Waste Not, Want Not td-130

by Warren Murphy

  "Smitty, I am not going down there to frisk garbage heaps for Shining Path whack jobs."

  "Neither am I," Chiun chimed in. "I spent enough years pawing through white garbage. I am not starting over again."

  "I thought you were retired," Remo said.

  "My work status is in flux," Chiun sniffed. Smith seemed cheered by the old man's words.

  "Obviously Master Chiun is welcome to join you. In fact, the last contract-"

  "It would be my joy to accompany Remo, Emperor Smith!" Chiun interrupted hastily. "Though but a humble citizen of Sinanju now, if by some modest contribution to his great work I might bring further glory to your crown, I would consider myself honored."

  Remo's eyes narrowed suspiciously. "What's all this about?" he asked Chiun in Korean.

  "How should I know?" Chiun sniffed in the same language. "When you and Smith talk, it is all garbage to me." He focused a little too much innocent attention on the TV.

  "That thing's more interesting when it's actually turned on," Remo said in English, nodding to the black screen. To Smith he said, "I don't suppose you'd care to fill me in on what his game is, Smitty?"

  "Er," Smith said hesitantly.

  "Remo, do not press your Emperor," Chiun insisted. "Have I taught you nothing?"

  "As usual, Remo's in the dark," Remo grumbled. "Now I've got something else to worry about while I'm doing the Secret Service's job."

  "Then you will go," Smith said. "Do I need to make arrangements for you to leave North Korea?"

  "Nah. Kim's got us covered. He'll be relieved to get us out of here."

  "Good. Because of the Globe Summit, Mayana is limiting the movement within the country of those not with foreign delegations. To make things easier, I have placed you on the American delegation. As a cover, you and Chiun will be Interior Department scientists who study waste disposal. I will have Mark overnight credentials to New Briton. They will be waiting at the airport when you arrive."

  "What do you mean, study waste disposal?" Remo asked.

  "There are scientists who have made a career of studying human trash," Smith explained.

  "I take it they do more than snap on Jerry Springer?" Remo said dryly.

  "Much of the work is done in garbage dumps," the CURE director said. "Decades' worth of trash can be drilled through and drawn up, presenting snapshots in time, like rock strata. Scientists are able to study decay rates, soil contamination and a host of other refuse-related topics."

  "You've gotta be pulling my lariat," Remo said. "Are my tax dollars paying for that?"

  "You do not pay taxes."

  "Glad I don't. I'd feel a real urge to toss something more than tea into Boston Harbor if my hard-earned money was going to study snotty Kleenex. I'd probably start with my congressman."

  "Be that as it may," Smith said blandly, "you will be Dr. Henell. Chiun will be your assistant." Across the room, Chiun's eyes opened wide. "I will not be Remo's assistant," the old Korean snapped.

  Remo was cringing even before Smith had finished. "Chiun won't play second fiddle to me," he told Smith.

  "It will only be for a day or two," Smith said. "I assumed that with your new status as Reigning Master-"

  "It's not a problem with me, Smitty," Remo whispered.

  "It is with me," Chiun called. "I may have surrendered my honorific here in Sinanju, but in this case I must remain senior to Remo, for I am the far greater expert on garbage. Remo has only had the mirror to study, lo these many years. I have had all of Remo, all the time."

  "Ha, ha," Remo said. "And I thought being Reigning Master was supposed to bring me a little more respect."

  "If you believe a title alone confers respect, Remo Williams, then I have wasted the past thirty years of my life," Chiun replied, tone serious.

  "Very well, Master Chiun," Smith said. "You and Remo may be partners."

  "Partners, Little Father?" Remo asked hopefully. The old Korean's leathery face drew into a scowl. "I will accept this as the latest episode in a long history of abuse. But I am the more senior partner," he added quickly.

  "We're a go, Smitty," Remo said into the phone. "Let's just hope Chiun and I don't end up bamboozled into some cyanide-swilling cult. Mayana's got a history in that department."

  "It would be best if you did not mention Jamestown while you are there," Smith said. "Jack James and his followers are still a sore subject as I understand it. The Mayanans are resentful that an American cult became so infamous on their shores. Now, if there is nothing else, I will make the arrangements with Mark for your identification."

