The Last Alchemist td-64 Page 4

  "Do you want me to call you Great?"

  "Do you want to call me Great?" said Chiun. "If you want to, that is your right. As you become a full Master of Sinanju when I am no longer here, I know you will want to remember me with accuracy and honor."

  "I don't know what Great is. I don't know any other Masters."

  "If you read the histories you would know what Great is."

  "I read them. They're distorted. Ivan the Terrible is Ivan the Good because he paid on time. The whole world revolves around what is good for Sinanju and what is not. The histories are mostly nonsense. I know that now. I'm not a trainee anymore."

  "Sacrilege," said Chiun. The head rose in righteous umbrage.

  "Truth," said Remo. "They're fairy tales."

  "The histories of Sinanju are what make you and me what we are. They are our past, and our future. They are our strength."

  "Then if they are so accurate, why do you want me to lie?"

  "Put in your own words, then, what you call truth." Remo glanced at the scroll.

  "White. The word you want is 'white.' Do you want me to write it? My characters are not as fine as yours but I will write it. I'm white."

  "That's so crude," said Chiun. "Perhaps you can say it with grace. Say, perhaps, that strangers would get a white impression from you but because of the way you have been taught to move and excel you are Korean in essence."

  "I'm white," said Remo. "The character sign is 'white.' You know, the pale lake surrounded by the bleaching sticks. Do you want me to write it?"

  "I wanted help," said Chiun, "and I got you." He cleaned the quill in pure vinegar and wax-sealed the special ink blended to last millennia for future Masters of Sinanju. He would write no more until the foulness of this betrayal left his spirits. "I can write no more for years. "

  "You didn't want to say I was white," said Remo. "Your problem is you have never worked for a real emperor. "

  The phone rang and a computer was talking to him.

  Remo knew who was behind it. But Smitty, Harold W. Smith, head of the organization, hadn't reached out for him like that in years, partly because Remo had difficulty in working the codes, but also because assignments often required questions and answers. This was an old and cumbersome routine. Remo got the first code right in answering the computer. It was to hit the number one on the touch-tone phone continuously until what at first appeared to be a sales pitch from a computer turned into a responding voice, still not Smith. It instructed him to make sure no one was following him and to proceed to a phone booth in nearby Lansing, Michigan. The code to punch in that phone booth was a continuous two.

  It was downtown Lansing and Remo arrived there at night. And after he put in his quarter and punched two continuously, he finally got Smith's voice.

  "What's wrong? What's up?"

  "You went running across water in front of a television camera today."

  "Yes. I did," said Remo.

  "Therefore, you threatened to compromise the entire organization."

  "I saved a little girl."

  "And we're trying to save a country, Remo."

  "Right then," said Remo, "I felt the little girl was more important. And do you want to know something? I still do."

  "Are you in the mood to help your civilization?"

  "What do you mean by that?"

  "Uranium is being stolen continuously from factories and we cannot stop it. So far, enough uranium to make fourteen atomic bombs is missing. We don't know how they are doing it. All other intellligence agencies are helpless. We're down to you, Remo."

  "I never thought I was down, Smitty," said Remo.

  "We are a last resort," said Smith. "We have to get you into one of the factories."

  "Smitty . . . "

  "Yeah."

  "If I had it to do over again, I would still save that girl."

  "I know," said Smith.

  "You know me."

  "That's why I said it. Watch yourself."

  "What's to watch? I'm always okay."

  Across the safe line Remo heard Harold W. Smith clear his throat. Remo did not mention that he would have loved to see Smith's face if the pictures did appear on network TV. Then he would have loved it. Now he felt sort of bad. He felt he had betrayed a trust, a trust to this man and a trust given by a nation.

  "I'll watch it," said Remo finally. He said it with anger. He hung up by embedding the plastic receiver into the phone and shattering the booth door as he walked out through it in a shower of wire-reinforced glass.

