The crashing went on and on as if it would never stop, like it would go on for an eternity.
Then it faded away.
Ranger Ricardo Wegman opened his eyes. He was floating in thin air, looking down on the path of ruin created by the tumbling SUV. Then he knew-he was dead. His soul had left his body, which had to still be inside the jeep getting pounded to pulp.
"I'm discorporated!" Wegman gasped.
"You're a dipshit," the skinny guy said. Wegman craned his neck back and down and up, and found that he was in actuality hanging over the sheer mountainside drop. The skinny running man held him by his belt, in one hand.
"What happened?" Wegman asked.
"You drove off the road. Like fifteen seconds ago. Remember-squealing tires, crunching body panels and all that? I pulled you out through the window when your National Park-issue transport went on its gravity-verifying fit."
Wegman looked flabbergasted-then stricken. "You should have let me go with the car!"
"Huh?"
"Go ahead!" he pleaded. "Throw me in! I'll never live down the humiliation!" Wegman didn't even feel the fantastic agony of his shorts and trousers practically splitting his crotch in what had to be a world-record wedgie. All he felt was the disdain that was yet to come. "You don't understand! It was the kind of thing a flatlander would do!"
"It's just a car. So what. You should see some of the stuff I've wrecked. Whole villages and shit."
"Please! End it for me! I'm begging you!" Wegman started twisting and clawing at the iron-hard fist that clung to his trousers, but it was like scratching his fingernails on steel girders. To his mortification, the skinny young man carried him to the shoulder of the road and put him safely on his own two feet.
"If the department of agriculture makes a higher moron classification than Grade A, then you rate it," Remo Williams said. "Listen, just tell everybody you were chasing some guy who was running fifty miles per hour and you got so caught up in it you didn't pay attention to the road."
Ranger Ricardo Wegman gave Remo a disdainful look. "They'll think I'm crazy on top of being stupid. I'd rather be dead."
"Fine. You want to end it, you go ahead. I've got a bus to catch."
Remo ran off. In a matter of seconds Wegman was alone. If it weren't for the obvious signs of the crash, he would have doubted the entire event had really even happened.
Now that the shock was wearing off, he started thinking-who was that guy and how the hell had he managed to pace a jeep at fifty miles per hour anyway?
The enigma was so distracting he entirely forgot about throwing himself off the mountainside before the first emergency vehicle arrived on the scene-and by then it was too late. Killing yourself right there, in front of your peers? It just wasn't done.
Chapter 19
Remo wondered if the fates were aligning against him. Here he was trying to do something good, trying to prove himself, for crying out loud, and he was getting nothing but misery for all his trouble. Chiun throwing a hissy fit, Smitty giving him the third degree and then Ranger Rick driving his car off the hill so Remo had to stop and yank his ass to safety. Only to get a lecture in the strict codes of National Park ranger machismo for his effort.
But the big hill was finally starting to cooperate, and he spotted the tour bus below him on the twisting, curving Blue Ridge Parkway.
"Time for a shortcut," Remo announced to no one and vaulted off the road into the underbrush, slipping soundlessly as a shadow through the bushes and wildflowers that clung to the steep grade. A hundred feet lower the ground leveled out enough to afford purchase to a few deep-rooted trees, and Remo scampered up the trunks into the upper limbs, then vaulted from tree to tree. His hand-sewn Italian loafers, already ruined from the downhill run, landed perfectly every time, supporting him for a second before he was flying on to the next tree. Moments later he landed on the road just a few hundred paces behind the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus, and he caught up at the next curve.
He climbed on the roof and glared at Chiun, who was arranging the fluttering silk of his kimono as if he had not moved from his seat in hours.
"That didn't take long," Remo grumbled.
"It certainly did," Chiun retorted. "The bus has been on the road for nearly twenty minutes."
"I'm not talking about me. I'm talking about you."
"I, however, am talking about you. Then, lo! what do I see but the Reigning Master of Sinanju flinging himself through the trees like some ungainly combination of Strong Man Jack and Lord Greystoke."
