Last Rites td-100

by Warren Murphy

  To the bald, drum-tight skin of the head clung dirty tatters of hair.

  "I see a mummy," said Remo.

  "Does the mummy have a face?"

  "Not much of one," Remo admitted.

  "In death, do you see whose face the mummy wore in life?"

  Remo's eyes took in the ruined mask of parchment skin and dead bone for a long time. He swallowed once, hard.

  And turning his head away, Remo squeezed his eyes shut and said nothing.

  "Whose face?" the woman insisted.

  "You know whose face," he said thickly.

  "You will visit this cave soon. You have only to take the first step."

  "I don't want to go anymore."

  "You seek your father. You seek the truth."

  "Not if it costs me-"

  "You have searched with your eyes and your brain. You have not yet searched with your heart. His eyes look down upon you, although he does not see you."

  "What does that mean?"

  "My people are the people of the Sun. Your people are the people of the Sun. Find the people of the Sun, and you will find understanding and the peace you have sought all your life."

  "I-I can't."

  "You will. Listen to the mother you have never known. You will enter this cave, and all will be revealed to you. Do not be afraid. There is no death. You are no more alive than I am. No more conscious than your most remote ancestor. And I am no more dead than my genes that you carry in your body."

  And with a last wistful look, the apparition faded from the room.

  Remo did not sleep the rest of the night. He lay flat on his back looking up at the ceiling, trying to convince himself that it had all been a bad dream.

  But Masters of Sinanju, the absolute lords of their own minds and bodies, did not experience nightmares. And Remo knew that his worst fears were only days away.

  THE MASTER OF SINANJU was making longevity tea for breakfast.

  The water boiled happily in its celadon teapot while the ginseng strips and crushed jujubes and raw pine nuts waited patiently in their individual bowls. Warm sunlight streamed through the kitchen window as the Western sun shed its good radiance upon the loose imported green tea leaves.

  The Master of Sinanju would have preferred an Eastern sun, but he lived in difficult times. Yet they were not terrible times, he reflected as he bustled around the kitchen with its electric stove and running water and other Western conveniences.

  As he prepared the morning meal, he hummed a song from his village of Sinanju in faraway Korea. The song made him feel closer to his village. But in truth, he was not unhappy.

  True, he dwelt in a barbarian land. True also, he dwelt with a son who was not only adopted, but white and large of foot and nose and blankly round of eye. A ghost-faced white.

  But the Master of Sinanju had known harsher times. He had experienced the bitter comfort of his village during the difficult days when he had no son, no heir, no pupil. Only the awesome responsibility of his village and the cold knowledge that the five-thousand-year tradition, of which he was the last caretaker, had come to an ignominious end.

  In those days he had tasted the gall of failure, the sure knowledge that he had let down fifty centuries of ancestors, and faced his final days alone.

  Those had been the darkest hours of his life. How could any event seem more distasteful? How could any ignominy make that one pale into insignificance?

  So he happily prepared longevity tea in the warm morning sunshine and, although his pupil should have arisen with the sun, Chiun didn't go upstairs to awaken him.

  "Remo will appear in due time. He is a good son, if pale."

  But Remo didn't appear. And when the water had bubbled down to trace metals, the Master of Sinanju simply put on a fresh pot and resumed his wait.

  Longevity tea is worth waiting for. And so are good sons.

  THE HUMMING had long since ceased and the teapot had grown cold when Remo Williams padded barefoot into the kitchen, the lines and planes of his strong face unhappy. His deep-set eyes were like burn holes above his high cheekbones.

  "I have made longevity tea," said Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju, not turning from the stove.

  "I'm not hungry."

  "That is good, because I have thrown yours into the sink."

  "That's okay," Remo said absently, taking a tumbler from a cupboard and holding it under running water.

  He drank two glasses of the metallic-tasting water, and the Master of Sinanju still didn't turn around.

  "I have wasted the entire morning," Chiun said abruptly.

  "Doing what?"

  "Being happy."

  "That's not a waste."

  "When one spends an entire morning thinking well of inconsiderate boors, it is a waste. It is a betrayal." Remo said nothing.

  Chiun whirled. "Do you know what time it is?" Remo didn't have to look at the wall clock in the shape of a black cat whose rocking tail swung in constant opposition to its shifty cartoon eyes. "Ten thirty-two," he said, setting the empty tumbler in the stainless-steel sink. His wrists were freakishly thick.

  "Why did you keep me waiting?"

  "Couldn't sleep."

  "If you could not sleep, why fritter away the morning on your back?"

  "Because I was afraid to get out of bed."

  The Master of Sinanju stopped, his mouth a perfect O. "Why?"

  Remo hesitated.

  "Why do you fear morning?" Chiun pressed.

  And when Remo turned, there were tears .in his dark, deep-set eyes. One rolled down the curve of a high cheekbone. "You're going to die," he said.

  "Possibly," Chiun admitted, searching his pupil's troubled features.

  "You're going to die soon, Little Father."

  A dark cloud passed over the Master of Sinanju's features. "Why do you say that?"

  "I don't want to be left alone in the world."

