Firing Line td-41 Read online

  "You would," Remo said.

  "You said you had something to tell me?" Smith said.

  "Yes. You can take this assignment and stuff it. You can take this job and stuff it. I'm done."

  "Just like that?" Smith said.

  "Just like that," Remo said.

  "Mind telling me why?"

  "No. I don't mind. I'm too nice to work for you people. That's why."

  Remo turned and walked away. At the steps leading to the sidewalk, he paused, then walked back to Smith.

  "As long as it doesn't matter anymore," he said, "I'm going to satisfy my curiosity." He slapped aside Smith's hands and opened the gray leather briefcase. '

  Inside was a portable telephone and a pill bottle. There was one pill inside.

  "Mind telling me what this is for?" Remo said.

  "Of course not," said Smith. "The phone's hooked up to CURE's computers. If I need to, I can dial a number and erase everything that's on our tapes, all trace of our having existed."

  "And the pill?" Remo asked.

  "If I have to erase the tapes," Smith said, "I'd have to erase me, too. It's for that." He looked at Remo, his face as bland and unconcerned as ever.

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  The answer gave Remo little satisfaction. He slammed down the lid of the case. "I hope you don't ever have to use it," Remo said.

  "Thank you," Smith said.

  Remo walked out into the small town. He wandered the streets of small, garage-size houses that for the most part constituted New Jersey shore architecture. The tough part was still to come. How to explain to Chiun, his teacher and trainer, that he had quit CURE. Remo had quit before, many times before, but something always seemed to bring him back. This time, there would be no coming back. He was sure of it and just as sure that this would offend Chiun, the reigning Master of Sinanju, head of an ancient house of Korean assassins who had been assassin to king and shah, emperor and pha-raoh, and to whom the only thing more sacred than fulfilling one's contract was the necessity of getting paid on time. Preferably in gold.

  Chiun would not understand. He had taken Remo soon after Remo, then a young policeman, had been framed for a murder he didn't commit and sent to an electric chair that didn't work, and Chiun had trained Remo Williams to work for CURE. And in the years of training, he had changed Remo's body and his mind, had made him something more than other men. He had made him a man who used his body and senses fully, but he had never been able to make Remo a Korean. And he would not understand Remo's wanting to leave the service of an employer who always paid on time. To Chiun, Smith was the best of Emperors.

  Remo had thought he was wandering aimlessly, but when he looked up, he was back in front of the Norfield Inn, where he and Chiun were staying,

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  and now he walked in the side entrance and up the worn carpeted stairs to their second-floor room.

  Chiun was not there. Remó thanked God for small favors and packed his overnight bag with his only belongings—a change of underwear, a toothbrush, a razor.

  He slipped off his bathing suit, showered, and changed into black chinos and a black T-shirt. Maybe he was a nice person after all. He had been raised in an orphanage, but who knew, maybe he came from a long une of nice people. Maybe his ancestors had always been nice.

  "Nice guy, Remo Williams," he mumbled to himself. "Proud descendant of an unbroken string of nice guys."

  He took his bag and walked down to the small backyard swimming pool behind the ancient hotel and found Chiun sitting in a corner of the yard, underneath a tree, his hands folded quietly in his lap. Light breezes blew the wisps of white hair alongside Chiun's lined parchment face. The ancient Korean was staring ahead at the water of the pool, which was rippling slightly from the agitation of the filtering system.

  Remo stood in front of him silently until Chiun looked up.

  "Chiun, I've quit."

  "Again?"

  'Tor good this time."

  "Why?" Chiun asked.

  "Because I think I'm a nice person. Do you think I'm a nice person?"

  "I think you are an idiot. Sit here and talk to me."

  Remo sat on the grass next to Chiun.

  "Smitty wanted me to kill Ruby," Remo said.

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  "Oh," said Chiun. Remo could tell by the tone of voice that Chiun was concerned at this.

  "Because she wants to leave CURE," Remo explained.

