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The mayor nodded and walked from the room.
Rocco Nobile sipped his Amaretto casually while looking out the large glass windows toward the small unused port of Bay City. He finished the glass and set it down on the windowsill and went to a telephone on the desk in the corner of the room.
He dialed a New York number and waited until the telephone was answered.
Nobile said simply, "It's ours." He paused," listening. "That's right. The whole city. We own it"
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CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he owned nothing.
He had no automobile. When he needed one, he rented it, and when he was done with it, he just left it at the side of the road, because it gave him pleasure to imagine the face of his superior when the bill came in.
He bought clothes when he needed them, using a variety of credit cards in a variety of names, and when the clothes were dirty, he generally just threw them away.
He owned no house. He had spent the last ten years in hotel rooms, and he had no name, no family, no friends, no past and no future.
Definitely no future.
He told himself that as he sat in the fork of an oak tree, twenty-five above the ground, looking through the big picture windows of a secluded lakeside home waiting for all the guests of honor to show up.
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Fifteen had arrived, but there were still two more due. Remo would wait. He wanted them all. He thought about that for a moment, and then realized he did own something after all. He owned his self-respect and that came from pride in doing his job well.
But no friends. Another car came up the driveway of the home and parked at the side of the long row of Cadillacs and Mercedes. Two men got out and walked toward the house. Remo recognized one as the man he had been expecting. The second man was obviously his lawyer because he had a gold pen and pencil set in his outside jacket pocket and only lawyers carried pens and pencils there.
One more guest to go.
No friends. The closest thing to a friend Remo had was Chiun, the eighty-year-old Korean who was the latest Master of Sinanju, an age-old house of assassins. But he wasn't a friend. He was Remo's trainer and a confidant and like the father that Remo had never had. But not a friend.
There was Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the secret organization CURE that had trained Remo to kill America's enemies. But Smith was no man's friend. Who could love Smith? Maybe Mrs. Smith. Maybe his accountant, who was taken by the CURE director's passion for neatness. Nobody else.
There was Ruby Gonzalez, the one-time CIA agent who now worked as Smith's head assistant in CURE—the only person besides Remo and Smith and the President of the United States who knew what CURE was. And even Ruby wasn't a friend. Remo respected her brains and her toughness, but
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the young black woman came from a world different from Remo's, and your friends were usually those who had shared the springs and summers of your life.
That was it. Everybody else Remo knew or met were people he had been ordered to kill.
Another car arrived, kicking up gravel on the roadway beneath Remo's feet as he sat in the tree. It was a Continental Mark Four, which the owner had seemed determined, by sheer tastelessness, to promote to a Mark Ten. The auto was littered with chrome and rabbit tails and pinstripes and special hood medallions. The driver was alone. He had a red face and sandy hair and Remo recognized him as the last guest, Lee-Bob Barkins, who had killed his wife with a chainsaw and then tried to use her body for chum while sharkfishing off the Alabama coast. Unfortunately, while he had been using her left hand for bait, a passing boat had snagged his line and ripped off the hook and hand. Lee-Bob Barkins had fled, but the other boat had gotten his boat's ID number and police were able to identify the dead woman from some identifying scars on her left hand, suffered three years earlier when Lee-Bob, a good old boy in a bet with some other good old boys, had taken to her with a hunting knife.
Lee-Bob at his trial had claimed he was framed, but he had been convicted of murder, sentenced to life, but then was pardoned after serving fourteen months, as an outgoing governor turned the jails
loose.
He had released rapists and murderers and arsonists and kidnappers and terrorists. All had one thing in common. They had money.
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Seventeen of the worst were now inside, in the lakefront home of Sam Speer, the outgoing governor's closest adviser, friend and confidant, for which, Remo knew, in politics you read bagman.
Seventeen men and Speer. That was tonight's assignment. There were also ten assorted lawyers who might get in the way, but that didn't bother Remo. There were too many lawyers anyway. Nobody ever got criticized for killing a lawyer.
Remo pushed himself out of the fork of the tree and dropped the twenty-five feet to the ground. He landed without a sound, his feet moving in a walking motion even before he touched ground.
He looked in the picture window in time to see the men raising champagne glasses in a toast.
Fragments of conversation drifted out to Remo's ears.
". . . act of mercy and charity."
"... in case of an investigation, don't say anything."
". . . charity, my ass ... cost me two hundred thousand."
". . . cost us all two hundred thousand."
". . . let anybody hear that and you'll be back in."
Remo recognized Sam Speer, the outgoing governor's right-hand man. He was a big, fattish man with a simian swoop of dark hair growing low across his forehead and hooded eyes that made him look as if he were just ready to doze off.
He was the governor's friend, Remo thought. Even that governor had a friend. And these seventeen animals in the Sam Speer living room. They probably had friends too. Somebody at least thought
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T
enough of them to put up two hundred thousand dollars each to get them out of jail. Maybe they had families as well as friends.
And Remo had neither.
He didn't think it was fair. Some guys had all the luck.
