It may have been the most important news event of the past six months, but less than fifteen seconds of airtime was given to it and absolutely none was devoted to helping the public understand that event.
Not that Harold Smith gleaned any understanding. But he knew enough to feel a cold tightness creep into his chest as he reached for his battered briefcase.
Unlocking the safety catches so the explosive charge remained inert, Smith exposed his portable computer and booted it up.
He was soon logged on the net and was calling up the wire-service news bulletins.
AP had a brief digest and included the secretary general's remarks. They were as devoid of substance as the TV report had been.
Other accounts were similarly sketchy. None identified the trigger for the commotion. Skimpy statements of an unidentified Third World delegate addressing the General Assembly at the time of the violence suggested a link between his remarks and what followed. But no one was saying that on the record. In fact, no one was saying much of anything.
But where lines of text existed, Harold Smith could read between them.
Reading between the lines, Smith came to a firm conclusion.
The person who had stood before the United Nations had made a declaration of war. That was the only possible explanation. There could be no other.
But who was this person? What representative of what country other than a nuclear-capable nation could declare war and have it send diplomats scurrying home for urgent consultations?
Harold Smith didn't know, but he was prepared to toil far into the night to find out.
From the bedroom door a voice called sleepily. "Harold, are you coming to bed?"
"Please start without me," Smith said absently.
"Start what?" came the puzzled voice of Maude, his wife of many years. "I'm going to sleep."
"Goodnight, dear," said Harold Smith as his aged fingers made the keyboard click with a hollow rattle like plastic bones.
Chapter Seven
It was the middle of the night, and Remo lay dreaming.
He dreamed of a woman he had never met but whose face and voice were imprinted on his memory. His mother.
For most of Remo's life, his mother had been a vague concept in his mind. She had no name or face or any voice. When he got old enough to develop an imagination, Remo started imagining mothers. Sometimes she was blond, sometimes her hair was brown or black. Mostly it was black. She usually had brown eyes because Remo had brown eyes. Even as a boy, he understood who he was somehow reflected who his mother had been.
There were times when Remo imagined her alive and there were times he lay awake sobbing silently into his pillow so the nuns and the other orphans wouldn't ask him why.
On those nights he mourned for his dead mother. It was easier to imagine her dead. It made more sense. If she lived, she wouldn't have abandoned him to be raised in an orphanage. No one's mother could be so heartless.
So Remo had buried her and mourned her and in time forgot about her all except in the secret recesses of his imagination.
A year ago she had appeared to him, wearing a face more angelic than the most idealized product of his longing imagination. That was when Remo knew with certainty she had died.
To this day he didn't know if she was a ghost or spirit or the product of some infant memory. But she had spoken in a voice he could hear and bidden him to seek out his living father.
Just to hold on to the memory, Remo had gone to a police sketch artist, who drew her face from Remo's description. He carried it with him wherever he went.
Nearly a frustrating year had passed before she had appeared to him for a second time. This time to tell him that the time to find his father was growing short.
Remo would have scoured the planet to find his father except the spirit of his mother had also showed him a vision of a cave and in the cave sat a mummy Remo had recognized as Chiun.
It wasn't Chiun. The mummy turned out to be Ko Jong Oh, but when Remo told the Master of Sinanju what he had seen, Chiun had dragged him from one end of the earth to the other in the Rite of Attainment until Remo found himself in the Sonoran Desert outside Yuma, Arizona.
There Remo had found his father, a stuntman turned actor, and learned that Chiun had known the identity of Remo's father for years. Remo and Chiun had encountered him during an assignment years before. Chiun had recognized who he was. Remo hadn't.
Of all the cons Chiun had perpetrated, this was the most selfish, yet Remo had understood why. And it had all worked out.
That was the funny part of their relationship. Remo always forgave Chiun. No matter what. Chiun, on the other hand, piled the slightest injury or imagined slight on his shoulders, complaining all the while.
In this dream Remo's mother was standing on a high dune, silhouetted against the desert moon.
He knew her by name now. Dawn Starr Roam. But he couldn't bring himself to call her by that name.
In his dream his mouth was open as he struggled with the right word. Mother sounded too formal. Ma was no good. Mom sounded like a character out of a fifties sitcom.
In his dream Remo didn't know what to call her. And as he wrestled with the dilemma, she lifted her perfect profile to the night stars and faded from sight as if she had been made of coalesced moonbeams.
Remo was running for the dune, calling "Wait!" when the gunshots shattered the night.
They came in a string of three pops followed by two more.
He was out of bed and at the door of his igloolike sheepskin hogan before he was really awake. His Sinanju-trained reflexes had carried him from sleep and into action.
Out in the night someone was trying to bring down the moon with a Winchester.
"Wa-hooo, I'm a Sun On Jo brave and I got everything money can buy except a future!"
And he squeezed off another shot at the low-hanging moon.
"Hey!" Remo called.
The Indian took notice of him. "Hey yourself, white eyes."
Lowering the rifle, he swung it around. Jacking another round into place, he drew a cool bead on Remo.
"I hear you got yourself some magical powers, white eyes. Let's see you percolate down into the sand ahead of hot, angry lead."
The trigger clicked back. And the rifle spit a tongue of yellow-red flame.
Remo slid from the path of the bullet before the lever could eject the smoking shell from the breech. When the bullet kicked up distant sand, Remo was already coming in from the darkness off to the rifleman's left.
The brave surrendered the rifle to an irresistible force that snatched it from his hands.
"Yep," he said, stumbling back. "You are a true Sunny Joe, 'cept there ain't gonna be a tribe for you to protect, Sunny Joe. What do you say about that?"