"You think ah'm dumb. You some smart yankee, come down hyeah, think ah'm dumb."
"Not until you opened your mouth," said Remo and went to the telephone booth. He piled up the change in front of him. He dialed the 800-area code emergency feed number. It was designed more for availability than security, but he could always leave a message for the real Harold W. Smith to call him back at the phone booth.
"I am sorry sir," came the distant voice of a tape recording. "The number you have reached is not in service at this time. If you need assistance, please wait and an operator will be with you in a moment."
Remo hung up and dialed again and got the same message again. This time he waited. A live operator answered with a nonregional sort of voice-neither the guttural consonants of the northeast, the syrup of the south, or the twang of the midwest. California, thought Remo. The drop phone number is in California.
"Can I help you?"
"Yes," said Remo. And he gave the number he had tried to dial.
"You're where, now?" asked the operator.
"Chillicothe, Ohio," lied Remo. "Why is that number not working?"
"Because, according to our records, this number has never worked. You're not in Chillicothe."
"Thank you," said Remo.
"But we do have some information on this number." And she gave him another number, and this was even stranger because if Smith had set this up, he would never have given out an alternate number. And it occurred to Remo that the operator was not there to give him information but to find out where he was. He hung up.
Outside a gray and white police car with a red bubble atop parked at the curb. Two heavy officers with hands on pistols were out of the car lumbering into the luncheonette. The clerk ducked. Remo left the booth.
"Were you in that booth making a telephone call?" asked the first officer. The other moved to one side so Remo would be facing two guns.
"No," said Remo.
"Who was in that booth then?"
"How should I know?" Remo said.
"He was in that booth," said the clerk from behind the counter. "He's a weirdo, Jethro. Watch him. He don't sweat."
"I want to talk to you," said the officer.
"You seem to be accomplishing that," said Remo.
"Down at headquarters," said the officer.
"Are you arresting me or what?"
"Just to talk. People want to talk to you."
"Weirdo don't sweat, Jethro," said the clerk rising from behind the counter.
"Shut up, Luke," said the officer.
"I do too sweat," said Remo. "That's slander."
And when they were in the air conditioned offices of the Nag's Head Police Department, Remo perspired while others complained of the chill. Two men who said they were lawyers from a joint congressional committee investigating CIA and FBI abuses arrived and said they wanted to talk to Remo. They wore three-hundred-dollar suits and didn't comb their hair. Remo was not being charged with anything, but he had phoned a telephone number they were interested in, they said. This number had come to light on an FBI voucher no one could explain. Perhaps Remo could help. Why did he phone that number, who gave it to him, what was it used for?
"I can't believe this," Remo said. "You guys have come all this way to check some guy's expense account phone calls?"
"It's not exactly just a phone number. We have discovered that within the FBI and CIA there were whole units unaccounted for in their investigative work. Incomplete files on American citizens that seemed to lead nowhere and a loose tie-in to a computer system that the committee investigators could not locate," said one of the lawyers.
"That makes you pretty important, fella," the other lawyer told Remo.
"We've had our own experts check out leads into this system and they believe it is massive. Massive," said the first lawyer.
"That makes you very, very important," said the second lawyer.
"So do yourself a favor, fella, and tell us why you were dialing that number, and maybe we can do you a favor."
Remo stopped perspiring. He had to leave soon. He had promised Chiun he would be back quickly.
"Like what?" he said. "Not charging me with felonious dialing? Conspiracy to make a phone call? Aiding and abetting the Bell System?"
"How about material witness in a murder, fella? How about material witness, if not suspect, in the murder of a United States congressman investigating coverup operations? How does that thrill ya, fella?"
"Because I tried to make a phone call, I'm a murder suspect?"
"Because you tried to reach that phone number, fella. Now we know that number appeared on an FBI voucher no one seems to know about. We know that in the last three months of the investigation, only one person has called that number. You. We know there was a congressman looking into that computer network and intelligence money hidden in federal budgets. And we know that he's dead now with his heart ripped out of his body. It's not just any phone number anymore, fella."
"It's a gazelle?" asked Remo innocently.
"You know we can hold you as a material witness," said the second lawyer.
"Feel free," said Remo, and he gave the cover name and address, which was proper procedure for arrest. When this name and address was forwarded to FBI files to check for any previous arrests-a routine police function-the FBI clerk would find a forwarding number listed on it, and within twenty minutes the computers at Folcroft Sanitarium would spin out orders to another government agency to get Remo released officially from wherever he was being held in the United States.
The whole process, Smith had assured him, would take no more than two hours, possibly three if the jail were relatively inaccessible. The fingerprints, of course, would check with nothing in the vast FBI files. Not with a service record, a security clearance, or an arrest, because they had been permanently deposed of by the FBI itself more than a decade ago. They did not keep fingerprints of dead men.
So when Remo was told he had his last chance to shed some light on the telephone number he had dialed from the luncheonette in Nag's Head or the horror killing of the congressman who had been investigating covert government operations, Remo said they could throw away the key if they liked.
The cell was small with fresh gray painted iron bars set into the normal flat iron frame that locked by pushing a steel stud, click, into a receiver socket. It looked formidable if you did not understand it in the Sinanju way.
Remo sat down on the hard cot suspended from the wall and remembered the last cell he had been in more than a decade before.
He had been waiting for death then when a monk entered his cell to give him last rites and told him to swallow a pill at the end of the crucifix, right at the moment he was strapped into the electric chair. He did and passed out, and when he recovered there were burns on his arms and ankles, and the first people he'd found yet who believed he had not committed a murder were talking to him. They believed that because they had framed him, a neat plan by Harold W. Smith, director of CURE.
"Never heard of it," Remo had said and the lemony-faced Smith allowed that if Remo had heard of it, the country as they knew it would be finished. CURE had been set up because regular government agencies could not deal effectively with growing chaos within the constitution. CURE provided the extralegal help the country needed to survive. It lacked only one thing-a killer arm. Remo was it, the man who didn't exist for the organization that didn't exist. As one who had just been electrocuted, he was a nonperson. Dead men had no fingerprints.
At first Remo had thought he would just escape at the first opportunity. But one mission led to another, and then there was the training with Chiun, through which he really became someone else, and each day the person he had been before he was electrocuted died a little bit more. And he stayed on the job.