"You ever think about flying yourself?" the pilot asked after they climbed up over the airport.
Remo looked down at the tangled remains of the vintage Barnes Stormer, now surrounded by crash trucks and fire engines.
"Not in the last half-hour," he said. His tone was worried. He hoped there was nothing wrong Upstairs.
But most of all, he hoped Chiun was all right.
"You fly, then?" asked the pilot.
"I had a plane but it crashed my first time up. How do you think I got this bump?" added Remo, who in fact had no idea how he'd acquired the lump.
Chapter 3
Remo Williams didn't bother counting out the pilot's money. He just extracted cab fare and handed the man his entire wallet, including ID cards and phony family pictures.
"Hey, don't you want-?"
"Keep it as a war souvenir," Remo said, jumping from the plane. He collared a taxi driver who was sitting in his cab sipping black coffee from a Styrofoam cup.
"Folcroft Sanitarium," Remo called from the back seat.
As if a spring had popped from the cushion, the driver jumped straight up in his seat. His head banged the cab roof and his coffee scalded his lap.
"Hey, what the "
"I'm in a rush," Remo said, throwing money into the front seat. "Take me there, and no lip. I'm a famous war hero. Only today I brought down a Barnes Stormer flown by a fiscal terrorist."
The driver turned around in his seat and started to protest.
He hadn't heard the cab door open or close and had no inkling of how the strange guy in the T-shirt appeared in his back seat. But the dark eyes that looked back at him were so cold and deadly that the driver swallowed his protests.
He peeled out of the cab stand, asking, "Folcroft, where is that exactly?"
Folcroft Sanitarium was exactly situated on the portion of Rye, New York, that overlooked Long Island Sound. It was nestled in a rustic section of the shoreline like a sore tooth in clover.
"Don't drive up to the gate," Remo warned as they drew near. "And kill the engine."
The driver obediently killed the engine, coasting to a stop in a copse of poplars by the side of an unmarked road. He glanced at his fare in the rearview mirror, thinking that the guy looked more like a Vietnam vet than he did a Gulf War hero. He had those thousand-yard-stare kind of eyes. Cold.
"I'll get out here," Remo said quietly, shoving a fifty-dollar bill through the partition slot. "You never brought me here. You never even saw me."
"Tell that to my scalded balls," the cabby muttered.
But he made no other protest as he watched the tall, skinny man in the T-shirt ease soundlessly into the woods. He watched him for several seconds. It was broad daylight, the woods not dark. Just kind of dim, the way thick woods are even at noon under a heavy canopy of foliage.
The man simply disappeared after slipping behind a tree. The driver dawdled ten minutes, and eventually lost interest.
By the time the taxi driver had gotten his cab turned around, Remo Williams was slipping over the perimeter fence surrounding Folcroft Sanitarium, ostensibly a private hospital but in fact the cover for the organization that employed Remo in the service of America.
Breaching Folcroft's gate was no feat, even for someone without Sinanju training. It was simply a matter of slipping up to an unguarded spot and scaling the stone fence. Pausing momentarily, Remo dropped soundlessly to the other side.
Although Folcroft concealed one of America's deepest deep-cover installations, high-profile security-not to mention out-of-the-ordinary secret surveillance equipment was not present. The very existence of such equipment would have signaled that Folcroft was more than it seemed. And attracted attention.
Attention was the last thing that the director of CURE-the supersecret organization that Folcroft harbored-wanted.
CURE had been set up in the early sixties. A United States President, destined never to complete his term of office, conceived it after he had come to the reluctant realization that his country faced a period of lawlessness and anarchy unequaled in its history.
The President concluded that the sole obstacle to righting the ship of state was its very mainsail. The Constitution. He couldn't repeal it, so he created CURE to work around it. Quietly. Secretly. Deniably.
One man ran CURE. A former CIA analyst named Harold W. Smith. Responsible only to the President, he became the rudder of America, steering the ship of state through political shoals by rooting out crime and corruption and extinguishing them through a variety of subtle methods. At first, by simply alerting traditional law-enforcement agencies and leaving matters in their hands.