Remo pondered. "Lord Greystoke is Tarzan, right?"
Chiun rolled his eyes and sighed to the crisp blue sky. Remo shrugged. "I give up. Who's Strong Man Jack?"
"Another character from twentieth-century American fiction or folklore or whatever passes for literature in this part of the world." Chiun waved his hand at the sky above, implying that "this part of the world" included the mountains and all the rest of the planet that was west of Pyongyang.
"So you're saying I'm sort of like Jethro Clampett meets George of the Jungle."
"I wouldn't have brought it up at all had I known I would be forced to explain it during the entirety of our downhill journey."
"Just trying to get a handle on the insults that keep getting hurled my way," Remo said.
"Maybe if you had an inkling about the written word, even the florid clutter that passes for literature in the Western world, you would understand what I say and why I say it."
Remo grinned without humor. "Hey, I'm getting smarter already-you just told me my culture is stupid and I'm stupider."
Chiun sniffed. "If the oversize novelty T-shirt fits..."
"Now that we understand each other on that point, let's move on to the next bit of trivia. How'd you get back here so fast? I just got off the phone with Smitty and next thing I know you're back in the saddle. So, what, are you carrying a mobile phone these days that you're not telling me about."
"I would not carry such a device. The waves emanating from them cook the tiny cells of the brain and addle the thoughts." Chiun looked suspicious. "Have you been using one behind my back all these years? It would explain much."
"So what are you doing here? Last I saw you transferred to the eastbound train, bound for Hoboken." Chiun nodded, as if the question was a perfectly reasonable one, and one that he had no intention of answering.
"Well?"
"I am here. Is that not enough?"
"You've got something up your sleeve you don't want to talk about."
"You are mistaken."
"You lie like a rug. Spit it out, Chiun-you realized I was on to something."
"What do you mean? On drugs?"
"The truth. My lead was panning out and you knew it and you came back because you had to be in on it when I solved this mystery."
Chiun, for a moment, looked genuinely surprised. Then he shook his head pityingly. "My son, that is not why I came back."
"Bulldookey. Then why?"
With a reluctant, graceful sweep of his arm the ancient Korean Master waved one hand at the billboard awaiting them on the very boundary of the national park. "There is your answer."
It was a magnificent, tawdry sign that put a blemish on the natural beauty of the mountain scenery the way a slash with garden shears would have blemished the Mona Lisa.
The billboard letters were multicolored, metallic and sparkling, and they spelled out: Mollywood U.S.A.! Just 15 Miles to the Entertainment Hub of the Smokies! Ms. Molly Pardon's Smoky Mountain Theme Park.
Remo groaned. "Molly Pardon as in country music singer Molly Pardon?"
"The same," Chiun enthused.
"Mountainous mammaries, big blond bogus bouffant, that Molly Pardon?"
"I have it on good authority that her hair is not bogus. Her silky tresses are naturally pale and golden."
"As natural as the boobs, anyway." Remo shrugged. "I've heard her sing."
"She has an angel's voice," Chiun enthused.
"Wolverines defen
ding a carrion stash sound more angelic."
"She's no Wylander Jugg," Chiun admitted, "but she sings with the same sincerity and passion. It is the music of real people, music that flows from the heart and soars from the lips, Remo."
"You say soars, I say hurls."
Chiun beamed. "You are an admirer of the beauteous Molly Pardon? I never knew this, my son."
"I wouldn't call it admiration so much as fascination," Remo said when the second billboard followed just minutes after the first. Molly Pardon herself was pictured, a fifty-year-old bleached-blond giantess rendered in thermoset plastic. Her ruby-red lips, open in a wide Southern-girl smile, could have swallowed a minivan. Her famous mass of hair had been constructed with the not-found-in-nature fluorescent yellow of plastic lemons. Her face had been re-created with a photorealistic transfer technique so accurate that a layer of fleshy-colored enamel was added to blot out the crow's-feet around the eyes and surgical scars around the scalp, lips, temple and chin. Not that anyone even saw her face. Remo found it impossible to focus his attention beyond the swell of her re-created cleavage, which reflected the daylight like patent leather.
