Next Of Kin td-46 Read online

  More than an hour passed. Outside, snow was falling in wet, fat flakes that coated the landscape as the train chug-a-chugged slowly through the Kentucky highlands. The boy dozed. Chug-a-chug, chug-a-chug. A hypnotic stillness fell over the car. The snow was falling with a chug-a-chug beat, chug-a-chug and the snow, the bright, white snow, bright and white, too bright, the snow, chug-a-chug...

  The snow!

  Jeremiah snapped awake to the sounds of people shrieking wildly as a storm of whirling snow blew through the train.

  "What— what's this?" the welfare lady grumbled as the snow slowed and ceased and disappeared without a trace of moisture. She looked around for the source of the noise, then went back to sleep.

  "It isn't even wet," someone called from a distance. And everyone turned and marveled about what could have caused such a mass hallucination, except for Jeremiah, who fought back tears of panic and sorrow and shame because he knew that he had caused it. He felt as if he'd just had a wet dream in front of fifty people, and he knew they would continue. He was a freak, a dangerous, uncontrollable menace who'd be locked up in prison or killed as soon as people found out about him.

  He straightened up. What if nobody did find out about him? If he could get away from the welfare lady who was already beginning to snore, perhaps never reach the home in Dover City... If he could live alone in the mountains, no one would ever know...

  But someone did know. The strange-looking man with the newspaper was staring straight at him, unsmiling, appraising. He knew. It was all over. He knew.

  With a movement so fast that Jeremiah didn't know what was happening, the man lifted him off his seat and clamped his hand over the boy's mouth. He carried him to the sleeper cabin where Jeremiah had first seen him and threw him inside.

  Before Jeremiah could get to his feet, the man swatted him across the cabin with the back of his hand. The motion looked effortless, but the boy felt as though all his bones were broken.

  "If you scream, I'll kill you," he said.

  He walked in a slow circle around the whimpering child. For several minutes he paced in silence. Then he said, "You are a most exceptional child." He spoke elegantly, unlike the rough Southern mountain twang Jeremiah's ears were accustomed to.

  "Where are you going on this train?" the stranger asked.

  "Dover City."

  "Is that woman your mother?" He inclined his head in the direction of the passenger car.

  "No. My parents are dead." He burst into tears. "I killed them."

  The man's eyelids lowered and the corners of his mouth curved upward. "Good," he said softly. "Does anyone know what you can do?"

  Jeremiah stammered, confused.

  "The snow. The boy in the corridor. Things like that."

  The boy shook his head.

  "You know, if anyone finds out about you, they'll kill you."

  Jeremiah's trembling worsened. "I won't do it anymore," he said weakly.

  The man laughed. "You know as well as I that you can't control this— this ability of yours. You were asleep when you caused the snowstorm. Stop that sniffling at once." He shoved the boy's shoulder painfully. "It can only be directed. And used. Yes, this talent of yours could prove to be quite helpful."

  "At the home in Dover City, they're going to put me in jail, aren't they?"

  The man smiled a sly, oily smile. "But you're never going to reach Dover City," he said. "This encounter with me has changed your fate finally and inexorably. You will be rich. You will be free to take anything you want on the face of the earth. You will lead a life that is both unique and invincible. And you will be, with proper guidance and discipline, of invaluable assistance to me."

  "Who are you?" the boy asked, ignorant of half the words the strange man had spoken.

  "I am the Master," he said.

  Then he shattered the glass in the cabin's window, gathered the boy up in his arms, and hurled them both outside into the cold to roll down the snowy, bramble-coated hillside as the train coughed on and out of sight.

  * * *

  Outside the castle's slit windows, the sea rumbled close to the palm trees. High tide. The Dutchman had been in the same position for hours. Waiting. A stranger from the outside would have thought he was resting, but the Dutchman never rested. He waited, and that was different.

  The door opened with a soft knock and a squat, dark-haired man wearing a shabby seafarer's uniform entered carrying a red lacquer box.

  "What's this for?" the Dutchman asked.

