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  "Yes," said Harold W. Smith. "CURE is now ready to enter the twenty-first century."

  "And once you have returned, you and I will be ready to enter negotiations for further service between your house and mine," returned Chiun, Reigning Master of Sinanju.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo, and he was whistling into the teeth of the hurricane.

  The winds had been clocked at seventy-five miles per hour, and Remo was walking against them. He was whistling "The Wayward Wind," and he could hear every note over the growing roar.

  The waters off Wilmington, North Carolina, were flat and oily in anticipation of Hurricane Elvis making landfall as Remo walked along the Wrightville Beach beachfront, where plywood sheets covered the windows of upscale summer homes and cottages. People had spray-painted messages to Elvis on the plywood.

  "Elvis Go Home!"

  "Elvis, You're All Wet!"

  "Go Back Where You Came From!"

  As if hurricanes cared.

  There was a mandatory evacuation along the beachfront, and almost everyone had left. Except Roger Sherman Coe.

  Roger Sherman Coe had elected to ride out the storm in his beachfront home. That was just like Roger Sherman Coe. The law meant nothing to him. The hurricane warning had been posted while Remo was enroute to his rendezvous with Roger Sherman Coe. Remo had put a call to the man from his first-class seat on Flight 334.

  "Is this Roger Sherman Coe?" Remo had asked.

  "Yes."

  "This is Bernard Rubble from the Federal Emergency Management Agency, Mr. Coe. We're calling all citizens in your area to personally alert them about Hurricane Elvis."

  "I'm staying," Roger Sherman Coe had snapped.

  "You're sure?"

  "Absolutely."

  "Suit yourself," said Remo, who had then hung up and tried to keep the first-class stewardess out of his lap. Stewardesses were that way around him.

  Assured that Roger Sherman Coe was determined to ride out the storm in the security of his expensive home. Remo had driven his rental car from the Wilmington airport and walked the last mile toward the beach because the state highway patrol was turning back cars on the main approach road.

  Remo hadn't minded walking. The fresh air was good for him. And because this was a simple assignment and he was in a good mood, he couldn't help whistling.

  There were a lot of reasons for Remo's good mood, not the least of which was that the man who had taught him to whistle into the teeth of a hurricane had been recalled to headquarters. Remo didn't know the reason for it, and it didn't matter. All that mattered was he had a solid week without complaints about the neighbors, having old soap operas constantly on the television, and carping. Remo especially didn't miss the carping. It usually took the form of Remo being told he didn't truly appreciate the person doing the complaining. Remo's comeback was that he never appreciated people who complained all the time. This invariably produced more carping and led to Remo's pointing out that it was easier to appreciate another person when that person carped less.

  So when Upstairs had called him with instructions about the Roger Sherman Coe assignment, Remo had been only too happy to oblige.

  The wind plastered the black front of his T-shirt against his lean but muscular chest as Remo walked along the sand leaving no discernible footprints. He would have to think about it to leave footprints because leaving footprints had been drilled out of him.

  His chinos, snug against his trim legs, were also black. His dark hair was too short for the wind to mess it up, not that Elvis wasn't trying. Remo leaned into the oncoming wall of wind, walking at a slight angle the way he had seen people on TV news reports trying to negotiate hurricane winds.

  Surprisingly it worked for him. The skills that had been drilled into him had taught him not to do the obvious Western thing when confronted with forces greater than he. He was doing the obvious Western thing and he wondered what Chiun would say about that. Maybe the obvious Western thing was sometimes the right thing to do after all.

  Remo had no more time to think about it because he had come to the beachfront house numbered forty-seven. That was the number he remembered, but because he had no head for figures or trivia he pulled a sheet of paper out of his chinos pocket and verified it. He had the right house. He let the hurricane winds whip the sheet of paper from his loosening fingers, and it skimmed away like a chattering paper ghost.

  Remo shifted direction, walking toward the beachfront house. Now he was walking with one side to the wind. His body, which understood these things better than he, adjusted itself, and Remo found himself walking at an angle, like the hunchback in an old Frankenstein movie.

