In Enemy Hands td-26

by Warren Murphy

  "Barbarians," Chiun yelled at them. "Brutal barbaric animals." The nun placed herself between her students and the yelling Chiun and quickly herded them down the well-lit hall.

  "Vicious degenerates," Chiun said. The tails appeared at the end of the hall, their faces pointed to pictures implacably, as if attached by strings.

  "I've got work to do, Little Father. Can I get some privacy in this place?"

  "Yes," said Chiun. Three rooms from the Mona Lisa there was a pink marble wall along which Chiun counted marble ornaments. At the count of eight, he raised a long fingernail chest high and part of the wall swung open. So graceful was the craftsmanship that the opened wall did not look like some intrusion of a secret passage, but just another room. This one, however, was without lights. It smelled of dusty death and had walls of rough rock. Remo beckoned to the two tails, and with a bit more surprise than the average stranger beckoned to by someone, they came. Remo's hands shot out like the quick snap of a frog's tongue and the two went smashing into the rough rock floor of the secret room. The wall closed behind all four.

  One had his hand on a small caliber pistol in an ankle holster. He had his hand on it only briefly, as Remo blended all of it into a painful bloody mess with his right shoe.

  Without too much pressure against their spines, the men talked profusely. Unfortunately, they talked neither in English nor Korean, the only two languages Remo spoke in. He needed Chiun to translate.

  A small light diffused into the room from above, making the room look as if it were in eternal dusk. Remo noticed a dry skeleton with a small hole in its temple, sitting against the rock wall as if it were a beggar waiting for a cup to be filled with coins.

  Remo asked Chiun to translate for him. Chiun said he was hired as an assassin, not a language teacher. Remo said it was part of the work. Chiun said it was never agreed to with Smith that his duties included translating. He complained that Smith had promised to send him tapes of the soap operas but that they had not come yet. The tail who still had two good wrists and two good ankles went for a shoulder holster. Remo put a knuckle into his sternum. Part of a ventricle came out of his mouth like spit.

  "Now we have only one, Little Father. Will you please help? Just find out who they are and why the tail."

  Chiun said it would dishonor his ancestors to act as a language teacher, especially in this very room where the Count de Ville's body was.

  "As a favor to me?" Remo asked.

  Chiun agreed but noted it would be one more favor to be unrepaid. He said there was a point at which generosity ceased and abuse began. That point had been passed eight years before. Nevertheless his good heart prevailed. He questioned the man, who lay in pain. Then he ended the pain with eternal finality.

  It was Remo's job to stack the two bodies neatly next to the skeleton. Remo said he would do it and thanked Chiun. What did the man say?

  Chiun said he had been asked to question him, not repeat the answers. Repeating answers was something else.

  Remo said that repeating answers was part of translating. Chiun said if Remo wanted that he should have asked for that also. Remo saw the hole in the skull of the skeleton was a bit too wide. He remarked that Chiun's ancestor had been sloppy or getting old, because he had mashed the skull instead of penetrating it sharply.

  Chiun said that Remo's ancestors had probably fought with rocks, and that Remo was probably the first who knew how to breathe. Besides, Remo didn't even know his ancestors.

  Remo said he didn't even know his father and only remembered the orphanage. Which was one of the reasons CURE had chosen him. in the first place. He had no known relatives.

  Chiun said if that was an attempt to make him feel guilty, it had failed miserably.

  "Miserably."

  Remo said it wasn't an attempt to make Chiun feel guilty. It was a fact. Chiun was the one who tried to make people feel guilty.

  In the administration offices of the Louvre, there was chaos that afternoon. Voices were coming from the walls all over the museum. At first, it was thought that someone had brought in a television set. Then it was thought that a tape recorder with American voices had been placed somewhere. Guards scurried up and down the corridors looking for the exact sources of the resonating voices talking about guilt and orphanages and failure.

  Visitors from all over the world, many who had come to this city just to visit this museum, stared at one another.

