Remo remained still, but it was too late. The camera flashed a red light, and then the light moved across the floor and quickly up the wall. The camera was aiming. The light hit HARP. The red glowed ugly, chasing the warm colors of the reflection of the move. And then in a blast of white light, HARP exploded and alarms went off.
Remo had triggered a self-destruct mechanism.
McCleary had just backed out of the door of the administration building. Everything had gone more smoothly than he could have hoped. Smith, in his usual brilliance, had pinpointed exactly what McCleary should get, and exactly where it should be, and there it was. McCleary had it; he had taken it exactly as Smith said he might be able to get it, and Remo over at the HARP prototype had blown up the building. Sirens were wailing and searchlights crisscrossing the whole place, and guards and dogs and guns made the whole place an inside of hell.
Con McCleary at that moment felt he could kill Remo. Wrong. He wanted to kill Remo. He didn’t know if he could ever kill him again.
One thing could be said about the boy. He could move. While Con McCleary had to work at getting back to the meeting point by carefully ducking from crate to crate, following moving trucks, trying to pretend to be part of the guarding force, Remo just moved. He was waiting near the fence hole when McCleary got there exhausted.
“I think I blew it,” said Remo.
“Don’t worry. We got what we need, I think,” said McCleary.
“We also got our escape cut off,” said Remo. McCleary couldn’t see what he was talking about. And then the searchlights blanketed the hole they cut, lighting it as though it were the infield of the Astrodome at night, and McCleary saw the guards run through the hole at them.
“C’mon,” said McCleary. “Those bulldozers.”
Remo ran to the bulldozer, and then realized that McCleary was still puffing along after him. A dog had gotten to his artificial arm and McCleary left the arm with the dog. Without it, McCleary ran crippled. The best he could manage was a lumbering, puffing, listing lunge.
Remo had the dozer running by the time McCleary got there.
“You got black man’s feet,” said Remo in revenge of his high-school years when blacks had outrun him and outplayed him, when the joke was if a player couldn’t move fast, he had what was called the “white man’s disease.”
“Through the fence,” said McCleary. Remo worked the gears. McCleary helped him. The bulldozer rattled and chugged, its treads crushing the gravel and scrub, moving forward. Remo helped McCleary jump off. The dozer chugged on into the electrified fence, setting off an explosion of light that would make a rock star envious.
They ran through the fence, and McCleary almost caught up to Remo, even with his sloppy gait, when his body jerked at the sound of a rifle bullet. Someone had gotten him in the back. McCleary went forward, too fast, faster than his legs, and he landed on the gravel.
Remo spun on the spot and turned back for McCleary. Another shot chipped stone at his feet. He couldn’t sense the men firing in the confusion.
“Get out of here. Take this. Get it to home. Get it to home,” said McCleary. He was pushing a cardboard package about half as long as a carton of cigarettes and twice as wide. “Get this to home. Go. Move it.”
Remo grabbed the package. “Home” meant Smith. But he wasn’t leaving without McCleary. Then he saw the eyes roll back in McCleary’s head, and the head hit the ground, and two more shots came too close, too close for someone who might already be dead. Two dead would do no one any good. Besides, that’s what CURE was about anyway. You gave up your body for your country.
Only when he was sure Remo had gone did McCleary open his eyes. The bullet he’d taken had touched off a dull pain McCleary knew would get worse later. At that point, he did not know how much worse.
McCleary only found out how much pain he could truly endure when a doctor who found him at the Grove site began asking him questions about “home.”
The doctor told him that the treatment might hurt. He kept asking if this was painful and that was painful as he poked a scalpel over McCleary’s body, looking for places that hurt. And he found them with surgical skill.
“We picked up, albeit not too clearly, that you wanted to get something home. What is home? Where is home? Who are you?”
The man seemed to know when McCleary was faking passing out.
“Come now. We know you are with us. Who are you?”
The probing knife touched McCleary’s left eye.
“Look. We have seen you as an investigator for the Internal Revenue Service. We have seen you as a bird colonel in New York and now we see you again, here at one of our factories. Who are you this time?” The voice was low and reasonable. McCleary could not make out the person in the dark. He felt a gouging near the eye.
“Are you really going to make me go through this?” came the voice.
McCleary smelled the sharp odor of hospital disinfectant. He realized there would be no rescue here. He was in a hospital. Any screams for help would be considered normal. They could call him hysterical and none of the nurses or doctors who weren’t part of this group would come to his aid. No one would come to his aid; he was sure of that. He had set up Remo that way in the beginning. McCleary knew from experience that he wasn’t getting out of here alive.
Even if he were in a friendly hospital he might not get out of here alive. He saw the support tubes holding his life this side of breathing going up from his nose and one good arm. There was that dullness of the body he knew had to precede death.
He felt something on his chest. The questioner had rested the scalpel there, as if it were a convenient table.
