Power play, p.8
Power Play, page 8
“I don’t know,” Remo said. “They do some strange things.”
“If they wanted to harass somebody, they could surely find a better target than Wesley,” she said.
“They’ve got enough people to harass everybody,” Remo said.
Downstairs, the hymn-singing had changed to chanting:
ONE, TWO, DOSEY-DO,
PRUISS IS GONE AND GROSS MUST GO.
“That’s enough of them,” Theodosia said. “I’m calling the police.”
“Don’t bother,” said Remo. “I’ll shoo them.”
Remo went downstairs and waited on the front steps for Rev. Higbe Muckley to make the circuit of the country club building.
“Nice sign, mama,” he said to an old woman who walked by, carrying a placard that read: “We will not be bought off by a mess of tax pottage.”
“You think so?” she asked, her bitter lined face lighting up.
“Best one yet,” Remo said.
“Think it’ll make that Pruiss go home? Back to New York where he belongs?” she asked.
“No,” Remo said. “Of course not. Signs never do anything except get you on television.”
“Oh my, television.” Her hand moved to smooth her hair.
“Absolutely,” Remo said. “You’re a shoo-in for it.”
“You’re one of them, aren’t you,” the woman asked Remo. She nodded toward the house.
“Guess so.”
“Well, you probably can’t help it, being Italian and all,” the woman said.
“Nice talking to you, mother,” Remo said as he saw Reverend Muckley come around the far corner of the building, moving his hands as if an orchestra leader, conducting the chants. He was a big man and he ambled along and Remo thought all he needed was a beard and top hat to look like Abraham Lincoln.
Remo fell in alongside him as he passed the steps.
“Good to welcome you here, son,” Muckley said. “Where’s your sign?”
“I don’t have one,” Remo said. “Look. There’s a man sick upstairs. Whether you like him or not, he’s sick. Now why don’t you go away and give him a chance to heal up?”
“An angel of the devil,” Muckley said. “Sent to visit evil upon us. It is God’s will that he be ill and God’s will that we be here, the hosts of the Lord, to guard against him.” His voice was impassioned but Remo saw there was no fire in Muckley’s eyes. He was just reciting from memory, probably something he’d recited hundreds of times before.
“I’m glad we had this little chance to talk,” Remo said. He grabbed Muckley’s right hand and pinched the flesh between his index and middle fingers. “Sure I can’t convince you?”
Muckley winced. “Of course, there is a time and place for Christian charity. Even to those who offend us.”
“Right,” Remo said. “Sort of turn the other cheek.”
“Correct,” Muckley said. Remo was leading him away from the house now, back toward the narrow street. As if they were mountain climbers, attached to their leader by lifelines, the forty pickets followed him.
Remo kept pressing the flesh between Muckley’s fingers.
“Go away now, Reverend.”
“Yes. I understand your point of view.”
“I thought you might,” Remo said.
“Folks, we’ve done what we can here,” Muckley called out.
There was a groan from the crowd. The old woman shouted, “The television ain’t arrived yet.”
“Now we should all go back to our homes and pray for this evil man,” Muckley said.
“Let’s set the house afire,” someone else called.
“No, no, no,” Muckley yelled. “Christian love will conquer all. Our prayers are the only flames we need. They will light the fire of decency, even in such a cold heart as Westport Prune’s.”
“Good going.” Remo said.
“You going to be here tomorrow?” Muckley asked.
“Every day,” Remo said.
“All right,” Muckley said. “But no more with the hand, huh?”
“If you behave,” Remo said.
He let Muckley’s hand go and the tall minister walked off down the road, followed by the straggling line of disappointed picketers.
CHAPTER SIX
THE FIRST SOLAR HEATING equipment arrived early that evening at Furlong County Airport, a paved area that looked like a Grand Union parking lot, three miles from the country club.
Because he had decided to go ahead with the solar program at the urging of Rachmed Baya Bam, Pruiss had insisted the Indian accompany them to the airport to inspect the arrival.
