"You moron, there's not a single good shot of their faces!" he said into the phone.
"I know, Mr. President. But it is very strange. Everything else is perfectly in focus."
What the hell was the old loser talking about? Grom magnified the next shot until the lounging white guy filled the screen. The dark blue T-shirt was perfectly in focus. Grom could count the neat stitches on the expensive Italian loafers with the ruined soles. But the face was unidentifiable, as if his features had been moving too fast for the camera to focus on.
The ancient Asian was the same. Grom could see the perfect stitching in the embroidery, but the face was just an expressionistic mess of colors.
Every photo was the same way. In the last shot, the white guy was shown giving the camera a friendly wave. "Oh, shit!" gasped the President of the United States Protectorate of Union Island.
"I'll try my best, sir," the old professor replied mournfully. He grunted again.
"Stop it, you moron. Get closer and get me some better shots. I gotta have face shots! And patch me in to the camera feed."
The real-time, frame-a-second images from the old fart's new toy fed into his laptop in low resolution, but the camera electronics stabilized them pretty well. As the professor closed in on the bus, the images of the pair on the roof became vivid.
Grom was squinting at the screen and barking at Curtis whenever he lost the bus from the frame. "Hold it there!" Grom ordered. He was as close as he could get and still have the top half of the white guy in the frame.
The white guy was just staring into the camera. "Take some more high-res shots but keep me on the feed."
"I'll do my best, sir," Curtis said.
"Get one now!"
"Got it, sir."
"Now zoom in on that asshole."
"Yes, sir." The image moved up on the white guy.
"Take another one."
"Okay."
The face. The damn face was still not coming into focus! Even the low-res feed showed the guy's torso in crisp detail, but the face was a blurred mess.
Were they human? Grom's fear mounted. "Keep shooting!"
"Yes, sir."
The guy bent down, and in the next frame he was standing again. He had something in his hand.
"Uh, sir," Curtis said uncertainly.
"Keep shooting!"
The man raised one hand, holding an unidentifiable object, and he waved with the other hand. This time it was a goodbye wave.
The next frame showed the object as large as life, hanging in the air a few feet above the hood of Professor Frank Curtis's Lincoln Continental.
Damn good camera, thought Greg Grom. The threefoot steel tube looked frozen in place, and the crisp detail showed the jagged end where it had been pulled off the roof of the bus. Amazing that you could get such detail when you consider that the metal spear had to have been thrown with tremendous force.
Alone in his little private room, Greg Grom was thinking these things as the muffled sounds of the violently self-destructing Lincoln Continental reached him and then receded.
Then came the screaming. Well, it was more like the hacking of a hyena trying to vomit out rotten meat. It was Amelia Powlik, of course.
The bus was slowing, and there were shouts of alarm and pounding on his door. "Mr. President, there's been an accident," Amelia screeched. "A horrible accident!" Greg Grom was sure it was quite horrible. Shattered wreckage and a mutilated body inside. But somehow that wasn't as horrible as the image on his screen. The last photograph relayed by the camera was still there, waiting to be refreshed for a follow-up image that would never come.
That damn piece of metal tubing, hanging in midair, was coming almost straight at the camera-but not quite. It went just a little bit higher and a little bit to the left, which meant it was targeted directly at the old professor himself. When they finally extracted the corpse from the wreckage, they would discover the old man had a piece of metal skewering his skull-not to mention a pants load of poop.
Well, the old professor had been a total asshole. Grom would have enjoyed Curtis's final touch of humiliation if he wasn't terrified.
He didn't know who these two guys were, where they came from, how they had tracked him down. He only knew that they were ruthless killers, with some sort of Special-Forces training like Grom had never heard of.
And they were onto him. And the bus, it occurred to him now, was stopping.
"Oh, shit!" he shouted, bounding to the door just as the air brakes brought the bus to a halt on the shoulder of the highway.
