The store manager looked unbelievingly at the gun. He had fired it point blank at Remo's chest, and he had missed. Directly behind Remo, a bullet hole smoldered through a stack of school notebooks with lines misprinted diagonally down the page.
"How'd you do that?" the manager asked. Remo felt no need to reveal the obvious: that he had moved faster than the bullet. The man fired again. Again, Remo shifted his weight off his heels, and then back onto them, and then there was another hole in the notebooks.
"This is getting dull," Remo said. And just as the fat manager was squeezing his fat finger around the trigger for the third time, he saw Remo move and decided not to shoot. As manager of a successful economy-budget chain store, he recognized his responsibility to the community. He realized that innocent people might get killed if he continued to pursue this nut case. He reconsidered shooting a defenseless man at point-blank range. He also observed that Remo had twisted the barrel of his revolver around so that it formed a perfect U and was now pointed directly into his own pudgy face.
He opened his hand to drop the gun but the gun did not drop and the hand did not open because the butt of the gun was jammed into the metacarpals of his hand. Then came the pain. "Eeeeeeeee," the manager cried.
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Remo tugged at his ear and shook his head. "That's not E. That's A-flat. You tone deaf?"
"Eeeeee," the man insisted.
"No, no," Remo said. "Here's E." He twisted the man's ear. The pain shot up eight notes.
Remo nodded his head approvingly. "Now I'll make the pain go away, if you'll do something ha return," Remo offered.
"Anything. One-thirty-five-twenty-four-sixteen-eight."
"What?"
"That's the combination to the safe. Eeeeeeeee."
"Hallelujah," said one of the checkout clerks who had come to watch the action. She ran off toward the safe in the back of the store, followed by the rest of the staff.
"So much for your money," Remo said. "Now I want you to do a little advertising, to let your customers know what an honest guy you are."
"Sure, sure," the manager grunted, the veins in his neck throbbing. "Stop this . . . please."
"In a second. Right after I give you your instructions. Are you listening carefully?"
"Yes. YES!"
"I want you to stand outside this store and tell everybody on the street what kind of operation you're running. The markups, the merchandise, the help. Everything. And the whole truth, right?"
"Right." The man panted to hold down the pain in his ear and his hand, but nothing helped.
Remo escorted him to the doorway by the ear. "Okay, start talking," he said.
"Pain," the man yelped.
"Oh. Forgot." Remo released the ear and pressed a small nerve network beneath the skin on the man's wrist and the man's arm went numb. The pistol clat-
23
tered to the sidewalk. He breathed in heavily with relief.
"Can you move your arm?" Remo asked.
"No."
"Good. Then it doesn't hurt. But if I don't like what you're saying, I'll make the numbness go away and the pain come back, understand?''
"Yes."
"Okay. I trust you. Talk."
"Help!" the man yelled. "Eeeeeee!"
"What'd I tell you?" Remo scolded. He touched the manager's wrist.
"B-bad merchandise," the man sputtered.
"Louder."
"Can't," the man sobbed.
Remo numbed his arm again. "Try now."
"This store has been cheating the pants off you every since it opened," the man yelled with the zeal of an evangelist. "I ought to know, I'm the manager. I buy rejected merchandise from factories and don't let you know about it when I sell it to you. All of these stores are stocked the same way."
"The clerks," Remo reminded him, smiling and nodding to the bewildered pedestrians on the sidewalk.
"The clerks are nasty as hell! You'd be crazy to shop here."
"Good work," Remo said and patted the man on the back. "Keep at it." Remo strolled back into the store. He picked up a bunch of plastic flowers and walked over to the assistant manager who was still rolled up tightly in his sarcophagus of green rubber garden hose. "Look what I brought to cheer you up," he said, and stuck the stems into the flower pot that used to be the assistant manager's mouth.
