Выбрать главу

"I was in a car with one of them. I think it was Sheila Baby, even though she looked different. She slashed my throat and tried to rip out my stomach. She did a pretty good job."

"What about her?"

"I bopped her up some, but she got away," Remo said.

Smith felt a weight plummet from his gullet into his stomach. Remo was his best and had almost been killed. What hope did anyone else have? There was no limit to the number of tiger people Sheila Feinberg could make. Now each one of her pack was a new source of generic material for others. The only way out would be to kill all the pack and make sure to eliminate Sheila Feinberg. Without her scientific knowledge, the geometric progression would stop.

But who could do it? If not Remo, who? Martial law, if imposed, was hardly likely to turn up Sheila and her tiger people. They looked like ordinary humans. FBI agent Hallahan proved that. On the day he had tried to kill Remo and Chiun, he had been working at his desk, just as he had every other day.

But if they weren't stopped and soon, before long, it would not be just Boston in peril. They could get in a car or on a plane and go anywhere in the country, anywhere in the world. You couldn't put the whole planet earth under martial law.

And even if you could, it probably wouldn't work.

The key was getting Sheila Feinberg first. That would stop the creation of new monsters. Then the existing ones could be hunted to ground, slowly but surely.

"Are you going to go back after her?" Smith asked. "Will you be able to?"

"Huh?" said Remo. He had not been listening. He was watching smoke rise from the glowing tip of the cigarette, savoring the taste.

"Can you go back after Feinberg, I said?"

"I don't know," Remo said. "I'm pretty weak. I seem to have lost my edge. And I don't think Chiun would let me go. He's pretty spooked about some kind of legend."

"Chiun is always disturbed about some legend or other," Smith said.

"Even if I found her again, I don't know what I could do with her," Remo said. "I couldn't get her the last time."

"You could call for help," Smith said.

Remo looked at him, angrily for a moment, as if Smith had attacked his competence. Then the look faded. After all, why not call for help? If he ever met Sheila again, he would need it.

"I don't know, Smitty," he said.

"Why did they come after you anyway?" Smith asked. "I mean, they shouldn't have thought you posed some kind of special threat to them. Even after you wounded Feinberg. Why not just leave you alone? If they're really animals, revenge doesn't any sense. That's human, not animal. Animals escape danger. They don't go back just to get even."

"Maybe they just like me. Me and my winning ways," Remo said.

"Dubious, dubious. Highly dubious," Smith said as Remo sucked one last lungful of smoke, saw the cigarette's glow reach the plastic filter which melted from white threads into dried tan glue, and stubbed the butt out in the ashtray.

"I'll leave you now," said Smith.

"Don't forget that pack of cigarettes," Remo said, but Smith did not hear him.

He was staring at a problem to which he already knew the answer but did not want to face.

He was hunting the Sheila Feinberg pack and the pack was hunting Remo. To get them, he would have to use Remo as bait.

It was clear and logical and left no alternatives. It was risk Remo, or risk the rest of the country, the rest of the world.

Smith knew what he had to do. It was what he had always done. His duty.

The trap was set with a classified advertisement in the Boston Times.

"S.F. Patient is at Folcroft, Rye."

There was little subtlety about the trap and when one of her pack showed the ad to Sheila Feinberg, she knew it for what it was.

"It's a trap," she said.

"So we'll ignore it," said the other woman, a buxom brunette with narrow hips and long legs. "There is plenty of meat in Boston."

But the age-old instinct of survival before all else gave way in Sheila Feinberg to another instinct-the longing to reproduce one's kind. She smiled sweetly at the woman, showing long white teeth that looked as if they had been polished by chewing through soft bone and said, "No. We won't ignore it. We will go. I want that man."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Remo looked at the high ceiling of the Folcroft gymnasium, its climbing ropes lashed up like a telephone circuit's cluster of wires, then scuffed the tip of his Italian loafer across the highly varnished floor.

"This is where we first met," Chiun said. He wore a yellow morning robe and looked about the gymnasium as if it were a favored son.

"Yeah," said Remo. "And I tried to kill you."

"That is correct," said Chiun. "Right then I knew there was something about you I might be able to tolerate."

"But I wasn't able to do it and you slapped me down good," Remo said.

"I remember. It was very satisfying."

"You would think so," said Remo.

"And then I taught you karate tricks and made them seem important."

"I never understood why you did that, Chiun." Remo said. "What did karate have to do with Sinanju?"

"Nothing. But I knew these lunatics would never give me enough time to teach you anything correctly. So I gave you karate, which I thought you might be able to remember. But if I had said, this is karate it is useless foolishness for attacking anything except a piece of soft pine shelving would you have listened? No. One must always feel that a gift has some value. I told you that karate was wonderful, marvelous, and would make you invincible. Then I proved it by attacking boards and doing tricks. Only that way could I manage to capture your attention for the five minutes a day necessary to teach you that game. How did they ever manage to toilet train you, Remo, when you forget everything so quickly?"

"Can that, Little Father. And then I left you and went out to kill the recruiter."

Chiun nodded. "Yes. He was a good man, MacCleary. He had courage and intelligence."

"He picked me," Remo said.

"He had almost enough courage and intelligence to overcome his lapses in judgment," Chiun said.

"Since then it's been you and me, Chiun. How many years?"

"Twenty-seven," Chiun said.

"It hasn't been twenty-seven. Ten. Twelve. Fourteen outside," Remo said.

"It seems like twenty-seven," Chiun said. "I started out a young man. I gave you my youth, my best years. They have been frittered away in irritation, annoyance, a lack of true and proper respect, wasted on someone who eats meat and sneaks cigarettes like a child."

Remo, who did not know that Chiun had noticed his smoking, said quickly, "It was only a couple. I wanted to see how they tasted after all these years."

"How did they taste?"

"Wonderful," Remo said.

"You give up the breathing so you can inhale particles of burning horse dung? This is truth, Remo, they make those things from horse and cow droppings."

"They make them from tobacco and, no, I don't mean to give up my breathing. Can't I do both?"

"How can you breathe? Breathing involves air but your big white mouth is busy taking in smoke. They only tell you they make them out of tobacco. It is horse and cow droppings. This is the American way, the big profit that makes your whole country work."

"You sound like a Communist."

"Do they smoke cigarettes?" asked Chiun.

"Yes. Made from horse and cow droppings. I've had them."

"Then I am no Communist. Just a poor, underpaid, misunderstood teacher who has failed to win the respect of his student."

"I respect you, Chiun."

"Quit smoking."

"I will."

"Good."

"Tomorrow."

In front of Chiun a pair of gymnastic rings hung from ceiling ropes. Without turning toward Remo, he swiped his hands at the hard plastic rings. They swung past him, their speed a blur, aimed at Remo's head like a boxer's one-two punch. Remo saw the one coming from the right side first. He slipped to the left to avoid it, and was hit in the forehead by the ring moving from the left. As he straightened up, the right ring, returning to its starting position hit him in the back of the head.