“Do what? I didn’t hear a bloody thing.” The videographer ran for a pay phone.
Chapter 12
Remo didn’t want to go back to Jamaica. He’d had enough of all things Caribbean. He also didn’t like waiting around for things to happen. “I especially don’t like standing around waiting for things to happen in Jamaica.”
“This you have stated ceaselessly.” Chiun was impatient, too, but better at hiding it. They were on foot and they had been strolling the gardens and neighborhoods in the vicinity of Jamaica House, where the prime minister was ensconced, apparently taking the warnings of a possible coup attempt more seriously than his compatriots in Africa.
Hope Road was busier than normal, with a few extra Kingston police on the beat, a few extra Jamaican military folks visible. These were ostensibly the “precautionary measures” the government was taking in light of recent troubles around the world. There were also 4 plainclothes commandos, Jamaican and U.S., roaming the Hope road vicinity, to be on hand should the expected attack come. Some bumbled; others were so good Remo couldn’t be sure if they were undercover or real tourists.
Still, he had little confidence in their ability to halt whatever was coming. “What’ll it be this time, Little Father? Will they attack with dreadlocks? Will they hurl coconuts?”
“There will be no more taking of governments off their guard,” Chiun mused as they strolled by the Bob Marley Museum. “The next strikes will use conventional Western methods of brutality.”
“Booms and thunder-sticks?”
“Perhaps people-killing booms that spare the buildings.”
“How encouraging.”
The hundredth street peddler approached them with a cart of brightly colored souvenirs. “You need a cap, mon, to keep off the fierce sun of Jamaica.”
“Can I have my money back now, Little Father?”
“You would purchase some of these cheap trinkets?”
“I would use the edge of the bill to slit his eyeballs open.”
“That is worse! You need no weapon! Simply slit them!”
The vendor attempted to push a baseball cap with nylon dreadlocks into Remo’s hands. “Just twenty dollars, mon—” he exclaimed, overplaying his accent and his friendliness.
“Twenty dollars for what?” Remo asked.
The vendor’s hands were empty. He stopped smiling, looked on the ground, looked at his customers and shrugged. He grabbed another dreadlocks cap from his cart and presented it to Remo.
Then it was gone. The merchant seemed to sense that it had flown up into the sky, but he couldn’t say for sure that he had actually seen it.
“You do that, mon?”
“Do what?” Remo asked.
“You some kind of magic man?”
“Who knows? We all have a little magic inside us, don’t we?”
“The merchant never took his eyes off Remo as he reached for a dreadlocks cap and held it out in front of him, but nothing happened.
“No, thanks. I don’t get sunburn.”
The vendor nodded at him and took his eyes off the cap in his hands for a second. Just a second. And it was gone. The young, tall American had not moved, and the little Asian grandpa hadn’t moved, although there had been that sense of movement again, like something in fast motion. Or something spiritual.
“Hoodoo?” the merchant whispered.
“Spread the word,” the American whispered fiercely. At least they were bothered by no more street vendors as they wandered Hope Road. By the time they were back at the museum, their peddler friend had discovered his dreadlocks caps perched atop the Bob Marley Museum, the dreads dangling over the side. One of the Marleys were knocking them off for him. He snatched them and ran when he saw Remo and Chiun.
“You shall be feared forever among the trinket-peddlers of Kingston,” Chiun commented.
“Better than being Qetzeel the Destroyer,” Remo snapped.
Chiun looked at him. Remo looked at Chiun. “Sorry, Little Father. Didn’t mean to sound like an asshole. Guess I’m a little bitter about the scene in Brazil.”
Chiun nodded, but he showed a trace of rare confusion. “Why, my son?”
“Not again, Chiun.”
“Humor this old man. Why does this disturb you so, to be the fulfillment of the myth of those peoples? What part of it was disagreeable to you?”
Remo thought about that. “I’m not sure. I don’t like being thought of as the channeler for somebody else.”
“But that is what is.”
It was strange, walking the streets of Kingston on a hot summer afternoon and thinking about the thing that was Shiva, the Hindu god who was called the Destroyer.
There was a weight in the name, or nickname or whatever it was. Somehow Harold W. Smith had come up with the code name Destroyer when Remo was first brought into CURE, years ago. That was before he was a Master, before Chiun had come to the belief that Remo Williams was, in fact, the earthly avatar of the genuine god Shiva.
Remo would not believe the outlandish notion at first, or for a long time afterward, but now he believed that there was something that came through him, and it did use the name Shiva. It called itself the Destroyer.
Remo had learned to retain his awareness when this thing called Shiva came into him. He had learned to summon it and control it—sometimes, and just barely— at will.
But he didn’t like it. He didn’t understand it.
“It’s not me. It lessens who I am.”
“It is who you are,” Chiun chided mildly.
“Cut the crap, Chiun,” Remo said, feeling hostile. “You get to be in your body all by yourself. Me, the mind that is me, Remo, doesn’t. I have to share it with this supernatural creep who is not me. Do you get that?”
“I get that, and yet I get not the fighting of that. It is not a choice you have to make, Remo Williams, so you must choose instead to make the most of it.”
“Yeah, so I’ve heard. And I do that. I make the best of it. But sometimes I think it’s getting crammed down my throat, like the scene in Brazil. I’m already Shiva. Why do I have to be Qetzeel, too?”
“They are the same,” Chiun answered.
‘Yeah. Probably.” Remo was dissatisfied by all these answers—and dissatisfied more by knowing that there were no better answers. “Man, I wish this business would get started. I feel like going Shiva on these British knights.”
They were facing Jamaica House again. The afternoon was at its hottest, and even the die-hard tourists were abandoning their sightseeing until later. The guards around the home of the prime minister and King’s House, the government offices, were looking droopy.
“Now would be the ideal time to hit ’em,” Remo observed.
“But not the ideal time for a walking tour of Kingston’s fabulous Hope Road,” Chiun added, as a tour bus pulled up, bearing the freshly painted billboard, Walking Tours Of Kingston’s Fabulous Hope Road!
It was an old school bus, painted sky-blue and allowed to rust for twenty years. Lately, however, the sign was added and the windows, inexplicable, changed to black mirror windows.
“Let’s catch that bus,” Remo suggested.
Then came the second bus. And the third. Remo stopped counting at six.
“First we keep the prime minister from getting whacked or napped,” Remo said. “Then we’ll worry about the rest of them.”
They moved down Hope Road as the bus pulled to a stop at the unloading zone. The driver of the bus pressed his fingers into his eye sockets—for a moment he thought he had seen human beings shimmering in the haze of heat coming off the asphalt.
The doors of the bus were removed from their hinges noisily.
“Hi.”
“Mother of gawd!”
“You here for the King’s House tour? I’m Remo Lee, and I’ll be leading the tour.”