"Spent."
Remo looked away from the screen. "On what?"
"The illustrious paperboy. He required a tip."
"You tipped the paperboy two hundred dollars!"
"Since he was worthy and it was not my money, it seemed equitable," Chiun said, shrugging. "And six hundred dollars will get you an excellent room-for One, perhaps two months. But what will you do after that?"
"I'll think of something."
"Perhaps once you find your roots, you may also find it in a beautiful orchard in which to dwell with the other trees."
"Not funny, Chiun." Frowning, Remo asked, "Look, if I come, how much of the gold is mine?"
"That depends."
"On what?"
"On how useful you are to me."
"Not good enough."
"One third. And I will prevail upon Smith to locate your forebears, who no doubt even now are hanging their heads in shame over your naked display of greed and graceless ingratitude."
Remo considered, "Okay. Done."
"Quickly. Before my gold rusts," said Chiun, fleeing the room.
"Does gold rust?" Remo asked himself. He decided to watch "Lamb Chop's Play Along" to the end and then pack. It made him feel better than he had in a long time.
JUST AS NATURE abhorred a vacuum, Harold W Smith despised coincidence. There was no place for such untidiness in the logical order of his world.
Yet coincidences happened, and Smith understood that. He did not accept coincidence without begrudging its very existence, but he understood that such puzzling phenomena manifested themselves from time to time, annoying as they could be.
In the world in which Harold Smith lived there was a phenomenon called cluster effect. The clumping of synchronous events or coincidences, producing a pattern that might suggest meaning or fate or even the guiding hand of an almighty God.
The cluster effect in which Harold Smith found himself trapped and drowning suggested just such an invisible hand.
In less than a week, he had lost his enforcement arm to an impossible computer failure, the Master of Sinanju's services to a mysterious submarine hijacking, CURE's operating funds to a bank failure and his all-important dedicated line to the President of the United States through a circumstance still unknown.
It was possible for any of these calamities to occur under extraordinary circumstances. Remo had resigned in the past, always to come back. Disagreements with the Master of Sinanju were worrisomely frequent and avoided only by nimble thinking. And it was certainly possible for the gold-bearing submarine to be intercepted by an overzealous North Korean gunboat. It had happened once before.
But a computer malfunction as inexplicable as the one that had resulted in the death of Roger Sherman Coe was flatly impossible, even if caused by a data transmission glitch or software virus. It was no glitch. No accident. Therefore it was the deliberate act of a conscious mind.
There was no escaping that, none whatsoever. And for a mind to go to the effort to trick Harold Smith into ordering the death of an innocent man, it would have to have a purpose.
The result had been to render CURE virtually powerless. Had that been the intent?
By itself, Smith would have dismissed the thought as patently ridiculous. Knowledge of the very existence of CURE was limited to Smith himself, Remo, Chiun and the current President. All previous Presidents, upon surrendering the office, were secretly visited by Remo and Chiun, their specific memories of CURE erased by a Sinanju technique Smith never understood but trusted implicitly.
No one outside the closed circle knew that CURE existed. Yet someone was attacking it. Attacking it at every seemingly vulnerable point.
It was a masterful strategy, Smith was forced to admit. It was elaborate. It was thorough. It showed the working of a brilliant mind with an almost omniscient awareness of CURE operations, from its secret financial conduits to the schedule of the gold shipment to Sinanju, to Remo's specific psychological vulnerabilities.
All of which were stored on the CURE computer-a system that was exhaustively scanned for viruses, electronic eavesdroppers and utterly Tempest shielded.
Somehow someone had entered the CURE system through a back door. There was no other way any of this could have happened.
But there were no back doors to the Folcroft Four, Smith knew for a fact. He had set up the system himself. The new XL SysCorp WORM drives were another matter. They could have been designed with trapdoors.
But why?
Smith was confident of one thing. The system had come to him through his own efforts. He had answered a classified advertisement in a disreputable computer magazine and initiated every contact. Buzz Kuttner was not out there twiddling his thumbs waiting for a call from Harold W Smith just so he could sell Smith a computerized Trojan horse.
If the Trojan horse were not waiting for him, it meant that it might not be the only Trojan horse. Smith turned in his seat to stare out at the sound. He was not used to this, not used to thinking through a CURE problem without the give-and-take data exchange of the Folcroft Four. But he was making progress-surprising progress without the distraction of his monitor.
Steepling his long fingers, Smith rested his pointed chin on them. Yes, it was becoming clear, as clear as Occam's razor, which suggested that the simplest theory was closest to the actual reality. Namely, that there was a mind out there that knew of CURE. Whether it knew of CURE before or after Smith had installed the WORM drives did not matter now. The mind had penetrated his system through a trapdoor, learned all CURE's secrets and exploited them masterfully.
There was only one flaw in the plan. It was a simple oversight. This supermind had broken the chain of CURE command at its strongest points. It was a unique strategy. One usually broke the weakest link to snap a chain.
The weak link was Harold Smith, an aging deskbound bureaucrat operating out of an installation whose very secrecy precluded security arrangements for his personal safety that were routinely extended to the heads of the FBI, CIA and other law-enforcement agencies.
A determined foe could simply walk into Harold Smith's office to kill him with a thirteen-cent bullet. Or ambush him on the lonely drive home.
There were many ways that Harold Smith could be liquidated, and CURE shattered.
The supermind had not elected to do that. It made no sense.
And because it had failed to do the intelligent thing, Harold Smith still lived.
It would prove to be a fatal mistake for the unseen foe Harold Smith was now certain existed out therein cyberspace.
Chapter 15
It was the worst duty of the Cold War and, even with the Cold War over, it had not changed one iota.
The Bridge of No Return was a narrow structure of green-painted wood that spanned an ideological chasm called the Thirty-eighth Parallel just north of the town of Panmunjom on the demilitarized zone between North and South Korea.
No peace treaty marked the end of the Korean conflict back in 1953, only a cessation of hostilities and a semi-permanent cease-fire. For forty years more than a million soldiers eyeballed one another across a three-mile strip of minefields and razor-wire nests set against the misty green hills of the ill-named Land of Peaceful Cahn.
It was on this spot that, after the Korean War armistice, Korean POWs from both side were presented with the heart-rending choice; north or south. Some were forced to choose between family and freedom in the newly divided land.
Here United Nations troops kept an uneasy watch. Border conflicts were few but often bloody. North Korean infiltrators often crept down dressed as raggedy farmers. Every few years the blue helmets discovered a tunnel linking the north and the south and would have to demolish it.
And Sergeant Mark Murdock, US. Army, had actually volunteered for Panmunjom.