“Why don’t you think about all the places this little knife can go, and all the things it can do. You think awhile and then I will come back. I will come back to either give you the warm comfort of a good narcotic, or the scalpel. And while you think, focus on who you are and where ‘home’ is, and what all this was about tonight. Would you do that for me?”
McCleary could make out the man’s white coat, though he did not see the diamond in his mouth. Nor did he hear the conversation that went on outside his room of the Grove Hospital.
“You should have called me sooner, he’s almost dead,” said Stone.
“Well?” said Wilson. He hated West Virginia. Even the governors wore off-the-rack suits.
“I think he has enough life left in him to give us what we want,” said Stone. “I am going to let his mind work against him for a little while. Then we will have it all.”
“This is lucky. This does it. We have them now. They gave themselves to us on a silver platter.”
“Unless of course they were after something here at the West Virginia plant.”
“Well, whatever they got, we are going to get it back,” said Wilson. “That is the beautiful part of that gift they have given us. We have them now. Do you think he’s had enough time?”
“I think so,” said Stone, and his smile glistened.
Even if he got the information, Stone had no intention of providing a narcotic. Not because he got any real delight from inflicting cruelty, but because a scalpel through the heart was the finest, most permanent narcotic of all. And of course, in a hospital, no one would notice.
Stone realized that something was wrong as soon as he entered the room. He did not hear the rhythmic rasp of labored breathing. He checked the life-support system—the phosphorous screens were sending out a steady signal. None of the jerks of life. Then he heard his foot squish in some liquid. He looked down. It was dark, reddish; and a tube poured silently into the puddle. Stone himself had attached the tube to the one good arm of the intruder. Now the arm hung over the bed, and in the puddle was the scalpel. He had cut the tube; severed the intravenous connection for the blood transfusion. When it was cut, the blood no longer flowed into the body, but out of it. Stone felt the chest. Nothing. He felt the wrist. Nothing. He checked the monitor. It was flat.
He wasn’t going to get any informat
ion out of this man. He had escaped once and for all.
Later, in New York City, Harold W. Smith unraveled the mysteries surrounding HARP, and couldn’t help giving George Grove just a little bit of admiration.
“I knew that son of a bitch was smart, but I didn’t know he was this smart,” said Smith. Remo had delivered McCleary’s package.
14
Remo rubbed his hand where the dog had caught him back in the Grove HARP plant in West Virginia. Smith kept nodding at the computer screen. On the green background a white diagram appeared, delineating the outer container of HARP. Then its flight path developed, stretching a protecting web over the western world.
Remo did not mind the pain in his hand. He understood that that sort of pain meant that his body was curing itself. Remo minded very much that Smith was calling Grove “very smart.” He minded very much that these people had killed McCleary. He had just gotten to like him in West Virginia.
He would never, he was sure, feel the same thing for this man and his computers. He was sure that being able to say something nice about the other guy had a great deal to do with the camaraderie that came of putting your guts on the line together. But Remo really couldn’t convince himself that that was the case. Smith did have that pill in his pocket. He was going to kill himself if CURE were exposed. And that made Remo think of who would be killing him.
“Look here and see what that smart son of a bitch has done. Look,” said Smith.
“I don’t give a wind spit,” said Remo.
“You should. Look at this. This explains it all. Our friend George Grove of Grove Industries has not only sucked billions from our taxpayers, our good friend George Grove has sent us out into this cold world without a protective stitch. Look at that.”
Remo saw some numbers come on the screen. Then he saw a graph drawing of something going out into space. Then he saw some more numbers.
“Numbers,” said Remo.
“America’s roof,” said Smith. “Our protection from the nuclear rain.”
“What?” said Remo. The hand was better.
“It doesn’t exist.”
“No. I saw it in West Virginia. It was beautiful. Like sculpture. It blew up in my face.”
“What you saw was a fake. Window dressing. And before you got close enough to figure that out, it self-destructed. Brilliant.”
“So Grove is just another crook.”
“I wish that were true,” said Smith. “You see the reason he surrounded HARP I with so much secrecy was not that the Russians would find out what HARP was about, but that some accounting office would.”
“Yeah, but sooner or later we’d have to find out HARP I didn’t work.”
“Not if HARP II worked. Not if HARP III worked. What George Grove did was to figure out a way to make a ninety-percent profit on a weapons system. He got tired with thirty and forty percent. He got tired of selling shoddy rifles and non-spec weapons.”
Remo saw the numbers move but he understood none of them.
“You see, what happened to Grove and, sadly, to some others who graduated from business schools was that they began to reduce the world to numbers. If you look at the numbers it makes sense to buy someone off rather than to build a product right. It’s cheaper. We’re getting away from that now, but there it is.”
“Stealing is stealing. A pickpocket thinks the same way.”
“You’re right, of course,” said Smith. “Unfortunately, a pickpocket has a lot better chance of getting caught. These numbers only confirm my suspicions. By the time these numbers might get to court, a lot of expensive accountants and lawyers will make them seem cleaner than the Better Business Bureau’s books.”
“But it’s a fraud.”