  The weathered-shingle house of Roger Sherman Coe was boarded up like all the others. Unlike the others, there was no spray paint graffiti defiance marring the wobbling plywood sheets. Not that the hurricane cared one way or the other.

  Remo knocked on the door. The knock was surprisingly loud for the force Remo seemed to exert. The door shook and the house shook with it.

  Evidently Roger Sherman Coe thought it was only the hurricane knocking because he didn't answer on the first knock. So Remo knocked again.

  This time Roger Sherman Coe answered. The door whipped inward, and he thrust a pale, lantern-jawed head out.

  "Good afternoon," Remo said brightly.

  "I'm not leaving. I'm staying. You can't make me."

  "I'm conducting a survey for the National Weather Service," said Remo. He smiled. The obvious Western thing would be to scowl. Scowls triggered the fear response and risked flight or retaliation. Smiles relaxed people-sometimes right into the boneyard.

  The man looked incredulous. "In the middle of a hurricane?"

  "Hurricanes tend to focus the mind," Remo assured Roger Sherman Coe. "We get better answers that way."

  Roger Sherman Coe looked at Remo's empty fingers at the ends of his unusually thick wrists, and asked, "Where's your questionnaire?"

  Remo tapped his head. "Up here. It's all up here." Roger Sherman Coe just stared.

  "First question," said Remo. "Do you approve of the National Weather Service's new naming system for hurricanes?"

  "What?" shouted Roger Sherman Coe over the growing roar.

  "Hurricane Elvis," Remo shouted back. "It's an experiment. After we saw how popular the post office was with the Elvis stamp, we thought we'd try it. You know, try to improve the popularity of tropical storms. Do you approve of Elvis as a hurricane name? Please answer yes or no."

  "No! I don't approve of hurricanes at all."

  "Good. Now, the National Weather Service hopes that Hurricane Elvis will be just the first of a new series of celebrity hurricanes. We're considering the following names for the rest of the hurricane season-Tropical Storm Roseanne, Hurricane Madonna and Hurricane Clint."

  "Eastwood or Black?"

  "Black. Country music is big again. Now, could you rank the choices in order of preference?"

  "Look, I'd like to get through Elvis before worrying about the next blow, if it's all the same to you."

  "Got it. Now, the obligatory sexual-preference question. Do you prefer hurricanes named after men or women?"

  "I prefer no hurricanes!" Roger Sherman Coe shouted, trying to hold the door open. Remo wondered why the man didn't simply invite him in, and decided some people just didn't know when to come in out of a blow.

  "That wasn't a trick question. I need a sexual preference."

  "Girl hurricanes sound better. I grew up in girl hurricanes."

  "Same here," said Remo.

  "Are we done now?" asked Roger Sherman Coe, squinting against the wind that seemed not to bother Remo at all.

  "Stay with me. Just a couple more questions."

  "Make it fast!"

  "What about building so close to the water on hurricane-active areas? If Elvis smashes this place down, do you think FEMA money should be used to rebuild?"

  "FEMA is a joke."

  "Tell it to the Midwest flood victims."
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  "I almost lost this place to Hugo."

  "No wonder you prefer girl hurricanes."

  "I prefer no hurricanes."

  Elvis's wail was building now. It didn't have the freight-train roar that characterized a full-blown tropical storm, but it was coming. Remo knew he would have to wind this up.

  "Do you have any next of kin?" he asked.

  "Why does the National Weather Service care about that?" Roger Sherman Coe wanted to know.

  "Because you're not going to survive Elvis," Remo said in a casual voice.

  Roger Sherman Coe saw the lips of the pollster from the National Weather Service move, but didn't catch the words.

  "What?" he shouted.

  "Do you believe it's a dog-eat-dog world?" Remo shouted.

  "What kind of fool question is that?"

  "A direct one."

  "Yeah, it's a dog-eat-dog world."

  "So if you're a dog that eats other dogs, it's okay?"

  "It's the way the world works."

  "And if another dog, a bigger dog, decided to eat you, you can't really complain, can you?"

  "Not if I barked first."

