Sue Me td-66

by Warren Murphy

  "It means you can't get bookings," said Debbie.

  "I don't know," said Remo.

  "It means that someday you will succeed. Remo, the handmaiden of success is failure. There are only so many times a determined person can fail before he succeeds. And look at whom we face. Someone who understood how Gupta worked. I believe we are being tested. See what fails here, and see what fails there, and see what fails elsewhere, and all the while the failures are telling that person who we are and what we can do."

  "I dunno," said Remo.

  "On the one hand, Remo, we face someone who knows what he is doing while we have no idea what we are doing."

  "Talk in Korean," said Remo.

  "I'm old enough to hear anything you say," said Debbie. "And smarter than you think, too. Yeah." But Chiun ignored her.

  "We hunt these lawyers for proof for some judge. What sort of a country is it that an emperor cannot maintain order with a scaffold or sword? What is evidence but something someone else may believe? Is that what we hunt? We should hunt thundershowers for our purse and build walls from morning dew. We are made fools of. Do you not understand we do not belong here? If this were easy for us it would be right. But it is impossible."

  "It's only impossible when you give up, little father. We will fail, and fail, and fail, and then succeed. What's good for our enemies is good for us."

  "Unfortunately, Remo, when an assassin fails, he is usually dead for the trouble. Leave this crazy land and the crazy man Smith. Come with me to civilized people. Did you not feel the respect of India, the grandeur, the sanity, the beauty?"

  "I saw a dirty river," said Remo.

  "How American," said Chiun.

  "I'm not giving up, little father. Every other country in the world has a tinpot dictator, where laws mean nothing. There's no difference between some despot and some glorious emperor," said Remo.

  "That's what I am saying. This is the age of the despot, and here the glory of Sinanju wastes itself in foolishness beyond comprehension. We do not even serve a lunatic emperor like Smith any longer: we serve some poetry that you alone appear to believe in."

  "Smith serves the same laws. And he's not insane. You just don't understand America."

  "That's not the problem, Remo. You don't understand the world."

  Debbie Pattie saw the two men fall into hostile silence. She did not understand a word they were saying, but she recognized a family fight when she saw one. She recognized two people thinking each other stubborn and unreasonable.

  She also recognized a chance to make her point. "Look," she said. "I know you think I don't know what I'm doing with all these crazy rags and the weird colors and downright junk I dress in, but I do. Nobody ever paid a million dollars for Beethoven's Fifth. This is what makes money. And so this is what I do, understand? I mean, I couldn't be a heavyweight boxer, right? I couldn't really be an opera star, because I don't have a voice that would carry past the first row. So I did what I could do without any talent. And I did all right, too. I'm famous and I'm rich, and that ain't bad if all you can do is yell and dress bad."

  Debbie paused. Her voice lowered, and they could hear the tears beginning.

  "So what I'm saying, fellas, is would you please be a little bit understanding of someone who works different from you? Huh? How about it? A little human understanding, Remo?"

  "No," said Remo. "I don't believe in it, and Chiun believes in it even less."

  "Okay, you poor moneyless jerk, I'll show you I have smarts. I'm going to show you where every penny of that Save benefit went. I'm going to show you you're wrong. You're wrong about everything. Because whether you know it or not, I love you, you big ape," she said to Remo.

  "I didn't know that," said Remo.

  "Well, I do," said Debbie, her tears making a rainbow stream through her multicolored makeup. Remo shrugged. It didn't make any difference to him. Chiun, of course, was not surprised. The girl was the epitome of bad taste.

  For Chiun, only one thing really mattered. He knew that if something did not change soon, he might lose Remo. And this mattered much, much more than he would ever let Remo know.

  Chapter 9

  During World War II, when defense planners identified the seven most likely targets for the maximum possible damage to the United States, the Grand Booree Dam on the Colorado River rated right behind the destruction of the capital itself.

  The project was immense. Not since the pyramids had mankind produced anything so massive. At its base the dam was almost a half-mile wide. In a perfect awesome slope of reinforced concrete it rose to the top of the canyon, almost as high as it was wide.

