"Are you referring to the Roger Sherman Coe matter?" asked Smith.
"No," said Remo. "I just did David Cassidy, and the entire Partridge Family is up in arms."
Smith cleared his throat to cover his confusion. "I don't quite follow-"
"Follow this. I found Coe right where you said, and I took him out just like you wanted. Only as I was walking away, his wife and daughter popped out in time to see him breathe his last-"
Smith sipped a sharp intake of breath. "You were not seen, were you?"
"Forget security. Listen to me, I did a guy in front of his wife and daughter. I made that little girl an orphan. You know what that means? No, you wouldn't, you cold-blooded fossil. Well, I know what it means. I grew up in an orphanage. I wouldn't wish that kind of childhood on anyone. You know what my Christmases were like?"
Harold Smith cradled the receiver against a gray shoulder and attacked his keyboard. The plastic clicking of the keys sounded like hollow dice rattling.
"Are you listening to me, Smith?" Remo said angrily.
"Yes, I am pulling up Coe's file."
"He's dead. Why bother?"
"Because I do not recall him having a wife or daughter."
"Well, he does. I can vouch for that because I just spent the past three hours standing on the frigging beach protecting them and their house from Hurricane Elvis."
Harold Smith didn't respond. He was moving digital packets of data at high speed, his face tight with concentration. The Master of Sinanju hovered nearby, his features anxious.
At length Smith gave out a dry groan. "What?" said Remo.
"What is it?" said Chiun.
"Remo," Smith said in a low, horrified voice, "are you certain you had the correct house?"
"I went to the number you gave me."
"What number?"
"Forty-seven, I think."
"Think! You were supposed to write it down."
"I did. I threw away the paper after I was done. It was 47 Ocean Street. Yeah, I'm sure of it now."
"That is the correct address of Roger Sherman Coe. Did you ask him his name?"
"I'm a Master of Sinanju. I know enough to identify a target before I do him."
"Hear! Hear!" said Chiun.
"And he identified himself as Roger Sherman Coe?" Smith pressed.
"Yes."
"Something is wrong," Smith said hoarsely. "Something is very wrong. According to my data base, Roger Sherman Coe is not and never has been married. In fact, he is a homosexual."
"Then he deserved to die," said Chiun loudly. "Hobosexualism is a despicable crime-unless one is a soldier in the U.S. Marines."
"The Roger Sherman Coe I killed had a wife and daughter," insisted Remo. "She couldn't have been more than five years old."
"The Roger Sherman Coe on my data base in fifty-six years old, red haired, and has committed an estimated sixteen contract killings that have been tied to him."
"This guy was on the sunny side of forty."
"Oh, my God. You may have killed the wrong man."
"Smith, don't say that. Don't tell me that. Making a widow and an orphan is bad enough, but don't tell me I hit the wrong guy."
Chiun bustled up to the telephone. "Remo, take heart. If a mistake was made, it falls not on your shoulders." Then, in an urgent voice, Chiun added for Smith's benefit, "Take responsibility, quickly. Remo is in a very fragile state of mind. We must not lose him to this tragedy."
"But my computers do not make mistakes," Smith said dully.
"Yeah? Well, they did this time," Remo Williams said bitterly. "Thanks a lot, Smith. Remember what I said earlier about picking my assignments? Cancel that. I quit. I'm through. Take CURE and shove it up your tight New England ass."
"Remo, you do not mean that!" Chiun wailed, seizing the phone. "Tell Emperor Smith you did not mean that! Smith, do not sit there like a ghost-faced white. Say something to absolve my son and my heir of this terrible guilt that overwhelms him."
"Stuff it," said Remo. And he hung up again. Harold Smith sat in his cracked leather executive's chair and stared into space. He seemed oblivious to the buzz of the dial tone in his ear. He seemed oblivious to the Master of Sinanju as he tore at the puffs of hair over each ear and paced the room in frustration.
"My contract! That impulsive white idiot has ruined a perfect negotiation," Chiun wailed.
And all Harold W Smith could do was mutter as if to himself, "My computers have never been wrong before. Never."
He sounded like a man who had lost faith in the sanity and order of the known universe.
If he was aware of the Master of Sinanju leaving his office, it was not reflected in his shell-shocked face.
Chapter 5
Hurricane Elvis had skirted Long Island, started out to sea and run into a cold-air mass that stalled it thirty miles out in the Atlantic. It couldn't go forward. Unable to go back, it festered over the water, churning up ocean brine and recycling it as hard, bitter rain that flattened spirits and human activity from Eastport to Block Island.
One by one airports up and down the affected area reopened, and Remo Williams was on the first flight out of Wilmington. Maybe it was the dampening effects of the overcast skies and the relentless rain, or maybe it was the hard scowl he wore on his face, but the stewardesses all left him alone during the short flight to Boston.
At Logan Airport Remo recovered his car and drove south to Quincy, Massachusetts, and home.
Home had long been an unknown concept to Remo Williams. In his pre-CURE days, a succession of walkup flats in Newark, New Jersey, and after that, motel rooms and hotels all over the US., had served as temporary residences. Every time he and Chiun had settled down in a condo or a house, security considerations beyond their control drove them out.
For the past year home had been what Remo mentally thought of as a Swiss/ Gothic/mock-Tudor stone church converted into a condominium. Chiun had dubbed it Castle Sinanju. It looked enough like a castle that at the last contract negotiation, Smith had been able to foist it off on the Master of Sinanju as a pre-Revolutionary War American castle. And Chiun had happily accepted it. Remo had not. But he had grown to enjoy having its sixteen units and accompanying parking spaces all to Chiun and himself.
Now Remo thought of it as home, and in his pain, it was where he was retreating to.
Chiun would not be home. Knowing the Master of Sinanju, he would be on his way to Wilmington to talk sense to him. Remo didn't want to talk to anyone right now. He just wanted to be alone. He just wanted to think. He had a lot of serious sorting out to do.
As he sent his blue Buick coupe into the handicapped parking slot, Remo thought of how for the past twenty years of his life he had been pulled in two opposing directions. There was his duty to CURE and his country. And there was his growing and unwanted responsibility to Chiun and the House of Sinanju that he would one day inherit. He used to feel good about being the first white man to master Sinanju, but as he unlocked his front door, he felt only a cold emptiness in the pit of his stomach.
The inner door surrendered to his key, and he stepped in.
Instantly his senses, numbed by his grief, came alive. Someone was in the building.
His highly attuned ears telling him that no one was on the ground floor, Remo floated up the stairs. On the second floor the distant heartbeat clarified. He did not recognize it. But the second floor was empty. So was the third.
That left only the tower. The church, when it had been a church, had had a crenellated square tower instead of a steeple. Each face was dominated by a great window facing the four compass points.
A flight of steps led up to this space.
Remo went up like a ghost in a tight black shroud, making no sound, giving forth no scent of fear or other warning of his approach.