"Bullish," Chiun mused. "I have heard of this bullishness. Sometimes called B.S."
"That's not the kind of bullish Faith means," Remo said. "And she's right. If the market keeps climbing, the stock value could double or triple."
"Ah. Then I should sell, correct?"
"No," Faith said. "Go long. Hold on to it as long as you can. Never liquidate a solid position with growth potential."
"Then how am I to make my profit if I do not sell?" Chiun asked in a puzzled tone.
"Don't think profit," Faith said, "think value. Think equity. "
"Right at this moment," Chiun said, an edge creeping into his voice, "I am thinking of the gold I have sold."
"It's not your gold, remember?" Remo pointed out. "It's Nostrum's. "
"Why do you think I sold it?" Chiun retorted. "If it were my gold, I would never have sold it."
"Just think of it as money in the bank," Faith said.
Remo uncoupled Faith's reactivated fingers from his wrist. "If the market drops tomorrow," he asked her, "what kind of shape would we be in?"
"Depends. Almost all of our assets are tied up in stock now. We could be wiped out."
"Wiped out?" Chiun squeaked. "By whom?"
"More business talk," Remo said hastily. "It means 'broke.' "
Chiun's eyes slowly widened. "Broke. As in 'impoverished'?"
"As in 'destitute,' " Remo said, nodding.
"Almost impossible," Faith said firmly. "The market is on an upswing."
"Almost?" Chiun squeaked.
"It's a volatile market," Faith admitted. "But this is where the big bucks are. If you want security, you don't invest in stocks."
"What do you invest in?" Chiun wanted to know.
Faith frowned. "Any number of things. Money-market accounts, CD's-"
Chiun's phone rang and Remo went into the office to answer it. He stuck his head out and mouthed the name "Smith" silently. Chiun hurried to the office and closed the door on Faith's annoyed face.
"Smith?" Chiun said urgently. "I need your advice."
"That's quite flattering, coming from the man whom the networks are calling the King of Wall Street."
"I?"
" I am calling to congratulate you," Smith continued. "You did an excellent job."
"Why not?" Chiun said proudly. "I am the King of Wall Street. "
"But there is a problem," Smith added cautiously.
"Yes?"
"I have just learned that Looncraft is attempting a series of hostile takeovers. Global is a prime target."
" I am not concerned with that," Chiun retorted.
"Nor am I. One major block of GLB is owned by DeGoone Slickens. He will never sell to Looncraft. And there are still the mysterious Crown people and the Lippincott holdings. Lippincott is Looncraft's banker and has been wary of takeover moves since last year's junkbond shakeout. I can't imagine Looncraft could pull off such a risky deal."
"Why tell me?" Chiun said peevishly.
"Because Looncraft has also tendered an offer on Nostrum, Inc. "
"That deceiver!" Chiun shrieked. He turned to Remo. "Looncraft is attempting to attack Nostrum, my precious Nostrum, again."
"We can handle him," Remo said confidently.
"Where is the suit?" Chiun hissed.
"Safe. "
"Get it."
"I don't think Looncraft's frightened of Bear-Man."
"Then terrify him," Chiun said. Returning to his phone conversation, Chiun asked, "I am told my stock positions are not secure, Smith. I wish to invest in less risky instruments. What do you suggest?"
"CD's are very safe."
"Then I will sell all my stock and invest in CD's," Chiun thundered.
"No, Master of Sinanju," Smith said quickly. "Please make no major moves. All of Wall Street is watching you. If you sell off; others will too. Hold on to your positions."
"But they are risky," Chiun complained. "I could be wiped out at any moment."
"Sell some stock, if you wish," Smith said placatingly. "A little here and there. But for God's sake, do it quietly. Wall Street must not get the idea you are fleeing into cash."
"I am not fleeing into anything," Chiun said indignantly. "But I will do as you say. I will buy CD's. Quietly."
"Thank you, Master Chiun. Now, if you'll excuse me, I must prepare myself. The Asian markets reopen in another few hours. They will tell me if the international situation is stabilizing or not. I will be in touch."
