The Last Monarch td-120 Read online

  It had all started with a trip to Hollywood, when Chiun had managed to secure a movie deal from a pair of oily film executives. Remo had been forced to keep Upstairs in the dark about Chiun's activities, lest he incur the old Asian's wrath. It was an uncomfortable time.

  Luckily for Remo and CURE, the studio producing the Master of Sinanju's movie had gone bankrupt. And while the lawyers swarmed the soundstages and offices of Taurus Studios, picking whatever they could from its dead carcass, Chiun's film had been vaulted.

  With the quiet demise of the movie, Remo had thought that his headaches were over. He was wrong.

  Chiun had been impossible to live with since his return from the West Coast. Never the poster child for temperate behavior, the old man's attitude over the past three months had been volatile in the extreme. And the bulk of his anger had been directed at Remo.

  It had gotten so bad that Remo had taken to using any excuse to get out of the house. The New York protests in the wake of the cabdriver shooting had been a godsend.

  Remo was ticked off by the initial reports of the demonstrations on the evening news the previous night. It was maddening to him that the protesters seemed to care little, if at all, for the man who had been shot. It was clear to anyone with a functioning brain stem that they were merely standing on a corpse to inflate themselves. And, given his current mood, their phony sanctimoniousness was all Remo needed to set him off.

  The line on the staircase before him was still annoying in its sheer orderliness. The celebrity protestors were allowing the proles to be processed first. The owner of every famous face in the crowd wanted to be last to enter that building. No one wanted to give up a single second of free camera time.

  As Minister Shittman wrangled the celebrities into a manageable pack at the rear of the throng, Remo stuffed a hand deep into one pocket of his Chinos. A handful of quarters rattled obediently. He'd picked up two rolls from a bank back home. More than enough.

  A hopeful face appeared before him, blocking his view of the stairs.

  "There's no shame in being homeless. I can take you to a shelter," the youthful police officer offered. "Or to a counselor. Would you like to see a counselor? We have several inside. Free of charge, of course. The city mandated that we hire them rather than buy bullets."

  Remo peeked around the man, irritated.

  "What I'd like to see is at least a scowl on one of these cops. How much manpower are you wasting processing these nits?" He waved a thick-wristed hand at the line of filing protestors. "You should be furious."

  "Oh, no, no, no," the young officer rapidly insisted. His worried eyes darted around, hoping no one in the vicinity had heard Remo's suggestion.

  "The new New York police force is very responsive to the needs and difficulties of the community at large. See?"

  The cop removed a tube of coiled pamphlets from the holster where his gun should have been. He peeled one off, handing it to Remo.

  On the cover of the flyer, a rainbow coalition of police officers grinned agreeably. Women, Hispanics, blacks, Asians-all were represented. Missing from the group was a single white face. Beneath the men and women, a colorful banner read, It's Your Police Force: We Love To Help ...And It Helps To Love!

  Remo looked up at the officer. "I'm going to retch," he said.

  "Would you like me to run down to the store and pick you up some Tums?" he offered helpfully, stuffing his remaining pamphlets back into his empty holster.

  Remo ignored the offer, as well as the man's eager expression. "What do you do if you need your gun?" he asked, nodding to the flyer-filled holster.

  "Weapons cause concern in poorer neighborhoods," the cop explained. "As part of the new Responsiveness to Community Issues Program, police officers are only allowed to carry firearms into those communities with a per capita income higher than thirty-two thousand dollars per year."

  Remo was stunned. "What if you get shot at?" he asked.

  The cop shook his head firmly. "Doesn't happen. Crime in lower-income neighborhoods is a media fabrication created to discourage investment in said neighborhoods. Page three."

  He pointed to the pamphlet in Remo's hand.

  "I don't know what kind of drivel they put in here, but I've been in those neighborhoods plenty of times," Remo said. "Any cop who doesn't go in armed to the teeth isn't likely to be coming home that night."

