Brain Storm (9 page)

"Was the information damaged when it was downloaded?"

"No, it was perfectly copied. It's just that it was filed away in such a way that proved difficult to access."

"But not impossible."

Newton grinned as he placed his computer printouts on the large desk. "I haven't reached all of it yet, but I've scratched the surface. It's almost like a testament to triviality. This guy has locked away stuff on financial matters. That's always easiest to reach first because of the raw numbers. And I guess that it makes sense for him to lock it up. Prying eyes and all. But I haven't quite nailed down the proper ratios. The computer is probably multiplying everything by a factor of ten or something. It's saying that the amounts he's moving are in the millions, and that can't be right. We were stumped on the cash aspect, which has held us up on the rest of this area of his mind."

"Maybe his work requires him to move large sums of cash," Holz suggested.

"Please. He reminded me of my nickel-counting grandmother," Newton said. "I just wish so much of the initial data capture didn't revolve around raw numbers. It usually helps, but here it's hindered us."

He pointed at the printout. "Look. A lot of this phantom cash goes to Korea, and a lot of it gets moved around here."

"Korea?"

"Yes. You're not going to believe this. The stuff this guy thinks is important enough to lock away is amazing. The money, according to our best guess, goes to a place called Sinanju."

Holz sat up. "Sinanju?" he said sharply. He snatched the computer papers from Newton but no matter how much he stared, could make neither head nor tail out of them.

"It's a small village in North Korea," Newton explained.

"I know where it is."

Newton looked surprised. "Really? I had to look it up. An interesting story. It seems that this small fishing village is listed in our files along with a bunch of other legends. For centuries, since the dawn of civilization, actually, the village of Sinanju has been the seat of the Master of Sinanju. The titular head of an ancient house of assassins. The story goes that the Master of Sinanju has rented his services out to the highest bidder for centuries. All myth, this Sinanju.

I guess it's right up there with Robin Hood or Bigfoot. I'm just wondering how it found its way into our Dr. Smith's head."

Holz had been frowning over the incoherent computer sheet until Newton's last words.

"Doctor?" he said.

Newton grinned proudly. "I've found him. He runs a sanitarium up in Rye. The first numbers to yield to our probe were his home and office. I looked him up in the phone book. He lives on the edge of the Westchester Golf Club."

Holz considered. "The Master of Sinanju," he said softly.

Newton nodded and retrieved the computer sheets.

"He's probably just regurgitating stored memories. Neuron junk. He probably read about it years ago."

"Millions of dollars in gold are shipped to Korea."

"Only in his head." Newton was so tired he didn't even remember not mentioning the fact that the millions to Korea were in gold. "It is probably just a few thousand. Maybe he gets paper clips or other office supplies from there. I'm amazed by how much of his brain is filled up with that sort of minutiae. It seems half his occipital lobe is dedicated to compar-ing the prices of staples today as opposed to thirty years ago."

Holz was no longer listening. He thought about the millions, about Korea. About the Master of Sinanju.

And about his superiors.

Newton cleared his throat. "Um, now that I know who he is, Lothar, I would like to get him down here, if you can arrange it. I'd love to do some laboratory study on him. It could step up the process."

Holz nodded slowly. "Yes," he said at long last.

"Yes, I would love to meet this most fascinating individual."

Newton was beside himself with delight. "His full name," he said, "is Dr. Harold Winston Smith."

7

The phone rang bright and early at 7:00 a.m.

Maude Smith was in the kitchen preparing a batch of her famous pancakes—the ones that had the tex-ture of dry wool and the color and tang of a block of charcoal. She left the wall phone dangling near the ancient linoleum floor and went to the bottom of the stairs to call up to her husband.

Harold Smith was in the process of knotting his striped Dartmouth tie around the severely starched collar of his plain white shirt. He sat on the edge of the bed and picked up the extension from the nightstand.

"Smith," he said crisply.

"Morning, Smitty," Remo's cheery voice announced.

"Remo?" Smith asked, shocked. The voice at the other end of the line gave a cheerful affirmative.