  Then suddenly the voices stopped and there was incredible silence in the vast museum, for everyone had been quiet trying to pick out the strange sounds.

  A nun ran horrified to a gendarme. Two men, one an Oriental, had emerged from a wall in the Cour Caree section. The wall had shut after them. The Oriental had started the girls crying because he had called them vicious animals. He was arguing with the white man. Most of the talking was in English. The white man was saying he was sorry for asking for a simple favor.

  When the guard returned with the assistant director of the museum, they could find no opening in a wall. The nun was put under sedation. Gendarmes escorted the girls back to their school.

  And outside, walking to the hotel, Remo dismissed all Chiun was saying.

  "I'm not interested in the last time Wang or Hung saw Paris." He stared at Chiun. "I just asked a simple little favor. I'm never going to ask again."

  But Chiun wouldn't tell Remo what the tail had said.

  Remo said he didn't care.

  Chiun asked why, if Remo didn't care, did he have Chiun do the work of the translator? The problem, Chiun said, was that he was too easy-going. People tended to walk all over the good-hearted.

  The next morning, Remo met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  It was midnight and only a man of peculiar habits would be working at his desk, so Dr. Harold W. Smith was at his when the special telephone rang.

  When he picked it up, the first thing he heard was the receiver dropped on the other end of the call. There was a moment's fumbling, and then the President's voice came on in a rough-edged whisper, competing with a raucous background squawk.

  "Good work."

  "Sir?" said Smith.

  "The European business. Went like a charm. I hear Treska's just about out of business."

  "I can hardly hear you," Smith said.

  "Well, somebody's here," the President hissed.

  "Who?"

  "Big Mama. The First Lady. She set her CB radio up in here."

  "Mister President. In a dozen years this has never happened. If you wish to speak to me, I suggest you do it when no one else is around."

  "How do I get rid of Big Mama?"

  "Push her through the door and lock it behind her," Smith said, and hung up. After a few minutes, the phone rang again.

  "Yes?" Smith said.

  "You didn't have to get huffy," said the President in his normal voice, a voice that would be at home on a Detroit assembly line or pumping gas in Joliet, the kind of voice that belonged to a man people would elect and elect and elect to most offices because he was one of them. It was also the kind of voice that people voted against for the highest office in the land because it was too much like "one of them," and they wanted a President who was better than they were. And sounded it.

  "I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. President," Smith said, "but for more than a dozen years I have maintained this unit's security and secrecy. I haven't done it by playing 'breaker, breaker, there's a picture taker' on the radio with my wife in the room."

  "Well, all right. Anyway, it looks like those two cleaned up everything in Europe. Reports I get say the Russians have withdrawn all their Treska units."

  "Your reports are wrong."

  "Wrong? I can hardly believe that. This is what we've heard from friendly nations. Allies."

  "Wrong," said Smith. "The Treska hasn't been called home; it's been destroyed. There is no more Treska in the field."

  "You mean… ?"

  "I mean just that. There was an a
ssignment to neutralize the Treska and render it harmless. They have been rendered the most harmless they can be," Smith said.

  "Those two?"

  "Those two," Smith said. "But it is not over. There is a Marshal Denia who has been called back to the Kremlin for discussions. He is in charge of Treska. He will be back at us with something new."

  "What should we do?" the President asked.

  "Leave it to us. The situation will be handled."

  "Well… if you think so…" The President seemed reluctant.

  "Good night," Smith said abruptly.

  After replacing the phone inside his desk drawer, Smith sat reading copies of new reports produced by CURE'S overseas agents policemen, newspapermen, minor foreign officials, all of whom knew only that they provided information to some agency of the U.S. for a monthly check. All of them "knew" it was the CIA. And they were all wrong.

