Waste Not, Want Not td-130 Read online

  The president worked the crowd, answering questions in an impromptu news conference. As he watched with growing jealousy, Finance Minister Whitehall clenched his teeth until the enamel squeaked. Barely controlling his anger, he whipped out his phone to call up to the control booth.

  "Yes, that is true," Executive President Curry-Hume was saying to a reporter from the Washington Times. "This demonstration is of global significance. Its reach is so great it is only fitting that it take place now, the week of the Globe Summit. Mayana is about to change the world for the better. I won't spoil the surprise that my people have worked so hard to get ready for you. I think we should stand back and let them show us what they've done for us all."

  He was backing into his entourage, ready to permit the demonstration to commence, when a final question was shouted from the gaggle of reporters.

  "Isn't this near the site where the Jamestown tragedy took place?" a reporter for the Boston Blade called.

  On his cell phone, Carlos Whitehall froze.

  This was the one question he had feared more than any other. The finance minister had yelled, bargained and begged not to build here. But the land was government owned and ideally located. Whitehall had been outvoted.

  The finance minister held his breath, awaiting the president's response.

  The executive president nodded soberly to the now silent crowd. "As you say, Jamestown was a terrible tragedy," Curry-Hume said, voice rich with sadness. "But we are not here to focus on the past. We are here to celebrate the future. A better, cleaner future for the entire planet." He turned his back on the reporters. "Gentlemen, if you please."

  Carlos Whitehall released a secret sigh. "Begin," he barked into his cell phone. Turning expectantly, he handed the phone off to George Jiminez.

  Immediately, a large set of double doors at the far end of the long pit yawned open. Like the smaller door through which the reporters had come, the double doors had been invisible when closed, blending in with the smooth wall.

  All eyes turned. Cameras rolled.

  Something big crawled up an unseen ramp. When it stopped, everyone there briefly wondered why they were looking at the back end of a dump truck. The truck was dwarfed by the vast black pit.

  The truck was overflowing with garbage. Heaps of torn plastic bags spilled their contents. A few seagulls had flown up from the bay. They swooped lazily in the warm air around the truck.

  Even the breeze was cooperating. The wind blew away from the press, toward the truck.

  At a nod from Carlos Whitehall, George Jiminez spoke in hushed tones into the phone. An instant later, the nozzles lining the black pit glowed brighter. They went from orange to brilliant white.

  Through their special boots, the gathered men and women felt a growing hum beneath their feet. Across the pit, the back of the dump truck slowly began to rise. The maw swung open and the truck's contents slid down into the black pit.

  The trash never reached the bottom.

  As it passed by the array of white-tipped nozzles, there came a series of sharp flashes from all around the pit. And like popping soap bubbles, the bags of trash began to vanish.

  There was a shocked intake of air all around. Reporters ran to the chain-link fence that surrounded the pit.

  "Not too close!" Finance Minister Whitehall called.

  He nudged himself cautiously to the edge, careful to keep at least a foot away from the fence at all times.

  The falling trash continued to vanish. The reporters blinked as if witnessing some sleight of hand in a sidewalk shell game.

  Another door opened above the pit. A second truck was already in position. Bags and steel drums of solid waste were dumped into the deep hole. When they passed by the glowing nozzles, they began winking out, piece by piece.

  The backs of both trucks tipped nearly vertical, loosing the last of their cargo. Not a single piece of trash made it to the bottom of the deep pit.

  The final floating scraps of paper and plastic caught the dying breeze on their way into the pit. They went the way of the larger trash bundles-erased from the air by some invisible force as they passed the glowing nozzles.

  The dump trucks drove away, the doors slid closed once more and the hum of energy faded to silence. As it diminished, so, too, went the nozzle lights. The brilliant white dulled to yellow, then orange.

  Sensing their meal had gone, the circling seagulls swooped curiously once more high overhead before heading back down toward the harbor.

  The reporters stood in shocked silence, staring down onto the empty black floor of the pit. A floor that should have been lined with trash.

