"No matter," said the Secretary of State. "I remember what it said. Verbatim."
The Sunflower Team had been annihilated, said the Secretary of State. This team had been the counterforce to the Russian Treska which had operated so successfully in Eastern Europe. Sunflower had been destroyed when it was de-weaponed. The weapons had been taken away for fear of another international incident. Now the Treska was loose, blooded, and there was nothing apparently to stop them.
"Perhaps a stern note to the Kremlin?" suggested the Secretary of Defense.
The Secretary of State shook his head. "They have their problems too. They cannot stop. We have created a vacuum they are being sucked into. They cannot not proceed. They have their hawks too. After almost thirty years of cat and mouse, they suddenly had the mouse in their mouths and they swallowed. What do we threaten them with in this note to the Kremlin? 'Be careful or you will be even more successful next time?' "
The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency explained how the Sunflower worked and that it took a man an exceptional man at least five years of training to achieve the level of competence needed for that sort of clandestine killing. What was needed now to stop the Treska was another equally good small unit. Or a nuclear war.
"Or time," said the Secretary of State. "They will kill and kill until even the American public wakes up."
"And then?" asked the President. "Then we pray that there is something left to fight them with," said the Secretary of State.
"America is not dead yet," said the president, and his voice was somehow calmer and his eyes just slightly clearer when he said this. In some manner, a decision had quietly been made, and he turned the agenda to another subject.
He canceled a meeting with a Congressional delegation that afternoon and went to his bedroom, a surprising move for a very fit President. He shut the large door behind him and personally drew the drapes. In a bureau drawer was a red telephone. He waited until 4:15 p.m. exactly, then picked up the receiver.
"I want to talk to you," he said.
"I've been expecting this phone call," came a lemony Voice.
"When can you get to the White House?"
"Three hours."
"Then you're not in Washington?"
"No."
"Where are you?"
"You don't need to know."
"But you do exist, don't you? Your people can perform certain extraordinary things, can't they?"
"Yes."
"I never thought I would have to use you. I had hoped I wouldn't."
"So had we," came the voice.
The President put the red phone back in the bureau drawer. His predecessor had told him about the phone one teary day the week before he resigned. It had been in this very room. The former President had been drinking heavily. His left leg rested on a hassock to ease the pain of his phlebitis. He sat on a white doughnut pillow.
"They'll kill me," said the former President. "They'll kill me and no one will care. They'd celebrate in the streets if I were dead. Do you know that? These people would kill me and everyone else would celebrate."
"That's not so, sir. There are many people who still love you," said the then Vice President.
"Name fifty-one percent," said the former President and blew his nose wetly into a tissue.
"Ever the politician, sir."
"And what do I get for it? If John Kennedy did what I did, they'd think it was a little boy's game and some sort of joke. If Lyndon Johnson did it, no one would find out. If Eisenhower did it…"
"Ike wouldn't do it," interrupted the vice president.
"But if he did."
"He wouldn't''
"He wouldn't have had the brains to do it. Everything was handed to that man on a platter. World War II, everything. I had to fight for what I got. No one ever loved me for myself. Not even the wife. Not really."
"Sir, you called me for something?"
"In that bureau drawer is a red telephone. It will be yours when I am no longer President." The thought overwhelmed him and he sobbed.
"Sir."
"Just a minute," he said, regaining his composure. "All right. When that day happens, you will have that phone. Don't use it. They're bastards and disloyal and never think of anyone but themselves."
"Who, sir?"
"They're murderers. They get away with murder. They go around our country murdering civilians and you're going to be responsible for them when you're President. How do you like them apples?" The President served up a delicious grin amidst his banquet of tears.
"Who are they?"
As the former President explained it, John Kennedy-who never got blamed for anything-was really the one who had started it. Code name: CURE. "Basically, they were a vicious, disloyal pack of killers who couldn't be counted on in a crunch. When things were going well, they were your babies. But when the going got tough, so did they. They got going."
"You still haven't explained, sir. I will need an explanation."
The President explained. CURE had been organized because the government had come to fear that the Constitution could not survive the spread of crime. The government needed an extra boost in that department. But the extra boost itself was a violation of the Constitution. So without getting caught or blamed, with nary a peep from the newspapers or from anyone else, that good old liberal John F. Kennedy had plucked a CIA man out of duty and set him up with a secret budget. It was a vast secret budget. It had a network throughout the country, and no one except the head of it-a New Englander who looked down on people from California because they weren't born rich-knew about it. It had an enforcement arm too-a homicidal maniac psychopath, and his teacher, who was a foreigner, and who wasn't white.
"Sir, I don't understand how no one would have heard of it by this time," the then Vice President said doubtfully.
"If only three know of it and only two understand it and if you can kill anyone you feel like, as free as the breeze without anyone complaining, you can get away with anything. But if you are the President of the United States and a Republican and come from California and if your wife wears a plain old Republican cloth coat, then you can't even get away with trying to save the presidency and the country…"
"Sir. In my administration, I won't tolerate this organization."