  "And now that you have betrayed your employer, you think she will live? You think that Emperor Smith will just say, oh, Remo will not remove Ruby and therefore Ruby must live? You know he will not say that, Remo. He will take steps to dispatch Ruby another way. So what have you gained? Instead of doing what you have been trained to do and guaranteeing that her death will be painless and swift, you have made it likely that she will suffer at the hands of some idiot. But she will still be dead. You will have accomplished nothing." ,

  "Chiun, I know all that. But I just don't want to be part of an organization that kills their best—like Ruby. I just can't handle that anymore. Let me ask you—would you kill Ruby?"

  "If my emperor said to ply the assassin's art upon her, then I would. The decision to do that is emperor's business and therefore not mine. I am not an emperor. I am an assassin."

  "Just like that, you'd kill her?"

  "Just like that, I would do as my emperor wished."

  "Smitty may send you after me," Remo said. "Will you take that assignment?"

  "I love you as a son, because you are my son," Chiun said, watching the shiny water of the pool.

  "I know," Remo said. "And you love your thousands of years of Sinanju tradition."

  "Yes, I do. As you should."

  "I'm leaving," Remo said.

  "Where will you go?"

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  "I don't know. I want to think about myself and just who I am. I'll let you know where I'll be if you need to find me."

  Chiun nodded.

  "Will you be all right here?" Remo asked.

  "Yes. I will be all right."

  Remo stood up. He looked down awkwardly at Chiun, wondering what he might say to break the silence, to lift the tension of the moment.

  "Well, so long," he said.

  Chiun nodded.

  When Rémo walked through the gate, Chiun stared after him for a long time. Then softly to himself, he said, "Foolish chüd. No one will kill Ruby Gonzales all that easily."

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  CHAPTER THREE

  After driving Dr. Harold W. Smith to the bus station, Ruby Jackson Gonzales had not gone back to Folcroft Sanitarium, the building in Rye, New York, which served as the cover for CURE's operations and housed the massive computer network of the crime-fighting agency.

  For the past four days, she had cautiously been cleaning out her desk—carrying personal belongings home at night in her purse—and now she went directly to the three-room luxury apartment she rented in Rye, to pick up her suitcases, packed the night before.

  She and Smith had not discussed where he was going, but she knew from the charge bills that had come across her desk that Remo and Chiun were at the Jersey shore. And she knew, too that Smith had made the appointment with Remo himself, a task which normally would have been Ruby's. That meant Smith didn't want Ruby to know what they were talking about.

  Fat chance. She knew the only way anybody left CURE would be in a box, and Smith was on his way to tell Remo to ice Ruby. Let him try; before

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  the ice arrived, this coldcut was going to be long gone.

  A half-hour after Smith's bus had left town, Ruby was aiming her white Continental south also, toward Newark, ¦ New Jersey, a city where she had relatives and where her black face would be just one among hundreds of thousands of black faces. There she would figure out what to do next. Going home to Norfolk, Virginia, at the moment was out of the question; it would be the first place they'd look for her.

  As she was driving out of Rye on the Cross-Westchester expressway, an idea came to her, an
d instead of taking the Tappan Zee bridge to New Jersey, she turned south on the New York Thruway and headed into New York City. There was something she wanted to do first.

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  CHAPTER FOUR

  Newark, New Jersey. Crossroad of 300,000 private lives. Gigantic stage on which are played a thousand dramas daily.

  And on this day, three special dramas.

  Remo was never supposed to go back to the town because he had left it dead. But he had been there once since, and St. Theresa's orphanage had been an old soot-covered brick building, with the windows and doors boarded up, a dead building waiting for the rest of the neighborhood to catch up with it.

  That had been a couple of years earlier, and now the neighborhood had caught up with the old orphanage. The street was a collection of empty lots and fire-gutted buildings. Even in the daytime, rats scurried across the street. Remo parked his car there and looked up at the old orphanage building. It was dead still, just as much of Newark was dead, just as Remo Williams—that old Remo Williams who had grown up in this building and been punished with rulers across the knuckles when he'd been bad—just as he was dead too. He sighed. What had he expected? A brass band and a memorial plaque

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  designating this as the spot where Remo Williams was raised? There were no brass plaques erected in this kind of neighborhood. Junkies stole brass.

