“You have no point. You may have memorized the names on the scrolls, but the entire story is not transcribed. Some history is remembered only through our spoken tradition. Such is the tale of Yeou Gang the Fool.”
“This is where I start thinking you’re making it up as you go.”
“Yeou Gang was like you in some ways, Remo.”
“A sharp-dressed Caucasian?”
“Moody. Disinclined to accept advice. Headstrong and arrogant. Like you, he was young and immature when the Rite of Succession made him Reigning Master. Like you, he kept the companionship of his mentor, Master Ghu Ung, but did not give heed to Ghu Ung’s wisdom.”
“Why?” Remo asked.
“It does not matter why.” Chiun waved at the air, as if wafting the question away like floating dust.
“Why it does matter. Maybe Ghu Ung wasn’t so smart himself. It’s possible Yeou Gang was a genius but Ghu Ung made him the scapegoat for his mistakes.”
“Unthinkable. The Korean Masters are not petty egoists, because they were not raised in The Land of Not-Me and the Home of the Blame.”
“I get it. The Korean Masters as in everyone but me, right? Remo, the American Master, is one peg lower than all the other Masters because he’s an American?”
“Cease your prattle and pay attention.”
“Cease my prattle? Shouldn’t a Master of Sinanju deserve better than ‘cease your prattle’? Or do only non-Korean Masters rate a ‘cease your prattle’? What’s prattle, anyway?”
Chiun shook his head tightly. “Prattle is rambling speech devoid of meaning. For example, everything that comes from your gargantuan mouth qualifies as prattle.”
“My gargantuan American mouth, you mean?”
“Correct,” Chiun said.
“Go to hell.”
Chapter 5
In Rye, New York, a sour-looking old man was immensely perturbed.
Harold W. Smith was the director of a private hospital in Rye. Folcroft Sanitarium was an exclusive facility that took care of the well-to-do when they required private recuperation, and it handled special medical cases in an eclectic mix of obscure fields. Likewise, Folcroft doctors were considered first-rate, if not always mainstream. The facility went out of its way to maintain its reclusive demeanor, because that’s what the patients wanted.
Folcroft Sanitarium was also home to an agency of the federal government—probably the smallest agency in terms of total employees. Named CURE, it was so secret that even the United States President—who had oversight over the agency—knew little of its methods or resources. Former Presidents, who had previously had oversight over CURE, no longer thought about it. The memory was erased from their minds.
Since being formed by an idealistic young President decades before, there had been just one director of the agency, and he was the same man who served as director of Folcroft Sanitarium.
Harold W. Smith, retiring from a career in U.S. intelligence, was ready to enter academic life when he received a request from the young President that he lead the new agency. Instead of becoming a university professor he took the reins of CURE. These days Smith found himself wondering what life would have been like if he had turned down the young President.
Such thoughts were unproductive, but they came more often than he would have liked.
For its first years CURE was an intelligence-gathering agency, but with a huge difference. It ignored the laws of the United States.
CURE violated the privacy of its citizens. It spied on innocent people. It planted bugs without probable cause. It was accountable to no set of rules, least of all the Constitution of the United States.
CURE was created with the intention of violating the Constitution. That great document had a downside in that it created loopholes for the criminal world to exploit. The worst murderers and thieves and mobsters were often the very ones with slick lawyers and lots of dollars for buying off justice.
CURE used dirty tricks, too, which worked much of the time. It rooted out the lies behind the Mafia countersuits. It exposed judicial bribe taking. It ferreted out evidence other law-enforcement agencies couldn’t get their hands on. In the end, the good it did wasn’t enough, and Smith decided to take on an enforcement arm.
He intended to hire one man, an assassin, working beyond the laws of the land. Through a strange series of events, one of the trainers hired for the new CURE assassin was an old Korean man, Master of an obscure martial art named after his home village of Sinanju. The old Master proved to be extraordinarily skilled, and in the end the other trainers were dismissed. The old Korean, Chiun, became the sole trainer of Remo Williams, the CURE assassin.
Remo did well under Chiun’s tutelage. Harold W. Smith was surprised, and even Chiun was surprised at Remo’s aptitude. Smith learned, much later, that no adult and no non-Korean had ever absorbed the full scope of the teaching of Sinanju in all the long history of the village. Somehow, Remo Williams did absorb the full scope of it. He became a Master of Sinanju himself.
Smith should have seen years ago just how odd this was, but he turned a blind eye—and he stayed blind for decades.
Remo was in fact a descendent of Sinanju himself. Although raised an orphan in New Jersey, chosen seemingly at random by CURE for this assignment, there was nothing random about it. Remo was eventually proved to be the son of a Hollywood stuntman who came from a small Native American tribe that dwelt near Yuma, Arizona. The tribe had been founded centuries ago—before the European incursion into North America—by a self-exiled Sinanju Master.
Smith learned this very recently, and he was still troubled deeply by the implication. CURE was not what brought Chiun and Remo together; CURE was the mechanism used to bring Remo and Chiun together.
The question that echoed like thunder in Smith’s head was this: who, or what, had used CURE?
The agency was so secure and Smith’s confidence was so absolute that he knew, incontrovertibly, that no human being or organization could have made it happen without him knowing. That pointed to something bigger and less easily explained. Smith’s mind retreated when he ventured into those shifting, unsettling mists of conjecture.
Now it looked as though it might all unravel. The supersecret agency was seemingly being exposed in some new way every time Smith turned around. The blame for most of it lay squarely on the shoulders of Remo Williams, who had become as obstinate and rebellious as a teenager in recent months. And right now, with anti-American sentiment at its highest peak in decades, somebody was adding fuel to the fire. These ridiculous sporting events were damaging U.S. relations around the world.
Smith had never been too big on the sports section of the newspaper. He was concerned with crisis, not games. He did not have the time to follow sports.
But these days there seemed to be a real crisis in the world of competitive sports—a crisis above and beyond the drug addiction, egotism, sexism, racism and wholesale greed that was endemic in all sports, starting with Little League.
These days there seemed to be a lot of murder.
At least, it looked like murder. A lot of people were dying, anyway, and Dr. Smith’s probability models indicated they were too numerous to be coincidence.
It started with yacht races. A series of deaths on a transatlantic kayak race had wiped out the five frontrunners just hours before the race was won by the sixth-place contestant, who was now a familiar face on boxes of breakfast cereal across the country.
When person or persons unknown began picking off the leaders of a round-the-world sailboat race, Smith dispatched Remo Williams to the very tip of South America to join up with the sailor who was now leading the race. Within hours the sailboat was attacked by well-equipped, professional assassins. Unlucky for them they ran into the most skilled assassin on the planet. None of the three survived their meeting with Remo Williams.