"Then pick up the phone and say to them, you're disbanded. Go ahead… say that. Johnson told me about them and told me any time I wanted to get rid of them, all I had to do was say they should disband."
"And did you?"
"Yesterday."
"And what happened?"
"They said it was up to you because I was resigning this week."
"And what did you say?"
"I said I wasn't resigning. I said I was going to fight. I said if those chicken livers won't support their President in his hours of need, I was going to put the screws to them. Announce what they were doing. Expose them. Get them put on trial for murder. I'd fix this CURE. I told them."
"And what happened?"
"What happens to all great men who don't kiss the ass of the liberal establishment, who stand up for America, who can be counted on to do the decent thing in a crisis."
"What happened to you, sir, is what I'm asking."
"I went to bed as I normally do, supposedly surrounded by loyal and competent guards. During the night I felt a slight tap and when I tried to open my eyes, I couldn't, and I drifted off into a very deep sleep. When I awoke, the world was way down beneath me. Way, way down. I was on top of the Washington Monument and the lights beneath had been turned out. And I was right on top of that needle, looking down. Right leg on one side, left leg on the other, and one man I could only tell that he had thick wrists was on one side of me, below me, and an Oriental with long fingernails was on the other side. And there I was, in my nightgown, with the point of the needle sticking right up between the cheeks of my you know what. And the man with thick wrists said being a tattletale was naughty and that I would resign within the week."
"A
nd what did you say?"
"I said, even if this a dream, I am your President."
"And what did he say?"
"He said they were going to leave me there and I begged him not to and he said it was either being left there, or them bringing me straight down to the bottom. With the needle in between. And in my dream, I said I would resign." He blew his nose fiercely into another tissue.
"So you had a bad dream."
The then but soon to be former President shifted in his doughnut shaped pillow.
"This morning, the surgeon general removed traces of limestone from the rectal tissue of your President. I resign tomorrow."
So it had been, and in the chaos of assuming the presidency of a nation torn by scandal, the former Vice President and now President had never touched that red telephone. Even now, after talking to the lemony voiced man on the telephone, he did not know what he was unleashing. But the risk was worth it. There was a situation in the world that could lead to world war if it were not stopped. And the third world war, with all its nuclear horror, would be the last.
Quietly he shut the bureau drawer and said a prayer. Then he opened the drawer again briefly. Pinkies were always getting caught in that sort of drawer.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he bathed his body in the blue deeps off Florida's west coast. He moved with the slow, crisp snap of a muscled fin through the green plants and rocks where crabbers plucked delicacies for the rest of the nation. There had been a shark warning that morning, and most of the pleasure divers had decided to spend that day with gin and lime and stories about heroism which rose with the ascent of the sun and the decline of the gin in the clear glass bottles set on checkered tablecloths, as the drinkers washed down fresh crab and baked mullet in sweet butter sauce. Remo followed four divers with spear guns, fading in and out of their group, going ahead, falling behind, until the group stopped and pointed to him and made the signal for going up to the surface. The surface always looked so shiny from below. He accelerated up into it, like a porpoise, so that as he cut up into the thin air, the water dropped beneath him to his ankles, and at the apex of his thrust, it appeared as if he momentarily stood ankle deep in water. He came back down with a slapping splash of his arms that stopped his head from going under.
The divers broke the surface too.
Puffing and spitting water, they removed the mouthpieces that led to tanks of compressed air on their backs.
"Okay. We give up," said one. "Where's your air supply?"
"What?" said Remo.
"Your air supply."
"Same place as yours. In my lungs."
"But you've been under with us for twenty minutes."
"Yeah?" said Remo.
"So how do you breathe?"
"Oh, you don't. Not underwater," said Remo, and went back down, curving into the green-blue cool of the salt water. He watched the other divers come down in splashing, jerky, waving, energy-wasting motions, muscles that worked against themselves, breathing that had never been trained, minds so locked in what they perceived as the limits of the human body that even a thousand years of training would never get them to use a tenth of their strength.
It was all in the rhythm and the breathing. The brute force of a man was less than almost any other animal per ounce. But the mind was infinite compared to that of other animals, and only when that mind was harnessed could the rest of the body be harnessed. Year after year, human beings were put into the ground at the end of their lives with less than ten per cent of their brain ever having been used. What did they think it was for? Some vestigial organ like the appendix? Didn't they see? Didn't they know?
He had mentioned this once to a physician who had trouble finding his pulse.
"That's weird," said the doctor, meat and animal fat reeking from his body.
"It's true," Remo had said. "The human mind is virtually an obsolete organ."
"That's absurd," the doctor had said, putting a stethoscope to Remo's heart.
"No, no. Is it true or not that people use fewer than ten per cent of their brain cells?"
"True, but that's common knowledge."
"Why are only ten per cent of the brain cells used?"
"Eight per cent," said the doctor, blowing on the end of the stethoscope and warming it up with his hands.
"Why?"
"Because there are so many of them."
