Terror Squad Page 11

  “What’s the joke?” Remo asked. “Let us all in on it.”

  “You think you have caught someone,” the youth said through his laughing. “But the revolution will go on. You have caught the barking dog. And now, another shall bite.”

  Inspiration. Suddenly, Remo realized what Chiun had meant. Remo and Smith were here, wasting their tune on a harmless dog. But there was another dog out there, somewhere, with teeth, and he was about to bite.

  “Smitty,” Remo yelled. “Quick.”

  Smith looked pained that Remo had blown his cover name of Jones, and even more pained when Remo grabbed him by the arm and pulled him to the back of the van, away from the ears of the curious FBI agents. “Quick. Is there something else going on today? Something to do with the terrorist pact?”

  Smith hesitated and Remo said, “Hurry, man, or you’re going to have a disaster on your hands.”

  “The three officers who are working out the agreement are meeting secretly today in New York,” Smith said. “Finishing it up for tomorrow’s meeting at the U.N.”

  “Where are they meeting?”

  “At the Hotel Caribou.”

  “What time?” Remo asked.

  Smith glanced at his watch. “Just about now,” he said. “Room 2412 at the Caribou.”

  “Does this thing have a phone?” Remo asked, nodding toward the van.

  “Yes, but…”

  Remo jumped into the van, got a mobile operator and called his apartment. The phone rang. And rang. And rang. Please, Chiun, be in a good mood. Don’t break the instrument in half because someone dares interrupt As the Planet Revolves. Please, Chiun, answer.

  Finally, the phone stopped ringing. Agonizingly slowly, it was being raised to an ear. Another pause and then Remo could hear Chiun’s voice, mocking him, and he could picture the look in Chiun’s eyes as the old man said into the phone:

  “Where is the dog that bites?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  THE HOTEL CARIBOU WAS only a few blocks from their apartment. Remo told Chiun to protect at all costs the lives of the three men meeting in Room 2412.

  Then he burned up the highway in his rented car, hoping to meet Chiun at the hotel before anything happened.

  Remo was too late.

  When he pulled up to the Caribou and double parked out in the street, police cars already were pulling in at angles before the main entrance.

  Remo sidled into the crowd of police and detectives and asked, “What happened?”

  “Don’t know,” one policeman said. “Three people killed somehow.”

  So Chiun had been too late. He had not been able to get to the Caribou on time. And because Remo would not listen or try to understand the proverb about the dogs, and because he arrogantly had gone ahead to Teterboro Airport, the three colonels were dead and the anti-terrorist pact set back for, only God knew, how long a period of time.

  Stupid, stupid, stupid, Remo accused himself as he ducked into the hotel and started up to the twenty-fourth floor to see if there were any pieces that he could pick up to try to salvage something.

  · · ·

  Clever, clever, clever.

  It had really been well done, the old man told himself as he walked slowly down the street, back to the East Side apartment

  The assassination attempt had been clever, but its planner should have known that it would not deceive the Master of Sinanju. Perhaps, China thought, someone thinks that Chiun is growing too old. That he has lost his skills. Fool, he thought.

  All his life, he had been sustained in his work by his pride in his skills; and then, one day, the use of them had become an end in itself, as it had, he was sure, with every Master of Sinanju who had come before him.

  Now Chiun used his skills, and the poor and the young of his village lived. It was that simple. Life was always simple for those who did not try to get out of it more than was in it.

  Still, he mused, it would be nice to retire. To sit back in the village of Sinanju, at the edge of the water, mending fish nets, children about him, paying to him the respect and homage that was due a Master who had gone out into the world beyond the seas and had come back with victory over all the world’s challenges.

  But before that could happen, there would have to be a Master to replace him. And of course that meant Remo, who could not really be a white man. Somewhere in the mongrel matings that produced all Americans, there must have been a Korean, blood of Chiun’s blood, a member of the House. Remo was too good to be just a white man.

