Terror Squad td-10

by Warren Murphy

  He turned back to Remo. "I found a way to open it."

  "Yes, I see that. Congratulations."

  Chiun held up a hand. "Think nothing of it."

  Then the waitress was at their table, young, dark-haired, pretty, mini-skirted, and more interested in who they were and what they were doing there than in taking their order.

  "We're Cheech and Chong doing field research," Remo said.

  "Yeah," she said, twisting her gum inside her mouth, "and I'm Shirley MacLaine."

  Chiun turned and squinted at her. "No, you are not Shirley MacLaine," he said, shaking his head with finality. "I saw her on the magic box, and you lack both her manners and her simplicity."

  "Hey, watch it," the waitress said.

  "What he meant was," Remo said, "that you're obviously a much more complex personality than Shirley MacLaine and that you don't waste time in those ritualistic niceties like doing ballets with good manners, but instead you let it all hang out in a symphony of truth and forthrightness."

  "I do?"

  "Yes," Remo said. "We noticed that as soon as we came in." He smiled at the girl and asked, "Now, what kind of juice do you. have in the kitchen?"

  She smiled back. "Orange, grapefruit, lemon, lime, tomato, carrot and celery."

  "Would you mix us up large glasses of carrot and celery juice?" Remo asked.

  "Macrobiotic, huh?"

  Chiun looked pained. "Yeah," Remo said. "The latest thing. Mixed together, they let you think in the dark."

  "Hey, wow," she said.

  "And no ice," Remo said.

  "You got it."

  When she had left, Remo upbraided Chiun. "Now I told you we'll go to Brooklyn when we're done. You've got to be a little more civil."

  "I will try to live up to your nation's high cultural standards, and not let it all hang out in a symphony of truth and forthrightness,"

  But Remo was no longer paying attention. him eyes were on a group of four who had just entered The Bard and were moving quickly through the dining area, alongside the bar, and then into a passageway that led somewhere into the back of the bidding. The first three were nondescript bomb-thrower types, a typical enough sight in the Village. Actually, so was the fourth, but with a difference. She was Joan Hacker. She wore tight jeans and a thin white sweater, a large floppy red hat and a black leather shoulder bag. She looked determined as she marched ahead behind the three men. Chiun turned and followed Remo's eyes.

  "So that is the one?"

  "Yes."

  Chiun looked and said, "Be wary of her."

  The girl had gone now into the back and Remo looked at Chiun questioningly. "Why? She's just a nit."

  "All empty vessels are the same," Chiun said. "But some have milk poured into them and some poison."

  "Thank you," Remo said. "That makes everything clear."

  "You're welcome," Chiun said. "I am happy I was able to help. Anyway, just be careful,"

  Remo was careful.

  He was careful until the waitress had brought back their juice, and careful to ask directions to the men's room which he knew was in the back, and careful that no one was looking when he got into the corridor, then darted up a flight of stairs.

  He was careful at the top of the steps to stay outside the door and careful not to miss a word Joan Hacker said, or a gesture she made.

  This was made immeasurably easier because none of the geniuses of the impending revolution had bothered to close the door to their meeting room and Remo could see clearly through the crack.

  There were a dozen of them, all squatting on the floor, eight men and four women, and the only one standing was Joan Hacker. Their attention was riveted on her, as if she were Moses carrying the tablets down from the mountain. Remo could tell by looking at her that she gloried in the attention paid her; at Patton College, no one had listened to her, but here she was a very important person indeed.

  "Now you all know what the plan is," she said. "No deviation will be allowed from it. It has been worked out on the highest levels . . . the very highest levels of the revolutionary movement. If we all do our part, it will not fail. And when the history of the Third World's rise is written, your names will loom large among those who were the makers of history."

  Those, God help him, Remo thought, were her exact words. She seemed a little unsure delivering them, and he realized immediately why. They were someone else's words that she had memorised and was now reciting.