Smith opened his mouth to speak but suddenly heard another voice on the line. It was female and matronly and somewhat distant. And familiar. The new voice was complaining quietly to no one in particular about something smoking far too much. Wordlessly Smith placed the phone on the lace doily that encircled the top of his nightstand and went to the top of the stairs.

"Maude, could you please hang up the phone,"

he called down the staircase. He heard his wife's muffled surprise at her own forgetfulness as she crossed the kitchen to replace the receiver.

This small act gave the already overdone pancake in the frying pan enough time to blacken to unrecog-nizability.

Smith shut the bedroom door and returned to the telephone.

"Your wife's burning breakfast, I gather," Remo said pleasantly.

'This is an open line."

"Open, shmopen, don't be such a girl's blouse, Smitty."

Smith crinkled his nose at the unfamiliar idiomatic expression.

"I will call you back," he informed Remo.

Smith hung up the phone. A minute later, once he had retrieved his special scrambled phone from his briefcase, he was once more speaking to CURE'S

enforcement arm.

"That was a foolish risk, Remo," he said.

"Oh, yeah, tell me about it, Smitty," Remo replied in a mock-serious tone. "No one ever gets a call at their house. You'll probably have the National Guard and Ma Bell beating down your door by seven-thirty."

"You have the special CURE line."

"I forgot the number."

"That hardly seems likely, even for you," Smith noted dryly.

Years before, Smith had been confounded by Remo's amazing inability to remember even the simplest phone codes. He had finally settled on the multiple series of Is that was now in use, reasoning that Remo would be unlikely to forget the first digit. As it was, Remo had taken six weeks to fully get the hang of it.

"Yeah, well, you can shelve the cloak-and-dagger.

This isn't a business call. It's personal."

"How so?" Smith said. Absently he checked the knot of his tie. As always, it was knotted to perfection in a four-in-hand knot.

"I wanted to congratulate you on your going public. Chiun says it was a mistake to go on when you did, though. The smaller stations are counter programming at the supper hour. He thinks Family Matters will trounce you in the overnights."

"I did not say 'trounce,' Emperor Smith," a squeaky voice called from the background.

"You said 'trounce,' Little Father," Remo said.

"I said that the other program has, in the past, been known to beat the emperor's program. But surely with the addition of Emperor Smith to the cast, the half hour of decadence will transcend its usual level of drollery and fecklessness and mount an effective attack against the sprite Urkel."

"You said 'trounce,' " Remo insisted.

"Did not."

"Did, too," Remo challenged.

"I will not argue with you."

"You should hear what he said about your acting," Remo confided to Smith.

Chiun raised his voice to a new pitch of squeak.

"Do not listen to him, Emperor. Your skills as a thespian are matched only by your wisdom as a ruler."

"I rest my case."

This brought forth from Chiun a burst of Korean that Smith could not follow even if he were fluent in the language, which he was not.

"Is there a point to this phone call, Remo?" Smith asked wearily, once the tirade tapered off.

"I thought we covered that. I just wanted to tell you we caught you on the news last night."

"A masterful performance, O Emperor," Chiun called.

"Er, yes," Smith said, uncomfortably. "A neighbor informed my wife that I was in some of the background footage of the news story."

"You mean to tell me some of your neighbors actually know what you look like? I figured with those Dracula hours you keep they'd either have to be up after midnight or before five just to get a glimpse of you skulking through the bushes."

"I am as active in my community as our work allows."

"Yeah, right. From the house to the car to the office and back. You used to golf," Remo said.

"When was the last time you were out on the links?

Ten years ago? That neighbor lady probably dropped her colon when she saw you on the news. She must've thought you were dead."

"Remo, is there something I can do for you?"

"Not me, Smitty. It's Chiun."

Smith raised an eyebrow. "Is there something wrong with the Master of Sinanju?" he asked.

"Nothing wrong. He just wanted me to ask you for something."

"A trifling item, O illustrious Emperor," Chiun called.

"If it is within my power to do so."

