Remo The Adventure Begins (21 page)

And here he was risking his life for a country that didn’t let him live where he wanted because of the color of his skin. It made it all very hard, and took the edge off his concentration.

“Is that the access I got by physically infiltrating Grove Industries?”

“Right. Once they believed you were an Internal Revenue agent, they had to show you their books, which were of course on their computer. You got the path codes for getting into HARP which also protected the original AR-60 from Army audit. That’s what we were looking at first. But look at what’s going on here.”

McCleary took in a sequence of meaningless numbers. “Right,” he said. He remembered the landlady’s face. It showed such pain. You always knew when they were lying because they showed pain at not having an apartment available. That was the dead giveaway. Otherwise, it would just be another apartment already rented, a simple sorry and good-bye.

When they said no because you were black, there was that special pain to the face, the lengthy explanation of who had just rented the apartment, all delivered at top speed.

Sometimes he would stand there and let them squirm. But Con McCleary didn’t enjoy it. He knew what it was all about, and sometimes it made him feel so tired, tired of everything. Tired of caring. Tired of trying. Tired of being an American.

But he was an American. He knew how bad Africa was. Maybe white liberal professors and African scholars had to keep afloat some myths of value either for their jobs or their good intentions, but he knew it was a garbage pit, from Tripoli to Cape Town. And Asia treated all human life with the compassion one normally bestowed on grass seed.

The problem for Con McCleary was that America was home. He wouldn’t trade a cold beer at an American bar for all the champagne in Paris. He liked fried chicken, beer and baseball. If he read a book, chances were it was history, and usually American history. He did his job because he was an American. His father worked in the post office and his grandfather worked on the trains, and McCleary saved the whole damned thing for people who wouldn’t rent him living space.

Smitty, on the other hand, had been part of this country since before it was a country, McCleary knew. Sometimes he wondered if that made that much difference. Sometimes he wanted to ask. But you didn’t ask Harold W. Smith those sorts of questions. You didn’t ask him personal things or tell him personal things. You watched computer screens and talked about economic access.

“Now here is protection for America’s most sensitive protection satellite, so new it hasn’t been orbited, so sensitive that they may have HARP II in space before they ever need HARP I. Now what is maximum protect?”

“What I see there, I guess. I don’t know. Get to the point, Smitty,” said McCleary.

“The financial records.”

“I got access to them for us.”

“You did, but you don’t know the higher levels of these things.”

“And I never will, happily,” said McCleary.

“When something is absolutely most important, maximum, all the other protection devices work to scrutinize it. It’s like a night watchman. He doesn’t check the fence to see if it is still there, he checks the locks on the doors to the room where the money is kept. What they have done is to devote their maximum protection to their financial records. Why?”

“They’re white,” said McCleary.

“Be serious,” said Smith. “Logic would dictate that the HARP I would have its maximum protect on its technological secrets, how one builds one of these things or gets around one of these things. But these people have put it on the books. Costs. Why?”

A red light flashed on the corner of the screen. Someone was entering the outer office. The cameras replaced the computer readout with an image of the intruder. The face was hard, and angry.

“He’s not supposed to come here unless we tell him,” said Smith. It was Remo.

“Well, he’s here,” said McCleary. “And he looks pissed. I would be very careful with that one. He is not the same guy we fished out of the river. Remo Williams is something else entirely.”

“But Chiun’s reports?” asked Smith.

“Hey, those people, Smitty, are them. Them don’t think like us. And this boy we shanghaied may be becoming one of them, so don’t play street games like this was the community.”

“Is there a purpose to that sudden black talk?” asked Smith.

“To save our asses. We got what we want, I think. But I don’t think we know what we got, and that sonuvabitch Remo is getting better. I saw him dodge bullets. And he hasn’t gotten worse since then.”

Remo entered on a tear.

He did not ask permission to enter. He did not say hello. He informed them they were all going to straighten something out. McCleary was glad he had warned Smith.

Remo was covered by flaky green stuff. His face was cut, his dark eyes burned.