"There's a hell of a lot of filet mignon and gold in the world, but that's all used. Why isn't the brain used?" Remo asked.
"It's not supposed to be used in its entirety."
"But all ten fingers are and every blood vessel is and both lips are and both eyes are. But not the brain?"
"Shhhh, I'm trying to get your heartbeat. You're either dead or I've got a broken stethoscope."
"How many beats do you want?"
"I had hoped for seventy two a minute."
"You got it."
"Ah, there it is," said the doctor and looked at his watch and thirty seconds later said: "Hope and you shall get."
"Want to hear it doubled?" Remo asked. "Halved?" And when he left the doctor's office later, the physician was yelling that he got all the practical jokers and he had a lot of work and only a weirdo like Remo would play the kind of tricks he played. But it hadn't been a trick. As Chiun, his aged Korean trainer, had told him early on:
"People will only believe what they already know and can only see what they have seen before. Especially white people."
And Remo had answered that there were plenty of black and yellow people just as insensitive and probably even more so. And Chiun had said Remo was right about the blacks and about the Chinese and the Japanese and the Thais, and even about the South Koreans and most of the North Koreans, they now being unified under the decadence of Pyong Yang and various other big cities, but that if one went to Sinanju, a small village in North Korea, there were those who appreciated the true outer limits of the human mind and body.
"I've been there, Little Father," Remo had said. "And that means you and the other Masters of Sinanju who have lived throughout the ages. And no one else."
"And you too, Remo," Chiun had said. "Transformed from pale nothingness and worthlessness into a disciple of Sinanju. Oh, never has such glory come to Sinanju as to be able to create something of worth from you. Wonderful me. I have made a student from a white man."
And overwhelmed by his own accomplishment, Chiun had gone into a three day silence broken only by an occasional "from you," and then a swoon of awe at what he had done.
Now Remo moved ahead of the divers, flopping with their artificial fins, leaving streams of shiny air bubbles coming up behind them. Four bodies fighting themselves and the water. They used oxygen they did not need for jerkily pushing muscles they did not know how to use. They hunted the shark, and the shark knew with a kind of knowledge better than mere knowing how to move and do. For that which required knowing always had less force than that which was done by the body itself. So Chiun had taught Remo, and so Remo understood as he, like the shark, snapped and curved through ocean waters off the Florida coast.
He had never been a big man and now, after more than a decade of training, he was thinner yet, with only his very thick wrists to hint that he might be something other than a thin six footer with a somewhat gaunt face, high cheekbones, and dark eyes, and a sensual quietness about him that could make an elderly nun kick over a statue of St. Francis of Assisi.
He saw the shark before the hunters.
It moved low and steady above clear white sand. Remo flashed the white of his body and gave short choppy flips with his hands to look like a fish in trouble. The shark, like a computer aboard a cruiser, zeroed in, and with great gray strength closed upon the man in a small black bathing suit.
The key, of course, was relaxing. The long, slow relax and to attain this, you had to disengage your mind, for this was the shark's home, and a man was a lesser being in this ocean place. A long, slow relax for to try to resist the rows of d
riving shark teeth meant the ripping of flesh and the loss of limb. You had to become like the rice paper of a kite, light and accepting, so that the shark's plunging snout drove into your belly and you collapsed around its great fins, causing it to snap its head in frustration at the light paper in front of its mouth, always in front of its mouth, never allowing it to get a mouthful of the beautiful white tender meat. And then you allowed the great force of its snapping body to bring your left arm under its belly, and there with sudden power the left hand closed, solid and eternal, on the rough, thick skin.
All this Remo did, until finally, as he and the shark snapped at each other, in one wrenching moment the shark's belly skin ripped out, and the shark swam away in its own dark blood, its intestines trailing behind it. And, tasting its own blood, in fury it attacked its trailing belly.
Remo went down in rhythmic, steady moves beneath the dark blood clouds above him. The shark hunters puddled along, still unaware of what had happened.
Remo came up behind them and one by one snapped the artificial flippers from their feet, leaving bare white toes pushing around. The flippers lazydipped and pivoted their way to the bottom. Four pairs. Eight flippers. And to prevent them from retrieving their artificial flippers, Remo snapped off their mouthpieces and sent them to the bottom also.
The hunters fired off a few harmless spears. If they had dropped their tanks and separated one might have gotten back to shore. But they remained, futilely trying to retrieve their mouthpieces and flippers. The ocean currents carried the taste of blood, and two hundred yards off, Remo saw the first of the triangle fins close in on the helpless swimmers.
None of this could not be seen from the shore which was a good three miles away. Not even the divers' belts would be left.
Remo surface swam back to shore and emerged at a small cove near Suwannee in Dixie County. A small A-frame with a large television antenna overlooked the moss and rock incline. He heard high chattering squawks over the rise. Inside a large television screen had Lyndon Johnson's living face on it, the big catcher's mitt of a puss with the beanbag ears. No one was in the room. Remo sat down opposite the television.
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