In all, the meeting took less than ten minutes. "That seemed to go okay," Remo said after they left the magnificent palace, which had started as a modest hunting lodge for Louis XIII and eventually metastasized into a display of the sort of vulgar opulence that got French kings' heads separated from French kings' bodies.
They were on the grounds of Versailles, walking past the Basin of Neptune fountain group. Mist spraying from the fountains chilled the crowds of evening sightseers.
"I suppose," Chiun said. "Not that it matters. These modern Gauls cannot afford our services. In order to hire us, some of them might have to work more than two days a week, which is as offensive a thing to them as warm bathwater. On top of that they have ugly notions of self-governance."
"No argument here," Remo said. "Nothing uglier than socialism in a beret." As he spoke, he turned left and right, scrutinizing everyone they passed.
"What are you doing?" Chiun asked.
"Isn't this the part where some guy jumps out of the bushes and tries to brain me with a baguette?"
"Just because the first two were obvious does not mean they all will be," the Master of Sinanju said dryly. "If they have planned well, it will happen when you do not expect it. Now, come. We have something more important than your impending attempted murder to worry about."
They took the cab into Paris. Remo didn't sense anyone following them into the city.
At Chiun's insistence, while waiting for the next assassin to attack they stopped for supper at a little cafe on the Rue des Ecoles. They were seated outdoors near the street. The place was nearly empty. Their corner table was tucked behind some potted plants away from the other diners.
Chiun ordered duck. Remo got fish. Both men asked for a side order of brown rice.
The waiter who returned to serve them was not the same one who had seated them. The first had been a tall, thin man in his twenties. This waiter was shorter, stockier and older. He had thick, callused hands that didn't seem to have gotten that way from carrying serving trays. The waiter's black uniform didn't fit him very well.
The waiter set their plates before them and produced a bottle of wine.
"Your wine, monsieur," he said in thickly accented English.
"I didn't order wine," Remo replied.
"It is with the compliments of the management." As he spoke, the waiter poured out a glass.
"I said I don't want wine," Remo insisted, irritated, as the waiter poured. "The only thing dirtier than a Frenchman's ass is his feet."
"Heh-heh-heh," said the Master of Sinanju.
The waiter's molars screeched. He forced a tight-lipped smile. "Monsieur obviously has a ready wit."
Chiun ignored the waiter's grinding teeth. "Did you know, Remo, that washing day used to come only once a year in France? It was canceled after the one Frenchman in the entire country who celebrated it died of syphilis. Heh-heh-heh. Frenchman's feet. Heh-heh-heh."
The old Korean turned his attention to his meal. Remo had picked up the stemmed glass. He sniffed the wine. The waiter looked on anxiously.
Remo didn't drink. He just sniffed. After a moment's sniffing, he looked up at the waiter with hooded eyes.
"It has a good nose, no?" the waiter asked.
"Yeah," Remo said. "Smells real swell."
The waiter was still waiting a little too eagerly for Remo to put the wineglass to his lips. Instead, Remo poured the wine onto the tabletop.
The table immediately began fizzing. The white linen tablecloth smoked. The wine proceeded to chew a hole straight through to the floor.
"Nice try," Remo said. "Next time try doing a little research, Frenchie. I don't drink wine, beer or spirituous beverages of any kind. You mind getting me some water?"
"Make that two," Chiun said, seemingly oblivious to the smoking crater in the middle of the table.
The waiter's smile tightened nervously to the point where his face looked as if it would shatter into little unctuous shards. His little mustache twitched. A creeping dark stain spread across the front of his uniform trousers.
"I do apologize," the waiter mumbled. "This wine has obviously gone off."
Leaving the bottle on the table, he marched woodenly into the back of the restaurant.
"And bring back a new table while you're at it!" Remo hollered at the retreating waiter.
The man offered a numb "oui." His entire body shaking, he disappeared into the kitchen.
"That's a relief," Remo said, chewing a forkful of rice. "For a minute I thought he was going to surrender."
"That is not permitted," Chiun insisted sternly as he ate. "The French contestant throws up his hands in surrender nearly every time the Time of Succession comes around."
"It happen to you?"
"No, but the Frenchman who tried to assassinate my father tried it."
"Bet that got him far."
"Actually," Chiun mused, "he was particularly sniveling, even by French standards. My father took pity on him and accepted his surrender."
"No kidding. What did he do with him?"
"He brought him back to Sinanju. Some of my earliest memories are of that smelly round-eye wandering lost around the village licking the worms from the undersides of rocks."
"Mmm?" Remo said, chewing slowly. "What happened to him?"
"He attempted to sully the virtue of my father's sister. His head is in the attic somewhere. I can show you when we next return to Sinanju."
"Pass," Remo said.
The waiter returned from the kitchen with their water.
He had gotten control of himself once more. His body no longer shook. His hands gripped the heavy crystal water glasses with determination.
"Your water, gentlemen," he said, setting down the glasses. "I apologize again for the problem with the wine. I am certain I do not know what happened."
"Yeah, yeah, yeah," Remo said. "If you're gonna keep up the waiter shtick, do it downwind."
