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Murphy - Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands

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The Destroyer #26:

IN ENEMY HANDS

by

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Copyright (c) 1976

CHAPTER ONE

It was a grand reunion. It was a glorious occasion. Vodka bottles stretched thirty meters along a linen tablecloth, each bottle with a gloved servant behind it. Accordions played. Glasses cracked against the inlaid wood walls. Shiny boots clicked on the polished marble. Blue uniforms with red piping, medaled as though jewelers had run amok, shone on proud chests.
Someone yelled out in the thick eastern accent of Vladivostok: "He's coming! He's coming!"
Silence came, marred only by the last few crashes of glasses from officers who had not realized what was happening. And then only the footsteps of a single man. A man at a podium set high at the far end of the hall called out:
"Officers, members of the committee, sword and shield of the party, we now greet with admiration, a hero of the Soviet Socialist Republic, Field Marshal Gregory Denia. A bravo for Denia."
"Bravo, Bravo," yelled the crowd.
Denia, medaled across his fat chest, his round face gleaming joy, his pudgy hands raised above him in his own triumph, marched into the great hall of the people's Committee for State Security.
"Denia. Denia. Denia," came the chant.
And he waved furiously, smiling at old friends, survivors of the great war where two nations battled in a line from sea to sea, with the losers facing annihiliation. They were tough men, these officers, survivors of the purges, the favorites of Stalin, then Beria, then Krushchev, and finally the current chairman. Chairmen came and went. The KGB stayed forever. Denia signaled for silence.
And then he spoke.
"I am not at liberty to tell all of you the specifics of our victory. I am not at liberty to tell you just how we achieved more than prominence in Western Europe. But I can tell you this, comrades. Today, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics dominates her continent as no nation ever has. Europe is ours. Tomorrow Asia and then the world. Tomorrow the world. Tomorrow the world."
Many officers who had fought only the cold war against America, in grueling, stalking contests where victories were measured in mere inches, now screamed their praise. For with Field Marshal Denia there had been a recent breakthrough of miles. The West was in full retreat.
Of course, even in such a work oriented group, there was always the one wag. From the back of the room, someone yelled out a toast to Russia's greatest ally.
"Bravo for the United States Congress and its investigating committees."
Faces turned in scorn, but Field Marshal Denia smiled.
"Yes, we have had help. But it was not accidental. Did not Lenin himself say the capitalists would hang themselves if we gave them enough rope? Well, they have the rope, and we tied the knot."
Denia called for a full bottle of vodka, and then, resting on the polished heels of his leather boots, leaned back and downed it completely to a chorus of encouragement. Then he danced out into the center of the marble hall to great clapping. A captain, his face ashen, his hands trembling, worked his way toward the clearing where Denia now spun drunkenly, laughing. The captain, in dull green, made a striking contrast to the array of medals, like a cheap plastic bowl in a jewelry store display window.
Denia brushed aside the captain.
"Comrade marshal, it is of the utmost urgency," said the captain.
He handed Denia a doublesealed envelope, the kind where a small plastic shield has to be broken to open it. He also handed the marshal a pen which he wanted him to use to sign for the letter. Denia took the pen and flipped it into the air.
"I need your signature, marshal."
"Anatoli, tell this idiot he doesn't need a signature."
"You don't need Marshal Denia's signature, captain," came a voice from the crowd. It was the commander of the captain's entire unit.
Denia read the message. He was feeling good with the warmth of the vodka, and his blood was running hot and wild from dancing. The message read:

Apparent high complications Treska units southern flank Europe. Stop. Suggest your immediate return Dzerzhinsky Square Building for consultation. Stop. Immediately.

Denia crumpled the note and put it back in his pocket.
"Serious, Gregory?" asked a general.
Denia shrugged. "It is always serious. The central committee wants to change the color of the uniforms and so the chairman of a textile factory faces a serious problem. The ministry of propaganda hears about a Solzhenitsyn speech or a new book he has written and they have a serious problem. Every day there is a new serious problem here and there, but all of us are drinking good vodka and living in good homes and yet everyone goes running around crying the sky is falling. The sky, gentlemen, is still above us as it was before we went crying from our mother's wombs into a serious confrontation with air, and it will be there after we are shoveled into ground following a serious confrontation with death. Comrades, I tell all of you now. There is no such thing as a serious thing."
His little speech was greeted with applause, partly because he held the rank of marshal, but also because he was known as a man who held things together during crunches. So this was the marshal's philosophy, and it was respected.
Outside a black Zil limousine was waiting. Traffic at home was always so much easier than in the field, where so many people had cars.
Marshal Denia was not as casual as he had appeared at his celebration. Years in the field had given him that extra sense of when to worry and when not to. It was a time for worrying.
Lubyanka Prison was in the Dzherzhinsky Square building. So many of his comrades had ended up there during Stalin's reign. He was the only one to survive from his unit, a political one under the command of a former university professor who had joined what was then called the Chekka, to be changed to the OGPU, to be changed to the NKVD, the MVD, and, finally the KGB. All different clothes for the same body.
Stalin had wanted the whole unit, forty two men, to dress in formal attire and attend a dinner with him alone. There was much vodka. Something had told Denia not to indulge too much on that long-ago evening in the early thirties. Perhaps it was the absence of water on the long tables that had given him the clue that Stalin wanted them to drink heavily.
His commander, who ordinarily was a cautious, abstemious man given to tea and crackers, had downed vodka as if he had been born on the back of a Cossack horse. By mid-meal, the commander had been talking loudly of being part of the socialist vanguard. Stalin had smiled. He did not drink, but he had lit that large white pipe and nodded and smiled, and young Denia had thought: "My god, this is a cobra we deal with here this night."
Each young officer had tried to outdo the others in his commitment to the purity of the Communist revolution. Denia had been quiet. Then Stalin himself had pointed to him.
"And what do you think, quiet one?" Stalin had asked.
"I think everything they said is nice," Denia had said.
"Just nice?" Everyone had laughed. "Nice," the august chairman of the party had then said, "is a word for strawberries, not the revolution."
Denia had said nothing.
"Do you wish to change that word?"
"No," Denia had said.
His commander had become immediately uncomfortable, then had launched into a dialectical attack upon uncommitted revolutionaries conducting a bourgeois counterrevolution.
"And what do you think about that, young man?" Stalin had asked.
Young Denia had risen, because he knew he was dealing with his very life and he wanted to do it on his feet. He had also understood what his comrades had not, however. They too were dealing with their lives.
"What my commander says might be very true. I do not know. I am not a great professor, nor am I a great thinker. I know Russia needs a strong hand. Before the revolution, those who ruled ruled for their own privilege. There were hard times. Now there is a chance for a better life. That is good. It will not be easy to achieve. This is a big country. We are still backward. I am Russian. I know there will be much bloody work ahead. I know that for every thing done, there will be a thousand ideas of how to do it better. But I am Russian. I hold faith with the party. What they decide is their business. But in Gregory Denia, the party has a faithful servant."
The commander had attacked this position as being as serviceable for a czar, or for any other feudal leader, as for the Communist party. He asked why Denia had joined the party.
"Because our family was given three potatoes by a party member."
"For three potatoes you committed your life?" Stalin had asked.
"We were hungry, comrade chairman."
No one else in the room had noticed Stalin's eyes narrow ever so slightly, nor had they perceived that ever so slight nod. Gregory had been dismissed immediately by his superior. When he showed up the next morning at temporary headquarters in the remodeled Baptist Church, he found himself alone and wondered if headquarters had been moved. It hadn't. He was now commander, while still in his twenties. He never saw the others again, nor did he ask about them.
He had seen Stalin only once more, and that was during the early days of the great war, when Nazi troops roamed freely over western lands.
There had been a hundred officers of his rank about to return to the field. He was organizing partisans behind the lines. Each officer had passed by Stalin and been introduced.
When it was Denia's turn, Stalin had smiled.
"Three potatoes," he had said.
"Three," had answered the then Colonel Denia.
A staff general had leaned over to explain some of Denia's recent heroic deeds. Stalin interrupted him with a brief wave of the hand.
"I know, I know," he had said. "The fiercest man on earth is a Russian with three potatoes in his belly."
It was a dirty war beyond anything seen since the barbaric hordes had slaughtered whole populations. To see what the Germans had done was beyond the hardness of even the NKVD. And then, of course, came the touchy stalking war with the west. Denia knew it would be a long one.
Three potatoes, he thought, as the Zil limousine moved quietly to the underground garage of the building on the square. He took a small elevator, one man only, to the codes room, and there he met a colonel in charge of one thing, a general in charge of another thing, and a halfdozen captains in charge of something else. There were maps and charts, and there were serious faces and people saluting all over the place and giving low toned ominous warnings about this and that.
"Excuse me, gentlemen, I've got to pee," he said. "Go on with your briefing." He left the door open so he could hear everything they said. Some men turned their eyes away. Babies, he thought. Little ladies. The big bad KGB had turned into a bunch of little ladies.
He went back to the table.
"All right. Now I have heard about twenty reasons each of you is important to the survival of the state. But I have not been given any hard information. Let me give you two bits of hard information, five minutes apiece to think, and then we will do this all over again. One. My Treska unit is on the attack, mopping up against a defeated enemy. Therefore things do not go according to every little dot on every little piece of paper. You don't hear from people for weeks. That's all right. Secondly, what does Vassilivich say? He is the only worrier I respect."
No one waited five minutes. Vassilivich had not made his checks for three days. Auxiliary units had discovered the following men dead, they told him.
Denia listened to the long list. He took a red pencil from one of the officers standing over a map. He asked for the approximate times of the deaths, then he wrote in the times next to towns Naples, Farfa, Athens, Rome.
"You said Ivan Mikhailov?"
"Yes, Major Mikhailov is dead."
"How?"
"Blunt instrument of some sort. Tremendous pressure."
"Of course. It would have to be," said Denia, remembering the incredible strength of the young giant. "Are you sure?"
"Yes. There was an autopsy. Major Mikhailov had enough rat poison in his veins to fell a battalion, but apparently it did not kill him."
"And no word from Vassilivich?"
"None."
Denia did not wish to express his suspicions at this moment, because things once said could never be brought back to safe silence and who knew what any of these heel clicking, saluting ladyniks would do.
"You're all jabbering about some great sudden assault by massive units, but I'll tell you something none of you has even mentioned yet. Look at my markings on the map. Look at the times. Look."
There was much talking about CIA backup teams, a rolling assault by multiple units, each going into action when the other had completed its mission.
One officer with an acneravaged face and sunken cheeks and thinning gray hair combed starkly to each side talked of a multinational chain reaction on isolated units. A conspiracy against Russia, possibly emanating from the Vatican.
Denia belched. He hadn't heard that sort of nonsense since a brief stopover in London, where British journalists had offered to sell any sort of story about anyone for a price.
An aide asked what the journalists meant.
"Would you like to read about America poisoning the Atlantic? The Israelis committing secret acts of war? The Danish government murdering children for cannibalism? The Dutch being secret racists? British journalism is the most lively money can buy. You name it and we'll write it. Books, of course, cost more than articles. But I guarantee, m'lord, there's nothing some of us can't write for a price. Want to read about the Pope's love affairs? His illegitimate children?"
"What love affairs? What illegitimate children?" the aide had asked.
"You pay for 'em and we'll write about 'em."
And this was all right for British journalism, but for serious men who dealt with life-and-death realities, it was appalling. So Denia belched, and he noticed an officer wince.
"Have any of you ever heard of an automobile?" asked Denia.
All the officers in the room without windows nodded that they had. A few cleared their throats. They avoided revealing glances at each other. Of course, they had heard of automobiles. What was the old man talking about?
"Can you all read wristwatches?" Denia asked.
Again the nods.
"Can you count?"
Yes, they could count. Would the most honored Marshal be more specific?
Denia put the red crayon on Rome.
"Imagine this red mark is a car. Puttputtputt goes the car. Rrrrrr goes the engine. Down this road, it goes whoooossh," said Denia. The pencil went from Rome to Naples. "Now we are in sunny Napoli. It is noon. Last night we were in Rome. Ah, here we go, we're heading north to Farfa. Puttputtputt. Whoooosh. Vroom. We are not even driving especially quickly. Now we go back to Rome and get on an airplane. It is a pretty airplane. It flies to Athens. Wheeee. Vroooom. Whooosh. Now it lands at Athens. What a pretty flight."
"Oh," said one officer who suddenly realized what Denia was talking about. Of course. They had all been so involved in gigantic plots and multiple killer teams that no one had noticed one simple fact. The old warhorse had seen it at once.
"It's not a massive counterattack at all," said the young officer.
"Welcome to reality," said Marshal Denia.
"It's only one team. They went from one unit to another, of course. And undoubtedly that executive officer is helping them because he is the only one who is connected to the various teams. He has defected and is leading that killer team to each of our units," the young officer said.
"Wrong," said Denia loudly. "Absolutely wrong."
"Why?" said the young officer. Denia thought quickly. Something like this could get out of hand. And he had worked too long with Vassilivich to surrender the man to some Kremlin suspicion, where people slept cozily and safely and did not know what it was like to have someone put the barrel of a pistol to your belly and threaten to spread your insides into the nearest gutter.
"Because," said Denia.
"Because why, comrade marshal?" asked the officer.
"Because this is the way it was," he said, thinking clearly. "The Sunflower, our counterpart in the CIA, was becoming outmoded, obsolete. Why was it becoming obsolete? Because America had a much more effective killer team. What to do? What best way to take advantage of this new technique? Let our Treska expose itself by getting rid of what America would have to retire anyway. How to do this? Take away their weapons under the pretext of not wanting another international incident. Why else would Americans leave themselves defenseless? Is anyone here so stupid as to believe America would expose itself defenseless to this world?"
One officer thought America could be that stupid. He listed events of American foreign policy.
Denia said if the officer wanted to go to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, he should do so. This was KGB.
"What Vassilivich has done, what this great and brilliant and courageous and loyal officer has done, is simply to save the party and the people of Russia. While ladyniks in the safety of the Dzerzhinsky Square building spin out fairy tales like Englishmen."
A liaison officer from the Red Navy took umbrage at being called English. Even being a marshal in the KGB did not give him the right to call another human being an Englishman.
"I am sorry your feelings are hurt. I only used English as a reference point. I did not even mean Englishman but English journalism as an example of silliness. I have great respect for the Red Navy and, it might surprise you, for the British Navy, and, it might surprise you even more, for most British. Now is everyone happy?"
The Naval officer accepted the apology.
"Good," said Denia and slapped the officer hard across the face. "Now, remember who I am. Marshal Denia who knows how to use his brains in combat, and yes, I do mean to insult every one of you for not realizing that just as the Sunflower was obsolete for the Americans, so was the Treska unit for us. Because, you dummies, the Treska and the Sunflower were all but identical."
Stunned heads nodded. Even the officer whose right cheek was a red welt nodded. There was a reason why Denia was a leader of men, and now he was showing it.
"General Vassilivich is directing their new weapon against our Treska units, not to destroy us, but to offer up the lives of his comrades so we will be able to see what their new weapon is and counteract it. What he is doing is, granted, ruthless, but brilliant. We are taking one step backward to be able to take two forward. Gentlemen, America may have started this, but I tell you now, we will finish it."
He slammed his fist on the table.
"You have my life on it," he said with finality. "Keep your heads, ladyniks, and welcome to the world of the cold war."
He knew he did not have to add that his life depended on it. Of course it did. But it made a great dramatic impression just to say it. He was not as bold as the other officers might think. Massive failure of his units would probably mean death anyway, or something akin to it, like prison. And, calculating probabilities, Denia had decided that Vassilivich was either dead or doing exactly what Denia had said he was doing. All life was the edge of the sword.
Without those three potatoes, he might have starved to death anyway.
By 4:55 a.m. Moscow Time, Vassilivich, beautiful, intellectual Vassilivich, started justifying his commander's faith. A lower-rank consul in Athens had picked up a note thrown from a rented car. It was three words. Put together, they showed Vassilivich was alive and a captive.
By late afternoon of the next day, a Swedish unit had gotten a long note left outside a small chalet where the crushed bodies of the Gamma unit were found, their guns unfired, their knives still sheathed. Vassilivich was undoubtedly desperate. The note was handwritten on the back of five empty cigarette pack linings. It was not in code. It read:
D. New U.S. weapon. One man. Unusual abilities. What is Sinanju? Special methods. Giant trap. Treska units useless. One male, six feet tall, brown eyes, high cheekbones, thin, thick wrists, called Remo. Travels with Oriental who may be friend, teacher, poet? Called Chiun. Old. Sinanju the key. Long live sword and shield. V.
Denia called a special meeting in a room he had set up. More than a hundred officers from various branches of the KGB were present. He outlined the situation. There would be two steps: first, find out what this new unit was; second, destroy it. In those five shiny cigarette wrappers was the key. It was their job to unlock the puzzle, and Denia's job to wreak final revenge. The new unit designed to combat the American weapon would be named the Vassilivich group, in honor of Vassily Vassilivich, who was undoubtedly dead.
On the banks of the beautiful river Seine, Marshal Denia was being proven correct once again.
Vassilivich had himself broken the key of Sinanju. The Korean Chiun was one in a line of Masters of Sinanju that stretched back for untold centuries. If one took all the martial arts and traced their connections to each other and the history of the development of each, one might be able to calculate that perhaps all of them had come from a single source, most powerful at its center. Unlike television sets, martial arts became weaker as they became newer. There "were no improvements in martial arts, only deteriorations, a slow dwindling away of essence, like radioactivity wearing out. The man Chiun was not a poet. It was even conceivable that he was more powerful than Remo.
Several times the comments "sun source" and "breathing" had been passed between the two in English. With breathing, these people were capable of harnessing the normal human body to its full potential. There was nothing miraculous about it at all. Moreover, if scientists ever got into the mysteries of Sinanju, they would probably discover how man had really survived on the ground before he organized into hunting parties and invented weapons. Barehanded man might at one time have been as strong as the sabretooth.
Sinanju, in some way, had harnessed normal human potential, which, interestingly, Vassilivich thought, brought up something from the old Christian religions. Christ had said it: you have eyes and do not see, ears and do not hear. Perhaps Christ had not been making a moral statement after all.
"Okay, fella, what are you writing?" asked Remo.
"Nothing," said Vassilivich.
"That's it for you," said Remo, and suddenly Vassilivich's eyes did not see, nor did his ears hear, nor did his body feel the Seine splash over him.
But it did not matter.
In the Dzerzhinsky Square building, Marshal Gregory Denia was getting the answers he wanted, and his tactical solution, he thought, was brilliant. If not biblical.

