The Head Men td-31

by Warren Murphy

  But it was as illegal as hell.

  The President carried the red phone by its long cord into the bathroom and lifted the receiver. The telephone had no dial.

  "Yes," came the voice. It was Dr. Harold W. Smith.

  "Are you going to do that demonstration?"

  "Yes."

  "When?"

  "Should be tonight. A day to get where you are and then ten minutes to get through whatever you've got in the way of protection," Smith said.

  "Ten minutes?" the President said disbelievingly.

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  "If they walk."

  "Don't they have to reconnoiter? Figure out a plan?"

  "No, sir. You see, the Oriental is a teacher and his House has been doing this for quite a few centuries. The Secret Service might think they have something new, but the Oriental and the white man have handled things like that before, and the Oriental's ancestors for thousands of years. Their skill is their memory."

  "What about electronics? Electronics haven't been around for centuries," the President said.

  "They don't seem to have any trouble," said Smith.

  "Just walk through? All the guards. All the surveillance. I can't believe it."

  The President cradled the red receiver between his sweater shoulder and cheek. He held the base in front of him like a young girl gripping a communion bouquet. He always rolled his eyes back up into his head when he spoke privately. The receiver handle suddenly slipped from his cheek as if it were a tooth yanked from a novocaine-numbed jaw. The President felt the yank as the receiver slipped away. His head jerked. His cheek touched his shoulder. Assuming the receiver had fallen, he instinctively reached for it. He felt warm flesh. The flesh pushed his hand back as if he were meeting a wall.

  There was a man wearing a dark tee shirt, gray slacks, and loafers standing in the presidential bathroom with the President's red telephone. And talking into it.

  "Hey, Smitty. We have some confusion here. Yeah. Everything is fouled up as usual. Excuse me, Mr. President, business."

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  "Should I wait outside?" the President asked drily.

  "No, you can stay. It's your business. Yeah, Smitty, he's standing right here. What do you want with him anyway? He's all right. He just looks a little dazed. Well, Chiun says you want this guy's face stuffed in it or something. Oh, oh. All right. Here. He wants to talk to you."

  The President took the telephone. "Yes," he said. "No," he said. "My god, I didn't even hear him. It was like he came from nowhere. My god. I never knew there were people who could ... yes, of course, Dr. Smith. Thank you all." He put his hand over the receiver and spoke to the intruder:

  "Is there a Mr. Chiun outside there?"

  "Hey, Little Father," Remo said. "It's Smitty. For you." Remo took the phone. The President saw a long-fingernailed hand reach into the bathroom, a golden kimono sleeve dropping from it like water over a cliff. The hand was parchment yellow. The fingernails were the longest he had ever seen on a person.

  The phone disappeared outside the door.

  "Yes, glorious emperor Smith. According to thy will. Forever and eternal. Rule in the glory of thy throne." The voice was squeaky. Then came the angry jabbering of an Oriental language as the phone was returned to the hook.

  An aged Oriental followed the arm and telephone into the bathroom. He was smaller than the President's twelve-year-old daughter and undoubtedly lighter. He was angry. The wisps of beard trembled. He jabbered at Remo for what must have been three minutes.

  "What did he say?" asked the President.

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  "Who ? Smitty or Chiun ?"

  "This must be Chiun then. How do you do, Mr. Chiun."

  The Master of Sinanju looked at the President of the most powerful nation in the world. He saw the hand stretched out in friendship, he saw the smile on the man's face. He turned away, folding his hands into his kimono.

  "Did I say something ?" asked the President.

  "No," said Remo. "He's mad about something."

  "Does he know that I am President of the United States?"

  "Oh yeah, he knows that. He's just disappointed, is all."

  "Over what?"

  "Never mind. You wouldn't understand. It's his way of thinking and I don't think you'd grasp it."

  "Try me," said the President, more ordering than requesting.

  "You wouldn't understand."

  "I am conversant with the Japanese."

  "Oh, my god," said Remo. "Don't call him Japanese. He's Korean. Would you want to be called French?"

  "That depends on where I am."

  "Or German? Or English? You're American. Well, he's Korean."

  "The best kind," said Chiun with cold hauteur. "From the nicest part and the nicest village in the nicest part. Sinanju, glory of the world, center of the earth, upon which all planets look for reverence."

  "Sinanju? Sinanju?" asked the President. He had worked on submarines in his Navy days, and in the submarine service the small village on the

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  west Korean bay had been discussed. American submarines had been going there for some reason for the last twenty years. Stories about delivering gold to a spy system or something, but every submariner had heard the tales of how every year one American submarine had to make the trip into enemy waters.

  "Glory to that name," said Chiun.

  "Oh, of course. Glory to it. Somehow that and submarines seem to be connected."

  "Tribute," said Remo. "America pays tribute to Sinanju." ,

  "For what?" asked the President.

  "For him to train me," Remo said.

  "In what?"

