Anna pointedly ignored the old man.
"If I tell you something only I would know, would that satisfy you?" she asked Remo.
"I guess," he replied reluctantly.
Anna leaned in close to him. Her breath was warm on his ear as she spoke in a barely audible whisper. "Stop shouting," Chiun groused.
When Anna finished, this time it was Remo's face that was flushed. His ears burned red.
"Anna," he said, his voice soft with incredulity. Until that moment he hadn't permitted himself to fully believe. He looked at her now with new eyes.
The Russian nodded sharply. She tugged off the big black poncho she'd been wearing since arriving in Barkley that morning, tossing it through the open window of her car.
"It is a wonder the two of you got any work done at all, with all of your groping and grunting," Chiun huffed. He turned a stern eye on his pupil. "Remo, I have always kept to myself my opinions about the way you fritter your life away. Though presented with opportunities to criticize that were more numerous than the stars in the sky, always have I held my tongue. I have allowed you to stumble and bumble and rut like a mad donkey with every debauched hussy who invited you to share her bed. Never did I scold or complain or offer even a single sharp opinion."
Remo gave the old man a heavy-lidded stare. "Don't make me start doubting you're you," he said flatly.
Chiun pointed a long-nailed finger at Anna Chutesov.
"I never liked this woman," the old man insisted. He folded his arms angrily. "There. I have said it. And to speak this truth, I have been forced to break my steadfast and ironclad rule against meddling. Her fault, again."
The Master of Sinanju's words were like white noise. Numbly, Remo turned back to Anna.
"It's really you," he said. "I don't get it. Why didn't you tell me?"
His voice was small. In his eyes was the lost-little-boy gleam that had always stirred some long-repressed maternal instinct deep within Anna Chutesov's ice-princess heart. But she well knew her feelings for Remo had never been truly maternal.
"You know the answer," Anna said. "It was too dangerous for me. I was an outsider who knew of your organization. Dr. Smith had already expressed his desire to see me terminated. That loomed over my head for the year we worked together. Long before our encounter with Gordons, I had been working on a way to get away alive. Our last meeting presented an opportunity I could not resist."
"Never would have happened," Remo insisted, shaking his head firmly: "You were never in danger."
"Yes, Remo, I was. And if you already thought me dead, you would not have come to kill me. With so many deaths, I assumed I would be counted among the missing at the amusement park. When it was demolished afterward, so, too, was my existence as far as you and Dr. Smith were concerned. Because of my deception, I have lived the last thirteen years of my life in peace."
"Anna," Remo said. It still seemed so strange to speak her name. "I never would have killed you. Ever."
Her expression remained unchanged. "If not you, him," she said, nodding to Chiun.
"The day is young," the old man offered thinly.
"I wouldn't have let him," Remo said.
"You could not have stopped me," Chiun volunteered.
"Stay out of this, Chiun," Remo snapped. His flashing fury melted instantly. "Don't," he begged. "Okay? Just don't."
He turned back to Anna. "I loved you," he said softly.
Her expression hardened.
"That is not what you told me in Smith's office thirteen years ago," she said. "Or do you not remember?"
Remo thought back to the last time he'd seen Anna Chutesov. There had been a long gap between encounters. So long that in the intervening months Remo had gotten engaged to someone else.
At the time Remo-the perpetual outsider, the orphan with no real roots-had been determined to get married. He wanted to force happiness on his life if it killed him. In the end it was not Remo who was the victim. His single-minded quest for the elusive normal existence enjoyed by the rest of the world had claimed but one life. Mah-Li, Remo's Korean bride-to-be, had paid the ultimate price for the life he led. Killed by the Dutchman, Jeremiah Purcell.
Before Mah-Li died, Remo had met Anna for one last joint mission. It was then that he had told her of his intention to marry someone else. Always cool, always in control, Anna believed that it was she who had the upper hand in their relationship. But the news of Remo's plans to wed another had been worse than any physical blow.
At the time she pretended it didn't matter. But it was a lie. The truth was, in the end, she had been shocked to learn that she loved Remo more than he loved her.
Anna had used the first opportunity that presented itself to flee. Her claim that her disappearance was motivated by concern for her personal safety was only partly true. Yes, she wanted to live. But the act had as much to do with emotional self-interest as physical. Given all that had happened between them, she needed to stay away from Remo.
Remo had accepted the lie, assuming Anna dead. Not long after, Mah-Li had died, as well. After that loss, Remo had thrown himself into his work, allowing little room for emotional contact. In the past decade he had come to realize that his marriage to Mah-Li had been more for his sake than for hers. A selfish desire for a life that could not be. But Anna...
Anna had always been another story. Remo wasn't really sure what it was he felt for her. Was it emotional? He didn't know. It was certainly physical. He didn't know if he could possibly still love her. At the moment all else had been short-circuited by the shock of discovery and his anger at her deception.
"Remo?"
The voice sounded far away. Remo was numbly aware of a pair of slender fingers snapping in front of his face, like a hypnotist trying to bring a subject out of a deep trance.
He blinked hard once, looking down into the beautiful upturned face of Anna Chutesov.
"As much as I would like to stand out on this sidewalk for the rest of the day, we should go," Anna said.
The Master of Sinanju was already scurrying into the back of Anna's car. Sitting in the center of the seat, he folded his billowing kimono neatly around his bony knees.
"Why can't anything ever be easy?" Remo exhaled quietly.
"There is a saying in my country," Anna said as she slid efficiently behind the wheel. "Simplicity is for children, fools and the dead. Did you kill all my men?"
"An even half dozen," Remo confirmed as he got into the passenger's seat.
"What about Koskolov, the man they were after?"
"Dopey-looking gay? Partial to Russian stand-up comics?" Remo said. "The big guy who looked like one of the dancing bears from the Moscow circus shot him."
"Idiots," she muttered, jamming the key angrily into the ignition. "They killed our only lead to the lunacy that is going on here."
Yet another surprise for Remo. "So this isn't just Smith getting us out of the house?" he asked. "You wanna fill me in on what's really going on here?"
When she looked at him, her blue eyes were charged with sparks of dark concern.
"The end of the world," Anna Chutesov replied ominously.
Twisting the wheel of her rental car, she pulled carefully away from the curb and into the pot-holed street.
Chapter 16
For Harold W. Smith, the end of the world had begun after midnight the previous evening. His impending personal Apocalypse loomed large and full in the gloomy gray hours before dawn. With the rising of the cold winter sun, the threat did not fade, but grew greater still.
As the tired sun swelled from bleary red to bright yellow, the light spilled through the one-way picture window at Smith's back. The shafts of widening sunlight stabbed across the room, illuminating the figure that slept on the sofa of his Folcroft office.