"That is one immense Molly," Remo said.
Chiun was mildly stunned at the spectacle. "It is large."
"Large? I'll bet they recycled five or six thousand soda bottles into each one of those knockers."
"Pah! You see only her womanly charms," Chiun said.
"How could I see anything else? Those things should have telescopes sticking out of them."
"She is well endowed, granted, and yet her attraction is in her voice, not her bosom."
"On anybody else you'd have called them 'udders.'"
"They would be so if she flaunted them in the same way the women you cavort with parade their milk-producing organs."
Remo laughed. "Come on! You're not seriously trying to tell me that Molly Pardon doesn't trade on her boobs."
"She does not!"
"You're wrong and you know it, but far be it from the Wise and All-Knowing Master Chiun to own up to a mistake."
"Someday I might make a mistake. Then I would indeed be the first to acknowledge it."
"And someday monkeys will fly out of my butt."
Chiun nodded seriously. "Such a feat would certainly be unique among all the Masters who have come before you. Is this the type of outrageous anecdote you plan as your legacy in the scrolls of the Masters?" Remo was about to respond when he caught it again. The whiff in the air, so faint, so fleeting, he was almost not sure of it. Then he saw Chiun lift his head and draw air into his nostrils. Chiun smelled it, too. It was here. Whatever it was that was making people go violently bonkers, it was right here in this bus.
Chapter 20
Frank Curtis always did what he was told. As long as it was Greg Grom who told him what to do.
Frank Curtis had infinite respect and measureless affection for Grom. Every word President Grom uttered resonated with ageless wisdom. Every action Grom took was purposeful and correct. Doing Grom's bidding was so gratifying.
Not everybody understood that, including his best friend since college, Randall Switzer, who would say, "I don't get it. You used to hate that guy, Frank."
"I never hated Greg!"
"Yeah, you did. You told me you did. You said he was the biggest moron ever to belong to Mensa."
"I never said that!"
"You called him an ambitionless, egoist jerk-off."
"Never," Frank Curtis had protested.
"The point is, you used to despise this little schmuck, and now all of a sudden you think he's God's gift to you."
"Don't call him a schmuck, Switz," Frank warned.
"I won't call him a schmuck if you admit that you used to say he was indolent as a sloth but with less personality."
Switz had been Frank's best friend for twenty years, but not anymore.
Frank's wife wasn't much better. "Frank, tell me the honest truth, honey," she demanded finally. "Are you gay? Are you having relations with this young man?"
Frank shook his head sadly. "Pauline, you know I am not gay."
"But Frank, I don't understand this obsession," Pauline wailed. "You're missing work, you're constantly away from home. Whatever this boy wants is your top priority, and everything else comes second. Where did this come from, Frank? You've never acted this way before-it's an infatuation!"
"Pauline, it is simply my respect and admiration for an important and powerful man."
"Powerful?" Pauline snorted.
"He's the elected president of Union Island!"
"It's just a small town that happens to be surrounded by water. If the place didn't make so much money on tourism, the mayor's position wouldn't even be a paying job."
Frank had not cared to continue that discussion. If Pauline Curtis couldn't show a proper level of respect for President Grom, then she could just go to hell.
Just that morning his boss had turned against him, too. "Professor Curtis, is this young man blackmailing you?" asked University Director Jack Holdsworth.
"Of course not! A ridiculous suggestion."
"I cannot think how else a rather unimpressive graduate student-a student you once fervently disliked-could turn you into his errand boy," the university director observed. "He's got you jumping through hoops. You've spent all your vacation days and personal days in his service-not just this year's, but next year's, as well. Hear me out-a few years ago, when Mr. Grom was our student, you disciplined him in a way that he may have found humiliating, although you were perfectly justified. It seems to me that he may have been angry enough to dig up some sort of dirt on you and use it against you."
