He pulled out onto the road, and the Lamborghini did something unusual when he hit the gas. It didn't go faster; it sort of burst ahead. He wondered if there was an exhaust pipe with flames shooting out like on the Batmobile.
It had been a while since he had driven anything like this, and he found himself liking it. The speedometer needle nudged up to the hundred-miles-per-hour mark and still had lots of little numbers to the right of it. Remo wondered if he could make the little needle move all the way over to the right-hand side of the speed indicator. He maneuvered around the traffic on the highway as if it were standing still. When he got ahead of the traffic, he really let the car show itself off.
A state trooper was impressed by his efforts and tried to catch up. Remo left the guy behind and exited quick when the trooper was out of sight, then took side streets for a while. The rest of the drive was on smaller roads where he never had the chance to get the car over 120.
A CASUAL OBSERVER WOULD have guessed-and rightly so-that Folcroft Sanitarium was a retreat for the elite who needed someplace to dry out, unwind or simply get their act together in an age when wealth and social standing were no guarantee against the standard nervous breakdown. It was also home to many patients with more serious psychological or psychophysical problems.
Dr. Harold Smith had earned his reputation as an extremely efficient administrator, but none of the Folcroft clientele-not even the most savvy, well connected of them-would have guessed his secret.
Smith was the director of CURE, probably the most secret intelligence agency in the world. The President of the United States knew about CURE. Dr. Smith and his assistant, a young ex-CIA analyst named Mark Howard, knew of it, of course. And then there was Remo-and Chiun.
And that was all. Even the former presidents who had overseen CURE activities no longer knew that they had done so, their memories purged of the information.
The problem was this: CURE was fundamentally illegal. The methods it employed were almost always in violation of the United States Constitution-the very document that CURE was intended to protect.
The gates at Folcroft Sanitarium were open, and Remo parked out front in the visitors' lot, then jogged around to the side entrance he typically used to avoid attention.
A CIA PSYCHOLOGIST HAD once stated, officially and on the record, that Dr. Smith had "no imagination whatsoever." That was not strictly true, of course, but he was perhaps the most bland, gray individual one was likely to meet, ever. He was gazing at his blank glass desktop when Remo walked in. Mark Howard, his assistant, was in one of the chairs in front of the desk.
"Hey, Smitty. Hey, Junior."
Howard gave Remo a meaningful look and said nothing. Smitty seemed not to notice Remo's arrival, staring dumbly at his desktop like one of the patients in Folcroft's Veggie Ward.
"Fine, thanks," Remo said. "Spent some time with the kids and the biological dad, you know. Had a few laughs out on the big res. Got some sun. Got some SEALs in New Mexico. Didn't get any wolves, though."
Mark Howard glared.
"Thanks, I'd love to sit down," Remo said as he sat. After a moment he nodded at Smith and said in a stage whisper to Mark Howard, "Better run for a drool bucket, Junior."
Howard responded by lifting up several sheets of Folcroft Sanitarium paperwork to reveal a printout of a Visa bill. It was dated that day. The charge amount had a bunch of numbers, a comma, and a bunch more numbers. Remo saw the words "Alucci-Fine Motorcars for the Discriminating Driver."
"What do you know about the Devil's Triangle?" Smith asked abruptly, looking up from his desktop.
"Some porn movie?" Remo asked.
"As in Bermuda Triangle," Howard clarified.
"Oh," Remo said. "I know it was a popular unexplained mystery in the sixties and seventies, but I thought the gullible masses were off that kick."
"I will assume you know the basic legend," Dr. Smith went on. "Ships and planes that disappear without a trace, or sometimes turn up drifting without passengers or crew. Speculation has fingered every conceivable explanation from flying saucers to magnetic vortices and time warps."
Remo snapped his fingers. "There was an old TV movie with MacMurray called Devil's Triangle. Pee-yew."
"Of course, official explanations have been more mundane," Smith continued. "The Caribbean-indeed, the whole Atlantic-can have sudden storms. Some pilots and sailors are clearly less than competent. Without beacons or other homing equipment, there's no reason to assume that searchers would locate wreckage or survivors in time to effect a recovery."