But as the years went on, it became obvious that the ship of state needed a secret weapon more powerful than the bank of computers Smith employed to track illicit activity.
And so Remo Williams was recruited to be its enforcement arm.
Remo wasn't thinking of that now as he ghosted around the brick building that was Folcroft Sanitarium. He was working his way down to the apron of grass that sloped gently to the Sound. It was a vista he had seen many times from the window of Harold Smith's office, an office he was about to enter in an unusual way.
Remo stopped in the lee of a ramshackle wharf. He lifted his dark-brown eyes to the building's brick facade, trying to recall which one looked in on Smith's office.
A frown touched his face when he picked it out. The window was easy to spot. It was completely opaque, like a dull mirror. For security reasons it was paned with two-way glass. Not even Remo could see into it.
"Damn Smith and his dippy security," Remo grumbled.
Remo floated up to the building anyway. The facade was brick, which made it easy to scale. Had it been smooth concrete, he could have scaled it just as easily.
Remo went up like a spider and paused at the opaque glass. He set an ear to the pane.
Voices came from within. Pitched low, but charged with urgent emotion.
"Under no circumstances will I allow this!"
Chiun's squeaky voice.
"I must insist."
Smith's lemon-bitter voice. He continued.
"This is Remo's decision, Master Chiun. It will do no good for us to argue it to death. Let Remo decide."
"I will not be ignored. I know how it is with you whites. You have no respect for age or wisdom, both of which I embody in full measure. I will be heard!"
Remo heard Smith's dry, rattly sigh, and expelled one of his own. If they were still arguing like this, there was no danger.
He removed his ear from the glass and knocked twice to get their attention.
He received an instant response.
"Aaiiee!" Chiun.
"My God, Remo!" Smith, of course.
Even though he couldn't penetrate the blank glass, Remo knew they could see him plainly. And he knew he wouldn't have long to wait for a reaction.
The sound was a shriek, like a diamond cutter scoring glass at high speed. It started above his head and screeched around the edges. Remo watched a thin silvery line trace a square.
It is open," Chinn called.
Obligingly Remo gave the pane the heel of his hand. The glass popped out of its frame in one piece.
He climbed in as if stepping through an ordinary doorway.
"Hiya, Smitty." This to the tall, gangling man who had turned in his chair not two feet in front of Remo. ,He jumped to his feet.
"Remo! What is the meaning of this!" he demanded.
Smith's distended jaw threatened the precise knot of his Dartmouth tie. Behind rimless glasses his gray eyes were aghast. His face was the hue of trout skin. This was normal. Smith always looked ashen and unhealthy. .
"You tell me," Remo said, nodding to Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju.
Only five feet tall, and looking like the Korean edition of Methuselah, Chiun stood beside Smith's desk holding the large heavy plate glass in his frail arms as if it were mere cellophane. He wore an emerald-and-gold kimono that might have been sewn from a pi
le of discarded Chinese dragon costumes.
His face was a knot of harsh wrinkles, the skin of his bald head unusually smooth and a translucent nut color. Puffs of wispy hair crowded above each delicate ear. A tendril of identical hair depended from his set chin. It waved under the steady pressure of his exhalations. He was angry.
"Why don't you give me that?" Remo said solicitously, reaching for the heavy pane.
Chiun retreated three short steps, his clear hazel eyes regarding Remo suspiciously.
"Why?" he asked, tight-lipped.
"Because it's heavy. I don't want you to hurt yourself "
"I am the Master of Sinanju!" Chinn thundered.
"Shhh!" Smith said urgently.
"I am no old man to be fawned over and shielded from the harsh realities of life," Chiun continued.
"I didn't mean-" Remo began to say.
Smith said, "Please, please. We can be heard outside this office. "
He was ignored.
"I know what you are thinking, Remo Williams," Chiun went on. "You think I am an old man. Go on. Admit this. Speak truly."
Remo folded his arms. "Well, you are a hundred now."
"I am not a hundred winters old! I have celebrated no birthdays since my eightieth. Therefore I am eighty. I will always be eighty.'
"Fine. Have it your way."