  "I've got a question," a young woman said from the floor. She was skinny and buck-toothed and wore a too large white sweater.

  "Questions are allowed in our new order," Joan said.

  "Why Teterboro?" the girl asked. "Why not Kennedy or LaGuardia?"

  "Because we are walking before we run. Because we must show our strength. Because we were told to," Joan responded.

  "But why?"

  "Because," Joan shrieked. "That's why. And questions are counter productive. You either are or you aren't. You either do or you don't. I don't like questions. Our leaders don't like questions. All my life, people are always asking me questions, and well, I'm not going to answer them any more because what's right is right, whether you understand it or not." Her face was livid. She stamped her foot.

  "She's right," one man said. "Questions are counter productive," thereby proving that he would rather bang Joan than the girl with buck teeth.

  "Counter productive.," another voice called. "Yes, down with counter productivity," came another.

  John Hacker beamed. "Now that we're all agreed," and she underscored all, "let us proceed with our revolutionary fervour to do what must be done in the never-ending fight against fascism."

  There was a collective nod of agreement from the audience and they began rising to their feet Remo moved back slightly from the doorway to assure that he would not be glimpsed.

  The thirteen people in the room milled around, everyone trying to talk at once, and Remo retreated downstairs, after first assuring himself that there was no other exit from the room.

  As Remo re-entered the dining section of The Bard, he saw Chiun spot him in the mirror. Chiun immediately leaned over toward the window, and when Remo arrived at the booth, Chiun had his nose near the small hole in the glass. He was gasping as if he were a fish.

  Remo, who knew that Chiun could live for a year inside a barrel of pickles without drawing a breath, said, "You know what you're breathing? Pizza crust and raw clams and baclava."

  Chiun recoiled from the window. "Baclava?" he said.

  "Yes," Remo said, "baclava. You start out by grinding these almonds and dates into a paste. Then you get a big pot of honey and gobs and gobs of sugar and...."

  "Hold. Enough," Chiun said. "I will take my chances in here."

  Remo looked up and saw the first people from the meeting beginning to leave. He perched on the edge of his bench, ready to move when he saw Joan. She arrived three minutes later, the last of the group, and he got up and intercepted her in the doorway.

  "You're under arrest," he whispered in her ear and when she turned, startled, and recognized him, he smiled.

  "Oh, it's you," she said. "What are you doing here?"

  "I'm on special assignment for the Patton College library."

  She giggled. "I really ripped them off, didn't I?"

  "Yes. And if you don't have a drink with me, I'm going to run you in."

  "All right," she said, again the revolutionary leader. "But only because I want to. Because I'm supposed to tell you something and I'm trying to remember what it is."

  He led her back to the table and introduced her to Chiun, who turned a withered smile in her direction.

  "Excuse me for not arising," he said, "but I lack the strength. Was that polite enough, Remo?"

  Joan nodded graciously to the old man, wondering for a moment what Remo was doing with the representative of the Third World and wondering if Chiun were Chinese or Vietnamese, and then abandoning the wonder as unworthy of a revolutionary leader.

  "
"What are you drinking?" Joan asked Remo.

  "A Singapore Sling," Remo said. "The latest thing in health drinks. Like one?"

  "Sure, but not if it's too sweet. I've got this terrible toothache."

  Remo called the waitress, motioned for her to refill him and Chiun's glasses, and said, "And another Singapore Sling for Madame Chiang here. And not too sweet."

  "Still pretty sure of yourself, aren't you?" Joan Hacker asked, leaning forward and setting her bosom down onto the table top.

  "No more than I have to be. Have you picked your targets yet?"

  "Targets?"

  "Targets. The bridges you're going to blow. Isn't that why you left school? To come down here and blow up the bridges? Paralyze New York. Seal it off from the rest of the country. Then direct the Third World revolution that will topple it from within?"

  "If we hadn't had such a meaningful relationship," she said, "I'd think you were being sarcastic. Even if it isn't a bad idea."

