"We tried. No good."
"No good? What do you mean, no good? I see two guys at it and you say no good."
One guard held up a swollen purple hand.
"I just walked up to touch the old guy on the shoulder. I don't know what happened but my hand went numb. Now look at it."
"Does it hurt?"
"No, but I got a feeling it will when the nerves come back to life. If they do."
"Aaaah, I'll handle this," the security guard said. "They're not even fighting, for Chrissake. They're dancing. I'm going to break it up."
"Don't do it," the guard with the purple hand said in a quivering voice. "Don't get between them."
The security guard from the desk ignored him and stomped across the rooftop. He held his pistol in his right hand, waved it at the two men, and said, "Okay, cut the crap. You're both under arrest."
He did not know which one of them did it, but in a movement that his eyes could not register, someone wrapped the barrel of the pistol around the fingers of his shooting hand. He looked down at his fingers trapped inside a corkscrew of twisted steel and yelled to the other guards: "Call out the National Guard."
Remo was against the edge of the building when he saw, far below, the figure of the gunman walking toward a car.
He leaned over the parapet and without thinking, he cried out:
"Don't go. Dad. Wait for me."
And then Remo was over the edge, down the side of the building. Chiun waited a moment, and then, as the security guards in the doorway watched, his head seemed to slump forward and he turned and walked toward the exit door.
The guards made way for him as he walked by, and later, one of them would swear he had seen a tear in the old man's eye.
Chapter 16
Dr. Harold W. Smith had not slept all night and now the sun was showing through the big one-way glass window of his office overlooking Long Island Sound.
Smith's face was haggard, his thinning hair uncombed. He still wore his striped Dartmouth tie tightly knotted at the throat but his gray jacket lay across the back of a chair, a single concession to the fatigue that stress and lack of sleep had wrought.
It was Smith's manner that he seemed smaller and slighter than he really was, and he wore naturally the look of a middle-management type who, in his declining years, had risen to a cushy but boring position as the director of a totally unimportant facility for the elderly, known as Folcroft Sanitarium.
No one knew him, but if someone had, it was most likely that Smith would have been described as a gray man, dull and unimaginative, who counted the days until retirement by the sizes of the piles of paper he shuffled endlessly.
Only one of those descriptions would have been true. Smith was unimaginative.
That was one of the reasons a long-dead President had picked him to head CURE. Smith had no imagination, nor was he ambitious in that power-hungry way that came naturally to politicians and reporters.
But the President had counted that as a virtue because he knew that a man with imagination could quickly be seduced by the unlimited power he would wield as the director of CURE. A man with both imagination and ambition might well attempt to take over America. And such a man could have done it too. CURE was entirely without controls. The director ran it with a free hand and without restrictions. A President could only suggest missions and the only order Smith was bound to obey from the President was the order to disband.
For two decades, Smith had been prepared to execute that order if the President gave it or to order the disbanding himself if CURE was ever compromised.
There would be no retirement for Harold Smith. Only a swift, painless death, and not even a hero's burial in Arlington National Cemetery for the man who had served his country with the OSS during World War II and who had occupied a high position in the Central Intelligence Agency until his supposed retirement in the sixties. The secrecy of CURE, the organization that didn't exist and whose initials stood for nothing and for everything, was too important to allow Smith even a small bit of posthumous recognition.
It was a lonely job, but never a boring one, and Smith would not have traded it for any work in the world because he knew its importance. Only CURE stood between constitutional government and total anarchy.
To remind himself of that, each morning Smith would come into his office, press the concealed button on his desk that raised the main CURE computer terminal, and consider that CURE was the most powerful agency on earth because it had unlimited access to unlimited information and it knew how to keep the secrets.
This morning, as he did every morning, Smith tapped out a simple code on the computer, and on the video screen appeared the first paragraph of the Constitution of the United States of America in glowing green letters. Smith began reading, slowly, carefully, sounding out the words in his mind.
We, the People of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, establish justice . . .
He could have recited the entire thing from memory, but to this rock-ribbed native of Vermont, the Constitution was not something one recited, as the Pledge of Allegiance was recited by unthinking schoolchildren, but a sacred document that ensured Americans the freedoms they enjoyed. To most of them, it was an ancient piece of paper kept under glass in Washington, a piece of history they took for granted. But to Harold W. Smith it was a living thing and because it lived, it could die or be killed. Smith, sitting quietly behind his desk and looking small in the Spartan immensity of his office, stood on the firing line in an unknown war to defend that half-forgotten document and what it represented to America and to the world.
Yet every time he entered his office, Smith knew he betrayed that document-by wiretapping, by threat, and so often these days, by violence and murder. It was the ultimate tribute to Smith's patriotism that he had accepted a thankless job whose very nature filled him with revulsion.
And so, in order not to lose sight of his responsibility and perhaps as a kind of penance toward the living document in which he believed implicitly, Smith read the Constitution from his video screen, reading slowly, carefully, savoring the words and not rushing through them, until in the end they were more than just words on a computer screen. They were truth.
When Smith had finished reading, he closed out the file and picked up the special telephone that connected directly to the President of the United States of America. But the telephone rang just as he touched it.
Smith snapped the receiver immediately to his ear and said, "Yes, Mr. President."
"Hubert Millis has just come out of surgery," the President said.
"Yes, Mr. President. I know. I was just about to call you regarding that matter. I assume you'll be issuing the order for us to disband."
"I should. Darn it, Smith. There's no excuse for not protecting Millis. What went wrong?"
Smith cleared his throat.
"I'm not certain, Mr. President."
"You're not certain?"
"No, sir. I've had no communication from my people. I don't know where they are and I don't know what happened."
"I'll tell you what happened. Despite everything, Millis was shot and is lucky to be alive and your people didn't do anything to stop it. If he had been killed, I want you to know that your operation would have been terminated immediately. "
"I understand, sir. My recommendation precisely."
"No, you don't understand. There's a lot of talk now that the Big Three auto companies are all going to make a deal to have Lyle Lavallette come in and run their companies, because they can't compete with the Dynacar anyway. I want Lavallette protected. If he goes down, Detroit may be down the tubes. And I want your people either on the job or eliminated. Do you understand? They're too dangerous to be running loose."