Remo The Adventure Begins (20 page)

“Not overconfident at all, Wilson,” said Grove. “But why did you fail?”

“It was a first time for Stone. He never missed before. There won’t be a second,” said Wilson.

“Who’s this one?” asked Grove, pointing to the picture of a man smiling at a car windshield.

“That one is very interesting. No fingerprints anywhere. No recognition anywhere. The man might as well be dead.”

“See to it.”

“I have,” said Wilson. “I couldn’t deny Stone now. I’m doing a blanket on New York City. If that man moves within the city, we are going to spot him. And when we spot him . . .”

“Stone,” said Grove.

“Almost as a favor to him,” said Wilson.

If Remo were Sinanju, he would not labor his breathing. If Remo were Sinanju, he would not ask so many questions. If Remo were Sinanju, both he and Chiun would be at the top by now.

Thus spoke Chiun, who had been more critical than ever all morning. Remo had lost count of the stories they had climbed on the narrow metal stairs leading up to the shafts of light above them. All he knew was that it was up, and he didn’t like up, because up meant high.

“I’d rather have the sex lessons. I mean how can you do a Korean courtship dance in an elevator? I failed in an elevator,” said Remo. It felt like they were climbing forever.

“Do you ask me about the inner line stroke? No. Do you ask me about the scorpion defense? No. Do you ask me about the seven traditions and the ninety-nine steps of purity? No. Food and sex. Food and sex. This is what I have to deal with.”

“How high are we now?”

“Almost perfect. Pretty good,” said Chiun angrily. Stupid questions demanded similar answers.

When they were at the correct height, Chiun stopped. Light flooded in from a curve of windows above a narrow platform. New York City and its harbor spread out before them. On all sides there was water, no matter where they looked many stories below them.

The curves and drops were the closest things in this area to the training mountains outside of Sinanju. This was a large statue presented to the Americans by the French. There was only one problem. It was undergoing repairs and scaffolding abounded on its side.

“Don’t hold on to the scaffolding,” said Chiun. “You are not supposed to use your hands. It doesn’t do you any good to hold on to scaffolding with your hands.”

“Other than to keep me alive,” said Remo.

“What a wonderful way to waste all my effort. Think about life and death at a time like this,” said Chiun, and then beseeching the heavens, asked the forces of the universe where he had gone wrong in so mistraining this white.

That done, he ushered Remo outside to the little catwalk. Chiun himself would not descend the face and robes with Remo. He would observe from the bottom, making sure Remo, of course, did not use hands. A small elevator had just reached the crown, riding up along the scaffolding. Chiun passed three hardhat workers coming out of the elevator, and descended. This left Remo alone on the edge of the scaffolding, trying not to think of falling, of death, of that great distance way down there where if he landed, his body would be a bag of crushed bones.

It was very high, and he was very unsure. He grabbed the cold bar of the scaffolding for balance. He couldn’t even stand. He knew now what Chiun had said about him having Sinanju was true. It was gone. He didn’t have it. He would never have it.

Okay, fine. As long as he could get out of here, down by the elevator.

The three hardhat boomers made the scaffolding jiggle.

“Take it easy, will ya, fellas?” said Remo. Heights didn’t bother them. Well, that was them. Remo wasn’t them. And he wasn’t Sinanju. He was getting down to the ground.

If Remo were not so scared he would have noticed the glint of the sun down below. He might have seen the man looking up at him with binoculars. He might have realized that the glint came from a diamond in a tooth.

But if he were not so scared, his balance would not be a question either, and standing many stories above the ground on repair scaffolding for a giant monument would not be a danger. The plank he stood on would have been more than enough, and the boomers in the hard hats, the men who worked heights, would not have bothered him. Their easy bounce along the plank would not have forced Remo to grab on to a scaffolding bar.

“Take it easy, fellas. Okay?” said Remo. They didn’t have to jostle the scaffolding like that. Not everyone liked heights.

The boomers looked at each other and smiled. They all heard the request. They bounced harder.

“Hey, you guys crazy?” said Remo.