  From across the street it looked as though the telephone booth had exploded the man out of it. It looked that way to the policeman who saw the suspicious-looking stranger who did it. But the longer the cop watched the stranger, the more unsuspicious he became, especially when, just as an angry boy might kick a can, he took a car door off and skimmed it down the street. The policeman then remembered a sudden parking problem in the opposite direction and ran there to write the tickets.

  Chapter 3

  Harrison Caldwell knew gold. Anyone who trusted anything else was a fool. In times of crisis, people bought gold with their paper and their land and their possessions. And when the price of gold went up, then Caldwell and Sons, est. 1402, goldbrokers to the world, bullionists supreme, would sell gold. It was a nervous time. The paper was called money, but it was based only on people's faith. Eventually all paper came to be worth its weight in wood pulp. When that happened slowly, it was called inflation. When it happened quickly, it was called a collapse.

  Selling gold for paper always made the Caldwells nervous. They only held the paper as long as the price of gold was high, waiting for the gold to moderate. That was the kind of patience that brought a man two things he could not have too much of. One was gold; the other was heads on the wall.

  "He who hangs his enemy's head on his palace wall may rest his easily for another night."

  The Caldwells had operated in the Americas since the sixteenth century, and in New York City since 1701, occupying the same family-owned land near the port for over two hundred years. Later that little street just off Wall Street in the commercial district would be worth millions. But the Caldwells knew that land, too, had flaws. Land was only worth what people said it was worth; therefore, it was nearly as weak an investment as paper. And as for ownership, armies decided who owned what land. Nobody ever stopped an invasion with a silly little piece of paper called a deed.

  Only gold was of value forever. When the Caldwells had lost everything once in Europe, they escaped with only the knowledge that gold endured, and tales of a great stone that someday one of their descendants might discover again. "Gold," they had told every firstborn son, "begins and ends every hope of man. With enough gold, anything you want will be yours."

  And now Harrison Caldwell was going to own more of it than anyone. The pictures of the stone and the translation from the old alchemist's symbols were safely locked in the Caldwell depository in a major New York City bank. The dead, of course, were dead, and therefore completely safe. While their heads didn't hang on palace walls to give warning, they would keep their silence more certainly than a promise from a saint's lip.

  It was Harrison Caldwell's own personal wonderful day. He left the sedate offices of Caldwell and Sons, bullionists, happy, receiving awestruck recognition from the line of secretaries leading to the front door.

  "Mr. Caldwell," each would say, and Harrison Caldwell would nod. Sometimes he would see a flower on a desk out of place, or a fingernail bitten. Though he would not say anything to the offending secretary herself, he would mention it later to an assistant. The secretary would then be reminded to mend her ways.

  The wages were relatively low, the demands precise and unmovable, and despite what every labor-relations counselor would call a throwback to the Stone Age, Caldwell and Sons had a turnover rate of virtually nil, while those corporations with "enrichment programs" and "employee feedback forums" and psychological tests had the pass-through rate of a subway turnst
ile.

  Caldwell and Sons did not have employee feedback forums and the employees knew why: they were not the chums of the Caldwells, nor were they partners in an enterprise. They were employees. In that respect they would be paid on time, given clear work, not overworked one day or idled the next. They could advance in pay as their skills advanced. There was something about working at Caldwell and Sons that was reassuring.

  "I don't know what it is. You just always know where you stand. It's weird. You just have to be in Mr. Caldwell's presence to know where you are in relation to where he is." This, invariably, came from each new employee.

  And where they stood, where everyone who worked for Harrison Caldwell stood, was beneath him. And the great secret he knew was that most of the people in the world liked that. The Caldwells knew how to rule.

  So, on this day as he left, all the secretaries were surprised to see him lay his hand on an assistant's shoulder. They would have been more surprised if they heard what he had said. But all they heard was the assistant's rather loud reply:

  "Are you sure? Are you sure, Mr. Caldwell?"

  Then they saw Harrison Caldwell nod ever so slightly. If they didn't know him, they would not even have known it was a nod. But that was the Caldwell nod. Three times the assistant asked the same question, and three times there was the nod.

