The End of the Game td-60

by Warren Murphy

  "Sinanju is back," the leader said. "Will the Shah return?"

  "No business of mine," Remo said. "I told you. I don't care what you believe. But you don't attack the American President. You hear? Off-limits. Repeat after me. Off-limits."

  "Off-limits."

  "You attack other Great Satans, if you want. I don't care. Run around your streets yelling. Run around your own embassies blowing them up. Do whatever you want, but America is a no-no."

  "No, no," said the Iranian.

  "Good," said Remo. "Every group you talk to now, every group you send out, you give them the warning of Sinanju. The American President is a no-no. And if you don't listen, then Sinanju will be back and we hang heads like blossoms as in the olden days."

  "What?"

  "Heads like berries," said Remo.

  "I don't understand," the leader said.

  "Heads like mushrooms," Remo said. "You don't have a legend where we hung heads like mushrooms?"

  "Like melons on the ground," said the Iranian leader.

  "Right," said Remo. "Right. Melons on the ground," and he hung the man upside down for a moment by his boots to let it sink in. Of course the man had remembered it better than Remo had. Remo had generally ignored the tales of Persia before it became Iran because he had generally not wanted to come here. He had been, of course, generally right in that desire. Iran sucked. Old Persia was probably no better. Legends were always better in the telling than in the living.

  The leader was returned to the campfire with further instructions.

  All during the night, as the young Iranian volunteers snuggled warm in their wools and furs to keep out the cold, they thought of him who needed no clothes. They thought of the voice from the dark. They thought of the head that had been wrenched off the body.

  Simple death was one thing. But that which lurked out in the dark was another. They had been trained not to fear death. Thousands of their friends had died in suicide charges during the Iraqi war. Of course, their friends had been yelling and chanting as they raced toward death. But this thing out there was not death in glory for them. It was the night. It knew. It was there. Always there. It came at its own time and it would come for them.

  They whispered to themselves that it was the Great Satan and while they had all wanted to fight the Great Satan, it was something else when it really was the Great Satan.

  In the morning, the leader spoke very softly. It was a whisper over the cold black charcoal to ears that strained to listen. He said that it was not the Great Satan that had ruled the night. It was he who come from the old Shahs, even before Mohammed, he from those who dealt death, with heads rolling like melons on the ground, like the night before.

  One of the followers from Quom had heard of those who dealt death that way. But they were from the East, he said. The vision was white.

  "Sinanju," the leader said quietly. "The vision is from Sinanju," and he went on to say that there was only one way to escape the vision and that was never to harm or think of harming the American President. They would not be going to America to organize bands of suicide heroes to strike at the head of the snake of the Great Satan. They would strike instead at other Great Satans. Perhaps the neighboring Arabs would be a better target. Beirut was always good for a suicide bomb. Kuwait was a jewel to slaughter whoever might be walking by. And in Ryadh, there were rich Saudis who could be stabbed, beaten and, of course, bombed, in their bedrooms right in Mecca itself, the holiest of places.

  The leader looked around the young faces surrounding the burned-out fire. Not a voice called for a renewal of the war against the Great Satan who lived in Washington, D.C.

  Out of the blood-red sun on that harsh dry morning came a sound, like whistling.

  "Good morning," said the person walking in over the horizon. He was a man but his face was the face of last night's vision. He was smiling and while he wore only a short-sleeved shirt and trousers, he seemed not to notice the cold.

  If one of them had started to run, they would all have run. But they sat around the fire unmoving.

  "You sweet fellows are going to escort me to Tehran and there you will give me one of your silly plastic flowers, tell me I am going to heaven, and then plunk me on a Pan Am the hell out of here."

  It was the best suggestion they had heard all morning. Remo thought it was pretty good too. Especially the part about the hell out of here.

  He was in Atlanta by the next sunrise, in the penthouse of the Peachtree Plaza Hotel, trying to remember the tune he had been whistling the day before in the Iranian barrens.

  He thought he had done rather well. He liked the mystical part. He had always had trouble with the mystical part, but this time it had all worked.

  "Well?" came a squeaky voice from the main room of the suite.

  "Went fine," Remo called back. "Like a charm. Everything you said."

  He heard a slight expelling of air, and then, "Of course it went well."

  "I didn't think it would go that well. The legend part and everything."

  Remo entered the living room of the suite. A frail wisp of a man sat in a glittering yellow morning kimono. Frail strands of white hair circled his parchmented Oriental face like a halo. His stringy beard quivered as he spoke.

  "I told you what to do," he said. "I was clear. Was I not clear?"

  "Oh, yeah," Remo said. "You were clear. But you know, you kept referring to Iran as Persia and talked about the old Shahs and how they honored the House of Sinanju, and, well, you know."

  "I may not know, but I am finding out," said Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, teacher of Remo, and one who had detected once again that first smoke from the fire of ingratitude.

  "You Were right," Remo said. "The legends are still there, about Sinanju and the old Shahs. Still there."

  "And why wouldn't they still be there?" asked Chiun, his voice flat and cold like the first ice covering of a winter pond.

