An Apology to the Readers

CHAPTER ONE

It had to have been a military operation, thought Harold Smith as he bought a used golf ball from the pro shop at the Folcroft Hills Golf Club. He spent three minutes going through the twenty-five-cent jar, looking for a Titleist. He did not like to play with cheap golf balls.
He finally found one without a cut in the cover, but with a deep crescent crease that made the ball look like a white "Smile" button. With dimples.
As he cleaned the ball in the washer on the first tee, he asked himself where a military operation might have been launched from. The raid on Norfolk had not been done by any of the regular military units. He had known that. All troop movements from anywhere to anywhere were monitored by CURE's computers. But still there had been uniformed men in large number. A large force. And a large force meant training and training meant a base.
The caddy watched with barely disguised disgust as Smith finished cleaning the used ball. He had caddied for Smith before and, to tell the truth, he was not all that anxious to work four hours for a fifty-cent tip. When they had seen Smith walking from the clubhouse toward the first tee, all the other caddies had made themselves scarce. This one had been the slowest and so he had been nailed. He cursed his luck. Other people caught movie stars, politicians, entertainers to caddy for. He got "Tightwad" Smith, and it was the nature of the man that the caddy would never even catch a hint that he was being privileged to caddy for one of the three or four most powerful men in the world.
Even if it was just for fifty cents.
Smith was oblivious to his reputation among the caddies. He had long ago decided that men paid good money for the right to walk around a golf course, so why should a caddy decide that he should be paid money to walk around the same course? The only untidy factor in the equation was the golf bag. The caddy had to carry the bag of clubs. This constituted work and was therefore worth something. Smith figured it at about three cents a hole. That was fifty-four cents. Rounding it off to the lowest nickel made fifty cents. It did not bother him that other golfers tipped their caddies four and five dollars a bag. If they wanted to waste their money, that was their business.
Smith breathed deeply of the still chilly morning air, laced with salt from the nearby sound, and felt vaguely guilty about being on the golf course. He had once played golf regularly, once a week without fail, but in recent years, the work of CURE had multiplied like cancer cells and he found it impossible to scrape together the time away from his desk.
But this day he had decided just to go out and do it. There were a lot of things to think about and he had to be able to think without interruption. This was his justification.
Remo had vanished; Chiun had vanished with him. CURE's killer arm was no more and while Remo had been threatening and trying to quit ever since he'd been recruited, this time there was a reality to it that disturbed Smith. For without an enforcement arm, CURE would be nothing¹, have nothing to distinguish it from the laundry ticket of government agencies, all tripping over each other, all gathering the same intelligence, and all just sitting on it because they were afraid to act on it.
And there was the raid in Norfolk. He would have liked to pick up the telephone and tell Remo to get down there. But there was no longer any Remo to call.
He was worried and, as he carefully placed his ball on the white wooden tee that some other golfer had casually dropped, Smith hoped that his worry would not affect his golf game. Assuming he had a golf game left. He prided himself that he had once played the game well.
The first hole was a straight-away 385-yard par four. A pro would play it with a 240-yard drive, a 140-yard seven iron, and two putts.
Harold Smith cranked up and swung at the ball. He hit it clean, right on the screws, straight down the center of the fairway. The ball hit 135 yards out and rolled for 40 more yards before stopping.
The drive almost brought a smile to Smith's face. His game was still intact. Worry had not ruined it. He politely handed his driver to the caddy and walked off after his ball. He knew how he would play the round. He would not par a hole, but he would riot double-bogey a hole either. He would shoot every hole in exactly one over par. He would two putt every green.
Par for this course was 72; he would shoot 90. He always shot 90, and, if he had wanted to, he could have mailed his scores in. Ninety seemed to him a perfectly good score. Consistency. The idea of hitting great shots, miracle shots, and using them to balance off your occasional bad shots never occurred to him. He liked it the way he did it. Everything straight down the middle.
But what about Norfolk?
A military operation. There had to be a training base. But where?
He used a fairway wood for his second shot and hit it straight toward the green. It traveled with roll another 130 yards. He was 110 yards from the green.
Without being asked, the caddy handed Smith a four iron, which he swung and laced his ball onto the green twelve feet from the hole. He putted to within a foot, then dropped the short second putt and scored a five.
Sullenly, the caddy took the ball from the cup, replaced the flagstick and handed the ball toward Smith.
But Smith was not looking at the caddy. He was staring off at the trees and dense woods bordering both sides of the narrow first fairway. An idea was trickling through.
"Son," Smith told the caddy. "I've decided not to play anymore today."
The pimple-faced boy sighed and Smith took it mistakenly for disappointment.
"Now obviously I can't tip you the full fifty cents because you only caddied one hole," Smith said.
The boy nodded.
"What do you think would be fair?" Smith asked.
The boy shrugged. He had already decided that he would pay Smith up to two dollars, just to be rid of him, so he could get back to the caddy's shack and maybe get a paying customer.
Smith looked at the ball in the caddy's hand.
"I just paid twenty-five cents for that ball," Smith said. "Suppose you keep it and we call it even?"
The caddy looked at the ball. The crescent slice on it seemed to smile up at him.
"Gee, Doctor Smith, that's wonderful. I can probably resell it again and make ten, maybe even fifteen, cents."
"Just what I thought," said Smith. "At ten cents, that would average out to a dollar-eighty for eighteen holes. At fifteen cents, it would be two dollars and seventy cents."
Smith paused, and appeared to be calculating. For a frightened moment, the caddy wondered if Smith was going to want him to split the proceeds of the resale. Smith was thinking about exactly that. Then he shook his head firmly. "No," he said. "You keep it all."
"Thank you, Doctor Smith."
"Think nothing of it," Smith said. He walked off the green back toward the clubhouse.
"I'll see you next week," he called over his shoulder.
He did not hear the caddy groan behind him, then turn and throw the ball into the woods.
After the ten-minute drive back to his office in the old sanitarium building, Smith surprised his secretary polishing her nails on company time. He cocked an eyebrow at Miss Purvish, who looked as if she would be glad to drink the nail polish, anything to make it disappear.
"What happened to playing golf?" she managed to ask, hastily capping the bottle of polish.
"It's too nice a day to play golf," said Smith. "Don't disturb me unless it is absolutely necessary."
Inside his office, Smith sat behind the large, desk, his back to the one-way windows that looked out over the Sound, and began planning.
A military maneuver meant a military installation somewhere. And a military installation meant buildings and plumbing and access and water lines and sewerage.

