"We will find out," said Chiun.
"You must never refer to the director general as a member of a tribe," said Dara. "You'll never get anywhere like that. He would have his bodyguards throw you right out of the room, maybe out the window. He is a very proud man."
"You just get Dr. Ravits' discoveries ready for us and we'll take care of convincing Ndo," Remo said.
"You mean the anti-immune pheromone molecules," she said.
"Right. That," said Remo.
"Absolutely that," said Chiun. After all, they were supposed to be scientists.
Amabasa Francois Ndo heard his pilot announce in his clipped British accent that the IHAEO diplomatic jet was about to land at Kennedy International Airport. He burned a little sliver of chateaubriand before the god Ga, a wooden replica made from the first willow to bend in the first storm of the rain season. A good Ga protected one during dangerous times. A good Ga could take an Inuti boy and make him a great man, make him a director general of a worldwide organization.
Ndo always had the Ga with him. He had brought it with him to the Sorbonne, when he was young and poor, living on the pittance paid by the French colonial government.
They had sent him to school where he became part of the revolutionary movement to remove France from Inuti lands. The French had built roads for the Inuti, established police for the Inuti, hospitals for the Inuti, laws for the Inuti lands. But the French lived in the big houses and the Inuti served them drinks on cool white porches as their untouchable cool white ladies looked on.
Amabasa Francois Ndo had two ambitions as a young man going to Paris for his education. One was to become the head of police, the other was to have one of those cool white women.
The second ambition was realized seven minutes after he rented a cheap room. He didn't even have time to unpack. The daughter of an industrialist, determined to end racism in the world, came into his room calling for a form of solidarity against people whom Ndo figured out were just like her father.
She issued this call while undressing him and herself. It was her favorite way of fighting racism. Unfortunately, Ndo, like all the other African students she met, needed penicillin to escape the ravages'of solidarity with the young woman.
Amabasa hoped his other ambition proved more satisfying. But he abandoned it when he saw how policemen lived compared to how ambassadors lived. He had a knack for seeing where movements went and gliding along with them. He also found he had a knack for eating at fine restaurants, and more than a knack for public speaking.
When an African student raped and then hacked to death a local Parisian girl, he knew immediately it was a case of a madman who should be put away but he also knew that all Africans would be blamed by some whites and that might eventually affect him.
So he took his last piece of a stolen crepe and burned it before Ga secretly in his Paris room. The smoke rose and he chanted requests for protection. Then he went out and made the first of his speeches about the ravages of French colonialism as if the only reason anyone could commit such a mad brutal murder was a century of oppression. He put on trial all the things and people he so envied: the gendarmes, the law courts, the big white houses and even the cool white women.
Surprisingly, none of the young white radical women were offended. They wanted to hear whites attacked, their fathers attacked, their brothers attacked, their lovers attacked.
This realization stood the young Inuti student well, because in an instant he understood that there was nothing so fraudulent or so malicious that would not attract support from some white groups, provided they agreed with the choice of target.
With proper respect for Ga, a brilliant appreciation of abstract concepts and a disregard for truth that would have gotten him stoned out of any Inuti village, Amabasa Francoia Ndo rose in the ranks of Third World diplomacy.
It did not matter that First World nations supported the IHAEO. The way to success was not gratitude but treating white nations like those white radical girls so long ago in Paris. Applause followed. Awards. Honors from the white countries he attacked. Occasionally there were efforts to turn the health organization into some form of international clinic but Ndo always managed to convince members to address broader issues. Colonialism was a health issue. Imperialism was a health issue. And when Russia weighed in, totally on the side of the Arabs, Zionism became a health issue.
Considering the makeup of the delegates, these were easier issues to deal with. Ndo was sure there weren't three delegates who knew a corpuscle from a tractor trailer. Most of them did have college degrees but had gotten them in sociology which made them virtually useless for anything but unfounded speeches anyway. He would never express that opinion, of course, because of the strong support of most sociologists for IHAEO. Not that he would ever let his son become one.
