“Exactly what it says,” said Smith. “The three of us in this room are CURE. A cure for the crime and lawlessness that threaten to swamp this country and ultimately make it ungovernable.”
“I knew we were doing something like that. You told me.”
“Yes, but did we tell you that if it became known we exist, it would be an admission by our government that the whole kit and caboodle does not and cannot work? That our laws don’t work?”
“What are you getting at?”
“We created a killer arm that does not exist for an organization that does not exist. You learned to fight without weapons that would leave a trace. You are our only real killer arm. Why?”
“Because I am beautiful. What are you getting at?”
“We cannot be known to exist or everything we are fighting for goes. America becomes just another little police state above its own laws like any third-world country,” said Smith.
“A man named Grove has to have discovered your existence to send the man with the diamond tooth. If he knows about you, he may know about us.”
“He didn’t try to kill you,” said Remo. “You’re afraid now. Am I the only one who’s supposed to be shot at?”
“I will not be shot at,” said Smith. “If we are discovered, every file in our computers automatically self-destructs. And so do we. All of us. I have a pill. It is fast. It is painless. It is final.”
“Harold W. Smith, research analyst, will be found with a suicide note,” said McCleary, “and Con McCleary will be found with his brains blown out. Niggers with bullets in their heads are not uncommon in this great land of ours. No one will ask any questions about me. A black man can always find a place somewhere if it is beneath the ground.”
“Where does that leave me?” asked Remo.
“Well, you would be a bit much for us to kill now. Your abilities far surpass ours, from what McCleary tells me,” said Smith.
“So?”
“So there is only one man on earth equipped to kill you.”
“No,” said Remo. All the secrets were out. He didn’t care what else they said. It couldn’t be true. Chiun wouldn’t kill him. Most of the Master’s complaining was only proof of how much Chiun cared. Remo was sure of that. He was so sure that the complaining didn’t bother him anymore. He was certain of it. They were wrong.
The two of them worked out a plan while Remo thought of what he would say to Chiun. McCleary and Remo would hit the security-tight HARP manufacturing complex in West Virginia. HARP had to be the key to Grove Industries and if they could crack HARP, they could crack Grove. Then George Grove’s personal killer network could be eliminated, and CURE and all of them would go on.
When they asked Remo if he understood, he said yes. He would have said yes to anything. But first he had to speak to Chiun.
Chiun had learned how to tape the daytime soap operas so he could have dramas from all three networks played at his leisure. He now followed all of them daily and talked about the characters as though they were real people.
He was watching one of the soaps when Remo arrived back at the training house. Seeing him more absorbed in the drama than apparently he was in Remo’s life, Remo thought a moment. Maybe what Smith said was so. He started to speak. Then he decided not to. Then he decided to say something. Then he decided not to.
He stood there, making no sounds audible to normal people.
“You want to say something?” said Chiun.
“Yeah,” said Remo. “You know, I heard something, not that I believe it. You know. I don’t believe everything people say. I know what you’ve given me, and I know you wouldn’t just throw that away, right?”
“The answer is yes, Remo. I am a Master of Sinanju. My first loyalty is to the village. I would kill you. It is in the contract.”
As for breathing, Remo didn’t care to. But he noticed he had stopped, just stopped. His mouth was open, his feet were frozen to the floor. There wasn’t anything left to say. Chiun had said it all. And Remo had wanted to call the man “little father.”
Well, he didn’t have any father he ever knew of, and this man wasn’t one either. He had the nuns at the orphanage, who used to send him Christmas cards every year until a change of address threw them off his trail. He had his football coach, who remembered him for two years as the best middle linebacker he had ever seen until he got someone who made second-string all-American.
And Remo had himself. He had himself, and he had his job, and he had what he knew how to do, and he packed a little bag and left the training house alone.
He did not see the Master of Sinanju turn off the television set. He could not of course see the Master of Sinaryu remember his own son lost in the heights.