  He spoke from experience. A lifetime ago, before being framed for the murder of a petty drug pusher and sentenced to die in an electric chair that didn't work, Remo had been a simple Newark beat patrolman. As a cop, he had taken his life in his hands every day on the job.

  The young officer before him was shaking his head firmly. "You're not a protestor, are you?" he said, the light finally dawning.

  "Is my head up my ass?" Remo queried.

  The officer thought very carefully, surreptitiously glancing at both body parts in question. "No," he admitted finally, brow furrowed.

  "Then I'm not a protestor," Remo concluded. And before the man could speak again, he pointed to the first staircase. "Ron Silver looks pissed," he said abruptly.

  A look of horror sprang full-blown on the face of the cop. Knowing that there'd be hell to pay if a Hollywood activist had somehow been left out of the day's mass arrest, the young officer quickly left Remo's side. Car horns honked as he darted back across the street to the police station.

  As soon as the man had stepped from the curb, Remo brought a handful of coins from his pocket. The quarters were cool in his palm. Clenching his hand into a fist, he fingered a single coin onto the tip of his thumb.

  He was trying to decide who would make the best first target when a limousine roared up the street. It squealed up to the curb near Minister Shittman.

  The passenger in the rear didn't even wait for the driver to run around from the front. The door sprang open, and a familiar figure popped into view.

  She was six feet tall and dressed in a pair of black jeans tight enough to launch her femur marrow up into her pelvis. Her white lace blouse was chopped at her sternum to expose a perfectly flat stomach.

  Remo recognized Cheri, the unimonikered rock singer and Academy Award-winning movie star, the instant she got out of the limo. He'd had the misfortune of seeing part of one of her films a few years earlier. As far as he was concerned, as an actress, she made a great singer. Unfortunately, the opposite was equally true.

  In a desperate and futile attempt to remain youthful in perpetuity, Cheri had spent more time in operating rooms in the past two decades than on movie sets or in recording studios. Behind her back, friends joked that she could no longer sit next to an open fire lest she run the risk of puddling. As the years of plastic surgery took their toll, her face began to take on the elongated shape of an Easter Island statue.

  Remo remembered reading somewhere that she'd had the muscles in her face paralyzed to avoid wrinkling. It had the effect of turning her immobile features into a living death's-head mask.

  "Get out of my way! Out of my way, dammit!" Cheri yelled. Her warbling, whining voice rose past lips that didn't twitch a millimeter.

  For Remo, her timing couldn't have been better. "Wait your turn," a man groused.

  He was an actor who had starred in The Search for Pink November, a movie about a defecting Russian submarine captain. In the denouement of that film, the titular sub had been able to perform acrobatics more appropriate to an aerial dogfight than an undersea battle. The only two things Remo really remembered about the movie were the ludicrous battle scene at the end and the wooden actor's flaring nostrils.

  The angry star was flanked by his three untalented thespian brothers.

  "I was first!" Cheri shouted. "My agent phoned ahead."

  Neither the actor nor his three dull-eyed siblings seemed particularly impressed by her claim. As Cheri groused, they promptly offered her their broad backs.

  It was the chance Remo had been waiting for. Across the street, he gave his thumb a simple flick. The quarter, which had b
een balanced on his cuticle, rocketed forward. Only Remo saw it as it zoomed at supersonic speed across the street.

  The English Remo had put on the coin made it wobble from its deadly flat trajectory somewhere midstreet. Once it reached the curb at the far side, it had slowed considerably and was zipping along heads side first.

  By the time the coin struck the submarine movie actor between the shoulder blades, it had no more force than a rough shove.

  The actor was launched forward into one of his brothers. They both toppled over onto the stairs. "Hey, watch it, dude," the younger actor snarled, pushing his older brother away. He had been in the process of picking up another handsome young man. The older brother seemed shocked. As he got to his feet, he pointed back at Cheri.

  "She pushed me," the actor insisted, nostrils stretching to heretofore unrealized expanses of indignation.

