lage to buy the people's daily bread. As long as there was a need for political murder—and there always had been such a need—the children of Sinanju could stay safe in the arms of their families and not be sent home to the sea.
Remo had heard it thousands of times. He watched two planes almost collide, then tuned Chiun back in.
"The people of Sinanju are a very poor people," Chiun was saying. "They have barely enough food to eat, and they count on me to fulfill our contracts so that I might be paid and that they might not starve. And so they count on you, also."
"The people of Sinanju have not starved in centuries, Little Father," said Remo patiently.
"Nevertheless," the Master of Sinanju said, raising one frail yellow finger, "you are honor-bound both to our Emperor Smith and to your people, the people of Sinanju."
"You're bullying me again," Remo said. "Just because I want to take a small vacation, you're telling me that your people will have to drown their babies."
"They are your people, too," Chiun said.
Remo was about to answer, then stopped and thought about what Chiun had said, and the more he thought, the better he felt. Perhaps it was true that what he did brought absolutely no benefit to America. For every bad guy he killed, a dozen bad guys sprang up like weeds to take his place. But there was one immutable fact: By Remo's practicing his art, the people of Sinanju were fed. They were the beneficiaries of Remo's skill and work, and if he stopped working, they would feel it. He was needed by them. It made him feel good, or at least better.
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"I'll call Smith," he told Chiun, "and tell him I'll take the assignment."
"You cannot call the emperor," Chiun said.
"Why not?"
"He is sleeping in the next room. If you were not so out of sorts, you would have heard him."
Remo listened, and heard the sibilant breathing of a sleeping man. He was pleased with himself; his senses were starting to work correctly again.
"I hear it now," he told Chiun.
The old man nodded. "See. All good things come to the man who decides to do good," he said.
Five minutes later, Dr. Harold W. Smith had joined his two assassins in the living room. Smith was a slender, grayish man near sixty. As he grew older, he was starting to look more and more like the granite crags of his native New England. All those who had ever known him admitted that Smith was brilliant. After all, he had once been a law professor at Yale, and that required some brains since Yale was one of the few schools where law courses still taught law and not consumer advocacy and public relations. And those who had known him during World War II, when he had operated deep behind German lines for the OSS, never doubted his raw physical courage. Nor did anyone who knew him when 'he was one of the top administrators at the CIA doubt his organizational ability.
But none seemed to know the whole Smith. Those who knew of his brains knew nothing of his courage or his administrative skill. And those who knew of his courage would have been surprised to leam of his intelligence and savvy. Each knew only a piece of Smith, and each who had known him had found him dull, duller, dullest. As dull as the closely tailored
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three-piece gray suits with crisp- white cotton shirts and striped school ties that he always wore. One personnel officer at Langley, Virginia, had once spread the word that Smith was the only man in the CIA's history to completely confound the company's brain-probers: When he was given a Rorschach test, all he was able to see were ink blots. No imagination they said.
The shrinks, as usual, were wrong. It wasn't that Smith had no imagination. What it was was that he could deal only in reality. Ink blots were ink blots and nothing more. And his integrity was so much a part of his rock-ribbed soul that he could not unbend enough to play silly psychological games and pretend that he saw something that did not exist for him. Nor, for that matter, could Smith pretend to not see something that did exist.
It was those two qualities that had led to his being chosen to head CURE.
A bright young man had just been elected president. To anyone who cared to look, it was obvious that the country was going to hell in a handbasket and that ordinary methods would not help the situation. So the new president began a massive search throughout the country for a man with the ability to see only what was really happening and with the character to act upon it. And when he found that man, he made him head of an ultra-secret organization, an organization so secret that technically it did not exist. An organization whose job it was to ferret out the secrets of all those who would destroy the country, its way of Ufe and its Constitution, and then expose them. Only two people would know of the organization's existence: its director and the President of the United States.
At first, the organization, which was called CURE,
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almost worked. CURE employed thousands upon thousands of investigators, all of whom thought they worked for someone else: the FBI, the CIA, the telephone company, the Chamber of Commerce, or Madame Lulu's Lonely Hearts Club. It had an open-ended budget of millions of dollars funneled to it through dozens of government agencies. It had the most sophisticated computer system known to man, which was able to take in, analyze, and disgorge billions of discreet bits of information. It had secret headquarters at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York.
The only thing it didn't have was success.
It was obvious that exposure of wrongdoing was not enough. Even if CURE could find some newspaper to print disclosures—and that was not all that easy—the public often shrugged its shoulders and went on its way as if nothing had happened. Trying to send wrongdoers to jail through a court system that no longer worked was hardly any more successful.
It was obvious that CURE would have to change if it were to work. It was obvious that it would need an enforcement branch. That branch would be one man: a former New Jersey policeman named Remo Williams.
Williams was a rarity among cops: honest, uncor-rupted, and uncorruptible; an orphan with no family and no friends.
So CURE framed Remo for the murder of a drug dealer and railroaded him to the electric chair in the New Jersey state prison. The executioner pulled the switch, the current flowed, and Remo's body arched in agony. He woke up later at Folcroft Sanitarium, but he was officially dead, a man who no longer existed. His fingerprints were expunged from every file they had ever been in. His training was turned over to Chiun,
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Master of Sinanju, hired by CURE for the sole purpose of making Remo a killing machine.
But in the training, he had made Remo something else—something more than a man; and in Chain's mind, Remo had also become his heir. He traveled with his pupil now, just to make sure that no accident befell Remo and wasted Chiun's long investment of time.
Smith stood in the center of the room. "There are two things," he said.
"I've already heard that tonight," Remo said.
"What?"
"Never mind," Remo said. "What is it you want?"
"Have you ever heard of the copa-iba tree?" asked . Smith.
"It is not a Korean tree," Chiun said.
"No," said Remo. "And I don't want to hear about it either."
"Its correct name is Copaifera langsdorfii," Smith went on in a helpful, hopeful tone of voice.
"I am sure it is not a Korean tree," Chiun said. "Korean trees all have beautiful names. For instance, there is the Towering Nest of Swans, The Tree That Whistles When the Wind Walks. . . ."
"I don't care what you call it or what its correct name is," Remo told Smith. "I still don't want to hear about it. I need a vacation."
"The tree grows in the rain forests of Brazil," Smith went on. ,
"That's nice," Remo said.
"I am not surprised it has such a barbaric name," Chiun said. "Sinanju has never made a penny from Brazil."
"It grows quite tall," Smith said. "A hundred feet or more. And it is three feet thick through the center."
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