"I will see now to moving you to another table." The man took a step back, out of Remo's line of sight.
Behind Remo the waiter pulled out a razor-thin garrote that was stitched into the hollow seam of his shirtsleeve. With a hiss he flung it around Remo's neck, pulling tight. He yanked, grunting triumphantly.
The wire should have sliced through flesh and bone. But to the waiter's intense frustration, his victim didn't appear to even notice that he was being strangled.
Remo didn't pause in his chewing. "I hope they get better than this," he commented to the Master of Sinanju as the French assassin tightened the wire even more.
"Are you going to eat that?" the old Korean asked, pointing at the fish on Remo's plate.
"You ordered the duck, you live with duck."
"I want duck," Chiun insisted.
"Good, because that's what you ordered," Remo said.
"Die!" growled the French killer. Muscles in his arms bulged. Sweat had broken out across his forehead.
"Are you still here?" Remo asked, irritated. Reaching up, he snicked the garrote with his index fingernail. The wire snapped and the waiter flew backward, knocking over two tables. Plates crashed to the floor and silverware flew everywhere.
"And I can do without the Jerry Lewis impression," Remo said.
As he spoke, Remo snagged the wine bottle from where it still sat on the table. While the waiter struggled to get up, Remo stuffed the bottle's neck far down the man's throat.
Burning wine came out the man's nostrils. The killer tried desperately not to swallow. Then he swallowed. He wiggled for a moment in furious death before growing still.
The instant the waiter's arms flopped to the floor, a group of men hurried efficiently from the kitchen, calming the other restaurant patrons. Thanks to the upturned table, no one had seen quite what had happened.
The waiter's throat and stomach were dissolving into open hissing sores. Someone posing as a maitre d' threw a clean white linen tablecloth over the body. The man bowed his head respectfully to the Master of Sinanju.
&n
bsp; "I will inform the president, sir," he said crisply.
"Before you do that," Chiun said, "tell the serving staff that I would like this order to go." He pointed a long fingernail at his plate.
Remo noted that, in the confusion, his plate of fish had somehow found its way in front of the Master of Sinanju.
Chapter 12
Word of the dead French assassin found its way to Folcroft Sanitarium by the normal CURE means. Electronic tendrils extending from the basement mainframes collected the data in secret from an unknowing French intelligence computer. It was detected, translated and forwarded to the appropriate computer terminal for analysis.
For years the appropriate-indeed, the only-terminal with access to classified CURE files had been the one in the office of Dr. Harold W. Smith. But those days were gone.
Mark Howard read the report from Paris from the confines of his small office in Folcroft's administrative wing.
The centerpiece of the room was the large oak desk behind which Mark sat. The desk was so big that there was barely enough space for anything else in the office. So cramped was the room that for months after coming to work at Folcroft, Mark had regularly banged his head against the wall when he leaned back in his chair and bumped his shins on the desk's legs whenever he tried to get around it to the door.
If someone had walked by Mark's open office door, they might have laughed at the sight of such a big desk in such a small space. But few people strolled the halls of Folcroft. Besides, Mark kept his door closed and locked at all times.
In his early months at CURE, the size of the office used to bother Mark. These days he hardly noticed. His life had become far too serious in the past two years to worry about trivialities.
The rest of the room was plain and businesslike. In this Mark Howard had picked up his decorating habits from Dr. Smith. There was only one personal touch in the entire office.
For a time Mark's eight-year-old nephew used to draw pictures of Superman in flight. He would carefully color them in with red and blue crayons and have his mother cut them out with scissors so he could fly his little paper Men of Steel around the house. When Mark went home for the holidays the previous year, his nephew had grown out of that phase and Mark's sister was throwing a bunch of the little paper Supermen away. Mark saved one.
The cutout was in a little frame on Mark's desk. When Dr. Smith saw the picture, the older man frowned silent disapproval. Mark noted his employer's expression but hadn't removed the picture. The assistant CURE director couldn't express it in words, especially not to an emotionless man like Dr. Smith, but there was such great, wonderful innocence to the picture. Such hope. That simple pencil-and-crayon drawing reminded Mark Howard why he, why CURE, why America was here.
The picture stayed.
Mark wasn't looking at his nephew's masterpiece now. His greenish-brown eyes were locked on his computer screen.
He read the report from France with a determined frown.
Mark wasn't surprised at whom the French had selected. When Dr. Smith had briefed him in secret months ago about the rite of passage Remo would be going through, Mark immediately went to work sifting through CURE's files, compiling short lists of likely assassins from countries all around the globe. The man France ultimately selected as its champion was the name at the top of Mark's list.
It might have given another man satisfaction to have been right. Not Mark Howard. Pride at such a time was inappropriate. After all, a man was now dead.
Not that Mark objected to killing. Not when it was necessary. But the taking of a fellow human life was far too serious a thing to allow self-serving emotions to intrude.
Mark knew this from experience.
Although he did his best not to think about it, men had died thanks to him.
When he first came to CURE, there had been a patient at Folcroft by the name of Jeremiah Purcell. Purcell was a man with special psychic gifts. A psychotic, a murderer. The patient had manipulated Mark's receptive mind on a psychic level the assistant CURB director couldn't begin to understand. Mark had unwittingly freed him from his confinement. And people had died.
