Louie charged the dude from behind with his knife, but then the dude wasn't there. He was behind Louie. He tapped Louie on the shoulder and when Louie turned, the honkey jabbed him in the stomach. With his finger. Louie went down and Slits knew somehow, with a sinking feeling in his stomach, that Louie was never going to get up.
Where was his blade? Slits looked around the ground, anger overwhelming his good sense. Gonna cut that dude. Gonna cut him good.
Just as he got his hand around the hilt of his knife, he couldn't breathe. Something had him by the throat and he felt as if his throat had closed up tight. Then he saw the honkey's face in front of him,
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"Who sent you?" the honkey was asking. Sheeeit, Slits thought. I don't even know nobody's name. Just a white guy.
He tried to say I don't know, but it came out like "Ahdun" and then he remembered the knife in his hand and he swung it around, but before it reached anything, the steel band around his throat tightened up even more, and he could feel his brain exploding, and he dropped the knife onto the sidewalk. And then fell to join it.
Remo looked down at the body. He hadn't really wanted to kill the man, but his reaction had been automatic. Also, Remo's reactions had been slow and he had been stupid.
Chiun was right as usual. Remo had allowed himself to be affected by a woman and it had altered his reactions.
He looked at the three men on the ground and at the still feet of the man stuck through the windshield. Just run-of-the-mill, New York thugs. Bag-grabbers and lady-beaters.
But who? And why?
He stepped back and looked up at the penthouse window of Princess Sarra, suspicions invading his mind.
Had she set him up?
A man watched the action from down the block. He shook his head. He had known they would screw it up.
He watched Remo walk toward him. He lounged against a car, lit a cigarette and waited.
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When Remo was thirty feet away, he stepped away from the car, pulled out a pistol, took careful aim, and fired once.
And missed.
Impossible, he thought.
He fired again. He couldn't have missed at this range, but the man didn't even try to duck. He just kept coming straight on. „
He fired four more times. The man was still com- e was
ing toward him. He swung his gun at the man's head, but the man seemed to get out of the way of the blow without really moving.
Then Remo was on him. He felt hands on his kU1 me?" Remo asked'
throat. He snapped the knife out of its wrist spring.
He jabbed at the man's eyes. s
Remo slid below the blow, but then he heard the spine crack. Disgusted with himself, he let the man drop to the sidewalk.
Remo looked down at him. A white man. He S„' ,., „ „o ., .,
bent down and felt the man's jacket pocket. He ^ not taUc t0 me' Simth said
Good. A white man. With a full wallet. Remo took the wallet and started jogging back to his hotel room to tell Smith.
But his mind was still on Princess Sarra.
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Smith repeated it. "I said, he was a federal agent until last week, when he quit."
'What's an agent—an ex-agent—doing trying to
"I don't know. I hope you can find out," Smith
'All right. By the way, did Chiun speak to you?"
"No," Smith said. "Why?"
"Because he wasn't here when I got back," Remo
After he hung up, Remo looked out over the city. An ex-agent. Was he, really? There wasn't anything simpler than having a guy quit first so that if he was caught trying to perform the job his bosses had sent him to do, they could always wash their hands of him. He quit. He wasn't working for us.
But for that to be the case, it meant that the United States government might be involved in trying to kill the Emir. It wouldn't surprise Remo. The country had had a solid tradition over the last five years of turning its back on its friends. Washington was known around the world as Hand-ups-ville. Nothing coming out of Washington anymore would surprise him, including trying to eliminate
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the Emir just to solve the publicity problem of keeping him alive inside the United States.
Why not? It made as much sense as anything else.
And where was Chiun anyway?
The taxi driver had not wanted to go all the way to Sandy Hook, New Jersey, particularly not for that creepy, old, Oriental guy that he just knew wasn't going to tip worth spit.
In his own nice, New York way, he had tried to hint this to the old Oriental.
"Naaah, ain't no fucking way I'm going to Sandy Hook, 'cause when I get there, you'll tip me shit, and I'll be bringing back an empty cab, so fuck off, buddy."
He had tried to drive off, just as he had driven off hundreds of other times from other potential passengers, particularly in the rain, when they were getting soaked but refused to pay double the meter price for their ride. The driver put the cab in drive gear and gave it gas.
And nothing happened.
The wheels were turning. He could swear they were turning because he could hear them spinning and he could even smell the scent of burning rubber. But the cab was not going anywhere, and there was the little gook, still standing next to the cab, his hand on the front passenger's door handle, his head inside the window, promising to tip the driver a whole dollar if he took him to Sandy Hook.
"I ain't goin' nowhere. Frigging cab won't go."
"I will fix it," the old Oriental in the blue robe
said.
"Yeah? How?"
Chiun slid into the front seat next to the driver, and now when the driver gave it gas, the cab just drove off neatly, as sweet as you please. The driver looked at the old man. If he didn't know better, he would have sworn the old man was holding onto the cab and stopping it from moving. But, no. That couldn't be.
Chiun saw the driver look at him and he smiled over at him. "It will not be necessary for you to talk to me while you drive to Sandy Hook. I will even pay you the extra dollar if you do not make conversation. In fact, be silent and I will make it a dollar and twenty-five cents. I know this is a lot but I have been in America a long time and I understand the native customs."
The cabdriver started to say something about probably having to stop for gas on his way to Sandy Hook, but Chiun shushed him with a long-nailed finger pressed across the front of the driver's lips.
"No talk," Chiun said. "I have to think."
There was no more talk.
The fare to Sandy Hook was eighty-eight dollars and seventy cents. Insisting that the driver should think nothing of it, Chiun paid him with ninety dollars in American money which he took from an old, leather purse, secreted somewhere deep in the folds of his silken kimono. Chiun insisted that the driver keep the entire remaining dollar and thirty cents as his tip, even though only a dollar and a quarter had been promised.
"This is because I am the most generous of men," Chiun had explained. The driver had nodded. All he wanted to do was to go back home.
The owner of the small fishing boat did not want
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to go out to the island off the Jersey coast. As he explained to the little Oriental man in the silken kimono, he had already made his final party run of the day, the fish weren't biting anyway, and it was a good day for him to go home, lie alongside his backyard pool, and drink beer.
He had not realized how weak, how defective, how really dishonorable this goal was until the old Oriental had taken one of his heavy-duty, deep-sea fishing rods, suitable for catching anything from shark and marlin to small whale, from its holder alongside the rauing of the boat. The old man held the inch-thick rod in both hands.