It was very high, and he was very unsure. He grabbed the cold bar of the scaffolding for balance. He couldn’t even stand. He knew now what Chiun had said about him having Sinanju was true. It was gone. He didn’t have it. He would never have it.
Okay, fine. As long as he could get out of here, down by the elevator.
The three hardhat boomers made the scaffolding jiggle.
“Take it easy, will ya, fellas?” said Remo. Heights didn’t bother them. Well, that was them. Remo wasn’t them. And he wasn’t Sinanju. He was getting down to the ground.
If Remo were not so scared he would have noticed the glint of the sun down below. He might have seen the man looking up at him with binoculars. He might have realized that the glint came from a diamond in a tooth.
But if he were not so scared, his balance would not be a question either, and standing many stories above the ground on repair scaffolding for a giant monument would not be a danger. The plank he stood on would have been more than enough, and the boomers in the hard hats, the men who worked heights, would not have bothered him. Their easy bounce along the plank would not have forced Remo to grab on to a scaffolding bar.
“Take it easy, fellas. Okay?” said Remo. They didn’t have to jostle the scaffolding like that. Not everyone liked heights.
The boomers looked at each other and smiled. They all heard the request. They bounced harder.
“Hey, you guys crazy?” said Remo.
“What are you doing here?” asked a boomer. He looked like he was born fifty stories off the ground.
“We work here. Do you work here?” said another boomer.
“Authorized personnel only. We don’t want any accidents,” said another.
“Or suicides,” said the first. The plank moved dangerously.
“Okay. So I’m going down. Now. Down. Me. Just stop that, okay?” said Remo, trying to get across the plank. He would not walk unless he was holding on to one scaffolding bar before releasing the other.
“Yeah,” said the first boomer. “You’re on your way down, all right. The short way.”
Remo felt the plank jangle as the boomer jogged down it toward him, his arms raised, trying to push him off. They may have been real boomers. He didn’t know. But they were trying to kill him. And here, with his fear out of control, they were going to succeed. He saw a crossbar on the scaffolding below.
With feet like lead, and hands like ice cubes, Remo dove for it. The hands held, barely. The body felt like a bag of bricks. It swayed. He clutched the bar as though trying to tear off his skin. But he was safe.
Until all three of the boomers easily jumped down to his level, jumped with the grace of acrobats, acrobats chasing the bag of bricks.
Remo reached out for another strut, but the fear tightened his body and the hand missed. He was falling. But just for a second. Something stopped him. He was on the thumb, the great thumb. He looked up. He had been on the torch. He had fallen from the lady’s torch to her thumb. The green copper flaked on his face and under his hands. He could taste the sharp odor. His arms and legs wide over the thumb, he tried not to scrape off the outer layer of copper. And he tried not to look down. He had one great wish. Never to leave this thumb, this safe place, his home, his destiny, everything. He loved this copper thumb. He loved it so much, he didn’t even want to look away from it. He wanted to stay there on the thumb, and be nowhere else. His thumb. His place. His cheek very close to the copper, hugging it.
And then Remo heard the scraping. It was right above his head on the thumb. Something tapped his hands, then scraped them. Remo had to look up. The boomers had one of the pole scrapers used for chipping the flaked copper away from the statue. They were scraping him off his thumb. He crawled back away from the thing that threatened to remove him from his thumb.
He felt the copper come up quickly to his face, then slip away from above him, hundred-year-old weathered copper coming up in a funnel at his mouth. He was sliding. He was sliding down the arm of the Statue of Liberty, down the forearm, the bicep, into the robes seen by millions arriving in America. Remo’s view was that of a man who was leaving the country, and the earth, forever.
And then he was free of the copper, falling, falling free until he cracked into one bar, several bars, many bars . . . he was falling through scaffolding. And then the fall stopped. Remo was still grabbing, but he had landed on another platform. Painfully, expecting an arm or a leg to suddenly scream at him that it was broken, Remo made his way back up, careful not to look at the ground.
But at the last few steps, scaffolding had been removed. And beneath him was the chasm. He thought of them getting away, and he thought, good. He would be alive.
He felt his breath come strong, breath that almost left. And he drew it in, breathed like he had been taught, breathed until he was breathing correctly.
He brushed the copper off his clothes, without any pressure on the platform, moved across to the statue on the fine day whose brightness hid the stars that would show again that night.
He could have taken the elevator. But elevators were slow. And now, he had no intention of letting them get away, as he let his fingertips lightly brush the patina of the skin of the flaky copper, sensing the very salt that had bathed it these many years, feeling the air, and the mass of the statue and the sea, and the movement, the unity of the movement, the correctness of moving down a great height.
Stone received his men at the base of the statue, sparing any words of recognition. They would not be down here if they had not succeeded. It had been a classic move. If a man seemed comfortable in one area, such as on a city street, go at him at another. Such as on the Statue of Liberty.
The plan had one flaw. Stone saw that in an instant. The man had survived. He was on the ground, coming out from behind the base of the statue, coming at the boomers with blood in his eyes.
