His walks were enjoyable, he found. His legs felt a little stretched and sore and that was enjoyable, too. The fresh air felt good. He returned to the office reinvigorated.
But this day he returned to the office and found Mark
Howard waiting for him with a serious concern etched on his young face, and Smith knew the walks were a huge mistake. Not one, but two events occurred while he was gone, both requiring his attention.
"You should have paged me, Mark," he insisted.
Mark shook his head. "That would not have accomplished anything."
"I could have been at work on this sooner."
"Ten minutes sooner. And I was already at work on it. The Orville Flicker thing is still breaking. He says gunmen attacked the car not long after the press conference, drove them off the main highway and tried to gun them down. Ed Kriidelfisk was killed, Flicker was slightly injured."
"Kriidelfisk was the VP nominee," Smith considered aloud.
"But they must have been gunning for Flicker."
"Why?"
Howard stalled. "I am not sure. Lots of people have reasons."
Smith wasn't satisfied, but switched to the more immediate concern. "Where are Remo and Chiun headed?"
"They were en route to La Guardia. I'm having the plane land in D.C."
Smith looked at him.
"That is what you would have done," Mark explained.
Smith realized that it was. More alarming, however, was the realization that, in fact, CURE could get along
without him for twenty minutes each afternoon. Not just get along, Mark Howard could actually function, make decisions, make progress without Smith. The concept had been dawning on him slowly in recent months, but it hit him now with extra force, and he wasn't quite sure how he felt about it.
He neatly tucked the thought into the endless file drawers in his mind and began going over the machinations Mark Howard had put in place to deviate the New York-bound flight to a landing in Washington, D.C.
31
"I fail to understand why this elected pretender is of consequence. To us, or to those with ambitions to the throne of the puppet President," Chiun said.
"Don't look at me. Junior started going on and on about committees in the Senate and I don't know what all," Remo said. "I gather this bunch of MAEBEs had got far- reaching plans to exercise control of Senate committees."
Chiun's parchment brow wrinkled. "For what purpose?"
"Make things happen." Remo shrugged. "They have to send a law through a committee of senators before it can go on to the floor and be voted by all the senators, I guess."
Chiun's eyes were hard with suspicion.
"I'm not making this up," Remo said.
"The big bunch of lawmakers deliberately divides itself into smaller bunches of lawmakers to vote on laws before the big bunch votes on laws?"
"I think that's how it works," Remo said, steering the SUV through D.C. traffic.
"You're a liar, Remo Williams!"
"I'm not lying."
"You can't be telling the truth. It is ridiculous!"
"It's the political system, I guess."
"It is not a system but a bureaucratic morass!"
"Can't disagree with you there."
"This nation never ceases to amaze me with its stupidity. Even the Chinese have a less convoluted government—and I am beginning to think one with a smaller population of degenerates, thieves, and bribe-takers."
"Also, there's some bad blood between Senator Coleslaw and Flicker," Remo said. "Believe it or not, that guy had a lot of power when he was press secretary. I guess he was a thorn in the senator's side and vice versa. Senator Coleslaw—"
"Whiteslaw," Chiun corrected.
"Senator Whatsislaw told the press he's gonna introduce a bill that will change the elections process just enough to roadblock MAEBE."
Remo parked the car eight doors down from the canopy over the sidewalk that advertised Daryl's On Durham Street.
"Why would the other senators allow the upstarts into their committees?" Chiun demanded, not letting up on the earlier ludicrousness.
"Guess they'd have to if there were enough MAEBEs," Remo said. "Otherwise, the MAEBEs
would fight everything the Democraps and Republicraps did. I guess it's a part of the checks and balances."
After a long moment, Chiun shook his ancient skull shortly. "Fah! This democratic system is even more asinine than even I had imagined, or your knowledge is flawed, or both."
"Never said I was an expert," Remo answered, his concentration on the faces of the guests entering and leaving the restaurant. "I'm basing all this on what I remember from high-school civics class."
"What is amazing is that you've blundered along like this and not been annihilated after 230 years."
"Sometimes it seems that long to me, too, Little Father," Remo answered mechanically.
"Not you, this nation of yours."
"Uh-huh."
"It needs a leader—and not one of those clownlike elected pretenders."
"They're not all that bad."
"Name a good one—from your lifetime!"
Remo was watching the restaurant.
"Well?" Chiun demanded.
"I'll think of one eventually."
"You thinking about anything could take another presidential pretender's term. Meanwhile I shall take action to preserve and enhance this undeserving nation," Chiun announced quietly.
"Not the marketing campaign again?"
Chiun said nothing, and Remo wasn't sure if it was
in his best interest to get involved or steer clear. He saw a huge truckload of annoyance spilled on either road he decided to go down, and he had other worries. "There's Senator Whatlaw."
"Whiteslaw," Chiun corrected impatiently.
"Real effective bunch of Secret Service he's got working with him," Remo noted. He turned to glimpse an armored stretch limo approaching from behind their rental. The senator's ride was a rolling cliché of black paint and dark windows. The driver was a stony-faced Secret Service agent in dark glasses and an earpiece.