Amabasa Francois Ndo was at the pinnacle of his career when his private jet landed at Kennedy International Airport and his bodyguards motioned his armor-plated Cadillac limousine in from the hangar. He took the small wooden god and put it into the vest pocket of his three-piece Saville Row suit and prepared to debark. There had been some recent troubles with America threatening to withdraw its funding unless IHAEO started doing more health and less politicizing, but that would be easily quelled by a stroke of good fortune.
The stroke of good fortune was Dr. Ravits. One of the drones had been killed in the laboratory which had been having nothing but trouble since it started. They were always having killings there, and to Ndo the lab was nothing but a pain. None of the employees seemed politically aware and they certainly didn't know how to throw a party and if they weren't necessary for public relations in the West, he wouldn't have had them at all. But now this Ravits person had gotten himself killed and Ndo was going to use it.
That was why he was flying into New York City: to address the United Nations on one more attempt to destroy IHAEO.
Ndo loved New York, loved the skyline, loved it even more than Paris. New York was power and action and all those wonderful furriers from which he supplied his girlfriends and his sons' girlfriends.
He didn't like the people, of course, but then again, he never had to meet any of them. They rode in subways and they walked on the streets. Ndo never did either.
He got clearance from his bodyguards to descend and walked down the stairway from the jetcraft to his limousine and found two men waiting for him in the backseat.
One wore a kimono. The other wore a black T-shirt and black slacks.
"Who gave you permission to ride in the car with me?" asked Ndo.
"Hi," said Remo pleasantly. "We've come on business."
"I do not discuss business except by appointment."
"Your secretary was uncooperative too," Remo said. "He is in the front seat."
Ndo glanced into the front seat. A very big man was curled up in a fetal position. The big man was his favorite bodyguard and could break someone's arm with one hand. Ndo had seen him do it. His favorite bodyguard, was not moving.
"Ah, business, yes," said the director general of IHAEO. "Well, I am on my way to the United Nations. Let us do our business quickly."
Ndo gave the pair his most attentive look, even while he set off his emergency alarm to alert bodyguards and local police. Ndo had long-standing orders on what to do if he was abducted. The long-standing orders were to give any terrorists exactly what they wanted if they would return Ndo unharmed. Of course, he had already eliminated the danger from most of the terrorists in the world by putting them on the IHAEO payroll.
Ndo listened politely to some claptrap about bugs and laboratory experiments and a rainy season. He listened until he saw the blue bubble of a police car in front and then another one in back. Gas suddenly filled the backseat but he knew enough to hold his breath. A dark mask fell down from the car's ceiling. He pulled it over his face and breathed pure oxygen.
He waited for a full count of four hundred, far longer than anyone could hold his breath. Then he pressed the gas-exhaust lever and waited until there was absolutely no trace left in the backseat, then replaced the mask in its compartment. The police would have to take care of the bodies.
But there were no bodies. The white man just continued talking. He was still talking about bugs when Ndo tried to stab him with a little ceremonial knife he carried. The knife had the poison of the Gwee bush. It would send anyone cut with it into painful paralysis, like an execution which took a week of dying, every moment in agony.
The knife somehow wouldn't cut the man's skin. Remo put it away on the floor.
"So that's what we want," he said finally. "The good points are that you are going to help millions. The bad points are that if you don't do it, we are going to take off your face."
"I am not afraid," Ndo said.
Remo pressured the thumb up against the forearm, creating a shock through Ndo's nervous system. But he accepted the pain, accepted it as he had learned to accept pain for the initiation ceremony of the Inuti. "
Remo cracked the thumb and still the man didn't surrender. He did not surrender as his ribs strained close to his heart, even though sweat began to pour from his forehead. Then, with a smile, Ndo passed out.
"I don't want to kill him, Little Father," Remo said. "We need him to give orders."
"He is afraid of death," Chiun said. "But not of pain."
"I've never seen anything like that," Remo said.
"Because you have not adequately studied the history of the Masters of Sinanju."
"I have," Remo said.
"Not adequately."
Remo glanced at the police cars. Uniformed officers stood alongside the cars, guns down. He did not want to have to hurt them.