  Major U. S. highways were built just to transport material to the construction site. A rail line for the concrete alone was built along the upper ridge of the Booree Canyon. Enough concrete was used in the making of Grand Booree to build twelve cities.

  And behind its massive wall, a lake formed of such size that if the government chose, it could lose a fleet of battleships there. Homes and cities rose around the lake. And it was this lake that gave defense planners such nightmares.

  If an enemy chose to destroy the dam, the force of the unleashed waters cascading down the canyon would obliterate everything under a wall of water that would shame any tidal wave yet recorded.

  It was a nightmare that had moved this dam in Colorado right up the list of most vulnerable targets. It stayed there until a military officer took one look at the project and asked quite simply, "How would they destroy it?"

  He calculated that for Japan or Germany to put even a single hole in the Grand Booree they would need a round-the-clock fleet of heavy bombers pounding the dam for three weeks straight. Even if Germany or Japan could mount such an extensive air bombardment, penetrating formidable coastal defenses, they would certainly not bother to do it to flood a few cities in Colorado.

  What about a saboteur's bomb? the officer was asked.

  "In terms of known explosives, to put a hole into that mass of concrete would require the national production of dynamite for August and September, or roughly four full trainloads."

  There was no way any saboteur could sneak in enough explosives to do damage to the Grand Booree. Nevertheless, the very thought of what could happen if the lake ever let loose on the valley downriver was enough to force the government to station antiaircraft batteries around its perimeter and limit access to it all through the war. The government felt it just had to do something, even if something was absolutely not needed.

  The residents of the valley numbered twenty-seven people, most of them guides who could easily have been trucked away. But the Grand Booree was an object of national pride; its lake was as important a public symbol as the Statue of Liberty.

  The word from the top had been that Grand Booree was too big to be ignored. Robert Dastrow knew this was still government thinking, as he informed Nathan Palmer that he was about to do a freebie for Palmer, Rizzuto

  "Never mind why I'm doing this. You can pay me later. Just get your young lawyers into the Booree Canyon to warn the people that the Booree was badly built and might go any day now."

  "The Booree? How are you going to do the Booree?"

  "Never mind. Just get your people out there. Make a lot of noise. Attract attention. Do whatever you have to do to make sure people sit up and take notice. "

  "But we usually don't want to be noticed."

  "This time, you do," said Dastrow. "Be sure you make noise now. We're fishing, so to speak."

  When the young spokesmen for Palmer, Rizzuto came into the canyon to warn the few residents there, they were greeted with derision. The governor of the state went on television to laugh at the crazy lawyers. It became a popular joke that Palmer, Rizzuto had run out of disasters to chase, so instead they were hallucinating them. Palmer worried that the dam wouldn't go and their investment would be lost. Schwartz worried that the dam would go and for the first time Dastrow would have them linked as possible suspects in its destruction. Rizzuto worried about
filling an inside straight with two men he met on an airplane, and in Folcroft Sanitarium Harold W. Smith took the threat of the Grand Booree more seriously than anyone else in the country.

  It was a threat he couldn't possibly resist. Palmer, Rizzuto had made a mistake. They were, for the first time, establishing a trail right to themselves.

  At their first check-in he ordered Remo and Chiun into Booree, Colorado. As soon as Remo nailed the evidence he was to inform Smith, and Smith would move it through normal channels back into the justice system, where the law firm of Palmer, Rizzuto to say nothing of Messrs. Palmer, Rizzuto, and Schwartz individually, could at last pay for their crimes.

  "Well, we finally got 'em now, little father," said Remo as he made sure the fourteen steamer trunks with the kimonos for all occasions were packed and organized for the bellboys to wrestle into the elevator.

  "We have nothing. We have insanity. Even the girl dressed in rags made more sense than you. She understood money. She understood the purpose of work is to make money. You don't even understand what you do things for anymore."

  "No, it's you who don't understand;" said Remo.

