Terror Squad Page 10

  “If we hadn’t had such a meaningful relationship,” she said, “I’d think you were being sarcastic. Even if it isn’t a bad idea.”

  “It’s yours,” Remo said, “to use as you will. You don’t even have to give me credit for it. Only one proviso.”

  “Oh?”

  “You have to leave the Brooklyn Bridge.”

  “Why?” she asked suspiciously, her mind already made up that if one were to blow up bridges around New York, the only one really worth blowing up would be the Brooklyn Bridge.

  “Because Hart Crane wrote a great poem about it, and because people sometimes have important reasons to get to Brooklyn.”

  “Yes, indeed,” Chiun said, removing his face from the hole in the window long enough to speak.

  “All right,” said Joan. “The bridge is yours.” Quietly, she vowed to herself that the Brooklyn Bridge would be the first to go, meaningful relationship or no meaningful relationship.

  “Can I charge tolls?” Remo asked, as the waitress put their drinks in front of them.

  “Tolls will be outlawed in our new world,” Joan said. “The bridges will belong to everybody.”

  “Good reason then to blow them up,” Remo said. He lifted his glass and drained it. “Bottoms up,” he said. Joan drained her drink.

  “Phewww,” she said. “It’s too sweet.”

  “I’ll fix that,” Remo said. “You’ll see.” He signaled the waitress for a refill for him and for Joan. “And not so sweet,” he called.

  Chiun still dawdled over his glass of juice.

  Teterboro was what Joan had been talking about. It was an airport in New Jersey and Remo had to find out what had been planned.

  As she was halfway through her second drink, he broached the subject.

  “I was only joking about the bridges,” he said. “But if I were you guys, I’d really be doing something like that. You know, working on the transportation angle. Imagine, tying up Kennedy Airport or bombing the runways at Newark Airport.”

  Joan Hacker giggled. “Child’s play,” she said.

  “Child’s play?” Remo said. “Not at all. It would be tough and dangerous and would really advance the cause of revolution. I think it’s brilliant.”

  She slurped her glass until she had drained the last drop of heavy liquor from the bottom. Remo signaled for another as she said thickly, “You’ll never be a revol-ara-lutionary. You don’t think well enough.”

  “No? Well, you tell me a better idea.”

  “I will. How about if you took over the control tower? And had all the planes bumping into each other? Hah? Hah? Hah? Less work. More chaos. Terrific.”

  Remo shook his head in admiration. “Terrific,” he agreed. “I’ve got to hand it to you. Sneak in after dark, say at midnight, take over the tower and whammo, instant chaos. Doubly so, during the nighttime.”

  She drained a big swig of her third Singapore Sling.

  “Midnight, phooey,” she said. “How about high noon? Daylight makes terror even more unbearable.”

  Chiun’s ears perked up when he heard that. He turned from the window. “That is true, child. That is true. So it is written.”

  “You bet your sweet banana, so it’s written,” Joan Hacker confided to the Master of Sinanju, draining another swallow of her drink. “I know, for a fact. I have sources in the Third World too, you know.”

  She drank again.

  “Oh, yeah,” she said brightly to Remo. “Now I remember what I was supposed to tell you.” She held her glass up over her head, letting the last drops roll into her mouth.

  “What was that?” Remo said.

  “I remember now,” she said. “The dead animals are next.”

  Chiun turned slowly in his seat.

  “I know that,” Remo said. “Who told you to tell me?”

  She rubbed her fingers together in the shame-shame gesture. “I’m not telling, I’m not telling, I’m not telling,” John Hacker said, and then the revolutionary priestess smiled once, rolled her eyes back in her head and collapsed face forward on the table, unconscious.

  Remo looked at her, then at Chiun, who stared at the drunken girl, shaking his head.

  “There we are, Chiun, those dead animals again. Are you going to tell me what it’s all about?”

  “It will not matter,” Chiun said. He looked at Joan again and shook his head.

  “She is very young to die,” he said.

  “Everyone is very young to die,” Remo said.

  “Yes,” Chiun said. “That is true. Even you.”

