A faint smell of sulfur emanated from the room. The staff had tried all manner of soaps and air fresheners, but they could not eliminate the unpleasant odor.
The girl had come to Folcroft as part of the fallout from a CURE assignment nearly four years before. Since that time she had remained in a vegetative state. Smith continued on. He lingered at the last door.
There was another patient in that room, this one male. The patient in the bed looked far older than his years.
He had been in a coma when he was first brought to Folcroft. He had remained a permanent resident of the main hospital wing until just a few years ago, when he had been moved to the security wing at Smith's order.
Looking in on that patient, in that particular room, Smith felt a twinge of unaccustomed melancholia. In the early days of CURE, a secure corridor like this one had been unnecessary. It had never occurred to Smith back then that there would be patients related to his secret work who would need to be housed somewhere.
Prior to its current use, this hallway had been too far off the beaten path to be convenient for Folcroft staff or patients. It had been closed off for years. Back in those days, when Conrad MacCleary didn't feel like going home to his apartment he stayed here. For several years this room had been MacCleary's home away from home.
The room next to this, where the girl lay, was the one where Remo had been taken after the staged electrocution that had brought him aboard CURE. Later, he had recovered from plastic surgery in the same room.
This was a hallway filled with memories. And for Smith, in spite of the worries caused by current circumstances, not all of the memories were unpleasant.
As he tore his eyes away from the comatose patient, there was something approaching a sad smile on the CURE director's lemony face. It remained with him on his trip back upstairs to his office.
"Mark is doing well," Smith announced to his secretary as he entered the outer room.
She had asked him so frequently over the past two days that he now found himself answering preemptively.
Mrs. Mikulka offered a relieved smile. "That policeman called while you were downstairs," she said. "They haven't found the missing patient yet. He wants to come by to talk to you tomorrow afternoon.
I made him an appointment for one o'clock. If you'd like, I can change it."
"That will be fine, Mrs. Mikulka," Smith said. Thinking nostalgic thoughts, the CURE director stepped through to his office. He was crossing the room when the blue contact phone jangled to life. He hurried to answer it.
"Report," Smith said, sinking into his chair. "Something big's going on in Harlem, Smitty," Remo's troubled voice announced.
"The former president got out safely," Smith said, the last remnants of a smile evaporating from his bloodless lips. "As I understand it, the police have rounded up the rioters. I was going to have you return here so that we could discuss your future living arrangements."
"You're gonna have to reschedule our eviction," Remo said. "The president's fine. It's us who might be in the doghouse on this one."
He went on to give Smith a rapid rundown of all that had happened that morning, ending with the attack at the police station and his own image being broadcast subliminally on the handheld televisions.
"My God," Smith croaked when he was through.
"Mine, too," Remo said. "I just about plotzed when I saw my face on TV."
Smith's fingers were like claws, biting into the phone's plastic casing. With his other hand he clutched the edge of his desk. His heart was a molten lump in his palpitating chest. Blood sang a panicked chorus in his ears.
"My God," he repeated. He didn't know what else to say.
"Reel it back in a little, Smitty," Remo suggested. "It might not be all that bad."
At this Smith finally found his voice. "Not that bad?" he said, aghast. "It's the end, Remo. All of it. We have to disband. You and Chiun need to leave the country right away. I will take care of the loose ends here."
He thought of the first loose end. Mark Howard, asleep downstairs. An air-filled syringe would end the young man's life. Smith's assistant would die in his sleep, never knowing what had happened. Smith's own end would come minutes later in a cold steel box that had been gathering dust in the corner of Folcroft's basement for thirty years.
"Take a breath, Smitty," Remo warned. "No one else really saw what I saw. I'm sure of it. I don't even think it'd be visible if you taped it and freeze-framed it. It's like light between the video images. It's hard to explain, but I'm sure no one but me could see it."
"But someone is broadcasting it, Remo," Smith said. "Someone has your image to broadcast. Who could have it? I have been so careful. Who could know about us?"
"I don't know," Remo admitted. "I'd say Purcell, but he hasn't been out long enough to cook up something like this. Plus it's not really his psycho style. It's gotta be someone else. But the good news is these images fade for people who see them. Shittman said the words he saw were already disappearing. If I can track the source and stop them, their heads will be clear of me in a couple days."
"No, Remo," Smith said firmly. "A couple of days is unacceptable. If what you've said is true, then we have to disband now, before we become known publicly."
"Smitty, something is known to somebody," Remo argued. "But whatever they know, they're not running to the New York Times with it. They obviously have a way to broadcast it, but they haven't held a press conference. They didn't go on the evening news or break into the middle of prime time with a news flash. All they did was put my picture up in a way that even the people who've seen it don't know they've seen it."
This was nearly too much for the CURE director to digest. He tried to swallow, but his throat had dried to dust. His tongue felt too large for his mouth.
"No," Smith said weakly. "We cannot go on after this."
There was the briefest of pauses on the other end of the line before Remo sighed.
"This might not even be a CURE thing," Remo admitted reluctantly. "It could be a me thing." Smith couldn't miss the guilty concern in the younger man's voice.
"Why?" the CURE director asked. Some of his fear was instantly replaced by suspicion. "What have you done?"
"Not me," Remo said. "Chiun. Something strange happened when we were in Europe a couple days back. I didn't tell you because I figured it was gonna cause me enough grief in the future without getting an earful from you right now. Remember that fat Swiss assassin we went after?"
Smith remembered all too well. The killer in question had dogged Remo and Chiun from Europe to South America, setting several elaborate booby traps in the path of the two men. They had traced him back to his hideaway in the Alps.
"Olivier Hahn," Smith said. "What of him?"
"It's not him, exactly," Remo said. "See, Chiun's been mailing out some kind of top-secret letters for the past few months. He's been real mysterious about them. Every time I ask, he tells me to take a flying leap. When we went to punch that Swiss guy's ticket, the guy had one of those letters in his house. I recognized the envelope. Chiun grabbed it up before I could take a look at it. I think it has something to do with me becoming Reigning Master of Sinanju. So maybe this picture of me on TV is connected to the same thing."
Smith was trying to digest Remo's words.
"Could Chiun be so careless?" the older man breathed. He knew the truth even as he posed the question. If history was an indication, the answer was a resounding, unequivocal yes.
"Not Chiun exactly," Remo replied. "But I don't know what those letters said or who got them. This stuff in Harlem could be connected to Sinanju and not CURE at all."
"Ask Chiun," Smith demanded tartly.
"I could, but I doubt he'd give me a straight answer. He wouldn't before and he's kind of ticked at me right now."
"Put him on the phone."
"I can't," Remo said. "He stormed out of here. I'm standing in an empty Harlem police station. Which, by the way, I should get out of before the cops come home."
Smith sat behind his big desk, quietly fuming. The Master of Sinanju had been unconcerned about security in the past. It was entirely possible that they had been brought to the brink of ruin because of the old Korean's carelessness.
Smith allowed his grip on the phone to loosen. "Those weren't typical rioters," he mused. "They had the opportunity to attack the former president at any time in the hours they had his building surrounded but they did not. It's possible that whoever gave them their orders was merely trying to draw you in."
"Shittman said he was watching 'Winner' when he zonked out," Remo explained. "You know, that show where they strand a bunch of people I wouldn't trust to lick the sticky side of a stamp out in the middle of nowhere."