Terror Squad td-10

by Warren Murphy

  The man inhaled. "Maher. IRS," he said. "If you let go of my arm, I'll show you my identification."

  "That's all right," Remo said. "Why are you following me?". He squeezed the arm again to guarantee truth.

  The man winced. "Don't know. Office assignment. Find out where you were going. Big deal. Mr. F.G. Maher. A field assignment, when all I am is an analyst."

  "And your partner out there? Who's he?" Remo asked.

  "That's Kirk. He's in my office."

  "All right," Remo said, releasing the man. "Why not just go back and file your report that we went to the apartment building and that was that? We're not going out tonight. I promise you, so you can go home."

  "Suits me," Maher said. "Tonight's the night Carolynn makes spaghetti and sausage."

  "If you say one more word," Remo said, remembering the long-ago taste of it, "I'll kill you. Go away now."

  Maher turned and left. Remo waited a few minutes and then went out onto the street and headed back toward him apartment building. Up ahead, he saw Maher and his partner walking away from the building.

  Goddam that Smith. The two men were obviously CURE agents. Just two more faceless dummies in the nationwide network of information-gathering that Smith had set up. Two more men who filed reports without any knowledge of to whom they really went.

  Smith couldn't wait again. He was blundering around, sending in men, getting in Remo's way.

  Remo got upstairs, picked up the telephone and dialled the 800 area-code number that rang on Smith's desk, ready to tell him just what he thought of him.

  But the telephone rang and rang and for the first time that Remo could remember, there was no answer.

  The next morning, Chiun refused to go with Remo to Teterboro. He was smugly adamant. "I will not expend my small store of energy on barking dogs," he said.

  "Well, then, expend your energy watching Julia Child and try to learn to cook something someone can eat," Remo said, beating a hasty retreat.

  In him rented car on the way to Teterboro, Remo thought of Chiun and his arrogant refusal to take the attack on Teterboro seriously. Lives were at stake, and another victory for the terrorists might screw up totally the antiterrorist agreement that was in the works.

  Dammit, Teterboro was important, no matter what silly proverb Chiun came up with at any given moment.

  That hijacked plane to Egypt had been important and so had the skyjacking over California. Any terrorist activity now was important, when the nations of the world were so close to working out an agreement to cut down terrorists in their tracks. Chiun just didn't understand.

  Remo knew that he, himself,, didn't hold out too much hope for the antiterrorist pact ever being the panacea that Smith seemed to think it was. Still, that was a decision for Remo's government to make. It was his job to try to see that the agreement was carried out.

  Teterboro was tucked away in suburban New Jersey, only minutes from Manhattan.

  Remo pulled into a parking spot alongside the fence that separated the hangars from a small side street, and walked through an opening in the fence onto the field. There were no guards, no security, no one to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. The airport was made for ripping off.

  Remo was walking toward the control tower when he saw it. A Red Cross wagon was parked near the tower, its side doors only ten feet from the entrance to the tower.

  A stakeout. Someone inside watching. But who? Friend or foe, Remo wondered, afraid that he already knew the answer.

  He darted into a hangar, and moved through it, then into another hangar, and another, and finally exited somewhere behind the Red Cross truck. From the shadows, he looked the track over carefully. The windows were extremely shiny glass, obviously one-way mirrors and he could see no one in the cab. Casually, he strolled up to the side of the wagon and pounded on the two closed doors.

  "What do you want?" came the lemony, puckered voice that Remo had come to know and hate.

  "I'm new in town," Remo yelled, "and I want my brochure on local places of interest."

  "Go see your Chamber of Commerce," came back Dr. Smith's voice, muffled by the closed doors.

  "I will not. This is a welcome wagon, isn't it? Well, you just come out of there and welcome me to town." He pounded again. Inside he heard the shuffling of steps. He continued to pound.

  Finally the door opened a crack. Dr. Harold W. Smith's beady eyes peered out, saw Remo, and did a double-take.

  "It's you," he said.

  "Of course," Remo said. "Who did you expect? The Man from Glad?"

