Onto the screen came "As the Planet Revolves," an old segment. Remo recognized the age of the soap opera because people were still worrying about someone having an affair, as opposed to the newer ones which had people worrying if they didn't.
Remo heard the high rising tones of a familiar squeaky voice. It was Chiun. He was behind the house talking to someone.
Remo phoned a long distance number and heard a recorded message. On the beep signaling that he could speak, he said:
"Done."
"Be more specific," came the voice over the phone. One would think he was talking to a person if one didn't know it was a carefully programmed computer.
"No," said Remo.
"Your information is inadequate. Be more specific," said the computer.
"The four assigned were done clean. All right?"
"That is the four assigned were done clean. Is that correct?"
"Yes," said Remo. "Are your transistors clogged?"
"Blue code, purple mother finds elephants green with turtles," said the computer.
"Up yours," said Remo and hung up. But as soon as the receiver clicked off, the telephone rang again. It was the computer.
"Use your blue code book."
"What blue code book?" Remo asked.
"Be more specific."
"I don't know what you're talking about with your garble," Remo said.
"Code book blue works off the date and the volume you were given four months, three days, and two minutes ago."
"What?" asked Remo.
"Two minutes and six seconds ago."
"What?"
"Ten seconds ago."
"Oh. You mean the poem. Just a minute." Remo rummaged through a rusting cookie tin made vulnerable by the salty air. He found a sheet torn from a book. He did the counting of words from the date.
"You want me to blend a porcupine?" said Remo.
"Let me repeat, purple mother finds elephants green with turtles," the computer said.
"I got that. It means blend a porcupine… one, two, April six, divide by four. Add a P before the vowel. Right. Blend a porcupine. This is a great code."
"Breakdown," said the computer. "Hand up and hold."
Remo hung up and the phone rang as soon as the receiver touched the cradle.
"White House master bedroom. 11:15 p.m. tomorrow." The line went dead.
Remo quickly calculated. It was easier the second time. The message: "White House Master Bedroom, 11:15 p.m. tomorrow" coded itself into "Purple Mother finds elephants green with turtles."
Remo tore up the poem. Outside he found Chiun facing a grove of coconut trees. He was talking in Korean. He was talking to no one.
The morning air gently ruffled the delicate yellow kimono, the long fingernails moved with slow grace, the wisp of a beard caught every breath that touched a leaf. Chiun was reciting old lines from soap operas. In Korean.
"The set's on but you're not watching," Remo said.
"I have seen that performance," said Chiun, latest Master of Sinanju.
"Then why do you have it on?"
"Because I cannot tolerate the filth of the new shows."
"We're going to Washington. I think to see the President," Remo said.
"He has called us personally to remove his perfidious enemies. This I had always predicted, but no, you said the Master of Sinanju does, not understand American ways. You said we do not work for an emperor, but the real emperor was in Washington. You said our emperor, Smith, was but the head of a small servant group. But I said no. Someday the real emperor will realize the gems that are but his to command and will say, 'Lo, we recognize you as assassins to the court of the great automaker. Lo, we have endured the mess and bungling of amateurs. Lo, we have shamed ourselves before ourselves and the world. Lo, we now unto this thing glorify ourselves with the glory of the House of Sinanju. Let it be done."
"Where'd you get that garbage?" said Remo. "The last President we met, we put on the top of the Washington Monument. This time, we've probably got to steal the red phone. If I know Smitty, there's a deposit on it and he wants it back."
"You will see. You do not understand the world, being white and younger than four score. But you will see."
Remo had never quite been able to explain to Chiun that Dr. Harold W. Smith, formerly CIA and now head of CURE, was neither an emperor now nor planning to become one. For thousands of years, the little fishing village of Sinanju on the West Korea Bay had supported itself by furnishing assassins to the courts of the world. When hired by CURE to train Remo, Chiun could not understand first of all that Smith, was not an emperor, and second that, not being one, he did not want the current emperor removed by assassination.
Now Chiun felt vindicated, and his frail elderly parchment-like face lit with joy. Now, said Chiun, people would not be shooting guns at other people in the street, but things would be properly done.
"Forget it, Little Father," said Remo. "No one's going to put you on television with a royal announcement. We'll probably be in and out of Washington-snap-that fast. Like the last time."
"Who was that man? He slept well protected."
"Never mind," said Remo.
"He had a bad knee."
"Phlebitis," said Remo.
"We call it coo coo in Sinanju," Chiun said.
"What does that mean?" Remo asked.
"It means a bad knee."
In Washington, Dr. Harold W. Smith was admitted at 10:15 p.m. through a side door of the White House and unobtrusively ushered to an office near the Oval Room. He was a sparse man, sparse of lip and smile or the amenities of the day. He wore a gray suit with a vest and carried a fine old leather briefcase. He had a lemony face and looked as if he had lived on white bread sandwiches of imitation spiced ham all his life. He was almost as tall as the President.
The President said good evening, and Harold W. Smith looked at him as if he had told an off-color joke at a funeral. Smith sat down. He was in his early sixties and appeared ten years younger, as though there weren't enough life in him to bother aging.