Chapter 15
The busy hum of Folcroft Sanitarium was winding down as Harold W. Smith watched the first reports come in from the Far East exchanges.
Prices remained firm. The volatility of the American market hadn't spilled east. Slowly, tentatively, the tenseness in Smith's unhealthy face slackened.
After an hour, Smith felt confident enough to log of the Reuters overseas ticker feeds. He got to his feet and stretched. Every joint felt starch-stiff: For a moment his vision grayed over. It was something that happened to him more and more these days when he got to his feet too suddenly. The blood rushed from his head, starving his brain of nourishment.
Steadying himself with a hand on his silent terminal, Smith waited for his vision to return. When it did, he turned and looked out the one-way picture window behind his desk. It framed a view of Long Island Sound, now benighted and dancing with silvery moonglade.
It was a view Smith had seen a thousand times, but it never failed to quiet his restive New England soul. It reminded him of his childhood. The wild forests of his Vermont childhood and the rocky New Hamphire mountains of his adolescence.
Harold Smith missed few things of his childhood, but the sense of place was one of them. Rye, New York, was not far removed from Putney, Vermont, but it was not the same. The red leaves of fall were not as scarlet, the golds nowhere near as scintillating. He missed the scent of burning leaves and the sharp bite of frost in the air.
But most of all he missed the stability. In New England, Harold Smith had known from an early age that he would go into law. His ambitions took him from Dartmouth to Harvard Law, and ultimately to a professorship at Yale. It was all he could ever want. But World War II had intervened and Harold Smith had found his sharp mind and steady nerve needed in the European theater of operations, where as a clandestine OSS operative he mastered explosives and fear and, ultimately, victory.
After the war, Yale no longer seemed enough. And as the old OSS gave way to the new CIA, Harold Smith found a place in cold-war counterintelligence. The years had turned him into a bureaucrat, not a warrior. But it was the stability of a desk and an office routine and the absence of sudden death that spoke to Harold Smith. He had gotten his fill of war.
Smith never completely abandoned the dimming hope of one day returning to Yale-until the day in the early 1960's when a young President, in the last months of his tragically brief presidency, offered him the directorship of CURE. Smith had never heard of CURE. In fact, the agency that supposedly didn't exist, really didn't exist when it was offered to Smith. Smith would be CURE. Without his sterling qualities, CURE might not be viable, he was told.
With reluctance, Smith accepted the most awesome responsibility in the world outside of the Oval Office.
Only then did Harold Smith finally put away his dream of returning to Yale. There would be no Yale in his future. There was only his duty.
It was that same sense of duty that had infuriated Harold Smith's patrician father, Nathan. Any other man might have been proud of a son who had so distinguished himself in law and service to his nation.
Not Nathan Smith.
Even after all these years, Harold Smith could still hear his father's cold voice rising in indignation.
"What about the family business, Harold?"
"I have no aptitude for publishing, Father," Smith had said with the simple, unchallengeable logic that dominated his thinking.
"You can learn, boy. The Smiths have been in publishing for over a hundred years."
"
My mind is made up," Smith said stiffly. He did not want to remind his father that the family firm of Smith gotten its start publishing dime novels during the Civil War and graduated to cheap fiction magazines at the turn of the century. Nathan Smith never allowed one of his firm's magazines into the house. He didn't object to publishing them, but he felt it beneath the dignity of a true Smith to be caught reading one.
"Take the summer off. Come work for the firm." For the first time, Nathan Smith's voice lifted. It was almost wheedling.
"I am sorry, Father," Harold Smith said, and he meant it. It was the first time Harold had ever stood up to his father, and it was painful beyond endurance. He had received a full scholarship to Dartmouth. The matter was out of crotchety Nathan Smith's hands. To a man used to being obeyed without question, it was an unforgivable slight.
Smith's unwarm relationship with his father cooled completely after that day. He continued to pay the usual respects during family holidays, but as the years passed and his responsibilities increased, it became less and less possible to visit the family compound in New Hampshire.