Remo frowned.
Chiun glanced at him, then returned to watching the entourage as the agent performed a quick electronic scan of the interior and a pair of agents circled the limo in opposite directions with their handheld devices.
"What is bothering you?"
"I don't know," Remo said.
"The driver?"
"I don't think so."
Chiun was the one frowning now. For all his berating of his pupil, Chiun knew that, in fact, Remo had the second-sharpest set of eyes on Earth. Sometimes sharp eyes, and other heightened senses, picked up minuscule scraps of information that were difficult to identify immediately.
"Was there something wrong with the car?" Chiun demanded.
"Maybe, Little Father."
Remo watched the driver go through a high-level security check. Although the driver was likely a part of the same Secret Service group and well-known to the others, he was still questioned and required to provide his fingerprint. If the driver checked out, and if he was worth his paycheck, he would have stayed in the car and alert while the senator was inside having lunch. It was unlikely the car could have been sabotaged.
"Even if there was a trap their tricorders should find a bomb or anything," Remo remarked.
"Fah!" Chiun said. He had little faith in technology of any kind.
What was it? Remo couldn't put his finger on what was itching him. Had there been something wrong when he glimpsed the driver?
The limo pulled into traffic and Remo followed at a distance. The plan was to make their presence known to the senator when he was at his office, then hang out and watch what happened.
Remo was now worried about what would happen before they even reached the office. He kept seeing the brief video clip of the Senator's limo replay in his head. What was wrong with that picture?
Remo Williams knew he was no mental giant, but he also was pretty s
ure he wasn't the dull blade that certain over-the-hill Koreans said he was. He never claimed to have a photographic memory. But he kept seeing that glimpse. The driver. Damn—every time he pictured the driver again, the man morphed a little more
into Tommy Lee Jones from the Men In Black movie poster.
He gave up on the driver.
Only then did he remember the car.
What kind of car was that? A Lincoln? What kind of an ornament had been on the reinforced grille? Now, hadn't that ornament been a little too blobby to make a good car company insignia?
"Shit!"
"Done thinking?" Chiun asked.
"Me done thinking. Now me go driving."
"Not again," Chiun protested, but Remo stomped on the gas and sent the rental swerving through the heaving D.C. traffic. He closed only half the distance to the limo when the traffic locked him in.
"There is something to be said for urban congestion," Chiun commented.
"There's something on the grille," Remo said, holding up his fingers in a loop the size of a quarter. "Like maybe a plastique button or something like that."
"Even I know a thing so small cannot boom the senator through the hard shell of the car," Chiun said.
"I don't get it, either, but it's something." Remo lifted his upper body out of the rental to see over the stopped traffic. The senator's limo was near the front of the line at a traffic light. Nobody else seemed interested—federal government limos were a dime a dozen on the streets of D.C.
The traffic was heavy. Remo knew he wasn't going to catch up to the senator anytime soon in his SUV.
"Come on." He got out and began weaving through the stopped cars, skimming over the pavement, keeping himself out of sight while attempting to monitor the limousine and every other car and pedestrian in the vicinity, looking for someone who was also interested in the senator. He wondered if he was overreacting. What if the blob on the grille of the limousine turned out to be mud? Or pigeon fudge? Chiun would never let him hear the end of it.
Damn! He hated this sneaking-around kind of stuff.
The light changed and traffic began flowing. Remo followed on foot, ignoring the honking behind him from the drivers stuck behind his rental. Chiun was on the streets, as well, glimpsed like a phantom's shadow on the far side of the street as they glided after the limo, off the main artery and onto a four-lane street lined on both sides with storefronts. Traffic was much lighter and the curbs were solid with parked vehicles.
Good place for an ambush, Remo thought, and a moment later the ambush commenced.
It was a smelly affair. There was a brief flash of light from the front end of the limo, then Remo smelled smoke, and the smoke became noxious. He slowed his breathing as the vapor turned into airborne acid.
He saw the plan now. Of course it didn't need to be a big explosive. Just enough to flush out the prey. The limousine screeched to a stop and doors burst open on both sides. Remo rushed into the street and grabbed the hacking Secret Service agent who had collapsed half in, half out. Remo dragged him free of the limo and sent him rolling across the sidewalk. Pedestrians were fleeing the gas on foot.
Remo inserted himself in the limo and found a pile of bodies on the floor, three choking agents atop the choking senator.
Remo had enough breath for a quick sarcastic comment. "Good plan," he told the agents as he shoved them off. "Suffocate the man when he's already short on breathable air."
The white sedan slowed alongside the open limo doors as Remo unearthed the senator. The driver's window opened. Remo saw a man in black, with a white ski mask and a white hood. The man smiled and dropped something on the pavement.
Remo might have had time to extricate himself from the car and get to the grenade—but not without shoving agents out of his way with deadly force, he decided. Instead he twisted himself and the senator out of the open door on the opposite side, and he felt the pressure waves coming at him. Too fast. There had to have been a one-second fuse on the device. There was no time to get himself and the others to real safety.
The blast engulfed them.
32
The senator from California found himself on the sidewalk, finally able to breathe again despite the smoke from the limo.
