"To report a crime. To have the bodies carted off to the morgue."
"That's not how we do it in the Hollywood community," Squirrelly said. "The business of Hollywood is publicity, and bad publicity is bad business."
"You can't just leave them here."
"Won't the tide be in soon?" inquired the actress who wanted to play a vampire. She had stopped tasting the blood, and with the aid of a compact mirror was using it to freshen her lipstick.
"Yes," said Lobsang, appearing as if from nowhere. "The tide will be in soon. It will return their useless husks to the sea, for they no longer reside therein."
Squirrelly clapped her hands together like a child. "Oh, that is so Buddhist. I love it when you talk like that. Teach me to talk like that."
"Look," Remo said, dumping the last body onto the pile, "do what you want. Chiun and I have stuck around too long as it is." He turned to Chiun. "Isn't that right, Little Father?"
"We have paid our respects to the forty-seventh Bunji Lama and done her a service, as well." Chiun bowed. "Let that be a gift to you, Light That has Come. May you reign in wisdom and glory."
"Do not fear, Master of Sinanju," said Kula stoutly. "I will see to it that the Bunji arrives in Lhasa still wearing her pink skin. Farewell."
Squirrelly waved them off. "Kale pheb! Go slowly. Or softly. Or whatever. Has anybody seen my roach clip?"
ON THE WAY to the rental car, Remo said to Chiun, "What happens when the Chinese government discovers that Squirrelly's still alive and their agents are dead?"
"They will realize that a message has been sent to them. Perhaps they will discover the wisdom to do the correct thing."
"Is this what you meant by the message traveling far?"
"Possibly," said Chiun.
"Do me a big favor. Let's keep this entire episode between you and me. Okay?"
"Agreed. I do not wish to anger my emperor with my sunlighting. "
"That's 'moonlighting!'"
"We practice the sun source. We are sunlighters. And by the next sun I will have much gold to count"
"I still say there's going to be blood on that gold."
"Spoken like a true Buttafuoco," said Chiun, standing by the passenger side door and pretending to look at the waves until Remo got around to opening it for him. Once that was done, he would remind his pupil to fetch his trunks.
Chapter 13
Dr. Harold W Smith arrived for work promptly at 6:00 a.m. He was a very punctual man. The gate guard had a habit of checking his wristwatch as soon as Smith's beat-up station wagon rolled past the gate, and if it was more than thirty seconds off, he reset it. Smith was that punctual.
The lobby guard knew to expect him to walk in at precisely 6:01. If 6:01 came and went without Smith striding into the lobby attired in his unvarying uniform consisting of a gray three-piece suit, the guard knew that Harold Smith wasn't late. He was out sick. That's how punctual Harold W Smith was.
Smith's personal secretary knew that her employer invariably stepped off the second-floor elevator at exactly 6:02. When she heard the ding of the elevator, she didn't bother to look up. She just said, "No calls, Dr. Smith." That's how tied to his routine was Harold W Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy little private hospital nestled amid the poplars and oaks of Rye, New York.
Once Harold W. Smith closed the door marked Director, the portion of his routine that was known to no one but him began.
He settled into the cracked leather chair before the picture window of two-way glass that gave an excellent view of Long Island Sound. It was wasted on Smith because his back was to it, but it had the advantage of being opaque to prying eyes.
Smith looked at his pathologically neat desk, saw nothing out of place and took that as a sign Folcroft's cover had not been penetrated and pressed a concealed stud under the oaken desk.
A section of the desktop to his immediate left dropped, slid away, and up from the exposed well hummed an ordinary-looking computer terminal. The keyboard unfolded itself, and Smith addressed the keys with his long thin gray fingers.
Everything about Harold Smith was gray. His eyes, shielded by rimless glasses, were gray. As was his thinning hair and his dryish skin. He was the grayest of gray men-colorless, uninteresting, a bureaucrat to the bone.
Smith entered a password known only to him, and the computer screen began scrolling the Bill of Rights, which Harold Smith read silently as a reminder of the awesome responsibility that had sat on his gray shoulders since that long-ago day when a much-admired United States President had plucked him out of the bowels of Langley to offer him the position of director of CURE, the supersecret organization that didn't exist.
His reading done, Smith called up the night's news extracts. Deep in the basement of Folcroft, sealed behind a concrete wall, was a bank of mainframe computers that twenty-four hours a day scanned data banks throughout North America, extracting raw data according to programs Smith himself wrote, seeking threats to US. security, whether domestic or foreign.
It had been a light night. Only two events stood out.
Squirrelly Chicane, noted actress, was claiming to be the long-lost Bunji Lama, an obscure Tibetan spiritual leader dead nearly half a century.
Smith frowned. This seemed not to fall under any of the program rubrics he created. Then he read further and saw that Beijing had denounced the announcement as a transparent American provocation.
Smith blinked. It had been a long time since Beijing had used such harsh language to describe a US. action. Relations between the two countries these days were relatively settled.
Smith went on to the next extract.
It was the report of the death of an obscure screenwriter named Denholm Fong. Fong's body had washed up on a California beach, disemboweled.
Smith blinked again. This was not right. Was the computer acting up?
He pressed the question-mark key, and the computer responded by highlighting the single common word in both reports.
The word was "Malibu."
"Odd," said Smith in the dry, lemony voice that betrayed his New England upbringing. "Could there be a connection?"
Smith logged off the extract program and ran a background check on Denholm Fong.
Smith had only to glance over the dead man's bank account activity, IRS files and permanent-resident immigration status in order to come to a conclusion.
"A Red Chinese sleeper agent," he muttered. "But who killed him-and why?"
Smith considered that matter for a few silent moments, decided there was insufficient data for a working theory and dumped his findings into a new file he labeled "Bunji" for brevity's sake. He instructed the computer to dump any related discoveries into the Bunji file. Perhaps a pattern would reveal itself.
Smith turned his attention to Folcroft matters. From time to time the terminal would beep and display an incoming fragment of data that programming had culled out of the billions of bytes of raw data being transmitted across the nation. Nothing escaped the Folcroft Five, and nothing that they brought to his attention escaped the tired gray eyes of Harold W. Smith.
It was close to noon when the intercom buzzed and Smith said, "Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?"
"A Mr. Buttafuoco to see you:'
Smith blinked. "First name?"