"The connection to the Dolomos."
"What connection?" said the President.
"Don't move. Don't touch a thing," said Smith.
"I just momentarily forgot," said the President.
"Maybe," said Smith. "You're under my care now. I want you to go to the door to your living quarters. Don't touch it. I will open it. On the other side, slip out of all your clothes. Can you walk to your living quarters in your underwear? Will anyone see you?"
"I hope not. I feel sort of foolish doing this."
Smith got up from his seat and followed the President's nod to a door. He opened it. The substance might be on the handles. At every step Smith was acutely aware of his mental activity, exactly what he remembered and where he was. Even so, he did not touch the doorknob any more than he had to.
"Use another office while we have this one cleaned. We'll monitor everyone who works in the office. I am going to call the Oriental back from assignment. We were after the Dolomos for other reasons."
"Don't call off your efforts against them," said the President.
"I won't. But I want Chiun here. He can sense things routine examinations would miss. I don't know how he does it, but it works."
"The older one?" asked the President.
"Yes," said Smith.
"I like him," said the President.
"He can stop things we can only imagine."
"We'll have to give him a suit. He can't be around me wearing a kimono without attracting attention."
"I don't think we could get him to change his clothes, sir," said Smith. "He really doesn't change much. He probably won't change anything. He doesn't even understand our form of government. He won't accept the fact that some emperor doesn't run the place."
"Hell," said the President of the United States, unbuttoning his shirt. "Nobody runs the place. We all hang on for dear life."
He left his clothes in the Oval Office and walked with as much dignity as he could muster in his underwear through the passage to the presidential apartments.
Smith made sure the Secret Service examined all the clothes and all the objects in them. Then he made sure everyone who touched anything in the office was given an immediate test for memory. Everyone passed.
Still, the only real test was to have human hands run over everything in the office. It might have been that a minute amount was secreted on something, so minute that it might have been entirely rubbed off by the President. But on what? And how would they deliver it?
Smith sighed as he looked around the office, wondering who or what had entered it to deliver the substance. He looked at the American flag and the presidential flag. He looked at the office he had known of since childhood. He had always been taught such respect for it and he had always treated it with that respect.
It struck Harold W. Smith hard that he had told his first lie to a president of the United States right in this office. Chiun was not going to be brought in here solely to protect him. Because if the President could not be protected, Harold Smith had a duty to his country and the human race to assassinate his President as quickly and as surely as possible.
If a person regressed to childhood, as the plane's black box indicated, then what would happen to America if the President succumbed to that? What would happen to the ship of state with a child running it, one who could trigger a nuclear holocaust in one angry fit?
Smith resolved that at the first sure sign of childish behavior, the President would have to die. Smith could not take chances. He looked at the Oval Office one last time, shook his head, and left.
It had been so long since he had been ordered to start the organization by a now-dead president, so long and so many deaths ago. It had not been planned as a permanent thing. He was to help America get through the chaos an analyst saw coming. That was in the early sixties. The chaos came. It went, somewhat, and the organization was still here, now adding the President of the United States to its hit list.
Harold W. Smith said a silent prayer as he prepared to set up his own office out of the way of normal traffic and very close to the President, a man of exceptional integrity and courage. But that had nothing to do with whether he would die. He was going to die if he should appear to be stricken by that substance. Thereafter when Harold W. Smith asked the President how he felt, he really would be asking if he was going to have to kill the President that day.
In California, Remo got a strange response when he reached Smith. He knew immediately that Smith was in danger.
"One, I am not at normal home base now, Remo. Two, I want you to get some things straight before you put Chiun on."
Remo had found a street phone that worked after six failed to respond to quarters, nickels, or dimes. He knew Smith preferred street phones, because while they appeared more public, they gave less of a stationary target to anyone for bugging purposes. And Smith's own electronics could clean the line, as he called the process, from his end.
So here was Remo watching skateboarders zip through palm trees and Rolls-Royces form caravans as he made an absolutely safe phone call on Rodeo Drive. Chiun stood nearby, glancing every now and then at a jewelry display in a window. He had been on the alert for movie stars ever since he thought he saw one of the actresses from the soap operas he used to watch so faithfully. Chiun had stopped watching when violence replaced the romance. He did not approve of violence in shows.
He placed his delicate hands inside his kimono and surveyed the passing Hollywood scene. It did not, of course, get his approval. Remo watched him out of the corner of his eye.
"What's the problem?" asked Remo.
"We might be close to end game."
"We've been compromised?" asked Remo. He knew that if there should be any chance of exposure of the organization, it could be ruinous for the nation it hoped to serve. So everything was planned to self-destruct. This included Smith's taking of his own life. Smith would do it, too. Once it had been arranged for Remo to die, but Smith gave that up early on when it began to seem impossible to kill him. Instead, he trusted in Remo's lasting good feelings for his country, and a promise just to leave. Remo did not tell this to Chiun because he knew Chiun might do something to take down the organization. The only thing holding Chiun in America was Remo, whom he called his investment and the future of Sinanju.
Remo knew that with all the new dictators and tyrants in the world, Chiun was thirsting for an opportunity to align Sinanju with one of them.
"Remo. It's the new Dark Age coming. Let's not miss it," he had said.
"I am against Dark Ages," Remo had answered. "Just to kill someone for a few more bars of gold to be held in a house somewhere for centuries doesn't make sense to me. I love my country. I love America."
Chiun had almost wept at that remark.
"You work. You train. You give the very best of yourself, and look. Look at what you get in return. Lunacy. Disrespect. Nonsense. A despot is the best employer an assassin can have. Someday you will appreciate that."
Sometimes, but not often and not for long, Remo began to think Chiun might be right. But not really. It remained the one great difference between them. And as Remo listened to Smith, he reminded himself to remind Smith where Chiun stood.
"If we are not compromised, why is it end game?" asked Remo.
"I can't explain that now. But you will know why if it should happen. I want a promise from you, Remo. I want you to agree that if it is all over, you and Chiun will never work in America again. Can I get that promise?"
"I don't want to leave America," said Remo.
"You must. It's almost been a full-time job, covering for you, making sure people don't put together all those strange deaths you and Chiun have left behind."
"Why should I have to leave if I served the country so well?"
"Because you're like me. You love it, Remo. That's why."
"You mean I'll be an exile?"
"Yes," said Smith.
"I don't know."