Blood Ties td-69 Page 15

  Remo hung his head.

  "I thought you said you were a killer," the other man said. "Isn't that what you told me? And I said to myself, 'Remo, your son is a man. He's following in your footsteps.' That's what I said to myself."

  The man spat disdainfully.

  "I didn't know you were a wimp. Now are you going to let your father do his job? Are you?"

  Remo did not answer. He looked toward the man and then toward the fire door that led down from the roof. His mouth worked and he was about to speak when there was a crash at the fire door and it popped up like a piece of steel bread ejected from a toaster. Pieces of hinge and padlock flew like grenade shrapnel.

  A head appeared in the opening like a ghost rising from its grave, except this ghost wore a purple kimono instead of a shroud and spoke in a voice that crackled like a loose electrical wire.

  "Remo! What are you doing with this man?"

  "Little Father, it's-"

  The gunman interrupted. "What did you call him?" he demanded as he reached for his Beretta, which still lay on the graveled roof.

  "Well, he's not really my father," Remo said. "But he's been like a father to me."

  "I'm your father, Remo. Don't you ever forget that," the gunman said.

  "Lies," snapped Chiun, his face flushed with fury.

  "No, Chiun," said Remo. "I think it's true."

  "Stand aside," Chiun said. "I will deal with this most base of deceivers." He stepped up from the stairwell.

  "No," Remo said.

  The gunman grabbed his weapon. Good, if the kid keeps the old gook busy, I'll be able to wrap this up.

  "You say no to me, Remo?" Chiun demanded. "Are you crazed?"

  "Keep him busy, kid. I'll just be a moment," the gunman said.

  "I can't let you hurt him, Chiun. I'm sorry."

  "And I cannot let this amateur thug harm someone under the protection of Sinanju."

  "Didn't you hear me, Chiun? He's my father. My father. I didn't even know he was alive."

  "Not for long," Chiun said. He moved around Remo and instinctively Remo swept out a hand. The hand almost touched the person of the Master of Sinanju, when Remo's feet suddenly tangled together. He tripped and went down.

  Remo bounced back to his feet as if he were on a trampoline.

  "Chiun," he said and the Oriental whirled. A longnailed finger flashed warningly at Remo, then at the gunman. "I cannot let this man live."

  "You knew he was my father all along, didn't you? Didn't you?" Remo cried.

  "I am doing this for your own good," Chiun said. "Now stand back."

  "This is why you didn't want me around here, isn't it? You and Smith knew about him. You knew he was my father, didn't you?"

  "I am your Master," Chiun said. "Nothing else in the universe has a meaning in your life. Now leave us, Remo."

  A kind of sick horror rode over Remo's features as he said, "You can't hurt him, Chiun."

  "That man," said Chiun stonily, "has profaned the sacred personage of the Master of Sinanju." He touched the spot over his ear where the ricocheted bullet had hit him. "He has attacked someone under Sinanju's protection. He must die."

  "Kick his ass, son," the gunman yelled. "1 know you can do it."

  Remo looked at the gunman, then at Chiun. His decision showed on his face.

  "You may not raise your hand against the Master of Sinanju," Chiun intoned gravely. "Though I love you as one from my village, Sinanju comes first."

  "I don't want to fight you, Chiun. You know that."

  "Good. Then wait below," Chiun snapped.

  Suddenly a shot sounded and Chiun's bald head whirled, the tufts of hair dancing.

  "Aiiieee," he shrieked.

  "Got him," the gunman grunted. "One shot and picked him off clean."

  "Murderer," cried Chiun and moved toward the man, but Remo dove between the two of them.

  Chiun stopped and his hazel eyes narrowed as he looked at Remo.

  "So be it," he said. "You have made your choice, Remo. You are lost to Sinanju and lost to me."

  He watched only for a moment, before realizing that ordinary people could get hurt just by being close, and the gunman slipped out the fire door, collapsing his Olympic pistol into his briefcase on the way down.

