"You called me because Remo has a sunburn?" demanded Smith with ill-disguised incredulity.
"No, I called you because Remo does not have a sunburn. He does not get sunburned, but if he did, I could deal with it. This sunburn-which-is-not is something new. Something I do not understand. He has one of those education burns."
"Education burns?" Smith, in his office overlooking Long Island Sound, hastily gulped two Alka-Seltzer tablets and water. Sometimes he longed for the old days in the CIA without Remo's flip attitude and without Chiun's language barrier.
"Yes, education burns. I have read of them. When a person is burned, the severity of those burns determines his education," repeated Chiun, who sometimes longed to be back in Sinanju, without Remo's lack of responsibility or Emperor Smith's inability to communicate in his own language.
"Oh," said Smith. "You mean as in first-, second-, or third-degree burns."
"Yes. Remo has the least of these. To an ordinary person, this would merely be an inconvenience, but Remo's essence is developed beyond ordinariness. He is now insensible."
"Will he recover?" demanded Smith, who knew that if something should happen to Remo, something serious, he would have to order Remo liquidated and then dissolve CURE, finally ending his own life. Chiun, who did not understand that exposure of CURE would be an admission that America did not work and therefore did not understand CURE, would quietly return to his village after he had killed Remo— which would be his task under those circumstances.
"Thanks to my healing skills, he will recover. I will make him recover whether he wishes to or not. Now he sleeps like a child— the child that he is."
Smith suppressed a relieved sigh. "That is good. How soon will that be? He is in the middle of an assignment."
"I know this," Chiun said abruptly. "What I do not know is what he met with which burned the skin beneath his clothes and which did not burn exposed flesh. This you must tell me."
"Wait one moment. You say his skin is burned. But not as it would be by sunburn, but instead exactly the opposite?"
"Yes. Opposite of reality."
"Just a minute," Smith said, as he pressed a concealed button on his desk and a hidden desktop computer console rose up. Smith keyed a description of the scientific phenomenon into the files of the computer's memory banks, and then punched in the circumstances Chiun had explained to him. The screen went blank, and the cursor raced across the screen like a spider, leaving behind the greenish words that were the answer Smith needed.
"I have it," Smith said. "Ultrasonics."
"Speak English," Chiun snapped.
"I said Remo was affected by ultrasonics. Sound pitched to a degree higher than human ears can perceive. This has been worked out to some degree in laboratories and in practical experiments. Focused ultrasonics have the property of creating heat between interfacing surfaces but don't affect surfaces not in contact with other surfaces. It fits exactly. Remo obviously entered an ultrasound field, which caused intense heat between his skin and clothes, enough to create an effect like a severe sunburn. Exposed skin wasn't affected unless it touched something else."
"Where would Remo have encountered this ultrasonic?"
"I don't know. It must have something to do with his assignment."
"You told me his assignment had to do with flying whizzbees."
"That's right. Flying saucers are another name for Unidentified Flying Objects. Lights in the sky that people see."
"Lights in the sky? Remo said something about lights."
"Then he must have gotten on to something. He was supposed to infiltrate a group of UFO watchers, FOES."
"Explain to me about these lights."
Smith cleared his throat. "Well, for several years now, people in this country and around the world— but mostly in this country— have seen or thought they've seen peculiar objects in the sky— lights, objects, fires, etc. Most of them are ordinary phenomena like planets and aircraft, but some aren't easily explained. There's a popular theory that these UFOs are ships from other worlds, that they are the work of advanced civilizations who have been monitoring Earth for thousands of years. I find this a bit hard to swallow myself, the idea of advanced civilizations greater than our own—"
"What is so difficult about that?" Chiun said. "I am from an advanced civilization— Korea."
"Yes. Well, uh, Remo's job was to investigate this group to see if they had made contact with an individual calling himself the World Master, who might be influencing them to attack America's missile defense system. Most of this is contained in the files I gave Remo."
"Then this group is responsible for what happened to my son?" Chiun said slowly.
"Possibly. But at this point we must assume that they are probably harmless."
"No one is harmless. Especially the foolish," Chiun said and hung up.
Chiun went over to Remo, whom he had stripped and then washed with special ointments and laid in a bed. Chiun normally discouraged Remo from using a bed, but its soft mattress was the perfect resting place for his injured body. Bending his old head, Chiun listened to Remo's breathing. Its rhythms were returning. Good. Yes, Remo would get better. Most of it was shock, and the shock had triggered defensive sleep mechanisms.
Chiun then retrieved the files Remo had tossed into a wastebasket, and began reading them. As he read, Chiun grew excited. His beard trembled. The more he read, the more agitated he seemed to become. His clear eyes took upon a peculiar, shocked light. Under his breath, Korean words spilled forth. Harsh words at first, then quieter ones. Words of astonishment.