Pruiss rode in the back of an ambulance commandeered from the Furlong County General Hospital for the occasion, and Rachmed Baya Bam helped roll him down the ramps in his wheel chair.
Four ten-foot-high piles of solar panels had arrived aboard a transport plane and now sat on lifts near the far edge of the runway. The hangar floodlights had been turned on to illuminate the black plexiglass collectors.
“Looks like junk to me,” Pruiss said to Theodosia. “How do they work?”
“The sun beats on the black plexiglass. It absorbs heat and passes it on to pipes below that hold water. Then the water’s circulated through the radiators or whatever and heat the house.” She waved at the piles of panels. “And this is just the first, Wesley.”
She was walking alongside Pruiss while Baya Bam was wheeling him along. Remo saw her step was light and bouncy. Chiun was next to Remo, his eyes searching the darkness around the hangar.
Baya Bam stopped Pruiss’s wheelchair five feet from the piles and stepped to the side to look around. “Even science pays glorious homage to the sun,” he said.
He looked spellbound. All Remo saw was piles of plastic.
Theodosia took the Indian’s place behind Pruiss’s wheelchair and began to roll it away from the piles.
“Rachmed,” she said sharply to the Indian who stood near the piles. “Be careful. They may fall over on you.”
He smiled at her, as if inviting her to bask in the salad oil of his warmth. “It is all right, Missss,” the said. “I am very agile and will…”
“I said stand clear,” Theodosia said sharply, “before you get hurt.” She kept wheeling Pruiss away. He was twenty feet now from the piles of collectors. Baya Bam shrugged and followed her.
Remo turned to speak to Chiun, but paused for a moment. Something registered on his hearing. There were always sounds in a place but the trained ear could focus on them and out of a hubbub pick the hub and the bub. There was something now fighting for recognition in Remo’s ears.
Chiun had heard it too. His head was cocked like that of a deer in the forest, tilted at a slight angle, all the intensity of his tiny body tuning in on his hearing.
Remo began to speak when suddenly Chiun moved forward. To Theodosia, he seemed to drift, but somehow he was moving with an unbelievable speed. At that moment, Remo recognized the sound he had heard too. It was a hissing, sputtering, metallic burning.
He followed after Chiun who tossed himself across Wesley Pruiss’s wheelchair and pushed it back toward the hangar farther away from the piles of collector plates. Remo wrapped Theodosia in one arm and scooped up Rachmed in the other and the force of his forward motion carried them back toward the hangar where Chiun was still shielding Pruiss with his body.
There was a split second in time in which the sputtering ended, the hissing stopped, and then there was a roar as an explosion blew away under one of the piles of collectors. There was the cracking sound of plexiglass snapping and behind him as he veered around the corner of the hangar wall, Remo felt heat and pressure, but then they were all behind the wall as all the piles of panels blew up, spraying glass shards and bits of metal into the air. It rocked the corner of the hangar building behind which they stood, Chiun again looking as placid as if he had just returned from meditating in his garden.
Glass and metal pieces dropped, with pinging sounds, on the corrugated metal roof of the building, then slid down and landed about their feet. Theodosia looked stunned; Rachmed Baya Bam cringed in the corner of the building behind her.
Pruiss had his usual angry look on his face.
“What the Christ is…?”
“A boom,” said Chiun.
“Bomb,” said Remo.
“Those fucking oil companies,” spat Theodosia.
She stepped out now from behind the hangar and looked at the runway, covered with fragments of plexiglass, glinting sharply black in the reflection of the runway lights.
Airport workers were running from the hangar and Pruiss said, “Let’s get out of here.”
“Is it safe yet?” asked Baya Bam, still cowering in the corner.
“Yes, it’s safe,” Theodosia said. She grabbed Pruiss’s wheelchair and began pushing it rapidly back toward the ambulance. Rachmed raced ahead and ran into the ambulance, hiding in a far corner.
Remo and Chiun looked at the wreckage.
“Close call,” Remo said.