"Makes sense," said Remo.
"More recently," Dr. Smith continued, as if on cue, "the Coast Guard, DEA and CIA have suggested another cause for some of the regional disappearances, at least where surface ships are concerned. Piracy."
"Piracy?"
"Indeed."
"Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum?"
"Nothing so quaint, I'm afraid. It's believed that certain well-organized rings may be involved in the theft of private pleasure craft and murder of their crews, with an eye toward resale of the vessels or conversion into smugglers."
"That should be right up the Coast Guard's alley," Remo said. "Glad we got the whole jurisdictional thing figured out. Can I go home now?"
"In theory, yes, the Coast Guard and DEA would handle this." Smith said. "Unfortunately, for all their discussions of the problem, none of the agencies involved have managed to prove their case. To date, they have no pirates, no hard evidence of their existence. That is, until last week."
Remo was pretty sure he wasn't going to get to go home.
"Are you familiar with Senator Chester Armitage?" Smith asked.
"Is he the guy who said he wished Strom Thurman had won his presidential bid in the 1940s and resegregated the U.S., then tried to claim he wasn't a racist?"
"That was another senator. Armitage is vicechairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee, heavily involved with half a dozen other major Senate groups. As if that weren't enough, he's an intimate friend of the sitting President, dating from their college days. Altogether, a man of great influence." As Dr. Smith spoke those final words, the corners of his mouth turned downward in a clear expression of distaste.
"So what? I hear the President dated a lot of people in his college days."
"Two weeks ago, Senator Armitage lost his son and daughter-in-law in the Devil's Triangle," Smith said morosely. "That is, both were presumed lost until Saturday, when Kelly Bauer Armitage was pulled from the water west of Fort-de-France by a pair of sport fishermen from South Carolina. She was half-dead from exposure, nearly drowned and she had suffered ...um...extensive physical abuse. It's no immense surprise to learn that she was-and remains-nearly incoherent."
"Nearly?" Remo prodded, sensing that he was about to hear the crux of Dr. Smith's unusual problem.
"She was able to report her husband's death-a homicide-and to describe her own abduction by... well, that is ...by a group of pirates."
"Hijackers, you mean," said Remo.
"Not exactly," Dr. Smith replied. "From her description, sketchy and disjointed as it was, it would appear that her assailants were, in fact, for all intents and purposes identical to pirates of the seventeenth or eighteenth century."
"Identical?"
"I'm filling in some gaps, of course, but from the woman's somewhat fanciful description of their primitive lifestyle-boats and weapons aside, I believe we may safely assume-they appear to emulate the tactics of such men as Blackbeard and Captain Kidd."
"So we are talking yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum," Remo said. "So what's CURE got to do with it? Why can't the FBI and Coast Guard handle this?"
"Normally, I would assume they would," Dr. Smith allowed. "They've tried and gotten nowhere. They have no leads, Remo. The woman can't provide them with directions or locations, names or any meaningful descriptions-anything at all, in other words. She doesn't know or can't remember where her husband's yacht was captured by the men who killed him and abducted her. There's a suggestion that a newly added member of the crew was possibly involved, but the only name she can offer is Enrique. After the murder and abduction, of course, she has no clue where she was taken or exactly how long she was held or by whom. In short, she's virtually useless."
"So the Feds are giving up," Remo said.
"But not the senator," Mark Howard chimed in. Remo could guess the rest: an urgent phone call to his college chum on Pennsylvania Avenue, demanding justice. If he played the angles properly, there was a decent chance the senator could parley private tragedy into a winning hook for his next election campaign, combining the tried-and-true sympathy vote for a grieving father with support for a tough, no-nonsense law-and-order candidate. A die-hard cynic might suggest that a dead or missing son was a reasonable down payment on six more years in Washington, sitting at the right hand of power.
Or maybe not.
The man could just be grieving, like any other outraged father, pulling any strings within his reach to gain justice, revenge, satisfaction-call it what you like. Who would deny him that, except for certain bleeding hearts who still regarded vicious criminals as the moral superiors of their victims?