Remo The Adventure Begins

  IT WAS GOING TO TAKE A DEAD MAN

  TO SAVE THE COUNTRY

  He was the toughest cop in Brooklyn. Until he woke up one morning to see his own name in the obit headlines—and a new face in the mirror. The face came with a new name, a new I.D., and a new job.

  Remo Williams was going to be the Eleventh Commandment: thou shalt not get away with it. And Chiun, a wispy little Korean who talked like a fortune cookie and fought like a martial master, was going to show him how. Just in time to save a beautiful bombshell of an Army major—not to mention America—from a death merchant’s dream of destruction . . .

  A DICK CLARK/LARRY SPIEGEL/MEL BERGMAN Production

  A GUY HAMILTON Film

  FRED WARD • JOEL GREY • WILFORD BRIMLEY

  “REMO”

  J. A. PRESTON • GEORGE COE

  CHARLES CIOFFI • KATE MULGREW

  Editor MARK MELNICK

  Production Designer JACKSON DeGOVIA

  Director of Photography ANDREW LASZLO. A.S.C.

  Based Upon “THE DESTROYER” series

  by RICHARD SAPIR & WARREN MURPHY

  Executive Producers DICK CLARK • MEL BERGMAN

  Co-Producer JUDY GOLDSTEIN

  Music Composed by CRAIG SAFAN

  Written by CHRISTOPHER WOOD

  Produced by LARRY SPIEGEL

  Directed by GUY HAMILTON

  THEY ALL HAD TO DIE

  No one who worked for the organization could live if he were compromised. That was the deal two of the three men made when they entered. That left Remo. But there was a special problem with Remo.

  “Well, you would be difficult for us to kill. Your abilities far surpass ours,” said Smith.

  “So?” said Remo.

  “So there is only one man on earth equipped to kill you now.”

  “No,” said Remo.

  He couldn’t believe it. He wouldn’t believe it. He had to find out.

  “Little father. They tell me you are going to kill me,” Remo said.

  Chiun, Master of Sinanju, the man who taught Remo that a bullet can be dodged and a leap off the Statue of Liberty is no different than any other first step, looked closely at him. “Don’t call me little father,” he said.

  REMO: THE ADVENTURE BEGINS ...

  Copyright © 1985

  by Richard Sapir and Warren Murphy

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 0-451-13908-9

  SIGNET, SIGNET CLASSIC, MENTOR,

  PLUME, MERIDIAN AND NAL BOOKS

  are published by New American Library,

  1633 Broadway, New York, New York 10019

  First Printing, October, 1985

  PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

  For Larry Spiegel,

  who made it happen

  1

  Sam Makin was dead a day and a half before someone finally showed him his obituary. He couldn’t read past the headline by himself because his eyes wouldn’t focus. His head felt like it had been engraved with a tin can, and there were bandages covering most of his face.

  He tried to swallow but his crack-dry tongue had first priority on any moisture his mouth could generate.

  “It was a grand funeral,” came the voice. “The mayor was there. Your precinct captain was there. Your lieutenant was there. Your desk sergeant was there. And of course, I was there. I had to be. I had to make sure you didn’t have any really close friends.”

  The voice was almost joyful. So was the smooth black face just within Makin’s peripheral vision. The man wore an expensive hat and well-tailored jacket. Sam tried to breathe. His ribs hurt. The man talked about funerals. Somehow Sam Makin’s funeral had been this man’s problem.

  “You never know who shows up at a funeral. It’s like a poultice for acquaintances of life. Do you know what a poultice is?”

  Sam Makin groaned.

  “It’s a packet of herbs that draws out the poisons from wounds. We didn’t know who, or what, would be drawn out by your funeral. We might have found out you had a mother or a father. You might have even had a friend who cared about you. There could have been complications.”

  Sam Makin groaned again.

  “Were you hoping, laddie, that you had a mother who would remember you? Were you hoping that?”

