The coyotes fled when the sound of whining aircraft interrupted the night's natural noises. The officer in charge was red-faced, glaring hard at Remo as he walked through swirling dust, ducking below the helicopter's swirling rotor blades.
"Where are they, dammit?" he demanded. "Here ya go," said Remo. He had gathered the unconscious SEALs and sat them in a long row on the wooden sidewalk. Each had a hand on his neighbor's right shoulder, just to make them look less menacing. "Here come the others."
Two SEALs, paint splashed, had extricated themselves from Remo's pitfall in the old mercantile store with the ladder he tore off the side of a building and lowered to them. Their third companion was being dragged between them.
"Jesus Christ, I wouldn't have believed it," the commander muttered.
"Wonders never cease," said Remo.
"Bullshit!" the older man snarled. "These children will be going back to school."
"They're not all that bad, really," Remo said.
"Not that bad? How do you explain this mess?" he demanded.
"Oh, well, it's because I'm so damn good, ya see."
"You're not that good!"
"Am too!"
"By the way," the officer informed him, glaring balefully at him, "you've got a message waiting for you back at my HQ. Eyes-only, urgent. Better check it out."
"Aw, crap." Remo sighed. "I'll need the chopper, I guess."
"No sweat." There was a softening, however marginal, about the Navy officer's attitude. "I've got a full night's work ahead of me right here, just cleaning up your mess."
Remo strolled toward the chopper and called from just below the whirling rotor blades and flicked the object in his hand with one finger. It rocketed at the Navy officer.
"Hey!" Remo shouted.
The officer practically bounced off the ground and spun in place, almost losing his balance and desperately trying to crane his head to see what had just happened to his rear quarters. He discovered the seat of his trousers was wet with fresh blue paint.
The officer shot Remo a look that was disbelief and fury. He didn't know what to do first: ball him out or demand to know how he'd fired a paint ball without actually having a gun.
"Am too!" Remo shouted over the rotor noise.
Chapter 3
The red-eye into White Plains managed to arrive six minutes earlier than its absurdly precise ETA of 6:13 a.m. The plane was nearly empty, leaving Remo thankful for small favors, even though a fat man in a rumpled polyester suit had snorted, wheezed and rumbled in his sleep throughout the flight, directly opposite the seat in coach that Remo occupied.
A rental car was waiting for him at the airport, subcompact, no doubt the cheapest one available. Economy was critical to Dr. Harold Smith and CURE, the supersecret crime-fighting agency that Remo served, although its budget was so well disguised that only Dr. Smith himself had any real idea of the resources at his fingertips.
Remo had an odd relationship with money by the standards of most people, in that he didn't care about it. He had a lot of it, certainly. Being Reigning Master of Sinanju made him, technically, the custodian of Sinanju's wealth. He had no idea how vast his resources actually were. Chiun, Reigning Master Emeritus, smacked his hand if he tried to get anywhere near the money.
To Remo, you bought things with various plastic cards that were issued to him by CURE. The cards had lots of names on them. Most of them had the first name Remo, and they never ever had the last name Williams.
He didn't mind flying coach most of the time. He would have upgraded himself if he wanted to and nobody, but nobody, would have stopped him. He didn't mind driving an inexpensive set of wheels if it got him where he needed to go. But when he saw the three-year-old Beetle with a partially detached fender he went back to the Rent Cars Cheap! desk and said no thanks. "Got something a little bigger?"
The pretty young Rent Cars Cheap! clerk looked doubtful.
"Newer?" Remo asked. The clerk looked sad.
"Do you have a car without metal parts hanging down far enough to drag on the pavement?"
The clerk looked despondent.
Remo moved on to the next car-rental booth in the airport concourse and asked for something nice. "Yes, sir!" said the middle-aged man in a buttoned double-breasted jacket and neat tie, with gold tie clip. He looked more like a bank president than a car-rental clerk. "What are you looking for? Sporty? Luxury? An SUV?"
"Sporty?" Remo asked. "Define sporty."
The bank-president-type got a gleam in his eye. "Define sporty? I'll define sporty. V-12 engine, 6-speed stick, 580 horsepower and a top speed of 205 miles per hour."
Remo looked at the clerk, then took a step back and looked at the sign on the desk. The name of the car-rental agency didn't have the word "budget" or "cheap," and there wasn't an "econo-something" to be found. The name was something like Alucci-Fine Motorcars for the Discriminating Driver."
"You Al?"
"Pardon me, sir?"
"I guess that sounds kind of sporty, if it's red," Remo said.
"It's bright red," Al said. "Cherry strawberry bloodred. It is-" he inhaled before he spoke the words "-a Lamborghini Murcielago."
"Smitty'll have steam coming out of his ears," Remo said.
"Pardon me, sir?"
"Nothing. I'll take it if you don't ask me to pronounce it," Remo said.
Al couldn't have been happier. "An excellent choice, Mr.... ?"
Remo glanced surreptitiously at the credit card as he slid it over. "Quartermaster. Remo Quartermaster."
"I just need to check and be sure your card will take the security deposit."
"Okay."
"The deposit required is-"
"Whatever."
Al was visibly surprised and greatly pleased when the card was authorized.
"Sign here, please," he said, slipping over the company's standard contract. "And here. And here, here and here."
Al noticed that the man slapped his hand over the rental fee and the security amount before signing the document. Al couldn't care less. He had his credit-card approval.