  After the assistant bowed his good-bye, he stumbled back to his own office. There he sat down, cleared his desk, and set the telephone directly in the middle of it. Next, he ordered that no phone calls were to be put through to him unless they came from Mr. Caldwell himself.

  Then he waited, staring at the telephone, as the perspiration formed on his forehead. For what Mr. Harrison Caldwell, the most conservative broker in a conservative business, had just told him was that when he phoned, Caldwell and Sons was to immediately sell twice as much gold as they had, or possibly hoped to have. And this plan was to be carried out in seven languages in seven countries.

  Harrison Caldwell left his office humming and entered his chauffeur-driven limousine, promptly giving his driver an address in a part of Harlem few whites ever entered.

  For Harrison Caldwell, Harlem was one of the safer places in the world, because he understood the black ghetto. It was not unsafe; it was just unsafe for people without guns or unwilling to use them. During the riots of the sixties when stores and buildings went up in flames, several buildings were left unscathed. And these were not black-owned places, but those owned by the mob.

  While commentators throughout the country placed the blame of the riots on deprivation, racial injustice, and all manner of social ills, Harrison Caldwell and the Mafia knew a far more basic reason for the destruction. A very human reason. The rioters knew they were not going to be shot, except when they entered mob-run stores.

  These remained as peaceful as Fifth Avenue.

  And so would Harrison Caldwell's warehouse. It was a bastion neither riot nor arson nor anarchy could penetrate. Nevertheless, Harrison Caldwell took his precautions one step further when he ordered that everything being brought into his warehouse be delivered in giant drums, drums so large that only a crane could move them. Since nothing could be snatched and run with, even the random street crime that plagued the neighborhood would not affect him.

  He entered his warehouse at noon and went to a glassenclosed booth high above the floor. Beneath him were bubbling vats of molten lead and sulfur. He looked at his watch. The trucks should be arriving soon, he thought. Time for a final check. As he requested, each door was guarded by a man with a shotgun. These were rented by Caldwell from a local gangster. Outside there was the growl of heavy trucks, coughing their way to a halt. The guards checked their weapons and glanced toward the booth. Caldwell nodded for them to let the trucks in. The heavy metal doors to his warehouse creaked open and three trucks lumbered into the building and parked near giant hoists. Immediately the hoists dropped metal claws into the backs of the trucks and picked up, drum by drum, the yellow barrels marked with the black crosses that signified nuclear danger, careful to set them right, without spilling. What pleased Harrison Caldwell most was not how perfectly the hoists set each drum in its preordained position, nor how the warehouse staff functioned as one, but the very fact that the trucks had arrived on time. For it had taken him months to gather this material, to put together all of the small and large quantities that made up the contents of three trucks. Harrison Caldwell was watching months and a dozen little acts all coming together at the specified time to join the bubbling vats of lead and sulfur in proper proportions. He was watching himself become the richest man who ever lived. As he saw the trucks unload tons of the one material the ancient alchemists lacked, he felt his ancestors were applauding in their royal way. They were right-it was possible to make gold from lead and mercury. All they had to do was add the ingredients symbolized on the stone, an element incredibly rare in their age, but plentiful today. All they needed was uranium, and all the Caldwells could have forged their futures on the philosopher's stone. After all, the secret to how he knew the stone and its one ancient flaw was the very history of his family.

  As was the adage: "He who holds gold holds the soul of the world." Not that Harrison Caldwell wanted the soul of the world. He only dealt in what was of value.

  He himself directed the emptying of the drums into a vat, watching it fill up to a mark he had made on its side. Harrison Caldwell had taken the formula inscribed on that stone now beneath the Atlantic and multiplied it by twenty thousand. The proportions were immense. What had been a mouse-hair's pinch in alchemic terms was now exactly five tons of uranium. The lead was seventy-three-point-eight, by weight. The sulfur would only act as a catalyst.