The petals fell off on contact. They just didn't
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make plastic like they used to. With a flick of his foot, Remo sent the ball of garden hose containing the assistant careening to the ceiling, where it bounced spectacularly and veered off in a trajectory toward the door. It sped through the exit and came to rest exactly where Remo had planned, in the gutter in front of the manager.
"It's the worst store in New York!" the manager screamed so loud that his voiced cracked. "Maybe the world!" Remo flashed him the okay sign as he trotted past.
"It's the pits!" the manager yelled. "Save your money. Go someplace else!"
But already a small crowd was filtering through the doors, anxious to buy. After all, it was New York, and a bargain was a bargain.
Remo grumbled as he pulled back the oars on the rowboat.
"Don't go so fast," Smith said, his pinched lemon face squeezed tight against the wind as Remo plowed across the lake at forty knots. "You'll attract attention."
Indeed, a few boaters on the lake in Central Park turned their heads as the little rowboat flew past with the speed of a Harley Davidson at full throttle.
"Attract attention?" Remo looked across at his two passengers. Smith was dressed in his usual three-piece gray suit, which he would have worn even if the meeting had taken place under water. Next to Smith sat an aged Oriental, with skin like parchment and thin, cloudlike wisps of white hair on his head and face. He was swathed in a long robe of red brocade. "If this is your idea of an inconspicuous meeting place, you're nuttier than I thought you were," Remo said.
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"Forgive him, Emperor," the old Oriental said as he flicked his frail hand from the sleeve of his kimono, displaying fingernails as long as penknives. "He is an ungrateful child who does not understand that it is his honor to propel this craft for the American emperor and the Master of Sinanju." He bowed his head toward Smith. "Also, he seeks to disguise his faulty breathing with this show of irritation."
"My breathing is perfect," Remo protested.
"As you see, Emperor, he is also arrogant. Now, if the Master of Sinanju had been given a decent specimen to train instead of a fat meat eater with skin the color of a fish belly-"
"Better watch it, Chiun," Remo cautioned. "Smitty's the white devil, too. Anyway, you're just mad because I didn't bring back the potting soil."
"You see? He admits it. This oafish person who has failed to bring his old master the one item which would have filled the master's final years with joy even brags to you that he is incompetent. And what was that item, you may ask? It was not one of your airplanes which serve inedible foodstuffs and require that one wait endlessly in line to use the lavatory. It was not a television set on which is shown violence and pornography in place of its once serene daytime dramas. No. What the Master of Sinanju had requested as the final flickering light in his twilight-dimmed life was only earth from the ground. Simple dirt, Emperor, so that I might have had the pleasure of growing bright flowers to ease the pain of my weary life."
"I told you what happened," Remo said.
"He was too occupied engaging in a senseless altercation, in which not, even one individual was properly assassinated, to remember his old master."
"I know about it," Smith said flatly.
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"Lo, Remo. All the world knows of your loutish-ness. An assassin who does not assassinate is a useless assassin. You are a sluggish, forgetful, and ungrateful wretch who fails even to bring a small pot of earth to an old man."
"It was disgraceful," Smith said.
"See? See?" Chiun jumped up and down in the boat delightedly. "I would be most grat
eful, Emperor, to accept a new pupil at your command. Maybe someone young. The right color."
"You could have been caught, Remo. You know what that would mean. The end of CURE." Smith turned his head in disgust.
Remo said nothing. He knew Smith didn't bring him out in the middle of a lake to slap his wrists.
And Smith was right. Not that Remo was bound by loyalty to CURE, as Smith was. CURE was what sent Remo out to kill people he did not even know, against whom he held no grudge. CURE was responsible for the thousand motel rooms instead of one home, for the near certainty that he would never have a woman of his own to love, or children to bear his name, for the plastic surgery that had changed his face and the unending stream of paper to change his identity.
Who was Remo Williams? Nobody. A dead policeman with an empty grave and a marker somewhere in the eastern United States. Only the Destroyer remained. And CURE.