  He broke the connection.

  Remo hung up the old-fashioned phone. "You want to tell me what that stuff was about the contract?" he asked Chiun.

  The old Korean was rising to his feet like a puff of soft steam. He turned in a swirl of kimono silk. "You have never before been interested in the business affairs of our profession," the old man said dismissively as he breezed past his pupil. "Why break a perfect record of ignorance?"

  The wizened Asian hustled from the room to pack. "Because maybe I have a feeling I'm being hosed?" Remo hollered at the old man's disappearing back.

  His answer was a self-satisfied cackle from somewhere in the depths of the House of Many Woods.

  Chapter 6

  The normally sedate international press was gathered with giddy excitement on the hot tarmac at Mayana's New Briton International Airport. When the portly man finally stepped from the Learjet onto the air stairs, an enthusiastic cheer rose from the crowd of ecstatic newspeople.

  It was unusual in the extreme for the press to display anything but cynical disdain for Western leaders. The farther west, the more disdain. But this was a special case.

  The dumpy little man offered a melancholy smile. Nikolai Garbegtrov, the last premier of the old Soviet Union, had shed his usual heavy wool overcoat in favor of a light French-tailored suit.

  The sun was hot on his pale face. As he climbed down the steps, he waved politely to the crowd of reporters. His tired eyes scanned for Mayanan government officials. Any dignitaries at all who might have come out to welcome the arrival of the man who had once had at his fingertips control of one of the world's greatest nuclear arsenals. He saw only press.

  "Mr. Garbegtrov, why are you in Mayana?"

  "Mr. Garbegtrov, could you sign this? It's for my son."

  "Mr. Garbegtrov, I just loved you in Reykjavik." He knew why they were called the press. They swarmed him, pressing in. Scarcely allowing him room to breathe.

  It was always this way. For the Western press-particularly that of America-Nikolai Garbegtrov was like the Beatles landing in New York.

  As usual, he politely shook hands and signed a few autographs as he made his way through the crowd. His bald scalp itched under his golfer's cap, which he wore pulled down tight to his eyes. Beads of sweat rolled from the band down the back of his neck. He wanted more than anything to scratch his head. He fought the urge.

  "Mr. Garbegtrov, Mr. Garbegtrov, I have a question," a reporter said, muscling in. "Why do you wear a hat in public all the time these days?"

  He had gotten as used to hearing the question as he had to ignoring it.

  Garbegtrov moved with the surging crowd to his waiting sedan. As the reporters clawed at him, desperate to touch his greatness, he fell through the door, collapsing exhausted onto the rear seat. His driver slammed the door on the shouting crowd and in a minute they were speeding away from the plane, away from his adoring public. The same public that would turn on him in a heartbeat if they learned his secret shame.

  Garbegtrov was a bland little man in his seventies. A nondescript apparatchik who had risen up the ranks of the Soviet political system in the dying days of the failing Russian Communist empire. Everything about him was bland, from his physical appearance to his demeanor. His one great distinguishing physical characteristic was the large birthmark that was splotched on the front of his bald head.

  The birthmark was his most famous feature
. It had also not been seen in public for over two years. His great, secret shame.

  Alone in the back seat of the speeding car-behind tinted windows through which no eye or camera lens could see, beyond a panel that separated him from the driver-Nikolai Garbegtrov finally, gratefully, tugged off his hat. Desperate fingers scratched away at his bald scalp.

  It was always itchy these days. Ever since that dark night two years ago.

  As he scratched, he leaned over to get a glimpse of his reflection in the chrome lid of the armrest ashtray.

  There it was. As big as life. The reason he could no longer show his head in public.

  U.S.A. #1

  The logo was plastered around his bald pate, put there as a twisted joke by vandals while he slept. They had used his birthmark as a jumping-off point.

  He had tried everything to get rid of it. Lotions, chemical peels, laser removal. Nothing worked. Whatever process had been used to tattoo the slogan there kept bleeding it back to the surface. The doctors finally gave up, and Nikolai Garbegtrov was forced to put a hat on or face the wrath of those who professed to love him most.