"Nothing could be further from the truth," Professor Curtis insisted.
The university director sighed. "Well, I'm not going to pressure you on this, Professor, but I am also not going to authorize another day off so you can go propitiate this young hoodlum."
"Hoodlum-?"
"Go to your classroom, Professor."
Professor Frank Curtis left the office of the director of the university, but he didn't go to his classroom. He got in his car and he drove away. Out of town. Out of Virginia. Maybe he'd never go back.
His wife, his friends, his fourteen years of tenure in the department, all those things could wait. Right now he had an important job to do. It was important because Greg Grom said so.
He had been driving for hours when he spotted the tour bus a couple of miles ahead of him on the interstate. He closed to within a half mile and set the cruise control to pace the bus at sixty-six miles per hour, then opened the window and held the digital camera outside to avoid the windshield glare. With one hand he fumbled to get the tiny display adjusted so he could see it, then to max out the digital zoom. It was difficult getting the extreme close-up of the bus into the viewfinder while keeping the car from veering off the road.
When he finally got the tour bus in the shot, he snapped of few dozen high-resolution images and put the camera on the dashboard to see his results.
It was the latest top-of-the line digital camera for use by professional wildlife photographers, and had all kinds of bells and whistles that were beyond the understanding of a professor of anthropological studies. Somehow, though, he managed to take several high-quality shots. There were close-ups of the shoulder of the road that were crisp enough you could count the stones. Quite a few images of the surface of the highway showed contrast so vivid you could practically feel the texture of the concrete.
Only the last few shots finally managed to get the bus in the frame. A fender with some mud spots. The back window with a brilliant reflection of the late-morning sun. And finally, the top of the bus-and two people sitting there.
"Well, I'll be!" Curtis exclaimed. Then he squinted into the display. "Dammit!"
He tried shooting another round of photos. His aim got better but his frustration mounted. The third time he managed to get a total of six shots of the roof of the bus, but he was so irritated with the result he fe
lt like ripping out his comb-over.
He plugged the camera into the data port on his phone and E-mailed the best of the photos while hitting the speed dial for a voice call. "This is Professor Curtis, Mr. President."
Greg Grom sounded tense. "Took you long enough, Frank," his former student said. "I expected you an hour ago. Did you get the camera?"
"Yes, sir."
"Did you get good shots of the bus?"
"Yes, Sir."
"Well, come on, Frank, were they there or not?"
"Yes, sir," Curtis said. "A white man and an old Asian. You can see them plain as day relaxing on the roof, as comfortable as you please."
"Oh shit, Frank!"
Professor Frank Curtis, Ph.D., always followed President Grom's orders without question. This time was no exception. Still, he couldn't stifle the grunt that accompanied the sudden but successful effort.
"What's the matter with you?" Groin demanded.
"Nothing, sir. Excuse me, sir. It's just a habit, I guess."
"What's a habit?"
"When I-you know," Curtis stammered.
"Frank, I haven't got the foggiest clue what you're talking about."
"Just following instructions, sir," the professor said, embarrassment mixing with disgust at the smell and the squishiness. "I sent you the shots, sir."
GREG GROM DOWNLOADED the files onto his laptop. They were so big they seemed to take forever, but the high quality was worth the wait. It was amusing to think how much the professional-grade digital camera had to have cost the old fart.
When the first image filled the screen, Grom wasn't amused anymore.
There they were, sitting on the roof. It was weird; it was eerie. Except for his strangely thick wrists, the white guy could be any one of fifty million Caucasian adult males in North America. The senior citizen from the Far East was another story. He looked too frail to get across the sunroom at the nursing home without a walker. He looked underfed, and it seemed as if the billowing silks of his geisha outfit should have taken him into the air like a kite. And yet he sat cross-legged and relaxed. He looked like he was meditating, for crying out loud.
Grom magnified the image, muttered an insult at the old fart on the phone and moved on to the next image. Then the next.
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