«Don't they ever stop working?» asked Vickie, pointing to the roof and to the right.
Blake looked up. A painter's scaffold, its white slatted bottom coming toward them was descending from the roof. Blake could see shoes and bodies through the gaps between the slats, like black blobs against the darkening sky.
The platform lowered silently and that, more than the odd hour, told Blake they were definitely under attack. Scaffolds always squeaked, even when new. The pulleys would have to be muffled with packed grease to insure silence, and no painter, sand blaster, or steam sprayer would risk a slip just for quiet. Only a killer would.
«Vickie, go inside and tell one of the agents to bring me my shoulder holster, would you please?» said Blake in a very casual voice.
«You going to target shoot twelve stories down?»
«No. Just do as I say, will you, honey?»
«Okeydokey,» said Vickie, using her new word. The scaffold was descending just to the right of the balcony. If Blake had brought the radio gear he could have gotten the upstairs room to move on it first. But the radio gear and the government cars were back in Los Angeles. And that was the flaw in the diamond defense. The points weren't connected.
From behind Blake came a knock on the hotel suite door.
«Room service.»
«Don't answer it,» yelled Blake and with his shout, the scaffold came down quickly and he heard the door to the room open and Vickie scream. One agent was caught with a blast in the belly, but the other returned fire. In the room, the two side doors opened and there was more firing, and just above his head Blake saw a rifle poke down from the scaffold. He yanked and pulled a blond young man along with the rifle. With a snap of his elbow into the man's jaw, he knocked him into the bannister. The rifle disappeared over the railing. Three other men were coming down on the scaffold and Blake was weaponless. He grabbed one of the ropes, braced his feet against the railing, and pushed. One man fell; the remaining two were unable to fire.
Blake pushed again with his body, like a maniac working a playground swing. The scaffold swung far out from the side of the hotel wall. He felt a banging on his back, but he swung back to the wall again and pushed with his legs. Then the heavily greased pulley slipped and his end of the scaffold plunged down. He might have held on with his hands if he hadn't gotten a face and chest full of two sliding men. His hands popped free like two weak safety pins attached to a bail of hay.
Blake hit the Denver sidewalk accelerating, as would any other free-falling object, at thirty-two feet per second per second. The sidewalk remained stationary. They met. Blake felt a crack, and then nothing. He would never feel again.
The last man who fell from the scaffold hit his companion and his fall was cushioned just enough for him to live a day. Before he died of multiple injuries, he told FBI men about an open contract he was trying to fill. The whole gang were beach bums; they had thought that eight of them could pull it off. It was sort of a lark, but if it had worked, they would have been rich for life.
The killing had been a holocaust. Four agents dead. Eight assailants dead. Not in this century had that many people been killed in a federal shoot-out.
But there were indications that even worse might be around the corner. At the funerals of the young men, a single large wreath was delivered for each one. A bright gold envelope with silver lettering was attached. Each envelope had a tassel on it.
When the tassels were pulled, each envelope spilled forth $12,500 in twenty-dollar bills and a note made of letters cut from magazines and pasted on a sheet, almost like a kidnapper's ransom note.
The note read:
«For services almost rendered.»
Someone had been willing to pay $100,000 just for an unsuccessful try. The open contract was real.
The wreaths were confiscated as evidence. When the families of two of the dead men wanted to know why, they were told only that the wreaths might lead to the men who had hired the deceased. The funeral directors were warned about the dangers of disclosing the contents of the envelopes to anyone. Word was leaked to the press that the shoot-out was over a narcotics shipment. But the most emphasis was placed on keeping mum about the cash. There was trouble enough without helping to advertise an open contract.
During the shooting at the Denver hotel, Vickie Stoner had disappeared. She might still be alive somewhere. Supervisor Watkins confided to a special agent that he thought the situation was hopeless, that the girl was as good as dead. Later, when he tried to call the same special agent back to mention one other fact, he was told that no such agent existed.
«But you okayed him,» complained Watkins.
«We did not,» said the director's aide at headquarters.
In Washington, D. C., the man who had posed as a special agent finished writing his report, which he thought was for the National Security Agency. He had done many reports like it. On the two Kennedy assassinations, on the King killing and on many other, discreet deaths that had not made headlines. Officially, he was the authority on specific personnel functions, which translated into as which group was responsible. Each nation had a man like this.
His report concluded that the attempt on the life of Vickie Stoner had obviously been planned by someone with a lot of intelligence and very little experience--which ruled out any foreign power. It was his belief that the men who had attempted the assassination were also the planners of it. Certainly there was nothing in the attempt to suggest that it was beyond the capability of beach bums.
What was of special interest, his report stated, was that this was an open contract, something he had read about but had assumed did not exist, for reasons obvious to anyone familiar with the field. This open contract was real and payable, and the money in the funeral wreaths was proof.
It was inevitable that experienced professionals would now attempt to collect the sum, if Vickie Stoner was still alive-which was doubtful. Supervisor Watkins had stated the case accurately: «hopeless.» But it was of no concern to N.S.A., since no foreign power was involved.