  Their reports, raw information, some of it solid, some of it not better than rumor or outright lies from those who were taking money from Russia to ship America false information, came pouring into CURE's computers at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye,

  New York, on the shores of Long Island Sound. There it was mixed and matched in a way no single human mind could emulate. A man missing from his usual office for a week, a body found floating in a river somewhere, an airline ticket bought and paid for in cash by a man with a Russian accent-the computers put all the tiny threads of fact and information together, and then, on a console that only Dr. Smith could operate, wove out for him what had happened, classifying its results Conclusive, Highly Probable, Probable, Possible, Unlikely and Impossible.

  Then Smith, after using a computer to do work a man could not do, did what a computer could never do. He made instant judgments, weighing risks and rewards, conflicting priorities, money and manpower problems, to spell out CURE's next assignment. He did it day in and day out with few mistakes, aware of but never awed by the fact that the only thing that stood between a strong United States and a United States exposed naked and defenseless before its enemies in the world was Dr. Harold W. Smith. And Remo. And Chiun.

  Smith was not awed because he lacked the imagination to be awed. It was his greatest liability as a human being, and in turn his greatest asset as the head of a secret agency that had suddenly been given the global job of defending America.

  "That Smith is an idiot," Chiun said.

  "What now, Little Father?" Remo asked patiently, watching Chiun who wore his golden morning robe but was visible only in black silhouette against the bright early morning sunlight pouring through their triple-width hotel windows. Chiun looked out over the street. He was absolutely motionless, his hands extended straight out in front of him, his long-nailed fingers pointing ahead, near but not touching the thin yellow gauze draperies that hung from ceiling to floor.

  "We are done here," Chiun said. "So why are we still here? This is a city where every food is smothered in sauce, every juice is fermented, and the people speak a tongue that grates upon the eardrums like a file. And then, what they allowed to happen to the Louvre, the shame of it. I do not like France. I do not like Frenchmen. I do not like the French language."

  "You prefer to hear Americans speak English?" Remo asked.

  "Yes," Chiun said. "Just as I would prefer to hear any other kind of donkey bray."

  "We'll be going home soon."

  "No. We will be going back to the land of Smith and that maker of automobiles. For you and for me, our home is Sinanju."

  "Don't start that again, Chiun," said Remo. "I've been there. Sinanju is cold, barren, heartless and treacherous. It makes Newark look like heaven."

  "How like a native to speak disparagingly of the land he loves," Chiun said. "You are of Sinanju." While he spoke, his fingers had not moved a fraction of an inch. In silhouette, he looked like a plaster statue of Jesus as shepherd.

  Remo had stared at the Oriental's fingertips, eyes sharper than a hawk's, trying to see even the faintest quiver of motion, the slightest tensing of a muscle pushed beyond its limit of endurance, a twitch, a tic, but he saw nothing, only ten long fingers extended, at arm's length, an inch away from yellow drapes that hung perfectly straight, perfectly still, from ceiling to floor.

  "I am an American," Remo said.

  "Rooty toot toot," Chiun said. Remo started to laugh, then stopped when he saw the curtains move. Slowly, their delicate weight seeming to move, massively, like an ice age crossing a continent. The curtains moved slowly forward, a full inch, until they touched Chiun's extended fingertips, and then they swung forward even more until his fingertips were surrounded by the thin gauze which wrapped itself around the tips of his fingers as if they were iron filings and his fingers were magnets.

  Chiun dropped his hands to his sides and the drapes retreated, swinging softly back into place.

  The old man turned and saw Remo staring at him.

  "Enough," he said, "for one day. Let that be a lesson to you. Even the Master must exercise."

  The drapes were again motionless.

  "Do that again," Remo said.

  "Do what?"

  "That thing with the curtains."

  "I just did it," Chiun said.

  "I want to see how you did it."

  "You were watching. You did not see before. How will you see if I do it again?"

  "I know how you did it. You inhaled and the drapes came to you."

  "I inhaled with my fingers?" asked Chiun.

  "How?" said Remo.

  "I spoke French to it. Very softly so you would not hear. Even drapes understand French because it is not a hard language, even if they garble the pronunciation."