  The idea of tracing his parentage, finding out just when and how and why he had gotten to St. Theresa's as a boy, suddenly seemed like an insurmountable problem to him. He put the car in gear and drove off. He would think about it tomorrow. First, he would get a hotel room.

  Lester McGurl, who had decided he liked to be called "Sparky," already had a hotel room.

  He was sitting in it now, the television tuned in to an afternoon soap opera, a drinking glass from the bathroom on the floor five feet in front of the chair in which he lounged.

  The boy had filled out. In á few weeks since had had met Solly Martin, he had gained almost twenty pounds, and now all that poundage was encased in an expensive suit that fit correctly. Still, Sparky would have loved the suit even if it hadn't fit, simply because it was his suit, owned by him, not a hand-me-down that had been rubbed raw by a half-dozen wearers before it finally got to him.

  He pulled a match from a book, scratched it lit, and tossed it toward the glass on the floor. It hit the edge of the glass, then dropped back onto the floor, where it burned a moment, charring a black spot in the nylon rug before sputtering out. The glass was half filled with burned matches; the floor pocked with a few dozen burned black spots. He ripped out another match and tried again. It dropped into the glass, kept flaming, then set afire the twisted stack of matches inside the container.

  Sparky got up from his seat and poured some

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  water into the glass to extinguish the fire. Solly didn't like it when he broke glasses on the rugs or set fires in hotels. That was the only thing wrong with Solly: he didn't want Sparky to set any fires unless they were paid first for them. But he didn't hit the boy, and he kept him fed and clothed, and he didn't think Sparky was some kind of freak because he had a power to ignite fires, and all in all, Solly Martin was the first kind human being Sparky had ever met. Thinking "father" was painful to Sparky; he had never known a father, just a succession of heavy drinkers and their desperate wives who had used the boy as a vehicle to get foster parents' checks from the state and then had abused and degraded the child. No, not a father. Sparky didn't want to think father. But a big brother. That's what Solly Martin was like to him, and the boy was young enough that he was not embarrassed to say to himself that he loved Solly. He lit another match and flipped it into the glass. Just to make Solly happy, he would not set fire to this hotel when they left.

  Two miles away, Ruby pulled her Continental in close to the curb, and three loiterers came down off the front stoop to examine the car more closely.

  Ruby opened the car door and made a large show out of setting the anti-theft alarm on the dashboard, then got out of the car and carefully locked the door.

  "The Jacksons live here?" she asked one of the three young men, the biggest one with a gigantic bush of an Afro.

  "A lot of Jacksons around here," he said sullenly. "Nice car."

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  T

  "That's not a nice car," said one of the other younger men. "A deuce and a quarter, that be a nice car. A hog be a nice car. This just be a Continental."

  "Shut up," said the biggest youth. "This car's

  nice.

  'That's right," Ruby said agreeably. "It's a nice car, and I'm the nice owner, and I'm asking you nice one more time. The Jacksons live here?"

  The big youth met her eyes, and there was something cool and confident in her look that made him give civility higher marks than usual.

  "Fourth floor, back," he said. "Who you?"

  "Friend of the family," Ruby said. "Keep an eye on the car, will you? Tell anybody who tries to steal it that there's a poison gas canister inside that goes off if anybody tries to start it without a key."

  "Is there?"

  "Sure," Ruby said. "But it's not as bad as it sounds. It doesn't really kill them. Just makes them permanently blind."

  "That's heavy," the youth said.

  Ruby nodded. "Makes it tough to sink jump shots."

  She walked quickly up the steps of the old building, whose stone entranceway looked like an entry blank in the international four-letter-word contest. At the top of the stairs, she pushed the Jacksons' bell. Behind her, she heard the three youths discussing vigorously where they might be able to steal a gas mask so they could steal the car without being blinded. She smiled to herself. There was no answer to the doorbell, so she pushed open the unlocked inside door and walked upstairs.