“I just spent the morning being chased around the Statue of Liberty by a bunch of goons.”

“What were you doing on the statue?” asked Smith.

“That’s not the point. What were the guys who were trying to kill me doing on the Statue of Liberty? You’re supposed to be plugged into the universe and you can’t warn me when someone is staging a hit? I thought we were supposed to go after them. They were coming after me.”

“Who?” asked McCleary.

“Our friend with the Tiffany tooth,” said Remo. “Who gave me away to him? I’m supposed to be secret. I’m supposed to be the man who doesn’t exist for the organization that doesn’t exist. What was that thing in the police car and the plastic surgery for if you assholes are going to list me in the phone book or something?”

Smith and McCleary looked at each other. McCleary’s mouth opened. Smith became even paler. He swallowed hard. His voice jerked with fear under control, like a string on a violin stretched too taut.

“What do you think?” Smith asked. But he did not ask it of Remo.

“I think we are very close to buying the farm,” said McCleary.

“Not yet,” said Smith.

“If he’s on to Remo, then he’s on to us. We’ve got a problem,” said McCleary.

“Damned right you do. Someone tried to kill me,” said Remo.

“Let’s take him out before he gets closer?” asked McCleary. His voice almost begged.

Smith shook his head. “No. Not yet. We don’t know what it means absolutely for sure.”

“It means some guy tried to kill me. If you know where he is, let me at him. I’ll do it. I don’t need you people to tell me how to be correct with a target. Hell, you had tunafish with oily mayonnaise for lunch, Smith, and you had fried chicken for the last three days, McCleary.”

Smith turned to Remo, and with all the authority he naturally had felt because of the rightness of his cause, he said quite coldly:

“Remo, CURE is not interested in your personal problems.”

“Well, cure sucks, whatever cure is.”

“Exactly what it says,” said Smith. “The three of us in this room are CURE. A cure for the crime and lawlessness that threaten to swamp this country and ultimately make it ungovernable.”

“I knew we were doing something like that. You told me.”

“Yes, but did we tell you that if it became known we exist, it would be an admission by our government that the whole kit and caboodle does not and cannot work? That our laws don’t work?”

“What are you getting at?”

“We created a killer arm that does not exist for an organization that does not exist. You learned to fight without weapons that would leave a trace. You are our only real killer arm. Why?”

“Because I am beautiful. What are you getting at?”

“We cannot be known to exist or everything we are fighting for goes. America becomes just another little police state above its own laws like any third-world country,” said Smith.

“A man named Grove has to have discovered your existence to send the man with the diamond tooth. If he knows about you, he may know about us.”

“He didn’t try to kill you,” said Remo. “You’re afraid now. Am I the only one who’s supposed to be shot at?”

“I will not be shot at,” said Smith. “If we are discovered, every file in our computers automatically self-destructs. And so do we. All of us. I have a pill. It is fast. It is painless. It is final.”

“Harold W. Smith, research analyst, will be found with a suicide note,” said McCleary, “and Con McCleary will be found with his brains blown out. Niggers with bullets in their heads are not uncommon in this great land of ours. No one will ask any questions about me. A black man can always find a place somewhere if it is beneath the ground.”

“Where does that leave me?” asked Remo.

“Well, you would be a bit much for us to kill now. Your abilities far surpass ours, from what McCleary tells me,” said Smith.

“So?”

“So there is only one man on earth equipped to kill you.”

“No,” said Remo. All the secrets were out. He didn’t care what else they said. It couldn’t be true. Chiun wouldn’t kill him. Most of the Master’s complaining was only proof of how much Chiun cared. Remo was sure of that. He was so sure that the complaining didn’t bother him anymore. He was certain of it. They were wrong.

The two of them worked out a plan while Remo thought of what he would say to Chiun. McCleary and Remo would hit the security-tight HARP manufacturing complex in West Virginia. HARP had to be the key to Grove Industries and if they could crack HARP, they could crack Grove. Then George Grove’s personal killer network could be eliminated, and CURE and all of them would go on.

