So CURE changed its strategy. It became an agency that took action, and the action it took was just as illegal as its blatantly unlawful intelligence-gathering.
CURE hired an assassin. They found him in the form of Remo Williams, a New Jersey beat cop and war veteran. Smith's right-hand man, Conrad MacCleary, made the choice. What CURE needed, after all, was a natural-born killer. Conn had witnessed Remo Williams in action in wartime and never forgot it.
Officer Williams, with a fiancee and a solid reputation and a bright future, was framed for murder. He was found guilty. He was sent to the chair and executed.
But the execution didn't take, thanks to Smith and MacCleary, who arranged the entire charade, and Remo Williams woke up with a surgically altered face and a decision to make. Join the team. Or die. For real this time. No hard feelings.
Remo Williams joined the team. He was trained in weapons and stealth. He was trained in Sinanju. Chiun was another one of MacCleary's choices. Smith had such faith in his old friend from the CIA that he acceded to what sounded like a bizarre training regimen. Sinanju, MacCleary said, produced the finest assassins the world had known. Ever.
Smith didn't quite buy into it. MacCleary wasn't known to exaggerate, but the feats that he claimed for these Sinanju masters were beyond believability. But Chiun proved Conn right.
Before long, Remo proved Conn right, as well. Even Chiun was surprised by Remo's ability to absorb Sinanju. No child of the village of Sinanju ever mastered the art as Remo mastered it. No adult had ever been able to learn more than a few rudimentary basics.
But Remo became Sinanju, and Chiun deemed that this American orphan would become his protege, a last-minute godsend for an elderly master who had lost two heirs already-one to tragedy and one to betrayal.
Chiun would not leave Remo, so CURE found itself with the most potent pair of assassins on the planet under its employ.
They worked side by side, a perfect team. The disasters that had been averted by Remo and Chiun were unfathomable in their scope.
Harold Smith didn't know what the future held for the world, but he knew the world wasn't ready to exist without CURE and its enforcement arm. Its enforcement team.
But he might have no say in the matter. If and when Chiun made up his mind to seek the comfort of retirement in a dark cave in North Korea, Smith certainly wouldn't be able to talk him out of it.
There was something else on Smith's mind. He had enjoyed his parlay with the old master about the merits of Ung and Homer. It had hearkened back to the discussions he enjoyed years ago, when he was considered a scholar of sorts. It was the kind of pastime he had looked forward to during that brief interlude in his life when he was retired from the CIA and had accepted a position as a university professor. All too quickly that future was erased with a summons from a U.S. President in need of a man just like him.
Smith hadn't refused the CURE assignment. His patriotism would not have allowed him to refuse. But there had been no personal considerations, really. From the moment of that meeting with the President until this day, decades later, CURE came first. Everything else in Smith's life came second. Wife. Family. Home. Enjoyable diversions.
That give and take with Chiun had been quite satisfying and novel. It had been a long time since he had that kind of, well, fun.
Chapter 8
Greg Grom evaded his security detail without trouble. He always did. Still, he followed orders and did the circle-the-block thing and tailback thing. There was no sign of the others.
He looked for a likely dark alley to do the park-and-wait thing. Sitting in the shadows for fifteen minutes watching for the tail he knew would not come. What a waste of time. Just this once he'd skip it and nobody would ever have to know.
But that was a fantasy. When it came time to report in, he wouldn't be able to hide his rule breaking. And then he'd be in big trouble.
"Dammit!" He shouted at the steering wheel, then turned the car quickly into a convenience store lot, parking in the shadows alongside the building where a security floodlight was inoperative. He waited and watched for fifteen minutes, as ordered. There was no sign of pursuit.
"Told you so," he said to nobody.
It was a two-hour drive to Lexington. It was a two-hour drive back.
He stopped for a short while at the Big Stomp Saloon, which was big. It had been a roller rink once. The "Stomp" referred to the type of dance favored by the clientele. It seemed to include a lot of cowboy-boot stomping.
The Big Stomp was now famous throughout Kentucky and Tennessee as the birth of country rave, the newest evolution in country music. The original raves had sprung up in the US in the 1990s, when the designer drug Ecstasy became all the rage. Kids took it and danced all night. That was a rave.
An Ecstasy high gave the user a high-adrenaline rush that lasted for hours, and rave music had a rapid, thumping beat. Country music took years to come up with a hybrid that fit the bill. It was mostly just Garth Brooks remixed over a disco rhythm track. Whatever. It was awful.
Greg Grom smiled broadly, at no one in particular. "Look like you got a stick up your butt and you really are enjoyin' it," commented an acne-scarred teenager in grease-blackened jeans and shiny, new imitation-rattlesnake cowboy boots.
"Do I?" Grom asked.
"What the hell you all smiley about?"
"I just made a big score," Grom explained.
The teenager looked around. "Oh, yeah? So where's she now?"
"Not a woman. Business. A deal. I just closed a big deal, and I made a hell of a lot of money off it. Buy you a beer?"
"Oh. Sure. Yeah." It was hard to stay antagonistic to a guy who paid for your brew.
"Give this man a beer!" Grom shouted at the bartender. He slapped a twenty on the counter. The twenty made the bartender his friend, too. "What the hell! I want everybody to celebrate-give everybody a beer!"
He thrust a few hundreds at the happy bartender and the party started. Word spread throughout the place and the dance floor emptied as the patrons crowded in for the free drinks. "Let me give you a hand," Grom shouted, and the bartender had no objections when Grom stepped behind the bar to help him man the tap and shove beer mugs across to the eager customers. The bartender never noticed that Grom's beer mugs received a quick sprinkling of white powder before they were rotated under the open taps.
"This is party night!" Grom shouted. "This is the most fun we have ever had! We need to keep dancing all night long!"
The bartender gave him a bemused smirk, but Grom thrust several more hundreds at him. "That should cover things for a while."
The bartender quickly estimated it would cover every customer's bar tab for the whole night and maybe the next. "The rest is yours, friend! Keep 'em coming!" Grom shouted, "This is the best night ever! We want to celebrate all night long!"
He sounded like an ecstatic idiot drunk, and that was perfectly okay to the Big Stomp patrons. The bartender figured he had to be some sort of foreigner. The guy didn't talk right, sort of. But the bartender wasn't about to upset this apple cart.
After the first free round was distributed, Grom slapped the bartender on the shoulder. "Thanks, friend! I need to step out for some fresh air-"
The bartender just grinned and kept pouring.
"Hey, you're the greatest, businessman!" shouted the acned teenager, waving his free beer at Grom. Other patrons came at him, shaking his hand, offering compliments. Grom was careful not to say anything more. One careless suggestion could ruin everything.