The sound of displeasure emanated from the inscrutable face of the Master of Sinanju, Remo's passenger and teacher.
He was a delicate bird of a man. One hundred years old if he was a day, but possessed of piercing hazel eyes much younger than his wizened shell. Vaporous cotton-candy hair clung to a spot above each ear. His otherwise bald skull was enshrouded in an almost translucent film of walnut-hued paper flesh. A wisp of beard bobbed at his pointed chin.
The old Korean clasped his bony wrists with the opposing hands and stared glumly out the window. He remained silent for approximately ten seconds.
"Are we there yet?" Chiun asked.
"No!" Remo snapped. "Dammit, Chiun, why didn't you just wait for me in Berlin?"
"I did not trust you," Chiun said simply.
"You trusted me with the first gazillion dollars worth of booty," Remo replied.
"It is not that I thought you would steal any of my treasure," Chiun told him. "You are disgustingly honest and ill concerned with money. I find both character traits more than a little appalling, by the way," he added.
"Compliment taken," Remo said.
Chiun continued, "I did not trust that you would be thorough in your final search. I wanted to be certain that you did not carelessly leave behind a stack of gold bars or a crate of diamond tiaras when we at last shake the dust of this benighted land from our sandals."
"I'm not a six-year-old, for crying out loud," Remo complained. "Why do you think God gave me these?" As he drove he pointed at his eyes.
Chiun shrugged. "I am not privy to the thoughts of deities. A joke, perhaps?" he suggested.
"Har-de-har-har," Remo griped. "Make fun of the round eyes. I notice you weren't yucking it up when I was moving all your damned gold for you."
"That was business," Chiun said. "This is pleasure."
Smiling, he settled back into his seat.
Remo was grateful for the silence. He had been stuck in Germany with the Master of Sinanju for far too long. They were getting on one another's nerves more and more lately. His drawn-out trips to a desolate storage facility in Bonn had been his only breaks from the aged Korean. And they weren't much for breaks.
In Bonn, Remo had spent his time loading literally tons of gold and priceless jewels into his rented truck. He had to work at night to avoid prying eyes. Every once in a while, the owner of the facility would wander over and Remo would steer the man politely away. The steering had gotten less and less polite as time wore on.
Driving, Remo thought of the storage facility's owner. He was a greasy little German with a Kaiser Wilhelm mustache and a pastry-fed backside. Surprisingly, Remo hadn't seen him before leaving on this last trip. It was surprising because the man usually made himself known.
Thunder thudded somewhere in the distance. A snaking stream of lightning cut through the cheerless gray sky.
Dreary fat raindrops splattered loudly against the windshield. The wipers were attached at the top of the frame--unlike those in America. They squeaked angrily and doggedly across the sheet of bowed glass.
Remo had always thought that the British Isles were famous for their lousy weather. But he was willing to wager Germany could give England a real run for its money. He could not remember one decent day since they had arrived in Germany.
The dismal cast of the sky translated to Remo's attitude. He wanted nothing more than to get the last of the thousand-year-old junk in the back of the truck moved off German soil.
The treasure Remo was transporting across Germany was part of the legendary Nibelungen Hoard. A few weeks earlier, he and the Master of Sinanju had been involved in a race with a secret neo-Nazi organization to retrieve the incredibly valuable fortune. The neo-Nazi organization-called IV-had wanted the money to further its nefarious schemes. Chiun had simply wanted the money. In the end, Chiun had won out.
An eleventh-hour deal made with an interested and greedy third party had reduced Chiun's treasure to half the actual Hoard. However, even after halving the loot, there was a tremendous amount left over.
When he learned that their portion of the Hoard was in a storage facility in Bonn, Remo's employer had insisted that it be moved immediately.
"It's too risky, Remo," Harold W. Smith of the supersecret American agency CURE had said.
"Risk shmisk," Remo had said dismissively. "It's sitting in a half-dozen sheds collecting dust. No one's going near it."
"What if someone gets curious? What if they investigate to see what is in the storage facility? Good Lord, what if someone has already done so?"
"Smitty, don't burst a blood vessel," Remo said. "Chiun and I will deal with it first chance we get."
"Do it now."
"Isn't there anything else more pressing?" Remo begged.
"No," Smith insisted.
In their encounter with the neo-Nazi organization, Smith had been attacked and injured. At the moment he was hospitalized after undergoing emergency surgery to remove fluid from around his brain. With nothing urgent on the table for his two field agents to handle, the recuperating Smith had given Remo and Chiun time to move the Hoard from Germany to Chiun's ancestral village of Sinanju in North Korea. Smith, however, did not offer to help in any way. He did not want to create an international incident that could in any way be traced back to the United States. CURE's participation in the smuggling operation was to be strictly hands-off.
Remo had no idea how much their share of the Hoard came to. Millions, certainly. Billions, probably. That much raw wealth in the wrong hands could spell disaster if dumped into a single nation's economy. An economic domino effect could even go on to topple the world economy. This was Smith's real concern, Remo knew.
Fortunately, both Smith and Remo knew that Chiun had as much of a chance of spending the vast stores of Nibelungen wealth as he had of parting with the rest of his ancestors' five thousand years' worth of accumulated spoils that were even now languishing in the Master of Sinanju's Korean home. That was to say, there was no chance whatsoever.
Chiun's personal riches did not dissuade him from studying every nook and cranny in the storage sheds to make certain not a single ingot of the Hoard had been left. Since they had climbed into the truck cab, Chiun had been eager to return the last meager portion of gold to his tiny village.
Driving without a break for several hours now, they had just come upon a dreary, sprawling industrial city.
"Is this Berlin?" Chiun asked, perking up.
"You know it isn't," Remo said tiredly.
"All Hun cities look alike to me," Chiun replied.
"It's Magdeburg," Remo told him. "We've got another eighty miles to go."
Chiun's face pinched in displeasure as he stared across the visible portions of the gloomy German city.
The Gothic spires of the Cathedral of Saints Maurice and Catherine rose high above the other flat roofs. Industrial grit and grime seemed to be attracted to the steeples as if they were magnetized.
"I see they allowed that monstrosity to be completed," he commented with displeasure. He nodded to the cathedral.
"Gothic architecture doesn't do much for me," Remo admitted, glancing up at the steeples. "Still, you've got to admit it's pretty impressive."
Chiun turned to him, hazel eyes flat. "Do I," he said. His voice was devoid of energy.
Remo shrugged. "Sure," he said. "It's like the pyramids. I don't know how they managed to do anything so huge back then. I mean, we consider ourselves lucky when we get the government to deliver the mail on time."
Chiun extended a bony finger to the steeple. It was still far in the distance. They were not even going to drive within miles of the massive cathedral.
"That eyesore is representative of everything that went wrong with Europe in the last millennium," he said. "It is the direct product of the vile pretender Carolus the Dreadful. And you would defend such a thing?"