  He walked down, shaking his head all the way. He had never seen a fight like it. It had started like a ballet. The old man's movements were slow and graceful. A sandaled toe floated out and Remo's body became a blur as he avoided it. Remo's counterthrust was a lunging handspear that seemed to go wrong only because the old man sidestepped with such exquisite speed that he seemed not to move at all.

  If they were master and pupil, the gunman thought, they were the two scariest people on earth. Remo's thrusts looked faster because the human eye read them as a blur, but the old man was so blindingly quick in his movements that the eye did not register them at all.

  The gunman had had enough; all he wanted to do was to get away. When he reached the ground floor of the building he told the guard at the desk that there was a fight on the roof. He had been able to hear it from his own top-floor office, he said.

  The guard did not recognize him, but guards everywhere responded to men wearing well-tailored suits and carrying leather briefcases.

  The guard telephoned for a security team to go to the roof, then took out his pistol, checked the action, and rode the elevator upstairs.

  When he got to the roof, he shoved his way through a crowd of uniformed guards who stood around the doorway. "What's the matter? Why aren't you doing anything?" he demanded.

  "We tried. No good."

  "No good? What do you mean, no good? I see two guys at it and you say no good."

  One guard held up a swollen purple hand.

  "I just walked up to touch the old guy on the shoulder. I don't know what happened but my hand went numb. Now look at it."

  "Does it hurt?"

  "No, but I got a feeling it will when the nerves come back to life. If they do."

  "Aaaah, I'll handle this," the security guard said. "They're not even fighting, for Chrissake. They're dancing. I'm going to break it up."

  "Don't do it," the guard with the purple hand said in a quivering voice. "Don't get between them."

  The security guard from the desk ignored him and stomped across the rooftop. He held his pistol in his right hand, waved it at the two men, and said, "Okay, cut the crap. You're both under arrest."

  He did not know which one of them did it, but in a movement that his eyes could not register, someone wrapped the barrel of the pistol around the fingers of his shooting hand. He looked down at his fingers trapped inside a corkscrew of twisted steel and yelled to the other guards: "Call out the National Guard."

  Remo was against the edge of the building when he saw, far below, the figure of the gunman walking toward a car.

  He leaned over the parapet and without thinking, he cried out:

  "Don't go. Dad. Wait for me."

  And then Remo was over the edge, down the side of the building. Chiun waited a moment, and then, as the security guards in the doorway watched, his head seemed to slump forward and he turned and walked toward the exit door.

  The guards made way for him as he walked by, and later, one of them would swear he had seen a tear in the old man's eye.

  Chapter 16

  Dr. Harold W. Smith had not slept all night and now the sun was showing through the big one-way glass window of his office overlooking Long Island Sound.

  Smith's face was haggard, his thinning hair uncombed. He still wore his striped Dartmouth tie tightly knotted at the throat but his gray jacket lay across the back of a chair, a single concession to the fatigue that stress and lack of sleep had wrought.

  It was Smith's manner that he seemed smaller and slighter than he really was, and he wore naturally the look of a middle-management type who, in his declining years, had risen to a cushy but boring position as the director of a totally unimportant facility for the elderly, known as Folcr
oft Sanitarium.

  No one knew him, but if someone had, it was most likely that Smith would have been described as a gray man, dull and unimaginative, who counted the days until retirement by the sizes of the piles of paper he shuffled endlessly.

  Only one of those descriptions would have been true. Smith was unimaginative.

  That was one of the reasons a long-dead President had picked him to head CURE. Smith had no imagination, nor was he ambitious in that power-hungry way that came naturally to politicians and reporters.

  But the President had counted that as a virtue because he knew that a man with imagination could quickly be seduced by the unlimited power he would wield as the director of CURE. A man with both imagination and ambition might well attempt to take over America. And such a man could have done it too. CURE was entirely without controls. The director ran it with a free hand and without restrictions. A President could only suggest missions and the only order Smith was bound to obey from the President was the order to disband.