"Oh, it is," Remo said. Smith could almost see the grin being beamed via satellite from the kitchen of Remo's Massachusetts home. "Chiun wants to know if he can have your autograph."

"I'm not sure I understand...."

"He thinks since you've been on the news that you're going to break into the big time. He wants to get your signature first. Especially since he heard that a lot of autographs fetch big bucks."

"How like you to apply your base motivations to another," squeaked Chiun. 4'I would treasure the emperor's signature always, and hold it up for all to see. It would be witness to his munificent and generous nature."

"And you'll sell it as soon as you think you smell a buck."

"Visigoth," Chiun hissed.

"So, you willing to do it or what?" Remo spoke to Smith.

"I will see what I can do." Smith stood up from the bed, eager to end the phone call.

"And Smitty?" Remo said.

"Yes?"

"Don't forget us little people when you're a star."

The kitchen reeked of barbecued pot holders. The tiny hood fan above the stove was making a feeble attempt to clear the smoke-filled air as Smith took his seat at the kitchen table.

"I'm sorry the pancakes are a little dark," Maude Smith apologized as she placed a plate before him.

It looked like a tarred stack of miniature manhole covers.

"They are fine, dear," he said. He picked up his knife and fork and began the laborious job of hacking his way through the pile of charred disks. His wife went over to the sink. With great care, she started to chisel the black grit off the still-smoking frying pan.

Smith considered the phone call from Remo as he chewed languidly on a triangular sliver of carbonized pancake.

All things considered, he was holding up very well. Smith was a man to whom the security of CURE was paramount. For that secure shield to remain firmly in place, Smith could never move out into the limelight. The security of CURE and of Folcroft, and the possible compromise of both, had driven Smith into fits of terror for years.

It was, therefore, uncharacteristic for him to be so casual at getting his face plastered across the evening news.

But though it was normal for him to be upset as a general rule about such things, it was also just as normal for him to be pragmatic about any given situation. And the truth was, the news report meant very little.

Nothing of CURE'S secret mission had been revealed. Smith's name had not been given out. The simple fact was, he had been just another face in the crowd, recognized only by a nosy neighbor.

But Maude Smith had been delighted.

She was waiting up for him when he got home the previous night and had treated him as if he were a real media celebrity. She had burbled on for an hour about how thrilled she was that Gert Higgins had called her after the six-o'clock news and how she wished Harold had allowed her to purchase a VCR

machine so that she could have taped the later broad-cast.

She reminded him that she was going to visit their daughter, Vicki, at the end of the week and that Vicki would have gotten a real thrill out of the whole thing.

Maude was happier than he had seen her in years.

In fact, he didn't generally eat breakfast at home—

preferring instead to get a cup of coffee and a container of prune-whipped yogurt at Folcroft—but Maude had been so pleased at his brush with celebrity and so eager to do something special for him that he had agreed to eat a rare breakfast at home with his wife.

So here he was, home more than an hour later than normal, chewing in silence, lost in his own thoughts, while Maude Smith scrubbed diligently away at the blackened pans in the sink.

Smith was surprised at his own calm appraisal of the situation.

There was always risk of exposure. CURE had had several crises in the past. But this was nothing. Nothing at all.

Smith sliced away at a fresh sliver of blackened pancake, and raised it to his thin lips, first swallow-ing the wad of gritty, wet dough already in his mouth.

There was a timid knock at the kitchen door.

Maude went to answer it.

Probably the paperboy. Late, as usual.

Smith made a mental note to chastise the boy for his tardiness. But all at once, a thought occurred to him. The paperboy collected his money on Friday.

This was Tuesday.

"Mrs. Smith?" a man's voice asked from the door.

"Yes."

With worried eyes, Smith glanced up at the door...and nearly vomited his pancakes back up onto his plate.

He recognized the man from the bank. Lothar Holz.

Maude Smith recognized him, too. Before Smith could protest, she had ushered the man into the small kitchen and shut the door. With a quavering voice she announced him as "the man from the bank" to her seated husband.