CHAPTER SIX

"Assholes got themselves killed and we have to bail them out," said Ludmilla.
"Oh," said Major Krushenko, with absolutely no surprise.
"Denia is in trouble and we're his long shot," said Ludmilla, who had known and understood KGB policy since childhood. Denia had always had a reputation for overextending himself, and, without that bookish Vassilivich to restrain him, he had undoubtedly gotten some of his people wiped out. Or captured. Or something. She hated the family business. It was so boring.
She repacked her face and re-oiled her body, and so spent the rest of the afternoon pleasantly, remaining gorgeous. The blemish was beginning to recede. She was going to be Delilah to America's Samson, whoever the lucky man was.

In America the President got the first good foreign news since the surrender of the Japanese in World War II. The Russian extermination squads known as Treska seemed to have abandoned aggressive activities in Western Europe. The news came from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of State looked on. The President read the message and waited for the doctor to leave the Oval Office before commenting.
The Secretary of State said he hoped the cut on the President's forefinger would heal soon.
"Yes," said the President. "Those band-aids have very sharp edges and if you grab them wrong, they can cut like knives."
"Not as sharp as paper, though," said the CIA Director.
"You know," said the President, "the home is the most dangerous place of all. Seventy per cent of all accidents occur in the home."
The Secretary of State, in his urbane manner, decided cautiously and wisely not to ask the President why he had needed a bandaid. He saw a small bottle of burn ointment and an ice cube melting in an ashtray, and he did not want to hear that the President of the United States had burned himself on ice.
"Well, good news," said the President after the doctor left.
"We don't know why the Treska seems inoperative at this point in time, but they seem to have run into something that bloodied them pretty well," said the CIA Director.
"British, French, who?" asked the Secretary of State.
The CIA Director shrugged. "Who knows? They're not going to tell us anything until those Senate investigations quiet down. Who would want to trust us now?"
"Gentlemen," said the President, "it is neither the British nor the French, and I am not at liberty to say who or what it is, but as I told you at a recent meeting, this matter would be taken care of. And it has."
The Secretary of State wanted to know how. The President said there was no need for the Secretary to know. Nor was there a need for the Director of the CIA to know.
"Whatever did it, we're lucky it's on our side," said the CIA Director.
"And it will stay on our side as long as no one talks about it. Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Good day."
He eased the tight pressure of the bandaid on his finger, then looked up at the back of the Secretary of State.
"Uh, by the way, would you send the doctor back in, please? Thank you," said the President, hiding the new cut on his other hand.

In a three-star Paris hotel rated for its quality and service, Chiun decided to speak on the death of their guest of a few days, Vassily something with the funny name, the nice Russian boy.
He knew why Remo had killed the sweet, respectful young man.
"He was a KGB general, Little Father. He was the last of the Treska killers. That's what Smitty sent us over here to do."
Chiun slowly and precisely shook his head. His frail beard hardly moved with his head.
"No, that may be why Smith will believe you killed, but I know the true happiness you had."
"Happiness?" said Remo. He checked out the bathroom. The tub was much deeper than any in America, and there was a sitting bowl that looked almost like a toilet, except it had two water faucet handles and a metal tube sticking up. It was for women. The hotel's name was Letutia. The ceilings were high, and the closets were not in the wall but separate dark wood pieces with legs. "Happiness?"
"Happiness," said Chiun.
"It was work," said Remo. "We went to the one known location of the Treska, grabbed a piece of it, and unraveled. Hey, you know how women use this thing?" Remo asked. He played with the faucet handles at the back of the almost toilet. He reasoned that it took some skill. The water went squirting up. A lot of skill.
"You enjoyed your work because the nice young Vassily showed proper respect. His teachers must have been very proud of him. He must have given them much joy, for in Russia they could say, this is my student and he has given me much joy. Not like in some other countries where those who give the greatest knowledge are abused and ignored and generally discarded."
"What is wrong?" asked Remo.
"When I recited Ung Poetry to you, you merely left the room."
"I never heard of Ung Poetry."
"Of course. Like diamonds thrown into mud before the worm. The worm slithers over great beauty as but a sharp obstacle. You never heard because you never listened. You do not know languages or kings. You do not know the names of the Masters of Sinanju in their proper order, or who begat whom. You were eating animal fat meats on soft decayed bread when I found you, and you do not know who is where or what is why, but rumble along in your dark cloud of ignorance."
"I listen. I've been training more than ten years now. I do what you tell me. I think like you tell me. Sometimes I'm beginning to think I am you. Everything you say I respect. This is so. I have never gone against you."
"Then let us do honor to the Masters of Sinanju. We will start with the first Master who came from the caves of the mist."
"Almost everything," said Remo, who remembered some of the early sessions where he had tried to get down who was whose father and who was whose mother, and they had all sounded overbearingly repetitious and unimportant. At that time, Chiun had said that Remo could not learn, because his training was starting too late in life.
"Vassilivich would have learned," said Chiun. "He was a good boy. In my history of my mastership, I shall call myself 'teacher of the ungrateful.' "
Remo turned on the television set. It jutted out of the wall on a platform just above his head. There was a picture of Charles De Gaulle talking. It was a film of his life. He did not understand French. Chiun did.
If Chiun's baggage had not been misplaced in shipping, Chiun would have had his own television programs which he could run on tape. Lately, however, he had been looking mostly at reruns. America, he said, had desecrated its own pure art form, turning it into filth and violence and the reality of everyday life. After that, Remo could not convince Chiun that every American family did not harbor in its midst a dope addict, a child beater, a leukemia victim, a crooked mayor, and a daughter who'd had an abortion.
Chiun looked at De Gaulle's image and told Remo to turn off the television. "There was never any work from that man," he said. "Now the Bourbon kings, ah, they knew how to employ an assassin. France was always a good place until the animals took over." Chiun shook his head sadly. He sat in the middle of the floor on the soft brown carpeting before the two large beds. By "animals taking over," Chiun meant the French Revolution of 1789. Every French president after that remained to Chiun a wide-eyed radical.
"I give up," said Remo. "When did I fail to properly listen to your Ung poetry? I never heard it."
"I was reciting it to that nice Vassilivich boy."
"Oh, that stuff," Remo said. "I don't understand Ung."
"Neither does the carpet or the wood of the closets," said Chiun. With a great sigh, he said he must now explain Paris to Remo, only praying that Remo would remember some of what he had been told.
Downstairs in the lobby of the Letutia, Chiun had a small argument with the concierge about something. Chiun silenced him with a word.
Remo asked what the argument was about.
"If you understood French, you would know," Chiun said.
"Well, I don't understand French."
"Then you do not know," said Chiun as if that pleasantly explained it all.
"But I want to know," said Remo.
"Then learn French," said Chiun. "Real French, not the garbage spoken today."
The street was the Boulevard Raspail. Two elderly woman sold sweets and crépes in a small white stall on a corner. A man in a dark limousine did a quick double take on Remo and Chiun. The car pulled over to the curb across the intersection. Remo saw the man lift a small camera to the back window. Remo did not recognize the man but the man obviously was looking for someone who looked like them.
By the time they had walked across one of the graceful wide bridges that spanned the dark Seine, Remo knew the confusion had ended. There were two tails, both young men, following, and three more staked out on the far side of the bridge. It was not hard to tell a tail, because he locked into your rhythms instead of his own.
A tail could be reading a newspaper, looking at a river, or gazing at the outside of the mangificent Louvre that Remo and Chiun now were approaching. No matter what he was doing, he was really locked with you. Eyes did not focus properly, or something. Remo could not quite explain it. He had tried once to tell Smith about it, but he had fallen back on "you just know."
"But how do you know?" Smith had asked.
"When a person really reads a newspaper, he does things differently."
"But what?"
"I don't know. It's different. Like right now, I know I only have part of your mind. Most people can't hold a single thought for more than a second. Minds are jumpy. But a tail has to keep his mind still. I don't know. Just take my word for it. You can tell."
So it was spring in Paris, and Remo caught a couple of smiles from a couple of beautiful women, and he returned them, but in such a way as to acknowledge their loveliness but decline their invitation.
Chiun called this a typical American sex fiend way of looking at things. He too noticed the tails. But as they approached the Louvre, and as Chiun looked into a window, he emitted a low wail. "Ung poetry, Little Father?"
"No," said Chiun. "What have they done to the Louvre? What have they done? The animals!" Chiun covered his eyes. He made a fast check with marks on the bends of the River Seine, repeating all the descriptions given in the history of Sinanju, and yes, it was the place, and the animals that had followed the Bourbons had crassly turned the place into a museum.
People even had to pay to enter now. What disgust.
Remo saw the gilt ceilings, the rococo marble, the paint on paint, and he thought, "If this weren't the world famous museum, it would be in bad taste." It was just too much. Chiun shuffled through the crowds, checking one spacious room after another. Here a prince had slept. Here the king had entertained briefly. Here was where the king's advisors had held councils of war and peace. Here a great festival had been held. Here was where the king's mistress had slept. Here the Count de Ville had planned to assassinate the king. And what had they done? That had not only remodeled the beautiful palace-one of the true art forms of the world, like American dramas used to be-but they had strewn the whole place with ugly pictures and statues. Garbage. The animals had turned the palace into a garbage heap.
Chiun slapped a gendarme who was so surprised by the little Oriental that he merely blinked.
"Animals," shrieked Chiun. "Degenerate animals." They had not only destroyed a palace, they had made a chapter of the history of Sinanju obsolete. Chiun had always wanted to see Paris, especially for this palace so well described by his ancestors, but now the mobs had ruined it.
"What mobs?" asked Remo.
"Everyone after Louis the Fourteenth." And even he, according to Chiun, had not been all that gracious. He confided to Remo that he was glad Charles the Fifth was not alive to see it now.
A prim nun in a gray suit and a short black bonnet led a line of well-scrubbed little girls with blue blazers and school emblems, carrying small locked briefcases. They pattered down the hall like cute, prim ducks in a row.
"Barbarians," Chiun yelled at them. "Brutal barbaric animals." The nun placed herself between her students and the yelling Chiun and quickly herded them down the well-lit hall.
"Vicious degenerates," Chiun said. The tails appeared at the end of the hall, their faces pointed to pictures implacably, as if attached by strings.
"I've got work to do, Little Father. Can I get some privacy in this place?"
"Yes," said Chiun. Three rooms from the Mona Lisa there was a pink marble wall along which Chiun counted marble ornaments. At the count of eight, he raised a long fingernail chest high and part of the wall swung open. So graceful was the craftsmanship that the opened wall did not look like some intrusion of a secret passage, but just another room. This one, however, was without lights. It smelled of dusty death and had walls of rough rock. Remo beckoned to the two tails, and with a bit more surprise than the average stranger beckoned to by someone, they came. Remo's hands shot out like the quick snap of a frog's tongue and the two went smashing into the rough rock floor of the secret room. The wall closed behind all four.
One had his hand on a small caliber pistol in an ankle holster. He had his hand on it only briefly, as Remo blended all of it into a painful bloody mess with his right shoe.
Without too much pressure against their spines, the men talked profusely. Unfortunately, they talked neither in English nor Korean, the only two languages Remo spoke in. He needed Chiun to translate.
A small light diffused into the room from above, making the room look as if it were in eternal dusk. Remo noticed a dry skeleton with a small hole in its temple, sitting against the rock wall as if it were a beggar waiting for a cup to be filled with coins.
Remo asked Chiun to translate for him. Chiun said he was hired as an assassin, not a language teacher. Remo said it was part of the work. Chiun said it was never agreed to with Smith that his duties included translating. He complained that Smith had promised to send him tapes of the soap operas but that they had not come yet. The tail who still had two good wrists and two good ankles went for a shoulder holster. Remo put a knuckle into his sternum. Part of a ventricle came out of his mouth like spit.
"Now we have only one, Little Father. Will you please help? Just find out who they are and why the tail."
Chiun said it would dishonor his ancestors to act as a language teacher, especially in this very room where the Count de Ville's body was.
"As a favor to me?" Remo asked.
Chiun agreed but noted it would be one more favor to be unrepaid. He said there was a point at which generosity ceased and abuse began. That point had been passed eight years before. Nevertheless his good heart prevailed. He questioned the man, who lay in pain. Then he ended the pain with eternal finality.
It was Remo's job to stack the two bodies neatly next to the skeleton. Remo said he would do it and thanked Chiun. What did the man say?
Chiun said he had been asked to question him, not repeat the answers. Repeating answers was something else.
Remo said that repeating answers was part of translating. Chiun said if Remo wanted that he should have asked for that also. Remo saw the hole in the skull of the skeleton was a bit too wide. He remarked that Chiun's ancestor had been sloppy or getting old, because he had mashed the skull instead of penetrating it sharply.
Chiun said that Remo's ancestors had probably fought with rocks, and that Remo was probably the first who knew how to breathe. Besides, Remo didn't even know his ancestors.
Remo said he didn't even know his father and only remembered the orphanage. Which was one of the reasons CURE had chosen him. in the first place. He had no known relatives.
Chiun said if that was an attempt to make him feel guilty, it had failed miserably.
"Miserably."
Remo said it wasn't an attempt to make Chiun feel guilty. It was a fact. Chiun was the one who tried to make people feel guilty.
In the administration offices of the Louvre, there was chaos that afternoon. Voices were coming from the walls all over the museum. At first, it was thought that someone had brought in a television set. Then it was thought that a tape recorder with American voices had been placed somewhere. Guards scurried up and down the corridors looking for the exact sources of the resonating voices talking about guilt and orphanages and failure.
Visitors from all over the world, many who had come to this city just to visit this museum, stared at one another.
Then suddenly the voices stopped and there was incredible silence in the vast museum, for everyone had been quiet trying to pick out the strange sounds.
A nun ran horrified to a gendarme. Two men, one an Oriental, had emerged from a wall in the Cour Caree section. The wall had shut after them. The Oriental had started the girls crying because he had called them vicious animals. He was arguing with the white man. Most of the talking was in English. The white man was saying he was sorry for asking for a simple favor.
When the guard returned with the assistant director of the museum, they could find no opening in a wall. The nun was put under sedation. Gendarmes escorted the girls back to their school.
And outside, walking to the hotel, Remo dismissed all Chiun was saying.
"I'm not interested in the last time Wang or Hung saw Paris." He stared at Chiun. "I just asked a simple little favor. I'm never going to ask again."
But Chiun wouldn't tell Remo what the tail had said.
Remo said he didn't care.
Chiun asked why, if Remo didn't care, did he have Chiun do the work of the translator? The problem, Chiun said, was that he was too easy-going. People tended to walk all over the good-hearted.
The next morning, Remo met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

