There were men standing about the Folcroft entrance, men in black fighting suits with various assault weapons slung from shoulders and belts. They smoked nervously. The way they hung their heads and slumped their shoulders jarred.
Their bodies screamed failure, not victory.
Remo spotted the letters DEA on the back of one man's jacket.
It didn't exactly clarify the situation, so he moved off to the southern exposure.
He knew Chiun had been sleeping in the Folcroft basement, guarding the gold he had wrangled from Smith until arrangements to ship it to Sinanju could be finalized. The Master of Sinanju had not let Remo forget it. Remo was supposed to take the day trick. And he was a half hour late.
Remo figured Chiun would be with the gold. When he found Chiun, he would start to find some answers.
Remo made it to the freight entrance without being spotted. Once he passed a DEA agent pissing behind a parked car. The man never so much as smelled the odor of sea salt clinging to Remo's clothing.
The corrugated freight door looked as if King Kong had punched his fist through it. The force was clearly outward, not inward. Chiun leaving. Only the Master of Sinanju could split corrugated steel so neatly down the middle before forcing the hole open.
Remo went in anyway.
The basement was dim and musty. The concrete floor sloped downward. There were no sounds or smells of intruders.
Remo reached Chiun's sleeping mat, found the hastily discarded sleeping kimono on the floor and understood that the assault had come with the dawn. Chiun had been lying here when the shooting had started and flung his sleeping kimono aside in his haste. Normally the Master of Sinanju was too fastidious to toss it aside so carelessly.
Remo went to the triple-locked door in an otherwise blank concrete wall. In the dark his eyes saw true. The locks were secure, the door closed. That meant the gold was safe. It was probably the chief reason those DEA agents were lounging about the front lawn and not floating as dismembered body parts on the sound being nibbled at by the fishes.
From behind the door came a bitter tang. Not blood. Certainly not gold, which hadn't a specific smell, although Chiun had long insisted that he could smell gold at a distance of six Korean ri-about three miles.
Remo eased up to the door. He retreated suddenly, holding his nose. The smell was burned plastic. Smith's computers. He had destroyed them. Not a good sign. Smith would sooner take the poison pill he kept in the watch pocket of his vest than destroy his precious mainframes.
The realization hit Remo then. "Damn!"
Reversing, he made for the stairs. The worst had happened. Smith was by now either dead or dying.
"Damn that Smith," Remo hissed. "What the hell's wrong with him? The IRS isn't the KGB."
He glided up the stairs.
There goes my last hope of tracking down my parents, Remo thought bitterly.
An IRS agent was standing guard at the top of the stairs. He made the mistake of challenging Remo.
"Halt. Who goes there?"
Remo went for his wallet, intending to flash one of his many fictitious ID cards supplied by Smith. He was wondering if he should try to outrank the IRS agent with his Remo Eastwood Secret Service badge or bluff him with his Remo Helmsley IRS special agent's card.
The point became moot when the agent pulled out a 9 mm Glock.
Remo yanked the Glock out of the agent's hand and inserted the blunt barrel into his mouth. The IRS agent looked surprised, then bewildered, then a thin golden stream began to come out of his left pant cuff to cut into the high polish of his cordovans.
"I'm an innocent citizen," Remo grated. "Who are you?"
The agent managed to get the mushy letters IRS past his chipped teeth and plastic side arm.
"Since when does that give you cause to shoot at an innocent hospital employee?"
The man's explanation refused to get past the Glock, so Remo removed it, keeping the barrel hovering menacingly. The agent understood Remo had no intention of shooting him. His finger wasn't even on the trigger. But having felt the impact on his teeth, he recognized the threat.
"You can't do this to the IRS."
"The IRS did it to me first. Now I want answers."
The thin stream petered out as the agent got his answer organized. "This hospital has been seized by IRS order."
"I saw the sign. Why? And don't tell me for deducting his 900-number calls. Harold Smith is as honest as the day is long."
"The days are getting shorter. Smith failed to report over twelve million dollars of income. That makes him a money launderer. Maybe a drug dealer."
"Drugs! Smith?"
"This is a private hospital. A perfect cover for illicit drug dealing."
"That why the DEA is standing outside, scratching themselves?"
The IRS man nodded. "They landed just as we pulled in through the gate. There were two separate operations. We got the worst of it, fortunately."
"What do you mean, fortunately?"
"Well, we lost a man, but he was only a trainee. And another agent took one in the ankle. That gave us the moral high ground to claim jurisdiction."
"That's gotta be worth a man and an ankle," Remo said dryly.
"Without tax revenue, there is no America," the agent said in a wounded voice.
"Tell it to Thomas Jefferson."
"The founding father who said something about taxation without representation being tyranny."
"Never heard of him."
"Do tell. Where's Smith?"
"They took him to intensive care."
"Dead?"
"We don't know what's wrong with him. He's stiff as a corpse. Paralyzed, but his eyes are open." The agent repressed a visible shudder.
"Sounds scary," Remo remarked.