  "You ain't nothin' but a hound dog," said Remo.

  "What?" said Roger Sherman Coe.

  "I just wanted to see if you understood why they sent me to take a bite out of you!"

  "I'm not following you," Roger Sherman Coe screamed into the growing blow.

  "You're Roger Sherman Coe. Right?"

  "Right."

  "The Roger Sherman Coe who makes his living as a contract killer?"

  "What?"

  "Who burned down an entire house with the family in it so they wouldn't testify against the D'Ambrosia Family?"

  "Are you crazy? You have the wrong man."

  "Not according to the National Computer Crime Index," said Remo, lifting an innocent-looking hand. He made a fist but left his index finger sticking out. He was very casual about it-because that was the Eastern way-and that gave Roger Sherman Coe time to slam the door in Remo's face.

  But not enough time to step back from the door. They say a hurricane can drive a straw through a solid tree trunk. Remo didn't need a hurricane to back him. His right index finger shot through the panel and caught Roger Sherman Coe directly over the heart. When Remo withdrew the finger, the door slid open and Roger Sherman Coe's jittering body fell with it. When he landed at Remo's feet, he was already dead. His heart had burst under the piston-like power of Remo's single finger.

  The wind was pretty wild now, and Remo decided to leave the body where it lay, with the front door open. The hurricane would sweep right in, and with luck, when they found Roger Sherman Coe's body after it was all over, his death would be blamed on Elvis. An act of God would have killed Roger Sherman Coe and not a force of nature or a secret arm of the United States government that had decided a criminal of Roger Sherman Coe's caliber deserved the ultimate sanction.

  Remo was walking away when he heard the tiny shriek.

  He turned.

  Standing in the doorway of the beachfront house was a little girl with sad brown eyes and dirty blond hair. She had a fist up to her mouth and she was saying "Daddy?" in an uncomprehending voice.

  "What is it, April?" a woman's anxious voice demanded. And a tall blond woman stepped into the wind. Seeing the body, she pulled the little girl away from the door, then fell on the body, crying, "Roger. Roger. Get up. What's wrong, Roger?"

  By that time Remo Williams had disappeared into the howling wind whose freight-train roar was not long in coming.

  At the height of the storm, a state police helicopter spotted a man in a black T-shirt standing firm at the end of a stone jetty against the incoming wind. That was incredible enough.

  The part that was astounding, and ultimately decided the pilot against reporting the sighting, was the way the man stood up to the gale. Especially when airborne driftwood and other debris snapped toward him. Each time he lifted an open hand or the tips of his shoes he smashed the wind-driven wood into splinters that were carried, whirling and harmless, away.

  He looked angry. He looked very angry. A person would have to be very, very, very angry to take on Hurricane Elvis.

  Strangest of all, it looked as if the guy was trying to protect a single beach-front house from destruction. And he was winning.

  Chapter 3

  Dr. Harold W Smith arrived in his office as dawn broke, nodded to his private secretary and carefully closed the door to his Spartan office, whose picture window of one-way glass overlooked the dead gray expanse of Long Island Sound. It was usually a sparkling blue dotted with white sails. Today it was gray and strange and flat.

  There was a hurricane watch from Charleston, South Carolina, to Block Island. Elvis had glanced off Wilmington and now was prowling up the East Coast like a howling wolf, pushing ahead of it heavy, oppressive air and sullen clouds.

  Harold W Smith was not concerned about Hurricane Elvis as he settled in behind his shabby oak desk and for the last time touched the concealed stud that brought the blank glass face of his hidden desktop terminal humming from its well.

  Harold W Smith didn't know that he had executed that action-one he had performed almost daily for most of the thirty years he sat in the director's chair of Folcroft Sanitarium-for the final time. He simply logged on and initiated the virus-scanning program. It ran its cycle in less than six seconds and announced the new WORM arrays, as well as the old IDC mainframe tape drives, to be virus free.

  It had been almost a week now since he had had the new XL SysCorp jukeboxes with their WORM drives installed in the basement of Folcroft Sanitarium, the nerve center for CURE, the organization he secretly headed.