  "It's yours," Remo said, "to use as you will. You don't even have to give me credit for it. Only one proviso."

  "Oh?"

  "You have to leave the Brooklyn Bridge."

  "Why?" she asked suspiciously, her mind already made up that if one were to blow up bridges around New York, the only one really worth blowing up would be the Brooklyn Bridge.

  "Because Hart Crane wrote a great poem about it, and because people sometimes have important reasons to get to Brooklyn."

  "Yes, indeed," Chiun said, removing his face from the hole in the window long enough to speak.

  "All right," said Joan. "The bridge is yours." Quietly, she vowed to herself that the Brooklyn Bridge would be the first to go, meaningful relationship or no meaningful relationship.

  "Can I charge tolls?" Remo asked, as the waitress put their drinks in front of them.

  "Tolls will be outlawed in our new world," Joan said. "The bridges will belong to everybody."

  "Good reason then to blow them up," Remo said. He lifted his glass and drained it. "Bottoms up," he said. Joan drained her drink.

  "Phewww," she said. "It's too sweet."

  "I'll fix that," Remo said. "You'll see." He signalled the waitress for a refill for him and for Joan. "And not so sweet," he called.

  Chiun still dawdled over his glass of juice.

  Teterboro was what Joan had been talking about. It was an airport in New Jersey and Remo had to find out what had been planned.

  As she was halfway through her second drink, he broached the subject.

  "I was only joking about the bridges," he said. "But if I were you guys, I'd really be doing something like that. You know, working on the transportation angle. Imagine, tying up Kennedy Airport or bombing the runways at Newark Airport."

  Joan Hacker giggled. "Child's play," she said.

  "Child's play?" Remo said. "Not at all. It would be tough and dangerous and would really advance the cause of revolution. I think it's brilliant."

  She slurped her glass until she had drained the last drop of heavy liquor from the bottom. Remo signalled for another as she said thickly, "You'll never be a revolutionary. You don't think well enough."

  "No? Well, you tell me a better idea."

  "I will. How about if you took over the control tower? And had all the planes bumping into each other? Hah? Hah? Hah? Less work. More chaos. Terrific."

  Remo shook him head in admiration. "Terrific," he agreed. "I've got to hand it to you. Sneak in after dark, say at midnight, take over the tower and whammo, instant chaos. Doubly so, during the night-time."

  She drained a big swig of her third Singapore Sling.

  "Midnight, phooey," she said. "How about high noon? Daylight makes terror even more unbearable."

  Chiun's ears perked up when he heard that. He turned from the window. "That is true, child. That is true. So it is written."

  "You bet your sweet banana, so it's written," Joan Hacker confided to the Master of Sinanju, draining another swallow of her drink. "I know, for a fact. I have sources in the Third World too, you know."

  She drank again.

  "Oh, yeah," she said brightly to Remo. "Now I remember what I was supposed to tell you." She held her glass up over her head, letting the last drops roll into her mouth.

  "What was that?" Remo said.

  "I remember now," she said. "The dead animals are next."

  Chiun turned slowly in his seat.

  "I know that," Remo said. "Who told you to tell me?"

  She rubbed her fingers together in the shame-shame gesture. "I'm not telling, I'm not telling, I'm not telling," John Hacker said, and then the revolutionary priestess smiled once, rolled her eyes back in her head and collapsed face forward on the table, unconscious.

  Remo looked at her, then at Chiun, who stared at the drunken girl, shaking his head.

  "There we are, Chiun, those dead animals again. Are you going to tell me what it's all about?"

  "It will not matter," Chiun said. He looked at Joan again and shook him head. "She is very young to die," he said.

  "Everyone is very young to die," Remo said.

  "Yes," Chiun said. "That is true. Even you."

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Remo sensed the tail after he and Chiun had gone about two blocks from The Bard where Joan Hacker, high priestess of the impending revolution, slept on a table, the result of three Singapore Slings in fifteen minutes.

