Encounter Group td-56 Read online

  "You people do this every Thursday?" Amanda asked.

  "That's what I said," Orville grinned. "We're the Little Rock Chapter of FOES; there's dozens all over the country, though. But, zowie, wasn't that the most exciting thing you ever saw in all your life? That was the first genuine sighting in the sixteen years of our chapter— unless you count the one back in August 1975, which the Air Force claimed was the planet Jupiter."

  "That's great," Amanda said. "How far to the nearest town?"

  "Oh, about three miles due north. Why?"

  "Because that's where I'm going. Thanks. Good-bye."

  * * *

  Amanda Bull never made it to town. She had barely covered three-quarters of a mile when the black Arkansas night seemed to close in on her. At first that was all she felt. A strange sensation of pressure, as if the trees were crowding close like living creatures. Then there was a heaviness in the air, but that might have been the warmth of the night.

  Amanda really didn't become concerned until she heard the humming sound. Then, as it grew louder, she realized that the humming was connected with the oppressive feeling that had come over her.

  She ran.

  Running brought her to an open space before she could react to the sudden absence of trees. Somehow she knew that one thing she didn't wish was to be caught in a clearing. But one minute Amanda was tearing blindly through the forest and the next there was a hundred-foot clearing, and above that, suddenly, there was light.

  A thousand arc lights might have generated such illumination. But she knew arc lights weren't red and green and blue and brilliant white, and they didn't cluster together like soap bubbles suspended in the air. But that was exactly what Amanda saw. A cluster of bright, globular lights floating at treetop level above her.

  Amanda Bull screamed. Then the lights moved aside with a wobbling motion, and began to descend. Without a sound they descended, for the humming had stopped. There was no flame or rush of air to indicate propulsion. And through fingers held in front of her eyes, fingers that helped screen out some of the awful brilliance, Amanda saw the shape behind the lights— the dark shape of a squashed-down basketball.

  Then the lights dimmed, and she made out the rodlike projections as they touched the ground, digging into the earth, and supporting the gently settling object.

  When the object was at rest, Amanda thought she heard a voice, and the voice, she was certain, came from within the thing that had landed. The thing that looked like a flying saucer.

  "Greetings," the voice called out reedily, as if the words were translated through a wind instrument, like a flute.

  "Ummm... I don't believe in flying saucers," Amanda said in a strange voice.

  "I am the World Master," the voice said, ignoring her remark.

  "My— my name is Amanda Bull."

  "Yes. I know," the voice said musically.

  "You do?" Amanda said, her gray eyes wide with surprise.

  "Yes, Amanda Bull. I have looked into your mind and seen confusion and unhappiness, but I have also seen beauty and honesty and truth."

  "You have?"

  "You have been chosen, Amanda Bull, to prepare the world. You shall be the instrument by which the Earth will enter into a new age."

  And then Amanda Bull saw the lighted rectangle, like a window in the object's side, and the shadowy figure behind it. The figure's head didn't look quite the way a human head is supposed to. When the smooth hull beneath the figure cracked and let out golden light along three edges and a section of that hull fell forward, the voice issued from the golden interior with greater clarity.

  "Enter, Amanda Bull. And discover your destiny."

  And Amanda Bull walked into the beautiful light with the musical voice vibrating deep in her soul, the voice that seemed to speak the very language of her soul, and she smiled for the first time in weeks. As she disappeared into that light, she spoke two words very softly:

  "I believe..."

  ?Chapter Two

  His name was Remo and shoes annoyed him.

  He was standing on the burning roof of a burning building. Tar on the rooftop was bubbling from the heat, and now the soft live leather of his shoes was starting to give off little puffs of steam, and the soles were sticking into the tar. Like strolling through quicksand, he thought.

  So he kicked off the soft Italian loafers, stood in the hot tar in his bare feet and looked around through the thick haze of smoke for the man he had chased up to the roof.

  He saw him on the far edge of the building. D. Desmund Dorkley was poised on the roofs edge, looking over, looking for some way to escape being roasted alive.

