A moment later Chiun returned, shaking his head. Whoever it had been, he had blended with the thousands of panicking people before allowing himself to be spotted.
"So much for our intelligence coup," Remo bemoaned.
"What are they doing?" Chiun asked, nodding at the stage, where the surviving convicts were brawling amid the bodies of dead police and the dead governor.
Remo smirked. "Trying to collect their commutations. It's the governor's signature that frees them."
Chiun looked at Remo without saying a word, but even the look was unnecessary. Remo was already marching onto the stage, where he began snatching rolls of paper in blue ribbons out of the hands of killers and rapists.
"Sorry, this ceremony is canceled," he announced.
A hugely obese figure with a mop of sandy brown straw hair stared at his empty hands in dismay, then his face inflated with indignation. "That is my document, and you got no legal right to remove it from my person."
"Sue me," Remo said, his hand snatching paper rolls at lightning speed and adding them to the crushed wad in his other hand. He found a small wastebasket under the podium and used that for convenience' sake.
The fat man stepped gingerly through the mess of gubernatorial gray matter and waddled at Remo defiantly. Remo ignored him as he sped in pursuit of a pair of identical twin slimeballs who were making a run for it. They didn't get more than five paces before the commutation decrees were slipped from their fists.
"Stop there, little boy! I got matters to discuss with you!" The fat man was breathless from his five-yard dash.
Remo ignored him as he counted the rolls in his wastebasket, then counted the angry mob of convicts moving into position around him. Finally he stood on his toes to count the convicts who had been gunned down in the melee.
"What's thirty-three plus eighteen?" Remo asked the fat man.
"Them's our tickets to freedom. Hand 'em over, little boy," the fat man said, his tone reasonable but determined.
"First answer the question, scumbag," Remo insisted. "Thirty-three living scumbags plus eighteen dead scumbags is how many total scumbags?"
"Little boy, don't play games with me! That's my life you got there in that can!"
Chiun appeared at Remo's side. "Perhaps you should carry a calculator."
"The sisters always said I might need to use math some day, and I never believed them. And they were right, what do you know?"
Chiun sighed. "The answer is fifty-one scumbags."
Remo smiled and waved his wastebasket at the convicts. "Good, then I got all of them!"
"And you best be returning them to us directly, little boy," the fat man said threateningly.
"Certainly, thief, return them at once!" Chiun squeaked, and yanked the wastebasket from Remo. Chiun shoved one hand into the wastebasket, whirling his hand inside like some sort of industrial food-preparation machinery. His fingernails were as sharp as razors and strong enough to cut steel pipe. They worked well on paper, too.
"Here you are," Chiun announced, and flung the contents of the wastebasket at the convicts as if he were dumping a bucket of water on a barn fire.
The fat man was engulfed in a cloud of paper particles too small to be called confetti. He roared in fury, but made the mistake of inhaling afterward, coating his lungs with particles.
"You're breathing my commutation!" accused a tiny Puerto Rican with an Elvis bouffant, who placed a hard right into the obese man's stomach. The blow didn't penetrate the fat layer, and the little man next rammed the fat man with his head, hard, disappearing to his shoulders in the spongy blubber. The hacking fat man gagged up bile and collapsed with the Puerto Rican underneath him. The Puerto Rican cracked and went limp, and the fall raised a fresh billow of paper particles that the other convicts scrambled after, trying to scoop them out of the air in their cupped hands.
Remo and Chiun were long gone, but the clouds were still hanging in the air when the city SWAT teams stormed the auditorium and cuffed every single person on stage, alive or dead, including the deceased governor.
Nobody on the SWAT teams had really liked that governor.
6
Dr. Harold W. Smith stared at the computer monitor under the surface of his desk. It was a brand-new flat screen, recommended by his assistant, Mark Howard. Mark helped him remove the old, heavy unit. The new screen that was bolted in its place looked like a toy to Smith. It was only an inch thick and weighed just a few pounds. Still, Smith never allowed himself to become outdated in his computer technology. The success of CURE depended in part on state-of-the-art technology.
Sure enough, the nineteen-inch flat panel provided a brilliant image with high resolution. When they had turned it on that morning for the first time, Smith had gazed into it and experienced a strange lack of tension in his eyes. He realized that he had been squinting into his old monitor for so long it had become an unnoticed habit.
"This enables digital video feeds," Mark explained as his fingers rattled on Smith's keyboard and brought up four windows, each showing a digital television channel, now a part of the standard media feed being channeled into the CURE computer systems.
"And this allows you to adjust the screen resolution at a touch," Mark added, maneuvering the mouse to an on-screen button and clicking it once. The screen images magnified. They looked huge, but the width of the display meant Smith was seeing as much information now as he had seen on his old, smaller monitor.
"I use this all the time when my eyes get tired," Mark explained, vacating the seat so Smith could test out the new display.
Smith appreciated the comment, but he knew why Mark was showing him this feature first of all. His eyes were tiring more easily as he got older. Smith was not a young man.
"So?" Mark asked. "How do you like it?"
"Like what?" Smith asked without tearing his eyes away. "Oh. Yes, fine, but we've got trouble, Mark."
Mark looked over Dr. Smith's shoulder. One of the news network's digital satellite feeds was displayed in the top right window. The network was interrupting its regular program for a breaking news story. Dr. Smith brought the volume up so they could hear the anchor inform them of "Reports of gunfire in Chicago at the auditorium where Governor Bryant..."
"I'm on it," Mark Howard announced, leaving for his own office. After working together for a short time, Howard and Dr. Smith had developed an efficient two-pronged approach that allowed them to scour the global networks and their own information sources for valuable intelligence at the first sign of a crisis.
This crisis was still evolving. Between the two of them they learned just one meaningful bit of data, soon verified by the media: the controversial governor was dead.
Minutes later all the networks were showing video footage of the gunshot in almost constant rotation and sometimes in slow motion, and the brain bits were clearly visible flying into the rows of seated convicts.
The two phones rang at almost exactly the same instant. Harold W. Smith grabbed them both and said into the red one, "Hold please, Mr. President."
Before the leader of the free world could respond with "Hell, no," Smith had lowered the red receiver to the desk and spoke into the blue one. "Remo, what went wrong there?"
"Well," Remo said, "first they elected this really bad man to be their governor, then a few years later somebody shot him."
"Remo, I have the President on the other line and I would appreciate a straight answer," Smith said icily.
"What could be straighter, Smitty?" Remo demanded. "You want the important facts, you just got them."
"Did you question them?" Smith demanded.