"I know, I know, I know."
"He who thinks he knows before he hears does not know."
"I know," said Remo.
"Listen."
"I'm listening."
"You are not."
"All right. I'm listening."
"Now you are," Chiun said. "Children are promises of greatness, in all manners possible. They have all been made holy in your eyes, not just the babes of Sinanju but all children."
"So?" said Remo. He tried to slump into a chair but it came out as a delicate, precise placement of his body with the chair.
"So you cannot kill hope. And this is a good thing. What has been given us is a power that we achieve by giving ourselves."
"That's right. And I don't exist anymore. That framed killing has finally worked. Patrolman Remo Williams is dead. I don't know who I am now."
"You are a better you. Why, sometimes," Chiun said solemnly, "you remind me of myself. But do not think this is all the time. You had much to overcome."
"I liked what it was I overcame."
"You liked living with your mind and body asleep?"
"Sometimes, all I want to do is go into a bar and get a hamburger, yes, meat, and a beer, and get fat and maybe marry Kathy Gilhooly."
"What is a Kooly Gilloolly?"
"Kathy Gilhooly. A girl I once knew in Newark."
"How long ago?"
"Ten years at least. No. Twelve. Twelve years, I think."
"She is dead twice. Do not think you can ever find her. Every five years, a white person changes. If you see her, you will kill her in your eyes, that last remembrance of what you once loved. Wrinkles and fat will bury it, tiredness in the eyes will smother it, and in her place will be a woman. The girl dies when the woman emerges."
It was still six minutes until the call to Smith and Remo got up without answering and walked toward the kitchen.
"What rudeness is this that you inflict silence between us?" said Chiun.
"I'm sorry, I…"
But Chiun now turned in silence and went triumphantly into the kitchen. If someone was to not speak to the other, it would be the Master of Sinanju not speaking to his pupil, not the reverse. Besides, Remo would soon resolve his problems. In his new life, Remo was really only at puberty. A difficult time for anyone.
"Arrogant," said the pupil in American.
Chiun chose not to be offended, since the silence was his and he was not about to give it up for a minor rebuke.
At the precisely proper time, Smitty picked up the telephone and Remo told him everything was being resolved legally. There was this group that was using kids to kill which explained why no one had seen the killers. Grownups ignored children, especially at a murder scene.
"I know all about it," Smith said. "I think you've got everything solved but the problem."
"The Chicago police have a kid. He's one of them. He'll spill his little head open and the whole system will go down constitutionally. You ought to like that."
"Except for one thing, Remo."
"What's that?"
"I've already heard from Chicago. Little Alvin Dewar admits that he shot Warner Pell. He said Pell was sexually assaulting him and he grabbed the gun from Pell's desk to defend himself."
"He's lying. Get the cops to beat it out of him."
"Good thought, except our little Alvin Dewar has a bank account of $50,000 waiting for him. You know what the law is. He'll be out in no more than twenty-four months. He'll be a rich kid on his way to becoming a rich man."
"That's not my problem. Change the legal system," Remo said.
"And another thing," Smith said. "We still don't know how they get the locations of the hidden witnesses for their hits. There's still a leak someplace in the government. And another thing. Why did you go after Pell when I told you to wait?"
"I wanted to wrap this up," said Remo.
"Yes," said Smith drily. "And now Pell, our only real lead, is dead."
"Maybe what Alvin said is true. Maybe Pell was trying to mash him. Sure, that's probably what happened. Pell was the boss and now he's dead. And as long as we're complaining, how was it that the Chicago cops recognized me today and tried to arrest me?"
"Were you hurt?" asked Smith.
"No. Just a bullet in the back," said Remo with a grim satisfaction. "How about how that happened?"
"I'm afraid the Justice Department put out a wire on you and Chiun regarding forged credentials. It happened before I could stop it."
"Yeah," said Remo. "See. Nobody's perfect."
"No, you're not," said Smith calmly. "At any rate, I hope you don't have any more such trouble. But the problem still remains. We don't know-and I mean know, not guess-who's been behind the kids, and we don't know who the leak is in the government, and we don't know anything about the organization of the kids, and until you put that all together, this job is still going on. Goodbye."
The phone went dead and Remo hurriedly dialed to tell Smith he couldn't do the job; he couldn't go up against kids. But all he got was a busy signal.
"Little Father," he said to Chiun. "I need your help."
There was silence from the kitchen.
"I'm sorry. All right? Are you happy? I've got to find an answer to this kid thing. Help me, please."
Chiun returned to the living room of the motel suite. He nodded softly.
"What did you mean by arrogant?" he said.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Major General William Tassidy Haupt was on the move. His forces were rolling and he knew one word: "Attack."
"We'll hit those fuckers with everything we've got. They'll think they've run into a battery of Horlands."
"Howitzers," said a young lieutenant, just out of the Point, who had actually fired one during training-a fact that prompted Haupt's chief of staff to ask if they sounded as loud as they looked in the movies.
"Louder," said the lieutenant.
"Will you two shut up? This is a strategy session," said General Haupt. "What are you talking about?"
"Nothing, sir. The audio effect of a Howitzer."
"This is a strategy meeting of an American Army command, Lieutenant, I do not wish to hear one word out of you about norlands, tanks, pistols, grenades, rockets and all the folderol they like to talk about at the Point. Here we separate the men from the boys. You want to play games, you go to some combat outfit and stay a second lieutenant all your life. You want to dig in and be real Army, you guts it up with everyone else and prepare for the press conference."
"Press conference," gasped the chief of staff.
"No choice," said General Haupt coldly. "Our backs are to the wall. We win or die. Options limited. Therefore, at eighteen hundred hours I have summoned the two networks, Associated Press, and United Press International to be here."
Men checked their watches. Haupt's chief of staff exhaled a large gust of air. "The balloon is up," he whispered to the lieutenant.
"The problem is this," Haupt said, going to a large chart at the back of the briefing room. "One: A Martin Kaufmann has been killed while on our post. Two: While his safety was the responsibility of Fort Dix personnel, and so publicly acknowledged, I have received a call indicating some effort will be made to hold us responsible. Three: The caller had access to personal information about my life, leading me to believe it is either the Justice Department or the Central Intelligence Agency. I recommend at the press conference we announce that it is a major government agency and allow the press to assume it is the CIA."
"What if the CIA fights back?" asked the chief of staff.
"In its present position, I do not believe it is capable of launching a major attack. The hidden armor, Colonel, is that the CIA will not really be in a position to do anything except deny the charge which we are not making in the first place. We're just saying 'major government agency.' By this action I hope to convince the caller that he can't push us wherever he likes."