He thought about that while he walked around the back of the house and down to the lake, where he idly tossed stones into the water. Remo wore black trousers and a black T-shirt and he knew that, from the house, he would be lost in the shadows and invisible. He was a thin man with dark hair and eyes as deep as night and the only sign that he might have been something unusual were his thick wrists, which he frequently flexed and rotated as if they caused him discomfort.
Family and friends.
He had been recruited into CURE just because he had no family. He was an orphan, a cop on the Newark police force, and then one night he was framed for a murder he didn't commit, sent to an electric chair which didn't work, and when he woke up, he had been told he was working for CURE, a secret agency set up to fight crime. If he didn't want to work for CURE, they would just have finished the job the electric chair was supposed to have done.
He had been warned at the start. "You'll have no friends, Remo Williams. You'll have no family. You'll have no place you can call home. All you'll have is a sense that maybe, just maybe, you can do something to make America better."
He had thought it was bullshit then, and now, more than a decade later, he still thought it was
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bullshit. But he did not leave, and he knew why he stayed. Because CURE and the training of Si-nanju had given Remo the only thing he had ever had in his life. Self-respect. Pride in his work. And nobody could take that away from him.
Behind him, from the front door of the house, Remo heard sounds and he drifted back through the darkness under the trees.
Two men were leaving the home of Sam Speer. One he recognized as Billy-Ben Bingham, a particularly vicious rapist who had been released after serving ten years of a life sentence. The man with him looked lawyerly. They headed for a car and Remo moved up next to the car in the darkness. When the motors had started and the lawyer backed the car up and made a turn in the drive
way to head back toward the road, Remo opened the front door and slid in next to the rapist.
"Who. . . ?" said the driver.
"What the ... ?" said the rapist.
"Hi," said Remo. "Just drive. I'm getting out soon."
The rapist's hands were at his throat but they closed on air and Remo put him away with an,economical right index finger into the right kidney area. The rapist whooshed and slumped forward against the dashboard's digital clock between Remo and the lawyer, who threw the car into parking gear and reached for the door handle.
Remo's left hand pulled him back inside the car. Remo's right hand dropped the gear shift into "drive" and steered the car down the driveway, out onto the road, and made a right-hand turn.
Twenty-five yards down the road was a sign
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posted by the lakeside homeowners association, explaining that it wanted to keep out bad elements. On the right side was a small roadway leading down to a boat ramp. The way the lawyer's head flopped at the end of Remo's left hand, he knew the man's neck had snapped. Remo drove to the water's edge, dropped the gear shift in "low," and stomped on the gas pedal. As the car surged, he slipped out the door and watched as the car hurried down the slight incline, hit the edge of a wooden dock, teetered momentarily, then dropped into the waters of the lake.
The car hit with a splat and a sizzle. It began to sink but Remo did not stay to watch it because he was already moving back toward the house. He had to be careful that a big bunch of them didn't all leave at once, because then he would have to dispose of them on the lawn and that could get messy.
He waited in the tree again and heard Sam Speer's voice telling them that it would be safest if they continued to leave one at a time. "Just in case."
Remo nodded with satisfaction. "Good for you," he mumbled to himself. "Good for you."
The next one was Lee-Bob Barkins, who got into his Lincoln, recklessly swerved it around and started up the driveway. As he passed under Remo's tree, Remo let himself drop down onto the roof of the car. The driver's window was open and Remo turned his body sideways on the roof of the car, and reached his left hand through the open window and put it "around Lee-Bob's throat.
"Hi, fella," Remo said.
Lee-Bob saw the head hanging upside down in
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the driver's window and he wanted to reach out and crush it, but the pressure around his own throat was too great.
"Twenty five yards down the road, hang a right," Remo said.
Lee-Bob hit the brakes and the car stopped.
"C'mon," Remo said. "I don't have all night."
He slipped off the car's roof, still holding onto Lee-Bob's throat, pushed the man roughly across the seat and got in behind the wheel.
"Who are you?" Lee-Bob managed to sputter.
"I'm the welcome wagon," Remo said. "Come to make your brief stay in the outside world as pleasant as possible. Goodbye."
He heard the bones separate in the neck as he turned into the small roadway leading to the boat ramp. Behind him, he heard voices in the doorway of the Speer house.
"Damn," Remo said. "Hurry, hurry, hurry."
He got out of the car, aimed its wheels straight down toward the water, then wedged Lee-Bob Bar-kins under the dashboard against the gas pedal. He closed the door behind him, dropped the gear shift into "drive," and the car gunned down the slight hill. Remo did not wait to hear the splash. Two more men were getting into a car in front of Speer's house.
He caught that car on the road. In it was Jimmy-Joe Jepson, an arsonist whose fires had killed twenty-three persons. Remo decided that putting everybody into the lake was too time-consuming, so he just turned off the key after killing Jimmy-Joe and his lawyer, and let the car roll down the road until it stopped, nose-first, against a tree.
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It was getting complicated now. Remo reached into the pocket of his black T-shirt and took out a list. Right. He had Lee-Bob Barkins. And he had Billy-Ben Bingham. And he had Jimmy-Joe Jepson. Plus assorted attorneys. But they weren't on the list. Tonight lawyers were a bonus he would give Smith for free, just as a part of his annual contribution to the good of the republic.
