"Master of Sinanju, I call upon you to honor your contract."
There was a long silence, broken only by Smith's breathing. Finally, Chiun asked, "There is no other way?"
"If there were, I would take it," Smith said. "But there is none. I know that contracts are sacred to Masters of Sinanju and those were the terms of our contract. Upon request from me, you would remove Remo. I now make that request."
"You will leave me," Chiun said in a cold low voice that seemed to chill the skin on Smith's face.
At the doorway, the CURE director paused.
"What is your decision?"
"What you think important is my mission," Chiun said. "Contracts are made to be honored. It has been the way of my people for scores of centuries."
"You will do your duty," Smith said.
Chiun nodded once, slowly, then let his head sink to his chest. Smith left, quietly closing the door behind him.
And Chiun thought: White fool. Do you think that Remo is some piece of machinery to be discarded upon a whim?
He had trained Remo to be an assassin but Remo had become more than that. His body and his mind had accepted the trainings of Sinanju more thoroughly than anyone since Chiun. Remo now was a Master of Sinanju himself, and one day, upon Chiun's death, Remo would be reigning Master.
And by attaining that rank, Remo would fulfill a prophecy that had existed for ages in the House of Sinanju. That someday there would be as Master a white man who was dead but had come back to life and he would be the greatest Master of all, and of him it would be said that he was the avatar of the great god Shiva. Shiva the Destroyer. Remo.
And now Smith wanted him to throw all that away because some fools planned to blow up some other fools.
But yet, the contract was sacred. It was the cornerstone upon which the House of Sinanju had been built. Its word-- once given by the Master in contract-- was inviolate. No Master had ever failed to carry out the terms of a contract and Chiun, through thousands of years of tradition, could not allow himself to be the first.
He sat on the floor and slowly touched his fingertips to the temples of his bowed head.
The room grew dark with night and yet he did not move, but the air in the room vibrated with the long keening sounds of anguish that came from his lips.
sChapter Thirteen
"Why are we getting a motel room?" Pamela asked.
"Because I have to wait for a telephone call," Remo said. "You don't want to stay with me? Catch the next flight back and join the rest of the Lilliputians."
"Lilliputians?"
"From Liverpool. That's what people in Liverpool are called. Lilliputians," Remo patiently explained.
"No, they're not."
"Are too. I read it. The Beatles were Lilliputians."
"That's Liverpudlians," Pamela Thrushwell said.
"Is not."
"Is too," she said.
"I'm not going to stay here and try to educate you in speaking English correctly," Remo said. "Go home. Who needs you?"
That more than anything else convinced her to stay even though she looked with undisguised disgust at the dismal room, just like so many others in which Remo had spent so many nights. The furniture might have been called Utilitarian if it had not had a greater claim on being called Ugly. The walls, once white, were yellowed with the exhalations of countless smokers. The carpeting was indoor-outdoor rug, but looked as if it had not only been used outdoors but on the roadbed of the Lincoln Tunnel for the last twenty years. Threads showed through, masked only by dirt and embedded grime.
The toilet bowl had a dark ring around it at water level, the hot-water faucet in the sink didn't work, and the room's only luxury, an electric coffeepot in the bathroom, didn't work either. The place reeked with a faint smell of ammonia, as if from a cleaning solution, but the room resolutely refused to give up any clue as to where cleaning solution had ever been used in it.
"What are you here for anyway? What phone call are you waiting for?"
"I'm waiting to find out where Buell is," Remo said.
"I'd be better off trying to find him myself," Pamela said.
"Why don't you try?" Remo said hopefully.
"Because you're so hopeless that without me, you're liable to get hurt and then I'd feel guilty for causing it. For not staying around to take care of you."
"I promise not to come back and haunt your dreams," Remo said.
"You're pretty tenacious for somebody who's just supposed to be tracking down an obscene phone caller," she said.
"You too for somebody with just a tweaked titty," Remo said.
"That's gross. I'm staying."
"Do what you want," Remo said. He thought he'd rather have her tagging along for a while than argue with her. But he still didn't know why she wanted to stay.
Abner Buell did.
Outside the small central California town of Hernandez is a strange elevation of volcanic rock, rising fifty feet above the surrounding scrub grass. Abner Buell had bought the property and fifty surrounding acres three years earlier, and when he had seen the small mountain, he had hollowed it out and built inside it-- separated from the outside world by fifteen-foot-thick walls of rock-- a private apartment and laboratory.
He sat there now facing another of the computer consoles which he had in every home and apartment he occupied anywhere in the world.
It would be hours before he was to call Dr. Smith again, and he whiled away the time by reconfirming that he was able to tap into the Russian military-command computers.
Using satellite transmissions, he tapped into the Soviet system and amused himself by finding out actual troop strength in Afghanistan. He called up the number of spies in the Russian mission to the United Nations. The listing of names went on so long that Buell gave his computer simpler instructions:
"How many members of the Russian UN mission are not spies?"
The computer listed three names-- the chief ambassador, a chauffeur second-grade, and a pastry chef named Pierre.
Pamela Thrushwell came into his mind and on a whim, he tapped the Russian KGB computer network and asked how many spies the Soviet Union had inside Great Britain. "Five-minute reading limit on lists," he wrote.
The computer responded: "List too lengthy. Russian nationals who are spies? Or British who work as spies for USSR?"
He thought for a moment and asked: "How many members of British Secret Service are on KGB payroll as double agents?"