Hours later, when Chiun rose from his lotus position, his parchment face, ordinarily the color of aged ivory, was now more the color of old bone. And there was a strange expression on his face, one that would have puzzled Remo Williams had he been awake to see it. It was the expression of someone who, after a lifetime, has seen a great truth that had previously escaped him.
It was an expression of wonder and joy and a hint of fear.
Chiun returned to Remo's bedside and spoke softly, as if he could hear. "Why did you not tell me of this, my son? Did you not recognize this great thing for what it truly was? Foolish child, you ventured where only the reigning Master of Sinanju has the experience to go. And you have paid the price. But I will make these things right, and I will go forth for the greater glory of Sinanju. You will share in this glory, Remo, when you are well, never fear. But first you must become well. I will return for you when my pilgrimage is over. Good-bye, Remo."
So saying, the Master of Sinanju sat down to write a note with a goose quill, which he left on the dresser beside his sleeping son, and quietly and thoughtfully left the apartment and the hotel.
?Chapter Seven
Pavel Zarnitsa was not in America to spy on Americans.
No, that was the furthest thing from his mind. Pavel Zarnitsa was in America to spy on the Russians who worked for the Soviet airline, Aeroflot. Not all of them. Some were simply Russians who worked for Aeroflot, and these Russians were no problem. They were civilians.
But some were not civilians. Some belonged to the GRU, the Glavnoe Razvedyvatelnoe Uprevlenie, or the Chief Intelligence Directorate of the Soviet General Staff. The GRU was the world's second most powerful intelligence service in the world, after the KGB, or Committee for State Security, for whom Pavel Zarnitsa worked. That the GRU was as Russian as the KGB made no difference to Pavel Zarnitsa or his superiors. The GRU was a rival to the KGB. They were competition. And they liked to use foreign branches of Aeroflot as their "fronts."
It was ironic that it was the capitalistic idea of competition that the Kremlin used to keep the KGB and the GRU on their toes. They were given separate operating budgets but overlapping responsibilities, insuring a certain amount of rivalry and bureaucratic infighting between the two services, and virtually no sharing of intelligence. Probably the CIA knew more about GRU agents in Aeroflot than he did, thought Pavel ruefully. But he also knew that the CIA did not know the name of the one KGB agent in New York's Aeroflot office, namely himself. The KGB was subtle, despite popular depictions of its agents as thick-necked bulls in gray raincoats and fedoras. The GRU was not so subtle. Often, in fact, they were clumsy dolts. Still, they could be effective and had good men— some good men— working for them.
Pavel Zarnitsa knew this because his brother, Chuzhoi, worked for the GRU. Chuzhoi was younger by ten years, just a boy. But an imaginative boy, Pavel knew, too imaginative for the GRU. Pavel had told him that when Chuzhoi announced his decision not to follow his older brother's footsteps. But Chuzhoi, young and brash like his dead mother, did not listen. He never listened. And so Chuzhoi had gone his way and Pavel his own.
Pavel had seen his brother only once after that. It happened when they were accidentally seated together in a Moscow cafe, where lone diners were always seated with strangers because space was at a premium even at the worst places.
"The stupid capitalists are doomed," Chuzhoi had announced boastfully after Pavel asked how he was doing. "Within five years we will have military parity with them, thanks to their own lax security, and then the inevitable Communist revolution will cover the globe."
"They are not stupid, and no one believes in the glorious revolution anymore, Chuz," Pavel had replied as the two-hour wait for a waitress dragged past. Normally, it would have been a three-hour wait, but the Zarnitsa brothers had clout.
"The democracies are crumbling," Chuzhoi repeated.
Pavel sighed. "Is this what you have learned among the ham-handed GRU?" He felt sad. Most Russians outgrew such talk after they left the Young Communist League. It was indoctrination, nothing more. Pavel tried to explain geopolitical reality to his brother, to explain to him that even as an enemy, America was a friend to Russia.
"We need them. The Americans keep the Chinese in check. Without America, China might attack us. Even the Politburo knows this."
"You have been watching that television program again," Chuzhoi laughed, referring to a popular Russian show that every week televised the adventures of KGB agents fighting black marketeers, traitors and CIA agents in the Soviet Union. The GRU had always resented the fact that the KGB had its own television program and were public heroes, just as the FBI had been the heroes of the Americans until recently. But there was a good reason that there was no GRU program. Average Russians were not told of the GRU's existence.
Pavel shrugged off the suggestion. Sometimes Chuzhoi could be obtuse, and perhaps he belonged in the GRU after all. So he changed the subject and they talked of their boyhood in Kirovograd, in the Ukraine.