So ended his summary, and the directors of the N.S.A. did not even bother to completely read it. «No foreign power» put it out of their jurisdiction. As a matter of fact, they had not even ordered the report. A secondary-level official had. He had sent a Xerox of it along to his superior, who he assumed was engaged in some kind of watchdog agency.
Twelve hours had passed between the time Supervisor Watkins had said «hopeless» and the time the Xerox copy of the report landed on a desk in Folcraft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
At Folcraft the report was read thoroughly; it was there that the order for it had originated. A lemon-faced man scanned the words, jotted some semireadable notes to himself and then filed the copy in a round tube, which shredded it.
He leaned back in his chair and looked out through the one-way glass toward the Long Island Sound, dark now, waiting for the sun.
Hopeless? Maybe not. An interesting equation was at work here. If Miss Stoner were alive, then more competent assassins would go after her. And if they were stopped, then only more competent ones would come. An acceleration of excellence, leading to the very best wherever or whoever he or they might be.
Dr. Harold Smith looked out into the darkness. Wherever they might be. He knew where they were. He was going to send them a telegram. But Vickie Stoner would not worry. The best in the world would be on her side; she need only worry about the second best.
Dr. Smith dialed Western Union himself. His secretary had long since gone home. He gave the name of the person he wished the telegram sent to, and then the message:
«Aunt Mildred to visit tomorrow. She wants the green room.»
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he didn't care when Aunt Mildred was arriving or what room she wanted, and why didn't Western Union go back to the singing telegram, he wondered aloud.
Instead of returning the receiver to the cradle, he placed thumb and forefinger over the telephone cord and with a gentle snap
yanked it out of the wall. It was 4:30 A.M.
His suite in Atlanta's Hyatt Regency was air conditioned to a just bearable chill, only slightly more pleasant than the oppressive heat that was building up for the coming day. His mouth tasted of salt, but Chiun had said it would taste of salt. He went to the bathroom and let the water run and when it was cold stuck his mouth to the faucet and filled it.
Sloshing the water around his mouth, he went to the darkened living room of the hotel suite. On a bare portion of the floor slept a frail figure on a mat, a black kimono reaching from the toes to the wisps of white hair. Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju.
One did not wake the Master of Sinanju, especially not his pupil, even though Remo was never quite sure when Chiun was asleep or in one of his fifty-nine stages of relaxation, sleep being the fiftysecond. Someday, Chiun had said, Remo would achieve these same stages, even though he had started his enlightenment late and even though he was only a white man.
Why was Remo so lucky that he would learn all those stages, Remo had wondered. Because the Master of Sinanju could do wonders with nothing, the nothing being Remo.
«Thanks for your confidence, Little Father,» Remo had said and then Chiun had warned him of the coming night of the salt. On that night, Chiun had said, Remo would doubt himself and his abilities and would do something foolish to prove to himself that his skills and training were valid. «But in your case, there will be a problem.»
«What problem, Little Father?»
«How will you be able to tell when you do something foolish, since it is so much like everything else you do,» Chiun had said, and thought that this was amazingly funny, so funny he repeated it for days and attributed the fact that Remo did not appreciate the witticism to Remo's typical white man's lack of humor.
Sinanju was a village in North Korea, whose poor and young were supported by the labors of the Master of Sinanju, plying the trade of the professional assassin. Chiun, even though eighty years old, was the reigning master of Sinanju. He had himself experienced the night of the salt when he was twelve years old, almost as a rite of puberty. It was another sign of the body becoming something else, he explained.
«What else?» Remo asked.
But Chiun did not answer his pupil, for as he pointed out, a man who lacked a sense of humor also surely lacked wisdom.
«But you don't think it's funny when someone mistakes you for Chinese or Japanese, instead of Korean.»
«He who does not distinguish between insult and witticism certainly cannot understand the deeper meanings of Sinanju.»
«Why is it that when you insult me, it's humor, but when someone passes a harmless remark about you, it's an insult?» Remo asked.
«Perhaps you will never achieve the night of the salt,» Chiun had said.
But Remo had and here it was, and although his mouth was still filled with water, he tasted the salt as if someone had emptied a shaker of it into his mouth. Remo went back to the bathroom and spat out the water. He was in his thirties and for more than a decade he had been changing, first his mind, and then his very nervous system.
So he had become what Chiun had said he would become. An assassin was not something one did, but something one was. From time to time, of course, Chiun had warned, Remo's early improper training would crop up like poisons in the blood becoming boils on the skin. But with each boil his body would be cleansed.
«Of things like decency, right?» Remo had said.
But why should Remo care? He was a dead man anyhow, according to his fingerprints, which had been retired the night he was electrocuted for a murder he didn't commit. Of course, the electrocution hadn't quite worked and Remo had found himself pressed into service as the super-secret killer arm of a super-secret government agency, empowered by the President to fight crime outside the law. The whole thing had been supposed to take only a few years, and now Remo was in his thirties and he had neither home, nor family, nor even last name, and there was salt in his mouth. The first white man ever to achieve that stage. Remo gulped another mouthful of water from the still running faucet and sloshed it around. To hell with it. He was going outside.
