A Pound of Prevention td-121 Page 4

  "What's the sign of Sinanju doing on this?" Remo asked as he inspected the bisected trapezoid. When Chiun looked up from the trunk at which he was working, his wrinkled face grew horrified. He flounced across the room like a petulant bird.

  "Keep your nosy hands to yourself," the old man snapped. He snatched the knife away from Remo. In a flash, the yellow trunk lid sprang open and both knife and parchment disappeared inside.

  The lid slammed shut.

  "Okay, okay," Remo groused. "I just figured I should know if you cut a deal with Ginsu." His furrowing brow clouding his dark eyes, he sank to a lotus position on the floor.

  For a time, Chiun tried to ignore him, but Remo's silent attention finally got to the old Asian. The younger Sinanju Master had dragged into the room a palpable sense of gloom. To Chiun, it was a feeling both familiar and disturbing.

  "What troubles you, my son?" the old man asked, his voice softening.

  "You don't wanna know," Remo replied with a sad sigh.

  "Do not try to maneuver me into begging for a response," Chiun warned. "I can see that something bothers you, but I am very busy." He waved one hand at the organized mess of his room. "Speak."

  Remo wrestled with a reply, finally exhaling. "It's just that I don't feel good about the hit I just made," he said.

  Chiun lowered the purple kimono he'd been folding. "Of course you do not," he said. "You debase our art by calling a flawless Sinanju assassination a 'hit.'" A horrible thought suddenly occurred to him. "It was flawless?"

  Remo rolled his eyes. "No," he replied. "My elbow was bent, I used ten machine guns and I was dancing the hoochie-coo. Of course it was flawless. I'm always flawless."

  At this Chiun cackled.

  "With your hits and poochie-poos, the best you can hope for is mediocre," He placed the carefully folded purple robe into the chrysoprase-green trunk from the Chou Dynasty.

  "Mediocre or not, Brad Miller's dead and I still feel like crap," Remo said bitterly. He stared at the floor.

  Across the room, Chiun paused in his work. They had been watching a news story on Miller the previous night when Remo up and left the room without so much as a single word. Chiun now knew where he had gone.

  The old Korean quietly left his packing. On silent sandals, he padded over to Remo, sinking to the floor before his somber pupil.

  "You have done the world a service, my son," Chiun said, the wrinkles of his face drawn into a tight frown. "For a man who would murder a child robs the world of a life that will never be realized."

  "So you've said," Remo replied. "But that doesn't make any of this any better." His wrists rested on his folded knees. He clenched and unclenched his hands in frustration. "I met an old woman in Peoria," he announced. "I think she might have been senile or something. She knew where Miller was when everybody else on the planet couldn't find him."

  At Remo's words, Chiun's frown only deepened. "She also said the next few years were gonna be hard for me," Remo continued. He laughed sadly. "Can't say I like the sounds of that."

  The Master of Sinanju's eyes narrowed. "This crone," the older man asked, "was she a soothsayer?"

  "A what?" Remo asked, glancing up. He shook his head. "No. No, she was just some crazy old lady who knew where Miller was. Probably overheard someone mention it at the wake." He deliberately left out the most important detail of the story-the fact that Grandma Carlson had known his name.

  Chiun's face was troubled. He tipped his head, considering. "Do you remember, Remo, how I once told you that you suffered from Master's disease?"

  That got Remo's attention. The illness to which Chiun referred occurred in every fifteenth generation. It was an old Hindu curse imposed by one of their gods on Sinanju. Chiun had claimed years ago that this was the reason why Remo felt that he alone was charged with righting the world's wrongs.

  "Yeah, I remember." Remo nodded. "It was when I met the Great Wang. You dumped that on me at what was supposed to be my final step to full Masterhood. Of course, you neglected to mention the Sinanju Rite of Attainment," he added with creeping annoyance.

  With a flurry of long fingernails, the tiny Asian erased Remo's last words from the air. "How else could I keep your wandering mind alert?" he said dismissively. "The important thing here is the Master's disease. It has nearly run its course."

  Remo's face took on shades of dark confusion. "What do you mean?" he asked.