  "This is childish," said Chiun. "It could go on for days, you saying I don't understand and I saying you don't understand. Let us just let the subject drop."

  "Okay," said Remo.

  "Because you don't understand," said Chiun, following the trunks out the door.

  On the plane to Denver Chiun opened the magazines, pointing out stories about how people worked for money. Everyone else in the world worked for money but Chiun's lunatic protege.

  "I thought we were going to let the subject drop," said Remo.

  "I am dropping it."

  "Then do it."

  "Done. Why should I want to talk about how you are breaking my heart?" said Chiun.

  "If I don't do exactly what you want, exactly when you want, your heart is broken."

  "I hardly consider your betrayal of everything we stand for something so petty as 'not exactly what I want.' "

  "This may come as a surprise to you, but guilt does not work with me," said Remo.

  "Why should my suffering ever bother you? What have I done for you, other than teach you everything you know from breathing to movement? What should I expect in return for this, for the best years of my life?"

  Several people in the first-class section were now listening to Chiun. A young girl thought Remo was awful. A middle-aged man kept casting angry glances at him. A flight attendant comforted Chiun. A woman named Goldstein was taking notes, commenting that Chiun was an absolute master of communication.

  "See, even she knows," said Chiun.

  "She probably meant 'master at communicating guilt,' " said Remo. "I don't care how much other people make. I don't care how much glory other Masters have brought to Sinanju. I do my job. I like my job. It's my job and I'm happy with it, dammit. Case closed. Good night. I'm taking a nap."

  "Sleep well," said Chiun.

  "Thank you," said Remo angrily.

  "On the tears of one who loves you," said Chiun, who then dozed off contentedly while Remo fumed.

  "I never win with him," said Remo.

  "Why should you?" said a flight attendant.

  On the drive from Denver to Grand Booree, Chiun decided he was going to let Remo find his own way. He would no longer berate him for what he felt he had to do.

  Indeed, Chlun was most pleasant during the drive, saying how much he respected and liked Remo. "You have become a Master, something not always possible even for those of Sinanju. You are truly a good son in so many ways. Your loyalty to most of that, which is Sinanju has impressed me over the years. I have felt pride in your glory. For your glory, Remo, is the glory of Sinanju."

  Remo waited for the other shoe to drop. He recognized a setup when he heard one. But the other shoe didn't drop. Chiun just repeated how much he respected and loved Remo. That Remo was better than anyone from Sinanju except, of course, Chiun, which was why Chiun had stayed so long. If Remo weren't wonderful, Chiun would not have wasted a minute beyond the initial time paid for by Smith for the training.

  "Perhaps you do not even know the moment I knew you were someone special, even in white skin." Remo cast a quick glance at Chiun. The voice was soft, the hands were complacently at rest in the lap of the traveling kimono. The face was benign. This was when Chiun was most dangerous.

  Remo did not venture an answer.

  "It was when I saw a star in your eye. It is greatness that comes from a mystery. Is it the blood of birth? Is it the forge that tempers a soul? Is it the soul itself? Even Masters of Sinanju do not know this. But you had it, my son," said Chiun.

  Remo did not answer. He drove in silence, but Chiun did not attack him once. In the small town of Booree, alongside the lake above the massive dam, Remo finally exploded.

  "All right. I give up. Why are you being so nice to me?"

  "Because you are going to die, Remo," said Chiun, and he said it so plainly that Remo believed him. This was not a game. It was not a manipulation.

  Remo thought for a while. He finally said, "Not without a fight, little father."

  "May the Masters of Sinanju look down on me with pity. I train a Master of Sinanju who believes that second place in a fight to the death is all right provided he performs well."

  In Booree the laughter among the people had suddenly changed. People were now talking about how much less their homes would be worth if they bordered a big pit instead of Lake Booree. Every few moments people cast worried glances at the top of the dam. And Remo could feel what was going on. Through the reddish clay of what had once been the top of a canyon and was now the lake's shore, Remo could feel a slight rhythmic tremble every few moments.