  "Where did it go?" one small voice finally asked. President Blythe Curry-Hume stepped forward. "It went where it can never harm the environment again. It went where no beaches are despoiled by medical waste and no neighborhood is poisoned by seeping toxic chemicals. It went where the air is clean and the water is pure.

  "Ladies and gentlemen," the leader of Mayana called, "I give you the hope of a cleaner future for all the world. l present to the world its own salvation. The Vaporizer." His grimacing smile of triumph was a little too tight near his ears.

  Chapter 2

  His name was Remo and he was Master of all he surveyed.

  The thought came to him as he stood on a rocky bluff that jutted over the cold waters of the West Korea Bay.

  Remo. Master of all he surveyed. Him. Remo Williams. Master Remo Williams. It was a strange feeling and, at the same time, so very, very right.

  It had been a long time coming. Days spreading to decades. At times it seemed as if it would never happen. Now? The wink of an eye. Master of all he surveyed.

  Remo looked out over his domain.

  The tiny North Korean fishing village of Sinanju had been settled among craggy rock and sunken mud flats five thousand years before. It looked as if it hadn't seen a lick of paint or a single straight nail hammered since then.

  The crummy little shanty homes of tumbledown wood and moldy thatch were clustered together against the elements. The dilapidated shacks looked like something out of The Grapes of Wrath without the cheery Steinbeck optimism.

  With the melting winter snow came the annual rising tide of mud. Thick goop like brown oatmeal filled the crooked little streets and clogged the main town square.

  The Mission San Juan Capistrano had the annual tradition of its returning swallows. Sinanju had a similar event, but with a non-avian twist. When the ground thawed, the sleeping snakes of Sinanju percolated to the surface. Remo had seen the first million serpents of spring slithering through the ugly brown weeds the previous week. There seemed to be a lot more with every passing year. The exhausted female snakes of Sinanju apparently spent the long winter months unsuccessfully fending off the amorous advances of hissing, horny paramours.

  Remo would have thought the men of Sinanju were slipping the snakes Viagra for laughs if not for two things. First, the men of Sinanju were far too lazy to bother with the effort. Second, if they did have access to the drug, they'd need all they could spare for themselves.

  Which brought him to the people of his dominion. The women of Sinanju were shapeless lumps with manhole-flat faces that looked like the south end of a northbound mule. The chronically unemployed men had raised indolence to Olympian heights. With a village stocked to its rotting rafters with ugly women and lazy men, the only good to come from the arrangement was an exceedingly low birthrate.

  Not that a larger population couldn't have been cared for. Oh, not by the villagers. As a fishing village, Sinanju had always been a failure. The waters of the West Korea Bay supported little marine life. If there had been fish there at one time, the bay had long since been fished out. The surrounding plains were bad for farming, not that the villagers had ever shown much of an aptitude for agriculture. There were no minerals to mine, no crafts with which to barter. There was nothing really that the people of Sinanju had to offer.

  At least not on the surface. That's where Remo came in.
/>   Sinanju had one great asset, one shining jewel amid the cold and mud that made it far greater than it appeared.

  The tiny, seemingly inconsequential village was home to the Masters of Sinanju. The most ancient and deadly martial art had been born on these inhospitable shores. Death was the brush of the Masters of Sinanju; the world their canvas.

  If all the other, lesser martial arts were rays, Sinanju was the sun source. The rest had splintered from it. And, being but imitations, they were all inferior. Sinanju was the pure source, the essence of what could be for men in complete control of mind and body.

  Since the start, the Masters of Sinanju had used their skills as assassins. And they excelled at their craft. Scalpels employed to take the place of clumsy armies, the Korean assassins were capable of feats that would seem superhuman to the average man.

  There were only two Masters of Sinanju in a generation, teacher and pupil. But that was more than enough. The people of Sinanju need never work, for the efforts of the Masters of Sinanju kept them fed and warm.