“What are you doing here?” asked a boomer. He looked like he was born fifty stories off the ground.

“We work here. Do you work here?” said another boomer.

“Authorized personnel only. We don’t want any accidents,” said another.

“Or suicides,” said the first. The plank moved dangerously.

“Okay. So I’m going down. Now. Down. Me. Just stop that, okay?” said Remo, trying to get across the plank. He would not walk unless he was holding on to one scaffolding bar before releasing the other.

“Yeah,” said the first boomer. “You’re on your way down, all right. The short way.”

Remo felt the plank jangle as the boomer jogged down it toward him, his arms raised, trying to push him off. They may have been real boomers. He didn’t know. But they were trying to kill him. And here, with his fear out of control, they were going to succeed. He saw a crossbar on the scaffolding below.

With feet like lead, and hands like ice cubes, Remo dove for it. The hands held, barely. The body felt like a bag of bricks. It swayed. He clutched the bar as though trying to tear off his skin. But he was safe.

Until all three of the boomers easily jumped down to his level, jumped with the grace of acrobats, acrobats chasing the bag of bricks.

Remo reached out for another strut, but the fear tightened his body and the hand missed. He was falling. But just for a second. Something stopped him. He was on the thumb, the great thumb. He looked up. He had been on the torch. He had fallen from the lady’s torch to her thumb. The green copper flaked on his face and under his hands. He could taste the sharp odor. His arms and legs wide over the thumb, he tried not to scrape off the outer layer of copper. And he tried not to look down. He had one great wish. Never to leave this thumb, this safe place, his home, his destiny, everything. He loved this copper thumb. He loved it so much, he didn’t even want to look away from it. He wanted to stay there on the thumb, and be nowhere else. His thumb. His place. His cheek very close to the copper, hugging it.

And then Remo heard the scraping. It was right above his head on the thumb. Something tapped his hands, then scraped them. Remo had to look up. The boomers had one of the pole scrapers used for chipping the flaked copper away from the statue. They were scraping him off his thumb. He crawled back away from the thing that threatened to remove him from his thumb.

He felt the copper come up quickly to his face, then slip away from above him, hundred-year-old weathered copper coming up in a funnel at his mouth. He was sliding. He was sliding down the arm of the Statue of Liberty, down the forearm, the bicep, into the robes seen by millions arriving in America. Remo’s view was that of a man who was leaving the country, and the earth, forever.

And then he was free of the copper, falling, falling free until he cracked into one bar, several bars, many bars . . . he was falling through scaffolding. And then the fall stopped. Remo was still grabbing, but he had landed on another platform. Painfully, expecting an arm or a leg to suddenly scream at him that it was broken, Remo made his way back up, careful not to look at the ground.

But at the last few steps, scaffolding had been removed. And beneath him was the chasm. He thought of them getting away, and he thought, good. He would be alive.

He felt his breath come strong, breath that almost left. And he drew it in, breathed like he had been taught, breathed until he was breathing correctly.

He brushed the copper off his clothes, without any pressure on the platform, moved across to the statue on the fine day whose brightness hid the stars that would show again that night.

He could have taken the elevator. But elevators were slow. And now, he had no intention of letting them get away, as he let his fingertips lightly brush the patina of the skin of the flaky copper, sensing the very salt that had bathed it these many years, feeling the air, and the mass of the statue and the sea, and the movement, the unity of the movement, the correctness of moving down a great height.

Stone received his men at the base of the statue, sparing any words of recognition. They would not be down here if they had not succeeded. It had been a classic move. If a man seemed comfortable in one area, such as on a city street, go at him at another. Such as on the Statue of Liberty.

The plan had one flaw. Stone saw that in an instant. The man had survived. He was on the ground, coming out from behind the base of the statue, coming at the boomers with blood in his eyes.

One of Stone’s men in the boomer’s hard hat went for his pistol.

“Do him,” said Stone.