  Remo motioned Chiun to stand with him and look into the window of a souvenir shop.

  "Why am I forced to feign interest in all this Chinese shlock?" Chiun asked, using another of the Yiddish words he had learned on vacation a few years before.

  "Quiet. We're being followed."

  "Oh, my goodness," Chiun mocked. "By whom? Should I run? Should I scream for the police?"

  "By that guy back there in the blue suit," Remo said. "Don't look now."

  "Oh, my, Remo, you are wonderful. First for discovering him, and then for instructing me not to alert him that we have discovered him. How lucky I am to be allowed to accompany you." Chiun began to babble then, streams of Korean words, punctuated by an occasional in-English "how wonderful" or "how lucky I am."

  Finally, it all dawned on Remo and he said sheepishly: "I guess you spotted him, too."

  "The Master cannot lie," Chiun said. "I absorbed his vibrations. And also those of the other man who waits for us farther down the street and has been keeping one-half block ahead of us since we left that opium den."

  "Where?" Remo said.

  "Don't look now," China said, giggling. "Oh, how lucky I am to be with you. Oh, how wonderful you are. Oh, how grand. Oh, how..."

  "All right, Chiun, knock it off, will you? Anybody can make a mistake."

  Chiun turned immediately serious. "But not one who presumes to challenge the dead animals. For him, any mistake will be his last. You are lucky again, however; these men are not the agents of the legend. You have nothing to fear."

  That relieved the threat, but it did not answer the question: who were the men and why were they following Remo and Chiun?

  The two men continued their tail, one behind and one ahead, as Remo and Chiun strolled casually back to their apartment, and Remo explained what the terrorists had planned for tomorrow. Teterboro was a small private airport in New Jersey, but probably one of the busiest airports in the world. Planes took off and landed every thirty or forty seconds. Seizing the control tower and giving conflicting traffic directions to different planes might touch off a chain reaction of accidents that could cost lives and create chaos,

  And planes that would be frightened away by the accidents would probably wander into Newark Airport or Kennedy or LaGuardia, where their potential for accidental destruction would be fantastic, considering the big jet jobs coming in and out all the time.

  "Why is it," Remo asked, "that no matter what terrorists are for, they always wind up killing people?"

  Chiun shrugged unconcernedly. "It is a nothing."

  "Dozens could die," Remo said heatedly.


  "No," Chiun insisted. "There is an old Korean proverb. When two dogs attack, one barks but the other bites. Why do you spend your life worrying about barking dogs?"

  "Yeah? Well, there's an old American proverb too," Remo said.

  "I'm sure you will tell me of it."

  "I will," Remo said, but did not since he was not able to think of one right offhand.

  They continued walking in silence and in the middle of the next block, Remo said brightly:

  "How about 'a stitch in time saves nine'?"

  "I prefer 'haste makes waste,' " Chiun said.

  "How about 'an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure'?" Remo offered.

  "I prefer 'fools rush in where angels fear to tread,'" Chiun said.

  "How about rice for supper tonight?" said Remo, restraining his impulse to strangle Chiun.

  "Rice is nice," Chiun said sweetly, "but I prefer duck."

  When they reached their apartment building, Remo sent Chiun upstairs with cautionary words not to kill either of the men who might try to follow him. Then Remo went around the corner, dallied long enough to be sure the tail had picked him up, and ducked into a dark cocktail lounge. He stood alongside the cigarette machine in the dimly illuminated foyer and waited. Seconds later, one of the tails came through the door. It was the one in the blue suit; the one who had trailed them from behind.

  He blinked, trying to accustom him sun-shrunk eyes to the darkness, and Remo reached out and dug his right fingers into the man's left forearm.

  "All right, pal," Remo said "Who are you?"

  The man looked up at Remo, his face a picture of innocence under him soft-brimmed felt hat, his body soft under him blue suit, and Remo knew. With a sinking feeling in the pit of him stomach, he knew where the man had come from.