  Since before the time of the pharaohs, emissaries had come to the village to retain the services of the famed Sinanju assassins. And for aeons empires flourished or fell thanks to the secret services of the men from Sinanju.

  The dawn of a new century had brought a new beginning to the venerable House of Sinanju. Remo-a white American-had recently become the first non-Korean Reigning Master, accepting the title and all the responsibilities that came with it. But in his heart he knew that his skin color didn't really matter. In truth he knew that he was just the latest in an unbroken line stretching back through time to that long-ago, forgotten day when the first crooked beam was set upon the first mossy stone to form the first pathetic hovel from which would grow the village over which he now stood as Reigning Master.

  Taking it all in on the lonely bluff above the village-the history, the surroundings, the wind, sea and air; allowing the salty mist to sting his exposed flesh-a newfound poetic sense swelled deep in the spirit of Remo Williams. And the newest Reigning Master of Sinanju did give word to his innermost feelings. And that word did roll off his tongue, loudly proclaimed for all around to hear.

  And that word was, "Yuck."

  Thus spake Remo Williams, newly invested Reigning Master of the House of Sinanju.

  He might have gotten in trouble for saying it aloud, especially if it fell on a particular pair of sen sitive ears. Fortunately for Remo, only one person was nearby.

  "Excuse me, Master of Sinanju?"

  Though Korean, the groveling man's English was very good.

  The man in the North Korean general's uniform was not of Sinanju. General Kye Pun was head of the People's Bureau of Revolutionary Struggle. He had recently been given a temporary assignment by North Korean Premier Kim Jong-Il. Kye Pun was to personally act as liaison between the new Master of Sinanju and the Communist government in Pyongyang.

  A few months before, there had been a power struggle in the village. A man had come to the ancient seat of the Masters of Sinanju to claim the title of Reigning Master for himself. At the time it was not absolutely certain who would be the victor. But the premier had a history with the white Master of Sinanju. The truth was, the crazy American scared him silly. Kim Jong-Il had thrown his support behind Remo.

  When the dust settled, the premier was relieved to find that he had chosen wisely. Still, he wanted to be sure that the brave but dangerous Master Remo knew that he had the continued full backing of the leadership in Pyongyang.

  General Kye Pun had been put at the disposal of the new Reigning Master by Kim Jong-Il as a show of support. At the moment Kye Pun seemed confused by Remo's spoken thought.

  "What?" Remo asked, annoyed. Annoyance came easy to him lately. He had spent most of his days in Sinanju annoyed. As time went on, he had only grown increasingly annoyed.

  "I do not understand this word 'yuck,'" Kye Pun said.

  "Oh." Remo nodded. "Yuck," he repeated slowly. "As in 'Yuck, this place is a shithole, I want to go home.'"

  "Ah," said Kye Pun. "Home."

  The general looked over his shoulder at the lone house that sat across the bluff on which they stood. It was an eyesore, but of a different kind than the shacks of Sinanju. The big house looked to have been contracted out to a hundred blind architects who had each graduated last in his class. Dozens of architectural styles from countless centuries had been forced together in a clash of rocks, marble, granite and wood that made the sensitive eye ache just looking at it. Sitting on the roof was a gleaming satellite dish. The newly mounted eyesore-on-an-eyesore was aimed up at the heavens.

  The building had become Remo's official residence when he assumed the mantle of Reigning Master.

  "There is mud on the path to your home," Kye Pun said. "Allow your unworthy servant."

  The general began to lie down in the mud to form a human bridge so that Remo's Italian loafers would remain unsoiled.

  At any other time this would have been far too great an indignity for Kye Pun to bear. Not any longer. At least, not for this particular man.

  Four months ago, when this young Master of Sinanju had arrived by jet in the capital of Pyongyang, Kye Pun met him at the airport. Kye Pun's personal bodyguard was present. The bodyguard was a massive, muscled mountain of flesh who could have wrestled a live ox through a meat grinder onehanded. He was assigned to kill the white Master of Sinanju. The young white Master of Sinanju swatted the behemoth bodyguard's head from his shoulders with a single slap. The head lodged in a jet engine.

