"You've been awful quiet, Little Father," he said solicitously.
" I have a headache," Chiun's voice was muted.
"You!" Remo said aghast, and the shock in his face was not lost on Guadalupe Mazatl.
"Is this serious?" she asked.
"Is it?" Remo asked Chiun solicitously.
"This is a foul place," Chiun said brittlely. " I have a headache and my breathing rhythms are not properly centered."
"Does it hurt behind the eyes?" Lupe asked.
Chiun turned. "Yes. What do you know of this?"
"It is a pollution headache," Lupe explained. "Many turistas get these things. They are not used to the thin air or the smog. Our smog, I regret to say, is also famous. Mexico lies in a high valley and the mountains that surround it form a natural-how you say-cop. "
"Cup, not cop," Remo said absently. He was looking at Chiun. He had never seen his teacher ill a day in his life. As old and frail as the Master of Sinanju appeared, under the wrinkles and semitranslucent skin, he was a human dynamo. "Are you going to be all right, Little Father?"
"We must leave this place as soon as we can," Chiun croaked. "The air is bad and the oxygen thinner than Tibet's."
"Soon as we accomplish our mission," Remo assured him.
"Mission?" Lupe asked.
"Did I ask you what color a Bimbo Bread truck is?" Remo said quickly.
"Si. And you would not tell me why you thought this important."
"Forget it," Remo said. "An idle question."
"Blue," said the Master of Sinanju. "Blue and white. "
Remo leaned forward. "How do you know that?"
"Because there is one in front of us."
Remo followed Chiun's pointing finger-it trembled almost imperceptibly-and saw the back of a blue-and-white bread truck. The word "Bimbo" was plainly visible, as were a loaf of bread and a fluffy white cartoon bear.
"Driver," Remo said urgently, "try to pull up on the driver's side of that truck."
"What is this?" Lupe demanded.
"Later," Remo said. "Driver, do it!"
The traffic was thick, but the driver tried. He jockeyed in and out of the traffic flow with a kind of wild precision.
At a traffic light, they pulled up alongside the truck.
Remo rolled down the window, getting a faceful of noxious warm air. He put his head out, but all he could see was a patch of sky reflected in the breadtruck driver's mirror.
"Can you see anything, little Father?" he demanded.
The Master of Sinanju put his head out. He looked up, and Remo saw his beard hair tremble. His tiny mouth dropped open.
And before Remo could react, Chiun burst out of the car, shaking a tiny furious fist.
"You!" he shrieked. "Traitor!"
Remo started to open his door, calling, "Chiun, what are you doing?"
The bread truck surged ahead, cutting off the taxi. The Master of Sinanju leapt after it.
Remo flew out of the back and gave chase, oblivious of Guadalupe Mazatl's shouting after him.
Up ahead, the Master of Sinanju was running like an octogenarian Olympic torchbearer, fists pumping high, legs working like spindly pistons under his flopping kimono hem.
The truck veered crazily, causing near-accidents at every turn. Still, not a horn honked. Not a curse was shouted in any language. Unless one counted the excited imprecations of the Master of Sinanju as he hauled after the zigzagging truck.
Remo drew abreast of the Master of Sinanju, his own running motions controlled and tight.
"Chiun! What did you see? Who's driving?"
"The . . . puff . . . President of . . . puff . . . Vice," Chiun wheezed. His voice rattled.
"You sure?"
"I would know that callow, treacherous visage anywhere!" Chiun wheezed.
"Look, you're not breathing right," Remo pleaded. "Leave this to me."
"No!" said Chiun, sprinting forward.
"Oh, great," Remo said. "Now he's got to show me up...
The Bimbo Bread truck came to a rotary of sorts, dominated by a huge white column surmounted by a gold-leaf angel. Remo grinned, knowing that the driver would have to slow down to manage the sharp curve.
But he did not slow down. With almost computerlike precision he sped into the circle and began orbiting the massive column like a satellite on wheels.