CHAPTER SEVEN

It was midnight and only a man of peculiar habits would be working at his desk, so Dr. Harold W. Smith was at his when the special telephone rang.
When he picked it up, the first thing he heard was the receiver dropped on the other end of the call. There was a moment's fumbling, and then the President's voice came on in a rough-edged whisper, competing with a raucous background squawk.
"Good work."
"Sir?" said Smith.
"The European business. Went like a charm. I hear Treska's just about out of business."
"I can hardly hear you," Smith said.
"Well, somebody's here," the President hissed.
"Who?"
"Big Mama. The First Lady. She set her CB radio up in here."
"Mister President. In a dozen years this has never happened. If you wish to speak to me, I suggest you do it when no one else is around."
"How do I get rid of Big Mania?"
"Push her through the door and lock it behind her," Smith said, and hung up. After a few minutes, the phone rang again.
"Yes?" Smith said.
"You didn't have to get huffy," said the President in his normal voice, a voice that would be at home on a Detroit assembly line or pumping gas in Joliet, the kind of voice that belonged to a man people would elect and elect and elect to most offices because he was one of them. It was also the kind of voice that people voted against for the highest office in the land because it was too much like "one of them," and they wanted a President who was better than they were. And sounded it.
"I'm sorry you feel that way, Mr. President," Smith said, "but for more than a dozen years I have maintained this unit's security and secrecy. I haven't done it by playing 'breaker, breaker, there's a picture taker' on the radio with my wife in the room."
"Well, all right. Anyway, it looks like those two cleaned up everything in Europe. Reports I get say the Russians have withdrawn all their Treska units."
"Your reports are wrong."
"Wrong? I can hardly believe that. This is what we've heard from friendly nations. Allies."
"Wrong," said Smith. "The Treska hasn't been called home; it's been destroyed. There is no more Treska in the field."
"You mean… ?"
"I mean just that. There was an assignment to neutralize the Treska and render it harmless. They have been rendered the most harmless they can be," Smith said.
"Those two?"
"Those two," Smith said. "But it is not over. There is a Marshal Denia who has been called back to the Kremlin for discussions. He is in charge of Treska. He will be back at us with something new."
"What should we do?" the President asked.
"Leave it to us. The situation will be handled."
"Well… if you think so…" The President seemed reluctant.
"Good night," Smith said abruptly.
After replacing the phone inside his desk drawer, Smith sat reading copies of new reports produced by CURE'S overseas agents policemen, newspapermen, minor foreign officials, all of whom knew only that they provided information to some agency of the U.S. for a monthly check. All of them "knew" it was the CIA. And they were all wrong.
Their reports, raw information, some of it solid, some of it not better than rumor or outright lies from those who were taking money from Russia to ship America false information, came pouring into CURE's computers at Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye,
New York, on the shores of Long Island Sound. There it was mixed and matched in a way no single human mind could emulate. A man missing from his usual office for a week, a body found floating in a river somewhere, an airline ticket bought and paid for in cash by a man with a Russian accent-the computers put all the tiny threads of fact and information together, and then, on a console that only Dr. Smith could operate, wove out for him what had happened, classifying its results Conclusive, Highly Probable, Probable, Possible, Unlikely and Impossible.
Then Smith, after using a computer to do work a man could not do, did what a computer could never do. He made instant judgments, weighing risks and rewards, conflicting priorities, money and manpower problems, to spell out CURE's next assignment. He did it day in and day out with few mistakes, aware of but never awed by the fact that the only thing that stood between a strong United States and a United States exposed naked and defenseless before its enemies in the world was Dr. Harold W. Smith. And Remo. And Chiun.
Smith was not awed because he lacked the imagination to be awed. It was his greatest liability as a human being, and in turn his greatest asset as the head of a secret agency that had suddenly been given the global job of defending America.

"That Smith is an idiot," Chiun said.
"What now, Little Father?" Remo asked patiently, watching Chiun who wore his golden morning robe but was visible only in black silhouette against the bright early morning sunlight pouring through their triple-width hotel windows. Chiun looked out over the street. He was absolutely motionless, his hands extended straight out in front of him, his long-nailed fingers pointing ahead, near but not touching the thin yellow gauze draperies that hung from ceiling to floor.
"We are done here," Chiun said. "So why are we still here? This is a city where every food is smothered in sauce, every juice is fermented, and the people speak a tongue that grates upon the eardrums like a file. And then, what they allowed to happen to the Louvre. The shame of it. I do not like France. I do not like Frenchmen. I do not like the French language."
"You prefer to hear Americans speak English?" Remo asked.
"Yes," Chiun said. "Just as I would prefer to hear any other kind of donkey bray."
"We'll be going home soon."
"No. We will be going back to the land of Smith and that maker of automobiles. For you and for me, our home is Sinanju."
"Don't start that again, Chiun," said Remo. "I've been there. Sinanju is cold, barren, heartless and treacherous. It makes Newark look like heaven."
"How like a native to speak disparagingly of the land he loves," Chiun said. "You are of Sinanju." While he spoke, his fingers had not moved a fraction of an inch. In silhouette, he looked like a plaster statue of Jesus as shepherd.
Remo had stared at the Oriental's fingertips, eyes sharper than a hawk's, trying to see even the faintest quiver of motion, the slightest tensing of a muscle pushed beyond its limit of endurance, a twitch, a tic, but he saw nothing, only ten long fingers extended, at arm's length, an inch away from yellow drapes that hung perfectly straight, perfectly still, from ceiling to floor.
"I am an American," Remo said.
"Rooty toot toot," Chiun said. Remo started to laugh, then stopped when he saw the curtains move. Slowly, their delicate weight seeming to move, massively, like an ice age crossing a continent. The curtains moved slowly forward, a full inch, until they touched Chiun's extended fingertips, and then they swung forward even more until his fingertips were surrounded by the thin gauze which wrapped itself around the tips of his fingers as if they were iron filings and his fingers were magnets.
Chiun dropped his hands to his sides and the drapes retreated, swinging softly back into place.
The old man turned and saw Remo staring at him.
"Enough," he said, "for one day. Let that be a lesson to you. Even the Master must exercise."
The drapes were again motionless.
"Do that again," Remo said.
"Do what?"
"That thing with the curtains."
"I just did it," Chiun said.
"I want to see how you did it."
"You were watching. You did not see before. How will you see if I do it again?"
"I know how you did it. You inhaled and the drapes came to you."
"I inhaled with my fingers?" asked Chiun.
"How?" said Remo.
"I spoke French to it. Very softly so you would not hear. Even drapes understand French because it is not a hard language, even if they garble the pronunciation."
"Dammit, Chiun, I'm a Master of Sinanju too. You've told me that. You shouldn't withhold information from me. How am I going to support the village when I take over from you? How are all those sweet people I've come to know and love, how are they going to live if I can't ship them the gold? How can I do that if I can't even make a curtain lift?"
"You promise then?"
"Promise what?" asked Remo suspiciously. He had the vague sense that he was being pulled into Chiun like the drapes.
"To send the tribute to the village. To feed the poor, the elderly, the infants. For Sinanju is a poor village, you know. In bad times, we…"
"All right. All right. All right. I promise, promise, promise, promise. Now how'd you do that with the curtain?"
"I willed it."
"You willed it? And just like that, it happened? Remo asked.
"Yes. I have told you many times that all life is force. You must work to extend that force beyond the thin shell which is your skin. Extend that force beyond your body, and then objects that fall into the field of that force can be controlled by it."
"Okay, you've told me what, now tell me how."
"If you do not know the what, you cannot do the how."
"I know the what," Remo said.
"Then you can already do the how. No one need show you," said Chiun.
"A typical non answer," Remo said.
"You must practice," Chiun said. "Then you will be able to do it too. You had better start soon because you're not going to have me to kick around much longer."
"Oh? Where are you going?"
"I am retiring. I have a little sum put by which will enable me to live out my few remaining years in dignity. In my home village. Respected. Honored. Loved."
"Don't give me that. The last time you were home, the village sent a tank after you," Remo said.
"An error," Chiun said. "Never to be repeated. I have advice for you, regarding your future duties as Master of Sinanju."
"Yeah?"
"Yes. Do not take any checks. Make sure the tribute to the village is in gold. Remember. I will be there to inspect it when it comes And I do not trust Smith. He is an idiot, that man."
"Anything else?"
"Yes. Practice."
"Practice what?" Remo asked.
"Everything," Chiun said. "You do it all so badly."
"Little Father," Remo said, standing in the center of the room. "Ragaroo, digalee, freebee doan."
"What is that?"
"It's an old American art form called Mung Poetry. You know what it means?"
"No. What, if anything?"
"Go blow it out your ears," Remo said and walked out of the hotel room.
Entering the lobby, Remo took one step off the elevator and stopped cold, as if he had just remembered he had forgotten to put on his pants.
From across the Persian rugged lobby a woman smiled at him. She was long legged and dark haired. She wore a white silk pants suit, its jacket tied loosely above her hips with a belt, and even though she lounged on a chair, Remo knew that when she stood up the garment would be unwrinkled. She was a woman on whom a wrinkle, either of flesh or fabric, would have seemed like the defacing of a monument.
She stood and opened her arms wide as if welcoming Remo to step into them. Her long eyelashes flickered. Her eyes were gentian violet, made even more violet by the light blue of her upper lids, a light blue that seemed a gift of nature and not of a colorist's brush.
Remo moved forward dully across the lobby, toward the woman whose eyes were fixed on him with the unblinking gaze of a cheetah on the hunt. He felt ten years of Sinanju slip away from him. Ten years of control of mind and body so specific, so rigid, so detailed, that even his sex drive had turned into a physical exercise and an excuse to practice techniques. But as slowly as it had gone, that quickly it had returned, and Remo was consumed with the thought of the dark haired woman who still stood, smiling at him.
He stumbled across the lobby toward her outstretched arms, feeling foolish, wondering what he would do if those arms were not open for him, wondering what he would do if, at the last minute, she looked past him, stepped by him and swept some other man into her arms.
He knew what he would do. He would kill the other man. He would kill him on the spot, immediately, without remorse or feeling, and then he would grab the woman and drag her from the hotel and take her to a safe place from which she would never leave him.
When he neared her, the woman's arms dropped and like a chastened schoolboy, Remo stopped short.
He swallowed hard.
He tried to smile and even as it lit on his face, he knew it was a lopsided, sheepish smirk.
"My name is…"
"Your name is Remo," the woman said coldly. "You are an American. My name is Ludmilla. I am a Russian. I do not like Americans. You are decadent."
"Never more so than now," Remo said. "Why did you stand with your arms open?"
"Because I wanted to show you your foolish stupid decadence so that you would know the kind of idiot you are; the kind of imbecile I could make of you."
She walked away from Remo toward the door of the hotel. The bellboy scurried ahead of her to open the door, even though it was automatic and opened electronically when someone stepped on the rubber matted approach plate.
"Wait," Remo called, but the woman was gone out into the street, her very back exuding disdain for Remo. He ran to the door. It was the entrance door and the mechanical opener would not work from his side of the lobby. He used his right hand to teach it never again to stop anybody who was in a hurry to leave.
The woman was getting into a cab. The doorman went to close it after her. Gently. She was not the kind of woman after whom one slammed cab doors, even if she had not given him a tip. She had looked at him and almost smiled; it would last him the rest of the day.
Something stopped the cab door from closing. The doorman pushed harder.
"Just a minute," Remo said. He pulled the door open, extricated his left foot, then slid into the back seat of the cab and closed the door himself.
"Presumptuous bumpkin," the woman said.
"None other," said Remo. "Driver, take us anywhere at all, just as long as it takes a long time."
The driver turned. "Madame?" he said.
"Drive, I said," Remo ordered.
The driver nodded as if he was the creator and preserver of a unique moment in the history of old world charm, when actually he was wondering what kind of tip he would get out of this ride. Good looking women rarely tipped cabdrivers in Paris. And this American didn't look like a tipping tourist either.
When the cabdriver pulled away from the curb, Ludmilla said to Remo: "What do you want of me?"
"No. What do you want of me?"
"To be left alone. You can start now."
"Do you dislike all Americans equally? Or is it just me?"
"It is just you," Ludmilla said.
"Why?"
"Because you are an American spy, a killer, a…"
"Wait a minute." Remo leaned over the seat until his mouth was close to the driver's right ear. He reached up his hands and touched the bony prominences behind and below each ear. He pressed slightly as he said, "Just for a while, I'm going to do something to your ears."
The driver turned and in heavily accented English said, "I can't hear you. Something is wrong with my ears."
Remo made the okay sign and sat back. The driver continued rubbing, first his right ear, then his left, trying to restore his hearing.
"You were saying?"
"You are an American spy, a killer, a brute."
"And you?" Remo asked.
"I am the Russia spy who has come to kill you."
"Do I get my choice of ways to die?" Remo asked. " 'Cause I've got some great ideas."
"Only if the way is slow and painful," Ludmilla Tchernova said.
"Definitely slow," Remo said. "But I'm not much on pain."
"Too bad, American. Pain is definitely on your agenda."
"Why aren't you afraid of me?" Remo asked.
Ludmilla took a deep breath that noisily rustled the shiny fabric of her suit. Even sitting, the suit pulled tight against the curves of her body. She was so perfect she did not seem normal.
"You Americans are all fools," she repeated. "You will never hurt a woman. Cowboy mentality. I have seen all the movies."
"I've killed women," Remo said casually.
"That is because you are an indiscriminate slaughterer," Ludmilla said. "All Americans are. Remember Vietnam. Remember John Waynes. Remember Gene Autries. Remember Clint Westwood."
"All right," said Remo, "now that I know you hate me and you're going to kill me, do I get a last request?"
"Only if it is not offensive to the state."
Breakfast, it was decided, was not offensive to the state, and Remo told the driver to stop at the nearest cafe.
The driver kept going until Remo leaned forward and made twisting pressures with his thumbs behind the driver's ears. The driver's face brightened as his hearing returned and he suddenly heard the noisy honking of Paris morning traffic, the most unruly morning traffic of all cities, the traffic noise of a populace with a hangover.
"Stop here," Remo repeated.
He and Ludmilla ate breakfast at a streetside cafe under a bright umbrella that was the finest umbrella Remo had ever seen, at a table with a dirty tablecloth that was the finest dirty tablecloth Remo had ever seen, under a bright morning sun which Gallic ingenuity had arranged at just such an angle that it shone under all the umbrellas into all the diners' eyes, and which Remo decided, after much reflection, was just the finest bright morning sun he had ever had shining in his eyes, blinding him.
Unlike most Russian visitors to Western countries who gorged themselves with food as if Russia was just a vast empty icebox, Ludmilla ate only fruits with cream. Remo sipped Vichy water and picked at steamed brussels sprouts.
"Here, American," Ludmilla said, pushing a strawberry at Remo. "Try one."
"No, thank you."
"You do not have these in America," she challenged.
"Yes, but I do not eat them."
"An egg, then? I will order you an egg."
"No eggs."
"Aha, you do not eat strawberries and you do not eat eggs. Is this your secret?"
"What secret?"
"The secret of your power to overcome some of our best men," Ludmilla said.
"No."
"Oh," she said, and put the strawberry back into her own mouth.
"It is the Vichy water," she said.
Remo shook his head.
"Then what is your secret?"
"Clean living, clean thoughts, and pure motives. Not like those two friends of yours across the street."
"Where?" she said, looking surprised with a smile. It was one of the fourteen smiles she had down perfectly honest surprise.
"Over there." Remo nodded his head toward his right shoulder.
Across the narrow side street stood two men wearing heavy blue serge suits that bagged at the knees. They also wore brown shoes, white shirts, and black ties. Each wore a hat equipped with-as a conciliatory gesture to Parisian fashion and decadence-a small red feather in the brim.
Ludmilla looked them over as if she were a butcher inspecting a hindquarter that had turned suspiciously green.
"They are gross," she said.
The two men stared back stolidly at the staring Remo and Ludmilla until they apparently discerned that they were the watchees and not the watchers and they began to shuffle their feet, light cigarettes, and stare at non-existent overhead planes.
"I thought their disguises were wonderful," Remo said. "Who'd ever suspect they weren't Parisians?"
Ludmilla threw back her head and laughed. It was another of her fourteen perfections-a smiling laugh of wild abandon. Remo fell deeper in love, and he fell deeper still when he saw the long line of her swan-like but strong throat, as her head reached back and laughed toward the sky.
When the check came, Ludmilla insisted upon paying it. "Mother Russia does not take charity," she told Remo with a knowing lift of her eyebrows. She did not tell him that it was the first check she had ever picked up in her life.
She carefully counted out French franc notes and put them into the hand of the hovering waiter who, even in the morning, was dressed in a tuxedo and carried a silver tip plate.
"There," she said, looking at the man. "That is enough."
"Surely Madame has forgotten something," he said, looking at the bills.
"No. Madame has forgotten nothing."
"But surely, a tip?"
"There is no tip," Ludmilla said. "A waiter gets paid to wait. He gets paid by his employer, not by his customer. Why should I pay you an amount your employer does not think you are worth paying himself?"
"It is difficult to eat on a waiter's salary," the man said, still trying to smile, but his lips were pulled tightly across his teeth.
"If you wanted to be rich, perhaps you should have found some other career than being a waiter," Ludmilla suggested.
The man's eyes narrowed but the smile never wavered. "Ah, yes. But I was the wrong sex to be a courtesan."
"Keep trying, pal. You may make it yet," Remo said, standing.
"Perhaps Monsieur has something for me," the waiter tried.
Remo nodded. He picked something up from the table next to his. The waiter extended his always open, always hungry hand, palm up.
Remo ground out a cigarette on his hand. "How's that?" he said.
The waiter yelled.
Remo said, "Tell Lafayette we were here."
He walked off after Ludmilla. She did not walk, he noticed, like most Russian revolutionaries, who always seemed to have two problems: their pants were on fire, and they were trying to beat to the nearest corner a bus that traveled with the speed of light. Ludrnilla strolled like a young woman in Paris intent on giving as much as possible of the world a chance to see her.
"Before I have to kill you," she said to Remo, "I will give you the chance. Return with me to Russia. I will put in the good word for you."
"No," said Remo. "Counter-offer, You come with me to America."
Ludmilla shook her head. "It is a land of many beauties, your America. I have seen your women, your actresses and singers. They are most beautiful. Who would even see me?"
"You're a star that would shine in any heaven," Remo said.
"Yes," said Ludmilla, quickly converted to a point of view she had held all along anyway.
They walked along in silence and Remo listened to Paris. With the end of the morning rush hour traffic, the city hummed, a dull throbbing sound almost below the level of perception, but numbing the brain and senses. New York was noisy; it was a city where someone was always shouting. Paris was a city in which everyone was whispering at once, and no one was listening.
Except Remo. And out of the hum and the buzz he picked out what he wanted: the heavy clump and click of the two Russians following him, and Ludmilla.
"They're still following us," Remo said.
"Oh, those swine. They never leave one alone," Ludmilla said. "I wish they were dead."
"The wish is father to the dead," Remo said. He grabbed Ludmilla's elbow and steered her gently into an alley.
"What does that mean?" she said.
"Damned if I know," said Remo.
They were in a narrow dead end, only a half block long. It was bordered on both sides and at the end by three story high buildings that people called slums in the United States but called quaint when they arrived in Paris on a vacation to get away from the American slums.
Remo stood Ludmilla against the powdery brick wall of a building and walked across the cobblestone street to wait. There were no cars on the little alley.
The two men turned the corner, looking into the alley, then stopped. Remo winked at Ludmilla. She was looking at the two men and Remo saw her nod slightly to them. They came forward toward Remo, their hands jammed into their jacket pockets, their metal tipped heels clicking like castanets on the stones of the street.
Ludmilla fished in her gold brocade bag for a gold cigarette case. She flipped it open and extracted one cigarette, a long golden holder, and a thin golden lighter, and began assembling her smoke. A Russian scientist had reported that cigarette smoke caused the skin to age prematurely. From that day on, Ludmilla had used the long holder to keep the cigarette flame away from her face.
She watched as the men approached and stood in front of Remo, who leaned casually against the stone wall of a building.
"You are a killer," said one of them, a short stocky man with a face as memorable as a well worn patio block.
"Actually, I'm a dancer," Remo said. "If it was raining, I'd give you 'Singing in the Rain' " He looked skyward and shrugged. "Not even a "drizzle."
"You have killed many of our men," said the other man, a human built generally along the lines of a refrigerator.
"Right," said Remo, "so two more won't make any difference."
The two men pulled their hands from their pockets. Guns were in their hands.
Remo pulled their guns from their hands and then their hands from their arms and then put the two of them into the stone wall where their heads hit with matching clunks and became two more ringing endorsements of the poster there proclaiming Liberté, Egalité, Fraternité.
Ludmilla was about to flick the cigarette lighter when she heard the two men's heads hit and looked up to see them become part of the beauty that was Paris.
She ran across the street to Remo who was putting the men's guns into a sewer.
"Oh, I was so worried."
"Yeah," said Remo taking her arm and leading her back toward the main street. "I want to talk to you about that."
"About what?"
"Look, these dingoes come into the alley and you give them the high sign to go get me. Now if you're going to keep trying to kill me, it's going to be difficult to have any kind of meaningful relationship."
"It is true," Ludmilla said. She hung her head, doing abject sorrow.
"So what are we going to do?" Remo asked. "Seeing as how we're in love."
Ludmilla looked up brightly. "Suppose I only try to kill you on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays?"
Remo shook his head. "Naah, it'll never work. Too complicated. I have trouble remembering days and things."
Ludmilla nodded, understanding fully the immensity of that problem.
"You understand," she said, "that the only reason these people came after you was so that I could see you in action."
"I figured something like that."
"So I could learn your secret," she said.
"Right."
"You are awesome."
"Well, when I'm at my peak, I'm pretty good," Remo allowed. "Look." He stopped on the street and faced the young Russian woman, taking her elbows in his hands. "Just what is your mission? Is it to kill me or find out how I work?"
"Find out how you work. Then others can kill you."
"Okay, then it's solved. You do anything to try to find out how I work. But don't try to kill me. Fair?"
"I have to think about it," she said. "It may be just a dirty capitalist trick to try to stay alive."
"Trust me," Remo said, looking hard into her violet eyes with a look that had never failed before.
"I trust you, Remo," the woman said. "I will not try to kill you."
"Okay, then that's settled."
"But others might," Ludmilla said. It was not a prediction, it was an insistence. She would not enter into this pact with Remo unless other Russians had the right to try to kill him. After all, what did Remo take her for? A coat-turn?
"I don't care who else tries to kill me. I just don't want you trying it."
"Agreed," Ludmilla said. She extended her hand and shook Remo's formally, as if they were two diplomats who had spent months working out a meaningless, unworkable agreement of no interest to anyone but themselves.
"Okay. What do we do now?"
"We go to my hotel," Ludmilla said.
"And?"
"And we make beautiful, exquisite love. Seeing as how we are in love." Ludmilla smiled, the smile of awakening youth. It was one she did very well.
Remo nodded, as if making love were the most logical conclusion to an armistice that anyone could have devised. Together, arm in arm, they walked off. Remo looking forward, for the first time in years, to making love, and Ludmilla thinking of how she was going to find out the secret of his power so someone could kill this American maniac.

