"Is this what you meant by the message traveling far?"
"Possibly," said Chiun.
"Do me a big favor. Let's keep this entire episode between you and me. Okay?"
"Agreed. I do not wish to anger my emperor with my sunlighting. "
"That's 'moonlighting!'"
"We practice the sun source. We are sunlighters. And by the next sun I will have much gold to count"
"I still say there's going to be blood on that gold."
"Spoken like a true Buttafuoco," said Chiun, standing by the passenger side door and pretending to look at the waves until Remo got around to opening it for him. Once that was done, he would remind his pupil to fetch his trunks.
Chapter 13
Dr. Harold W Smith arrived for work promptly at 6:00 a.m. He was a very punctual man. The gate guard had a habit of checking his wristwatch as soon as Smith's beat-up station wagon rolled past the gate, and if it was more than thirty seconds off, he reset it. Smith was that punctual.
The lobby guard knew to expect him to walk in at precisely 6:01. If 6:01 came and went without Smith striding into the lobby attired in his unvarying uniform consisting of a gray three-piece suit, the guard knew that Harold Smith wasn't late. He was out sick. That's how punctual Harold W Smith was.
Smith's personal secretary knew that her employer invariably stepped off the second-floor elevator at exactly 6:02. When she heard the ding of the elevator, she didn't bother to look up. She just said, "No calls, Dr. Smith." That's how tied to his routine was Harold W Smith, director of Folcroft Sanitarium, a sleepy little private hospital nestled amid the poplars and oaks of Rye, New York.
Once Harold W. Smith closed the door marked Director, the portion of his routine that was known to no one but him began.
He settled into the cracked leather chair before the picture window of two-way glass that gave an excellent view of Long Island Sound. It was wasted on Smith because his back was to it, but it had the advantage of being opaque to prying eyes.
Smith looked at his pathologically neat desk, saw nothing out of place and took that as a sign Folcroft's cover had not been penetrated and pressed a concealed stud under the oaken desk.
A section of the desktop to his immediate left dropped, slid away, and up from the exposed well hummed an ordinary-looking computer terminal. The keyboard unfolded itself, and Smith addressed the keys with his long thin gray fingers.
Everything about Harold Smith was gray. His eyes, shielded by rimless glasses, were gray. As was his thinning hair and his dryish skin. He was the grayest of gray men-colorless, uninteresting, a bureaucrat to the bone.
Smith entered a password known only to him, and the computer screen began scrolling the Bill of Rights, which Harold Smith read silently as a reminder of the awesome responsibility that had sat on his gray shoulders since that long-ago day when a much-admired United States President had plucked him out of the bowels of Langley to offer him the position of director of CURE, the supersecret organization that didn't exist.
His reading done, Smith called up the night's news extracts. Deep in the basement of Folcroft, sealed behind a concrete wall, was a bank of mainframe computers that twenty-four hours a day scanned data banks throughout North America, extracting raw data according to programs Smith himself wrote, seeking threats to US. security, whether domestic or foreign.
It had been a light night. Only two events stood out.
Squirrelly Chicane, noted actress, was claiming to be the long-lost Bunji Lama, an obscure Tibetan spiritual leader dead nearly half a century.
Smith frowned. This seemed not to fall under any of the program rubrics he created. Then he read further and saw that Beijing had denounced the announcement as a transparent American provocation.
Smith blinked. It had been a long time since Beijing had used such harsh language to describe a US. action. Relations between the two countries these days were relatively settled.
Smith went on to the next extract.
It was the report of the death of an obscure screenwriter named Denholm Fong. Fong's body had washed up on a California beach, disemboweled.
Smith blinked again. This was not right. Was the computer acting up?
He pressed the question-mark key, and the computer responded by highlighting the single common word in both reports.
The word was "Malibu."
"Odd," said Smith in the dry, lemony voice that betrayed his New England upbringing. "Could there be a connection?"
Smith logged off the extract program and ran a background check on Denholm Fong.
Smith had only to glance over the dead man's bank account activity, IRS files and permanent-resident immigration status in order to come to a conclusion.
"A Red Chinese sleeper agent," he muttered. "But who killed him-and why?"
Smith considered that matter for a few silent moments, decided there was insufficient data for a working theory and dumped his findings into a new file he labeled "Bunji" for brevity's sake. He instructed the computer to dump any related discoveries into the Bunji file. Perhaps a pattern would reveal itself.
Smith turned his attention to Folcroft matters. From time to time the terminal would beep and display an incoming fragment of data that programming had culled out of the billions of bytes of raw data being transmitted across the nation. Nothing escaped the Folcroft Five, and nothing that they brought to his attention escaped the tired gray eyes of Harold W. Smith.
It was close to noon when the intercom buzzed and Smith said, "Yes, Mrs. Mikulka?"
"A Mr. Buttafuoco to see you:'
Smith blinked. "First name?"
"Remo," said the very recognizable voice of Remo Williams.
"Yes, send him in," said Smith quickly, adjusting his hunter green Dartmouth tie.
"Remo, what brings you here?" asked Smith after Remo had closed the door after him.
"Just thought I'd drop by," Remo said in a subdued voice.
"You do not just drop by. Is something wrong?"
Remo dropped onto the long couch by the door and crossed his legs. He looked everywhere except directly at his employer.
"Nah. I was just in the neighborhood."
"Remo, you are never just in the neighborhood. What is wrong?"
"Nothing," said Remo, absently rotating his thick wrists. Smith recognized the habit as something Remo fell into when restless or agitated.
"Have it your way," Smith said dismissively. "But I am very busy."
Remo came out of his seat and wandered over to the terminal.
"Anything up?" he asked.
"No."
Remo's face fell. "Too bad. I wouldn't mind an assignment right about now. You know, just for something to do."
"I would think that you would enjoy some time off after your last assignment."
"The HELP scare? It wasn't so bad." Remo was looking out the window now. Seen in profile, his face was troubled.
Smith took off his glasses and began cleaning them with a cloth. "According to Master Chiun, you came close to death at the hands of that Sri Lankan woman assassin. Have there been any aftereffects of that poison?"
"No. I feel great. I shrugged that stuff off like a twenty-four hour flu."
"People do not shrug off lethal toxins," Smith pointed out.
"I do."
Smith cleared his throat and said, "Er, Master Chiun said you had one of those . . . episodes again."
Remo whirled. "He told you about it?"
"Yes. He has told me about most of them."
Remo frowned. His mouth compressed, and he seemed to be looking inward.
"Is there anything you'd like to tell me, Remo?" asked Smith in a voice he tried to keep calm.
Remo shrugged. "What's to tell? I don't remember them."
"Any of them?"
"I remember some of it, yeah. I remember the voice."