  The mute stared at him intently, watching the shape of his lips. He handed the Dutchman the box with a slight bow, then gestured with practiced, fluttering hands a message that made the Dutchman shudder to the tips of his fingers. "It can't be true," he said as the mute drew a long beard in the air. Two men— a tall young white man and an aged Oriental. The mute bowed again, picked up a quill pen and a sheet of rice paper from a table in the room, and wrote with large, difficult strokes:

  THEY HAVE COME.

  He handed the Dutchman the paper, bowed again, and left the room, again sheathed in darkness except for the eerie light of the full tropical moon outside. The Dutchman looked at the lacquer box in his hands and willed his, fingers to stop trembling. When they steadied, he tossed the box into the air, thrust his right hand upward, and with a delicate dancing rhythm of his fingers, shattered the box in midair into a thousand pieces.

  An envelope fluttered from its place in the box, where it had rested for many years, and drifted into the Dutchman's hands.

  "At last," he said quietly, clutching the envelope to his chest. He rose, feeling the chains of a lifetime loosen and break. He walked to the door, handed the envelope to the mute waiting outside, and said, "Take this to the man called Chiun."

  When his servant had disappeared into the night, the Dutchman walked through the castle into a room with a hidden panel that led to another room, a tiny, square black box occupied by a small ebony shrine. The Dutchman knelt before it.

  He spoke softly. "O Master of Darkness," he whispered. "Thank you for delivering these men into my hands. Their arrival is premature, but I promise I will not fail you. Your will is mine. I go forth into death without fear. You will be avenged."

  The waiting was over.

  ?Two

  His name was Remo and he was bellysmacking. It smarted, diving forty feet from a cliff and landing on his stomach in the reef-shallowed waters of L'Embouchure Bay.

  "No, no," Chiun shrieked from the shore, his thin arms waving wildly over a 1920s red and black striped, knee-length bathing costume. "Come back. Come back at once."

  Remo sloshed back toward shore in the calf-high water, his abdomen glowing a bright crimson.

  Chiun folded his arms across his chest and shook his head, making his beard and the wispy tuft of white hair on his crown dance in the breeze like a banner. "Disgraceful," he said, pointing with a long fingernail to Remo's red belly. "You are soaked. You enter the water like a rock."

  "Tell that to my stomach. It feels like a ripe tomato that's just been fired out of a cannon. That water's only a foot deep."

  "Nine inches more than you need," said the old Oriental, his hazel eyes narrowing into slits above his parchment cheekbones. "The Flying Wall must be performed lightly, like a seagull skimming the waters. The dive was developed in my village of Sinanju in Korea. Perhaps the teachings of Sinanju are too rigorous for soft white men," he said with a tight smile.

  "Chiun, I live for Sinanju. But I can't help it. I'm not you. My stomach turns red when I hit a coral reef at a hundred miles an hour. Besides, this is supposed to be our vacation."

  "If you are so in need of rest that you cannot perform your exercises, I suggest that you remain abed." He sniffed. "This island sun cannot be good for one's health. Too warm."

  Remo's night-dark eyes pinched in sudden understanding. "That's it. You're just ticked 'cause Smitty sent us here for vacation when we could have been lolling on the rocky, frozen shores of Sinanju. Right? Right?"
/>   Chiun shrugged. "What can be expected from a white man? Perhaps Emperor Smith felt you were not sufficiently excellent on our last assignment to merit a stay in Sinanju. Perhaps this desolate, sun-filled place is a fitting punishment for your laziness in performing the exercises recommended by the Master of Sinanju."

  "Sint Maarten's one of the most beautiful islands in the world," Remo said stubbornly. "It sure beats the hell out of that back-stabbing rock quarry you call home."

  Chiun bristled, the white cloud of hair on his head whipping back and forth. "How dare you insult the name of my village?" he sputtered.

  "The last time we set foot in that godforsaken dump, the local clowns tried to murder me," Remo yelled.

  "Perhaps they had seen you attempt the Flying Wall. Heh, heh." He pointed to the cliff from which Remo had been diving. "Heh, heh. Flying Wall. More like Flying-Pile-of-Garbage. Heh, heh." He rubbed his stomach in painful reminder.

