"Good," Remo said. "Because I sure as hell wasn't going to work for them no matter what. And since someone broke the rules, does that mean the game's off and we can go home?"
Chiun fixed him with a baleful look. Unscissoring his legs, the old man rose fluidly to his feet. Remo's head sank. He let out a protracted sigh.
"So you're saying I've gotta hump my way around the globe killing the best assassins money can buy?" The Master of Sinanju raised a haughty brow.
"We are the best assassins money can buy," he sniffed. "Well, I am. You are whatever it is you are. But it is too late to do anything about that now." He clapped his hands. "Come!" he commanded. "We must hie to the airport, for France awaits." With that he turned on his heel and marched across the grass. For a long moment, Remo just sat there.
"Well, could be worse," he mused to himself, his voice a tired sigh. "At least I get to kill a Frenchman."
Rising reluctantly to his feet, he followed the Master of Sinanju from the park.
Chapter 10
"I saw your father this morning. I said to him, Mr. Dilkes, where are you going so early? Can you believe it, he was going out for the paper? I've told him a dozen times he can get it delivered, but he says the walk does him good. It must be doing something, because he looks wonderful. I think it's amazing how he's able to get around at his age. He's got to be-what-eighty? Eighty-five?"
"He'll be ninety-two in April."
"Ninety-two? Imagine that. Ninety-two."
As Francine Standish and Mr. Dilkes's son rode up on the elevator in the King Apartments in Boca Raton, Florida, she clicked her tongue and shook her head in quiet amazement.
Francine was forty-five, with a pretty smile and hips that were starting to grow a little too wide. She had probably turned her share of heads in her glory days. But too much blond dye had turned her hair to straw and too much makeup now filled the subtle lines of her aging skin. Still, she was an attractive woman. There was more to her chatter than the awkward talk of neighbors on a shared elevator ride.
She offered the smile. It was the same one women always gave him. The smile that told him she didn't care whether his father fell down the front steps and cracked his skull open on his way to get the morning paper.
Benson Dilkes had gotten that smile a lot in his life. Even now, at a time of life when virility was in retreat for most men, women still flirted. It was no surprise. Dilkes had retained his rugged good looks into his early sixties. Although his dark hair was peppered with gray, there remained a boyishness about him, amplified by the crimping laugh lines that creased his eyes when he smiled.
In the rear of the car, Benson Dilkes pretended he didn't see Francine Standish's leering smile.
"Yes, ninety-two," he said politely as he watched the floor numbers light. His voice was a soft rasp, with the twang of his native Virginia. "The other day Mr. Freeman on the third floor asked if we were brothers. I hope he was joking. It made Dad pretty happy."
Francine snorted, as if this were the funniest thing she had ever heard. The laugh was cute when she was homecoming queen. It was the same laugh that-among other things-had finally driven her husband away five years before.
Unlike her ex-husband, who had once liked her snorting laugh, Benson Dilkes found it instantly irritating. So much so, he nearly killed her right then and there.
It would have been easy enough. Just a simple blow to the temple. Right where the blue veins throbbed beneath a curl of lacquered hair. Oh, there were other, more exotic methods. There were a hundred different options open to him. But he'd always preferred simplicity.
Despite the urge, he didn't crack his fist to her temple. A murder in the building would have inspired too many questions. Benson Dilkes didn't like questions. Instead, he waited for the car to stop on the sixteenth floor. When it did, he gave his fellow tenant a courteous "nice talking to you" before stepping off the elevator. The doors slid shut on Francine's disappointed face.
Dilkes headed up the blue-carpeted hallway. His apartment was at the far corner.
Corner apartments were always preferable. They only shared a single wall with one immediate neighbor. The other walls in Dilkes's apartment were exterior walls, with one facing the hallway. The building narrowed at the floor above, so there was no apartment over him, just a flat roof.
Dilkes unlocked his door with two keys. One for the standard lock, the other for the explosive charge that, if not deactivated properly, would have blown the floor and most of this side of the building across Boca Raton.
Stepping inside, he closed the door.
The apartment looked like any other in the building. It was an important charade to preserve. When he had guests over-which he sometimes did to maintain a cover of normalcy-he didn't want anything to seem out of the ordinary.
The drapes were drawn on the daylight.
Dilkes had recently heard a reporter compare Florida to Rick's Cafe in Casablanca. The Sunshine State, with its porous border to the open sea, was a welcoming haven for illegal immigrants, drug runners and terrorists. Dilkes liked it for the fresh-squeezed orange juice.
When his father had retired here, Dilkes leased two apartments. One for the old man, one for himself. Despite the fact that Benson Dilkes had himself retired to a ranch in Zimbabwe, leasing a second apartment that remained largely unused was still preferable to staying with his father during visits to Florida. Even though Benson Dilkes generally only used the apartment a few weeks each year, he knew he wouldn't have lasted long under the same roof with his father.
Dilkes really only pretended to have a relationship with his father, mostly out of obligation to his dead mother. The truth was, Benson Dilkes wouldn't have cared if the nasty old bastard was buried under ten tons of collapsed building.
In his darkened apartment, the thought made him smile.
When he came to visit this time, people were as polite to Dilkes as they always were. He had been coming to the King Apartments yearly for the past few years. Most of the permanent residents knew him. They assumed that, like usual, he would stay for a short time and then head back home.
But one month became two, became three. People eventually realized that this time he was here to stay. The other tenants didn't know much about their new neighbor. They knew that he paid the rent on his father's apartment. The old man lived on the fourth floor. From the father they learned that the son had been some kind of businessman who had spent much of his time in Africa.
Dilkes allowed his father to perpetuate the lie. If the other tenants of the King Apartments ever learned the truth, Benson Dilkes would have to kill them all. He had gone the mass-murder route before. Hotel and apartment fires were easy enough to arrange. They worked better in Third World countries, where few questions were asked and everyone could be bribed, but the same techniques could have been applied to the King Apartments. Fortunately no one really asked questions of any consequence, and so Benson Dilkes wasn't forced to kill all of his neighbors.
As Dilkes passed through the living room of his darkened apartment, he fished something out of his jacket pocket.
The small plastic case rattled in his hand. He had gone to collect it from the storage room in the basement.
Most of the items downstairs had been shipped from his Zimbabwe ranch. They were seemingly innocuous items from his old African office that he had stored out in the loft of his garden shed. When he had closed his office five years before, he had assumed the stuff would collect dust forever.
Bright red thumbtacks clattered inside the case. Dilkes had hoped to never see that case again. But the world had dragged him from his life of well-earned leisure.
He noted the change in his skin tone as he brushed some grime off the cover of the plastic case.