While a procession of cars roared out and the siren wailed from the control tower, Remo slipped into the guard box and up behind the unsuspecting guard. He took the man's throat in both hands and squeezed until the blood to the brain was choked off long enough to cause unconsciousness. He couldn't remember where he'd learned that trick, but as he lowered the man's limp body to the floor, it was obvious he'd learned it well.
Remo waved to the cars as they continued spitting out of the prison gates. Hours later, after they still had not returned and dawn was a smoky red crack on the eastern horizon, Remo casually picked up a workman's lunchbox and walked up the prison road as if going home after a long night of work.
None of the tower guards bothered him. In his black and gray guard's uniform he was virtually invisible.
It was the morning before his execution, but Remo felt, for the first time in a long time, like a free man. His first order of business, he decided, was to find out how long that had really been....
Chapter 14
The Master of Sinanju sat in the House of the Masters, surrounded by the yellowing scrolls of his ancestors.
Somewhere in these histories, inscribed by hand by one of his ancestors-the guardians of the House of Sinanju-there must be a hint or clue as to how to deal with the problem of Remo.
Chiun sighed. After many days of careful study, he had not found the answer he had returned to Sinanju to seek. It would have been so much easier to blame this on Remo's whiteness. He was the first white ever to be trained in the art of Sinanju. His foreign birth, his mongrel heritage, excused much of what was wrong with Remo Williams, his pupil and the only heir to the Sinanju tradition other than Chiun himself.
No, this problem with Remo was that he fulfilled the prophecy of Shiva. His weaknesses were his strengths. The very thing that made him worthy of Sinanju was the thing that now threatened not only to tear him from Chiun but also to smash irrevocably the proud line that was the House of Sinanju, which stretched back into the mists of antiquity.
Tiredly Chiun gathered up the parchment scrolls. He would study them later, for soon he must go down the shore road and treat with the waiting vessel of the Americans.
As Chiun floated to his sandaled feet, there came a timid knocking at the door to his chambers. Girding his skirts, he spoke up in a tone befitting a Master of Sinanju.
"Who dares disturb my study?" he demanded.
"It is I, Pullyang," a quavering old voice replied. "Your faithful servant."
"It had better be important," Chiun warned.
"Two round-eyed whites stand on our sand, O Master. They come from the iron fish. They bear an important message for you."
Chiun leapt to the door, but measured his strides so that it would not seem to his faithful caretaker that he was in an unseemly hurry to meet with the Americans.
"Fortunately, you have come at a time when I could do with a walk," Chiun said importantly as he stepped out of the room.
Pullyang, bent with age, a cold reed pipe in one hand, executed a full bow at Chiun's approach, getting down on all fours and touching the floor with his forehead.
"I will carry word of your approach to them." Pullyang said.
"No. There is no need to expose yourself to their ugly big-nosed, round-eyed faces again. I will deal with them. No doubt they seek a boon, which I will of course deny them. Whites. They are forever seeking my wisdom. Sometimes even autographs."
"What are autographs?" Pullyang stumbled over the unfamiliar foreign word as they emerged from the House of the Masters.
"White Americans value them very highly," Chiun replied as he stepped down the hill to the water. "Yet they are merely the names of unimportant personages written on scraps of paper."
"The ways of the outside world are those of the mad. "
"Agreed," said Chiun, outpacing old Pullyang without seeming to hurry. It was several hours before the agreed-upon contact time. Chiun wondered if word had come from his emperor.
They reached the beach, where two men stood shivering in silence.
"Greetings, emissaries of Harold the Generous," Chiun told the two seamen. They stood beside a beached rubber craft. They exchanged uncomprehending glances at Chiun's salutation. Obviously they were mental defectives, like most who earned their livelihood by crossing the ocean's face instead of fishing from it.
"Our skipper asked that we deliver this to you," one said, offering a square of paper.
Chiun accepted the envelope. It was sealed. Inside was a thin sheet of yellow paper. The machine-typed message was short:
Chiun:
Vacation Extended Indefinitely. Do Not Return Until Contacted. R. W.'s Undercover Assignment Taking Longer Than Anticipated. Await Further Contact.
The Director
Chiun's wizened face puckered so that his wrinkles appeared to radiate even more wrinkles. He looked up at the seaman with clear, guileless eyes.
"This urgent message commands me to return to America at once," he said brusquely.
"We're ready to ferry you back to the boat, sir."
"One moment," Chiun said, turning to the shore road, where Pullyang hung back, watching with unabashed curiosity.
"Faithful Pullyang," Chiun called up in Korean. "Have the strongest men of the village bring me my green trunk. And then seal the House of the Masters. I am returning to America this very hour."
"But what of the villagers?" Pullyang said unhappily. "Will there be no farewell feast?"
"Inform my people," Chiun said, eyeing the Americans for any hint that they understood his tongue, "that if they wish the Master of Sinanju to provide them with a feast, they had better show him more appreciation in the future."
Pullyang departed in haste.
Chiun turned to the American seamen and he smiled placidly. "My luggage is being brought to this very spot," he explained in their sparse, unlovely language. "Then we must depart as quickly as possible. If my faithful villagers learn that I am leaving them so soon, they will shriek and rend their garments and put up all manner of commotion to persuade me to remain, for they love me greatly-I, who am the center of the universe to them."
"Maybe we should take you now and come back for your things," one of the seamen suggested earnestly, while the other cast uneasy glances out over the West Korea Bay.
"No, it will only be a moment," said Chiun, cocking a delicate shell ear for the sound of shrieking and garment-rending. Hearing nothing of the sort, he lapsed into a sullen silence. Had the people of Sinanju sunk into such ingratitude that they were going to embarrass him in front of the Americans by allowing him to take his leave without begging and pleading?
Chapter 15
Harold Haines drove through the predawn darkness from his Starke, Florida, home with the bleary eyes of a man who had not slept. He had not. He popped caffeine pills to keep himself awake as the twin funnels of his headlights burrowed through the thick hot air.
In less than seventeen hours he would press a button and monitor the three meters, one marked "Head," the others marked "Right Leg" and "Left Leg," that monitored the amperes going through each electrode to the condemned man, repeating the process as many times as it took for the attending physician to pronounce him dead.
Harold Haines intended to spend all day making certain that only one press of the button would be necessary.
This would be the last one, Haines decided. No more. He had electrocuted more than his share of men. And for what? Florida only paid one hundred and fifty dollars per subject. It wasn't worth this. He felt ... burnt out. That was the only word for it.
Burnt out. Just like the men who had sat on the hot seat. Only Harold Haines still lived.
A few more hours. And he would retire for good. The only reason he didn't quit immediately, he told himself, was that Remo Williams represented unfinished business. As much as he felt no stomach to cook him again, he was more afraid not to. He didn't understand why. He was a professional execution technician. People in his line of work couldn't afford to be superstitious. And he had never had a superstitious thought in his life.