  "Well, come in," Smith said distastefully, "and stop that bellowing out there." Remo shared the feeling of distaste; Smith was interfering again.

  Remo moved into the small van. There were three other men there besides Smith and they were carefully scanning the field in all directions. They did not even bother to turn their heads to look at Remo.

  Smith pulled Remo toward the back of the wagon and said, "How'd you get here?"

  "I drove."

  "I mean, how did you find out?"

  "Oh. From the people at PUFF. They're involved in it, you know."

  "Yes, I know," Smith said.

  His voice oozed disgust and Remo said, "You're not really sore that I'm here, are you? I can just as soon leave."

  "No. As long as you're here, stay and watch. Maybe you'll learn something about how a professional operates," Smith said.

  "How'd you find out about it?" Remo asked. "One of them talk?"

  "Yeah. Some skinny little thing with buck teeth,, She was only too glad to talk. She thought the whole idea was stupid. Where is Chiun, by the way?"

  "He's back in New York," Remo said. "I think he's working up a new supply of proverbs for next week."

  "Proverbs?" Smith asked offhandedly, him attention fixed on a pile of papers on a small table in front of him.

  "Yeah, you know, things like 'when two dogs attack, one barks, but the other bites.'"

  "Dogs?" said Smith, not paying attention, resenting any distraction from the numbers he was reading on a long yellow pad.

  "Yes. Dogs. You know, ungrateful curs. Bite the hand that feeds them. Carriers of dirt and disease. Rabies spreaders. Dogs."

  "Yes," Smith said. "Hmmm,, that's right. Dogs."

  One of the men in the front of the van called, "Mr. Jones! They're coming!"

  Smith wheeled and ran to the front of the van. Remo shook him head. Jones, he thought. What an original alias.

  "How many are there?" he heard Smith ask.

  "Six of them," the man replied, his face still pressed to the darkened one-way window. him voice had that flat Midwestern label that FBI agents wear, "Five men and a girl"

  "I want to see the girl," Remo said, walking to the front of the cab.

  "You would," Smith snarled,

  Remo looked between Smith and the agent and saw the six hippie types approaching. He recognized the girl from yesterday's PUFF meeting, but was disappointed that it wasn't Joan Hacker. It was time to wring the truth out of her.

  They came closer now to the tower, skulking in the high-noon daylight, their attempts at being inconspicuous making them look like a marching band.

  The three FBI men moved away from their windows and took up positions alongside the twin doors of the Red Cross van.

  Smith watched the group from the window. "Be alert, men," he hissed. "When I tell you, open the doors, jump out and collar them."

  Remo shook his head. Stupid. The place for the agents to be was inside the control tower, to cut off the six hippies. Suppose one got loose and got inside? Remo shook his head again.

  "Okay, men, on your toes now," Smith said.

  "Ready?" He paused. "Okay. Now!"

  The three agents flung open the doors and jumped out onto the black asphalt. "Federal Bureau of Investigation," one called. "You're under arrest."

  The sk hippies turned-shocked, and then five reluctantly raised their hands. But the sixth ran through the door of the control
tower, heading for the flight of stairs. With a bound, Remo was out of the cab, through the agents and their captives, and then inside the control tower.

  The youth who had bolted had a gun and he pegged a shot at Remo on the narrow stairwell leading up to the nerve center of the tower.

  Remo made it miss and then was on the youth who never had a chance to fire another shot.

  "All right, Fidel," he said. 'The war's over."

  He collared the youth by the neck and beard and began to drag him down the stairs. Just as he shoved him outdoors into the bright summer sunshine, the youth began to laugh. Loud. Uproariously. Eye-wetting gales of laughter.

  "What's the joke?" Remo asked. "Let us all in on it."

  "You think you have caught someone," the youth said through his laughing. "But the revolution will go on. You have caught the barking dog. And now, another shall bite."

  Inspiration. Suddenly, Remo realized what Chiun had meant. Remo and Smith were here, wasting their tune on a harmless dog. But there was another dog out there, somewhere, with teeth, and he was about to bite.