One of Stone’s men in the boomer’s hard hat went for his pistol.
“Do him,” said Stone.
On the other side of the statue, Chiun heard a shot. He had watched Remo and made observations for future reference. It had taken Remo too long to realize he was being attacked, but that was not the problem; it was only a symptom of the problem. The problem was what he had come here to solve. Fear of heights. A shot rang out from the other side of the statue, not loudly. Pistols were hardly loud surrounded by so much water, where sound waves tended to dissipate.
Chiun, who had been helping a family take pictures, handed back the camera and went to see about the shot. Remo would be there. There were things he needed to learn about fear, if he hadn’t learned them already. Even if he had learned by now, it should not have taken so long.
There were lots of things to tell him. Chiun moved happily toward the pistol shot.
The way to dodge a bullet of course was not to dodge a bullet. Instead, one dodged the very slow body sending the bullet, aiming the bullet. And of course this man’s body gave much heavier signals than Chiun’s. It was almost laughably easy. But Remo did not want this man right now. He wanted that man with the diamond in the tooth. Remo skimmed across a trough of wet cement, rounded the corner of the statue, and saw Stone riding away in a small motorboat. The boat made good speed on the choppy waves.
Remo thought about the water. Was it like wet sand? Could he move across it? The man with the diamond tooth was getting away, and Remo burned in his belly.
The anger was just as wrong as the fear. Because of it, he did not see another boomer, not the one who foolishly tried to follow him across wet cement and got stuck for his trouble, aim a pistol at the back of his head.
Bullets could not be dodged when one was unaware of the person firing. The bullet was well set for Remo’s brain and would have reached its mark had it not been for the long fingernail shooting out so quickly the human eye could not spot it. It paralyzed the boomer and sent him spinning. And still Remo didn’t turn around.
He didn’t turn around when the force of Chiun’s thrust on the boomer impaled him on
rusting wires.
He didn’t turn around to notice the man with the gun, stuck in the cement. He didn’t turn around of course to notice Chiun. He stood there trembling with his hatred, this after all these months of Chiun’s perfect training.
Was this what Chiun deserved? Was this his return for the awesome magnificence he had cast before the meat eater, the man who would want to copulate with a woman just because she was ravishing, not even caring whether she breathed correctly?
But that was all right, Chiun was used to these things. And he had found what he had come around the statue to find. Once again, another injustice had been visited upon perhaps the most decent and giving person Chiun had ever known. Himself.
Chiun turned away from this, and content that the order of the world had been reaffirmed, walked over to some young boys fishing to tell them that a good fisherman does not use a hook or a rod, or string. They, of course, were white and answered him with insolence.
“How can you fish without hooks and line?” they said, without calling him “gracious one” even once.
But he was not paid to teach them, so he ignored their question. Undoubtedly they would grow up adding themselves to the rubble of this civilization into which Remo fit so well.
Remo arrived with sweat on his body and breathing hard, even as the death rattle on his first exercise could be heard by the trained ear on the other side of the statue. What an awful beginning.
“Well, it worked,” said Remo. “Most of the time it was correct.”
“Go fish with a hook and a line,” said Chiun.
“Listen, I almost got killed up there,” said Remo.
“Yes,” said Chiun, feeling the frustration of it all. “Disgraceful. You breathe hard. You perspire, and you show anger. And you show fear. You are a shame to the breath I taught you to take.”
“I am happy to be alive,” said Remo.
“You should be,” said Chiun. And he refused to say another word all the way back to the mainland.
The problems that afternoon were just beginning for Smith and McCleary, however. And it was Remo who was going to tell them about it, only to find out about the horrible secret those two men shared. And the one Chiun had been struggling with, the one he had learned from the devious Harold W. Smith. It would explain to Remo why Chiun could never let him call the man “little father.”
It would explain why Chiun had to tell him about an assassin’s first loyalty. It would be something that would break Remo’s heart. But orphans were used to that.
13
The protection for the HARP system financial spread sheets was working again.
“Look at this,” said Smith. McCleary peered at the screen. Although he did not know computers, he could read. Access was denied.
McCleary thought of another access denied, one that he kept trying to push out of his mind. That very afternoon he had been denied an apartment because he was black. It was against the law to do so, illegal in one of the few countries that had such a law, but people did it nevertheless.
And here he was risking his life for a country that didn’t let him live where he wanted because of the color of his skin. It made it all very hard, and took the edge off his concentration.
“Is that the access I got by physically infiltrating Grove Industries?”
“Right. Once they believed you were an Internal Revenue agent, they had to show you their books, which were of course on their computer. You got the path codes for getting into HARP which also protected the original AR-60 from Army audit. That’s what we were looking at first. But look at what’s going on here.”
McCleary took in a sequence of meaningless numbers. “Right,” he said. He remembered the landlady’s face. It showed such pain. You always knew when they were lying because they showed pain at not having an apartment available. That was the dead giveaway. Otherwise, it would just be another apartment already rented, a simple sorry and good-bye.
