tried to defend themselves with their own snowballs, but the only targets they found were each other.
The protest march was dissolving in a rout, and Remo, moving swiftly in a semicircular path around the roadway, could not remember having so much fun in a snowball fight since one wintry day back at the orphanage in Newark.
"That's the demonstration biz, Ari," he mumbled to himself.
He looked toward the end of the line of marchers and saw that the six men to whom Ari had given special instructions had peeled off and vanished.
Time to give Pierre LaRue help if he needed it.
Remo dropped his armful of snowballs and ran through the trees to find the big Frenchman.
LaRue needed no help. He was standing beside his bulldozer, and the dozer was parked in front of a ten-foot-by-twenty-foot, six-foot-tall snowdrift.
Remo pointed at the drift.
"You got them all?" he asked.
"Oui."
"All six of them?"
"Oui."
"Good," Remo said.
"Very good," Pierre said. "Little man, you not so bad."
"Thanks," Remo said. He went over to the huge snowdrift and shouted at it. "Don't worry. Somebody'11 find you when you thaw out in the spring."
Before he joined LaRue in his walk back through the woods to Alpha Camp, Remo stopped to look at the tires on the Mountain High bus. He nodded. They matched the tread marks he had seen outside the forest
cabin to which he had trailed Oscar Brack and one of his attackers.
When he looked back at the demonstration, it had degenerated into a big snowball party, with the marchers seeming to take out their fury on the outnumbered and always outmanned press. corps. Mrs. Cicely Winston-Alright and Ari were standing to the side, talking, out of harm's way, and the whoop of police sirens coming down the road meant that Tulsa Torrent's formal security forces would soon have the area cleared.
He would have to talk again to the Mountain Highs, Remo decided, but doing it now might just draw too much attention. It would wait till morning.
He hoped everything would wait till morning.
He wanted some sleep.
But Harvey Quibble couldn't wait till morning.
104
105
CHAPTER
"I saw it," Harvey Quibble squeaked. "I saw it with my own two eyes." He wheeled toward Remo, who was lounging on one of the chairs in the A-frame. "And you're not going to get away with it. No, sirree. Not as long as my name is Harvey Quibble."
"Will you calm down?" Roger Stacy said. He was standing behind the sofa, facing Quibble. Joey Webb, Pierre LaRue, and Chiun were on the other side of the room, shaking their heads in either disbelief or disgust
"No, I will not calm down," said Quibble.
"I think if you've got a problem with O'Sylvan here, then you ought to work it out through channels. You're both federal employees," Stacy said, "and to tell the truth, I could do without either of you. Why don't you both hop a plane to Washington and petition the Supreme Court for a hearing?"
"Good idea," said Remo. "Quibble, you go first. I'll catch up with you in a couple of days."
The little mouselike figure jumped up and down in anger. The corner of his left eye began twitching.
"You may all think it's funny," he yelled, "but that person tonight attacked a group of innocent, unarmed, totally peaceful citizens while they were exercising their
107
legitimate rights of free speech, public assembly, and petition and redress. That's what he did."
"How'd he do that?" Stacy asked.
"He threw snowballs at them," Quibble said. ,
"I threw snowballs at them," Remo agreed.
"Snowballs?" said Stacy.
"From ambush. So that nobody could see him and take his picture," Quibble said. "But I saw him. I, Harvey P. Quibble. And I have to tell you that this has nothing to do with his job description. I thought I had this all worked out, with his new classification and all, but now I see I'm going to have to take sterner measures."
"Cut my pay another seventy-five percent," Remo said. -
"Is that all you have to say for yourself?" Stacy asked.
Remo answered in Korean.
Quibble said, "I warned you. What this man does is un-American. He even talks un-American."
"Why don't you translate it for Mr. Quibble?" Stacy asked Remo.
"He wouldn't like it."
"I demand to know what you said," Quibble said.
"It's a Korean proverb," Remo said.
"What does it mean?" asked Quibble.
"It means that the world is filled with people who will look at duck droppings and diamonds and fill their pockets with the duck droppings."