Whatever was wrong, Dr. Smith was clearly not happy with his assistant. Whatever could Mark have done that would make Dr. Smith so angry? Dr. Smith never got that angry.
"Oh, dear." She bit her lower lip to stop its quivering. She couldn't bear to think of that nice young man losing his job. Mark Howard had brought life back into Folcroft's executive wing. A little sparkle. A little humor. The years before Mark came seemed so gray and bland by comparison. To lose him would be awful.
AFTER THE DOOR CLICKED shut, Dr. Harold W. Smith said, "Mark, I want to know why you did this."
"I understand, Dr. Smith," Mark Howard replied tentatively, as if he felt remorse but also felt unsure of how to proceed. "First of all, when I give you my full report you'll see that there was no real urgency. Remo did not have anything to go on."
"Obviously he did," Dr. Smith replied. "He went after the Union Island tour group and now there's been an assassination attempt on the Union Island president. Remo is up to something."
"He didn't come across as having any agenda other than tracking down the source of the violent outbreaks," Mark insisted. "When he came to my office, he asked me to trace the movements of the Union Islanders. They happened to have an itinerary that meant one of them could cause the poisonings. I tried telling him we had a long list of people whose known movements gave them the opportunity."
"So what made him suspect the Union Islanders?"
"He had no reason, not that he would tell me about."
Harold W Smith frowned, and some of the anger was evaporating. "So why did he suspect them?"
"He mentioned seeing the island president on TV on a talk show, and placed him at the first set of poisonings. But that was all he had. We tried to brainstorm on a motive and couldn't come up with anything. There's nothing that connects the Union Island group to anybody involved in the mayhem. Nothing. We couldn't see any way the island independence movement could benefit from the killings. And that was about it."
Dr. Smith had his assistant start from the beginning and report, word for word, the conversation between Mark and Remo. It didn't take long.
Smith looked drained then. Paler than his typical gray. "Remo either mislead you about what he knew, or else he was simply getting into this avenue of the investigation impulsively."
Mark Howard shifted uncomfortably in his chair. Smith seemed to have lost his quiet anger, but it had been so startling and out of character that Mark simply didn't know where he stood now. He didn't have experience with this aspect of the director of CURE. "Sir, I don't think either of those characterizations is accurate."
Smith had been regarding his hands, folded on the desktop, but he raised his eyebrows and his rock-steady gaze met Mark's.
"Explain."
"I got the feeling there was a lot going on with Remo when he came in. I mean, that was unprecedented in itself. Since when does he come to me for help? I got the impression he was in a sort of strange place."
"You got an impression," Smith repeated evenly. "What kind of impression?"
Suddenly Mark was even more uncomfortable. He had long ago come clean to Dr. Smith on the subject of his special abilities. Abilities Mark himself didn't understand. These abilities manifested as impressions, intuitions, sudden burst of knowledge that came to him out of nowhere. There were times when he would be writing words on a page or entering data into the computer and suddenly realize he had written something unexpected, something that had not come from his own conscious thought.
Those brief riddles had more than once been unraveled and led CURE to the answers it needed.
But Howard's unique mental abilities had proved a great bane to CURE, too, when they opened the door to the reawakening of one of the great enemies of the Master of Sinanju, and the world. This bastard son of Sinanju, Jeremiah Purcell, had been locked away at Folcroft and maintained in a comatose state. For years his bloodstream was perpetually saturated with drugs that kept him unconscious. Purcell had used his own unique mental powers to find purchase in the conscious world, but his reach was limited. There were special minds in the world that Purcell could use, could bend, could manipulate, but none of those had come within the range of his clawing psychic fingers in all those years.
Until Mark Howard was assigned to be the associate director of CURE and, for cover, of Folcroft Sanitarium.
Jeremiah Purcell's malevolent influence on Mark Howard was tentative, but in time he coerced Mark into ordering the termination of the pharmaceutical regimen that kept Purcell comatose. Harold Smith learned of this only when it was too late-after Jeremiah Purcell, the one called the Dutchman, had escaped. Mark Howard nearly died.
Nobody expected Purcell to fade quietly away, but when he inevitably made his move against the Masters of Sinanju he brought with him, or was brought by, an even greater foe.
For months Mark Howard carried a heavy sack of guilt for his responsibility in those events.
"Mark," Dr. Smith asked, "are you saying Remo had some sort of psychic intuition that led him to the Union Islanders?"
"No. Dr. Smith, you remember what you told me the first time I told you about my, well, foreknowledge events. You suggested that they might simply be a heightened level of intuition. My subconscious putting the clues together in ways my conscious mind couldn't."
Dr. Smith looked uneasy. "Yes, I remember saying that." The truth was, he still preferred to cling to that notion, despite the evidence that proved there was much more to it.
"That's what happened here. Remo's investigative skills were kicking in. Maybe he picked up some subtle clues along the way. Maybe his heightened awareness of everything in his environment gave him an idea of who was responsible. He was going with his gut feeling."
Smith nodded. "I see."
"There's more," Mark added, less confidently. "I think Remo's got something to prove, and I think he's trying to do it by tracking down the people responsible for this violence."
Smith twitched his lip. "I find that hard to believe. You heard Remo's last tirade about being sent to do detective work."
"Yeah. He said something like, 'Smitty, we both know I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed.' And you didn't disagree with him. And Master Chiun would have called it a mild understatement."
"So this is all an attempt to throw mud in our eyes?" Smith demanded.
"I think he wants to prove to himself that he's more than just hired muscle," Mark said. "Maybe he wants to show that he's got what it takes to be Reigning Master-that he's got what it takes up here."
Howard tapped his temple with one finger. Smith nodded, considering that.
Mark was on a roll. "You know what they say in business and government and the military, that a talented man will rise through the ranks until he reaches one level above his level of competence. A man who knows his own capabilities knows when to refuse a promotion. Could Remo be trying to prove to himself and all of us that he has not been promoted beyond his skill level?"
Smith's mouth became a hard line. "That aphorism was a cliche when I was in military intelligence. In the middle ranks we used to make our own estimation of who would get the next advancement-into-inadequacy promotion. But there's something more to consider. A man who is a success, who finds himself in a new environment where success eludes him, will remake himself into a man who can succeed. If Remo Williams feels he needs to rise to the occasion to be worthy of the title Reigning Master, then I believe he'll do it."
Mark Howard screwed up his face. "I don't know if I've seen Remo show much genuine determination."
Smith turned to his keyboard and began typing rapidfire, saying, "Then you need to look harder."
"REMO," CHIUN SAID excitedly, "we are just minutes from Dixie's Answer to Disney World!"