He burst out the door of his private room. Amelia Powlik was babbling tearfully while the rest of his staff jostled for the exit.
"Get back in here!" Grom shouted. "Get this bus moving now!"
The bus driver, pulling the first-aid kit from its wall mountings, gave him a look of disbelief. "Mr. President, there's a horrible accident and we have to help."
"Help?" Grom's laugh was morbid and humorless. "He's dead! That's why he crashed! And whoever got him is trying to get me!"
"What's going on here, Mr. President?" demanded the ex-Secret Service agent in charge Grom's security detail. His voice always dropped deeper when he became annoyed, and right now the words were rumbling out like the big tumbling boulders.
"How about we discuss it after we get out of range, you idiot!"
"Oh. Yeah." The agent turned on the openmouthed driver and boomed, "What's your problem, driver? Get this vehicle moving now!"
Greg Grom collapsed in a leather couch, his body drained of energy but his mind a riot of conflicting emotions. And none of them were good. He laid his head on the back of the couch and stared straight up.
He expected that any second the ceiling of the bus might begin showing a small round opening to the daylight. Once the killers realized they had failed to flush out their prey, it seemed logical that they would simply start firing into the vehicle at random. Eventually they'd get Grom. Or they'd kill enough people that the bus driver would surrender and the killers would come in and get their intended victim. Isn't that the kind of thing hard-core killers did?
"You feeling okay. Mr. President?"
Grom realized that the two warm bodies pressed up against him on either side were the pair of Justice Department rejects hired for his protection.
"How about some space?"
The bodyguards scooted to the ends of the couch but stayed close, 9mm semiautomatic handguns held at the ready. The agent in charge touched a hand to his earpiece and nodded. "State and local emergency services are on the scene of the accident. One car. They've got the fire out and they can see one victim inside, but the wreck's still too hot to pry open. You want to pass on your information, Mr. President?"
"I got a phone call," Grom lied absently. "A stranger. He said I was about to be ambushed by a group of trained snipers. They'd cause an accident, hoping we would stop to help, then gun down me and my staff."
"I'll have a Justice forensics team called to the scene," the bodyguard said without hesitation. "I'll need your phone to trace the call."
Two exciting ideas came to him at that moment, and Greg Grom stifled his enthusiasm. He scowled at the bodyguard and said, "No way in hell."
Chapter 21
Eileen Mikulka knocked, waited a moment, then pushed open the door to Harold W Smith's office. She entered with a tray. Tea and prune whip yogurt for the Folcroft director, coffee for Associate Director Mark Howard.
She took one step inside and stopped, feeling something in the air that wasn't pleasant. Dr. Smith was as emotionless a man as Mrs. Mikulka had ever known, but right now he was angry. It was there in his hard eyes, his locked jaw. He was actually gripping the edge of his desk. There was a vein, emerging from the sallow flesh of his right temple, that Mrs. Mikulka had never seen before.
Mark Howard was sitting stiff and uncomfortable in the ancient, creaking chair in front of the desk.
She set down the tray. The air in the room was poisonous.
; "Will there be anything-?"
"No, thank you."
Mrs. Mikulka left as fast as her arthritic knees would carry her. When she collapsed at her desk, she felt like crying.
Whatever was wrong, Dr. Smith was clearly not happy with his assistant. Whatever could Mark have done that would make Dr. Smith so angry? Dr. Smith never got that angry.
"Oh, dear." She bit her lower lip to stop its quivering. She couldn't bear to think of that nice young man losing his job. Mark Howard had brought life back into Folcroft's executive wing. A little sparkle. A little humor. The years before Mark came seemed so gray and bland by comparison. To lose him would be awful.
AFTER THE DOOR CLICKED shut, Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Mark, I want to know why you did this."
"I understand, Dr. Smith," Mark Howard replied tentatively, as if he felt remorse but also felt unsure of how to proceed. "First of all, when I give you my full report you'll see that there was no real urgency. Remo did not have anything to go on."