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  There was another bell outside the Jacksons' fourth floor apartment, and it did not work either. She pounded on the door until a voice from inside said, "Stop that banging, for heaven's sakes. Who is it?"

  But the door did not open. "Aunt Lettie, it's Ruby." "Who?"

  "Ruby, your niece."

  The door still didn't open. The woman's voice instead asked, "What's your mama's name?"

  "Cornelia. And she still smokes her corncob pipe and still wears that silver dollar medal you gave her * once."

  The door swung open. A little black woman, her face prunelike with age, looked Ruby up and down, then grabbed her by the elbow and pulled her inside.

  "Ruby, child, what's the matter? Who's after you?" She quickly closed the door.

  "Why do you think somebody's after me, Aunt Lettie?"

  " 'Cause not many people comes to Newark just to visit. You all right, girl?"

  "I'm fine, Aunt Lettie. Really fine." And when the old woman was finally convinced, she swallowed Ruby up in a hug strong enough to make up for the last ten years in which they hadn't seen each other.

  "Come on in, girl. My, my, how pretty and big you got. Come in and talk to your Aunt Lettie. How's your mama? What brings you here, anyway?"

  "I thought maybe you could put me up for a few days," Ruby said, as she followed the woman

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  through the neat but sparsely furnished railroad rooms into the kitchen.

  "Now I know somebody's after you," Lettie Jackson said, "you wanting to stay here."

  Ruby laughed. "Really, Aunt Lettie, you are the most suspicious woman I ever saw. Can't I just want to visit?"

  Finally, cajolery and Ruby's obvious good humor pacified the old woman. As Ruby sat at the kitchen table and they talked, the old woman fussed about the kitchen, baking cookies, making tea, insisting that Ruby tell her everything about what she had been doing and how she was and how her mother was and her brother, no-account-Lucius, which the old woman pronounced all in one, as if it were a title and name like Prince Charles or King Edward. No-account-Lucius.

  Throughout the day, children drifted into the apartment. Lettie's children, her children's children, her ni
eces, her nephews. She introduced them all formally to Ruby, daughter of her sister, Cornelia, and Ruby instantly forgot all their names. In the big commune, no one seemed to mind. As it grew dark, Mrs. Jackson explained to Ruby that since she was a guest, she would have a bed to share with only one other person, a sixteen-year-old cousin who had heard that Ruby was in the wig business and wanted her to send two wigs, one for daytime and one for nighttime, so she didn't have to mess with doing her hair.

  At last, Ruby went to sleep.

  'That's the place?"

  Solly Martin looked away from the gray building and at Lester Sparky McGuri.

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  "Yeah," he said. "Then well get out of this town and go someplace to make some money." He waved toward the street. "Look at this street," he said, in a voice crisp with indignation. "You'd think anybody with brains'd want to burn down the whole city. But the guy paid us for this building, and so this building's it."

  "I better go do it then," Sparky said.

  "You all right?" Solly asked "You all charged up and everything?"

  "I guess so. I feel okay," the boy said.

  "It knocks me out," Solly said, "how you can just go into a building and wave your arms around and fires start, just like that."

  "Me, too," Sparky said. "I never know how it works. It just works. I think it's getting stronger, too. The last time I was really good."

  Solly nodded. His eyes looked around the street. It was dark and empty. He was surprised to see a fancy white Continental parked in front of the building. It was not the kind of car one would associate with this street. Sure, there was a myth that welfare chiselers drove Cadillacs and spent all day watching color television, but the fact was that the Cadillacs were usually five years old and burned three quarts of oil going around the block. This Continental didn't look like one of those.

  Sparky McGurl slipped out of the car, ran across the deserted street and into the tenement building.

  Solly waited. Newark was bad pickings. Everything worth burning down in town had already been burned down. There was only this building, and the goal tonight wasn't property destruction, it was death. The man who had hired them wanted people to die. Solly shrugged. It was all the same to

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  him. He looked at the five-story tenement building. And it was all the same to Sparky. The boy would set anything afire just to see the flames.