And he did not hear the sound come from Chiun’s throat.
“Ah,” said Chiun, but it held no satisfaction. It was as empty as the far side of the universe where stars did not reflect the sun.
“Nothing is bothering me,” said Remo, as their car traversed the bleak hills of West Virginia, heading on a road toward a place far away called Parkersburg. They were going beyond Parkersburg.
Remo didn’t see whether there would be much difference where they went. All across the country, there were plenty of run-down roadside bars that looked as though they were being held together by their neon signs that advertised beer. The West Virginia ones were only marginally different. They didn’t have the signs.
“You haven’t talked to me since New York. What’s bothering you?”
“Nothing. I told you nothing is bothering me,” said Remo. “Let’s do the job and get out of here. You talk a lot. All right? Don’t talk so much.”
“I didn’t say a word all through Pennsylvania, laddie. What’s bothering you?”
“I remember. It was peaceful all the way through Pennsylvania,” said Remo. “Yeah, something is bothering me. I don’t have a father, that’s bothering me. I don’t have a mother. That’s bothering me, too.”
“You just found that out, Remo?”
“You and Smith know more about me than I do, probably.”
“We never found out who your parents were, if that’s what you’re asking, Remo,” said McCleary. He drove easily, just enough speed to get there, yet not enough to attract attention from a traffic policeman, not that they had seen a policeman on the road since they entered the state. The shacks and roadside bars, and advertisements for chewing tobacco, were suddenly replaced by a large ugly chemical factory, lit like a stadium in hell, with smoke wafting through the harsh floodlights. Chain-link fence and warnings surrounded its base. The whole factory was set on a river. This was the plant just south of Grove Industries. It was actually a Grove subsidiary, acting almost as an outpost. The car would be tracked the minute it passed this plant. They were coming up against the best technology in the world; America’s own. Fortunately, Smitty had known it was there. The plant itself was not quite as well-protected as the accounting for HARP.
As of this point, both of them knew anything they said in the car could be heard by the monitors situated in the Grove complex ahead. Ironically, from this point on, they could say anything personal they wished but nothing about business. McCleary nodded to the factory. They had discussed this before. Remo nodded back. He understood.
“I used to imagine my father would teach me things if I had one. Really. I was never really good at anything in my life. I was never the best. And I always thought that if I had a father, he would have taught me how to be the best. I used to think things like that,” said Remo. “I did.”
“And you thought he was your father?”
“I did.”
“Until you found out he had a contractual obligation to us instead of you.”
“Well, I think you, he, and the other guy are all . . ." said Remo. He couldn’t get the words out. He waited a few moments until the rage subsided. And then simply added:
“Enjoy yourself. I quit.”
“Wait a minute, laddie. Not now,” said McCleary.
>
“I could live with what you did to me at the beginning. I accepted that. But what the old man told me back there—what you arranged with him—I just don’t think the whole country is worth it. That’s what I think. That’s what’s bothering me. That’s what I have been thinking about.”
“This country is worth a lot, Remo. I don’t think you know enough of the world to know how blessed this country is.”
“You had a father and mother, laddie,” said Remo, imitating McCleary. “When you have parents, you have a piece of this country. When you don’t have a father you don’t have nothing. It’s your country, laddie. Not mine,” said Remo. “That’s what I’m feeling.”
The factory ended along the road, and of course, the shabby bars began again.
“You see those bars?” asked McCleary.
“How can I miss ’em? The whole state is loaded with them. What do they have? Some sort of zoning ordinance that prohibits the number of homes you can build without a cheap roadside bar to service them?”
“I probably could not walk out alive from most of those bars, because of the color of my skin. When I go to small towns I don’t know if I can find a place to sleep because of the color of my skin. And more times than not, the places I want to live, I can’t live . . .”
“Those bars?” said Remo, nodding to the side of the road.
“Any of them practically. I wouldn’t go in unless I was ready to shoot my way out.”
“Stop the car.”