  "Well... things," Remo said. And the President heard the Oriental emit another stream of invective in Korean.

  "What did he say?" the President asked.

  "He said all the training was never really well used. It's what he's mad about."

  "What?"

  "Well, Sinanju is the great House of assassins. They sort of rented themselves out to kings and the like through the ages."

  Chiun poked a long fingernail into the space between Remo and the President.

  "So that children will not have to drown in the cold waters with empty bellies. We save children," said Chiun angrily.

  Remo shrugged toward the President. "He means that, oh, maybe twenty-eight hundred years ago, way before Christ, the village had to get rid of its babies because they couldn't afford to feed them. It was a poor village."

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  "Because of the soil," said Chiun. "Because of the degenerates who ruled. Because of foreign armies."

  "Anyway," Remo said, "until the Masters of Sinanju began renting themselves out around the world for tribute, the village starved. They saved the village from starving, but they like to say they are saving the babies from death."

  "There are a lot of Masters?" asked the President.

  "No. There's Chiun now, and there's me. But we are all part of the tradition of Sinanju so that when we talk about the Masters, it's as if they're all alive. You think of time as line and you're in the middle and the past is behind you on the line and the future is ahead of you. But we look at the time like a big plate, so anytime is just another part of the round plate."

  "And they are teachers?" the President asked.

  "No. Chiun is the first who has taught an outsider."

  "Well, what do they do ?"

  "The House of Sinanju is assassins," said Remo.

  "He was mad because he was told not to kill me, right?" the President said.

  "Well, actually, yes. You see, you're the first President he's ever had and we haven't been doing any heads of state. It's like if you were President of the United States and then suddenly you get hired to be President of a grocery store. It's a step down, see? You don't see."

  "He was going to kill me," said the President. His face blanched.

  "I told you you wouldn't understand," said Remo.

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  "I understand my life is in danger. Who
let you in?"

  "There's no 'let' involved," Remo said.

  "Your incompetence," said Chiun.

  "Hey, Prez. Let me show you how open everything is around here. You're dead meat. I mean, you're a bun on a plate. We could pepper you like scrambled eggs." Remo smiled. "Protection? You don't have any. Come on, Smitty says we're supposed to save your duff. We'll show you."

  In later days, the President would ask questions of doctors, of top CIA brass, trying to learn if certain things could be illusions.

  "Let's say, for example," the President would say, "let's say someone asked you to breathe heavily. Could that be the beginning of hypnotizing you into an illusion ?"

  And he would be remembering what had happened following the conversation on the red phone in the presidential bathroom. He was asked to breathe deeply because he was too nervous and his breathing, while it could not be controlled, could approach regularity. And the three of them walked out and he had felt two hands on his waist and even the frail Oriental was lifting him with no effort. He smelled a faint perfume wafting up from the kimono and then it was like no smell at all, so subtle that it was free of scent.

  They moved with a silence greater than quiet. There was water and heavy water and this silence that they all moved in was a greater silence than the stillness of a leaf. It was the silence of not existing so that when they came upon one of the Secret Service men from behind, they drew no

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  more attention than a table. It was a strange feeling to be standing behind a man who did not know you were there.

  The President did not see the hand move. But he did see the rustle of the kimono settling where the hand must have come from. The security man's head popped forward as though punished by a rolled-up magazine. The white man. called Remo, steadied the security man back into his chair.

  "You didn't kill him, did you?" the President asked.

  "Naah," said Remo. "He'll wake up in a few minutes and think he dozed off. Shhh. You gotta keep quiet. This hallway is loaded with eyes and ears. Your electronic stuff."

  It was a dream moving, held by the two men in this world of silence, and in this world of silence, other sounds became more noticeable, sounds he would never again hear in these halls, like the whirring of machines. Later he would ask what machines they had in this hall and he would be told there were hidden cameras on motor mounts but that he couldn't possibly hear the motor working because it was like a mosquito at twenty yards.

  "Does it go 'whir-a-boop, whir-a-boop'?" the President asked.

  "Yes, but you've got to have your ear right next to it. And you'd have to get through a wall to get next to it."

  So they moved in this silence, stopping every now and then, as if they were viewers to a performance on a stage where the actors could not see them. At a corner with a white painted arch.

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  and a gold eagle that would have been in poor taste anywhere but the White House, they paused. A printed wallpaper behind a large portrait of an American general from the Mexican-American war opened easily, like a wooden wound. Behind it was musty brown wood, with peeling old shellac like those old mansions back home in Georgia before they reconstructed them.

  This was old American craftsman's shellac.

  And the President moved into the long wood crack in the wall and he felt plaster rub against his back. And the crack closed off behind him and he was in darkness and then he felt himself being pressed, made into a thinner person. The walls came in on him so that his chest could not move out to breathe. He was being squeezed into a narrower and narrower crevice and he could not expand his chest. And being unable to expand his chest, he could not breathe. Nor did he scream and he did not know if the darkness that was around him now was his leaving of consciousness or the wall he was in.