  "Well, they didn't exactly roll out the welcome mat for you, either. After all the gold you've sent them, they all sided with Nuihc, against you. He was calling himself the Master of Sinanju, and they believed him."

  Chiun winced with the memory.

  The Master of Sinanju was obliged by a thousand-year-old custom to support his village through his earnings as an assassin— the best assassin in history— for the House of Sinanju was the sun source of all the martial arts. Chiun had honored that custom for most of his eighty-odd years. But Nuihc, his nephew, would not. Despite his lofty speeches to the villagers of Sinanju, Nuihc was a greedy, evil man who had lived in dishonor all his life, and planned to sell out the village to the Communist North Koreans as soon as he usurped Chiun's position as Master. Death was too good for him, but death had claimed him anyway.

  "That is all past now," Chiun said quietly. "Still, my village of Sinanju is lovely in the springtime. Come, Remo. I will show you the Flying Wall."

  Remo walked him to the edge of the water and watched as the little man scaled the sheer face of the cliff like a gaily striped spider. He loved the old man who still, in his eighth decade, toiled at the work of death to keep his ungrateful village alive. To Remo, Chiun was Sinanju, and all of the greatness of the training of Sinanju was embodied in him. Remo watched. He wanted to learn the Flying Wall.

  The tiny figure on top of the cliff shot off the edge without hesitation. He continued like a projectile almost straight out for some 50 feet before descending. He looked like a colorful bearded bird as he shifted his arms to catch the thermal air pockets in the wind. He descended in a curve toward shore, and landed in the shallowest water without a splash. The momentum of his flight kept him skimming over the corals until he was within inches of Remo. Then he stood up, revealing only a slender band of wetness down the front of his body. Even the backs of his legs were dry.

  "That was beautiful, Chiun," Remo said.

  The Oriental's eyes sparkled but he said only, "It was adequate to demonstrate the proper shifting of weight." He wrapped himself in a red silk kimono with a dragon embroidered on the back. "I will go back to the house now for dry clothing and a cup of tea," he said.

  "Okay. I want to try the Flying Wall a couple of times."

  "You will perform the exercise ten times, slothful one," Chiun said.

  "Ten? That's the hardest dive I've ever seen. Nobody can do that ten times without getting killed."

  "Oh? In that case, we shall meet next in paradise. Do not fail to breathe during the curved descent."

  "Ten times," Remo muttered as Chiun padded off toward the villa their employer had rented for them.

  It was odd that Smith had sent them to Sint Maarten. Smitty had to be the most tight-fisted man in the United States government. Springing for a villa, complete with private beach and housekeeper, was as alien to Harold W. Smith as eating octopus.

  Remo shrugged off the thought as he neared the top of the cliff, his fingertips pulling him in toward the wall of stone as his feet slid smoothly upward. At the top, he cleared his mind of all distractions but the memory of Chiun's powerful dive, and took off. His body, more finely tuned than any athlete's, was on automatic now. He glided out toward the sea on the instincts developed through years of training. His arms moved reflexively, feeling for the air pockets, and windmilled slowly backward as he began the slow curve downward. The water touched him softly as he saw, inches below him, a school of angel fish swimming between the craggy reefs of coral that would rip a normal diver to shreds. Like a speedboat he skimmed toward shore, emerging nearly dry.

  "I did it! I did it!" Remo exulted.

  "Nine more times," came a high, squeaky voice from inside the villa.

  * * *

  Remo lay in the sun, his eyes closed, the heat of midday warming his muscles. The ten dives had been exhausting enough, but he had performed the exercise four extra times for good measure. Now all he wanted to do was sleep.

  His past came back to him in snatches, as it often did when he was on the brink of sleep. His years in the orphanage, his training as a policeman in Newark, the incredible frame-up that caused his arrest for killing a dope pusher he didn't kill, the sensational kangaroo court trial that touted him as an example of police brutality, his days on Death Row...

