Still, there was no excuse for engaging in royal purse-snatching, which is just what he did next. He stole the queen of England’s purse and dumped its contents on the floor of the dingy old room in the moldy old palace.
“I’ve always wanted to know what the hell’s so important you gotta schlep this around all the time.”
To his surprise, the only thing that came out was a tiny, framed picture of a much younger Chiun.
If she’d chosen that moment to try to stick a poison dart in his aorta, she just might have accomplished it.
He was flabbergasted. It still made him wonder—and made him realize again that the old Master of Sinanju had done a lot of living in the seventy-odd years before he began training Remo Williams.
“You still have a thing for your little queenie,” Remo said aloud. “That’s why you’re all in favor of giving the power back to the throne of England.”
Chiun’s face grew redder and redder. “Wrong.”
“I knew it.”
‘Wrong. I say you are wrong. Please respect me when I say to you that you are wrong.”
“I’m not wrong. Sometimes you say I’m wrong and I’m sure I really am wrong and sometimes I say I’m wrong and I think that maybe I might be wrong and sometimes I say I’m wrong and I know I’m right but I think that maybe after I stop being mad about what I’m right about I might stop and reconsider and realize I was wrong all along but sometimes I know I’m not wrong.”
“Sometimes you babble like an infant.”
“This time I’m not wrong, and I know I’m not wrong. You want your sweetums to get her empire back.”
Chiun walked along glum and silent and pink-cheeked. “Are you in cahoots?”
“I am in my robe and sandals.”
“Are you in cahoots with the queen of England, I mean?”
“Certainly not! Do you speak of novelty underwear for sex-crazed couples to wear together?”
“Cahoots means working together. Are you and the queen of England scheming together to make this whole British Empire business happen?”
“No. I am doing nothing with the queen of England.”
“Not even pining?”
“Remo, you know nothing of the matters of which you speak. Kindly quit speaking of them.”
Remo shrugged and nodded. “Okay, but I was right about being right, so how am I right if I’m not right about you cahooting with the queen? What I’m saying is, you think this whole recolonization effort is a good idea.”
Chiun was simply relieved that the conversation was steering in a new direction. “Of course. Any right-thinking watcher of the world understands the power of empire. Empires endure. Egypt. Rome. England. Each provided stability that can never be matched in a world of democracy.”
“We’ve been going strong for about 230 years.”
“Egypt endured for three thousand years.”
“Egypt got a head start. Check back with me in 2,770 years and then we can compare oranges to oranges.”
“Fah. Democracy is an experiment, Remo. It is like the highly polished automobiles that are created by the car companies for the one and only purpose of trying out a new kind of screw-pipe or agitator. Once the experiment is done, the car is abandoned. It was never meant to last.”
“Well, guess what, America is lasting.”
“America throws itself into chaos, deliberately, every four years for the purpose of rotating out the leaders it installed just four years before. These leaders express themselves in quips no more intelligent or meaningful than the screeches from the bird from the village of the People in Brazil.”
“True.”
“Think what would happen if the conquerors of the old British colonies were allowed to hold on to their possessions.”
“They’d rule them.”
“Yes?”
“They couldn’t possibly do a good job. A race-car driver and an archaeologist?”
Chiun opened his hands. “How are they less qualified than a professional politician?”
Remo chewed the inside of his lower lip. “You got me there. But they’re bad guys.”
“Because they aggressively took power that they wanted, using devious means?”
“Yeah.”
“And this cannot describe any elected one of the Americas?”
“Sure, it can. Now you’ve got me all confused.”
“Now I have shown you the failure of democracy and the reason why an empire might be a good thing for the world.”
“And Sinanju,” Remo said. “The bigger the empire, the more gold and the more threats that need to be dealt with to keep the thing chugging along.”
“True.”
Remo sighed. “Here we are.” They had come to the end of a street to an intersection. Across the street was a decorative chain around the vast grounds of the Ayounde Government House. It was the dwelling place of the prime minister and the place where all national government business took place. It was known that Sir Michele Rilli, self-appointed governor of the recolonized African nation, was inside the complex. So, presumably, were the hostages who ran the nation until a few days before.
“You are violating the edicts of the Emperor and this you must obey. Disturb not the colonial governor, lest more vengeance be taken upon the colonial people.”
“Must’ve missed that memo. Don’t worry. Nobody will ever know I was here.”
Chapter 27
“Hello?” Remo called out. “It’s me! Anybody home?”
“You are certainly insuring that no one will know you are here,” Chiun said.
“Don’t worry about it.” Remo slammed the door behind him. The twenty-foot-tall brass door normally took two men to open and close. The boom reverberated through the quiet chambers. If nothing else attracted the attention of the two guards at the front entrance, that would have done it.
“Hands up!” They were in Ayounde National Police uniforms, but they spoke as if they had slunk right out of a dingy London alley. “How’d you do that with the door?”
“How’d I do what?” Remo took a single step, or so it appeared to the men in the police uniforms, and he went from being all the way across the room to being right in front of them. With a grin he snatched each by the shoulder, turned them to face each other, then clapped them together with a whack on the back.
They smashed together only after their assault rifles skewered each other, much to their surprise.
A hail of machine-gun fire came from the end of the vast, richly decorated receiving hall. Chiun and Remo slithered toward the gunners, moving deftly to avoid the bullets that ripped the air around them.
“Most ingeniously stealthy, this method of entrance,” Chiun remarked.
Chiun drifted everywhere except where the bullets were, then rose up underneath the attackers before they knew he had arrived. Chiun’s fingers pinched the gun muzzles as if he were snatching the earlobes of two rascally boys, and the guns blew back. One of the blasts was fatal. Another was less immediately fatal.
Remo questioned his own trio of victims, then finished them off by flinging them offhandedly into a convenient marble pillar. “He know anything?” Remo asked of Chiun’s lone survivor.
“Why not ask him yourself.”
The dying man gave them a general vicinity in which to hunt for the governor. Sir Michele Rilli had opted not to take up residence in the prime minister’s quarters and instead was housed in the bomb-proof emergency quarters underneath the meeting chamber of the cabinet of ministers. They left the informant to finish dying and went in search of the cabinet chamber.
“This will only result in more deaths,” Chiun pointed out. “That is why the Emperor insisted we not touch the governor.”