CHAPTER NINE

The DePauw mansion overpowered the neighboring West Palm Beach mansions like a two-carat blue-white set among diamond chips.
It sat on six acres of land, surrounded on three sides by ten-foot-high white iron fencing whose bars were too close together for a human to slide between. At the back of the mansion was the Atlantic Ocean. A large powerboat, tied up to a dock, could be seen through the estate's front gate.
Inside the gate, leaning against the white brick pillars, were two uniformed guards.
Remo drove past the estate and parked a half block away. "It's probably best if you stay here," he told Ruby.
"I'm going," she said. "Case Lucius is there."
"Brave, too," Chiun said to Remo. "Not only strong and smart, but brave, too."
"I now pronounce you man and wife," Remo said. "Will you knock it off?"
"Ingrate," hissed Chiun.
Remo got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. He was halfway to the DePauw mansion when Ruby and Chiun left the rented car.
Remo was tired to death of being pushed around, tired of having his mind made up for him, tired of being told what to do and when to do it. Thank God for the Vega-Choppa. It was the first honest dollar he had earned since he stopped being a city policeman a lot of years before.
If he had not given Ruby his promise, he would keep walking right now, past the DePauw mansion, and never look back. Being pushed around. It was what had tired him of working for Smith and for CURE and he was tired of it from Chiun and tired of it from Ruby.
He stopped outside the tall white gate and motioned one of the guards to come over.
"Yes?" the guard said.
"Look. We can do this easy or we can do it hard."
"Easy? Hard?"
"Just let me in," Remo said.
"Are you expected?"
"No. But my winning ways will soon have everybody forgetting that."
"Then I'm sorry, sir, but…"
"Not as sorry as you will be," Remo said.
He reached through the bars of the gate, grabbed the guard's wrist and gently pulled him close. To the other guard, it looked as if the man had stepped forward so Remo could whisper something in his ear.
"Now," Remo said softly. "This is still your wrist I'm holding in my hand. We can keep it a wrist or we can make it into jelly. Take your pick."
"Wrist," the guard said.
"Good. Now call your buddy over."
"Joe," the guard called out. "Come here a minute."
"Good," said Remo. "Very good."
"Yeah, Willie," the other guard said when he reached the fence but before he could get an answer, his left wrist was in Remo's left hand.
"Now if you both don't want your ping pong careers ended for good, open the gate." He squeezed on Willie's wrist for emphasis and the guard's hand went to the ring of keys at his waist. He fumbled them loose, and used a large brass key to open the gate. It opened and Remo released both men momentarily, slid inside, then resumed his grip on their wrists. He walked them over to the high shrubbery alongside the brick pillars, transferred his grip to their necks, and left them sleeping underneath the japonica shrubs.
When he stepped back to the ceramic tiled driveway, Chiun and Ruby were entering through the gate.
"How was that?" Remo asked. "All right? Did I open the gate well enough for you two geniuses? In your wisdom, do you approve?"
Ruby looked at Chiun. "What's wrong with him now?" she asked.
"I can never figure out what white people are talking about."
"Me neither," said Ruby.
"Yeah? Yeah?" said Remo. "White people, hah? Big friends, you two, hah? Have him tell you about how God made man and put it in the oven and kept getting it wrong. Have him tell you that, you want to find out what a tolerant warm wonderful person he is."
"Ignore him," said Chiun. "He knows, better than anyone else, how tolerant I am of inferiors."
"Hah," said Remo, and walked off up the long driveway.
The main house stood at the back of the property, its rear patio extending down to the water line and the docks. There were two small buildings on one side of the house and Remo cut across the slightly overgrown lawns to go to those buildings first.
The first room must have been the gardener's quarters. There were two rooms, immaculately clean. And empty.
The second building, hidden from the street by the first building, was made of fieldstone. Remo tried to look inside, but there were curtains over the windows.
There was a hasp on the outside of the front door for padlocking the small building from the outside, but the door itself was unlocked.
The three stepped into one large room, twenty-five feet square. Thin metal bunks, covered with bare striped ticking mattresses, lined one wall. In a corner was an open toilet bowl and a sink. On another wall, chains had been installed at about the height of a man's shoulders.
Ruby counted the metal bunks. Thirteen. But fourteen men had been kidnapped.
Remo heard a sound.
"You hear it, Chiun?" he asked.
Chiun nodded.
Ruby strained but heard nothing.
"What is it?" she asked. "What do you hear?"
"Some kind of machinery whirring," Remo said.
He began to look around the room carefully. The sound was loudest near the wall of the building, next to the main DePauw house.
There was a ragged rug under Remo's feet. He kicked it aside and found a trap door with a large sunken ring cut into the wooden floor.
He pulled up on the ring and the trap door lifted noiselessly.
Now Ruby could heard the sound, too. It was a slow, steady whirring. She stood alongside Remo and looked down into the open well. Steep wooden stairs had been erected against the wall, and Remo led the way down.
They were in a tunnel seven feet high and not that wide. It stretched ahead of them for thirty feet and ended at a door. There was a piece of black plastic covering the door's windows on their side. Remo peeled a piece of it away and they lifted it slightly to peer in.
They saw a long conveyor belt and thirteen men standing alongside it. The first seven of them wrapped metal bands around sticks; the last six removed the metal bands and brought the sticks and bands back to the front of the line so the cycle could start over again.
All the men were black. They wore white cotton sleeveless undershirts. The room was illuminated by bare overhead bulbs.
Ruby sipped in her breath.
She started to cry out, but Remo clapped his hand over her mouth.
"What?" he said.
"That's Lucius."
"Which one?"
"The first one on the left side."
Remo watched for a moment. There seemed to be nothing to distinguish Lucius from any of the other dozen men working at the conveyor table.
At the end of the conveyor belt, on a small platform, stood a wiry man with red hair. He wore a white suit and a white hat and metal-tipped boots and carried a long whip coiled in his right hand.
On the far side of the room, six feet up the wall, there was a door, and, as the three of them watched, the door opened.
Striding out onto a raised platform that looked over the room was Baisley DePauw. Remo recognized him from the newspaper photographs. Baisley DePauw dedicating the liberation library. Baisley DePauw sending his personal jet to Algeria to bring back exiled black Americans. Baisley DePauw opening his heart and his checkbook to every crack-brained anti-American movement that had come up in Remo's remembrance.
"How are they doing?" DePauw called out to the overseer.
"All right, sir. They get faster every day," the man called back. He had a deep tomb of a voice and Remo thought it odd that for his overseer, DePauw had hired someone obviously from the streets of New York City.
"I've got another inspection today," DePauw said. "I want them singing. Slaves should sing to show how happy they are."
The whip went singing out over the men's heads, cracking sharply in empty space.
"You heard the massa. Sing."
Without slowing down their work, the slaves looked at each other.
"Sing, I said," the overseer shouted.
The men were still silent.
"You, Lucius. You start it."
Ruby's brother looked up and smiled a fetching grin.
"What should I sing, massa boss?"
"I don't know. Sing anything you know."
"I don't know many songs," Lucius said.
"Sing what you know. Something with a beat so you can speed up your work."
Lucius opened his mouth and the first halting words came out:

Disco Lady.

Will you be my baby?

Saturday night

to Sunday's light,

Their car was the first back to Norfolk and Ruby led Remo and Chiun upstairs to give her mother the good news.
"Mama, Lucius is coming home," Ruby said.
Her mother inhaled a deep lungful of pipe and exhaled a smoke that looked greenish. She looked down at her feet.
"What he been doin' the last week?" she asked.
"Working," Ruby said.
Her mother looked up at her sharply.
"You sure it be Lucius?"
For the first time, she seemed to notice Remo and Chiun. "That fella you be leavin' here, I fix up his arm best I could. But then he wen' over the hotel to stay. Say?"
"Say what?" said Remo.
"Iffen he be a doctor, how come he cain't fix his own arm?"
"Not that kind of a doctor."
Mrs. Gonzalez nodded, her dark face deepened with chasms of crease wrinkles. "Guess not. Otherwise he be able to fix hisself up."
"Where is he?" said Remo.
"De hotel."
"Which one?"
"One of dem."
Remo looked around to Ruby for help. She was talking agitatedly with Chiun in a corner of the room.
"Ruby," Remo squawked.
"He's at the Holiday Inn," she said. "You two can go ahead. I'll meet you there. I want to make sure Mama's all right."
Smith was sitting in his hotel room in a straight backed chair, reading newspapers. The room looked as if it had emerged from the hermetically sealed pages of a Sears Roebuck catalogue, as if no one alive had ever been in it, and looking at Smith's pinched acid face, Remo saw no reason to dispute that judgment.
"How's the shoulder?" Remo said.
"I think by tomorrow I will have been able to wash off all that green slime that woman insisted on putting on it. Then I won't be too embarrassed to go to a doctor."
Chiun opened Smith's shirt and pulled it down off his right shoulder to investigate the wound. He pressed with his fingers and nodded.
"That green slime has done very nicely," he said. "I must learn what it was. You are healing well."
"What happened in Florida?" Smith said, re-buttoning his shirt.
Remo found it hard to remember the last time he had seen Smith without a jacket and vest.
"Florida?" Smith repeated.
"Oh, yeah," Remo said. "DePauw is dead. The prisoners are free. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and I'm back in retirement."
"Well, perhaps," said Smith. "But there's one thing left."
Remo's face was grim as he leaned toward Smith.
"As long as I've known you, Smitty, there's always been just one more thing."
"Listen to the emperor, Remo," said Chiun, "who knows but that this one more thing may yet bring glory to your dull life. Tell him, Emperor, tell him. What is this one more wondrous thing?"
Smith cleared his throat. "Yes, well. You know that we can operate only in secrecy. Without secrecy, CURE goes under."
"I've heard that and heard it and heard it," Remo said.
"Our secrecy has been breached. Shattered, I guess, is more accurate."
"Good. Then go out of business. Open a dry goods store someplace up in New Hampshire. Cheat the locals before they cheat you. I know a good real estate agent. If you like houses without roofs."
Chiun looked stern. "Remo, since you have been on television, you have lost all your manners. Is that what being a star has done to you? Show respect for the little people."
"Who are the little people, Chiun?"
"Everybody but me."
"All right, Smitty, I'll hear you out before I laugh in your face. Who breached security this time? And so what?"
"Ruby Gonzalez," Smith said. "And you've got to dispose of her."
Smith watched closely. Remo's face showed no emotion. He simply stood back from Smith's chair and looked out a window. "Why don't we talk English, Smitty? You don't mean dispose of her, you mean kill her, don't you ?"
"All right, kill her."
"Stuff it. You forgot that I quit."
"Just this one more thing."
"Never again. I'm retired. You want her hit, talk to Chiun. He's still in the business. But I won't."
Smith looked at Chiun who shook his head sadly. "Any enemy of yours, Emperor, is an enemy of mine. Point them out and they will feel the wrath of Sinanju. But not that girl with the Brussels-sprout ears. Not her."
"Why is she different?"
"She is going to give me a son. It is all arranged."
"You? A son?"
"It will technically be Remo's, of course," Chiun said.
"I have something to say about this," Remo said without turning.
Behind his back, Chiun shook his head, indicating to Smith that Remo would have nothing to say about it at all.
"So this I cannot do," Chiun said. "Not by my hand can I lose the only good recruit my House will ever have, my chance, like all the other Masters for centuries, to pass on my secrets to someone deserving."
Remo sniffed his disgust.
"Guess you'll have to do it yourself," he said. "Get a taste of what it's like."
"I guess I will," Smith said.
"You do that." He winked at Chiun who turned his back so Smith would not see him smile.
"I will," said Smith.
There was a knock at the door.
"It's open," Remo called.
Ruby stepped in. She had changed to a sleeveless white dress. Her skin looked as smooth and pure as melted maple ice cream. Her face shone with the young look of a woman who found all the cosmetic help she needed in a bar of soap.
"Hello," she said to Smith. She nodded to Remo and Chiun. "They told you what happened?"
Before Smith could answer, Remo said "No. We never tell him. We just tell him it's taken care of. He doesn't like to hear details because then he might, just might, realize once, just once, that somebody dies every time we make a new corpse for him. He doesn't want to hear about that. He just wants us to send him monthly lists of victims for his statistical charts."
"Gotta have charts," Ruby said mildly.
"Then you talk to him," Remo said. "He's got some business with you anyway. Chiun and I are going next door. You talk with him."
In the next room, as the door closed behind him, Remo asked Chiun, "How long?"
"What is this how long?" said Chiun.
"How long will it take for her to con him out of his socks?"
"How long do you say?" asked Chiun.
"Five minutes," said Remo.
"Three," said Chiun.
"You're on. Nobody can con Smith in three minutes. My own personal record is five minutes fifteen."
"What are we wagering?" asked Chiun.
"Anything you want, Little Father."
"Anything?"
"Anything except that," Remo said.
In the next room, Ruby sat in a chair facing Smith, who drummed his fingertips on the small blond formica desk.
Finally Ruby broke the silence. "How you gonna do it?"
"Excuse me?"
"You. How you gonna do it? A gun or what?"
Smith sat back in his chair. "How do you know that?"
"It's not hard. You're the brains of this here operation. It's what I'd do if it came to it."
"Oh, I see," said Smith. He had never had anyone offer himself up for killing before.
"Course it might not be in your best interests," said Ruby.
"Perhaps you'd tell me why."
"Sure. Since't I came here and I knew what you were fixin' to do, I'd be kind of a dope to just walk in and let it go like that. So I took precautions."
"What kind of precautions?"
"I wrote down everything I know and I spread it around a bit."