  "What?" Cheri's ventriloquist's dummy mouth asked. "Eat shit, you asshole."

  As she spoke, she suddenly lurched forward. Arms thrown wide, she collapsed onto the falling form of the stunned actor. No one heard the clatter of coin on pavement.

  "Get off me, you freaking mummy!" the actor screamed.

  As he yelled, a commotion broke out in the next line.

  Apparently, one of the noncelebrities in the crowd had shoved Susan Saranrap's lover. Tom Roberts had scrambled to his feet and pushed the man back. Not recognizing Roberts's standing among the unassailable glitterati, the man had promptly socked the actor in the nose.

  There was blood everywhere.

  Someone unseen rammed one of the ex-mayors in the back. As he fell, the man's tennis racket accidentally swatted his predecessor at city hall in the bald head. The other former mayor promptly went into cardiac arrest.

  It went downhill from there.

  Fistfights erupted up and down the stairs. Men screamed and swore. One man was pushed over the railing and landed with a splat on the sidewalk.

  Cheri was livid as she punched and kicked the submarine movie actor. So angry was she, her eyes nearly twitched.

  Minister Shittman had been propelled onto Mace Scree. Only the trademark hat of the diminutive director was visible beneath the great, wobbling purple velour mound.

  For some reason, the fattest of the submarine movie actor's brothers had stripped off every last stitch of clothing. Screaming, he raced naked up and down the street.

  As the riot grew, a few people begged the police to do something. Unarmed, the best they could do was read loudly cautionary advice from their pamphlets on making racist assumptions about the intentions of mobs.

  Without any nudging from Remo, the protestors on the other staircase began rioting, as well.

  And on the sidewalk, through it all, news cameras dutifully recorded the brawl that had broken out among the peace-loving protestors.

  Remo pushed away from the fire hydrant against which he'd been leaning. The remaining coins jangled merrily in his pocket. In all, it had cost him only $2.50 in quarters.

  "Now that's a mob," he pronounced.

  While the cameras captured the true nature of the men and women on the steps of the police precinct, Remo turned away from the wrestling crowd.

  He was feeling so good, maybe he'd rent a movie on the way home. Because of Chiun, he hadn't done so in ages.

  Hands thrust deep into the pockets of his Chinos, he began strolling, whistling, down the sidewalk. The August sun was warm on his face.

  Chapter 3

  The somber brick building with its ivy-covered walls hunched warily amid the chirping woods and clawing night shadows. Lights from shore and the waxing moon sent ripples of shimmering silver across the undulating black waves of nearby Long Island Sound.

  At the rear of the big building, one lonely light shone out from the darkness. The dull yellow glow spread thinly across the damp, midnight-black lawn that stretched to the lapping waters of the Sound.

  The window through which the light spilled was made of one-way glass. Beyond the thick pane, away from the prying eyes of the outside world, a solitary figure sat at a lonely desk in a Spartan office.

  Although it was well after hours, Dr. Harold W. Smith had completed his day's work only twenty minutes before.

  To anyone in the outside world who might note Smith's schedule, this would not have seemed unusual. More often than not, as director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York, Smith worked late.

  However, all but a handful of people would have been surprised to learn that the work that occupied him was unrelated to sanitarium business.

  Harold Smith led a dual life. To the public, he was the taciturn administrator of Folcroft, a bland man with a bland job. But in private, he was director of the supersecret government agency known only as CURE.

  CURE was not an acronym, but a dream. A wish by a President-long dead-to heal the ills of a wounded nation.

  At its inception, the agency was to work outside the tricky confines of the Constitution in order to protect it. A most illegal means to reach a most noble end.

  Smith had toiled as director of Folcroft for the better part of his adult life. It was an irony not lost on the aging New Englander that the greatest lawbreaker in American history was also the nation's greatest defender.

