"Sir, we don't understand."
"We have our orders. I imagine another bureau is handling it."
The FBI men shrugged. It must be international, a project for the CIA. Over at the CIA in Langley, Virginia, those concerned thought the FBI was handling it.
And everyone was satisfied, except for a man in a small office facing Long Island Sound-Dr. Harold Smith, the head of the secret agency CURE. He was handling the case and he was stumped.
He walked from his office down to the small wharf at the back of the Folcroft Sanitarium grounds. It was evening and it was dark across Long Island Sound. The case had too many questions in it. At first he had thought a foreign country was behind the assassinations. Then he had changed his mind and decided that one of the big American oil companies was probably financing the killings. Either might still be correct.
But why the FBI badges? That was stupid-almost as if whoever was running the killings had wanted Mobley and Philbin to be unmasked as fakes. And what of the nonsense of "fat and thin"? What did that mean? It nudged something deep inside his brain, but he could not remember what it was.
Mobley was fat and Philbin was thin. Fat and thin. Apart from that, they were two ordinary small-time hoods with sudden skills and competence.
And Remo had found out nothing from them before they died.
Smith smelled the salt of the sound and felt the cooling moisture bathe his face. Who was behind it?
The Arab states? Estimates eliminated most of the large oil producers, and the wild man of the region, Colonel Baraka, who one day wanted to merge with Egypt and the next day with Tunisia and the next start a holy war against Israel, well he wouldn't dare conduct assassinations in America. Or would he?
But there were the oil companies. There was definite proof that an oil company had promised Arab states it would deny fuel to the American army. And hadn't they, from the outset of the oil squeeze, rigged prices to gouge the American public? It had been the oil companies that had begun the crippling price increase, even before the Arabs had started slowing down oil to America to make the increases even more crippling.
If there was an industry in America with a chilling contempt for American citizens, it was the oil industry. From the oil-soaked corpses of little birds washed up on scum-coated California beaches, to the multimillion-dollar propaganda that came out of New York City agencies, spent to convince the suffering that the oil companies were good guys, there was blatant disregard for the welfare of the world.
Millions were spent on misleading advertisements indicating that most of the oil was supplied by the Middle East, while the American oil companies actually had enough stored in Venezuela to keep America flooded for years. Tankers laden with oil lined up just outside the harbors, while children groped their way to school in the dark, because walking safely in the light would cost a few extra drops of oil. Walking safely in daylight meant a different time system that a country starved for oil could not afford. And the tankers waited out in the ocean for prices to go up a little more. Tankers filled and bobbing low in the water waited while American mothers buried their children who were killed walking to school in the dark.
And to counteract the growing rage, oil companies ran more advertisements implying that foreign policy was responsible for the shortage of oil-though if they got a rise in price, why then, all of a sudden, the oil worries would be over. And by the way, explained the public relations newspaper ads, the oil companies have record profits this year only because last year wasn't good enough; just look at the millions we spend for public commitment...
The millions spent, the public relations ads did not mention, were for the public relations ads themselves. One could not turn on a television set at night without seeing fairy tales about what a public benefit the oil companies were. Why, birds and fish, if you were to believe the ads and commercials, just couldn't live without those wonderfully clean and cosmetic wells sunk into the belly of the earth that the animals-in fact, everyone-has to live on.
Dr. Smith thought about this, thought about workers laid off from their jobs and children dying in the darkness and the oil companies willing to sell out the nation's armed forces, and he knew the oil companies also might be behind the murders of the scientists.
A foreign country? Our own oil companies? He just didn't know enough to even guess. And gnawing at him was the mystery of fat and thin, and the two old whores who remembered someone probably Korean was paying them to claim two bodies. Why had to he done that? Obviously to send some kind of message. Probably that he was a Korean. But to whom was the message directed?
For the first time in many years, Smith was defeated. He had nothing. Nothing except Remo and Chiun, and he had no target to turn them loose against.
He thought again of the young children killed in the predawn darkness and he decided to turn Remo loose. Find out what he could and stop what he could. It was all Smith had right now.
But when Smith reached out for his best shot again, it was not he who had his hand on the trigger.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Colonel Baraka discovered the real employer of the two hundred and fifty thousand dollar incidentals-two, With a capital European T, on a night that gave him more horror than he had ever felt in his four years as president of Lobynia. He felt as helpless as the day he had discovered that the French had secretly sold the latest engines for the Mirage to Israel and had shipped him the old ones. The Revolutionary People's Free Arab Republic had purchased the new Mirage jet bodies but not the engines. Baraka's air minister had assured him that it would not matter because the people would never know. Colonel Baraka hanged his air minister quietly, in an unused hangar, and did not tell the people that their new planes were inadequate to bomb Tel Aviv the next day.
But this was the new night of his helpless horror. Out of his entire army, Baraka had found fifty men who would serve as commandoes to make secret night strikes inside Israel. They had completed their training and were now to undergo night exercises, a secret assault against caves outside the capital city of Dapoli which were like those in the Judean hills. The French ambassador was there with Baraka to see how the Jews would be slaughtered. For the exercises, these slaughters would be simulated, of course, since the last few Jews who had lived in Lobynia had either escaped the country or had their throats cut by screaming mobs. The colonel had remembered the black writer who, when he met an Arab in Tel Aviv whose running water did not always function well, commented that he knew what it was like to be an Arab at the hands of the Jews, the implication being that he didn't like Jewish landlords.
"He should try being a Jew at the hands of an Arab," laughed one of the colonel's cabinet and Baraka had smiled. As prizes from the last war the Arabs had lost, his cabinet had noses and ears from Israeli prisoners of war that had been presented as gifts from Iraqi, Syrian, and Moroccan soldiers. When Colonel Baraka had been offered a nose, he had slapped the Syrian ambassador.
"Do you think the Jews will fight less hard after this useless butchery, you fool?"
Later he had commented that he knew the Islamic cause would triumph because "all the human excrement is on our side. We will always have them outnumbered."
Now searchlights played along the dry caves outside Dapoli and the commandoes weaved their way among the rocks. A general announced the plan for the mock attack. The set was this: the Israeli government had fled from Tel Aviv. Trapped in the caves, Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan, and General Sharon were begging for mercy. If they were not given mercy, they would wipe out Mecca with an atomic rifle provided by the pig United States.