"Obviously he did," Dr. Smith replied. "He went after the Union Island tour group and now there's been an assassination attempt on the Union Island president. Remo is up to something."
"He didn't come across as having any agenda other than tracking down the source of the violent outbreaks," Mark insisted. "When he came to my office, he asked me to trace the movements of the Union Islanders. They happened to have an itinerary that meant one of them could cause the poisonings. I tried telling him we had a long list of people whose known movements gave them the opportunity."
"So what made him suspect the Union Islanders?"
"He had no reason, not that he would tell me about."
Harold W Smith frowned, and some of the anger was evaporating. "So why did he suspect them?"
"He mentioned seeing the island president on TV on a talk show, and placed him at the first set of poisonings. But that was all he had. We tried to brainstorm on a motive and couldn't come up with anything. There's nothing that connects the Union Island group to anybody involved in the mayhem. Nothing. We couldn't see any way the island independence movement could benefit from the killings. And that was about it."
Dr. Smith had his assistant start from the beginning and report, word for word, the conversation between Mark and Remo. It didn't take long.
Smith looked drained then. Paler than his typical gray. "Remo either mislead you about what he knew, or else he was simply getting into this avenue of the investigation impulsively."
Mark Howard shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Smith seemed to have lost his quiet anger, but it had been so startling and out of character that Mark simply didn't know where he stood now. He didn't have experience with this aspect of the director of CURE. "Sir, I don't think either of those characterizations is accurate."
Smith had been regarding his hands, folded on the desktop, but he raised his eyebrows and his rock-steady gaze met Mark's.
"Explain."
"I got the feeling there was a lot going on with Remo when he came in. I mean, that was unprecedented in itself. Since when does he come to me for help? I got the impression he was in a sort of strange place."
"You got an impression," Smith repeated evenly. "What kind of impression?"
Suddenly Mark was even more uncomfortable. He had long ago come clean to Dr. Smith on the subject of his special abilities. Abilities Mark himself didn't understand. These abilities manifested as impressions, intuitions, sudden burst of knowledge that came to him out of nowhere. There were times when he would be writing words on a page or entering data into the computer and suddenly realize he had written something unexpected, something that had not come from his own conscious thought.
Those brief riddles had more than once been unraveled and led CURE to the answers it needed.
But Howard's unique mental abilities had proved a great bane to CURE, too, when they opened the door to the reawakening of one of the great enemies of the Master of Sinanju, and the world. This bastard son of Sinanju, Jeremiah Purcell, had been locked away at Folcroft and maintained in a comatose state. For years his bloodstream was perpetually saturated with drugs that kept him unconscious. Purcell had used his own unique mental powers to find purchase in the conscious world, but his reach was limited. There were special minds in the world that Purcell could use, could bend, could manipulate, but none of those had come within the range of his clawing psychic fingers in all those years.
Until Mark Howard was assigned to be the associate director of CURE and, for cover, of Folcroft Sanitarium.
Jeremiah Purcell's malevolent influence on Mark Howard was tentative, but in time he coerced Mark into ordering the termination of the pharmaceutical regimen that kept Purcell comatose. Harold Smith learned of this only when it was too late-after Jeremiah Purcell, the one called the Dutchman, had escaped. Mark Howard nearly died.
Nobody expected Purcell to fade quietly away, but when he inevitably made his move against the Masters of Sinanju he brought with him, or was brought by, an even greater foe.
For months Mark Howard carried a heavy sack of guilt for his responsibility in those events.
"Mark," Dr. Smith asked, "are you saying Remo had some sort of psychic intuition that led him to the Union Islanders?"
"No. Dr. Smith, you remember what you told me the first time I told you about my, well, foreknowledge events. You suggested that they might simply be a heightened level of intuition. My subconscious putting the clues together in ways my conscious mind couldn't."
Dr. Smith looked uneasy. "Yes, I remember saying that." The truth was, he still preferred to cling to that notion, despite the evidence that proved there was much more to it.