  The press had always been his most devoted fans. Short of diddling Lenin's corpse in Red Square on May Day, there was little he could do to make them turn on him. But tattooing a pro-American slogan on his head was one thing a rabidly anti-American press corps would never stand for.

  And the worst thing-the absolute worst-was the itch.

  As he dug away at his scalp with his pudgy fingers, he pondered anew what would happen if the world found out.

  Garbegtrov had always had the press. Without them, he truly would be a man without a country. The metaphor stirred old embers in the former Communist leader's heart. He stopped scratching. Hat in his hands, he sank back tiredly in the seat of his speeding car.

  It was his fault. All of it. And it was all a horrible, horrible mistake. He never intended for the Iron Curtain to fall. As premier, he initiated reforms, but they were never meant to go so far. The dissolution of the Soviet Empire was all a terrible accident.

  Western commentators at the time insisted that he would not be able to put the toothpaste back in the tube. But he had always assumed that, were it to become necessary, he would be able to cram it back in somehow.

  When he declared himself to be the first Russian president, he didn't leave the Communist Party. Yet another mistake. The Communist Party was now openly despised, thanks to Garbegtrov's misfiring reforms. When the party was thrown out of power, Garbegtrov was thrown out, as well.

  With the dawn of a new, freer age, there was no longer anything for him at home. He wandered the world for a time. A speech at a press gathering here, another at a university there. Always well received, of course. But for a man who had helped run the world, it was never enough.

  His whole life changed because of his blundering. He thought he could never find anything to compare with the clumsy, iron-fisted, pig-headed Soviet Communist system.

  Then he went to San Francisco.

  Nikolai Garbegtrov's spirits were at their absolute lowest when he was called to make a speech before something called Green Earth, an organization devoted to environmental concerns of global scope.

  He assumed he was being hired as a whipping boy. Since the Green Earth people were supposedly concerned with the environment and since the USSR had been the most notorious environmental offender in the history of civilization, Garbegtrov naturally assumed they would hammer him with accusations concerning Russia's dismal record. He would willingly suffer the slings and arrows of these self-loathing products of capitalist wealth. All for a big, fat paycheck.

  But at the meeting something strange happened. During the question-and-answer period he brought up the Chernobyl disaster. The Green Earthers dismissed it as nothing. They wanted to talk about Three Mile Island.

  "But Chernobyl was catastrophe," Garbegtrov said. "Many have died. Many more will die. Poison cloud of radioactive material spread across Europe. Chernobyl was disaster on scale that still cannot be calculated. Your Three Mile Island was-how you say?-like X ray at dentist."

  But try as he might, they would not let go of Three Mile Island, a twenty-year-old accident that did little more than prove that American safety procedures worked.

  Changing focus, he mentioned Russian dumping of nuclear waste and reactor cores into the Arctic Sea, poisoning coastal land and water for hundreds of miles. They talked about Meryl Streep and Alar on apples. Wasn't she great in The China Syndrome? That was Jane Fonda. Oh.

  Garbegtrov talked about draining Lake Aral, which devastated the center of Russia and destroyed the largest body of fresh water within the former Soviet Union's borders.

  They finally grew suspicious, asking if he was really the Nikolai Garbegtrov and demanding he show them his driver's license.

  After his talk was through, Garbegtrov stayed behind to speak with members of the environmental group. Something about their attitude struck him as familiar.

  He quickly learned that their faith in the dire pronouncements of dubiously accredited doomsayers was unshakable, even with mountains of evidence to the contrary. There was not an ozone hole that was not man-made nor a polar ice cap that was not melting because someone somewhere liked to squirt cheese on his crackers.

  If saving an endangered rat in a California farmer's field threw hundreds of human families into chaos, so be it. Everyone knew animals were intrinsically good and humans were, by nature, evil. After all, the only rat on the bridge of the Exxon Valdez was the human kind.

  No matter the motives, no matter the bad science, no matter the downright dangerous silliness, they accepted the words of their leaders with pure, blind faith. In short, they were better Communists than any the old Soviet system had ever produced.