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  REMO SENSED THE TAIL AFTER he and Chiun had gone about two blocks from The Bard where Joan Hacker, high priestess of the impending revolution, slept on a table, the result of three Singapore Slings in fifteen minutes.

  Remo motioned Chiun to stand with him and look into the window of a souvenir shop.

  “Why am I forced to feign interest in all this Chinese shlock?” Chiun asked, using another of the Yiddish words he had learned on vacation a few years before.

  “Quiet. We’re being followed.”

  “Oh, my goodness,” Chiun mocked. “By whom? Should I run? Should I scream for the police?”

  “By that guy back there in the blue suit,” Remo said. “Don’t look now.”

  “Oh, my, Remo, you are wonderful. First for discovering him, and then for instructing me not to alert him that we have discovered him. How lucky I am to be allowed to accompany you.” Chiun began to babble then, streams of Korean words, punctuated by an occasional in-English “how wonderful” or “how lucky I am.”

  Finally, it all dawned on Remo and he said sheepishly: “I guess you spotted him, too.”

  “The Master cannot lie,” Chiun said. “I absorbed his vibrations. And also those of the other man who waits for us farther down the street and has been keeping one-half block ahead of us since we left that opium den.”

  “Where?” Remo said.

  “Don’t look now,” China said, giggling. “Oh, how lucky I am to be with you. Oh, how wonderful you are. Oh, how grand. Oh, how…”

  “All right, Chiun, knock it off, will you? Anybody can make a mistake.”

  Chiun turned immediately serious. “But not one who presumes to challenge the dead animals. For him, any mistake will be his last. You are lucky again, however; these men are not the agents of the legend. You have nothing to fear.”

  That relieved the threat, but it did not answer the question: who were the men and why were they following Remo and Chiun?

  The two men continued their tail, one behind and one ahead, as Remo and Chiun strolled casually back to their apartment, and Remo explained what the terrorists had planned for tomorrow. Teterboro was a small private airport in New Jersey, but probably one of the busiest airports in the world. Planes took off and landed every thirty or forty seconds. Seizing the control tower and giving conflicting traffic directions to different planes might touch off a chain reaction of accidents that could cost lives and create chaos,

  And planes that would be frightened away by the accidents would probably wander into Newark Airport or Kennedy or LaGuardia, where their potential for accidental destruction would be fantastic, considering the big jet jobs coming in and out all the time.

  “Why is it,” Remo asked, “that no matter what terrorists are for, they always wind up killing people?”

  Chiun shrugged unconcernedly. “It is a nothing.”

  “Dozens could die,” Remo said heatedly.

  “No,” Chiun insisted. “There is an old Korean proverb. When two dogs attack, one barks but the other bites. Why do you spend your life worrying about barking dogs?”

  “Yeah? Well, there’s an old American proverb too,” Remo said.

  “I’m sure you will tell me of it.”

  “I will,” Remo said, but did not since he was not able to think of one right offhand.

  They continued walking in silence and in the middle of the next block, Remo said brightly:

  “Ho
w about ‘a stitch in time saves nine’?”

  “I prefer ‘haste makes waste,’” Chiun said.

  “How about ‘an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure’?” Remo offered.

  “I prefer ‘fools rush in where angels fear to tread,’” Chiun said.

  “How about rice for supper tonight?” said Remo, restraining his impulse to strangle Chiun.

  “Rice is nice,” Chiun said sweetly, “but I prefer duck.”

  When they reached their apartment building, Remo sent Chiun upstairs with cautionary words not to kill either of the men who might try to follow him. Then Remo went around the corner, dallied long enough to be sure the tail had picked him up, and ducked into a dark cocktail lounge. He stood alongside the cigarette machine in the dimly illuminated foyer and waited. Seconds later, one of the tails came through the door. It was the one in the blue suit; the one who had trailed them from behind.

  He blinked, trying to accustom his sun-shrunk eyes to the darkness, and Remo reached out and dug his right fingers into the man’s left forearm.

  “All right, pal,” Remo said “Who are you?”

