"No," said Remo.
"Go there sometime. You would get not only points but a blessing for it. One of the truly bad places in the world," Chiun said.
"Baghdad is bad," said Remo.
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"Baghdad has beauty," said Chiun.
"Baghdad has Iraqis," said Remo.
"No place is perfect," said Chiun, "except Sinanju."
"How many points for Baghdad?" Remo asked Hamamota. The Japanese wriggled onto his belly. Inch by painful inch, he crawled toward Remo and Chiun. When he got to Remo's shoes, he opened his mouth to bite and Remo lifted his foot and stepped down with one precise step, separating Hamamota into two parts.
Terri fainted.
"See if you can do Calcutta," said Remo.
"I can't do Calcutta," said Chiun.
"Why not?"
"No joystick. I think this fat Jap probably threw it away."
By the time Terri recovered, Remo and Chiun had carried her back to the temple ruins and were digging around for the Hamidian inscription.
"You didn't have to kill him," she said to Remo.
"What should I have done?"
"Rehabilitate him," said Terri.
"Right," said Chiun. "Correct." And then in Korean he said to Remo: "What is the matter with you? You would argue with a stone wall. Do you really think this woman knows what she is talking about?
"Thank you," said Terri, sure the kindly old Korean was explaining decency to his rude and crude student.
"You're welcome," said Chiun to Terri, and then to Remo: "See how easy it is when you treat idiots like idiots."
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"I just want you to know this," Terri told Remo. "There has been death and destruction this day and all you could think about was playing games with human lives. You kill without remorse or even anger. I could understand anger. But nothing? Nothing? Nothing?"
"Would it make you feel better if I hated everybody I kill?" said Remo. "You want hate?"
"Moron," said Chiun in English.
"I don't know why you put up with him," Terri told Chiun.
"Neither do I," said Chiun.
Eight
Dr. Harold W. Smith waited in the headquarters of CURE, sitting atop staffs he could not reach, a network unconnected to anything, running dummy corporations and fronts all operating without purpose.
Through the years, he alone had set up these groups to create a network of people gathering and dispensing information, all them helping, without knowing it, to help CURE fight crime and to keep America alive.
Only Smith, each president, and CURE's lone killer arm knew what CURE was. Clerks gathering information on illegal trucking and fraud never knew for whom they really worked. Government agencies with vast sprawling budgets never knew how much of their workforce actually worked for that secret organization set up in Rye, New York, behind the facade of the sanitarium called Folcroft.
Smith had prepared for everything and he had not prepared for this. He was not even sure how long the networks would keep working or what they would do or if they would just gather, orga-
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nize, penetrate, and then do it all over again because the information just wasn't being used.
He didn't know. Only the computers would know, and his computers' brains were as blank as a baby's at birth.
For the first time since those murky days when a desperate president had called on him to set up this organization, Harold W. Smith was out of touch with it all.
For the first time, there were no two dozen problems to be juggling at one time.
For the first time, there was only that blank computer terminal, with the lights flashing meaningless symbols.
And suddenly Harold W. Smith found himself doing something he had not done since grade school when he had finished reading Peter Rabbit ahead of the rest of the class. He was doodling with a pencil. He was drawing pictures.
There was a box inside a box inside a box.
He looked at it a moment and then he knew what he would do. Trying to track down the missing computer records had failed. There had been no response.
But if he set up just the sort of illegal operation that activated the CURE network? Then when it latched on to him, he could send Remo up through the network. . . .
The pencil dropped on the desk. So Remo could go up through the networks and then what? None was connected to any other and Smith was disconnected from the whole mess. He was alone and in this aging part of his life, when the body stopped
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responding to the commands of the mind, he was becoming useless.
And then the telephone rang.
It was the technician in the new headquarters in St. Maarten. They had received a strange message several days after the failed transmission from someone. Would Smith be interested?
"Absolutely. I want to know everything about the message, especially where it originates," said Smith.
"I'm sorry, sir, but we didn't get that. Just somewhere in the western part of your country."