"2," Smith wrote neatly. Point Two was that Foxx/ Vaux had last been seen in the company of a woman who was found-murdered, her body drained of what might have been an unusually high level of procaine. The New York police were after Foxx on that one, but they were looking in the wrong places. Foxx was at a so-called aging clinic in Pennsylvania called Shangri-la with Remo, and Smith wasn't about to turn the information over to standard law enforcement agencies until Remo had found what he had gone after.
Shangri-la was Point Three. Apparently this was no ordinary massage-and-mud-bath resort. Remo had reported guests to the clinic, who were in their seventies, even though they looked barely old enough to buy a drink. The procaine connection. Large amounts of the drug might keep them young. At least that was the theory advanced by Vaux in the thirties before he disappeared off the face of the earth. That would explain Foxx/Vaux's advanced age, but little more. So far, there was nothing to connect the strange goings on with the two military murders.
Secret Service guards had been posted around
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Clive R. Dobbins, the secretary of the Army, since he was the next logical choice for an assassination team bent on eliminating the country's military leaders, but if the hit team got through the Secret Service to Dobbins, who would be next? The Folcroft Four had answered with chilling efficiency, flashing the names of the next three possible victims: the secretary of Defense, the Secretary of State, and the president of the United States.
Time was running out. It was still eminently possible that Felix Foxx, for all the interesting revelations about him, had nothing to do with any murders except for that of the gir! in New York City, and even that lead was circumstantial at best. Remo might have been on the wrong track all along. In the interests of time, Smith was on the verge of pulling Remo out of Shangri-la and having him start over.
And then, at 4:51 A.M., Smith wheedled Point Four out of the computers. Point Four was DESTINATION ZADNIA, and the words were printed on the console screen four times. Foxx, under the name of Felix Vaux, had traveled to Zadnia three times during the past year, and purchased an open ticket to the same place two months before.
That was the stickler. Why would a nationally celebrated diet doctor want to make four unpublicized visits to an unstable country in the north of Africa? Zadnia had nothing-no technology, no arable land, not even enough overweight people to fill one of Foxx's lectures. All Zadnia possessed was a power-mad dictator named Ruomid Halaffa who would buy arms and secrets from any source at any time in order to fuel, indiscriminately, the terrorist forces of the world. That and just enough oil to buy Halaffa's weapons from the lowest bidder.
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"Zadnia," Smith said, bewildered. Across from him, the Folcroft Four seemed to be smirking. The last of the machine's parts had been handed over. Now you make it run.
He would have to call Remo. Maybe Remo had discovered somehting during the night that would shed some light on this Zadnia business. He called the Shangri-la number. The line was dead. No ring, nothing. He called the operator and asked her to dial the number for him. She told him that the line was out of order, possibly because of some violent snowstorms going on in that part of the country.
While the operator was talking, the special red phone on his desk, the one with the direct hookup to the president, rang. He immediately hung up on the operator and picked up the red phone on the first ring.
"Yes, Mr. President," he said. He listened for several minutes while the president spoke, and during those minutes Smith felt as if he'd aged five years. He could almost feel the flesh of his face sagging with each dreadful word on the other end of the line.
"Thank you for the information, Mr. President. We're working on it," he said and broke the connection.
Dobbins was dead. The killers had won again.
There was only one thing to do. Smith checked the special portable phone in his attache case and locked the clasps. Then he memorized the coordinates of Shangri-la, which Remo had given him, pulled on his galoshes and coat, and fixed his brown felt hat on his head. There was no time to wait for snowstorms. If Remo couldn't get out of Shangri-la, Smith would go there himself.
Chapter Fourteen
As Harold Smith was closing the catches to his attache case, Remo was sitting in a pine lean-to somewhere in the Black Hills of South Dakota.
He should have known that Chiun would get bored with his new toy before they had gone even forty miles on their skis. But that had put them on a drivable main highway, and a truck driver had barreled them into Chicago.
Chicago itself, despite the arctic winds off Lake Michigan, was a blessing. O'Hare Airport was used to terrible weather and they managed to catch a flight as far as Sioux Falls, South Dakota.
Naturally, Chiun insisted on sitting in the seat next to the left wing, which was occupied by a Chinese widow who was nearly as boisterous as Chiun. After twenty minutes of mutual castigation, the rest of the passengers had demanded that both the strange old skinny Chinese guy and his wife be bodily ejected from the aircraft. Chiun made the point that he was neither Chinese nor crazy, which was what any person married to the Chinese lady would have to be in order to tolerate her dog-eating ways. He emphasized the point by knocking out the window above the left wing
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seat, causing the 727 to fall into a shrieking spin as oxygen masks dropped into the fusilage and several loose articles of clothing got sucked out into the atmosphere. The temperature inside the plane plummeted.
The plane climbed out of the spin only after Remo managed to stop up the open window with someone's red American Tourister weekender, which had heretofore not been collapsible. Then he'd had to give all three stewardesses a good sample of the 52 steps to ecstasy before they would agree that the missing window was a quirk of fate.
At Sioux Falls, Remo stole the first available automobile, a pink 1963 Nash Rambler, which puttered as far as Belvidere in Jackson County before giving up the ghost in a cloud of greasy black smoke. He'd kept the owner's registration card so that whoever usually drove the old fossil could be reimbursed. Smitty was going to love that. In his book, stealing cars was definitely not a desirable function of CURE, and paying for them was even less so.
They still had twenty miles to hike before even arriving in the right county, then eighty more skimming the 2,000-foot high cliffs of the South Dakota Badlands in the back seat of a souped-up '55 driven by suicidal teen-agers, before reaching Deaver Airport. Which, as the man said, was closed. A wonderful trip.
Now he sat under the pine lean-to, watching the morning sun blaze in full glory, while he wondered what to do next. The storm had quit about an hour after dawn, and the snow glistened, trackless, on the ground around him. A few feet away, Chiun slept quietly on a mat fashioned from twigs.
Chiun had led them to this spot in the middle of nowhere, based on nothing more than the fact that the
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area they were in was the least inhabited. Remo tried to argue that Felix Foxx was even less prepared than they were to brave the desolate countryside alone during a snowstorm, but Chiun had insisted. He heard echoes, he said. And, actually, Remo had heard them, away-faraway, disconnected echoes through the mountains that seemed to have no point of origin. But by that time he was too exhausted to know whether the echoes were anything more than the soughing of the wind in the trees.
Once they made camp, Chiun had slept immediately. The most Remo could do was to lower his heartrate and will his body into a simulation of basal metabolism. It was fake sleep, with all his senses keenly aware, but he had felt a little better afterward.
Suddenly Chiun sat up, bolt upright, his head cocked. Remo opened his mouth to speak, but the old man held up a restraining hand. He listened for a few more seconds, then said, "Prepare."