"It is good that your thoughts are not of returning to places you have been before."
"Why's that?"
"Because one looks for one's future in places he has yet to go."
"Good point."
"There is one thing that concerns me, however."
"What's that?"
"Shiva."
Remo was silent a long time. Their feet in the sand made no sound. No footprints appeared behind their track.
"I don't believe in Shiva."
"You are the avatar of Shiva the Destroyer, according to the legends of my House. The dead night tiger made whole by the Master of Sinanju."
"The legends are dead wrong," Remo said with more than a trace of an edge in his voice.
"It is not only the death of this innocent man that troubles you, is it?"
"It's been building a long time," Remo admitted.
"It has been especially troublesome since your last assignment. Tibet seemed very familiar to you, yet you had never before visited that land. A land legends tell is the abode of Shiva the Destroyer. A land your brain remembers from a past life your mind does not."
Remo shook his head in annoyance. "I don't believe in Shiva. I don't believe in reincarnation. I'm Remo Williams. Always have been, always will be."
"Not always."
"Correction. Before I was Remo Williams, I wasn't alive. After, I'll be dead. End of story."
Chiun's sparse eyebrows lifted in mock astonishment. "What, no Christian Heaven for Remo Williams? No angels in white to expiate your earthly sins with their many graces?"
"Not after Roger Sherman Coe," said Remo.
"If the error was not yours, the retribution is not yours, either."
Remo said nothing.
"You have one problem, not two."
"Yeah?"
"You are trying to find yourself but you do not know who you are."
"I just told you. I'm Remo Williams. No more. No less."
"And how do you know you are Remo Williams?"
"What do you mean?"
"Did you come into this world with the name Remo Williams stamped upon your backside? Or tattooed to your arm?"
"That's what they called me at the orphanage."
"And you believed them? Just like that?"
Remo frowned. "You're trying to confuse me."
"No, I am trying to unconfuse you. You have been confused by the virgins you call nuns. This happened before I first heard your ridiculous name. You say you have no roots, but what you mean is that you do not know what your roots truly are."
Remo stopped in his tracks. "You mean my parents?"
"Perhaps."
"I've gone through that. Smith says there's no record. And as I recall, you've always steered me away from this line of thought."
"You were younger then. Perhaps you are old enough to seek them out."
"What do you mean, seek them out? You don't think they're still alive, do you?"
"I did not say that," Chiun said quickly.
"I always figured they must have died in a car accident or something," Remo said slowly. "Why else would they give me up for adoption?"
"Why do you think that?"
"Because," said Remo, with a suggestion of tears starting in his eyes, "I couldn't bear to think they just abandoned me like a stray dog."
"And this fear has haunted you all your life?" Chiun asked gently.
"Yeah."
Chiun nodded sagely. "Then it is time to put it to rest. Seek out your parents, Remo Williams, be they living or dead. And put the darkest fears of your childhood behind you."
Remo brushed a single tear away. "I can't believe you're being so understanding about this. From the bottom of my heart, thank you, Little Father."
"It is nothing. I may not be your father in truth, Remo Williams, but I have tried to be one in spirit."
"Thanks again."
Chiun regarded his pupil with understanding eyes. "When will you leave?"
"I don't know. Tomorrow. The next day. I don't know where to start."
"I do."
"Yeah? Where?"
"Begin with Smith. His oracles have proved exceedingly accurate in the past."
"Not in the past few hours," said Remo darkly.
Chapter 7
Harold Smith prided himself on being logical.
Logic ruled his life. Long after he'd stopped attending church services regularly, logic had remained the driving force in his waking life. Every mystery had a solution. Any column of numbers could be added, and the result was predictable, unvarying, and the end product as sound as money in the bank. The product of a mathematic operation was subject to division, multiplication, addition or subtraction, and the answer could be looked up in a table and verified.
As the sun set on Long Island Sound, Harold Smith sat in his leather chair, his Dartmouth tie loose at his throat, fine gray stubble on his lean cheeks, his face dappled with the phosphorescent green glow of his monitor.
He was also sweating.
It was a hot, creeping sweat, and from time to time Smith felt flashes of a chill deep in his logical bones. "This makes no sense," he mumbled as he manipulated his clicking computer keys.
Just as two plus two always and invariably totalled four, the two Roger Sherman Coes did not add up.
The dead Roger Sherman Coe of Wilmington, North Carolina, had an electronic trail that went back to his Selective Service file.
The Roger Sherman Coe of the National Computer Crime Index was a ghost. Smith could find nothing about him. There was no IRS record, no listing in any motor-vehicle registry in any of the fifty states. His credit cards had all been overcharged and abandoned, the balances unpaid.
Yet according to his computer, these two men, sharing one name but utterly different life-styles, were one. They could not be one, Smith saw as darkness clamped down on Folcroft Sanitarium and the shaky fluorescent tights of his office automatically came on. Smith paused in his search to sip mineral water. It was after hours and his secretary had gone home for the day. The night shift had come in, and no one would disturb him while he was at his work.
At an impasse, Smith logged off his search and switched to monitoring other areas of CURE activity. Out there in business, government agencies and other walks of life, ordinary Americans routinely sent anonymous tips on ongoing or suspicious activities. They thought they worked for various government agencies-the FBI, the CIA, OSHA and many others-as paid informants. The checks came in the mail at the same time every month. And they filed their reports electronically.
Only Harold Smith received them. These ordinary citizens helped satisfy CURE's vast need for raw information.
Smith paged through the latest reports. They were unremarkable. A warning of a crooked state senator in the far west. A coal-mine owner who was routinely ignoring federal safety standards. Price-fixing among New England dairy farms. In the old days Smith would simply drop a dime on these people and hope the justice system did its job. Now it made just as much sense to tip off one of the proliferation of investigative-news television shows, trusting in the resulting broadcast exposure to coax the proper authorities into doing their jobs.
One report caught Smith's attention because it involved XL SysCorp, the computer giant that had manufactured the WORM arrays Smith now relied on.
It said that XL SysCorp was being picketed by a black special-interest group that accused the computer giant of discriminatory hiring practices. The matter did not fall under Smith's purview, so he passed on.
Another report emanated from within the Federal Emergency Management Agency, which had already moved into the area of North Carolina struck by Hurricane Elvis. The complaint accused FEMA of not addressing the situation quickly. It was an old complaint about FEMA. Smith passed on.
In the end there was nothing CURE sensitive. But the respite had cleared Smith's stymied thought processes. He returned to the vexing Roger Sherman Coe conundrum.