"Screw you," Remo said, slamming the door shut after him.
Remo went to a closet and pulled out a handful of straw sitting mats and scattered them on the floor of a spare room. The spare room was completely bare of furniture, although one end was cluttered with fourteen stacked lacquered trunks. Chiun's precious traveling luggage.
Remo stretched out on the mats and ran the events of the afternoon through his mind. They were no clearer than before.
From the other room, Chiun's prayers continued like a singsong dirge.
Because he felt tired, Remo drifted off to sleep.
He didn't know how long he slept. He had wanted only to nap, but was awakened by a high-pitched argument in progress.
Remo rolled up onto one elbow. The argument was between Chiun and the Chinese student. It was in Chinese. Remo couldn't make out a word of Chinese.
The argument escalated from a kind of husky back-and-forth to a high-pitched volley of accusations and response.
Chiun was doing the accusing. The Chinese student was hotly denying something. Or everything.
"A little less noise out there, huh?" Remo called through the door.
The arguing subsided for a pregnant minute.
Then it started up again, low and intense, but swiftly escalating in violence and heatedness.
Finally Remo got to his feet and stormed past the suddenly quiet pair and out the front door.
"If this is how it's going to be all night," Remo barked, "I'm going to check into a motel."
He was not stopped by Chiun's voice on his way out, which both surprised and disappointed him. The shouting resumed. It was going hot and heavy as Remo pulled out of the driveway. He laid down a hundred yards of rubber, hoping it would awaken Harold W. Smith, the architect of his misery.
Chapter 7
Remo Williams tossed on the mattress pad.
It was too comfortable. He had left home without his bed mat, which the Chinese student was using anyway. So he had gone to a Motel Six, which he knew from past experience put mattress pads on their beds. And they had left the light on for him.
Remo had stripped the lumpy bed of its coverings and laid the pad on the rug. There, he went to sleep. Years of Sinanju training had made sleeping on an elevated surface as unrewarding as sex.
The pad was too thick, so Remo tossed and turned through the night. His thoughts were of the Master of Sinanju.
Remo had worked with Chiun for two decades now. They had grown close in that period of time, although their relationship had been very rocky, especially during the early years, when Chiun had considered the training of a white an odious task. In those days, CURE security was crucial. As its enforcement arm, Remo was an experiment, one which might be terminated at any time by presidential decree.
In those days, it had been Chiun's responsibility to execute Remo if the order came from Smith. The relationship between Master and pupil had nevertheless flowered under this dark cloud, in part because of the great promise that Remo had shown and in part because of the respect each man had developed for the other.
Until the day, in the midst of a grave US-USSR crisis in which the President had ordered CURE disbanded, Smith had given the termination order to Chiun. Remo had never forgotten that he was partnered with a man who considered assassin's work a high calling, one who would kill anyone anywhere on orders or for the correct amount of gold, and not think twice.
But when the order came, Chiun had refused to execute it. His logic was Byzantine-something about Remo not being the same Remo he had started with-but Remo knew that their relationship had reached a turning point: Chiun would never kill him, no matter who gave the order or what the provocation.
For Remo had progressed beyond simply being a human instrument of US political policy. He had joined the ranks of the House of Sinanju. In truth, he had become one with Sinanju many years before, but it was not until that day that Remo understood he had been fully accepted by Chiun.
But that acceptance hadn't meant getting along. If anything, they fought more frequently, and about less important things. But after that, the edge had been blunted.
Remo thought he knew and understood Chiun.
He had thought the same about Smith until recent events had reminded him that Harold W. Smith-despite his professional demeanor-could be as ruthless and cold-blooded as the Master of Sinanju himself.
Remo decided he could live with Smith.
But still it was a shock to think, as he did now, lying awake on the too-comfortable mattress pad with the pale winter sun peeping through the chinks in the motel curtains, that as long as he had known Chiun, he had not known him fully.
In two decades, he had never thought to ask the Master of Sinanju about his history prior to coming to America. Certainly, Chiun had often spoken of the grim days of World War II, when Sinanju had no clients, and the decades after that, when clients stopped coming to the rocky shore of his ancestral village. North Korea had become inaccessible to outsiders, thanks to the Communist regime. The last potent monarchy had long since fallen. The emerging nations had resorted to guerrilla warfare or mercenaries. Assassins could be gotten anywhere, Chiun had said bitterly, even at open-air markets and Western malls, like so many melons.
Remo had never thought beyond the lesson-and there was always a lesson in Chiun's tales of Sinanju Masters-that this latest Master of Sinanju suffered to train a white only because he had no better offers. But Chiun had had an early career, one that went back to the dying monarchies of Europe and the pre-Communist days of China and the Orient. He must have had clients in those days.
Remo wondered if Chiun had in fact assassinated Amelia Earhart. It was certainly not the worst blot on the Sinanju house, which had liquidated popes and rulers down through history. As long as the gold took teeth marks, the work was worthy. It wasn't for nothing that the motto of the House was "Death Feeds Life."
But those were the previous Masters. It bothered Remo that Chiun had personally done Amelia Earhart. It made him wonder who else he had eliminated.
Remo sat up. He wasn't going to get any sleep anyway, so he padded over to the curtain and drew it open.
The sun was making tiny diamonds on the previous day's snowfall. The snow had been blown into drifts and rills like a desert sandscape of powdered sugar.
Remo noticed a young woman walking through the parking lot toward a red car, jingling her car keys. She noticed Remo standing there and smiled up at him.
Remo smiled back.
She gave him a friendly little wave.
Remo waved back. To his chagrin, she broke into uncontrollable laughter. And at that moment he realized he was standing in the big window stark naked.
Remo lost his smile and ducked into the bathroom, where he showered furiously.
Twenty minutes later he was behind the wheel, navigating through the snow-clogged streets, contemplating that he was a Master of Sinanju now. One day, the village might depend on Remo's ability to terminate a target without regard to the victim's deserving of death.
As long as he and Chiun were technically American agents, that was not a problem. But CURE was only thirty years old. The House of Sinanju had nearly five thousand years' head start. It would outlast CURE. It would probably outlast America. Remo's ultimate duty lay with the man who made him whole, not the nation which had wrenched him out of his comfortable existence and turned him into an expendable element in a global conflict that might mean nothing in a mere thousand years.
Remo grunted as he swerved to avoid an oncoming snowplow.
He was starting to think like Chiun-in the very long term.
The snow-draped hills of the Folcroft golf course hove into view, signaling that Remo was approaching his neighborhood. His house had been built, like Smith's, on the edge of the fairway.
Remo decided it was time he learned more about Chiun's past. He hoped it wouldn't be too painful.
Who knew, if he showed enough interest, the Master of Sinanju might teach Remo how to enjoy sex again.
It was a tempting possibility and it made Remo press the accelerator harder. He leaned into the turns, the big blue Buick literally skiing at times. In other hands, it was a recipe for disaster. In Remo's trained hands, he and the car were one.