CHAPTER EIGHT

It was twenty-four hours since he'd left, but when Remo returned to his hotel room, Chiun was standing in the same position before the same set of yellow draperies, staring out at the same bright sun.
"It is all right," Chiun said without turning.
"What is all right?"
"It is all right that you are gone all night and you never let me know anything and I stay awake wondering all night if you are well or dead in an alley someplace. They have a Pig Alley in this city where people die all the time and how did I know you weren't there? Especially since they named it after you?"
"I wasn't there."
Chiun turned and waved a long nailed index finger in triumph. "Aha, but did I know that? Did you care enough to tell me?"
"No," said Remo honestly.
"Ingrate," said Chiun.
"True," said Remo. Nothing was going to spoil this day, the first day of the rest of his life, not even a bitching, carping, kvetching Chiun.
Remo smiled.
Chiun smiled.
"Ah, you are joking with me. You wanted to let me know you were well, but you couldn't? That's it, isn't it?"
"No," said Remo. "I haven't thought about you since yesterday morning. I didn't care whether you were worried or not. By the way, if you couldn't sleep, what's your sleeping mat doing out?"
"I tried to sleep, but I couldn't, I worried so much. I almost went out looking for you. You can see. The mat is barely wrinkled."
Remo said, "You could dance on it for eight hours and not wrinkle it." He said it mildly.
"But I didn't. I didn't even sleep on it."
"Chiun, I'm in love."
"Well, good,' said Chiun. "I forgive you then. It is a major step to take and I can understand why you were wandering the streets all night, thinking of the glories that are Sinanju and deciding to devote your life to our village, in a spirit of love. It is…"
"Chiun, I'm not in love with Sinanju. I'm in love with a woman."
Chiun looked shocked. He said nothing. Then he spat on the floor.
"All Frenchwomen are diseased," he said.
"She's not French."
"And American women are venial and stupid."
"She's not American."
Chiun tried a slight tentative smile. "A Korean girl? Remo, you are bringing home a…"
"A Russian," Remo said quickly.
"Aaaaagh," Chiun said. "Battalions of women with faces like gun butts and bodies like garages. A fine choice, meat-eater."
"She is a beauty," Remo said. "You shouldn't judge until you see. That's what you're always telling me."
"There are things you can judge without seeing, if you have any sense at all left in your head. You do not have to see every sunrise to know what the next one will look like. You do not have to spy on the moon every minute to make sure that it does not take the form of a square. Some things one knows. I know about Russian women."
"Not this one," Remo insisted.
"Where did you meet this creature?" Chiun asked.
"Woman, Chiun, not creature."
"Yes. Where did you met this meet this… one?"
"Woman, Chiun. I met her when she was trying to kill me."
"Very good," said Chiun. "And that of course told you it was love at first sight."
"Not really. For her, it had to grow."
"Good," Chiun said. "Now she is in love with you and will not try to kill you any more."
"Right."
Chiun shook his head. "Some day when all this world is ended and all the Masters of Sinanju who have ever lived gather with their ancestors to review the past, surely I will have the most elevated station of all. Because I have suffered the most. I have had to deal with you."
"Maybe not much longer," said Remo.
"I would meet this Russian barracks beauty with the face of a shovel and the form of a tractor."
"Good," said Remo. "I'd like you to meet her. I've told her a great deal about you."
"Will she try to kill me too?"
Remo shook his head. "I didn't tell her that much about you."
Remo and Chiun paused inside the door of the restaurant where they were to meet Ludmilla.
"There she is," Remo said. He pointed to the young Russian woman. No one in the restaurant saw him point because they were all already staring at Ludmilla, the men with lust, the women with envy.
"She is ugly," Chiun said.
"She has skin like cream," Remo said.
"Yes. That is one of the reasons she is ugly. The beautiful people have a different color skin."
"Look at her eyes."
"Yes, poor thing. Hers are straight. And violet. Violet eyes give very little protection against the sun. Marry that woman and you will have a blind crone on your hands before you get through your first thirty summers together."
"Have you ever seen hands like that?" Remo said. Ludmilla rose as she saw Remo. "A body like that?"
"No, thank the eternal powers that protect old men from shock. What an ugly creature."
"I love her," Remo said.
"I hate her," Chiun said. "I'm going home." He spun and brushed past Remo and walked back to their hotel, thinking deeply.

