Dangerous Games td-40 Page 9

  As they stepped inside the room, both felt the vibrations immediately. Remo looked toward Chiun but Chiun was already walking toward the far wall where there was a lamp alongside one of the small bunks. With the side of his hand, Chiun slapped at the base of the lamp and ripped it from the wall. He reached in among the tangled wires and brought forth a little silver disc.

  "So much for the hidden microphone," Remo said. "But . . ."

  "You are correct. There is more," Chiun said. Over a large dresser against the side wall was a four-foot-high mirror. Remo felt, sensed without understanding why, some vibration from the mirror. As he went toward it, Chiun was ahead of him. The Oriental felt along the right side of the mirror. Remo thought it odd that the mirror was anchored directly to the wall and not to the dresser.

  Chiun ran his long thin fingers along the right edge of the mirror. When he reached the top of the

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  wood frame, he nodded to himself and with a sudden splash outward of his fingertips, broke off the top right corner of the mirror. He looked at it and tossed it toward Remo, who caught it, turned it over, and saw that that section of the mirror had been made of one-way glass. He looked at the bare wall exposed by the broken glass. A small camera lens was built into the wall. Chiun reached his fingertips toward the wall. He caught the metal frame housing the lens between two fingers and squeezed. The metal slowly bent shut. Inside the little tube of metal, Remo could hear the glass lens being cracked and shattered to powder.

  "There," said Chiun. "Now we are alone."

  "Good," said Remo. "You come here often?"

  "What?"

  "Forget it," Remo said. "It's a thing people say in the States. At singles bars." When he saw Chiun's blank look, he shrugged and shook his head. Forget it. You had to be there."

  "Something is on your mind," Chiun said, "that you are so intent on playing games these days."

  Remo dropped onto the single bed near the window. He knew he had his choice of the two beds because Chiun slept on the floor on an old grass mat. He had to admit it to himself that Chiun was right on the mark. Something was on Remo's mind. Josie Littlefeather. He tried to put her out of his head.

  "Now that we're here," he said, "we've got to keep our eyes open for terrorists." He looked out the window at the gray Russian sky. It reminded him of Smith's personality. "I wonder how they're going to try to get into the games."

  "The story is told by the Greatest Master Wang," Chiun said.

  Remo groaned. "Please, Chiun. No fables."

  "How quick you are to label history a fable," Chiun said. "Didn't you just ask a question?"

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  "Yes. I wondered how the terrorists were going to get into the games. I didn't ask what the Great Wang had for dinner two thousand years ago."

  "It was longer than that," Chiun said. "And you know what they say, don't you?"

  "What do they say?"

  "They say that those who do not remember history are condemned to have to listen to it more than once. The Greatest Master Wang was a great athlete, as are all Masters of Sinanju. But of course, the Greatest Master Wang, being the Greatest Master, was also the greatest athlete in the history of Sinanju."

  Their room was three stories up. Remo knew he could open the window, jump to the ground, and live. But that would not change his fate. It would delay the inevitable. Remo figured he could change his name and run away. He could hide among the Bedouins of northern Africa for ten years. And when he decided to return to the States, one whiter night, at 2 A.M., when he walked into a hotel room in some dismal southern state, Chiun would be there, sitting on the floor, and he would say: "As I was saying, the Greatest Master Wang was the greatest athlete of all the Masters of Sinanju." And he would go on without missing a beat as if nothing had happened.

  Remo decided to get it over with now. He pretended to listen.

  "This was before the time of these Western games, these Olympics as you call them.

  "In those days, there was a sporting competition held in Korea among the many cities. And it happened that two of these cities were constantly at war with each other, even though they called a truce during the games because the games themselves were a tune of great good will among men.

  "So, one night, while the Greatest Master Wang was home, eating a soup of fish and rice of which he was most fond-he cooked this soup with a very

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  spicy red pepper which grew then in that part of the country. A nice soup, with a special warming character. Still, not intrusive. It was-"

  "Chiun, please," Remo said. "Skip the soup and do the story."

  "You care nothing about beauty," said Chiun.

  "I care nothing about soup."

  "At any rate, the people of the first city came to the master and said to him that they wanted him to ingratiate himself with the rulers of the second city so that he could compete on the second city's behalf in these athletic games. Do you understand so far?"

  "Yes, City A said to Wang, you go compete on behalf of City B."

  "These cities were not named City A and City B," Chiun said. "They were named-"

  "Go ahead," said Remo. "I'm listening. Skip the cities as well as the soup."

  "So Master Wang did as he was commissioned and he competed on behalf of the second city and of course won all the events. In most of them, the champion he had to defeat came from the first city, the city which had retained him."

  "Why? Why would the first city hire Wang?"

  "The Greatest Master Wang," Chiun corrected.

  "Why would the first city hire the Greatest Master Wang to defeat them? That doesn't make sense."

  "Just be quiet and let me finish."

  "Go ahead," Remo said.

  "When the Greatest Master Wang won every event, he was carried back to the second city as a hero. The people of the second city asked him what he wished as tribute to his great skill, which had brought them such honor. He told them he wanted their respect. He suggested that they cut a hole in the wall of their city as a symbol, because with such a great master as Wang as their champion, who needed city walls for safety?

