"I need to get back a package I sent."
"Sorry. Once it's in the box, it's ours. Company rules."
Remo smiled pleasantly. "Sure. I understand."
And he and Chiun followed the man to his awaiting orange-and-purple-splashed white van. They were not at all secretive about it. In fact, they carried on a loud running conversation.
"Don't you hate it when big companies take your money and blow you off when you have a problem?" Remo told Chiun.
"Customer satisfaction is the soul of the professional assassin," Chiun replied. "So said Wang the Great, who understood such things."
The driver, knowing he was being followed, cast several nervous glances over his shoulder. He looked more worried each time. Just as he inserted his key into the door, he looked back again.
He saw no sign of the thick-wristed white guy or the old Oriental who had been following him.
Still looking back over his shoulder, he rolled the rear van door up.
Then he climbed aboard, threw his satchel in the back and lowered the door. It locked with a resounding chink of steel latching.
He drove out of LAX at a good clip, pausing only at the main entrance.
That was when the rear door unexpectedly rattled up, and he saw California sunlight beaming in from the back.
Braking and swearing, he ran back.
The cargo door was fully up, but there was no sign of whoever had opened it. He ran it down again and decided not to report any of what had happened.
But as he eased onto the freeway, he had the uneasy feeling that at least one of those two had been hiding in back of the van.
How was another matter. The only way into the van was through a locked side or rear door. And the rear door had been unlocked only long enough for him to check to see that the coast was clear and climb aboard.
Surely that was too short a time for a grown person to slip on board. Surely.
BACK AT THE TERMINAL, Remo was saying to Chiun, "That guy was looking everywhere except where we were."
"No," corrected Chiun. "We were everywhere his gaze did not fall."
Remo shrugged. "Same difference. Okay, let's get this thing to Folcroft."
"What of the bug man, Earwig Wormfood?"
"Smitty said he can wait."
"Thus, he waits."
Chapter 19
Harold Smith was deep in cyberspace when his secretary buzzed him that he had visitors.
"It's those two," she whispered.
"Send them in, Mrs. Mikulka," said Smith, looking up from his desktop screen. It was a relief, he thought, not to have to reach for the old concealed stud under the edge of his old desk to send the oldstyle monitor humming down into its concealed desktop well. That was in the days before he had the new system with its screen mounted flush under the black glass desktop. He still sometimes missed that system with its comforting green monochrome screen. It matched his Dartmouth tie.
When Mrs. Mikulka popped her blue-haired head in, Smith merely looked up and nodded his gray head. No one could see the buried screen except the man seated before it.
Mrs. Mikulka withdrew as Remo and Chiun entered.
Remo said, "Hiyah, Smitty," and tossed the FedEx envelope across the room.
It went sailing over Smith's head, out of reach. At the last moment, it abruptly boomeranged back to settle before him, square with the corners of the desk, unnoticed by Smith, who was still looking over his shoulder, expecting it to bounce off the office picture window.
Smith blinked, looked about and finally saw the package, resting on the desk as if it had been there all along. He cleared his throat, unimpressed with Remo's theatrics.
Stripping back the cardboard zipper, he emptied the contents on the smooth desktop.
A single wing fluttered to the black glass. It was backlit by the amber screen below. Touching a key, Smith reset the screen to a pure white. The light highlighted the outline and veins of the tiny wing.
Chiun was uncharacteristically silent as Smith studied the wing's delicate structure.
"You're being ignored," Remo whispered to him.
Chiun shook his head. "I ignored him first."
"Well, he's ignoring you back."
"He is too late. He is the ignoree, while I am the true ignorer. "
"Well, you know the etiquette of ignoring," said Remo in an unconvinced tone of voice.
Smith's patrician nose was almost touching the desktop now. He made assorted faces he was entirely unaware of.
"What do you say, Smitty?" Remo prompted.
Smith looked up, squint eyed. "It appears to be a bee's wing. Unremarkable."
"Well," said Remo. "Is it a bumblebee or a drone?"
Smith sat back and began working his keyboard.
Remo came around the desk to watch.
Smith had brought up a color replica of a drone honey bee and was manipulating it. One wing broke off and enlarged itself. It matched in outline and vein patterns the detached wing resting on the desk.
"It is a drone's wing. An ordinary drone," he said.
"No, it was a not-bee," Chiun corrected.