The creature had arrived at the sanitarium exhausted and confused, and in search of Chiun. They were old acquaintances. Chiun and the bird had met in the Caribbean months before. Chiun was suspicious of the creature, which made Sarah feel foolish. When she had witnessed its intellect she had been willing to believe whatever words came out of its big beak.
Soon, Chiun did understand the message the parrot was bringing him—but it was too late. The damage was done. The thing Chiun called Sa Mangsang had been stirred from its slumber. Chiun blamed himself—and Remo—for carelessly allowing the awakening to occur. Sarah doubted it. She had heard of the meeting between the man and the bird at a tourist resort on a Caribbean island. The bird hadn’t been unusually communicative then. Why should Chiun have paid attention to the creature?
Chiun spent hours questioning the bird, hoping to get something more from the creature, but the bird had nothing more to say. It was simply the bearer of bad tidings, or so Chiun concluded. Sarah wasn’t convinced.
“Chiun doesn’t see you like I see you, bird,” Sarah told it. She spoke to it constantly, and it always seemed to be listening. “I can see you struggling. You wouldn’t work at it if there wasn’t more for you to say.”
“Exactly, Sarah,” the bird said.
She smiled and rested her chin on her hands, her elbows on her knees. The bird shuffled its feet on its eye-level perch, favoring the good leg, and cocked its head.
“When you say things like that I think you’re really listening.”
“I’m always listening.”
“But how do I know when it’s you speaking, or the bird?”
“Trail mix!” the macaw demanded.
“I thought so.” She smiled and stroked its head, but her disappointment was bitter. The bird seemed so lucid sometimes. It couldn’t be a trick.
Or could it?
The bird was obviously a superior mimic. Its repertoire of dirty limericks was world-class. Was it possible it had been trained to speak a bunch of conversational phrases? Could someone have even coached the bird to respond to certain emotional phrases and voice tones? Had someone crafted the bird’s behavior to give it the illusion of intelligence?
The longer Sarah spent with the bird, the less believable its intelligence became.
But she had witnessed some amazing exchanges that couldn’t be passed off as good training. There had to be more to it than that.
There was a flapping of huge wings, and the bird weighed down on her shoulder as she retrieved trail mix from the hospital cupboards. She had a small kitchen setup, with a hot plate and a minifridge. She felt more at home here, with Mark, than she did in the big mansion in Providence, Rhode Island, the ancestral home of the Slates.
“Dee-ya dee-ya dee-ya,” it murmured as she opened the trail mix. It was the mumbling it made when it was about to get a treat, or sometimes when she stroked it. It was like a purr. She held a palm full of mix and allowed the bird to pick out pieces with its great beak.
It bent its head and hooked a raisin, and the tip of the beak drilled into her flesh and froze.
It was looking right at her, and it mumbled, “Hear us now, Sarah. The more you feed it, the bigger it gets.”
It ate the raisin.
Chapter 17
“You mean, you were about to sabotage the entire facility?” Harold W. Smith asked peevishly.
“Yes.”
“That’s unconscionable. Incidentally, it’s far beyond the scope of the new contract’s areas of authority sharing.”
“Why?” Remo demanded.
“It’s a matter of national security,” Smith said.
“Uh-uh. You can’t claim national security. Everything we do is national security.”
“I meant national defense, specifically,” Smith insisted.
Remo bit his tongue and it didn’t help. “Smitty, there’s a few big words I get, like ‘genocide.’ What I saw in the basement at the Tweed’s castle was for genocide. Not defense.”
“Remo, perhaps you don’t understand—”
“Not homeland security or nation rebuilding or shocks and awes. It was WMD taken way over the top.”
Smith sighed heavily. “All this is moot since you were not the ones who initiated the self-destruct. I assure you, the order did not originate with CURE.”
“We do not doubt your sincerity., Emperor,” Chiun sang. He was seated on his reed mat on the floor of the London Ritz-Carlton. “Doubtless Remo tripped over some sort of electrical cabling. Perhaps he leaned accidentally against the automated-destruction lever.”
“I don’t lean.”
“You lean often and carelessly.”
“You’re making that up.”
“You are likely unaware this is happening.”
“The question remains,” Smith interrupted, “who initiated the attack, if not Remo?”
“You tell us. Weren’t you watching the blips and bleeps in real time?” Remo asked.
“We were doing our best. Believe it or not, everything the U.S. government does is not known to us. The system at Tweed was nearly one hundred percent physically isolated—they had almost no data channels into or out of the system. It’s one way of heightening security.”
“Nearly one hundred percent isn’t one hundred percent,” Remo said. “You did get in?”
“We were able to worm our way inside. It was barely enough to get more than a system ping.” Smith added, “Remo, is there any chance that one of your prisoners regained consciousness?”
“C’mon, Smitty. You serious?”
“Yes.”
Remo looked at Chiun. Chiun looked at the infinite horizon of their Ritz suite.
“No. They were very unconscious. None of them would have woken up soon, and even if they had we would have heard them—we were in the same laboratory they were.”
“Any chance there were other people in the facility that you did not notice?”
“What are you, nuts?”
“I feel compelled to ask. Please be forthright about this, Remo. The consequences—”
“You mean, be straight? I’m being straight. To the best of my ability I swear there was nobody else in the room. No closets. Even the toilet was out in the open. It was me, Chiun and the microbots.”
“Yes,” Chiun agreed.
“Hey, Smitty, are you thinking that the little mechanical guys blew themselves up? Why couldn’t it be just an automatic self-destruct in the computer system?”
“There wasn’t one,” Smith stated flatly. “The agency in charge of the research ordered the self-destruct application purged from the operating system. You have to understand, Remo, the Department of Defense has got some serious catching up to do after their technology losses to the Fastbinder arms sales.”
Remo scowled at the ritzy print on the hotel bedcover. Jacob Fastbinder had done great damage to the U.S. military research effort, stealing and selling billions of dollars’ worth of innovative technology.
“That’s a crock, Smitty. We didn’t lose anything. We just have to share what we have with everybody else.”
“That’s the same as being behind when you’re the only world superpower.”
“Can the crap. We’re still not talking about conventional unconventional warfare. We’re talking about continent killers. Did you figure out who’s behind the development? I bet it’s not your standard-issue secret government agency.”
Smitty was quiet, then said, “You’re correct. It’s a small, secretly funded offshoot of the Anglo-American diplomatic effort.”
Remo snorted as he became more agitated.
“It’s almost completely unknown by the British or the U.S.,” Smith continued.
“And you? How long has it been on your radar?”
“Since I ordered you to Scotland,” Smith said. “Even then my intelligence was sketchy.”