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  "So the leaders of that city broke a hole in the wall of their fortifications. When they showed him the wall, the Greatest Master scoffed. Such a small hole for such a great hero was an insult. The hole was made larger, much larger. That night when all slept, the Greatest Master Wang left the second city and went home. Later in the night, soldiers from the first city marched through the hole in the wall and disposed of all their enemies in the second city."

  "Old Wang's a sweetheart," Remo said. "And the moral of this story is, don't ever trust a Master of Sinanju."

  "There are many morals to this story and that is not one of them. First of all, the Greatest Master Wang did what he was retained to do. To break through the defenses of the second city. He did that. And he did it with style. In fact, I think that the Greeks adopted the custom for their Olympic games. Without paying. Nobody ever pays Sinanju for any of the things they steal from us."

  "All right, all right. What has this got to do with terrorists?"

  "Sometimes I think you are truly denser than stone. The Greatest Master Wang knew that the best way to break into someplace was to be inside in the first place."

  "I don't understand what that has to do with anything."

  "Stone," Chiun muttered. "Denser than stone."

  Ill

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  The list of "Official Rules For Visiting Olympic Athletes" was slid under Remo and Chiun's door ten minutes after they arrived in their room.

  The list, printed in a tiny type face called Brilliant, which had not been used for a century in the United States for anything except shipping news and the lifetime records of also-ran horses, took up both sides of six sheets of pink paper.

  "What does it say?" asked Chiun.

  "I don't know. I don't have a year to read it," Remo said. "Try this, though. Don't try to leave the Olympic villa
ge. Don't talk to anybody. Don't take pictures. Rat on anybody who does those things. And don't even consider trying to beat the glorious athletes from the glorious Communist countries. If you want to defect, call for an appointment. They promise to get you on television. And there will be a bus ride in twenty minutes and all will go."

  "I'm not going," Chiun said. "Russia is very depressing. Any country that stands in line for cigarettes has nothing to show me that I want to see."

  "I'll probably go," Remo said. He was thinking of Josie Littlefeather. She should be on the bus ride. .

  Chiun looked at him suspiciously. "Yes, you go," he said. "Tell me of anything interesting."

  "Will you be all right here alone?" Remo felt, unaccountably, suddenly guilty.

  "Of course I'll be all right. I don't mind being

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  alone. In truth I have been alone since first I had the misfortune to encounter you. I will stay here and rest. Then I will walk around the village. Not for me the idle pursuits of youth. I will be about, doing my emperor's business. I will . . ."

  "See you later, Chiun," Remo said as he walked toward the door. There was a kind of overkill of guilt common to both Jewish mothers and Korean assassins that, after a while, roused not guilt but amusement. Remo no longer felt guilty.

  He waited at the staging area, where a long line of red, lumpy-looking buses without air conditioning were lined up. Secret policemen trying unsuccessfully to imitate tour guides kept trying to herd Remo onto one of the buses but he kept ignoring them, watching and waiting for Josie Littlefeather.

  She walked up about twenty minutes later, part of a group of female gymnasts from the United States, and Remo was again struck by how much bigger and more mature she was than the rest of them.

  Her face brightened when she saw him and Remo waved casually at her, trying to make it seem as if he had not been waiting for her but had just happened onto the scene.

  She smiled and said, "Been waiting long?"

  "Just got here," he said. She stared at him with a slight smile still toying with the corners of her mouth. "Twenty minutes," he confessed.

  "Good," she said. "It gives me a sense of power. You haven't forgotten that you owe me some instruction on the balance beam."

  "Put it out of your head. You're a guaranteed winner," Remo said. "You taking the tour?"

  "They didn't seem to leave much choice on that executive order." She mimicked a Russian accent. "You vill show up at 2 P.M. for the bus tour of beautiful downtown Moscow. You vill not take pictures. You vill blow no bridges around here, American."

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  Remo laughed then. "Let's go then. Mustn't disappoint our Russian hosts."

  They sat in a back seat of a bus together, trying without much success to ignore their Russian guide who extolled the virtues of living in a Communist state over a handheld loudspeaker whose output would have shamed a New York disco.

  "I don't mind comic book Karl Marx," Remo told Josie, "but top volume is a drag."

  "He's talking loud so you won't notice the lines outside all the stores and how badly the people are dressed."

  Remo glanced out the window and saw that Josie was right. The Russian cityscape looked like an old newsreel of Depression America. The people wore lumpy, shapeless clothing.

  "It looks like a black and white movie," Remo said. "Grim."

  "There is grimness in America too," Josie said. "My people have that look too. Maybe people who are held down, told to stay in their so-called place, have that look the world over."

  "Don't start on that," Remo said. "I don't believe it first of all. And even if it was true, it's not my fault. I wasn't at Wounded Ankle or whatever the hell it is you people are always complaining about."

  Josie started to answer when the guide told them in his loud, baritone, unaccented English that they were at the Tretyakov Gallery, one of the world's great museums, and that they would disembus now and go look at paintings for twenty minutes.