But the end of CURE would mean the end of Smith, too. It was arranged that way. To Smitty, the prospect of his own death was just another item of information in his orderly file clerk's mind. If the president ordered CURE to be disbanded, Smith would press one button on his computer console to destroy all of CURE's information banks in sixty sec-
27
onds. Then he would descend unhesitatingly to the basement of Folcroft sanitarium, where his casket and a small vial of poison waited.
For Smith, suicide was just another routine thing he would do one day when he was ordered to. But somehow, and Remo would not have been able to say why, he would miss Smitty's bitter face and acidic ways.
"What's the assignment?" Remo asked softly, breaking the silence.
"A former CIA agent named Bernard C. Daniels. He blew the lid on the agency about a year ago in Hispania."
"A double?"
"No," Smith said. "A fine operative, really, judging from his past performance. But an alcoholic now. His memory is gone. Even under hypnosis, Daniels draws a blank about the Hispania business. It seems he was sent there on a routine mission, requested an extension, disappeared for three months, and then staggered into Puerta del Rey one morning and announced the CIA presence there. A big international mess, and nobody knows anything about how it happened or why. Daniels claims the CIA tortured him. They deny it. And now that the press has forgotten him, it's time to remove him before he becomes a further embarrassment to the CIA."
"Pardon me for knocking your old alma mater, Smitty, but the CIA's an embarrassment to the CIA."
"Nobody knows that better than I do."
"Since when do we do the CIA's laundry?" Remo asked.
"Washing clothes is an appropriate task for so incompetent an assassin and so ungrateful a pupil,"
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Chiun said, nodding appreciatively toward Smith.
"The agency's head of operations, Max Snod-grass, has family connections to the president. Ordinarily, I wouldn't have taken this-er-project, but I served with Snodgrass in World War II, and if he's anything like he used to be, Daniels could take out a full page advertisement in the New York Times before Snodgrass could manage to get rid of him. Snodgrass doesn't know about CURE or me or you, of course. As far as he's concerned, he's going to identify Daniels to a freelancer who will then take care of things."
"Identify him? Why not just give me Daniels's address?"
"Snodgrass insists on going by the book and fingering Daniels himself." Smith looked out over the water. "And so does the president."
"I thought CURE wasn't supposed to be political."
Smith allowed himself the briefest moment to think about something which was not on his day's agenda. It was a vision of the basement of Folcroft sanitarium. "We can get back to the dock now," he snapped. "This should be an easy assignment."
"Why?"
"Barney Daniels is a dinosaur at the CIA, an old-fashioned agent. He didn't use weapons, even at the peak of his career. You won't have any kind of interference. And he's an alcoholic. He'll be defenseless."
"That's a terrific incentive, Smitty. You really know how to make your employees enthusiastic about their work."
Smith shrugged. "Somebody's got to do it."
That was the reason Remo usually got when he
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was sent out to kill. Somebody had to do it. Somebody had to look into a dying man's eyes and think: "That's the biz, sweetheart."
And Smith wasn't often wrong in picking Remo's targets. Usually they were vermin that Remo was glad to get rid of. On several occasions, those vermin had been deadly enough to obliterate the country, if they had been allowed to live, and on those occasions, Remo felt that he was somebody after all, that he had some purpose in life besides eliminating strangers who were someone else's enemy.
But sometimes it hurt to kill. And that was why Remo was not yet the perfect assassin, although he was the best white man there was, and why he still had 80-year-old Chiun as his teacher, and why he would kill Bernard C. Daniels very quickly and with no pain, but would think about it later.
"What happens when I get too old to work for CURE, Smitty?" Remo asked as he eased the little rowboat next to the docking platform.
"I don't know," Smith answered honestly.
"Don't plan on being a gardener if you can't even remember to bring home dirt," Chiun said.
CHAPTER THREE
The phone rang twenty times. Twenty-one. Twenty-two. Twenty-three.
