‘I haven’t spoken to him yet.’
‘You could transfer him into some government operation. Definitely military operation.’
‘No, sir, I’m sorry. I cannot do that.’
‘What will you do with him?’
‘I had planned to eliminate him in a situation like this. You don’t want him walking the streets uncontrolled.’
‘Had planned?’
Smith sighed. ‘Yes sir. When it was possible.’
‘You mean he can’t be killed?’
‘No sir. Of course, he can be killed, but God help anyone or anything that misses.’
There was a silence. A long silence.
‘You’ve got a week,’ the president said. ‘Settle this thing or disband. I’m leaving tomorrow for Vienna, and I’ll be gone a week. The heat won’t really build up until I get back. So you can use that week. Settle it or disband. How can I reach you after this line is dead?’
‘You can’t.’
‘What should I do with the phone?’
‘Nothing. Put it back in your bureau drawers. After 7 p.m. tonight, it will be your direct line to the White House gardener.’
‘Then how will I know?’ the president asked.
‘We have a week,’ Smith said. ‘If we clean it up, I’ll contact you. If we do not… well, it was an honour to serve with you.’
There was a pause on the other end of the line.
‘Goodbye and good luck, Smith.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanatorium in Rye, New York, returned the receiver to the cradle.. He would need the offered luck, for in a week the most important of all links would be destroyed—himself. That came with the job. He would not be the first to shed his blood for his country, nor would he be the last.
The intercom buzzed nervously. Smith opened a line.
‘I told you I didn’t want to be disturbed,’ he said.
‘Two FBI men out here, Dr. Smith. They want to speak to you.’
‘In a minute,’ said Smith. ‘Tell them I’ll be with them in a minute.’
Well, the investigation had begun. CURE‘S compromise was well underway. He picked up another phone and dialled through an open line to a ski resort in Vermont, closed for the off-season.
When the phone was answered at the other end, Smith said somberly: ‘Hello, Aunt Mildred.’
‘No Mildred here.’
‘I’m sorry. I’m very sorry. I must have the very wrong number.’
‘That’s okay.’
‘Yes. A very wrong number,’ said Smith, and wanted to say more, but he no longer had any guarantee that this line was not already being tapped.
For all practical purposes, he had said it all. The last hope of CURE, that special person, knew now there was a ‘condition red’.
What Smith had wanted to say was, ‘Remo, you’re our only chance. If you’ve ever come through before, you’ve got to come through now.’ Maybe the tone of his voice carried that plea. Then again, maybe it didn’t, for Smith could have sworn he heard laughing at the other end of the line.
CHAPTER FOUR
‘Free at last, free at last. Thank God almighty, free at last.’
Remo Williams returned the phone to the cradle and danced out of his lodge room onto the empty carpeted foyer that a few months earlier had suffered the constant tromping of ski boots. Now it supported the bare, dancing feet of one very happy man.
‘Free at last,’ he sang, ‘Free at last.’ He danced down the steps, taking them not three at a time or four at a time, but all at a time, one leap like a cat and landing spinning.
But for his thick wrists, he appeared a very average man, somewhere near six feet, somewhere near average weight, deep brown eyes and high cheekbones—the plastic surgeon, by accident, returning them to almost what they looked like ten years earlier, before all this.
He pirouetted into the lodge lounging room where a frail Oriental sat in a golden kimono, his legs crossed in lotus position before a television set.
The Oriental’s face was as silent as glass, not even the wisp of a beard moved, not even the eyes blinked. He, too, looked like an ordinary man—an old, very old Korean.
Remo glanced at the set to make sure a commercial was playing. When he saw the soapsuds filling a tub and a woman being congratulated by her peers for a cleaner wash, he danced before the television screen.
‘Free at last,’ he sang, ‘Free at last.’
‘Only a fool is free,’ said the Oriental, ’and he, only from wisdom.’
‘Free, Little Father. Free.’
‘When a fool is happy, wise men shudder.’
‘Free. F. R. E. E. Eeeeeeeee! Free.’
Noticing that the commercial was fading into the storyline of As the Planet Revolves, Remo quickly removed himself from the viewing line of Chiun, the latest Master of Sinanju. For when American soap operas appeared on the screen, no one was allowed to disturb his pleasure.
Barefoot, Remo danced out into the spring mud of the Vermont countryside, delirious with joy. It was a ‘condition red’, and his instructions were burned into his mind by his ten years of waiting, since he had gotten his very first assignment
The bastards had just recruited him then, a Newark policeman, an orphan with no close friends who would miss him. They framed him for murder and sent him to an electric chair that didn’t work. When he woke, they told him they were an organization that didn’t exist; that now he was their enforcement arm who also didn’t exist, because he had just died in the electric chair. And just in case he should happen to bump into someone who knew him when, they changed his face and kept changing it periodically.
‘Condition red,’ Smith had said, before Remo left on his first mission, ‘is the most important instruction I give you.’
Remo had listened quietly. He had known just what he was going to do when he left Folcroft that first time. He would make a half-hearted attempt at the hit and then disappear. It didn’t work out that way, but that was what he had planned.
‘Condition red means,’ Smith had said, ‘that CURE has been compromised. It means that we are disbanding. For you, condition red means you should remove the compromise if possible. If not, run and don’t try to reach us.’
‘Run and don’t try to reach you,’ said Remo, humouring the man.
‘Or remove the compromise.’
‘Or remove the compromise,’ Remo repeated dutifully.
‘Now chances are I won’t be able to communicate with you under those conditions, at least not safely. So the code for condition red is calling you, asking for Aunt Mildred, and then saying I must have a very wrong number. Do you understand?’
‘Aunt Mildred,’ Remo repeated. ‘Got it.’
‘When you hear my voice asking for Aunt Mildred, you become the last hope of CURE,’ Smith said.
‘Right,’ Remo said. ‘Last hope.’ He wanted to get out of Folcroft and vanish. To hell with Smith, to hell with CURE, to hell with everybody.
It never worked that way. It turned into a new life. Years went by, names on lists, people he didn’t know, people who thought that guns were protection and suddenly found those guns in their mouths. Years of training—under Chiun, the Master of Sinanju—who slowly changed Remo’s body, mind and nervous system into something more than human: a man of years without tomorrows because when you change your name and your place of living and even your face often enough you stop making plans.
So it was over now and Remo danced in the sunshine. The air was good and clean; the new buds were fragrant on the hill. A young girl and her dog were standing by the silent chairlift being put into seasonal retirement. Vermont labor being what it was, the project was two months behind schedule.
In all of industrious New England, Vermont somehow has escaped the Protestant work ethic. People buying homes and land in this beautiful state find it almost impossible to get a plumber or an electrician to do a fast job. Land waits for houses and houses wait for service and the whole state works off a tax base that would shame a Polynesian island.