"What's he doing?" Remo muttered, falling in behind the truck. He stayed with it for one orbit. Midway through the second, he decided to cut across the monument. The noxious fumes of the exhaust were starting to make him feel whoozy.
Remo sprinted across the monument, up the shallow steps, and back down again.
He alighted on the opposite side-just in time to intercept the speeding truck.
His eyes flicked once toward the Master of Sinanju, pelting around in the truck's wake.
He saw a winded, red-faced Chiun, slowing down, his arms jerking unsynchronously, like those of a Boston Marathon runner at Heartbreak Hill, his legs wavering.
"He's in trouble," Remo muttered worriedly.
Suddenly, the Master of Sinanju stumbled, a big green colectivo bus only yards behind him.
Remo's eyes jumped to the approaching bread truck and went back to Chiun. The sun on the windshield obscured the driver's face.
Swearing to himself, he let the truck roar past and raced back to rescue his mentor.
The green bus was not stopping. The driver's dark eyes were fixed on the traffic, not the road. The Master of Sinanju was raising himself of the asphalt with trembling arms, his face dazed.
Remo's mind raced, making instinctual mental calculations he could not have duplicated with pen and paper. The speed of the truck, his own velocity, even the air resistance pressing against his chest. They all coalesced into some deep untranslatable knowledge.
Remo picked up speed, bent at the waist, and without pause scooped up the Master of Sinanju with bare inches between them and a big bus tire.
The bus whizzed by, sucking at the hairs at the back of Remo's head.
He deposited the Master of Sinanju on the grass of a little square park. He felt his own lungs burning slightly, as if he had somehow inhaled fire.
"Chiun! Are you all right?" he said with difficulty.
"The air is poison here!" Chiun wheezed. His eyes were closed, his thin chest heaving with each breath.
"Yeah. I'm starting to feel it too." Remo settled back. He concentrated on his own breathing. The air was heavy. He had been aware of it ever since leaving the airport, but he hadn't noticed the thin oxygen content. The pollution particles had masked that deficiency.
Now, in the strange humming drone of Mexico City traffic, he became slowly aware that his head was beginning to throb.
"This is not good," said Remo Williams, who had not had a headache or a cold or any other common minor infirmity since achieving the early states of the art of Sinanju. "And that Lupe is probably looking for us right now. Are you up to ditching her?"
"I am up to returning to America," Chiun said weakly.
"Soon as we can," Remo promised. He stood up, looking for a taxi.
He flagged down a yellow VW Beetle with black and white checks on the doors as it came around the circle.
"Where are the best hotels?" Remo asked the driver. "The ones with air-conditioning."
"In the Zona Rosa, senor. The Pink Zone."
"Then take us to the Pink Zone," Remo said, assisting Chiun into the back.
"Zona Rosa, si," the driver said. The cab scooted down a street and back up another. They passed streets with European names like Hamburgo, Genova, and Copenhague.
"You feeling any better, Little Father?" Remo asked.
"I will live," Chiun said stiffly. His eyes were closed. He looked very old all of a sudden, Remo thought. He always looked old. But Remo had long ago learned to trust-and respect-the power that flowed under the wizened shell of the man who was his teacher. He sensed that power ebbing, and it worried him.
Sooner than Remo
expected, they were tooling down a street called Florencia, where a row of tall palms dominated a center island. They passed trendylooking boutiques and even some American restaurants.
Remo was about to ask the driver why it was called the Pink Zone when he noticed that the cobbled sidewalks were faintly pink from paint that had been worn thin by rain and the tread of countless feet.
Abruptly the driver pulled up to a corner. He turned around, saying, "Two hundred pesos, senor.''
"How do you know this is where I want to get off?"
The driver shrugged, muttering something Remo didn't catch.
"What did he say, Chiun?"
The Master of Sinanju put the same question to the driver, and translated the reply.
"He said, 'This is a good place to get off;' " Chiun explained.