Although Mark hadn't been in control of his actions, that didn't lessen the guilt in the days and weeks after those terrible events. The patient was still at large. Purcell had gone silent after his escape from Folcroft. But there were probably others dead. All thanks to Mark Howard.
Those deaths had been at a distance. Other hands had done the actual deed. Maybe he could have lived with that. Gotten over the guilt. But they weren't the only dead.
Mark had killed. Personally. With his own two hands.
Only one man. Not that "only" could dismiss the horrible significance of such an act.
It was justified. The man with the gun on that cold December night had been about to shoot Dr. Smith. But that didn't matter. The guilt afterward had swelled to a point where it threatened to consume Mark. He had fought to hide it, to control it. But for months through spring and summer the anguish was almost more than he could bear. He came to work, did his job, went home. No one, not Dr. Smith, not anyone had guessed the crushing burden Mark Howard lived under all those months.
And then he stopped it. Just like that.
He remembered the day. September 10, 2001. Mark had finally gotten his nephew's drawing framed. He had just put the small frame on his desk. As he sat there in the yellow afternoon sunlight, he thought of the tiny hand that drew it, of the life of joys and heartaches that had not yet been explored, and of the lurking forces that threatened that young life, and the lives of all Americans.
Mark thought of his job at CURE. A frustrating, ugly, dangerous job. And a necessary one.
Guilt over what he had done, over what he had to do, was a small price to pay to help ensure the safety of those lives. And in that moment of realization, guilt was replaced by cold determination.
There were terrible events that took place the next day. Events that changed the world and America forever. But in a quiet moment the day before the world turned upside down, Mark Howard had already changed. The events of September 11 only helped to codify that resolve. Since that time, Mark had come to his small Folcroft office determined to toil and sweat and worry to the best of his abilities so that his fellow Americans did not have to.
For the moment his regular CURE duties were on hold.
Mark logged the death of the French assassin. The man joined the two English Source agents who had been reported dead earlier that day. He wondered briefly what country would be next. Most likely Germany.
Mark was pulling up his list of the best-known German killers when the phone at his elbow jangled to life.
It was the outside line.
Puzzled, he glanced at his watch. After 6:00 p.m. Mark had recently convinced Dr. Smith to relax his schedule. Now, two days a week, Tuesdays and Thursdays, the CURE director went home from work at 5:00 p.m. These days Smith's secretary generally left around the same time. After they were gone the calls were routed to an answering service.
This was the public line, not the one used by family or friends. Confused, Mark scooped up the clunky old phone.
"Folcroft. Mark Howard speaking."
The noise that issued from the earpiece was so loud, Mark immediately had to yank the phone away from his ear. For an instant it sounded like the electronic shrieks of an Internet connection. For a second he held out the phone, unsure if it was some sort of malfunction.
He was about to hang up when he heard a series of distinct sobs amid the horrible shrieks. Only then did Mark realize that the noise wasn't phone static. It was the sound of a woman in distress.
He drew the phone tentatively back to his ear. "Hello?" he asked uncertainly.
The woman cried, she screamed. She wailed full heart and soul in pain into the phone. All in a language that Mark Howard could not begin to understand.
"I'm sorry," he said after a moment of listening to the crying woman. "I think you've got the wrong number."
He
didn't know what else to say. He was about to hang up on the pitiful caller when she suddenly blurted out something that made Mark's hand grow white on the receiver.
"Sinanju," the woman bawled. Mark gulped. He hesitated.
Korean. Yes, the woman could be speaking Korean. He had heard Remo and Chiun speak it enough. He didn't know what to do. This was unprecedented in his CURE experience.
"I-I'm not sure what you want," he said cautiously, his heart beating faster.
"Sinanju!" the woman repeated, her frustration apparent. And then her voice failed and the gibberish she had been blurting was consumed by grief. She wept into the phone.
"Can you speak English?" Mark asked.
But the woman was no longer listening. She rebuffed all of Mark's attempts to question her. She finally hung up the phone in the middle of her pitiful sobbing.
Swallowing hard, Mark hung up his own phone. He grabbed it back up immediately. He held it there for an uncertain moment, halfway from desk to ear. He glanced at his watch. It was suppertime at the Smith household. Right about now Dr. Smith would be sitting down to a plate of his wife's rock-hard meat loaf. Mark Howard had been invited to supper with the Smiths on a number of occasions. He knew well of all the horrors it entailed.
"You can thank me later, Dr. Smith," Mark muttered.
From memory he began dialing his employer's home number.
Chapter 13
They didn't leave France.
Remo was surprised when Chiun flagged them a cab to the Left Bank. On a forgotten side street near the Hotel de la Loire, the taxi stopped in front of a small apartment building.
"Wait here," Chiun commanded the taxi driver.
"Why aren't we taking a train to Spain to kill someone on a plain?" Remo asked as they mounted the front stairs.
"Because everything in this world does not conform neatly to what you think it should be, that's why," the old man replied mysteriously.
Remo didn't like the sound of that at all. His teacher's words and tone screamed trap.
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