“We have a schedule.”
“Stop the car,” said Remo. “You and I are going to have a beer.”
McCleary felt Remo’s foot work its way to the brake. He couldn’t kick the leg away.
“We’ll have a beer later,” said McCleary.
“Now,” said Remo.
“I don’t want a beer that much. When we’re . . . To hell with it.” Somehow Remo had gotten his feet and hands on the wheel and pedal in such a way that McCleary couldn’t pry them off. He wasn’t driving the car anymore.
McCleary pulled the car over to the first brightly lit sign as an alternative to coming to a halt in the middle of the road.
“We’ll get a couple of bottles to go,” said McCleary as they entered the din and darkness of a bar that smelled like an armpit gone sour. As McCleary had thought, there wasn’t a black face in the room. Someone pointed that out.
Another person announced loudly that the bar didn’t serve baboons. Even in the dim light McCleary could make out just what clientele this bar did serve—big persons. Some of them had their sleeves cut off to make room for very big biceps. One of them offered to show his girlfriend “what the insides of a nigger look like on a barroom floor.”
And then brotherhood came to this little roadside tavern on the West Virginia byway. Remo noticed the bar had spills on it. So he wiped them off. He wiped off every little puddle of beer and every last nutshell so that it was neat. He did this with the two largest men in the bar.
And since they were now dirty rags he tossed them through the front windows.
Everyone was so impressed with Remo’s tidiness that they came to admire his handiwork on the bar. A man with a hunting knife was the first to look. He was so impressed he left the imprint of his skull and face on the glossy surface, then collapsed on the floor.
The two largest men quivered in the little gravel space used for a parking lot. There wasn’t one person who interfered with the well-dressed black man’s drinking. In fact, several offered to buy him drinks but he refused.
“Do you feel better now?” said McCleary, checking his watch. They hadn’t lost much time, but they had lost time.
“Yeah,” said Remo. “Do you?”
“Do you think I take pleasure in watching you abuse poor ignorant people who don’t know any better?”
“Sure,” said Remo.
“I did, damn me. I did, laddie,” said McCleary, with a big laugh from the belly. “I loved it. I wish I could do something like that about your father problem.”
“To hell with it. I got work.”
“I could get to like you, laddie,” said McCleary. “But I won’t.”
And both of them understood that one might be called upon to kill the other in an emergency.
“You already do, asshole,” said Remo.
“You didn’t take a beer back there.”
“My system doesn’t use alcohol. There is no purpose to it.”
“You used to drink a lot.”
“I used to eat for taste too,” said Remo. And McCleary understood that as American as Remo appeared, there was something else going on in him that McCleary would never fathom.
The signs for Grove appeared as warnings: “Roads Ahead Impassable,” then “Private Property.” Only when they had reached the high wire gates did they see the signs marked with the skull and crossbones indicating danger.
They, like those in every vehicle on that dismal stretch of road, had been monitored for several miles back. They parked the car at a small lot near a guardhouse, showing proper identification.
They could have used those papers to get into the plant, but such was the sophistication of the HARP defenses that identification, unless verified personally by someone inside who knew them, would be invalid within an hour. And more important, according to what Smith could make out, the defenses of the HARP complex were such that it was harder to get out than to get in.
What they had to try to do was avoid the entire checking system, stay out of the Grove personnel-identification machine. The plan was simple. Cut their way in under a fence, commando style. Remo and McCleary walked back down the road, then suddenly dropped, lying there quiet in the frosty grass and chill night air, waiting to see if anyone noticed. And when no one had, McCleary eased a wire cutter up in front of him, and clipped. The wire hissed and sparked. It was electrified. McCleary grabbed it with his left hand. The left hand smoked and sputtered. But it did not release the wire.
“Did Chiun teach you that?” whispered Remo. “How do you do that? I can’t do that.”
“You lose your hand to an antipersonnel mine in Nam and you replace it with an artificial one.”