  He obviously hadn't counted on Remo Williams. No one ever counted on Remo Williams. Who would count on a dead man?

  Once he had been patrolman Remo Williams, a beat cop in Newark, New Jersey, who expected to retire on a police pension if he made it to age 55. Until he became one of the last persons to be sentenced to die in the electric chair, for the murder of a drug pusher Remo hadn't killed. He had been framed, and it wasn't until he woke up with slight electrical burn marks on his wrists and was informed that the chair had been rigged not to kill him, that Remo Williams learned who had set him up.

  It had been the United States government— or, rather, a secret organization within that government known only as CURE. Remo had been chosen as America's secret enforcement arm to handle an out-of-control crime situation before that situation swamped American democracy.

  "Then I'm not dead?" Remo had asked.

  "Yes, you are," he was told. "For all intents and purposes."

  And he was. Remo Williams, an orphan, had officially ceased to exist. He became just Remo, whom CURE had code-named "the Destroyer," and so began intensive training designed to make the ex-cop a human weapon. Remo had had no choice, but he went through with the whole deal, and it had changed him in ways even Remo didn't always understand. But all that was long ago, and all D. Desmund Dorkley knew was that a skinny guy with very thick wrists was running barefoot toward him, and there was no expression of pain in the man's eyes as there should have been. The eyes just looked dead.

  For D. Desmund, it was to have been an ordinary torch job. A pile of rags in a corner of an old warehouse, a can of gasoline and a flick of a Bic. No problem.

  Until the unexpected Remo Williams stepped out of the shadows and asked, "Got a light, pal?"

  That was just as the rag pile went orange with a whooosh! D. Desmond, who never carried a gun because loud noises frightened him, dived out the nearest exit, which unfortunately led to the roof. It was a fundamental mistake. You do not go up into a building that is about to go up. You get out. But something about the cold, dead eyes of Remo Williams unnerved D. Desmund. So, he made his first professional mistake.

  It was to have been an ordinary job for Remo Williams, too. He hadn't counted on the arsonist getting the fire started, but Remo was delayed because his trainer had insisted on accompanying him on an ordinary hit.

  "Damn Chiun," Remo muttered as he shifted to a less hot part of the warehouse roof, where the tar wouldn't stick to his feet. There, the roof was only hot enough to broil a steak, not cook the skin from his feet in sliding chunks. Remo wore a black T-shirt that left his arms bare. It was the lesser evaporation of sweat from his left arm that told Remo that it was cooler to his left, and so he veered left.

  Remo could do these things because of his training. It worked this way: Remo ran in a long-legged stride in which only one foot touched the ground at a time. The principle depended entirely on rhythm, which is what made Remo's movements look so graceful, as if his feet floated from motion to motion. The rhythm demanded that Remo keep moving and that one foot remain in the air for the exact length of time the other touched the hot roof surface. With each step, Remo felt the brief flash of heat signaling contact, but only long enough to touch, find traction, and propel him forward another step. Then the other foot took over. Yes, Remo felt the heat but, no, Remo's feet were not burned. They were
not in contact with a heat source long enough to be burned. As for the pain, what little Remo felt in the soles of his bare feet was drawn up his legs, through the nerves, where it was diffused into a tingling sensation. Correct breathing technique enabled Remo to handle pain in this manner.

  It was not much different from the way Hindu fire walkers moved over hot coals— except that they had the technique secondhand and were sometimes burned. Remo had the technique from its originators, which is to say he had it in its pure form and not the Hindu style, which depended in part on the heat-absorbing properties of human sweat and sometimes on artificial salves. And he knew that as long as only one foot touched at a time and he didn't break stride, he could run across the burning roof safely.

  Remo knew how to make the technique work, but he didn't understand how it worked. His trainer understood, but Remo had a long way to go before he completely mastered the art of Sinanju, of which fire walking was but a part. On the other hand, he had only a short way to go across the roof, and he got to the cooler edge just as D. Desmund Dorkley, with a horrified scream, tried to jump out and down to the next roof.

  "Uuurk," said D. Desmund, when he found himself hanging in midair by his green jacket collar, his yellow bow tie looking like a bright, vampiritic butterfly at his throat.