  It had been Chiun’s plan from the first moment he had met the young American. The American had looked at him, down the barrel of a gun, and with no qualms, no misgivings, no second thoughts, had attempted to shoot Chiun. That had been ten years ago, and in those ten years, a mere ten years, Remo had advanced his skills almost to the point of perfection. Chiun thought with pride of Remo’s genius, his ability to do things with his body that before him, only Chiun in the world could do.

  Only Chiun and one other.

  One other. Remo had come far, but now he faced grave danger. It was in his nature to scoff at the tales of typhoons and of dead animals and of the dog who bites, but there was more truth to legends than to history; history tells only of the past, but legends tell of the past and present and future.

  So, while Remo might laugh in his vile American way, he must be protected from the mortal threat of the dead animals, no matter whether he wished to be or not. This was Chiun’s commitment to the people of Sinanju, who looked to their Master, not only for sustenance, but for the appointment of a new Master who would continue that sustenance.

  And that someday Master was now in peril of his life. The episode today at the Hotel Caribou had shown that. It would have been normal to presume that the three men who were meeting inside Room 2412 would be attacked from outside. Remo might have made that presumption. But Chiun had found the three would-be assassins inside the room, cloaked in the garb of security men, there supposedly to protect the three colonels but actually assigned to kill them.

  Well, they would kill no more. Chiun had seen to that, and then had removed the three important men to another room where they could be safe and could continue their meeting in privacy.

  Yet, the plan of attack had been well-conceived. And those conceptions were drawing nearer and nearer to Remo, threatening him, and Chiun wished that Remo could be convinced to move away from this assignment. It was for that reason that Chiun had refused to tell Remo what the legends meant and who his adversary was. For, if once Remo knew, his pride would prohibit him from walking away. Instead, he would seek out his confrontation with the enemy. So, he kept Remo ignorant of the truth.

  As he turned into the door of the apartment building, the tiny, aged Oriental smiled slightly to himself, recalling the look on the face of the Chinese officer when Chiun had entered the room and disposed of the three assassins. The look told of a man who had heard the legends, and had, at that very moment, come to believe them; the look of a man who knew he was seeing a typhoon blow.

  And as the typhoon named Chiun rode up in the apartment house elevator, he vowed that if it must come to it, Remo would be protected from the dead animals, even at the cost of Chiun’s own life. Even at the cost of breaking a lifelong vow that the Master of Sinanju would never raise hand against another from his village.

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  “ALL RIGHT, CHIUN, HOW’D you do it?”

  Chiun turned to look at Remo, who was pacing up and down the carpeted floor of the living room of their apartment.

  “Do? Do what?”

  “The three colonels. How did you know the security men were fakes?”

  Chiun shrugged, his shoulders moving slightly underneath the heavy brocaded blue robe. “One knows what one knows,” he said.

  “All right, then, how did you know that the attack on Teterboro was a red herring?”

  He looked at Chiun who was about to speak and said disgustedly, “I know, I know, ‘one knows what one knows,
’” parroting Chain’s Oriental sing-song. “But why the hell didn’t you tell me?”

  “But I did tell you. I warned you of the dog that barks and the dog that bites. If you then choose to join a chorus of barking dogs in baying at the moon, that is your business.”

  “You’ve got to stop talking to me in riddles, Chiun. I’ve got to know what things mean,” Remo said.

  “All things are riddles to him who will not think,” Chiun said, folded his hands over his chest and turned from Remo to gaze out the window into smog-laden New York.

  Remo exhaled an exasperated puff of air, started to speak again, but was interrupted by a knock upon the door. “Now what?” he mumbled to himself. “First fat, then thin, then the dead animals,” he said, again parroting Chiun. “This is probably the dead animals.”

  “Come in, it’s open,” he roared.

  The door pushed open and Dr. Harold W. Smith stood there. He looked with disgust at the open door, as if it had somehow offended him, then said, “I’m glad to see that you are still vitally concerned with your own security.”