“Son, you blew the only hard evidence we had against him right out of court. Grove is probably filling his fire-insurance claim right now. I’ve got to hand it to our Mr. Grove. He is going to get richer and richer, safer and safer.”
Remo couldn’t believe what he was hearing.
“Grove is going to get his appropriations for a HARP II and a III and maybe even a IV. And no one is going to ask what happened to HARP I. It will end up just like the rest of that vast junkyard of obsolete weapons. Nobody cares whether they ever worked or not.”
“And you think it’s funny,” said Remo. “Mac gives his life to get you that stuff so you can nail the bastard and now you’re telling me he’s going to get away with it, that we can’t stop him?”
“You can,” said Smith.
“For McCleary,” said Remo. “I liked him.”
“No,” said Smith. “You are going to do it because it has to be done. There is no other way we can get at George Grove. It gives me a sense of pleasure that we are going to get someone who calculatedly is defecating on our country. But that pleasure is not what it is all about. That was not why McCleary gave his life. I knew that man longer than you did and I believe I felt closer to him than you could have. But McCleary does not matter, Remo.”
“To you,” said Remo.
Smith cleared his throat.
“You will eliminate George Grove with a natural kill. A perfect accident. I spoke to Chiun about that at the very beginning.”
“Along with a few other things,” said Remo.
“Well, you understand that was necessary,” said Smith. “I hope. In any case, you can do the natural kill, can’t you?”
“Sure, but it’s not a natural kill. It only looks natural.”
“Yes,” said Smith. “That will do fine.” He wondered how much Remo had really changed, as McCleary had warned. Already the young man was thinking differently. The New York City policeman they had kidnapped over a month before would have scarcely given a second thought to the difference between a kill appearing natural and being natural.
“Grove is at Mount Promise testing area. It may be one of the more heavily guarded sites in America. You will be going up against what is probably the technologically best protected site in the world. It has all the latest equipment, things that aren’t even in production stage yet.”
“What are you worried about?” asked Remo.
“I don’t know how much of a chance you stand.”
“Listen, half the new stuff you’re talking about was probably forgotten a thousand years ago. I mean take HARP. Do you know the story of General Liu and the Emperor of the Shining Light? In the fifth dynasty, the generals were given the money to raise their own armies. General Liu had five armies defending the western provinces. But four of them were fake. He pocketed the rest of the money. Only one real army belonged to him and the emperor couldn’t do anything against them.”
“What happened?”
“The emperor hired Sinanju.”
“And?”
“What do you mean ‘and’? And he hired Sinanju.”
“You mean Sinanju terminated the greedy general?”
“What do you think they did? Bring him to trial with evidence? They hung his head on a palace wall, gave half of his gold to the Master of Sinanju, put the emperor’s brother in charge of the last remaining army, and gave laudations to Sinanju, as well as the added tribute. Sinanju.”
“Do you want tribute, Remo?”
“I don’t want anything from you, Smith. I don’t need anything. What could I want? Hey, I’m the guy you got because nobody would miss him. Well, you chose right, you calculating lemon-faced . . . Good-bye.”
“I’m sorry about the Chiun thing. Is that what’s bothering you, Remo?” asked Smith. Remo was walking out of the main computer room.
“No. Nothing bothers me. That’s the least of it. If I never see Chiun again, then good.”
“It was just security, Remo.”
“Right. You got the right man. I don’t need anything. I don’t want anything. I don’t have anything. Or anyone.”
And Remo left. Later, Smith requested the presence of the Master of Sinanju. Chiun listened in silence. There was a very dangerous place called Mount Promise. It was where America t
ested weapons. Remo was going to penetrate that place to remove an enemy. But it was a very dangerous place to penetrate. There were devices upon devices that would stop people from entering, things only the greatest minds could imagine.
Remo might not survive. He might become wounded. He might be captured. If that happened, Chiun was to fulfill the contract.
Chiun nodded.
“O gracious emperor, your commands are like the roaring thunder of the oncoming storm, unstoppable in their awesomeness. How well you fear for your subjects. You have feared so well that you have called upon Sinanju to enforce your will. We have had great success in the past with such defenses, and I am sure you will be pleased with Remo’s services again.”
It was almost a classic speech. What Chiun had said was the emperor should not insult Sinanju by suggesting there was something it could not do. Chiun could have told him five stories of such defenses, each one ending in a Sinanju victory. The only problem would be if Remo forgot his lessons like he did that day on the statue that so resembled the Korean cliffs. Then of course there could be problems.
“You won’t have any problems executing Remo if you have to?” asked Smith. “I ask this because I think he has an emotional attachment to you. I think it bothered him when he found out you would have to kill him, under certain circumstances.”
“Yes. I saw how it bothered him.”
“You will not have any problems in this matter then?” asked Smith.
And Chiun answered in the room of the machines that Emperor Smith seemed to like so much:
“There is but one problem in the world, and that is that your glory is not fully recognized as yet.”
“Well, all right,” said Smith.
Remo The Adventure Begins Page 18