CHAPTER NINE

Walking to her hotel from the restaurant, Remo finally broke down. He had held strong through the salad, the soup, the main course, the coffee, and the dessert none of which he had eaten but Ludmilla finally got to him, and he told her the secret of his power.
It was candles. He had to sleep with candles lit in the room. If the candles weren't there or if they burned out, his strength vanished.
"Why did you not lose your power last night?" Ludmilla asked.
"Because I didn't sleep," Remo said. To prove his point, he stopped at a store and bought three thick red candles, the size of large instant coffee jars.
That night, as Remo slept in her playground sized bed, Ludmilla went into the drawing room of her suite, made a telephone call, then extinguished the candles and lay down beside Remo.
Remo slept through her getting up and slept through her extinguishing of the candles and slept through her phone call and her return to bed.
He woke only long enough to take care of the man who sneaked into the room, wrapped powerful fingers around Remo's throat and began to squeeze. Remo impaled him on the bed post.
"You lied to me," Ludmilla screamed.
"Tell me about it in the morning."
"You said candles were the secret of your strength," she bawled. "You lied."
Remo shrugged and rolled over.
"I want you out of here. Now. And take your body with you."
"It's hard for me to go anywhere without it," Remo said.
"I don't mean your body, I mean that body on the end of my bed."
"Oh, no," Remo said, rolling over to look at Ludmilla. "Call the Russian embassy. They sent him; let them get him. I don't clean up any more bodies. That's all. Forget it. I won't."
Ludmilla reached out a long index finger and trailed it gently down Remo's chest from his throat to his navel. She smiled at him.
After Remo had disposed of the body under a pile of trash behind the hotel, he went back to Ludmilla's bed.
He did not sleep.
"Smitty, I need some cash." Remo drummed his fingers on the coffee table in the living room of his own hotel suite while the transatlantic phone call clicked and sputtered.
It took him a few seconds to realize the clicking and sputtering wasn't the phone system. It was Smith.
"Cash?" Smith was saying. "I just got a bill of yours for a thousand dollars."
"So? Is that so much?"
"From a shoe store?" Smith asked.
"Come on, Smitty, you know how it is when you find a pair of shoes you like. You buy a couple of pairs."
"One thousand dollars?"
"Well, I bought twenty-two pairs. It was important that my feet be clad just so."
"I see," Smith said drily. "And you have these twenty-two pairs of shoes with you, I presume."
"Of course not. Could I travel overseas with twenty-two pairs of shoes?"
"What'd you do with them?"
Remo sighed. "I gave them away. Smitty, don't you ever do anything but bicker, bicker, bicker about money? Here I've just saved the free world from disaster and you're complaining about my buying a measly couple of shoes. I need some cash."
"How much?"
"Fifty thousand dollars."
"You can't have it. That's too much for shoes."
"I'm not buying any more shoes. I need it for something else. Something real important."
"What?"
"I'm not telling."
"You can't have it."
"Okay. I'll raise it. I'll hire myself out to the highest bidder."
From the corner of the room, Chiun squeaked, "I bid twenty cents." Remo fixed him with an evil stare.
"All right," Smith said after a pause. "It'll be at the American Express office. Your passport in the name of Lindsay?"
"Wait a minute. Let me look." Remo looked through the top drawer of the chest and found the passport under a thing in waxed paper that seemed suspiciously like a dead fish.
"Yeah. Remo Lindsay."
"The money will be there in an hour."
"Good going, Smitty. You'll never regret this."
"Fine. What are you going to buy with it?"
"I can't tell you. But we'll name our first child after you."
"Oh?" said Smith, with more than his usual show of interest.
"Yes. Skinflint Tightwad Williams. That's if it's a boy."
"Goodbye, Remo."
Remo hung up and saw Chiun staring at him.
"It is about time that you and I had a talk," Chiun said.
"About what?"
"It is customary for a father to tell his son of certain things when the son is old enough to under stand them. In your case, I'll do it now rather than wait another ten years."
"You mean sex and like that?" asked Remo.
"Partially. And about women, good and bad."
"I don't want to hear about it."
Chiun bridged his fingers before him as if he had not heard Remo. "Now if you were able to select any woman in the world to be with, who would you choose?"
"Ludmilla," said Remo.
Chiun shook his head. "Be serious. I mean any woman in the world, not just a woman who is so desperate that she is willing to be seen with you. Let your imagination run amok. Any woman. Name her."
"Ludmilla."
"Remo. There are beautiful women in the world, even some with straight eyes. There are intelligent women and loving women. There are even some quiet women. Why would you pick this Russian tank truck driver?"
"Because."
"Because why?"
Remo hesitated for only a split second. "Because I love her," he said.
Chiun lifted his eyes upward as if requesting God to pay close attention to the problems Chiun had to deal with in this life.
"Does she love you?"
"I think so," said Remo.
"Has she stopped trying to kill you yet?"
"Pretty soon now."
"Pretty soon now," Chiun mimicked. His voice grew sincere and concerned. "Remo. Do you know who really loves you?"
"No. Who?" asked Remo, wondering if Chiun were going to let down his defenses. For once.
"Smith," said Chiun, after a pause.
"Bullshit," said Remo.
"The president of the United States. The automaker."
"Horse dung," said Remo. "He doesn't even know my name. He calls me 'those two.' "
Chiun yelled, "The people of Sinanju."
"Hogwash," Remo yelled back. "They don't even know I'm alive. If they can tolerate me, it's because I have something to do with those lazy slugs getting their gold shipment every November."
Chiun paused. He looked ceilingward as if gathering the courage to give Remo the name of one more person who really loved him. He looked back. "There is no point in discussing something with someone who can talk only in barnyard terms."
"Okay. Does that mean our discussion of the birds and the bees is over?"
"We did not once mention birds and bees, just other barnyard animals," Chiun said.
Remo rose. "I've got something to do."
"What is that?"
"I've got to buy a present."
"It is not my birthday," Chiun said.
"It is not for you," Remo said, walking to the door.
"See if I care," Chiun called. "See if the one who really…"
Remo paused. "Yes?"
"Never mind," Chiun said. "Go."
After picking up a bank draft for fifty thousand dollars at the American Express office, Remo went to a small jewelry shop on the Rue de la Paix.
The asking price for the diamond ring was forty thousand dollars, but by shrewd maneuvering, hard bargaining, and his incredible knowledge of the French language in which the negotiations were carried out, Remo managed to get the price up to fifty thousand. He pushed the bank draft over the counter to the French proprietor who had eyes that looked as if two hardboiled eggs, had perforated his face, and a mustache that seemed to have been drawn on with one stroke of a woman's eyebrow pencil. The jeweler put the draft into the cash register quickly.
"Do you want it gift wrapped?" he said, in the first English he had spoken since Remo entered the shop.
"No. I'll eat it here. Of course I want it gift wrapped."
"There is a two dollar charge for gift wrapping."
"Throw it in for free," Remo suggested.
"I would like to, but…" The man shrugged a Gallic shrug. "You know how it is."
"You know how this is too," said Remo. He punched the nosale button on the register and plucked out the fiftythousand dollar bank draft. "Goodbye."
"Wait, sir. In your case we make an exception."
"I thought you might. Wrap it," Remo said.
When he presented the eight-carat stone to Ludmilla, she tore the paper, opened the box, looked at the ring, and threw it across the room.
"I already have diamonds," she said. "Do you think I would take a gift from a man who lies to me?"
"Okay, now I'll tell you the truth. I love you. I want you to come to America to live with me."
Ludmilla hissed at him. "Soooo, you think I give up my homeland that easily. Never. I am a Russian."
"Do you love me?"
"Maybe."
"Then come to America with me."
"No," Ludmilla said.
"My secret is in America," Remo said.
"Yes?" Ludmilla said.
"There is a spring there, a special water that makes any man invincible."
She came to his arms, and, without trying, he found himself flushing with warmth.
"Oh, Remo. I am glad you have at last told me the truth. Where is it, this spring?"
"In Las Vegas. That is a city," Remo said.
"I have never heard of it," Ludmilla said.
"It has much water," Remo said.
"And when do you want to go there?" she said.
"Tomorrow."
"Tonight," she said.
Remo kissed her lips. "Tomorrow," he said. "I have plans for tonight."
She looked at him with velvet eyes. "All right, tomorrow."
After Remo left, Ludmilla recovered the diamond ring from the floor. From a mother-of-pearl jewelry box in her top dresser drawer, she took a jeweler's loupe. She held the lens up to her eye and examined the ring carefully.
Only a VVF, she thought, a Very Very Fine. She noted a small carbon dot in the back of the stone. Worth no more than thirty thousand retail. But the American had probably paid forty thousand for it. Americans were such fools.
She put the ring in her jewelry box and then went to the phone to make a long distance call.

CHAPTER TEN

He was not going to the building at Dzerzhinsky Square. This time he was going to the Kremlin itself, and Marshal Denia decided not to wear his ribbons. He decided he was right when he saw the four men facing him. They wore dress uniforms with rows of ribbons on their chests. Each of them owned more ribbons than Denia had, and if he had worn his, it would have been a small admission that he was somehow less than them. By wearing none, he admitted only that he was different from them.
He looked at the clumps of ribbons on the four chests, each looking like an ear of Indian corn worn over the heart. Military decorations, he thought, were a tribute not to bravery or competence but to longevity. The best and bravest soldiers he had ever seen had often not lived long enough to earn even one ribbon. In their youthful pride, they would have laughed at these four cadavers who stared now at Denia and demanded explanations of his "curious performance."
"Curious, comrade?" Denia asked the chairman of the board of inquiry. "The Treska has demolished America's most secret and powerful spy organization in Western Europe. In the process, true, we have lost some men. But we are continuously training new men to replace them. In months… weeks, we will be back at full strength, while the Americans will never again put such a force in the field."
He said it and did not believe a word of it. Neither apparently did the chairman, a wizened old man with a face like cracked desert mud.
"And what guarantee do we have," the old man said, "that our new force will not be obliterated just as our last force was? What have you done about this?"
"I have isolated the special American agent who worked such damage on our men. I have infiltrated the entire apparatus. Soon we will have the answer to this riddle."
"Soon is not good enough."
"Soon is as good as it can be," Denia said, trying unsuccessfully to keep the edge from his voice. He looked to the other men sitting behind the stark wooden table in the small basement room. "In operations like ours, one occasionally encounters the unusual. You must study it before you can destroy it." One of the men on the panel had been a leader in Russia's scorched-earth policy when the Nazis invaded during World War II. Denia spoke in his direction. "It must be like the first foot soldiers ever to encounter a tank in battle. It would have been easy to run away. Or to panic and throw stones at the tank. But it was wise to watch and learn the monster's weaknesses. As our glorious people did against the Hitler hordes."
The old resistance leader nodded. Denia thought he had convinced one, before he realized, with disgust, that the old man was nodding himself to sleep. The man at the far right of the table had the look of a retired ribbon clerk and the manner of a lifelong cuckold. The look and manner disguised the fact that he was the premier's closest military advisor, a man whose bark could send even the secret police jumping. He had peopled one entire prison camp with his personal enemies.
"Your analogy is interesting, Gregory, but insufficient. We do not need descriptions of tactics that were successful thirty years ago in different situations. We need an up-to-the-minute report on what you are doing to eliminate this existing problem."
"One of our agents is with the American right now. She…"
"She?" Denia was interrupted by the aged chairman.
"Yes. Ludmilla Tchernova." Denia look at the man on the far right and smiled slightly. The man had been sleeping with Ludmilla for two years.
"Some of you know her," Denia said. "Ludmilla is one of our best agents. She is now on her way to America with this man. He thinks she has defected with him in the service of love. Her assignment is to find out what unusual weapons or techniques or powers this man uses, and then to report back to us so we can destroy him."
"When do you expect this will be accomplished?" asked the confidante of the premier.
Denia shrugged. "It is hard to say." From their faces, he could see that this did not go down well. "Within a week."
The premier's aide nodded. He looked at the other men at the table, then said, "All right. A week. And if that does not produce results, we shall have to try other measures."
Denia nodded in a military fashion. He tried not to show that he understood that those "other measures" would specifically exclude him, and that one week and a sexy Russian courtesan were all that stood between him and exile.
Or worse.

On the Air France plane to New York, Remo sat between Ludmilla and Chiun, who kept asking the stewardesses to bring him more magazines. He would scan each magazine quickly, then lean across Remo to point out to the young Russian woman stories about the latest atrocities behind the Iron Curtain.
Ludmilla kept her face fixed grimly on the window.
"All right, Chiun, knock it off," Remo said.
"I am just being friendly," Chiun said. He flipped the pages of the magazine in his lap, then excitedly pushed it across Remo into Ludmilla's hands. "See. The advertisement for a new tractor. You will love America. They have many tractors for you to drive."
Ludmilla snatched the magazine from Chiun and slammed it to the floor then threw her arms up over her head in desperation. The diamond ring on the index finger of her right hand glistened an eight carat glisten.
"How much of this abuse must I tolerate?" she said.
"Abuse?" Chiun said. "Abuse? What abuse? Now a friendly gesture and warm conversation is abuse?" He talked to Remo as if Ludmilla was not there. "Really, Remo, I cannot see what you like about this one."
Remo growled. Ludmilla turned her face stonily toward the window. Chiun looked back at another news magazine. He recognized a picture and pushed the magazine into Remo's lap.
"Look, Remo. The woman. Isn't she beautiful?"
"Yeah," Remo said without spirit. "Beautiful."
"I knew you would like her," Chiun said. He sat back in his seat and stared at the magazine. The woman was the kind Remo liked. Long in the leg and big in the chest. The man was hopeless. If a racehorse could fit into a dress, Remo would fall in love with it.
Chiun read the caption under the picture of the half-clad Hollywood star who was making her nightclub debut with a new act that featured partial nudity and total witlessness.
"Remo. Where did you say we were going?" Chiun asked.
"Ludmilla and I are going to Las Vegas. I don't know where you're going."
Chiun nodded and said softly, "I might just go to Las Vegas too." He read the caption again. The Hollywood star was opening her new night club act at the Crystal Hotel in Las Vegas. Chiun nodded. There was only one thing to do: fight ugly with ugly.
How simple it all would have been though if Remo had been taken with one of the lovely maidens of Sinanju. How simple.
Chiun mused as Remo got up and went to the men's room in the front of the first class section.
Ludmilla waited until he disappeared into the small room, then moved over into his seat. She looked at Chiun.
Eyes like a cow, he thought.
"Why do you hate me?" she said.
"I do not hate you. I do not understand what he," Chiun nodded toward the bathroom, "sees in you."
"Perhaps love."
"He has all the love he needs."
"From whom?"
"From me," Chiun said.
"You are jealous of me, aren't you?"
"Jealous? The Master jealous? Do you think I care what that pale piece of pig's ear does? No? Except for this. I have invested years of my life in this one, and I cannot sit by and watch him turn into mud in the hands of one whose only wish is to kill him."
"You think that's all I want?" she said.
"I know that is all you want. It is written on your face in foot-high letters. Only a fool could fail to see it."
"A fool. Or a man in love." Ludmilla laughed. She was still laughing when Remo returned to his seat.
"I'm glad to see you two are hitting it off better," Remo said.
Ludmilla laughed again. Chiun grunted and turned away, across the aisle, to look out the windows on the other side of the plane.

Two important meetings were held later that day.
In Washington, the Secretary of State stood before the President's desk, waiting for the Commander in Chief to finish stapling together a small pile of papers. The President carefully positioned the stapler at the upper left hand corner of the sheets. He held it accurately in place with the thumb and middle finger of his left hand. He raised his right fist up in front of his forehead and slammed it downward at the stapler.
And missed.
His right fist slammed into his unprepared left hand. The stapler slid away. Papers bounced into the air. The President jerked his left hand to his mouth and began sucking on the injured fingers.
He sighed, looked up, and remembered the Secretary of State. Odd that the man should be standing in the center of the room. Why hadn't he come closer to the desk?
He beckoned the Secretary to come nearer. With a cautionary look at the stapler, the Secretary waddled slowly forward.
"What is it?" the President asked.
"I have just returned from a closed door meeting of the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee," the man said. His voice was a slow professional chant that sounded as if he were going to begin a disquisition on mathematical theory in the Golden Age of Greece.
"Yeah?" mumbled the President around the fingers that were still stuck in his mouth. The hurt was starting to leave them now. If he was lucky, he wouldn't get blood blisters under the nails.
"They had heard that somehow we have scored a major intelligence victory in Europe and of course they wish to investigate this."
"Ummmmmm," the President sucked.
"I told them that I had no knowledge of such a victory and certainly we did not have anything to do with securing it, if victory it was."
"Ummmmmm," the President said.
"They did not believe me. They think this administration has defied their Congressional prerogatives and gone off on some kind of intelligence adventure."
"Ummmmm."
"They will call me and the CIA Director to testify, probably in the next few days."
"Ummmmm. Seems logical."
"So don't you think, Mr. President, that it is now time to tell me just what has occurred in Europe?"
The President took his fingers from his mouth. "No," he said. "What you know is accurate. The United States took no action with any of its agencies to bring about whatever Congress thinks may have happened in Europe. Stick with that. It's true."
The Secretary of State looked unhappy, but he nodded.
"Tell me," the President said. "Do you think the Congress really wants the Russians to beat us?"
"No, Mr. President," the Secretary said. "But they are pandering to those who do."
"Who are?"
"The press. The young. The radicals. Everyone who hates America because they have been rewarded, by life here, in a manner that far exceeds their worth."
The President nodded. He liked it when the Secretary was philosophical. The Secretary waited, then turned again to the door.
His hand was on the knob when the President spoke.
"Mr. Secretary," he said.
"Yes sir?"
"I've just about had it with these people. I want you to know. If Congress puts any heat on you over this European business…"
"Yes?"
"I'm going to hang them up by their balls."
When the Secretary of State met his eyes, the President of the United States winked.
The other important meeting was held later that day, backstage at the Crystal Hotel in Las Vegas where Miss Jacquanne Juiceshe was always billed as "Miss Jacquanne Juice," although there had not been, since she was eleven years old, any danger of anyone's mistaking her for Mr. Jacquanne Juice was trying to explain to a costume designer what was wrong with the bra she was wearing.
"Look, I'm going to flash my galonkers at them for the finale. But it would help if I could get them out of the bra. The goddamn thing doesn't open up."
The designer was a small man with long whiteblond hair. His wrists were thinner than the woman's. His fingers were inoffensive as he touched the front clip on the bra the young woman wore and showed her how a simple squeeze on both sides of the strap would pop it open.
"See?" he said, as the bra exploded open and Miss Jacquanne Juice was left standing barebreasted in the middle of the rehearsal stage. Around them, throats cleared and movement ceased. Men who a second before had been busy doing things, professional things on which their livelihoods depended, stopped, no longer caring about anything except Miss Jacquanne Juice's mammary glands.
"It's easy," the costume designer said.
"It's frigging impossible," the woman answered. "It's easy for you, you're fooling around with somebody else's tits all day. For me, it's hard. I keep clawing at this thing and clawing at it. If I ever get the thing open, I'll be standing there, my jugs covered with blood. Is that what you want for a finale? Is it? A frigging horror show? You going to bring bats down out of the balcony? Hah? Oh, crap. Doesn't anyone around here care about me? Am I always going to be just a piece of meat?"
She looked around the stage and found that every pair of male eyes within sighting distance was fixed upon her breasts. Some of them were nodding answers to her question.
Except one.
A small, aged Oriental wearing a white robe looked at her with hazel eyes that were wise beyond wisdom, and he smiled at her slightly and nodded, a nod of sympathy and understanding. The small movement of his head seemed to send waves across the room to where Miss Jacquanne Juice stood, waves that enveloped her with knowledge of her own womanhood and personhood. She suddenly felt barebreasted, and she pulled the bra's cups closed around her front and fumbled with the clip.
"We'll work on it later," she told the clothing designer, then brushed past him to speak with the old Oriental.
She stood in front of the old man, staring down at the white brocade robe, and then, because she could think of nothing to say but had to say something, she said: "Did you know I have an IQ of 138?"
"I can see that," Chiun said. He had never heard anyone describe her bust size with the letters IQ before, but if she claimed to be a 138, he believed it, because she was cow-like like most American women were or aspired to be.
"And yet," he added, "they treat you badly. They all want something from you, but in turn they give nothing."
He patted a spot next to him on the top of the wardrobe trunk, indicating that she should sit down.
"How did you know that?" she said.
"They all want and take but never give. There is none you can trust, none who cares about you as much as he cares about himself."
Miss Jacquanne Juice nodded.
"But how did you know? You're some kind of a guru, aren't you? How did you know?"
"It is ever thus with leaders. With stars as well as with emperors. The most difficult thing is to find one you can trust, someone without motives of his own, someone who cares for you as you and does not wish something from you."
"Oh. All my life. Looking and looking," Miss Jacquanne Juice said. She put her head on Chiun's shoulder. He patted her bare back gently, to console her for a world so cruel that it paid her only a quarter-million dollars for two weeks of breast-baring in the middle of the Nevada desert.
"You can stop searching," Chiun said. "There is one who cares about you." He turned his face to look into her eyes.
"I believe. I believe," she said. She pushed her face closer to his shoulder. "Oh, what a feeling to know there is someone who cares."
Chiun patted her back again, this time searching out a precise spot for tapping with his long fingernails.
"And you must let me…" She sighed as she felt the currents from Chiun's fingers pass through her body. "You must let me do something for you."
She looked up at Chiun hopefully. He shook his head. "There is nothing I need, my child."
"There must be something, something I can do for you."
"Nothing," Chiun said.
"Something. Anything. A gesture."
Chiun paused, long enough to appear thoughtful. Then he said:
"Well, there is just one little thing."

