Lords of the Earth td-61 Read online

  It was only after he had known it a long time that he realized he could see a building and know how to penetrate its hidden places, just as surely as a physician would know there was a vein under a forearm.

  He knew there would be an old dumbwaiter channel in this basement and he knew that it would be behind the elevator. He also knew that a seemingly solid wall would hide it. He pressed the heel of his right hand against the plaster, feeling its dryness, sensing the darkness around him, tasting that neverlost smell of coal in this basement in Boston's Back Bay.

  He pressed with his hand, steadily increasing the force so there would be no violent noise, and then the basement wall gave way with a little groan. The old dumbwaiter was inside. Carefully he gathered up the plaster in his hands, like a silent eagle with soft talons, and gently funneled the plaster chips and dust into a pile at his feet.

  He reached inside the hole and felt old iron, ridged with rust, that crumbled in his hands. That was the handle for the dumbwaiter door. He did not bother to pull it. He sensed that it would come off in his hands, so he pressed it silently into the old wood, and it gave way with a gentle sputter of dry rot.

  These dumbwaiters had once been used by delivery boys who were not allowed into the main halls of the old Back Bay brownstones. They were boxes running on pulleys. A boy would put a package of groceries into the box, pull down on a rope, and the box would be raised to the correct floor.

  As in most of the sealed dumbwaiters, the box and rope had long ago settled to the floor. Now there was just a dark, airless passage, and Remo moved into it smoothly, knowing that the brick he felt under his hands could crumble from too much pressure. He did not climb the brick, but instead let the wall become part of him, creating the movement upward.

  He was a thin man with thick wrists and wore a dark T-shirt and dark slacks. His shoes were simple loafers that skimmed gently upward as his body rose in the narrow dark channel. And then he heard the voices on the other side of the wall.

  He made a bridge of five fingers with his left hand, set the right hand against the opposite wall and stayed suspended to listen. The rising was not the hard part in dealing with heights. All movements had their own power, but a stagnant body would fall, so he supported himself with his hands, varying the pressure under his fingertips to maintain the unity of his motion with the brick.

  He heard one man say, "What can go wrong? What? Tell me."

  "I'm scared, I'm telling you. I'm scared. Look at the size of it. I just want to run. Forget what we found and thank our lucky stars they don't know it yet."

  The first man laughed.

  "Baby," he said. "We have never been so safe in our lives. It's not a crime. They're committing the crime. They're the ones who are outside of the law, not us. They're the ones who should be afraid. They should be pissing their pants."

  "I don't know. I still say forget it."

  "Look, nothing can happen to us."

  "These aren't our files," the second man said. "So?"

  "We got them by accident on a computer scan by one of our research people."

  "You've just proven," the first man said, "that we did not steal anything."

  "But it's not ours."

  "Possession is ninety percent of the law. If these files, these beautiful files, aren't ours, whose are they?"

  "They belong to that sanitarium we traced in Rye, New York. Folcroft Sanitarium."

  "I talked to the director up there today. He said the files aren't his."

  "Well, how about that computer setup in St. Martin? That was tied up with this whole thing, somehow."

  "St. Martin. Swell, a vacation island in the Caribbean. Think anybody there will care about these files?"

  "I think the files at Folcroft are duplicated on St. Martin. Probably to stop them from being erased by mistake. And I think it's some secret government outfit and we ought to stay the hell away from it," the second man said.

  "We'll help them stay secret. We won't say anything. We'll just become rich as Croesus from all this wonderful information."

  The second man let out a sound like a soft groan. "You know, all that data tracks crime in America. The printouts have files on how somebody gave the FBI, the narcotics people and local cops the information to help send crooks to jail. I think it's our own government's attempt to keep the country from falling apart, and darn it, I think we ought to leave them alone. This country's been good to us. If some secret agency helps it survive, then let it be."

  "Why?" the first man said.

  "Because tampering is wrong. These people are trying to do good. What are we going to do? Make some more money? This country has already let us become rich."

  "Not a good enough reason. You got to show me how I can be hurt."

  "What if they have commandos or something working for them?" the second man said.

  "No. The computer said only one man was authorized to do any violence."

  "Maybe that one guy's dangerous."

  The first man laughed aloud. "We've got three men outside the door and three men on the street. The doors are made of reinforced steel. Let's see him try something. There'll only be one dead body. His."

  "I still don't like it," the second man said.

  "Look, we'll be richer than oil sheiks. We can forget our computer business. We'll know all the dirt that goes on in the country. We can blackmail the government. Or people who are breaking the law. We can do anything we want and everybody'll be afraid of us and pay us. Nothing can happen to us."

  Right, Remo thought to himself. These were the right ones.

  He released his left hand and let his left side brace against the wall, and with an easy extension moved the room wall right into the room. Rolling free of the white plaster dust, he found himself in a high-ceilinged room with an ornate black marble fireplace and two frightened men.

  Between them was a gray metal box which Remo had been told was a two-hundred-megabyte hard disk, whatever that was.

  The two men were middle-aged with deep tans from some sunny place they had apparently visited that winter. But when the wall opened up and Remo came through, the tans disappeared. and they became old men with very white faces.