  For two decades, Smith had been prepared to execute that order if the President gave it or to order the disbanding himself if CURE was ever compromised.

  There would be no retirement for Harold Smith. Only a swift, painless death, and not even a hero's burial in Arlington National Cemetery for the man who had served his country with the OSS during World War II and who had occupied a high position in the Central Intelligence Agency until his supposed retirement in the sixties. The secrecy of CURE, the organization that didn't exist and whose initials stood for nothing and for everything, was too important to allow Smith even a small bit of posthumous recognition.

  It was a lonely job, but never a boring one, and Smith would not have traded it for any work in the world because he knew its importance. Only CURE stood between constitutional government and total anarchy.

  To remind himself of that, each morning Smith would come into his office, press the concealed button on his desk that raised the main CURE computer terminal, and consider that CURE was the most powerful agency on earth because it had unlimited access to unlimited information and it knew how to keep the secrets.

  This morning, as he did every morning, Smith tapped out a simple code on the computer, and on the video screen appeared the first paragraph of the Constitution of the United States of America in glowing green letters. Smith began reading, slowly, carefully, sounding out the words in his mind.

  We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice . . .

  He could have recited the entire thing from memory, but to this rock-ribbed native of Vermont, the Constitution was not something one recited, as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited by unthinking schoolchildren, but a sacred document that ensured Americans the freedoms they enjoyed. To most of them, it was an ancient piece of paper kept under glass in Washington, a piece of history they took for granted. But to Harold W. Smith it was a living thing and because it lived, it could die or be killed. Smith, sitting quietly behind his desk and looking small in the Spartan immensity of his office, stood on the firing line in an unknown war to defend that half-forgotten document and what it represented to America and to the world.

  Yet every time he entered his office, Smith knew he betrayed that document-by wiretapping, by threat, and so often these days, by violence and murder. It was the ultimate tribute to Smith's patriotism that he had accepted a thankless job whose very nature filled him with revulsion.

  And so, in order not to lose sight of his responsibility and perhaps as a kind of penance toward the living document in which he believed implicitly, Smith read the Constitution from his video screen, reading slowly, carefully, savoring the words and not rushing through them, until in the end they were more than just words on a computer screen. They were truth.

  When Smith had finished reading, he closed out the file and picked up the special telephone that connected directly to the President of the United States of America. But the telephone rang just as he touched it.

  Smith snapped the receiver immediately to his ear and said, "Yes, Mr. President."

  "Hubert Millis has just come out of surgery," the President said.

  "Yes, Mr. President. I know. I was just about to call you regarding that matter. I assume you'll be issuing the order for us to disband."

  "I should. Darn it, Smith. There's no excuse for not protecting Millis. What went wrong?"

  Smith cleared his throat.

  "I'm not certain, Mr. President."

  "You're not certain?"

  "No, sir. I've had no communication from my people. I don't know where they are and I don't know what happened."

  "I'll tell you what happened. Despite everything, Millis was shot and is lucky to be alive and your people didn't do anything to stop it. If he had been killed, I want you to know that your operation would have been terminated immediately. "

  "I understand, sir. My recommendation precisely."

  "No, you don't understand. There's a lot of talk now that the Big Three auto companies are all going to make a deal to have Lyle Lavallette come in and run their companies, because they can't compete with the Dynacar anyway. I want Lavallette protected. If he goes down, Detroit may be down the tubes. And I want your people either on the job or eliminated. Do you understand? They're too dangerous to be running loose."

  "I understand, sir."

  "You keep saying that, Smith, but somehow I don't find it as reassuring as I used to. I expect to be hearing from you."

  "Yes, sir," Smith said. He replaced the special phone and tried, for the hundredth time in the hours since he had learned of Hubert Millis' brush with death, to call Chiun at his hotel.

  As he held the telephone he wondered if he would ever again begin a working day reading the Constitution of the United States from a computer terminal.

  In the honeymoon suite of the Detroit Plaza Hotel, in the early-dawn light, Chiun, reigning Master of Sinanju, watched the sun ascend in glory.