  Sam took in the expensive cashmere of the man’s jacket. The fingernails buffed to a high gloss. The man seated himself on one side of the thin foam mattress, talking on with that same cheerful malevolence.

  “Not even a girlfriend showed up, although you had a lot of those in your day. Too many. Never cheated on one of them either, loyal man that you were. It was one woman at a time, for a week, a month. You were even engaged three times in one year. And not one of them came to your graveside; not a single rose was sent. Nothing. You want to see all your friends, your relatives? Do you think I am lying to you?”

  Sam Makin tried to move his head. He did not know if it was the pain that held it on the pillow, or a heavy weight. He could tell the sheets on the bed he was lying in were white. The walls of the room were white. The bed had white bars at the foot, with a clipboard attached. And he smelled ether. Or did he taste it? There were bandages on his head. He was in a hospital.

  The well-dressed black man busied himself with something at the foot of the bed. A short metal tripod and a small screen. Why was he saying these cruel things? What was he doing?

  “Can you focus yet? They tell me you might have a wee bit of difficulty in focusing at first.”

  Sam Makin tried to speak. The word came out with sharp pains in the back of his throat. His voice sounded odd, like a stranger’s voice. The word he said was:

  “Who?”

  But the stranger didn’t let him finish the sentence. The screen at the foot of the bed lit up. There was a graveside. A coffin rested between two pulley cords. A priest read a eulogy for Sam. It was very brief. It talked about duty. The priest didn’t even say he was a good man. He only talked about duty. Sam could see the pictures of the mourners. One mayor. One precinct captain. One desk sergeant. Six men from his Brooklyn precinct, obviously recruited as pallbearers. And when the camera pulled away Sam could see that very big graveyard and the handful of living people who had come there for him.

  The mayor spoke exactly one sentence: “Patrolman Sam Makin gave his life so that the people of Brooklyn might live in a safer city.” There wasn’t even a newspaper photographer. Sam had been the seventh patrolman killed that year. No story in that. Then the pictures on the screen ran through close-ups of the few people gathered at the graveside. Close-up of a face, then a pause. On to the next subject, and a pause. Suddenly Sam realized, realized too late, that the man sitting on his bed was controlling the film, manipulating the lapses between images. The man was studying something on his lap, an electronic device, and it was connected to Sam himself. Wires ran from Sam’s wrists to a monitor. The man was reading Sam’s reactions to the faces on the screen.

  “Nope, not a friend there, laddie. No momma. No poppa. Not a friend in the world.” The man was actually happy.

  “Who,” said Sam Makin, “are you?”

  He had finished his question.

  “Me?” said the man cheerfully rolling up the wires to the monitor. “I’m the man who killed you.” On the screen at his feet, the picture suddenly speeded up, apparently released from the controls, and there, center screen, was the shiny wood coffin, lowering into the grave, and someone saying, “Good-bye, Sam Makin.”

  Even the priest didn’t say anything more about him. As everyone left, the camera sound picked up talk of basketball and the New York Knicks, retirement allowances and how the New York City police force had to have a new summer uniform.

  “Like today re
ally made me think,” came the voice of Sam’s old desk sergeant. “We’re all out here wearing winter uniforms and it’s a warm day. But the summer uniforms aren’t that much better. You know. I was thinking that, watching the priest. Even in a surplice, a priest is better dressed for the weather than we are.”

  And then the screen went blank, and Sam Makin remembered how he had died. He had heard that sergeant’s voice at the end, and at the beginning. The sergeant had been working radio control. Patrolman Makin had been doing a solo cruise on the waterfront. He remembered how beautiful New York City looked across the East River. He remembered watching the barge loaded with happy dancers being pulled out for an evening under the Brooklyn Bridge. He remembered listening to the end of a tight Knicks game on his own little transistor, and taking a short break with a cup of coffee. And Sam Makin remembered the sergeant’s voice.