  "Dammit, Chiun, I'm a Master of Sinanju too. You've told me that. You shouldn't withhold information from me. How am I going to support the village when I take over from you? How are all those sweet people I've come to know and love, how are they going to live if I can't ship them the gold? How can I do that if I can't even make a curtain lift?"

  "You promise then?"

  "Promise what?" asked Remo suspiciously. He had the vague sense that he was being pulled into Chiun like the drapes.

  "To send the tribute to the village. To feed the poor, the elderly, the infants. For Sinanju is a poor village, you know. In bad times, we…"

  "All right. All right. All right. I promise, promise, promise, promise. Now how'd you do that with the curtain?"

  "I willed it."

  "You willed it? And just like that, it happened? Remo asked.

  "Yes. I have told you many times that all life is force. You must work to extend that force beyond the thin shell which is your skin. Extend that force beyond your body, and then objects that fall into the field of that force can be controlled by it."

  "Okay, you've told me what, now tell me how."

  "If you do not know the what, you cannot do the how."

  "I know the what," Remo said.

  "Then you can already do the how. No one need show you," said Chiun.

  "A typical non answer," Remo said.

  "You must practice," Chiun said. "Then you will be able to do it too. You had better start soon because you're not going to have me to kick around much longer."

  "Oh? Where are you going?"

  "I am retiring. I have a little sum put by which will enable me to live out my few remaining years in dignity. In my home village. Respected. Honored. Loved."

  "Don't give me that. The last time you were home, the village sent a tank after you," Remo said.

  "An error," Chiun said. "Never to be repeated. I have advice for you, regarding your future duties as Master of Sinanju."

  "Yeah?"

  "Yes. Do not take any checks. Make sure the tribute to the village is in gold. Remember. I will be there to inspect it when it comes And I do not trust Smith. He is an idiot, that man."

  "Anything else?"

  "Yes. Practice."

  "Practice what?" Remo asked.

  "Everything," Chiun said. "You do it all so badly."


  "Little Father," Remo said, standing in the center of the room. "Ragaroo, digalee, freebee doan."

  "What is that?"

  "It's an old American art form called Mung Poetry. You know what it means?"

  "No. What, if anything?"

  "Go blow it out your ears," Remo said and walked out of the hotel room.

  Entering the lobby, Remo took one step off the elevator and stopped cold, as if he had just remembered he had forgotten to put on his pants.

  From across the Persian rugged lobby a woman smiled at him. She was long legged and dark haired. She wore a white silk pants suit, its jacket tied loosely above her hips with a belt, and even though she lounged on a chair, Remo knew that when she stood up the garment would be unwrinkled. She was a woman on whom a wrinkle, either of flesh or fabric, would have seemed like the defacing of a monument.

  She stood and opened her arms wide as if welcoming Remo to step into them. Her long eyelashes flickered. Her eyes were gentian violet, made even more violet by the light blue of her upper lids, a light blue that seemed a gift of nature and not of a colorist's brush.

  Remo moved forward dully across the lobby, toward the woman whose eyes were fixed on him with the unblinking gaze of a cheetah on the hunt. He felt ten years of Sinanju slip away from him. Ten years of control of mind and body so specific, so rigid, so detailed, that even his sex drive had turned into a physical exercise and an excuse to practice techniques. But as slowly as it had gone, that quickly it had returned, and Remo was consumed with the thought of the dark haired woman who still stood, smiling at him.

  He stumbled across the lobby toward her outstretched arms, feeling foolish, wondering what he would do if those arms were not open for him, wondering what he would do if, at the last minute, she looked past him, stepped by him and swept some other man into her arms.

  He knew what he would do. He would kill the other man. He would kill him on the spot, immediately, without remorse or feeling, and then he would grab the woman and drag her from the hotel and take her to a safe place from which she would never leave him.

  When he neared her, the woman's arms dropped and like a chastened schoolboy, Remo stopped short.

  He swallowed hard.