  "This the two-hundred-megabyte hard disk?" Remo asked.

  They both nodded. Their eyes were wide and their heads moved as stiffly as if their necks were petrified wood.

  "That's it, huh?" confirmed Remo. He remembered Smith's computers at Folcroft, taking up most of a basement, and he didn't understand how anything of value could be contained in the small gray box.

  The men nodded again.

  "You make any backups?" Remo asked. He had been told to ask that and find the backups if they had made any.

  "No," said both men in unison.

  Remo grabbed one by the left pinky and pressed the finger backward with increasing pain.

  "In the bathroom," the man gasped.

  "What's in the bathroom?"

  "Soft disks. Backups."

  "Show me," said Remo. Both men went to a white door around the corner from the fireplace. When they opened it, Remo saw thousands of thin, recordlike disks.

  "Is that it?" Remo said.

  "You couldn't be from that place if you don't recognize a floppy disk," said the more aggressive of the two men. He wore a flared gray suit and a striped tie. The other wore a dark blue suit and plain white shirt with all the joy of someone rehearsing for his own funeral.

  "I'm from that place," Remo said.

  In his pocket was something he was supposed to use now. It was a small device that looked like a cigarette lighter but had no flame. It was black and metallic and had a button he was supposed to press. He pressed and the light in the living room flickered strangely.

  "He's from that place," said the man in the flared suit. "He erased everything with a projected magnetic field."

  "Is that what I did?" Remo asked.

  "What are you going to use on the hard disk? It's got a platinum shell five times harder than ste
el."

  "Five times, you say?" The men stared, stunned, at what they saw. It appeared as if the thin man in the dark shirt and trousers just slapped the two sides of the super-strong metal box, not hard, not even fast, as if he were giving it a love tap. With a crack, the shell shattered and the insides were exposed, shining purple.

  Remo had been told that the insides, the hard disk, was vulnerable even to a nudge because of its incredible closeness to some sort of internal reading device. A tap would disable it. He gave it a punch, and a shower of glittery material sprayed the room.

  The two men now realized that their own door's protective thickness prevented their bodyguards from hearing them.

  "That it?" asked the bolder man. He had a small pistol he had been carrying since that first day when his computers had somehow been switched into the mind of the master computer that had monitored the dark side of America for so long.

  "No," Remo said. "Two more things."

  "What?" said the man. He had his hand on the pistol. He would put a shot right into the thin man's dark shirt. He would not aim for the head. Nothing fancy. A simple bullet in the chest, then unload the gun into the head and run. That was his plan. Unfortunately, it required an operating brain to carry it out and his was suddenly in the back part of the fireplace.

  The other man passed out and never recovered, since his spinal column had been neatly severed. Neither of them had seen Remo's hand move for the very simple reason that they weren't supposed to.

  Remo looked around. "Hard disk, backup," he mumbled to himself. "Hard disk, backup: That's it. I think I got it."

  He left by the dumbwaiter. Outside, in the alley next to the elegant Back Bay brownstone, an armed guard gave him a hard stare. Remo smiled. The guard asked him what he was doing coming out of the building.

  Remo tried to think of an answer. He didn't really have a good one so he deposited the guard and his gun in a nearby garbage container called a Dempsey Dumpster.

  Had he missed anything? Hard disk, backup. That's what he was supposed to destroy. He was sure of it. Maybe.

  He did not like the world of computers.

  He liked it even less when he arrived at a small resort off the South Carolina coast. Several wood bungalows faced the calm Altantic, lapping against sand and grass. The old wooden steps of the bungalow made no sound as he moved lightly up them. The air was salty and good. Remo whistled softly, but once inside, he stopped. An ugly glass screen atop a keyboard was staring at him. Someone had brought a computer into the bungalow.

  Sitting in a chair facing the sea was a frail wisp of a man in a subdued maroon kimono with gold dragons dancing around a golden sunburst. At the sides of his head, gentle fluffs of hair floated like wool grass in a breeze. Two parchment-frail hands with delicate fingers and long graceful fingernails rested peacefully at his side.

  "Who brought that thing in here?" asked Remo, pointing to the computer near the front door.

  "It makes my heart sing at the joy of your return," said the old man, Chiun, Master of Sinanju.

  "I'm sorry, Little Father," said Remo. "I just hate computers and machines and things that don't go bump in the night."

  "That is no excuse to greet me with such irreverence," Chiun snapped.

  "Sorry," said Remo.

  He walked around behind the computer and saw a body lying on the floor. There was an open attache case next to it.

  "What's this all about?" Remo asked. He saw a brochure for a computer inside the attache case. "What?" Chiun asked mildly.

  "This body. Did you have some trouble with the computer?" Remo asked.

  "I did not. I am not a computer illiterate."

  "Then what's this corpse doing here?"

  "He had trouble with the computer," Chiun explained.

  "It up and killed him?"

  "He's dead, isn't he?" said Chiun.

