"Dr. Smith?" Mark asked weakly.
He was disoriented. Trying to soak in his surroundings.
"I'm at Folcroft," Howard said, confused.
"Something happened in Florida," Smith said, a hint of relief in his lemony voice. "You lost consciousness at Benson Dilkes's apartment. Do you remember what went wrong?"
The memories flooded back. The corkboard maps.
The two red pins. The blond-haired man hovering in the corner, hiding in the cobwebs of consciousness. Howard sat upright in bed. He grabbed Smith's wrist so hard, the older man winced.
"Where's Remo and Chiun?" Howard demanded.
"Remo was supposed to be on his way back here from Russia," the CURE director replied. "However, he never made his flight. Chiun is in Sinanju."
"We have to call him," Howard insisted.
"We can't," Smith said. "Unless the phone is working again. It was out of commission earlier." Howard released Smith's wrist. His eyes darted to the corners of the room, searching for answers. "What's wrong, Mark?" Smith pressed.
When Howard glanced back up at his employer, there was a deadly earnestness in his greenish-brown eyes.
"He's back," the assistant CURE director pleaded. "And it's all my fault."
Chapter 30
Remo ignored the whine of the lowering landing gear. Across from him on the jet, Rebecca Dalton chatted away on her cell phone in yet another foreign language. On her lips and tongue, even Arabic sounded sexy. The young woman seemed to know every dusty dialect of every country they had been to in the past two days.
Two days. It seemed like a month.
Remo had spent the past forty-eight hours bouncing around the Middle East like water on a griddle. True to her word, Rebecca Dalton had streamlined the Sinanju Time of Succession to move with assembly-line efficiency.
Turkey-which was still listed in Sinanju's out-of-date guidebook as the seat of the Ottoman Empire-had been a breeze. Rebecca handled all the details. Remo merely had to show up. A quick meeting with the prime minister, a trapdoor assassination pit in the belly of an ancient citadel, finally another dead assassin to satisfy the Master of Sinanju and back on the plane by breakfast.
Then the real trial began. Mostly it was a challenge to Remo's patience. So far he was holding up okay. But it had been a steady drumbeat for two days now. Before they returned to the airport in Damascus after meeting with the Syrian president, Remo was shot at by that country's top assassin. He'd also been assaulted by lancers on horseback in the Jordanian desert, fed poison fruit in Lebanon and had a basket of asps thrown into his cab in Israel. Aside from Remo, the only living things to get out alive in all those attacks were the snakes. Any Arab he could find in the West Bank who grinned when Remo mentioned the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center towers got a snake down the pants, a cracked kneecap and an eye poked out with a sharp stick. Remo kept the stick as a happy souvenir.
He was tapping his stick against his ankle as he stared out the small window of the jet.
Thanks to Rebecca, Remo had left in his wake a whole passel of dead would-be assassins in rapid succession.
On several occasions he asked her what her real interest was in all this. She continued to insist that she was a unique public-relations expert who had been hired by a collection of governments working in their own self-interest. Their only concern was streamlining the Time of Succession process.
Remo knew that was a crock. Even Madison Avenue PR firms weren't cutthroat enough to deal with assassination. And it wasn't as if he didn't notice Rebecca's conspicuous absences. She was constantly disappearing to talk on her cell phone. Still, she was better at getting him where he was supposed to be than Smith had been. So what if she turned out to be a killer, as well? He was making great time.
Remo was starting to think that he might not shame himself in front of Chiun's ancestors after all. In fact, he might have actually felt good about the way everything was suddenly going if not for his current destination.
As the jet flew low over the latest Mideast country, Remo looked out the window with undisguised disgust.
The buildings were low. Probably because they were built out of desert sand and held together by camel spit. More than two stories and the sand would give out. Here and there onion domes had been stuck on the columns of mosques. From the air it looked as if someone had dumped a box of Christmas ornaments into a backyard sandbox.
"This is dumb," Remo grunted as he watched the ground grow larger. "I am never going to work for goddamn Iraq."
Rebecca had finished her conversation and was clicking her phone shut. "Patriotism?" she asked. Her face was open, guileless. She seemed genuinely interested in what Remo had to say.
Remo stopped tapping his eye-poking stick. "What?" he asked.
"The way you said it. 'Goddamn Iraq.' It sounded more American patriot than Sinanju assassin."
"Sure," he replied. "Why not? It's on the approved list of countries we Americans are still allowed to hate."
''Hmm."
"What 'hmm'?"
"I probably am wrong and I don't want to insult, but you don't seem to like anyone."
Remo frowned. "What do you mean?"
"It's just an observation. But judging from your comments about the countries we've been to in the last couple of days-the way you've acted when we've been there-you don't really seem to be very happy with, well, anyone."
Remo shrugged. "Arab countries are like giant cat boxes, except it's people shit, it's everywhere and the people doing the shitting haven't bothered to bury it or scoop it up for the last six thousand years."
"And with a statement like that, I'd say you were bigoted against Arabs."
"Just telling it like it is."
Rebecca didn't condemn. She smiled. "But from what you've said, you don't like any of the places you went to before we met. And they were all white European countries."
"White shmite," Remo grunted. "Paint them plaid, they're still living in inbred squalor."
"And it's statements like that that make me think you don't really like anyone. I'm not judging you," she added quickly. "Actually I find it refreshing. It's not really bigoted when you think about it. I don't think you can really be bigoted if you don't like anyone at all."
"I'm not the bigot in my family," Remo said. "Guy who taught me? Now, he's a bigot."
Rebecca wasn't listening. The stewardess appeared in the plane's lounge to whisper something to Rebecca.
"They have a ride waiting for us at the airport," Rebecca said to Remo, opening up her cell phone once more.
"I like plenty of people," Remo insisted. "I've saved the world a bunch of times. I didn't do it for spotted owls or kangaroo rats. I did it for people."
"I'm sure you did," Rebecca said, patting his knee. They landed at a small airport in northern Iraq.
In the years following the Gulf War, Iraq's leader had built dozens of opulent palaces around the country. A five-minute limo drive from the airport deposited Rebecca and Remo on the steps of one of the dictator's lavish new homes.
Rebecca wore sunglasses against the desert sun and windblown sand. Remo's eyes were wide open and filled with disgust as they climbed the palace steps.
"Isn't this just peachy?" he complained. "You know, back in the States we've got this stupid Sunday-night TV show that pretends to be news and it's got this ditzy old fart who likes to talk about things like elevator doors that don't open fast enough and the black stuff under ketchup caps. Nobody pays any attention to him 'cause he's just a crazy old fool who ought to be at the dog track. But now all of a sudden he's a big political expert. They all get to be big political experts, all these morons ...the cartoonists, their talk-show wives, all of them. Well, anyway, this guy, like all the big political experts, suddenly he knows what's wrong with the world. You know what's wrong with the world? America's what's wrong with the world. Every time some kid in some Cairo slum gets a sniffle or the Managua Y runs out of Band-Aids, it's somehow Uncle Sam's fault. But over here we've got Iraq, where this tinpot caterpillar-puss has built himself a hundred Taj-freaking-Mahals while his people are allegedly going hungry and not one of those blowhards can get their sucking mouths off of Castro's craphole long enough to say one bad word about the rape of Iraq."