speak again but a thick gush of bloody ooze welled up in his mouth. He tried to swallow, could not, and then his head lolled off to the side, his eyes still open, staring at the wall.
Remo stood up. He nodded down at the Russian spy. He felt a curious emotion toward the man, an affection he did not often experience. It was respect and he had thought it no longer lived in him.
"That's the biz, pardner," he said. He turned back to the corridor, to follow the premier, to make sure he was kept alive.
The lights in the chamber of the past had been turned out. But Remo knew where the hidden door was, and he jammed his fingertips like the points of screwdrivers into the wood and yanked it to the left. There was a whooshing sound as his power was pitted against a hydraulic door lock. The whoosh turned into a total expulsion of air from the device and as the air rushed out, the machine's pressure against the door ended, and the oaken panel slammed to the left, crashing into the innards of the door, with a wood-cracking sound.
A twisting corridor stretched out in front of him. Remo went down it at full speed. After twenty yards, the corridor twisted off to the left and opened onto a miniature railroad platform.
Chiun stood on the edge of the platform alone. He looked up as Remo approached.
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"Karbenko is dead," Remo said.
Chiun nodded. "He was a good man," he said.
"Where's the premier?"
"He is with the four security men."
Just then a small train appeared at one end of the track and picking up speed, it began to move past them. The four KGB men were on it.
"Where is the premier ?" Remo called.
"In the back car," one of the men responded as the train moved quickly past them. The car with the guards vanished into the tunnel. Remo and Chiun looked toward the other end. The last car of the train came by them. The premier and Nina were not on it.
"They must have changed their minds," Remo said.
"Fool," hissed Chiun. He ran to the far end of the platform. A fiberglass wall, molded to look like the stones of a dungeon, separated the train "station" from the small boarding area.
As Remo raced up behind Chiun, he saw the small man leap into the air, and then come down against the wall. His hands flailed out in explosive fury, and the fiberglass splintered and parted, and in the same forward motion, without his feet ever hitting the floor, Chiun was through the rip in the wall. Remo followed him at a dive.
He saw Nina turn toward them. She had been facing her husband over a distance of six feet. When she saw Chiun and Remo she turned again toward her husband. Her finger closed on the trigger of the pistol she held in her hand. But she was too late.
The tiny Oriental, his green kimono swirling
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about him, moved in front of her. As the gun fired, he deflected her hand and the bullet dug into the ceiling of the room. Then Chiun had the gun from her hand.
He gave it to Remo.
"Compliments of the Great Ung," he said.
The premier's face was ashen with shock.
"Nina," he said heavily. "You? Why?"
The woman looked at him for a moment, then dropped her head and began to weep. "Because I had to," she sobbed. "I had to."
Remo put his arm around the woman.
"It's okay now. It's all right," he said.
The premier came up to his wife, and took her hands in his. He waited until she lifted her eyes to meet his.
"We go home now, I think," he said.
"Not until I get my ride on the train," Chiun said, inspecting his Mickey Mouse watch.
The President and the premier had met at the White House and issued a joint statement that both condemned all acts of political terrorism and would work jointly to prevent the kind of senseless violence that had cost the lives of three Russian ambassadors in the past week. Project Omega was not mentioned.
Nina met with the President's wife for tea and at a press conference later charmed everyone by announcing how smart and pretty the President's wife was, and that the President's daughter who had spilled a cup of tea on Nina's dress would benefit from a good spanking.
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The body of Vassily Karbenko, a cultural attache at the Russian embassy in Washington, was found in a lake in Florida. He had been on vacation and apparently had been drowned in a boating accident.
Smith looked across his desk. "I don't understand why," he said.
"MacCleary had gotten close to Nina in the old days," Remo said. "Her husband was barely able to make a living. MacCleary conned her somehow into taking money from him. She needed it to keep the family alive."
"Did he tell her that she'd have to kill her own husband if he became premier ?"
"Yes, but she never thought it would happen. Then one day it did and she was stuck."
"Why?" said Smith. "Couldn't she just ignore the Project Omega signal ?"
"MacCleary had filled her head full of crap," Remo said. "He had told her that if she didn't act, America would have documents to prove that she was an American spy, and we'd release the documents. This would bring her husband down in disgrace. Probably send both of them to the slave camps. It was better, she figured, for the premier to get killed in America. He'd be regarded then as a glorious Russian hero. She'd rather have her husband a dead patriot than the live husband-of-a-traitor and maybe a traitor himself."
Smith shook his head. "We didn't have any information to release on her. She was safe." "She didn't know that. MacCleary had really
1
80
done a number on her. She didn't say it, but I think they were probably a thing one time. She used to be a good-looking woman," Remo said.
"Well," Smith said, "all's well that ends well."
"You think it ended well?" Remo said.
"Yes. Didn't it?"
"Karbenko died," said Remo. "He was one of them but he was a good man."
"And if the CIA hadn't gotten him, we would have had to," Smith said. "He knew too much."
"That's our rule, right?" said Remo. "Anybody who finds out about CURE is dead meat, right?"
"I wouldn't put it in exactly those terms," Smith said. "But that's about it."
Remo stood up.
"Thank you, Smitty. Have a nice day."
Ruby followed him into the outside office.
"You're strung really tight today," she said. "What's wrong?"
"Karbenko would have had to die because he knew about us," Remo said. "Well somebody else knows about us. And he's still alive."
Ruby shrugged. "Rank has its privileges," she said. "I guess one of them privileges is staying alive."
Remo held her face in his hands and smiled coldly at her.
"Maybe," he said.
It happened just after Time magazine's deadline and by the time the next issue came out, the other press had all covered the story to death.
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So Time's story was brief:
When Admiral Wingate Stantington, the newly appointed head of the CIA, drowned in the bathtub in his private office bathroom last week, his body was not discovered for a day. CIA personnel had to break into the bathroom by cutting away a lock that had been installed only the week before (at the usual Washington, B.C., cost of $23.65).
Three days later, Ruby yelled at Remo for wasting $23.65 of taxpayers' money and told him if he did it again, she'd give him more trouble than he could handle.
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Last Call td-35 Page 13