  He was a gaunt man, in the twilight years of his life. Smith's very being seemed to have been conceived in shades of gray. His dry skin was dead-fish gray. His thinning hair was grayish-white. Even the suit he wore was an unimaginative gray. The only splash of color was that of his green-striped Dartmouth tie, knotted tightly below his Adam's apple. Though at this time of night Smith was alone in the administrative wing of Folcroft Sanitarium, he still didn't loosen the four-in-hand knot.

  Of course, in the unlikely event that anyone did stumble in on Smith, it would in all likelihood be necessary to neutralize that person as a threat to exposure. For although the agency Smith helmed had endured many dangers over the past four decades, the one thing CURE could not weather was public knowledge of its activities.

  People had died who learned of CURE. Smith accepted this as an unfortunate fact of his covert existence. In his world, knowledge was danger. Not just a danger to himself or to his agency-those threats were fleeting. The danger was to America itself. For if it was learned that a succession of eight Presidents spanning much of the last half of the twentieth century had availed themselves of an unquestionably illegal agency, the very underpinnings of American democracy would be knocked loose. The country would topple.

  "America is worth a life." Those were the words of an ally of Smith's, long dead. It was Smith's credo, as well. But it was a concept he applied not just to others. Smith would not exempt himself from this philosophy. The CURE director carried in his breast pocket at all times a coffin-shaped pill. In the event of exposure, he would take the bitter medicine without hesitation, insuring that knowledge of his and CURE's activities would be taken with him to the grave.

  As he sat at his desk, he found that his arthritis-gnarled hand had strayed to his lapel. A gray thumb tapped absently against the poison pill in his vest pocket, pressing it against his thin chest.

  Suddenly conscious of the movement, he pulled the hand away, placing it to the gleaming surface of his onyx desk.

  Smith sighed, a mournful sound of rusty water trying to navigate up frozen pipes.

  He knew why his hand had sought out the pill. Although in his younger years he wouldn't have given such things a second thought, he couldn't dismiss the obvious psychological explanation for his subconscious action.

  It was death. Plain and simple.

  Smith was undeniably old. Part of another generation. A throwback to another era.

  A few months back, he'd had a run-in with the President. In and of itself, that was not unusual. There were more times in the past than he could remember that he had come to loggerheads with a given American leader. But in this particular crisis, he had finally admitted to a basic incomprehension of this current chief executive.

  Someone ha
d twice tried to murder the President. Both attempts were halted by agents of Smith. Usually this would engender a spirit of gratitude in any man. But the President of the United States had been angry, particularly upon learning that the man who had been trying to kill him was a friend. Not just a friend, but a financial benefactor. In the end, the President was not so much angry that he knew his would-be killer, but that the man had contributed money to him in the past and, by dying at Smith's command, could not contribute in the future.

  After the President was through screaming at him over that particular crisis, Smith had briefly contemplated dismantling CURE. His poison pill had almost seemed preferable to living in this new era of warped agendas and bizarre loyalties.

  Of course, that was never a real consideration. In the end, Smith had hunkered quietly down behind his desk to do what he had always done. His job.

  But thoughts of mortality continued to play at the fringes of his conscious mind. Like now.

  It wasn't necessary for him to be there at this hour. If a crisis arose, the cell phone in his battered briefcase would relay the message to Smith's home.

  He could have left an hour ago. Could have trudged to his rusting station wagon and driven home. Could have climbed into bed next to his sleeping wife and tried to push away the demands of his solitary life with a few hours of sleep.

  But Smith was finding it difficult these days to work up the energy to do anything beyond his work. And so he sat. Alone. In the shadows of his austere office. Embracing the dark night.

  When the phone rang ten minutes later, the sharp jangle in the darkness startled him awake.

  Smith didn't even realize he had dozed off. Alert now, he reached for the blue contact phone. "Remo?"

  It was a silly question. Only CURE's two field agents, Remo and, less frequently, his trainer, Master Chiun, used the phone. But Smith was not a young man any longer, and old habits had a way of dying hard.

  So much a creature of habit was Smith that he didn't at first know enough to be startled when the voice that answered him was not Remo's. "Smith?"