His face pinched disapprovingly as he rose wordlessly from his bent posture. Almost as soon as he was gone, he began shouting down to the gathered police. He spoke in English, the accepted international language.
"Diplomatic immunity! Diplomatic immunity! These are Korean diplomats and this is sovereign North Korean soil! Please to stay beyond fence!"
Sok's voice grew more faint as he hustled down the drive to the twisted remnants of the embassy gates. He was greeted with shouts and jeers from the Berlin police.
Somewhere far above, Remo heard a helicopter rattling loudly.
"Let's take stock, shall we?" Remo suggested heartily. "So far we've pissed off the Germans, the Koreans and-when Smith finds out about this-America, as well. All that for a few scraps of yellow metal. Whaddaya think?" he asked with growing sarcasm. "Was it all worth it, Chiun?"
On the seat below him, the elderly Korean turned a baleful eye up to his pupil.
"Yes," droned the Master of Sinanju simply, adding, "and I am not talking to you."
Chapter 5
"No way," Dr. Wendell, the surgeon who had performed the emergency procedure, had insisted. "I will not be a party to it. If you leave, it is with my strongest reservations."
"Listen to reason," suggested Dr. Styles, the general practitioner who had diagnosed the edema. But though he used his most rational tone, his words fell on deaf ears.
"Folcroft Sanitarium is more than suited to handle these cases," the doctors' patient had declared.
The doctors pushed hard for an extended stay-unusual in the modern era of "everything as outpatient" medicine. But this was an extreme case; the patient was at the sensitive time of fife when the seriousness of something such as excess fluid on the brain could not be overstated.
Already, while in the care of New York's Columbus-Jesuit Hospital, he had fallen once on the way to the bathroom. Of course, it had been the night after the operation and he should not have been out of bed in the first place, but their patient was determined.
"Determined to kill himself," Dr. Wendell muttered to Dr. Styles in the hallway prior to their last attempt to keep their patient in the hospital one more day.
He was running a big risk leaving, but their patient had made up his mind. Apparently, that was that.
Of course, he could suffer more dizzy spells that might cause him to fall down a flight of stairs. The fluid could build up once more. Most insidious of all, years down the road he might even develop a tumor at the site. Who knew? In such cases, it was always best to play it safe.
"This is craziness," Dr. Styles said. "You've only been here two days."
"Where are my trousers?" Harold W. Smith asked in reply.
Smith was an absolutely terrible patient. Full of intelligent questions and eager to get everything over with as quickly as possible. Even brain surgery.
The old axiom was true. Doctors did make the worst patients. The fact that the gaunt old man was listed as "Smith, Dr. Harold W." on all of his hospital forms went a long way toward explaining his attitude. But though Smith held the title of doctor, no one-not even his personal physician-seemed to know what he was a doctor of.
He was director of Folcroft Sanitarium in Rye, New York. That much was clear. For it was into the care of this respected but terribly exclusive and secretive care facility that Harold Smith was given over.
Smith accepted the mandatory wheelchair ride out of the hospital without complaint. A parsimonious man, he reasoned that the orderly assigned to escort him from Columbus-Jesuit would be paid whether he wheeled Smith to a waiting car or not. Better that the boy did his job as he rightly should rather than use for idle purposes the ten minutes it took to bring Smith downstairs. And-though Smith hated to admit it-the Folcroft administrator was not sure if he could have walked down on his own.
Dr. Lance Drew was waiting for him downstairs.
Dr. Drew was the chief physician at Folcroft, answerable directly to Smith. He instantly took over from the orderly, aiding his frail-looking employer into his car. It was a forty-five minute drive from the city to Rye.
When the familiar high wall of Folcroft appeared beside the road, the sight seemed to hearten Smith.
He was not an emotional man by any stretch of the imagination. Few physical objects held much meaning to the taciturn Harold Smith. But Folcroft was different. It had-in a large way-been his home for more than three decades. Rarely did a day go by without Smith's passing between the somber granite lions set above the gates of the venerable old institution.
In a sense, this was a homecoming. Although he had never entered the grounds in quite this way before, he felt more energized than he had in a long time. Even when he was feeling perfectly well.
Taking the car past the small guard shack, Dr. Drew drove rapidly up the great gravel driveway to the main building. He parked at the front steps, hurrying around to the passenger's-side door.
At first, Smith was determined to negotiate the stairs on his own. He found, however, that he was having trouble simply getting out of the car.
"Please take my arm," Smith asked eventually. His reserved tone belied his embarrassment.
Dr. Drew did as he was instructed. When he reached a helpful hand for Smith's battered leather briefcase-the only luggage the Folcroft director had brought with him to the hospital-Smith pulled it away. His strength in this seemed quite surprising.
"I will carry it," he insisted.
Drew only shrugged. He held firmly on to Smith's biceps as Smith clasped the doctor's forearm for support.
"Careful, careful," Dr. Drew instructed soothingly when they were at the stairs. "Take them slowly. We have all day."
Smith found Drew's tone patronizing in the extreme. He would have liked to have said something, but all of his energies were being devoted to negotiating the staircase. It had never seemed so high before.
Once inside, Smith settled into a room in the special Folcroft wing. Virtually deserted now, it only held patients on an infrequent basis.
There Smith worked, not only on his recovery, but on the small laptop computer that he kept stored in his precious leather briefcase.
Like the physicians at Columbus-Jesuit, Dr. Drew discouraged Smith from working. There was nothing, he said, that would not keep until the Folcroft administrator had made a complete recovery.
"Hydrocephaly is no small matter, Dr. Smith," Dr. Drew said.
"I am aware of that," Smith replied as he typed away at his keyboard. He was careful to keep the text on the small bar screen turned away from the Folcroft doctor.
"It is an accumulation of cerebrospinal fluid inside the skull. Your skull. Where your brain is?"
"I do not appreciate sarcasm," Smith replied crisply, eyes leveled on his computer.
Dr. Drew merely threw up his hands and left.
Of course, Smith knew how serious his medical condition had been. It was the result of an obstruction caused by a severe blow to the head. The unrelieved pressure had caused Smith much discomfort for many days, including vision problems, nausea, vomiting and a relentless, pounding headache. The headache had been the thing that finally propelled him to the doctor and ultimately to surgery.
But the bandages were gone now, the small incision scar was a puffy memory of the operation and the patch of gray-white hair that had been shaved from his pate was on its stubbly way to filling back in. It was three weeks after the operation now, and Smith was firmly on the road to complete recovery.
Besides, he had work to do.
Not Folcroft business. If it became necessary, his secretary was well trained by her employer to handle long absences. The work that occupied all of Smith's time as he sat alone in the virtually abandoned wing of the big old institution had nothing to do with the grounds or building in which he had toiled tirelessly for thirty-plus years. Truth be told, every last brick of Folcroft could have toppled over into the cold black waters of Long Island Sound and the lifework of Harold W. Smith would still go on.