  On that day, after years of dispirited wandering, Nikolai Garbegtrov finally found his new home. After joining the international environmental movement, Garbegtrov quickly became the poster boy of Green Earth. He traveled the world-lecturing, hectoring. He liked the West especially. He could always be guaranteed a warm greeting by a fawning press. For the ex-Communist premier who had lost an empire, it was almost like the good old days.

  The traffic grew heavier as his car drove into the heart of New Briton. Despite the air-conditioning, his head was sweating. The itch began anew. He did his best to ignore it, pulling his golf hat back on.

  His car dropped him off in front of the Chamberlain Hotel in the center of New Briton. He was met by a fresh crush of reporters.

  Green Earth handlers hustled the former premier up the sidewalk, beneath the gilded canopy and into the hotel lobby.

  After a brief exchange of pleasantries with some of the Green Earth leadership, he was led into the grand ballroom and herded onto the dais amid a flurry of flashbulbs and shouted questions. Someone handed him a few 3 x 5 note cards. On them, carefully typed lines had been written out phonetically. Behind the podium, he perched a pair of bifocals on the end of his nose.

  The ballroom noise swelled, then subsided. Garbegtrov didn't smile to the crowd as he read Green Earth's statement. He spoke in heavily accented English.

  "Ladies and gentlemen." His words echoed out across the ballroom. "The eyes of world are directed here this week. People of good conscience are about to come together in this small country to confront serious, devastating environmental havoc that the West continues to wreak on rest of globe. Now, during this time when environmental misdeeds of the West should be on trial, Mayana has chosen to reveal its new technology for the disposal of waste. We at Green Earth are skeptical of this device. Is it smoke screen to provide cover for polluting America? If it works, what is cost to precious environment? Will release of atoms destabilize ecosystem?

  "These are questions for vigilant press to ask. I would caution other leaders of world as they convene here in days that follow to not forget the environmental horrors the United States and others-but mostly United States-have visited on planet. Green Earth remains vigilant."
r />   He tapped his note cards back together. A few reporters shouted from the hall. Garbegtrov held up a staying hand.

  "There will be no questions now. I, like you, seek answers. Donations may be sent to Green Earth world headquarters in San Francisco. Is your planet, people."

  And with that, Nikolai Garbegtrov walked offstage. He left behind the growing murmur of the dispersing press corps.

  Backstage, Garbegtrov's brow was furrowed beneath the brim of his hat. Members of his Green Earth entourage hurried up to meet him.

  "Sock it to 'em, comrade," said an intense, bearded man in a hemp suit. He was just the sort of political agitator Garbegtrov would have sent to a gulag back when the Western media used to ignore the fact that Garbegtrov's gulags were standing room only. "Show them the power of Mother Earth."

  The former Soviet leader's eyes were flat. This idiot-indeed all of the dolts in Green Earth-had no idea what real power was like. Or, worse, what it was like to lose it.

  "Is my room ready?" Garbegtrov grumbled morosely. His head was itching like mad.

  "Oh, yeah. Sorry." The man clapped his hands. Garbegtrov's entourage reassembled around the former Soviet premier. Like a sad little tyrant prince surrounded by his pathetic court of sycophants, Nikolai Garbegtrov-itchy tattoo and all-trudged from the shabby backstage.

  Chapter 7

  Petrovina Bulganin steered her cute little 2002 Ford Thunderbird convertible through the sharp twists and turns of Moscow's narrow old streets. In the urban valleys the growling engine was a nasty rumble that rattled dirty windows high up in ugly Communistera tenements.

  Petrovina didn't pay much attention to the engine sound. She was too busy reapplying lipstick in the rearview mirror.

  Barely nudging the steering wheel, she flew around a corner. A big truck blocked her side of the street. Two men lugged a ratty sofa down the back ramp.

  Petrovina noted the workers with bland impatience. She flew up to them without slowing, cutting sharply at the last moment and zipping around the truck, her rear wheels just nipping the corner of the ramp. The sports car bounced and the men dropped their sofa. They were cursing and raising their fists at her even as she zoomed off down the street. Petrovina waved a dainty hand back at them. Petrovina Bulganin was in a hurry. And when Petrovina Bulganin was in a hurry, she slowed for neither pedestrians nor other vehicles.