  The birds winging over the dam sensed the danger, cawing strange calls. Remo sniffed the water and the air: it smelled of impending disaster.

  " 'Course you can't tell a thing from here," said an old-timer with a sun-grizzled neck and a face as worn as a leather saddle. "But engineers say the Grand Booree, she's beginnin' to tremble. Vibrations like. Slow now but they're pickin' up. Those lawyer fellas sure are smart 'bout what's happenin'. They said it would. Said the government was negligent when they built her. Nobody ever thought that, but it sure looks like it's true."

  "Who says the Booree is going to go?"

  "Engineers. Came in to check once those lawyer fellas got around sayin' so. If you own property here, better sign up with them. They sure know what they're talkin' 'bout. Chief engineer wonders how they could've figured it out."

  "Where is he?"

  "Over at Grand Booree. But better not go there. It's a danger zone now."

  Before Remo left for the dam itself, Chiun gave him an order.

  "Forget all our troubles. Forget everything but what your body has been taught. Listen to your body. It has learned everything it needs."

  "Thank you," said Remo.

  "You will survive," said Chiun.

  "Yes. I will survive." And then there was a long silence, broken only when Chiun turned away to let his thoughts and being quiet and focus on the center of the universe.

  At the dam Calvin Rutherford was giving orders. He wore a plastic safety helmet, and his white shirt pocket contained a plastic case filled with pencils and pens. His face was ashen, and every few moments he sighed in frustration and rage, feeling more helpless by the moment.

  When he saw Remo he ordered him off the dam. "This is no place to be," said Rutherford.

  "I'm safer than you are. Do you know how this happened?"

  "You from the government?"

  "Yeah. Who the hell else would be interested?"

  "Reporters," said Rutherford. "But what the hell. I've already told them. I'll tell you. Don't care who sues us. This is a disgrace. The damned engineers made a mistake."

  "After all these years?"

  "Hell, the mistake didn't happen now. It's just showing up now. I'll take you down to see for yourself. "

  Inside the dam
Remo could feel its mass. He sensed the hugeness of this man-made mountain. He felt the awesome weight of the water in Lake Booree, and sensed the vibrations through the elevator that had brought him and Engineer Rutherford twenty stories down into the bowels of the Grand Booree.

  They walked through a half-mile of internal piping that Rutherford explained in detail and Remo did not understand at all.

  "A dam, any dam, has got to have its sluices working. You've got to let the water out below, because if it comes out over the top, it'll be useless for energy and eventually will wear down the surface of the dam, grind it down just like waterfalls do to the stone they fall on, understand?"

  Remo nodded. He thought he understood.

  "So the sluices are important. It's what we run the turbines with. Water pressure pushes the blades and we create electricity. The Grand Booree supplies much of Colorado. Okay?"

  "Gotcha," said Remo.

  "Now, understanding the turbines, you've got to understand vibrations. Soldiers break step when they walk across a bridge because otherwise the vibrations would set the bridge to rocking. What we have here are not cables, but masses of concrete. The very mass has picked up the vibrations from turbines synchronized in such a way as to turn this whole damned incredible mass of concrete into a pane of window glass that'll crack when the vibrations get strong enough."

  "So where was the negligence?" asked Remo.

  "You sound like a lawyer."

  "I'm trying to catch lawyers."

  "The negligence is that not only did we fail to perceive the effect of synchronized vibrations but we built the turbines in such a way as to be able to run them in only one direction."

  "What's wrong with that?"

  "If we could get them reversed to create a counter vibration, which would be diametrically opposed to the one that is gathering momentum now, we could stop the vibrations perfectly."

  "Well, why not just shut down the turbines? Won't that stop everything from shaking?"

  "No, it's too late for that. Other than reversing the turbines, the only solution's a construction one. We're working on it now."

  "So what's the problem?"

  "The problem is we have to reconstruct the sluices at the entrance point. In other words, we have to do it from underwater at lakeside. We've got divers there now."