"What legend?" asked the colonel.
"It is said that when my family ruled Baghdad ... I am not a Berber, as you know."
"That helped considerably with the revolution."
"When we had the caliphate of Baghdad ... this was way before that sergeant declared himself shah ... well, in any case, it is said that when an ambassador from an eastern country wished to present the most magnificent gift he could think of, he gave my ancestor-the caliph- a promise. This promise, he said, was worth more than gold, more than rubies, more than the finest silks from Cathay."
"Get to the point."
"I'm telling the story," said King Adras.
"I don't have all day."
"Well, to make a beautiful, long story short and ugly, what he gave was the promise of the services of the finest assassins in the world. He who takes the crown from the head of any of the descendants of the great caliph will reap a whirlwind from the east. But it will come from the west."
"Anything else?"
"No."
"Long live the revolution. Good-bye." And the young colonel hung up the phone and did not think about the fanciful tale, one more tool of reactionary forces, until he held the industrialized world by a ring through its nose. And the ring was what the Tyrannosaurus's body had become. Oil.
And at first, just like the Tyrannosaurus, Colonel Muammar Baraka was afraid of nothing.
CHAPTER TWO
His name was Remo and he was ready.
He did not have to be told he was ready, because if he had had to be told, then he would not have been ready. He could not feel he was ready because the knowledge was beyond feeling. It was a knowing so quiet, so beyond far and yet so close at the same time, that when it was there one knew it.
It came to him, not during nerve-chilling exercises and not during his balance tests as he hovered twenty stories above the street on a narrow hotel ledge. It came to him in his sleep in a hotel room in Denver, Colorado. He opened his eyes and said:
"Wow. I'm ready."
He went into the bathroom and turned on the light. He looked at himself in the full-length mirror behind the door. It was more than a decade now since he had started, and if anything, he had lost ten or fifteen pounds since then. Thinner. Definitely thinner. But he still had the thick wrists. They had been nature's gift; everything else he had been taught.
He dressed. Black socks, tan slip-on shoes of Italian leather, gray slacks, and blue shirt. He had dark eyes and high cheekbones, the flesh drawn taut under them. There hadn't been any more operations to change his face recently, and in the last few years he had learned, if need be, to change it himself. It wasn't that hard, and anyone could do it. It was just a matter of tiny changes, muscle manipulations within the mouth, a tensing of the scalp around the hairline, a change in the cast of the eyes. When most people tried it, they looked as though they were making a funny face, because they forgot and did one thing at a time instead of making all the changes simultaneously.
The hotel hallway was silent when he slipped out, and Remo Williams did not bother to lock his room. What would anyone take, anyhow? Underwear? Slacks? So what? And if they should take money, so what again? What could he spend it on? He'd never be able to buy a home, at least not one to live in. A car? He could buy all the cars he wanted. So what?
Money was not a problem. He was told at the beginning that he would never have a money problem again. What they didn't tell him was that it wouldn't make any difference. It was as though someone were assured that he would be free from attack by flying saucers. Well now, isn't that nice?
No, there was different treasure now, that no one could take away from him. Remo stopped in front of the adjacent hallway door. Well, only one person could take it away. That one person was sleeping in the adjacent room. His teacher, Chiun, the Master of Sinanju.
Remo took an elevator down to the lobby, hushed in its deep night wait until morning would make it alive wit! people again.
When he and Chiun had checked into the hotel the day before, Remo had looked out the window and said, "There are the mountains."
Chiun had nodded almost imperceptibly. The frail wisp of a beard on the yellowed parchment face seemed to shiver.
"Here it will be where you must find the mountain," he said.
"What?" Remo had said, turning to Chiun, who was sitting on one of his fourteen gaudily lacquered steamer trunks. Remo wore all his clothes. When they became soiled, he threw them away and bought new ones. Chiun never threw possessions away, but he chided Remo for his white American materialism.
"It will be here," said Chiun, "and you must find the mountain."
"What mountain?"
"How can I tell you, if you do not know?" asked Chiun.
"Hey, don't play philosopher with me, Little Father. The House of Sinanju is a house of killers, and you're supposed to be an assassin, not a philosopher," said Remo.
"When something is so good, some one thing is so glorious, then it must be many things. Sinanju is many things and what makes us different from all those that have ever been before is what we think and how we think."
"God forbid Upstairs should miss one payment to your village, Little Father; they'll find out how philosophical you are."
Chiun thought a long moment while he looked at Remo. "This may be the last time I look at you the way you are," he said.
"Which way? As what?"
"As an inadequate piece of a pale pig's ear," said Chiun with a high cackle before he disappeared into a separate room. He did not answer when Remo knocked. Not for morning exercises nor for evening advancement did the Master of Sinanju respond to Remo's knocks, even though during the day, Remo could hear the dull television voices of the soap operas in which the Master of Sinanju found pleasure. Thus it was for several days, until Remo was awake and aware that he was ready.
It was cool that spring night in the mile-high city, and while Remo could not see the great Rockies ahead of him, he knew snow was there. At a street corner, he stopped. The snow would melt and whatever destruction the winter had done to life would be exposed. If not buried in some dry place, elk or man or fieldmouse would rot in the sun and become part of the soil and of the mountain which had been there long before life tiptoed over its crust, and which would be there long after life was buried in it.
Ten years ago, when Remo had started his training, he did not think of such things.
He had been framed for a murder he had not committed. He had thought he was being executed but had awakened to find he had been selected as the enforcement arm of a secret organization that did not exist.
It did not exist because public knowledge of it would be an admission that the United States Constitution did not work. Its job was secretly to balance the books that had tilted on the side of crime. Remo, as its assassin, was the chief bookkeeper. "Violate the constitution to save the constitution," the young president who created the secret organization named CURE had said.
Only three men knew what it was and what it did. One of them was the president, another was the head of CURE-a Dr. Harold W. Smith, director of the Folcroft Sanitarium research center in Rye, N.Y., that served as CURE'S cover-and Remo.
After he had been recruited from the electric chair, Remo had been put in the hands of Chiun, an aged Korean, for training in the assassin's art. But not even Dr. Harold W. Smith of Folcroft could have anticipated the changes that the training would make. No computer could have projected what the human body could do, not even if they had fed in data calculated on the per gram strength of an ant times the balance of a cat
They had selected one man and his body to be a tool to serve a cause, and ten years later he found himself using the cause to serve the tool.