  "Right," said Remo. "Right you are."

  "Very wrong," said Chiun. "Very wrong you are. I have given the best years of an assassin's life to the training of a white, and still he is surprised that what I tell him is so. Surprise? Are you surprised when the cold does not cut or the world slows for your eyes? Are you surprised when your hand is one with the force that the universe intended man to have?"

  "No, Little Father," Remo said softly.

  "And yet the glory of Sinanju, the days when the great House of Assassins was properly honored by civilized nations, surprises you. Persians remember their assassins. Americans remember nothing, especially not gratitude."

  "I am very grateful to you, Little Father, for all you have taught me," Remo said.

  "You're the worst of whites," said Chiun.

  "When it comes to knowing what is, there is no match for you," Remo said. "I have never questioned that. Not once."

  "The French are acceptable although they do not wash. The Italians, yes, even Italians are acceptable although their breath is foul. Even the British. But I was cursed with an American student. A hybrid white. And yet I gave without stint or complaint. Your lunatic government contracted for my services and then gave me a thing like you to turn into an assassin. I should have returned home. I would have been justified. I could simply have said this pale piece of pig's ear is much too ugly to allow in my presence and I could have walked away from you and this imbecilic country of yours. But instead I stayed and I trained you. And what do I get? Ingratitude. Surprise that what I say is true."

  "All I'm saying," Remo said, "is that the old legends tend to get a bit, well, glorified."

  "Of course. How else could one treat the awesome magnificence of the glory of the House of Sinanju?" Chiun asked.

  Remo sat down in front of Chiun. The old man turned within his yellow robes. He turned so that he faced away.

  "Little Father," Remo said to the back of Chiun's head. "I respect what the House of Sinanju is because I have Sinanju. I am part of it. But the rest of the world doesn't have quite that high opinio
n of assassins. And that Sinanju was remembered in Iran after centuries was gratifying-- yeah, gratifying." Remo liked that. He thought he had really come out of that one well.

  Chiun was quiet a moment. And then he turned. Remo had done it. He was so surprised that he couldn't quite remember if it were the first time Chiun had ever responded to his reasoning and his apology. He would have to remember how he did it. He felt quite confident and he smiled.

  "Did you remember heads like melons on the ground or did you just say fruit?" Chiun asked.

  "I got to melons," Remo said.

  "You forgot melons," said Chiun, and a bony finger with a long tapering nail came out from the robe and rose toward the ceiling of the penthouse suite of the Peachtree Plaza. Chiun was making a point.

  "If you had listened well, you would have remembered the melons. You would have remembered heads littering the fields like melons. You would have performed better. But why should I be listened to? It is impossible to teach someone who thinks he knows everything."

  "Of course I don't know everything," Remo protested.

  "Well, I do," Chiun said. And on that he contended that Remo should listen to everything in the future, as he should have been listening in the past.

  Chiun was not the only problem with the Iran assignment. There was a message waiting for Remo at the desk of the hotel. Aunt Catherine had called. Therefore Remo was to phone the coded number that would automatically scramble from both ends.

  It was answered far north in a sanitarium overlooking Long Island Sound. Headquarters.

  "Where have you been? Remo, the White House is desperate. We promised them protection for the next crucial month and then you disappear."

  "They have it," Remo said. "They have the best protection."

  "Remo, the White House had to publicly ring itself with concrete barricades to stop truck bombers. That's an international admission of weakness. But we know there are suicide groups aimed at the President's life. We can't stop them with normal security. We had your assurance that the President would be protected. Where are you?"

  "Home, or whatever passes for it this week."

  "What about the protection?"

  "The President's got the best kind," Remo said.

  "He doesn't see you. Where is his protection?"

  "Because he can't see it doesn't mean he doesn't have it."

  "Please don't get Oriental with me, Remo. We have a problem here of Iranian suicide squads who have vowed to kill the President."

  "Smitty," Remo said patiently. "Don't worry about those things, will you? It's taken care of."

  Dr. Harold W. Smith found himself looking at the telephone now when he talked to Remo. If Remo said it was taken care of, it was taken care of, and that was that and Smith wanted to get off the telephone. Keeping a phone line open longer than he had to extended the risk, scrambler or no scrambler, and Smith found himself worrying more and more these days about the security of the secret organization, CURE.

  In his years as the head of CURE, Harold W. Smith had grown old. His hands were not as steady nor his movements as quick. Even his mind had dulled somewhat. But what really had grown old was his spirit. He was tired.

  Maybe it was because when the organization began, there was so much hope. A secret agency to work outside the Constitution to fight America's enemies. Someday, a crime-free society. It was a grand goal, but it had never been reached. CURE struggled all the time, just to stay even, and when they had added Remo as their enforcement arm, to punish those who somehow the law missed, it was all just more of the same. More treading water. It wasn't progress, just survival, and it had made Smith a tired old man who worried too much.

  But in all those years, not once had Remo told Smith something was taken care of when it wasn't.

  "All right," Smith said. "I'll tell him."