"That's what happened here. Remo's investigative skills were kicking in. Maybe he picked up some subtle clues along the way. Maybe his heightened awareness of everything in his environment gave him an idea of who was responsible. He was going with his gut feeling."
Smith nodded. "I see."
"There's more," Mark added, less confidently. "I think Remo's got something to prove, and I think he's trying to do it by tracking down the people responsible for this violence."
Smith twitched his lip. "I find that hard to believe. You heard Remo's last tirade about being sent to do detective work."
"Yeah. He said something like, 'Smitty, we both know I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed.' And you didn't disagree with him. And Master Chiun would have called it a mild understatement."
"So this is all an attempt to throw mud in our eyes?" Smith demanded.
"I think he wants to prove to himself that he's more than just hired muscle," Mark said. "Maybe he wants to show that he's got what it takes to be Reigning Master-that he's got what it takes up here."
Howard tapped his temple with one finger. Smith nodded, considering that.
Mark was on a roll. "You know what they say in business and government and the military, that a talented man will rise through the ranks until he reaches one level above his level of competence. A man who knows his own capabilities knows when to refuse a promotion. Could Remo be trying to prove to himself and all of us that he has not been promoted beyond his skill level?"
Smith's mouth became a hard line. "That aphorism was a cliche when I was in military intelligence. In the middle ranks we used to make our own estimation of who would get the next advancement-into-inadequacy promotion. But there's something more to consider. A man who is a success, who finds himself in a new environment where success eludes him, will remake himself into a man who can succeed. If Remo Williams feels he needs to rise to the occasion to be worthy of the title Reigning Master, then I believe he'll do it."
Mark Howard screwed up his face. "I don't know if I've seen Remo show much genuine determination."
Smith turned to his keyboard and began typing rapidfire, saying, "Then you need to look harder."
"REMO," CHIUN SAID excitedly, "we are just minutes from Dixie's Answer to Disney World!"
"Can't wait," Remo muttered insincerely. He'd be glad when this bus-t
op ride was done with, though. He had hoped to solve the problem on the highway when he put a stop to the picture taker. The bus had actually come to a halt, and Remo had planned to simply take a stroll among the occupants until he literally sniffed out the guilty party. Somebody inside was going to have a sharp smell like fishy poison clinging to him or her, and that man or woman would have some serious explaining to do.
Then they took off again.
The bus stopped for fuel at a truck stop, but security was high. Nobody got on or off. A gathering of local law-enforcement officials was on hand for added security.
"Why do we sit here doing nothing?" Chiun demanded. They were waiting in the trees a hundred yards behind the truck stop. "Let us simply enter the traveling palace and gather up the guilty parties."
"'Cause there's maybe thirty parties that ain't guilty, and some of them will end up dead."
"You imply that I would slaughter innocent civilians indiscriminately? I am an assassin, not a berserker."
"Yeah. Maybe. But I'm more worried about Agents Anal and Retentive. They've got that shoot-first, file-a-report-later approach to security work. Not to mention that half the staff is probably armed and incompetent."
"Why should that worry us?" Chiun scoffed.
"Come on, Little Father, you know it's not me and you I'm worried about. It's everybody else inside this Playboy Mansion on wheels. There's no way we can protect the whole entourage if the bullets start flying."
"Pah!" Chiun scowled and observed the refueling of the bus and the patrols of the local law enforcement with disdain.
Then, without warning, he vanished.
Remo Williams was the only witness as the Tennessee Highway Patrol Special Response Unit entirely failed to detect the intruder in their midst. They never realized that the very thing they were looking for-a highly suspicious individual-slipped through their perimeter on his way to the truck-stop store. They would have been especially chagrined if they had known he returned a minute later and passed through their midst without their ever noticing him or his brilliant kimono.
"Remo, see what I have!"
"If I know you, Chiun, it's Slim Jims and a Vanilla Coke."
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