When they asked Remo if he understood, he said yes. He would have said yes to anything. But first he had to speak to Chiun.

Chiun had learned how to tape the daytime soap operas so he could have dramas from all three networks played at his leisure. He now followed all of them daily and talked about the characters as though they were real people.

He was watching one of the soaps when Remo arrived back at the training house. Seeing him more absorbed in the drama than apparently he was in Remo’s life, Remo thought a moment. Maybe what Smith said was so. He started to speak. Then he decided not to. Then he decided to say something. Then he decided not to.

He stood there, making no sounds audible to normal people.

“You want to say something?” said Chiun.

“Yeah,” said Remo. “You know, I heard something, not that I believe it. You know. I don’t believe everything people say. I know what you’ve given me, and I know you wouldn’t just throw that away, right?”

“The answer is yes, Remo. I am a Master of Sinanju. My first loyalty is to the village. I would kill you. It is in the contract.”

As for breathing, Remo didn’t care to. But he noticed he had stopped, just stopped. His mouth was open, his feet were frozen to the floor. There wasn’t anything left to say. Chiun had said it all. And Remo had wanted to call the man “little father.”

Well, he didn’t have any father he ever knew of, and this man wasn’t one either. He had the nuns at the orphanage, who used to send him Christmas cards every year until a change of address threw them off his trail. He had his football coach, who remembered him for two years as the best middle linebacker he had ever seen until he got someone who made second-string all-American.

And Remo had himself. He had himself, and he had his job, and he had what he knew how to do, and he packed a little bag and left the training house alone.

He did not see the Master of Sinanju turn off the television set. He could not of course see the Master of Sinaryu remember his own son lost in the heights.

And he did not hear the sound come from Chiun’s throat.

“Ah,” said Chiun, but it held no satisfaction. It was as empty as the far side of the universe where stars did not reflect the sun.

“Nothing is bothering me,” said Remo, as their car traversed the bleak hills of West Virginia, heading on a road toward a place far away called Parkersburg. They were going beyond Parkersburg.

Remo didn’t see whether there would be much difference where they went. All across the country, there were plenty of run-down roadside bars that looked as though they were being held together by their neon signs that advertised beer. The West Virginia ones were only marginally different. They didn’t have the signs.

“You haven’t talked to me since New York. What’s bothering you?”

“Nothing. I told you nothing is bothering me,” said Remo. “Let’s do the job and get out of here. You talk a lot. All right? Don’t talk so much.”

“I didn’t say a word all through Pennsylvania, laddie. What’s bothering you?”

“I remember. It was peaceful all the way through Pennsylvania,” said Remo. “Yeah, something is bothering me. I don’t have a father, that’s bothering me. I don’t have a mother. That’s bothering me, too.”

“You just found that out, Remo?”

“You and Smith know more about me than I do, probably.”

“We never found out who your parents were, if that’s what you’re asking, Remo,” said McCleary. He drove easily, just enough speed to get there, yet not enough to attract attention from a traffic policeman, not that they had seen a policeman on the road since they entered the state. The shacks and roadside bars, and advertisements for chewing tobacco, were suddenly replaced by a large ugly chemical factory, lit like a stadium in hell, with smoke wafting through the harsh floodlights. Chain-link fence and warnings surrounded its base. The whole factory was set on a river. This was the plant just south of Grove Industries. It was actually a Grove subsidiary, acting almost as an outpost. The car would be tracked the minute it passed this plant. They were coming up against the best technology in the world; America’s own. Fortunately, Smitty had known it was there. The plant itself was not quite as well-protected as the accounting for HARP.

As of this point, both of them knew anything they said in the car could be heard by the monitors situated in the Grove complex ahead. Ironically, from this point on, they could say anything personal they wished but nothing about business. McCleary nodded to the factory. They had discussed this before. Remo nodded back. He understood.

“I used to imagine my father would teach me things if I had one. Really. I was never really good at anything in my life. I was never the best. And I always thought that if I had a father, he would have taught me how to be the best. I used to think things like that,” said Remo. “I did.”