Chiun nodded.
“So much for knives with horses on them,” Remo said. “No assassin works with a knife, then with a bomb.”
Chiun continued to look at the pile of rubble.
“Perhaps,” he said. “Perhaps.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
BY THE TIME THEIR AMBULANCE had reached the Pruiss residence, Theodosia had decided. She was keeping the other three bodyguards on the payroll. She twisted her hands together nervously as she told Remo.
“That’s not necessary,” Remo said.
“No,” said Chiun. “Not necessary. If you have money to throw away, I know this nice little village where the people…”
“Chiun,” said Remo.
Theodosia shook her head. Dark curls splashed around her shoulders.
“No. This is the way I want it. I’ll just sleep better.”
“Suit yourself,” Remo said. “Just keep them out of our way.”
“You do it,” she said. “I don’t want to deal with anybody tonight.”
Remo had the three bodyguards meet him in the old ground floor golf pro shop of the former country club.
They came in as if expecting an ambush, scanning the room cautiously with their eyes, glancing behind the glass counter and the doors.
Remo was practice putting with a putter he had pulled from a sample bag of clubs.
“Nobody hiding in the golf bags either,” he said, looking up.
“Now listen, Yank, what’s this all about?” the mercenary colonel said. “We’re supposed to be on duty.” He was a husky man with a mustache twirled into points so precise that only a sadist would have inflicted that kind of discipline on his facial hair.
The small arms expert and the karate man nodded.
“Theodosia’s decided to keep you on,” Remo said. “Don’t ask me why.”
“The ‘why’ is because we’re the best there is,” the colonel said.
“Sure,” Remo said. “Right.” He putted a ball across the room and stopped it twelve feet away on a little dark spot in the green rug. Pro shops always had green rugs, he realized. “Anyway, I just wanted to tell you to stay out of our way. Work outside or something.” He inspected the soft rubber grip of the putter.
“Do you know what a drag it is being able to one-putt every green?” he said. “I liked golf better when I used to miss a shot once in a while.”
“You know, Yank,” the colonel said with a faint sneer. “When this is all over…”
“If you guard yourselves the way you guarded Pruiss in that hospital,” Remo said, “when this is all over, you’ll be lucky to be alive.”
“You Americans are always pushy,” the colonel said. He fingered the stock of his submachine gun. “When this is over, just you and me.”
Remo smiled at him, then putted another ball across the floor. It stopped, touching the first practice putt.
“You don’t seem worried, Yank,” the colonel said.
“I told you,” Remo said. “I never miss. One putt all the time.”
“I’m not talking about your bleeding golf game,” the colonel said. “I’m talking about big things. Life and death.”
“If you want something big, you ought to try a twenty-dollar Nassau with presses on the back nine,” Remo said.
“Life and death,” the colonel insisted. “You know how many men I’ve killed?”
Remo putted another ball. It stopped touching the first two.
“I’ve seen what you killed,” Remo said. “Untrained ninnies who couldn’t tie their own shoes. People who signed up to be soldiers so they could eat anybody they captured. The Cubans are probably the worst fighters in the world, except for the French, and when they got to Africa, they kicked your ass and sent all you make-believe field marshals home.”
The colonel took a step forward and put his foot in the line of Remo’s putt.
Remo dropped another ball on the floor and putted it across the carpet, with a chopping up and down stroke. The ball squirted off the putter head and skidded across the floor. When it reached the colonel’s shoe, the back english took effect and the ball hopped into the air, over the shoe, and stopped dead still on the far side, next to the three other balls.
“Will you put that bloody putter down?” the colonel snarled.
“Don’t have to,” Remo said.
The colonel growled in anger, reached down and snatched one of the golf balls from the carpet. He flung it across the ten feet of space separating himself and Remo. The white, rock-hard ball sped in on Remo’s face. He turned his body slightly toward the left and raised his left hand in a buzz-saw motion. The ball was intercepted by Remo’s hand. It hit the hand without a sound and seemed to hang on the side of Remo’s open palm for a moment. Then he dropped his hand and two halves of the golf ball fell to the floor, sliced neatly in two as if by a surgical laser beam.