"Do not take that tone with me, pale piece of pig's ear," Chinn retorted. "Eighty is a fine age. Worthy of respect. One hundred winters is an achievement to be revered. Which I would be, had you enabled me to celebrate my kohi."
Remo threw up his hands. He didn't want to get into it. It was too tangled. "Fine," he said. "I screwed up. I'm eternally sorry. Now, will you hand me the glass before you break it, please?"
Remo turned to Smith. "Where do you want it?"
Smith's eyes were sick. "My God. First the phone, and now the window. What about security?"
Remo fixed Chinn with his eyes. "Little Father, what did you do to Smith's phone?" Remo spotted the blue telephone on the desk. The coaxial cable linking receiver to base was severed as cleanly as if by bolt cutters. Remo recognized the handiwork of Chiun's long fingernails-the same tools that had scored the glass like a diamond cutter.
"It was an accident," Chiun said dismissively. "In my fear and concern for our future, I mistakenly severed the wire."
"In a pig's ass," Remo said. "You deliberately stampeded me and then cut the wire so I'd come running like a maniac."
"How you come running is your responsibility," Chiun sniffed. "That you are now here is all that matters. Emperor Smith has placed a terrible choice before me. One I was not prepared to shoulder alone. Not that I am too old to shoulder it," he added hastily. "It is that it is your responsibility too.
Chiun looked to Smith. "Emperor, tell Remo all.
"If this is what I think it is about, the answer is no," Remo said firmly. "Just like last time."
Chinn's wizened features softened. His youthful eyes acquired a pleased glow.
"That is what I told Smith, but he insisted upon laying the sordid matter before us both."
"No way, Smitty," Remo said. "I'm shocked you'd try an end run around me like this." ,
Smith pointed with an anxious finger. "Remo, the glass.'
"Where do you want it?"
"Somewhere where I do not have to explain it," Smith said wearily.
Shrugging, Remo stepped up to the Master of Sinanju, who willingly surrendered the glass. Calmly Remo carried it over to the gaping window frame, set it leaning, and scored it to quarters with quick swipes of one diet-hardened fingernail.
Remo cracked the glass into quarters and one by one scaled them out the window into the incoming fall breeze.
The glass squares spun over a mile out into the Sound, actually skipping like flat stones the last five hundred or so yards before sinking without a trace.
"Now," Remo said happily. "Where were we? Oh, yeah. Smith, since you have to be told twice, the answer is a flat no. "
"I agree with Remo," Chinn said quickly.
"No," Remo repeated. "Plastic surgery is out."
"Surgery!" Chiun squeaked. "What is this? I have not heard of this request before."
Remo frowned. He turned. "Isn't that what you were arguing about just now?"
"No," said Chiun.
"No," said Smith.
"No?" asked Remo, suddenly sensing that he was on uncertain ground.
"I was discussing with Master Chinn the urgent need to relocate you both in the wake of your participation in the Gulf crisis," Smith explained.
"Relocate? You mean sell my house?"
"Our house," Chiun put in.
"I think it's in my name," Remo pointed out.
"My lawyer will call your lawyer," Chiun snapped.
"Not unless he's taking you on contingency," Remo remarked. To Smith he said flatly, "We're not moving."
"But you must. Remo, as a result of your activities during the Gulf War, your face was telecast to the world. You were identified as the President's personal assassin."
"What is wrong with that?" Chiun wanted to know. "Let the world know this undeniable fact. Your President is safer if tyrants everywhere understand he is protected by the House of Sinanju."
Smith pressed on. "We must take immediate steps to cover all traces of Remo's recent existence. This involves relocating you from Rye and fixing your face."
Folding his arms decisively, Remo said, "No way. Right, Little Father?"
When the Master of Sinanju did not answer, Remo undertoned, "I said, 'Right, Little Father.' That's your cue."
"Emperor," Chiun said slowly, "when you refer to fixing Remo's face, do you mean changing it, as was formerly done in the days when it was necessary to do so often due to Remo's unforgivable carelessness?"
Smith nodded. "Yes. Only I expect once more will suffice. If we have no further . . . incidents of exposure."
