"To see if my lead pans out."
"Did you not admit that the lead already panned in? We are wasting time. Let us look for an eastbound bus. Perhaps we'll find one that will even allow us to take passage on the inside. I understand this part of the nation has loosened its bus travel restrictions."
"Look, this is my gig. I thought it up. I'm doing what I think I ought to do."
"And I have warned you that thinking is not always your best skill, my son."
"Cram it, Chiun."
"This advice I offer with the best intentions...."
"If you mean your intention is to be a first-class son of a bitch then you pull it off with flying colors." The youthful eyes seemed to withdraw into the eggshell skull.
"Why do you insult me with bitter words?"
"Me? Insult you? I'm so freaking stupid I don't know that you just called me a moron. And you know what? Now that I think about it, you called me moron the very first time we met. And, wait a second, unless I'm a total moron, you've called me a moron every day in between!"
"Control yourself."
"Smith thinks I'm an idiot, the Little Prince thinks I'm a dull-witted playground bully and every President whose life I every saved thought I was a dumb bouncer. You know what, they even thought I was a dim bulb back when I was on the force. Hell, when I was in the freaking Marines they used to say behind my back that I could fight my way out of a steel cage, but I couldn't think my way out of a wet paper bag. And you know where it started? The nuns used to whack me on the shoulder blades when I'd get it wrong and say, 'Think, Remo. Why won't you just think?'"
"Is that the cause of this outburst?" Chiun demanded. "Have you been carrying around this anger toward the Virgins of the Carpenter sect for so long that it has finally boiled to the surface?"
"What brought it to the surface was you treating me the same damn way as the Sisters," Remo said hotly. Chiun gasped and shot to his feet. The wind turned his kimono into a furiously flapping flag, like a hundred silk fingers wagging disdainfully at Remo Williams.
"You compare me to the foolish nuns of the Christian cult?" Chiun challenged.
"If the habit fits, wear it."
"I will not stay and be insulted!" Chiun warned.
"Don't let the overpass hit you in the ass on the way out."
Chiun stamped his foot in impotent fury, creating a foot-deep crater in the aluminum roof of the bus, then turned and jumped up. It looked like a light hop, but the leap carried him twelve feet into the sky and his feet settled perfectly on the rail of an overpass.
He walked along the steel rail, then leaped down again, alighting atop a moving van heading east, and sat with his back to Remo Williams as the distance grew rapidly between them.
Remo had not even bothered to watch where his mentor went. Right now, just the fact that Chiun was gone was good enough.
Chapter 17
The elected president of the United States Protectorate of Union Island was sporting a bad case of bed head and rubbing the sleep gunk out of his eyes when he emerged from his bedroom into the outer cubicle occupied by his secretary.
"You missed the excitement." Amelia Powlik made a sound like a small dog choking on a chicken bone.
"What's so funny?" Grom asked.
"We got pulled over by one of North Carolina's finest. He said we had people riding on the roof."
"What?"
"When he looks on the roof and can't find anybody, he says there must be a trapdoor on the roof to let people get up top from the inside. You know what I think?" She pantomimed drinking out of a flask and then rolled her eyes like a drunk. Amelia thought she was immensely humorous and hacked at her own hilarity.
"So what happened?" Grom demanded.
"He wanted to get into your private room to look for this trapdoor, and that's when I called and got the Feds involved. By the time he goes to his car to radio for backup he's got his CO on the other end telling him to back off."
Grom felt like he was missing a piece of information. "But did he really smell like he'd been drinking?"
"Naw, but he was out of it. Wacko." She barked delightedly. "By the way, we're twenty minutes from the photo-op stop."
Grom retreated into his room to get washed up in his phone-booth-sized shower. Funny how talking to his secretary made him feel strangely unclean. In fact, every woman on board the Union Island Freedom Tour Bus was less than attractive. This was one of the attributes that got them their high-ranking positions on the president's staff.
