"Around here?" asked Remo. As they drove out of the improvised parking lot, Remo suddenly noticed how fine Burning Star's features were, how the night light played on her soft cheeks, and how her breasts swelled under the deerskin.
"You know," said Burning Star. "You're an attractive man. Very attractive."
"I was thinking something along those lines myself," said Remo. But then he felt the truck shudder, and he stopped thinking about such things, even though he realized as they sped down the highway that the bump was just a soft shoulder of the road. He parked in front of the motel where Chiun and Van Riker were.
He left Burning Star in the truck and went in to find Chiun watching the last of the taped shows. Ever since the networks had stretched soap operas to ninety minutes and two hours, he had been watching the delayed shows later and later,
It was nine thirty P.M.
Remo sat on the motel bed, waiting patiently as one sister refused to go to another sister's welcome-home party because she was jealous of the sister's success and the mother wanted to know why, especially since the famous sister was really dying of cancer and had difficulty speaking to boys.
Remo made sure that even the last commercial was over before he spoke.
"Where's Van Riker?"
"Where he will not ruin the rhythms of art," said Chiun.
"What did you do with him? You're supposed to keep him alive. You didn't kill him, did you? We're supposed to keep him alive. Alive means breathing, even if breathing should interfere for one moment with your pleasure."
"I am well aware of the instructions from Emperor Smith and how you slavishly follow them. I am aware that some men achieve Sinanju and others are mired in the slavishness of servants, no matter how perfect the training or the master who administers it. Smith, being white, would not know the difference between an assassin and a servant."
"Where's Van Riker?"
"Where he cannot harm the simple pleasure of a gentle sweet soul taking meager comfort in the golden years of his mellow life."
Remo heard snoring.
"You locked him in the bathroom, didn't you?"
"I didn't have a dungeon," said Chiun by way of explanation.
Remo snapped open the door without bothering to unlock it. Van Riker, who had been sleeping against the door, tumbled out, his plans on his chest.
"Oh," he said. He got to his feet, straightened himself out, organized his papers, and noted that he had never been treated so disrespectfully.
"Neither has the master of Sinanju," said Chiun. "Remo, how much longer must I endure this torrent of abuse, this incessant squawking?"
"All I said was…"
"Shhh," said Remo, putting a finger to his lips. "Listen, I don't have much time. They tried to blast off the bronze cap with dynamite."
"Oh, my God," said Van Riker.
"Sit down, sit down. There's some good news. I can guarantee no one there knows that it's the Cassandra."
"I told you. They tried to blast off the cap. Would they do that if they knew?"
"That's right. I was just so shocked. Will they try again?"
"I doubt it. I hid the dynamite."
"Good. So far. I've got to get in there to check on certain radiation leakages." To explain himself, Van Riker drew diagrams of what he called critical mass and various other things that made only vague sense to Remo.
"Look, let me put it this way," said Van Riker. "I've got to measure the damned thing to see if it's going to go off. I can do it. I know how to do it. I do it every month. There isn't one nuclear device in there—there are five and…"
"All right, all right, all right," Remo said. "Well get you into Wounded Elk tonight."
Van Riker went to the closet, where he got the special broom he had shown the Oriental before.
"What's that?" asked Remo.
"It's a geiger counter," said Van Riker. "It was my little extra touch to the whole Cassandra plan. One of the details that made it work."
"It worked so well," said Chiun, "we are all here waiting to be ashes."
"It worked so well," said Van Riker, the blood rushing to his tanned neck, "that the Russians have been kept at bay for more than a decade. And possibly, sir, in some small part because a gieger counter looked like a broom."
Across the globe, in a room without windows in a complex called the Kremlin in a city called Moscow, someone else was making the same point.
And the top brass was listening as they had not listened since the speaker was a young man who could explain scientific ramifications to military men and military ramifications to scientific men and international politics to all of them.
CHAPTER SIX
There was some unexpected trouble from the diplomatic liaison. Valashnikov did not sit down, nor did he leave the map of the United States, nor did he—as his most recent instincts would command—move apologetically to a side seat among the many generals and field marshals waiting for the diplomatic liaison to make his point.
Smiling, Valashnikov leaned his right knuckles on the edge of the table, almost touching the chairman of the Russian People's Defense Forces. "Are you through?" he asked the diplomatic liaison. "Or do you want intelligence to ask Military Intelligence?"
"There are some questions we have," the official answered, "questions we feel perhaps should have been asked by Military Intelligence before we were called here at the drop of a hat to hear an assistant personnel officer for a Pacific port tell us about military imbalances that might become political imbalances that would give us the entire world—which we could not occupy on such short notice, anyway."
"One does not have to occupy a land with troops to control it. Go ahead, comrade," said Valashnikov crisply.
"Does it not seem strange, comrade, that this gigantic, dirty bomb—for that is what Cassandra is, a gigantic, dirty bomb at the end of a missile—does it not seem strange to you that the Americans would leave it lying out in the middle of a prairie? A prairie, by the way, that is the site of an injustice perpetrated against a minority in revolution? Eh? Strange? Eh?"
"Yes," said Valashnikov with the calm of a frozen lake, and the generals exchanged little glances indicating that a man had just very quickly ended a career and possibly a life by surrendering this major point.
"Yes," Valashnikov repeated. "It is totally absurd. Or would be if Cassandra had been built today and not in the early 1960s. In the early 1960s there was a different American Indian. There was a different everything in America. At that time the safest place for anything was an Indian reservation, which, I might add, comrade, tended to keep whites out. And yellows out."
"But there was a road right to the monument?"
"Right. And it was not even paved until a book made the site famous," said Valashnikov. "Until the road was paved, it was just good enough for military trucks to bring in missile components."
Diplomatic Liaison shook his head. "It is not that I am trying desperately to protect the détente. Détente with America is just another step in our foreign policy. It doesn't mean a change in anything. It is a tool to be discarded when no longer useful. What I am afraid of is reckless endangerment of this tool of détente because you saw a picture on a television screen."
"And had it made into a still, in which I have positively identified a nuclear engineer by the name of Douglas Van Riker, lieutenant general. United States Air Force—"
"Whom you have for years assumed was a cleaning man who went to the monument every month, a cleaning man who was positively identified by our own KGB as a cleaning man."
Valashnikov clapped his hands loudly and beamed. "Which, comrade, has thrown me off for years. For years. I had assumed that the monument could not be the Cassandra. And why? Because of a report by the KGB. Now this is not a criticism. The KGB was right… in overall policy. I had devoted a career to finding that missile-bomb, and I had failed. After seeing failure after failure on my part, the KGB was most correct in moving its better agents to more crucial areas."