  "I am not getting rid of this body," Remo said. Chiun was silent. Had he asked Remo to get rid of the body? Had he done anything this day, this poor sunlit day where the world had little joy for him, but attempt to be reasonable and fair with this highly unfair world? What had he ever asked from the world? He wanted peace. He wanted only a small dollop of fairness and a chance to enjoy whatever the sun might bring. In return for giving Remo the awesome secrets of Sinanju, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju, received no gratitude but hostile questions about some worthless computer salesman who had died because he had failed with the computer.

  Through the years, he thought with bitterness, he had given Remo what no other white man had been given. He had given him the power of Sinanju, the sun source of all the martial arts, from which had come the lesser rays that even whites had mastered: karate, tae kwando, judo, and all the other weak movings of the body.

  And for giving this to Remo, for training him to masterhood, Chiun had received nothing, as always. But he was determined this morning not to allow this to ruin the day. He would accept as a fact that some things, some defects of character, could not be overcome, no matter how perfect and wondrous the training or the trainer. Chiun was determined to let Remo's rudeness pass until he realized that Remo was going to let it pass also, and then he had no choice but to bring up the ingratitude, the rudeness, the insensitivity, and all the other things he hadn't wanted to mention.

  "I'm not cleaning up this body," Remo said. "I don't ask you to take care of my bodies, so please don't ask me to take care of yours."

  "This one is not mine," said Chiun. "But I realize there are some things that can never be explained to one with a vicious heart."

  "Since when do I have a vicious heart, Little Father?" Remo asked.

  "You have always had a vicious heart."

  "I'm used to 'ungrateful,' but not 'vicious.' "

  "Does it bother you?" Chiun asked. There was the hint of a smile on his calm Oriental face. "No," Remo said.

  The hint of a smile vanished. "I will think of something else," Chiun promised.

  "I'm sure you will," Remo said. " 'Vicious heart' is going to be hard to top, though."

  Chiun, of course, had not killed the salesman. Oh, no. He made that clear. He had merely attempted to become part of the computer age. Through the centuries that the House of Sinanju had worked for emperors and rulers, tributes had piled up at the small village on the West Korean Bay. Gifts from the Greekling, Alexander, from pharaohs and kings, from all who had wished to employ the ancient Korean house of assassins. Gifts too numerous to list. Computers were good at listing such things and so Chiun, who liked the gadgets of the West, called a salesman and purchased a computer, one that could do lists well.

  The salesman had arrived that day, bearing a lovely machine, finely tooled, with a beautiful gray box to house it and a keyboard of glistening keys.

  Chiun explained the problems of listing different weights, because the ancient Masters would get paid in weights of stone, and also in dramits, pulons and refids, such as a major refid of silk or a minor refid of silk.

  "No problem," the salesman had said. "How big is a refid? I'll just put it right in the computer."

  "It depends on the quality of the silk," Chiun had said. "A small refid of fine silk is better than a large refid of poor silk. It is both quantity and quality."

  "I see. So a refid means value."

  "Yes," Chiun said.

  "No problem," the salesman said. "How much is a single refid worth in money?"

  "One refid?" asked Chiun.

  "Sure," said the salesman pleasantly.

  "A single refid is equal to three and seven-eights barons during the time of the Ming Dynasty, or one thousand, two hundred and twelve Herodian shekels from that fine king of Judea."

  It had taken the whole morning but the salesman had studiously set up a value system for the many different weights and measures of the House of Sinanju. Chiun's fingers fluttered expectantly as he waited for the moment when he himself could touch the keys and record, for the first time in centuries, all the glorious tributes of the House of Sinanju.
For this meant in centuries to come, every Master to follow would have to think of Chiun when they examined the wealth that would be passed on to them.

  "Can we put my name on every page?" Chiun asked.

  "Sure," said the salesman, and he programmed every page to list automatically and forever that this accounting had been started by Chiun. They could even make the pages shorter so that Chiun's name would appear more often.

  "Should we say 'the Great Chiun'?" Chiun asked.

  "Sure," said the salesman again, and he inserted it into the program. Such was Chiun's happiness that tears almost came to his eyes.

  The old Korean sat before the keyboard and touched it with his fingers. Then he began to list the modern tributes sent by submarine from the new nation of America to Korea as payment for "the Great Chiun's" teaching services.

  He paused, imagining future generations reading this. They would tell stories of him, just as he, as a student, had been told stories of the Great Wang and other past Masters of Sinanju. He had told Remo the stories so that the young white man would understand what it was to be a Master of Sinanju.

  And then, as Chiun pressed the precious keys again, a dull gray mass appeared suddenly on the screen and all the letters were gone.

  "Where is my name?" he asked.

  "Oh, you hit the delete-key format instead of the file-key format," the salesman said.

  "Where is my name?"

  "If we had made a backup disk, your name would still be there. But we didn't. So, in the future, you're going to have to make a backup disk, do you see?"

  "Where is my name?" asked Chiun. "It was deleted."

  "My name was in there forever. That is what you said."

  "Yes. It was."

  "Forever," Chiun explained, "does not have a 'was'." Forever is always an 'is.' Where is my name?"

  "You struck the delete-key format."

  "Where is my name?"

  "It's not there."

  "I put it there and you put it there," Chiun said. "You said it was there forever. Bring it back."