The three men looked at the golf ball in shock.
“Guard outside,” Remo said again softly.
They turned toward the door.
“Colonel,” Remo said. The mercenary officer, his face drained of color, turned to meet Remo’s eyes.
“That was a good ball,” Remo said. “A Titleist DT. I’m docking your account a dollar thirty-five.”
· · ·
Theodosia had put Remo in a bedroom on one side of Wesley Pruiss and Chiun in a room on the other. Her room was down past Remo’s and Rachmed Baya Bam’s was the farthest down the corridor.
When Remo got upstairs, the Indian had already gone to bed because he said his nerves had been shattered by the American propensity for violence. He could easily, sirrr, have been killed before his mission in life had been accomplished.
Chiun hissed to Remo, “That means as long as there is still a dollar loose in this country.”
Theodosia had put Pruiss to sleep and Remo and Chiun headed for their separate rooms.
“Which one of you is staying with Wesley?” she asked.
“I don’t like sharing a bed,” Chiun said. “I sleep on my mat.”
“But somebody’s got to stay in his room,” she said. She looked at Remo helplessly.
“No, we don’t,” Remo said. “Nobody can get within a hundred feet of this room without us knowing it. Don’t worry about it.” She did not look convinced.
“Look, if you want to do something,” Remo said, “pull down the shades in his bedroom. If that makes you feel better.”
When she came back out of Pruiss’s room, she told Remo: “You forgot your weapons.”
“No, we didn’t.”
“Where are they?”
“They’re always with us,” Remo said.
“Show me,” Theodosia said.
“They’re secret,” Remo said. He stuffed his hands into the pockets of his black chinos.
“Let me have a good night’s sleep,” she said. “What kind of weapons do you use?”
Chiun paused at his bedroom door.
“The most deadly weapons known to mankind,” he said. He went inside. Theodosia looked at Remo.
“The same weapons we used to get through those steel windows at the hospital,” Remo said.
“You’ve brought them?”
“Yes. Never travel without them,” Remo said.
Theodosia looked at him suspiciously. “You’re sure you can tell if Wesley’s in any danger?”
“Sure I’m sure. If it makes you feel any better, I’ll sleep with my door open tonight.”
He smiled and she shrugged.
“I hope you’re worth what I’m paying you,” she said. She sounded sure he wasn’t.
He took his hands from his pockets and held her soft hands in his, stroking the knuckles with his thumbs.
“More,” he said. “Go to sleep. It’s been a long day.”
Almost reluctantly, she started down the hall, then stopped and went back to Pruiss’s room and peeked inside.
“He’s sleeping,” she told Remo.
“Good,” said Remo.
“I want you to kill anybody who tries to go into that room tonight,” she said sternly.
“You got it,” Remo said. “Go to sleep.”
He entered his own room, undressed and lay on the bed. There had been a time, years before, when he had had trouble sleeping. Going to bed was just another struggle in a day filled with struggles and he would turn and toss on his bed until his drained and exhausted body reluctantly accepted sleep.
But that had been years ago, back before CURE, back before Chiun had transformed him into something different by giving him control of his own body, able to make it do what he wanted it to do.
He had once mentioned the change in his sleeping habits to Chiun, who laughed one of his infrequent laughs.
“You have always been asleep,” Chiun had said.
When Remo finally came to understand the gifts Chiun had given him, he reflected that the ancient Korean was correct. He had been asleep, never in touch with his body. Most men used only a small fraction of their bodies and an even smaller fraction of their senses. Remo was man pushed toward the ultimate, using almost all his body, almost all his senses. And Chiun? Chiun was the ultimate. The secrets of centuries of Sinanju were stored in his mind and body and it explained why that frail old man, less than five feet tall, weighing under a hundred pounds, could bring physical forces to bear that had to be seen, and still were disbelieved.