  And seeing the pain deep in his pupil's eyes, the Master of Sinanju dropped his anger like a mask and padded toward Remo.

  "What troubles you?"

  "I don't want to talk about it."

  Chiun clapped his long-nailed fingers together. "Speak!"

  The doorbell rang.

  "I will answer it," said Chiun.

  He came back a minute later with a heavy plastic mailing envelope and laid it on a kitchen counter carelessly.

  "What's that?" asked Remo.

  "Nothing."

  "How do you know?"

  "It is only for you and it is from Smith."

  "Could be important."

  "It is not. The look in your eyes is important."

  "I'd better make sure," said Remo.

  And because he was showing interest through his pain, the Master of Sinanju allowed his pupil to open the package.

  It was a Federal Express pouch, made of a plastic called Tyvek that was so tough it could not be torn or damaged even by truck drivers flinging it carelessly at doors. Houses were now wrapped with Tyvek before siding was nailed in place. It could be cut with sharp blades but not torn by human hands, no matter how strong.

  Remo tried to find the flap, got confused and impatiently grabbed the pouch at both ends, popping it apart like a paper sack.

  Out spilled a fanfold stack of green-bar computer paper. Remo glanced at the top sheet briefly.

  "What is it?" asked Chiun.

  "Nothing," said Remo, dumping the stack of paper into the trash bin.

  "It is from Smith. How could it be nothing?"

  "Because it is," said Remo.

  The Master of Sinanju lifted the stack from the trash and examined the top sheet. It was a list of names.

  Williams, Aaron

  Williams, Adam

  Williams, Alan

  Williams, Allen

  Williams, Arthur

  "What are all these names?" he wondered.

  "Just names. Forget them."

  "Ah," said Chiun, understanding dawning in his hazel eyes. "You demanded of Smith that he seek out a
suitable father for you, and this is the list of culprits."

  "It's a stack of wastepaper. Get rid of it."

  "If you no longer care to seek your wayward father, perhaps I will do so. If only to congratulate him for ridding himself of so intractable a son. Then I will present him with a bill for raising you."

  "Stuff it," said Remo, storming from the room.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Harold W Smith began his day as he always did. He parked his beat-up station wagon in his assigned parking spot at Folcroft Sanitarium, nodded to the lobby guard as he strode to the elevator and rode it one floor up to his office.

  "Any calls, Mrs. Mikulka?" he asked, and Mrs. Mikulka crisply informed him that no, there had not been any calls, a fact that should have been obvious inasmuch as it was six in the morning.

  Harold Smith liked to get an early start on the day. Some people were that way, so no one considered it unusual that the director of a sleepy sanitarium in Rye, New York, should approach his boring job with the same brisk urgency as the head of a major TV network.

  Smith shut the office door behind him and entered his sanctum sanctorum, an office overlooking Long Island Sound.

  The office reflected his personality. Spare, frugal, unassuming. If Smith had chosen the wall paint, it would have been gray, like the three-piece suit he habitually wore. Like the pale grayish cast of his skin. But because Folcroft was supposed to be a warehouse for the chronically ill, the walls were a vapid hospital green.

  The office might have been furnished in the 1960s, from prewar castoffs. Except for the desk. It gleamed darkly, like an altar of obsidian, out of place in the slightly shabby room.

  A Spartan block, the desk sat before the picture window framing the sound. The leather executive chair behind it was cracked with age, and the springs creaked when Harold Smith dropped his spare frame into it. But the desk was new.

  Smith absently tightened the knot of his hunter green Dartmouth tie and reached under the lip of the slab of black tempered glass that served as a desktop. He found a black button and depressed it.

  Deep in the desk, under the glass and canted so that it faced the man behind the desk but was invisible to anyone else, a phosphorescent amber screen came to life.

  Smith brought his gnarled fingers up to the edge of the desk. A touch-sensitive keyboard lit up. Smith input a string of characters, and the amber screen went through its sign-on cycle.

  Smith waited patiently, his patrician face glued to the screen. Behind rimless glasses, his gray eyes watched the familiar process. The virus-check program automatically executed. When it was complete, Smith watched for an on-screen warning light.

  There were none. No emergencies. Only then did he relax.

  Smith called up the Constitution data base, reading it word for word as he had for the three decades he had operated out of Folcroft, not as its chief administrator, but as the director of CURE, a government agency so supersecret only the President of the United States knew it existed.

  "We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union..."

  Smith finished his reading, closed the file, and called up the wire-service news digests. Two floors below, in Folcroft's basement, giant mainframes and optical WORM-drive servers toiled night and day, trolling the net, culling information that might indicate a threat to US. security, warning signs of domestic disorder or global peril-all of which fell under the secret CURE operational guidelines.

  There had been another overnight Amtrak derailment. This time outside Baton Rouge. It might be simply another example of incompetence on the part of the government-funded company that ran the nation's aging railroad system, but there had been a great many such derailments of late. Smith captured the news digest and dumped it into a growing electronic file marked 'Amtrak.'

  If these derailments continued, it might mean a matter for CURE to look into.

  There had been an overnight political assassination in Mexico according to Notimex. This was the third in recent months. The situation south of the border was difficult but not explosive. At least not yet.