"Why not?" Remo said, getting out. He paid the driver in coins, knowing he was overtipping but not caring. He was sick of the heavy Mexican money rattling in his pockets. It all came out of his CURE operating expenses anyway.
The cab pulled away. Remo looked around. He was standing before a boutique called Banana. The roof had been done over to resemble Jungleland. A giant version of King Kong clutched a hairless mannequin against the backdrop of papier-mache trees.
"Let's find a hotel," Remo said, stepping around the corner onto a street called Liverpool.
The first hotel he came to was in an area dotted with earthquake-shattered buildings. The glass face of the Hotel Krystal was undamaged.
"Looks fine to me," Remo said. "So long as the earth doesn't move."
They checked in and, once in the air-conditioned room, began to feel less light-headed. Remo poured out the contents of a bottle of complimentary purified water into two glasses and gave one to the Master of Sinanju. That helped too.
Chiun sat up in one of the big beds.
"I recognized the President of Vice, Remo."
"No kidding," Remo said dryly, looking out at the Mexican skyline. It was magnificently broad and seemed to extend as far as the ring of distant mountains. The sky was darkening to a steely elemental color, as if it was about to rain toxic metals.
"But there is something else," Chiun added.
"Yeah?"
"He recognized me. That is why he ran."
"Can't be. He's never seen us. He shouldn't know we exist."
"The look in his eyes told me that he recognized me," Chiun insisted. "Not in his face. It was like the mask of a clown, always grinning. But his eyes. They told me that he knew my face and feared me."
"Impossible!"
"It is so," Chiun repeated firmly.
"Look, I'm going to need you on this," Remo said anxiously. "Are you up to it, or not?"
" I will serve my emperor," the Master of Sinanju said weakly.
"I'd better call Smith."
"Tell him what I have told you."
"He's not going to believe any of this," Remo muttered, punching the telephone keypad.
Chapter 15
The headquarters for CURE, the supersecret U. S. government agency that existed in no budget, employed no official staff; and yet possessed a multimillion-dollar operating budget, was a second-floor office in a sleepy private hospital in Rye, New York.
The name on the plain door was Harold W. Smith, who was officially director of the hospital, incorporated as Folcroft Sanitarium.
For nearly three decades Smith, formerly with the CIA, had helmed CURE from its early days of crisis management through times of grave political uncertainty. He had not been young when the even younger President had offered him the monumental task of preserving American democracy from those who would twist the Constitution to achieve their vicious ends. And he was not young now.
Smith sat in the same chair he had first occupied in the first day on the job, staring into a modest computer terminal on his desk. He looked like a man who had spent his youth locked in a dank basement eating only lemons and the occasional hard crust of bread. His skin was grayish and dry, his mouth puckered in thought. Behind the prim transparencies of his rimless eyeglasses, his eyes were gray where they should be gray and red where they should have been white.
Smith watched the message-traffic intercepts scrolling before his eyes. The White House was clamped down like a fortress. Cryptic, carefully guarded messages were going back and forth in the State Department and from there to the CIA station in Mexico City.
The lid was still on. It would not stay on long, Smith knew.
He leaned into the screen, his long patrician nose almost bumping the glare-free glass. His fingers lifted like a pianist's. The dry clicking of the keys was as close to music as lemony Harold Smith ever made.
Smith brought up the whereabouts of the Vice-President. All was calm there. He was definitely where he should be.
So whom had Remo and Chiun seen-or supposedly seen-on the Mexican videotape?
"An impostor," he muttered. "Must be." Or was it as Remo had suggested, the other way around?
There was no way Smith could verify either theory. His eyes darted to the black dialless red telephone that sat within easy reach. Normally it was his hot line to the White House. But now there was no one there to pick up the phone. Other than the President, no one in the executive branch knew of Smith or CURE or any of it. That was one of the safeguards built into CURE, which, if it was discovered, would have to be disbanded, because to admit it existed was to admit that one gray man hunched over a computer screen, unknown and unelected, as well as two of the finest assassins ever known, was all that kept America from slipping over the brink into anarchy-or worse.