  Remo had already this day had enough of Smith to last him the rest of his life. “What’s to worry?” he asked jauntily. “Now that I know you’re having us tailed, what do we have to fear? Have no fear, CURE is here.”

  “That was a mistake,” Smith said. “We had agents following everyone who left The Bard. Two of them just happened to pick you up.”

  “And two of them damn near got killed for their trouble,” Remo said. “Will you tell me why you are suddenly sticking your patrician nose into field business? Since when has it become necessary for you to chaperone me?”

  “I might in turn ask, since when have you questioned my decisions on the correct way to handle things?” Smith said stiffly.

  “Since you’ve been running around like a chicken with its head cut off,” Remo said. “Look, if you had told me in advance that the colonels were meeting today, we would have protected it. But we didn’t know. And so we almost bought the farm. But now, we do know that the formal conference at the U.N. is tomorrow. So why don’t you just go back to Folcroft and count paper clips? Chiun and I will take care of the conference.”

  “How?” Smith asked drily. “When you don’t even know what way an attack might come?”

  “I’ll tell you how,” Remo said. “I’m going back after Joan Hacker this afternoon, and I’m going to squeeze her like a lemon until she talks. I should have done that before. And then we’re going to wrap up this whole thing.”

  “Absolutely not,” Smith exploded. “You are going to do precisely what I say and what I say is do not, repeat do not, go blundering around. You might force the terrorists into some unpredictable action that we will not be able to control.”

  “And you’ll be able to control anything else, I suppose?” Remo said. “How? With those goddamn computers?”

  “If you must know, I expect that those goddamn computers, as you call them, will have enough information for us tonight, to absolutely guarantee the safety of tomorrow’s formal conference. We are questioning every one who was at the PUFF meeting at The Bard. Scraps of information, names, dates, relatives and friends. Our computer will decipher it for us.”

  Chiun, who had sat quietly through the argument, looked at Smith and shook his bead sadly.

  “A typhoon does not register on a computer,” he said softly.

  “Oh yes,” Smith said. “You and all this nonsense. What is this business about a typhoon? What is this business about dead animals? I’m tired of hearing about them.”

  “They are legends, Dr. Smith, and that means they are true.”

  “Then what do they mean?”

  “They mean that two typhoons may yet confront each other. They mean that the danger will come in the place of the dead animals.”

  “Typhoons? What two typhoons?” Smith snarled.

  “Don’t look to me for help,” Remo said. “He won’t tell me either.” Chiun turned his back, indicating the lecture was over. Smith’s face grew red with rage.

  “Remo. You’re off this case. I’m taking full control from now on in.”

  Remo shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said. He flopped back on the sofa, kicked off his loafers and began to leaf through a copy of Gallery, looking at the pictures. “Just be sure you do as good a job as you did today in protecting those three colonels,” Remo said.

  Angrily, Smith turned and left, slamming the door shut behind him.

  “Poor Smith,” Remo said aloud to himself. “He’s gone off the deep end. Worrying about those paper clips and the cost of pencils and my expense account —it’s finally all numbed his brain.”

  “No,” Chiun corrected. “He is on the edge, but I see signs that he will be soon well again.”

  “Now how can you see that?”

  “Never mind. I can see it,” Chiun said. “Soon he will resume his life as if this period had never existed.”

  “Can’t come too soon for me,” Remo said. “He’s nasty enough when he’s well.”

  “In the meantime, however,” Chiun said, “he has relieved you of duty. May we not now just depart from this place to a place of clean air? Perhaps Brooklyn?”

  “You don’t really think, do you, Chiun, that I’d walk away from this assignment?”

  “No,” Chiun sighed. “I did not suppose you would. Loyalty often transcends common sense.”

  Some day, this loyalty would be given where it belonged, to the House of Sinanju, which made this white man into a pupil of Sinanju. Some day, there would be a new Master of Sinanju, if misplaced loyalty did not get him killed first.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  THE WAITRESS AT THE BARD remembered Remo. No, the girl who had conked out at his table had not been back. But the waitress would keep an eye out for her and if she could have Remo’s phone number at home, why, she would be sure to call in case the girl showed up.