When they said no because you were black, there was that special pain to the face, the lengthy explanation of who had just rented the apartment, all delivered at top speed.
Sometimes he would stand there and let them squirm. But Con McCleary didn’t enjoy it. He knew what it was all about, and sometimes it made him feel so tired, tired of everything. Tired of caring. Tired of trying. Tired of being an American.
But he was an American. He knew how bad Africa was. Maybe white liberal professors and African scholars had to keep afloat some myths of value either for their jobs or their good intentions, but he knew it was a garbage pit, from Tripoli to Cape Town. And Asia treated all human life with the compassion one normally bestowed on grass seed.
The problem for Con McCleary was that America was home. He wouldn’t trade a cold beer at an American bar for all the champagne in Paris. He liked fried chicken, beer and baseball. If he read a book, chances were it was history, and usually American history. He did his job because he was an American. His father worked in the post office and his grandfather worked on the trains, and McCleary saved the whole damned thing for people who wouldn’t rent him living space.
Smitty, on the other hand, had been part of this country since before it was a country, McCleary knew. Sometimes he wondered if that made that much difference. Sometimes he wanted to ask. But you didn’t ask Harold W. Smith those sorts of questions. You didn’t ask him personal things or tell him personal things. You watched computer screens and talked about economic access.
“Now here is protection for America’s most sensitive protection satellite, so new it hasn’t been orbited, so sensitive that they may have HARP II in space before they ever need HARP I. Now what is maximum protect?”
“What I see there, I guess. I don’t know. Get to the point, Smitty,” said McCleary.
“The financial records.”
“I got access to them for us.”
“You did, but you don’t know the higher levels of these things.”
“And I never will, happily,” said McCleary.
“When something is absolutely most important, maximum, all the other protection devices work to scrutinize it. It’s like a night watchman. He doesn’t check the fence to see if it is still there, he checks the locks on the doors to the room where the money is kept. What they have done is to devote their maximum protection to their financial records. Why?”
“They’re white,” said McCleary.
“Be serious,” said Smith. “Logic would dictate that the HARP I would have its maximum protect on its technological secrets, how one builds one of these things or gets around one of these things. But these people have put it on the books. Costs. Why?”
A red light flashed on the corner of the screen. Someone was entering the outer office. The cameras replaced the computer readout with an image of the intruder. The face was hard, and angry.
“He’s not supposed to come here unless we tell him,” said Smith. It was Remo.
“Well, he’s here,” said McCleary. “And he looks pissed. I would be very careful with that one. He is not the same guy we fished out of the river. Remo Williams is something else entirely.”
“But Chiun’s reports?” asked Smith.
“Hey, those people, Smitty, are them. Them don’t think like us. And this boy we shanghaied may be becoming one of them, so don’t play street games like this was the community.”
“Is there a purpose to that sudden black talk?” asked Smith.
“To save our asses. We got what we want, I think. But I don’t think we know what we got, and that sonuvabitch Remo is getting better. I saw him dodge bullets. And he hasn’t gotten worse since then.”
Remo entered on a tear.
He did not ask permission to enter. He did not say hello. He informed them they were all going to straighten something out. McCleary was glad he had warned Smith.
Remo was covered by flaky green stuff. His face was cut, his dark eyes burned.
“I just spent the morning being chased around the Statue of Liberty by a bunch of goons
.”
“What were you doing on the statue?” asked Smith.
“That’s not the point. What were the guys who were trying to kill me doing on the Statue of Liberty? You’re supposed to be plugged into the universe and you can’t warn me when someone is staging a hit? I thought we were supposed to go after them. They were coming after me.”
“Who?” asked McCleary.
“Our friend with the Tiffany tooth,” said Remo. “Who gave me away to him? I’m supposed to be secret. I’m supposed to be the man who doesn’t exist for the organization that doesn’t exist. What was that thing in the police car and the plastic surgery for if you assholes are going to list me in the phone book or something?”
Smith and McCleary looked at each other. McCleary’s mouth opened. Smith became even paler. He swallowed hard. His voice jerked with fear under control, like a string on a violin stretched too taut.
“What do you think?” Smith asked. But he did not ask it of Remo.
“I think we are very close to buying the farm,” said McCleary.
“Not yet,” said Smith.
“If he’s on to Remo, then he’s on to us. We’ve got a problem,” said McCleary.
“Damned right you do. Someone tried to kill me,” said Remo.
“Let’s take him out before he gets closer?” asked McCleary. His voice almost begged.
Smith shook his head. “No. Not yet. We don’t know what it means absolutely for sure.”
“It means some guy tried to kill me. If you know where he is, let me at him. I’ll do it. I don’t need you people to tell me how to be correct with a target. Hell, you had tunafish with oily mayonnaise for lunch, Smith, and you had fried chicken for the last three days, McCleary.”
Smith turned to Remo, and with all the authority he naturally had felt because of the rightness of his cause, he said quite coldly:
“Remo, CURE is not interested in your personal problems.”
“Well, cure sucks, whatever cure is.”
Remo The Adventure Begins Page 16