"My feet hurt."
"I bet they do."
"What happened?"
"They tricked you into opening the doors. If you'd have kept them closed, the grenade wouldn't have hurt anybody."
Senator Herbert Whiteslaw's feet hurt so much he had to see what was wrong with them, despite the vivid scene in front of him. He looked down, was dizzy for a moment and found himself looking at two black things in an inflatable children's swimming pool. The black things were his feet. He was sitting on a plastic chair in front of a small hardware store. The glass storefront had blown inward and left the kiddie pool undamaged.
"Sorry. I didn't have time to get you fully under cover."
"Who are you?" the senator asked the man who, he realized, had just departed, fast.
The man was back in a moment with a Secret Service agent. The agent was burned, as well, more extensively but not seriously, it seemed. The agent rolled his eyes in relief when the man sat him down in the children's pool.
"Who are you?" the senator asked again.
The man was gone again. The senator remembered dark eyes. Not the eyes of a man who saved people, when he thought about it, but cruel eyes. Appearances were deceiving, he decided, and by then the man was back again. The driver in his arms, who was a massive brute of an agent who had chosen the service after his pro wrestling career fizzled, was being carried without effort. His body was limp and his suit was smoldering.
"Is he dead?" the senator asked.
"No, just bonked his head." The ex-wrestler was placed in the pool with his head leaning against the inflated palm tree that emerged from one end.
"Don't let him drown," the man instructed the other agent and the senator. On the next trip he carried another limp figure, burned superficially across his entire back. When he was placed in the kiddie pool the water sloshed out over the top.
"We'll need another pool," the conscious agent observed stupidly.
"No, we won't," said Remo.
"There's more agents," the agent insisted.
"There's not," Remo said. "Not anymore."
He'd done all he could. Remo strolled down to the end of the block, ignoring the senator's questions, to where the white sedan was parked. There were crowds a few hundred feet away, but the rumors of a gas attack were keeping them at a distance for now. Sirens were approaching.
"What do we have here?" Remo asked.
"A nothing," Chiun explained. "A worm or a snail or some other low level of life-form."
Chiun stood alongside the car, which had a dead man in the passenger seat and a wide-eyed paralyzed man at the wheel. The paralyzed man sought mercy from Remo Williams.
"He is the boom dropper," Chiun explained, not looking at the driver.
"And the sidekick?"
"He is the foul talker. You should have heard his language."
"I won't swear, I swear," the driver whined.
"Hope you've got something to tell me," Remo said, "such, as, where's the rest of the guys?"
"Guys?"
"You know. The guys. Your buds. The rest of the gang. We've shut down White Hand cells in Chicago and Colorado and San Fran and those losers in Kansas. There's always a bunch of you."
"There was just the two of us for the D.C. job."
"Bulldookey."
"It isn't bulldookey," the driver cried, rolling his eyes like a beaten dog.
"Little Father, did you hear what he just said?"
"Yes."
"I said bulldookey! Just like you!"
"I'm allowed."
"It's not a swear word!"
"It means 'motherfucker' in Korean," Remo explained.
The driver's head was flopping around in panic and he even made an attempt to shift the car into Drive with his te
eth, which toppled him on the steering wheel.
"Company's coming," Remo pointed out as the first squad car came around the corner, siren screaming, and braked fast. The officers jumped out of the vehicle and aimed their weapons at Remo and Chiun.
"Don't shoot. They saved us." It was the senator on the lawn chair. The cops got a good look at the blackened bodies in the kiddie pool and they boggled.
"I shall kill this one and we may be on our way," Chiun announced for the driver's benefit. The driver, now trapped in place staring at the remains of his former partner, started talking.
The cops tried to figure out what to do, until the Secret Service arrived and tried to figure out what to do, but the Service looked more intimidating during their decision-making process. Finally the ambulances began pouring in and the EMTs more or less took over, stabilizing the burn victims. The Walter Reed ambulance took the senator, with two high-ranking Secret Service agents insisting on coming along. The phone call came in as soon as the doors closed.
"Spacey," answered the more senior agent, then he nodded to his partner. "HSCC with the CO."
"Okay"
For the HSCC—High Security Conference Call— the two agents dialed their phones into a security system that took them through the highest level of electronic screening and encryption. When it was all done their commanding agent was back on the line.
"Agent Spacey, Agent Nor?"
"Yes, sir."
"The next voice you hear will be the President's. Understood?"
"Yes, sir."
The next voice they heard was the President's, and the President gave a very strange set of instructions.
It would have been a big joke except for two things. One, Secret Service agents never, ever joked. Two, the encryption of the phone call was reserved for the highest-security concerns.
They looked at each other. This was a waste of effort since Secret Service agents never, ever showed emotion and, if they accidentally one day showed a twinge of emotion in the call of duty, the sunglasses were there to mask it.
Then Spacey and Nor looked around the interior of the ambulance. It was a big ambulance, but still crowded with the senator, the EMT and the two agents. The President had said there was someone else there. Well, he was the President, but it seemed unlikely that there would be a fifth person present without their knowing.
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