  "I told Smith then that it would take fifteen years for you to get well. It has been that. The disquiet you now feel is from the final phase of the disease."

  Remo bit the inside of his cheek in contemplation. "Okay," he said. "So what now?"

  The old man's face grew suspicious. "Your prophetess did not tell you?" he asked.

  "No," Remo said, shaking his head.

  Chiun breathed deeply. "In that case, I do not know," he exhaled. But the depths of his hazel eyes were troubled.

  "Chiun-" Remo began.

  He was interrupted by a silencing hand.

  "I have told you of the legend of my village?" the Master of Sinanju asked abruptly. "How in dark times, when the fishing was poor and there was nothing to eat, the villagers sent their babies home to the sea?"

  Remo was confused by this sudden shift in the conversation. "About a billion times," he said cautiously.

  "There is wisdom in the retelling." Chiun nodded. He forged ahead, his singsong voice taking on the cadence of instruction. "Sinanju was and is a poor village on the West Korean Bay. The harsh winters and bleak summers punish the land. The soil yields meager harvests, and the frigid waters of the bay surrender few fish. At those times when food was most scarce, the people of my village would gather at the shores of the bay and hold their infants beneath the icy water, robbing them of life."

  "And they called it 'sending them home to the sea' even though they knew that it was nothing but mass infanticide," Remo added. "I know the story, Little Father."

  "Then you know, as well, O Wise One, how only with the discovery of the Sun Source did this barbaric practice end. For countless years has the Master of Sinanju left our village to ply the assassin's art to courts of kings and caliphs. We are but the latest in an unbroken line extending back into the mists of time."

  "So what?" Remo asked. "What's that got to do with me?"

  A thundercloud passed over Chiun's features. "You are ill, so I will let that lie," the Master of Sinanju said. "My ancestors toiled so that the children of our village could live. No longer must we resort to the dire practice of drowning our young. The Master's duty to the village has carried down through the ages. I bear that responsibility with pride. One day, you will do so, too."

  "I don't know where you're going with this, Chiun," Remo said, "but I'm sorry. I'm not sure it's enough to say I kill to feed the kids of Sinanju anymore."

  "And if I reminded you that I was a child of Sinanju once?" Chiun offered. "What if my father was possessed with your attitude?"

  "He wasn't," Remo said. "And anyway, he wasn't afflicted with this dumbass Master's disease-which I'm not sure I believe in, either. Sinanju is just a dump infested by fat-faced ingrates who'd bash you over the head with a rock and steal your frigging eyeballs if they thought they could get away with it. You just happen to come from there and you just happened to stumble on me when you hired out to train some faceless American hit man for a couple of sacks of rice and a hunk of gold. We were lumped together by chance, not destiny, I kill people for a living, I hate what I do but I'm really good at it, and I just don't think I'm making a difference anymore. That's it. Case closed." Remo clenched his hands in impotent frustration.

  By the end of Remo's tirade, Chiun's papery eyelids had closed to slits so tight a laser could not have penetrated the space between them. "Do you truly mean that?" he asked.

  "Which part?"

  "That idiocy about hating what you do?"

  Remo shook his head. "Yes. No. I don't know. It used to make me feel good sometimes to ice a creep like Miller. Today..." His
voice trailed off.

  "That is part of your destiny," Chiun said. "A larger part than you know. You still see yourself as the savior of all mankind. It will pass."

  And with that, Chiun rose to his feet like a puff of steam. He padded thoughtfully back to his luggage.

  Remo remained seated on the bedroom floor. For a long time, he said nothing. When he finally looked up, his eyes were moist.

  "When will it pass, Little Father?" he asked quietly.

  Chiun glanced to his pupil. He was shocked to see that he held a small shiny silver object in his hand. Remo was staring at it with lost, sad eyes.

  The Master of Sinanju buried his surprise. "Call Smith," he instructed. "He is waiting for you." Remo only nodded. Slipping baby Karen's crucifix back into his pocket, he rose to his feet and left the room.

  Behind him, the Master of Sinanju was deeply disturbed. There were eventful signs on the horizon for the two living Masters of Sinanju. All the omens pointed that way. Remo's circumstances made things all the more problematic.