"I've heard that many times before," Smith said.
"Yeah, I know. Somebody's always giving something to their lawyer for when they die and like that. And then you get to the lawyer first so nothing happens. Well, I didn't do that. I left everything where the CIA gets it if I die."
Smith looked at Ruby with narrowed eyes.
She nodded.
"I figured you can maybe get to my lawyer or something, maybe make sure that what I tell him don't get out. But the CIA? They gonna have a field day when they find out what you doing when they been getting their ears pinned back for less. They never let up on you. CURE goes right down the drain."
Smith sighed and Ruby said, "Now look at the good side."
"There is no good side."
"Sure, there is. First you think I know a little bit about your organization, enough to be dangerous. And that's only part right. I know a whole lot about your organization."
"How'd you learn that?"
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "I been with them on two separate things now. You have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to find things out. I know who you are and where you operate and what you do and what you do personally and what they do and I have an idea of what you spend and where the President keeps the phone he calls you on and what your telephone codes are. Like that. Ceppin' for you, I guess I know more about your operation than anybody in the world."
"Just what I needed," Smith said. "A woman who knows too much that I can't get rid of."
"Want me to tell you what to do?" asked Ruby.
"What?"
"Hire me."
"Hire you? What for?"
"Nothing special. Not right now. But I hear things. I keep track of things. Sometimes you need special help, you call me. I smart and I don't say nothin' to nobody."
"Do I have a choice?"
"No. That's why this is your lucky day," said Ruby.
"How much do you want?"
"Make me an offer."
"Five thousand dollars."
"You fooling," Ruby said.
"Why?"
"I making twenty-five with the CIA before I left."
"For what?" asked Smith. His first salary with the CIA had been seven thousand dollars a year, but that was long ago.
"For hanging around. In three years, they call me once. They send me down to that island and I run into those two inside there. I helped you then and when I got back, I didn't go running around, telling everybody I was a big spy, helping a big secret organization."
"I'll give you twenty-three," said Smith, surrendering.
"Thirty," said Ruby.
"Split the difference. Twenty-five," said Smith.
"Splittin' the difference is twenty-six five."
"All right," Smith said, swallowing hard. "But it's banditry."
"Yeah. But now I be your bandit. And I'm gonna earn my money for you in less than five minutes."
She left Smith with a puzzled look on his face and opened the door to the other room.
"Why'nt you come in?"
Chiun smiled at Remo triumphantly. "Two minutes and fifty-five seconds. You owe me."
"Aaah," said Remo in disgust. "Don't worry. I'll pay you. As soon as I get my residual check from Vega-Choppa."
He walked away, but as he moved, Chiun's hands flicked into Remo's pocket and came out with a roll of bills. Chiun extricated the ten dollars Remo owed him, and tossed the rest of the money onto the sofa.
Inside, Remo told Smith, "Not so easy when you've got to see their eyes, is it?"
"You're wrong, Remo. It was a simple administrative decision."
"Here's another simple administrative decision. I quit."
Smith nodded his head. "I know. What are you going to do?"
"I told you. I'm going to get a lot of residuals from those commercials for my hands. I'm going to be rich. My hands are going to be famous. Then, who knows? Maybe next my feet. Maybe they'll want somebody to do something with his feet."
"Like a monkey," said Chiun. "They do things with their feet."
"What was the name of that gadget you advertised?" asked Smith, reaching for a newspaper from the desk.
"The Vega-Choppa," said Remo.
Smith looked at the newspaper. "I don't think you'd better count on them to support you," he said.
"Why not? Let me see that."
He glanced at the story that Smith had circled.
Twenty-seven lawsuits, totaling over forty-five million dollars, had been filed against the Vega-Choppa manufacturer by housewives whose fingers and hands had been mangled using the device. They charged that the television commercials showing the product's ease of operation were misleading and had obviously been filmed at slow speed and then speeded up.
When the manufacturer denied this, the attorneys representing the injured women amended their complaints to include among the defendants a John Doe, who was the demonstrator of the device. They accused him of using manual dexterity to give housewives "a false sense of security that the utensil was safe for normal human beings to use."
Remo looked at Smith and, if he had been smiling, Remo might have killed him then and there. But Smith was as somber as usual.
"Let's see, Remo. Your share of forty-five million dollars in damages should come to twenty-two point five million. You're going to have to sell a lot of carrot cutters to make up for that."
Remo sighed. "I'll find some other work."
Ruby tapped him on the shoulder. "Could I talk to you please?"
"Talk," said Remo.
"Inside," Ruby said.
In the other room, he said "What do you want?"
"Don't be so grouchy."
"It's easy for you to say. You never just lost your chance to be a rich television star."
"You'll get another chance someday."
"Now what am I gonna do?" Remo asked.
"I don't care what you do," Ruby said. "I want to talk about what you did."
"Which was?"
"Freeing Lucius. Those other men."
"A favor to you. I owed you one."
"No, it wasn't. It was a duty to your country," Ruby said. "That was a good thing you did."
Remo sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He was silent for a moment before looking up.
"You really think so?"
Ruby nodded.
"It was a good thing. Today you made America a better place to live in. We should all have the chance to do that sometimes."
"You really think that, don't you? Really."
"I really do. I'm proud to know you."
Remo stood up. "You know, you're right. Getting rid of that creep today was worth a lot. It takes away a lot of the stench."
"It was a good thing," Ruby said again.
Remo took her hands. "You know, maybe Chiun's onto something. About me and you," he said.
Ruby smiled. "We'll just have to see about that."
"We will," Remo said. "We will."
He walked back into the main room of the hotel suite. Ruby followed closely behind him.
Chiun looked past Remo at her. She held up her fingers to make an okay ring.
As she passed Chiun, she leaned over and whispered, "You lose. He was easy. Where's my ten dollars?"
Chiun handed her the ten dollars he had filched from Remo's pocket.
Ruby tucked it into her dress and she and Chiun watched as Remo approached Smith.
"Smitty," said Remo. "I've decided to give you another chance."
Smith almost smiled.
"But if you blow this one, that's it. Right, Chiun?"
"For the first time," Chiun said.
"Right, Ruby?"
"Anything you say. Dodo."