That afternoon, after a platoon of hotel personnel had made her comfortable in her room, Ludmilla pressed Remo for the exact location of the secret spring that gave him his powers.
Remo sighed. "Look, we're in America. You promised to give this a try, and maybe to stay. Now can't you stop being a government honcho for a while?"
"This has nothing to do with government. This has to do with honor. And trust. And love. You promised me and you should live up to your promise."
"It's not far from here," Remo said. "Ten, twenty miles."
"When will we go there?"
"Now if you want."
"Tomorrow. Tomorrow will be better. And we will have a picnic. And we will make love out in the sand."
Remo, who knew more about sand and desert heat than Ludmilla, nodded, but the more he nodded, the more appealing the idea sounded.
"And now you must leave," Ludmilla said.
"Why?"
"Because I need my rest. Go. Go. I will see you later and be beautiful for you."
Remo nodded again and left, and walked whistling down the hallway toward the steps to his own room. He did not hear the silent movements behind him as Chiun came from behind a potted palm and walked to Ludmilla's door.
Inside the telephone rang. Ludmilla said "hello" and waited while the operator opened the line on her call to Moscow. Chiun could only hear her half of the conversation with Marshal Denia.
"Yes. Probably tomorrow we will go there. Oh, good. You are coming? When will you get here? Wonderful. I long to see you again. I will not go there until you arrive."
Chiun rapped on the door, and heard the telephone quickly hung up. When Ludmilla opened the door, her face was first surprised, then annoyed.
"Oh. You."
"Yes. I hope I did not disturb anything important." He smiled at her and Ludmilla knew that Chiun had heard the call. What she did not know was that Chiun, at that moment, was only a hair away from killing her to protect Remo. But he did not strike, because Remo would never have believed in the necessity of the act.
"Nothing important," she said. "What do you want?"
"I am inviting you and Remo to dinner tonight. As my guests."
"Oh, well…"
"You must," Chiun said. "You and I must be friends."
She paused, then acceded. "If you insist."
"I do. I insist. Remo will call for you. I will see to it."
Ludmilla laughed. "I have already seen to it, old man. He will call for me whenever I wish."
"As you would have it," Chiun said and walked away, angered because the woman was right. Remo was her slave.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

"I don't know why you keep that old man hanging around anyway," Ludmilla said.
"I've grown accustomed to his face," Remo said, and sipped his mineral water to turn off the conversation.
They sat at a front table in the Crystal Hotel supper club. Chiun had insisted that all the arrangements be left to him, and when Remo and Ludmilla arrived, the headwaiter smiled at them, showed them to a front row table, was polite, and set the indoor record for Las Vegas, a mark that would live forever, Remo decided by refusing a tip.
Ludmilla persisted. "It would be different if that old goblin gave something to you. But nothing except complaints. This is how you spend your life? Listening to him complain? Why is he here? Why is he with us?"
"He's really a nice old geezer," Remo said. "Besides, he has his strong points."
"Yes?"
"Yes," said Remo.
"Tell me one of his strong points."
Remo thought a moment. How to tell her that Chiun was more deadly than a whole military division, more powerful than plutonium, more accurate than calculus. How to tell her?
"He's all right," Remo said. "He knows a lot of things."
"He knows how to get old and sponge off his betters and his youngers," Ludmilla said. "Too bad for you that you do not send him away."
"Well…" Remo was noncomittal. "That's the way it goes."
He was spared further conversation by the crowd. Instead of a roar, there was a hush and then every voice in the room was silent, and Remo turned toward the entrance to the supper club.
Walking down the aisle through the tables was Chiun, wearing a black robe, and on his arm, towering a head over him, was Miss Jacquanne Juice, headliner of the show at the Crystal Hotel. She wore a scanty white gown and nothing else.
Remo looked at them, as did every other pair of eyes in the room.
"Stop looking at her," Ludmilla said.
"I'm not," Remo said. "I'm looking at Chiun. The old fox is enjoying this."
There was a spattering of applause. Like a heavyweight fighter, Chiun waved, a king's gesture to quiet the unruly mob.
Then Chiun and Jacquanne were at the table and the headwaiter helped seat them, and slowly the room returned to its steady buzzing as customers went back to their drinks.
Chiun smiled. "Remo, this is Miss Jacquanne Juice. Or something like that. This is Remo, who is better than he looks."
Chiun stopped and Remo cleared his throat.
"Oh," Chiun said. "This…" He waved toward Ludmilla. "This is a Russian woman. This is Miss Jacquanne Juice."
Ludmilla nodded. Jacquanne looked at her, then said, "You're beautiful."
Chiun nudged her under the table, but Remo said, "Yes, isn't she?"
"So are you," Chiun said to Jacquanne. "You are most beautiful. The most beautiful woman Remo has ever seen. Isn't that right, Remo?"
Remo shrugged and looked at Ludmilla.
"Isn't that right, Remo?" Chiun persisted.
"What is your name?" Jacquanne asked Ludmilla.
"Ludmilla."
"You are beautiful. Truly beautiful."
"Thank you." It did not occur to Ludmilla to return the compliment; it did not occur to Jacquanne to hint at it.
Chiun said, "You are truly beautiful," to Jacquanne. "Don't you think so, Remo?"
Remo nodded, reluctantly.
"And she makes a very good living, Remo. She has her own band, and people who walk around fastening her brassieres and everything," Chiun explained.
Remo nodded again.
Ludmilla said, "Remo, I have a headache. I think I'd like to go back to my room."
"All right." Remo stood.
"You are coming back, though, Remo, right?" said Chiun.
"I doubt it." Ludmilla answered for Remo.
Chiun looked dejected. Jacquanne could not take her eyes off the Russian woman. Remo shrugged.
"Good night, Chiun. Good night, Miss…'' Remo said.
"Juice," said Chiun. "Jacquanne Juice."
"Good night, Miss Juice," Remo said.
"Good night," said Ludmilla. "Miss Juice. Old man." And when Chiun met her eyes, she winked-the wink of a winner to a loser, and then she turned and led Remo from the supper club.
They had gone only two steps toward the exit when Remo was stopped by an order, barked by Chiun in Korean.
Remo turned. He felt Ludmilla stop and look back also. Chiun, speaking a fast flow of Korean words, picked up the dinner knife at the table. He held it in his left hand, handle between his fingertips, then with the tip of his right index finger struck the knife three times, with no more apparent force than if he were poking someone in the chest to make a point. The first two pokes broke off pieces of the steel knifeblade; the third poke split the silver alloy handle into two pieces which fell on the table in front of Chiun.
He nodded to Remo who nodded back before pulling Ludmilla toward the door. She was looking over the shoulder at Chiun and the pieces of knife in front of him.
"What did he say?" she asked.
"It was Korean," Remo said. " 'Even a knife may shatter; even a strong man may fall.' "
Ludmilla was still looking over her shoulder, her eyes narrowed.
"How did he do that with the knife?"
"Who knows?" said Remo.
"Can you do it?"
"I don't know. Maybe. Chiun understands more about objects than I do. It has something to do with vibrations."
They were at the door and Remo led the way out. Ludmilla kept staring at Chiun until the door closed behind them.
The next day Marshal Denia arrived in Las Vegas.

CHAPTER TWELVE

Ludmilla had begged off the trip to the desert to see Remo's magic spring, pleading an upset stomach; Remo had gone out to walk around Las Vegas; and Chiun was alone in their room when a messenger came.
"I must see you. L."
Chiun crumpled the message and dropped it on the floor, then walked up to Ludmilla's room.
When he entered, she was seated at her dressing table, her back to Chiun, wearing only a bluish robe that made her skin seem to glow a pale yellow. She smiled at Chiun in the mirror, a dropped eyes coy smile, then carefully closed her open robe before she spun on her chair and faced him.
"I have asked you to come so I could apologize to you," she said. "I have treated you badly."
"I am always treated badly," Chiun said.
"I know how it must be. No one understands you; they ask much of you but give nothing in return."
Chiun nodded. The faint tendrils of hair over his ears continued nodding after his head had stopped.
"Well, I do not wish to be one of those ungrateful ones," said Ludmilla. She rose and walked to Chiun who stood just inside the door. She took his two hands in hers. "I am sorry," she said.
"Why?" said Chiun.
"I am sorry for my rudeness, but more for my stupidity. I realize all I could learn from your wisdom and your gentleness and like a fool I have rejected that gift of friendship you offered me."
Chiun nodded again.
She reached her right hand to touch the side of his face. As her left arm left her side, the front of her dressing gown slipped open. She moved even closer to Chiun, so close their bodies almost touched. "Can you forgive me?" she said.
"Yes," said Chiun. He looked down at Ludmilla's flawless skin, shadowed yellow by the blue of the gown. "You are a lovely woman," he said.
She smiled at him again and left her hand on the side of his face. "Thank you," she said. "But beauty is a gift of God; wisdom is an achievement of character."
"That is true," Chiun said. "That is true. Most never see that truth."
"Most never have their eyes fully open," she said. She leaned even closer to him.
"And what of Remo?" Chiun said.
Ludmilla shrugged. The movement almost, but not quite, released her breasts from her gown. "Who looks at the sapling when he stands on the edge of the forest?"
And again Chiun nodded, and as he did, Ludmilla leaned forward and moved her face down to his, searching for his lips with hers. As she found them, she said softly, "I have never been made love to by a Master of Sinanju."
And afterwards, she said-and meant it-"Never before like that."
She lay next to Chiun in her bed, his body still clothed in his red kimono, hers covered by a sheet, and laughed.
"To think of Remo telling me his power came from a magic spring."
"The child likes to joke," Chiun said.
"But the power is Sinanju, isn't it?" she said.
"No, beauteous one. The power is within each person; Sinanju is the key that unlocks the power."
"And you are the Master." She said it in a tone of reverential awe, as if she could not believe that Chiun was with her.
Then she rolled on her side toward him, put her left hand on his face, and said, "Show me a trick. Do something for me."
"Sinanju is not meant for tricks," he said.
"But for me? Just once. Just let me see some of your awesome power. Please?"
"Only for you," Chiun said.
"Remo told me it was vibrations," she said.
"Sometimes it is vibrations," Chiun said. "It is in knowing what you deal with that you make each thing a weapon. Each thing has its own vibrations, is its own central being, and to use it, you must first understand it, then become it."
As he spoke, Chiun used a fingernail to bust open the pillow under his head. He sat up and pulled out two small feathers, each an inchlong piece of fluffy down.
"What could be softer than the feather?" he said. "Yet, it is soft only because we use it for softness. We need not."
Hands moving faster than eye could follow, Chiun raised the two feathers, one in each hand, to his eyes, and then splashed his hands forward toward the opposite wall of the room.
The two small feathers left his fingertips like supersonic darts, hit the wooden wall with simultaneous "pings," and buried themselves into the wood panel where they stayed, vibrating, in the breeze of the overhead air conditioner, like miniature plumes.
"Marvelous," Ludmilla said. "Can I do that? Can I learn?"
"Only after much practice. Much time," said Chiun.
"I have much time," she said, pulling him back onto the pillow next to her. "And I want to learn everything you can teach me."
"And I will teach you," Chiun said. "Things you never even dreamed of before."
Later, Ludmilla had a wonderful idea. Her upset stomach had vanished, so why didn't she and Chiun drive out into the desert and look for a spring, then tell Remo they had found his magic spring. It would be a joke. A wonderful joke, she thought. And if Chiun wanted to change, he could; she would arrange for a car and driver, and meet him in front of the hotel in fifteen minutes.
Chiun looked at her and she could see in his eyes that he wanted to do this thing very much, so without even waiting for an answer, she patted his face again and walked with him to the door.
He stopped in the doorway and looked up at her violet eyes.
"You are a most beautiful woman," he said.
Ludmilla blushed and then closed the door behind him. She had things to do and she didn't need Chiun around. No fool like an old fool, she thought, as she went to the telephone.
Twenty minutes later, she and Chiun were sitting in the back of a Rolls Royce on its way out of Las Vegas on Boulder Highway. Chiun wore a thin black robe.
In the front seat was their driver, a pudgy mustached man, and two other men who, Ludmilla explained, were guides to the desert around Las Vegas. Each had a neck as big as the average man's thigh. They wore hats and stared straight ahead. Ludmilla's eyes looked up and caught the eyes of the driver in the rearview mirror.
Field Marshal Gregory Denia smiled at her. The courtesan had done her work well. First, they would finish this old man, and then even the score with the American, Remo. The courtesan had done very well.

Remo lost $2,350 playing roulette but won $4.00 in nickels playing slot machines before getting back to the hotel, where the first thing he saw was the crumpled note Chiun had dropped on the floor.
I must see you. L.
He would talk to Chiun about that. Intercepting a note obviously meant for Remo, and then just throwing it away. He steamed on his way up the stairs to Ludmilla's room.
There was no answer to his knock, but the door was open and inside, in an envelope, he found another note: this time for him.

