"Well, let me tell you, Mr. Know-it-all with your smart proverbs," sputtered Quibble, "this doesn't end here. I intend to see. that you never get through your probationary period with the Forestry Service."
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"Good," said Remo. "I miss the New York City subways."
Quibble left, followed a few minutes later by Pierre LaRue. When Stacy said good night, Remo followed him outside.
"Where'd you get that Harvey Quibble?" Remo asked.
Stacy shook his head. "The main company applied for some federal research funds. As soon as they got them, they got Harvey Quibble, too, to make sure that all the federal job regulations were obeyed. The company sent him up here and told me they wouldn't mind if he got lost in a snowdrift."
"He will if he keeps getting in my way," Remo said. "No sign of Oscar Brack?"
"Nothing," said Stacy.
"The reason we broke up that demonstration tonight was because the Mountain Highs were planning to start a forest fire," Remo said.
"Oh," said Stacy thoughtfully. He rubbed bis cheek, and even outdoors Remo noticed he smelled sweet.
"I thought you ought to know so you can keep your guards watching them.".
"Good idea," said Stacy.
"The two dead men up at the copa-iba farm?"
"They carried no identification," Stacy said. "The police have taken prints and are trying to find something out through Washington."
"Keep on them," Remo said. "Knowing who they are could clear this up fast." He decided not to mention the dead lumberjack.
"Chances are they're just more Mountain Highs," Stacy said.
"Maybe," said Remo. "But I don't know. Guns
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wouldn't seem to be their way. Forest fires and marches, yes. But not guns. Not snakes in cars. Not bloody fights with Brack, wherever he is."
"We'll see," Stacy said. "If I hear anything, I'll let you know."
Chiun had decided that as pleasant as sleeping before the fireplace was, the traffic patterns made it impossible for him to get a wink, so he confiscated the floor in Remo's bedroom.
Joey Webb sat down beside Remo on the couch out in the main room. She touched his arm, and Remo felt a pleasantly warm sensation where her hand rested, a feeling that he had not known for a while. "What are you thinking about?" she asked. "How much I hate women who ask me what I'm thinking about," he said.
"I deserved that," she said. "It's not much of a conversational gambit. I want to know who you are and why you're here."
"Can I sleep first?" Remo asked. /"No."
"You tell me your story, I'll tell you mine," Remo said. Maybe she would talk herself to sleep.
Joey Webb started with her earliest memory—back when she was little more than an infant and her name was Josefina Webenhaus. Of being awakened one steamy jungle night to the sound of someone screaming, of sneaking from her tent to her mother's and seeing some dark figures doing unmentionable things to her. Of finding her father lying dead and headless in his work tent. Of the endless nights of nightmares and eating dirt to try to stay alive. Of being rescued, along with Stacy, by Oscar Brack. Of an endless round of boarding
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schools and summer camps, punctuated only infrequently by visits from the grim Dr. Smith who had been her father's friend and had taken over responsibility for her upbringing.
She told him more. Of her struggle to get into the Duke University forestry school and how once she had gotten there, her life had blossomed because of a young professor named Danny O'Farrell, whom she had loved and to whom she had given herself. Of how Oscar would visit them both at college and arranged for them to go to work for Tulsa Torrent on her father's copa-iba project.
She spoke of the project. How over the past three years she and Danny and Oscar had searched for a way to grow the,Brazilian trees in all but the coldest of U.S. climates. How they were still stumped because the trees couldn't be raised from seedlings anywhere except in the semitropical coasts of the States. How everything just started to go wrong: trees rotting with fungus, equipment breaking down, key people being injured, and reports being lost. How Danny had become frustrated and suspected spies and began to snoop around.
And then he was killed. Joey told Remo how, in complete desperation, she had called Dr. Smith, her old guardian, and asked him for help, and how he said he'd try but she had never heard from him again.
She talked for a half-hour, seemingly without a breath or a pause, then stopped abruptly and said, "That's me. Now you."
Remo thought for a moment of telling her something, anything that might ease her opinion of Smith, the head of CURE and his boss, but decided against it. Smith deserved the grief he got in life.
"Let's just say that maybe somebody you know
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knows somebody who knows somebody who might have sent somebody like me here to help."
Joey nodded. "I wouldn't be surprised. I used to get the idea that Dr. Smith was an important man."
"Slow down. I never said anything about Harold Smith," Remo said.
"And I never told you that his name was Harold," she said. "So thanks. And thank him, too."
The sound was very quiet, so soft that even as Remo sat there looking at Joey Webb, he wasn't sure he had heard it.
He had almost reached out and touched the girl, almost taken her into his arms out of a sense of personal desire rather than as a matter of duty, when he heard the call and stopped.
"What is it, Remo?"
"Someone's calling my ñame," he said.
She listened for a moment.
"I don't hear anything," she said. "It must be-just the wind. Sometimes it plays tricks on you up here."
Remo listened again. This time the calling was louder. Still below the threshhold of hearing of non-Sinanju ears, but louder nevertheless.
"I've got to see what it it," he said, getting up from the couch.