His mother had passed away first, in her sleep. Harold and Nathan Smith, although over twenty years apart in age, were by then two aging men. At the funeral they spoke barely a word to one another. Harold had tried, but was curtly rebuffed. Nathan Smith's bitter disappointment in his son was expressed in his too-loud complaints to other mourners that Harold's lazy cousins were mismanaging the family firm, preventing Nathan Smith from entering honored retirement.
The next time Harold saw his father, six years later, he was in a wheelchair and his wheezing breath fogged the clear plastic oxygen mask affixed to his mouth. The eyes were unchanged, pale, disappointed, and cold as glacial ice.
Harold hadn't known what to say to his father. He never had. By that time, Smith had assumed his responsibilities as director of CURE.
"Father, I think we should put aside our differences," Smith had suggested in a quiet voice.
Old Nathan Smith looked daggers at his grown son. He spoke three words, the last words he would ever speak to his only son, who had always been dutiful except for that one matter.
"You disappoint me," Nathan Smith had croaked.
And as Harold Smith left his father in the Gilmore County Retirement Home-the same brick building he used to walk by every day on the way to high school-he felt an aching void in the pit of his stomach. By then the family firm was only a publisher of movie fan magazines and crossword-puzzle books, but CURE was the fire wall that stood between American democracy and anarchy.
Smith had fulfilled his resolute sense of duty to a degree his narrow-minded father could never have imagined, and never learned. He died a week later.
But the sense of guilt Harold Smith had felt after their final meeting never went away. It was like a cold pill forever caught in his throat.
As Smith came out of his reverie, the shadowy reflection of his face in the Folcroft picture window shocked him. It was his father's face. Harold Smith's eyes darted to the wheelchair standing alone in the corner like a stainless-steel ghost. It might have been the very chair his father had ended up in. The thought that Smith had, for a few months, been consigned to one just like it chilled him anew.
Returning to his desk, Smith wondered what had made him reflect on his troubled family past. He decided it was just that he was overworked.
He logged onto the Far Eastern stock reports. From Sydney to Singapore, the markets remained stable. Smith wondered if the world's economy was out of the woods yet. He hoped so. He itched to isolate the forces that had triggered a global near-meltdown.
For he wanted to punish them. He wanted to punish them more than he had wanted to punish anyone who had ever come into the CURE operational orbit.
Above all, Harold W. Smith treasured the stability of modern civilization. It was what he had fought to hold together all his adult life, from Yale to CURE.
Chapter 16
Remo Williams tooled his Buick Regal around the area of Wall Street, looking for a parking space. He found one an instant before a Federal Express truck could slide into it.
He reached back into the back seat for a paper-wrapped package. It was under his arm when he left his car and strolled into the lobby of the gleaming Looncraft Tower.
Remo waited patiently for an elevator. The lobby was filled with well-dressed men and women, each carrying a briefcase in one hand, a neatly folded copy of The Wall Street Journal in the other. They looked like they had all been outfitted by the same maiden aunt, who, instead of combing their hair, baked it.
When a car arrived, Remo jumped in ahead of the pack.
"Sorry, private car," he said, pushing a man into the others. He hit the "Close" button.
The elevator shot up. Quickly Remo stripped the paper wrapping off his Bear-Man suit. The car abruptly stopped and the doors started to separate. Remo hastily donned his bear-mask helmet.
"Next car," he told a pair of secretaries, hitting the "Close" button.
"Did you see that?" one squealed. "It's the Wall Street Bear!"
When the door opened again, Remo was completely enveloped in his Bear-Man suit. He stepped out onto the thirty-fourth floor, causing an instant commotion on the Looncraft, Dymstar d trading floor.
"It's back," a man cried. Several security guards ran in Remo's direction. He set himself. He needn't have bothered. They ran past him and escaped into the waiting elevator.
"That's right," Remo rumbled, taking up the cue. "I'm back. And I'm here to tell you that greed is bad. Never mind what you've heard elsewhere."
An eager young trader leapt from his desk and approached Remo with expectant eyes. He was dressed in a striped shirt and red suspenders and was almost identical to the others -except for his bright gold tie.