  Three chrome-plated steel funnels twenty yards long all led to a white-faced wall and a single funnel. No one in the mixing room would see what came out the back.

  Harrison Caldwell returned to his office and entered the only passage to the back room, a small man-size circular stairway. There were no doors to that room. He flicked on a light. A vast cavern lit up. The floor beneath him, one hundred yards by one hundred yards, looked like a checkerboard run amok. And on that floor, thousands of oblong molds were laid out at a precise angle, so that those closest to the funnel were slightly higher than those farther away.

  A lesser man might have sweat or yelled. But Harrison Caldwell simply threw a switch. On the other side of the wall the vats tilted. Molten lead flowed alongside burning sulfur and mercury; then came a stream of the uranium, called so quaintly by the alchemists, "owl's teeth." Uranium, of course, had nothing to do with teeth at all. Professor Cryx had given his life to explain that to Harrison Caldwell.

  The hot metals made a cracking sound as they joined at the wall and went on through, gray and pink and red. But when they came out mixed, they had turned magnificent yellow, with a light white coat of dross skimming the top. What was now pouring out into the thousands of molds was gold. Twenty-four karat gold. Exactly seventy-eight-point-three tons of it, forming at his feet a floor full of gold bars in a world where that simple, soft metal sold for $365 an ounce.

  In the offices of Caldwell and Sons, the assistant, on his eighth tranquilizer of the hour, got a phone call. He remained as calm as if Mr. Caldwell were ordering biscuits.

  "Sell," came the aristocratic voice of Harrison Caldwell.

  In Bayonne, New Jersey, the three drivers who had made a routine delivery of uranium for the federal agency controlling it were pulled over by a car with a blinking bubble on top.

  A man with a badge hopped out of the car and asked the three drivers their names. Then he asked where they were taking the trucks.

  "Back to the garage," said a driver. The man with the badge wrote down the address of the garage.

  "Have you been carrying uranium?"

  "Sure. What do you think those trucks are lined with lead for? Stops radiation. What do you think we wear radiation cards for? Why the questions?"

  "We've had a problem. Large quantities of uran
ium have been missing from plants across the country. We're checking all transport."

  "We got our bills of lading."

  "I'd like to see them," said the man, putting his badge away. "All of them."

  The three drivers returned to their trucks. It was a cold gray sort of day, and they had been looking forward to parking them for good and getting a beer. The trucks idled their big diesels on Kennedy Boulevard, a well-traveled road. Several people stopped to watch.

  The man with the badge looked at the bills of lading and mentioned that nowhere did they show a stop in Harlem.

  "Oh, that. Yeah. I'll give you the address."

  "Wasn't that supposed to be secret?" said the man with the badge. "Weren't you supposed to keep your mouths shut, under any circumstances?"

  "You're with the government, ain't ya?"

  The man with the badge smiled. He beckoned them closer, returning their bills of lading. Each bill had an envelope with it. Each envelope had a note. It told them to look up. They were being robbed.

  The big barrel of the .357 Magnum, a cannon of a pistol, told them to believe what they read. One of them began trembling. He couldn't get off his watch.

  "Just a couple of wallets will be fine," he said. They didn't ask why he wanted only two. They thought of themselves as lucky. And this thought lasted less than three seconds because the big barrel of the pistol made flashes. They saw the flashes before they heard the sounds. Sound traveled at six hundred miles per hour.

  The .357 Magnum slugs traveled faster, right through their skulls, taking off the tops of their heads, spilling their brains out onto Kennedy Boulevard.

  A passing car slowed down, the man jumped in, and was driven to the Bayonne Bridge, a high-rising arch that reached across to Staten Island. At its apex he tossed out his badge. Everything had worked perfectly, just as he had been told. And just as he had been told, he was given his payoff near a public golf course on Staten Island. And this is where the plan changed. He did not get an envelope with thirty thousand dollars in it. He was given, instead, a brand-new shovel and allowed to dig his own grave.