  Rerno had been raised in an orphanage by nuns. There was no telling what pagan sorcery those vestal virgins had used on him. Chiun prayed to a thousand gods at once that some latent Catholicism was not manifesting itself in his pupil. Not now of all times.

  He reached to collect another kimono. The weight of five thousand years of tradition heavy on his frail shoulders, the Master of Sinanju returned to his packing.

  Chapter 4

  The dark cloud of Remo's mood hadn't improved on his way downstairs to the phone. In fact, if anything the parched nasal tone of his employer only put him in a lousier humor.

  "The situation is grave," announced Dr. Harold W. Smith, head of the supersecret organization known only as CURE.

  "It's always grave, Smitty," Remo replied morosely. "Everything around me is grave. Or graves."

  He was sitting on the kitchen counter. A bird had just landed on the windowsill over the sink. Its tiny head darted left and right. As they spoke, Remo watched the bird.

  Smith let the remark pass. "As I was saying, it was pure serendipity that this even came to light. One of our old CURE contacts in another government agency reported it through the old network. The CURE mainframes had nothing to track, since at the time there was little electronic information. That has changed dramatically of late."

  "I thought you cut all those people loose years ago."

  "Most, not all. As you know, in the early days CURE relied largely on scraps of information relayed from a network of thousands of individuals. People who, although strategically important, did not know for whom they worked. The computer age eliminated the need for most of them. Fortunately, I retained a few."

  "Yeah, good thing," Remo said absently. "Smitty, what kind of bird has a brown body and a red head?"

  The bird hopped along the sill. It didn't even seem aware of Remo's presence on the other side of the screen.

  "I don't know. Remo, please pay attention. It's still incredible to me that a scheme so massive in scope could have gone this far undetected."

  "I don't know why," Remo said. "East Africa's been a mess for years. I don't think it's a cardinal. Cardinals are all red."

  Smith exhaled exasperation. "Only the male. The female is a drab, grayish brown. Remo, please-"

  "Really?" Remo asked. "I thought they were all red. Anyway, they're big with orange beaks, right?"

  "Correct," Smith agreed. And before Remo could expand on his ornithological theme, he quickly forged ahead. "Political and social upheaval have little in common with criminal activity. East Africa was on the right track when it ended its policy of institutionalized racism, but this has the potential to be as evil. I have tracked billions of dollars from other nations that have found their way into East African banks. Representatives of different crime interests have been shuttling back and forth for several weeks. In some cases, the leaders of criminal fraternities themselves have begun to make the journey. There is every indication that the East African government has decided to look the other way as far as crime is concerned."

  "Wait a minute," Remo interjected. "Isn't this like what happened in Scambia years ago? These guys are just ripping off someone else's idea."

  "In crime there are no new ideas," Smith said somberly. "Merely new opportunities and variations on old themes."

  "Okay, but does Willie Mandobar know about this?"

  Smith's reply stunned him.

  "Three confirmed sources point to former President Mandobar as the architect of this scheme." Willie Mandobar was one of the most famous men on the face of the planet. A political prisoner in the old racist system, he had risen to the position of president of East Africa once that system was abolished. He had recently retired from office, turning over the reins of power to a handpicked successor in a free election. Mandobar was a smiling, grandfatherly figure. Remo couldn't believe he'd be behind something like this.

  "Mandobar is pretty old," Remo offered cautiously. "Maybe someone else is pulling his strings on this."

  "I would like to believe that, as well," Smith replied crisply. "But according to a private E-mail sent to the La Cosina drug cartel, Mandobar is clearly behind this. Two other sources confirm the fact that Willie Mandobar, in retirement, has opened the doors of his nation to criminals."

  "Couldn't he just gripe about social security from his winter home in Florida like every other old codger?" Remo grumbled, Scowling, he turned his attention back to his bird. Maybe it was some kind of finch.

  At that moment, the Master of Sinanju breezed into the kitchen. He immediately spied the bird on the windowsill.

  "Scat!" the old man snapped, slapping his hands sharply near the screen. The bird fluttered off in a panic.

  Wheeling, Chiun marched to the nearest cupboards. Flinging the doors wide, he began rummaging inside.

