There were now only two regular CURE patients in the special wing, a comatose man and a catatonic young woman. A faint sulfur smell emanated from the girl's room.
The third room in the hallway had been Purcell's for ten years. Smith glanced in the empty room as he passed.
The damage to the room had been repaired, the bodies long carted away and the blood washed clean. A new mattress was rolled up at the foot of the bed and wrapped in plastic.
Smith's face was grim as he looked in that room. Rather than eliminate the Dutchman while he had the chance, he had allowed Remo and Chiun to talk him into keeping the dangerous man a prisoner down here. Some metaphysical claptrap about Remo's soul-and thus Remo's fate-somehow being intertwined with Purcell's. Chiun had insisted that were Purcell to die, Remo would die, as well.
Smith didn't believe it, of course. But the Master of Sinanju was insistent and Purcell seemed harmless enough at the time. One of Smith's rare mistakes.
Frowning self-recriminations, the CURE director continued along the hall, entering the room at the far end.
Mark Howard was asleep in the bed.
It was strange, but Smith felt uncomfortable leaving his assistant alone down here. The young man seemed so lost.
Only two physicians on the regular Folcroft staff were allowed into the room, and even then only while under Smith's supervision. For security's sake the night staff had not been told the condition of Folcroft's assistant director. No one would have a reason to come to this out-of-the-way room during the night. As he had the previous night, Smith would work from Howard's bedside until midnight, go home for a few hours' sleep and then return before dawn.
There were no monitors or intravenous drips hooked up to Smith's young assistant. At the moment nothing seemed necessary. Mark was simply asleep.
It had not yet been twenty-four hours since the onset of this mysterious unconsciousness. In another day Smith would consider hooking up an IV.
As he looked down on the youthful face of Mark Howard, Smith noted darkly that there were other, more serious options to consider if the young man remained in this state.
For now Smith put aside such uncomfortable thoughts.
The CURE director pulled a chair up to the bed, hung his coat and scarf over the back and set his briefcase onto his knees. Popping the hasps, he took out his laptop, placing it on the closed briefcase lid.
Within moments Smith was once more engrossed in his work.
He didn't know how many hours he worked at Howard's bedside when he heard the rustling fabric. Glancing up from his computer, he found Mark Howard shifting under the sheets. Arms and legs moved like a man in light sleep. As Smith watched, Howard's youthful face-which had remained almost lifeless since Florida-began to twitch. Eyes rolled beneath closed lids.
Smith quickly exited the CURE computer system and put away his laptop. With one hand he drew his chair closer to the bedside.
"Mark?" he questioned quietly.
It seemed as if Howard responded to the sound of Smith's voice. The young man's head rolled over on the pillow, eyes still closed. He began speaking, softly at first. Smith strained but couldn't hear the words. But as he listened, his assistant's voice grew stronger.
"I did this," Mark Howard whispered. "I shouldn't have- Should have left him. I have to tell... warn..."
Standing now, Smith pressed his hand to Howard's shoulder. "Mark," he repeated, giving a gentle push. With great slowness the young man's eyes fluttered open. There was confusion at first as they focused on the gray face hovering above.
"Dr. Smith?" Mark asked weakly.
He was disoriented. Trying to soak in his surroundings.
"I'm at Folcroft," Howard said, confused.
"Something happened in Florida," Smith said, a hint of relief in his lemony voice. "You lost consciousness at Benson Dilkes's apartment. Do you remember what went wrong?"
The memories flooded back. The corkboard maps.
The two red pins. The blond-haired man hovering in the corner, hiding in the cobwebs of consciousness. Howard sat upright in bed. He grabbed Smith's wrist so hard, the older man winced.
"Where's Remo and Chiun?" Howard demanded.
"Remo was supposed to be on his way back here from Russia," the CURE director replied. "However, he never made his flight. Chiun is in Sinanju."
"We have to call him," Howard insisted.
"We can't," Smith said. "Unless the phone is working again. It was out of commission earlier." Howard released Smith's wrist. His eyes darted to the corners of the room, searching for answers. "What's wrong, Mark?" Smith pressed.
When Howard glanced back up at his employer, there was a deadly earnestness in his greenish-brown eyes.
"He's back," the assistant CURE director pleaded. "And it's all my fault."
Chapter 30
Remo ignored the whine of the lowering landing gear. Across from him on the jet, Rebecca Dalton chatted away on her cell phone in yet another foreign language. On her lips and tongue, even Arabic sounded sexy. The young woman seemed to know every dusty dialect of every country they had been to in the past two days.
Two days. It seemed like a month.
Remo had spent the past forty-eight hours bouncing around the Middle East like water on a griddle. True to her word, Rebecca Dalton had streamlined the Sinanju Time of Succession to move with assembly-line efficiency.
Turkey-which was still listed in Sinanju's out-of-date guidebook as the seat of the Ottoman Empire-had been a breeze. Rebecca handled all the details. Remo merely had to show up. A quick meeting with the prime minister, a trapdoor assassination pit in the belly of an ancient citadel, finally another dead assassin to satisfy the Master of Sinanju and back on the plane by breakfast.
Then the real trial began. Mostly it was a challenge to Remo's patience. So far he was holding up okay. But it had been a steady drumbeat for two days now. Before they returned to the airport in Damascus after meeting with the Syrian president, Remo was shot at by that country's top assassin. He'd also been assaulted by lancers on horseback in the Jordanian desert, fed poison fruit in Lebanon and had a basket of asps thrown into his cab in Israel. Aside from Remo, the only living things to get out alive in all those attacks were the snakes. Any Arab he could find in the West Bank who grinned when Remo mentioned the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers got a snake down the pants, a cracked kneecap and an eye poked out with a sharp stick. Remo kept the stick as a happy souvenir.
He was tapping his stick against his ankle as he stared out the small window of the jet.
Thanks to Rebecca, Remo had left in his wake a whole passel of dead would-be assassins in rapid succession.
On several occasions he asked her what her real interest was in all this. She continued to insist that she was a unique public-relations expert who had been hired by a collection of governments working in their own self-interest. Their only concern was streamlining the Time of Succession process.
Remo knew that was a crock. Even Madison Avenue PR firms weren't cutthroat enough to deal with assassination. And it wasn't as if he didn't notice Rebecca's conspicuous absences. She was constantly disappearing to talk on her cell phone. Still, she was better at getting him where he was supposed to be than Smith had been. So what if she turned out to be a killer, as well? He was making great time.
Remo was starting to think that he might not shame himself in front of Chiun's ancestors after all. In fact, he might have actually felt good about the way everything was suddenly going if not for his current destination.
As the jet flew low over the latest Mideast country, Remo looked out the window with undisguised disgust.
The buildings were low. Probably because they were built out of desert sand and held together by camel spit. More than two stories and the sand would give out. Here and there onion domes had been stuck on the columns of mosques. From the air it looked as if someone had dumped a box of Christmas ornaments into a backyard sandbox.
"This is dumb," Remo grunted as he watched the ground grow larger. "I am never going to work for goddamn Iraq."
Rebecca had finished her conversation and was clicking her phone shut. "Patriotism?" she asked. Her face was open, guileless. She seemed genuinely interested in what Remo had to say.
Remo stopped tapping his eye-poking stick. "What?" he asked.