The President said he was deeply worried about the ethics of such an organization as CURE.
"What if I ordered you to disband tonight?" he asked.
"We would do it," Smith said.
"What if I told you that you may have the only existing organization that can save this country and possibly the world?"
"I would say that I have heard that before from previous Presidents. So I must answer from experience. I would say we can do some things to stop some things or to help some other things, but, Mr. President, I do not think we can save anything. We can give you an edge; that is all."
"How many persons has your organization killed?"
"Next question," Smith said.
"You won't tell me?"
"Correct."
"Why, may I ask."
"Because that sort of information, if leaked, could destroy our form of government."
"I am the President."
"And I represent the only agency in this country that doesn't have its dirty underwear spread out on the front pages of the Washington Post."
"Did you force my predecessor's resignation?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"Must you ask? No one was running the government. You know that. He would have taken the country down with him. And you know that too. We still haven't recovered economically from that absentee President."
"Would you do the same to me?"
"Yes. If the circumstances were the same."
"And you would disband if I said so?"
"Yes."
"How do you keep your cover so well?"
"Only I know what we do. I and the one enforcement arm. His trainer does not know."
"You have thousands working for you?"
"Yes."
"How come they don't know?"
"In any given business, 85 per cent of the people do not know what they are doing or why. This is true. The overwhelming number of people
do not understand why their jobs are done that way. And for the other fifteen per cent, you can generally keep them in isolated compartmentalized jobs so that one thinks he works for the Bureau of Agriculture and another for the FBI and so on."
"I can understand that," the President said. "But in your killings wouldn't the police be picking up fingerprints of your man, especially if there is only one doing all that… what's the word for it… work?"
"Yes, if the prints weren't already out of circulation. He's a dead man. His prints are on file nowhere."
The President thought a moment. It was dark outside in Washington, despite the lights illuminating all the monuments. He had assumed this office at a point when his country faced collapse and he dreamed only of the great hope America still held out. Tarnished hope, yes. But hope, nevertheless. It was not, he knew, an improvement in the living of man, just to declare your country the new wave and to have police arrest dissenters as in the Communist and Third World blocs. The goodness was in the doing. But to unleash this force he now had before him would in a way further tarnish that goodness that was America.
Still it was not an easy world. And until man found a way to live in peace, you were either armed or dead. He did not assume the world was at a different stage yet.
"I want to tell you about the Treska," the President said. He found Smith able to cut through details. No, Smith did not want extensive intelligence reports; anything that was formally given, he explained, created traceable links. Smith's team would be unleashed. You did not order them; you turned them loose and trusted their genius.
"I want to see them," the President said.
"I thought you would. At 11:15 they will be in your bedroom with the red phone."
"You've provided them some pass?"
"No," said Smith, and he explained about the House of Sinanju and how the masters really hadn't come up against anything new for centuries, because new protection devices were really just variations of old ones, and Sinanju knew them all.
The latest Master of Sinanju had been hired by a former agent of CURE to train the enforcement arm. The first assignment of the enforcement arm had been to eliminate this agent, who was wounded and vulnerable. Unfortunately, too many assignments had been necessary just to keep CURE secret. Even the most recent one. Four men who worked for CURE and had found out a little too much and had bragged a little too loudly.
The President said he had not heard of any four men being murdered; he assumed the murders had been done separately.
"No, all at once," Smith said.
"You will not work in this country again. No domestic activities any more," said the President. "No more. I don't understand how four men can simultaneously disappear from the face of the earth in a country with a free press. I don't understand it."
Smith said simply that it was not for them to understand. They went up to the room with the red telephone, and at 11:15 p.m. the President said he guessed that Smith's men hadn't gotten through security.
And then they were standing in the room, an Oriental in a black kimono, and a thin white man with thick wrists.
"Hi, Smitty," said Remo. "Whaddya want?"
"My god. How did they do that? Out of thin air?" said the President.
"Mysteries innumerable," intoned Chiun. "All the secrets of the universe to glorify thy great reign, oh emperor."
"It's not a trick," Smith said. "No mystery. People don't see things that aren't moving and these two know how to be stiller than anyone else.
"Did you see them?"
"No."
"Could they do it again?"
"Probably not because you're looking now. It's the way the eyes work. Literally, we don't see most of the things in our field of vision." Smith started to add more, then realized he knew no more; he knew so little of how Remo and Chiun worked.
To Smith, the President whispered that the old Oriental looked too frail for a foreign assignment. Smith said that the President's least worry was the safety of the Oriental.
Chiun made a short speech to the President about Sinanju being willing to shed its blood for his glories, about how the President's enemies now lived on short rope, and how his friends had a shield and a sword. Moreover, the President had many enemies, close and devious, but this was true of all great emperors such as Russia's Ivan the Good and the gentle Herod and Attila the Benign as well as such westerners as the fair voiced Nero of Rome, and, of course, the more modern ones the Borgias of Italy.