  "Let me go. Let me go. God, put me down," D. Desmund screeched. His legs kicked like a swimmer's over empty space, and his blond hair was limp with sweat. He didn't look like a man who had torched a museum, a church, two office buildings, a fast food restaurant and a school for the blind in just three weeks, and all in the Baltimore area, which showed up on CURE's computers as an aberration significant enough to call for drastic attention. Those same computers had worked out a probability pattern that pinpointed the warehouse as the arsonist's next target so that Remo Williams could be there.

  And now Remo, who had simply extended his hand and caught D. Desmund's coat collar, stood on the edge of the roof and held the arsonist out at arm's length. Although Remo did this casually, it didn't seem possible. For one thing, Remo's arm was too thin and held at too awkward an angle for him to be able to stand on a precipice and hold up a struggling man without both of them toppling over the edge.

  If D. Desmund hadn't been scared completely out of his mind, he would have realized that fact and possibly pointed this out to Remo Williams.

  Remo, had he been so inclined, might have informed him that his arm really wasn't holding up a 200-pound man by main strength. No, it just looked that way to Western eyes because Westerners always thought in terms of just using their arms and then only the muscles in those arms, as if muscles alone provided strength and weren't really simply a system of pulleys— which was exactly what a muscle was when you thought about it. A pulley.

  No, Remo was holding D. Desmund up with Remo's entire body— from the strong toes, which hooked over the roof edge for purchase, to the straight legs and locked knees; and to the stiff spinal column, which provided a fulcrum for the arm, which was held in position by muscle tension, but whose strength really came by the bones within that arm. Balance had something to do with it all. Balance was important in Sinanju, but strength came from the correct alignment of bones that interlocked and spread the dragging weight of D. Desmund's body throughout Remo's body. Balance, bones, muscles, and breathing. All of Remo functioning in perfect harmony with its parts and creating a unity which was greater than the sum of those parts, tapping Remo's inner potential. This was Sinanju.

  And so D. Desmund did not fall to his death, taking Remo with him.

  When D. Desmund finally stopped screaming and flailing, and said, "Oh dear God almighty" once weakly and shut his eyes, Remo hauled him back to the roof edge, careful not to disturb the harmony of his own body.

  "I want the truth," Remo said, after his captive again opened his eyes.

  "Sure," D. Desmund said. "You got it. Any truth you want. Just name it."

  "Good. I'm glad you're being cooperative. Why did you set that fire?"

  "I didn't set any fire," D. Desmund told him.

  "I saw you, remember?"

  "Oh. That's right."

  "Now, why did you do it?"

  "I didn't," D. Desmund said with a straight face.

  "Right," said Remo. "Let's try a different approach, okay?"

  "Okay," said D. Desmund eagerly.

  "Listen carefully," Remo said. "You're going to have one chance to answer this question, and then I'm going to push you off this roof. Okay?"

  "Okay," repeated D. Desmund, who was as frightened as he'd ever been in his life, which meant he was very, very frightened.

  "Good. Stay with me, now. Here's the big question: Did you torch all of those buildings because someone paid you or because you wanted to?"

  "Because I wanted to. I like to watch stuff burn."

  "That's fine. Thank you for leveling with me. Goodbye." And Remo pushed D. Desmund off the roof.

  But D. Desmund, acting by reflex, grabbed Remo's thick right wrist, which felt like a skin-covered girder.

  "Wait a minute— you said if I answered your question you wouldn't push me."

  "No, no," Remo corrected. "You weren't listening. I didn't say 'You're going to have one chance to answer this question or I'm going to push you off this roof.' I said, 'You're going to have one chance to answer this question and then I'm going to push you off this roof.' "

  "But that's not Fa— AAAAIIIRRRR..." said D. Desmund just before he went splat on the hard pavement below.

  "That's the biz, sweetheart," said Remo as he jumped across to the next roof and slid down its brick surface like a spider to join the kimono-clad individual who was waiting for him.