  “Twenty-one sixteen,” the sergeant’s voice crackled over the radio. It was Sam’s patrol car he was calling. The short break was over. Sam turned off the game, stuffed his Styrofoam coffee cup down a model of Miss Piggy he kept just under the dashboard, somewhat against regulations. This was an NYPD police car, and according to regulations there “shall be no foreign accoutrements not directly in support of police duties.” But he had kept Miss Piggy. As he had told so many people, she seemed to be the one woman who stayed by him.

  “Twenty-one sixteen,” said Sam.

  “You got another couple hours on the graveyard shift,” came the sergeant’s voice.

  “Great,” said Sam. He had been counting on a pizza with extra cheese, and a glass of beer. The closer his shift came to an end, the more he could taste the sharp smooth cheese and the rich foamy beer. The respite that had been fifteen minutes away had now become a two-hour-and-fifteen-minute stretch.

  “Look at it this way. You can hear the rest of the Knicks on city time.”

  Sam smiled. The sergeant knew him. Actually the two hours didn’t matter. It had been one of those weeks. Hell, it had been one of those months. Sam Makin would remember in the hospital that it had been one of those months. It had started with the reaction time drills. Apparently some idiot in Washington had decreed that for cities to get certain matching funds for their police departments, every patrolman under a certain age had to take a battery of reflex tests.

  Sam didn’t know he had scored well until he was rewarded, with another test. And this was even crazier. It was a psychological evaluation. Sam recalled question number five as if the printed form were still before him.

  “How do you imagine your mother and father would look if you saw them?”

  It didn’t take a genius to figure out that everyone in the examination room was an orphan. Then there were other questions. Finally some he just refused to answer.

  He had brought the test up to the proctor. An honest woman from Toledo, Ohio.

  “You can take this, lady, and do you-know-what. You can have the job. I am not answering these questions. There are some things I just will not do.”

  “Very good,” she said and smiled.

  At the time, three weeks before the night he spent waiting near the East River, the night he would die, Sam had been dating a psychology major at City College. Like so many before her, Sam had thought she could have been the one, the right woman for him.

  She recognized some of the questions he repeated for her.

  “That’s the standard test for the compulsive-obsessive, authority-oriented, social-avenger types.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “It’s a kind of a patriot.”

  “What do you mean some kind of a patriot?” Sam asked, hoping Sheila wouldn’t turn out like all the others. Sheila Winsted had seemed so reasonable up until this point. Reasonable, in addition to a dynamite smile and a body that could turn heads a hundred yards away.

  “There is a type that can function alone driven by a compulsion. And that compulsion is socially oriented. They feel that things are not right in the world, and that they should be made right. They have a very strong sense of justice.”

  “That’s good,” said Sam. “That’s a good thing to have. Why are you describing it like some sort of insanity?”

  “Well, it is a form of deviant behavior. All heroism is.”

  “That’s the trouble with schools today. That’s the trouble with America. When you start calling the patriots sick, then the country is sick.”

  “Sam, were there some questions on that test you refused to answer?”

  “You’re damned right.”

  “Then they got you. Those are the key questions that nail them every time. Sometimes these patriots can hide behind the answers they give, but they can’t hide behind the questions they won’t answer.”

  “Those questions were obscene. They had no right to get answers to them.”

  “Sam,” said Sheila Winsted with the dazzling smile. “You are one.”

  “And you’re a ball buster,” said Sam.

  “Like all the rest of them?” asked Sheila.

  “Yeah. Like all the rest of them.”

  “Often your kind has an inability to establish a lasting contact with anyone, although you do have a great need for love.”

  “Hey, Sheila,” said Sam, grabbing her shoulders. “Look at me. I am a human being. I am a person. I’m not a type.”

  “Don’t take it personally,” said Sheila.

  “You’re calling me a nut, and I am not supposed to take it personally? You’re crazy, Sheila.”

  And that of course had ended the affair with Sheila Winsted, leaving Sam Makin with the only one who was always there for him—Miss Piggy. Miss Piggy was with him that night. The last night.