An Apology to the Readers

CHAPTER ONE

The DePauw mansion overpowered the neighboring West Palm Beach mansions like a two-carat blue-white set among diamond chips.
It sat on six acres of land, surrounded on three sides by ten-foot-high white iron fencing whose bars were too close together for a human to slide between. At the back of the mansion was the Atlantic Ocean. A large powerboat, tied up to a dock, could be seen through the estate's front gate.
Inside the gate, leaning against the white brick pillars, were two uniformed guards.
Remo drove past the estate and parked a half block away. "It's probably best if you stay here," he told Ruby.
"I'm going," she said. "Case Lucius is there."
"Brave, too," Chiun said to Remo. "Not only strong and smart, but brave, too."
"I now pronounce you man and wife," Remo said. "Will you knock it off?"
"Ingrate," hissed Chiun.
Remo got out of the car and slammed the door behind him. He was halfway to the DePauw mansion when Ruby and Chiun left the rented car.
Remo was tired to death of being pushed around, tired of having his mind made up for him, tired of being told what to do and when to do it. Thank God for the Vega-Choppa. It was the first honest dollar he had earned since he stopped being a city policeman a lot of years before.
If he had not given Ruby his promise, he would keep walking right now, past the DePauw mansion, and never look back. Being pushed around. It was what had tired him of working for Smith and for CURE and he was tired of it from Chiun and tired of it from Ruby.
He stopped outside the tall white gate and motioned one of the guards to come over.
"Yes?" the guard said.
"Look. We can do this easy or we can do it hard."
"Easy? Hard?"
"Just let me in," Remo said.
"Are you expected?"
"No. But my winning ways will soon have everybody forgetting that."
"Then I'm sorry, sir, but…"
"Not as sorry as you will be," Remo said.
He reached through the bars of the gate, grabbed the guard's wrist and gently pulled him close. To the other guard, it looked as if the man had stepped forward so Remo could whisper something in his ear.
"Now," Remo said softly. "This is still your wrist I'm holding in my hand. We can keep it a wrist or we can make it into jelly. Take your pick."
"Wrist," the guard said.
"Good. Now call your buddy over."
"Joe," the guard called out. "Come here a minute."
"Good," said Remo. "Very good."
"Yeah, Willie," the other guard said when he reached the fence but before he could get an answer, his left wrist was in Remo's left hand.
"Now if you both don't want your ping pong careers ended for good, open the gate." He squeezed on Willie's wrist for emphasis and the guard's hand went to the ring of keys at his waist. He fumbled them loose, and used a large brass key to open the gate. It opened and Remo released both men momentarily, slid inside, then resumed his grip on their wrists. He walked them over to the high shrubbery alongside the brick pillars, transferred his grip to their necks, and left them sleeping underneath the japonica shrubs.
When he stepped back to the ceramic tiled driveway, Chiun and Ruby were entering through the gate.
"How was that?" Remo asked. "All right? Did I open the gate well enough for you two geniuses? In your wisdom, do you approve?"
Ruby looked at Chiun. "What's wrong with him now?" she asked.
"I can never figure out what white people are talking about."
"Me neither," said Ruby.
"Yeah? Yeah?" said Remo. "White people, hah? Big friends, you two, hah? Have him tell you about how God made man and put it in the oven and kept getting it wrong. Have him tell you that, you want to find out what a tolerant warm wonderful person he is."
"Ignore him," said Chiun. "He knows, better than anyone else, how tolerant I am of inferiors."
"Hah," said Remo, and walked off up the long driveway.
The main house stood at the back of the property, its rear patio extending down to the water line and the docks. There were two small buildings on one side of the house and Remo cut across the slightly overgrown lawns to go to those buildings first.