When he was certain it would ring until he either
30
answered it or succumbed to massive brain damage from the noise, Barney Daniels stumbled over an obstacle course of empty tequila bottles to pick up the receiver.
"What do you want," he growled.
A woman's voice, laced with southern honey, answered. "You didn't call."
"I don't love you any more," Daniels said automatically. That one usually worked with unidentifiable women.
"You don't even know me."
"Maybe that's why I don't love you."
He hung up, satisfied with a romance ended well. He should drink a toast to that romance, whoever it was with. It had probably been a glorious night. It might even have been worth remembering, but there was no chance of that now. He would give that romance a proper posthumous tribute with a drink of tequila.
Barney rooted through the mountain of empty bottles. Not a drop.
Booze-guzzling bitch, he thought. No doubt the unrememberable woman, selfish wretch that she was, had sucked up the last ounce of his Jose Macho, callously unconcerned about his morning cocktail. The whore. He was glad he was rid of her. Now he would drink a toast to having gotten rid of her. If he could only find a drink.
His eagle eye spotted an upright bottle in the corner of the room with a good half-inch left inside. Ah, the queen, he said to himself as he lumbered toward it, arms outstretched. A woman among women. He raised the bottle to his lips and accepted its soul-restoring contents.
The phone rang again. "Yes," he answered cheerfully.
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"The CIA is going to kill you," the woman said.
"Was it wonderful for you, too?" Barney crooned.
"What are you talking about?"
"Last night."
"I've never met you, Mr. Daniels," the woman said sharply. "I called you last week, but you said you were too busy drinking to talk. You said you'd call me back."
"Call ... me ... unreliable," Barney sang in a shaky baritone, snapping his fingers.
"I am trying to tell you, Mr. Daniels," the woman shouted, "that you have been marked for death by the Central Intelligence Agency, your former employer."
Barney rubbed the sleep from his eyes. "You woke me up to tell me that?"
"I am calling to offer you sanctuary."
"Do you have a bar?"
"Yes."
"I'll be right over."
"In return for that sanctuary, I would like you to perform a small task for me."
"Shit," Barney said. The world was right. There was no such thing as a free lunch. He was
about to hang up when the woman added, "I will pay you a thousand dollars."
"Well, well," he said, suddenly interested. There was still the better part of a month to go before his next Calchex pension check. All that remained of Snodgrass's last payment to Barney were the empty bottles on the floor.
"For one day's work," the woman continued tantalizingly.
"Provided it is very legal and above board and does not involve politics or espionage," Barney said.
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Who knew that the woman wasn't a secretary in Snodgrass's office? Sneaky Snodgrass wouldn't be above doing that.
"I will discuss your work when you get here."
She gave him detailed instructions on how to reach a large brownstone building on the northern end of Park Avenue, a building just across the socially acceptable line that separates the very poor from the very rich in Fun City.
"You will arrive between midnight and one A.M. by taxi. When you get out of the taxi you will place a white handkerchief over your mouth three times. Pretend to cough. Then lower the handkerchief and walk up the stairs and stand at the door. I warn you. Don't try to approach the house any other way."
"I'm just glad we're not involved in anything illegal," Daniels said.
The woman ignored him. "Do you understand everything I've said?"
"Certainly," Barney answered. "There's only one problem."
"You'll be paid very well for your problems," the woman said.
"This problem requires money. You see, I've invested very heavily in American Peace Bonds and I am without liquid capital."
"That will be straightened out when you get here."
"That's the problem. If it's not straightened out first, I won't get there."
"You're broke?"
"Said brilliantly."
"I'll have a boy at your home in two hours."
He was the biggest boy Barney had ever seen, six-and-a-half feet tall with a shaved black head shaped
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like a dum-dum bullet without a crease. He was muscular and the muscles apparently did not stop until they reached his toes, which were encased in golden slippers with toes curling up to a metallic point.
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