"I'm not impressed with your effort, Boris," Remo said finally.
"That's all I know!" Boris sobbed, knowing he had become something pathetic.
"I believe you, Boris," Remo said.
"So do I get 'no hurts'? I really want 'no hurts.'"
Remo nodded. "Okay."
"Thank you thank you thank you."
"In fact, you're never going to have hurts ever again."
"Oh," Boris said, seeing the light. Then, as blackness engulfed him so swiftly he didn't even know how it happened, he wondered about the afterlife. Because there were some who said the afterlife, for the bad people, had a lot of hurting in it.
20
The man in the T-shirt came into the shop whistling a Grateful Dead song about a narcotized locomotive conductor. Helen Lendon thought he looked like a very nice young man. He slapped a Visa card on the counter and went about his business.
First he selected a black permanent marker from the display. Then he took a ream of white paper from the shelf and opened it, extracted a sheet and went to the counter where customers did their form filling.
Helen Lendon would watch them in the security mirrors. She wasn't the kind to poke her nose in other people's business, but she didn't want anything unsavory going on in her Mail Boxes & More store.
Somehow the young man with the marker managed to position himself so that she couldn't see what he was doing. He took something out of his pocket, did something with the marker, did something with the sheet of paper, then put whatever it was back in his pocket.
He capped the marker and took the sheet of paper to the fax machine. He poked and positioned the paper in various places, and Helen Lendon asked him more than once if he needed assistance. He said no. Finally he had the paper in the right place and looked across the shop. Helen Lendon nodded. He smiled with satisfaction and picked up the phone on the fax machine, then pressed the buttons as he shifted his weight, and Helen Lendon couldn't see what numbers the young man was dialing.
But she heard him speaking into the phone. "Blah, blah, blah," he said quite clearly. "Carrots and peas, carrots and peas." This went on for almost a minute.
"Hiya. It's about time," he said then. "Got a fax for you. No, I already pressed a button. I don't want to press another button. Send? How do you know there's a button that says Send? Even I know there's different kinds of fax machines. Oh, wait, there is a button called Send. So I press it, then what? You sure? Okay, here goes."
The young man pressed the Send button, then watched the page feed through the fax machine and slide out into the bottom tray.
The machine beeped.
"Aw, hell!"
"No, that's what it's supposed to do," Helen called out to him assuredly. "That means it's done. Look at the display." A few seconds later she clarified, "The display on the fax machine."
"Oh." He glared at the display, then shrugged and shredded the sheet of paper so fast Helen couldn't quite believe her eyes. The shreds fluttered into the wastebasket.
The young man charged it all to his Visa, the paper and the marker and the fax call, which Helen's computer claimed had gone to the Solomon Islands. The man didn't want to take the paper or the marker with him. "Don't write things down very often," he explained.
When he was gone, Helen Lendon's curiosity got the better of her and she poked around in the wastebasket. Not one tiny sliver of paper had missed it. She found a sliver with some black on it and peered at it intensely for a moment, then gasped. It was a fragment of a black fingerprint.
But the man hadn't sent his own fingerprint. That meant the thing in his pocket...
Helen Lendon let the little scrap of paper flutter away. This time it missed the wastebasket.
21
"Get it?" Remo asked on the pay phone in the hotel lobby.
"It came through fine," Harold Smith answered. "I hope you used discretion disposing of the finger."
"Yeah, I tossed it," Remo said, taking the finger out of the pocket of his Chinos and flicking it into the brass trash can with a sand-filled ashtray on top. The ashtray had been recently cleaned and molded into the stylized S that was the hotel chain logo. "Learn anything?"
"Nothing he hadn't already told you," Smith admitted. "He was who he said he was, of course. It looks as if his body has already been discovered near the explosion site." Smith sighed. "I really wish you would have stopped him from firing those missiles, Remo."
"I begged and pleaded," Remo said. "Anyway, it's done and this city's a better place because of it."
"The police department is in chaos," Smith said sourly. "The federal investigation is in tatters. It will take them months to sort out the mess."
"Can't be worse than leaving Chief Roescher in charge."
"Yes, it can. Chief Roescher was corrupt, but he was at least keeping the system running."
"He was a murderer and a drug dealer."
"Remo, CURE doesn't go after men like Chief Roescher. He was already under investigation. He would have been removed from the system eventually."
"Hey, Smitty, since when are you on the bad guys' side?"
"I am not. I am on the side of peace and order. Do you realize that this country is starting to fray at the edges? There is instability in Pueblo just as there is instability in Governor Bryant's state and in Old Crick, Iowa."
"They'll get over it."
"That's just the tip of the iceberg, Remo, and there are a hundred other places like them."
"They're isolated."
"No. The reverberations are starting to be felt. The instability could easily escalate. We can see the beginnings of governmental breakdown. Once it happens, it may happen again, and then we'll see a chain reaction."
"Then what? Apocalypse? We leave ourselves open for an invasion by the Soviet Union?"
"Joke if you like, Remo. What might actually occur is mob action. When the structure disintegrates, it unleashes all kinds of societal elements capable of creating unrest."
"All right, Smitty, I apologize. I won't let it happen again. Now, what do we do next?"
"We're trying to select a logical series of targets, but all the other cells have been inactive too long to pinpoint them. Once we know where they are, we can postulate other targets in the vicinity, based on our new database of likely hits. Until then we just wait."
"What about the information we got from Boris on the leader? The guy who recruited him?"
"The name was fake and the description was not helpful. All we have is Bernwick's assertion that the man was a press agent. That's not terribly helpful. There are hundreds of press agents in the ranks of the new political party."
"Uh-huh. But who's the head press agent in charge?"
Harold Smith sighed. "If we only knew."
By the time he reached the hotel room the plans had changed. Chiun's chests were stacked neatly near the door. "The Emperor says we must leave immediately. There is no time for a bellhop."
"When did he call?" Remo demanded. "I just talked to him in the lobby."
"So I was informed," Chiun sniffed. "What has taken you so long to come from there?"
"It was three minutes ago."
"Were you dawdling over the filthy magazines in the gift shop?"
"This place is too classy to have dirty magazines in the gift shop," Remo said. "Where we going?"
"Topeka."
"Are you joking?"
"Why?" Chiun demanded.
"Seems like kind of a sleepy place to do murdering, is all."
Chiun squinted. "But there really is such a place as a Topeka?"
"Well, yeah. It's in Nebraska. Or Idaho. One of those states that everybody always forgets about."
Chiun nodded. "Good. I believed at first that the Emperor was committing a practical foolery upon me."
"But why we going to Topeka?"