Smith looked at the phone. The two worst fears of his professional life, a long life in service to his country, had just arrived at the earpiece of the special red phone: having to tell the president he had failed and having to give a stupid answer. His mouth tasted of bitter soda water.
"Sir, as near as I can make out, the enforcement arm you speak of is engaged in something that has to . . ."
"Yes?" the president said. "I'm really interested."
"We'll have someone into the White House with you by late tonight, sir. A somewhat older man," Smith said.
56
"Oh, the Oriental. Golly, I've heard of him. Over eighty, I was told, but I don't every have to worry about growing old, not once f see him in action. How old is he exactly?"
"The one we'll be sending is in his sixties and is Caucasian. He has what has been described as a lemony face and speaks with a New England accent."
"If you fellows have some age cure, let me know about it," the president said, chuckling.
"No sir, we don't," Smith said. The president was taking with good grace the fact that an old administrator who had not fired a planned shot for more than thirty years was now the only one standing between him and his death.
Harold W. Smith shut down the computer access codes from his office in Folcroft, reducing to only one portable device the ways to reach his computers. The device fit into his briefcase.
Gun, he thought. Now where did I put the gun?
Then he realized his gun wasn't in his office. It was home.
He told his office secretary,, who thought he spent too much time cooped up in his office, that he would be gone for a few days, possibly a few weeks. He authorized her to make any decisions that had to be made and to sign any papers that needed signatures.
A few days, possibly a few weeks. He did not tell her possibly even a bit longer than that. Like forever. If he did not contact his computers within any 168-hour period, automatically the entire network would erase itself and no evidence would be left that the organization ever existed. Remo and Chiun, of course, would be on their own.
Something had gone wrong, but it had been going wrong for many years. It was only when Smith was in his house, holding his old pistol in his hands, that he realized fully what had happened over the years. You didn't see change
57
when it was gradual; and sometimes it took many years to see motive.
Remo had been recruited in his special way because he was an American patriot. Now he had become something else. The enforcement arm was off somewhere enforcing something else.
Chiun had trained more than Remo's body; he had trained his soul. The whole organization came down to a window on the world through which everything could be seen, but nothing could be done, and now its strongest enforcement arm was an old gray-haired man searching through an old bureau drawer for a 1938 Smith and Wesson .38 caliber revolver.
Smith found it wrapped in oiled rags. It was clean, but he didn't trust the ammunition. The shoulder holster was curled and brittle.
He remembered the last time he had used the gun. It was on a drop into France. He was with the old OSS that later became the CIA. He was told to shoot a young woman who was a Nazi collaborator and was going to get them all killed. He remembered how she smiled. She knew he was going to shoot her, and she just smiled as if it were some joke. It haunted him. He spent spare moments for almost a year reassuring himself that he had saved countless lives by shooting that smiling woman.
Only years later, when he was running the organization, did he understand what had happened. Ironically, it was Remo who made it come clear, in an afterthought, mentioning how some people-knowing they had lost and sensing they had an amateur in front of them-would laugh or smile as their last striking-out at their killer.
"Chiun tells me some people do that," Remo said.
"Did someone, a target, do that to you recently?" Smith asked.
58
"Oh, no," Remo had said. "They do it sometimes to amateurs."
"Oh," Smith had said. Remo had become the professional.
And now the professional was off somewhere while the amateur was going to defend the life of the chief executive officer of his nation.
How many hundreds of millions had the country spent for the organization and in return was getting a man who in any other service would have been retired for age and who had found that his shoulder holster had split from age and he was going to have to carry his revolver in his briefcase.
When Irma said good-bye to him-he told her that he was going to Washington for a few days-he saw that she had been crying. She knew he was carrying the gun again.
You didn't stay married to a man for so many years and not know a thing like that.
Chapter Five
The president was overjoyed.
The country had spent $7 billion to develop an antimissile space ray, and that didn't work. The federal government had lent cities $20 billion to repair subways and they didn't work.
Bridges were crumbling around the country, and all the road tax money didn't seem to help them at all. Educational costs had tripled and the only educational increase was in illiteracy across the land.
But this evening, he was going to see more than his money's worth. His predecessor had told him about the old man who could crush glass in his hands, shredding it to powder, and then through finger movement make it into glass again.
The man could climb walls.
His money's worth.
"Sir, your new auxiliary bodyguard is here. But he's, well, sort of old, sir," said the chief of the Secret Service detail assigned to the White House.
"Well, don't mess with him, whatever you do," chuck-
59
60
led the president. He wondered what sort of robes the man would wear. His predecessor had said he wore flowing crimson robes with golden decorations over which his long fingernails seemed to flutter.
This time the man was dressed in a gray three-piece suit. He had a lemony face. He apologized for being a bit late because he had to get ammunition and a new holster.
"You cut your fingernails, I see," said the president. Harold Smith glanced at his fingernails, then shook his head.
"They're short," the president said.
"Yes," Smith agreed.
They were in a private meeting room outside the Oval Office. The president was wearing pajamas and a bathrobe. He was preparing for bed.
"We have information," Smith said, "that someone is going to make another attempt on your life at six A.M. tomorrow. For some reason, the Secret Service failed to get word to you."