Remo. I do not wish to see you again. The old one has shown me what true love is. I am heart and body the woman of the Master of Sinanju. Goodbye. Ludmilla.

Remo crumpled the note and dropped it. His brain whirling in confusion, he spun and looked at the room. The bed was unmade, and Remo could see that it had been used, but not for sleeping.
"Chink bastard. Dirty two timing conniving slant-eyed Korean fink," Remo shouted. He slammed his fist into the wall, splintering the wood panel, and then, the blood rising up in his temples, he walked from the room with a mission in his mind. He was going to find and kill Chiun. Search and destroy.
It took him five minutes to learn that Chiun and Ludmilla had driven out into the desert in a rented Rolls Royce and only five seconds to steal a car to follow them.
Minutes later, Remo was racing across the desert highway, his foot holding the gas pedal down to the floor, the stolen Ford a projectile, moving at 120 miles an hour down the straight as string two lane road.
And ten minutes later he saw the big Rolls Royce parked alongside the highway, and he saw footprints through the sand leading toward a small hill seventy-five yards from the road.
He turned off the key and skidded the car to a stop and was out, on the ground, before the car stopped rocking on its springs.
There were a lot of footprints leading through the sand but Remo was interested only in one pair-those of Chiun's sandals, which scuffed along in the middle of all the other footprints.
Remo took the hill in three giant strides. He was looking down into a natural depression, a bowl in the ground surrounded by an almost perfectly circular hill. Sitting in the sand, his black robe swirled about him, was Chiun. His arms were folded and he looked implacably ahead.
"Dink bastard," Remo shouted and ran down the hill into the natural amphitheater, before it occured to him to wonder where Ludmilla was.
"Rat bastard," Remo yelled again.
Chiun looked up. "I have waited for you."
"And so have we." The voice came from behind Remo. He turned and saw three men and
Ludmilla coming down the hill toward him. The three men carried pistols in their hands.
Remo looked from Ludmilla to Chiun, then back to the woman and the three men.
Two of the men stopped behind Remo and trained their weapons on him, while the third man, Marshal Denia, and Ludmilla walked past Remo and stopped in front of Chiun.
"Ludmilla," Remo called weakly. She did not respond. She did not even look at him. Denia did.
"This is a better catch than I hoped for. First the old man, and then you, American. The spilled blood of the Treska will be avenged."
"Go ahead," Remo said. "Kill the son of a bitch."
Denia cocked his revolver and pointed it at Chiun, who sat still only six feet away from him, his arms still folded.
"Chiun," Remo called. But Chiun did not answer, and Remo suddenly realized the truth. Chiun was going to let himself be killed.
"Chiun," he yelled again.
"Only one can save my life," Chiun said finally.
"I'll save it," Remo said. "I'll save it. Just for the pleasure of killing you myself, you two-timing fraud."
Chiun shut his eyes. "The House of Sinanju has lived on a frail thread for thousands of years," he said. "If it must be broken now by a Master I have chosen and I have trained, then these eyes will not see it. I welcome this Russian death."
As if to oblige, Denia raised his pistol at arm's length before him, taking aim at Chiun's forehead. Remo saw Ludmilla reach into her handbag and remove her cigarette case and begin to light a cigarette.
"I'll save it," Remo yelled. "I'm going to save it and then I'm going to wring your scrawny neck."
He lashed back with both feet, kicking up and out. He felt the backs of his shoes crack into two gunbearing hands. His own hands hit the sand and Remo pulled his weight up and forward, then slammed back with the toes of his feet into two throats. He knew without turning that both men were dead, and he used their throats for a toehold to break across the sand toward Denia and Chiun and Ludmilla.
"Gregory," Ludmilla said when she saw Remo coming toward them. Denia turned and pointed his pistol at Remo who stopped, ten feet away, apparently neutralized by Denia's gun.
"So these are the tricks of Sinanju," Denia said with a smile. "In some other age, American, I would have liked to learn them." He sighed heavily. "But this is not the time or the place."
He squeezed the trigger and fired a shot at Remo. At ten feet, it missed. Remo had slipped off to the left, and now he was standing motionless in a new spot. Denia fired again, and missed again, and now Remo was moving slowly across the sand toward him, high on his toes, scurrying, slipping, and sliding, and Denia fired again and again and again and… click! The revolver was empty, and Remo made one final move in, plucked the revolver from Denia's hand, and replaced it in the Russian spy's throat. It went in barrel first and Denia coughed, as if he had swallowed a piece of food down the wrong tube, and then he reached for his throat but the gun butt got in his way. His hand closed on it, and it looked as if he had just punctured his own throat with his own gun, and then he exhaled, a single loud hiss of air, and fell heavily onto his side in the sand.
Chiun opened his eyes and saw Remo towering over him. Remo rocked back and forth on his feet as if building up enough inertial energy to strike.
"You're dead, Chiun," he said. "You made love to her. My woman. How could you?"
"It was easy," Chiun said mildly. "She asked me to. She would have asked anyone to, if she thought they could give her a way to kill you."
Remo blinked, then looked from Chiun to Ludmilla. She shook her head at him. "He lies," she said. "He lies. He came to my room and took me by force. It was awful. Terrible."
Remo looked back to Chiun who still sat motionless in the sand. "Ask yourself, Remo. What are these Russians doing here? Who were they sent to kill? Who led them to you and to me?"
"Enough of this, Remo," Ludmilla said. "Kill this old fool and let us be off. In Russia, you can have a new life with me."
Remo hesitated. His hands clenched and unclenched.
"Do it now, or I leave," Ludmilla said. "I will not stand here burning in the hot sun waiting for a fool to make a decision." She flicked her gold lighter and raised it to the cigarette at her lips.
Remo looked down at Chiun. His hands were folded in his lap; his eyes were closed, but his face was tilted upward, and his throat was a target as open as an Irish drunk's mouth. A toe shot would take him out for good. Rip out the throat and leave him in the sand.
"I'm waiting, Remo," Ludmilla said. Remo still hesitated, and Ludmilla walked past him to the body of Marshal Denia. "If you won't do it, I'll do it myself." She picked up the empty revolver and turned to aim it at Chiun.
His left arm flailed out around his body, and the side of his hand came up, hit into the end of Ludmilla's gold cigarette holder and slammed it back into her throat. She looked at Remo with large violet eyes, made larger by shock and surprise, then she smiled at him the smile of sudden joy-but she still didn't have it right, and she died.
Remo dropped to his knees and buried his face on Ludmilla's body. He wept. Chiun rose to his feet and moved silently to Remo and patted him on the shoulder.
"She wanted only to kill you, my son."
With almost invisible pressure, his patting motion turned into a grasp that lifted Remo up from the sand and placed him on his feet.
"Come," Chiun said. Still holding Remo's shoulder, he walked him away toward the cars behind the small hill.
At the top of the hill, Remo looked down at the body of Ludmilla and his voice broke again.
"I loved her, Little Father."
"How long are you going to hold this against me?" Chiun asked. "Am I going to hear nothing but complaints for the rest of the afternoon?"

A week later, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, which had given the Secretary of State and the CIA Director a tough going-over behind closed doors, was called to the office of the President of the United States.
The President dumped out a manila envelope containing some two dozen passports. He looked around the room at the thirteen senators who sat in soft leather chairs facing his desk.
"Those are the passports of twenty-four American agents who have been killed since you clowns began meddling with our intelligence setup."
The chairman of the committee began to rise to protest. The President of the United States put a large sinewy hand on his shoulder and pushed him back into his chair.
"Sit still and shut up."
The President dumped out another envelope filled with passports.
"Those are the fake cover passports of the Russian spies who killed our men. They're dead now, too."
He looked slowly, around the room, meeting and holding every man's eyes in turn.
"Now you can make something of this if you want to. It's your right to do that. But let me tell you something. Mess with this and I'm going to hang all your asses on a garage door. When I'm done telling the American people how you were responsible for twenty-four murders, you'll be lucky not to be indicted yourself. For murder. You got it?"
No one spoke.
"Any questions?"
No one spoke.
Three days later, the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee decided unanimously that there was no substance to the reports of major espionage activity in Western Europe by the United States and decided to drop its planned investigation.

REVISION HISTORY
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Murphy - Destroyer 026 - In Enemy Hands

eVersion 2.0 - see revision notes at end of text

The Destroyer #26:

IN ENEMY HANDS

by

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Copyright (c) 1976

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

Ludmilla Tchernova noticed a blemish. Two inches below and slightly to the left of her left breast bloomed ever so slight a kiss of red on the immaculate, smooth white body. The breasts rose in youthful firmness, capped by mounds so perfectly round they looked as if they had been designed by a draftsman's compass. The waist narrowed in gentle tautness to creamy hips that billowed just enough to establish womanhood, and no more.
The neck was a graceful ivory pedestal for the crowning gem: the face of Ludmilla Tchernova.
She had the kind of exquisite face that made other women want to go back to veils. When she entered a room, wives would kick husbands in the shins just to remind them they were still on earth. Her smile could get a rabid Communist to say mass on his knees. She made the average young Russian woman look like a tractor trailer.
She had violet eyes set in the perfection of a pale symmetry composed of a graceful nose and lips that looked as if they were almost artificial in their delicate pinkness. But that they were real showed when she smiled. Ludmilla Tchernova had fourteen different smiles. Her happiness and gentle acquiescence smiles were her best. Her worst was the smile of sudden joy. She had been working on sudden joy for a month now, watching children when she gave them ice cream cones.
"Hello, dear, this is for you," she would say. And she would watch the child's lips carefully. Sudden joy tended to take two forms. One was a delayed action, which was very hard to get just right, and the other was an explosion of the lips, very wide. She could do the explosion, but, as she had told her uncle, who was a general on the Committee for State Security (KGB), it lacked force, and sometimes, if one looked closely, it could be misinterpreted as cruelty. She certainly did not want to look cruel when she intended to express sudden joy.
She had a major of the KGB, female, assigned to her. Lately this major had been picking up ice cream cones, cleaning the dirt off them, and handing them back to children. For as soon as Ludmilla had seen the smile she wanted, she tended to discard the cone.
"I'm not here to feed the masses," she had answered when the female major suggested that, with a little more effort, she might continue handing the ice cream cone forward until the child had a firm grasp on it. "I serve the party in a different way. If I wanted to feed children, I would have become a nurse. And it would be a waste of a great natural resource which I have chosen to give to the party and to the people."
"A little kindness cannot hurt," said the major, not especially known for a soft heart but who, in Ludmilla's presence, tended to think of herself as St. Francis of Assisi.
She was a relatively attractive Volga German with blond hair and blue eyes, clean features and an attractive body. Next to Ludmilla, she looked like a light heavyweight boxer at the end of his career. Ludmilla Tcheirnova could make a rainbow look plain.
Now there was a great problem, and as Ludmilla stared at the blemish beneath her left breast, she demanded of Major Natasha Krushenko what she had been fed the night before.
"Strawberries and fresh cream, Madame."
"And something else. There had to be something else." The voice was heavy with anger, but the face was calm. Grimaces could cause wrinkles.
"There was nothing else, Madame."
"There had to be to explain this blemish."
"The human body produces substances that create blemishes. It will disappear."
"Of course it will disappear. It's not your body."
"Madame, I have many blemishes like that."
"No doubt," said Ludmilla who had not been listening to the answer but was very carefully outlining the blemish with her finger. She did not want to aggravate it more by touching it. She found it quite helpful to ignore the crudities of Major Krushenko. In the center of her entire world, this blemish on her body lounged in grievous and grating insolence. And that Krushenko lout claimed she hadn't even seen it at first. Krushenko was a barbarian.
She applied body cream made from Vitamin E, sardine innards, and bleached beet paste, and said a small prayer that this grief be removed from her life. Then she covered herself in a gauze bathrobe and packed her face with warm mud brought from the Caucusus.
It was in this manner, with her eyes closed, that she met with a marshal of the Soviet Socialist Republics, one of the highest ranked KGB officials in the short history of the Communist state. Field Marshal Gregory Denia who had done something quite awesome in Western Europe, something which she had heard about during the gossip of the KGB community, and something which didn't interest her very much. It had to do with the Americans. But didn't everything? When it wasn't the Chinese or someone?
She did not open her eyes when she heard the clomping footsteps of the marshal in the hallway. Major Krushenko greeted the marshal and added congratulations for recent successes.
She heard him enter the sun room where she rested and plop his body heavily in a chair. She smelled the reek of cigars.
"Hello, Ludmilla," said Marshal Denia.
"Good afternoon, Gregory," said Ludmilla.
"I have come on business, my dear."
"And how is uncle Georgi?"
"Georgi is fine," Denia said.
"And Cousin Vladimir?"
"Vladimir is fine."
"And how are you?"
"I am fine, Ludmilla. We have an emergency and now you can repay to the state all that the state has given you. You can do for Mother Russia what armies cannot do, I believe. I am here to call on you to carry the banners of the heroes of Stalingrad and of your people, who will never again have to see their homes and their families brutalized."
"And how are you?" asked Ludmilla.
She heard a fist pound into the sofa on which she had heard Gregory lower himself. He expressed anger. He expressed hostility. He included a veiled threat and made accusations of a lack of gratitude to the state.
"Gregory, Gregory, of course I wish to help. I work for the same committee as you. Why do you show so much anger? You should be more like your executive officer, what's his name?"
"Vassilivich. General Vassily Vassilivich, dead in the line of duty, who has given his life so you may live here in safety where the capitalists cannot wring your neck."
"Yes, Vassilivich. That was his name. How is he?"
She felt the sudden shock of hands upon her very person. Rough palms rubbing off the soothing mud, thick brutal fingers at her neck. Denia was yelling at her.
"You will listen or I will shove your pretty face in a vat of acid. Damn your relatives. You will listen. My units lie strewn across the face of Europe and I am going to annihilate their killers. And you are going to help me or I will crush you."
Ludrnilla shrieked, then cried, then begged for forgiveness, and vowed she would pay attention. Through her tears she asked to be allowed to get fully dressed. She was not prepared for this, she sobbed. She whimpered as Major Krushenko helped her, with a motherly arm, to one of her powder rooms.
Ludmilla thought she detected a small smile of triumph on Major Krushenko's plain face. Inside the powder room, the whimper disappeared. Ludmilla was crisp in her orders. She wanted a plain print dress without bra, a pair of light linen panties, and American cold cream.
She prepared herself in a record thirty five minutes. She reintroduced tears to her eyes before she returned to the sun room.
Marshal Denia stood by one of the large windows, at a pre-boil, looking at his watch. But when he turned and saw the sweet freshness of Ludmilla's beauty and the rim of tears beneath her eyes, and when he heard her soft voice beg forgiveness, the anger vanished like air from a balloon. He nodded curtly.
She held his hands as he talked. He explained about the country's killer teams, and America's, how, after years of stalking, the heroes of the Soviet Socialist Republics had finally seen an opportunity to rid the continent of these murderers, and had struck back brilliantly and quickly.
Alas, it proved to be a trap by the cunning American mind. With the taste of victory in their mouths, the extended units of the peoples' teams, called Treska, had suffered a vicious onslaught by the capitalists, who were using a deadly team of but two men.
But Mother Russia had not bled for centuries to lower the standards of the people before gangsters. Russia was preparing its counterattack, which would be more victorious because of the greater obstacles to overcome.
The difficulties were, first the locating of so small a unit-two men at the most-second, finding out how they did what they did, what secret powers or tools they had. Once that was known, they could be annihilated, and the rightful dominance over intelligence in Europe would go to the superpower indigenous to Europe.
"Europe for the Europeans," said Ludmilla.
"Yes. Absolutely," said Denia, happy that Ludmilla was now listening. He wanted to kiss her beautiful cheeks, but he restrained himself by remembering all his men who were gone.
"And you want me to find out how they do what they do so we can defend ourselves. I can succeed where muscle cannot."
"Correct," said Marshal Denia, delighted:
"I am honored, gracious marshal." And she leaned over and kissed his rough, pudgy cheek, knowing that the neckline of her dress exposed her perfect breasts. She felt his arm reach around and ducked playfully under it.
"We have work now," she said with her "delightful" smile, a middle-range sort of thing used for refusing sexual overtures or a second slice of cake.
Laughingly she ushered him to the door. There would be problems of course. She did not want to have to fend men off until she reached her target man. That tired her so. When the door was shut behind Marshal Denia, Major Krushenko asked Ludmilla what had transpired. She knew they would be packing.
"Assholes got themselves killed and we have to bail them out," said Ludmilla.
"Oh," said Major Krushenko, with absolutely no surprise.
"Denia is in trouble and we're his long shot," said Ludmilla, who had known and understood KGB policy since childhood. Denia had always had a reputation for overextending himself, and, without that bookish Vassilivich to restrain him, he had undoubtedly gotten some of his people wiped out. Or captured. Or something. She hated the family business. It was so boring.
She repacked her face and re-oiled her body, and so spent the rest of the afternoon pleasantly, remaining gorgeous. The blemish was beginning to recede. She was going to be Delilah to America's Samson, whoever the lucky man was.