  The man looked up at Remo, his face a picture of innocence under his soft-brimmed felt hat, his body soft under his blue suit, and Remo knew. With a sinking feeling in the pit of his stomach, he knew where the man had come from.

  The man inhaled. “Maher. IRS,” he said. “If you let go of my arm, I’ll show you my identification.”

  “That’s all right,” Remo said. “Why are you following me?” He squeezed the arm again to guarantee truth.

  The man winced. “Don’t know. Office assignment. Find out where you were going. Big deal. Mr. F.G. Maher. A field assignment, when all I am is an analyst.”

  “And your partner out there? Who’s he?” Remo asked.

  “That’s Kirk. He’s in my office.”

  “All right,” Remo said, releasing the man. “Why not just go back and file your report that we went to the apartment building and that was that? We’re not going out tonight. I promise you, so you can go home.”

  “Suits me,” Maher said. “Tonight’s the night Carolynn makes spaghetti and sausage.”

  “If you say one more word,” Remo said, remembering the long-ago taste of it, “I’ll kill you. Go away now.”

  Maher turned and left. Remo waited a few minutes and then went out onto the street and headed back toward his apartment building. Up ahead, he saw Maher and his partner walking away from the building.

  Goddamn that Smith. The two men were obviously CURE agents. Just two more faceless dummies in the nationwide network of information-gathering that Smith had set up. Two more men who filed reports without any knowledge of to whom they really went.

  Smith couldn’t wait again. He was blundering around, sending in men, getting in Remo’s way.

  Remo got upstairs, picked up the telephone and dialed the 800 area-code number that rang on Smith’s desk, ready to tell him just what he thought of him.

  But the telephone rang and rang and for the first time that Remo could remember, there was no answer.

  · · ·

  The next morning, Chiun refused to go with Remo to Teterboro. He was smugly adamant. “I will not expend my small store of energy on barking dogs,” he said.

  “Well, then, expend your energy watching Julia Child and try to learn to cook something someone can eat,” Remo said, beating a hasty retreat.

  In his rented car on the way to Teterboro, Remo thought of Chiun and his arrogant refusal to take the attack on Teterboro seriously. Lives were at stake, and another victory for the terrorists might screw up totally the anti-terrorist agreement that was in the works.

  Dammit, Teterboro was important, no matter what silly proverb Chiun came up with at any given moment.

  That hijacked plane to Egypt had been important and so had the skyjacking over California. Any terrorist activity now was important, when the nations of the world were so close to working out an agreement to cut down terrorists in their tracks. Chiun just didn’t understand.

  Remo knew that he, himself,, didn’t hold out too much hope for the anti-terrorist pact ever being the panacea that Smith seemed to think it was. Still, that was a decision for Remo’s government to make. It was his job to try to see that the agreement was carried out.

  Teterboro was tucked away in suburban New Jersey, only minutes from Manhattan.

  Remo pulled into a parking spot alongside the fence that separated the hangars from a small side street, and walked through an opening in the fence onto the field. There were no guards, no security, no one to ask him who he was and what he was doing there. The airport was made for ripping off.

  Remo was walking toward the control tower when he saw it. A Red Cross wagon was parked near the tower, its side doors only ten feet from the entrance to the tower.

  A stakeout. Someone inside watching. But who? Friend or foe, Remo wondered, afraid that he already knew the answer.

  He darted into a hangar, and moved through it, then into another hangar, and another, and finally exited somewhere behind the Red Cross truck. From the shadows, he looked the track over carefully. The windows were extremely shiny glass, obviously one-way mirrors and he could see no one in the cab. Casually, he strolled up to the side of the wagon and pounded on the two closed doors.

  “What do you want?” came the lemony, puckered voice that Remo had come to know and hate.

  “I’m new in town,” Remo yelled, “and I want my brochure on local places of interest.”

  “Go see your Chamber of Commerce,” came back Dr. Smith’s voice, muffled by the closed doors.

  “I will not. This is a welcome wagon, isn’t it? Well, you just come out of there and welcome me to town.” He pounded again. Inside he heard the shuffling of steps. He continued to pound.