  "Hear, hear," said Chiun, who was Remo's trainer and, although 80 years old, the most dangerous man on earth. "Excellently done, Remo." He was a small, frail Korean with clear hazel eyes in a wrinkled old face to which clung tiny wisps of hair above each ear and from his chin. A black night kimono concealed most of his form.

  Remo, who was not used to praise from his teacher, nevertheless accepted the words graciously. "You do me great honor, Little Father."

  "Yes," said Chiun. "Your technique, especially on the burning roof, was exemplary. Your feet are not even singed."

  "I lost my shoes," replied Remo, who was becoming suspicious.

  "Shoes are shoes, but correct technique is art. It is beauty. It is perfection. And you only recently were given the gift of fire walking."

  "Yeah, but the firebug managed to torch this place before I got to him," Remo pointed out.

  Chiun shrugged. "It is unimportant in the face of your skill. Besides, this structure is ugly. Someone should burn them all."

  "Yeah, right," said Remo vaguely. "Can we continue this back at the hotel? The fire department will be here any minute now."

  "Very well, then," said Chiun, a smile multiplying the wrinkles of his old face. "Let us return home."

  * * *

  "We will have duck tonight," Chiun said when they had entered the suite of their Baltimore hotel, which was one of the best in the city even though it was only two blocks away from a peep show parlor. For some reason, although the city of Baltimore had a waterfront area in which its adult entertainment establishments were congregated, there were few sections of the city not blighted by massage parlors and adult bookstores.

  "I think duck in apricot sauce would be appropriate," Chiun added, humming happily to himself as he disappeared into the kitchenette.

  "I've gotta tell Smith the firebug was working on his own," Remo said, picking up the phone. Smith was Dr. Harold W. Smith, the director of CURE and Remo's employer, although Smith was ostensibly the director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, from which he and his batteries of computers secretly ran CURE. Because Smith was waiting in Rye for Remo's report, Remo called a number in North Quincy, Massachusetts, which instantly rerouted his call through Blue Ball, Pennsylvania, but which rang a secure phone on Smith's desk.

  "Remo," Smith's lemony
voice demanded before Remo could so much as say hi. "What happened? I have a report the target warehouse was torched."

  "Do you have a report that a body was found next to the warehouse?" Remo asked, wondering how Smith's voice could sound as bitter as a lemon wedge and as dry as a graham cracker both at the same time.

  "No," Smith said.

  "Well, there was. And besides, the building was ugly. So get off my case," said Remo before he hung up.

  When Chiun returned a few minutes later, he was still humming, so Remo decided to get to the bottom of that, too.

  "Is there some reason for this celebration I should know about?" he asked suspiciously.

  Before he answered, Chiun stepped over to his sleeping mat, which had been set in the middle of the floor, and settled onto it like a leaf falling from an autumn tree.

  "Yes, my son," Chiun said, his long fingernails tapping together happily. "Come, sit at my feet. We must talk. This is a happy day."

  "Why?" asked Remo, even as he sat on the floor.

  "Because, my son, you have come far in Sinanju. Because you are about to take a major step forward in Sinanju, and I am pleased with you."

  Remo thought a moment. "I thought I'd taken a major step about a year ago. Remember? The Dream of Death? You told me then I'd be in this phase for a long time."

  "This is true, Remo," Chiun said, his voice solemn. "You are still young in the eyes of Sinanju and must walk the traditional path. But today you showed me that you are ready to move forward along that path more swiftly. To run ahead, but without straying from that path. Your work with the fire walking told me this."

  "It is a good technique," Remo said. He was debating whether or not to add "taught by an excellent teacher" when Chiun said, "Yes, a good technique, and taught by an excellent teacher. But you know this. What you do not know, for I have not told you, is that fire walking is not usually taught to one as young as you. But in ten years you have absorbed better than any Korean what I have taught you of Sinanju. This gives me hope that certain other lessons can be taught ahead of their proper time. This is important, Remo, because the more you know, the safer is your life and mine, and it is upon our safety and skills that my poor village depends. You are their future, after me. And one day you will be the Master of Sinanju instead of me. Thus, you are ready for a new technique."