"I am dying, Chiun."
"I have not come to witness the disposal of garbage," said Chiun,
"The poison I have taken robs me of almost all sensation. I cannot feel, therefore you cannot make me tell you where I put your treasure. I am about to pass through the only door that can withstand an assault by a Master of Sinanju: death, Chiun. Death." Cang's fading eyes saw that Chiun remained still. He did not talk. Good. He did not wish to waste time. Cang had ordered what he wanted to be written out in case the poison acted too quickly. It was all the descriptions the Russian had given him, including the location of the machine. Chiun was to bring the machine to Russia and then he would be told where the treasure was. And incidentally, there was a presumptuous American he was to kill, and a Russian he was to save.
"I am to trust you now?"
"Trust or not. Do the task or not. I am leaving you and you cannot follow through the door of death. No one here knows where the treasure is, and you can kill for a hundred years and never find it."
Chiun read the note again. He knew where Boston was. He had spent so long in America, wasting the best years of his life in one country serving the insane emperor who refused to take the throne. He knew Boston. He knew whites. He was perhaps the foremost authority on whites in the world.
"Tell me, O Great Master, how did you fathom I had stolen the treasure? Tell me that, and I will give you one piece now."
"The Frenchman told the truth. He didn't know who had sent him the coins. This I know. And the great theft by the pope was impossible."
"How did you know that?"
"The popes have not shown any skill since the Borgias. To steal the treasure of Sinanju, maybe, only maybe, could have been done by a Borgia pope who sought conquest and land. But for the one decent period, the popes have been as useless as their founder, caring not for the glory of gems, the power of land, but for fanatic and useless things like prayer and their Western cult manners of charity and love, and whatever other peculiarities are endemic to their kind."
"You truly know whites, don't you?" said Cang.
"They are not all the same. But Pyongyangers are. They are dogs without the virtues of courage and loyalty," said Chiun. "Where is this piece of treasure you are willing to return?"
"Underneath me," said Cang.
Chiun rolled him over with one foot and found a minor silver statue taken as tribute by a minor Master, Tak. Tak was always the Master Chiun used to forget when memorizing the cadences of the history of the Masters of Sinanju.
Chiun ordered one of the flunkies to return the statue to the village of Sinanju and let the villagers place it on the steps of his house in tribute.
Cang now faced the floor after having been rolled over. No one dared roll him back in the presence of the Master of Sinanju. But with his last breaths, Cang explained what Sinanju meant to Korea, and that all Koreans should now work together. He had not desired to touch such a treasure but he knew of no other way to induce service from a Master of Sinanju now working in the white lands. Cang's last words were of his admiration for Sinanju, and his love of Korea, and his plea that Koreans work together as the true brothers they always had been. Only in that way could the land they all loved be free of foreign domination. These were Cang's last words as he passed through the door even the Masters of Sinanju could not penetrate to harm him. He spoke them into the hard floor of his office. The floor heard the plea much better than the Master of Sinanju.
Chiun had left for America after seeing which piece of the treasure had been returned for an answer to the question.
It was Ivanovich's competence that led to the great battle of America's high-tech Route 128 just outside of Boston. He knew the last moment that Zemyatin could call off the missile attack. He found out the speed of the airliner headed toward Boston carrying the Korean detachment. He had only one element to control, and he did that to perfection.
He slowed down the Russian aircraft. Zemyatin apparently understood because there was no complaint. They did pick up conversations ground America to air Russia between the American monster and a man named Smith. Smith was asking what on earth kind of game the Russians could be playing now. Even his computer couldn't figure that out.
Famous ports around the world began noticing the strange new tide licking ever so slightly at their piers and wharves.
Scientists around the world were tracking the phenomenon over the polar ice cap. The ozone shield was thinning, opening and threatening to collapse, bringing with it the last gasp of life on earth.
And General Ivan Ivanovich controlled it all with the simple speed of an aircraft headed toward America. He played it perfectly. Chiun's car and the car bearing Remo and Zemyatin arrived at the barricades outside of Chemical Concepts of Massachusetts virtually at the same time.
Remo and Chiun cried out:
"Where were you?" And each answered with his own version of: "I am here now. All right?"
The paratroopers, state police, national guard, and local police had all received orders to seal off the building, but they didn't know why. They were all ordered now to pass the barricades and not to let anyone through until otherwise ordered.
What they could not be told from above was that they were only constituting a pitiful holding action. Their barricades would not protect them, would not stop the madwoman from incinerating everyone around her in the northeast corridor. They had orders to let only one person through: the one she wanted.
When three men tried to get through-one Oriental, one American, and one Russian-the guards reacted swiftly. "I just want one, the handsome one," screamed a beautiful red-haired woman from the flat building of CCm. "Remo isn't bad-looking," said Chiun, wondering where in that ugly building the machine was.
"The young white. Remo. Get in here."
"You know her?" said Chiun. "You've been hanging around with whores."
"How do you know she's a whore?"
"She's white, isn't she? They all do it for money."
"My mother was white," said Remo.
"Gentlemen," said Zemyatin. "The world, please. It is coming apart in a multitude of ways."
"You don't know for sure who your mother is. You told me you're an orphan."
"She had to be white. I'm white."
"You don't know that."
"Gentlemen, the world," said Zemyatin.
"Remo, you get in here now," screamed Kathy O'Donnell from the factory window.
"He is not white. Don't believe him," said Chiun. "Ungrateful as a white, yes. Slothful, yes. Cruel, yes. Shortsighted, yes. But he is not white. He is Sinanju."
"Remo, that is the woman," Zemyatin broke in. "She has got the machine. You get the machine to stop. I will put through the stand-down order of the missiles, the polar ice cap will stop melting, and we may all live to see tomorrow."
"Am I white?" said Remo.
"You are as white as snow," said Zemyatin. "Please. In the name of humanity."
"Not white," said Chiun, moving through the guards.
"White," said Remo, pushing Zemyatin through also, and leaving a couple of guards trying to disengage their weapons from their jumpsuits.
"Asking another white? Ask me," said Chiun. "You couldn't do the things you do and be white. Yes?" Inside the building, none of the typewriters were working. None of the bookkeepers were pounding on computer consoles. Only a few terrified technicians and a man named Reemer Bolt huddled in a corner.
"You've got to stop her," said Bolt. "I can't even get out of here. I've got to establish a Rhode Island branch office."
"You, Remo," called out Kathy. She had a bullwhip in her hands. She raged with venom. "Are you sorry now? Are you sorry you left me?"
"Sure," said Remo. "Where's the machine?"
"I want you to apologize. I want you to suffer the way I suffered."