It was gratifying how splendidly these explanations worked for him. The book was truly invaluable. Clearly, the wisdom of some from beyond the jungle was great—although clearly some, like the missionary, were great fools.
And the lie of the phalluses was a harmless one, for who would have thought the dreams would ever come true? For a hundred generations the dark secret of Chuh Mboi Aku was kept by his forefathers, and never had it come true.
Now the dreams were suddenly coming all too frequently. There were many of the People who were having the dreams every night so that they couldn’t sleep. They had the dreams every time they collapsed into just a moment of slumber. They awoke in terror.
“No more can we accept these interpretations of towering manhood,” they proclaimed. “What else could they be?”’
That was when the father had come with his daughter, who was in madness from her dreams and her torment of sleeplessness. That was when the Caretaker decided to go search for answers in the mountain, in the cave. It seemed unlikely that he would find enlightenment there, but his grandfather said that he must meditate on the painting …
So he turned away from his village, feeling like he was betraying them all, and walked away from the People in their hour of greatest need.
Chapter 20
The office had seen better days. Decorated in the era of sock-hops and greasers, its upkeep had been limited to only what was absolutely necessary to keep it functional.
Dr. Smith wore a sour expression, which was perfectly at home on his unnaturally gray face.
“Smitty?” asked Remo’s voice from the speakerphone.
Harold W. Smith was elderly, but today he looked ready for the grave. “I’m here, Remo.”
“Somebody dying?” Remo asked.
“The oceans,” Chiun answered from the same phone.
“I am not convinced of that yet, Master Chiun,” Smith said.
“Choose to disbelieve, if that comforts you—it matters not, Emperor.”
“The ocean is low?” Remo asked.
“Not noticeably,” Smith said.
“As of yet,” Chiun added.
“The ocean levels have indeed dropped,” Smith said, then clammed up when there was a knock on the door and a young man entered, walking almost at a normal pace and barely limping.
“Hey, Junior,” Remo said.
“Remo, good to hear from you.”
Remo sounded more worried by the second. “It is?”
Mark Howard’s desk was positioned awkwardly in the room. He and Smith had been sharing office space for months, ever since Mark Howard’s leg was seriously injured. His own office was so tiny his wheelchair couldn’t fit inside. He was out of the wheelchair now, but neither Smith nor Howard showed an inclination to change the arrangement.
Harold Smith was director, and Mark Howard assistant director, of Folcroft Sanitarium, in Rye, New York, a private hospital and mental health facility.
The two of them also made up the entire management staff of the smallest agency in the United States government. The agency was called CURE, and Folcroft had always served as its base of operations and cover.
CURE operated differently than other agencies, taking no orders and operating without oversight. Only the current President of the United States of America knew of the existence of the agency, and even the Commander in Chief was not empowered to give orders to CURE. He could only suggest missions. The one command the President could issue to CURE was to shut it down.
It had existed for decades, but even the surviving former Presidents no longer remembered that they had once been party to the wide-scale violation of the Constitution of the United States that was CURE.
Exposing CURE would have destroyed the agency. Its methods of operation were so blatantly illegal, it would never have been allowed to continue. Smith and Howard, as the intelligence gatherers for the organization, violated right-to-privacy laws every day. They stole information from U.S. and international intelligence organizations with impunity.
The CURE enforcement arm did the true rule- breaking. Remo and Chiun were assassins on the payroll of the United States of America.
Putting this kind of power into the hands of any one man would have seemed like an act of national suicide. How could any man wield such unrestrained, unsupervised power without being corrupted by it?
Harold W. Smith had done this. For years, he alone had managed CURE’s intelligence gathering and directed Remo and Chiun in the field. Smith never abused his power.
His assistant was Mark Howard, a young CIA agent installed on the whim of the President. Smith had never asked for an assistant, had never wanted an assistant. If he were to search for an assistant it would have been a massive data-crunching operation to find a suitable trainee—one without a hint of corruptibility.
Smith had come to realize that no search he could have conducted would have yielded him a better candidate than Mark Howard. The young man had proved himself in unexpected ways. He was a patriot, he was ethical and yet he was young enough to see the twenty-first-century world through a clearer lens than Smith could.
In a few years—perhaps twenty—Mark Howard would be ready to run CURE on his own.
Today, Mark Howard was lucky he could stand on his own two feet.
“Junior,” Remo said, “you sound like you look—like hell.”
Mark Howard slumped into the squeaky, ancient chair behind his old desk. “Not sleeping,” he explained, and just saying it seemed to be an effort.
“No one sleeps within those walls, or elsewhere,” Chiun intoned in his melodious voice. “All around the world, those whose minds are sensitive to certain vibrations are agitated in their dreams. This place brings many such minds into close habitation. The young Prince Regent is even more attuned to this disturbance than the inmates of Folcroft.”
“Please don’t call them inmates,” Dr. Smith said. “They’re patients.”
“Pardon me, Emperor.”
“Please don’t call me Emperor,” Smith replied automatically.
One of the rules of the assassins of Sinanju was that they worked only for kings, emperors, popes and regents—never for those of a lesser rank. Harold W. Smith was probably on par with the President himself in terms of real power, but without the title. Chiun had long ago taken to addressing him as Emperor, which befitted his station better. Also, it sounded better in the Sinanju histories. Smith no longer tried so hard to dissuade Chiun from using the term.
“So, what are the dreams like?” Remo asked.
“Do not answer,” Chiun snapped. “You would be wise to refrain from foolish questions. Have I not told you of the dangers we face, unique to us, in this time?”
“I don’t see how it can hurt to know what the dreams are all about.”
“It can hurt grievously if it stirs His thoughts toward us.”
“Master Chiun, I have not accepted your theory of these events,” Smith said.
“Have any of my predictions failed to transpire?” Chiun posed. “I predicted a tumult in the ocean. It has happened, has it not?”
“It has,” Smith agreed.
“It has?” Remo asked. “Hey, I’ve been up to my eyeballs in work for the last forty-eight hours.”
Mark Howard tapped out commands at his desk. “They’re calling it a storm of interference, or the vortex. The number of lost ships and aircraft is eighty-three at the moment. Missing, believed dead, are more than five hundred. The first report was from a freighter bringing produce out of the Marquesas Islands to Oahu. Within hours there were eighteen ships and aircraft lost. Coast Guard, navy cruisers. We sent in a B-l bomber and two extremely high-altitude drone aircraft. They go in, we lose them, and they don’t come out.”