"Oh?"
"That's right. Nothing. You do less than nothing for me. Zip code. My ideal man is cultured, noble, regal."
"And my ideal woman doesn't have a loose upper plate," Remo said.
Terri harrumphed, got up and stepped across Remo. She moved to the other side of the aisle and sat next to Chiun.
Chiun said, "I prefer to sit alone. Be gone, woman." He spun around and clamped his gaze on the wing again.
Terri rose and moved to a seat behind Remo.
He turned and smiled. "Welcome to the club. When he abuses you, he likes you."
"You must both love me then," she said.
"Only him," Remo said.
Smith regularly awoke at 5:29 A.M., one minute before his alarm was set to go off. Then he turned
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the clock off so that the ring would not disturb his wife.
By this day, he awoke at 5:24 A.M., a full five minutes early, and knew something was wrong. He must have been dreaming. But what was it about?
Then he remembered. It wasn't a dream. It had been a thought. The lunatic he had been talking to in the West somewhere had been talking about motion pictures.
Suddenly, it all made sense-his talking about gross points, his maundering about how everybody was stealing from him.
Somehow CURE's records had gotten into the information system of a moviemaker. No ... a writer, as Smith recalled the conversation. Out there somewhere was a writer with CURE's records and now he was writing a screenplay based on the exploits of Remo and Chiun.
A small chill shuddered through Smith's body.
"Are you all right, dear?" his wife asked in the darkness of their bedroom in a little ranch house in Rye, New York.
"Yes. Why?"
"You're awake early," she said.
"Yes. I had an idea."
"How unusual," she said.
"Sorry to disturb you, dear," Smith said.
"Oh, you didn't disturb me."
"Go back to sleep, dear," Smith said.
"If you're sure everything's all right," she said.
"Everything's all right." Smith leaned over and pecked a kiss on his wife's cheek, then quickly left the bedroom to dress.
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But Mrs. Smith knew something was wrong, two minutes later, when the alarm sounded. Smith had forgotten to turn it off, and that was something he hadn't done in twenty years.
Thirteen
His bags were flawless. The ammunition and auxiliary weapons were stashed neatly in lead-lined cavities on the inside of mock typewriters and dictating machines, so the airport's randomly used x-ray equipment would show only the familiar shape of those ordinary objects.
But most of Commander Hilton Marmaduke Spencer's arsenal was on his body, built into his suit, his shoes, his sleeves, his belts.
"How will you get past airport security?" Wissex had asked him.
"The same way I escaped from Moscow in 1964," Spencer had said. "Did I ever tell you? I was"
"Well, I really have to go now," Wissex said. "Good luck on your mission."
"Luck has nothing to do with it, old top," Spencer said.
At London's Heathrow Airport, there was a long corridor leading to the waiting and boarding area for Air Espana planes. Only passengers were permitted past the human x-ray security machines that controlled the corridor.
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Forty minutes before he was due to board, Spencer was at a cocktail lounge in the airport, waiting for someone to arrive.
"Stolichnaya, double," he ordered from the bartender.
"How do you like it, sir?" the bartender asked.
"Neat, of course," Spencer said. "And bring the pepper."
When the bartender came, he set the large shot glass in front of Spencer, along with the pepper shaker. Spencer sprinkled some of the spice on top of the liquor. The pepper grains floated there for a few moments, then slowly settled to the bottom of the glass.
Spencer looked up at the bartender and smiled. "The only way to drink vodka, don't you know," he said. "The pepper takes out the impurities and carries them to the bottom of the drink. What's left is pure vodka. I've always drunk it that way."
"I see it all the time," the bartender said in a bored voice. "I read about it once in a James Bond book. Even Yanks do it now."
"Until I told him about it," Spencer said frostily, "that man who wrote about James Bond used to drink his vodka with Coca Cola." His eyes defied the bartender to argue with him, but the man just drifted off toward another customer.
Spencer nursed his drink for about ten minutes until the man he had been waiting for showed up. The man was Spencer's size and wore an identical blue pinstripe suit with a red handkerchief in the lapel. Like Spencer, he had a rust-colored mustache and he wore an ecru-colored Panama straw hat. Standing alongside Spencer in the darkened
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