  After that incident, Kye Pun decided that there was nothing that he would not do to make the white Master of Sinanju happy. If that meant lying on his belly in the mud, he would wallow like a pig in a pen with a song in his heart.

  The Korean general had barely gotten to his knees when he felt a strong hand on his shoulder.

  "Hey, Sir Walter Dingbat, I'm not talking about that dump," Remo said, lifting the general from the ground and setting him back to the path. "I meant America."

  Kye Pun felt his breath catch. He could scarcely believe what he was hearing. "You will return to the bourgeois land of the capitalist oppressors?" he sang.

  "I prefer to think of it as the good ol' U.S. of A.," Remo said thinly.

  "Of course," Kye Pun said quickly. He pumped a clenched hand in the air. "Go, Dallas Cowboys, John Wayne and Mickey Mouse." He pitched his voice low. "You know, I have always secretly been a great fan of the exploitation of the workers by the power elite," he confided.

  "As a card-carrying Commie, you'd have to be," Remo said dryly. The sarcasm was lost on the North Korean general.

  "How soon will you leave?" Kye Pun asked excitedly. "Do you wish for me to make the travel arrangements? They are still repairing the engine of the Iraqi jet you came in. Shan Duk's accursed skull caused much damage." He spit angrily on the ground. "Or I am certain the premier himself will gladly loan you his plane, as he has in the past."

  "Hold your horses," Remo said. "First, are you absolutely sure we're all through here?"

  The general looked at the clipboard in his gloved hand.

  A stack of papers had been snapped to the board. Lines of neat text were written in English for the benefit of the new Reigning Master of Sinanju. Across the top of each page, columns were labeled National Leader, Assassin's Name, Method/Date of Shipment, Time of Contact/Name of Caller. To the left were lined up the names of countries, one atop another. To the far right were boxes to be checked off when a line was full. All of the boxes on the first page had received a tidy red check mark.

  Most of the paperwork had been filled in four months before. The Contact/Caller column and the checks had been slowly filling up as the months wore on.

  General Kye Pun licked the tip of his black-gloved thumb as he rattled through the paperwork.

  "Yes, yes, ye-es," he said, nodding as he went. "As I mentioned when I arrived, it appears to be finished. Norway and some of the African nations took a long time to get back to us. But the
last was Morocco, and that call came today. That is why I came here. Not that I would not trade my eyes for another glimpse of this, the Pearl of the Orient."

  He waved a hand to grandly encompass the mud pit and decaying shantytown that was Sinanju. At the same moment, the shifting wind brought a fresh gulp of putrescence from the thawing public outhouses.

  "Beautiful," Kye Pun enthused even as he turned to vomit down the side of the bluff.

  "Thanks a lot," Remo groused. "That was the one spot in town that didn't have something disgusting dripping off it."

  Kye Pun apologized profusely. The general was climbing down, handkerchief in hand to clean off the rocks even as Remo turned on his heel and headed down the path.

  Remo's gait was easy as he headed into the village proper. More a steady glide than a walk. The villagers he passed seemed delighted to see him. They offered reverent bows as he strode through their midst. In Korean, they offered what sounded like words of praise.

  "I will never get used to those eyes," one said, bowing deeply to the new Reigning Master.

  "Yes, they are homely things," agreed another. "Still, they are better than that ghost-belly white skin."

  Remo-who was fluent in Korean-pretended he didn't understand a word they were saying.

  It was a little game he had been playing to pass the time. He had come to Sinanju many times over the past few decades. While there, some had heard him speak Korean. This visit, he wondered how easy it would be to convince the populace that he had only ever spoken words and phrases by rote, and that he didn't understand the language at all.

  He was stunned to find the people of Sinanju were even dumber than they were lazy. A few helpless shrugs and loud "whats?" during conversations, and all of them were convinced he couldn't speak a word of their language.