The first room must have been the gardener's quarters. There were two rooms, immaculately clean. And empty.
The second building, hidden from the street by the first building, was made of fieldstone. Remo tried to look inside, but there were curtains over the windows.
There was a hasp on the outside of the front door for padlocking the small building from the outside, but the door itself was unlocked.
The three stepped into one large room, twenty-five feet square. Thin metal bunks, covered with bare striped ticking mattresses, lined one wall. In a corner was an open toilet bowl and a sink. On another wall, chains had been installed at about the height of a man's shoulders.
Ruby counted the metal bunks. Thirteen. But fourteen men had been kidnapped.
Remo heard a sound.
"You hear it, Chiun?" he asked.
Chiun nodded.
Ruby strained but heard nothing.
"What is it?" she asked. "What do you hear?"
"Some kind of machinery whirring," Remo said.
He began to look around the room carefully. The sound was loudest near the wall of the building, next to the main DePauw house.
There was a ragged rug under Remo's feet. He kicked it aside and found a trap door with a large sunken ring cut into the wooden floor.
He pulled up on the ring and the trap door lifted noiselessly.
Now Ruby could heard the sound, too. It was a slow, steady whirring. She stood alongside Remo and looked down into the open well. Steep wooden stairs had been erected against the wall, and Remo led the way down.
They were in a tunnel seven feet high and not that wide. It stretched ahead of them for thirty feet and ended at a door. There was a piece of black plastic covering the door's windows on their side. Remo peeled a piece of it away and they lifted it slightly to peer in.
They saw a long conveyor belt and thirteen men standing alongside it. The first seven of them wrapped metal bands around sticks; the last six removed the metal bands and brought the sticks and bands back to the front of the line so the cycle could start over again.
All the men were black. They wore white cotton sleeveless undershirts. The room was illuminated by bare overhead bulbs.
Ruby sipped in her breath.
She started to cry out, but Remo clapped his hand over her mouth.
"What?" he said.
"That's Lucius."
"Which one?"
"The first one on the left side."
Remo watched for a moment. There seemed to be nothing to distinguish Lucius from any of the other dozen men working at the conveyor table.
At the end of the conveyor belt, on a small platform, stood a wiry man with red hair. He wore a white suit and a white hat and metal-tipped boots and carried a long whip coiled in his right hand.
On the far side of the room, six feet up the wall, there was a door, and, as the three of them watched, the door opened.
Striding out onto a raised platform that looked over the room was Baisley DePauw. Remo recognized him from the newspaper photographs. Baisley DePauw dedicating the liberation library. Baisley DePauw sending his personal jet to Algeria to bring back exiled black Americans. Baisley DePauw opening his heart and his checkbook to every crack-brained anti-American movement that had come up in Remo's remembrance.
"How are they doing?" DePauw called out to the overseer.
"All right, sir. They get faster every day," the man called back. He had a deep tomb of a voice and Remo thought it odd that for his overseer, DePauw had hired someone obviously from the streets of New York City.
"I've got another inspection today," DePauw said. "I want them singing. Slaves should sing to show how happy they are."
The whip went singing out over the men's heads, cracking sharply in empty space.
"You heard the massa. Sing."
Without slowing down their work, the slaves looked at each other.
"Sing, I said," the overseer shouted.
The men were still silent.
"You, Lucius. You start it."
Ruby's brother looked up and smiled a fetching grin.
"What should I sing, massa boss?"
"I don't know. Sing anything you know."
"I don't know many songs," Lucius said.
"Sing what you know. Something with a beat so you can speed up your work."
Lucius opened his mouth and the first halting words came out:

Disco Lady.

Will you be my baby?