"Tell me, sir," he asked, "are you really a harbinger of a coming bear market?"
"Think again, pal," Remo told him gravely. "I'm here to prevent a bear market. You listen to Bear-Man, and the bulls will run forever."
A cheer went up from the floor.
"Tell us," the traders cried. "Tell us what we should do. "
"Go long. Long and strong. Save your money. Brush your teeth regularly."
"Teeth?"
"Brushing your teeth leads to good working habits."
"Should we invest in pharmaceutical companies?" Gold Tie asked sincerely. "Do you have inside information?"
"Bear-Man knows all. Just remember, the market is fundamentally sound. It was only a correction."
A trader raised his hand eagerly. "Mr. Bear-Man, do you expect corporate profits to-"
"Sorry. Can't chat now. Got to see your boss."
Remo sauntered up to P. M. Looncraft's office. His secretary recoiled as if from a viper. She ducked behind her desk.
"Mr. Looncraft is not in," she said in a quivering voice. "He's in a meeting. In another building."
"I've heard that one before," Remo said, brushing past her.
He pushed open the door. P. M. Looncraft's office was unoccupied, unless one counted the array of ancestral Looncrafts on the walls.
" I told you so," the secretary's voice said. "Now, will you go away? Please?"
"I'll wait," Remo said, closing the door. He lumbered over to the desk and plunked his hairy butt down. It was hot in the suit, and the smell was heavy in his nostrils, like used cotton. He hoped Looncraft would not be long.
While he waited, Remo drummed his claws on the desk. He noticed the Telerate machine at his elbow. He found the "On" switch and finally hit it with a claw after stabbing at in several times.
Remo got a listing of ten active stocks, some with arrows pointing up, others pointing down. He looked for Nostrum, Ink but remembered that it traded over the counter, on NASDAQ, not NYSE.
When boredom set in, he rummaged through the desk. There were no papers. The desk reminded Remo of Smith's desk. Very Spartan, almost paperless, with everything in its place.
Remo went back to drumming his bear claws
on the leather blotter.
When he exhausted the entertainment possibilities of that, he noticed the computer beside his chair. He turned to it, and brushed the "On" switch. The computer blipped into life.
Behind his bear mask, Remo's brown eyes blinked.
The heading read: "MAYFLOWER DESCENDANTS." Below that was a single line: "QUEEN'S ROOK TO KNIGHT THREE."
Remo's eyes narrowed. He started hitting buttons, until he had written "Rook's Queen to King None," give or take a typo.
He looked for a "Send" button, knowing they made things happen.
When he found it, he tapped it with a claw.
The screen blipped. There was a pause. Then the screen went crazy. Lines of amber exclamation points appeared, and replicated themselves until they filled the screen. A concealed amplifier began beeping, annoying Remo. He tried to shut it off by pressing several buttons at random.
Instead of shutting down, a remote printer in a corner of the room rattled to life. The print head began racing and buzzing. Paper started to spew out.
Remo pressed more buttons. The printer kept printing, so he looked for a power plug. When he found it, he yanked hard. The computer and the printer both shut down.
Remo examined the printer and ripped away several sheets of paper. He looked at the top sheet. Deep within his bear mask, he made a puzzled sound.
Rolling it up, Remo went back to the desk and started to scratch a message onto the polished mahogany desktop. The claw barely cut the finish, so Remo shucked off one bear-paw glove and used his natural nail, which had been hardened to glass-cutting precision through diet and exercise.
When he was done, the mahogany desktop bore the words: "LEAVE NOSTRUM ALONE OR I'LL COME BACK OUT OF MY BEAR CAVE AND EAT YOU ALIVE. -BEARMAN."
Remo left the LD floor with a hearty, "Carry on, yuppies. And don't forget to brush your teeth."
He smiled under his bear mask at the chorused, "Yes, sir!" that followed him to the elevator. Chiun wasn't the only one who knew how to motivate workers.
Chapter 17
P. M. Looncraft saw the shocked look on his secretary's face, which rather reminded him of a frightened lighthouse, all the way across the bustling Looncraft, Dymstar d trading floor.
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