  His feet could not move, his hands could not move, even his airless mouth was forced open by plaster and dry wood strips pushing the jaw back.

  He was going to die. He had trusted these two men and he was going to die for it, wedged motionless, suffocating, inside the walls of the house from which he was supposed to govern the country.

  The red telephone had done it. It stood for everything he was against: illegality, surreptitious-ness, the playing on the weaknesses and fears of men. That whole organization CURE was an ad-

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  mission that democracy did not work. He was being punished by the Almighty for doing what his better instincts told him was wrong.

  And the President wondered if submariners felt this way, dying without air when the hulls caved at too great a depth. No, he had no regrets, and somehow even as his body retched, pinned inside this wall, he knew it was not the end. There was too much pain for the end.

  And suddenly he was breathing again, big free gulps of air in a lighted office. It was the Oval Office and there was a click behind him and he did not see where the wall had opened to let them all inside.

  "My lord," said the President in a hoarse gasp.

  "Yes," said Chiun.

  "The White House is a network of secret tunnels," the President said.

  "No," said Chiun. "It has fewer than most palaces. There is not one that does not have these entrances. The pharaohs understood this."

  And it was then that the President began to understand what world leaders had known before him. They were exceptional targets and the more important they were, the greater the attempts made upon their lives. The pharaohs had understood that great amounts of money could corrupt and the greatest sums were offered for their heads. They responded by removing the heads of their own chief architects whenever a palace was done to keep the palace secrets secret.

  The castles of Europe were a joke. They had more secret entrances and exits than a modern football stadium. The President wondered whether Chiun would share this information with America's CIA.

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  The Master of Sinanju refused.

  "Sinanju has been here for centuries. We will be here for centuries more. Before you were a country, we were. When you are gone, like the Roman Empire and the Ming Dynasty, we shall still be here. And we will still keep our secrets. Because a weakness kept secret remains a weakness. Once shared with someone else, it is usually corrected."

  "I see where I have a lot to learn. It is not to my taste to use people like you, but I see where it is either you or death."

  "What a misfortune," said Chiun, bowing his aged head. There were problems, he said. Great problems. There was an agreement he had with Emperor Smith and now he could not overturn that agreement lest the poor babies starve in Sinanju. However, if the President who was a far greater personage than Emperor Smith, should offer more money as tribute, then Chiun could not possibly refuse. His village would demand it. Besides, said the Master of Sinanju, he was tired of working for ugly men and wanted to work for a handsome emperor whose wisdom was appreciated throughout the world.

  "Thank you," said the President. "But by working for Smith, you are working for me and all the American people."

  Did the President trust Smith? Did the President know of Smith's ambitions late at night when each man imagines himself to be ruler of the country? If Smith had to die, were to die, then Chiun would be free to sign a new contract with the President. How much did the President really trust Smith? Already it was rumored,

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  Chiun said, that Smith was planning a drive to seize power. Did the President really trust Smith?

  "Implicitly," said the President.

  Well, allowed the Master of Sinanju, if the President wanted to entrust his life to any willy-nilly ambitious man from the North, who hated people from the South, who looked down on people from the South as inferior, who lusted after the President's wife, then the Master of Sinanju would do what he could do against such formidable odds.

  "I never knew Smith looked down on anyone because of regionalism."

  "He doesn't, Mr. President," said Remo.

  "I must know what you're going to do. How do you propo
se to effect saving my life which many people now tell me is in some special danger for some reasons I don't understand. What and how are your methods?"

  "Sorry, sir, but the House of Sinanju does not propose saving lives. It saves them. It does not share its methods with every two-hundred-year-old country. It is Sinanju. Everything else is less," Remo said.

  "He does not mean that, oh, gracious American emperor," said Chiun. "We can help you better by easing the strain of knowledge upon you. Did you understand movement? No. Neither would you understand this. Just allow us to guarantee your life unconditionally."

  And it was agreed. But the President looked older that evening because he had just accepted a hard reality-that there would have to be people in this world doing things in his name that he did not approve of.

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  Outside, Chiun allowed as how Remo was beginning to learn. He especially liked Remo's attitude toward new countries. But most of all was Remo's new ability to understand things without being told.

  "Like what?" asked Remo.

  "Like promising to save his life. We cannot do it, of course. Nobody can guarantee saving a life anymore than one can guarantee to make life. One can only guarantee a death."

  "I intend to save his life."

  "That makes me most sad," said Chiun. "I had thought you were becoming wise."

  For, he explained, it was an old guarantee that one could give an emperor that his life would, without question, be saved. For if one failed, the only person who had heard the promise made- besides yourself-would no longer complain.

  It was of little matter. And this Chiun tried to use to reassure Remo.

  "The least endangered position in the entire world is that of your emperor or king."

  "I thought everyone tried to kill them."