  Next on the list was a phone call to Patton College to Millicent Van Dervander. Why, certainly, she remembered Remo.

  “Are you coming back to Patton?”

  “Why? Is your room dirty again?” he asked.

  “No. But you and I could mess it up some.”

  Then followed the announcement that the bitch had not come back, but she had called. No, she didn’t even apologize. All she had wanted was an address from the desk phone book she had left behind.

  Whose address?

  Let me look it up. It was the phone number of a dentist. She had lost a cap from her tooth. Millicent hoped the dentist would sew her mouth shut.

  “Yes. Here it is. Dr. Max Kronkeits,” and she gave Remo an address on the upper West Side.

  Dr. Kronkeits’ nurse was forty-two years old, had a tendency to weight, and liked to be home on time. She was just getting ready to leave when the young man showed up. He made it very clear that while the foolish world might have one opinion, his own personal opinion was that women should be substantial, not frail wispy things that threatened to evaporate when touched. Because, of course, women were made to be touched. Strangely enough, he conveyed all this information to her without saying a word, just by his look.

  When he got around to saying a word, it was to ask about Joan Hacker. Miss Hacker, the nurse informed Remo, had called and was now on her way. Dr. Kronkeits was going to recap an upper right frontal bicuspid.

  Remo explained to the nurse that he was from the FBI, that it was important that Joan Hacker not know that he had been asking for her, that when the case was over, Remo would come back and explain to the nurse, perhaps over a drink or two, just how it had worked out and how helpful the nurse had been. Of course, secrecy now was essential.

  And so it was that Remo was waiting near the front door of the West Side apartment building in which Kronkeits had his office when Joan Hacker arrived. An hour later she came out, and Remo began following her on the other side of the street. She wore tight jeans and a thin, white, floppy blouse, and she smiled as she walked down the street. Remo note
d this was the most common reaction of people who are putting distance between themselves and a dentist’s office.

  She walked along Central Park West for three blocks, Remo casually strolling along with her, pace for pace, then she turned into a street in the high eighties. She sauntered down the street, happily swinging her red shoulder bag, and then turned into a small coffee shop in mid-block. When Remo entered the shop, Joan Hacker was sitting at a table in the back, anxiously drumming her fingertips on the red Formica table top, glancing over her shoulder at a door in the rear.

  She hardly noticed Remo when he sat down across from her.

  “Back again,” he said. “This time for some answers.”

  “Oh, you,” she said. “Why don’t you just leave me alone? I’ve got things to do.”

  “And I’m not going to let you do any of them,” he said.

  She stopped drumming on the table and met his eyes. “You are really a ridiculous reactionary,” she said. “Do you actually think you can stop our glorious revolution?”

  “If your glorious revolution means rape and baby killing, then I can try.”

  “You can’t make an omelet without breaking the eggs,” she said.

  “Particularly when your brain is scrambled to begin with. Now some answers. What’s going to happen tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow?” She laughed. “Tomorrow every one of those delegates to the anti-terrorist convention is going to be killed. Every one.” She seemed almost pleased to tell him. “Isn’t that glorious?” she asked.

  “Murder glorious?” he said.

  “You know what you are?” she asked. “You’re a dinosaur. A dinosaur.” She giggled. “Plodding around in the past, trying to stop tomorrow. I just saw one. You’re a dinosaur.”

  She was interrupted by a voice from the back of the room.

  “You can come in now.”

  Remo looked up. The speaker was a young Puerto Rican. He wore the uniform of The Gauchos, a street group that had been set up as the Boriqueño equivalent of the Black Panthers, but which had pretty well died out when the TV networks stopped covering their antics. He wore a brown beret, a brown shirt with military patches and emblems, brown slacks tucked into highly polished paratrooper boots. The youth was small and slim, perhaps twenty, and he crooked an imperious finger at Joan, beckoning her to follow him.