"Hey, zip it up, will you? I'm trying to kill somebody. You're wrecking my concentration."
"Always with the smart shit. May your grandchildren be smitten with boils. May your wife lie with lepers."
"Look, if you don't stop hurting my feelings, I'm going to forget about you and leave," Remo said.
"That's the idea. May your uncles choke on chicken bones."
"Just a second," Remo said, stopping. "Now that's getting personal. You don't mess with a guy's uncles. I'm leaving." He tossed Bonelli into the air. Bonelli shrieked, his voice growing small as he catapulted upwards.
"Take that back," Remo said.
"I take it back," Bonelli howled.
"How much?"
"All of it. Everything." He paused in midair for a moment, then began his screaming descent. "Help!"
"Will you shut up?"
"Yes. Yes. Forever. Silence."
"You'll let me concentrate?"
"Do anything you want. Jest catch me." As he ap-
17
preached eye-level with Remo, Remo reached out and clasped Bonelli by his belt. With a whoosh of air and frantic movements of a drowning man, Bonelli whinnied once, then opened his eyes a crack and discovered he was still alive.
"Smart-"
"Ah-ah-ah," Remo cautioned.
Boneili was silent.
The rest of the six-story climb was peaceful. Remo whistled an ancient Korean tune he'd learned from Chiun. The melody was haunting and lovely, and the sound it made in the crisp winter air made it even more beautiful. In the background, birds were singing. Remo half forgot about the narcotics king dangling from his right arm as he made his way up the building.
Sometimes Remo almost enjoyed his job. He supposed that made him a pervert. Assassins weren't generally happy people, and Remo guessed that he was probably no happier than most people who killed other people for a living. But at least he killed people who deserved to be killed. He didn't hire himself out to greedy landlords who had stubborn tenants put away because those tenants didn't have the good grace to die quickly in their rent-controlled apartments. He didn't shoot foreign students because a thrill-crazed dictator decreed it. He killed when there was killing to be done. When there was nothing else that could be done.
Like all professional assassins, Remo did not decide whose souls would be liberated from their bodies. That was done for him by an organization developed by a president of the United States long ago as a last-ditch emergency measure to control crime. Only the emergency never passed, and the president was himself murdered, and so the organization continued.
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It was called CURE. CURE was possibly the most highly illegal instrument America had ever devised to combat crime. Unknown to ali but three people on earth, CURE worked outside the Constitution-utterly outside. CURE had no rules, and only one objective: to control crime when every other method of controlling it had failed.
Of the three people who knew about CURE, the president of the United States was the least important. It was his option either to use the special red phone in a bedroom of the White House or not. The red phone was a direct line to CURE'S headquarters in Rye, New York. Almost every president, upon learning from his predecessor about the red phone, swore that CURE would never be used. The existence of an organization like CURE was an admission that America's legal system had failed miserably, and no new president would admit that. And so the red phone would rest, forgotten, for months at a time at the beginning of each new administration. But eventually it was used. It was always used.
And when that red phone was picked up, it was answered immediately by a lemony-voiced man, the sec-, ond person who knew of CURE'S existence. That man was Dr. Harold W. Smith.
Smith was as unlikely a personality to run an illegal organization as could be found on the face of the earth. His principal interest lay in computer information analysis. He was precise, fastidious, methodical, and law-abiding by nature.
His job, as director of CURE, brought him into daily contact with murder, arson, treason, blackmail, and other forms of man-made catastrophe. The long-dead president who had begun CURE had hand-picked Smith, knowing that illegal work would be difficult for
19
him. Smith had been chosen because he possessed one quality, which the president knew would override all possible objections Smith could have about the nature of his work: Harold W. Smith loved his country more than anything else. He would see to it that the job got done. Or didn't get done, according to the best interests of the country. Even the president himself could do no more than suggest assignments to Harold W. Smith. CURE obeyed no one.
The third person who knew about CURE was the enforcement arm of the organization. One man, trained in an ancient form of defense and attack developed millennia ago in the small Korean village of Sinanju. One man who could perform the impossible.
That man was Remo Williams.
He had scaled all six stories of the warehouse now, the silent but pained-looking Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli in tow. Below, the two dock workers were once again loading the crates full of white death into the parked truck. As he tossed Bonelli onto the flat, snow-covered roof, the small man grimaced and ciutched at his side.
"What's the matter?" Remo asked dubiously.
"It's just that song."
What song?"
"The one you kept whistling. You know, over and over, over and over."
"What about it?"
Bonelli doubled over. "It gave me gas," he said. "I didn't want to say nothing over there"-he gestured vaguely over the side-"but, I mean, like if you've got to sing, couldn't you do 'My Way' or 'I Left My Heart in San Francisco'?" Not that" weird shit. Gives me a pocket, right here." He pointed to a region of his intestines.
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"You've just got no taste," Remo said. Chiun was getting to him, he knew. He was even beginning to remind himself of Chiun.
But he wouldn't worry about that, he decided. He wouldn't worry because at the moment there were other things to worry about. Like the fact that Giuseppe "Bones" Bonelli had reached into his inside coat pocket and was unfolding something metallic with a black handle. It was a hatchet. Chortling with glee, Bonelli swung it in Remo's direction, the blade singing.
"Okay, smart shit. You asked for it." He brought the blade home. It struck at exactly the place where Remo's head was, only Remo's head was no longer there. The thin young man had miraculously moved to another spot in a movement so fast that Bonelli couldn't follow it. Bonelli struck again. And missed.
"I wish you'd cut this out," Remo said, casually tossing the hatchet away. In the distance, outside the compound, it buried itself deep in a large tree.
"Nice," Bonelli said admiringly. "Hey, who are you, anyway?"
"Call me Remo."
Bonelli smiled broadly. "Remo. That's a nice name, sonny. Sounds Italian. You Italian?"
"Maybe," Remo said. He was an orphan. As far as he knew, his ancestry could have been anything.
"I thought so. You got a brain like a paisan. That was good, that tree. Say, Remo, I could use a guy like you in the business."
"I don't think I like your business."
"Hey, it's good money. And you'll be part of the family. Do lots of family things together."
"Like shooting dope into children."
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"Remo, paisan," he said expansively. "It's business, that's all. Supply and demand. Buy low, sell high. I'll show you all the ropes."
Remo thought about it. "No, I don't think so," he said. "There's something else I'd rather do."
"More than making money? Come on."
"No," Remo protested. "I really think I'd rather do this other thing."
"What's that?"
"I'd rather kill you."