  The desk sergeant had just checked in one more time, when Sam saw a thin black youngster zipping sneaker-fast across the front of his squad car. Two white men ran after him. When the youngster careened toward a warehouse pier the whites stayed right on his tail.

  Sam, headlights off on the squad car, slowly eased it out of position onto the street, following the running men. The two whites caught up with the black man just at the warehouse wall. Sam drove the squad car right up behind them, and drawing his 38-caliber special, slammed on the brakes and was out of the car in an instant.

  “Freeze,” he said. He had the convincer right in his hands, sighted on all three of them. He could drop them all in less than a second. He was a top marksman at the range.

  The trio got the message. Sam Makin had that kind of a voice. People knew he would shoot. Their hands went up above their heads.

  “Over to the car,” said Makin. “Move it. Hands on the car. That’s it.” The two white men leaned against the car as though they had done this before.

  “Spread ’em,” said Makin. The young black man was not that young, close up. He looked all right, just a bit groggy. Makin turned his back on him. He would help him later.

  But he didn’t have a chance to help. He knew he didn’t have a chance to help when the bat came cracking across the side of his head. Trying to swing it again was the black man he had been trying to save. He was panting out some kind of instruction to the whites. Sam felt the warm blood on the side of his face, the dullness that would precede great pain, the ringing in his head. His legs wanted to give out, but there was something in him that didn’t let him fall. He looked for his gun. It was on the wharf, sickeningly spinning away from him as the bat came back at his head. He felt his own hands on the bat, catching the force, catching the numbing hurt in a myriad of delicate bones and tissue, but the hands held. Screaming out in pain, he yanked the bat free and rammed it back, handle forward, into the giving groin of the black, who gasped like a broken water bag and fell useless to the wharf.

  Makin wasn’t thinking. He was swinging. He felt the reassuring crunch of a jaw under his elbow. One of the white hoods had a hammerlock on his head and was trying to bring him down. But Sam smashed his own head into the man’s nose, butting hard, feeling nothing. And then there was that reassur
ing crack of a face under his fist, and he kept sending it back into the teeth, into the jaw, hitting until the face was falling from him.

  And then there was one. But that one had a switchblade. Sam could run for his car and get help. He could dive for his gun and probably get the knife in his back. He could also back away. The man wasn’t coming after him.

  Sam decided to make him move—take a run at him. On the first step, the hoodlum turned to flee. But Sam got him in three good strides, kicking the feet out from under him, sending the hoodlum crashing into stacked garbage cans.

  It was over. Sam casually went over to the man, grabbed his belt buckle and with one hand hoisted him up, and then head forward dumped him into an open can.

  “Don’t eat too much,” said Sam. He retrieved his gun, handcuffed the one hood who seemed most able to run. It was the black man.

  “What was that about?” asked Sam. “You working with them? Why were you running if you tried to help them?”

  The black man didn’t answer. Sam lifted him in the air by his armpits and informed him of his rights. He informed him he had a right to remain silent. But he also informed him that he did not have a right to be held aloft over the wharf planking. And on that Sam dropped him. Then lifted him. And informed him of these rights again.

  This invariably changed a criminal’s mind about talking. In fact, this simple technique had always worked so well that despite five citations for bravery, Sam Makin was still a patrolman. A patrolman with four charges for police brutality. He had been warned a good half dozen times just to do his job.

  “We are policemen, Makin. This isn’t good guys versus bad guys. Everyone is equal under the law. And whether you like it or not, people are innocent until proven guilty.”

  “And what if someone has a knife in the back of a little old lady?”

  “You arrest him, and let the judge decree punishment.”

  He had heard that several times. And it struck him as odd on that wharf that night, with New York City twinkling massive across the dark East River, that the very same questions Sam had asked his sergeant had appeared on that funny test, the one whose last questions he refused to answer. It also seemed strange that after three drops onto the wharf planking the hoodlum was still not talking.