Saturday night

to Sunday's light,

Their car was the first back to Norfolk and Ruby led Remo and Chiun upstairs to give her mother the good news.
"Mama, Lucius is coming home," Ruby said.
Her mother inhaled a deep lungful of pipe and exhaled a smoke that looked greenish. She looked down at her feet.
"What he been doin' the last week?" she asked.
"Working," Ruby said.
Her mother looked up at her sharply.
"You sure it be Lucius?"
For the first time, she seemed to notice Remo and Chiun. "That fella you be leavin' here, I fix up his arm best I could. But then he wen' over the hotel to stay. Say?"
"Say what?" said Remo.
"Iffen he be a doctor, how come he cain't fix his own arm?"
"Not that kind of a doctor."
Mrs. Gonzalez nodded, her dark face deepened with chasms of crease wrinkles. "Guess not. Otherwise he be able to fix hisself up."
"Where is he?" said Remo.
"De hotel."
"Which one?"
"One of dem."
Remo looked around to Ruby for help. She was talking agitatedly with Chiun in a corner of the room.
"Ruby," Remo squawked.
"He's at the Holiday Inn," she said. "You two can go ahead. I'll meet you there. I want to make sure Mama's all right."
Smith was sitting in his hotel room in a straight backed chair, reading newspapers. The room looked as if it had emerged from the hermetically sealed pages of a Sears Roebuck catalogue, as if no one alive had ever been in it, and looking at Smith's pinched acid face, Remo saw no reason to dispute that judgment.
"How's the shoulder?" Remo said.
"I think by tomorrow I will have been able to wash off all that green slime that woman insisted on putting on it. Then I won't be too embarrassed to go to a doctor."
Chiun opened Smith's shirt and pulled it down off his right shoulder to investigate the wound. He pressed with his fingers and nodded.
"That green slime has done very nicely," he said. "I must learn what it was. You are healing well."
"What happened in Florida?" Smith said, re-buttoning his shirt.
Remo found it hard to remember the last time he had seen Smith without a jacket and vest.
"Florida?" Smith repeated.
"Oh, yeah," Remo said. "DePauw is dead. The prisoners are free. God's in his heaven, all's right with the world, and I'm back in retirement."
"Well, perhaps," said Smith. "But there's one thing left."
Remo's face was grim as he leaned toward Smith.
"As long as I've known you, Smitty, there's always been just one more thing."
"Listen to the emperor, Remo," said Chiun, "who knows but that this one more thing may yet bring glory to your dull life. Tell him, Emperor, tell him. What is this one more wondrous thing?"
Smith cleared his throat. "Yes, well. You know that we can operate only in secrecy. Without secrecy, CURE goes under."
"I've heard that and heard it and heard it," Remo said.
"Our secrecy has been breached. Shattered, I guess, is more accurate."
"Good. Then go out of business. Open a dry goods store someplace up in New Hampshire. Cheat the locals before they cheat you. I know a good real estate agent. If you like houses without roofs."
Chiun looked stern. "Remo, since you have been on television, you have lost all your manners. Is that what being a star has done to you? Show respect for the little people."
"Who are the little people, Chiun?"
"Everybody but me."
"All right, Smitty, I'll hear you out before I laugh in your face. Who breached security this time? And so what?"
"Ruby Gonzalez," Smith said. "And you've got to dispose of her."
Smith watched closely. Remo's face showed no emotion. He simply stood back from Smith's chair and looked out a window. "Why don't we talk English, Smitty? You don't mean dispose of her, you mean kill her, don't you ?"
"All right, kill her."
"Stuff it. You forgot that I quit."
"Just this one more thing."
"Never again. I'm retired. You want her hit, talk to Chiun. He's still in the business. But I won't."
Smith looked at Chiun who shook his head sadly. "Any enemy of yours, Emperor, is an enemy of mine. Point them out and they will feel the wrath of Sinanju. But not that girl with the Brussels-sprout ears. Not her."
"Why is she different?"
"She is going to give me a son. It is all arranged."
"You? A son?"
"It will technically be Remo's, of course," Chiun said.
"I have something to say about this," Remo said without turning.
Behind his back, Chiun shook his head, indicating to Smith that Remo would have nothing to say about it at all.
"So this I cannot do," Chiun said. "Not by my hand can I lose the only good recruit my House will ever have, my chance, like all the other Masters for centuries, to pass on my secrets to someone deserving."
Remo sniffed his disgust.
"Guess you'll have to do it yourself," he said. "Get a taste of what it's like."
"I guess I will," Smith said.
"You do that." He winked at Chiun who turned his back so Smith would not see him smile.
"I will," said Smith.
There was a knock at the door.
"It's open," Remo called.
Ruby stepped in. She had changed to a sleeveless white dress. Her skin looked as smooth and pure as melted maple ice cream. Her face shone with the young look of a woman who found all the cosmetic help she needed in a bar of soap.
"Hello," she said to Smith. She nodded to Remo and Chiun. "They told you what happened?"
Before Smith could answer, Remo said "No. We never tell him. We just tell him it's taken care of. He doesn't like to hear details because then he might, just might, realize once, just once, that somebody dies every time we make a new corpse for him. He doesn't want to hear about that. He just wants us to send him monthly lists of victims for his statistical charts."
"Gotta have charts," Ruby said mildly.
"Then you talk to him," Remo said. "He's got some business with you anyway. Chiun and I are going next door. You talk with him."
In the next room, as the door closed behind him, Remo asked Chiun, "How long?"
"What is this how long?" said Chiun.
"How long will it take for her to con him out of his socks?"
"How long do you say?" asked Chiun.
"Five minutes," said Remo.
"Three," said Chiun.
"You're on. Nobody can con Smith in three minutes. My own personal record is five minutes fifteen."
"What are we wagering?" asked Chiun.
"Anything you want, Little Father."
"Anything?"
"Anything except that," Remo said.
In the next room, Ruby sat in a chair facing Smith, who drummed his fingertips on the small blond formica desk.
Finally Ruby broke the silence. "How you gonna do it?"
"Excuse me?"
"You. How you gonna do it? A gun or what?"
Smith sat back in his chair. "How do you know that?"
"It's not hard. You're the brains of this here operation. It's what I'd do if it came to it."
"Oh, I see," said Smith. He had never had anyone offer himself up for killing before.
"Course it might not be in your best interests," said Ruby.
"Perhaps you'd tell me why."
"Sure. Since't I came here and I knew what you were fixin' to do, I'd be kind of a dope to just walk in and let it go like that. So I took precautions."
"What kind of precautions?"
"I wrote down everything I know and I spread it around a bit."