  "This is a matter that needs our attention," Smith said as Chiun banged pots. "The world cannot allow what would amount to a wholesale terrorist state to emerge from the old East African system."

  "Just a sec, Smitty," Remo said.

  He cupped his hand over the phone. "Chiun, wanna keep it down?"

  Inside a cupboard, backside sticking out into the kitchen, the Master of Sinanju continued clanging metal pots and pans. The racket was deafening.

  "I cannot hear you," Chiun sang from the depths of the cupboard.

  Remo jammed a finger in his free ear to block out the noise. "Speak up, Smitty." He frowned.

  "This is an extremely delicate situation," the CURE director warned. "Willie Mandobar is a hero to many. His death could have international ramifications. Neutralize him only as a last resort."

  "So what do you want me to do?"

  The banging stopped. A harrumph of deep consideration emanated from the black depths of the cupboard.

  "Obviously, there are co-conspirators involved. Mandobar could not manage such an elaborate scheme alone. Find out who these people are and remove them. With them gone, the foundation will collapse beneath their leader."

  "You hope," Remo suggested.

  "Yes, I do," Smith agreed without irony.

  Remo closed his eyes. "Want an alternative suggestion?"

  The tone of CURE's enforcement arm made Smith instantly wary. "What?" he asked guardedly.

  "A lot of these kingpins are there now?"

  "Yes. It is already the largest number of criminal leaders ever collected in any one place."

  Remo opened his eyes. They were cold steel. "Bomb the whole damn country," he said, his voice perfectly level.

  As the CURE director absorbed Remo's dispassionate, almost clinical suggestion, Chiun emerged from the cupboard, a fat pot clutched in one bony hand.

  Although the words were strong, the delivery was not. It was as if Remo's idealism had fought a battle with his practical side and realism had won. Yet his old longing for a perfect world still remained.

  So distracted was Remo by his own thoughts, he did not even notice that Chiun had begun to t
est the strength of the cast iron pot by banging it mercilessly on the countertop.

  "You are serious," Smith said after a brief pause.

  "One hundred percent," Remo replied in a tone icy enough to chill the phone in his hand. "We've been kidding ourselves that we've been making a difference, Smitty. Ever since you bamboozled me into this rinky-dink organization, you've had me running my ass off all over the world supposedly safeguarding American values. Well, rah-rah for the flag and apple pie. I'm telling you those values are shot to hell. If you nuked that whole damn country now, in one fell swoop you'd be taking out an entire generation of predators. You want something that'll make a difference, Smitty? That would make a difference."

  "That is not an option," Smith said stiffly.

  "It ought to be," Remo replied.

  "No, it should not. You and I are of a different opinion," Smith said. "I think we have made a difference. Right now crime is fragmented. But if it is allowed to consolidate under one roof, as it were, there is no telling how much more powerful it could get."

  "Don't worry," Remo muttered. "Wait a few years and you'll see." He sighed deeply. "I'll go, Smitty. Because that's what I do. But I'm not happy about the world right now or my place in it, so don't come bitching to me when I rack up a body count on this one."

  "Yes," Smith said cautiously.

  Periodically during his tenure with the agency, CURE's enforcement arm had lapsed into melancholia. The last time had been about a year ago. But Smith could not remember Remo ever sounding this bad.

  "Er," Smith ventured carefully, "perhaps it would be wise if you brought Chiun with you on this assignment."

  Across the room, the Master of Sinanju was examining the bottom of his pot in the sunlight that poured in through their kitchen window. At Smith's suggestion, the old Korean scowled. He shook his head violently. The wisps of hair above his ears were cotton blurs.

  "He can't," Remo said. "He's already packing for some other trip he won't tell me anything about."

  The pot went flying at Remo's head. Remo snagged it before it cracked his skull.

  "What?" he asked as the old man bounded across the room.

  "I will what you," Chiun whispered, yanking the receiver from Remo's hand. "Remo is in error, Emperor Smith, whose every word is a pearl that enriches my unworthy ears," he announced in dulcet tones. "I am merely in the process of reorganizing my meager possessions. A task suited to one as old and frail as I."