"And if the one who sired you agrees to relocate his people to my village?"
"He won't."
"But if he does?"
"Ask me then."
"Very well. I go now to write my speech."
"It better be one heck of a speech if you hope to convince the Sun On Jos to leave their reservation."
"My speech does not have to convince them all. Only one person."
And with that, the Master of Sinanju turned his Appaloosa pony and sent it trotting back toward the heart of the Sun On Jo Reservation.
From his saddle Remo watched him go. He felt nothing. He didn't know what to feel, really. For most of his adult life he had been torn between two worlds—the East of Sinanju and the West of America. His love of his country and the deep devotion and respect for the Master of Sinanju who had given him so much.
Now he stood between the stranger who was his father in blood and the man who was his father in spirit, both tugging him in different directions.
If only all the pieces would fit, he thought grimly.
And then he forked his mount and made for Red Ghost Butte.
He felt like paying his respects to Ko Jong Oh, too.
It felt good to have family and ancestors and a place where he truly belonged.
No one was going to spoil it for him, Remo promised himself.
Not even the Master of Sinanju, whom he loved with his whole heart.
Chapter Three
Harold Smith didn't report the stripping of his station wagon until he was safely in the sanctum sanctorum of his office at Folcroft Sanitarium. He considered not reporting it at all, but that would be more suspicious than reporting it.
The Harlem police sergeant sounded bored. "We'll never find it."
"It was parked on Malcolm X Boulevard not two hours ago," Smith returned thinly.
"We'll never find it intact. You got insurance?"
"Of course."
"Some people don't. My advice is call your adjuster."
"I would like every effort undertaken to recover my vehicle."
"We'll do what we can," the police sergeant said with an appalling absence of conviction or enthusiasm.
Smith thanked him without warmth and returned the telephone receiver to its cradle.
This, he thought, was exactly the reality the President who had established CURE three decades ago had hoped to avoid. A lawlessness and anarchy where private property and human lives were not longer respected. Where even the police in major cities had given up enforcing every law to the fullest because they had neither the money, manpower nor will to hold back the tide of lawlessness.
Three decades of operating outside the Constitution, bending it, ignoring it and even subverting it, had preserved the security of the United States but had not restored domestic order. The America Harold Smith had grown up in wasn't the America he was growing old in. It had changed. Despite all efforts, all sacrifices, large sections of urban America had been ceded to anarchy and fear.
It was in reflective moments like this that Harold Smith wondered if it had all been worth it. He had been CURE'S first director back in the early sixties. A President soon to be martyred had placed the awesome responsibility in his hands. America was sliding into anarchy. CURE was the prescription. Only Smith, the incumbent President and his enforcement arm would know it existed. Officially there was no CURE. Officially Harold Smith was director of Folcroft, his CIA and OSS days firmly behind him.
For three decades CURE had worked quietly to balance the scales of justice and preserve American democracy, which many considered an experiment and which only Harold Smith knew had failed utterly. CURE exposed corruption private and public. It worked through the system, manipulating it to see that the deserving were punished to the full measure of the law and, where the law could not reach, it struck down the forces bent on undermining the nation.
For the most serious missions, CURE was sanctioned to kill without regard to due process. If the media were ever to learn that a secret branch of the U.S. government controlled a covert assassin, unknown to Congress and the electorate, CURE would be shut down in a blizzard of hearings and federal indictments.
And within two years—perhaps three at most—the nation would begin to unravel like a cheap sweater.
That knowledge alone kept Harold Smith going when his old bones ached for the long-deferred peace of retirement.
Today Smith wondered if CURE were not close to fading into the twilight zone of unsanctioned government operations.
For a year now, ever since the Friend attack, his enforcement arm had been threatening to quit. Remo Williams had threatened to leave CURE many times before. It was understandable. How long could a man, even a committed patriot, be expected to solve his country's worst crises?
This time Remo seemed determined. True, he had executed several missions. Some reluctantly, some with enthusiasm and others because his trainer had coerced or cajoled him into fulfilling his contractual obligations.
The trouble was that increasingly Remo's obligations were to the House of Sinanju, the five-thousand-year-old House of assassins that had performed the same service to King Tut that it did the current U.S. President. Ancient Persia had enjoyed its protection, just as modern Iran had feared its wrath. Less and less had Remo felt the pull of his nation's duty. More and more he belonged to the House.
For the past year Smith had kept Remo in play on the pretext of helping find his roots. It was a hopeless task and Smith knew it. For it was Harold Smith who years ago had a young beat cop named Remo Williams framed for a killing he never committed. Executed in an electric chair as rigged as the murder trial that condemned him, Remo was erased from existence. His fingerprints pulled, his identity and face altered, he became CURE'S enforcement arm. An ex-Marine with a pure killer's instinct.
Smith had selected Remo in part because he was unmarried and an orphan. There were no roots to hold him to his past.
But under the training of the last Master of Sinanju, Remo had grown new roots. It was inevitable, unavoidable perhaps, but it had complicated matters the cut-and-dried Harold Smith had preferred left simple and uncomplicated.
It had been three months since Smith had any word from Remo and Chiun. The last he had heard, Remo was undergoing a grueling ordeal called the Rite of Attainment, which would sanctify him as worthy of becoming the next Reigning Master of Sinanju, the heir to the House of Sinanju and its tradition of hiring itself out to the highest bidder.
Smith had no idea how long the rite was to last. Certainly three months' silence was a long time. Had something dire befallen either of them? Would they return to America? There was no telling. Chiun had always been prickly and unpredictable. And Remo moody and temperamental.
Could this really be the end? Smith wondered.
Sighing, he adjusted his rimless eyeglasses and found the black button under the lip of his polished black desk.
Under the flat surface of the tempered black glass, an amber computer screen came to life, canted so it was visible only to Smith's gray eyes.
After executing the log-on and virus-scan program, he. searched his data banks for any trace of Remo or Chiun. Neither had made credit-card purchases that would indicate his present whereabouts. That in itself was strange. They had virtually unlimited expense accounts and routinely charged their cards to the maximum every month. It was as if they had dropped off I he face of the earth.
Smith logged off that file and went into the NYNEX system. It was considered uncrackable, but Smith Superuser status got him into it easily.
With deft keystrokes, Smith inserted a work order into the Manhattan NYNEX files, instructing a work crew to dig up the former excavation site beside the XL SysCorp Building and restore a severed conduit. He gave the work order a rush status and signed it "Supervisor Smith." If anyone checked, they would learn that there was a supervisor named Smith working for NYNEX. Currently on vacation in Patagonia.
That done, Smith went through his active files. There was no incipient crisis or CURE-specific problems out there needing attention. This was a relief. Without his enforcement arm, he was extremely limited in his ability to influence events.