On the other side of the statue, Chiun heard a shot. He had watched Remo and made observations for future reference. It had taken Remo too long to realize he was being attacked, but that was not the problem; it was only a symptom of the problem. The problem was what he had come here to solve. Fear of heights. A shot rang out from the other side of the statue, not loudly. Pistols were hardly loud surrounded by so much water, where sound waves tended to dissipate.

Chiun, who had been helping a family take pictures, handed back the camera and went to see about the shot. Remo would be there. There were things he needed to learn about fear, if he hadn’t learned them already. Even if he had learned by now, it should not have taken so long.

There were lots of things to tell him. Chiun moved happily toward the pistol shot.

The way to dodge a bullet of course was not to dodge a bullet. Instead, one dodged the very slow body sending the bullet, aiming the bullet. And of course this man’s body gave much heavier signals than Chiun’s. It was almost laughably easy. But Remo did not want this man right now. He wanted that man with the diamond in the tooth. Remo skimmed across a trough of wet cement, rounded the corner of the statue, and saw Stone riding away in a small motorboat. The boat made good speed on the choppy waves.

Remo thought about the water. Was it like wet sand? Could he move across it? The man with the diamond tooth was getting away, and Remo burned in his belly.

The anger was just as wrong as the fear. Because of it, he did not see another boomer, not the one who foolishly tried to follow him across wet cement and got stuck for his trouble, aim a pistol at the back of his head.

Bullets could not be dodged when one was unaware of the person firing. The bullet was well set for Remo’s brain and would have reached its mark had it not been for the long fingernail shooting out so quickly the human eye could not spot it. It paralyzed the boomer and sent him spinning. And still Remo didn’t turn around.

He didn’t turn around when the force of Chiun’s thrust on the boomer impaled him on rusting wires.

He didn’t turn around to notice the man with the gun, stuck in the cement. He didn’t turn around of course to notice Chiun. He stood there trembling with his hatred, this after all these months of Chiun’s perfect training.

Was this what Chiun deserved? Was this his return for the awesome magnificence he had cast before the meat eater, the man who would want to copulate with a woman just because she was ravishing, not even caring whether she breathed correctly?

But that was all right, Chiun was used to these things. And he had found what he had come around the statue to find. Once again, another injustice had been visited upon perhaps the most decent and giving person Chiun had ever known. Himself.

Chiun turned away from this, and content that the order of the world had been reaffirmed, walked over to some young boys fishing to tell them that a good fisherman does not use a hook or a rod, or string. They, of course, were white and answered him with insolence.

“How can you fish without hooks and line?” they said, without calling him “gracious one” even once.

But he was not paid to teach them, so he ignored their question. Undoubtedly they would grow up adding themselves to the rubble of this civilization into which Remo fit so well.

Remo arrived with sweat on his body and breathing hard, even as the death rattle on his first exercise could be heard by the trained ear on the other side of the statue. What an awful beginning.

“Well, it worked,” said Remo. “Most of the time it was correct.”

“Go fish with a hook and a line,” said Chiun.

“Listen, I almost got killed up there,” said Remo.

“Yes,” said Chiun, feeling the frustration of it all. “Disgraceful. You breathe hard. You perspire, and you show anger. And you show fear. You are a shame to the breath I taught you to take.”

“I am happy to be alive,” said Remo.

“You should be,” said Chiun. And he refused to say another word all the way back to the mainland.

The problems that afternoon were just beginning for Smith and McCleary, however. And it was Remo who was going to tell them about it, only to find out about the horrible secret those two men shared. And the one Chiun had been struggling with, the one he had learned from the devious Harold W. Smith. It would explain to Remo why Chiun could never let him call the man “little father.”

It would explain why Chiun had to tell him about an assassin’s first loyalty. It would be something that would break Remo’s heart. But orphans were used to that.

13

T
he protection for the HARP system financial spread sheets was working again.

“Look at this,” said Smith. McCleary peered at the screen. Although he did not know computers, he could read. Access was denied.

McCleary thought of another access denied, one that he kept trying to push out of his mind. That very afternoon he had been denied an apartment because he was black. It was against the law to do so, illegal in one of the few countries that had such a law, but people did it nevertheless.