Smith considered the possibility that the Vice-President had somehow been responsible for the downing of Air Force One. He immediately resolved not to communicate with the man until he knew for an absolute certainty that the President had been lost and the Vice-President was not complicit. He had that option. CURE was autonomous of the executive branch.
Smith switched over to the wire services and TV news digests, automatically processed by the massive computers hidden in Folcroft's basement, two floors below.
A press plane had just arrived in Bogota. It had gone on ahead to record Air Force One's arrival. They would be stalled with a story about weather over the Yucatan Peninsula.
The White House was throwing a lot of attention to the Vice-President's itinerary, obviously hoping by misdirection to keep the domestic press occupied. A major speech by the Vice-President had been announced, one having serious political repercussions.
More misdirection. Unless it too was part of the plot. Smith dismissed that thought. The President's own staff would not throw in with any coup. It made no sense. This was America, not some banana republic. But even as the thought struck Smith, he sat up, realizing that had it not been for CURE, America might be no better than many Latin-American republics struggling against internal disorder.
The ordinary desk phone rang, and Smith reached for it without averting his eyes from the screen.
"Yes?" he said dryly.
"Remo here."
"Progress?"
"We found the Bimbo Bread truck, but it got away."
Smith's hand tightened on the receiver. "The President?"
"He might have been in back, but the V. P. was definitely at the wheel. He drives pretty good too. He got away from us."
"Where are you now?" Smith's voice was bitter.
"In a hotel. The Krystal. That's with a K."
"Return to the field. Every minute counts."
"Wish we could," Remo said worriedly, "but Chiun's incapacitated. I'm not feeling so hot myself."
"What is this?"
"It's the air. The pollution. You know how we function, Smith. Correct breathing, centering. We're weak as kittens."
"I understand nothing of that."
"If you can't breathe, you can't run. Right? If we can't breathe, we can't do the impossible. But we'll manage. "
"Remo, I'm getting the CIA warnings out of Mexico of suspected Colombian narco-
terrorists converging on Mexico City. What do you know about that?"
"Oh, right. That flashy DFS comandante you hooked us up with? We think he's been bought off. It's possible he overheard our last talk."
"Then he knows the President may be alive in Mexico," Smith said in a hoarse tone.
"Afraid so," Remo admitted.
"Therefore these terrorists may be en route to locate or possibly to take possession of the President from whoever's holding him." The long-distance trunkline buzzed over the silence as both men considered the possibility. Finally Smith cleared his throat. His voice was metallic when he spoke again.
"Remo, the President must not fall into the hands of the Colombians."
"Gotcha."
"Remo, it would be better if the President died before he fell into their hands-better for him, and better for America."
"You don't mean-"
"Do you want me to repeat that?" Smith said harshly.
"No, I read you, you cold-blooded son of a bitch," Remo said bitterly.
"Do you remember the story of Enrique Camarena?"
"Should I?"
"He was a DEA agent stationed in Mexico. Corrupt Mexican authorities betrayed him to drug traffickers. They tortured him until they extracted every DEA secret they could. Then they killed him. The President holds many secrets too. Our national security-never mind our nation's prestige-rides on his not falling into the hands of these bloodsuckers."
" I said, I read you," Remo snapped. "Look, we're on it. Is there anyone we can trust down here?"
"No."
"That makes it harder for us. We're handicapped as it is."
"Your best lead will be the local Mexican news," Smith said. "That was the source of the bread-truck tip. Follow any rumor, no matter how bizarre."
"Oh, come on, Smith!" Remo exploded. "We can't hang around watching TV, hoping for a lead."
"You'll do whatever it takes, Remo," Smith said flintily. "But you'll do your job. And stay in constant touch. "
"There's another thing," Remo said quickly. "Chiun thinks the V. P. recognized him. That's why he took off."
"Remo, that's impossible. The President knows what you both look like, but the Vice-President could not."
"You don't suppose the President could have told him about us?" Remo suggested.
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