  "Smitty," Remo yelled. "Quick."

  Smith looked pained that Remo had blown his cover name of Jones, and even more pained when Remo grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the back of the van, away from the ears of the curious FBI agents. "Quick. Is there something else going on today? Something to do with the terrorist pact?"

  Smith hesitated and Remo said, "Hurry, man, or you're going to have a disaster on your hands."

  "The three officers who are working out the agreement are meeting secretly today in New York," Smith said. "Finishing it up for tomorrow's meeting at the U.N."

  "Where are they meeting?"

  "At the Hotel Caribou."

  "What time?" Remo asked.

  Smith glanced at him watch. "Just about now," he said. "Room 2412 at the Caribou."

  "Does this thing have a phone?" Remo asked, nodding toward the van.

  "Yes, but..,"

  Remo jumped into the van, got a mobile operator and called him apartment. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. Please, Chiun, be in a good mood. Don't break the instrument in half because someone dares interrupt "As the Planet Revolves." Please, Chiun, answer.

  Finally, the phone stopped ringing. Agonizingly slowly, it was being raised to an ear. Another pause and then Remo could hear Chiun's voice, mocking him, and he could picture the look in Chiun's eyes as the old man said into the phone:

  "Where is the dog that bites?"

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The Hotel Caribou was only a few blocks from their apartment. Remo told Chiun to protect at all costs the lives of the three men meeting in Room 2412.

  Then he burned up the highway in his rented car, hoping to meet Chiun at the hotel before anything happened.

  Remo was too late.

  When he pulled up to the Caribou and double-parked out in the street, police cars already were pulling in at angles before the main entrance.

  Remo sidled into the crowd of police and detectives and asked, "What happened?"

  "Don't know," one policeman said. "Three people killed somehow."

  So Chiun had been too late. He had not been able to get to the Caribou on time. And because Remo would not listen or try to understand the proverb about the dogs, and because he arrogantly had gone ahead to Teterboro Airport, the three colonels were dead and the antiterrorist pact set back for, only God knew, how long a period of time.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, Remo accused himself as he ducked into the hotel and started up to the twenty-fourth floor to see if there were any pieces that he could pick up to try to salvage something.

  Clever, clever, clever.

  It had really been well done, the old man told himself as he walked slowly down the street, back to the East Side apartment

  The assassination attempt had been clever, but its planner should have known that it would not deceive the Master of Sinanju. Perhaps, China thought, someone thinks that Chiun is growing too old. That he has lost him skills. Fool, he thought.

  All his life, he had been sustained in his work by his pride in his skills; and then, one day, the use of them had become an end in itself, as it had, he was sure, with every Master of Sinanju who had come before him.

  Now Chiun used his skills, and the poor and the young of him village lived. It was that simple. Life was always simple for those who did not try to get out of it more than was in it

  Still, he mused, it would be nice to retire. To sit back in the village of Sinanju, at the edge of the water, mending fish nets, children about him, paying to him the respect and homage that was due a Master who had gone out into the world beyond the seas and had come back with victory over all the world's challenges.

  But before that could happen, there would have to be a Master to replace him. And of course that meant Remo, who could not really be a white man. Somewhere in the mongrel matings that produced all Americans, there must have been a Korean, blood of Chiun's blood, a member of the House. Remo was too good to be just a white man.

  It had been Chiun's plan from the first moment he had met the young American. The American had looked at him, down the barrel of a gun, and with no qualms, no misgivings, no second thoughts, had attempted to shoot Chiun. That had been ten years ago, and in those ten years, a mere ten years, Remo had advanced his skills almost to the point of perfection. Chiun thought with pride of Remo's genius, his ability to do things with his body that before him, only Chiun in the world could do.

  Only Chiun and one other.

  One other. Remo had come far, but now he faced grave danger. It was in his nature to scoff at the tales of typhoons and of dead animals and of the dog who bites, but there was more truth to legends than to history; history tells only of the past, but legends tell of the past and present and future.