  He put down the telephone and looked through the one-way windows of Folcroft Sanitarium. The Long Island Sound was churning with dark clouds overhead and the winds whipped silly sailboats toward shore where they should have been an hour before. Smith's mouth felt dry and he looked at his hand. It had age spots. Remo's teacher was old, but he never seemed to get any older. And Remo hadn't seemed to age a day. But Smith had. Yet what worried him was not that his body was aging but that his mind was aging faster. He was slipping.

  He pulled out a drawer, picked up a small red telephone and waited. He recognized the voice. So would most Americans. It was the voice of the President.

  "Sir," said Smith. "Everything has been taken care of."

  "Where is he? I haven't seen him."

  "It's taken care of. Those concrete barricades against the trucks aren't really necessary now."

  "You were supposed to have him here to protect me. I didn't see him," the President said.

  "He handled it, sir."

  "I know this sounds a bit far-out, but can he make himself invisible?"

  "I don't know. He is aware of how people move their eyes, but I really can't say," Smith said.

  "And the older one is even better, right?"

  The President often asked that question. He liked hearing that there was a man at least eighty years old who was physically superior to Smith's awesome assassin. The President did not even know that the assassin's name was Remo and that his teacher was named Chiun.

  "In many respects, the older one is better," Smith said.

  "At least eighty, huh?"

  "Yes, sir."

  "And you say we're safe?"

  "You're safe from the truck bombers, the people who'd give up their own lives to get yours."

  "Well, all right. That's good enough. Does the older one say it's safe?"

  "I don't know if he was involved," Smith said.

  "Does he exercise? I exercise. Does he have exercises he does to stay so damned fit?"

  "Not like you know of, sir. It's not their muscles they exercise."

  "They do the damnedest things. You know, the hardest part of this job is not telling anyone about them."

  "Only you and I know," Smith said. "Imagine if it were known that the government employs those two. Imagine if my agency's existence were known."

  There was a chuckle at the other end of the phone.

  "I can imagine what the press would do with that. They'd bust a blood vessel with the joy of it."

  The President hung up and Smith reflected that at least the man in the White House had not changed. He still held no rancor toward a press corps that obviously would like nothing more than to feed on his liver, even if they had to destroy the country to get to it.

  Smith replaced the telephone and looked out again at Long Island Sound.

  No one had changed. Not Remo, not Chiun, not the President.

  Only Smith. The gaunt young man with the lemony face and the impossible job had become a gaunt old man with lemony face and impossible job.

  sChapter Three

  Abner Buell waited until the last actress and her pushy agent had left the party. They had stayed too late for people who already were going to get his backing in a movie. They had lingered over his new three-dimensional Zylon game, the adult version where the Zylon maiden ran around on the screen unclothed and the Orgmork had an engorging male organ.

  The woman player was supposed to get the maiden through the maze of electronic obstacles without losing more clothes, until she was safe in the castle. The male operator of the machine was supposed to get the monster Orgmork to capture the maiden while keeping the sex organ at what was called a point level but was really something much cruder.

  The big selling point of the game was that when the monster got the maiden, they would simulate a sexual assault. Right down to the screams.

  The children's version of the game just had dismembering, and both the maiden and the Orgmork were clothed. It was the biggest arcade triumph of the month and Abner Buell had been bored with it in two days. He had created it.

  He had also created Zonkman, where a flashing mouth ate bluish hamburger to mu
sic, and he promptly got the highest score ever. There would be little awards for those pimply-faced youngsters who scored in the zillions on those machines but Abner Buell knew that none of them would ever reach his score.

  But as the inventor, the computer genius behind the game, he would never let on that the best of the kids were not even at half the level of his skill. That would ruin the image of the game, that youngsters with bubblegum reeking out of their insides or wherever they reeked, could be the best in the world at these things.

  They couldn't be, precisely because they were unformed adolescents. Abner Buell invented the games for them because during those complex constructions, he was momentarily relieved of what had plagued him since he graduated from Harvard summa cum laude at the age of ten.

  Boredom. The appalling grayness of the never-ending dullness of life.

  At twelve, he had obtained a Ph.D. in mathematics and was thinking of getting another one in English literature when he knew that too would fail to suffice. So he planned and executed a perfect bank robbery and that was exciting for at least twenty minutes, but it wore off as soon as he realized that the police had absolutely no hope of catching him.

  He was twenty-three now, could not count all his money, owned seven homes and sat morosely through dinner with what had been described as the most exciting people on the Coast. His Malibu home overlooked what was left of the beach. He drummed his fingers on the silk tablecloth as the agent talked of the wonders of his client. He saw her cast eyes at him and he saw everyone else leave.

  He made an obscene remark and the actress thought it was funny. He called her names. She said that excited her. He said she was boring. She had an answer to that. She took off her clothes. She said she had always wanted to play one of his video games in the nude.

  "Your agent is here," Abner Buell said.

  "He's seen me do nude scenes," the actress said.

  "I'll help," the agent said. "You want me to take my clothes off too?" he asked. "I'll take them off. All of them."