The President said he was not happy about this and that he had wanted to see these two because this was a heavy burden on his heart, and that if his country had any other choice at this time, he would not unleash them.
"Can I say something?" Remo asked.
The President nodded. Chiun smiled, awaiting Remo's speech of loyalty to the emperor.
Remo said, "I started in this thing a long time ago and I really didn't want to, but I was framed for a murder I didn't commit. Well, I started learning Sinanju as a way to do my job, and in the process I learned what I could be and what others had been. And what I'm getting down to is I don't like the way you call the Master of Sinanju and me 'those two' or 'these two.' The House of Sinanju was here thousands of years before George Washington ever got his army strung out on a short supply line at Valley Forge."
"What are you getting to?" asked the President.
"What I'm getting to is I'm not all that impressed with whether you have a happy heart or a heavy one. I just don't give a bubbly fart about how you feel. And that's how I feel."
Smith assured the President that Remo was always reliable, awesomely so. Chiun apologized for Remo's insolence before an emperor and blamed it on his youth, he being less than eighty years old.
The President said he respected a man who spoke his mind.
"There's only one person in this room whose respect I want," Remo said. He pointed to the President and Smith. "And you two aren't him."
CHAPTER THREE
The first thing Colonel Vassily Vassilivich noticed, in the new glory days of the Treska, was a loss of discipline. Before, when the Sunflower team was always floating somewhere in the same European cities as the Treska, no man would go up in a single elevator alone, no men would get themselves stranded in the back room of a restaurant without someone on the street as a safety valve, and everyone kept in constant contact with the rest of the killer unit.
Now, as executive officer of the Treska, he would lose the whereabouts of men for days. They would run through their hit lists in half an hour, then go off to savor the delicacies of the Western capitals and only report back when their money ran out, smiling a stale whiskey smile, bearded, tired, content with their own dissolution.
When Ivan Mikhailov, the laughing giant, returned to a contact point in Rome, the Geno Restaurant down the narrow sloping street of the Atlas Hotel, he became enraged when Colonel Vassilivich accused him of returning only when he ran out of funds.
Ordinarily, someone like Ivan would have stayed on his farm in the Caucasus, taking over some of the chores of plow horses. But his enormous strength had been noticed early by the KGB, which brought such things as candy and radios and extra meat rations to the Mikhailov family, so that when young Ivan reached fifteen he happily went off to training camp at Semipalatinski, where top graded instructors watched in amazement as he showed how he could snap two by four boards in his bare hands, how he could lift the back of an official black Zil limousine with one hand, and how he could kill. And how he loved it.
Semipalatinski was less than two hundred miles from the Chinese border, and when a People's Army Patrol got lost and ended up inside the Soviet Union, the school sent out an urgent message to the Fifteenth Red Rifle Division that the KGB unit would handle the Chinese patrol, while the Rifle Division sealed off their escape. The message really meant the KGB unit commander wanted to blood his trainees. The Rifle Division commander scoffed at the policemen and spies trying to do soldiers' work, but he had to accept the order.
&nb
sp; Three brigades from the Rifle Division trapped the Chinese patrol in a small valley. The Chinese retreated up the sides of the valley to small caves, where they dug in. The Rifle commander wanted to shell the caves, roll in explosives, and go home if the Chinese did not surrender. KGB had other ideas.
When night fell, trainees of the KGB Treska unit were sent in with short knives, garottes, and pistols. The order was that for every bullet the trainees fired, they would receive a lash on the back.
Vassilivich, then an instructor of English and French at the school, waited that night with the commander of the Rifle Division. They heard an occasional shot from the caves. About 3:45 a.m., there was a scream from one person that did not let up until after 4 a.m. Then there was silence.
"We will have to shell the caves at dawn," said the Rifle commander. "A waste of Russian blood. That is what you policemen have done. You have wasted young Russian blood. You should stay to sticking a microphone in people's asses, is what you should stay to."
"What makes you so sure it's not the Chinese who were killed?"
"For one, those were Chinese weapons fired. For two, if your silly little boys had won, they would be coming out now. At first light, we do what we should have done before."
"They have orders not to use pistols and to stay where they are until light, so that your soldiers don't become panicstricken and shoot at them, and thereby force us, general, to annihilate you. Sorry, but that is the truth, general," said Vassilivich.
"Lunatics," said the general. But his staff officers were quiet because all military men were quiet when KGB was around.
Vassilivich had shrugged, and in the morning when the sun first broke over the valley, the Treska trainees came out singing and dancing. Ivan skipped out of the cave, juggling two heads in his massive hands, and each trainee had to empty his pistol to show he had killed without it.
The soldiers were left to clean up the bodies. Several of them passed out from what they saw. Laughing Ivan had to be told he could not keep the heads.
"Give them to the general of the guards, Ivan. That's a good boy. Good boy, Ivan," Vassilivich had said. And Ivan pushed the two heads into the general's reluctant hands and sniffled because they were his heads; he had taken them off the Chinamen, and why couldn't he keep them and take them home to his village when he had leave, because nobody in his village had ever seen a Chinaman's head?
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