  So far, Smith was pleased. It was rare for Harold W Smith to be pleased about anything. He was a gray individual to whose dry, patrician visage smiles did not easily come. No smile actually touched his thin lips this morning. Something tugged at the corners, but only someone who had known Harold Smith all his life could have recognized the faintly constipated grimace as an expression of pleasure.

  It had been a long, long time since Harold W Smith had upgraded the CURE computer system. He had put it together himself, back in the early days of CURE, the government agency that officially did not exist.

  Originally there was just one mainframe. Over time others had to be added. And other innovations had forced upgrades.

  There was a time when, for security reasons, printouts slithered by under a desktop glass panel to a shredder, but even paper that existed for no more than sixty seconds before being committed to memory and shredded for consignment to the oblivion of the basement coal furnace represented a security risk. And so Harold W Smith had pioneered the paperless office. The four great basement mainframes alongside the new optical jukeboxes were connected with Smith's desk terminal through the shielded standpipe, and no printer was dedicated to print its secrets.

  When the Pentagon's Advanced Research Projects Agency created the first computer network, ARPAnet, by wiring thirty-two high-powered computers together by phone link in the early 1960s, not even the Joint Chiefs of Staff suspected there was a thirty-third system involved and Harold Smith was an unsuspected eavesdropper on all that was said and done.

  When data transfer by phone wire took off in the early 1970s, it was old news to Harold W, Smith. He had been doing it since the inception of CURE.

  When fiber-optic cable came in, the term multiplexing was already in Smith's vocabulary.

  When the PC invaded the home market and America began dialling up bulletin boards, information services and other networks, Harold W Smith had not only been there before, but his powerful mainframes continually trolled the net, gathering information for storage and eventual security analysis.

  When a remarkable new software called Windows came on the market, Harold W Smith never bothered to read about it. His version, called Doors, was ten years ahead of Windows five years before there was a Windows.

  When on-screen technology brou
ght in digital imaging, pull-down menus and other high-tech features, Harold W Smith was already there. His monochrome terminal normally displayed green text against a black screen because it was more restful to his overtaxed gray eyes, but a touch of a key transformed it into a color monitor that could bring in TV signals. This feature was only now coming onto the commercial market, but Harold W Smith had had the capability for years. Now ARPAnet had mushroomed into Internet, and half of America was sifting through the mountains of hard information and soft trivia carried along the phone and cable wires.

  The way Harold W Smith saw it, he was one of the first hikers on the information superhighway back when it was the electronic equivalent of a unlit dirt road.

  But lately the net had grown too large and too diverse, and the old Folcroft Four, although perfectly adapted to the mission of CURE, were no longer enough. Thus Smith had been forced to seek out a new high-performance system to augment the old. It had not been difficult. There was a ready black market in stolen information systems out there. Stolen was important. Folcroft, a private hospital, had not yet come into the information age. It would be awkward to acquire such powerful machines through its purchasing office, CURE had a vast operating budget, but it was a black budget, and unusual Folcroft purchases-especially large ones-would have to be explained to the AMA or the IRS.

  And so Harold W Smith had made a hushed call to a furtive purveyor of pilfered information systems, arranged a midnight rendezvous, overseen installation of the new equipment in the basement of a nonexistent asylum and, when it was all over with, had instructed the termination of the only security risk involved in the transaction. It had been unpleasant but absolutely necessary. Buzz Kuttner had given his life for his country-he just never knew it.

  When CURE had been set up in the early 1960s, its mandate was very clear and very dangerous. Locate and eliminate threats to US. security, both domestic and foreign. It had been a lawless time, one calling for extreme measures. The President who had laid the problem before Harold W Smith, a faceless CIA computer programmer whose background check showed him to be the only man the beleaguered chief executive could trust with the job, had explained it this way: democracy was not working. Corruption on all levels, combined with threats from the extremists on both sides of the political spectrum, threatened to sink the glorious experiment that was America. If this went on, the President had said solemnly, he might have to suspend constitutional liberties for the duration of the crisis-probably the remainder of the century-and rule by decree under martial law.