President Greg Grom didn't have much say in the matter. At some point the personnel responsibility had been usurped by his minister of tourism, although Grom couldn't quite explain how or when it had happened. Somehow Dawn Summens had wiggled her way into the role as personnel manager, and Grom's access to women was curtailed. That was fine so long as he had access to Dawn Summens. There wasn't a straight guy on the planet who wouldn't trade his own mother for a taste of Dawn Summens's goodies.
But pretty soon that well had all but dried up, too. It hadn't always been like this. Before Dawn Summens came onto the scene, Greg Grom had been awash in women. There had been women by the boatloads, women of every color. Shy ones and bold ones. Fresh faced college girls on spring break and sophisticated aristocrats. Even royalty. It didn't matter to Greg Grom as long as they were attractive. He scored with just about every woman he went after.
Greg Grom, once upon a time, had made a very important discovery.
THE DARK AND FOREBODING shadows of the pile of rubble would have frightened your run-of-the-mill, superstitious rabble. Greg Grom was highly educated superstitious rabble, and he was scared out of his socks.
Even in daylight the overgrown ruins were ominous. At night, the shadows held primordial demons that disregarded all the education and sensibility of a twentyfirst-century man.
Greg Grom stood in the open area that had once been the town center. Around him the earth swarmed at knee level with weeds and shrubs. All around the periphery of the buildings waited the dark, huge malevolence of the rain forest trees, silent minions of the long-gone inhabitants. Once this was home to Miytec, which, as far as anyone could tell, was a little-known Mayan-Toltec breakaway group that thrived on Union Island briefly in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. By the time Columbus landed in the New World, Union Island was empty.
Grom still felt the Miytec. They were all around him, and they weren't happy to have a grave robber in their midst. He was quivering with fear. A mosquito flew up his left nostril, and he slapped at his face and snorted for fifteen seconds. The moon peeked cautiously over a nearby tree.
Forget this! Grom thought. I'll do it in daylight! But he stayed where he was. There was no way to do this during daylight, when the ruins were full of excavators. Grom was himself part of a team of students from all over the U.S. doing an internship on Union Island. It wasn't a prestigious dig site, but it was mostly unexplored, and all the enthusiastic young people came with high hopes of making a major find.
Greg Grom actually made a major find-and he wasn't telling a soul. He wouldn't share this with anyone, which was why he had to do his excavating in the dark of night.
The second level of the massive stone building had collapsed in on itself during the five centuries since the mysterious disappearance of the Miytec. It was on the ground-floor level that the real finds were being made. Some of the rooms had become sealed by earth or by flora, preserving their contents.
One of the lower-level rooms had been opened just two days earlier, and there the team discovered its first human remains. It was a middle-aged man slumped against a wall. In his hand was a paintbrush. On the floor was a pot of dried, cracked paint. On the walls were painted his final words.
They were in Miytec, which was tough enough to translate. But they were in such crudely penned Miytec as to be almost illegible. None of the others could make sense of it. Not even Burnt Haller, the professor in charge of the group.
But Central American languages were Greg Grom's specialty. And what he read there made his feet perspire with excitement. He took some snapshots to study. He translated them carefully in the hotel bar, when none of the other team members were around.
If true, it was an amazing find.
The dead man and author claimed to be the last Miytec holy man, imprisoned in the tomb by attackers from other islands and from the mainland. The small allied army that had come and wiped out the Miytec on Union Island had been afraid even to touch a Miytec holy man, let alone risk the wrath of the Miytec gods by striking him dead. They had satisfied themselves with sealing him alive in his precious storeroom.
"Here I tell the secret of the Miytec power to rule," the holy man wrote. "With this rite, a man loyal to the pantheon of Miytec deities will gain control of the will of all men."
When Greg Grom read this he thought, Interesting. Something persuaded him to keep it to himself. On some strange impulse he tapped the cracked pouch in the skeletal fingers of the long dead Miytec priest and was surprised when a bit of coarse powder trickled out.