  He sat before the glass doors of the balcony which gave the clearest view of the sunrise. He rested on a straw mat, a single taper illuminating the room behind him with a smoky, angry light. As the sun rose, the light of the taper faded before it, like the glory of old empires fading before new ones.

  Many Masters of Sinanju had preceded Chiun. They were all of the same blood. Chiun's blood. But there was more than a blood link connecting Chiun with his ancestors. They were all of the sun source and one with the sun source-the awesome power that enabled the Masters of Sinanju to tap the godlike power that lay within all men.

  But only those could come to the sun source who had trained under a Master already possessing the sun source and only after a lifetime of training. Sinanju had been handed down to each generation of Chiun's ancestors from the time of the first great Master, Wang, who legend said had received the source from a ring of fire that descended from the stars.

  It had been a proud, unbroken tradition until the day of Chiun. Chiun, whose wife bore him no heir. Chiun, who then took a white man from the outer world because there were no worthy Koreans left in Sinanju. Chiun, whose pupil was so ungrateful that when asked to choose between the gift that was the sun source and a white meat-eater who had so little use for him that he left him on a doorstep as a child, had made the wrong choice.

  And now it had come to this.

  Chiun hung his tired old head in sadness and seemed to hear the voices of his ancestors speaking in the stillness:

  -Oh, woe, that Sinanju should come to this.

  -It is the end. The greatest line of assassins in the universe will soon be no more.

  -Gone, gone. All gone. Our honor besmirched and there is none to carry on our line.

  -Shame. Shame to Chiun, trainer of whites, who chose a non-Korean. Shame to him who let the future of Sinanju slip through his fingers while he lived in luxury in a corrupt land.

  -All we were, you are now. When you are gone, the glory of Sinanju will be no more.

  -And we will be voices in
the void, nothing more. Voices without hope, without one of our blood to carry on Sinanju.

  -And you will be one of us, Chiun.

  -A voice.

  -In the void.

  -Without a son.

  -Without hope.

  -That will be your destiny, Chiun, final Master of Sinanju.

  -And your shame.

  -0h, woe, that Sinanju should come to this.

  Chiun lifted his head at the sound of the ringing telephone, then turned away. But the ringing continued, insistent, and finally he rose from his lotus position and glided to the phone. He picked it up but spoke no greetings.

  After a pause, Smith asked, "Chiun?"

  "I am he," said the Master of Sinanju.

  "I've been trying to reach you, Chiun. What happened? Millis is in a coma."

  "I have no answer for you," Chiun said.

  Smith noticed the old Korean's voice was empty of feeling. He said, "Remo never arrived. He wasn't on the plane. "

  "I know. He is lost to us, lost to Sinanju."

  "Lost?" Smith demanded. "What do you mean lost?"

  "He is with the one of white skin who is his father," Chiun said.

  Smith said, "But he's alive, right? He's not dead."

  "No," said the Master of Sinanju as he hung up the receiver quietly, pain in his hazel eyes. "He is dead."

  Chapter 17

  If he could only take care of that lunatic gunman, things would be perfect for Lyle Lavallette. He considered that as he sat in his office, first trying, then rejecting a pair of elevator shoes that his cobbler in Italy had just sent him. They were guaranteed to make him a full inch taller than his even six feet, but when he tried them on, they wrinkled his socks and so he tossed them in the wastepaper basket. Maybe if he were only five-feet-eleven, but he was six feet tall already, and the extra inch wasn't worth wrinkled hose.

  He had expected more competition from the Big Three when he unveiled the Dynacar. But with Mangan's killing, the board of directors National Autos seemed prepared to offer Lavallette the opportunity to head the company. And he had already heard from two board members at American Autos, whose president Hubert Millis lay near death in a hospital. Only Revell's company, General Autos, seemed to be holding firm, but Lavallette figured that Revell was shaky and with a good pension offer, could probably be persuaded to take early retirement. That would clear the way for Lavallette to take over General Autos too.