So McCleary had one hand. That explained his talk about leaving only one handprint wherever he went. McCleary said it tended to confuse people, but not as much as he liked. Now Remo understood.
Inside the fence, fifty yards of gravel and grass surrounded a four-story building. Pools of light from shaded overhead bulbs at regular intervals illuminated the red-brick masonry and ironwork. It was an old factory.
Service trucks and crates littered a side road leading to a modern administration building farther back. No words were exchanged as the pair split. McCleary would meet Remo back at the opening. He headed for the administration building. Remo headed for the factory. Remo became part of the night. McCleary had to try to keep quiet on the balls of his feet. McCleary’s nerves were taut. Remo’s were correct. To him, this was not life and death; this was proper and improper.
Remo entered through a wood-frame window. The paint was new. The wood was old. Now here was the prototype of the most sophisticated electronics in America’s arsenal, and it was housed in this old factory with wood-frame windows. Why?
It seemed odd to break into a place and not feel fear or anxiety. Remo noticed the change in himself but did not feel it. One did not use feelings for that at a time like this. It was dark. He sensed sounds throughout the building. He could almost hear Chiun expounding on the proper way to enter a castle. He just substituted factory. As for the target, he substituted the HARP prototype.
The factory was open inside, dark but for partial moonlight coming from skylights above. Catwalks surrounded the open space like a prison. The room smelled of old dust, and shoe polish and dogs. Probably watchdogs, thought Remo.
Remo heard the pads on the floor. He turned. Saw it. German shepherd. Teeth bared. Midair. At him.
And by him. Remo let it bite at air, and moved through the open space to the lower plat
form circling the inside of the factory. He took a skip-jump to the lower rail and lifted himself just as the dog got a mouthful of trouser. With that foot, he flicked it off with a turning toe into the neck. The blow landed solidly. Funny, thought Remo, the animals always do it right. And he remembered all that Chiun had said about animals, where they were right and man was wrong. Animals always believed in themselves.
Two more dogs padded well out into the center of the factory and joined the other. Remo thought he was safe from them for a moment until one leaped at a bar, and then the other joined him. It was a game of fetch. Grab the bar, and their weight lowered a ladder. Then they could fetch the man with their bare teeth.
They ran toward him. Remo leaped to the walkway above. And they ran upstairs to join him. As he moved higher, so did they until they all reached the roof. Remo was outside. It was five stories to the ground.
He thought about it. Mistake. A searing pain gripped his hand. A dog was on it, hanging on by its teeth. Another one got in behind him. And he was high on the roof. He slipped a hand under the jaws of the large dog and opened them, freeing his hand just as one of the others bowled into him, sending him to the edge, holding on to crumbling brick. He felt something below. There was a ledge. It was a window. He dropped to it. Little ugly screeching sounds came at his feet. Rats. He felt prickly clawing up his pants leg. Up his calf. At his knee. Still going. A rat in his pants. The dogs on the edge of the roof were about to jump down to get him, and Remo smashed in the window with his head and dove into the factory.
He landed correctly, letting the whole body dissipate the force of the landing and unzipping his fly to release the trapped intruder.
A large “Access Forbidden” sign hung over a doorway. Remo tested the door. It was good steel. As Chiun had said, the best iron gates always guard the king. And the king in this case was HARP. He pressured the handle into the lock and it snapped with the ease of a garter.
And then he was in the room. But he was not prepared for what he would see. Smith had drawn him a rough sketch of HARP in his office. But there it only looked like a cube.
This cube was eight feet on all sides, and hung from the ceiling. Each side was a burnished metal, and the moon played golden on its polish. It was beautiful. Remo thought of what had to be inside. All the knowledge of a technological age, the perfection of defense achievement. He heard a buzzing. It came from above the doorway. A motor. A small motor. It drove a thing with a round glass barrel. A camera. It stopped when it pointed at him. It could spot movement.
Remo The Adventure Begins Page 17