  So, while Remo might laugh in his vile American way, he must be protected from the mortal threat of the dead animals, no matter whether he wished to be or not. This was Chiun's commitment to the people of Sinanju, who looked to their Master, not only for sustenance, but for the appointment of a new Master who would continue that sustenance.

  And that someday Master was now in peril of his life. The episode today at the Hotel Caribou had shown that. It would have been normal to presume that the three men who were meeting inside Room 2412 would be attacked from outside. Remo might have made that presumption. But Chiun had found the three would-be assassins inside the room, cloaked in the garb of security men, there supposedly to protect the three colonels but actually assigned to kill them.

  Well, they would kill no more. Chiun had seen to that, and then had removed the three important men to another room where they could be safe and could continue their meeting in privacy. '

  Yet, the plan of attack had been well-conceived. And those conceptions were drawing nearer and nearer to Remo, threatening him, and Chiun wished that Remo could be convinced to move away from this assignment. It was for that reason that Chiun had refused to tell Remo what the legends meant and who him adversary was. For, if once Remo knew, him pride would prohibit him from walking away. Instead, he would seek out his confrontation with the enemy. So, he kept Remo ignorant of the truth.

  As he turned into the door of the apartment building, the tiny, aged Oriental smiled slightly to himself, recalling the look on the face of the Chinese officer when Chiun had entered the room and disposed of the three assassins. The look told of a man who had heard the legends, and had, at that very moment, come to believe them; the look of a man who knew he was seeing a typhoon blow.

  And as the typhoon named Chiun rode up in the apartment house elevator, he vowed that if it must come to it, Remo would be protected from the dead animals, even at the cost of Chiun's own life. Even at the cost of breaking a lifelong vow that the Master of Sinanju would never raise hand against another from his village.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  "All right, Chiun, how'd you do it?"

  Chiun turned to look at Remo, who was pacing up
and down the carpeted floor of the liying room of their apartment.

  "Do? Do what?"

  "The three colonels. How did you know the security men were fakes?"

  Chiun shrugged, his shoulders moving slightly underneath the heavy brocaded blue robe. "One knows what one knows," he said.

  "All right, then, how did you know that the attack on Teterboro was a red herring?"

  He looked at Chiun who was about to speak and said disgustedly, "I know, I know, 'one knows what one knows,'" parroting Chain's Oriental sing-song. "But why the hell didn't you tell me?"

  "But I did tell you. I warned you of the dog that barks and the dog that bites. If you then choose to join a chorus of barking dogs in baying at the moon, that is your business."

  "You've got to stop talking to me in riddles, Chiun. I've got to know what things mean," Remo said.

  "All things are riddles to him who will not think," Chiun said, folded his hands over his chest and turned from Remo to gaze out the window into smog-laden New York.

  Remo exhaled an exasperated puff of air, started to speak again, but was interrupted by a knock upon the door. "Now what?" he mumbled to himself. "First fat, then thin, then the dead animals," he said, again parroting Chiun. "This is probably the dead animals."

  "Come in, it's open," he roared.

  The door pushed open and Dr. Harold W. Smith stood there. He looked with disgust at the open door, as if it had somehow offended him, then said, "I'm glad to see that you are still vitally concerned with your own security."

  Remo had already this day had enough of Smith to last him the rest of his life. "What's to worry?" he asked jauntily. "Now that I know you're having us tailed, what do we have to fear? Have no fear, CURE is here."

  "That was a mistake," Smith said. "We had agents following everyone who left The Bard. Two of them just happened to pick you up."

  "And two of them damn near got killed for their trouble," Remo said. "Will you tell me why you are suddenly sticking your patrician nose into field business? Since when has it become necessary for you to chaperone me?"

  "I might in turn ask, since when have you questioned my decisions on the correct way to handle things?" Smith said stiffly.

  "Since you've been running around like a chicken with its head cut off," Remo said. "Look, if you had told me in advance that the colonels were meeting today, we would have protected it. But we didn't know. And so we almost bought the farm. But now, we do know that the formal conference at the U.N. is tomorrow. So why don't you just go back to Folcroft and count paper clips? Chiun and I will take care of the conference."