  It had been a lousy life. And then another frame-up, perpetrated by Harold W. Smith, who had masterminded the whole false arrest mess in the first place: the electric chair didn't work. That made it complete. A fake death for a fake crime. Only nobody knew the death was a fraud except for Harold W. Smith, who pulled his weighty strings from a computer console hidden in the recesses of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York; another man who conveniently died shortly after Remo's electrocution; and, after several days of unconsciousness, Remo himself.

  All very neat. The President of the United States had wanted a one-man enforcement arm for an illegal organization, CURE, dedicated to fighting crime outside the Constitution, and Smith had delivered Remo: a man with no family ties who was officially dead.

  Smitty had chosen Chiun, the Master of the ancient House of Sinanju, to transform Remo from an easy-going cop into a smooth, perfect killing machine. All the pieces fit into place. There was little room for error, because error would mean the instantaneous destruction of CURE. If Smith failed to keep CURE secret, his death was sealed in a vial of poison in the basement of Folcroft. If Remo failed, Chiun was instructed to kill him at the moment of Smith's order. If the President failed, he was to pass along the information about CURE's existence to his successor in the White House.

  Remo hadn't liked it. He didn't want to train with the irascible old Oriental in the beginning, didn't like the cloak-and-dagger secrecy of Smith and CURE, and he certainly didn't like killing people for a living. America went on, after all, even if there was a lot of crime that went unpunished, even if the Constitution, written for decent men, was manipulated inside out by criminals who preyed on decent men under its full protection. Remo could see no need for CURE.

  Then the President of the United States was murdered in cold blood by an assassin's bullet. The man who had conceived of CURE as a last-ditch effort to bring crime under control was himself destroyed by crime, and that was when Remo first understood the importance of CURE.

  Remo felt a shadow pass in front of his closed eyelids. He opened them slowly to a vision of two bountiful breasts scantily encased by a purple bikini top.

  "You are going to burn here," the owner of the breasts said in a lilting accent.

  "What?"

  She pressed a spot on his forearm. When she released the pressure, the spot emerged white in a field of hot pink. "The sun," she said, pointing upward. "You will burn the skin. You must go inside, or the sunburn will be very bad."

  Remo squinted to get a better look at the girl. She was beautiful, with long auburn hair streaming carelessly from a knot on the top of her head. She had bottle-green eyes that danced mischievously under long black lashes. Her mouth was full and ripe, and she was very tan.

  "No bathing suit
marks," Remo said flirtatiously. Chiun was a great teacher, but as an after-dinner companion, he was a bust. "You look like an experienced tourist."

  "I live here," the girl said. She extended her hand. "My name is Fabienne de la Soubise."

  "Remo Williams," he said.

  "You are American?"

  Remo nodded.

  "I am French, but here on the island we are all Sint Maarteners. Welcome." She smiled and gave his hand a squeeze. She started to pull away, but Remo got to his feet before she could let go of him. "Say, as long as we've got so much in common, how about us seeing each other again?"

  She took in Remo's body with a discreet glance: the thin lines of his frame, his dancer's legs, the well-shaped meat of his shoulders, the thick wrists. His face was handsome in a masculine way, with its deep-set brown eyes and heavy, straight brows, its high cheekbones and firm mouth and clean jaw. A man's man, to be sure. But a woman's man in bed. "Of course," she said. "Can you come to my house tonight?"

  "Tonight? Sure—"

  A clatter of pots and pans clanking angrily directed his attention toward the kitchen of the villa, where a fat black woman wearing a red bandana on her head emerged banging a soup pan with a wooden spoon.

  "You!" she bellowed, waddling toward them with determination in every step. "I thought you already inside," she said crankily, shaking her head in dismay. "You been out here for more than five hour. You gonna fry. All you white men de same—"

  "Hello, Sidonie," the girl said with a smile.

  "Fabienne!" She slapped Remo's arm with the spoon. "What you doing talking to a nice island girl like her? Gonna give her fancy mainland ideas, make her leave us." She waddled up to Fabienne and kissed her wetly and noisily on the cheek.

  "I've just met Remo. He seems a perfect gentleman."

  The housekeeper eyed Remo with a twinkle. "He all right for a white man," she said. Remo pinched her ample hindquarter, and she hit him with the spoon again.