Chiun's smooth brow wrinkled, making it match his spidery web of a face. He glided close to Remo and stared elaborately.
At length he asked, "Can you do something with his nose?"
"Such as?"
"Make it normal. Like my nose."
"I will not have a button nose!" Remo shouted, seeing where the conversation was about to go.
"His nose can be reduced," Smith said, unperturbed.
"You stay out of this, Smith!" Remo shouted. He looked down at Chiun, matching the Master of Sinanju's curious regard with a cold stare of his own. "Both of you listen to me. I'm not going to say it again. This is my face -or at least as close as we could get to my original face after all those old face lifts. And a couple of miles from here is my house. It may not have a white picket fence. It may not be inhabited by a loving wife and children, but it's as close to a normal home as I ever expect to get. And I'm keeping it. Is that clear?"
Remo glared down at the Master of Sinanju. Chiun looked up at him with a grim mien. Smith looked at the ceiling.
When no one spoke for half a minute, Remo pressed his advantage.
"I didn't ask for this life," Remo said evenly, a glitter of steel in his tone. "I was happy as a patrolman. I would have made sergeant one day. Probably. I didn't ask to be recruited to the organization. I didn't ask to be trained in Sinanju. I was dragooned into it. Okay, it worked out. I'm Sinanju now. I accept that. Remo Williams may be dead to the rest of the world, but to me, I'm still him. I mean, he's still me."
Remo blinked. Chinn's dry lips curled with pleasure.
"I mean I'm still Remo Williams," Remo said testily. "And I'm keeping this face and I'm keeping the house. Screw security. A million U.S. troops had their faces telecast from over there. No one's going to remember mine."
Remo paused for breath.
"Very well," Smith said tightly. Remo could tell by his tone that he was seething. He was used to absolute obedience. After twenty years of working with Remo, he should have gotten over that by now. He had not.
Chinn spoke up. "Emperor, what about the ey
es?"
"The point is moot," Smith said thinly.
"So are the eyes. I do not want a Remo with moot eyes. Can you give him proper eyes? Like mine." Chiun's hazel orbs wrinkled into wise slits, the better to impress the dull whites with their undeniable magnificence.
"I will not go around looking like a Korean!" Remo shouted.
"I am insulted," Chinn said huffily, shaking a tiny fist in the air.
"You are dreaming," Remo snapped.
"Could you both moderate your voices?" Smith said wearily.
I will if he will," Remo said flatly.
Chiun made a face. "I will. But only if Remo does first."
"I already started. Your turn."
Chinn compressed his papery lips. His long-nailed hands sought one another. He took hold of his wrists and the belling sleeves of his emerald-and-gold kimono slid together, concealing them.
"Let me propose a compromise," Smith said when the silence was both thick and cold.
"I'm listening," Remo said, not taking his eyes off the Master of Sinanju, who had trained him in the discipline called Sinanju, legendary for centuries as the sun source of the martial arts. Trained him until no feat achievable by the human biological machine was beyond his abilities.
"At least will you, Remo, agree to take an extended vacation?" Smith pleaded. "Until memories fade?"
"I'll consider it."
"I will consider it too," Chiun allowed. "If Remo's face can be fixed to my exact specifications," he added.
"I am not repeat, never-giving up this face!" Remo said hotly. "I'm comfortable wearing it. It's like an old shoe."
"Ha!" Chiun crowed. "Now he admits its ugliness."
"I give up!" Remo groaned, throwing up his hands.
"I accept your graceless surrender," retorted Chiun. "Emperor, bring on the powerful surgeons of plastic. I will sketch for them Remo's magnificent new countenance."
Smith cleared his throat. He had remained standing through the heated exchange. Now he settled into the cracked leather executive's chair he had broken in when CURE began three long decades before and which he expected to occupy until the day he died. There would be no retirement for the head of CURE.
Smith straightened his gray vest, which matched his suit, his hair, and his pallor in a way that looked calculated but was not. His rimless glasses had slid down his patrician nose. He pushed them back with a finger, taking care not to smudge either lens.
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