  After reading the extract, Smith dumped it into the Mexico file.

  Other items flashed on the buried amber screen. Another American fishing boat had been seized in Canadian waters. The new premier of North Korea continued his courting of the UN, even while making veiled threats against South Korea. The situation in Macedonia still festered.

  Problems but no crises. No mission for CURE, Harold Smith reflected.

  Which was a distinct relief, because CURE had no enforcement capability at present. He was on strike and vowed to remain on strike until Harold Smith had found his parents.

  It was ironic, thought Smith as he turned in his chair to face Long Island Sound with its sun-dappled waters and scooting skiffs. Remo Williams had been selected to be CURE's enforcement arm precisely because he had no living relatives. There had been other candidates, all collected by the very mainframes that still hummed in the Folcroft basement, but only Remo had all the qualifications to fulfill the mission.

  When CURE was set up in the early 1960s, there had been no thought of an enforcement arm. A new President of the US. had taken up residence in the White House full of hope-and discovered the nation faced its greatest crisis. It was tearing itself apart. The laws of the nation were no longer enough to hold society together. The Constitution had been made obsolete by lawless forces.

  That President had faced as stark a choice as Lincoln had a century before. Take drastic action or forfeit the nation.

  Two options had presented themselves. Declare martial law or suspend the Constitution.

  The President had wisely done neither. Instead, he had plucked an obscure information analyst named Smith out of the CIA and installed him as head of CURE with a mandate to clean up the nation and preserve American democracy even if it meant riding roughshod over the Constitution of the United States.

  Which Harold Smith did with a grim relentlessness over the course of CURE's first decade. And it was the reason why, at the beginning of every work day, he dutifully read the most sacred document in American history. It was a reminder of his awesome responsibility and a kind of silent act of contrition. Harold Smith believed in the Constitution. He just didn't believe in sacrificing the greatest democracy in human history to the inflexible demands inscribed on a sheet of parchment paper. Nor did he believe that the great democratic experiment called America had failed abysmally.

  By the end of that first decade, a new President had assumed the office and found the tide of lawlessness had only worsened. He had given Smith the broader responsibility of creating an enforcement arm.

  Smith had plucked an obscure patrolman with a single tour in Vietnam to his credit-who nevertheless fit an exhaustive list of criteria-and had him killed.

  Harold Smith's fingerprints were not on file in the killing of patrolman Remo Williams, the last man executed by the State of New Jersey. He had arranged it all by telephone calls and whispered orders. Others had done the dirty work.

  A badge was stolen. A pusher was beaten to death with a baseball bat in an alley in the Ironbound section of Newark, New Jersey, and when the sun rose, it was Remo Williams's badge that was found at the scene of the crime, Remo Williams who was arrested by Newark detectives, Remo Williams who was rushed through a show trial and found guilty of premeditated murder.

  Everyone believed Remo was guilty because everyone knew that the State of New Jersey would not execute one of its own law-enforcement officers unless there was absolutely no shred of doubt. Twelve honest men found Remo Williams guilty, never dreaming they were unwitting participants in a conspiracy that reached all the way to the Oval Office. They only knew that Remo Williams had to die. It was as obvious as the color of the sky.

  Remo Williams never understood he had been framed and railroaded through a corrupt justice system. Not until the day after the smothering black leather hood had been jammed over his head and the searing juice poured th
rough his jerking body.

  He'd lost consciousness in the death house of Trenton State Prison and woke up in Folcroft Sanitarium, where it was all explained to him by CURE's lone field operative in those days, a one-handed man named Conrad MacCleary.

  The chair had been rigged. The trial had been rigged, the jury bought off. His fingerprints and other life records had been pulled from every file.

  "Won't work," Remo had said after it was all laid out for him.

  "We were thorough," said MacCleary. "You have no family. Few friends-what cop has real friends except other cops?-and the blue brotherhood didn't exactly stand by you here. You were too honest. And honest cops are always the first ones they hang out to dry."

  "Still won't work," Remo Williams insisted stubbornly, feeling the bandages on his face from the plastic surgery used to change his appearance.

  "Why not?" asked the man with the hook for a hand.

  "I grew up in an orphanage. Maybe I don't have a family, but I had a zillion brothers."

  "Saint Theresa's burned down two weeks ago. Fortunately, there was only one casualty. A nun. Seems she contracted smoke inhalation or something. Understand you knew her, Williams. Sister Mary something?"

  "You bastard."

  "You're all alone in the world, Williams. And there's a hobo with no name lying in your grave. Just say the word, and we'll swap you for him and no one will know any different."

  Remo Williams had accepted his new life. He had been given over to the last pure-blooded Master of Sinanju and transformed by long training, arduous exercise and monkish diet until he himself was a Master of Sinanju, a martial-arts discipline so old it was said that all other fighting arts were descended from it.

  For many years, seeming never to grow older, he had served America in secret. The man who didn't exist working for the the agency that didn't exist. America's enemies wilted before this silent, implacable human weapon.

  And now he wanted out. Forever.

  But before he got out, Remo was calling in an old obligation from the man who had robbed him of his old life and set him on the new.