  Finally the door opened a crack. Dr. Harold W. Smith’s beady eyes peered out, saw Remo, and did a double-take.

  “It’s you,” he said.

  “Of course,” Remo said. “Who did you expect? The Man from Glad?”

  “Well, come in,” Smith said distastefully, “and stop that bellowing out there.” Remo shared the feeling of distaste; Smith was interfering again.

  Remo moved into the small van. There were three other men there besides Smith and they were carefully scanning the field in all directions. They did not even bother to turn their heads to look at Remo.

  Smith pulled Remo toward the back of the wagon and said, “How’d you get here?”

  “I drove.”

  “I mean, how did you find out?”

  “Oh. From the people at PUFF. They’re involved in it, you know.”

  “Yes, I know,” Smith said.

  His voice oozed disgust and Remo said, “You’re not really sore that I’m here, are you? I can just as soon leave.”

  “No. As long as you’re here, stay and watch. Maybe you’ll learn something about how a professional operates,” Smith said.

  “How’d you find out about it?” Remo asked. “One of them talk?”

  “Yeah. Some skinny little thing with buck teeth. She was only too glad to talk. She thought the whole idea was stupid. Where is Chiun, by the way?”

  “He’s back in New York,” Remo said. “I think he’s working up a new supply of proverbs for next week.”

  “Proverbs?” Smith asked offhandedly, His attention fixed on a pile of papers on a small table in front of him.

  “Yeah, you know, things like ‘when two dogs attack, one barks, but the other bites.’”

  “Dogs?” said Smith, not paying attention, resenting any distraction from the numbers he was reading on a long yellow pad.

  “Yes. Dogs. You know, ungrateful curs. Bite the hand that feeds them. Carriers of dirt and disease. Rabies spreaders. Dogs.”

  “Yes,” Smith said. “Hmmm, that’s right. Dogs.”

  One of the men in the front of the van called, “Mr. Jones! They’re coming!”

  Smith wheeled and ran to the front of the van.
Remo shook his head. Jones, he thought. What an original alias.

  “How many are there?” he heard Smith ask.

  “Six of them,” the man replied, his face still pressed to the darkened one-way window. His voice had that flat Midwestern label that FBI agents wear, “Five men and a girl”

  “I want to see the girl,” Remo said, walking to the front of the cab.

  “You would,” Smith snarled,

  Remo looked between Smith and the agent and saw the six hippie types approaching. He recognized the girl from yesterday’s PUFF meeting, but was disappointed that it wasn’t Joan Hacker. It was time to wring the truth out of her.

  They came closer now to the tower, skulking in the high-noon daylight, their attempts at being inconspicuous making them look like a marching band.

  The three FBI men moved away from their windows and took up positions alongside the twin doors of the Red Cross van.

  Smith watched the group from the window. “Be alert, men,” he hissed. “When I tell you, open the doors, jump out and collar them.”

  Remo shook his head. Stupid. The place for the agents to be was inside the control tower, to cut off the six hippies. Suppose one got loose and got inside? Remo shook his head again.

  “Okay, men, on your toes now,” Smith said.

  “Ready?” He paused. “Okay. Now!”

  The three agents flung open the doors and jumped out onto the black asphalt. “Federal Bureau of Investigation,” one called. “You’re under arrest.”

  The six hippies turned—shocked, and then five reluctantly raised their hands. But the sixth ran through the door of the control tower, heading for the flight of stairs. With a bound, Remo was out of the cab, through the agents and their captives, and then inside the control tower.

  The youth who had bolted had a gun and he pegged a shot at Remo on the narrow stairwell leading up to the nerve center of the tower.

  Remo made it miss and then was on the youth who never had a chance to fire another shot.

  “All right, Fidel,” he said. “The war’s over.”

  He collared the youth by the neck and beard and began to drag him down the stairs. Just as he shoved him outdoors into the bright summer sunshine, the youth began to laugh. Loud. Uproariously. Eye-wetting gales of laughter.