There was silence.
"I said I was right!" Remo shouted, making it very loud.
"Right right right right," the mountains echoed. "That's better," Remo said. "This doesn't happen often, and I want credit for it."
HE JOGGED BACK to the mountaintop restaurant and grabbed a pay phone in the hotel lobby, leaning on the 1 button until the phone system connected him. The voice that answered was not a voice he knew. "Aloo?"
"Who's this?" Remo demanded. "Why, it's Beatrice, luv."
"This is Agnes up the street."
"Agnes, my dear, how are-"
"Give me Smitty, would you?"
A moment later the familiar voice of the director of CURE came on the line. "Where are you, Remo?"
"Hey, Smitty, your new receptionist sounds hot."
"She's not real, Remo. It's the new voice verification system."
"Save it for later, Smitty. I've got news. I've tracked down the source of the run-amokers down south."
"What? Where are you?"
"Uh." Good question, actually, Remo thought. "Some big hill. Don't have time to explain. I've got a bus to catch. Go ask Junior."
"Mark knows about this?"
"Sort of."
"What about Chiun?"
"Departed. Vamoosed."
"I don't think I understand...."
Remo could feel the bus getting farther away, and his patience getting shorter with every passing second and every particle of misgiving transmitting through the line. "Here's the situation in a nutshell-and I know it's gonna be a real mindblower, Smitty. The truth is, I figured it out. I homed in on the clues, I followed up on 'em. I solved it."
"So where is Chiun?" Smith asked.
"Dammit, Smitty, I did it. Just me. Chiun had nothing to do with it. Truth is, he was tagging along until he got fed up and went home."
"Did what, exactly?" Smith probed.
The stainless-steel cable snapped apart like button thread when Remo yanked on it, then he hung up the receiver and left the restaurant, sputtering obscenities like an inconvenienced Teamster.
NATIONAL PARK RANGER Ricardo Wegman hated traffic detail. As far as he was concerned, catching speeders was the state's job. Not the National Park Service. But up here on the Blue Ridge Parkway the access was limited. North Carolina ended and Tennessee began halfway through the park. All this made it difficult to persuade the troopers to come in for an occasional look-see.
Tourists in the Smoky Mountains ignored the warning signs as a matter of course. They thought they could get all the way to the bottom riding their brakes, never mind the burning smell. Some flatland geniuses even turned off their engines and tried to coast all the way down, just for yuks. The real laughs started when their heat-stressed brake rotors and pads disintegrated, then there would be a bunch of frantic swerving and grinding of gears as the panicking motorists struggled to bring the car to a halt with a mixture of low-gearing and hard praying. Neither worked too well when you were on a steep downhill grade that wound from an elevation of four thousand feet down to an elevation of two thousand feet in a matter of a couple of miles.
Wegman had to admit that there was something amusing about the speeders-the idiots who got going as fast as they could at the top of the hill before the long slalom down.
When the radar beeped, Wegman was lounging in his seat with his eyes closed. By the time he opened his eyes the speeder had disappeared around the curve. The radar display said fifty-three miles per hour. It took a special machine to get going that fast on this short stretch of mountain blacktop. Of course, the guy had probably gone straight over the lip at the next curve.
Ranger Wegman drove down the road to the guardrail, which was unmangled. The speeder had managed to make the curve. Had to have hit the brakes hard, although there were no skid marks.
He accelerated his Jeep until he was pushing his own safety limits, and only then did he spot the speeder. The speeder wasn't a car.
It was a man.
Ranger Wegman brought his jeep up behind the running man, then pulled alongside him.
"What the hell are you doing?" he asked as he paced the runner.
"Jogging," said the runner. "Nice day for it, but the altitude slows me down a little."
Wegman tried to make sense of what he was seeing and decided there was no sense to be made of it. "Son, you're going fifty-three miles per hour."
"Well, I gotta admit the incline makes up for the thin air."
Wegman steered himself around a curve in the road, tires squealing in protest, and tried to figure out what he was missing in this little scenario. The man looked awfully normal. Maybe thirty-something or maybe not. No stringy marathon-runner muscles. No bulging weight-lifter muscles. Nothing abnormal about the guy except a pair of extrathick wrists.
"You bionic or something like that?" Wegman asked.
"Something like that. Sharp curve ahead." Wegman knew this road like the back of his hand and of course he knew there was a sharp curve ahead, but the world wasn't real to him right now. He slowed just enough to take the curve with his tires sliding on stones. Somewhere in the back of his head he was thinking that he was driving like the idiot flatlander tourists who didn't quite understand that a slide onto the shoulder at this height meant a slide into oblivion.
Of course, the running guy had no troubles at all navigating the curve.
"You stop now, son," Ranger Wegman called, head protruding from the window as he floored his vehicle to catch up again. "You're speeding and breaking the law!"
"Better reread your rule books, Ranger Rick," the running man said. "I'm not operating a vehicle, and I can run as fast as I want."
"Son, I don't know if that's true or not, but I'm telling you to pull yourself over and stop, now."
"This next curve's a doozy, Ranger," said the running man.
"Son, you- Shit!"
Ranger Ricardo Wegman suddenly felt the strong strands of reality take hold when he found himself barreling headlong into the Two-Mile Hairpin at better than fifty miles per hour.
Just the kind of fool stunt one of those idiot flatlanders would pull.
Wegman stood on the brakes and steered the Jeep into a sideways skid, maximizing the friction on all four tires in a desperate attempt to slow the car before it hit the retaining wall. It was a hopeless gesture, and he knew it. He also knew they would be shaking their heads and calling him a damn fool for pulling a flatlander stunt like this. They'd be saying it even while they were dragging his broken car and his banged-up remains off the mountainside.
The rubber screamed for a lifetime, and the stench of scorched radials was the smell of humiliation in his nostrils. The big Jeep didn't feel like it had slowed at all before it slammed broadside into the safety barrier. The SUV flipped neatly over the barrier and plummeted into the underbrush that clung to the steep-sided mountain.