  As they got up to leave the bus, Remo said, "Now we'll split."

  "We'll get in trouble," she warned.

  "Naaah," Remo said. "We'll be back at the Village before they are. We'll just tell them we got lost if anybody asks."

  "If you say so," she said.

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  The crowd of athletes turned left off the bus to follow the guide and Remo and Josie turned right and crossed the street toward a group of shops. Immediately Remo knew they were being followed. He decided not to mention it to Josie.

  "Maybe we shouldn't have," she said.

  "Don't worry about it."

  "We won't get arrested or anything?"

  "Not for strolling around," Remo said. By their reflection in a store window, he saw two men following them. They wore brightly flowered shirts and pants that bagged at the knees.

  He darted with Josie into the doorway of a store. They stood behind a counter, looking over medallions of Lenin and heroic tractor drivers, and only a few seconds later, the two men entered the store.

  Remo pulled Josie down toward the floor. He heard the men walk by on the other side of the counter. Quickly, he stood up, pulled Josie to the door, and they went out into the street.

  "What's that all about?" she asked.

  "Just shaking our tail," he said.

  They went into another shop three doors farther down. It sold medallions of Karl Marx and of heroic tractor drivers. They waited there for two minutes until the two men in flowered shirts passed them. Remo was surprised that in the entire two minutes, no salesperson came up to them to pester them under the pretext of offering help. Perhaps Communism did have something to recommend it after all.

  They went back out into the street, walked to the corner and turned left on Bolshaya Ordynka Street. Half a block down they found what looked like the Russian equivalent of a coffee shop and went inside.

  A waitress, whose long black dress made her look like the official greeter for a funeral home, finally understood that they wanted coffee, but even as she

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  poured it from an old pottery urn, she kept turning her head to stare at the two obvious foreigners.

  "We're being watched," Josie told Remo.

  "They're not watching me," he said. "It's you they can't keep their eyes off."

  She took his hands in hers and told him, "You're sweet," and Remo wondered how sweet she'd think he was if she knew about the past ten years, all the deaths, all the bodies.

  "Why are you running track?" she asked him abruptly. "I've seen you on the balance beam. You could win anything in gymnastics,"

  "I don't know. There's just something about running, I guess," said Remo.

  "They talk about you, you know," she said.

  "About me?"

  "Yes. They call you strange. You dress strange, you act strange, you-"

  "What do you think?" Remo asked.

  "I told you. I think you're sweet. And strange."

  "Then I guess I'm strange. What's keeping that coffee?"

  He looked toward the counter, just in time to see two soldiers enter the shop. They looked about until their eyes fell on Remo and Josie.

  "Company," he told her. He felt her hands tense up and he said, "Don't worry. Just another nosy Communist waitress doing her job."

  The soldiers came to the table. One said, "Excuse, please. You are with Olympics?"

  "Yes," said Remo.

  "You not belong outside Olympic Village by yourself," the soldier informed them. He was looking at Josie's bustline as he spoke. The other soldier was staring at her beautifully boned face. To each his own, thought Remo.

  "We got lost," Remo said.

  "We will take you back," the guard said.

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  "Thank you," said Remo. He helped Josie from her chair. He turned to the waitress, smiled, waved, and called, "Take poison, bitch."

  They followed the soldiers outside, where they were hustled into the back seat of a waiting Army car. It deposited them into the hands of securi
ty guards at the main gate of the Olympic village. The guards insisted upon taking their names. Remo gave his name as Abraham Lincoln. Josie said her name was Sacajawea Schwartz.

  The guards dutifully wrote the names down, asking to be sure the spelling was correct. Remo told them the spelling was worth a B-plus. Then both he and Josie were back inside the village.

  It was dark and there was music all around, the strains of different countries competing in the nighttime air.

  "Let's go to the gym," Remo said. "We'll start tonight to get you ready."

  She nodded and Remo led her to a small practice gymnasium on the outskirts of the main competition complex. The door was locked but Remo slapped it open and the building was dark but Remo found the light panel and flicked on just one small light, enough to illuminate the balance beam apparatus at the far end of the hall.

  He had Josie go through her routine and watched her closely. She had trouble with her front walkovers and her split-lift to a handstand.

  "Damn," she said as she hopped off the beam. "I just mess up all the time on those."

  "You ever do them right?" asked Remo.

  "Not often."

  "But once in a while?"

  "Yeah. Why?"

  "If you can do it once, you can do it every time," Remo said. "It doesn't change. You do."

  "What do you mean?" she asked.

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  "Josie, all this competition's in your head. The beam is always the same. It never changes. Your body is always the same. The only variable involved is in your head. Get back up on the beam."

  She hopped back up and stood there, looking down at him. She had stripped off the skirt she was wearing over her body suit and Remo again felt a tingle looking at her proud woman's body.

  "Look at the beam," he said. "How wide is it?"

  "Four niches," she said.

  "Wrong. That beam is two feet wide. There is no way you can fall off it. Now, down the center of that two-foot beam there's a four-inch red stripe. Do you see it?"

  She looked down, hard. "No. I see a four-inch beam."

  "Close your eyes," Remo said.