"I've heard that many times before," Smith said.
"Yeah, I know. Somebody's always giving something to their lawyer for when they die and like that. And then you get to the lawyer first so nothing happens. Well, I didn't do that. I left everything where the CIA gets it if I die."
Smith looked at Ruby with narrowed eyes.
She nodded.
"I figured you can maybe get to my lawyer or something, maybe make sure that what I tell him don't get out. But the CIA? They gonna have a field day when they find out what you doing when they been getting their ears pinned back for less. They never let up on you. CURE goes right down the drain."
Smith sighed and Ruby said, "Now look at the good side."
"There is no good side."
"Sure, there is. First you think I know a little bit about your organization, enough to be dangerous. And that's only part right. I know a whole lot about your organization."
"How'd you learn that?"
She jerked a thumb over her shoulder. "I been with them on two separate things now. You have to be deaf, dumb, and blind not to find things out. I know who you are and where you operate and what you do and what you do personally and what they do and I have an idea of what you spend and where the President keeps the phone he calls you on and what your telephone codes are. Like that. Ceppin' for you, I guess I know more about your operation than anybody in the world."
"Just what I needed," Smith said. "A woman who knows too much that I can't get rid of."
"Want me to tell you what to do?" asked Ruby.
"What?"
"Hire me."
"Hire you? What for?"
"Nothing special. Not right now. But I hear things. I keep track of things. Sometimes you need special help, you call me. I smart and I don't say nothin' to nobody."
"Do I have a choice?"
"No. That's why this is your lucky day," said Ruby.
"How much do you want?"
"Make me an offer."
"Five thousand dollars."
"You fooling," Ruby said.
"Why?"
"I making twenty-five with the CIA before I left."
"For what?" asked Smith. His first salary with the CIA had been seven thousand dollars a year, but that was long ago.
"For hanging around. In three years, they call me once. They send me down to that island and I run into those two inside there. I helped you then and when I got back, I didn't go running around, telling everybody I was a big spy, helping a big secret organization."
"I'll give you twenty-three," said Smith, surrendering.
"Thirty," said Ruby.
"Split the difference. Twenty-five," said Smith.
"Splittin' the difference is twenty-six five."
"All right," Smith said, swallowing hard. "But it's banditry."
"Yeah. But now I be your bandit. And I'm gonna earn my money for you in less than five minutes."
She left Smith with a puzzled look on his face and opened the door to the other room.
"Why'nt you come in?"
Chiun smiled at Remo triumphantly. "Two minutes and fifty-five seconds. You owe me."
"Aaah," said Remo in disgust. "Don't worry. I'll pay you. As soon as I get my residual check from Vega-Choppa."
He walked away, but as he moved, Chiun's hands flicked into Remo's pocket and came out with a roll of bills. Chiun extricated the ten dollars Remo owed him, and tossed the rest of the money onto the sofa.
Inside, Remo told Smith, "Not so easy when you've got to see their eyes, is it?"
"You're wrong, Remo. It was a simple administrative decision."
"Here's another simple administrative decision. I quit."
Smith nodded his head. "I know. What are you going to do?"
"I told you. I'm going to get a lot of residuals from those commercials for my hands. I'm going to be rich. My hands are going to be famous. Then, who knows? Maybe next my feet. Maybe they'll want somebody to do something with his feet."
"Like a monkey," said Chiun. "They do things with their feet."
"What was the name of that gadget you advertised?" asked Smith, reaching for a newspaper from the desk.
"The Vega-Choppa," said Remo.
Smith looked at the newspaper. "I don't think you'd better count on them to support you," he said.
"Why not? Let me see that."
He glanced at the story that Smith had circled.
Twenty-seven lawsuits, totaling over forty-five million dollars, had been filed against the Vega-Choppa manufacturer by housewives whose fingers and hands had been mangled using the device. They charged that the television commercials showing the product's ease of operation were misleading and had obviously been filmed at slow speed and then speeded up.
When the manufacturer denied this, the attorneys representing the injured women amended their complaints to include among the defendants a John Doe, who was the demonstrator of the device. They accused him of using manual dexterity to give housewives "a false sense of security that the utensil was safe for normal human beings to use."
Remo looked at Smith and, if he had been smiling, Remo might have killed him then and there. But Smith was as somber as usual.
"Let's see, Remo. Your share of forty-five million dollars in damages should come to twenty-two point five million. You're going to have to sell a lot of carrot cutters to make up for that."
Remo sighed. "I'll find some other work."
Ruby tapped him on the shoulder. "Could I talk to you please?"
"Talk," said Remo.
"Inside," Ruby said.
In the other room, he said "What do you want?"
"Don't be so grouchy."
"It's easy for you to say. You never just lost your chance to be a rich television star."
"You'll get another chance someday."
"Now what am I gonna do?" Remo asked.
"I don't care what you do," Ruby said. "I want to talk about what you did."
"Which was?"
"Freeing Lucius. Those other men."
"A favor to you. I owed you one."
"No, it wasn't. It was a duty to your country," Ruby said. "That was a good thing you did."
Remo sat heavily on the edge of the bed. He was silent for a moment before looking up.
"You really think so?"
Ruby nodded.
"It was a good thing. Today you made America a better place to live in. We should all have the chance to do that sometimes."
"You really think that, don't you? Really."
"I really do. I'm proud to know you."
Remo stood up. "You know, you're right. Getting rid of that creep today was worth a lot. It takes away a lot of the stench."
"It was a good thing," Ruby said again.
Remo took her hands. "You know, maybe Chiun's onto something. About me and you," he said.
Ruby smiled. "We'll just have to see about that."
"We will," Remo said. "We will."
He walked back into the main room of the hotel suite. Ruby followed closely behind him.
Chiun looked past Remo at her. She held up her fingers to make an okay ring.
As she passed Chiun, she leaned over and whispered, "You lose. He was easy. Where's my ten dollars?"
Chiun handed her the ten dollars he had filched from Remo's pocket.
Ruby tucked it into her dress and she and Chiun watched as Remo approached Smith.
"Smitty," said Remo. "I've decided to give you another chance."
Smith almost smiled.
"But if you blow this one, that's it. Right, Chiun?"
"For the first time," Chiun said.
"Right, Ruby?"
"Anything you say. Dodo."