He spat the water into the bathroom light switch, hoping to cause an electrical short circuit to see if he could really create the sort of pressure Chiun had talked about. All he got was a wet light switch. He left the door open under the assumption that if a team of burglars should wander in and attack the eighty-year-old Chiun in his sleep, it was their fault and they had it coming.
The revitalized Downtown Atlanta was suspiciously like the old unrevitalized Downtown Atlanta. Heavy oppressive air and a general feeling of discomfort. Remo walked to the bus station. Bus stations in every town across America were always open.
Why was it people at bus stations at this hour always appeared to be without hope? Remo bought a newspaper. The Atlanta Eagles had begun summer training and the rookies were reporting. This year, according to the coach, their rookie crop was the best and they had a good shot at the National Football League title, even though their schedule was rougher and some of the stars were a mite slow getting into shape.
A column caught Remo's eye. The writer was berating the Eagles' annual open tryout, scheduled for today as a publicity farce.
«The Eagles will have the cameras and the newsmen, the fanfare and the fans, but they won't have any football players. They are preying on the secret fantasy of many American men, who imagine themselves running for a touchdown before thousands of screaming fans, when the hard fact is that professional football players are reared from high school to be professional athletes of abnormal size, and speed, and if a search were made across the entire country, probably not one person could be found who could make the Eagles' taxi squad. Today's open tryouts are a cruel farce and this reporter, for one, will not cover them.
If the television stations and other news media, such as my own newspaper, would do the same, we would see an end to this free agent hoax. The only thing the Eagles are really trying out is our gullibility. So far, they seem to be successful.»
Remo looked around the almost empty bus station. It reeked of disinfectant as all bus stations in the wee hours reek of disinfectant. He stuffed the paper into a trash can. It would be foolish for him to go to the Eagles' training camp at Pell College, just outside the city limits. For one thing, he was supposed to go to great lengths to avoid publicity and second, what would he prove? He was in an entirely different business from professional athletes. And for three, Smith would be phoning him that morning for a meeting in Atlanta. That had been the point of the telegram about Aunt Mildred. And for four, Chiun frowned upon unnecessary displays. Those were four excellent reasons not to take a look at the Eagle training camp. Besides, he had gotten rid of his football lusts in high school. Middle guards simply didn't weigh less than two hundred pounds, not even in college. Remo went to the water cooler and filled his mouth again. They were four excellent reasons not to go.
The fare to Pell College was $7.35 and Remo gave the cab driver a ten and told him to keep the change. It was just 6:30 A.M. and already a line had begun to form outside the field house. At just shy of six feet, Remo was one of the shortest men in line. He was also one of the lightest.
Remo stood in line behind a garage mechanic who played semipro and said he knew he didn't have a chance but he just wanted to butt heads once or twice with real pros. He had played against the Eagles' third string linebacker once hi high school and had gotten by him once. Of course, he had been hit so hard he had fumbled four other times during the game.
On Remo's other side was a college dropout of six-feet-seven, 280 pounds, who had never played football but thought he might show enough talent, considering his size. The men gathered and the line grew. All of the men but one cherished fantasies most men had surrendered in childhood. That one's mouth tasted of salt and he was experiencing a body and mind change hundreds upon hundreds of years old, a transformation never experienced before by anyone outside the little Korean village
of Sinanju.
The assistant coaches avoided the eyes of the free agents as they broke them down into groups. The only thing the coaches seemed concerned with were the release forms. Seven for each man, freeing the Eagles from responsibility for any possible injuries.
The hopefuls were herded to the sidelines of the Pell playing field and told to wait. The Eagles went through their morning workout. They did not exchange any words with the amateurs. When a television crew arrived, five applicants were called from the sidelines. Remo was not one of them. He was too small, according to an assistant coach.
«They're putting them in with the regulars,» said a man sitting next to Remo. «I was here last year.»
«Why don't they give them a chance and put them in with the rookies,» asked Remo.
«Rookies would kill 'em. A rookie will hit anything that moves, just to show they can hit. Rookies are dangerous. The regulars will take it easy on us.»
For each television crew and reporter, another group of free agents was trotted out. Remo waited through the morning workout, but was not called. At lunch they all ate with Eagles but at separate tables. Every now and then, one of the applicants was called to sit near an Eagle. One photographer had an Eagle feed an applicant, holding the fork near his mouth and smiling at the camera. When the photographer said, «Got it,» the offensive tackle dropped the forkful of coleslaw in the other man's lap. The man tried to laugh it off.
One of the reporters tried to get Lerone Marion Bettee, aka «The Animal,» to pose with an applicant's head in his hands. Bettee refused, saying he did not use his hands like that without toilet paper.
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