"Got you, old man. Next time."
"Yes. We'll talk," Wissex said.
Ten
Only the ocean hadn't changed.
That unusually philosophical thought occurred to Dr. Harold W. Smith as he sat in the semi-darkened office at Folcroft Sanitarium, looking out through the one-way glass of his windows at the Long Island Sound, pitching and surging at the end of the long green manicured lawn that dribbled down to the narrow sliver of beach.
He had changed. He had come to CURE and its first director, picked by a president he didn't like for a job he didn't want, and he took it only because the president had told him that he was the only man in the nation who could handle it. Smith then had still been young-ready to retire from the CIA after twenty years of service to his country and ready to go back to teach law in New England. The law had been his first love.
And suddenly he had been made the greatest law-breaker in the history of the United States. It was CURE'S mission: to work outside the law to capture the lawbreakers; to use criminal methods to stop crime from overrunning the United States,
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Smith knew of only one way to work. He had thrown himself into the assignment with the same rockhard New England tenacity he had brought to everything in his life. His marriage, never very exciting to begin with, had slowly slipped away into an arm's length exercise in boredom. He had lost touch with his young daughter and she had fallen away into the sink of drug addiction.
And CURE hadn't worked. It had struggled and carved out many successes, but it had all amounted to trying to bail out the ocean with a spoon. No matter how hard you bailed, there was even more water to take the place of whatever you removed. So too with crime. In the United States, it had become almost infinite in its scope and as it had grown more successful, it had enticed more and more people into the criminal life. In recruiting, nothing succeeds like success.
So, almost against his will, Smith had found it necessary to take CURE one step further. He had recruited a killing arm. Remo Williams, a Newark, New Jersey policeman, who had killed in Vietnam. Remo had been surly and felt abused at having his comfortable life disrupted. He had not wanted anything to do with CURE. But he had been the right man. An orphan with no family. A man who loved his country and had killed for it. Smith knew he had chosen correctly: that Remo would kill again for his country.
And he had . . . hundreds of times, now beyond count. Maybe they were still trying to spoon out the ocean but in Remo, CURE now had a bigger spoon and those whom Remo visited did not live to be criminals again.
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But only the ocean had not changed.
Remo had changed. He had started out reluctantly, doing CURE's work because America needed it. But then had come the change. He had started to do the work because he was an assassin and assassin's work defined him and made him whole. Remo's sense that CURE could make a difference was long gone. There were still residues of his patriotism but they were thinner, more nebulous now than they had ever been. Remo now killed because he killed, and America was better to kill for than anybody else he could think of at the moment.
Chiun had changed too. He had been brought to CURE just to train Remo, to teach him to kill and to survive. It had started for the old Korean as just another job, but that had not lasted long.
Somewhere along the way, Chiun had decided that Remo was not just a student, but that he was to be Chiun's successor as the next Master of Sinanju. Chiun had also decided that Remo was the reincarnation of the Hindu god, Shiva the Destroyer. Smith had never really understood what Chiun was talking about. It was enough for Smith to know that Remo and Chiun were different from other men; that their minds worked differently and their bodies worked differently. Smith had never expected, and now never understood, the strange powers they would have and why they were so much more than other men.
Chiun once had explained that the only secret of Sinanju was to teach men to use all their powers; to emulate the insects who could leap scores of times their own height and lift hundreds of times
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their own weight. He cited the case of the shark and its senses which could detect one part of blood in a million parts of water. This, Chiun had said, was the potential that man could live up to. Smith didn't believe it. There had been nothing like that in the human physiology courses he had taken at Dartmouth. But he had seen those powers too many times now to disbelieve them.
Still, since he could neither disbelieve nor understand, he chose to ignore, and just to be thankful that those powers, whatever exactly they were, were arrayed on the side of the United States and not against it.
So they had come a long way, Smith and Remo and Chiun and CURE and America itself, and the only thing that had not changed was the water that ran back and forth endlessly in front of Smith's windows.
The telephone rang, its sharp jangle seeming visibly to jolt the quiet waves of air in the darkened room.
That was another thing that didn't change: the telephone. It had started ringing all those years before when Smith had first moved CURE into Folcroft. And it was still ringing.
He lifted the receiver slowly and said, "Hello."
Smith had never before heard the voice, which said, "What kind of deal are you offering?"
"Depends on what you've got," Smith said noncommitally. "Suppose you tell me something about yourself."
"What I've got is one of the great stories of our time. A secret agency for the United States government. An official government assassin and his
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elderly Oriental trainer. A father-son love theme that runs through it. Their battles against evil to try to make America safe for all its people again."
As the intense voice of Barry Schweid ranted on, Smith's stomach sank. This man, whoever he was, knew everything. CURE had been compromised.
There was silence on the end of the phone and Smith realized he was supposed to say something.
"Sounds interesting," he said. "What'd you say your name was?"
"I don't want to tell you my name," Schweid said. "Out here, they rip off everything. I don't want anybody to know what I'm working on."
Out here? Where? Smith wondered. Who rips off everything? What was this lunatic talking about?
"Like you. Like you got a message into my computer and processor," Schweid said. "I don't know how you did that. Maybe somebody else could do it. Then everybody would have everything I was working on."
His voice seemed to be approaching hysteria and Smith wondered if talking about money might calm him down.
"What kind of deal did you have in mind?" Smith said.
"I wouldn't take less than 250 thou. And ten points."
"Oh, yes, points," Smith said, totally confused. "Have to have points."
"And not net points either. Gross points. Net sucks."
"Well, that should be no problem," Smith said. No, there would be no problem. This madman,
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whoever he was, was due a visit from Remo. If Smith got his records back. If CURE survived that long. "We should get together and work out the details," Smith said.
"Who do you have to talk to first?" Schweid asked.
"No one. I'm in this alone."
"You're not going to make this one, are you?" Schweid asked. His voice took on a whiny, suspicious sound.
"Why not?" Smith asked. What was this man talking about?