In America the President got the first good foreign news since the surrender of the Japanese in World War II. The Russian extermination squads known as Treska seemed to have abandoned aggressive activities in Western Europe. The news came from the Director of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Secretary of State looked on. The President read the message and waited for the doctor to leave the Oval Office before commenting.
The Secretary of State said he hoped the cut on the President's forefinger would heal soon.
"Yes," said the President. "Those band-aids have very sharp edges and if you grab them wrong, they can cut like knives."
"Not as sharp as paper, though," said the CIA Director.
"You know," said the President, "the home is the most dangerous place of all. Seventy per cent of all accidents occur in the home."
The Secretary of State, in his urbane manner, decided cautiously and wisely not to ask the President why he had needed a bandaid. He saw a small bottle of burn ointment and an ice cube melting in an ashtray, and he did not want to hear that the President of the United States had burned himself on ice.
"Well, good news," said the President after the doctor left.
"We don't know why the Treska seems inoperative at this point in time, but they seem to have run into something that bloodied them pretty well," said the CIA Director.
"British, French, who?" asked the Secretary of State.
The CIA Director shrugged. "Who knows? They're not going to tell us anything until those Senate investigations quiet down. Who would want to trust us now?"
"Gentlemen," said the President, "it is neither the British nor the French, and I am not at liberty to say who or what it is, but as I told you at a recent meeting, this matter would be taken care of. And it has."
The Secretary of State wanted to know how. The President said there was no need for the Secretary to know. Nor was there a need for the Director of the CIA to know.
"Whatever did it, we're lucky it's on our side," said the CIA Director.
"And it will stay on our side as long as no one talks about it. Thank you for coming, gentlemen. Good day."
He eased the tight pressure of the bandaid on his finger, then looked up at the back of the Secretary of State.
"Uh, by the way, would you send the doctor back in, please? Thank you," said the President, hiding the new cut on his other hand.

In a three-star Paris hotel rated for its quality and service, Chiun decided to speak on the death of their guest of a few days, Vassily something with the funny name, the nice Russian boy.
He knew why Remo had killed the sweet, respectful young man.
"He was a KGB general, Little Father. He was the last of the Treska killers. That's what Smitty sent us over here to do."
Chiun slowly and precisely shook his head. His frail beard hardly moved with his head.
"No, that may be why Smith will believe you killed, but I know the true happiness you had."
"Happiness?" said Remo. He checked out the bathroom. The tub was much deeper than any in America, and there was a sitting bowl that looked almost like a toilet, except it had two water faucet handles and a metal tube sticking up. It was for women. The hotel's name was Letutia. The ceilings were high, and the closets were not in the wall but separate dark wood pieces with legs. "Happiness?"
"Happiness," said Chiun.
"It was work," said Remo. "We went to the one known location of the Treska, grabbed a piece of it, and unraveled. Hey, you know how women use this thing?" Remo asked. He played with the faucet handles at the back of the almost toilet. He reasoned that it took some skill. The water went squirting up. A lot of skill.
"You enjoyed your work because the nice young Vassily showed proper respect. His teachers must have been very proud of him. He must have given them much joy, for in Russia they could say, this is my student and he has given me much joy. Not like in some other countries where those who give the greatest knowledge are abused and ignored and generally discarded."
"What is wrong?" asked Remo.
"When I recited Ung Poetry to you, you merely left the room."
"I never heard of Ung Poetry."
"Of course. Like diamonds thrown into mud before the worm. The worm slithers over great beauty as but a sharp obstacle. You never heard because you never listened. You do not know languages or kings. You do not know the names of the Masters of Sinanju in their proper order, or who begat whom. You were eating animal fat meats on soft decayed bread when I found you, and you do not know who is where or what is why, but rumble along in your dark cloud of ignorance."
"I listen. I've been training more than ten years now. I do what you tell me. I think like you tell me. Sometimes I'm beginning to think I am you. Everything you say I respect. This is so. I have never gone against you."
"Then let us do honor to the Masters of Sinanju. We will start with the first Master who came from the caves of the mist."
"Almost everything," said Remo, who remembered some of the early sessions where he had tried to get down who was whose father and who was whose mother, and they had all sounded overbearingly repetitious and unimportant. At that time, Chiun had said that Remo could not learn, because his training was starting too late in life.
"Vassilivich would have learned," said Chiun. "He was a good boy. In my history of my mastership, I shall call myself 'teacher of the ungrateful.' "
Remo turned on the television set. It jutted out of the wall on a platform just above his head. There was a picture of Charles De Gaulle talking. It was a film of his life. He did not understand French. Chiun did.
If Chiun's baggage had not been misplaced in shipping, Chiun would have had his own television programs which he could run on tape. Lately, however, he had been looking mostly at reruns. America, he said, had desecrated its own pure art form, turning it into filth and violence and the reality of everyday life. After that, Remo could not convince Chiun that every American family did not harbor in its midst a dope addict, a child beater, a leukemia victim, a crooked mayor, and a daughter who'd had an abortion.
Chiun looked at De Gaulle's image and told Remo to turn off the television. "There was never any work from that man," he said. "Now the Bourbon kings, ah, they knew how to employ an assassin. France was always a good place until the animals took over." Chiun shook his head sadly. He sat in the middle of the floor on the soft brown carpeting before the two large beds. By "animals taking over," Chiun meant the French Revolution of 1789. Every French president after that remained to Chiun a wide-eyed radical.
"I give up," said Remo. "When did I fail to properly listen to your Ung poetry? I never heard it."
"I was reciting it to that nice Vassilivich boy."
"Oh, that stuff," Remo said. "I don't understand Ung."
"Neither does the carpet or the wood of the closets," said Chiun. With a great sigh, he said he must now explain Paris to Remo, only praying that Remo would remember some of what he had been told.
Downstairs in the lobby of the Letutia, Chiun had a small argument with the concierge about something. Chiun silenced him with a word.
Remo asked what the argument was about.
"If you understood French, you would know," Chiun said.
"Well, I don't understand French."
"Then you do not know," said Chiun as if that pleasantly explained it all.
"But I want to know," said Remo.
"Then learn French," said Chiun. "Real French, not the garbage spoken today."
The street was the Boulevard Raspail. Two elderly woman sold sweets and crépes in a small white stall on a corner. A man in a dark limousine did a quick double take on Remo and Chiun. The car pulled over to the curb across the intersection. Remo saw the man lift a small camera to the back window. Remo did not recognize the man but the man obviously was looking for someone who looked like them.
By the time they had walked across one of the graceful wide bridges that spanned the dark Seine, Remo knew the confusion had ended. There were two tails, both young men, following, and three more staked out on the far side of the bridge. It was not hard to tell a tail, because he locked into your rhythms instead of his own.
A tail could be reading a newspaper, looking at a river, or gazing at the outside of the mangificent Louvre that Remo and Chiun now were approaching. No matter what he was doing, he was really locked with you. Eyes did not focus properly, or something. Remo could not quite explain it. He had tried once to tell Smith about it, but he had fallen back on "you just know."
"But how do you know?" Smith had asked.
"When a person really reads a newspaper, he does things differently."
"But what?"
"I don't know. It's different. Like right now, I know I only have part of your mind. Most people can't hold a single thought for more than a second. Minds are jumpy. But a tail has to keep his mind still. I don't know. Just take my word for it. You can tell."
So it was spring in Paris, and Remo caught a couple of smiles from a couple of beautiful women, and he returned them, but in such a way as to acknowledge their loveliness but decline their invitation.
Chiun called this a typical American sex fiend way of looking at things. He too noticed the tails. But as they approached the Louvre, and as Chiun looked into a window, he emitted a low wail. "Ung poetry, Little Father?"
"No," said Chiun. "What have they done to the Louvre? What have they done? The animals!" Chiun covered his eyes. He made a fast check with marks on the bends of the River Seine, repeating all the descriptions given in the history of Sinanju, and yes, it was the place, and the animals that had followed the Bourbons had crassly turned the place into a museum.
People even had to pay to enter now. What disgust.
Remo saw the gilt ceilings, the rococo marble, the paint on paint, and he thought, "If this weren't the world famous museum, it would be in bad taste." It was just too much. Chiun shuffled through the crowds, checking one spacious room after another. Here a prince had slept. Here the king had entertained briefly. Here was where the king's advisors had held councils of war and peace. Here a great festival had been held. Here was where the king's mistress had slept. Here the Count de Ville had planned to assassinate the king. And what had they done? That had not only remodeled the beautiful palace-one of the true art forms of the world, like American dramas used to be-but they had strewn the whole place with ugly pictures and statues. Garbage. The animals had turned the palace into a garbage heap.
Chiun slapped a gendarme who was so surprised by the little Oriental that he merely blinked.
"Animals," shrieked Chiun. "Degenerate animals." They had not only destroyed a palace, they had made a chapter of the history of Sinanju obsolete. Chiun had always wanted to see Paris, especially for this palace so well described by his ancestors, but now the mobs had ruined it.
"What mobs?" asked Remo.
"Everyone after Louis the Fourteenth." And even he, according to Chiun, had not been all that gracious. He confided to Remo that he was glad Charles the Fifth was not alive to see it now.
A prim nun in a gray suit and a short black bonnet led a line of well-scrubbed little girls with blue blazers and school emblems, carrying small locked briefcases. They pattered down the hall like cute, prim ducks in a row.
"Barbarians," Chiun yelled at them. "Brutal barbaric animals." The nun placed herself between her students and the yelling Chiun and quickly herded them down the well-lit hall.
"Vicious degenerates," Chiun said. The tails appeared at the end of the hall, their faces pointed to pictures implacably, as if attached by strings.
"I've got work to do, Little Father. Can I get some privacy in this place?"
"Yes," said Chiun. Three rooms from the Mona Lisa there was a pink marble wall along which Chiun counted marble ornaments. At the count of eight, he raised a long fingernail chest high and part of the wall swung open. So graceful was the craftsmanship that the opened wall did not look like some intrusion of a secret passage, but just another room. This one, however, was without lights. It smelled of dusty death and had walls of rough rock. Remo beckoned to the two tails, and with a bit more surprise than the average stranger beckoned to by someone, they came. Remo's hands shot out like the quick snap of a frog's tongue and the two went smashing into the rough rock floor of the secret room. The wall closed behind all four.
One had his hand on a small caliber pistol in an ankle holster. He had his hand on it only briefly, as Remo blended all of it into a painful bloody mess with his right shoe.
Without too much pressure against their spines, the men talked profusely. Unfortunately, they talked neither in English nor Korean, the only two languages Remo spoke in. He needed Chiun to translate.
A small light diffused into the room from above, making the room look as if it were in eternal dusk. Remo noticed a dry skeleton with a small hole in its temple, sitting against the rock wall as if it were a beggar waiting for a cup to be filled with coins.
Remo asked Chiun to translate for him. Chiun said he was hired as an assassin, not a language teacher. Remo said it was part of the work. Chiun said it was never agreed to with Smith that his duties included translating. He complained that Smith had promised to send him tapes of the soap operas but that they had not come yet. The tail who still had two good wrists and two good ankles went for a shoulder holster. Remo put a knuckle into his sternum. Part of a ventricle came out of his mouth like spit.
"Now we have only one, Little Father. Will you please help? Just find out who they are and why the tail."
Chiun said it would dishonor his ancestors to act as a language teacher, especially in this very room where the Count de Ville's body was.
"As a favor to me?" Remo asked.
Chiun agreed but noted it would be one more favor to be unrepaid. He said there was a point at which generosity ceased and abuse began. That point had been passed eight years before. Nevertheless his good heart prevailed. He questioned the man, who lay in pain. Then he ended the pain with eternal finality.
It was Remo's job to stack the two bodies neatly next to the skeleton. Remo said he would do it and thanked Chiun. What did the man say?
Chiun said he had been asked to question him, not repeat the answers. Repeating answers was something else.
Remo said that repeating answers was part of translating. Chiun said if Remo wanted that he should have asked for that also. Remo saw the hole in the skull of the skeleton was a bit too wide. He remarked that Chiun's ancestor had been sloppy or getting old, because he had mashed the skull instead of penetrating it sharply.
Chiun said that Remo's ancestors had probably fought with rocks, and that Remo was probably the first who knew how to breathe. Besides, Remo didn't even know his ancestors.
Remo said he didn't even know his father and only remembered the orphanage. Which was one of the reasons CURE had chosen him. in the first place. He had no known relatives.
Chiun said if that was an attempt to make him feel guilty, it had failed miserably.
"Miserably."
Remo said it wasn't an attempt to make Chiun feel guilty. It was a fact. Chiun was the one who tried to make people feel guilty.
In the administration offices of the Louvre, there was chaos that afternoon. Voices were coming from the walls all over the museum. At first, it was thought that someone had brought in a television set. Then it was thought that a tape recorder with American voices had been placed somewhere. Guards scurried up and down the corridors looking for the exact sources of the resonating voices talking about guilt and orphanages and failure.
Visitors from all over the world, many who had come to this city just to visit this museum, stared at one another.
Then suddenly the voices stopped and there was incredible silence in the vast museum, for everyone had been quiet trying to pick out the strange sounds.
A nun ran horrified to a gendarme. Two men, one an Oriental, had emerged from a wall in the Cour Caree section. The wall had shut after them. The Oriental had started the girls crying because he had called them vicious animals. He was arguing with the white man. Most of the talking was in English. The white man was saying he was sorry for asking for a simple favor.
When the guard returned with the assistant director of the museum, they could find no opening in a wall. The nun was put under sedation. Gendarmes escorted the girls back to their school.
And outside, walking to the hotel, Remo dismissed all Chiun was saying.
"I'm not interested in the last time Wang or Hung saw Paris." He stared at Chiun. "I just asked a simple little favor. I'm never going to ask again."
But Chiun wouldn't tell Remo what the tail had said.
Remo said he didn't care.
Chiun asked why, if Remo didn't care, did he have Chiun do the work of the translator? The problem, Chiun said, was that he was too easy-going. People tended to walk all over the good-hearted.
The next morning, Remo met the most beautiful woman he had ever seen.

"Murphy, Warren - [Destroyer 026] - In Enemy Hands" - читать интересную книгу автора (Destroyer)

eVersion 2.0 - see revision notes at end of text

The Destroyer #26:

IN ENEMY HANDS

by

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Copyright (c) 1976

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE

eVersion 2.0 - see revision notes at end of text

The Destroyer #26:

IN ENEMY HANDS

by

Warren Murphy and Richard Sapir

Copyright (c) 1976

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

CHAPTER ONE

CHAPTER TWO

CHAPTER THREE

CHAPTER FOUR

CHAPTER FIVE

CHAPTER SIX

CHAPTER SEVEN

CHAPTER EIGHT

CHAPTER NINE

CHAPTER TEN

CHAPTER ELEVEN

CHAPTER TWELVE