As Remo negotiated the winding road, his eyes kept going to the circling birds. They were black against the rising sun, and that made it harder for even his eyes to make out their color and nature.
Vultures, Remo decided. Vultures for sure. But why were they circling Folcroft as if it was dead?
As he got closer, he began to smell blood. The metallic tang hung in the early-morning air. There were other smells-death smells. Sinanju had not taught him to proceed cautiously when he smelled them. He had learned that as a Marine, back in Nam.
Pulling over to the side of the road, Remo got out. There were leaves underfoot. Without having to look down, his feet avoided them perfectly. That he hadn't learned in Vietnam. That was Sinanju, and so deeply ingrained it was second nature.
Remo moved on to the trees, easing from bole to bole until he found an oak tall enough to do him some good. He went up it.
Half the leaves were gone, but there was foliage enough to conceal him provided he didn't move.
From the branches Remo spotted the unguarded gate to Folcroft. There was a sign on one of the brick gate pillars. It read:
NO TRESPASSING
GOVERNMENT PROPERTY
SEIZED BY ORDER OF THE
INTERNAL REVENUE SERVICE
The black block letters were printed over the IRS seal.
"Damn, damn, damn," Remo said.
In the early days of his work for CURE, the supersecret agency that didn't exist, there had been a number of standing orders. Paramount among them was what to do if Folcroft was compromised in any way: disappear. Since Remo was CURE's enforcement arm, his very existence was a security secret.
In the old days Remo had taken security seriously. The years had taught him differently. He had been officially dead more than two decades now. Although thanks to the succession of plastic surgeries and the strange effects of his Sinanju training, he looked almost exactly the same now as he did then. For all intents and purposes, Remo hadn't aged. That very fact meant that if any old friend from his past ever came across him, knowing Remo had been executed by the State of New Jersey, he would naturally have leaped to a logical conclusion: Remo was his own son.
Remo had never had a son. Had never been married. But the days when he had to stay away from New Jersey and his past were long over. No one would assume that Remo Williams was above ground. Even if they did, the world wouldn't come to an end. Remo could be in the witness-protection program for all anyone knew. It was all Harold Smith bullshit.
Remo had had enough of Smith's bullshit. That was why he had quit CURE the week before. Technically he was a free agent, but he had agreed to stick around for the duration of Chiun's next contract on one condition: that Smith use CURE's massive computer outreach to help Remo locate his parents, living or dead.
Smith had agreed. Chiun, surprisingly, had gone along with it all. But Remo was serious this time. A year hence he would kiss Harold Smith, CURE and Folcroft Sanitarium goodbye. Forever.
Chiun, he would worry about then.
But as he hung in the crown of the oak, Remo understood that something unexpected had happened, something that promised to cheat him out of the one chance he had to unearth his roots.
CURE was under stress as the result of an effort by an old enemy-a superintelligent artificial-intelligence microchip called Friend-to destroy the organization. Friend, whose programming was dedicated to the mindless making of profit and the unremitting accumulation of wealth, had struck at CURE in a brilliant three-prong attack calculated to render the agency nonfunctional.
It had come at a critical time. Chiun had just negotiated the contract for the coming year. The gold had been shipped to the village of Sinanju on the West Korea Bay by submarine. A renegade North Korean frigate captain had commandeered it, destroying the sub and seizing the gold. Without gold, the contract was void. Without gold, the Master of Sinanju had withdrawn his services, along with Remo's.
At the same time Friend had struck at Remo indirectly. By a subtle manipulation of the data in the CURE computer system, a man's name had bubbled up to catch Smith's attention. A fugitive hit man, long wanted by the authorities. Exactly the kind of hit that Remo routinely handled between higher-priority assignments.
Remo had tracked him down on Smith's orders. And killed what was later discovered to be an innocent man in front of his wife and daughter. Their horrified faces still haunted Remo, shocking him enough to question his role as a secret assassin for an even more secret arm of the United States government.
When Chiun had balked at another year's service because of the missing shipment of gold, Remo already had one foot out the door.
The trouble continued piling up from there. CURE's computers became unreliable. Something somehow had managed to sever Harold Smith's direct telephone line to the President of the United States. CURE was cut off from the one US. official who knew it existed.
It was a masterful plan, and CURE should not have survived. But it had. The gold had been recovered. Friend had been deactivated as he was consummating a brilliant attempt to blackmail the U.S. government through computer manipulation designed to paralyze the federal banking system.
But the damage had been done. CURE had been hobbled, and all Remo cared about now was uncovering his past. The future would take care of itself.
And now this.
Remo wondered if the President had had something to do with this. Smith hadn't been getting along with the new President. They were like oil and water. And Friend had managed to divert the last of CURE's operating funds from its offshore bank. Smith had been trying to trace the lost taxpayer funds for over a week now. The President had not been happy to hear about that. The very existence of CURE offended him.
Maybe, Remo mused, he had decided to lower the boom this way.
Stepping to the ground, he decided to find out.
Moving low, Remo made his way to the sound. He eased into it, the cool water swallowing his bare feet. He had stepped out of his Italian loafers. The water drank his thighs, his waist and, after his dark hair dipped into the cool blue surface, the water regathered as if he had never been there.
No disturbance marked Remo's progress. He swam effortlessly, arms trailing loosely, feet kicking easily. So quiet was his progress that a sunfish failed to notice him until Remo had already passed his line of sight. Then it twisted away in staring-eyed panic.
When the rotting piles of the Folcroft dock-a relic of some long-ago period before Folcroft had been built-came into view, Remo arrowed toward the ground.
He came out of the water like a seal, on his stomach. The entire operation was soundless.
Lying on the mud, Remo lifted his head.
The smell of blood was still strong. Over the L-shaped brick building that was the headquarters for CURE, the three circling birds still described their tight looping pattern. Remo focused on them.
For the first time since he had embraced the sun source called Sinanju, his eyes failed him. The birds remained black against the sky of the new day, like living shadows. Remo couldn't make out their true color, never mind their markings and distinguishing features.
Not sea gulls, not vultures, not really like any birds he knew.
The skin along his bare forearms tightened with a vague fear.
Remo shifted his gaze to the window he knew was Harold Smith's. He didn't expect to see into it. The opacity of the one-way glass defeated even his sharp eyes.
The window was broken. Through the angular hole in the pane, Remo spotted figures moving about. Men in suits. Men who didn't belong in Harold Smith's office.
There was no sign of Smith.
Remo shifted his gaze. The water was draining from his clothes, and he was willing his body temperature to rise by fifteen degrees. That would take care of the remaining dampness in his clothes.
There were Cigarette boats beached in the mud not far from him. They were empty. The ground around the rise when the mud became high ground had been chewed up by feet and something more vicious.
The air was thick with stale gunpowder smell, Remo noticed. Digging his fingers into the tiny burrow in the mud, he pulled out an intact 9mm round.
Someone had attacked Folcroft by boat. That much was clear. But who had fought them back? Although Folcroft was technically one of America's most secret installations, Smith had never installed sophisticated security systems. There was only a single lobby guard, no barbed wire or electrified fences, no motion-sensing detectors or other such safeguards. Smith believed that installing such trappings would merely serve to advertise Folcroft's importance. He might as well string up Christmas lights that spelled out Secret High Security Installation. Do Not Enter.
It was Smith's New England sensibleness that betrayed him. Folcroft had been assaulted and taken. It had never happened before.