By the time he reached the seventeenth car, the roadway leading from Speer's house was pretty full, so Remo took Tim-Tom Tucker and his lawyer in the driveway, before they even started their car.
Remo looked at his list again. Every one of them. He had them all. He snapped his index finger against the list with satisfaction. "There," he said. "Now nobody can complain about that."
He walked to the front door of the house, unlocked because even though the crime rate in the South was the highest in the nation, it wasn't crime that took place in houses. It was generally just senseless violence that Remo thought came out of a streak of viciousness that ran deep through the Southern character. It exploded in saloons and parking lots and on street corners, but it was rarely premeditated so no one ever had to lock their doors. Remo was glad he did not have to live in the South. Angry violence annoyed him as a waste of energy.
He strolled inside the house and found Sam Speer in the living room, pouring the last of a bottle of champagne into an oversized brandy snifter.
"Who are you?" Speer asked as he turned to face Remo.
"My name is Remo."
"What do you want?"
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"What I want is some time off to go fishing," Remo said. "But what I got is to kill you."
"Not a chance, Buddy," Speer said. He reached inside his jacket, very quickly for such a big man, and pulled a .38 caliber revolver from a shoulder holster.
Remo shook his head.
He frowned. "Don't waste my time with that," he said.
Speer raised the gun at Remo and squeezed the trigger.
He blinked his eyes at the sound of the report. When he opened them, Remo was not standing in front of him. Nor was he on the floor in a bloodied heap.
"You're not a nice person," he heard Remo say. "Just because you're a fat, ugly schemer who would steal a hot stove and come back for the smoke doesn't mean you couldn't try to be a nice person."
Speer felt the tap on his left shoulder, but before he could spin around and fire again, he felt a sharp burst of pain in the center of his back. Normally, the brain could tell a body what kind of pain it was suffering from and where, but the brain relied on impulses that traveled along the spinal cord, and here Speer's spine had been snapped, so he felt nothing and knew nothing after the first burst of pain and instead just slowly slumped to the oak flooring of the house.
On a table, Remo saw a large pile of money. It should have been seventeen payments of two hundred thousand dollars each. He calculated quickly and decided that that would be more than a million dollars. Maybe even two million.
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And because he had just heard on the news that inflation was caused by excess money in circulation, he started a fire in the fireplace and burned the money before he left.
Remo had left his car in the parking lot of the Ding-Dong Diner, only three miles away, so he walked because it was a nice night. The birds sang in the trees under the bright Southern moon and there was just enough breeze to cool the air, and it was the kind of night that made a man glad to be alive, Remo thought.
Chiun was still sitting in the passenger's seat of the rented automobile, watching the front door of the diner which had been converted from an old railroad car.
The frail old man did not turn around as Remo opened the unlocked door and slid behind the wheel. Instead, his hands folded inside the billowing sleeves of his dark green evening kimono, he watched the front door of the diner with intense concentration.
"All done," Remo said.
"Shhhh," said Chiun. "This is very interesting."
"What's very interesting?"
"This is a place to eat, correct?" Chiün asked.
"That's right."
"Everybody who goes inside is already fat," Chiun said. "If they are already fat, why are they going
in there to eat?"
"Even fat people have to eat," Remo said.
Chiun turned his hazel eyes on Remo and stared at him with disdain.
"Who told you that?" he asked.
"Listen. I do a big night's work and all you're interested in is fat people eating?" Remo started the
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car and drove over the pitted ruts of the diner driveway, out onto Route 123, heading north.
Chiun sighed. "I suppose now I must listen to your boring account of how you spent your evening," he said.
"No, you don't. It's not important. Twenty-seven guys, that's all. Twenty-eight if you count the one who wasn't a nice person."
"Paaaah. And faaaaah. It is a nothing," Chiun said. "Numbers are not important. What is important is attitude and performance. Was your elbow straight? Did you take pride in doing adequate work? These things are important."
"Strangely enough, Little Father, I did," Remo said as he turned off Route 123 and headed east toward the coast on County Road 456, a narrow, unlighted two-lane road. "I thought to myself that all I have in this world is self-respect for a job well done."
"Adequately done, knowing you," Chiun said.
"Well done," Remo insisted. They were silent for a few moments. Remo said, "Funny, to think of being proud about killing."
"Killing?" said Chiun. His voice scaled the heights of outrage. "Killing? You call the work of an assassin mere killing? Booms kill ..."
"Bombs," Remo corrected.
"Yes," said Chiun. "And they are not proud. Bullets kill. They are not proud either. Are germs proud? Yet who kills more than germs? I remember once, a particular bad sort of germ which carried off almost half my native village of Sinanju."
"Halfway measures are never any good," Remo said. Chiun ignored him.
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"But those germs were not proud. Now, you are not a boom . . ."
"Bomb."
"Or a bullet or a germ. You are an assassin. If you do well or, in your case, adequately, you must be proud. Really, Remo." Chiun's hands had come from his sleeves and fluttered in front of his face as he spoke. "Really, you surprise me. If you were a doctor or a lawyer or some other menial, I could understand not being proud. But an assassin? Trained by Sinanju? Not being proud? It staggers me."
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